Leading Brand Transformation: A Masterclass with Doug Zarkin

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How many times have we sat in a boardroom where ideas are being thrown and I'm like, oh, we got to do it. That's great. We got to do it. That's great. And then you ask yourself, is it something that you must and need to do? Is it something that you should or could do? Or is it something that you want? And when in business, you spend too much time on the wants and not enough, focus on the must and the needs. That's when your business goes sideways.

To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move at an ever increasing pace. I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy. Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now and how you can keep up. Welcome to the speed of culture Today. We're back with a very special guest. Actual return guest, the author of the recently published book moving your brand out of the friend zone, Doug Zarkin. Doug, great to see you again.

Great to see you my friend. How you been? I've been not too bad.

You know, it's interesting. I wrote a book in the past. I'm always asked what was the experience like writing a book? And I'm just curious to hear from your mouth, how is writing a book? I guess what you expected and in what ways did it throw some curve balls at you?

So I wrote the book in 16 weeks. I wrote the outline for the book in about 15 minutes. I had the title of the book before I even started it. But for somebody who cannot Spell and is a multiple time assault victim of autocorrect. It was a terrifyingly exciting experience to write it. There was moments of clarity and moments of what am I doing? I will share with you candidly that the day before I had to turn the book in for five. Final. Final. I was reading the book at the pool, Labor Day weekend and I read the first three chapters and I thought they were dog. And I said to my wife at like 2 o' clock in the afternoon, honey, I gotta go home. And she goes, what are you doing? I go, I gotta just rewrite this. It's not what I want to say. And I rewrote three chapters in about five hours. And I'm glad I did because it's kind of like the opening lean in, but what a terrifying experience. But at the same time I'm glad I did it. Have any plans to do another one. But I'm glad I did it.

What about the writing experience, do you think led you to maybe make a misstep in how you open the book? Is it because you rushed the beginning or is it because you learned more about the concept as you wrote the whole book?

I think I got smarter as I went along. When I wrote the beginning chapters, I didn't have the full narrative in mind. I was still kind of working on my writing style, trying to figure out did I want to write as I speak, did I want it to be conversational, how formal, how did I want it to be? I was very self conscious about my experience and making it all about what I've done versus what I've learned. And that's very different. And so I found the beginning of the book to be a little bit too self serving. It was a little bit too narcissistic and it didn't welcome the reader in. It didn't give them that lean in that you and I both know in anything that you do. That moment of lean in factor, to get somebody to want to pay attention is so important. It didn't have it, but I had a moment of clarity when I was reading it at the pool. I started to see what I wanted to do. And I will tell you to write three chapters in four or five hours. That's the most I've ever done in the least amount of time. And I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Awesome. And just diving into the book, so just the title itself, Break Free from the Friend Zone. It's yeah, we've all kind of been there. I know what it's like from a relationship Standpoint, terms of, you know, you have feelings for somebody, but they just want to be friends and you don't really know. And then you get to the point, and in the end, what's the correlation between that and a brand and their customer? And what made you kind of create that analogy as a thesis for your book?

So, you know, as handsome as you are, my friend, you know, we have all experienced that moment of where our feelings aren't matched by the person on the other end of the table. And for me, that analogy really materializes is when you look at sales plan and you find yourself, you know, missing revenue targets. And part of the reason you miss revenue targets is because when you look at your appeal to people that aren't in a relationship with you, you overestimate it, and you greatly overestimate your appeal with your existing customers to come back. And so the analogy of sort of feeling like you're in a deeper state of relationship commitment with somebody than you are, the analog of being in the friend zone to me, just popped. And it was a way of really simplifying the complexity of that consumer brand relationship that is so hard to figure out, because you and I both know, and I think your listeners know, that marketing at its core is about motivating the consumer to do what you want them to do or what you're asking them to do when you want them to do it. Books, classes, seminars. Bottom line is, marketing has got to get somebody to do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. To do that, you have to have such a blend of arrogance and humility, confidence and insecurity. And that's no different than when you go headfirst into a relationship in your personal life.

