From brand friend-zone To market dominance

Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we explore what it takes to grow meaningful brands in a world that demands both scale and relevance. I’m your host, Jason Hemingway, and I’m joined by Doug Zarkin today, Chief Brand Officer at NPR Brands, an award-winning strategist and author of Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone, which is a fantastic book, and I’d advise everyone to get a copy of it and read it. From retail to healthcare, Doug’s work has helped brands build stronger customer relationships while accelerating growth, even in some of the most highly competitive categories. Today, we’re exploring how to scale with consistency, build trust in every market, and turn emotional connection into commercial impact. Doug, great to have you here.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

That’s good. So, you’ve built some of the world’s most recognizable brands. Can we just talk a little bit about your career journey? I always think it’s really interesting to get other marketers’ sort of career journeys, because there’s always an interesting story about how you ended up where you are. So, what was your journey to where you are today?

So, I will tell you, there was a master plan, but like most plans, going from A to B, B to C doesn’t necessarily happen. So, coming out of graduate school, I knew that I wanted to run a business and run a brand. And I had absolutely, despite having an MBA, had absolutely no idea how to go about doing it. And so I got some great advice. Get on the communication train at the end, work your way to the front so that by the time you’re in the C-suite, you’ll not only have done all of the roles and functions, you’ll speak the language of those roles and functions. And then most critically, you’ll be in a position to motivate those people that are in those roles and functions. And so for me, starting out in the agency world, which was my first career, I spent my first decade really understanding media, creative services, eventually was tapped to start the youth entertainment and lifestyle division of, at the time, the largest private agency network in the world, which was Grey Advertising, scaled that business, and then made the move to go in-house. And you’re talking to one of the few guys that’s proud to say that he was an Avon lady. If you need lip gloss, I’m your guy, which confuses the hell out of my 17-year-old daughter. But spend some time at Avon helping them reinvent the direct selling model, bringing e-commerce in, e-based learning, a younger, more affluent customer. Moved from there to scale a small business called Victoria’s Secret Pink and really moved that from a one-dimension into a cross-category business. Spent a number of years in fashion and beauty, and then got tapped on the shoulder by this company I had never heard of. At the time, the company’s name was Luxottica. And I’m like, never heard of you. They said, “Come talk to us.” And what I realized was that Luxottica, now EssilorLuxottica, owns almost every major eyewear and eye care brand in the world, from Ray-Ban to Oakley, from LensCrafters to Target Optical. And for me, joining Pearl Vision, which I think of all of them, was the most complicated because it was a business that really was franchise-driven, but was really looking to find its place in what really is a commoditized category. And had the opportunity to spend 11 amazing years redefining the Pearl Vision brand, helping it distinguish itself not only from a performance perspective, but most importantly, from a trust perspective. When I left the business in the summer of 2023, we had eight consecutive years of double-digit growth. We were the number one brand in quality of care, top 10% of all brands on Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 list. And I think most importantly, we really had reestablished the trust from our franchisees and from our consumers in the neighborhoods in which we owned and operated our locations. And then decided that I wanted to fulfill a passion project. And you mentioned it before, which was writing a book for a guy who cannot spell. It was a labor of love. Moving your brand out of the friend zone was really for me an [00:04:00] opportunity to do something that I love to do, which is to train, to teach, to mentor. It’s something I’ve been doing throughout my career. And having a book allows you to do that at scale. It allows you to impact the lives of people that you meet and people that you don’t, and give them a couple bits and pieces to be able to figure out on their journey, how do they want to go about not only building the brand that they’re a part of, but also their personal brand? Because we, as people, are brands. And so it’s been out for a little over a year. And I’m really proud of the impact that it’s having. And I appreciate your interest in it today.

No, it’s fantastic. And I think you’ve got some of the really interesting things that you’ve said, which is, it’s based, and you can feel it when you read the book, it’s based on a lot of the grounding that you’ve had. And like you said, that analogy of the train where you start at the back and you go all the way up to when you’re actually driving the thing. I love that. So, that sort of inspired the book. And some of your more recent experiences, like at Pearl Vision, must have had a huge [00:05:00] influence on how you wrote it. But talk me through or talk the audience through, you know, that thinking human approach and how that evolved and where it came from.

