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In this episode of all about business, James Reed sits down with David Robertson Mitchell, the branding expert who spent almost a decade working as a brand consultant for Mercedes’ Formula One team.
They discuss how David helped build Lewis Hamilton’s personal brand, the secret to getting your finance director on board with your marketing plans, and why Jaguar’s recent rebrand might not be as terrible as you think.
David Robertson Mitchell aka The Brand Rover, is the Founder and Managing Director of dna-rB, a brand consultancy that works with individuals, businesses and sport teams to define brands, support the implementation of brand strategy and help manage reputations. dna-rB specialises in personal and corporate branding, ensuring alignment between a company’s brand and the personal brand of its CEO.
02:43 branding Mercedes’ Formula One team
07:14 Lewis Hamilton's personal brand evolution
14:12 branding success stories in sports
17:11 rebranding challenges and strategies
30:31 the importance of messaging
34:25 consistency in branding and marketing
39:40 personal branding strategies
42:42 the CEO brand
52:14 reputation management
Check out David R Mitchell’s website: https://thebrandrover.co.uk/
Follow David R Mitchell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrobertsonmitchell/
Follow James Reed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chairmanjames/
James: [00:00:00] Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business management and leadership. Every episode I sit down with different guests of bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. They're leaders in their field and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture.
Having a consistent brand could increase your revenue by a whopping 20%, but with massive rebrands making headlines for all the wrong reasons. How can you refresh your image without alienating your audience? Today's guest, David Robertson Mitchell. Has been branding and rebranding companies for nearly two decades.
Nicknamed the Brand Rover. He spent nine years working as a brand consultant for the Mercedes Formula One team, and [00:01:00] now runs his own consultancy firm. Well, today I am really pleased to welcome David Robertson Mitchell. It's all about business. And David as well as being a neighbor of mine in Wilshire is an expert on all things brand and he has his own brand consultancy that he started, which is called DNA hyphen rb, which David tells me is brand.
So I've invited you in today because I think brands branding is super important. I think it can make a massive difference between business success and failure, and I think some people have got it spectacularly right. Some people have got it spectacularly wrong, and I want to explore some of these themes with you.
And also the word brand is attached to more and more things these days. You have personal brand, you have employer brand, you have digital brand, and so all about brand building is all about business for this conversation. And I wanna start because I [00:02:00] know you've got a fascinating history working in an area that so many people are interested in, which is Formula One, and you have worked for the Mercedes.
Team in Formula One for nine years. You've also worked for the McLaren team, and tell me about what you were doing at Mercedes and how you were helping them with their brand.
David: Well, thank you for having me on your podcast, James. Yes. I started working with Mercedes in 2014. I'd met Toto Wolf who just bought into.
Mercedes and he was looking for somebody who understood corporate branding, personal branding and motorsports. And I'd got, in my sort of career history, I'd got all of those aspects. So I started working there in December, 2013, and my role covered a variety of different areas. So how do you take Mercedes as a brand, as a car brand, but apply it to a Formula One team.
Which is a, an interesting challenge because the aspects of a car brand you, you wanna get out the exciting bits of it to put it onto a Formula One team, which is effectively a sporting team. I then work with the drivers on their individual driver brands, so Nico Rossberg Lewis Hamilton, George Russell, on how we could be [00:03:00] really clear and consistent in the way that we talk about them and make sure that they come across clearly to their fans.
I worked with all the different. Sponsors as we brought the sponsors into the team, making sure that their brands meshed seamlessly with the team's brands. And then finally it was the reputation management. So when things started going wrong, I'd be there in the background understanding where we wanted the story to be as far as the brand was concerned.
And working with the comms people I. And Toto to get the story back onto track again.
James: Well, so much in what you just said that I want to ask you about, because some of this feels quite hard to pin down. So Mercedes is a reputable brand. It's been around for a very long time. It's associated with fabulous saloon cars.
I would guess. How do you take a brand like that and make it into a. Sports brand. Let's start with that one.
David: So that was an interesting challenge because Mercedes is a very strong brand and it has very clear brand guidelines. But there were areas when you applied it to a Formula One team that slightly jarred, that didn't quite gel with what you were trying to do from a sporting perspective.
We would take the brand and probably use about [00:04:00] 95% of it in terms of the brand positioning, the brand values, all of that would be meshed into the team.
James: What jarred, what was the bit that you had at the time? Smooth over at It was, actually,
David: I can I, I'll talk about that in specific. So their positioning was the best and.
As a sports team, defining yourself as the best is quite a challenge because sometimes you are the best if you win the race, but other times if you don't win the race, you're not the best. And so you are, you are setting up an expectation. So what we did is we suffered it ever so slightly and we put the brands, the team's brand positioning was aspiring to be the best.
So it was sort of an aspirational thing, which meant that the team was always trying to be the best. Sometimes you weren't, sometimes you were. In the nine years I was with the team, we won eight. Constructive championships, so it was a great time. So you
James: put those four words in front of best? Yes. Yeah.
Aspiring to be the best. Yeah,
David: inspiring to be the best. And that just softened it slightly. The rest of the brand model, we were then able to take and apply that to the Formula One team,
James: but it's also giving a clear message to everyone in that team. I. Yes, what you're about,
David: and [00:05:00] that I think is where brand and culture has a really strong overlap.
So when you have a company has a brand, you need to make sure that that flows through to the culture because the brand is the external promise of what you want people to think about you. But that's got to align with what it's like internally for the people working there. And then that the culture then leads onto the customer experience.
So the experience people have of that brand should be driven by the culture. And I think one of the things that people often forget is that brand is something that the whole organization owns. It's not just something the marketing department does. Everybody in the organization, whether they are a customer service rep or a finance person, or a sales person, or even just somebody working in ACT or wherever else, we'll be talking to people outside.
They all represent. The brand. So it's something that you've gotta get the culture, the brand, the culture aligned, and then that aligns with the customer experience. So true. And you want the whole team to be pulling together
James: in the same direction. Yeah. And I hadn't really thought of brand as being a sort of key driver of that in that way.
So, yeah, that's very powerful. I was [00:06:00] thinking about Lewis Hamilton. So Louis Hamilton's just started driving Ferraris. You know, I think of Ferrari Red. Cool. It's a different brand from Mercedes, the best, or aspiring to be the best. You just said that you work with Louis Hamilton on his personal brand.
Let's start with that. What were you trying to achieve? Well, I mean, Lewis Hamilton is a racing driver. He is a bloody good one. But what, beyond that were you trying to say?
David: So with Lewis, when he first started working with Mercedes and I got involved, we had a, a brand positioning for him, which was the world's fastest, I think, the world's fastest racing driver.
