Building Strong Brands with Modern Strategies And Stories (w/ David Aaker)

What's up, brand builders? Stephen Horahan here on the Brandmaster Podcast. And in this episode, I'm joined by an undisputed branding legend, Mr. David Acker. Now, David Acker is a branding veteran and pioneer, and once hailed as the father of modern branding. David has authored no fewer than 17 books on branding and marketing, including classics such as Building Strong Brands and Acker on branding. In 2015, he was introduced into the American Marketing association hall of Fame and for his lifetime achievements in marketing. And on today's episode, David opens up about what brand awareness actually is and how to achieve it, how to create modern signature brand stories, and three actionable tips for brands to get ahead in modern markets. So if you want to learn from a true legend in branding about how to strategically build brands using modern techniques, then stick around for this episode of the Brand Master Podcast. Welcome to the Brandmaster Podcast show. Specialized in helping branding professionals and entrepreneurs to build brands using strategy, psychology and creative thinking. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Brandmaster Podcast. I am delighted to have the one and only Mr. David Acker on the show with us today. Now, if you don't know David Acker, you're probably new to marketing and branding because this man has been around for a long, long time and he has written many, many books and the likes of Managing Brand Equity, Building Strong Brands, Akron Branding, and his latest to Creating Signature Stories and Owning Game Changing Subcategories. And we'll talk about different aspects of different parts of your books throughout this chat, David, but I'd like to kind of get an understanding of how you became so obsessed about branding. I know for me, my obsession with branding is probably only a little over 10 years old, but yours goes back probably 40, 45 years maybe. How did that all come about?

Well, I was working at. I was teaching strategy, I wrote a book on strategy. And I came to believe that companies were too focused on short term financials and instead they ought to build assets. And so I sort of did a career epiphany and decided I'd be devoting my career largely to help them do that. I looked around and my background included work. I'd written fact books and taught courses on advertising market research as well as strategy. And so, and I did a little study that asked people, what is your sustainable competitive advantage? And of the it got 41 answers like that. And the numbers 1, 3 and 10 were all associated with branding. It was perceived quality, brand recognition and customer base.

So what, roughly what year was that?

Oh, that was in the late 80s.

Okay.

And so it seemed pretty obvious to me that of all the kinds of assets to build, I was best suited to work in the branding area. And so I started off, and at that time, brand equity was becoming kind of a big deal because people were a little bit burnt out in trying to achieve growth by cost reduction, and they were, in fact, destroying brands. And they came to realize, I think, that they needed to build brands. In fact, some of their brands have been destroyed by price competition and sameness. And so there was a great interest in building brands and providing growth platforms, but nobody had defined what brand equity was. So my first book was to define brand equity, and not only define it, but to sort of discuss the 16 or 17 ways in which brand equity was valuable to a company.

And you said before that you were teaching strategy. Well, you were teaching strategy more so at that time from a business point of view. So from your perspective and your philosophy, what is the difference between business strategy and brand strategy?

Well, they're sort of complementary. Brand is really the face of a business strategy, and a business strategy is enabled by a brand. You can only go far with a business strategy unless you have a brand to support it. So they have to have to work together.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in your book, Managing Brand Equity, that was you kind of putting a flag in the ground to define brand equity. And as you said, no one had really defined brand equity back then. There wasn't this universal understanding about what it was. And you kind of distilled it into awareness, image and loyalty. Can you, can you talk to us a little bit about that, about how you see brand equity?

Well, as I said, I not only talk about awareness, which I now describe as brand visibility and credibility, which is the basis of brand relevance. So that's sort of the first pillar. But I would also then say, well, what does brand awareness give you? And it gives you. People recognize the brand. They figure it's, you know, there's some reason I'm recognizing it's probably pretty good. It's sort of the first stage in buying. You have to be aware of the brand. And so it has a lot of things. It gives you. And brand image is, you know, your perceptions, what you think about it.

But.

