27. Lewis Hamilton’s brand expert reveals the key to building a winning reputation | David Robertson Mitchell

Welcome to All About Business, with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests, the bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. Their leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture. Have you a consistent brand? Could increase your revenue by a whopping 20%. But with massive rebrands making headlines for all the wrong reasons, how can you refresh your image without alienating your audience? Today's guest, David Robertson Mitchell, has been branding and rebranding companies for nearly two decades. Nick named the brand Rover. He spent nine years working as a brand consultant for the Mercedes Formula One team, and now runs his own consultancy firm. Well, today I'm really pleased to welcome David Robertson Mitchell to All About Business, and David, as well as being a neighbor of mine in Wiltshire, is an expert on all things brand. And he has his own brand consultancy that he started, which is called DNA hyphen RB, which David tells me is brand backwards. So I've invited you in today because I think brands branding is super important. I think it can make a massive difference between business success and failure. And I think some people have got it spectacularly right, and some people have got it spectacularly wrong. And I want to explore some of these themes with you. And also the word brand is attached to more and more things these days. You have personal brand, you have employer brand, you have digital brand. And so all about brand building is all about business for this conversation. And I want to start because I know you've got a fascinating history working in an area that so many people are interested in, which is Formula One. And you have worked for the Mercedes team in Formula One for nine years. You've also worked for the McLaren team. And tell me about what you were doing at Mercedes and how you were helping them with their brand. Yes, I started working with Mercedes in 2014. I met Toto Wolf who just bought into Mercedes. And he was looking for somebody who understood corporate branding, personal branding and motorsport. And I got in my sort of career history. I'd got all of those aspects. So I started working there in December 2013. And my role covered a variety of different areas. So how do you take Mercedes as a brand as a car brand, but apply it to a Formula One team, which is an interesting challenge because the aspects of a car brand, we want to get out the exciting bits of it to put it on to a Formula One team, which is effectively a sporting team. I then worked with the drivers on their individual driver brands. So Nico, Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, George Russell, on how we could be really clear and consistent in the way that we talk about them and make sure that they come across clearly to their fans. I worked with all the different sponsors as we brought the sponsors into the team, making sure that their brands meshed seamlessly with the team's brands. And then finally, it was the reputation management. So when things started going wrong, I'd be there in the background understanding where we wanted the story to be as far as the brand was concerned and working with the comms people and Toto to get the story back on track again. Well, so much in what you just said that I want to ask you about because some of this feels quite hard to pin down. So Mercedes is a reputable brand. It's been around for a very long time. It's associated with fabulous saloon cars, I would guess. How do you take a brand like that and make it into a sports brand and start with that one? So that was an interesting challenge because Mercedes is a very strong brand and it has very clear brand guidelines. But there were areas when you applied it to a Formula One team that slightly jared that didn't quite gel with what you were trying to do from a sporting perspective. We would take the brand and probably use about 95% of it in terms of the brand positioning, the brand values, all of that would be meshed into the team. What jarred, what was the bit that you had at the time it was actually I can I'll talk about that in specifics. So their positioning was the best and as a sports team defining yourself as the best is quite a challenge because sometimes you are the best if you win the race. But other times if you don't win the race, you're not the best. And so you're setting up an expectation. So what we did is we suffered it ever so slightly and we put the brands, the teams brand positioning was aspiring to be the best. So it was sort of an aspirational thing which meant that the team is always trying to be the best. Sometimes you weren't, sometimes you were. In the nine years I was with the team, we won eight Constructors Championships. So it was a great time. So you put those four words in front of best? Yes, aspiring to be the best. Yes, inspiring to be the best. And that just softened it slightly. The rest of the brand model we were then able to take and apply that to the Formula One team. But it's also giving a clear message to everyone in that team. Yes, and that I think is where brand and culture has a really strong overlap. So when you have a company has a brand, you need to make sure that that flows through to the culture because the brand is the external promise of what you want people to think about you. But that's got to align with what it's like internally for the people working there. And then the culture then leads on to the customer experience. So the experience people have of that brand should be driven by the culture. And I think one of the things that people often forget is that brand is something that the whole organisation owns. It's not just something the marketing department does. Everybody in the organisation, whether they are a customer service rep or a finance person or a sales person or even just somebody working in factory or wherever else will be talking to people outside. They all represent the brand. So it's something that you've got to get the culture, the brand, the culture aligned and then aligns with the customer experience. So true. And you want the whole team to be pulling together in the same direction. And I hadn't really thought of brand as being a sort of key driver of that in that way. So yeah, that's very powerful. I was thinking about Lewis Hamilton. So Lewis Hamilton's just started driving for RRIs. Yeah, I think of RRIs. Red, cool. It's different brand from Mercedes, the best or aspiring to be the best. You just said that you work with Lewis Hamilton on his personal brand. Let's start with that. What were you trying to achieve? Well, I mean, Lewis Hamilton is a racing driver. He's a bloody good one. But what beyond that were you trying to say? So with Lewis, when he first started working with Mercedes and I got involved, we had a brand positioning for him, which was world's fastest racing driver. And that worked well for him. So that landed with me because that's what I think of him. Yeah, that's right. But come by the end of 2016, he'd had a challenging year. He'd been beaten to the championship by Nico Rosberg. He transcended Formula One. So his audience was way beyond just the Formula One audience. And he was achieving a sort of stature within the sport, which was more than just being a racing driver. So I sat down with him and his management and we decided that was