You’re fired! Lessons in reinvention, brand strategy & professional growth
“The company doesn’t create the culture. If you hire great people, the culture will be created.”
Christian Stein
In this episode you’ll hear about
- Brand strategy misconceptions: What is brand strategy, what is it not and how should it be approached to be valuable and effective?
- The paradigm of fear in professional life: Why so many professionals are held back from pursuing their full potential and how to adopt a mindset that allows for change and dissuades fear
- The value of strategic thinking and incremental progress: How to clearly define a brand or organisations long-term goals and then approach the goals by seeking progress rather than perfection
- Redefining business success: The importance of reframing the idea of success in an organisation and how to identify meaningful non-quantifiable objectives to retract sole focus from number targets
- Vital role of customer engagement: How to engage with customers in a genuine and meaningful way to receive the data you need to make informed and powerful decisions
Key links
About our guest
With over 25 years of global marketing communication experience, Christian specialises in developing transformative strategies for diverse brands and agencies across Western Europe, Russia, North America, China, Australia, and South Africa. His expertise spans B2C and B2B, encompassing luxury to mainstream sectors in areas such as cars, trucks, motorbikes, beer, spirits, luxury goods, technology, and financial services.
Christian is known for building strong partnerships with C-suite stakeholders, using creative thinking to unlock opportunities and achieve business growth. His leadership has consistently led to impactful creative outcomes, driving business results and earning numerous awards.
About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.
Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.
Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.
Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.
Transcript
Chris Hudson: Hey everyone and welcome back to the Company Road podcast. Once again, massive, thank you to all the listeners of the show. I just wanted to say that I started this up, not really knowing where it would go and the response has been really phenomenal and more and more inspiring guests from my network and beyond are coming out of the woodwork and sharing their personal stories on intrapreneurialism and what it takes to change a company or an organisation.
And this was really always my dream that we’d be able to bring these stories out as a way of supporting other like minded people. And thank you so much for your support. It started out as a bit of experiment and it’s quickly growing into a community. And I can safely say that based on some of the feedback that we’re having, we’ve been able to help a lot of organisational leaders out there present and emerging.
So that’s really cool. We now have a listener base of entrepreneurs across five continents, which is just awesome and one of the fast growing regions is North America. My very special guest today joins us from the East Coast of America. I believe just outside New York city last time we chatted, I think Christian, you were somewhere near there just north of New York.
Christian Stein, welcome to the show.
[00:01:01] Christian Stein: Thanks, Chris. Great to be here.
[00:01:02] Chris Hudson: We worked together in Europe. We were helping to launch luxury cars in multiple countries during a time when car launches were, it felt like they were just popping up everywhere. There was- There was a lot of clutter in that space. And we were thinking smartly about how to differentiate the brand and the experience.
And Christian, you were the guy that brought it all together I feel. You’re an exceptional business strategist and you’ve helped lots of organisations realise the power of their brand and I also see that you’re a bit of a global citizen as well, you’ve worked with companies in Western Europe, Russia, North America, China, Australia, South Africa, and yeah, I wanted to say as well, based on our last chat you’d come to a point in your career where your work you know, was taking its toll in a way it was almost running your life in the way that marketing and brands does sometimes and that you were faced with a burnout situation at one point as well. You needed to reconsider your choices, and now you’re the founder of your own brand transformation consultancy, Stone Owl.
Today we’re going to hear about your highs and lows, the wins and falls, what’s really important, what should be ignored in some of those experiences that you’ve had. So, Christian, welcome again. yeah, I want to begin with maybe the part of you that I was just describing about being a global citizen.
So maybe we could talk a bit about that first. But what was it about you that you think connected you to some of the opportunities in different parts of the world. Maybe we start there.
[00:02:14] Christian Stein: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’d been working, I started my career in Canada where I was from. And after seven years working in that market, I really felt this, desire to go to the bigger platform, the bigger stage. The US has always been challenging because it’s just a complicated country to get work permits to come in.
And I was still, I would say, relatively junior, even if 7 years of experience to get visas and things like that. So the US wasn’t really an option, but I got an amazing opportunity to go to Amsterdam to work at 180 Amsterdam when it was in its heyday, it was like, global agency of independent agency of the year, year after year.
They’re doing all these amazing campaigns for Adidas and I had this opportunity to go in and actually run all the businesses that weren’t Adidas which was amazing. It’s incredible when you get to go to a place like that, where you just have the best talent from the world working and living and working in one place.
And we were just one big family of really incredibly smart and talented people. I learned so much from that experience and being in Amsterdam, getting immersed in the European way of life was really amazing for me, which then, led me to Paris where we met and you were in London, I was in Paris, many Eurostar trips back and forth.
And we had this amazing opportunity to launch a car brand that was not really well known into, the European market to go against Mercedes, Audi and BMW, which is no easy feat and it was, it was fun. Moving from Amsterdam to Paris was a massive cultural shock in a way very different, even though they’re only, three hours away by train, so just the opportunity to work on brands pan European, I think, gives you a chance to learn about different cultures, but I think the one thing I really learned about that experience, at least in Western Europe, working on global brands was, how do you find that one insight? What is that one thing that is universal and crosses borders and transcends cultures that consumers can connect with? And that was a skill that working in Canada, you don’t really develop because you’re just focused on that market. But when you’re all of a sudden dealing with, 25 countries and languages and cultures, it becomes challenging, but it also shapes you and how you think as a person and how you think about company cultures as well.
The one thing I’ll say that’s interesting about the 180 experience. I was having a conversation with an old colleague of mine the other day and so much conversation right now that we’re hearing is all about, we got to build the culture in this company. We have to create a culture that people want to be part of, whether that’s, and I say this tongue in cheek, snacks and free coffee, or if it’s actually, like training and development or all these other things. And we were talking about 180 and we got to this point where I said the company doesn’t create the culture. If you hire great people, the culture will be created.
And it’s an interesting mindset shift. If you think about so much energy and time is being spent in these big corporations, trying to create something. And rather than focusing on if we just bring in amazing, talented people, that culture will just manifest itself on its own. So that was just an interesting realisation we had coming out of that conversation.
