INBOUND 2015 HHT: Mike Troiano "Brand Positioning: How to Tell Your Story"

Well, thanks. It's great to be here. Is that too loud? Everybody hear me? Boy, solo crowd. I'm actually pleasantly surprised. I started my career as the digital zealot in a brand driven world, and increasingly it looks like I'm going to end it as the brand zealot in a digital driven world. We're all here. We're going to spend three days learning how to growth hack our way to a fully optimized demand gen funnel. I guess I just want to take 45 minutes today to first share some ideas and then have a conversation about the importance of recognizing that there are real human beings at the top end and throughout that thing. I think it's so easy to lose that in the context of all these amazing tools that enable us to track things and to be data driven and to measure and all that is great. But at the end of the day, you're still having a conversation with a person and we don't want to forget ever that there's meat in the machine. So in thinking about what we were going to talk about today, so I want to talk about really five topics, and the first is to sort of give you my definition of brand. Brand is one of these words we use every day, but there's a remarkable lack of consensus on exactly what it means. If you put your finger on people and they talk about brands and you ask them what is a brand, you're going to get a lot of different answers. And for what it's worth, I'll give you mine. A big part of branding is really tied up in the importance of emotion in changing behavior. And I want to share some interesting ideas and some actual empirical information about the role of emotion in changing behavior. And from there I want to sort of shift gears out of theory mode and into practice mode. So I think the other problem with a lot of conversations about brand is they're sort of up here. They're very theoretical, very sort of touchy feely. And so I want to give you some very specific things you can do to start to think through your brand positioning and hopefully realize that in the real world. All right, does that sound useful? It's after lunch here, so we're all kind of like after lunch, pre coffee, always a tough slut. All right, so a couple weeks ago, I saw the Foo Fighters at Fenway. Anybody? Foo Fighters fans here? Yeah. So amazing show. And I'm a huge fan of the band and of Dave's in particular. Well, on a short list of people, I'd rather be Dave Grohl. No question. And so here's a still from that show. And I would ask you, where is the brand in this photo? Where is the brand? Some people would say, well, the brand is here, Mike. That's the Foo Fighters logo on the throne of rock and roll that Dave created for himself. And other people would say, well, no, you know, Dave is the brand. Dave is the person with whom we have this relationship. Right. Dave is the brand. And I would say the brand in this picture is out here. The brand is a set of perceptions, feelings, emotion. The brand lives in the hearts and minds of people out there. I think there's a dangerous tendency to conflate brands with logos, with personalities, with individuals, with graphic standards. And the brand is none of those things. A brand is goodwill towards a company. It's a predisposition that lives out there in the hearts and minds of the people that you're trying to reach. And I think this is really the place to begin a conversation about branding. Here's some other more concrete, tweetable nuggets. I think it's useful to think of the brand as the world's collective emotional response to your business. Your logo is the stimulus for that response. Your identity package, your website, all those things are a stimulus. And you find your brand in the reaction of the world to whatever you put out there. The brand is the envelope for your product's rational benefits. And throughout this talk, I'm going to really make that distinction between rational and emotional, both very important drivers of human behavior. But I think we're seeing we're in the era of rational behavior here, despite some irrational presidential candidates. As I mentioned, you useful to think of brand as your emotional value proposition, something that guides people toward or away from whatever it is you're selling. As we'll discuss, we experience the world first emotionally, and then we drill in to a rational understanding, because we need that shorthand just to navigate life. And I'll even share some empirical data that evidences that. The final thing I would say on this point is if you think your brand doesn't matter, well, likely you're not in this room. But for people who say that don't really understand how we make decisions. So let's talk about brand value. This is a brand that I worked on. And if you take Coke and you disclose the recipe, if you destroy the factories, you fire the team, you rip up all of their contracts with all of their distributors, all of their relationships, you burn every hard asset of the Coca Cola Company. If you control the brand, you could still go out There type problem and borrow 79 billion or so against the value of the brand and rebuild it all. Think about that. This isn't some kind of touchy feely marketing bullshit thing. You could literally borrow $79 billion against the value of this brand and rebuild all of Coca Cola having wiped out every one of its tangible assets. So there's something real here in all this mumbo jumbo and, and mystery. So where does that come from? Well, there was a guy named Antonio Damasio, an Italian, of course, wrote a book called Descartes Error. Anybody read this book? It's an obscure book, but I think it's really profoundly insightful. This guy was a neuroscientist and what he did was he studied a group of people who were outwardly normal, but who had a specific brain defect that prevented them from feeling. Some of you may have dated one of these people. So you'd think that these people would be excellent decision makers. This is the Kirk Spock dynamic. Spock believes he will make better decisions because he's entirely rational. He's a logical man. But