David Aaker on the 5Bs of modern banding

Jason Hemingway: [00:00:00] Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with the leaders shaping the future of global business. Today’s guest is someone whose influence on marketing and branding spans generations and continents. David Aaker is Vice Chairman of Profit, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and author of something like 18 books that have become foundational texts in the marketing world. His frameworks have guided everyone from Fortune 100 CMOs to students entering the field for the first time, and I can attest to that because I was one of those students of David’s many years ago. And he’s been called the Father of Modern Branding, and rightly so. And I guess few people have done more to define how brands are built and why they matter than David. So, David, welcome. It’s a real honour to have you here.

David Aaker: Well, thank you, Jason. Nice to be here.

Jason Hemingway: Great. Well, [00:01:00] let’s open up with, you know, you’ve had an extraordinary career. I just mentioned the 18 or so books, and Aaker on Branding, being one of the seminal texts, and you’ve just re-released a second version of that this year as well. But over that extraordinary career, what surprises you most about how brand has kind of evolved in its thinking and what’s kept you so committed to it for all these amounts of years?

David Aaker: Well, first of all, branding is just fun. It’s really stimulating, and everybody’s interested in it. And I just thank God I’m not like an accountant or an economist. Branding is just a lot of fun. When I first got on it, it was around 1990. And the stage was set. In the 80s, the [00:02:00] BCG matrix, the gross share matrix, was king. And it said that all you had to do is increase market share and profits would go up, which was a flat-out lie based on, you know, a really atrocious statistical analysis. But anyway, that was the mantra. And something like 40% of big Fortune 500 companies used that to strategize. And, you know, explicitly, that’s what they said they were doing. And so that led people to do a lot of short-term stuff that was destroying brands. And then scanner data came in, which allowed you to know your next-day sales. And that put more pressure on short-term brands. And around the last of the 80’s, people just sort of said, this isn’t working. This is not working. And at that point, somebody came in [00:03:00] with the idea of brand equity. And actually, Michael Porter had, in the mid-80s, introduced the concept that differentiation was one of the three strategic ways to compete, and that kind of helped. But they were ready for brand equity. And so then I wrote this first book and said brand equity is awareness. And it means that’s right. But it’s more than that, it’s brand equity, it’s brand loyalty as well. And that, really, not just me, but that and others that promoted that, really made marketing get a seat at the executive table. There was now a CMO, a VP of Marketing, whereas before, marketing was delegated to the advertising agency, more or less.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah.

