Branding legend David Aaker returns to JUST Branding to unpack what separates truly strategic brands from the sea of sameness in 2025.

In this power-packed conversation, we dive into the evolution of Aaker’s thinking—from brand equity to brand relevance and portfolio strategy—and explore why so many organizations still miss the mark.

We cover:

• The 5Bs of Modern Branding and their real-world application
• How to build (and protect) strategic subcategories
• The critical link between brand, innovation, and leadership
• Why brand portfolio strategy is a game-changer (and often ignored)
• Signature stories, branded energizers, and how to drive meaning at scale
• The biggest mistakes brands still make—and how to fix them

We also spotlight the updated edition of Aaker on Branding and wrap with a fast-paced quickfire round you won’t want to miss.

If you care about building brands that actually matter—this is essential listening.

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Transcript

Welcome back to JUST Branding. Today, we’re honored to welcome back a true legend in the field, David Aaker, for a second appearance on JUST Branding, often called the father of modern branding. David is the vice chairman of Profit, the creator of the Aaker brand vision model, and the author of 18, yes, 18 books that have profoundly influenced the way we build, manage and think about brands. He’s back with a powerful new edition of Aaker on Branding, a curated, updated collection of his most important frameworks, tools and thinking adapted for today’s complex brand landscape. In this episode, we’re going to discuss what’s changed in branding, what’s still misunderstood and what brand leaders must focus on today to stay relevant and differentiated in 2025 and beyond. So let’s get into it. Welcome back to the show, Dave.

Thanks for having me.

Awesome. We have a lot to cover. So Matt is here too. We’re going to have some fun. We’re going to tuck into your book, obviously. So I’m curious, what motivated you to update this latest edition?

Well, in 2014, I had something like five or six branding books, and people would basically come to me and say, I’m not going to read all of these, which pages should I read? I decided I need to write a Aaker on branding book that would sort of summarize the pages they should read. But now that it’s 11 years later, and I’ve written three books since then on stories and disruptive innovation and branding and social programs and branding, and the world has changed as well, and the communication environment is so hostile now. And so a lot of things in branding is changing. The basic concept haven’t, but brand building has seen a lot of changes. So I decided it was time to revisit branding. Plus, it was kind of a good excuse to take stock and to figure out what’s important now. And for me, writing a book is really kind of a fun learning experience.

Well, what’s changed then? So since you’ve written those books, what has changed and what stayed true about branding since you first wrote the first one?

Well, I think that I characterized it in terms of four or five challenges. One challenge is that the little history back in the late 80s, early 90s, several things happened. One of the main things that happened was the BCG growth share matrix, which was dominating strategic thinking in those days. And based on a flawed but empirical analysis, that if you increase market share, you would increase profitability. And so that was the strategic thing. You find areas of growth that you can capture large market share in, and that’s the route to winning strategy. Well, it tended to give people an excuse to buy market share, and they would do that by basically damaging or destroying brands. And other things happened too. That version of big data and analytics was scanner data driven, and they encouraged short-term thinking. So the world then said, okay, this isn’t working. We’re not getting growth, we’re not getting profits, we’re losing profits, and we need something different. And then came brand equity. And so everybody kind of jumped on the bag line and that that’s a way to do it. You build brand assets and that will fuel growth. And that changed everything really. And it changed how people viewed marketing, it changed who did marketing, it changed what marketing did. So marketing was now had a seat at executive table. There was a CMO of marketing or the VP of marketing, and they started dealing with strategy, with market segmentation, with consumer insights, the consumer journey. And so they touched everything in the organization really. And so they were really became a strategic partner. So that really has a movement that grew very fast and it’s grown maybe a little slower, but steadily ever since. It’s now quite established. And so now you see sort of cracks in the cement barricade and it’s never gone away. This idea that we need to get sales and profits and leads quickly, that’s always been there and it’s always been enticing, compelling even. But it’s been held at bay. And now it’s kind of breaking out because curiously, they gave it a new brand name. They call it demand marketing or sometimes performance marketing. Now who could oppose creating demand or improving performance? So it’s a great brand tool. It’s like the Republican Party, where you think they know how to do it right. And so one of the things that I wanted to do was to explain that branding has more depth and complexity than just a communication function to create awareness and image. So I created a construct called the Five Bs. And I did that in hopes that I could provide a way for people to get their hands around the complexities of marketing. So the first B is brand equity. And the message there, it is about building assets. It’s not about just creating awareness and image. And it’s not a communication function. It’s everything. And brand equity has to be managed strategically. It has to make sure that people don’t do things to damage the brand. We have programs to build sales and leads, of course. But we’ll make sure those programs leverage the brand and not damage the brand.