But the unique part of my definition was loyalty. Most people perceive brand strength as is sort of awareness and image. And some of the other academics, that's how they define brand equity. And I added brand loyalty. And that was really, really a game changer, because when you think of brands as customer loyalty, it changes everything you do. It's no Longer a communications problem, it's the brand experience problem, it's a brand innovation or a product innovation problem, it's a customer engagement problem. And so that takes you in an entirely different way. And it automatically gives you long term customer value perspective on things you do.

And in terms of what you said before about loyalty being so important, a lot of people would speak about awareness and image, but really loyalty is the holy grail of branding now. Going back, you know, 40 years, the way marketing was taught in universities was that, you know, branding was this subset of marketing. And now it seems that the brand has become the entity and the brand now dictates so much more about the business than just the marketing side of things. How have you seen the evolution of branding from a subset of marketing that it once was to where it is now?

Well, it's really dramatic. It's changed business, it's changed culture, it's changed organizations because, you know, well, brand management started in the 1930s. Around 1932, a fellow at P and G wrote a memo saying what a brand team should do because he wanted to hire one. He was a brand manager for sort of the second brand in soap or something and he wanted more people. And they asked him why and he wrote a three page manual despite the fact that Procter and Gamble, you could only write one page memos at the time. But that same person went on to become Secretary of Defense later and a president of P and G. So it was a very successful career. But his idea was what you do is you look at data, find out weak spots in the market share trend and you immediately jump in with some promotions or pricing or improve distribution to correct those problems. And that's, that was what brand management was. Well, if you flash forward to brand equity times, it's no longer what's, how are we going to, you know, correct the sales decline this week? But rather it's, you have a time horizon of 1, 2, 3 years and you're dealing with entirely different variables. You're now dealing with strategic variables. You're dealing with the, you know, the composition of the product or service. You're dealing with a brand experience and so on. And so you're, you know, you're, and it's all tied to business strategy now. It's not tactical or the business strategy in the, in the past. It's the business strategies on the table and who does it changed. It used to be that the brand was done by, you know, several levels below the chief marketing officer. It was tactical and the chief marketing officer didn't even pay much attention about it. Somebody else was checking the data and so on. And now the marketing has the seat at the executive table. He's the vice president of marketing or the cmo, and he's part of the executive team. And so he's intimately involved in strategy. And he's contributing a strategy because he has access to customer insights. He's got access to market trends and to forces within the marketplace. So it's very different.

Yeah. And of course, the impact of perceptions on the buying decision over time. I mean, so much has been learned, you know, in the last 10 or 20 years through neuroscience as well, about how decisions are made. You know, it's. It's just become so much more. You know, people have become so much more aware of the power of branding and what those perceptions do. So it's, you know, the business strategy has always been important, but now the brand strategy is up alongside it because people understand the importance of those perceptions. We touched a little earlier on brand awareness, but in terms of practical advice, because a lot of small brands or small businesses, that's their first protocol, they want to achieve that brand awareness. They want to get some traction in the market. What would be some steps that a business could take to first achieve some kind of awareness in the market? And what then are the benefits of that? And how can they springboard off that?

Well, I advocate that they try to understand what they want their brand to stand for. And I have what I call the brand identity model. I now label this the brand vision model. But you're really asking the question, how do I want my brand to be perceived? What is the, you know, what are the pillars? What are the. And within all those pillars and which might be eight or 12 of them, which are the most important? How can I make sure that some combination of those pillars create differentiation, they resonate with the target audience, and there's something I can deliver. Those are the three things you're looking for if you're not there yet. You either have to have a program in place to get there, or you have to back away because you don't want to put out something you can't deliver.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's the first step. And the second step is to take those pillars and position your brand by getting people to look at their. Their choice in those eyes. And if you're lucky, create a whole new subcategory of your own where you're the dominant brand by creating a unique set of features or benefits or personality or values or something.

Yeah. And look, we'll jump on to subcategories and owning subcategories a little bit later. But going back to one of your other books, Brand Relevance Making Competitors Irrelevant. What are the factors that make one brand more relevant to a specific market segment than other brands, than their competitors?