fastest racing driver. It really wasn't strong enough for him. And it sort of confined him within Formula One. So we went off and we looked at how to take his brand positioning in a different direction. So on the back of his helmet, he has a quote, still I rise, which is from a poem by Maya Angelou, who's a black American poet from the 1950s. And she was talking about the struggle of black people in America and still we rise. And so he had still I rise and we put those two together and created a brand positioning around inspires to rise in taking Lewis's sort of mantra, still I rise to other people. And you can see this. And you can see that to a wider community. So much to much wider community. And you can see now in today, he's still using that as his inspiration. He's doing an awful lot of work with minorities in Formula One bringing people through from education right into the sport. Watched a couple of years ago, he went to the Met Gala in New York. And he normally as a superstar, you go with a fashion house, but he went to the Met Gala and said, I'd like to buy a table. And they went, okay, and he turned up with handful of young black designers from America who never have had a chance to get to the Met Gala wearing one of their outfits. And he was on, I saw him on the BBC News and he was on the front page of every newspaper. And he was, you know, that inspiring to rise was spreading his goodness to other people. So that was his brand positioning. He's still using that today. So he was able to take his personal branding, which he helped develop from one manufacturer to another. So he's now driving the Red Ferrari. I mean, I heard him on the radio. I think he was saying he was having a bit of trouble getting his head around that. Which I thought was interesting because I mean, for me, for me, it's like, I'd be, you know, if you cut me in half, it would say, read, you know, I couldn't imagine going to work for another recruitment company. So I think how do you deal with that? If you were advising him now, what would you be saying about this transition? I think it's an amazing transition. I mean, first of all Ferrari is an iconic brand, both as a car brand and a motorsport brand. And pretty much every rating driver in the world would want to drive Ferrari at some station in their career. How did Ferrari achieve that? He is in the making there, you know, it's Italian. So there's got that passion. They own the color red. You've got all the history and the heritage and the mythology of Enzo Ferrari. And they've managed to create a very high profile luxury brand. It's a very niche brand in terms of people who can afford it, but it's got mass appeal. So everyone can get a cap with it. We can get a cap and we can dream that they're going to win the next championship. Well, they don't do that. That's a completely different story. That's a new brand. I mean, I've just do a night in Ferrari. I remember it's on those yesterday's news on it. So Lewis has gone there and he's going to have to lift this. He's probably already lifted it. He's probably lifted their share price quite a lot because he knows he has a superstar and wherever he goes, eyeballs will follow him. And I think the alignment of his brand, you know, he's a high profile superstar brand with the high profile luxury brand Ferrari. It's a match made in heaven. Much more so perhaps than Lewis and Mercedes was. And I think, you know, good on him. He'll be there for two or three years, maybe four years. You know, he might win a championship. He might not, but that iconic vision of Lewis dressed in red racing Ferrari will be on people's minds. He'll be on a podium at some point. He'll be. But he won the sprint race this last weekend. But then he was disqualified from that. Yes. The main ground for unfortunate. It was unfortunate. But I think you know, you can see him now on the podium. And he might, as you say, win the champion. It'd be a fantastic new chapter. So in a sense, he's reinvented himself by making this move. And it's good for both brands that they've come together and coalesced in that way. We're delighted that you're listening to this episode. Hit the follow button so that we can continue to bring you the best business insight and actionable advice to help your business and your career. So you also said that you did sort of communications around when the proverbial hits the fan. And you have to manage situations which are tricky. How does that work? When things happen in Formula One and the story starts spinning out of control, it happens very quickly. It normally happens during a race. So someone hits someone else or something. And back when I started working with Mercedes, I would be the eyes and ears, sitting at home watching the commentary, watching the social media. I mean, the eyes and ears for the comms director who was in a thick of it at the track. I was in a sort of hot line to the concert. So you're on the watching the telly like everyone else. And if you can't tell what's going on when you're at the track, ready because they're going around that as soon. I think you have a fairly good idea, but you don't have that context of being away from the thick of it. And you know, seeing what's, you know, it's getting us a sense of what's going on. So tell me, do you have a scenario that you had to do? I mean, there was a couple of times when back in 2014, when Lewis and Nico collided with each other on track. Yeah, I remember that. And you know, that got very tense. And you know, so we would be chatting. It was a fantastic rivalry there, wasn't there? Yeah, there was. But you know, when you've got two top drivers in a team, you know, they want each other win. Yeah. So, you know, we'd be chatting behind the scenes. How do we respond? And then ten minutes later, Toto would stand up and talk to the world. Now as a brand person, that level of influence in terms of getting the message back on to where you want it to be from a brand perspective is amazing. Brands normally use it, move at glacial speeds. In sport, you know, you can be, go from here to zero, almost immediately. So having that sort of level of influence and ability to guide the story behind the scenes was amazing. So looking beyond Formula One into sports more widely, who do you think? I mean, this might be an unfair question to ask you, but who do you think is doing a good job, brand-wise at the moment? In a wider sport, there's one obvious one that I think is doing a good job for a brand perspective is is Rex and football club. So you've got the two American film stars who've brought into the club. And it was a nothing sort of lower division club. And suddenly it's got a global audience. It's got a clear brand positioning. It's getting lots of revenue and they're gradually rising up through the ranks. So why did they do that? Who thought that was a good light? I mean, if you're sitting in California, I mean, heading to Rex and the five football clubs, not obvious. It's not, but I think when did that come from? They did a lot of research to find the right one. And I think you're looking for people. Why do they pick Swindon, our local team? I wish they would. That would have been true. I wish they would. We need some more Hollywood stars. There's a thing that comes to Swindon and others. There's a club which, which, Swindon is a club which, I mean, I was born in Swindon. So it should be the club I support. But it's, yeah, it's a tough time. It's