I. And that worked well for him.
James: So that landed with me 'cause that's what I think of him, right? Yeah, that's right. Um, but come
David: by the end of 2016, he'd had a challenging year. He'd been beaten to the championship by Nico Rossberg. He transcended Formula One. So his audience was way beyond just the Formula One audience.
And he was achieving a sort of stature within the sport, which was more than just being a racing driver. Uh, so I sat down with him and his management and we decided that the world's fastest racing driver really wasn't strong enough for him. And it [00:07:00] sort of confined him within Formula One. So we went off and we looked at how to take his brand positioning in, in a different direction.
So on the back of his helmet, he has a, a quote still I Rise, which is a, is from a poem by Maya Angelou, who was a, a black American poet from the 1950s and she was talking about the struggle of a black people in America and still be rise. And so he had still, I Rise and we put those two together and created a brand positioning around inspires to rise in taking Lewis's sort of mantra of Still I Rise to.
Other people and you can see that. So extending that to a wider community, to much a much wider community. Yeah. And you can see now in, you know, today he's still using that as his inspiration. You know, he's doing an awful lot of work with minorities in Formula One, bringing people through from education right into the sport.
Watched a couple of years ago, he was, he went to the MET Gala in New York and he normally, as a superstar, you go with a fashion house. But he went to the Met Gala and said, I'd like to buy a table. And they went okay. And he turned up with a handful of [00:08:00] young black designers from America who'd never have had a chance to get to the Met Gala.
Yeah. Wearing one of their outfits. And he was on, I saw him on the BBC News and he was on the front page of every newspaper and he was, you know, that inspiring to Rise was, you know, spreading his goodness to other people. So that was his brand positioning. He's still using that today. So he was able to take his
James: personal branding, which you helped develop from one.
Manufacturer to another. So he's now driving the red Ferrari. I mean, I, I heard him on the radio. I think he was saying he was having a bit of trouble getting his head around that. Yeah. Which I thought was interesting. 'cause I mean, for me it's like I've been, you know, if you cut me in half, it would say read, you know, I couldn't imagine gonna work for another recruitment company.
So I think, and so how do you deal with that? If you were advising him now, what would you be saying about this transition?
David: I think it's an amazing transition. I mean, first of all, Ferrari is an iconic brand, both as a car brand and a Motorsport brand. And pretty much every rating driver in the world would want to drive for Ferrari at some stage in their career.
How did Ferrari achieve [00:09:00] that years in the making that, you know, it's Italian, so it's got that passion. They own the color red. You've got all the history and the heritage and the mythology of Enzo Ferrari and they've managed to create a very high profile luxury brand. It's a very niche brand in terms of people who can afford it, but it's got mass appeal.
So it's, and it's, everyone can get a cap with us. Ferra. Yeah, we can get a cap and we can, we can dream that they're gonna win the next championship, but they don't, do they, that's a different, that's a completely different story. Brand. I mean like United Ferrari. I mean, that's Story's
James: yesterday's news, aren't they?
But go on. So, so Lewis has gone there and he's gonna have to lift this, he's probably
David: already lifted it. He's probably lifted their share price quite a lot because he's, you know, he is a superstar and wherever he goes, eyeballs will follow him. And I think the alignment of his. You know, he's a high profile superstar brand with the high profile luxury brand Ferrari.
It's a match made in heaven, much more so perhaps than Louis and, and Mercedes was. And I think, you know, good on him. He's, you know, he'll be there for two or three years, maybe four years. You [00:10:00] know, he might win a championship, he might not. But that iconic vision of Lewis dressed in red racing for Ferrari will be on people's minds.
Yeah. He'll, the rest of he'll on the podium
James: at some point. Right? He'll be, yeah. Looking fantastic. But he was f
David: He won this, he won the sprint race this this last weekend. Yeah.
James: But then he was disqualified from the
David: Yes. The main ground. That was unfortunate. It was. It was
James: unfortunate. But I think, you know, you can see him now on the podium and he might, as you say, win the.
Champion, it'd be a fantastic new chapter. So in a sense, he's sort of reinvented himself Yes. By making this move. Yeah. And it's good for both brands that they've come together and coalesced in that way. We are delighted that you are listening to this episode. Hit the Follow button so that we can continue to bring you the best business insight and actionable advice to help your business and or career.
So you also said that you did sort of communications around when the proverbial hits the fan. And you have to manage situations, which are tricky.
David: How does that work when things happen in Formula One and the story starts spinning outta control? It happens [00:11:00] very quickly. Um, it normally happens during a race.
So someone hits someone else or something. Yeah. And back when I started working with Mercedes, I would be the eyes and ears. Sitting at home watching the, the commentary, watching the social media, I mean the eyes and ears for the comms director who was in the thick of it at the track. So he had a sort of hotline to the Yeah.
So you were on the
James: watching the telly like everyone else. And, and, and, because you can't tell what's going on when you're at the track really. 'cause they going around outta sight.
David: I think you have a fairly good idea, but you, you don't have that context of being away from the thick of it and. Seeing what's, you know, getting a sense of what, so tell me through a
James: scenario that you had to do.
I mean,
David: there was a couple of times when, back in 2014 when Louis and Nico collided with each other on track. Yeah, I remember that. And you know, that got very tense and you know, so we would be Jack it an interesting rivalry. There wasn't there? There was, but you know, when you've got two top drivers in the team, you know, they, they wanna beat each other.
They both wanna win. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we'd be chatting behind the scenes, how do we respond? And then 10 minutes later, Toto would stand up and talk to the world. Now as a brand person. That [00:12:00] level of influence in terms of getting the message back onto where you want it to be from a brand perspective is amazing.
Brands normally use it, move at glacial speeds in sport, you know, you can be go from hero to zero almost immediately. So having that sort of level of influence and ability to guide the story behind the scenes was amazing.
James: So looking beyond Formula One into sports more widely, who do, who do you think, I mean, this might be an unfair question to ask you, but who do you think is doing a good job brand wise at the moment
David: in a wider sport?
There's one obvious one that I think is doing a good job from a brand perspective is, is Rex and Football Club. So you've got the two American film stars who've bought into, into the club and it was a a nothing sort of lower division club and suddenly it's got a global audience. It's got a clear brand positioning, it's getting lots of revenue, and they're gradually rising up through the ranks.
So
James: why did they do that? Who thought that was a good idea? I mean, I mean, if you're sitting in California, I mean heading to Rec em to buy a football club is not obvious.
David: It's not, but I, I think they, where,
James: where did that come [00:13:00] from? They, they did
David: a lot of research to, to find, did find the right one. They were looking for a football club.
