 Kia ora kato, no mai haere mai. Greetings and welcome to this month's EHF Live session. Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of entrepreneur, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investor change makers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa, New Zealand. This session is part of a series where you'll hear from Scott Cabot, an EHF fellow who is an experienced operating executive and entrepreneur with a track record of building customer friendly mainstream brands to compete in historically unfriendly categories. His experience includes subscription businesses, marketplaces, health care, IoT and consumer package goods. So in this session, it's going to be on brand positioning. So Scott's going to share his insights on why it matters, how to approach it, best practices and just because this is a series, last month we covered building your MVP marketing engine and that recording is up on our website if you want to catch up on that one. There is going to be time for Q&A during this session and Harlan is also joining us and he works with Scott. So now just note, these are informal sessions. They're planned in a way that when you leave here after the 60 minutes, you feel that you know the fellows on a personal level, understand what their intentions are here in New Zealand and that you can connect with them directly afterwards. Note that this is being recorded. Just stay on mute while the guys are talking and then unmute or raise your hand if you want to ask a question or you can put your questions in the chat box and we will read them out for the recording. Over to you, Scott. Thanks, Michelle. Hey everyone, it's great to see you. Actually, let me share my screen here first before we get started. There we go. Is that showing up? Fantastic. Well, it's great to be with you. I see some familiar faces from our last workshop and some new ones, which is fantastic. Just to give a quick overview before we jump in. This is one of my favorite topics. So I always get really excited for conversations on branding. We'll do a really quick background on Harlan and on me. I brought a special guest this time. We'll go through a little bit of background around branding overall, talk about why it matters. And then we'll dig a little bit into some of the early things to think about is getting started in building a brand positioning. Look, all this is with the caveat that one, it is virtually impossible to do this topic justice in a one hour meeting. So my hope for today isn't so much that you're going to walk out of here with an action plan as much as we just like to get your wheels turning. We have a process that is, you know, by definition, very iterative and requires thought and letting ideas marinate. So we want to give you a few things to think about. And more than anything, we're not here to talk at you. This is the best thing about branding is there's no one right answer. Everyone has a different opinion, different view of it. So we're really interested to hear some of your thoughts and questions along the way. So we have a few provocative questions we'll ask midway. We don't wait for those. If you have a, have a comment, please, or, you know, speak up a little bit about us. So I'm from cohort eight. I'm in San Francisco currently run an operating consulting business team of experienced operators who parachute into startups and private equity back businesses to help them build marketing capabilities to scale prior to that. We have a long history as a CMO myself. So I've, I've lived these wars. My, as Michelle mentioned, my repeatable act through many startups was this idea of building a likable brand in an unlikable category. That's one of the things I find really fun with an equal focus and scalable revenue engines. And one of the things we'll talk about in the course of this conversation is building a great brand and building a scalable business with scale and healthy unit economics are, are one in the same. I hopefully some of what you'll take away from Harlan and from me is that the getting brand right is really instrumental to building a scalable business. So I wanted to bring Harlan. I'll let, I'll let him give you his background in a second. Just suffice it to say that I have a long history with him that what would be interesting in this is I look at brand strategy as a former CMO who hired agencies or did this work within our teams. Harlan comes from the agency world as a head of strategy. And yet, so we come at it from very different backgrounds, but are very aligned in the core ethos and philosophy behind brand building. So I was really excited and grateful to him for agreeing to participate with us today. This is his first exposure to EHF. So hopefully we'll, we'll hook him and make him interested in wearing more Harlan. Tell us just a little bit about your background. Yeah, sure thing. Thanks, Scott. And thanks everyone for having me here. Definitely kind of a treat here in the middle of the afternoon. Yeah, I guess just really quickly, you know, spent most of my career on the agency side working with clients really to help them, you know, identify, define, codify their brands, their brand strategy, amplify that out oftentimes in advertising. But then I spent about seven years, you know, before kind of going out on my own. I worked at, I worked at an agency here in the Bay Area called Venables Ballin Partners and spent about seven years there actually creating a, the experience design division within the agency. And the reason I bring that up is as we think about brands, I think it's important to think not just about advertising and about what we say in the world or about advertising campaigns, but about the customer experience and the brand comes to life in the everyday interactions that we have, whether that's service, packaging, the product itself. And so I wanted to call that out. I think there's an opportunity for more companies to kind of think that, you know, holistically when it comes to brands. And we'll talk about some examples of that as well. But yeah, other than that, I've been working with Scott, you know, been out on my own consulting for the last three years or so. Thanks, Harlan. So, you know, let's jump in. Harlan's going to take the lead just in setting some of the groundwork here about what is this when we talk about building a brand? Yeah. So, I mean, look, I think this, this felt like a good quote to kind of start on. I apologize. We're not, you know, this is, this probably is the slide with the brand. So we're not going to hit you with a bunch of reading on the presentation, but I just wanted to lean into