a tough time and it's gone from owner to owner who never quite get it right. So, that's an opportunity. So, yeah, that's an opportunity everywhere. I'm branding front, I'm beginning to think. And then you also did the personal brand for Toto, you said. Yes. So I told me through that, tell us a little bit about him and what your role was in terms of respect. So Toto, they're all quite different. These sort of tasks you've got. So, Toto was an interesting one. He's very clear in terms of what his brand is. I'll tell you who he is for people who don't know. So, Toto Wolf is the team principal and CEO of Mercedes Formula One team. And he's Austrian and he bought into the team in 2013, a third owner of Mercedes and a couple of other people. And he's very clear on what his brand is. So, there wasn't an awful lot we needed to do with him in terms of. Clear him what way. He knows who he is. He's got a good name. He's got a great name. And if you can be known by one name in your life, that's even better than having two names. So, he's, and he comes across very well in the media. He comes across very well on TV. And it's a really nice chapter work for. So, that's an ambition for people listening to be known by one name in your life. I think you can. Yeah, I'm just thinking of a few people. There are not many quite a few played for Brazil. Yeah. One of them was Prime Minister in this local. And you've got Toto there. But yeah, it's interesting. So, if you can get to one name, it certainly helps. Was he born Toto? Was he given that name to be named? He has got to be created. I mean, because Elton John was a different name. So, he made that name. So, you can create your own name out there. You can do. If you're into personal branding, well, I think that's worth thinking about, I think, for the ambitious. So, that's really interesting. It's given us a good sort of overview, David, of what you do and what you think about. Re-branding. This is a minefield. And it's something that companies do periodically. And I know ourselves, we're on our fourth or fifth iteration of our brand since the 1960s. We haven't ever changed it very radically, but it's sort of evolved. But some people do things a lot more dramatic. And as we're in the car space, jaguar. I mean, that's the one that's really hit the headlines. I mean, what's going on there? I mean, how do I upset and lose a lot of customers? What are they trying to do? I mean, explain what's happened there and what you think they're trying to do. With brand and branding, they are words that get thrown all sorts of things and used interchangeably, along with marketing. So, brand branding and marketing, you see them used in lots of different ways. And no one's ever really sure what they mean. And I'm quite keen when I talk to my clients to find that in a really simple way to start with. So, brand is the thought you want customers to have about you or your company. So, it's a thought in their head. And ideally, it's more than a thought. It's a thought and an emotion. Because an emotion creates that feeling of connection and it spurs action. So, it's a desired positioning. You know, you want to people to try and think, get people to think in a certain way. So, if anyone's watching, we've got love Monday. Which is our brand message. So, we want people to think that they can find a job that they'll love. But that's, you want that thought and emotion in somebody's head. You can't force them to have it. But you can shift the odds in your favour that they will think that way. If you're very consistent in the way you deliver your branding. Now, branding is everything you do to get people thinking that way. So, as an example, if you went to a party and you walked into a party and said, "Hello, I'm James, I'm funny." People would look at you slightly strangely. But if you went to a party, you told jokes, everybody enjoys themselves. When you leave, they go, "That's James, he's a funny guy." So, the branding there was the jokes being an enjoyable person to be with. So, branding is made up of all sorts of things. It's the values of your organisation that you stand for. It's the behaviours that come out of that. The behaviours and the culture of the organisation. It's the tone of voice in which you communicate. It's the identity that you have as an organisation. Part of the identity is the logo. And then it's the messaging that you use thereafter. So, there's lots of different elements to branding. All of that is what you're doing with total clarity and ruthless consistency to try and shift people's perception to the direction you want them to have. I mean, if you know what you're doing, you're doing it with total clarity and ruthless consistency. If you don't know what you're doing, I can imagine it's quite easy to be all over the shop. You can be all over the shop and you end up looking unfocused, which is why you need somebody like me to come and help you then. That's what you do. You inject clarity and consistency. And then consistency, yes. Building a brand is a long task. It's something that doesn't happen overnight. So, it takes a long time to build it. It can be very quick to destroy it. So, it takes a long time. It takes a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of money to build a brand. But once you've got that and you can be totally clear and ruthless, and you're consistently consistent about it, then you start to shift the odds in your favour that people think about you in the way you'd like them to think. But it's an interesting compilation of what you said of thinking and feeling. Yes. So, when you see brands, they should have voted both. Well, they do. And I think I do an exercise when I do brand training. And I get the audience to tell me, think of a brand they love. And I want them to tell me how it makes them feel. So, what brands do you get coming up with? All sorts of things. You get food brands and drink brands and travel brands. And things that make people feel nice and warm. And then a few minutes later, I say, "Right, I want you to think about a brand that you don't like or you even hate." And when you do that, you get off and get the same brands coming up. The same ones. But the feelings are really negative. And then you contrast the feeling in the room between the lovely warm feeling you had with the brands you love. And the feeling with the brands you hate. And then the next question is, why do they make you feel like that? What is it that makes you feel negative about it? About those brands. And it's pretty much always personal. It's something that company has done. So they've been disrespectful. Or they failed to do what they said they were going to do. It was a customer experience thing. So, advertising can build nice warm brands. But customer experience can destroy brands. And that's where you, if you don't have that connection between your brand, your culture and your customer experience, all lined up and working perfectly, then as hard as you work to build a brand, at the other end, you can be destroying it very easily. So that's where the consistency comes in. That's where consistency comes in. So back to Jaguar. Jaguar. I mean, they haven't been that consistent in their branding. Well, they've suddenly changed. So describe for people who might not have seen it, we'll try and put some pictures of the new Jaguar ads in the video for the YouTubers. But try and tell us what Jaguar have done. So Jaguar have