David, before you go on, sorry to intrude. Can I just ask you to give us a definition of equity? Because some people on the podcast may not have fully got their arms around that concept. So it’d be super helpful just to get a bit of a definition from you on that one if possible.

Matt is really cool. He really knows how to ask questions. That’s a great lead in because the three Bs that follow are what is brand equity. Brand equity is brand relevance, brand image, and brand loyalty. But they’ve changed over time. Now, it used to be you just wanted visibility, brand awareness, but what my work has shown is that you need more than awareness, you need relevance. Relevance means you need to have visibility with respect to what you’re now building. If you’ve gone from hybrid to electric cars, you got to have a visibility in electric cars. It doesn’t help if they know your name. I mean, if Donald Duck make a rental cars, that doesn’t make him having one leg on the stool of brand equity. You have to have also credibility. You have to have a feeling that there’s no reason not to buy this brand. I mean, they could do it. I mean, maybe somebody will do it better. That’s not issue for another day, but at least they’ll be credible. At least I can consider them. That’s the new brand awareness is now brand relevance. The second thing is brand image. I think image, too often people ask you, what is your brand about? And they’ll tell you what they do. It’s so important that it be differentiated. That ought to be number one. I mean, how do you differentiate it from other people? And that’s the essence of the image you need to attract. And of course, you also would like to make it, you have to have something that will resonate with them. That’s important to them. You have to have something that’s intriguing, that they’re interested in. But more than ever, you have to, it has to be differentiated. And that leads into another challenge I’ll talk about in a minute. But the third thing is brand loyalty. And actually, when I defined brand equity way back in 92 or something, when I wrote my first book, Managing Brand Equity, I defined it as including brand loyalty. And here before, it was really about MHN and awareness, and brand loyalty was an output. You drive brand loyalty. And I said, no, no, it has to be part of brand equity because you’re buying a brand, you’re really buying a loyal customer base. And also, that’s the basic equity of a brand. So anyway, that’s really what drove the change in marketing because once you include brand loyalty, then everything changed is no longer just a communication function. And that allows brand to do a whole bunch of things. And the fifth B is brand portfolio. Because I’m really amazed at, I’m not amazed, but I think the reality is that if most people build a brand, they think of a brand. I want to build a Jaguar brand or I want to build the GE brand or the Citicorp brand. But that’s never the case. And all strong brands need to realize that. That if you’re going to have a strong brand, you got to have some partner brands. You just can’t do it by yourself. And you need endorser brands, you need co-brands, you need sub-brands to really position your brand so it differentiates and resonates. And then you have what I call silver bullet brands. And when I go into an organization, I don’t do this much, but when I do, I ask them, what is your secret sauce? What are you proud of? What makes you special? And almost always, they can very articulately spend two or three or four minutes articulating what it is about their company that’s special. And then I ask, why don’t you brand it? Because if you don’t brand it, it’s really hard to communicate it to others. If you don’t brand it, it’s really hard to manage it, hard to give it priority. So I develop what I call the Silver Bullet Brands. And they’re branded features, branded benefits, branded processes, branded programs. But they do one of three things. They either become a branded differentiator, and that’s something that differentiates your product from others, or it becomes a branded energizer. It’s a way to give yourself energy that if you make bar soap, you can’t do it any other way. And three, it’s a branded source of credibility. And that goes back to relevance again. You need to have credibility, and that’s usually based on some branded program or branded offering or something. So I’m saying, if you really want to get into branding, it’s not about awareness and image. It’s not a communication task. You’ve got to consider it’s all about brand equity. It’s about being relevant, not just aware. It’s about an image that gets you real differentiation. It’s not just a mission, doing what you do. And finally, you’ve got to still employ other brands to get there.

Love that. I’ve got a follow up question. Can I, Jacob? I know you’ve got some questions planned. I want to derail us ever so slightly. Was there anything? So you’ve selected these five, right? So we’ve got equity, relevance, image, loyalty and portfolio. And all of them makes an awful lot of sense. What made you frame it around those five? And were there any outliers that you kind of considered but thought frankly, they’re good but they’re not quite good enough for those five? What was the criteria that made you select those five as the core ones?