we all know that Kirk brings that human element and he makes better decisions. Well, it turns out there is empirical evidence of that very dynamic that when you take away the ability to feel from someone, you don't liberate them to follow rational choice. You paralyze them. You make them unable to make even the most basic decisions. And I'm talking about whether to pick up a pencil, they can't decide. And this is amazing to me. The relationship between choice and emotion, between action, behavioral change and emotion, is very explicit. We are wired to reflect this relationship in ways that marketers ignore at their peril. It's not just for silly little stuff. It's not just buying gum, you know, at the cash register. Think about the decisions you make that are emotional decisions. The house you decide to buy, I promise you that's an emotional decision. You know, getting married or unmarried, both driven by emotion. The job you take, whether or not to have kids. No rational person would have more than one child. I have four. You know, the school you go to, the places you travel. You are making big decisions in your life every day based on emotional drivers. And this whole notion of like B2B. So we sell enterprise data virtualization technology, it's pretty. Surely that is a fortress of rationality. Well, no, I think the myth, this B2B B2C distinction, are you a C and then you go to work and you're a B until 5 o' clock when you become A C. I don't get it. I say to my team, companies don't buy anything. People within companies buy things. People within companies buy what we sell. And changing their behavior, which is a big part of our job, is dependent on emotional appeals. Now, why is this? Well, we are constantly bombarded by stimulus as we walk around in the world. Here are some visual stimuli, and each of these things is complex and multivariant and whatever. But if you think about the collective emotional response to these things, there is a kind of shorthand. Fairly or unfairly, rightly or wrongly, we distill these multifaceted stimuli into very simple ideas. Now, those ideas change over time. They're constantly evolving. As the world shifts, so does our perception. But think about these things. Think about that flag didn't represent that. At least there was not a broad, ironclad consensus that it represented that idea. But we saw this national shift in consensus that it doesn't mean this, it means that. And that happens all the time in large and small ways. And when we encounter the world, we see these things. I like whiskey, and my brand of whiskey is Bulleit Rye. I really like bullet rye whiskey. Now, why is that? Part of it is I like the product. But truth be told, I didn't go out and sample the 4,000 whiskeys that were available in a blind taste test and select bullet rye. There was something I found appealing about it. There was something I liked about the bottle. There was some aspect of it that attracted me with sufficient intensity for me to sample it. And then the product took over. I liked the product. As we'll see. A brand is not a substitute for a good product, but it is a shorthand that enables people to navigate the world and make decisions in nearly every category on Earth. Think about how we come to understand new things. We encounter things at the point of this wedge. When you meet someone at a party, you meet some people, and they just give you the whole brain dump of everything about who they are. And you're just like, whoa. And then you're in the car and you're talking to your significant other, and they say, well, you're talking to that guy for a while. What's his deal? I don't fucking know. The guy's like, just like, holy God. I mean, just like, was it terrible? Or you have people that you encounter them and they open with an idea, or they say something witty or interesting, or they ask a question or whatever. And if you like that, maybe you dig a little deeper and you have a conversation about something that flows Organically from that. And then you go a little deeper. And then eventually it may be multiple meetings, it may be deeper. Later on in the night, you have a much deeper understanding of who they are and what they were. And. And when your significant other asks you about that person, the thing you're most likely to repeat is the place where you began with them. Okay? And that is we encounter products in the same way we encounter people. We're a bunch of animals. We're just like lizard brain. We're not as sophisticated as we think. And so we are not hardwired in nature to consume products. We're hardwired in nature to begin relationships, to acquire assets, to satisfy our needs, whatever they are. And so we bring the biology. This is a function of human biology, and it is a truth that's nearly universal in the stream of those things. Very often you find that emotion is what comes first. So Maserati. My relationship with Maserati begins in an emotional place, specifically with lust. I see the Gran Turismo, and I want that car. I want it. So then I start to rationalize. I say, you know, the back seat of that car is big enough for the kids, and really only the kids are in my back seat. I mean, if we're going to go somewhere as a family, we're going to go in the Lexus. And so it really doesn't if I prefer to drive that car, why would I not have it when it doesn't? So what is that? That is me rationalizing an emotional desire. Another anecdote. So I went to Harvard Business School, and sometimes you meet someone and you like them, and they say, somebody says, oh, that guy went to hbs. And you're like, oh, wow, seems like a really smart guy. I totally believe that. Other times, people are like, if they think you're an asshole and they find out you went to hbs, they're like, fucking hbs, asshole. It's the same fact, but you see it through a different lens depending on the emotional response that you begin with. And again, we engage with products in a similar fashion. If you want to change what someone does, you have to change what they feel and not just what they think. This is universally true. I know