Lauren Boggi is the Founder and CEO of Lithe Method, a powerhouse fitness concept that combines principles of cheerleading, Pilates, etc. With four studios and expansion across the lifestyle, Lauren shares her fascinating personal story — from an unfortunate injury in college through building the Lithe business and brand. An accidental businesswoman, Lauren is inspiring, honest, and certainly worth a listen. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review!

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‘One Big Idea’ is a shorter episode of Real-World Branding, to be released in the week between our interviews. In this edition, Bill uses case studies to show how the strongest brands are built and delivered with a focus on the internal team. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review!

Welcome one and all, this is Real-World Branding. I’m your host, Bill Gullan, president of Finch Brands a premier, boutique branding agency, and this is One Big Idea. Today’s big idea is that Brands are Built from the Inside Out.

Our most recent interview was with Wil Reynolds, the founder and director of strategy at Seer Interactive, and one of the things we talked about was a branding or re-branding process that he and his team have recently undergone. One of the things that were notable about it was that it had really bubbled up from within the organization, the need and the potential to go through that process. We heard on an earlier podcast how Scott O’Neill, C.E.O. of the Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils etc., as an important part of his practice back when he was at Madison Square Garden Entertainment, internally developed a rule of three in terms of guiding principles and core values. That was something that he and the team developed together as a representation of their commitment, which certainly comes through in the way that their brand is perceived, sold, and everything else.

The best brands are built from the inside out for a couple of reasons, one is that the brand is often delivered via the efforts and the passions of human beings. Whether one is a retailer and has thousands of store associates who are interacting with customers or guests on a daily basis, they are carriers of the brand, they’re representations of the brand, or any organization that employs a sales force, any organization that has to write a bunch of different things over social media, sell sheets, or white papers, whatever it is, these are all human developed and it is impossible even with a smaller organization to control a message, to inspire folks to believe in and be passionate about a message, and to live successfully as embodiments, to be the brand unless the internal team, the team that is charged with carrying these things out, understands it, feels it, and models it day in and day out.

So a couple of examples, at least in our work, of how processes of brand development can be oriented to include and derive insight from, and then ultimately enroll, external teams in both brand creation and in the delivery of brand messages. We were working with a really amazing non-profit organization called KenCrest that is one of the leaders in the Mid Atlantic area in its field and the need was for a newly energized logo, tagline, and core communication. So it was a classic re-brand, although the name stayed intact. One of the things, to their credit and we’ve written about this on our blog, they realized that in order for this process to be effective and for all the goals to be achieved that their team really needed to be an important part of the process. KenCrest has over two thousand direct care staff who serve people with disabilities, across residential and workplace settings, and many different locations and group homes and different sized institutions. Direct care staff are the folks who are really on the ground, embodying what it means to be a part of the KenCrest team and thus embodying what KenCrest regards as special and different about itself.

We talked last week about how branding is about promise and about differentiation, there’s no point or moment where that ought to be more in evidence than when one interacts with a member of the field team – the direct care team at KenCrest. To their credit, another need is this work was getting done to undergo and facilitate a process of brand education and re-enrollment within an organization. Many of these folks have been there for a long period of time and really model the KenCrest brand every day, but there hadn’t been a lot of content around why, and what, and how, so we, in conjunction with our friends and clients at KenCrest, built a brand training program.

We used what we would call a ‘train the trainer’ technique where we develop the content and KenCrest chose probably forty out of that two thousand [team members] who would become trainers. They weren’t corporate trainers, their position wasn’t in education or training, they were just members of the team who happened to either have tenure, influence, were well liked, or understood the history and role of KenCrest. So we trained the trainers, these forty people, on brand education and then they fanned out across this organization and delivered this training, over the course of a month, to just about every single team member.

The way the training was built was for it to be a dialogue, it wasn’t just about ‘here are some slides, listen and take it.’ It was a dialogue within the KenCrest organization about what it meant to be a member of the KenCrest team – what were those core values that needed to be modeled, why KenCrest had decided to go through this process of re-branding, and what was the significance of some of the decisions that were made along the way. I think where KenCrest was left [after the process] was not only with all that they had hoped for in terms of extra communications on the re-branding side, but with a team that was energized, a team that understood why, a team that was ready to go out and take this message into the marketplace. Certainly when they were asked, ‘who is KenCrest’ they can answer but more importantly, they would live it, they would understand how to live it every single day.

One important element of the training was again not just about the logo or the tag line. What it was about was the history of the organization, its history of firsts when it comes to treating, supporting, and helping people with disabilities. So they were left with this kind of a three hundred sixty degree branding project that really put into practice this belief that brands are built from the inside out.

One more example before we close, in our work with our friends and clients at ThinkGeek, an organization that is by, of, and for those who are in touch with their inner geek – which we believe everyone has. Over time, they developed a very distinctive style of communicating on their e-commerce site, which is really the core of their business. It’s really important for them to maintain the trust and interest of their core customer that may be perceived as really enthusiastic for what they do. When you go to their headquarters you cannot help but take away a really solid sense of culture there. So when it became time to create brand content, it isn’t efficient to, whether you’re doing vision, mission, or positioning or whatever it is, tagline development [for instance], to have a couple hundred people in the room providing input, but it is important to create a mechanism whereby a team like this can be heard, can be heeded, and can feel really good about the outcome.

So in particular as we were building, in conjunction with ThinkGeek, their brand manifesto – the series of beliefs – we harvested ideas from the entire team, from our team, from the ThinkGeek management team etc. As we harvested the ideas we put them out, enabled voting on it, encouraged everyone to not only add their own ideas but to weigh in on those that had been developed by their peers, and ultimately the brand content that came out was not only great, we’re proud to say, but had been very strongly endorsed by and really created or co-created by the entirety of the ThinkGeek workforce.

So what they ended the process with was all the things they hoped for from an external communications standpoint, but also that receipt, that content was embraced, endorsed, and created by members of the team. So the culture was considered, not necessarily from an outside consultant only, but through the role of ThinkGeek team members in the process.

A couple of examples and there are obviously many more when you look at some of the most successful brands in the book, powerful brands, those that have reached the pantheon of being well understood. One of the factors they seem to have in common is that their workforce, while they may not use exactly the same words or repeat the same speech (they probably shouldn’t everyone has their own style), but often the attributes and elements of the core fabric and connective tissue of a brand are easily understood and modeled every day by teams. Whether it’s the folks that you meet when you go to the Apple store, other retailers, or other businesses that are just really well defined and well constructed.

So that’s the One Big Idea for this week, Brands are Built from the Inside Out. Hopefully it gives you the opportunity to think about how to effectively include members of the team and their insight into all the work that you do as it relates to brand development and management.