We live in a world where relationships are, right now, pretty tense. In the world of branding, relationships are essential. And so for me, the premise of moving your brand out of the friend zone is grounded in this notion of thinking human. And thinking human imagines a world both, and let’s talk about your professional world for a second. Actually, let’s start with your personal world. We all have friends in our lives. Imagine if every friend that you had treated you as if you were their best friend. Just let that kind of percolate for a minute. What would that mean to you? What would that say to you? What would that allow you to do and allow you to feel? How would you be treated? Now let’s go to the business world. [00:06:00] Imagine if you treated every customer that walked into your store, that visited your website, that called your customer service line, as if they were the only customer that day that was coming in. What would you do? And that’s the whole premise of what thinking human is. It’s building an ecosystem as a brand, of really prioritizing the one-to-one relationship. It is less about things like customer service, which are two words that should be completely thrown in the toilet and flushed. And it’s more about customer relationships. And that’s really the building, the beginning of the brand value equation, which we may talk about. And then obviously, how to move your brand out of the friend zone.

Yeah, look, I think it’s really interesting, that human side of things. So, my background is very much in the customer engagement space. That’s what I was doing for the previous 10 years before I got to Phrase. And engagement is a relationship with a customer that’s built over time, and it’s built on trust. And how do you build trust if you’re not looking at every interaction that you have with a customer? And actually, thinking we used to call it outside in rather than inside out. It’s very similar to this human concept. It’s really putting the customers, you know, walking that mile in the customer’s shoe or thinking as a human, what would you do next? Rather than what lots of brands were doing and, you know, personalization and things like technology, you know, exacerbate this problem. It’s really what we want that customer to do rather than what is that customer trying to do at every point. And if you can build that into your strategy of, okay, there’s a value equation, which we can talk about in a minute, which is built on, you know, understanding customer need at that precise moment. And what they’re trying to do, don’t try and sell somebody an iPhone when they’re having a problem with their connection of the line or, you know, the iPhone’s broken, don’t, so suppress those kind of messages or do something different. It’s very interesting. So, tell us a bit about, we’ve gone into, I get into that value equation very much, or the equation of engagement being trust over time. So, tell me about that, the equation that you’ve kind of coined in the book.

Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Pythagorean theorem, and now Doug Zarkin’s brand value equation, #sarcasm, but for me, when I think about brands, I think about value. And I think about the fact that whether you’re making $50,000, $500,000, or $5 million a year, we all want value from the brands that we trust and bring in our life. Brand value equals, as your numerator, experience, and your denominator, price. You can charge whatever the hell you want, provided that your experience is three to five times greater than your denominator. If you walk into an amazing restaurant with your family, and you have a fabulous dinner. Great service. Best food you’ve ever tasted. Gorgeous linens. They refer to you by name. The maître d’ comes over and checks on you. The bill comes. Yeah, you’re going to look at it if it’s pricey, but you’re going to feel like, wow, I just had an unbelievable experience. You walk in your neighborhood diner, and if they treat you like, pardon the salty language, if they treat you like shit, you know, it may be a $12 hamburger, but you’re like, why am I coming here again? So, we need to think about brands, a very simple formula, and the simplicity breeds with it an opportunity for focus. If I can get that experience to be amazing, and I’m not just talking about the four-walled experience, I’m not talking about the experience on your website. I’m talking about pre, current, and post. Post being that customer service. We can deliver amazing value. We can drive premium pricing and make a hell of a lot of money. And there’s no shame in it because the consumer is getting great value.

Yeah. And I used to think about peak and end, peak end theory, you must be familiar with that kind of stuff, which is, the customer remembers an experience that is either peak or it’s the most recent or something like it’s along those lines, I’ve probably paraphrased that terribly. But it’s interesting. I think that where that squares with yours is the value that the customer puts on those experiences. And if it’s a particularly good experience, an intense experience can be bad as well. But if it’s a particularly good experience, customers are willing to pay more. But if the experience is overpriced or you have a bad experience and they still pay a premium price, then the customer really doesn’t like it. Is that sort of along the lines?