David Aaker: And since that time, and then I wrote a book on how do you manage brand’s equity and how do you build it. And I had a model that was based on awareness, [00:04:00] and image, and loyalty, and that’s kind of where we were. And I think that the interesting thing about today is, first of all, a lot has not changed. You still have to do the fundamentals. You have to determine your brand vision, which now I call brand pillars. You want 3 to 5 core pillars; you, maybe, want another 3 or 5 that are on the bench, they’re in substitutes, but they’re ready to come in if needed. And it’s important to get a label on those that’s right. And it’s important to realize it’s not a three-word phrase. It’s not a single dimension. A brand has multiple dimensions, even in packaged goods, but especially in service business and B2B. And the second thing to realize is these dimensions are not pre-specified: everybody doesn’t have to have a personality, everybody doesn’t have to have a differential something or other. You have [00:05:00] what you have, and it’s all based on your thing. And that hasn’t changed. And the idea that you have to build brand equity and then leverage it for growth and for thriving business has not changed. What has changed is, I think, two things. One is the pace of innovation and the depth of new innovation. And on that score, branding has a role to play. And if you read the books on disruptive innovation, like Blue Ocean and so on, they don’t mention branding. Blue Ocean has half a page on First Mover Advantage, which is not all that relevant. And anyway, that’s it. And the other books, most of them have no mention at all. You look under the index, there’s nothing under B for branding. And the reality is, I have a book called Owning Game Changing Subcategories that elaborates, [00:06:00] but the thing is, branding has a huge role to play. They have to position the subcategory, they have to become the exemplar of the subcategory, they have to scale the subcategory, and they have to build barriers. And all of those are branding issues. And the second change, I think, is that the environment has become so hostile. The communication environment is now so hostile. There’s rampant skepticism everywhere. There’s polarized audiences, there is incredible information overload, the number of things people are exposed to, not only in television or radio or print advertising, but also in other forms, is just enormous. And so it comes across as noise, mostly. And so, how do you communicate in that? And so I have written, I have in the book, methods you can use, [00:07:00] and I also have written articles about how you do that. And briefly, it elevates the role of a tagline, and you can use social programs to do that. You can emphasize ways to get attraction by using humor, by using emotion, and so on. And finally, you can resurrect some of these brand builders that we’ve kind of relegated to others outside marketing, things like events, things like sponsorships. But then there’s also things like brand’s communities that instead of talking at people, you engage people.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, with them rather than at them, I think, is an interesting point. And you do talk about, and we’ll get to a little bit later, about energizing and those kinds of things, energizing factors in brand. But let’s just step back a little [00:08:00] because we jump quite a lot into what you need to do about it there. But if we just step back and go all the way to sort of what you defined as a brand originally, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve kind of got it as a set of assets and liabilities linked to a name or symbol that add or subtract value. It’s interesting that ‘add and subtract value’, isn’t it? Because we often talk about brands as adding, but if you get it wrong, there can be that sort of subtraction factor, which is derogatory to the business as a whole. And I guess some of what you’re saying, as things have evolved, is how do brand leaders, or how do business leaders, rather than brand leaders, still misunderstand what a brand actually is today? Do you come across that? Do you think there’s still some misunderstanding?

David Aaker: Well, I think that we’ve had a growth in the last three decades in the people that understand and believe in brand as an asset. But still, [00:09:00] no, in the background, there’s this pressure for short-term profits. And there’s good reason for that. It’s a shareholder value thing. That’s the stock market thing. And it’s the way you evaluate executives and managers, you know, you have short-term sales to work with and short-term profits, and that’s hanging over everybody’s head. So, that pressure’s always been there. But it’s been receding for these three decades. But it’s now kind of coming out again. And it’s really disturbing, but it is, and I guess after three decades of pushing it down, you know, your techniques have become less and less effective, and it’s popping up. And one of the driving forces is the same driving force that caused us to damage brands in the [00:10:00] 80s, which is digital, which is big data, which is analytics, which is AI, and that’s putting a focus on short-term financials again. And so, yeah, we’re fighting that off. And so one of the things I did in the new book is to introduce a new framework, which I call the 5Bs. And the 5Bs were created in order to make people understand that it’s not just awareness and image, and you don’t go back to those days. A brand is more than that. And most people that are running companies aren’t that familiar with branding, and they haven’t the benefit of the literature and experience, but they damn well know that short-term financials are going to matter to their career. And so we had this [00:11:00] backsliding. So, the purpose of the 5Bs is to make sure people realize the depth and breadth of branding. And it’s not just that, for example, instead of brand awareness, now, I talk about Brand Relevance. So, you would not only have to be aware in general, you have to be aware that, you know, Pepsi-Cola, everybody knows Pepsi-Cola, but if it would sell cars, it wouldn’t have relevance, even though they have a lot of visibility. But more than that, it has to have credibility. So, as you point out, there can’t be any reason not to buy that emerges or exists in the first place. And so there’s that. And then in Brand Image, we have to recognize it’s not just functional benefits that we’re talking about, we’re talking about social benefits, [00:12:00] emotional benefits, self-expressive benefits, we’re talking about personality, corporate values, and so it’s more than just functional benefits. But the most important thing about brand image is differentiation. And people don’t realize how important differentiation is and how hard it is to get it. And actually, sometimes not so hard to keep it, but to get there. And then there’s Brand Loyalty. And then you get into things not only making a perceptual connection, but also getting engagement and involvement in the things we can do there. And then I added a 5th B called Brand Portfolio, because what people think is really quite remarkable. People think that it’s just building a brand, you know, it’s Clorox, it’s Barclays, it’s Siemens, it’s just a [00:13:00] brand. That’s never the case. It’s really never the case. You always have a team of brands, you have an enforcer of brands, you have sub-brands, you have co-brands, you have branded differentiators, as I call them, and you have branded energizers. You have branded source of credibility.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah.