Yeah, I just want to understand whether there’s a lot of other things. We could have put in brand research, we could have put in a lot of things. But I really wanted to explain what branding was. It’s breadth and depth and what you had to, the way you had to look at branding. I wanted them to pause and realize that, no, no, you’ve got to have relevance, you’ve got to be credible. No, no, it’s not just an image, you got to be differentiated. It’s not just brand loyalty, but you have to manage that brand loyalty, you have to build it and keep it and make sure that you’re understanding the customer. And finally, and this is really brand new. I mean, I’ve never heard of anybody say that branding, it has to include a brand portfolio strategy.

This is true. This is true. You’re unique on that. You’ve got a whole book on portfolio architecture.

I did. Good knowledge, man. Good knowledge.

Well, there’s not a lot written.

Don’t you wonder, man, why nobody else has written a book on brand loyalty, and there must be 50 people that have written a book on branding.

Well, the architecture is painful.

Yeah, it’s hard. It’s painful.

It’s painful and it’s difficult because every organization, well, I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but from my experience as a consultant, every organization is different. Every category is different. And so when it comes to portfolio management, it’s very tricky, isn’t it? It’s a very difficult subject. So your book, I think, is probably the only one that I’m fully aware of that is a robust analysis on how to tackle that subject. So that’s why it come to my mind when you were mentioning, right at the end there of your five Bs, the portfolio thing, I think that is quite an interesting insight that you’ve included there. And this idea that you can’t do it alone, I think, is really, really interesting. Yeah, I’d love to talk about that.

It’s true, isn’t it, Matt? Isn’t it? I mean, I defy you to find a brand that doesn’t have an important partnership with some other brand that’s successful.

I’d love to tuck into that in a little bit, but I know I’m derailing. Basically, my job in this episode, David, is to completely derail Jacob, right?

Episode or the whole podcast?

Basically, life. He’s got a whole planned kind of thing and I just jumped in. So what I’m going to do is defer to my excellent, notorious co-host to keep us on track, but I might jump in in a minute as we go through. Go through.

David is actually the other co-host because he’s jumped ahead and answered my questions already, because we were going to tuck into the 5B framework, and you went straight into that. So you’ve done my job, David. But I’d love to kind of tuck in a little bit further into some of those subjects. So as we move along, one of them is brand relevance, which is a big portion of this. You said brand preference isn’t enough anymore. So when we talk about brand relevance, could you just explain that a little bit further?

Yeah. The brand relevance is sort of the key to participating in the market, to be a player, but it’s also the key to winning. And with people, I don’t think you realize that anyway. My book on branding and disruptive innovation, which is summarized in a couple of chapters in Aaker on Branding, is basically takes the position that, first of all, the only way to grow is with disruptive innovation. I mean, I’ve looked at a whole bunch of categories, and if you see a spurt in growth, it’s always because of some disruptive innovation. In fact, I think the most robust finding in all of marketing research studies over the last century is that we can predict the success of new products. I mean, there’s been study after study, and it’s always the same. It’s how different they are. That’s what predicts their success. There’s all kinds of anecdotes. But anyway, you have to have disruptive innovation in order to grow. All these people that are spending all this money fighting the brand preference, my brand is better than your brand thing, they just don’t generate growth. There’s rare, rare exceptions. You need disruptive innovation. If you look at the disruptive innovation literature, there’s all kinds of wonderful books. The Blue Ocean Strategy has sold 2 million copies. Basically, it just says, be different. The problem with that is that none of these books mention branding. The Blue Ocean Strategy has a half a page on branding. It talks about first mover advantage for a half a page. That’s it. It’s not really about branding. It’s just saying, it’s better if you’re first. Then the other books, the Christensen book doesn’t mention branding. It’s not even in the index, I don’t believe, and on and on. The point of my book and the chapters here is to correct that, and to introduce the thought that branding enables disruptive innovation to succeed. It enables it. Without branding, it’s not going to work. It does it in two ways. First of all, the disruptor has to become the exemplar brand for the new what I call subcategories. Usually a subcategory, unlike the Blue Ocean book which only talks about whole new categories. Most of the time, disruptive innovation creates a new subcategory. You want to be the exemplar brand, and then you use that status to manage the position of the disruption of the new subcategory. Subcategories form when you have some must-haves, some things that customers must have that don’t now exist or at least don’t exist as well as you’re doing it. Customers are going to insist on those must-haves, and they will find your offering relevant, and those that don’t have the must-haves irrelevant, or at least a lesser relevance. That’s the job of branding, to position the subcategory. What that means is you make sure that these must-haves are elevated in visibility and importance to people making the brand choice or using the brand. And that’s a branding problem, pure and simple. And the second thing is you have to build barriers. The biggest barrier you can do is to create a huge loyal customer base. You scale a brand as fast as you can. So that means you’ve got to get relevance, you’ve got to get visibility, you’ve got to explain what this must-have and why it’s going to be good for you. So that becomes one barrier. If you can own the must-haves, it’s going to be hard for competitors to come in. If you can own the customers, the customers that are most profitable, the ones that are implying to your new innovation, they’re going to have a tough time coming in. And then the third thing you need to do is brand the innovation. You recreate branded differentiators. If you’re Uniqlo developing to be a technological leader in fabrics, you brand them. You call them Heat Tech. You call them ARIZM. And then others can duplicate you or pretend to duplicate you, but if they don’t have that brand, they’re not going to be authentic. So you brand it. And so you have these cluster of branding tasks that allows you to position and control and manage the subcategory, keep it a moving target, make it harder for customers to become relevant. And second, you build barriers.