And I think you're looking for, you know, why did they pick Swindon are local too. I wish they would. Yeah, quite. That would've been good. I wish they would. We need some more Hollywood stars investing
James: to come to Swindon. And there's a club which, which,
David: uh, Swindon is a club, which, I mean, I was born in Swindon, so it should be the club I support.
But it's, yeah, it's a, it is a, it's a tough time. It's a tough time and it's gone from owner to owner who never quite get it right. So, so brand, there's an opportunity for you, James. So
James: yeah, there's lots of opportunities everywhere on branding front. I'm begin to think so. And, and then you, you also did the personal brand for Toto, you said?
David: Yes. So, so
James: talk me through that. Tell us a little bit about him and what your role was in that. So was, because they're all
David: quite different, these sort of tasks. Yeah. You've got. So, so Toto was an interesting one. He's very clear in terms of what his brand is. Anyway, well tell us who he
James: is for people who dunno.
So, Toto
David: Wolf is the team principal and CEO of Mercedes Formula one team. And, uh, he's Austrian and he bought into the team in 2013 and a third owner of it with [00:14:00] Mercedes and, uh, a couple of other people. And he's, but he's very clear on what his brand is, so there wasn't an awful lot we needed to do with him.
In terms of clear in what
James: way?
David: He, he knows who he is. He's, you know, he's, he's, he's got a good name, he's got great name, a brand, doesn't it? Great. And you know, if you can be known by one name in your life, that's, that's even better than having two names. So he's, and he comes across very well in, in the media, comes across very well on tv.
It's a really nice chapter. Work for.
James: So that's an ambition for people listening to be known by one name in your life. I think you can, yeah. I'm just thinking of a few people. There are not many. Quite a few played for Brazil. Yeah. One of them was Prime Minister in this local. You've got Toto there. But yeah, it's interesting though.
Yeah. So if you
David: can get to one name,
James: it certainly helps. I. Was he born? Toto was, I mean, was he given that name? Did he name it Create, he has got a D name because El John
David: or something. It was a different name and I can't remember. So he that name.
James: And so you can create your own name out there. You know, you can do if you're inter personal branding.
Well I think that's worth thinking about, I think for the ambitious. So that's really interesting. It's given us a good sort of [00:15:00] overview. David, of you, David, have. What you do and what you think about rebranding. This is a minefield and it's something that companies do periodically, and I know ourselves, we are on our fourth or fifth iteration of our brand since the 1960s, and we haven't ever changed it very radically, but we've, it's sort of evolved, but some people do things a lot more dramatic, and as we're in the car space, Jaguar, I mean, that's the one that has really hit the headlines.
I. What's going on there? I mean, how to upset and lose a lot of customers. What are they trying to do? I mean, explain what's happened there and what you think they're trying to do
David: with brand and branding. They are words that get thrown at all sorts of things and used interchangeably along with marketing.
So brand branding and marketing. You know, you see them used in lots of different ways and no one's ever really sure what they mean. And I'm quite keen when I talk to my clients to, to define that in a really simple way. To start with. So brand is the thought you want customers to have. About you or your company.
So it's a [00:16:00] thought in their head and it, ideally, it's more than a thought. It's a thought and an emotion because an emotion c creates that feeling of connection and it, it spurs action. So it's, it's a desired positioning. You know, you want to people to try and think, get people to think in a certain way.
So if
James: anyone's watching, we've got Love Mondays here, which is our brand message. So we want people to think that's right. They can find a job that they'll love,
David: but that's, you want that thought and emotion in, in somebody's head. You can't force them to have it, but you can shift the odds in your favor that they will think that way if you, if you are very consistent in the way you deliver your branding.
Now branding is everything you do to get people thinking that way. So as an example, if you went to a party and you walked into a party and said, hello, I'm James. I'm funny. People would look, look at you slightly strangely, but if you went to a party, you told jokes. Everybody enjoys themselves when you leave, they go, that's James.
He's a funny guy. So the branding there was the jokes, the, you know, being, yeah, being an, you know, an enjoyable person to be with. [00:17:00] So branding is made up of all sorts of things. Is the values of your organization that you stand for. It's the behaviors that that come outta that. Behaviors in the culture of the organization.
It's the tone of voice in which you communicate. It's the identity that you have as an organization and part of the identity is the logo. Um, and then it's the messaging that you use thereafter. So there's lots of different elements to branding. I. All of that is what you're doing with total clarity and ruthless consistency to try and shift people's perception to the direction you want them to have.
I mean, if you
James: know what you're doing, you're doing it with
David: total clarity and ruthless consistency.
James: If you dunno what you're doing, I can imagine it's quite easy to be all over the shop. You can
David: be all over the shop and you end up looking unfocused, which is why you need somebody like me to come in and help you.
Then that's what you do. You in inject clarity and consistency. Clarity and then, and then consistency. Yes.
James: Building a brand is a, a long.
David: Task. It's something that doesn't happen overnight, so it takes a long time to build it. It can be [00:18:00] very quick to destroy it. So it takes a long time. It takes a lot of hard work, it takes a lot of effort.
It takes a lot of money to build a brand. But once you've got that and you can be totally clear and ruthlessly consistent about it, then you start to shift the odds in your favor that people think about you in the way you'd like 'em to think.
James: But, but it's an interesting combination of what you said of thinking and feeling.
Yes. So when you see brands they have, they should evoke
David: both. They, well, they do. And I think I do an exercise when I do brand training and I get the audience to tell me, think of a brand that they love and I want them to tell me how it makes them feel. So what brands do you get coming up almost? Oh, all sorts.
So, you know, you get food brands and drink brands and travel brands and things that make people feel, you know, nice and warm. And then a few minutes later I'll say, right, I want to you to think about a brand that you don't like or you even hate. And. When you do that, food brands, travel brands, you often get the same brands coming up the same ones.
That's interesting. The feelings, the feelings are really negative and you, so you then you contrast the feeling in the room between the, the [00:19:00] lovely warm feeling you had with the brands you love and the feeling, you know, with the brands you hate. And then the next question is, why do they make you feel like that?
What is it that makes you feel negative about, about those brands? And it's pretty much always personal. It's something that company has done. So they've been disrespectful or they've failed to do what they said they were gonna do. It was a customer experience thing. So advertising can build nice, warm brands, but customer experience can destroy brands.
And that's where you, if you don't have that connection between your brand, your culture, and your customer experience all lined up and working perfectly, then as hard as you work to build a brand at the other end, you can be destroying it very easily. So that's where the consistency comes in. That's where
James: consistency comes in.
Yeah. So back to Jaguar. Jaguar. I mean, they haven't been that consistent in their branding or they've suddenly changed, so, so describe for people who might not have seen it. We'll try and put some pictures of the new Jaguar. I. Ads in the, uh, video for YouTubers, but try and [00:20:00] tell us what Jaguar have done.