this. So a brand is not, I think it's oftentimes easy to think about, well, companies own their own brands, right? And I think that's the first kind of fallacy is that, you know, the company doesn't own the brand, you know, the customers own the brand. They define what the brand is and what your brand is, whatever is in the minds of your customers, the folks out in the world. So it's a set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships. Sometimes these are rational. Sometimes they're not rational. They're emotional or they're sort of based on something that may or may not be true even. And taking together they account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another. And so, you know, ultimately what a brand equates to, ideally is a premium. And so that's something that actually creates real value in the world. If we've created something that, you know, the brand itself, oftentimes you can put a dollar amount on that. And I think there was a couple of examples we wanted on the next slide. We wanted to just kind of illustrate, use to illustrate that point. Yeah, Harlan, I was going to say, you know, you know, one of the things I just want to make sure everyone's thinking about before we dive in is I think sometimes there is a tendency when you hear about brands to think of consumer brands. And I would argue, and hopefully you'll take away from what we're sharing. You know, frankly, of the examples we share, they may skew a little more consumer heavy, but this is equally relevant. And I think that's one of the things I want to make sure everyone's thinking about before we dive in is I think sometimes there is a tendency when you hear about brands to be equally relevant on a B2B business, all shapes and sizes. And if you have questions about that, please ask. We do see that these as fundamental truths that are really ubiquitous for startups. Yeah, that's a great ad. So we think about the idea of the brand itself creating value. They're just a couple of different companies, different brands that, you know, probably everyone we've familiar with all 76, maybe the one that's a regional gas brand. I wanted to, you know, pull that in for, you know, a specific reason. But, you know, the brands themselves have value. I used to work with on some Coca-Cola brands and the joke around Coca-Cola was that, you know, if the entire headquarters in Atlanta burned to the ground, you know, followed by every bottler across, you know, the world, you know, the company, the intellectual property of the Coca-Cola brand would still be worth potentially billions of dollars with no physical assets. Right. And so that's the that's really the power of a strong brand. Right. I worked for a number of years on Audi really relaunching that brand in the U.S. kind of restoring it to luxury, luxury status here. It's kind of fallen off, you know, fallen off from what should have been its competitors, Mercedes, BMW. And, you know, the joke, no one will ever say this in a meeting or presentation. Certainly not when the client's around. But, you know, German luxury cars, BMW, you know, they're all, if you compare class to class, they're kind of the same car, you know? I mean, I know that's like, that's one of those things like if someone were here, if they were a BMW or Audi executive, they'd fight me tooth and nail on this, but it's not really, they're basically the same car. And so what you're really buying is an identity or, you know, I'm going to associate myself with new luxury as more of a, you know, an up-and-comer with Audi versus like my dad's car, which is maybe a Mercedes, right? And so these, the meanings of the brand create preference, create an identity that then translates into value in the marketplace. Sexy, you know, you could, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more commoditized product than gasoline, petrol that you put in your car, right? That, um, and, and yeah, we can tell stories around detergent or whatever. But the reality is that, you know, a couple of cents per gallon that you might, you go to one station because they, you know, they charge a couple of cents per gallon more. That's because I assume that maybe because it's a brand name station, they have cleaner restrooms or it's just going to be a better experience. And so, you know, these are again, whether I ever use the restroom or not, these are those associations that create a story that I tell myself for why so many six costs two or three cents more a gallon than, than whatever the, the kind of unbranded gas station is down the street. And, you know, a couple other, I think Intel is another one to call out partly because it's just such a great, you know, example of an ingredient brand, a brand that kind of lives inside of other brands, right? And the value that they created was such that, you know, all the, you know, PC makers had to have, you know, had to have the Intel logo on their, you know, in their advertising, right? And on their, literally on their laptop so that I know, you know, this is a, this is a laptop or, you know, it might be an HP or, you know, compact, whatever, but it has an Intel processor in it, right? And that's the thing that that's one of the things on my checklist now. And the, the value that comes with that for the Intel company, the fact that I know that I know to ask for it is, you know, is huge, huge amount of value there. So, you know, I think we just wanted to talk about that. And I think I also think that, you know, as we, as we think about each of these, and I guess Disney, you know, is here for reason as well, like there's a, you know, it, a brand sends a message. It sets an expectation for the kind of experience we'll have. So we went to, we actually, I know this sounds like a canned story, but we actually literally did go to Disneyland for, for spring break this past year with my, with my kids. And we've been a couple of times and it's, you know, it was fine. You know, the truth is like some of the rides were broken and it wasn't that great experience, but because it's Disneyland, for some reason they kind of get a pass and it's like, but it's Disneyland. Oh, it's okay. It's not, you know, and it feels like, like, I didn't, we wouldn't like complain to anybody because thunder mountain was broken. It was just like, oh, well, that's too bad. Let's move on, you know, to the next thing. And so what's that worth? Like what's that worth to build that kind of level of that high of an expectation as well as that level of goodwill towards a brand, I think. And ultimately that's something that's delivered again, not just through advertising, but through generally the