Before we sign off, three ways to help, as always, with Real-World Branding and with what we’re doing here with this podcast. We would love for you to subscribe, so it automatically flows in every single week into your device, you can do that through your podcast App Store of your choice. We’d love a rating, if we earned it, up to five stars. That’s what we strive for and rating this show, particularly rating highly, gives others a better opportunity to know that we’re out here – those who would find value in what we’re doing. And then the third thing, let’s continue to have great dialogue. The best way is on Twitter, @FinchBrands or directly to me @billgullan. Let’s keep the conversation going. All the best to you, signing off on the Cradle of Liberty, have a terrific day.

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Wil Reynolds is a true digital marketing visionary. Discouraged early in his career, Wil went on to found and lead Seer Interactive as it has grown into an SEO and Paid Search powerhouse, with offices on both coasts and over 100 team members. In this episode of Real-World Branding, Wil tells his story and proceeds to discuss with Bill his views on the future of SEO, building a distinctive culture, being honest about personal strengths and limitations, and being a new Dad! If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review!

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‘One Big Idea’ is a shorter episode of Real-World Branding, to be released in the week between our interviews. In this edition, host Bill Gullan seeks to set the world straight on what ‘branding’ and ‘strategy’ really mean! If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review!

Bill Gullan: Welcome one and all, this is Real-World Branding. I’m Bill Gullan, President of Finch Brands a premier boutique branding agency. Thank you for joining us, we’re going to do something a little bit different today. We’ve received feedback since we went to market with this podcast that our listeners would appreciate, and do appreciate, the current format of biweekly interviews with business and brand builders who have interesting stories and things to say about their companies, their categories, their careers and everything else. We’ve been really gratified by the reception that we’ve been getting and I think what we’ve heard listeners asking for is if we could find ways to deal with some of the fundamental elements or implications from some of the things we’ve heard in these interviews, or core concepts related to the art and science of what we do at Finch, and others of us who are practitioners in the world of brand development and management do.

So in the spirit of taking feedback and letting one’s audience shape the direction, what we decided to do is, in off weeks between the interviews that we conduct, to do a much shorter edition of Real-World Branding that is really focused on One Big Idea that is related to the world of branding in business building. These are often inspired by the interviews that we conduct and so we’re going to try that today and actually you get two for the price of one.

So the One Big Idea today is two words that have been used in so many ways by so many different people as to become completely unrecognizable. Those words are the word brand, or branding, and strategy. I’m going to speak for a minute or a two about each of them and hopefully redefine them, as well as issue a call to action for all of you out there who are using these words, to use them and to reassert the original definition so that they restore some level of meaning in terms of what they were intended to do.

The word brand, I’ll define it the way Seth Godin has defined it, a brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that when taken together account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. Brand is a concept that is far larger and far more nuanced in many ways than the way that it is commonly used. Many people say branding to mean a name, a logo, packaging, or an advertising campaign. Those are the components of branding and of building and growing brands, but they do not come close to defining what branding truly is and the power of well-constructed brands.

This isn’t a surprise that the ‘brand’ concept means what it does. When we think about where it came from, the first commercial manifestation of branding comes from back when the world was largely consisting of agrarian economies and a branding iron was used initially to draw distinctions between one’s cattle and the cattle of the guy or gal, probably mostly guy at that time, whose farm, fence, or field was right next door. Branding was purely and literally about differentiation my cow, your cow. As these brands went on hides and then that hide and that which lay within ultimately made it to market in town, the brands carried through and thus consumers of meat were able to make decisions based upon these symbols that they saw.

They might find that one brand or one family or farm’s yield was fresher or chewier, or more substantial, or whatever the basis on which they were making decisions of which to buy. The brand, it’s real way back roots in just purely differentiating one’s livestock from someone else’s came to mean something commercially. So over time, branding has become a discipline for which folks are paid a heck of a lot of money and in which executives place the great deal of trust.

The word branding, again it’s been used in a variety of different contexts, at its heart branding or a brand and then the practice of branding is about two things. It’s about promise and it’s about differentiation. It’s about promise from a perspective of expressing what one should expect from you. What your promise is to them of the experience that they will have when interacting with your company or your products or your services, so that’s promise. The other one is differentiation and again back to the classical definition mine versus yours. Branding in the art of branding is designed to create decision points and to convince the people who are in positions to make those decisions, why us versus someone else.

Ultimately a brand is about all of the content related to the image, personality, or attributes of a product and service. Then the art of branding is to affect the way the market perceives and acts on those attributes and images. So branding is not, as noted, marketing. Marketing is a tool to express brand differences, to create loyalty, and to create preference to create trial. A name, a logo, a symbol, a color scheme, packaging, all the touchpoints in the experience, are tools of skillful brand developers and managers, but taken individually, are not branding.

Developing a logo is a way to represent an image of a brand and a way to try to tilt the decisions in your direction, to give people something to hold on to, something that’s pleasant and motivating. But being great at developing logos or recognizing greatness in logos is not in itself brand expertise.

So that’s branding, the other topic and the other word or concept that I want to redefine, underline, italicize, and bold is strategy. We find that the word strategy, used very commonly today to mean ‘I thought about it before I did it.’ Strategy is a discipline; it is a process. It is not just simply about thinking and nor is it about drawing a distinction between something that was purposeful and something that was thoughtless.

Strategy is about setting major goals and initiatives that are taken by an organization, and using rigorous assessments of factors related to these strategies – for example the availability of financial and human resources of a company, the external factors that may be shaping the opportunity for that company in a particular product category or space, or with the way that consumers or customers are thinking these days.

The act of strategic development and teaching management is a very rigorous, disciplined process of assessment. There are tools used in that, for example many are familiar with the concept of a SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – which is a very simple graphic, but the process of doing a good one is a very in-depth process and there are many other structures, thought elements, and planning elements that go into strategy and strategic planning (a phrase for that discipline).

To give you an example of what strategy means in practice, and the difference between strategy and tactics, let’s think for a minute about a company, let’s make up a company that is selling sportswear to women. When the company goes through its strategic planning process, someone is thinking that there’s some velocity and opportunity around women’s athletics and women’s activewear. The process of assessing a strategy for this fictional company to enter or extend themselves into the category of women’s activewear involves a bunch of different parallel analysis.

One may and should think about what the resources required to be a credible contender in that category are, what would they be, and are they within reach for that company – we will call it Company X. Company X would also need to think about what the competitive set looks like in the category that they’re thinking about entering. Company X will also need to look at to what degree their internal and human expertise, and that of their partners, would enable them to be really good, plausible, powerful, and strong in that category that they might choose to enter.