Well, what you have to do is to create subcategories and create sort of a new buying set of criteria. So you have to develop what I call a must have. You have to have some sort of attribute of your product or service or some kind of connection with a customer, some kind of customer relationship that's different than anybody else. And it becomes in the mind of customers, a must have. They must have this and they start avoiding any other offering that doesn't have that. Must have.

Yeah. And you know, so I speak about brand relevance as well. But when, when I read your books, you know, obviously, you know, we talk a lot or you reference a lot the kind of bigger brands of the world. And I think the smaller brands now are starting to catch up a lot more in terms of the importance of brand strategy. Certainly the small business owners, they understand a lot more about brand strategy. Just generally, business owners understand a lot more about brand strategy and, you know, relevance as well as, you know, being completely different and changing the, the category or creating subcategories. Often it's, it's about really connecting with who the person is, the, the type of personality they are, the, the attributes that they have through the, the messaging of the brand. How important is that messaging to make sure that it hits the right person in the right way?

Well, it, it really depends on the product class and within that, the brand itself. And it depends on its heritage. It depends upon, you know, what, what kind of personality it's able to express, what kind of values lie behind it, what kind of people are behind the organization. Especially with a service or B2B business, people are really making a relationship with a company, not a product, and they want to know about that product that shares its values and so forth. So it, yeah, it, it really depends. I mean, brand personality for some brands in some situation is really important. For others, it's, it's not a, not, not really a good option.

Yeah, yeah, I, I, I, I do agree with that. Brand personality is, you know, it is a big topic, but, you know, depending on the industry, it is more effective in some areas than it is in others. Now I'd like to move on to talk about your book, Creating Signature Stories because, you know, brand storytelling has grown in terms of its importance, its use, you know, it's, it's understanding from, you know, brand leadership teams and how effective it can be. But it is often misunderstood as well. We see a lot of stories from, you know, certainly small businesses talking about, you know, the founder and, you know, where the founder has come from. Can you break down what brand storytelling is from your perspective?

Well, I got into the topic because my daughter Jennifer was teaching a course on stories at Stanford, and, and I kept dialoguing with her. I said, what is not a story? Because you ask people for their brand story, they'll give you five bullet points of some facts and benefits. And that's not a story. I mean, that's not the signature story. That's what I. The phrase I developed. Because the signature story is a narrative. It's a once upon a time that something happened to some person or some organization or something. And it turns out that stories are just such powerful communicators. I mean, right now we have such information overload, such media clutter, such perceived sameness in offerings that, you know, people just basically turn it off. They don't let themselves get exposed, and if they do, they greet whatever is there with skepticism and cynicism and they counter, argue. So, so how do you break through that? And the answer is stories, because stories, first of all, attract attention. If somebody says, I got a story to tell you, your ears perk up.

Yeah.

And you listen to it. And then while you're there, you get involved. You don't counterargue, you don't say, yeah, but you, you just listen to this. It's just a story. I mean, you don't argue with a story. And, and then what often happens in the story is, is you discover some quality of the brand. Nobody was telling you that our brand is so great because you discovered it yourself. And, and that's, that's the way to learn and remember. And, and there's all kinds of studies. And it turns out that if you can embed a message in a story or have the story motivate some message, or have the story illustrate some message, it's order of magnitude more effective. Not 20%, but 200%. It's just quite remarkable.

Yeah. And there's been, we have learned so much about this again in, in the last 10 or 20 years through the study of neuroscience and through the study of the brain. And it really does tap into the primitive side of humans and how we've kind of passed on information from generation to generation, long before there was complex language and books. And there's a great TED Talk You've probably seen it. For anybody else listening, if you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend going checking it out. It's by a neuroscientist called Yuri Hassan. And the title of the TED talk is Our Brain on Stories or something along those lines. And it really does show the effectiveness of our ability to remember story versus fact based information because we simply store stories in a different part of our brain and we're able to connect dots. So it's so much more effective at landing in, in, in the memory. And that's at the end of the day, what branding is all about. It's about landing your message in the memory of your audience so that they're able to recall your brand. Now you've defined brand story or a way to activate story as a brand's signature story. So what is a signature story? And can you give us maybe one or two examples of a signature story?