basically thrown out pretty much all their old brands. and they're all brand new. Even the leaping jaguars gone. And they've come up with a typeface Jaguar. There's lots of bright colors. The car model that they showed is very bold. And basically what they've announced is that they've looked at their marketplace. They realize that they switched toward electric vehicles, the competition from China, their traditional market is rapidly going away. Their traditional customer base is rapidly dying off. And they have a choice. They either try and play around the edges, but gradually decline or do something drastic. And they've gone for the drastic. And they've publicly stated that when they launch their new cars in probably two years' time, with all the new brand around it and everything else, they expect to have lost 80% of their traditional customer base. But they're going after a completely new audience of young, wealthy, aspirational customers, which are very different to the customer base that they've had previously, which were seen as, well, I would look at that jaguars. I would always thought as the sort of car my dad would drive. I never saw it as a car that I would drive. I think my dad did drive on it. The Jin and Jag belt, if you still ain't known, I was there. People in Blazers would drive around in the junk who was going to drink's positive. And although I'm of an age where perhaps I would be a Jaguar driver, even that thought now, it's my dad's generation. So you think they're on to, 'cause it was widely mocked. It was. It's re-brand. But you think they're on to something. I think they are following a route that is probably the only sensible choice they've got. And it's because it's so drastic, people who aren't brand savvy are going, oh, they've throwing it all the way and it's all terrible. I would love to see them succeed, because it would be great. He's a great British brand. I'd love to see it continue. And they've got a huge task on their hands, but if they execute it correctly, it could be good. Yeah, and they've got everyone talking about it. Which is a big thing. I mean, just getting noticed in this world is hard enough. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. I hope they succeed too. I think it's good to try things, but it's a pretty bold bet. It's a bold bet, but the alternative, I think, is a slow, painful decline. Yeah, our company's called Reed. I mean, we're not very imaginative. My dad just stuck his name above the door, but I suppose, fortunately for us, it's a four-letter word, and that's quite good for branding, as it turns out, because it's simple, and people can remember it. But if you're called into consult with a business that's saying, well, we think our brand is out of date or isn't helping us shift more product or feels tired, where do you begin? I think I begin by looking at all the business fundamentals. So what's really going on? Why are you starting to think that your brand is tired or out of focus or out of date? And there could be all sorts of reasons. It could be that you've got a shiny new competitor in the marketplace who's making you look dull. It could be that the marketplace itself is changing. It could be that your audience no longer want what you're doing. Or it could be you're just at the end of a brand cycle. Brands will have a cycle. They start, they build, they grow, and then over time familiarity comes in, and they start to decline, and you need to have a refresh. So there could be all sorts of different business reasons why you'd need to rebrand. But being really under-- But you need to try and identify what the main one is. Before you start advising-- Before you start figuring it out. Because I think if you start changing the brand and not understand why you're doing it, that's one of the big reasons why rebrands fail. And once you embark on it, what do you need to make sure you get right? I think you need to make sure that you once you've understood what the business problem is, that you're going down to the process that is going to lead you to the right answer. So first of all, you've got to go and do your research. You've got to go and talk to lots of people. You've got to look at the marketplace. You've got to look at-- you've got to talk to customers. You've got to talk to employees. The leaders of the organization. Even suppliers to the organization will give you really valuable information about what's really going on. And then start to work out how you're going to respond. So I went through this in 2007. I was hired by Xerox to be their head of brand and marketing for Europe. And at the time, they were going through a major rebrand. And what was driving that rebrand was a move away from being a photocopier printer company into being a business services company. So really repositioning the company from business perspective. And at the time, the CEO of the company, and Makahi, said to the guys leading the rebrand, I want you to do four things when you do this rebrand. One, I want you to do it globally. Two, I want you to do it quickly. Three, I want you to do it cheaply. And four, you're not allowed to touch the logo. Didn't we merge then? No. And-- I wanted you to do it. That's right. Fast, global, cheap, and no touch in the logo. Right. And that was the most-- That was at a level of reasonableness. So then what happened? Well, I thought it was very smart. Because normally people go, oh, we need to rebrand. Let's fiddle with the logo. And as I said already, the logo is just one part of the brand identity, which is just one part of branding. But you get somebody coming into an organization and says, we need to revitalize the business. Let's change the logo. And that's where you've seen a lot of brand projects fail in the past, because it's just been sort of building the brand smelly thing, rather than-- What was she talking about? I don't know whether I could say that. I'll go, he said it quite openly about advertising. Sounds like the same sort of whole part. So the Xerox brand did all the research. And the research came back. Xerox is gray. It's sort of very corporate. It's not got an excitement to it. And going to business services, you need to have-- you need to be much more human. So they started to reposition the company and the brand values and the positioning around being much more human and colorful and vibrant. But as we went down the route of that, looking at the logo, the old, old red capital letter Xerox logo started to feel like a barrier to where we were going. And so the guy in charge of this project Richard went to the CEO and said to her, this is the problem. The logo feels like it's a barrier. She said, we'll change it. She said, but you said, number four was, don't change the logo. She said, no. If you have to change the logo, you're changing it for the right reasons. And I thought that was an absolutely genius on her part. It was clear that she really understood that the brand was much more than just the logo. So the logo changed. And the whole brand went out and refreshed the fear of the business. So that's a good way of handling it. We've talked about big brands, Mercedes for R.E. Xerox. Frankie My producer has a brand called Flamingo. And she was telling me that when she spoke to you before, you gave her a little bit of advice. Can you remember what it was? Yes, so she asked why it was called Flamingo. And it was all to do with her grandmother and Flamingo's. And