[00:05:18] Chris Hudson: Whether the incentive is there for those amazing people to join in the first place, you’ve got to get them which is sometimes a bit more challenging. I feel like I’m not sure what your market is doing in this space at the minute, but over here in Australia, it feels like there’s just a constant battle for the talent, they can choose where they want to go.
There’s a lot of great people out there that are just picking what they want. There’s a mix between that and obviously what the application processes are making them do as well. There might be hundreds of people applying for the same role, the one role. And yeah, there’s like a saturation of talent out there.
So actually finding the right matches is quite difficult sometimes.
[00:05:53] Christian Stein: Yeah and well a layer on to that, and I had an interesting conversation with the CEO. He had just joined this company and we were talking about return to office and the challenges that poses in this conversation about talent. And he’s like, I’m struggling with this. Like on one hand, I want to have everyone there because I think it’s important that we’re there and you can choose whatever side of that argument you want to sit on, but there’s legitimacy to both sides.
But he’s like, but if I do that, that then limits my talent pool geographically to this 1 specific area. Whereas if I don’t enforce that now my talent pool is now like much broader and I can actually find people who, want to have flexibility, don’t want to commute, don’t want to spend, 80 percent of their pay check just to put a roof over their head.
And it’s a really interesting debate of, talent the power being in the hands of the people in a way now, in terms of what they choose to do and where they work and that sort of thing. But also bringing in the best people. And where’s that pond that you’re fishing from?
Is it next door to the house? Or is it like multiple ponds all over the world? I don’t envy the people who are in those positions trying to figure that out because. I don’t think there’s a right answer. It’s a really tough nut to crack.
[00:07:04] Chris Hudson: Thankfully there’s a sizeable talent pool, obviously, in the U. S. where you are. There was back in Europe you know, when we were both working there, it felt quite easy to get that resource in a way and to activate the right talent at the right time. But yeah, I think it is harder when some of those restrictions are put in place.
I’m curious to know within the US the climate since COVID has significantly different, I suppose the US market from an outsider’s point of view has always felt like, a very hard working quite industrious type market where there’s long hours, fewer holiday days, the usual things that are maybe just generalisations but I’d love to validate some of that and get your perspective on how things are right now in the US.
[00:07:40] Christian Stein: All those things are still true. It is very much like most people have very limited vacation days. It’s very much a live to work mentality here. But the flip side of that is, there is a massive sort of we can do whatever we put our minds to mentality here, where, when you do get into a team environment or a business environment, problems are looked on with excitement, versus being problems and, we’re going to solve this. We’re going to figure it out. That’s very much the mindset here that the sky’s the limit. Opportunity is abundant. We can do whatever we really want to do. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people who are in a tough situation now, because let’s not kid ourselves.
The economy is in a difficult spot. You’re hearing about mass layoffs, especially in the tech sector. But even in marketing and advertising, they’re obviously the first ones that get hit when a recession happens, because marketing is a cost and not valued in some instances, so there’s a lot of people that I’ve been having conversations with.
And the thing that I talked to them about is, we live in a world now that is fundamentally different than 10 years ago, even five years ago. We have tools, we have capabilities, we have global reach at our fingertips. And the cost of entry to try new things is significantly different than what it was, if I think back to 2012 when I started a small consultancy creative agency in Paris, the amount of money we spent on our logo, it was in hindsight, ridiculous.
But that’s what it cost and it’s not to devalue what we got because the designer we used was amazing and world class and all that. But nowadays you can go on Fiverr or Upwork, commission someone for 250 bucks and get something that’s actually pretty darn good and does the trick and same thing with building a website, you’ve got all these platforms, you’ve got Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, it’s all plug and play, WYSIWYG and it costs 6. 99 a month, and you can figure it out yourself. So yes, you might be looking at this sort of foundational sort of job that you have, or you need, or you want, but what else do you love doing?
And can you do something with that? And the answer nine times out of 10 is yes. You can do something with it because the tools are available today that weren’t there, 10 years ago or five years ago, and the cost of entry is significantly less, whether that’s you’re a writer and, you want to publish a book like you don’t have to go to Amazon to ask them to publish your book or random house or whatever you can self publish, and you can see if it starts to get traction and then you can scale, but the cash outlay to actually do that is, is minimal. And so I think that’s a long way around to say, the mentality here is whilst the economy is tough, I feel that a lot of people are still very optimistic about their careers, about their futures, about unlocking opportunity and doing the things that they love doing versus just sitting quietly and hoping, it all goes well.
[00:10:35] Chris Hudson: So where does that leave you in your profession and the other fellow practitioners that are really experienced, they’re craftspeople. They’ve been obviously deep in their trade for a long time and all of a sudden clients are saying, if we need a logo, we’ll just grab it off Fiverr and we’ll get it back within 48 hours.
I mean, there’s a big difference there to what it once was, as you say, when brands and the origination of brand identity, look and feel all the assets that go with it, campaigns and it seems just really different. What’s your take on it all?
[00:11:02] Christian Stein: It is radically different, but I think the reality is like in my industry, at least in the consulting world or branding world I think it’s much more about the value of what you deliver versus the price of what you deliver, when you’re in independent business, like mine, you don’t have a lot of overheads, you can be efficient and you’re not paying for head count, you’re not charging a client for someone to be sitting there at a desk and all this stuff.
You’re just charging them for the value of what they’re going to get from you. And there’s a role for all the things you mentioned, ad agencies, design firms, designer, like all those things. think it just depends on what level of investment the business is ready to make or able to make, and part of the reason that I set up my consultancy was, I’d come across a lot of brands that had reached out to the agency that I was working with and I was in a sort of a biz dev growth role. And so I was sitting in the share where all the inbound would come in and they were really interesting brands with really interesting ambitions and cool stories they wanted to tell.
But unfortunately, because they’re approaching a very well known agency and the price tag for them was insurmountable. And so what I realised was everyone deserves great thinking. Every brand deserves, the best and given to be given the best chance of success. But not every brand can afford big agencies to do that.
And so I saw an opportunity to be like I can deliver the same level of value or some level of value that’s similar for an investment that is significantly less or more aligned to what your investment realities are. I think that goes the same with design, with brand books, all these things that yes, there’s always going to be the 250 option on Fiverr.