experience that's created. And those personal experiences that we have. So we actually created a little pause here and, you know, wanted to ask the question, you know, is there a brand that you feel, you feel connected to, right, personally? And why is that? Or, you know, is there something, is there an experience that was created that stuck with you that, you know, in a way might have created that value. That value for you. And then, you know, coming back to this theme of expectations, how is it brand in the, whether it's the same brand or another brand, how has it kind of met you or exceeded your expectation? Like what's a story around that? Because then collectively, those are the stories that create that value out in the marketplace. And Scott and I'll, in a couple of minutes, talk about how you kind of, what are the tools you need to kind of build that and create that. But when I pause here, and see if anyone had any thoughts or, or, you know, experiences we could share in order to crack into that, that experience that, that builds that brand. So then that way we can see if anyone's got their hands up. Does anyone want to go first? Got any thoughts? Although as I can, top of one that just came to me was Cactus Hardware. It's a clothing brand here in New Zealand. It's manufactured here, designed here, designed here, designed here, designed here, designed here, designed here. It's manufactured here, designed here, designed for the New Zealand market. And one of the cool things that I think makes me always go back and buy stuff for my family is that they fix things for you as well. So if like things rip, they will fix it. So there's kind of like an enduring of the, you know, the sustainability in there. And I think the people in behind it and the investors also are just so proud of it. It's a brand that people actually are proud of. And I love seeing it. And I saw it somewhere. I can't remember it was a news clip or on an article. I was like, oh yeah, look, that's the Cactus brand just hanging there. It's quite, it always catches my eye. Anyone else? Yeah, I can relate to that. The example I was actually going to share is Beta Brand, which is a clothing brand that makes apparel for women mostly. But the thing that makes me feel loyal to them is that they make pens that have pockets that fit my phone and my wallet, which is unheard of from regular clothing retailers for women, which seems kind of outrageous. But I now no longer wear any pens that don't have pockets that fit my stuff. Yeah, I love that. I was just going to say like, what I take away from that is like, Julie, you probably feel like, like they get you, like they understand what your life is like. You know that you're walking through life with multiple things in your hands and you need a place to put them, right? And so feeling understood always feels good, right? Right, yes. I was just going to add that the, both of the examples that Julie and Michelle shared are good ones to remind us that the experience with the product, whether it's a physical product or a retail outlet or a service or a piece of software, is completely intertwined with the brand experience. I think, you know, Harlan touched on this, sometimes people think, oh, the brand is the logo and ad campaign or whatever. That's really just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. And it's beautiful. I shock people sometimes when I say this as a marketer that I would usually be the first to say the product is the best marketing you have. And if you gave me a million dollars to spend on marketing, I'd say don't spend a penny of it until you think your product doesn't have to be perfect, but you feel like your product is reflective of the experience that you want. Because that will create your marketing engine for you. And people are smart enough to see through and like, hey, this thing is all marketing, no substance. Yeah, yeah, that's totally right, Scott. And I think another thing that stood out to me about those is that they challenged the status quo where both Michelle's example and mine are like, oh, like all the big companies are doing it one way and it doesn't seem right. Here's the small company that does it a different way so that the world doesn't have to be the way that the big corporations want it to be. It's a great point, Julian. It's something that Harlan and I both, I think Harlan, I can speak for you fairly when I say we both have a real passion around this concept of how you build a challenger brand that has a different point of view on the world as it is or how everyone else is doing it. I think sometimes where you see brands go sideways with that is that they, their whole existence is about being against, they're the anti, but they haven't clarified what they're for. And it's important to be able to do both and we can certainly chat more about that. Any other examples or should we keep rolling? Let's keep going. And then I thank you guys for the thoughts and hopefully this will spur some further conversation. All right, I'm trying to share again and of course I lost my, oh no, here we go. Okay. Let me just find that. Okay, you're saying this? We're good? Okay, so let's talk briefly just about how the impact of brand are all over your business, right? I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this page, but this was actually something Harlan and I had developed when we were helping a private equity firm educate their portfolio companies on why it's important to think about brand. And I think what's important to consider is that at every step in the journey, there are areas that your brand influences. And that's just about building awareness or putting our logo on a screen or something like that. And it really is far more than that. And we gave some examples here where you can see these relevant KPIs for each part of your traditional funnel. And I'm happy to have a conversation on why what you do with your brand impacts each one of them. And at this point, Harlan talked earlier about setting expectations, which is one. But then the other that's really important, especially for startups, is to think about how your brand gets represented consistently. As Harlan mentioned, if you aren't attentive to how you define your brand, others, like your customers, your competitors, partners, others will define that for you. So thinking about where your brand shows up all around the customer experience is super important. And then similarly, if you ultimately get to a brand positioning, build a brand playbook the team can use, it's not just something that the team uses in marketing. You start to see how, all right, this