she'll tell the story much better. I think her grandmother gave her Flamingo's a lot, which is right. So what did you suggest? But what I said was if you got that story, that backstory, then tell it, find a way of bringing that out, because it makes your brand new, feel much more human. So when I arrived today, she said to me, she's put that on her website. So that was great. That was made a bit of a free consultancy, which is good. Man, she told me that. But I think it's interesting for people starting out, which is why I ask you, because if you're trying to establish a brand or create a brand for your business, you know, being human is clearly important. So what else-- what other advice do you give people who are starting out? You know, you've got to pick a name. And we had a young woman in here the other day who started a business called Good Squish. And it's a great business that makes hair accessories, recently. And she's doing really well. And she said it just sort of came to-- then it was a eureka moment. She knew that was it. But I don't know if that's an experience shared by many or everyone. Maybe it's not so obvious. I think the name isn't so important. And if it's a cool name or a funky name, then great. But it's the meaning you build into the name, which is key. And you look at one of the biggest companies in the world, Apple. It's just a piece of fruit. But the meaning that Steve Jobs built into that brand over the years is immense. And now when you think of Apple, you don't think of it as fruit. You're thinking it as computer hardware and phones and all the rest of it. So the meaning is more important than the actual name. If it's a funky name or a simple name, then that's all really good. But I think when you're starting-- So OK, so what do you mean by meaning? So if you're starting off on accessories business, what's the-- So a meaning you should be certain for? Well, the meaning is whatever you want your-- that one thought and one emotion that you want your audience to think about, the conclusion that they have about you. That's-- when I talk about meaning, that's that sort of brand meaning that I'm trying to get to. Because if you can be really clear with your audience, you're also being really clear with the people within your organization. I did a work-- some work over the pandemic with a technology company. It was sort of a technology wearables company. And they brought me in and they had a brand name. And they said, we'd like you to-- we want to sort of create a brand model around it. And I said, as I spoke to the CEO, I said, what's it mean? And he sort of explained what it was all about. So the part of the research I did was to go and talk to everybody who's involved in it. Most of the employees, some of his investors. And the presentation back to this big group at the end of the project was, this is a product that can do everything for everyone. If I listen to what you're saying, because everybody had a different idea of what it was about and how it's positioned and what it stood for and what the values were. So when you're starting out with a new product, make sure that you've got that total clarity. [BLANK_AUDIO] and make sure that the people working on it understand that, and make sure that as you're building up this into who the product is for. Who the product is for, what it stands for, what it does, what it problem it solves, plus as a business what are the values that you want to represent and how you're going to communicate and what style you're going to communicate. All of these things, because when you've got a small organization quite often, people are just making assumptions because if you haven't done that piece of thinking, then you're just allowing people to assume what it is and the chances are that everybody is assuming something slightly different. It just means that what you're trying to do is. I'm not the case in that example. Absolutely. How did you sort that out? By gradually iterating. You start off with, this is where I think it should be, and then you iterate. You work with the owner of the business, the marketing people in the business, and you iterate into something that everybody feels is really comfortable. Did you get there in that case? Yeah, I did. Not getting out of that tape. I didn't take long. The research took probably a couple of weeks and the iteration two or three weeks to get everybody around the table. But once you've done that, you've got that clarity. What I've observed in our business and elsewhere with advertising and obviously closely associated with brands is people inside the business get tired of campaigns long before people outside even notice they've probably come on air. And they lose consistency by trying to do new things when actually it might be better to just consistently deliver the same message or similar. Is that something you've come across in the brand space or is it people like Tinkering? Everyone has opinions on that. They're not necessarily equal merit. I think you come across it sometimes with people deciding that they, particularly from a brand design perspective, they can go, "Oh, I'll use that colour there," or "You've got your little heart shape on your Mondays." I'm going to do a presentation where all the zeros are little hearts. And suddenly, this thing which is meant to be very specific, it sort of leaks out into other areas because everybody thinks they're a creative director. You end up with a mess. But I've certainly seen it on the marketing side where there's a bored and threshold with marketing people that they want this year's campaign or this quarter's campaign. You have to just say, "Sorry, are we going to carry on something?" But that, I think, is when we talked about the difference between brand and branding, marketing is another area where, depending on who you talk to in that industry, you will get their perspective on how the marketing works. So what's the difference between branding and marketing then in your view? So brand is how you get that thought into people's heads. Marketing, the best description of marketing I've ever come across, was from the London Business School, a gentleman called Tim Ambla, who used to be in charge of marketing for Diagio. And he did a lecture on how to talk about branding to marketing to finance directors. And he said that the definition of marketing you should use is that marketing is the sourcing and harvesting of cash flow. And marketers should know who's got the money out there, who's got the need. So when you come up with products and prices and promotions and positioning and. Tess, sourcing and management of cash flow. So if you're harvesting, harvesting. So come up with creative ways. Sourcing and harvesting of cash flow. Harvest that cash out in the marketplace from the audience. Is there? You want to bring it in. And then deliver it to the finance directors as cash flow. Now, to me, when you go and talk to a marketing person, you'll get their particular lens on their particular discipline within marketing. You'll get their particular metrics, which means nothing but often to the business itself. But if you start to look at marketing as a sourcing and harvesting of cash flow, you're linking the effectiveness of marketing directly to something that matters really, really important to the business. But that's quite hard to then link to putting a guinea sad on the telly, is that, I suppose. How did the finance director