Company X would need to look at the entire cost structure of how they manufacture and from where they source the materials to think through whether or not the supply chain would enable them to be successful in that category. They’ll need to look at what it would take to market and be successful there, what it would take to advertise. What are the unique trends that impact the consumer who shops in that category and whether those trends are intensifying, abating, or remaining static?

You look at women’s activewear, for example, one of the trends that has been driving the success of that category, in addition to the work of all the manufacturers and brands that are within it, is the fact that there’s been an explosion in women’s sports participation both formally as well as informally – gym membership, yoga, the emergence of other activities that women in America are highly interested in. The leaps and bounds growth of the number of people participating has given a lot of strength to companies that may want to enter that category and Company X really ought to evaluate, as part of a strategic planning process, whether or not those trends will continue.

So Company X may decide, ultimately having studied that deeply through their strategic planning process, that a strategy for them, a major goal or opportunity that they plan to organize their company to seize as a way of activating their full potential and accelerating profitable growth, they may decide that their launch of a women’s activewear line is an important business strategy for them.

Strategies must not just be about thinking, strategy is about the formulation and validation of major goals and objectives, and then the commitment to them. The operations element of a strategy is to bend organizational processes and partnerships in decision-making toward the achievement of those strategic objectives.

Tactics are fundamentally how do you do it? How should you advertise? What, once you decide to enter this category, are the strategies to enter women’s activewear? There are hundreds, in many cases, of tactics that Company X would need to employ to lead to the greatest potential from execution to expectation, and beyond of that strategy. It would be your product strategy, what category you should enter, what should your pricing be like, how does that affect the supply chain, certainty in the marketing realm, certainty in the distribution realm and on and on and on.

So at this point, having heard a lot of folks use the word, ‘hey we do strategy’ and meaning primarily that they’re reasonably smart and their process involves sitting back a little bit before they just start to do and do and do. That is not strategy. I’d say that’s probably strategy with a lower case s whereas strategy with a capital S is really about something much greater.

So there you have it One Big Idea for this week is the definition and the reaffirmation of the traditional definition of both brand and branding as a concept and strategy and strategic planning as a concept. We will be back with you next week with another interview with a really interesting business and brand builder.

Couple things you can do to help us out if you like what we’re doing at Real-World Branding. Please consider subscribing, so that this podcast just somehow magically appears in your app, through the store of your choice. Please also consider, if we’ve earned it, giving us a rating, hopefully five stars, we’ve learned helps others find us. We’d love to see comments in your app of choice reflecting how you think we’re doing and we would love to continue this open dialogue we’ve had with our listeners. Probably the best way to do that is through Twitter @billgullan or @FinchBrands, finch like the bird. That dialogue, we would love for it to continue to include not only feedback on what you’ve heard but guest ideas, people you’d love to hear in this format, as well as questions you’d love for us to ask future guests.

So hope to continue this dialogue we’ve been really grateful for the support of our listeners and their kind words as well as their really helpful actionable feedback and we look forward to continuing this for many weeks. Signing off from the Cradle of Liberty, have a terrific day.

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Laura Johnson is a powerhouse fashion executive and consultant. She has contributed to the growth of successful brands such as Urban Outfitters, Zac Posen, Theory, The Limited, and beyond — parlaying her design/merchandising talent into an incredible general management career. In this episode of ‘Real-World Branding,’ Laura shares her thoughts on the state of the fashion world today and, especially, the role of demographics in style brand positioning and aesthetic. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review!

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Summary:

Bill Gullan: Greetings one and this is Real-World Branding. I’m Bill Gullan, President of Finch Brands, a premiere boutique brand agency. Thank you joining us. Today we will be spending some time with Chief Marketing Officer of Nutrisystem, Keira Krausz.

Keira and the CEO of Nutrisystem, Dawn Zier, have both been with the company for about two years and in that time they and the terrific team including both long-term team members and comparatively new arrivals, have authored a tremendous turnaround story. We conducted this interview prior to the most recent earnings release for Nutrisystem and embargoed it until after. Yet again, last Friday a tremendous quarterly performance. I believe its seven quarters of significant growth and beating estimates, the stock price certainly reflects that.

We get into a lot of different elements of Keira’s background, the unique rhythms of the business that Nutrisystem is in, some of the things they’ve done to be relevant to their consumer and expand their consumer base and bring their unique approach to weight loss and health into the world and in the marketplace.

Before we go to that, a couple things if you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe to Real-World Branding. Every two weeks or so it will just pop right into your app there and you will have another interview with a really interesting brand and business builder.

We love of course, if we’ve earned the right to receive a high rating in the store, whatever store you’re using and we would certainly very much love and appreciate feedback in what we’re doing here. Questions, suggestions for future guests, the two best ways to do that perhaps would be on Twitter, either @FinchBrands, or directly to me @BillGullan on Twitter. Whereas sometimes I vent my spleen a little bit about topics that might be on my mind, let’s let Keira’s words stand alone. It’s a terrific interview, I hope you enjoy and thanks again for joining us.

Bill: We’re here with Keira Krausz, CMO of Nutrisystem. Keira thank you for joining us on Real-World Branding.

Keira: You’re welcome, my pleasure.

Bill: All right, so to start could you take us through a bit of your background? The twists and turns that have led you here and some of the notable things from your career.

Keira: How I meandered to this point in time, okay.

Bill: It was more linear than that maybe but …

Keira: Or maybe not but that’s okay. I don’t recommend being totally linear, but there are some common themes I will say. The first is that most of my career I’ve been in direct marketing. I started my career way back when in continuity and subscription models for MacMillan. Then I have many great years, too many to name at Reader’s Digest, marketing everything from books and music, to financial services and membership clubs.

Even though I worked at a publishing company, per se, I was used to selling all numbers of categories. Then, what I found is the direct marketing fundamentals. Stuff like speaking directly, selling the benefits, offering something of special value, driving for immediate action and urgent action. Those are very highly transferable skills, so that’s a lucky thing that I had those skills from Readers Digest.

The second thing is that over the years, whether I liked it or not, I started getting asked, or sometimes told, to come into a business or a division to assess the situation. It was usually not as good as I would have liked and I had to fix it fast, to return that particular division or business to growth. I developed turnaround skills. It wasn’t really a plan, that’s the meandering part. That became sort of a necessity. That’s lucky as it has served me well. At the beginning of time at Nutrisystem. We’re not in turnaround at the moment, but when I first got here we were.

Third, after those businesses were healthy I had to pivot from a turnaround mentality and shift to a growth mentality and that’s like what we’re doing here [at Nutrisystem]. That all made sense, all those things made sense when I came to Nutrisystem. That’s how I sort of landed my way here.