Right. It's a fascinating correlation. And, you know, you also talk about the importance of adopting a business mindset. And I've seen that. You know, I spent 15 years in agency world where you see so many concepts that get presented and they're like whiz bang ideas, but there's never any thought given to how is it going to impact the bottom line. I think a lot of advertising has been disconnected from that. You work for some of the biggest brands in the world leading their marketing. Is that the impetus behind focusing on that business mindset when it comes to brand building?

You know, FOMO is not a marketing strategy. And I talk about that in the book. And, you know, how many times have we sat in a boardroom where ideas are being thrown and everyone's like, oh, we gotta do it? That's great. We gotta do it. That's great. And then you ask yourself, is it something that you must and need to do? Is it something that you should or could do? Or is it something that you want? And when in business, you spend too much time on the wants and not enough, focus on the must and the needs. That's when your business goes sideways. And for me, that mindset of building that marketing layer cake and really being disciplined is at the core of driving marketing effectiveness. But for somebody who's young in their career, sitting in these meetings, trying to make sense out of a brainstormed idea of how much time and energy to action against it, hopefully, and I call it a guide because I don't believe there's a right way or a wrong way. I believe there's just a way and it's a journey. I hope this helps them.

Yeah. And you talk about, when you talk about the layer cake, you also kind of go through like these high performance habits that like angel for brand growth. Can you elaborate on like what some of those are and which ones maybe are the most underutilized in your experience?

So I think to me, any success I've had in my career, and I mean this sincerely, has been because I have surrounded myself with great people. Building a high performing team is a skill and it's a skill that you gain proficiency in over time. But for me, there's sort of three core concepts in what I look for when I build a high performing team. First, I hire for passion. You can teach somebody a skill, you can't teach them the will. And the challenge is, is that if you have somebody who has a lot of passion but doesn't have a lot of skill, you have to work that much harder to try to get that greater balance. And it doesn't have to be the.

Skill of what you're selling. Right, Doug? Because like if you're a toothpaste brand, people aren't necessarily passionate about toothpaste, but they're passionate about brand building and connecting with consumers and other parts about that.

Well, it bugs me that there are certain career jobs that I let's say would be dream jobs. But because I haven't worked necessarily in the vertical, your resume doesn't appear to the top. But if everybody who sells soft drinks worked for a soft drink company, you would never get innovation. And it takes a leader to recognize that there are translatable skills from other industries that you can bring in to help round you out. So starts with passion. The second thing is requiring purpose. I need people around me that go about their day with intent. We never have the size of the teams that we need. Everything is always, I've got 20 minutes worth of work that I need to do in 10 minutes. You need people who are very purposeful in how they go about their lives, both outside and inside the office. And then it's about celebrating progress. Perfection is not attainable in marketing. It just isn't. There is no such thing as the perfect ad. You can get really close, but there's never such thing as perfection. So as a leader, if you're only focused on 100% results, you're going to miss the fact that if your sales target was plus 5 but you hit a plus 2, you still are a plus 2. Celebrate that progress with the team. Then dig deep to figure out, all right, what did we need to do? Where didn't we perform? But if you don't take the moment to celebrate, you're all about negativity. You're all about what you didn't do versus what you accomplished.

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So I think I saw you on TV talking about super bowl spots. I know you're a football fan just looking at the Lawrence Terror picture behind you. Because, you know, it's interesting. When you talk about brand building, we often create an equivalent to TV advertising. And the place that we really see TV spots is during the Super Bowl. What was your take on the super bowl spots this year in 2024? And how does that kind of weigh against, I guess, your overall thesis in the book?

There were more misses than hits. I mean, there were some brands. I just, I can't understand how this creative actually made it out of concept. There was one brand in particular that ran multiple spots during the super bowl. Probably spent 35 to 40 million dollars. It was some of the worst creative I've ever seen. And what made it bad, I would say executionally, it was very sophomoric. You couldn't really dissect the strategy or what it did. It happened to be for a service and it didn't tell you anything about the service. It used a reverency in its illustrative style. Not to give away who I'm talking about, but almost to the point of agnostic of a narrative. And, you know, to create that critical thing, which is consumers make emotional decisions before they make rational choices. You still have to give them emotional decision about what. And for some of these, I walked away saying, what the hell was that? It didn't make me want to learn more. It actually made me angry that marketers never have enough money to do what we want them to do. How does somebody get this much money approved with this story? I just didn't get it.