Sure. Well, a signature story is first of all narrative. It's a once upon a time narrative. And second of all, it's, you know, it's authentic and it's engaging and it has kind of a wow factor. And that means that when you hear the story, you just don't go to sleep or you just don't pass it by, but you, you're motivated to say, this really is something I should share it with somebody. It really makes an impact on you. It really pops. And there's all kinds of ways to get that quality. It can be entertaining, it can be humorous, it can be informative, it can be emotionally evolving, it can be engaging. So there's a lot of avenues to create that, that thing. But anyway, it's something that just pops out at you. Well, one of my favorite stories is out of Life Boy Soap in India. They. Well, first of all, Lifeboy was in, was started in the 1880s as a soap to help you avoid disease. And there was a color epidemic in London at the time and it was started to combat that. And ever since then it's been, you know, trying to get people to wash their hands, to be less sick, less subject to disease. And so they started this program in India to, you know, again, get people to wash their hands. And about six, seven years ago, they said, well, this isn't doing that great. We could do better than this. So they sat down with a bunch of their top creatives and their agency and the brand people for a couple days and they came up with the idea that they needed to elevate the program and they needed to brand it and they Branded help a child reach 5. Because 2 million kids under the age of 5 die each year mostly from diseases that can be reduced by washing your hands. Right. And, and, and then the thing sort of took off and they put the new program in three villages and made a video of a person in that village that was affected by the program. A mother, a grandfather, and a daughter. And they got 44 million views. Wow, 44 million views. We're talking bar soap. They got 44 million views. So, you know, that illustrates a lot of things. It illustrates that if a, you know, program is managed well under you and it draws upon branding principles, it can do well and it can do enormous goods for the, for the business brand Lifeboy. I mean, can you imagine 44 million views?

It's, it's just, it's unfathomable the amount of views that they got for, as you say, bar soap.

And to bring it back to stories, each of those three videos was a story. Yeah, that you got to know the person intimately in each thing. You got to know the story behind the person, why they were doing these things. Each of them start out with the first part of the three minute video. You didn't really know why the person was doing what they were doing, but then you learned.

Well, I'll definitely go and find some links to, to those videos for the viewers, and I'll leave that in the show notes. So if you check out, you just.

Just go to YouTube and put in Help a Child Reach 5.

Help a Child Reach 5. That's an easier way to do that. But as you said, you know, we've got a lot of businesses where they believe that branding doesn't appeal to them because of the category that they're in or because of the product that they're selling. And it just goes to show that if, you know, if you can activate a brand like that to get 44 million views for a bar soap, then it's just a matter of creativity and kind of attaching the right story that will appeal to a specific audience. So it's a great indication of how powerful story is. Now you also, within that signature story, is there a process that brands can go through to find what their signature story should be?

That's a really good question. And there's. I've, I've, I. As the years go by, I get more and more convinced that story is so important. It's the answer. And, and so I've talked to a lot of companies about that, a lot of nonprofits, and what happens is that generally they they kind of accept the premise that story is powerful because, you know, they know it from personal experience or from common sense that it's going to be powerful and. But they hadn't really thought about it before. So they. It's. It's pretty easy for accept that present when somebody is pounding at them. But the second part of it is finding the story. The third part of it is presenting it right. And those are tough for them. They're not equipped to do either one. And it's not easy to find a good story. No, it just isn't. And so a lot of some companies are hiring newspaper reporters and having them help them find stories and then write them up. But it turns out stories can come from all sources. And that's another plus or minus about stories. You can find them anywhere. I mean, one source is the customers or a company's heritage. There was a appliance company in China about 1986 that elevated a foreman to be CEO because the company was just failing. In his first week, a customer came in and said his appliance broke down. And he said, no problem. They went to the warehouse to pick out a new one and 70% of them were defective. So he brought all those 70% into the factory floor and he got people sledgehammers to destroy them. And that started a company that now makes more appliances than any other in the world. And it's higher.