I shouldn't have that donut. I know it, but I want it. And so changing your behavior, if you talk about even something like that, your relationship with food, your relationship with people, the way you make decisions, it's hard to change your own behavior, let alone to change the behavior of some audience out there with whom you don't even have face to face contact. Marketing is a dilution of a one on one conversation. Inherently, no matter how strong it is, no matter how compelling, no marketing effort is as intense as a face to face conversation with another human being. And so as a dilution, you have to be very focused on what you need to do in order to move people from A to B. And in the vast majority of cases, moving them from A to B behaviorally involves changing what they feel and not just what they think. And I'm surrounded by examples of people who forget this. If you don't create a brand for the market, the market creates a brand for you. Take this product. All right, this product is very cool. I actually tried it once and the technology's amazing. It's so well done. I mean, it's like game changing. There are people who are freaks for was such a big thing. And what got in the way, well, what got in the way is this association got created and all that engineering goodness just went away. I mean, it destroys so much value. So much hard work is eliminated by what seems like this trivial thing. But it's not. Because getting people to adopt this particular technology involved changing their behavior in significant ways. And it was not able to affect that change because it ignored the emotional driver of human behavior. Now, this was true at the top of that company and still is, I believe. And so as we go through this, I want to highlight for you, like, failure points. What are key sort of failure points where the whole thing goes sideways. And the first brand failure point that I've observed in my many years is the failure to apply the right level of executive leadership and frontline execution to deliver on an emotional value proposal. Now, this is understandable. It's hard to make great products, hard to beat competitors. And very often people are either consumed by the struggle to do that or the romance of doing it. There are still people in this very building who feel like marketing is just for shitty products. They won't say that here with all of us here, but they believe that. A lot of people believe that. And so this is the first place things go sideways is that people don't understand all the stuff that I've been spending time on up to now. The role of emotion, the value of brand. And that's the first place things go wrong. All right, so let's be a little more positive. So you say, well, all that's great. So a great mic. I'm not a douchebag, so what do I do? So I really tried to sort of say, okay, If I had to boil it down now, what are three things you can go do? Just get this sorted in your own organization. What would I do? And the first thing I would do is spend some time reflecting on your customer. The second thing is to simplify your promise to that person. And the third thing is to deliver on that simplified promise consistently at every point of contact with the market. Reflect on your customer, simplify your promise, deliver it consistently. And I'm going to dig into each of these things in a little bit before we break for questions and discussion. All right, anybody here catch the Marin spotlight? I love him. I'm a huge fan of his. I love what he does. That podcast. It's the WTF podcast for those of you who don't listen. And it's just great because he really gets under someone's skin. He gets deep into someone. And one of the people he got deep with was this guy, which is really remarkable for a comedian podcaster. But he had this hour long interview with the president and it was all about getting past the Persona and to the person. That's what he just said to us. He was really trying to get past the politician, the facade of Obama. He went back and read Obama's first book, which is a very personal book about his relationship with. With his own racial ambiguity and his relationship with his father in particular. And Marin's conversation with Obama was all about that. It was a conversation with the person. And I see this all the time in marketing circles is people are focused on the Persona. I think one of the most awful phrases outside of consumer, which is like, bleh, no one wants to be consumer is target audience. Anybody want to be in the target audience? No. So don't do that to people. Another thing I like to say is explain this to me like I'm a person. Just imagine if I was a person and explain it to me. And we don't do that. I'm guilty of it. Sometimes I have this Persona, this demographic set of attributes, and I want to give them my spew about how great our thing is, whatever. And they don't want that. They're not going to listen to that. So you got to try to make your. Having a Persona in mind is better than just talking at the whole world. But that's an inferior dilution of understanding a person at the end of the line. So first piece of advice here is start by thinking about the person and not necessarily their Persona. So then start to peel the onion. Who is she? Who is this person? Think about it. Who are they? Not only demographically, but in terms of who are they really? What are they about? Where did they grow up? Do they have siblings? Birth order, whatever it is that gets you there. What does she care about? What does she really want? Why does she want that? How does she feel when she gets it? These are all questions that will help you understand the person that you're talking to. Not the target, not the Persona. I'll give you some examples. So, one is a business traveler, unhappy to be away from home. So think about that business traveler that's sort of junior varsity marketing. Okay, I can do stuff for that. But if I zero in on the insight that there's some subset of the business traveler universe that's just unhappy to be away from home, think about how that affects my downstream