David: So, so Jaguar have, have basically thrown out pretty much all their, their old brand, their old branding. Even the leaping Jaguar's gone, even the leaping Jaguar's gone. Yeah. And they've come up with a, with a, a sort of a, a type face. Jaguar, there's lots of bright colors. The the car model that they showed is, is very bold, and basically what they've announced is that they, they've looked at their marketplace, they realize that they, the, the switch towards electric vehicles, the competition from China, you know, their, their traditional market is rapidly going away.
Their traditional customer base is rapidly dying off, and they have a choice. They either try and. Play around the edges, but gradually decline or do something drastic. And they've gone for the drastic and they've publicly stated that when they launch their new cars in probably two years time, with all the new brand around it and everything else, they expect to have lost 80% of [00:21:00] their traditional customer base.
Um, but they're going after a completely new audience of young, wealthy, aspirational customers, which are very different to the customer base that they've had previously, which were, you know, seen as well. I would look at that Jaguar, I would always thought as the, the sort of car my dad would drive. I never saw it as a, as a, as a.
A car that I would drive. No,
James: I think my dad did drive on the gin and jag belt. Absolutely. It used to be known people in blazers would drive around and jaguars and go to drinks parties. And although I'm of an age where perhaps I would be
David: a Jaguar driver, even that thought, now, you know, it's my dad's generation car.
So you think
James: they're onto, 'cause it was widely mocked. It was. There's rebrand, but you think they're onto something? Um,
David: I think they, they are following a route that is the only, probably the only sensible choice they've got. And it's. Because it's so drastic. People have, you know, who aren't, who aren't brand savvy are going, oh, it's, it's, they're throwing it all the way and it's all terrible.
I would love to see them succeed because I, [00:22:00] it's, it would be great. This is a great British brand. I'd love to see it continue and they've got a huge task on their hands, but if they, if they execute it correctly, it could be good.
James: Yeah. And they've got everyone talking about it. Absolutely. Which is a big thing.
I mean, just getting noticed in this world is hard enough.
David: Yeah.
James: Yeah, I'm with you. I hope they succeed too. I, I think it's good to try things, but it's a pretty bold bet.
David: It's a bold bet, but the alternative, I think is, is a slow, painful decline.
James: Yeah, so, so if you are advising a, yeah, our company's called Read.
I mean, we're not very imaginative. My dad just stuck his name above the door. But I suppose, fortunately for us, it's a four letter word, and that's quite good for branding as it turns out, because it's simple and people can remember it. But if you are, if you are. Called in to consult with a business that's saying, well, we, we think our brand is out of date, or isn't helping us shift more product or feels tired?
David: Where do you begin? I, I think I begin by looking at all the business fundamentals. So, you know, [00:23:00] what, what, what's, what's really going on? What you starting to think that your, you know, your, your brand is tired or outta focus or outta date, and there could be all sorts of reasons. It could be that you've got a, a shiny new competitor in the marketplace who's, who's making you look dull.
It could be that the, the marketplace itself is, is changing. Um, it could be that your audience no longer want what you, what you are doing, or it could be you're just at the end of a brand cycle. Brands have all have a cycle. You know, they, they, they start, they build, you know, they grow, and then over time, familiarity comes in and, and they, they start a decline and you need to have a refresh.
So there could be all sorts of different business reasons why you'd need to rebrand. But being really under. But you need to try and identify what the main one is. Yes. Before you start advising on which way to go this, start fid with it. Because I think if you start changing the brand and not understand why you're doing it, that's one of the big reasons why rebrands fail.
James: And once you embark on it, what do you need to make sure you get right?
David: Um. I think you need to make sure that you, [00:24:00] once you've understood what the business problem is, that you are going down a process that that is going to lead you to the right answer. So first of all, you've gotta go and do your research.
You gotta go and talk to lots of people. You've gotta look at the marketplace, you've gotta look at, you know, you've got talk to customers, you've gotta talk to employees, the leaders of the organization. Even suppliers to the organization will give you really valuable information about what's really going on and then start to work out how you're gonna respond.
So I, I went through this in 2007. I was, I was hired by Xerox to be their head of brand and marketing for Europe. And at the, the time they were going through a, a major rebrand and what was driving that rebrand was a move away from. Being a, a photocopier printer company into being a business services company.
So really repositioning the company as from business perspective and at the time the CEO of the company, Anne Makki said to the guys leading the the rebrand. I want you to do four things when you do this rebrand. One, I want you to do it globally. [00:25:00] Two, I want you to do it quickly. Three, I want you to do it cheaply.
And four, you're not allowed to touch the logo. It
James: didn't want much then.
David: No, that's, I wanted your take. No, that's right. Fast global, cheap and No, no touching the logo.
James: Right.
David: And sounds, that was interesting. A m sort level
James: of reasonableness. Yeah.
David: So then what happened? Well, and that, that I thought was very smart, because normally people go, oh, we need to rebrand.
Let's fiddle with the logo. And as I said already, the logo is just one part of the brand identity, which is just one part of branding. But you know, you get somebody coming into an organization and says, we need to, we need to re revitalize the business. Let's change the logo. And that's where you've seen a lot of brand projects fail in the past because it's just been a, it's just been sort of gilding the.
The brand smelly thing rather than, um, polishing turd that I didn't know whether I could say that. No,
James: he said it quite openly about advertising. So sounds like the same sort of absolutely same principle.
David: So did all the research and the research came back. Xerox is gray. It's not. It's sort of very [00:26:00] corporate.
It's, you know, not got any excitement to it. And going to business services, you need to have, you know, need to be much more human. So they, they started to reposition the company and the, the brand values and the, and the positioning around being much more human and colorful and vibrant. But as we went down the route.
Of that, looking at the logo, the old, old Red Capital letter, Xerox logo started to feel like a barrier to where we were going. And so the guy in charge of this project, Richard, went to to the CEO and, and said to her, you know, this is, this is the problem. The, the logo feels like it's a barrier. She said, well, change it.
She, he said, but how come you said number four was don't change the logo. She said, no, if you have to change the logo, you are changing it for the right reasons. And I, I thought that was absolutely genius on her part. You know, it was, it, it, it was clear that she really understood that the brand was much more than just the logo.
So the logo changed and the, and the, the, the whole brand went out and refreshed the field of the business. So that's a good
James: way of handling it. We've talked about big brands, [00:27:00] Mercedes, Ferrari, Xerox, Frankie, my producer, has a brand called Flamingo, and she was telling me that when she spoke to you before, you gave her a little bit of advice.