David Aaker: Got to brand this stuff. If you can’t brand it, you know, I go into an organization, especially some nonprofits, and I say, “Well, what makes you special? You know, what’s your secret sauce? What are you proud of?” And they can give me two or three minutes of a passionate, eloquent statement. And then I say, “How do you not brand it? Or if it’s branded, how come you don’t leverage that brand internally and externally?” And there’s usually, that’s the greatest low-hanging fruit of almost all organizations. They need to develop a brand portfolio to support this [00:14:00] brand that they’re trying to build. And then the final B is Brand Equity. And there, the managers of brand equity have to, A, take on the job of telling people that it’s an asset and you shouldn’t destroy it by engaging in short-term programs. And B, you have to coordinate all these other 4Bs. There’s got to be a master coordination device. And anyway, so that’s where the 5Bs came from.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I mean, they’re amazing. And the update is especially interesting in terms of its evolution since you first wrote it. I think going back to something you said just earlier, I think there’s this idea of short-term, long-term. And the best place to be is kind of in this idea. I think it was Mark Ritson who talked about it, which was both-ism, which is you’ve got to try and do both. You can’t let the short-term suffer because you’re concentrating on the long-term, but equally. And that’s the trick. That’s [00:15:00] the hard part in marketing, I guess, is kind of doing both to the benefit of the business because you’re never going to get away.

David Aaker: Yeah, Mark’s a great writer. But I think that if you do the branding really well, it will generate short-term benefits. I mean, you know, look at, for example, Dove, Unilever’s Dove, that has a program called Real Beauty that was inaugurated 17 years ago. And it really has changed the lives of hundreds of billions of women and girls, but at the same time, it has enabled Dove, which is a kind of bar soap. I mean, it’s now made some shampoos and deodorants. But, you know, it’s nothing that you’re going to get energized by. But they’ve grown that brand from $2.6 billion to $6.5 billion. And because along the way, all those things they did [00:16:00] almost every year, they’d have a new study or experiment or something out there. And they’re all built on each other.

Jason Hemingway: Exactly.

David Aaker: Everything that they did generated short-term sales as well as long-term sales.

Jason Hemingway: Well, and I think that’s the bit people forget is it’s a compounding effect, isn’t it? The brand feeds into that short-term stuff. If you get it right, it has loads of short-term benefits over the course of time, if that’s it.

David Aaker: There’s two problems with that, Jason. That argument that you would seem is so sound and indisputable. The first problem is it’s damn hard to do that, especially when you have this temptation to tell people about the attributes and benefits of your offering. I mean, it’s just, you just have to do that, especially if you’re in high tech, but in everybody. They want to tell what is my benefit? What is my attribute? And they’re not interested. It’s [00:17:00] boring. And so that’s not a way to get, it doesn’t even build long-term equity very much, but it sure as hell doesn’t do anything in the short term. The second thing is, it’s tempting. Well, some companies divide it. There’s short-term marketing, there’s brand marketing, right? And they call this short-term marketing something like demand marketing or performance marketing. I mean, what a brilliant branding scheme, right? Who could be against demand or performance? But the temptation there is to say, okay, we’re going to do brand advertising. I’m all for that, or brand programs. We’ll build a brand, but we also have to get the business in next week. So, we’ll let them do separate things, and then they end up doing things that are damaging the brand. So, somebody’s got to say, okay, you can do anything you want, but don’t damage the brand. Now, it would be nice if you enhanced the brand. It would be nice if you leveraged the brand. But if [00:18:00] you can’t do that, fine. Just don’t damage it. And that’s where we get back to these days in the 80s when scanner data came in, and they damaged experience.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, interesting. So, let’s explore a bit more of what you talk about. I thought it’s so interesting, this idea of energizers and signature stories, which you’re talking about as ways to kind of excite people about what the business is doing or the brand. Can you just explain a little bit about those kinds of things, branded energizers and signature stories, and why you think business leaders should listen to that, and they’re not nice to have? They’re not just words that we’re sort of, you’re making up.