communication. If that, I realize is an insight, something universal among the target audience that I'm addressing. Moms who feel bad about getting groceries delivered. I'm married to one of these and I don't, you know, initially I didn't understand it. I get it now. She wants the ripe bananas, not the bananas they pick. It's very complicated. But I think a lot of the online grocery folks didn't deal with this emotional reality and they were unable to change behavior as a result. Technicians who feel undervalued and underappreciated or put otherwise, technicians. Here's one for us bosses. Sick of paying for storage. Sick of paying for storage. One of our best opening lines with CXOs in our business is, how'd you like to take a two year vacation from writing EMC a check? Give me 15 minutes. Okay, teens with stage five FOMO. Everybody know FOMO? Fear of missing out. I got a couple of these in my household too. But again, you have this insight that is an emotional driver in this person and you only get to it with deep reflection on who they are beyond the superficial, observable demographic attributes. All right, so reflect on your customer, simplify your promise, deliver it consistently. Let's talk about number two. So when you're engaging with someone, it's human nature. The first thing they're going to do is they're going to try to discern based on that thing in the point of the wedge, whether additional time spent with you is worth the effort. If you're extremely good looking, this is a great equation for you. If you're not, or if you're a product, if you're trying to interrupt something else someone is doing, you really need to think about making sure you communicate to them tangibly or intangibly explicitly or implicitly, what's in it for them to continue this dialogue. And in some cases that will be a rational reason. You can sound like a dick if you try to squeeze that into the first three minutes of hey, talk to me, I'm really interesting. It's hard to do that. And so that's one of the reasons questions are effective as you get to know someone, is that it shows that this person is interested in me. And we all want to be understood for the richly complex and nuanced beings we are. And so now you have an opportunity to do that. This person is interested in me, we are interested in the people who are interested in us. That's an emotional value proposition. There are lots of others, lots of different ways to engage someone. But we have this duality. And as marketers, we have to engage people with an understanding that the first thing we have to do is we need to justify this in some way. And so when I say to people, how do you start with that and boil down your message to the what's in the point of that wedge? I talk about typically like this five step idea. Bring together some smart people, some people with emotional intelligence, some people who really understand the customer, people who have lots of customer contact are really useful for an exercise like this. And bring those folks together and brainstorm a bunch of ideas about what does this do for this target person that I've just described? What do we do for them uniquely? How do we begin the conversation? With something that shows them how we can help them. So you're going to put a lot of ideas on the table, all over the whiteboard. There's all these different things. Everybody's an advocate for one. The next thing you have to do is you got to pick one that seems right based on the stuff that I've shared so far. So when you pick that, you've got to sort of polish it up. You have to express that choice clearly and simply as something you and everyone on your team can remember, share and deliver in the details of every customer. Touch point. So now you have this polished little object, this opening statement, and then you gotta go and take it out into the world and see how people respond to it. My third day at Actifio, which was a product I really didn't understand until probably the third month, I was dropped into a trade show. And I spent the time at that show coming up with different positionings and trying them for one hour. So I would open with positioning A and I would do that for one hour and I would See if people respond. And then, like hour three, I started to talk about this idea called copy data. And people were like, oh, and you see the penny drop. And then I was like, ok, that's it. And then went back and we made everything about that and we created this category called copy data management, which is a big deal in enterprise technology. Many of you don't know it, but you're not in our target audience. All right, so after you figure that out, you want to refine, confirm, and anoint the imperfect, you need to be comfortable anointing the imperfect, because getting everything you can behind a value proposition is 80% as effective as getting everything you have beyond the value proposition. If you focus all of your energies on one thing and just hammer that everywhere, that's better than debating endlessly whether it should be an and or an or or a the or a the or whatever it is. All the obscure, like, arcana of, like, how taglines and all that nonsense figure out a way to tell the story quickly, an opening line, a way to tell it that communicates a value prop to the user, validate that with the outside world, and then commit to it 1000%. Examples following on the folks that I talked about. Enjoying the road. A little more confidence of delivering the best to your family. Recognition of solving a real business problem. Freedom from the hassle and expense of 20th century technology. The joy of feeling you're a part of the group. So you can see how those ideas for the people that I talked about earlier might be a good way to start a conversation. A warning. Avoid the stain fighting power problem. You cannot launch a detergent with stain fighting power. Why? Because every detergent has stain fighting power. And stain fighting power is white noise to the consumer. Of course. Yeah, I get it. Stain fighting power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not distinct