Michael Campion: So, last but not least, time and place. You mentioned earlier that we can't own the whole of a consumer's life. A brand has to try and own a specific time and place. So if we can't please all of the people all of the time, how are you trying to help brands on their journey to owning a specific time and place?

Bob Sheard: You know, if you think about yourself as a consumer, vodka might be your friday night drink, but a nice glass of claret might be your sunday afternoon drink. So you might have a high tempo selection, which is vodka on a high tempo occasion, and you might have a low tempo drink when it's a low tempo thing. So vodka when you're with your mates out on a night out, red wine when you're on your own sat by the fire watching songs of praise. How did you know my schedule? Different times and different places. It then splits quite nicely when you think of there are two different types of time. There is measured time and there's experienced time. So measured time is the Greek god Kronos, and experienced time is the Greek god Chiron. Kronos is where the chronometer comes from and it's the time that we sell. It's the time that we measure, it's the when we're clock watching, it's the time where we work. Chironic time is nothing to do with clocks, it's to do with fleeting moments, it's to do with experiences. It's to do with how we spend our time, not how we sell our time. So those are two very different aspects of time. In some brands, chronomatic time is important. In other brands, chironic time is important and it's the same with places, understanding whether a brand is at a destination or whether a brand is transitioning on a journey to a different place. And we get to the importance of understanding the meaning of those places. And if they're not in a place, they're in a thing called liminal place and liminal time, which means in between, which can be very exciting because it's in the city limits, where it's not exactly in a place. It's at the city limits where, in westerns, all the outlaws live there. That's a kind of interesting place, it's where all the excitement is as cities grow. It's often in the liminal places which are cheap rents, where artists start to live and that's where some of the most amazing flourishing of creativity starts. So liminal can be good as well as destination. With brands it becomes very important. So a brand that we work with in Canada is called Monos and it's a luggage brand, but it's not a brand for the destination. It's a brand that honours the experience of travel, that the journey is the destination, whereas another place, when we work with LVMH, it's all about the destination. This year we worked on Burberry and, in terms of their brand, not so much about time but about place. They're about the place of the open space and they wanted to explore how being an adventurer could help them capture the sense of optimism that comes from owning the open space. So time and place can become very, very important and can deliver strong meaning for brands. You know, it's by no accident that many brands occupy the slipstream of the identities of the cities that they're from. So you know, DKNY quite literally with New York, Burberry, the brands that come out of Italy, whether it's Milan or Tuscan brands like Prada or Gucci, they unashamedly play off the slipstream that exists in their national identity. So places are very important in creating the context and meaning system for a brand that they can then nuance. So time and place very important to consider when you're designing a brand.

Michael Campion: I mean it resonates as well with my experience in the wine and spirits world, of course, of champagne and terroir and vintages. All are evocative of time and place. Looking at this through the lens of someone who's starting their own companies, starting their own brand, they're right at the beginning of their journey. It probably doesn't make sense, does it, for them to talk about being a brand of destination. It's more about being a brand of transition, of the journey, or that liminal space, that chaos. What would you advise to someone who can't leverage time or heritage, who maybe doesn't have a specific geography or terroir or place to leverage? How should they think about this protocol when they're creating a small brand from scratch?

Bob Sheard: Well, they will be from a place.

Michael Campion: Absolutely.

Bob Sheard: So there will be an identity that they can be from. So when we worked with Arc'teryx for the first time, they were only 10 years old, so they didn't have, it wasn't like working with Levi's who were 160 years old and you can pick a rich history. They were only 10 years old, but they created really beautifully designed products that seemed to not have an ego. In the same way, some of their American counterparts had big logos on and big expressions of identity. So what we wanted to do was unwrap what behaviour created that kind of design and whether that design behaviour was rooted in the fact that they were from British Columbia and that they lived in balance with nature rather than trying to conquer it. So that was a kind of important aspect. So I think you can find sources of truth in place and in time. You don't have to, you know, with Arc'teryx we didn't have to put maple leaves on everything, but understanding that source of truth became a big source of meaning for the brand.

Michael Campion: Yeah, and I guess also for existing brands who do have quite a long heritage, maybe have been fairly successful but are looking to regenerate or breathe some new life into the brand. Sometimes something as simple as simply changing the ritual right, changing the time at which that product is consumed, can completely transform a brand's outcomes, can't it?

Bob Sheard: If it adds value to the consumer. So a brand that we worked with is Dainese, which made protective headwear and armour for motorcycling, and they tended to show in their comms the making of the product. So they were sort of obsessed with the sort of rituals of creation and actually we said the ritual that's important for your consumer is the ritual of preparation. So rather than the ritual of product creation, we should be showing the ritual of consumer preparation that once I've put all my armour on, I'm fully protected and I'm free. So protection is freedom. So protection having put all the armour on that enables me to take the leap of faith. So it's still craftsman in its origin, but it's actually not the ritual of creation, it's the ritual of preparation. So in changing that ritual we were able to connect with a much more visceral emotional need on the part of the consumer.