David Aaker: Everybody needs differentiation, and everybody needs energy. Every brand needs energy. And the reality is that both brands have, I mean, these are the cornerstones of success in business. It just is. And look at [00:19:00] the words of Peter Drucker way back when. I mean, it’s all about energy and differentiation. And the reality is almost all firms have no ability to do either, especially energy. There’s just no energy in bar soap, there just isn’t, or banking. There’s just no energy there. So, one of the things you can do is to find something with energy and use that to be your energy source, use that to be the reason people read your ads or involve your ads. And one way to do that is to use social programs. I call them Signature Social Programs. These are programs you’ve developed, or they’re maybe a nonprofit program that you’ve adopted as your signature program. And then [00:20:00] you can use that. And I already mentioned the Dove thing. The signature program was Real Beauty and grew the sales from $2.6 to $6.5 billion. I mean, I like the Dove story because we have that number. We don’t have that number for most of the stories.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, that’s interesting.

David Aaker: Another favorite story of mine is Barclays.

Jason Hemingway: Okay.

David Aaker: Barclays, at one time in 2011, they were the least trusted brand in the least trusted industry in all of the UK. I mean, think about that, the least trusted brand in the industry. And they ran all those ads saying things like, you know, we weren’t responsible for the market collapse and the financial collapse. You know, it wasn’t really our fault. And anyway, [00:21:00] we’ve changed. And so we’re not like that anymore. And now you can trust us. And nothing, nothing. It didn’t move the trust needle. And then they developed a set of social programs. One of them was called Digital Eagles. And they developed stories out of the application of these – Digital Eagle and the other programs. And Digital Eagles was started by 17 people at Barclays. There’s now 17,000 employees involved, but they started with 17 people that wanted to share the digital techniques with people that need them, younger people, kids, and so on. And they would be kind of their consultant. And then he created stories. One was a guy named Steve Rich, who hurt his knee playing soccer and could no longer play anymore. It was his [00:22:00] passion, but he could start to play walking soccer. And then he grew to love the sport, and he decided to use the Digital Eagles to help him make a website, expand the availability, create a place you go for schedules, for games, for finding a team. And then they told this video about it, and you got to know his wife, you got to know his grandson, you got to know his mates, and you got to know how this changed his life. And it was very emotional. And just this thing, the trust went up 35%. And the trust of the other financial institutions at that same time period didn’t go hardly at all up. And so that was the breakthrough. And why does that work? Well, one reason it [00:23:00] works is because people are distracted from counter-arguing, you know, they see the story, what’s there to argue with?

Jason Hemingway: How can you argue with a nice, legitimate, emotional story?

David Aaker: So then you have these attributes of the story, the involvement. You get to know this person, what a nice guy, Steve Rich, was, and what the benefit Barclays Digital Eagles did for him. And so there’s a warm feeling, there’s a sense of liking, there’s a sense of respect, and that sort of permeates under the brand. I mean, psychologists call it affect transfer. I mean, it does. But you don’t have to be a psychologist to understand that. All that good stuff gets onto the brand, and so it gives him some energy. The brand gets some positive energy. And [00:24:00] you can’t get that any other way.

Jason Hemingway: Interesting, I think. That Barclays Eagle story, I completely remember that. Fantastic. It was a great, great idea from a brand that needed to build trust, that’s for sure. Just to sort of move that. So, that’s a very country-specific example in the UK, but when you kind of go on to maintaining a brand across, you know, international markets, how do you keep that clarity and meaning as you grow internationally?