swallow this? Well, I think, you know, as long as you can start to demonstrate, you know, the overall buying it, you know, the buying it and you're increasing your sales, then it links back to cash flow. But it does show that, you know, and I use this with various finance directors when I was in marketing roles. And, you know, the first of all, you explain it and this sort of an, no one's ever explained marketing to me like that before. Well, I haven't heard that explain like that before. I think it's really interesting. So the sourcing and harvesting of cash flow. But also what it does, I'm thinking is it gets the marketing people thinking much more strategically about what they're there for. They're not there to make a pretty ad with pink and a love heart on it. They're there to think about how are we going to grow this business, reach more customers and be super relevant. And most finance directors will look at marketing as a cost center. And so you could then have the debate that says, well, if you'd like me to do more sourcing and more harvesting, that's great. You'll get more cash flow. But if you reduce the amount of sourcing and harvesting I can do because you cut my budgets, then you have to accept that you're going to get less cash flow. And it became a very interesting debate then. Yes. I mean, you have to demonstrate that you're good at sourcing. Obviously. Because otherwise you might not. But it does, as you absolutely say, it forces you as a marketer to think about the business rather than just your own little discipline and marketing. And then that gets you away from wanting to do a new campaign every quarter. So you're sourcing and harvesting cash flow. And at the same time, I mean, does branding change a lot? I mean, you've got your brand. That's sort of branding bit that sits between. That's, I think, is the thread that runs through everything. And once you've got your brand, don't change it. You can keep it fresh and vibrant by doing different marketing and using different messaging relevant to the time of year or the product or whatever else. But that ruthless consistency of delivery of brand is how big brands built. So you can go anywhere in the world into a McDonald's store. And you know pretty much what you're going to see. You know pretty much what it's going to taste like. You know pretty much how it's going to operate. And that's ruthless consistency in action. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. So moving on from sort of big brands and products and services like McDonald's to personal brand. I mean, with the development of social media and sort of digital marketing, personal branding in my impression has really become much more important for sort of business leaders. I mean, also people actually have sort of involved in personal influencers. Which would someone be thinking about if they want to develop a personal brand? I think they need to go through the same piece of thinking that any brand goes through. So any corporate brand when they come up with that brand positioning and those branding activities that they do, it's the same whether it's a business. What is it? What's the top five things you do as a business? So I think the first thing to do is how do you want to be perceived? What is that thought that you want to be behind? What's the conclusion that you want people to have about you? And so what do you want people to be saying about you after? Absolutely. And what else? Once you've worked that out, you then work out how are you going to deliver that? What are you going to do through a meeting with somebody or a presentation that you're giving or when you're doing your social media? What are the things you're going to be doing that give you that ruthless consistency in the way you express yourself? Whether it's the values you stand for, the behaviours you exhibit, the way in which you talk, the identity that you have, even the name that you use, and the messaging. What are the key sort of messages that you're repeating time after time? One of the things that we want to bring in Donald Trump at the moment, he's a very strong personal brand. Yeah, we have to sort of bring him because they've got market podcasts on YouTube. No, no. We mentioned Donald Trump ago. Yeah, I got him. He's very good at catch phrases. His messaging is very, whether you love him or hate him, he is very good at the catch phrases. The part of the personal brand is having a catch phrase or two. He invented your fight. I mean, he was the apprentice originally. Yeah, so he's taken it from them onwards. So catch phrases. Do you think he comes up with them himself? Or do you think other people are doing it for him? Got no idea. Maybe there's something like me sitting behind him. I think he probably comes up with them himself. Yeah. Would be my guess. You're saying very much of what I'm hearing is that if you want to develop a personal brand, you approach yourself like me, PLC, as if you're a business. And you think about how you want to be remembered, what sort of impact you want to make, and what name you want to give yourself. Or that's to that extent. Absolutely. And I think if you're a high profile individual or really anybody in somebody even starting out in work, having a clear understanding of how you want to be perceived can be really helpful. And it just requires a bit of thinking to do it. And then a bit of discipline to deliver that consistency. I think there's one exception to this rule. And that's CEOs. And CEOs are really interesting because they have a personal brand and they've probably got to their position as a CEO through being a personality and being very good at what they do. But they also have to be the public face of an organisation. So they have to represent the brand to the outside world. They also have to be the role model internally to employees for the culture. And so if you imagine the old school vendiogram, they've got their own personality, they've got the corporate brand, they've got the internal corporate culture. Somewhere in the middle of all of that is the CEO brand. I've said sort of distinct from all through. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so this is where you have to, you know, quite often when you sit, when I work with CEOs, you start off by understanding what their CEO brand is. And then you look at the corporate brand and you're looking at where's that over that? of the values that you could put into their brand, their CEO brand. that make them distinctive, what's their personality, what are the strongest elements that make their personality stand out? And what are the elements from the corporate brand, which you can put into their CEO brand, which mean that they're looking genuine as the CEO of that company? They end up with a sort of one-pageer saying this is really CEO brand. So what would typically be on that? It's like, and it's like, it's like, you're perhaps another exception, should come to in a minute. Why am I saying that? Because you're a founder. You're a founder. You're a founder CEO, it's such a family CEO. Family and some founder of some things. So we'll talk about that in a minute. But with a CEO, I mean, you're looking at the maybe the brand values of the organization and taking maybe two or three of those which work, and then combining those with the two or three maybe from the personal brand. But that is like a uniform that the CEO wears for the duration of their