I. Can you remember what it was?
David: Yeah. So she, I asked why it was called Flamingo. Yeah. And it was all to do with her grandmother and flamingos, and she, she'll be able to tell the story much better. I think her
James: grandmother gave her flamingos a lot,
David: which is, that's right. So, but then what did you suggest? So I, but what I said was, if, if you got that story, that backstory, then tell it.
Find a way of bringing that out because it, it makes your, your brand and you feel much more human. And so when I arrived today, she, she said to me, she's put that on her website. So that, that was great. That was made me very happy. Well,
James: that's a bit of free consultancy, which is good, man. She told me that.
But I think it's interesting for people starting out, which is what, why I ask you, because if you're trying to establish a brand or create a brand for your business, you know. Being human is clearly important. So what else? What other advice do you give people who are starting up? Yep. You've gotta pick a name and we, we had a young woman in here the other day [00:28:00] who, who started a business called Good Squish.
And it's a great business that makes hair accessories and, and she's doing really well. And she said it just sort of came to her, you know, and then it was a eureka moment. She knew that was it. But I don't know that if that's an experience shared by. Many or everyone, um, maybe it's not so
David: obvious. I think, I mean the name you, you, the name isn't so important.
If it's a cool name or a funky name, then great. But it's the meaning you build into the name, which is key. And you know, you look at one of the biggest companies in the world, apple, you know, it's just a piece of fruit, but the meaning. That, that Steve Jobs built into that brand over the, over the years is immense.
Um, and now when you think of Apple, you don't think of it as fruit. You're thinking it as computer, hardware and phones and all the rest of it. So the meaning is more important than the actual name. You, you, if it's a funky name or a simple name, then that's, that's all really good. But I think when you're starting, so,
James: so, okay, so when you start, so what do you mean by meaning?
You know, so if you are starting off an accessories business
David: Yeah. [00:29:00] What's the sort meaning you
James: should
David: be searching for? Well, it's the meaning is whatever you want. You want your, that one thought and one emotion that you want your audience to think about you, the conclusion that they have about you.
That's when I talk about meaning. That's that sort of brand, meaning that, that I'm trying to get to. Um, because if you can be really clear. With your audience, you're also being really clear with your, with, with the people within your organization. I did a, a work, some work over the, the pandemic with a, a technology company.
It was a, a sort of a technology wearables company, and they brought me in and they had a, they had a brand name and they said, we'd like you to, you know, we'd, we want to sort of create a brand model around it. I said, so I spoke to the CI said, what's it, what's it mean? And he, he sort of, he explained what it was, what it was all about.
So the part of the research I did was to go and talk to everybody who was involved in it. You know, most of the employees, some of his investors. And the presentation back to this big group at the end of the project was, this is a product that can do everything for everyone. If I listen to what you are [00:30:00] saying, because everybody had a different idea of what it was about and how it'd be, how it was positioned and, and what it stood for, and what the values were.
So when you're starting out with a new product, make sure that you've got that total clarity and make sure that the people working on it understand that and make sure that as you're building your business well, as in who the
James: product is
David: for. Who the product is for, what it stands for, its what it does, what it, the problem it solves.
Plus, you know, as a business, what are the values that you want to represent and you know how you're gonna communicate and what style you're gonna communicate. All of these things, because when you've got a, a small organization, quite often, you know, people are just making assumptions because you, if you haven't done that piece of thinking.
Then you are just allowing people to assume what it is, and the chances are that everybody's assuming something slightly different and it just means that what you're trying to do, and that was the case in that example. Yeah, absolutely. So how did you, how did you sort that out? By, by gradually iterate.
You say you start off with, so this is where I think it should be. And then you, you [00:31:00] iterate, you, you work with the lead, you know, the owner of the, the business, the, the marketing people in the business, and you iterate into something that everybody feels is really comfortable. Did you get there in that case?
Yeah, we did. Yeah. And then you lock it in place. How long did that take? It didn't take long. I mean, you know, a, the research took probably a couple of weeks and, and the iteration two or three weeks to sort of get, you know, get everybody into around the table. But once you've done that, you've got that
James: clarity.
What I've observed in, in our business and elsewhere with advertising and obviously closely associated with brands, is people inside the business. Get tired of campaigns long before people outside even notice they've probably come on air and they make change. You know, they, they lose consistency by trying to do new things when actually it might be better to just consistently deliver the same message or similar.
And is that something you've come across in the brand space or is it. People like tinkering. I mean, everyone has opinions and [00:32:00] you know, they're not necessarily of equal merit.
David: I think you, you, you come across it sometimes with people deciding that they, particularly from a brand design perspective, they can go, oh, you know, well I'll use that color there.
Or I'll, you know, you've got your, your little heart shape on your Mondays. You, I'm gonna do a presentation where all the zeros are little hearts and suddenly, you know, this, this thing, which is meant to be very specific. It sort of leaks out into other areas because everybody thinks they're a creative director.
James: Yeah. Then you end up with a. A mess.
David: But I think I've, I've certainly seen it on the marketing side where there's a sort of a, a boredom threshold with marketing people that, that, you know, they get, they, they want this year's campaign or that, you know, this, this quarter's campaign, and
James: you have to just say, sorry, we're gonna carry on through what we're doing.
David: Yeah. And, but that, that I think is, you know, when, when we, we talked about the difference between brand and branding, marketing is, is another area where depending on who you talk to in that, in that, in that industry, you will get their perspective on. How the, how the marketing works. So what's the difference between branding and marketing then, in your view?
So brand, brand is that, is [00:33:00] is how you get that thought into people's heads. Marketing. The best description of marketing I've ever come across was from the London Business School. A gentleman called Tim Ambler, who used to be in charge of marketing for Diageo. And he did a lecture on how to talk about branding to, to, to about marketing, to finance directors.
And he said that, that go on the, the, the, the, the definition of marketing you should use is that marketing is the sourcing and harvesting of cash flow. Right. And marketers should know who's got the money out there, who's got the need, come up with products and prices and promotions and positioning and, and techniques.
Sourcing
James: and management of
David: cash flow, service harvesting
James: and harvest. Sorry. So, so come up with creative ways, sourcing and harvesting of cash
David: flow. Harvest. Harvest that cash out in the marketplace from, from the audience. But it's
James: there. You wanna bring it in
David: and then deliver it to the finance director as as cashflow Now to me.
When you go and talk to a marketing person, you'll, you'll get their particular lens on their particular discipline. Within marketing, yes, you'll [00:34:00] get their particular metrics, which means nothing often to the business itself. But if you start to look at marketing as a sourcing and harvesting of cash flow, you are linking the effectiveness, effectiveness of marketing directly to something that matters really, really important to the business.