David Aaker: Yeah. It’s a challenge to manage over any silo. It can be not only country but different products, I mean, a lot of companies have 100 products. Unilever does. Panasonic does. And then there’s different modalities within marketing. There’s advertising, sales, and events and so on. So, managing across silos is really hard. [00:25:00] And I actually wrote a book called Spanning Silos because I was involved in several indirectly and saw the problem. And I interviewed 50 CMOs, and I asked them, what is the problem, and what’s the solution? And what I got out of that was that in the organization that I’m talking about, the answer is not standardization and centralization. That’s not the answer. You just blow up. I mean, these silos are there for a reason, a good reason. What does work is anything you can do to facilitate cooperation and communication. Cooperation and communication. So, if you get these people talking together, if you stage events, if you have cross-silo task forces, if you have some sort of a newsletter or something, whatever can to get [00:26:00] people together and communicate in club. Because if they start doing it in one area though they’ll learn to know there are others and another thing to do is to change the performance.

Jason Hemingway: Well, look, let’s pause for a minute, and onto a lighter. So, we have what we call a kind of mid-show moment, where I ask you something. I ask you about an inbox confession we call it, but we talk a lot about, you know, automation technology in my business, all of that kind of thing. But I always ask a guest, and you’re no exception, David, what’s one task, professional or personal, that you wish you could automate?

David Aaker: Maybe my schedule. I don’t have an assistant that I use, so I probably should. But, yeah, I could use help in my schedule because I’ll have certain events during the week and the day that are really important, and I [00:27:00] would like to keep track of them better.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I mean, it’s surprising how many people we get on that talk about calendars, schedules, busy people, obviously, all of us. And it goes back to what you said at the beginning is that we’re overloaded in lots of different ways from a communications point of view. Okay, right. Let’s get back into it a little bit and talk a bit more. I like this idea. You introduced this idea of trust. And, you know, the Edelman Trust Barometer is something that I’ve been looking at of late and over the last few years. And that suggests that trust, and we talked Barclays building trust back, but globally, trust is going at an all-time low, and it’s more fragile than ever. So, have you got any thoughts on what brands need to do to earn trust and keep it and get it back from their consumers?

David Aaker: Well, I think that actually, I think social programs are a way to do that. But I think social programs should be designed to help the [00:28:00] business. It should bring visibility, energy, it should bring an image lift, it should bring engagement to the business, and can and does. So, even with that, especially with that perspective, how can you avoid people being cynical and saying you’re just in that for the business, which you are? And so the answer is you just have to have real passion for this, one. You have to have a commitment over decades and not over months, and you have to be involved in it. You can’t just be somebody that passes money over. And the fourth thing, you have to be a thought leader, even. I mean, you have to understand that and have enough nuances to be a thought leader to contribute to making the social problem more visible and the solution more effective. So [00:29:00] that’s, you know, nobody accuses Dove of being cynical about the Real Beauty program. Nobody. Because there’s such commitment and such a value add. I mean, they are the thing, of course. But you take another example, Thrivent, a financial services company that has adopted Habitat for Humanity for 20 years. But the same thing there. That’s not very visible to the general public, but to their 2 million customers, everybody knows about Habitat. And they’ve got their own little take on Habitat. They’ve got a build-it brand that’s their brand that talks about their approach to Habitat. And they do some special things to help Habitat finance, which is their area. But the point is that their commitment, their passion, their belief, their 100% [00:30:00] depth of knowledge of how that works and how it goes and their experience over 20 years. So, I think that if you get a social program and you show that authenticity of commitment, then that will be in your brand, and it will transfer into other areas.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. That’s interesting because it moves it away from performance theater, just saying it and doing it, to something that’s a bit more credible and, like you say, sort of authentic.

David Aaker: Just as an aside, Jason, I don’t know about the UK, but in America, things are so polarized here that you run a terrible risk if you get in the political space. And my advice to the companies is not to do that. But instead, you know, focus on a social issue. It could be [00:31:00] climate change and so on. But if you address it as, you know, if you don’t have to make windmills necessarily, but if you address it in such a way that you’re in a positive way, talking about this, then you’re helping the effort by framing the discussion. And we’ll talk about the importance of framing the discussion later, but that’s a big step up without being political.