And do you think it's really a notion of, I guess, like some type of Stockholm syndrome that large brands have, where they kind of create an echo chamber of feedback on something that's completely disconnected from the real world and what their consumer is looking for? Like, is that possibly how it gets out?

I mean, look, in society today, there is only one moment where you have appointment viewing for commercials, and that's the Super Bowl. So much so that one of the big evolutions we saw this year was a lot more money and time spent on trailers for your super bowl ads than the ads themselves. It almost created a movie like atmosphere where you went to the super bowl waiting for the debut of the spot because you had all the great teasers and some spots had better teasers than they did the spots themselves. I think you can get lost in the allure of I'm on the super bowl and it's a badge of honor not realizing that if you are mediocre, you lose. If you're bad, you really lose. That winning formula is so, so small a window that your chances of being successful, agnostic of testing and perfecting, I feel like is so slim.

Yeah, absolutely. So what are some success stories, more broadly speaking, that you've seen brands execute where they've been able to successfully get out of the friend zone, you know, create that real winning relationship with consumers that has long term commercial viability?

I'm going to give you two examples that I mentioned in the book, and it's because I think they practice both the arrogance and the humility. The first one is Delta. I am a Delta loyalist. I will go out of my way to fly the airline, hashtag, not a sponsored ad because they make me feel valuable. And during the pandemic when they could have really blanked out everybody's status, what did they do? They grandfathered your status. They made it actually easy for you to remember that as your life was getting back on track, that they were a valuable partner. They go out of their way to accommodate. And maybe that's because of the amount I fly, but I feel like when I travel with them, I always have somebody that's taking care of me. Okay. And even though they've gotten a lot of negative press for some of the way they've done readjusting their loyalty programs, I actually think as far as an airline goals, they actually really do think human. They actually treat me as if I was their only flyer. And some of the accommodations and some of the flexibilities and some of the, you know, we want to get you home to see your kids. So let me get you on this flight. Just those small moments of care and connection, not to mention the thank you note that comes on your chair when you show up. As a frequent flier, those things mean a lot. Another one that I think has done a really good job of kind of moving itself out of the friend zone, similar in vain is Marriott. When Marriott expanded and created Bonvoy and brought in other hotels like W and Weston, there was a real fear that the volume was going to dilute the value of your patronage. And again, I think they do a really good job in small little touches. Early check in, late checkout, a couple of free bottles of water. Small things that don't necessarily create material value, but they create material love. Why those brands come to mind is because they're in a service culture mindset.

Yeah, experience too, right?

Experience. My Pythagorean theorem in the book is the brand value equation. Brand value, which is whether you make 50,000 or 5 million, everybody wants it, equals experience divided by price. If you deliver an amazing experience, you can charge a premium price and still have a positive brand value equation. They have realized those brands that they live in an experience economy. I think a brand like Starbucks is a brand that forgot the notion of the experience economy and really lost the cachet of. I go to Starbucks and I feel really good about being there. Not necessarily just because I'm drinking a good cup of coffee, but there's that neighborhood coffee feel vibe. I feel like when I carry the cup, I'm showing a proud badge of honor. Starbucks, we all know is called five bucks. And Dunkin sees the opportunity to sort of be the anti Starbucks and be the everyman's coffee. And I mean, look, you want to talk about super bowl success, what they did was just a stroke of genius, absolute genius.

Why do you say that? And what was the insight behind what.

They took a highly produced couple in Ben and Jen and gave you a peek under the hood of do you think this really happens? Their use of cameos. I mean, the Matt Damon cameo when he utters the bastardized line from Good Will Hunting, you know, how about them donuts? Then you look over and you got Tom Brady. Then you listen to Ben, who dials up the Boston accent. Just the authenticity. Duncan really grew out of that New England culture and they've owned it. They've not tried to be a foofy shishi brand. They're a blue collar brand. They have a great sense of humor and irreverence about themselves. And I think consumers feel good that when they carry a Dunkin cup of coffee, that badge says something about who they are, that they're smart enough not to spend five bucks on a, you know, double skim vanilla skim latte. And I'm just getting, you know, a good cup of coffee from Dunkin and getting a bagel or getting a munchkin and feeling great about it.