from the claims of competition. So again, it becomes white noise in the marketplace. Not effective. This is the second brand failure point. It's the failure to decide on a single simple brand promise for your customer to evaluate the full range of options, but then to pick one that's true, relevant, motivating, and distinct from the claims of your competition. Okay? That's the second place things go wrong in your journey. All right? Got this funky build here. Now we got to deliver it consistently. So why is consistency so important? All right, this is my girl, Lindsay. There was a time when Lindsay was the bomb. Let me tell you. Now we don't like Lindsay. I feel for her. I feel like we had a relationship. It just went sideways. Part of the Reason we don't like her, we respond negatively to her, is we don't know who she is. She's like, all over the place. She's this way. She's a redhead, she's a blonde. She's a mess. She's a leader. She's got her act together. She's on drugs again. She's in court, she's on rehab. We don't know who she is, and so we don't like her. You've been dating someone and things are going well, and you think they're such a good person, and you're on the third date and they treat a waiter like shit, and you're like, whoa, you have a contrarian data point now. And that casts a shadow on your whole understanding of this person. One data point like, whoa. People do that with brands, too. You're all about this, this, this, this, this. And they say, over here. Well, over here they say they're about that. And they're like, well, I don't know what the fuck they are. You know, contrast that with this guy who saw him on Stephen Colbert. I mean, he's the man. He's the man in a goatee. He's the man, whatever facial hair configuration. But George is always George. George is just George. Like, he's. And it's remarkable for an actor to have such consistency of Persona, but he does that, and we like him because we know him and we feel like we understand what he's about. Repetition breaks through. We're in the middle of a presidential campaign, as I commented on a little while ago, and having messaging discipline is so important for candidates, something they struggle with. CEOs, too, as my compatriots will acknowledge. Hard to keep them on message because you make them the chief repetition officer. That's what a presidential campaign is. Saying the same thing again and again and again until you want to vomit. But that's what it takes, because when you've said it seven times, most people are only hearing it for the first. All right, so I'm going to give you an example of all this coming together before I close Westin Hotels. So I spent a lot of time on the road, and I really love Westons. And this is my inference about what happened in the brand war room of Weston way back in the day. And so applying this methodology. So the way I think about them, thinking about their audience is they said, well, we have a certain group of people for whom being on the road kind of sucks, I feel. And I look like shit. I really need to get my act together. And this is the voice of an affluent middle aged business traveler. But see the emotion, that emotion in it, for me is what differentiated the subsequent execution, which I'll share with you in a moment. So what they came up with for this was substance, product, a real program. And that program is called the Be well program. Play well, work well, feel well, sleep well, eat well, move well. They put this on the website, but they did way more than that. This sensibility, this emotional value proposition is everywhere at a Weston. Everywhere. Things encouraging me to be well, to take care of myself. I feel like they care about me and I am positively predisposed to them as a result. It's such a powerful example of such a mundane thing at some level. Who gives a shit what it says on the sticker that hangs on the water? But they want me to hydrate, you know, they know I gotta hydrate. I just got off a plane, I'm like, you know, and it's just, it's consistent. That's branding. That's what it's all about. So the final brand failure point is the failure of communications discipline and the delivery of that same brand promise at every point of contact with the customer, the same one every time. If you're bored, I don't care. They haven't heard it yet. How do we be rock solid consistent in the way we communicate our value prop? I'll say this. If your product sucks, your brand won't save you. If it sucked, staying out of Westin, they got to get everything else right for me to get the emotional value prop. Brands live on the emotional plane of customer experience. But if you reflect on the slides that I've shared and the failure points that I've articulated, great brands are built on a foundation of executive leadership, customer understanding, insight on potential to add emotional value and product quality over time. All right, so to recap, your brand is out there in the hearts and minds of people you care about. It works on the emotional plane that drives behavior in all people. Your brand is grounded in the substance of your product, insight and leadership. It helps to begin by pretending your audience is a person. Talk to them like they are. They are. Talk to them like they are. Engage them with a clear and simple expression of your emotional value prop. Deliver that message consistently and relentlessly at every touch point with the market. I'll leave you with this before we go to questions. It's one of my favorite quotes about branding, about marketing, about leadership. It's by a guy named Antoine de Saint Exupery. And he said, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. That's our job as marketers. It's not just to organize the people to build a data driven, fully optimized, robust. We have to teach people to long for the endless immensity of the sea. And if you do, everything else will be more effective. That's it. I'm happy to take your questions or thoughts. All right, we got a mic. Anybody got a question, thought, idea they want to share? If you're closer to the middle, just.