can help us build awareness. It can actually like, for instance, like in a consumer business, especially if you're driving word of mouth, it makes your marketing more efficient because your acquisition costs go down. You're not having to buy interest. One of the issues I find a lot in my advisory business is I see startups struggling with figuring out what product marketing means and how do the product and marketing teams work together. And what I always like to talk about is that a good symbiotic relationship there is where the, the marketing team is working upstream with the product team and they're collaborating on insights, understanding the customer, understanding how the product can be reflective of that and then how we market it. So finding product market fit can really be well informed by understanding your brand playbook which starts with who's our core customer, right? What's our value prop to them? We'll get into all that in a minute. And then, you know, down in the bottom right, there are factors like employer branding. How do we attract and retain the right kind of talent? And a lot of that starts with having a clear sense of who we are and what we stand for. So where do you go in getting started with all this? This is a framework we like to use to define a range of areas. And frankly, there's depth behind each one of these but I want to just talk at a high level around where do you begin, right? For starters, you can look at, you know, who are we today? Why did we start this company? Why are we here? What is it that makes our culture unique? What is it that makes our product unique? How do we want our product or service to, what do we want it to deliver to customers? And then you talk about your future state, right? A mission we're going to get into in a minute and go deep. But it's incredibly important because one of the things I love about EHF is so many of us are here because we have a mission orientation about doing some sort of good in the world and connecting that internal who we are, what we value, why we're here, the external manifestation of the brand becomes really critical to doing this well. And there's this aspiration of like, what do we want our brand to become over time and how does that inform our goals as a company? So we thought what we do is, you know, there's this notion of where we are now and where we go. We thought we'd dive a little bit into this notion of mission, what it means to define a mission and what you then do with it. By the way, one other thing I want to mention that came up as we were going through some of these examples earlier is that keep in mind that having a beloved brand gives you permission to make mistakes, right? Like customers will forgive you for getting something wrong if they really buy into who you are and what you stand for in your transparent about that. And so, you know, look at like, if any of you remember the fiasco when Apple first launched maps on iOS, it was a disaster, but they were Apple and people love their brand and forgave them for that. Not every company has that luxury. So getting the stuff right and being really transparent about who you are can go a long way and giving you some runway to make mistakes. Harlan, you want to take this? Yes. So the mission is a good place to start because it creates clarity really and it answers the question for both you and employees and anyone else who is a stakeholder, you know, in your company, like what is this company's role in the world? And I do want to make a distinction because there's been a lot written around kind of like purpose-driven brands. And, you know, I think that's sometimes what happens with some of this language is the meaning gets conflated a little bit. And so when we hear purpose-driven that oftentimes means, you know, sometimes there are legacy brands who have grabbed onto a cause and attached themselves to it and there's nothing wrong with that. But that's not really what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is, you know, a mission that is literally like, why does this company exist in the world and what kind of a reality are we, do we get up every day to kind of create? So ideally it's something meaningful, both to you and to others, ideally, you know, customers. You know, it's this kind of dichotomy of being both grounded in what we do, but also aspirational in terms of the future that we are trying to create. Less about kind of a product positioning and more about, you know, a noble goal for, you know, how the world is better with this brand in it. And again, I think ideally you have a mission that you can use a little bit as you make decisions about, you know, how the brand shows up in the world, what new products we might launch with. You know, again, how we message. And ideally it kind of catalyzes employees that, you know, is one of those things. Ideally your employees know what they're doing and working together towards a higher purpose. And I'll give you an example of submission statements. And, you know, a couple of these are, I mean, all of these are clear. I would say, let's start with, you know, Nike, right? Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. And you'll notice the asterisk. If you have a body, you're an athlete. And so just clarity, conviction, and a brief for everything the company does, really. And, you know, ideally you want to get to something like that. Airbnb I love because it flips an assumption about travel on its head. It's less about visiting places and help make people around the world feel like they could belong anywhere. So creating a sense of belonging, even when you're 4,000 miles away from home. Zillow is one that I actually worked with them. I don't know. I'm actually not sure if you have Zillow in New Zealand, but it's a real estate here in the US. It's a giant real estate company. Basically everyone has Zillow at the app on their phone and what they, the sort of killer app for it is that I can see they basically have an algorithm. It tells me what my house, my house is worth and my neighbor's houses and all of that. So it's like they started by creating transparency in the real estate market. And then they've moved into a bunch, you know, a lot of other services and people, you can basically shop for a new home. But where we ended up with their mission statement was not about home and not about, you know, real estate, but in a way what home represents for people is, you know, the next chapter of your life. So we think about when we move, if you think back to the places you've lived, they probably correspond with moving out of my parents' house or living in, you