Bill: Reader’s Digest, those who haven’t followed it at the corporate level, may think of it as something that they found at their grandparents’ house or whatever, but their were a lot of businesses that it was involved in.

Keira: Sure I mean Reader’s Digest, at one time at least, was basically one of the largest database marketing companies in the country and, in fact, the world. Very global business. Yes, the brand of the company is also the brand of it’s flagship magazine. For most of it’s history the business model was to attract as many people as we could with that magazine. It was at 20 million, I think, at one time. Then with that database of names, learn as much as we could about those customers by asking them questions and making different offers. Then actually launching different businesses to that list, so it was very profitable.

Now database marketing and using data, big data, these are all kind of buzzwords in the marketing industry. Way back when in the 60s, 1960s, Reader’s Digest was actually already doing that, so that’s cool.

Bill: Right, absolutely. You did undergrad at Cornell?

Keira: I did.

Bill: You’re second consecutive Big Red, are they the Big Red? I think they are.

Keira: I will confess they are Big Red, but I have to confess I would not be the one to ask because I’m not exactly a sports person.

Bill: Fair enough. Second consecutive guest from Cornell. Where ae you from?

Keira: I’m originally from Illinois. From the flat-lands of the Midwest. My dad’s family is Chicago born and bred so if you ask me a question about the Black Hawks or the sad Cubs I might be able to answer a few things but not too much about Big Red.

Bill: We’ll see how the Cubs improve.

Keira: I’m hoping.

Bill: Yeah, a lot of optimism there. You mentioned the turnaround condition. When you and CEO Dawn Zier came, I think, a little over 2 years ago at Nutrisystem, it was labeled appropriately as a turnaround. This is a company with incredible ups and downs. Somebody should write a book about Nutrisystem, all the ups and downs.

Keira: That could be you.

Bill: It could be me. I’m not sure anyone would read it but it would be fun to write.

Keira: I’ll read it.

Bill: Thank you Keira. So you and Dawn come here a little over 2 years ago and since then there has been a tremendous resurgence and obviously Wall Street, I think, is registering their pleasure with it. Given this upswing and these really strong results what do you attribute that to? In terms of what you’ve been doing?

Keira: First of all the question makes it sound like we rode in on white horses and in fact that could be the farthest from the truth. We did come in. We didn’t have white horses. It’s not a 2 man band. I think that’s the most important thing, we don’t necessarily believe in grandiose, charismatic, one person saves the day. We have a great team that’s probably the first and the foremost thing. It’s a team, it’s a combination of the people who were here. We have people who’ve been here for 25 plus years.

You mentioned that Nutrisystem has a fascinating and long history. Some of those people have lived that history and are really amazing at knowing the weight loss business in and out and forever – having a much longer term view than somebody who just walked in the door. We also brought in people who were functional specialists or really champions at some specific skill. Brought in a new creative director, a new CFO, etc. it’s a combination of people who were here and new ones. I have to say that of anywhere I’ve ever worked we really have trust in each other. We have passion. We definitely work hard and we’re nice, on most days.

Bill: So it’s fun for both of you?

Keira: It’s a team that has a diversity of skillsets and on any given day somebody … I mean you’ve spent time with us in our business.

Bill: Sure.

Keira: We have strong opinions. I guess we differ constructively, hopefully, mainly. There are some basics and the basics are essentially we exist to serve and help customers lose weight. They’re first, so as you know we try to understand what those customers need and want all the time. The second fundamental is that we try to be as fact based as possible. Dawn Zier, the CEO, has a saying. I don’t think she invented the saying but she always says, ‘I will always listen to facts, but if it’s a matter of opinion, I’ll just use my own, thanks.’ That kind of encourages us to use facts to make most of our decisions and to guide our constructive debates.

We execute with excellence. It’s not that hard to come up with a strategy. Many failed companies, and successful companies, have come up with strategies and decks to say where they’re going. You need a strategy, but the thing is, you have to actually execute on that strategy. I think one thing that we’re good at is that we focus and then we do what we say we’re going to do and then we do more later.

We’re not all over the place. Just that focus and we really try to just get the basics right. Then, we definitely are direct marketers. I know we’re going to talk a little bit about that. We definitely focus on the direct marketing fundamentals.

Then we do have a great brand. A brand that proved to be much stronger than we thought. That could travel to new channels and really carry. Just the brand alone communicates benefits to customers which is a very helpful thing.

Bill: Right, indeed. In this sort of upswing, there certainly has been, and it is palpable, a focus on execution and delivering the fundamentals of the branding business anew. With new energy or asserted energy. There’s also then, as you mentioned, some channel expansion. There’s been some product and concept expansion.

To the degree that you are able, or want to, to say a word about some of the things that have come to market in the past couple years. The retail business for example. That’s been augmented, it seems, considerably. Some a la carte products and services have been offered. Is it a combination of back to basic and highly energetic execution-focused leadership, plus some of these new strategies that you all put together?

Keira: Definitely, definitely. I mean, the first year was more about fixing things. Fixing things fast, true turnaround stuff and returning back to basics. At that time we planted the seeds for retail. Retail is now a sizable and significant part of the business, and growing quickly. It’s really helped us bring the brand and products to retailers. Walmart, Sam’s Club, Costco, and meet people that we were not going to meet otherwise.

We are able to vary the products and the pricing of those products so that we have a way of introducing ourselves to customers that we just weren’t meeting. I think that’s really valuable. Some of them come to our direct business, most of them will not. It’s a different relationship, but we’re happy with that expansion. So yes, now we’re growing retail and we’re focused on digital expansion, social marketing expansion. It’s a lot of channel expansion for the businesses that we’re in, and then as you look too, we’re also trying to expand by moving into new businesses or new business segments within weight loss.

Bill: Right. We talked about retail but as we know, as you said earlier, the core of this business is the direct business. A lot in your background, as you noted, has been about direct response and creating direct relationships with consumers. With a traditional marketing model that has been heavy on this PR approach, what would you say the role is? You mentioned the strength of the brand. PR is about tactics and transactions but also relationships and continuity. How would those two things live together to help really strengthen the company?

Keira: A lot of people will say, ‘are you a brand marketer or a direct marketer,’ as if they’re two sides of a spectrum and they have nothing to do with each other. That’s really not how we see it. Definitely brand and direct marketing are friends, not total strangers.

The brand helps people chose us rather than another option. It keeps us top of mind. We have attribution models that measure how many of our orders we can attribute to each dollar that we spend in each channel. We know that there’s some that we can’t attribute. That is because that’s from the brand. That’s the equity that we have in the brand.