tenure. And where you see CEOs going wrong, I think, quite often is that they come in and ego takes over. And they start to believe that their brand is more important than the corporate brand. And when you start to get that divergence, there's attention there and eventually something will break. Usually the CEO. Yeah. One of the things I always say to CEOs is that corporate brand has a lot longer shelf life than the CEO brand. But whilst you're there, you have to be that face of the the you kind of want to leverage the corporate brand on a thought. It makes you look much more genuine if you are very closely aligned with that. Family brands and founder brands are fascinating because they are the values of the organization tend to be the values of the individual. So I mean, three examples. All James is, you've got James Dyson. You look at the Dyson brand. That's very much James is own personal brand. Sir Jim Ratcliffe at Innioss, the way Innioss operates and his culture in his brand is just Sir Jim Ratcliffe. And then you've got Reid. And I'm sure that if I talk to the people at Reid, they'd be going. Well, also thing in other James James, James Tinson. Yes. And I don't know about that. They've all got different surnames, fortunately. I don't be very confusing. But I think yeah, I suppose there's not I would say our brand is very closely associated with our family values, which and they go back to the original founder, Alec Reid and we've carried them forward. And all the new things we've started since, they sort of also pervade that. I hope. But it's got I would also hope it's evolving, you know, it's not a it's not fixed in 1960. No, and I think that's you can move with the times, but you don't need to change it every five minutes. I think it's the key with brands. Those individuals you name are sort of notable entrepreneurs. I mean, sometimes they say or do things that are controversial. How does that affect the corporate brand? Well, I think it's a really good example going on in the world. Well, even on mask, people have any foot stickers on their Tesla saying I bought this before Elon went nuts and stuff like that. And that that's you know, I think what we're watching is a Gerald Ratner in, in on a massive scale, on a global scale. You know, here's somebody who as the CEO of a company is doing things which people just don't understand. And the knock on effect, the knock on impact of the reputation of his company, you know, in sales in Germany, they say 85% down. That's that's drastic. And that's to me. Well, it is drastic. It'd be interesting to see what happens. I mean, Starling still doing pretty well. And apparently X has now back up in value. So I don't know what he's playing in many games at one. He's playing many games. But you know, the car company is X, you can get away with the using without anybody really noticing. Starling is so far removed from what we're doing, you know, on a day to day basis. But if you're driving a Tesla, you're starting to see it getting vandalized or you take it to parties because people are seeing you arriving at it. That's really, I've got a lovely friend who's very right on and very cares about the environment. He's got big white Tesla. How do you feel for a driving at a round of the line? So, but yeah, so that's interesting. So those sort of brands are vulnerable to sort of some, I don't know whether sabotages are right, but sort of volatility, the founder or the CEO or the leader, the volatility of those people can have a big impact on the brand. The rat in a moment, we've talked about rebranding. We've talked about building a personal brand. I don't know if you've got expertise in this really, but the other area I'm very interested in is the employer brand. Is this a good company to come and work for or be part of? What sort of things should people be thinking about in terms of employer brand in your view? Well, I think first of all, you want to have a strong employer brand. It's not something you can fake. So it's not something you can build. If the reality is different, then you'll get found out. There's various online sources that you have. Oh, yeah, there's some trip advisors for Yeah, trip advisors for working somewhere. Glass ceiling or something like that. Glass door, glass door, that's right. Glass door that you can go and see what really employees say. So if you are trying to, you know, build the third, say to speak of what it's like to work somewhere, you've got to make sure that first of all that's true of everything in this world now. It is absolutely absolutely. Everything's become very sad. You've got to make sure that your internal culture and the way you operate and the way you reward your staff is in line with your brand. And if you're making that promise outside to customers, you need to make sure that you're also making that same sort of promise inside to your employees. If you can do that, then you have a you have a the basis for a really strong employer brand. Then it's a question of working out. What are the stories? What are the messaging that you want to pull out that you can tell which should really genuine, which encourage people to come and work for you? And you and you would do that through what sort of channel social media, maybe, is that? Well, you have lots of roots. You have your own website which can tell the stories. You have your social media. I'm sure you have, you know, sort of open days where, you know, you can graduate intake and and whatever else that that that people can come in and see what it's like. So, you know, and even as far as as people going down the pub with their friends and saying, well, I work for Reed and this is what it's like. You know, that it's wherever people touch the organization. You know, it's the experiences right, you know, and they're talking to employees and the employees are giving off a good vibe and saying, yeah, it's actually, I really enjoy working here. And, you know, they are genuinely loving Mondays. Then, then you've got a strong employer brand. So maybe lots of companies out there, you know, delivering that to their teams and colleagues, but aren't talking about it enough, perhaps, to attract others. But then an employer brand becomes marketing for employment effectively, doesn't it? Yes. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, how do you take that messaging and market it to potential employees? So you become a destination employer? Yeah. I suppose. So people think, I really love to work at Reed or I love to go and work. Yeah. Ferrari or whatever it is. But it's interesting for Reed because you're representing. Well, we're representing a lot of employers or we recruit for a lot of employers. Some of them would be household names and some of whom people wouldn't have heard of. So the, I think, especially when you're a smaller business, it's creating that sort of feeling in your catchment area, I think it's really quite important. So it makes such a difference getting the best people. And, you know, one form of media for them is there, is there recruitment agents? So how he tells that story about what it's like to work there and your understanding of that organization? Sure. I mean, if someone comes and registers with us and says they're looking for a job as an accountant, we'll say, well, here are the five companies hiring. This one gets a very good press from people who work. They go there first. And that's where I think the other thing