Jason Hemingway: I think that’s interesting. And let’s get into that sort of framing of the discussion. How do you unlock that kind of thing from a business? You know, listening to you, everybody will say, well, I’d love to do that, but where do I even start to get that kind of thing going?

David Aaker: Well, I think that it starts with a nice context to talk about it is that of disruptive innovation, where the whole category is right now available to [00:32:00] be positioned. And so you have to position the brand and to use that position to position the category and to frame the category. So, when you position, say, well, let’s take Salesforce, going back to 1999 when they introduced cloud computing. So, they were a brand new company. So, they had to position their company and use that to position the category they’re in. So, they didn’t talk about Salesforce; they talked about cloud computing and how you don’t, no investment up-front, there’s no shutdown to reinvent your software once a year, and shut down your whole company for two weeks in July because it’s continuous, it’s ongoing, it’s always up-to-date, it’s never shut down. And [00:33:00] the third thing is that it’s safe because of redundancy and so on. And that, for a lot of people, was the reason not to buy. They didn’t want somebody else holding all my data. And then there’s a personality to it. You’re cool. You’re advanced. You’re not obsolete. You’re not grandpa’s software. And so they position that. So when you do that, that can serve as a way to frame the discussion. And would that mean when you come to the discussion, or you come to think about software or any software, you think about the Salesforce software, which is mainly on connecting with customers, then you would think of it in that way. Do I want to [00:34:00] invest? And do I want to have ongoing… So, that’s the way you look at it. That’s how you stop into that conversation, you stop into learning new things or reading things about it, that’s where you are, and that’s called framing.

Jason Hemingway: I think that’s right.

David Aaker: One of the most influential books I’ve ever read. I just wrote a blog that will be out shortly in my LinkedIn blog, the 10 books that have influenced me. Number one by far on the list is a book by a guy named George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist who wrote a book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. And he talked about the fact that it’s not the quality of the argument that wins. It’s not the quality of the argument. It’s not my brand’s better than your brand. That’s not what wins. It’s what the argument is about. That’s what wins. If you get the argument about tax [00:35:00] relief as opposed to arguing about investing in infrastructure. I mean, you can argue all day how tax relief is bad because you need to invest. But you’ve lost. You’ve lost already. So, it’s what the argument is about, and that’s what framing is. You want to frame the discussion. So positioning, one of the jobs of positioning is to do it in a way that frames the discussion. You want to have such a strong position that it dominates the mind when you come to, you know, you’re buying a diamond ring. Diamond is forever.

Jason Hemingway: That whole idea of salience, and then when the person’s in market, they’re ready to think of you as one of the top fighters. I think, a really interesting, Salesforce, I think, was a great story for lots of technology marketing. In particular, going back to your thinking at the very beginning, do you remember they used all that [00:36:00] framing and that positioning to come up with that kind of campaign idea of no software? If you remember, it used to be a circle.

David Aaker: Yes. Yes. Good memory. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You know, an interesting thing about, there are a lot of interesting things about Salesforce. Let me just have two others. One is, the day they started, they had this social program, 1-1-1. And now they’ve got, I don’t know, 300, they opened it up to everybody. Now there’s 300 organizations that are doing that. They’ve made such a huge difference. And they branded it. I think they branded it.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, they did. And they also, going back to your kind of community aspect that you talk about, they had the Trailblazer community, which is essentially a free set of training for everybody that would ever look at Salesforce software, CRM, whatever you want to call it, but it’s completely free. You go in there, you can become a [00:37:00] Salesforce admin without having to pay a penny. And that is amazing because they built a massive community outside of just their customer base. And they’re doing a bit of social good for that as well at the same time. So, very interesting case study, I think, in many ways.

David Aaker: Well, just along that line, I wrote a book on purpose. And one of my theories is that sometimes one purpose doesn’t include social and business. You might need a business purpose and a social purpose. And so one of the things that Salesforce does, they have a business purpose. We’re a connection. We connect you. That’s their business purpose. But the social purpose is there’s software that’s good. So, they’ve got all their software as a nonprofit sub-brand, and they give it away or sell it at cost or something. And they’ve made a huge difference with that.