James: That's quite hard to then link to putting a Guinness ad on the telly, isn't it? I suppose. I mean, how did the finance director, you know, swallow this?
David: Well, I think, I think it, you know, as long as you can start to demonstrate, you know, the overall mix, people are buying it, people are buying it, and you are increasing your sales, then it links back to cashflow.
But it does show that, you know, and I, I used this with various finance directors when I was in, in marketing roles, and, you know, the, the, the, the, the first of all, you explain it and the, this sort of an. Oh, no one's ever explained marketing to me like that before.
James: Well, I haven't heard that explained like that before.
I think it's really interesting. So the sourcing and harvesting of cash, but also what it does I'm thinking is it gets the marketing people thinking much more strategically about absolutely what they're there for. They're not there to make a pretty ad with pink and a love heart on it. They're there to think about build the business.
How are we gonna grow [00:35:00] this business, reach more customers and be super relevant?
David: And most finance directors will look at marketing as a cost center. And so the the, you could then have the debate that says, well, if you'd like, like me to do more sourcing and more harvesting, that's great. You'll get more cashflow.
Yeah. But if you reduce the amount of sourcing and harvesting I can do, 'cause you cut my budgets, then you have to accept that you're gonna get less cashflow. And it became a very interesting debate then.
James: Yes. I mean, you have to demonstrate that you are good at sourcing and
David: harvesting
James: because otherwise you might not.
David: But it does, as you absolutely said, it forces you as a marketer to think about the business rather than just your loan, little discipline and marketing. And then that gets you away from wanting to do a new campaign every quarter.
James: So you are sourcing and harvesting cash flow and at the same time, I mean, does branding change a lot?
I mean, you've got your brand. That sort of branding
David: bit that sits between, that's, that I think is the, is the thread that runs through everything. And once you've got your brand, don't change it. Yeah. You know, you can, you can keep it fresh and vibrant by doing different [00:36:00] marketing. And using different messaging, um, you know, relevant to, to at the, you know, the time of year or the product or whatever else.
But that ruthless consistency of delivery of brand is how big brands built. So you can go anywhere in the world into a McDonald's store and you know, pretty much what you're gonna see, you know, pretty much what it's gonna taste like. Um, you know, pretty much how, how it's gonna operate. And that's ruthless.
Consistency in action.
James: Yeah. Yeah, so interesting. So moving on from sort of big brands and products and services like McDonald's to personal brand, I mean with the development of social media and sort of digital marketing, personal branding in, in my impression has really become much more important for sort of business leaders.
I mean, all sorts of people actually are sort of involved now, personal influencers, and what should someone be thinking about if they want to develop a personal brand?
David: I think they need to go through the same piece of thinking that any brand goes through. So any corporate brand [00:37:00] when they, when they come up with that brand positioning and those, the branding activities that they do, it's the same whether it's a a, a business.
Okay. But individual what, what's the
James: top five things you do as a business? So I think
David: the first thing to do is how do you want to be perceived? What is that thought that you want to be behind? What's the conclusion that you want people to have about you? And so what do you want people to be saying about you after?
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And what else? Once you've worked that out, you then work out. How are you gonna deliver that? What are you gonna do through a, you know, a meeting with somebody or a presentation that you're giving, or when you're doing your social media, what are the things you're gonna be doing that give you that ruthless consistency in the way you, you express yourself, whether it's the values you stand for, the behaviors you exhibit, that the way in which you talk, the identity that you have, the, you know, even the name that you use and the messaging.
What are, what's, what are the key sort of messages that you are repeating? I. Time after time. One of the, I think one of the things that, you know, if we wanna bring in Donald Trump at the moment, and he's very, very strong personal brand.
James: Yeah. Well we have [00:38:00] good bringing him in 'cause they, we can't market podcast on YouTube if we mentioned Donald Trump.
But go on the Yeah, go on. Talk about, but he's very good at
David: catchphrases. You know, there's, his messaging is, is very, you know, you know whether you love him or hate him. He's very good at
James: the catchphrases. Part of a personal brand is having a catchphrase or two. Well, he invented your fight. I mean, he was the apprentice.
Absolutely. Original, wasn't he? Yeah. So he is taken it from there onwards. Yeah. So catchphrases, do you think he comes up with 'em himself or do you think other people are doing it for him? I've got no idea.
David: Maybe there's someone like me sitting behind him. I wonder. Yeah. Yeah. But I
James: think he probably comes up with 'em himself
David: would be my guess.
James: Yeah. You are saying very much of what I'm hearing is that if you wanna develop a personal brand, you approach yourself like me, PLC, as if you are a business. And, you know, you think about how you want to be remembered, what sort of impact you wanna make, and what name you want to give yourself,
David: almost to that extent.
Absolutely. And I think if you are, if you are, you know, a, a high profile [00:39:00] individual or really anybody in, in, you know, somebody, even starting out in work, having a clear understanding of how you want to be perceived can be really helpful. And it just requires a bit of thinking to do it, and then a bit of discipline to, to deliver that consistency.
I think there's one exception to this rule, and that's CEOs, and CEOs are really interesting because they, they have a personal brand and they'd probably got to their position as a CEO through being a personality and being very good at what they do. But they also have to be the public face of a, of an organization.
So therefore they have to represent the brand to the outside world. They also have to be the role model internally to employees for the culture. And so if you imagine the old school Venn diagram, they've got their own personality, they've got the corporate brand, they've got the internal corporate culture.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that is. The CEO brand
James: as a sort of distinct from all three of those. Absolutely. So, and, and, okay, I've thought of
David: this. So this is, this is [00:40:00] where you have to, you know, you, you, quite often when you sit, when I work with CEOs, you know, you start off by understanding what their, their CEO brand is.
And then you look at the corporate brand and you're looking at where's that overlap? What are the values that you can put into their brand that their, their CEO brand, um, that make them distinctive. What's their personality? What are the strongest elements that make their personality stand out, and what are the elements from the, the corporate brand, which you can put into their CEO brand, which mean that they're, they're, they're looking genuine as the CEO of that, that, that company, I.
James: They end up with a sort of one pager saying, this is my CEO brand. Yeah. So this is, so what would, what would typically be on that? It's, it's like, and it's like it be on my one pager. David,
David: you are another, perhaps another exception we should come to in a minute. Well,
James: I'm A-A-C-C-E-O, but yeah, you're a founder.
David: You're a founder, CEO, such you're a family, CEO
James: family and some founder of some things. Yeah, so we'll
David: talk about that in a minute. But with a CEO, I mean, you, you're looking at the, the, maybe the brand values of the organization and taking maybe two or three of those at which work, and [00:41:00] then combining those with, with.