There’s always going to be the 200,000 option when you go to an amazing design firm. And then somewhere in the middle, there’s going to be a whole swath of really talented people out there that you can tap into that are going to bring world class work, but they’re just not attached to the infrastructure that then dictates the extra expenditure.
So I think in the world we live in now, there is a place for the Fiverr’s the hustlers, the offshores side of things. The cheap and cheerful, if you will, there’s the big agencies and the big companies that are going to do their thing. And then in the middle there’s this amazing group of people who have tons of experience and are able to deliver something comparable to the big agency product at a, at an investment level.
That is in reality with that business or brands realities,
[00:13:33] Chris Hudson: From a CMOs point of view, or if you’re thinking about a brand leader or a marketing team function it’s from their point of view really within the organisation, they’re having to justify the spend, the value, as you say, and actually, it’s hard to do sometimes when you’re putting a value figure or a number or quantified something or other onto, it’s a creative output a lot of the time.
How have you found some of the conversations around value going and what does the justification of value do you feel in a way that’s worthwhile for some of those internal conversations?
[00:14:02] Christian Stein: I think it’s having come from the agency side where the pricing model is, let’s call it a legacy model, with FTEs and lots of places where procurement and client, can go in and negotiate on, and question and challenge and that’s just the reality of it.
And that’s the model that they’re trying to get out of some successfully. Some not to something where it’s more of like a consulting model. I think the challenge is less about this versus that, it’s more clients from a consultancy standpoint, understand that what they get, at least from what I do is not what you’re going to get from an agency because an agency is going to want to sell you advertising and that’s what they make and they want to make that because they think they know that is part of what you need.
I’ve now gone away from that and I don’t want to make ads. I don’t want to be an ad agency. I want to be more upstream, helping create the foundational strategy for that client, which the challenges in that is I can’t sell you and tell you, you are going to get this 32nd thing, this banner ad, this, whatever.
I’m basically selling you, a blueprint for success. And it’s hard for a lot of times for people to justify, you mean, I’m not going to get some tangible things out of that. You’re going to get thinking and clarity and structure and that’s actually got a ton of value. And then you’re going to probably have to go and get other things made by other people, but that’s the challenge I’m finding is like people to understand that what I deliver is going to help drive your business forward and increase your brand value, but it’s not a tangible thing that you can like touch and share with your, your friends and family to say, look, that’s what I paid that much money for because it’s on TV.
So it is challenging because, you don’t have that tangible deliverable, if you will, or that list of stuff you’re going to make, right? I don’t make the sausage. I write the recipe in a way.
[00:15:56] Chris Hudson: I suppose the same could be said for strategic leaders within the organisation, you know, you’re working as a consultant for those organisations, but within their teams, all of those people, if they were commissioning you, or if they were trying to have a go at it themselves, they’d be coming up against the same challenges and you’re always up against somebody else in another department that is seeking budget probably.
And is seeking to justify that, present value in a different way. And then the decision maker is basically the face of the choice. Do I go with the strategic output that is, know, claiming to be transformative for the business? Or do I go with something that I know is tangible and I can really understand because I’ve seen it done before? So do you find yourself in a lot of those comparative type conversations?
[00:16:35] Christian Stein: I haven’t been in those too many of those conversations because the brands I’ve been working with for the most part have been smaller, almost founder led type of things where it’s more, bringing my expertise in because I have experience in an area that they’re not experts in, which is actually exciting because your thinking is then applied.
And I think you’ve done the grind. I’ve done the grind of rewriting PowerPoint decks and presenting them through the meat grinder of big corporations. And at the end of the day there’s not much to show for it, even though the original idea was and strategy was great.
And fortunately when I’ve been, the clients I’ve been working with have been amazing and really grateful for the value that I’m bringing them and the thinking I’m bringing them. So that’s been somewhat refreshing for me but yeah, like in certain instances you do get pulled into a bigger organisation and you start to have that push and pull of, brand value versus tactics that are going to drive immediate revenue, and I talk a lot of, to, to a lot of clients and people about, short term security mindset versus long term growth mindset. And, unfortunately, most of us, live and die by a short term security mindset, whether that’s, we’re holding onto a job that sucks and we’re just hoping it will get better one day because we know that if we leave it, there’s a chance that that paycheck’s not going to show up, in our bank account versus going, you know what, going to throw a little bit of caution to the wind and put my long term happiness and growth as the priority here and go down that road and leave this thing that’s making me miserable and see if I can make this thing actually viable.
It’s a horrible situation and brands are in the same situation too. Like you can invest in a lot of brand strategy and, foundational thinking, or you can really invest down, further down the funnel in getting, stuff made that’s going to go into market and you can see it and be like I think it’s working cause you know, we got some clicks and that’s not to disparage one or the other. It’s just, there are places where businesses need to place their money and their bets and quite often, as you said, it’s on the thing that they can then tangibly see and
[00:18:37] Chris Hudson: yeah,
[00:18:37] Christian Stein: and not on the stuff that’s up front.
I love using construction analogies and if you were to go and you said, look, I’ve got a million dollars and I want to build my dream house and you scribbled on a piece of paper, like roughly what it would look like. And then you went to a builder and just said okay, build this, it’s probably not going to be the house of your dreams.
And it’s probably going to fall down. Not because the builder doesn’t know how to build something, but the foundational architectural thinking is not there. Nine times out of 10, you would go to an architect, pay that architect a fee to design and do all the intricate work to then give that to the builder who would bring in, his guys to do the work and the plumbers and the electricians and whatever, and that house is going to be exactly what you wanted because you’re going to craft it together with the architect from a blueprint stage. I would put myself as being the architect versus being like the general contractor or the plumber or the electrician. Everyone’s necessary in the process. It’s just where you fit. And unfortunately, I think a lot of businesses and brands skip the architect step because they see it as an unnecessary investment when in fact, it’s the biggest, most important investment they can make in the long term success of their brand.
[00:19:48] Chris Hudson: I mean, it depends on the type of architect that you get, of course. some are very focused, functional. Others are perhaps interested in other areas. that depends a bit on what the choices are.
But I think, analogy is an interesting one. I was thinking as you were talking just about if you were a plumber and electrician and you were coming in in the later stages to fit what you needed to fit and the house structure wasn’t right, you’d soon moan about it, right?