I love that spot too. When you talk about experience from Marriott and Delta, totally makes sense. But what does experience look like for a brand that sells shampoo or bottled water or something much more low involvement category? How can they look at that experience brand equation that you laid out when.

You don't control your point of distribution? The experience that you cultivate has to be in the way in which you educate a consumer before or you romance a consumer after.

Content is a huge part of it.

Content is a big one. Advice and counsel, I would say, honestly, your customer service. I had the privilege of spending a month in Japan learning the Japanese philosophy of customer service. And interesting. In Japan, they look at customer service as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, not triage a problem. In the States, we look at it as an opportunity to triage. If something breaks, if I have a problem and I call the customer service line, number one, do I get somebody live? Number two, do they speak the same language? Number three, do they stop reading from a script and listen to me? And one of the stories I tell in the book is something about a ceiling fan that I bought from Restoration hardware that was 2 years old that fell because the mount broke and I was ready to buy a new one. And I had called and said my ceiling fan broke. Can you tell me which one that I bought? I need to buy a new one. And the customer services person on the other end was like, oh my God, are you okay? I said, yeah, it was in my master bedroom. My Wife and I weren't in there. She's like, you bought this two years ago? I said, yeah. I said, do you still sell it? She said, yes. I said, can I buy it? She goes, no. I go, what do you mean, no? She goes, it shouldn't fall off the mouth. I'm sending you a new one. Didn't ask for a picture, didn't ask for anything back. Just didn't want me to feel like I spent a lot of money on something and the quality wasn't there. And I will tell you, I will forever go back to Restoration Hardware because of the way they treated me.

Right. And there are premium brands. When you do your equation, in order for it to play out, given the expectation you have for what you paid, the experience needs to be that much better.

Yeah, I had another story where I, you know, my son basically eats like, five things, and one of the things he eats is a particular peanut butter brand. And we opened the jar of peanut butter, and we found a piece of plastic in the peanut butter. It clearly was from one of the, like, nozzles or something. It sprayed off. And so it took me about 20 minutes to get the customer service number for that brand. I finally got the number. Got somebody on the phone. They said, oh, my God, this is terrible. Do you still have the container? I said, yes. They said, would you mind FedExing it back to us? I said, no, we'll send you a label. Great. I send a label. Three months go by, I don't hear anything. So I call back and I said, listen, what happened? And they're like, no one's ever gotten back to you? I'm like, no. And they're like, well, we're going to send you a bunch of coupons for free. Insert brand name peanut butter. And I was like, that's so lame. My son could have choked. I didn't want to make a big deal about it. I just wanted them to know, but they didn't care. You know, if my son wasn't such a picky eater, I wouldn't buy the brand of peanut butter anymore. But think about all the times that we've had bad experiences at a restaurant or have bought something that's broken or not lived up to our expectations. Does the customer service experience leave you feeling valued or valueless?

Yeah. I think it's so interesting, and I love the whole take on if there's a problem if something breaks in a relationship or in a customer business relationship. A lot of people look at it as, okay, let's just put a Band aid on this thing when the reality is this is a chance to end up ahead of where you were before. Because if you over deliver to a problem, then the customer usually forgets about the problem and they're just focused on how you provide the solution and it strengthens the brand to entire new level. And that has a creative effect over time.

Yeah, it's a small moment of care and connection that could lead to big wins.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, looking forward, you know, 2024, everyone's talking about AI and your ability to theoretically customize at scale. Obviously, AI also presents a risk of chatbots where there's no human in the loop and companies in their quest for efficiency being less personal and not even being a friend, but being sort of like, I guess, a relationship between data and a human because they're relying so much. What are your, I guess, hopes and fears in terms of how brands can leverage AI in the context of the philosophies that you laid out in the book?