Jason Hemingway: So, look, we’re coming towards the end, David. It’s been a [00:38:00] brilliant, fascinating conversation. But a couple more questions. If there is one guiding principle you have for the next generation of brand leaders, what would it be? If there is, I mean, there might not be one, but a collection, however you want to answer that question.

David Aaker: Well, that’s a good one, Jason. But I’m not sure we have enough time. But just a few off the top of my head, I mean, I think this idea of the 5Bs, that it’s not just advertising, not just communication here, it’s brand loyalty and brand communities and its relevance and being credible and its image and, you know, getting beyond functional benefits. And it’s supporting brands, brand differentiators, brand energizers. And so that’s one thing. The other is, [00:39:00] and that’s part of the way you stave off short-termism, and you protect the brand as an asset point of view organizationally and so on. So, that’s one thing. And the other two, I think, would be as we started off, these two things that have changed and dramatically influence branding. And one is the role of branding and disruptive innovation and the importance of disruptivation as the only vehicle to fuel growth because it’s the only way to get real differentiation. And the second is figuring out, recognizing, first of all, you know, the famous line, we’re not in Kansas anymore. And this is a new communication environment. And it’s very hostile. And [00:40:00] all the skepticism and overload and so on and lack of trust, you have to look at communication differently. And you have to figure out how to get these really powerful taglines that, when you do get through, they stick, and they serve to frame the conversation. I’ve been working on a political front with that. And the second, you have to understand that you have to get attention in the first place. And you have to divert from counter-arguing. So that means humor, that means emotion, that means being intriguing in some way, and when you do that, as anybody in advertising would tell you, you run into the trouble that we’ve seen in the past again and again. That was a great ad, but I can’t remember who was.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Aaker: So, you’ve got to, at the same time, connect it to the brand. And again, branding can help you do that. If you have a branded program, Barclays Digital Eagles, that can help you do that. [00:41:00] And then you have to figure out how to energize events, like a contest that Schneider has for energy applications and sponsorships. And we mentioned in passing brand communities, which is the home run of brand equity and of our business.

Jason Hemingway: All right, David, just two questions. You’ve answered one of the ones I was going to ask, which is a book you think people should read. And it was Don’t Think of the Elephant. So, I’ll leave you out of that one. But I’ve got two final questions, just one-word answers. This is something we do with everyone that comes on. So, one word to define a strong brand.

David Aaker: I think my whole problem with branding and this is my first book. Branding is not a free three-word phrase. It’s multidimensional. And [00:42:00] I really, I wrote my second book on How Do You Manage Branding. I didn’t even have a brand essence. I added that later, but I didn’t have a brand essence because I didn’t want people to go back to one word, one phrase.

Jason Hemingway: No. Well, interesting. Your word could be multidimensional because it’s more than one thing.

David Aaker: Oh, thank you, Jason. Thank you. That’s good. Yes, absolutely.

Jason Hemingway: And then if you could describe global growth in one word, this is a question I ask everyone, what would you kind of?

David Aaker: Oh, without question, it’s disruptive innovation, or just disruptive if I have to pick one word.

Jason Hemingway: Love it. Well, David, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for what is a brilliant conversation. So great to meet you after all these years, reading some of your texts from being a student of marketing right up until today. And I wish you all the best with the latest version of Aaker on Branding, which has just come [00:43:00] out. Thanks very much. And I just, yeah, thanks for the discussion. And I wish you well and see you again, hopefully, in the future.

David Aaker: Oh, great. Thanks Jason.

Jason Hemingway: David, thank you for a brilliant conversation. As a CMO, I spent years thinking about what makes a brand stick. And it’s not often you get to talk to someone directly who’s defined the field. And I found it genuinely fascinating. Thank you. And that’s it for another episode of In Other Words, a podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway. And a massive thank you to David Aaker for joining us today. If this episode made you rethink about how your brand shows up in your organization, be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform, of course. You can also find more conversations on leadership, growth, and what it really takes to scale globally at phrase.com

Thanks for listening, and see you next time.