You’d say, well, the foundations aren’t there, but we’re still having to fix it. And we know we’re going to have to rebuild this house in two years time, whatever it is.
[00:20:13] Christian Stein: Which is interesting because the owner of that house is going to have to spend more money to fix what they could have prevented up front. That’s where it gets really interesting because ultimately businesses and brands, if you skip that part, it’s going to cost you more in the long run because you’re going to have to eventually come back to that to fix what wasn’t done right in the first place.
[00:20:30] Chris Hudson: And a lot of this work , it sounds like we’re talking you know, we’re speaking in tongues sometimes when we’re talking about strategy, because it’s not something that everyone understands. It’s like this thing that is a necessary presence within most organisations, but a lot of people, particularly those that are subject matter experts, they’re in very specific roles.
They’re frustrated at strategy as a whole, as a thing, because it gets in the way of getting stuff done and they just want the strategies so they can act upon it and do something with it and turn it into something more tangible. So, let’s flip from the analogy of the building and the construction and the architecture to maybe a real life example, if you can give one around, the types of things that we’re talking about in strategy and what it’s been able to achieve for some of the businesses that you’ve worked with.
[00:21:11] Christian Stein: There is an example of that in my recent work and I’ve been working with this wonderful founder and she is amazing. I absolutely love working with her and it’s an interesting example because she did exactly what we just talked about, all the right things seemingly to do, which was beautiful brand logo, beautiful, packaging, beautiful website, beautiful photo shoot, everything absolutely stunning from a brand sort of storefront standpoint. What the first customer touch point would be. I’m not talking about getting into retail and all that. She’s amazing at that. And she’s done an amazing job building this brand. But what was interesting was that when we started talking. It wasn’t really clear like why this product should exist, who it’s for and what it stood for. And even more so what category it should live in. And she’d gone to the builder and the plumber and the contractor, the interior designer and done all those beautiful things.
And that’s not wrong. And she’s amazing. there’s nothing she did wrong. And I want to be very clear about that. But what we were able to do is we were able to go back to the beginning and look at what she had. And instead of just tearing it down and saying, start over, build on the amazing foundation she had and clarify a few key things.
Around the brand to the point where now it’s crystal clear what category she needs to play in, it’s crystal clear what her brand positioning is. It’s crystal clear what the higher order of the brand is in the world and her as the founder, it’s crystal clear what her win will be. And this is a question I ask all my clients what’s your win in five to 10 years?
And it’s not revenue. It’s not sales. It’s not customers. It’s something bigger than that. And for her, it was beautiful. And she said, I just want my brand to be a reminder for people to take care of themselves. And I’m like, that’s amazing. Like that now sets a whole level of conversation you can have with the world from your brand about that. And then we got down to the nitty gritty of the core pillars. And we just, we sharpened, we clarified, we got more structure around what her brand was, and now we’re starting to slowly implement change into her brand ecosystem, whether that’s through messaging on her social media posts, whether that’s, copy that goes on the little card that goes in the packaging, whether it’s what podcast she should go on to, to talk about, what her brand is all about and the category and her role in that from a thought leadership standpoint.
So it was taking something that was, aesthetically and structurally good and just it more clear, more solid, and giving that blueprint for long term success. Even to the point where, she had and has a couple other products that were different than the main product that the brand was built on.
And we started having, we had a call like a couple weeks ago and it was like, we keep those? Do they fit? Are they just something that you were like, and it’s great because it gives us the ability to have those conversations and make decisions that are informed because you have this blueprint that I call it the instruction manual for your brand.
Go back to construction one more time. If you go to Ikea and you buy, a cabinet and you bring it home and you just start slapping it together. Without looking at the instructions, it’s probably gonna be not right. But if you go and you pull the instructions out, you’re going to get this beautifully, done, Ikea cabinet made and it’s the same with brands, you can wing it and hope you get it right.
Or you can have an instruction manual that’s actually going to help you make informed decisions about your business and brand moving forward. So hopefully, for her this brand game plan, as I call it, will allow her to make the right decisions, whether that’s product strategy, pricing strategy, retail strategy, go to market, all of those things to make sure that when her target audience engages with the brand, it’s crystal clear all the things that they need to know and fall in love with.
[00:25:09] Chris Hudson: Yeah. And that’s the important part, isn’t it? It’s giving the broader teams presumably the things to hook into and actually take forward as well in a way all ladders up to the same goal. From what you were saying, I love the more specific nature of what you were describing and the fact that it’s probably more instructive.
Some brand work I feel is misguided and it sits in silo within organisations and you know that it does because the CMO wants to might be, you know, be famous for something. And it’s not always at one with the rest of the organisation, put it that way. I don’t know if it’s instructive versus destructive or deconstructive or counterintuitive to what the rest of the organisation is experiencing, but it feels like that happens a lot of the time, particularly when it’s very short termist.
There’s another point that you made around quick wins quick storytelling, short, sharp bursts of news stories, and really it’s a bit more of a flappy approach to use a technical term around like what’s going to work in the market. Let’s put another story out. Let’s put another brand campaign out see what works.
And you see brands jumping around all over the place. But from what you described, I really like it because it’s it’s longer term and it also plays out and builds over time, but it gives everyone that, that compass and that, that singular point of focus really so that everyone knows whether it’s a fit with what’s been defined as a brand strategy or not. So so that’s really cool.
[00:26:20] Christian Stein: The big misconception is that brand strategy equals advertising. It’s not. Brand strategy should inform everything in that business, whether that’s your HR, your talent strategy, your thought leadership your product strategy, your pricing, your everything should be informed by that strategic idea.
I was fortunate to have worked with, an agency for many years that worked with some of the most well known brands in the world and their strategic methodology is exactly that. It’s like landing on these ideas that are timeless and have informed and built some of the biggest brands in the world in terms of value and when you see the power of a simple articulation of a strategic idea, not a tagline, not an ad line, but like a strategic idea and how that impacts an entire business, it’s amazing. Unfortunately, a lot of people misinterpret brand strategy with the thing that’s going to make, end up as an ad campaign when in fact, it’s something that’s going to dictate and should dictate and be the filter for everything your business does.