know, moving in college or my first job or what, you know, there are these moments that we have where we kind of associate. And so Zillow, their mission we define is give people the power to unlock life's next chapter. So a couple others there, again, that are really, I think what's great is that all of these are pretty basic. They don't, none of these, you don't see any like product features or anything that's like, you know, kind of explaining what the company does. It's more about, you know, at the very highest level, this is what we, this is our role in the world. And to think about how the different puzzle pieces, we started with the mission, but, you know, I think on the next slide, Scott, if we think about a brand architecture and there's, I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to tell you, I'm never going to say like, this is the only, this is the only way to do this because it's not. And a lot of different ways to kind of put these pieces together. But this is, you know, one way of kind of telling the story and having the pieces fit together. It's like, you know, let's start with a customer truth. What's an insight or something that we're building this business around? I think the mission in a way is kind of the answer to that. A brand positioning, I think of as like, you know, what would we, if we were going to put our company on a bumper sticker, what would it be? Like think of us as what in two or three words. And then I think the pillars ground us in reality. In this case, we have kind of for Zillow, they think in terms of both emotional pillars and then innovation pillars. That's kind of a layer of complexity that may or may not be relevant for all companies. And then personality traits, what are the words we use are the guardrails that, you know, for when we show up in the world. And the way that, you know, ultimately this kind of, if this fits together, it reads like a story. And so, Scott, if you want to move to the next slide, I think, you know, this is something I think, ideally as you think about your company, the brands that you're building, ideally you get to something like this, right? So because moving is one of the hardest things we'll ever do, we, as Zillow, give people the power to unlock life's next chapter. Think of us as your partners in change. We deliver innovative products and services built with simplicity, value, and integrity. And those are words that give guidance to, again, the types of products, the way we, you know, create the experience. We give our customers the feeling of possibility, understanding, and security. Our personality is empathetic, trustworthy, and real, forward-looking, creative optimism. So, if you can get to something like this that's relatively simple, but starts to create an expectation for, oh, I kind of have a feeling for, like, what this company feels like, what it would feel like to do business with them. And I'm clear about what, you know, their role in the world is, as well. Yeah, and I'll just add, what one is on this specifically, I love that this has this idea of empathy in it. And honestly, if you had, if you asked, like, where's the first place we should start with building a brand? I would want ten times out of ten say, start with empathy. Like, who is our core customer, our bullseye customer? What problem do they have? And how do we build a brand that shows we understand that, we get it, right? I think that's incredibly important. And one thing that I, and this can be, we can answer questions on this because it's certainly material for deeper discussion. What I would think about both with this page and the prior page of the house, the pyramid Harlan shared, is that these are, in many respects, examples of the sort of outputs that would come out of brand positioning exercise. And we'll talk a little bit about what that process looks like. But in essence, what you're trying to get to is some sort of playbook that the team can look at as the single source of truth on the brand and can leverage as a North Star whenever there's a question about strategy, positioning, messaging, et cetera, et cetera. And so, as Harlan said, there's no one right way to do it. And I think he would tell you that landing on these two pages was a lot, a lot of work. It wasn't something he went and wrote overnight. But the idea is codifying your positioning somewhere where if new people were to come into your company, you could say, look at this, understand this, ask questions on this, and go use it. That's the idea. So, yeah, and then just a few final things. So just a few best practices. This is kind of a segue from what we were just talking about. Or how do you go about doing brand positioning? Because Harlan and I could both share examples of when this is done well and when it goes poorly, right? And first and foremost is that this cannot be done in a vacuum like, hey, I'm going to close myself up in the office. I'm going to write our brand positioning. I'm going to tell everyone to follow it. It needs to be a participatory process, particularly on mission-driven businesses where people are there because they're passionate and they care. And everyone needs to feel like they've had an opportunity. The key stakeholders need to be invested. They need to have an opportunity to weigh in along the way. It doesn't mean everyone gets everything they want, but making that process inclusive is very important. Next, and Harlan shared some great examples of this. The best brands have a point of view on the world. Those ones that he shared in Dove and Nike, for instance, like they're not afraid to be provocative. You say, here's who we are and here's what we stand for. It's enough for everybody, right? But having a point of view and really leaning into that can inform how you build your brand. Customer-centric, this is the empathy point. And I mentioned in the beginning it's relevant both for B2B and B2C. I think sometimes, honestly, B2B businesses can discount the value of brand where you have to remember you're still selling to a person and the company. And that person has needs and pain points that are part of their job that you want to be able to solve. So it's important not to build the brand positioning based on who we are and what we think people want, but more who's our customer and what's going to be important to them. We talked about the product reflecting the brand already. I think that's incredibly important. And then finally, to take some of the pressure off of this, when you saw Harlan share a brand positioning, while it is the ideas that everyone on your team will use that and execute against it, take