If you’re building a brand and want to do it right, this is for you. Join the Brand Builders Alliance for expert coaching, live masterclasses and a crew of brand builders who’ve got your back. Get on the wait list now at joinbba.com. Now, back to the show. You did it again, David. You answered many of my questions ahead of time. But just to summarize, you’re creating a new subcategory. You’re taking the must-haves, then innovating, adding something new or differentiated to that product or service. You’re growing fast in scaling and then you’re branding the innovation to make it unique and ownable. Is that right?

Yeah. It all starts to become the exemplar brand. There’s a lot of branding to that as well. You have to become the thought leader. That’s a branding job. You have to passion, you have to make a commitment and it really helps to be the market leader as well. Again, that comes back to scaling fast.

Thank you, David. We’re going to jump into your nine brand building actions that actually work. Could you highlight a few? You mentioned Signature Stories and Energizers before.

Yeah, I tried to stay away from things that people are familiar with people and try to think of some things maybe some hadn’t thought of, at least at first. One is to get a branded Energizer. Everybody needs energy and most brands are pretty boring and pretty taken for granted and it’s just no way to get energy. So, what you have to do is find something with energy and attach it to your brand. It could be a sponsorship, it could be some kind of a program or it could be an offering partnership. But anyway, you need to find sources of energy and attach it to your brand. Another is the whole idea of brand communities. Brand community is the ultimate in loyalty because you have these active members that are sharing with other members a passion for some sort of interest or activity or belief, and they get a lot of energy and self-expressive benefits from that. And if that can be attached to a brand or driven by a brand or managed by a brand, the brand will be part of them. So, the brand is no longer going to be telling them things as a manufacturer, it’s going to be chatting to a fellow member of the community. Of course, the classic example is Harley-Davidson, but it’s now more feasible for people to have communities because of the Internet and websites and so on, and Zoom. You can do things that you really couldn’t do before. And so, the challenge is, see if there’s any way you can elevate your offering as being part of a community. Like Sephora has a beauty-oriented community and gives beauty tips and allows people to talk to each other, share pictures and so on. So anyway, that’s one. It’s really one of my favorite topics. I think that it’s difficult to pull off. But if you can do it, the payoff is just huge. And of course, you don’t necessarily have to have a self-generated community. You know, like Thrivent, the financial services company has partnered with Habitat for Humanity. And Thrivent has done really an interesting thing. They have 2 million customers. They divide them by zip code into Thrivent communities. And each of these communities does, goes out and do social good locally, and also participates in Habitat teams that go to Africa and so forth and build homes. So, but the point is, I mean, Thrivent is a financial services company. I mean, that’s a, I don’t know if that’s as boring as it gets. I mean, there’s more boring things. But it’s pretty hard to think we’re going to get together and talk about interest rates and bonds or anything like that. But they’ve got their people together and had that kind of a community. Let’s see. What’s another one?

Well, the Signature Stories.