[00:27:22] Chris Hudson: Yeah. It’s the very essence, the DNA of what your business stands for. The work that I do is often in the customer experience area so it’s more like externally facing. Sometimes we’re running UX, a lot of what’s called co design and co creation, bringing customers in, asking people what, how they’re finding, know, different experiences online through an app or whatever.
And there’s a question for me. It’s more of a. I guess the talking point here in the market that I work as well, but there’s often a bit of a mix of point of view where how much of the outside world you bring in versus how much do you define from within to take to the outside world? And where does your employee experience and all that sit within the context of all of that to connect the inside to the outside and, does the brand live within or should it live within or should it be something you openly discuss and work together with your customers on in some way or another, have you got a point of view on that?
Look, everything has to be about your customers, right? You have to be important to them and relevant to them. I think that’s something that unfortunately a lot of brands miss that point. And they do think only from within and they are very insular. And they don’t necessarily end up with something that is, relevant to their target audience because they’ve just haven’t looked there.
[00:28:33] Christian Stein: It’s not to say that you shouldn’t trust your own employees and your own people, because they know and live and breathe the brand every day. But it is important to talk to your customers and understand, what they value and where the opportunity might be and what’s important to them and deliver that to them.
Because at the end of the day. If you don’t have them, you’ve got nothing, right? You don’t even have a business. So you really, go back to what I was talking about at 180 and working on these global brands, like that focus on what’s that one universal insight that is going to allow this brand to connect with people, no matter what country or culture they’re from or language they speak.
It is a very smart approach because you inevitably created then off the back of it ad campaigns that were meaningful and engaging for those people and created a lot of people called brand love, and but when you’re just looking internally and I think Agencies can be guilty of this as well, which is oh we just want to make something cool, like great, but is cool actually going to make a difference and connect with the people you really need to talk to and connect with sometimes.
[00:29:37] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Yeah. That talks to the point I was making before, maybe around the short term is you know, the brief that usually came out and there’s some clients that we used to work with as well. They would have an ongoing briefing, you just had to make something cool or just do something viral, you know, just pop it
[00:29:51] Christian Stein: Make it viral. Can you make this thing
[00:29:52] Chris Hudson: viral?
If you have an idea, feel free to share it with us because we want those followers and we want the extra. awareness that would result from it as well. So it’s a tough one, isn’t it? You do have to have your story straight inside the organisation to know how best to engage the customers as well.
A lot of the time you can’t just have an open conversation with your end user or your customer. And I think this is where the craft surrounding research and design research, brand research is, it’s really important too. Because unless that’s framed in a certain way, you can’t just go in and, do you like this because it’s green or if it’s red?
Or do you like this feature on the website? Would you prefer it this way? If you ask very specific questions, then you’re kind of leading them to the answer a little bit. A lot of the time we have to go deeper than that and actually understand what the thing is you’re presenting actually means to them, what do they value from it? How is it gonna impact their lives their behaviour? You’ve got to understand the value system a bit to then extract the findings and then apply that to what we think we should change about our brand our products or our service and I think a lot of research in that space it’s feeling like it’s becoming quite literal. Ask the people what they want, we’ll make the change. We’ll give it back to them. We’ll see if the sales increase. Do you find that some of those more transactional discussions are quite common as well?
[00:31:00] Christian Stein: I found it through those advertising days, research was the worst thing you could possibly like, please don’t say the R word in a conversation with a creative agency. And there’s valid reasons for that, and fortunately I was able to work with some incredibly amazing marketing leaders on the client side who understood how to interpret research and how to use it in a powerful way versus it being the thing that just is like you said, like they said that, change this.
And I think if you’re a savvy marketer and brand leader, and you understand your brand and what it stands for intrinsically, and you use research as a way to gain more depth of knowledge about your customers, desires, wants, needs feelings about your brand or your product.
And when you get down to something like an advertising campaign, use it to improve what’s already there. I think you’re going to win. But when you are the opposite of that, where you don’t have a strong brand point of view, where you don’t understand your customers and you’re just like, whatever they say, let’s do it, chances are it’s not going to be as successful, it might show a short term blip, for whatever reason, but it’s not going to be the thing that’s laying the foundation for long term success and growth. Yeah research is really powerful. And if used in the right ways, I think it can be game changing. And there’s a lot of interesting new ways of doing research too, we don’t have to do focus groups anymore. I’ve sat in many a focus group room through my career and evaluating storyboards and things like that. And you’re just like, Oh my God, like we’re asking these people, what they think about, our expertise. And it’s a terrifying feeling, but at the same time, it can unlock some really interesting things. And I think there are some really great tools out there now that make it more more real and you can get real insights and really break down that sort wall that exists when you’re in a focus group setting. And I encourage clients to use that, to learn to understand and to ask the questions that- and you can do it at scale too, which is great because with technology, everything can be done at scale now versus having to recruit, 10 people in this city, to come in on a Thursday evening at seven o’clock, it’s much harder.
[00:33:07] Chris Hudson: No, I mean, it’s amazing. I think working in the world of product design, maybe slightly different, but a lot of people are trying to figure out, you know, the organisations that I work with want to know whether the justification for the investment is there a lot of the time. So we’re, we’re working with pretotyping as a way of getting ideas out and testing them before committing to any level of build in a digital product, or if there’s a transformation is the business case there, can we prove it?
As I’m not adding ideas at a conceptual level, really, before we start making any of it, like you’re saying the barriers to entry are probably less, there than they once were, you know, you can go out and you can find this stuff out quite easily now. And I know, we can be smart about that and actually then direct the effort in the direction that it needs to go from that.
Technology is definitely helping with that.
[00:33:50] Christian Stein: It’s interesting. I was going to ask you, like how you’re finding in your world, like the test and learn mentality and approach and I bought into it a lot and I have to give credit to the coach that I’m working with, who helped me through a lot of change in the last year, and she says progress over perfection and it’s really interesting when you start to apply that mindset to business as well, and in the world we live and we talked about technology and these things like Fiverr and SquareSpace, all these platforms that allow us to build proof of concepts.
And the reality is like we live in a world of such short attention span that if you throw something out there and it’s not perfect, no one’s going to notice first and foremost. Secondly. You’re going to figure some stuff out. You’re going to be able to make some changes to it. No one will notice again.