And it’s not about premium brands. I’ll give you a great example of a low-cost brand in my life that delivers an unbelievable experience that creates brand value. So, I was talking about the diner example. I live in Long Island, New York, about 26 miles outside of Manhattan. And there’s a diner that I’ve been going to since my wife and I had kids, little kids. My kids are older now. And I remember when we first started going there, you know, we would be a family of four. And, you know, you’d see the same waiters, and they would always seat us at, like, a table for six. Now, if you know anything about food service, you know that in a diner, it’s all about turning tables. And so, probably about like a month into going there, like every weekend for Sunday breakfast, I finally turned to the waiter, and I said, “Tony, I’m like, why do you always seat us at a table for six?” And he’s like, “Doug, you guys have stuff.” He’s like, “I want you to be comfortable.” And I said, “But aren’t you sacrificing the opportunity to get a check that’s based on six people eating versus four?” He’s like, “Yeah, but you’re a regular, and we want to make sure you’re happy.” And that is really the experience element that I’m talking about. And it gets built on by things like, you know, brings over free refills, I never leave without cookies for the kids, you know, all those little accoutrements add up, and it’s those small moments of connection that create value. And then you get to brands like the Ritz-Carlton, who I think are among the best in the world at doing it. You’re not thinking that you’re paying $500 to go to the Ritz-Carlton. You’re thinking about the fact that they call you by name. They check on you. There’s towels. Towels are soft. There’s always a lounge chair. There’s always somebody willing to help you. You feel like a celebrity, even if you’re just a nobody like me. So, the experience numerator is in everybody’s control. It’s just a matter of do you want to seize that opportunity?

It’s interesting what you say about it being in everybody’s control. So, a bit of practical advice for people when they think about this, but how do you apply that mindset when you’re building campaigns, for example, designed to scale across markets, across different audiences and channels? I think a hotel experience and actually a restaurant experience is a good analogy, but it is confined to a sort of set of parameters that are very controllable, you know, we’ll bring you your food on time. We’ll make sure it’s amazing. We’ll seat you in the right area. We’ll give you a little bit. It’s easier, I think, maybe to give you a better experience. Not every restaurant gives you good experiences, so maybe I’m wrong. But you know what I mean? It’s that the parameters are different when you –

So, how do you scale it?

Exactly. Building massive campaigns for the brands you’ve worked for, for example.

You know, this is one of the things that I feel is really important. Marketing without operations is just words and pictures. And so having an operations partner that understands the notion of thinking human is an obligation of the CMO, chief brand officer, or whatever position you’re in. A lot of it has to do with what happens within the first five seconds of somebody crossing the threshold of your business. And I’m going to use brick and mortar because it’s probably the easiest to visualize. How are you greeted? Does somebody, “Hey, welcome to Doug’s house of blah, you know, my name is Fred. I want to help you. How can I help you?” The engagement meter of creating that personal connection is so incredibly important. How you navigate a consumer through the journey is also a way. And a lot of this is operations, but truly, if you think about marketing and you think, actually, if you think about brand, the most powerful tool in a brand toolbox is your frontline associate. Your frontline associate is a three-dimensional living, breathing embodiment of your brand, of your brand’s position, of your brand’s values. So, the sales script from how they look to what they say are opportunities at scale. Also, it’s a little bit of a pivot by, how do you make the employees in your business the heroes of your brand? You know, do you empower them to deviate? Do you give them flexibility to adjust, whether it’s pricing, whether it’s, you know, a bundle, even how the process works to accommodate that person that they’re connecting with? You know, you go in, you buy, you know, my daughter just had her senior high school prom last night. You know, my wife took her in to get her dress, and place where she bought her dress was like, “This is a beautiful dress, you know, we don’t have it in her size, but what we will do is if you’re willing to buy the size bigger, we will do all of the alterations to make it smaller on us because it’s the perfect dress for her.” And he must have spent $300 or $400 on alterations. Just because the sales associate was like, “This is the dress that she has to have for prom.”

And the company allowed that person the freedom with the set of guidelines to make that, it’s a philosophy.

I hope that the sales associate didn’t get killed. But yeah, I mean, you know.