It also helps us set our voice and have some consistency across all of our communications with our customers. Which then leads to, hopefully, building a relationship with customers so that we are not all burn and churn and try to get another batch of new customers in next year, but we have an ongoing relationship. I mean weight loss is a thing that hopefully when you succeed with us and you won’t need to be on a full program forever. As anybody who’s ever lost weight knows you are going to gain a few pounds back come Christmas time. Or Halloween, or what have you. We hope that our customers now will remember that they had a positive experience with us in all ways. Then when it comes time that they might just need a tune up that they come back to us. That’s what we’re going for. I think the brand helps do that.

Bill: Right well the retail business, in particular, to jump start it, is a great place for someone that has reached the point that they really want to do some things. p>

Keira: That’s right and when they see the brand, you know, when they’re walking down the isle and they see Nutrisystem versus the other brands on the shelf I think one reason that we’re able to grow quickly was because they knew and trusted that brand. We didn’t have to explain a lot on a little box. They were willing to stop and pick up that box and take a chance with us and for that we’re grateful.

Bill: As the brand increases at retail and as the distribution model becomes increasingly diverse how, if at all, does that empower you and the marketing team to think a little bit differently about what the success factors are? For example, at retail versus at the direct business, you mentioned there is continuity in terms of how we execute and so the cultural touch stone is this continuity in terms of what the brand stands for, visual style, brand personality, everything else. You know, vast differences across channels verses some of the …

Keira: Right, the business model is completely different.

Bill: For a brand named Nutrisystem to be successful at retail in addition to relying on the things that it’s created over the many, many years, are there a couple of things that make this brand successful? Especially to stand out within a channel that it may not be traditionally focused on.

Keira: Well, you know, we spend many, many millions of dollars on the direct business on TV and while we’re trying to get you to call, or to more likely go online or your mobile phone and check us out. Even having all that advertising does support the retail business, basically telling our story millions and millions of times every day. That in itself does support the retail business. We are different from a traditional retail only brand in that they invest money in many channels that don’t inspire people to respond right there but drive to retail. Some of the things that we do have to be more mindful, we have to have great partnerships and relationships. We have to please those big retailers. It’s really all about understanding their world, innovating for their customers so we’ve done a lot of product innovation for the retail channel.

That we would not have done for the direct channel. It’s about understanding how their marketing requirements and promotional requirements work so it’s just really understanding that world and how it differs from ours. The other thing that we have to do, because we have a direct business, is we don’t want to just trade one for the other. We have to watch very carefully the product variety, product piecing, and product pricing makes sense across the channels. It doesn’t always happen.

We’re pragmatic before anything else, but we spent a lot of time thinking through how things relate across the channels and that they make sense. We try to remember that we might think of things as direct marketing and retail but customers don’t do that. Customers live in the world and so it’s got to make sense. If a product is priced much higher someplace else, it just doesn’t make sense to them and they’re going to go and find the best price for them.

We equally have to remember that we don’t live in a bubble. We’re not just competing with weight loss companies but we live in the world and they see all sorts of marketing messages and customer service standards and delivery standards from everywhere else. We have to keep in mind what’s going on in the consumers world not just in our world.

Bill: Right, and you mentioned gathering strength in areas like creative. Obviously for the retail business, presumably your packaging right?

Keira: Correct.

Bill: You’ve got to get some of the different cadence of how consumers make choices. The brand is progressing in a really positive way in those realms as well. You mentioned consumer needs and they live their one life, and that’s absolutely true. We know, just from looking around that there is a lot of talk, there’s always been, but there’s seemingly a progressive amount of talk amongst consumers in what’s considered about nutritional elements, about freshness and whatever that means.

Keira: That’s definitely true and with the growth of Whole Foods, we don’t necessarily see ourselves as taste setters. We are definitely oriented around what consumers want. We’re not trying to tell them what they want and we’re not trying to change their minds. That definitely is hard to do especially in direct marketing so we go with the flow.

Definitely, you know and I know, that we’re all changing. We look at labels much more. we expect clear labeling. If there’s a weird ingredient in there that we don’t understand because we’re not chemists, we would like to know what it’s doing there. People are looking to see how much sugar is in their food, what percentage of the food is whole grains, how healthy is it? On the other hand, there is a portion of the market that is very health conscious and very nutrition conscious and is willing to give up dessert because they are watching their sugar.

There’s a larger portion of the population right now who wants both. They want health and they want their usual traditional, if you will, American foods. We have to do a good job at doing both and that’s probably challenging. We serve people who like to eat.

We have to be careful not to be too cutting edge and yet very on trend. That’s basically what we seek to do. We have a food development team that everyday is trying to improve the taste, improve the variety, improve the health, improve the labeling, improve the packaging. They’re constantly busy. That’s what makes my job possible. If they don’t do that then I don’t really have anything to sell. We spend a lot of time on that.

Bill: Sure, as someone who’s been on the program before I can attest that it works and the food’s pretty good.

Keira: I paid him everybody.

Bill: Right. There now that I’ve said it. I think, I may be the consumer who loses 30 pounds every year and then gains it back.

Keira: We kind of like you.

Bill: Yeah, I may be good for continuity.

Keira: As long as you don’t go anywhere else.

Bill: Yeah, no. First of all, thank you, this has been terrific and as we wrap anything you can disclose about major priorities, future plans?

Keira: No, I could tell you but then I’ll have to kill you.

Bill: Some people would applaud that.

Keira: They’d hate me. No seriously though we have a number of things. I spoke about how we were in a really ‘fix it fast’ mode and now we’re in a growth mode so we have a number of initiatives to keep that going. Basically they’re centered around reaching new customers for our core offerings, our core business. That centers around channel expansion as particularly in SEO, content marketing, and social. Those are probably our three big focus areas. That doesn’t mean we neglect everything else and shrink that, I mean, it’s an ‘and’.

Then we really want to focus on improving the customer experience and getting to know the customer even better so that we are not a burn and churn business. That’s terrible. We want to make people happy so they’re motivated to stay with us a long time. Then, finally, we’re watching a bunch of new businesses to try to move us into other segments. You spoke about the move towards fresh food so now we have Simply Fresh, which we started in California and will be most likely expanding shortly. That’s a pure fresh business. Now, delivering fresh food is expensive and so that won’t be for everybody, though we wish it were. The economics won’t work for everybody so we’re also really focused on getting products for all sorts of occasions and needs. If you want more flexibility, don’t want to be on five meal occasions a day. You’d like to do your own thing for dinner or you want to do your own thing for weekends we can vary our offerings. To make them more or less flexible depending on what people need.

What we want to do is that which will allow us to offer things at different price points again so that we can attract more customers. Really figure out what different segments need and want and then go for it. That’s basically, I think, sumarizes it.