Oh, yeah.

And that sledgehammer is in a museum at their headquarters. And all you have to do is to mention the sledgehammer and people will be reminded about a core pillar of the higher brand. And that is they're only going to make top quality merchandise. Because he said at that, at that event that that's over. We're not making bad stuff anymore. And that started them on the road.

And it just goes to show that stories can, as you said, stories can kind of come from anywhere. But I think the common denominator and the glue has to be the relevance of the story to the audience. Of course, that story of the sledgehammer, it taps into this idea of we aren't going to take this anymore. We now stand for quality, and we're going to put a sledgehammer to the old way of doing things, and this is the new way of doing things. And of course, the audience, that's going to resonate with them because that's what they want. They want somebody representing them that's not going to take defaulted goods and make sure that the goods in front of them are quality. But it can also come from any other different source. It can come from the journey of the audience and the challenges that they go through on a day to day basis. Or it could come from like the bar soap story, you know, a shared challenge that, you know, you want to make the audience aware of that they can overcome. So stories can come from many different places. And I know that you also talk about story culture. What is story culture and how do you instill that into a brand?

Well, I think that's just the sort of when the organization has accepted the role of strategic stories and they have created a process to find and nurture them and then a process to present them. They've got staff, they've got a procedure. So if a story occurs, there's somebody to take it to and that person can follow up and do the research and write it up. So in a story culture, people have got their eyes open looking for stories and they've got a structure and a system to follow up when they find one.

Yeah, yeah. And that's great if you know, and this has to be internal, this has to be part of the core of the brand, whether that is through the values and you know, discussing this internally as a way to kind of get the brand's message out there. And if you're able to bring stories in from different angles, different perspectives, they're just new ways to activate the brand and kind of leave a message that's more likely to be remembered in the mind of the audience. Now I want to kind of transition into your book owning game changing subcategories. Now for a lot of our audience, they would be freelancers or agency owners dealing with small to medium sized businesses. But what exactly is a subcategory from, from your perspective and, and how do you go about creating a new one?

Well, it involves innovation and it involves what I, what I call, and I mentioned before, must haves. You have to develop some sort of a product feature or benefit or some kind of relationship with a customer that might be based on a shared value or personality or something, or a way of interacting with the customer. That has to become something that becomes important to the customer. It becomes something that influences what they buy, they own and want to buy that subcategory that has that feature. This is really a book about branding and disruptive innovation because there's a whole bunch of books on disruptive innovation, but they largely ignore branding. And what I believe is that branding is critical to success with that kind of a strategy. First of all, you have to become the exemplar brand, the brand that represents that subcategory. And then you have to use that exemplar brand status to position the brand subcategory, which means you have to dictate what elements people are going to look for in their decision and make sure that they include one of these must haves or two of these must haves in that decision. And three, these days you have to scale. You have to scale really fast. You can't just, you know, do it slow and have a high price at the first. It just won't work. And that's a branding issue. To scale, it requires, you know, you know, getting visibility and credibility out there. It requires getting your message out there so people understand there's these must haves available. And fourth, there you need to build barriers. You need to build barriers so that competitors won't benefit from this subcategory you've defined and managed. And you can do that by having a large customer base quickly. You can do that by having a strong image that you have the must haves. And this is a go to place for that. It can happen by ongoing innovation, where you're changing the goalposts on a daily basis. It can happen by owning this must have, by branding a feature, branding a relationship, and something that you can then own.

And I think that's a great example of how business strategy and brand strategy complement each other. Because to scale so quickly in a new subcategory, the business strategy has to be talking to the brand strategy and vice versa, because that kind of scale needs business thinking and it needs brand thinking at the same time. So it's a great example of the point that you made earlier, that they are complementary and they need to be speaking to each other.