The two or three may be from the, the personal brand, but that is a, it's like a uniform that the CEO wears for the duration of their, their tenure. And where you see CEOs going wrong, I think quite often is that they come in and, and ego takes over and they start to believe that their brand is more important than the corporate brand.
And. You know, when you start to get that divergence, there's a tension there and eventually something will break.
James: Usually the ceo EO. Yeah. And on
David: a
James: floor
David: of corporations, one of the things I always say big, one of the things I always say to CEOs is the corporate brand has a lot longer shelf life than the CEO EO brand.
Whilst you're there, you have to be that face of the, the, the, the, the company. You gotta leverage
James: the corporate brand on a thought. Absolutely. Ceo.
David: And it makes you look much more genuine if you are very closely aligned with that. Yeah. Family brands and and founder brands are fascinating because they are.
The, the values of the organization tend to be the values of the individual. [00:42:00] So I mean, that's three examples. All James is, you've got James Dyson, you know, you look at the Dyson brand, that's very much James, his own personal brand. Um, so Jim Radcliffe at Iios, you know, the way Iios operates and it's, it's it's culture and its brand is, is.
Just Sir Jim Radcliffe. And then you've got Reed. And I'm sure that if I talk to the people at Reed, they'd be going Well, yeah. I also think another James. James Timson. Yes. Timson.
James: So I must see, well, I dunno about that. Yeah. Yeah. They've all got different surnames. Fortunately. Otherwise it'd be very confusing.
But I think, yeah, there's, I suppose there's, I would say our brand is very closely associated with our family values. Which, and, and they go back to the original founder, Alec Reed, and we've carried them forward and, and all the new things we've started since they sort of also pervade that, I hope. But it's, I, I would also hope that it's evolving, you know, it's not a, it's not fixed in 1960.
David: No. And I think that's, you can move with the times, but you don't need to change it every five minutes, I think [00:43:00] is the key with brands,
James: those individuals you name have sort of. Notable entrepreneurs. I mean, sometimes they say or do things that are controversial. How does that affect the. Corporate brand.
Well,
David: I think it's a really good example going on in the world. Well, Elon Musk, Elon Musk, people having
James: to put stickers on their Teslas saying, I bought this before Elon went nuts, and things
David: like that. Yeah. And, and that, that's, you know, I think what we're watching is Gerald Ratner in, in, you know, in on a massive scale.
On a global scale. Um, you know, here's somebody who, as the CEO of a companies is doing things which people just don't understand. And. But the, the, the knock on effect, the knock on impact of the reputation of his company, you know, in sales in Germany, they say are 85% down. That's, that's drastic
James: and that's terminal.
Well, it is drastic. It'd be interesting to see what happens. I mean, Starling's still doing pretty well and. Apparently X is now back up in values. I dunno what he's playing many games at once. He, he's
David: playing many games. But, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the car company [00:44:00] is X you can get away with do using without anybody really noticing.
Starlink is so far removed from what we're doing, you know, on a day-to-day basis. But if you are driving a Tesla, you, you are starting to see it get getting vandalized or you take it to parties because people will see you arriving in it. That's really, I've
James: got a lovely friend who's. Very right on and very cares about the environment.
He's got big white Tesla. How do we feel for her driving it around at the moment? So, but yeah, so that's interesting, isn't it? So the, so those sort of brands are vulnerable to sort of some, I dunno whether sabotage is the right word, but sort of volatility of the, the founder or the CEO or the leader. Yeah.
The volatility of those people can have a, a big impact on the brand. The rat the moment we've talked about rebranding, we've talked about building a personal brand. The other, I dunno if you've got expertise in this really, but the other area I'm very interested in is the [00:45:00] employer brand. You know, is this a good company to come and work for or be part of?
And um, what sort of things should people be thinking about? In terms of employer brand in your view?
David: Um, well, I think first of all is you want to have a strong employer brand. It's not something you can fake. It's not something you can build. If the reality is different, then you'll get found out. There's, there's, you know, various online sources that you can Oh yeah.
There's so TripAdvisors for, yeah, TripAdvisors for working somewhere. The glass ceiling or something like that. That is glass door. Glass door, that's right. Glass door. That, that, you know, you can go and, and see what real employees say. So if, if you are trying to. You know, guild the third, so to speak, of what it's like to work somewhere.
You've gotta make sure that, first of all, well that's
James: true of everything in this world now, isn't It's Absolutely, yeah. Sort of. Everything's become very sad. You've gotta make sure that
David: your internal culture and the, and the way you operate and the way you reward your staff is, is in line with your brand.
And if you're making [00:46:00] that promise outside to customers, you need to make sure that you're also making that same sort of promise inside to your employees. Um, if you can do that, then, you know, you, you have a, you have a, a the basis for a really strong employer brand. Then it's a question of working out what are the stories, what are the messaging that you want to pull out, that, that, that you can tell, which are really genuine, which encourage people to come and work for you.
James: And you would
David: do that through what sort of channels? Social media mainly. Is it? Well, you have lots of routes. You have your own website, which can tell the stories. You have your social media, I'm sure you have, you know, sort of open days where, you know, you have graduate intake and, and, and whatever else that, that, that people can come in and see what it's like.
So, you know, and it's even as far as, as people going down to the pub with their friends and saying, well, I work for Reed and this is what it's like. You know that, that it's wherever people touch the organization. Um, you know, if it, the experience is right, you know, and they're talking to employees and the employees are giving off a good vibe and saying, [00:47:00] yeah, it's actually, I really enjoy working here and you know it, they are genuinely loving Mondays then, yeah.
Then you've got a strong employer brand. So maybe
James: lots of companies out there, you know, delivering that to their teams and colleagues, but aren't talking about it enough perhaps to attract others
David: Well, but then employer brand becomes marketing for, for employment effectively, doesn't it? Yes. It's, uh, what I'm, so how do you take that messaging and and, and market it to potential employees?
So you
James: become a destination employer?
David: Yeah, I suppose
James: so. People think, oh, I'd really love to work at Reed or love to go and work. Yeah. Ferrari or whatever it is. But it's interesting for Reed, because you are representing. We're representing a lot of employers. Well, we, we recruit for a lot of employers, some of whom would be household names and some of whom people wouldn't have heard of.
And so the, I think especially when you're a smaller business, it's creating that sort of feeling in your. Catchment area. I think it's really quite important. So it makes
David: such a difference getting the best people and you know, one form of media for them is [00:48:00] their, is their recruitment agent. So how retells that story about what it's like to work there and your understanding of that organization.
James: Sure. I mean, if someone comes and registers with us and says they're looking for a job as an accountant will say, well, here are the five companies hiring. This one gets a very good press from the people who work there. Go there first.