That’s so, so, you’re sort of aligning the company around that vision, that purpose of being more human. And you’ve done, to what extent have you done that with the brands you’ve worked with, like Pearl Vision, for example?

Yeah. I mean, with Pearl, I had the opportunity to work very closely with our ops team on the neighborhood eye care experience. And it started with appreciating that from the exam room to the retail floor, trust is earned through a series of small moments. So, working with our [00:16:00] ops team to educate our doctors, not on how to practice medicine or optometry, but understanding the importance of chair-side manner, which is not something they teach in medical school, you know, being able to be a little bit more inclusive and inquisitive with the person in the chair. You know, getting to know the person behind the eyes, as we like to call it, navigating them to the retail floor and providing them the tools to kind of do a lifestyle assessment. You know, you’re wearing glasses. Okay, so, you know, Jason, you know, “Hi, Doug. This is Jason. Jason has a minus two, minus one vision issue. But Jason wears glasses all day, and he’s somebody who lives a pretty active lifestyle, so we want to look for him to have a lighter titanium frame. And you know what? He’s a sports guy, and he likes to be outside, and so let’s make sure we get him a photochromic lens that goes from clear to sun, because that’s the most efficient way and the most cost-effective way to ensure that he’s getting the most out of his pair of glasses.” Great! Jason, you are now not just a faceless customer; you are a patient who we’re treating from the exam room to the retail floor.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

You know, and the embodiment of that by the Pearl Vision franchisees, even as I’m two years removed from being on the brand, it’s still something I’m incredibly proud of. How your associates take care of the customer in front of them and make it less about reading a script, which you hear anytime you call a customer service line, and more about reacting to what’s happening in front of them. That is the ultimate, ultimate expression of thinking human.

Yeah. And then I think that the subsequent question I have on that is that, yeah, so that’s great. And how do you balance, you know, maybe the boardroom or the exec side of things with, you know, we’ve got to grow a business. We’ve got targets to hit. We’ve got, you know, quotas, all of those kinds of things. How do you position it with those kinds of stakeholders?

This isn’t an ethereal concept. Like, this is actually based in union economics. It is 5 to 25 times more expensive, according to a Harvard study, to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. Too many times, brands are dumb, and they don’t see the value, the lifetime value that’s in front of them with a customer. And so this is purely economics. It’s also leaning into the fact that a very powerful marketing tool that existed 30 years ago, 3 years ago, today, and will exist 30 years in the future, is word of mouth. And so if I can take a customer and turn them into an advocate, they’re going to do my marketing for me. So, the investment in finding a solution within certain parameters that allows that customer to feel special, to feel taken care of, is just good business. It’s good unit economics.

Yeah, no, no, I think you’re right. I think, but it has to be pointed out, I think, isn’t it? Because you need the theory behind it. Because you see a lot of discussion about, oh, we want relationships with customers, but rarely do you see the actual economic theory behind doing that. So, it’s interesting. Right, we’re about midway through. So, we have this one question that we always ask, which is, we call it our inbox confession. It’s a little bit lighter than the others we’ve been going through. So, what’s the one thing you wish you could automate in your inbox to make your day run smoother?

I would probably say calendar management. Being able to have this, and I’m sure AI is on its way to doing it. I don’t mean just responding to meeting requests. I mean, knowing my lifestyle, knowing my family commitments, and being able to say, you know, Doug, a 6 o’clock Eastern meeting on a Friday is probably not the thing for you. Okay, or not scheduling me from 11 to 11:30, 11:30 to 12, 12 to 12:30, 12:30 to 1, so by the time 1 o’clock rolls around, I’m starving, I’m hangry, and I’ve got to go to the bathroom. So, I think probably sort of really smart calendar management would be something I would kill for.

You’d be surprised how many execs and leaders say calendars. It’s a good one. So, yeah, don’t blame you at all. I completely share that pain. Okay, well, let’s move into sort of looking across those different brand categories. You know, you talk very much about the B2C brands, I’m sure it’s exactly the same in B2B. Technology is very similar. I always think that that first experience is very interesting, the thing you talked about, but what have you learned about how engagement with customers and building this kind of human aspect works regardless of market? And you can take that in any direction. You can take it in market. You can take it in geography as well because obviously, we’re a language technology company. So, for me, it’s very interesting to see how that translates, for want of a better word, across areas.