we've not talked about yet is reputation comes in. And reputation is fascinating because if brand is your desired state is what you'd like people to think about you, reputation is a reality. So that's what people are actually thinking about you. And it's based on how well you're representing your brand to them. So how well you're getting into their heads combined with their experience of you and the reality of dealing with with your organization. And that's reputation. And reputation, whether it's as a corporate level or an individual level, has a life of its own. It lives beyond any control that you might have over it. People might be thinking talking in very different ways as well. Some people might think this organization has got a good reputation, others the opposite. What do you do about that? I mean, is this something companies should be paying attention to? We do social media listening, which I find quite interesting. Every Monday I get the report and you see all the comments of people have made on LinkedIn, Facebook, some negative, some positive. What people put on trust pilot and tells you a lot actually. It does. I think social media listening is very important. Looking at what complaints you're getting, if you're logging complaints from customers and looking at those in detail and understanding what calls them, that experience is part of what's driving your reputation. And at a personal level, if you are going for a job, I often say to people, if you've got a really strong brand and you've done a really good job, by the time you get to the interview, your reputation has already interviewed. If you've got a really strong banner as a person, you've been in this interview. And your reputation. I was saying about you before you get. And your reputation will have had an interview before you even arrive in person. Guardio, though, is right. We're going to want to hire you then. Likewise, if you've got an inconsistent brand or people have got a bad experience of you, then your reputation's already been in there. You might not even get to the interview. But is that a reasonable level of expectation to put on someone? I mean, I'm thinking of younger people. coming into the workplace. How do they achieve that? Because it would be great if they could. - I think it's something that they need to be conscious of. And I go and talk to young people in schools about how to have a successful career. And not what you tell what to do. There's a couple of little things we look at. One is just a sort of way of thinking about it. We talk about careers as a noun, you know, have a career. And that comes with lots of words like career structure and ladder and path. And it sort of feels like it's all uphill for the rest of your life. But actually if you switch it round and think about it as a verb, careering, it comes with words like, that's not fun. - That's not a fun. - And you know, you can imagine - Carrying down a hill, you know, you've got speed, exhilaration, change the direction, lack of control. That's what life is like. That's what work life is like. All of those things. - So you turn career from a noun to a verb. - Turn it into a noun. - And so, hang on, do you turn it into a noun? - I turn it from a noun into a verb. - That's what I thought. - So first of all say to young people, think about going careering for the rest of your life. But instead of something you have, it's something you do. It's an activity. And if you're going to do it well, you're just a set of skills you need to have. And as, you know, making yourself a successfully employable human being, you need to be able to take decisions, you need to be able to communicate well. You don't want to leave a trail of bodies. All these skills that you need to have to get you successfully through life. - What do you mean you don't want to leave a trail of bodies? - You don't want to be the toxic. You don't want to be the arsehole in the room. You know, you want to make sure that people enjoy working with you and being with you. But if you're leaving a trail of bodies behind you, if you clamber up through your life, that'll catch up with you eventually. But reputation is something I talk to them about, which is understand that you do have a reputation. You're in a. - Yeah, all kids will have a reputation amongst their classmates. - Yeah, that's right. But you can influence that reputation by doing great stuff and also by being completely clear and consistently, ruthlessly consistent in the way you present yourself. - So you do this presentation. What's the question you get asked most commonly about the end? - Have I worked with Lewis Hamilton? (laughing) - So which you say? - Yes. (laughing) - If you were. Well, here's a guy with an amazing reputation, actually. And I thought, well, you said right at the beginning about how he sort of went beyond being the fastest racing driver into something on a different level. It was so interesting and he really has achieved that. I know colleagues of mine just follow everything he does. Have huge admiration for him. So, but he obviously wanted that. There was something, there was a big part of what was inside him. It wasn't someone said, "Well, that's what you should do next, Lewis." Was it? - No, that's, you know, he's completely driven as far as that's concerned. And there are other racing drivers who don't want that and who are quite happy just doing the racing driving bit and then disappearing off. - I'm not sure. - Tell you that we can. And we sit on their super yacht or something like that. So, yeah. - Hey, thanks for coming and talking to me, Dave. And I've really enjoyed that. I've learned a lot. I'm going to be harvesting cash flow from my marketing team from now on. And I've got two questions I always ask at the end, which I'll ask you. And the first is it's related to this post of presidences, what gets you up on a Monday morning? - What gets me up on a Monday morning? I think just the sheer variety of what I do. Working with other people. For me, when I started my business, I looked at the marketplace for corporate brands and there are hundreds of corporate brand consultants. And I thought, now actually I want to work with people. I want to, because when you do something for a company, it's okay, but when you change somebody's life, when you work with somebody to really change the direction they're going, that's immensely satisfying. For me, it's working with people. - Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. And then the last question is, where do you see yourself in five years' time? This is a question from my interview book. Why are you? Retired. Retired. But with a great reputation. - Well, I turned 60 last year. And so I see myself the next five years just doing stuff I enjoy doing. But yeah, 65, 66, that's probably when I'll sort of hang my business. - You'll be able to historical sleuth, I have to know. - I am, yeah. I'm going to do more of that. - I won't stop doing stuff, but I just maybe just move away from work and do the stuff I really enjoy doing. - Fantastic. Thank you for coming to the. - It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. - Thank you very much. - Thank you, David, for joining me on all about business. I'm your host, James Reed, Chairman and CEO of Reed, a family-run recruitment and philanthropy company. If you'd like to find out more about Reed, or the brand Rover, all links are in the show notes. See you next time.