Bill: This is a company and a brand on the move.

Keira: Thank you, its been fun.

Bill: Keira I think you’ve obviously been one of the primary authors of a really amazing couple of years.

Keira: Thank you.

Bill: We can’t wait to continue to watch and see what happens.

Keira: Check back with us, knock on wood.

Bill: We will. Knock on wood. Formica, or whatever it is. Keira Krausz, Nutrisystem CMO thank you so much for being with us.

Keira: Thanks for listening.

Bill: So there you have it. Thanks to Keira Krausz for being a terrific guest. Nutrisystem is a fascinating business and in it’s several decades of history. Someone should write a book about this company. The twists and turns, peaks and valleys, changes in model, and it would be a book that would be a fascinating series of case studies about how businesses grow and prosper and why they decline. Now, we’re in a prosperous moment certainly with a really bright future for a terrific brand and management team. Thank you again to Keira for your insight and certainly for your time.

One thing that struck me was everyone’s talking about omni-channel, or multi-channel, brands today. Nutrisystem for at least the last little while has really been a direct response driven, telephone or internet brand, with historically one way to be a customer. Since Keira and Dawn have helmed the Nutrisystem brand and business, the explosion of the brand into retail, the many, many different touchpoints and opportunities have reinforced the traditional mold of how these types of products are bought and sold. They have also paved new ground because the consumer always wants things to be convenient and to be compelling, to be served up in the way that he or she finds most interesting and most in step with the way they live. Nutrisystem has been, to their credit, very responsive to the marketplace.

One other thing that was particularly interesting, I think, from my perspective was Keira’s response to how brand and direct response live together. The fact that they really are partners. We couldn’t agree more. It’s wonderful to hear that from a practitioner as Keira is of direct business’.

Terrific, thank you again Keira for your insight and input. As we sign off, again, a couple ways to support what we’re doing here at Real-World Branding. Please subscribe if you are so compelled to receive these types of interviews with brand and business builders at regular intervals. We would obviously love a rating if we’ve earned it of 5 starts, or 4 stars. Whatever you think is appropriate. Then for feedback, for questions, for suggested guests reach out to us on twitter. Either @billgullan, reach out to me or @FinchBrands. Signing off from the Cradle of Liberty have a great day and week.

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Show Notes:

Greetings, one and all. This is Real-World Branding. I’m Bill Gullan, President of Finch Brands, a premier boutique branding agency. I am, so excited to kick off our Real-World Branding podcast with our inaugural edition today, to bring you, with great frequency, at least once every couple weeks, some practical, smart, interesting conversation about the world of branding and business building.

We start today with an interview with Scott O’Neil, more on Scott in a minute. This interview is a reflective of what this podcast will accomplish, which is interviews with practitioners, and brand and business builders to understand their journeys and challenges in their careers. The goal for this is to be fast, interesting, helpful, and valuable for those who love the discipline and are involved in the discipline of brand and business development.

So, Scott O’Neil. A little bit about Scott. A great guest. So excited to have him. Scott currently serves as CEO of the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils, as well as of the Prudential Center, home of the Devils. So a lot on his plate, not to mention franchised in different media markets and different sports. We will get into the compare and contrast game as the interview goes on.

A little more on how Scott evolved over his life. He did his undergrad at Villanova University and his MBA at Harvard Business School. HBS, of course, began his career working with the NBA. He was with them for eight years then rose to SVP of Team Marketing and Business Operations, parlayed that into the president role at Madison Square Garden Sports. He, then, moved onto the Sixers and the Devils in July 2013. Incredible perspective that he has from all he has accomplished, from the unique challenge and interesting situations, from the organizations he has been a part of in his career.

So we’ll run the interview with Scott in a minute. But before we do, and I think what we like to do in each one of these, is give me a chance, for better or worse, to talk about a thing or two that has been on my mind.

I’ve been hearing about a little phrase called ‘personal branding.’ When we were going about thinking through a podcast of this nature, we wanted it to have a place of difference and value in this market. We did what we would do for a client and took a look at what’s out there. What I found was an amazing number of podcasts and other forms of content that were about this notion of personal branding.

We had a colleague, who is a very accomplished graphic designer, and she was invited to speak at a local university and the topic they wanted her to speak about was not design, but personal branding. Everyone is talking about personal branding and the thing that bugs me a bit about it is that 95% of the content that I see about personal branding is not about branding at all.

It’s about publicity. It’s about how do I get more visible. How do I get more Twitter followers? How do I get on the news, on a panel or whatever it is? That’s not branding!

Tom Peters wrote a book that I give to my colleagues when they would start with our company. It was called Brand You. That was about personal branding. It was about applying the rules of effective durable brand development to one’s own sense of self as a business person.

Branding, as we know, is about isolating attributes and values that are consistent, that are important, and then expressing that consistently and in a way that ultimately is renowned to one or a brand becoming known for something. That’s what brand development is all about.

Personal branding, when the words are used correctly, really should be about how you can build a reputation within your work place or personal life for certain attributes that matter to you and others. It’s an immensely important and really helpful topic for those who are entering the work force, being promoted, or entering new professional challenges. To know the importance of thinking of yourself and your own capabilities and your own attributes, thinking of them in the way of the leading brands that are successful today.

What I hear and read and see under the banner of personal branding is shallower than that. It’s about how do I get noticed. The reason why people who have become brands, from Oprah to Michael Jordan, is that the various businesses that they have gotten into are successful not because they had good publicists or were smart at getting noticed. It’s because the core element that makes them popular and makes people want to bond with them is present across the various businesses that they enter.

Oprah is a great example. When one fell in love with the Oprah Winfrey Show, it would be natural that one would find value in the magazine and the TV network, because the ingredient to her success is the same. The engine is powerful, unless all that the engine does is deliver against the same attributes.

In the same way, it will also be powerful, and we think about brands that have expanded into other categories as well. There’s a reason people wanted to wear cuffing, ties, and sports coats from Ralph Lauren because the core aesthetic and sense of value was leverageable and extensible.

When I hear personal branding and I really dove a little deeper because I’m interested in what it means it’s all about things that are transactional and that are about how can I get someone to look at me and less about how I cultivate a sense of self that is valuable and powerful and consistent. So personal branding phraseology and what it means is on my last nerve this week. Not that it’s not important and certainty there’s a lot to be learned on how to promote one’s self but don’t call it branding. Get the words right!

So that’s what’s on my mind. More to come. Let’s hear now our interview with Scott O’Neil.

Bill: I’m with Scott O’Neil. Scott, thanks for being the inaugural guest here. You have a lot of different roles and responsibilities. So you’re title in a paragraph or less?