Whether you are marketing a B2B business or a B2C business, there is a fundamental truth that exists. And I talk about this in the book. Consumers make emotional decisions before they make rational choices. Full stop. You’ve got to get them here before you can get them here, and then get this. And the more we forget that when we’re marketing B2B, let’s take SaaS, let’s take software as a service, okay? The reason why you bring a software company into your business first starts with the emotional benefit. It’s gonna make my life easier, right? It’s going to make me more money. It’s going to make me more efficient. It’s going to allow me to be smarter. The rational choice is it’s a great value; they have great aspects to the product solution, all the nerdy stuff. But it starts with, jeez, these guys can make me better, you know, they can help me win. That’s an emotional reaction. So, I love when B2B companies approach you, and they give you this like 75 bullet point list of all the reasons you should be. And none of them speak to the fact of, it’s an easy user interface, or you know what, we can take the complexity out. Show me the emotional benefits with the rational support. Don’t lead with the rational support because, out of context, then you become a commodity.

Yeah, 100% agree. And we are a SaaS business as well. So, it’s a really nice analogy, but it’s starting with the how are we going to help you as an individual? How can we make you successful? And I think, you know, you’ve got all the salience stuff. So, be around where everybody is, so salience is a huge thing that I really, really believe in. Be there when somebody’s got to make a buying decision. And I think I talked a little bit about category entry points. So no, and one of the things about those is focusing on the things that you can do well, then building emotion on top of those sort of things. So, lots of brands try and be all things to all people, don’t they? That’s one of the things you talk about. But I think you’re absolutely right. It’s that, you know, moving into making sure that, you know, the emotional aspect is front and center, and you lead with that. Rationality comes later. And obviously, you know, every technology buyer has procurement teams and all of those kinds of things where rational comes in. But if you start with that, you are leading on a commoditized sell, I think, which is a really interesting point. Anyway, sorry, we could talk about that all day. But so, how does that, let’s shift a little bit. So, we talk about getting that emotional connection. But how do you then take that into building content, building things with people that resonate on that level?

Well, so let’s reframe that a bit. It’s not content, it’s stories. Content is rational. Stories are emotional, right? And so, you know, let’s look at it. This is sort of how I’ve been taught through working with some really good agencies in the course of my career on how to really build a creative brief. And again, I talk about this in the book. The first thing you have is one circle in a Venn diagram, and that is the truths of your brand. These are the things we stand for. Then you go to the other circle. You get into the human truths of your target consumer. What are their beliefs? The intersection of that Venn diagram is where your storytelling happens. That will allow you the opportunity to bring your brand to life and make it sticky, which is something that, at the heart of what I hope I’ve been able to do throughout my career, is the goal. And so as we think about storytelling slash content. It’s not for the sake of just for the sake of. It’s got to reinforce that connection between the truths of your brand and the truths of your consumer. And why you use influencers is because they’re good at it. You know, why you put content out there is because you feel like you’ve got something to say, i.e., a story that’s going to get somebody excited and interested in your brand.

And do you think, I mean, you’re just sparking thoughts in my head about, you know, cultures and language, and storytelling can vary from culture to culture, can’t it? And so the adaptation of that is quite an interesting point, I think, isn’t it? So, how do you adapt those stories to resonate in local geographies? Have you got any thoughts on that?

I’ll give you a good example. You know, at Pearl, one of the things I’m really proud of is our lean into the U.S. Hispanic marketplace. And in understanding the U.S. Hispanic market is to understand the Hispanic consumer. And so the content that we put out was really focused on the abuela, the grandmother, and how she is held in such high regard, how she, in many cases, lives with her kids still, even if they’re married with children. And so the positioning of that family dynamic helps to make the stories that you’re telling more authentic. The cultural nuances that exist need to be factored in your story, or else it’s not a story that you can relate to.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that echoes not just in North America and specific communities there, but it’s all over the world, isn’t it?