away the pressure of thinking that, like, hey, we're signing this in blood from now until eternity. The best brand positionings are one where you say, hey, this is a theory we have. Let's validate it. Let's pressure test it. Let's test it and we'll iterate on it over time. It's the playbook we use until we've determined that it's out of date, at which point we'll update it and we'll have a new playbook. Harlan, anything on this page you want to add that I missed? I don't think so. I mean, it's queuing up a couple of things that I thought. A couple of points I think we want to head on these last couple of slides here, but when you do FedEx. OK. Yeah, we're almost done. We're just going to share a few examples and talk about them. This is one I love as a great example of a really focused brand strategy where FedEx, there are all these ways you can have a package delivered. FedEx has one single-minded element of their brand, which is we are the most reliable. They never talk about cost. They never talk about anything else. They're not the cheapest. But what they really understand is for businesses and for individuals, you have something really critical that needs to get from point A to point B and do you really want that rock to run the risk of it not showing up? I remember they had this commercial during the Super Bowl one year of this. These people in an office and this guy's just getting humiliated by his boss that they had all worked really hard on this proposal. They had it ready to go. And the guy who is supposed to send it out, send it with a cheap carrier and it didn't show up the next day. And it was like, it makes your heart just race thinking like, I don't want that to be me. So the best brands are really single-minded. They don't try to be all things to everyone. And FedEx really understands like we are about reliability. That's the soul, our soul mission in life. So do you guys have Oatly in New Zealand? It's a Swedish. I'm seeing some nods, thumbs up. So it's a Swedish company. The interesting thing is it feels like a new company here in the US, but that's really just because it was flying under the radar for years and years until they started to get a little more clear, distinctive, and I would say a little more aggressive with their point of view. And if you dig into the brand story a little bit, most of their first decade here in the US market, kind of duking it out with other dairy alternative brands, like making the case of why we're the best dairy alternative, which is kind of like small ball. It's like if you want to think about a mission, be clear about your mission and be clear about your point of view. And they were very shy about going after big dairy or going after cow's milk. And as soon as they did that, of course, that's a much more authentic place for them to be. And it creates, again, this is where Scott and I see the world probably a little bit differently because as a farmer ad guy, I'm looking for friction, I'm looking for heat. And I think going after and finding that dragon and finding something that we can poke at creates interest, draws in people who are like-minded and positions you as a brand that really has a strong point of view on the world and it speaks to, it starts to, you know, as people think about the brand, I think it's one of those things that bleeds into, well, if you have that strong of a point of view on the way the world is, your product must be a great product. It must work really hard to kind of back that up, right? And then, of course, they also do it just a phenomenal job of using the touchpoints they have, right? So, thinking about the packaging, I mean, this is just tremendously innovative in terms of what you see when you walk down the grocery aisle in a supermarket in the US. And again, they're very clear about their point of view that we don't believe people should drink cow's milk. And they say that and they say it in a way that's not, you know, it's sort of a little bit couched in humour and it's got a personality to it. So, it's kind of received in that way. And then the last brand I wanted to bring up is a very small clothing brand. We can't look past the fact that they use part of their packaging to find Sarah a date, which I think is hilarious. That's right. Go ahead. That bottom right corner. I wish there was a little larger. So, yeah, Painter Jackets is a brand in the UK. This is one of those. Their company mission is to restore meaning to clothing, right? Which is such a, again, a point of view and a, you know, in a world of fast fashion and disposable clothing and all of the environmental impacts of all of that, you know, they've got a very contrarian point of view and they bring it to life in a very interesting way, which is they do four limited edition batches each year. You have to be, you have to log in at a certain time. It's basically like, you know, buying Billy Eilish tickets or something, right? It's like they're gone in like 30 seconds. And so you have to show up by, and then once you've ordered your jacket and basically it's like each edition, each batch will be like, okay, there's been a woman's jacket and this batch is corduroy. And here's what it looks like and you're either in or you're out. And then once you've ordered, then you receive weekly updates. They number your jacket. You get video of your jacket actually being made. And they create that, again, that tactile sense that we've lost, you know, of course, in a lot of different categories. And again, if we want to say we're going to restore meaning, like once that jacket comes, it's probably feels like, you know, your baby's arrived or something, right? So again, I don't know what the scalability of that is. I don't know what their business goals are, but they've certainly created a passionate, passionate group of customers. So I think that was, I think that was it for our slides. We wanted to kind of open up to Q&A or anything that, you know, was triggered. Yeah, thank you. Thank you guys for letting us get through. It's a lot of material in a short period of time. I hope that this at least spurred some thinking. Yeah, please. We'd love to hear questions, comments, debate. Michelle, you had something in here about product market fit. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed you mentioned that. And that is what investors look for is product market fit. And they talk about it all the time, but I'm not too sure that the new founders actually understand what that means. And you did sort of say your touch on that a little bit more. So just if you can, because sometimes your founders don't want to speak up and they ask what do you truly mean by product market fit? Yeah, it's funny. One of the things we talked about in my stint and white combinator that I think is good to start up practice is how do you get really, I think there are two things to keep in mind in my opinion in getting to product market fit early on. One is defining your core customer and as precise a way as possible. I think that startups honestly are hesitant to do this sometimes because you start a company with a vision of world domination. Everyone's going to buy this. It's for everybody. I can make the cases for everybody. And I love that. I would set that aside for now and say, who can we delight first? Right? And don't be afraid to do that. Don't be afraid to go deep early on into one market segment because what it will force you to do is understand those people really real or those businesses really, really well and to build out the thinking around not just your brand but some of the things we talked about in the last session in your MVP marketing engine. How do we delight that group and then apply that learning to other audiences? So I think that's one piece. Another is that where I see companies get tripped up early on in the search for product market fit is that at least when it comes to brand positioning, they begin with the end in mind of it becomes very self-referential. Our product is the best collaborative productivity tool for teams and then your brand positioning is everyone wants a better productivity tool for teams. Thank God we're here. And I would just encourage you to set aside your solution for a second. Make sure and after you define that core audience, make sure you really understand their problem and then you can course correct as you get close to them and iterate and learn, you'll get smarter with your insights and course correct on your product to make sure that both your product and your brand are delighting those people. What gets tricky is like you get to the point where you sunk time and energy and money into a building something and you haven't validated if it's right for that audience. So if you define the right audience, it will give you a North Star in terms of how we find our way to building a product that they really love. Does that answer your question, Michelle? Yes, no, that's good. Thank you. I know that you've got your hand up as well and then there's another question chat. We're in the midst of trying to go through this iteration again. And I guess the question I have is, out of all of the processes you've been through, what are some of the key process points to getting into a good end point in these types of discussions? I'm in the midst where I feel like I'm in a whirlwind of potentials and I'm not shy of that. I feel like I'm in a whirlwind of potentials and I'm not sure which direction to take and I need some structure to get me through it. I don't know if that's familiar to you. You want to take that one, Harlan? Yeah, Bart, sorry. Could you hit me with a question when are you asking what's the president process question? It's a process question. So are there certain parts of a process or a certain process to get to these answers that you've enjoyed or that you've got good results out of or is it totally random? Yeah, so much of it depends on your specific situation, right? But ultimately all of this, as we think about when Scott and I work with clients, I think of it the way I always structure an engagement is there's always a discovery phase where we get in and have conversations with stakeholders both internally, externally, partners, customers, potential customers. A lot of this ends up, like you're kind of testing out these hypotheses. I don't know if this will be useful, but I'll give an example of a client that I worked with. There were some former Barclays clients of mine and they came to us and wanted to build. This was kind of like several years ago. So it was like they wanted, they had a vision that they wanted to build, create an investment app. And in the course of doing the exploration around talking to, identifying some segments, potential segments, talking with folks about what unmet user needs they have, which is kind of in a way how I kind of think of product market, right? What are the unmet user needs, right? And then if we sort of dig into that, that might be where the opportunity is. So in the course of doing that exploration, what kind of investment app should we need? What's the help people need? We uncovered that a lot of folks in their 20s and even quite a few folks who are later in life here in the US have very little savings. And what they really need is a way to make savings easier, and literally a way that is just going to automate that. And there were some solutions out there, but we ended up building something that was simple, very cool kind of user interface. And they ended up selling it to a fifth third bank, which is a Midwest bank here in the US. And I think as an example of like sometimes needing, you have this vision of what you want to do, and then you pivot based on what the user needs are that kind of rise to the top. But I don't know how helpful that is, but is that somewhat getting to the core of your question? Yeah, it is. Is there any relationship with market mapping that you end up doing as well? Story, can you repeat that? Is there any relationship with market mapping? So if you're looking out at the market and seeing what other businesses are out there and kind of missions that they're following, is that one of the following steps as well? Yeah, I see you nodding. Do you want to take this? I'm going to answer them. I'm going to cheat on that part a little bit. So yes, it's important. I do think you want to look at what's going on and inform yourself around who the competitors for Limber and other alternatives. It makes a ton of sense. And I do think it's important in a brand to make sure you're playing more offense than defense. Like I think it's really important to articulate the brand you want to build and that you think can deliver a delightful customer experience that your employees get excited about. And to a degree, you have to tune out what everyone else is doing. I'm not saying ignore the competition, but I do think that the risk is if you define your brand solely by defending against everyone else, you don't really play to win. And I'm not suggesting that's what you're asking. So I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth that you want to look at the market but also be bold in defining your brand. I see we had a question from Laura about when you work with a brand expert. That's a really good