By request for the cameras, because these are all recorded, either go up and ask them or going to pass them down the rows start with you.

We got one over here and one over here. You know what, let's get the mic over to you so we can record this. But let's get this young lady first, then we'll come over, I promise. You're next.

Okay. So in talking about simplicity and focusing on a single message and delivering that consistently, what happens when you have a brand and a company and a product that relies on three, two or three or more than that, very different types of customers, and not just they like the product for one reason or another, the product's actually used in very different ways by different customers and the use of the total product depends on those three different customers using it.

Yeah, I would think really hard for a long weekend about a universal constant among all those three. And I bet if we really focused on it, we could figure out something universal across those folks. In cases where you can't, you have to fragment your marketing effort and you have to distill a value prop for each. That is a very expensive, time consuming. It adds, you're multiplying the complexity of your whole marketing program. If you can't come up with something sufficiently abstract as to be universal so there's no absolutes, I would really encourage focusing on that, a level of abstraction that is universal to all three targets. And if you can't come up with that, you're going to need to fragment your marketing and target each with the prop that's relevant for them. We're actually doing some of that now in the way that we're approaching the market. It's painful, it's expensive, but sometimes there's no other alternative. Yes, sir. So I thought you were definitely going to mention this quote, people don't buy products, they buy better cases of themselves or something. Have you heard that quote before? Yeah. Well, they buy things that signal to the world the person they aspire to be. Right. So as you're going through these failures, does that factor into what you're thinking? Yeah, sure. I mean, one of the emotional value props is always the ability to signal to others the person I aspire to be. The whole ringtone business, you know, why does my, you know, my 14 year old who's like a skinny white kid in Sudbury, why does he have like, you know, whatever, kill the police as his ringtone? It's because he wants to be a badass man dad, you know, that's why. And so where you understand that and what's the role of that, you know, ringtone is digital cologne for people that age. Tells people something about them that's right. You know, and so, like, I think understanding that can be a powerful motivator of behavior. And in other categories, it's a little bit harder to grasp, but I think it's always a good place to mine for an emotional value prop that sticks. Yes, Sir.

I'm the CEO of GetUplaws.com and we have a weight loss product that's mostly used by women. So in trying to understand what kind of emotions people feel while they're trying to lose weight, we did focus groups and came up with a list of things that people feel, then graded them on what is the overwhelming emotion. And exhaustion with having tried so many things was one of them. So when you're trying to figure out that positive emotion that you want to appeal to people, is it basically the opposite of the negative they're feeling, or it is almost like an antonym of the feeling they're feeling? So if they're exhausted, do you just want to reverse it, or do you come up with something else that, I mean, I know it's inspirational, but how do you get to that?