Scott: Sure. So I’m CEO of Philadelphia 76ers, the New Jersey Devils, and the Prudential Center.

Bill: Awesome, so a lot on your plate?

Scott: Yeah. Quite a bit.

Bill: You’re in Philly about how much of the time?

Scott: About half. I live down here. I live in West Chester, but I’m up there in New York on Mondays then I split the rest of the week.

Bill: Glad to have you. A Villanova guy!

Scott: Go Cats! Yeah, when you’re listening to this, we probably have won a national championship.

Bill: Anyway, when I first was coming to meet with you a year or so ago, being a good stalker, I googled right away after your hire. The first thing I saw was this article from Inc. Magazine; it was about this rule of three. I was very taken with the process and the experience that they had described that you had worked at MSG. Can you tell us what went into that, and how it worked?

Scott: Sure. So when I was growing up, I grew up in a town called Newburg, NY, upstate New York, pretty rough town. My parents both worked – both entrepreneurs. So we had experienced the feast and famine of entrepreneurial parents. My mom ran a couple businesses. My dad ran a few businesses, some successful, some not so successful.

We had 5 kids, all pretty tight. The four oldest are boys and the youngest is my sister. So it’s a pretty chaotic house with 5 crazy kids. So our parents pretty much gave us three rules. One was ‘Don’t hurt each other,’ ‘Don’t hurt your mother,’ and the last ‘No girls in the bedroom.’

So one of the ways I thought about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness came all in 3’s. When I was at the NBA for quite some time and Madison Square Garden, I always thought there were 3 things that drive a business.

One of them was always ‘root for each other’ and three was always ‘make sure your pushing and dedicating yourself to create a world class organization.’ Two seemed to move around over my decade that I used it. At the NBA, it was ‘no surprises’. And at the Garden, it was ‘share everything’. Here we are a little more traditional. We have a mission, core values, and that kind of stuff.

We have our commitments, but I always think that you can rally people around something that matters, in particular with so many millennials in the work force now. The world’s really different, and it’s changing really fast.

I don’t know if this is going off topic, but I’m going to take the opportunity to say that we’ve got over 180 people here of which 150 of them are under 25. That creates an incredible opportunity culturally. It’s such a special workforce especially over the last three decades.

They’re really smart; they’re really fun; they are very entitled; and they believe they have total access. They work hard and believe they can run into a wall. They just need to believe in something bigger than the mundane job they have. This is a group that doesn’t buy houses, that doesn’t buy cars, but they are very mission driven group.

Here we spend a lot of our time talking about the ‘why.’ The ‘why’ really matters to millennials. We’re really focused on our community here. So when you sign up to work here, you give 76 hours of service. We shut down the office once a month, and then people are going to do stuff of their own, but you can mentor; you can teach; you can coach; you can go clean you can paint; you just have to give back if you work here.

Again, very mission driven, very much about using the platform that we are given in sports entertainment to do something better which I think is consistent with this work force – and we have free food.

I promise I’m not going to ask you any questions about what is Sam doing, but let’s talk about the other side. Because wins and loses come and go but when you think about the role of a brand or culture beyond who happens to be performing or not performing, what do you think of the role that brand plays outside of what the standings might say?

Scott: That’s a pretty complex question, but I can tell you that Finch was instrumental in helping us last year when we came in. As you know I went to Villanova, as you mentioned, and then having worked for the Eagles and then having a failed start-up here. I spent a good 10-11 years of my life here and have a good sense of the market.

Then being back for a couple years, it’s just more of my home. I consider Philadelphia home, and it’s a pretty fascinating and interesting sports city. It’s not like going to Atlanta, LA, or Dallas where some of the more transient markets are. It’s just hardcore, and people love what we do and the brands that we have.

So we are given a tremendous head start on just about any other business and any other brand in any other place in the world. We got a heck of place to start from. We believe that here transparency is really important. We believe in getting ahead of the message. We believe in the core attributes of what our brand is all about.

It’s a city of the heart of the American Revolution. Some of the greatest inventions of the last century took place here. It’s a city that’s Rocky-tough and gritty, and you got to leave it all on the floor or at the office or at the factory.

So a lot of those attributes enter about being a revolutionary at heart, and in the end, being gritty and tough and part streetfighter, part brain. That’s how I see myself and that’s very much how, when we talk about figuring out who we are, that’s always the first step and what fans see or what business people see.

It’s just what it is. But most of our work the past 12 months has been figuring out who we are, and what’s that North Star? What’s the guiding post? What does it look like? The therefore-after that becomes relatively tactical.

So I think when you talk about our business in terms of wins and losses and that’s how we are defined in terms of our success, that the businesses that can flatten out the troughs of the roller coaster and do a little bit better. When a team wins 57 games in the regular season and we’re on a playoff tear, even I could sell in that environment. But when you’re looking at March with 13 wins and 50 losses, that’s when we do the real work.

That’s when we are doing foundational work, and we have had great success. Sponsorships are up 30%, and I just looked at the preliminary business plan and our group has gone up another 30% to share. That’s pretty healthy. Our season tickets grew by over 20% last year. And they are projected to grow another 20% this year.

So you’re seeing, in a really tough environment, growth. And it doesn’t mean we don’t have parts in our businesses that are down, such as individual game tickets sales. Our ratings, some measures of the casual fans, are very much us getting slaughtered. But then core business for us which are sponsorship and season ticket base are growing.

You can either see us being geniuses and having a great staff or you could look at the core realities. We have this incredible opportunity in this city with this great brand and long standing history. We are starting to figure out who we are and the core is following and some of that has to do with messaging and marketing. But at the end of the day, if you don’t understand your brand, your fans won’t.

Bill: Everything you talked about in terms of commitments, I would imagine, regardless of what the standings say, that the experience that one has interacting with anyone within this organization is consistent with the experience of fun.

Scott: Yeah, I think so. I love going to our games. It’s amazing that a team that struggles as much as we can in the win/loss column, it’s amazing our team is built in the likeness of the city, and it’s not an accident that comes right from our coach that says we have to be gritty tough. We have to work hard. We have to leave it all on the floor every night. You don’t take a possession off of this team.

We take every measure. We measure everything. We measure every step in how people are working and running and it’s important but if you go to our games, like a few minutes left in the game, you’ll see 15,000 people yelling ‘DEFENSE, DEFENSE.’ I’ll smile look around, and I get the chills. I say ‘How is this happening? And why?’ We have incredible people here, who create a really fun experience. We have fans who care and players that go hard. But there’s a lot of other stuff you can do.