So I think marketers have to embrace AI. Okay. I think to ignore it is silly. I think for a marketer to embrace AI, you have to recognize that AI is not going to do your job for you. What it does is it allows you to iterate and see things from multiple angles. If you are skilled at AI, you can take a piece of content, put in a couple queries, and get five or six different versions of said content that play with certain emotions, certain focus to help to round out what you're doing. And I think for us, options are a good thing, but it also could torture you to death. So you've got to be careful not to look at AI to be a problem solver, but to possibly be an assistor out. I happen to like AI a lot for helping to take a email where I want to convey something that potentially could be challenging to convey an email and optimize it for tone, content, professionalism. You know, we've all in our history have fired off angry emails and maybe we regret it. I know for me, being able to use AI to help take something that maybe is aggressive and still get the point across without possibly creating ill will is an incredible use of the tool.

Yeah, absolutely.

I wish I could use it in my personal life.

I know right now there actually are lots of ways to use it, but they're just slowly kind of coming on board. But I think we'll probably hear a lot more about that this year. So, shifting gears as you wrap up here, Doug, you know, the fact that you've had a great Career in brand building and working for, as I mentioned earlier, really prolific brand. We first met when you were leading the Victoria's Secret Pink brand over a decade ago. After all you've accomplished, kind of what gave you the ambition and motivation to do something like writing a book, putting yourself out there, going out and doing a media tour. A lot of people think about doing things like that, but never kind of get through to the other side. So what is it about you? And I guess either the way you were raised or the way your career has formed that kind of gives you the motivation and confidence to do that, that maybe we can impart in some of our younger listeners here so they can kind of put their best selves out there?

Yeah. Matt, such a great question. I think for me, to whatever degree of accomplishment I may have in my career, I hold equally to the amazing leaders that I've worked for and frankly, the really shitty bosses that I worked for. And I probably can count on one hand not using all my fingers. The people that I've worked for, that I admire and that I would consider mentors, I can count on two hands. The people I've worked for that are just people that I never wanted to be but learned so much from. If I can help somebody avoid mistakes that I've made in my career. Not learning experiences, but mistakes, and they're different. A learning experience is when you do something wrong once. A mistake is when you do the same thing wrong multiple times. If I can help, if I can provide a little bit of a clear way to possibly frame an idea or solve a problem and help somebody to help somebody. I love teaching, I love lecturing. I've been very fortunate. I've taught everywhere from Ivy League to my daughter's high school class. And when you connect with somebody, it's amazing, you know, best part of my job is leading a high performing team, creating a team, high performing, making them, and then really helping them grow and learn. The book for me was an opportunity to give a little bit back and maybe help. If I help somebody figure something out and avoid some of the pain that I've had in my career, then I'm doing something right and I can sleep well at night knowing that, you know, maybe I've given back.

Absolutely. Well, I definitely think you have. And I, you know, I really want to thank you for taking the time to continue to share your learnings and wisdom here on the podcast once again. And hopefully we'll have you back yet again at some time in the future. So thanks again.

You guys are doing great work. You're always at the center of what people think and how they think. And so much of our success collectively is in understanding the how, not just the what. So I appreciate the opportunity to be on with you today.

Absolutely. Everyone please go and check out Doug's book Moving youg Brand out of the Fred Zone. Available on Amazon everywhere books are, so be sure to check it out. So on behalf of Susie and I, we team, thanks again the great Doug Zarkin, marketer and author, for joining us once again here today. Be sure to subscribe Rate Review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Till next time, these are one Take care. The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Sue Susie as part of the Adweek Podcast Network and a Guest Creator Network. You can listen subscribe to all Adweek's podcasts by visiting Adweek.com podcasts to find out more about Suzy, head to Susie.com and make sure to search for the Speed of Culture in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found, click follow so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Suzy, thanks for listening.

Finding the right audience shouldn't feel like doom scrolling with Experian. It doesn't. Experian syndicated audiences help you reach holiday shoppers, car buyers and more across over 200 top platforms. With over 2, 400 pre built audiences, there's no more doom scrolling. It's audience targeting you can trust. Made simple. Learn more at experian. Com Adweek. That's exp E R I a N Com Adweek.