And it's really extraordinary. There must be a hundred books out on innovation and disruptive innovation and the importance of setting up a new product, and by famous authors. And they're really good books, but they really don't mention branding.

So you talked a little bit earlier about barriers and the importance of speed when getting in there, creating a new subcategory and getting those barriers up. What are the dangers of not activating that brand quickly enough, not having the structures in place to scale? What are the dangers of, you know, is it that your competitors can come in, be more prepared, have the business and the brand strategy, and then own the subcategory that you've created?

Oh, yes. In fact, research shows that almost all market leaders, almost all of them, were not the pioneers. The pioneers almost always get beat down by somebody bigger, more resources. They, they've advanced the concept and, and, you know, just, it's just quite amazing. And a lot of people, some people at USC have, looking at some of the big successes and tracked them back to the early days to see if they were the pioneer. And it turns out they almost always were not. They were the first ones to get it right. They were the first ones with the insight, the expertise and the resources to, you know, to dominate that market and let it grow.

I think the perfect example for me, the one that jumps to mind for me is in the MP3 space, there was a brand called Creative, and they had a great MP3. There was a lot of MP3s before, but creative was the first one to have a product that was, you know, it ticked a lot of boxes. And I actually had one of those, one of those MP3s. But then Apple came in with the ipod and their ability to scale, their ability to couple business strategy with brand strategy and something completely unique, I think is a perfect example of how, you know, being the first to market is not always a guarantee for success. It is the brand who acts fastest and are able to put up those barriers. As you pointed out, the ipod is a perfect example of that.

The ipod was introduced two years before Apple. It was introduced by Sony.

The MP3. Yeah.

Sony had two products, one out of their computer division and one out of their. They had this audio division. Anyway, two years before Apple, they introduced at the big conference in Las Vegas an ipod. And it was two years too early. I mean, they couldn't have enough songs on it because it wasn't big enough, it wasn't easy to use, and it wasn't successful. Then. Then ipod came along. I think that the very unappreciated genius of Steve Jobs was timing. And also he. And another unappreciated quality of Steve Jobs was his ability to stay on top of technology. He really understood where technology was, and so his timing, instance after instance, was impeccable.

And Sony, I really like the example of Sony because I've referenced Sony when compared to Apple before as well. And I just reached down there as you were speaking to pick these up. So these are wireless headphones from Sony that I bought about a year ago. Now these compete directly with the AirPods. But as I mentioned in one of my YouTube videos, I do not know the name of this product. Now I can go to my Bluetooth and I can tell you that it's the WF1000XM3. So the difference between how Apple brands And how Sony brands is huge. If Sony branded the way Apple did, we would all know the name of this product. And it would make it so much easier for me to refer this to somebody else to spread that word of mouth, to have that, you know, to pass on that brand equity. And, you know, it's just a. And as you said, they did it with the MP3 as well. So Apple is a great example of, you know, assigning value to things through how they brand them and building that equity open in, in a way that, that other brands just, you know, they just haven't been able to keep up with Apple. From that perspective, I'd like to know, you've, you've got all this wealth of experience. You've written all of these books. If, and you can see over the years from the, you know, the times that we've gone through how much branding has changed to where we are now. What would be your top three tips for brands to get ahead in modern markets today?