Yeah, Signature Stories is another thing people don’t think about it and if they do, they don’t do anything about it. My daughter, Jennifer, was teaching a course on Signature Stories at Stanford, not at Signature. She was teaching stories and stories. And so, I got really interested in it and we spent a whole year and a half trying to figure out what was not a story and you ask me, what’s your brand story and they’ll give you five bullet points and everything’s a story. So, it didn’t have any context. So, I defined something called a Signature Story to get around that and that’s one that’s not a set of facts or descriptions, it’s actually a narrative with a beginning and an end and a plot. And it can be a story of a founder or of a major decision for a CEO or a customer story or an employee story. But it really needs to be a story that represents the brand and then you got to figure out a way to tell it and make it visible. And it turns out those aren’t so easy to do, but when you can pull it off it, it’s amazing. One of my favorite stories I used is in 1986, there was a middle manager at a failing appliance manufacturer in China that was elevated to CEO and said, see if you can save this company. It’s just floundering. And a few weeks later, a customer came in with a defective appliance and he said, no problem. We went to the warehouse and found that 20% of them were already defective. So we took them to the factory floor and they got a sledgehammer and destroyed them all. And he said, from now on, we’re going to build quality goods. Well, that company is now the largest manufacturer of appliances in the world, it’s Haier. And one of their pillars is quality. And they don’t have to go around saying, we are really good at quality and we have fine quality assurance people, we design for quality. And, you know, who listens to that? And who believes that? All they have to say is, remember the sledgehammer? You know, that’s part of our culture and our values.

Thank you. And the other one you touched on before was the Silver Bullet brand?

Yes, that’s the idea I spoke of a second ago. And the idea is that if so many people have sort of differential advantages, points of differentiation or points of energy, or reasons why they can deliver, and if they only brand it, then they could communicate it. If it’s not branded, it’s really hard to communicate. It is. It’s just hard. So I developed a long time ago these ideas of a branded differentiator and added to that, the branded energizer and the branded source of differentiation, and called it Silver Bullet Brands. Because Silver Bullet is a metaphor for something that is unknown or under known, and it really makes a difference.

So David, I had a quick question to add. You’ve hinted at this that branding is like a long-term strategic initiative, right? So in today’s day and age, we get a lot of short-term thinking that you’ve touched on, a lot of ROI driven marketing to build leads, to build sales, very data driven in that response. I’m sure Jacob and I know I come across this a lot in my work, working directly with leadership teams where that becomes the core thing, particularly from private equity, particularly when people have to answer to the money guys above them, the finance. What’s your sort of response to that? Because these ideas are fantastic. I’m fully behind them. I know Jacob is as well. But how is your kind of typical response if you were to face somebody that says, yeah, but what’s my ROI? For example, on building a signature story or building a silver bullet brand, like how do we quantify that in terms of finance? What’s your sort of catalog response to a very short-term thinker who might challenge you in relation to that sort of thing?

Well, that’s a great question, Matt, and it’s a difficult one. I wrote that the chapter 2 in the book is all about that, because I get the question a lot and it is true. If we’re going to fend off the short-termism, we have to answer that question. The holy grail is you put a number on the brand, and then you manage to that number, and that’s when it’s really been an illusion that you can do that. You can’t do that. It’s an intangible. Nobody asks you what’s the value of your people, what’s the value of your process of managing or your culture. Nobody asks that. It’s an intangible and you can’t know. Interbrand does as good a job as anybody. And what they do is they say, here’s the business value, discounted cash flows or the stock value or whatever. And then they subtract the tangible assets and said, this is the intangibles. Here’s your six or eight major intangibles. How much of, and brand is one of them, how much of this is due to the brand? Well, the problem with that question is, if you remove any one of those eight, you go to zero. They’re all indispensable. And but you can say, you know, if the brand is 10% or 40% or if it’s a major or minor, you can make that kind of a judgment. So you get a value that’s, I don’t know, plus or minus 20% or something. And that could be useful. It can be useful in this discussion. Because we say the brand is worth $40 million plus or minus, even if it’s plus or minus 20%, that’s a lot of money for you not to manage it and resource it. So it can play a role in making allocations to countries or products or something. So it can be used, but it doesn’t, it’s not the Holy Grail. So anyway, so how can you measure it? Well, first of all, I have done personally some statistical analysis using time series instead of cross-sectional data that shows that a change in brand equity will have almost as much effect on stock return as does earnings, accounting and earnings. And you know, that’s a powerful driver. If earnings go up, stock price pops. So anyway, that’s a pretty good evidence that on the average across all brands, it pays off. A second thing you can do is you can tuck experiments. Now one experiment that’s scientifically sound is called a before-after experiment. So you look at a business before, and then you do something to its brand, and then you look at the business after. So you’ve got, you know, the same people manage it, you said the same products, the same distribution strategy, the same corporate values. All you’ve changed is the brand. Now, there might be something, the background has changed, but you control for a lot. So you look at a brand like, one of my favorites is the Dove, their real beauty program. And in 2004, when they started that, their business was worth $2.6 billion. And that’s continually grown. And today it’s worth $6.5 or $7 billion. And it’s all on the backs of real beauty, this really brand building campaign. And you can look at all kinds of case studies. These startups like Dollar Shave Club went from zero to a billion dollars in four years. And it was all brand new. I mean, they didn’t invent razor blades or anything. So there’s a lot of case studies that give you before-after experimental design studies. And so you can do that yourself. You can try some of your branding stuff and do a before-after and see what happens. One problem is that our brand building is often not very good. And it’s not very good at building brands. And as a byproduct, it’s not very good at short-term results either. So a really, really good brand building program is probably going to deliver short-term results as well.