The challenge when I was in school, seems like over 100 years ago now, I kept hearing ‘I’m ready.’ I was a marketing major studying 1 to 1 marketing. I didn’t even know what it was then, and now if you don’t do that now, it’s 1 to 1- what have you connected with me in the last fifteen minutes. We have this incredible opportunity to reach people on a different level, and I mean I’m really excited about our potential here for this team and growing the business.

I’m really excited about the evolution of the brand here, but more intrigued about how we have this incredible opportunity to change the trajectory of the base and the city here. Think about it, and I’m not overstating this. I’ve seen it happen. You can actually lift a city with a sports team. And think about the power of that, and we have that opportunity and it’s fun.

Bill: So we talked certainly about the trajectory of the Sixers. We know that your portfolio is broader. It includes the Devils, and it includes the building. Hockey and basketball are different on some level, and each franchise is in a different moment. How would you compare and contrast the challenges of the brand or communications level? How it might differ from the Prudential Center itself? Devils? Sixers? How much is the same? How much isn’t?

Scott: I guess the process and discipline are the same but the brands couldn’t be any more different for all three. The Prudential Center was brand-less when we got there. We’re in a really competitive market with the Izod Center, Nassau Coliseum, Madison Square Garden, and Barclays. Izod is shutting down, and Nassau should be shutting down for a couple of years. So we’re kind of left with the two horses.

They’re number 1 and 2 in the country in terms of booking. The world’s most famous arena, the limping legend, they have all that history and tradition at Madison Square Garden that’s just pinned up and I think it’s the 4th or 5th iteration of the Garden, but this history is so rich in there. It’s incredible. And Barclays Center which kind of like faux-hipster-cool with the fake Jay-Z thing, all the black and white, and Brooklyn and hardcore Brooklyn and I think they did both incredible jobs of giving brands to buildings, and we didn’t.

We went through a pretty exhaustive exercise in New York, and where we are is, we’re really different. So we’re hugs over handshakes, we kind of Norm walking into Cheers. We want this to feel like you go home from work, you leave your suit, you throw on a jersey, you grab your keys, and come to a game. We want you to dance and to cheer in our place. We want you to leave with sore throats and sore hands, and when you walk in, whether it’s the ushers, the concessioners, the security guard, me, a player, a coach, or a ticket sales rep, you feel like family. That’s a really fun brand to sell and be part of.

The Devils is different. It’s a little bit of a schizophrenic brand. You have this incredible history and tradition. It’s one of the most winningest hockey franchises among the top three over the last twenty years. They have a reputation of fans not showing. The reality is they have a lot of hardcore fans, and the brand stands for ‘the jersey over back of the jersey’ sacrifice, which is what can you do for your teammates; are you willing to give a little to get a lot for the team? That’s not translated to the fan in the way they react to the brand and the team. So there’s a whole opportunity there to reinvent what that might look like.

It’s also a challenge having the name ‘Devils.’ It was a contest that the team ran in 1981 before they moved to name the team, and there was a legend of a New Jersey Devil who rolled in the swamp lands of the shoreline in New Jersey. It represents some really interesting challenges for marketers and the leadership to figure out how to avoid any demonic presence, and it’s really easy to fall into natural traps that you might have.

We were trying to build a base in a market that’s incredible. If you just took north Jersey and took the population, it would be the 4th largest market in the country behind New York, LA, and Chicago. Second wealthiest state in the country. Number 1 in education. It has 26 Fortune 500 companies, just in north Jersey. That’s more than Chicago, LA, and San Francisco combined.

This is a powerhouse market, but no one is really from there. You got a thousand multinationals, people from all over the world. There’s no sense of town. So when we talked about this being the town square, but it’s not there yet.

Plus, we’re in Newark which is a really tough town. So what we’re trying to figure is how this can be the connective tissue to a bettering community where most people go to Philadelphia or New York to work or live So it’s a pretty complicated jigsaw puzzle, but we’re on the case.

Bill: Obviously, you’ve provided great depth and texture to where the Sixers are, so I won’t burden you to explain it again. This has been terrific, and we appreciate your time and your insight. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you over the past year. Proud son of the city. We are very excited about the future of the franchise and everything else.

Scott: Can I give you a public thanks for ‘Together We Build’ because that was the stroke of genius. I always take credit for it myself, just so you know. I thank you for that and the campaign. It really put us on the map and took us out of the oblivion or pain that I often times see these other franchises go through. It’s brilliant, brilliant work. You’re incredible.

Bill: I know that the hashtag isn’t being used as much. I still try to tweet it back to the organization and see if someone will use it.

Scott: You know I think we’re in a funny time. I’m going to use this time to talk about we’re in a funny time in this organization, where it’s exactly what we needed at the right time. When you’re resetting your brand, you never want to be flipping by month or even year. You want to have something you can stick with.

We do quite a bit of research and testing. The market wanted to move off of that. It felt to them like we were saying five years, and we don’t want to build anymore like make a decision. So we’re a little bit like we’re floating, but we have a plan, but we’re floating now. It’s quite a challenge, but it was the anchor that I’ll always point to forever that kind of stroke of genius.

Bill: Thanks that means a lot to us, and I’ll never forget the first pregame of last season. If we stopped it there, it would have been perfect, we would have been undefeated. We were following social media chatter, and we were so proud. I remember I was at a bar and everyone was crowding around the TV. I look in social media, and everyone is saying ‘Together We Build.’ We’re building; we’re ready – 3-0. But thanks for your kind words. It means a lot.

To close, you shared so much, but any other things that you’ve learned along the way that you think of folks who are practitioners of how to build brands and businesses and people who aspire to reach the heights that you’ve reached through hard work and talent. A couple of things, if not, fine. Any things about this journey and things that stand out to you?

Scott: Yeah, sure. I’m usually on the advice receiving business, not the advice giving. But I’ll give it a shot. I would say one is just listen more, ask more questions, and listen. We are all so focused, and we all have a voice. We are all members of the media Everyone, your taxi driver, the guy that serves you in a restaurant, the babysitters of your kids, the person getting your ticket at the movies, we’re all members of the media. I just to encourage you to ask more questions and listen more than you talk. People will tell you; that’s the good news. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is a lesson that took me a long time to learn in my career. Make it about the who. Forget about the what. Some people say ‘I want to work in sports,’ and I say ‘No, just go work for someone you like, love, and respect.’ And go on the ride because that’s the fun part. The what will take care of itself; it’ll emerge; it’ll come. You’ll find your place, your passion, and probably some of pain points. But the lesson I wish I learned earlier was just seek out the who. You want to be around really, really top talent who are even better people.

Bill:Thank you so much for your time and continue your success and for the first Real-World Branding podcast. That’s a wrap. Thanks.

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