David: They're, you know, and that's, that's where I think the other thing we've not talked about yet is reputation comes in.
And reputation is fascinating because if brand is your desired state is what you'd like people to think about you. Reputation is a reality. So that's what people are actually thinking about you, and it's based on how well you're representing your brand to them. So how well you're getting into their heads combined with their experience of you and Yeah, and the reality of dealing with, with, with your organization.
And that's reputation. I. And reputation, whether it's as a corporate level or an individual level, has a life of its own. It, it lives beyond any control that you might have over it. Um, and
James: well, and people might be thinking, talking in very different ways as well. Yeah. Some people might think this organization's got a good reputation.
[00:49:00] Others the opposite. Yeah. What do you do about that? I mean, uh, is this something we, you know, companies should be sort of paying attention to? I mean, we do social media listening. Yeah. Which I find quite interesting. Every Monday I get the report and you see all the comments that people have made on LinkedIn, Facebook, some negative, some positive.
You know what people have put on Trustpilot. It tells you a lot actually.
David: It does. I think it the, you know, social media listening is very important. Looking at what complaints you're getting. You know, if you're logging complaints from customers and, and looking at those in detail and understanding what caused them, you know, that that experience is part of what's driving your reputation.
Um, and at a personal level, if you are going for a job, I often say to people, if you've got a really strong brand and you've done a really good job, by the time you get to the interview, your reputation has already interviewed. You know, you are,
James: you've got a really strong band as a person. You mean in this case as an
David: individual.
And if you, you know, and your reputation as they know about you before you get there. Yeah. Yeah. And your reputation will have, will have had an interview before you even arrive in person,
James: Guardiola. That's right.
David: They're gonna [00:50:00] wanna hire you then. But likewise, if you've got a, if you, if you've got a, you know, an inconsistent brand or you know, people who've got a bad experience of you, then your reputation's already been in there.
You might not even get to the interview.
James: But is that a reasonable. Level of expectation to put on someone. I mean, you know, I'm thinking of younger people coming into the workplace. How do they, how do they achieve that? Because it would be
David: great if they could. I think it, it's something that they need to be conscious of.
And I go and talk to young people in schools about how to have a successful career. Right. And not about what to do. Um, there's a, there's a couple of things we look at. One is, uh, just a sort of way of thinking about it. We talk about careers as a noun. You know, have a career and that comes with lots of words like career structure and ladder and path.
And it sort of feels like it's all uphill for the rest of your life. Um, but actually if you switch it round and, and think about it as a verb, careering, I. It comes with words like, sounds more fun. It's much more fun. And you know, you can imagine careering about [00:51:00] careering down a hill. You know, you've got speed, exhilaration, change of direction, lack of control.
That's what life is like, that's what work life is like, all of those things.
James: So you turn career from a noun to a vet, turn it into a noun.
David: And, and so hang on,
James: do you turn it into a noun?
David: I turned it from a, a noun into a verb. That's what I thought. Yeah. So, so, so, uh, first of all, say to young people, think about go going careering.
For the rest of your life. But if you are, it's instead of something you have, it's something you do. It's an activity, and if you're gonna do it well, there's a set of skills you need to have. And as an, you know, making yourself a, a successfully employable human being, you need to be able to take decisions.
You need to be able to communicate well. You don't wanna leave a trail of bodies. All these skills that you need to have to, to get you successfully through life. What do you mean? You don't leave a trail of bodies? You don't wanna be the, you don't be toxic. You don't wanna be the, the asshole in the room.
You know, you, you wanna make sure that, that people enjoy working with you and being with you. But if you are, if you are leaving a trail of bodies behind you, as you clamber up the, you know, clamber through your, through your life, that will catch up with you eventually. But [00:52:00] reputation is something I talk to 'em about, which is understand that you, you do have a reputation.
You, you are in, you know, you can, yeah. All
James: kids will have a reputation amongst their classmates, weren't they? Yeah.
David: You can, but you can influence that reputation by, by doing great stuff and also by being completely clear and, and, and consistently, you know, ruthlessly consistent in the way you
James: present yourself.
So you do this presentation. What's the question you get asked most commonly at the end? Have I worked with Lewis Hamilton? So, which you say yes. Yeah. If you were, well, here's a guy with an amazing reputation actually, and I thought what you said right at the beginning about how he sort of went beyond being the fastest racing driver into something and a different level was so interesting.
And he really has achieved that. I know colleagues of mine just follow everything. He does have huge admiration for him, so, but he obviously wanted that. I. There was some, you know, it was a big part of what was inside him. You know, it wasn't, someone said, well, that's what you should do next to the race, was it?
David: No. That, that's, you know, he's, he's completely driven as [00:53:00] far as that's concerned. And there are other racing drivers who want, you know, who, who, who don't want that and who are quite happy just doing the racing driving bit and then disappearing off. Don watch it tell you the weekend. Yeah. You know, sit on their super yacht or something like that.
So yeah.
James: Hey, thanks for coming and talking to me, David. I've really enjoyed that. I've learned a lot. I'm gonna be harvesting cash flow from my marketing team from now on, and, uh, I've got two questions I always ask at the end, which I'll ask you. And the first is, it's related to this. Posted beside us is what gets you up
David: on
James: a Monday
David: morning?
What gets me up on a Monday morning? I think just the sheer, sheer variety of what I do, working with other people. For me, when I started my business, I looked at the marketplace for corporate brands and there are hundreds of corporate brand consultants. Uh, and I thought, no, actually I want to work with people.
I want to, 'cause when you do something for a company, it's, it's okay. But when you change somebody's life and when you work with somebody to really change the direction they're going, that's immensely satisfies For me, it's, it's working with people.
James: I
David: couldn't
James: agree more with that. [00:54:00] And then the last question is, where do you see yourself in five years time?
This is a question from my interview book. Why you retired. Retired,
David: but with a great reputation. Well, I, I turned six, I turned 60 last, uh, last year, and so I see myself next five years just doing stuff I enjoy doing. But yeah, 65, 66. That's, that's probably when I'll sort of hang my boots up. You're a bit of
James: a historical sleuth.
I happen today.
David: I am, yeah. I'll go and do, you're gotta do more of that. I won't, I won't stop doing stuff, but I just maybe just move away from work and do the stuff I really enjoy doing, so.
James: Fantastic. Thank you for coming to see you today. Pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you very
David: much.
James: Thank you, David, for joining me on all about business.
I'm your host, James Reed, chairman and CEO of Reed, a family run recruitment and philanthropy company. If you'd like to find out more about Reed or the Brand Rover, all links are in the show notes. See you next [00:55:00] time.
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