I agree. I think the challenge that you find, David, I don’t know if you find this with your work at Profit, is that to do it properly, you do have to have confident, bold, brave leaders, who spot that gap in the market, that want to fulfill a need that’s not being fulfilled now, and are willing to back it. I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, but I often find a lot of people in these positions, they can become quite safe, quite conservative in their approach, and to step into something new, which as you rightly pointed out earlier, it comes from leaps in innovation, of an area that’s highly valued by consumers, but it’s not an unmet need, that’s not being fulfilled right now, but a brand can jump into that space. That’s where the new value is then created, that’s where the new income is generated. But to do that, you’ve got to be super brave, and particularly, I find CEOs that have to answer to boards and to shareholders, they’re nervous, right? To really stake a place in somewhere brave and somewhere new, because frankly, their reputation, their careers, everything that’s put them to this point is on the line. What are your thoughts on that? How do you feel like we need to support these people to move into those places? And to be fair, sometimes it fails, right? So it is a risk, right? So it’s a tricky position to be in as a brand build, to say, look, you want to create value, you’ve got to step into the unknown, but hey, it could fail. What are your thoughts on that?

First of all, I think these people you’re talking about that are working at Clorox and P&G and General Motors are very talented, sharp people. I mean, they are really good people, but they were hired because they were really good at managing the existing business. So if there’s an opening in advertising, they want something that’s really good at doing that job. And so the second thing is, so anyway, they don’t hire people that are risk takers, that are good at innovation, and they’ve done screwball things in the past. They just don’t have a job description that makes them look for that. The second thing is that these companies are successful. They’re worth a lot of money in the stock market. They’ve been making profits for a long time and so on. And so it would be strategically stupid for them to do things that would jeopardize that business. And yeah, that’s just the way it is. So in order to innovate, a lot of times, these companies have to put out companies at the side, or more likely, they find some small company that’s innovating, they buy them. And then they turn them into a company that can scale them and doesn’t have to do that anymore. And that’s Unilaterable Dollar Shave Club, and they’ve scaled that. So they’re really good at scaling, but they’re not good at creating. And a third problem is that innovation starts small. And these companies are not capable of running a small business. It’s not so much that they don’t have the executive talent, it’s that they don’t have an operation or a set of assets that physically can operate viably with a small business. They just can’t do that. And so then if you translate into the branding case, then you see companies that are kind of had their hands tied. So that’s why I advocate that people find sources of energy, find sources of differentiation. And that’s why I wrote this book and have a chapter in this book on using social programs to give you a source of energy and really a bump in your image and so forth. And Dove Real Beauty is an example of that.

Love that. Brilliant.

So let’s talk into employees in brand building today. We’ve kind of talked about leadership, but a big part of that is the employees. They’re a big part of the company. So what’s your opinion on employees and how they lead into brand building?

A brand is sort of the face of a business strategy. So you have to get the business strategy right. And to do that, you have to understand the culture and the things that are prerequisites to a successful business strategy. And then the brand has to reflect that and the brand has to drive that. It’s sort of a two-way street. So you have to have a brand that will support the business strategy and the company culture. But then when you create a brand, it really has to drive both the culture and the business strategy. So there’s sort of a flywheel relationship between those two. And so it’s a real mistake to think of a brand is something that is we communicate to customers. And that’s certainly not going to be the case, especially to be to be in service companies.

Is there any examples that come to mind that the company is doing this well?