question, Laura. And I get that a lot in my work. Can we just read the question out? Oh, sorry. Yes, for the recording. So Laura asked, when would you engage with a professional brand expert versus giving it a go within your own team? I don't have a hard and fast answer to that. But I will say is, let's talk a little bit about the range of, you know, options when you were to work with someone from outside. What you can do internally that always has to come from you anyways, hey, let's make sure we're really clear on mission and values because even if you hire an expert, they're not going to tell you what your mission and values are. That has to come from you and your team. When it comes to working with outside parties, there are many different options, right? And Harlan and I see this a lot. You could do everything from, hey, we want someone to just kind of come in and do a project with us and advise us through it. And we're going to do quick and scrappy all the way up to, we need a team that's going to do some market research for us to help us better understand our customers and then take us through a long, thoughtful exercise of building an end to end blueprint for our brand. And there are options in between. So it's my long way of saying there's not one right way to do it. What I will say is if, you know, notwithstanding the fact that it always costs a little money or equity or something that having an outside party, aside from being an expert, making sure you find someone who has an expertise in building brand, is it does help having kind of a neutral party to help bring the information out of you and your team and to help negotiate all that? I don't think, I think the best brand strategist and Harlan in my mind is one of the very best. He's not going to walk in and say, okay, guys, here's the answer. I know better than you. It's really more a matter of saying, okay, I hear a little bit of this from Brian and a little bit of this from Bart and this from Michelle. Let's debate that. Okay. And then what ultimately these brand positions are, is it's a reflection of agreements and decisions you've made, right? You can't be everything to everybody. So there's a negotiation around like, yes, we'll stand for this and we'll stand, we'll set that aside. I hope that answers your question, Laura. Anything else? We probably got time for one or two more before we go, before we wrap up. Is anyone else got a question? Otherwise I have, otherwise, but rather you will go first, right? Okay. Maverick marketing. You hear that term bandit around quite a bit and sort of in New Zealand was sort of referred to it as your product is 70% sort of finished and then the other 30% can happen afterwards once you've kind of got yourself on the road. But listening to you before, you were saying it's quite important to have that product right. So is that term still used or is that kind of an old school thing now and that New Zealand needs to sort of catch up a bit and sort of get rid of that sort of term and sort of how it's used and definition of it. Tell me a little more about what the traditional definition has been in New Zealand and so what that means. Yep. So like I was saying that you might only develop your product 70% out and you'll wait that last sort of finishing off of your software or product until you've actually kind of got a little bit of testing in the market. So you're not sort of spending all the way through that in any case you need to do maybe those perverts. I see. Yeah, Harlan, I'll be curious for your reaction on this too. I think it might get an instinct, Michelle, and what you're touching on is a really good point because there's always ambiguity in this. When I talk about the product being the best marketing you have, there is the risk of spending so much time over engineering the perfect product without getting market feedback that you know in searching for the perfect product, you ended up building a very expensive product that was the wrong product, right? So I do think part of what you have to decide as a founding team is what's the minimum threshold of acceptability before we will start to put this out and let people interact with it. And the truth is in general, I would be I would really encourage you to don't set the bar very high for going out and getting some small scale customer input. You know, I think it's fine to bring in the sooner you can get some input the better. Your product doesn't have to be perfect there. It's different if you were doing a big launch and a PR campaign and advertising, then you really do want to meet certain thresholds. But in terms of building just enough that you can go out and get intelligent customer input that will help you iterate on your product and search for product market fit, I would do that sooner rather than later. And look, at the end of the day, the product should never be done. I think when it comes to really turning on a big marketing machine, you want to make sure it meets a standard you can live with understanding that it's probably never going to be 100%, right? Harlan, anything you'd want to add there? Yeah, I mean, I would echo that. I don't know. It's funny even having like a threshold or saying 70%, like I think maybe it's a really different way to think or just be like constant, a state of constant iteration and test and learn, test and learn from the very beginning, like from a, we drew wireframes on it. Let's put those in front of people. Like let's get, you know, and so I think it's just a way of being getting that feedback. And then you're right, at a certain point you feel like, oh, based on what this product is and the sort of we've reached a threshold where we feel like we can either launch it or start charging people for it. Or, you know, each of those is a different kind of stair step in the, you know, in the lifespan. So, yeah, I don't know. I think of it as a continuous, I think of it in sort of idea terms as like continuous iteration versus, oh, you get to 70% and you go, you know, so I don't know. That's just a different maybe model. No, great. No, that's good. Thank you. What team, unless there is any other last comments, we won't finish up. Otherwise, it's been great having you. It's been great having another guest, Harlan. Thanks for joining us. And Scott, a pleasure as always. Thank you. And so next time, which is the 30th of June, so hopefully you all come back. We're going to be talking about building your marketing team. And this recording will be on the website so that you can rewatch it and you can watch the others if you miss them as well. So, kakete, we'll see you next time, team. Thanks to...