Well, I'm really biased, I guess, but I just think that these two books, plus the one I'm working on are really important for the future. One is that you have to understand disruptive innovation and the roles brand play, because that's virtually the only way to grow. I mean, I looked at a lot of categories and all, almost all of the major growth surges comes from that. It doesn't come from better. My brand is better than your brand marketing. It just doesn't. And so if you want to grow, I think in the future, that's a necessity. And the other side of the coin is if you want to survive, if you want to maintain your relevance in the marketplace, which means visibility and credibility, you have to be making what they're buying. And if, you know, if you make. SUVs, and then people start buying compact hybrids, it doesn't matter how much they love your suv. They could say, you know, this is the best car I ever got. I love this car. It's, it's part of me. I'm going to tell all my friends that want an SUV that to buy this brand, but if they and their friends aren't buying SUVs anymore, they're buying compact hybrids, it doesn't matter how much they love your suv. And so you have to, you have to play defense as well as offense. You have to understand who else in the marketplace is creating new subcategories for which you are not relevant. And you have to either get relevant or, or do something else to compete. And then the second thing is, like Again, I think when this era of information overload, media, color and perceived sameness, you need to understand stories and how to work at stories. And stories are not necessarily tactical. They're strategic, too, because they can. They could be the basis of our internal culture with employee stories or stories that employees understand and learn. They can be strategic externally, too, because they sort of cement a perception or a relationship. There's a famous story at Nordstrom's department store that a new Nordstrom employees in a store in Anchorage, Alaska, somebody came in with two tires that were bald. He said, these tires don't work anymore. I want my money back. This guy gave him his money back. And Nordstrom's had never made tires, although there was a tire store on the site of what is now a Nordstrom store. But anyway, that story has been repeated again and again. I'd give talks to maybe 100 people in California, and I'd ask them how many people have heard the Nordstrom story? And 60% of them would raise their hands. This was 35 years after the story occurred. There was no advertising about it, no effort on Nordstrom's to communicate that story. And 60%, I mean, 60% of the audience, I mean, there's not even 60% of the audience that go to department stores, but they knew that story about Nordstrom's, that Nordstrom stand behind their product, their money back, guarantee that they, they live by it. So that's the second thing. The third thing is the subject of my new book, which is going to be this social programs and signature social programs and how you use them to build relevant brands. And I think that in the future, even today, people are demanding more than just functional benefits. They, they, they, they want. Employees want to work for and customers want a relationship with, and investors want to buy companies that have a soul, that have a passion, that have a purpose, that have a coherent social program that is having an impact.

Yeah, there's been so much talk about brand culture in recent years and, and how important it is for the people to be connected to the work that we. That they do. Because, you know, what appears on the outside of a brand is a reflection of what's inside the brand. And, you know, having the right structures and systems in place so that everybody believes in what the brand is doing is one of the best ways to make sure that it's, it's communicated externally so the audience believes it as well. It's been an absolutely enlightening chat, David. And for those who I'm sure a lot of our audience already has at least one or two of your books sitting on their bookshelves. But for those who want to find out about your new books or kind of go back to the old library, where's the best place that they can get in touch with you, find out a bit more about your books and be able to jump on there and buy some of them.

I have a website, David aker.com I think has that and the profit.compro p h e t that's a company I'm associated with. There's a website that has that. But I don't know how easy it is to navigate because I don't go there very much.

But I think, I think David Akker.com is the safe bet.

Yeah. And I don't know how Australia works very well. But in this country these are the two books. But in this country Amazon is the go to place you can get a book in a couple days.

Yeah, I was actually just speaking with Rob Meyerson the other day who also had you on his show and he brings everybody to his website and then he redirects them to Amazon to go and buy the book. So Amazon is definitely one of the best places to go and grab books. But if you want to find out what the books are, what kind of books you can get, go to David Acker.com or if you know what books you want to buy, jump onto Amazon and you can purchase them there. David, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day and if and when you're ready to release your new books and you want to to to tell us a bit more about them at the time, I'll be be happy to jump on with you again and have a chat about them.

Oh good. Look forward to it. Thanks for the offer and thanks for having me.

No problem at all. Thanks again David. We really hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to learn more brand strategy techniques to level up your skills, make sure you check out brandmaster academy.com there's plenty of free resources and premium content content for you to download and get you going. If you'd like to join our Facebook group full of like minded brand strategists all learning from each other, then find us by searching for the brand strategy community where you can find exclusive content for members as well. If you enjoyed this content, please be sure to give us an honest review on itunes, Stitcher or wherever you listened. And make sure you tune in for the next episode of the Brandmaster podcast.