Well, I think that any company that has a strong culture is doing it well. And, you know, incidentally, some companies have branded their culture or culture elements. You know, go back to the HP Way. I don’t know if you’re either you’re not old enough for that, but there used to be something called the HP Way. They branded their culture and everybody knew what it was. And everybody was comfortable doing business with HP and they knew they were going to be honest and concerned and supportive. And it was the HP Way. They branded it. And others have branded their culture elements of their culture. So branding is really intertwined with employees and culture. Okay.

So how would a company actually go about doing this? To make culture a big driver of an organization, not just a marketing message, how do they integrate that?

That’s a really good question. And I have a friend, Jennifer Chapman, that’s spent her whole career trying to figure that out. But culture to me is sort of norms of behavior and values. And if you’re in a strong culture company, you kind of know what’s acceptable and what’s encouraged and what’s unacceptable and not encouraged. You just have a feel for them. It’s not a matter of memorizing a culture manual. It’s just that you have this feeling. In a high culture company, you have stories, stories of employees that did this or that. At Nordstrom’s, it was this first year employee that took back two worn tires because they have a money back guarantee. He took them back and he didn’t ask anybody. He just figured that was what we do at Nordstrom’s. That’s a story that’s lived there ever since. Anyway, I think that if you have a strong culture, you’re going to have stories, you’re going to probably have symbols like the sledgehammer and the Chinese company. You’re going to have visual symbols around. Maybe it’s of the founder or this founder’s stories. There’s going to be employee stories about the Nordstroms. This employee did whatever and everybody thought, and he thought or she thought it was okay because that’s a culture. As I say, I’ve seen many times people brand a cultural component, something that employees are expected to do and do. I think if you look at any strong cultural company, you’ll see those things.

It’s funny how much comes back to storytelling, right? Branding, it’s just like those stories that comes out, it shapes the brand. So David, are you ready for a quick fire round before we wrap up?

Well, there’s one thing you haven’t talked about, and that’s a hostile communication environment. All the information overload and the skepticism and the media clutter and the polarized audiences.

Let’s talk about that.

Let’s talk about it.

I spent time on that. One of the things I’ve been doing is to work in about the role of taglines to help you manage in that environment where people aren’t paying attention and they won’t process. And I have a whole chapter, I saw the book on taglines and symbols and why they’re really important. I’ve gotten involved in political advertising and where their absence there has been really wasteful. But one of the things I say is that brand building as a result of that has really changed. So you have to manage your advertising and so on differently. You have to use more taglines, you have to use more entertainment, more emotional advertising, more edgy advertising, because you have to break through. And so in advertising, the goal now is to go viral. If you can hit a home run once in a while with a viral ad, you can generate hundreds of millions of free advertising. And if you can’t, it’s going to be a sludge. But then I think you have to turn away from advertising and look toward things we’ve kind of, I don’t know, turned up our nose at or we parcel off to somebody else. I’m thinking of things like sponsorships, things like events, and it is much more important than before. So we got to make them figure a way for them to work, to build our brand. And taglines is one way that we can help do that. But, you know, I wrote in the book about a Schneider Electronics that had a competition for the most innovative application of their products. And all of the world got input. They came to New York for the presentation. And then there’s things like the FedEx Cup, the sponsorship like that, that you just have to take another look at those kind of things. Because all of the problems of ad media advertising disappear when you’re in that context. And you’re at the FedEx Cup and you bring your clients into the final tournament and you reach with great energy and visibility to people you want to reach. So anyway, that’s some of my thoughts. I’d be curious what you guys think.

Well, it sounds like you’re integrating your brand into culture where people want to be a part of the business experience, not just being advertised at.

That’s right. Instead of talking at them, you engage them. That’s right.

Yeah. And I was curious around the taglines because you mentioned political advertising and I was thinking, you know, Obama had change and Trump is mega. Like, is that what you’re referring to when you’re saying taglines or is that more like an idea or could you just unpack that?

No, that’s a tagline. But I call that an umbrella tagline. It just covers everything. What I think they need is special issue taglines, single issue taglines as well. So they need a tagline for access to health care, for the immigrant problem, the inequality, the climate change. So when they go on with an attack ad or a positive ad, to get it remembered, to get it processed, to work, to build on prior ads. If you don’t have a tagline, it’s just another ad hoc ad. It’s part of the noise. The noise out there is unbelievable for political advertising.

So I was thinking, should we get into a quick fire round, David? We’ve got some quick questions for you to sum up our episode, because it’s been fantastic and we’ve talked into quite a lot.