And then all of a sudden it’s going to, you’re going to optimise, find the perfect product market fit or product experience, and then, things are up and running and what I think happens a lot of times is organisations are afraid because they think they got to go along, they think they got to take the big leap and go all in on something when in fact, if you take small, incremental, intentional steps towards something, crawl, walk, run, whatever methodology you want to apply to it you’ll get there.
And you’ll know by the time you get there that it’s actually the right results or the right thing, I talk a lot with people about, there’s an American football analogy, but, there’s a play called the Hail Mary, which is the quarterback gets the ball and he throws it like 80 yards down the field, hoping that the guy is going to catch it.
First of all, that guy’s got three guys covering him, the chances are so slim of that actually working. Whereas if you give the ball to the running back and he runs the ball two yards and then five yards and then another two, and you just keep advancing the ball in small incremental steps, the success rate is going to be far higher on the running the ball approach than the long bomb and I struggle to understand why corporations and big companies don’t want to embrace that.
Let’s just go in small steps and get where we want to go versus moonshotting it all the time. And so I’ve been now really trying to embrace this let’s just try stuff, throw it up there. See what happens, did it work? No. Okay. Why not? Okay. What if we change that?
Great. Let’s do that. See what happens. And you just take this kind of a journey versus we got to get it perfect before we go to market. It’s never going to happen. You’re never going to get it a hundred percent right but the world we live in allows us now to do that.
Like you can spin up a proof of concept in two days, and see if it works and put it out there and learn from it. I wish more big companies would take that approach. A lot of them talk that talk, but they don’t walk that walk. And the ones that do take that approach, I think are the ones who are going to win in the end.
[00:36:28] Chris Hudson: There’s definitely a framing that you experience and I’ve just been listening to audio book Sapiens. You probably read the book as well. It’s interesting about the construct of business and how this came about and it talks about obviously humankind and how we came about too, but it goes into this world of business and it’s in people’s heads. It was constructed to basically put parameters and guardrails around how people wanted to own, but then monetise things in one way or another. And so this sense of perfectionism, I think is also a stretch on from that point in that you find yourself as a practitioner wanting to perfect the things that you do.
If you’re the CMO, you want the perfect brand campaign. If you’re a product owner, you want the Perfect products and actually incrementalism can come in contradiction to that. They’re aspiring for the best and they want that in the next step, but they don’t want to build it over time because they want it all now.
So the long game is important, but it’s always a barrier to overcome. Like you’ve got to be comfortable with progress over perfection, and some of the smaller changes that can make a huge difference because at least you’re able to report on that stuff more regularly as you build towards the, masterpiece.
But I think particularly from the point of view of creativity, our output is often the creative one. People’s framing of that, it feels is often like if you did art you’d start by sketching something and then you might end up with a final piece, which is this thing that you spent days or weeks on making. The idea itself was just very sketchy.
It was just a concept. It was nothing like the final piece. So you’re trying to come to that, the best representation of what it could be as quickly as you can. And I think that’s probably where some of the tension lies, but what do you think? Is that your perspective as well?
[00:38:01] Christian Stein: The biggest challenge is that for most of those people you were describing who have to make those decisions, the average, tenure for a CMO is less than three years now. So they have no choice but to act fast and do stuff to either, get re upped for another three years or take that success story and move on to the next company because they’re inevitably going to get moved or lose their job.
And it’s a shame because, the best brands are the ones that have taken the long game. Look at Apple. Apple has been constantly evolving and trying new things. And going back to the point about perfection over progress, like you remember the day that they stopped having the button on the iPhone? And you got the first one that didn’t have the button. You’re like, wait, what hang? And now it’s like, Oh,
A button?! Why would we have a button? And you don’t think about it in the moment, but they’re just like, we just keep moving. We keep changing. We keep evolving. We keep moving things forward, trying things.
And if they work. If they don’t work. They decided that they didn’t need iPods anymore because they had the phone, and they can sell more phones with an iPod built into it. So like the iPod went away, but at its time, like the iPod was a really cool thing. This willingness to constantly be changing and transforming and taking small steps incremental steps to reach a better end state are those the brands that I think are going to succeed and that you can try stuff and it’s going to it’s going to crash and burn miserably as well.
And it’s okay. Like, I think we have to accept sometimes, pardon my French shit will go wrong and that’s okay, too. It’s hard. I totally get it because go back to that short term security mindset. You’re the CMO. You’ve got three years. The top clock is ticking. You got to do something great.
I sympathise with you to have to walk into the CEO’s office and the CFO and be like, I got a great plan. It’s going to take 10 years for us to get there because we’re going to slowly build this brand and that’s going to impact our product strategy and they’re going to laugh you out of the room.
They’re going to be like, you’re out of your mind. We need to show results now. What about our shareholders and the wall street and the board? And you’re in a really tough gig. Because you need to show the short term results. But on the other hand, taking a long term strategy and breaking it down into incremental components could actually be a way to navigate those conversations to say we’re going to get here with a 10 year plan.
But we will start to show results in the first two years because we’re going to do these five things that are smaller steps. They require a smaller investment, but we’re going to start to create momentum. And as we start to create momentum, that momentum is going to compound. And all of a sudden, this brand is going to be taking off in our business is going to grow.
And when we’re able to break free of the short term security mindset and use intentional, small, incremental steps as our approach forward, whether that’s personally in your own life or your career, or as a business executive making key decisions for the trajectory of a company, I think that is a pathway to success and allowing things to happen and that then allows you to operate within a test and learn mindset because you’re not saying we’re going to get perfect in two years. We’re going to slowly make our way there, we’re going to have a button, but, in two years, we’re going to get rid of the button, right? Eventually, you’re going to get where you go. I don’t envy anyone in those, decisions, in those conversations who has to walk in there especially from a marketing standpoint where you are a cost to the organisation and justify, your plan for long term growth.
[00:41:27] Chris Hudson: Kind of makes me think about the work that I do in the future space. And sometimes we’re looking for signs of what exists out there in the world somewhere already to bring fragments of that understanding together to then form a picture of what the future might be in one way.
So, if you’re looking for distributed models of how product might work, then you’re looking there, if you’re looking for how community might come together, there might be an example of how people have built a solar community based, solar powered and battery powered infrastructure in Bangladesh or whatever it is, you can find examples of things that usually somewhere in the world that would say there are traces of that somewhere that exists already.