Well, in every category, it's different. So for us, we have fragmented the front end of our marketing just recently, and we're talking to backup administrators as one of our targets. And we had to come up with a way to talk about backup. And where we ended up was with the phrase, it's the last backup modernization you'll ever need. Where did that came from? We talked to a bunch of customers, and they were all on their third or fourth backup modernization, and they were deeply frustrated with this process. They don't want to modernize again, whatever. And so for us, in that example, we acknowledged the negative reaction in a way that hopefully creates empathy that they're used to hearing about backup modernization. Every vendor talks about backup modernization, but nobody else in the category says, this is the last time you'll ever have to do that, and here's why. And so it may be that you create empathy by acknowledging the emotion. That can be a very powerful motivator if there is an antidote to it. In that case, the obvious one is, it's not you, it's them. Okay? You are not the failure here. It's this, right? Which is kind of Oprah. That's a door. Oprah goes through a lot, right. With great effect, you know, So I think you need to noodle on it a little bit. But it might be that it might just be connecting with them to show that you get it, because most brands don't.

Thanks.

Yes, ma'.

Am. So our company is built on a single spokesperson. He's been around for 30 years. In the market, on TV.

No.

And at this point, our spokesperson is ready to retire. So we're looking to rebrand. And what advice would you have for us? You know, we're considering finding a new spokesperson, you know, transitioning altogether to a group of spokespeople. You know. Have you ever seen any success in doing that?

Yeah, it's hard. I think you need to figure out what is it about the relationship with this person that people find compelling. I think we always say in the ad business, you want to separate your equity from your history. There may be some things you can let go of in the baggage of your background, but what's the equity there? And what comes to mind is the men's warehouse guy. That guy, People had a relationship with him. You're going to love the way you look. That guy, I forgot his name, but he was great. People had a relationship with him. And now Joseph Abboud is running that shop like a handsome guy with a shock of gray hair and super stylish. And I think they've done a pretty good job transitioning that, because at the end of the day, this guy's size. Not Cy Sperling. That's the bald guy. That guy. It was like, okay, I made these clothes, and I care about the way you look, and there's an authenticity to him. And now when you see the work they're doing with Abood, he's not some far off design. Y. Like, whatever you feel like. Joseph Abboud wants you to look good. So I think there's an example of someone who got at that core, which was, what's important in the relationship with the first guy is the feeling that he wants me to look good. And they've transferred that to another vessel. That's a good way to. Good approach.

Thank you.

Yes, ma'. Am. Hi.

What is, or what has been the most difficult brand that you've worked on or the most difficult branding strategy that you've had to encounter?

This one very hard to find the emotional value prop and copy data virtualization. Whoa. But, you know, in another meeting that first week, we had a little customer thing. And so all the engineers are there, and they didn't really know how to deal with a marketing guy back then. And so I said in this meeting, like, they were talking about whatever. Oh, the Fetzer valve, the flux capacitors, we're going to make this blue. And so I said at one point, how does it feel to use this thing? How did it feel before and how does it feel now? And my own team was like. And there was this silence. And then one of the guys said, it really used to suck. Because I know the stuff's not getting backed up, and I know at some point exchange is going to go down and they're going to yell at me, but the reality is we didn't spend enough money to back the thing up every 24 hours like I'm supposed to. And another guy was like, yeah, you know. And then one guy said, I've had, you know, I keep ramen noodles in my desk. I keep four packages of ramen noodles on my desk. Because the last time this application went down, I was in the office all weekend and I couldn't leave and it sucked. And this liberates me from that. I don't worry about that because I know if the thing goes down, I can bring it back. And then the last guy said, the first time I used this, the first time I recovered an Oracle database with this took 22 seconds. And it was like the first time I kissed a girl. And even my team was like, that was it. Freedom. Freedom for us. But it's there. You just gotta have the courage to have the conversation on an emotional plane. Yes, sir. So what if your product is the opposite of the donut? You're talking about where you really should want it, but you just don't want it? What's the benefit of having it? What is the benefit in emotional terms of accepting the need to do whatever this is. Are you from the US Kale association or. Not quite. Our product is a test. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, it's about, you know, it's about objective validation. It's about, you know, there's another door into that from the back that you can find and go through that door. I think we're out of time. This has been really great. I'm Mike Trapp. On Twitter, I have the slides up. Thank you.