Sure, I’m a little apprehensive. It sounds like-

It sounds dangerous, doesn’t it? Quick fire.

It’s going to be fun or apprehensive.

So the idea is, we’re going to ask you some quick questions. The idea is that you try and give a top of mind answer to what we’re about to ask. So quick question number one, quick fire round. Give us an example of a brand you think is getting it right now in 2025, a brand that’s getting it right.

This will be a profit client. I’ll have to qualify that. But UBS, Scott, this idea, they had merged with the other Swiss bank and so they’re a big animal now. And so they had some issues and so on, but they wanted to tell, and their industry is kind of shaky. So they wanted to tell how committed they are to banking and how they take it professionally and with innovation and competence. And they came up with a metaphor that banking is our craft, is our craft. And so they went around and they had all kinds of events demonstrating people getting good at their craft. And this is like tennis players, a jeweler, a dancer, and a diamond cutter or something. And they all would talk about their craft. And everybody kind of understands, you know, if you’re a craftsman and really committed to your craft, you’re going to be careful, you’re going to love it, you’re going to be passionate about it, you’re going to… and so on. And that’s how they are about banking.

I love that, actually. It’s such a common thread that you can relate with so many people. It’s a pretty bold idea to thread everyone through.

All right.

Thank you for sharing that. Next question. Most misunderstood idea in branding today.

Well, one of them is that if you have some secret sauce, it’s not branded. I mean, I think that’s the lowest hanging fruit in most organizations. They don’t brand their secret sauce. And the easiest way for them to improve their branding and operation. And maybe the other one is the business that my brand is better than your brand preference marketing works to instill. That’s the route to growth.

One piece of advice you’d give to a young branding professional.

Well, we used to say if you are entering the workforce in branding, you really need to elevate your knowledge and skill in social media higher because the people writing brands are old and they are frightened as hell about social media. Well, that period is over, but we now have AI. So I would say get really proficient at AI so you can come into a branding group and be the one that can facilitate AI coming aboard and you can be the one that have judgment on which AI can do what. I think that would be a way to get an early sort of value reputation.

I think we nearly got away with not mentioning AI in one episode.

You can’t not mention AI, can you? It’s just such a powerful thing.

Right.

Next question. Most impactful idea for building a successful brand. If you had to pick one of all your ideas, what would be the one that you’d say this is the one you’ve got to focus on?

Is to enable a disruptive innovation, and a branding can enable one, but it also can be one of the ways you can get an idea for a disruptive innovation, because branding people are close to the market, they have customer insight, and there’s two ways to get a disruptive innovation. One is from the market, where branding has some knowledge and ability to understand, and the other is from technology or some capability you have technologically to do something new, and that can create the innovation. So, so marketing could be a part of that. And I think that, that, that really, you have to have some, some at bats at creating disruptive innovation, because the payoff is so huge. And, and to be the also ran and the follower is, is very costly. And that’s, that’s, that’s having much more frequently with more impact and moving faster than ever before.

David, is there any, any last words before we wrap this up? Anything else we missed or want, you wanted to share?

No, I’m good. You guys are terrific.

Well, I’ve got a final question. Like where, if people want to follow you, if they haven’t perhaps read some of your books, how do they connect with your work? How do they get in touch with you? How do they kind of find out about your, your thinking, David?

Well, I blog pretty frequently on LinkedIn. And so if you go to my LinkedIn thing and follow me, you’ll get it. And one of the things I’ve done on LinkedIn, and I’m going to expand on this, I have developed, every Wednesday, I put out a learning from Aaker on Branding. It’s about a seven or 800 page thing. And if you go to profit.com and you dig deep enough, you’ll find me and underneath me is a paragraph that’ll talk to you how you can access all these 10 learnings, because they’re all out now. And I’ll probably in the fall do some more. But the learnings are really fun. And so that would be a good way to do it as well. Yeah, I’m really excited about those learnings. One of them, for example, is the history of brand equity, which we talked about a little bit.

And obviously Aaker on Branding, second edition out now, Amazon and other book retailers as well.

I’m sure we’ll pop the link somewhere in the description, folks. So thank you for tuning in. And be sure to grab your copy because I’ve been going through it and it’s blown my mind in multiple times, David. So thank you for the latest book and for all your other books. We really, really appreciate your contributions.

Thanks so much for having me again. It’s my pleasure, Matt, Jacob.

Thank you, David.

Cheers.

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