And you can bring that together to, sort of a shared understanding. I think that the piecing together is also really important. But you’ve got to look for the quick wins and the things that you can pull from that are immediately at your disposal. And the two analogies that come to mind and I never thought I’d go there with this, but ones around politics.
Because, if you win a campaign and you’re in power two years, four years, whatever the term is or if you’re the president or if the prime minister, you’ve got to that point, you’ve campaigned, you’ve put promises out there, you’ve got your manifesto, obviously you’re thinking well, what can I do?
What are the quick wins that we could basically be known by? You’re piecing down what you stand for as a whole into very tangible things. So that’s one example. The other one was probably around like an art gallery or something like that. The gallery exists and it’s existed many many years and decades and hundreds of years in some cases, but actually trying things out and bringing something new to those spaces in a way that people understand, can experience in a fresh way.
Can learn from. At an organisational level, you can break down the building blocks of what could be tried out and actually, just see where it goes. Some are high risk, some are low risk, but yeah, it feels like that particularly at brand level, it’s always misconceived or misinterpreted as this like singular thing, but actually, if you break it down, you can try a lot of things out.
[00:43:13] Christian Stein: There’s something interesting that I’ve been thinking about a lot right now, which is, when I talked earlier about asking clients, what’s your win. And importantly, I, as I said earlier, I don’t qualify that by like I don’t want your wind to be revenue or something you can quantify, right?
And I think because I firmly believe the minute you quantify success, you’re immediately going to put yourself on the back foot if you don’t make your target. And so if you can equate success to something more profound or more, visionary or meaningful, You’re going to see progress because you’re always going to be striving to get to that place.
Whereas if you quantify success as, I don’t know, $250,000 of revenue in Q1, and you get $249,000 of revenue in Q1, you’re on the back foot because you didn’t reach your target. Now you got to make it up. You got to get that extra $1000 next quarter. And if you don’t get it, then now it’s compounding.
And now all of a sudden, every decision you’re making is not misinformed because you’re constantly in defence mode, right? You’re now like blocking and tackling, just trying to make some crap up to justify the path you’re going on. Whereas if you define success or your win as something more meaningful.
Did you take a small step to that? Did a customer play back what you what your brand means to them? Look, I get, you need to have forecasts and you need to have targets and all that stuff. Cause that’s how business works. But when you’re talking about longterm success, let’s not kid ourselves.
A forecast is only as good as tomorrow’s revenue, Like you can project 10 years, But what happens tomorrow, right? You have no idea. Maybe your factory explodes and you have no business left. What good was that forecast, right? It’s just a, I think it could be that. Whereas if you set yourself on a trajectory to be more meaningful in your customer’s life or lives.
It’s much easier to start to show and identify success moments along that journey. And that will keep you going down the right path because the minute you quantify it, I’m convinced of this. The minute you quantify it and all the CFOs listening to this are going to lose their mind on me. But the minute you quantify it, you are immediately going to put your business on the back foot.
Because all you’re going to be thinking about and focusing on is hitting that target because it’s a number.
[00:45:23] Chris Hudson: Self fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it? If you’re focused on the number, you’ll look at the number. If you’re focused on the work, you’ll look at the work. You’re dragging everyone through those conversations around the number, the work, whatever it is.
It’s all in the frame isn’t it.
[00:45:34] Christian Stein: Yeah. And I think when the focus is on the number. It prevents people from thinking about the other possibilities and other ideas and being creative in that space. And I don’t mean creative, like in an ad agency creative, I just mean creative thinkers, creative problem solvers, can be engineers, can be product designers, can be CFOs who come up with really interesting models of revenue generation or whatever it is.
But the minute everyone gets hyper focused on like a target you lose the opportunity to be creative in the space and actually benefit the business with solutions and ideas that we’re going to make it grow.
[00:46:11] Chris Hudson: I think you can definitely spin your wheels in so many of those areas and I’d love to get just maybe a, spend a few minutes getting your perspective on that because I think in the recent years we’ve known each other for a little while and I’ve been following your story a little bit and it feels you’ve tried a lot of these things out of the personal level and obviously you can be focused on this or that or the right thing or the wrong thing, you know, somebody else’s ambition, it’s somebody else’s objective, KPI, whatever it is, but that can quite quickly get you into a pattern of following other people and obviously aiming at the things that you think will deliver success for those people, so that it reflects well on you personally.
And I’d love to just hear your, your story around navigating some of that and what resulted, and we will mention the burnout at the start of As I was introducing you, but just flipping it back to that conversation and hearing about your perspective in managing some of those really tricky management of agendas.
[00:47:00] Christian Stein: I’m going to be totally frank. I had a very difficult section of my life fairly recently. Let’s call it like two years, a year and a half ago, where I was in a job that was working with a great company and with great people. And I was in a job that I wasn’t familiar with.
It was a new opportunity for me, and I wanted to go in that area and experience it and try to take strategic thinking into more of an internal consultancy kind of role of how we can grow our business, both organically and with net new clients and the reality is, is like, where I had hoped the role would go wasn’t the reality of what the business needed. And that happens all the time. We all think we should be doing something that’s going to be the right thing to do, but then pressures come from the other side.
And it’s we need to get the number. We need to grow. We need to whatever it is. The focus from where you want to be gets pulled into where you’re maybe not so good at. And I found myself in a situation where I was frustrated. I was lost a little bit. I’d lost my confidence.
I’d lost my, what do you swagger, whatever it is, like just my I’d lost the ability to be me. I take 100 percent responsibility for that. But at the same time, it was a really hard place to be in to the point where we weren’t bringing in new business and that job that I was in, that’s on your shoulders and I was having anxiety, I was waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats.
I was going into a very dark place, let’s say, and I wasn’t being the best version of me that I could be and I got fired in the end of July last year and I say that openly now, but it took me a year to actually be able to speak openly about the F word. Which is sad.
And I’ve actually had a lot of conversations with a lot of people. And I’m really, I’ve now made it a bit of my own personal crusade to destigmatise the F word. And I was joking with someone who was in the UK. I’m like, it’s even worse in the UK. You get sacked fired is one thing, but sacked, oh man.