All over the world. You know, I mean, if you’re marketing in Japan, for example, you’re going to approach the male-female dynamic a little bit different than you would do, you know, in the Middle East, which you would do a little bit different if you were doing in Latin America. Like, you’ve got to be, it’s not one-size-fits-all. And that’s where the importance of, you can think global, but act local. You know, you can have a, we want to tell a story about this, but the actual dynamics of the story change. I mean, that’s why in the movie business, for example, some movies do really well globally, others don’t. And the ones that don’t doesn’t mean that it’s a bad movie. It just may culturally not make sense.

Well, and then I think it goes back to audience, understand audience, treat them like humans who are culturally different in lots of respects. Anyway, okay, well, moving it sort of towards a technology angle. So technology, you know, particularly with generative AI and LLMs and all of those kinds of technology things and new automation, you know, changing scale all the time. What’s your, kind of, thoughts on how you can keep the human-first marketing, but scale using technology? Is there, obviously, there’s dangers with it because, you know, you can cut corners and maybe not do that. But how do you keep it, let’s say, keep it real and human?

To me, it’s, the complexity lies in the simplicity. AI is essentially an algorithm. An algorithm is only as good as the data points you put into it. So the more you work with, let’s use ChatGPT, the more you input who you are as a human being into ChatGPT, the more it’s going to be able to capture your voice more effectively. But it requires you to curate. It’s pretty easy if you don’t have a well, a mature ChatGPT to see that somebody’s using ChatGPT to write. There are certain words that pop up that you just wouldn’t use in common language. So much like if you go back 15 years to when programmatic was the cutting-edge approach to buying media, programmatic was about feeding the algorithm certain inputs. AI is about feeding the algorithm certain inputs. And whether that’s ChatGPT, whether that’s any of the other creative platforms that exist. You’ve got to feed it. You’ve got to feed the beast. And, you know, much like the human body, your body is a representation of the nutrition you put in; the nutrition you put into technology are the strategic inputs.

Yeah, and the big thing we talk about is the data side of it. You know, you’re trying to do that at scale. The data that you put in, if it’s not relevant, or it’s old, or it’s wasteful, or it’s not good, then you’ll get terrible outputs.

I’ll even give you one deeper than that, maybe a little bit more profound and perhaps provocative. Data does not make decisions for us. We make decisions using data, and here’s why. Data is only as good as the questions that you ask. Just because it can be measured does not mean that it is meaningful. How you ask a question, how you frame a question, that’s why, you know, if you look at, let’s take the U.S. National election of last year. Okay. Or maybe six years ago. Everybody got it wrong because they were asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. They were getting the answer that they almost wanted because of the way they were feeding the questions in. That’s when you get forecasts that are incorrect. That’s when you get data outputs that are incorrect. Living behind an Excel multivariate crosstab is one of the most boring and yet dangerous things that a marketer can do, because if you are not out in the community of your business, you are losing sight on that qualitative experience that really is bringing your brand to life.

Yeah, I think that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because there’s lots of talk about measurement at the moment. And there are some things that are very difficult to measure. But you should try. Tell me about, I know you know a little bit about measurement, of course, brand measurement in particular. Tell us a little bit about where you would start on those kinds of topics.

Everybody you talk to that is touching the world of marketing is like, oh, performance marketing. I want a performance marketer. It’s all about performance marketing. Here’s the dirty little secret, folks. Performance marketing will not perform if your brand is not clearly understood. And that is different than being aware of your brand. Educated brand awareness is the required precursor to making performance marketing perform. If you are putting all of your eggs in Google advertising, you are going to lose because Google page one is not the place to educate your consumer. Google page one is where you reap the benefits of all of the other work that you’re doing outside of Google. And so if you want to drive performance marketing to perform better, you have to take stock of where your brand sits humbly in the world of awareness – I’ve heard of you. Educated brand awareness – I understand you. And then you get into things like consideration, you know, and the values that you’ve communicated. But if it’s like, let’s just pump a bunch of money into performance marketing, hope it works, you’re going to miss. You’re going to miss every single time because your problem is way earlier in the timeline.

And is that one of the problems you see brands, a common mistake brands make when they’re trying to scale, or are there other mistakes people make along on that when they’re trying to do it too quickly?

The foundation of your brand has to be solid, absolutely solid, in order to ensure that you are going to do well. And if you don’t do well with the foundation of your brand, the cracks in what you’ve built above it are gonna be felt throughout your brand. Sales, lifetime value, average dollar sale, Google star score, share of voice, share of market. It’s the foundation of a brand is the foundation of a house. It’s got to be rock solid. And so brands need to continue to funnel money into ensuring that the brand is not only aware in the culture of the consumer that you’re going after, but it’s clearly understood.

I think that’s right. And I think that one of my kind of challenges to the marketing profession, I guess, is to keep brand in mind when we’ve got all the technology. You said about performance marketing, which I think the argument is actually shifting specifically in B2B, which is my kind of background. But the argument is shifting that you should be much more brand-focused than you have done before. And I think classical training in brand strategy with diagnosis, how you build strategy, which is deciding what you shouldn’t do as much as what you should do. And then the tactics come in, then the things like promotion and performance marketing come in. But you need to, and when you talk about going out and listening to customers, that’s about diagnosis. It’s about understanding who the brand is, what the heritage of the brand is, what the storyline is; there’s so much cool stuff that is available to you to understand consumer sentiment. One of the things that I love is I work with, I have worked with a company called System One. System One allows you to do face trace testing to really understand the emotional dynamism of your communication. Going back to my point about emotional decisions before rational choices. And so much of communication is unspoken. And so you miss that in traditional ways that you would measure effectiveness of advertising. And those are just some of the things that marketers are availing themselves of. Because look, we’re all looking for that little bit of an advantage. Because the arrogance of being a marketer is this notion that you can understand how to motivate the consumer to do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. That is arrogant as all hell. The first step in being that arrogant is actually being humble, and recognizing that if you do not listen to the voice of your customer, you will never be able to lead them. And it’s a muscle that I’ve worked on throughout my career. It’s something that is a work in progress. And I would encourage anybody who’s listening to this to invest in that listening in order to lead gene.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. The thing I was always taught very early on is you are not your customer.

No, you are not. You are not. And I mean, that’s part of the reason I went to companies like Avon and Victoria’s Secret. I mean, I don’t wear lip gloss, and not that there’s anything wrong with it, and it put me in the mindset of a customer that wasn’t me. And I thought it allowed me really the opportunity to be even more effective early on in my career.

It makes you listen. You had to listen because you couldn’t empathize naturally, right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Interesting. Right. Well, we’re coming towards the end, but we have this little quickfire thing right at the end.

Go for it.

It’s, maybe three questions. Growth in one word.

Growth in one word. Curiosity.

If you had to launch tomorrow in a new market, where would you go and what moment would you focus on?

I would launch an environmental product in Iceland. Because to me, it is the one place I have visited that is so far ahead. It is what society will look like. Their use of eco-friendly everything is so pervasive that I think anything environmental will thrive there.

And lastly, a book or podcast. I mean, I know which book you’d recommend, that you would recommend to your team. Maybe not yours. You can recommend yours, of course.

Okay, I’m going to give you a deep one. And I was just talking about this yesterday. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read the book in high school. It had such a profound effect on me. I haven’t read it since then, and I really should read it again. But this journey into self, you know, self-care is a real thing. Mental health is a real thing. And as marketers, we get so caught up in driving performance that oftentimes we lose sight of ourselves. And so being able to embark on a journey of literacy where you can really explore who you are and what matters to you, I think, is healthy.

Brilliant. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Mental health, people should focus a lot more on it, and take the time to do it. I know I’m trying to do those kinds of things. Tricky, but keep trying. Doug, thank you so much for joining us. That was brilliant. And I hope to catch up with you again soon.

Yeah, hopefully. Everyone, check out the book at Amazon on Kindle and paperback, Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone.

Brilliant. Thanks, Doug.

Thank you, buddy.

Well, that’s it for another episode of In other words, a podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a big, big thank you to Doug Zarkin for sharing his experience and showing us how thoughtful brand leadership, consistent storytelling, and human customer understanding can fuel lasting success. If you enjoyed today’s episode, follow In other words on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your podcast platform of choice, or indeed at phrase.com. And stay tuned for more honest conversations on leadership, AI marketing, and what it really takes to scale globally. Thanks for listening, and see you again.