But the stigma that comes with that, what was amazing is one of my old colleagues, she said, you got to talk to this coach. She’s amazing. So I’m like, okay, yeah, this is what I need to do. Spend money on a coach when I’ve just lost my job. And so I started working with this coach and the first part of her process is like a 20 minute phone call where she’s- you don’t know it, but she’s vetting you whether she wants to take you as a client or not. And on that call, I remember it vividly. I was sitting on the back patio of the house we just bought two months before I got fired, freaking out, looking at the bank balance every day going, oh my God, what’s going to, we’re going to have to sell the house.
This is a disaster. We went through this exercise where she started asking all these questions and eventually it got to a point where I wrote down in my notebook. I don’t want to be an ad guy anymore. And I was just like, whoa, hang on a second here. That’s big, right?
Because for 25 years, I’ve been an ad guy and I just realised you somehow managed to get to this deep part of my brain and my heart and got out of me that’s not what I want to be doing anymore. And to her credit, she flipped that very quickly. What would you love to be doing?
And that’s when I said I love looking at a brand today and seeing what it can be tomorrow and helping figure out the strategy to get it there. She said make a business around that.
Okay. And so I did. And fortunately I started my business and it was, it’s going well, but I took a lot of learnings from this process because it was not a, one day it was this, the next day, everything was rosy again. What came out of it, the most profound thing I can say I came out of it is like so many of us are doing things, we’re stuck in the spin cycle of misery professionally because we’re dictated by fear, we’re motivated by fear, right? If I leave that job, I’m not going to have that pay check. Maybe it’ll get better if I just ride it out a little longer, maybe things will change. Maybe you have a toxic manager. They’re going to get rid of that person. And the reality is we have so much opportunity as human beings to do things that are amazing. And so many of us hold back from doing those things because we’re afraid of getting out of that short term security space and going into that long term mindset and that thing could be just get another job in a different company. And all is good. That could be that leap you need to take. But this idea for me of identifying what my superpower is.
And then going all in on that and I’ve talked to so many people like they’re like, Oh, I would love to do something rather like I’d rather be working for a nonprofit or I’d this one woman incredible. She said, I write children’s novels on the side. I’m like, that’s amazing. Go for that, pursue that doesn’t mean you have to go all in on that, but those doors are open to you to pursue and for me, this journey has been incredible because I’ve learned so much in a year about myself, and at the end of the day, we need to have good old fashioned fun doing what we do. I would imagine if you did a poll of your listeners, how many of you can genuinely say you go to work and have fun every day? I don’t think the number is going to be very high, right? And that’s a bit sad in a way because we spend so much of our life working and if we’re working in something we’re not enjoying, what’s the point, and again, I think we’re driven by, we’re driven by dollars.
We’re driven by titles and association with company X, Y, or Z. But at the end of the day I think we need to look inside ourselves and say, what do I love doing and can I make that the thing that I do every day and fortunate for I know that’s not everyone can do that. I’m very aware of that, but it doesn’t have to also be like an all in proposition, right?
Take a small step to signal to the world I’m going to try this thing. That could be as simple as registering a URL for a company that you think you might want to create someday. It’s a $10 investment, but it’s a value, like you can’t even quantify the value of that step that you’re taking and that signal you’re sending to yourself and to others around you that I’m going to try this.
I’m going to go down that road. It might not be the only road. It might be one of 10 roads, but so many of us just are paralysed by fear. We get in this spin cycle of fear of I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid when again, you don’t have to throw the Hail Mary just advance the ball a little bit.
And try a bunch of stuff. You’re never going to get it perfect. It’s never going to be exactly right. Look at Steve Jobs created Apple, got fired from Apple. Then they brought him back so the story goes, but like he didn’t get it perfect, but he at least tried stuff and moved the ball down the field.
And I think for me that moment of time of uncertainty of anxiety of pressure of all these things. In the moment it was hard but coming out of it and being able to see that, the F word doesn’t mean you’re doomed. It actually means doors have just opened, doors of possibility have just opened in your life, go through all of them and run with it and go for it because magic will happen.
And so that’s kind of my story of the pressures of the corporate world and then figuring out what I love doing and going for it. Fortunately, so far, so good.
[00:54:10] Chris Hudson: Such a good outcome. The interesting thing as well is that there’s a real parallel between what you’re describing about an attitude and a mindset towards risk and towards fear, probably within a organisational setting, if you’re thinking about brand and the things that you need to try out, you can be okay with imperfection and you can do all these things and it will take you to different parts.
And then one’s own personal experience of that.
What is your own brand inside? What do you feel is inside you? What do you want to aim towards and is what you’re doing in your work today going to fulfil that in one way or another? And you can use that if you understand that about yourself, then you can obviously use that to direct your own career.
And I think, the listeners on this show will take great comfort from that. So I really appreciate the story. Thank you so much, Christian.
[00:54:55] Christian Stein: I said earlier, like I ask my clients, what’s your win and I would say to all everyone, ask yourself that question. What’s your win? And I actually had someone asked me that the other day. I was like, oh, crap.
hadn’t really thought of it. But I did I knew what it was and my win is, and I’m very open as I want to be stress free. That to me is it’s not about, I need my business to have this much revenue and I need to have, this many clients it’s just, I want to be stress free, which to me is a much more attainable goal and something that I can do a lot of different things to help me get to.
Versus putting all my eggs in like the revenue basket or the client basket or whatever. And so that’s just something I would encourage everyone to do to take a step back and think about like in 5, 10 years, what’s your win? How are you going to say yeah, I got there. I got where I needed to go and it’s all good.
[00:55:43] Chris Hudson: That’s perfect. I think we might end there. I think that there was sort of element of Jerry Springer’s final thought about that, that we should probably just end on. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to close the conversation unnaturally, but it feels like that was a really good point. We’ll end on a question.
What’s your win? And people could think about that. So Christian, I really appreciate you coming onto the show and just your experience around the world, but also bringing it and connecting it through to your own personal story and how you’ve managed to not only, come out of that horrible situation, but also turn it into something really incredibly positive as well.
So thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. You’ve been a wonderful guest on the show. So thank you.
[00:56:20] Christian Stein: Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.
[00:56:22] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.
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