How To Stay Optimistic, and the DNA of Great Brands

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:
When some people hear the word optimism, they think wishful thinking. But optimism isn't wishful thinking. It's a practical, necessary, forward looking element of doing brilliant, brave work. And if you lead other people, it's a critical part of getting others to follow you. In my most recent book, the Brave Habit, I wrote about the two qualities that tend to be present when brave decisions are made. The first is perceived agency, and the second is optimistic vision. It can be difficult to maintain optimistic vision in the midst of uncertain times. And let's face it, I don't care what your perspective is.

Todd Henry [00:00:39]:
These are uncertain times that we're living through globally right now. But the people you lead need clarity from you. Above all else, clarity, not certainty. They need to know that you see a way through. They need to know that you understand how they fit into that vision. And you need to communicate to them how they fit into that vision. That is the essence of optimism, is we are going someplace. I can see it.

Todd Henry [00:01:02]:
It's better. We can get there. And here's how we're going to get there. Here's the clear path, even in the face of uncertainty. So I want to share with you an excerpt from my latest book, the Brave Habit. It's a chapter about cultivating optimistic vision. And then after this, we're going to have Peter Wilken on, and Peter Wilken is going to talk to us about what makes a brilliant brand. So the most predictable driver of optimism is what I call productive passion.

Todd Henry [00:01:31]:
This is an outcome that you care so deeply about that you're willing to suffer if necessary to achieve it. It is clean fuel. As Kierkegaard wrote, cowardice settles deep in our souls like the idle mists on stagnant waters. From it arise unhealthy vapors and deceiving phantoms. The thing that cowardice fears most is decision. For decision always scatters the myths, at least for a moment. Cowardice thus hides behind the thought it likes best of all. The crutch of time.

Todd Henry [00:02:05]:
I love that quote, because I do think that the thing that cowardice relies on in us is the crutch of time. Well, tomorrow I'll get around to it. But that causes us often to put off the very things we need to do in order to gain clarity today to make a decision that will scatter the myths. In my book Die Empty, I wrote about what I call the passion fallacy. We toss around phrases like follow your passion as if it means just pursuing things that you enjoy. And on the surface, there's nothing wrong with this advice. Except for the fact that we are fundamentally misusing the word passion. In its root form, the word passion comes from the Latin word passio, which means to endure or to suffer.

Todd Henry [00:02:48]:
So when we encourage someone to follow your passion, what we're really saying is follow your suffering. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it, Right? But I think it's actually a fundamentally different and better way to think about this phrase, follow your passion. The fundamental twist on this common advice is something I can get behind, because it's the foundation of brave action and it's the foundation of optimism. When you tap deeply into a productive passion, it means you're willing, if necessary, to suffer. It doesn't mean you will suffer, but you're willing to suffer, if necessary in order to achieve an outcome that matters more to you than your temporary discomfort. It doesn't, again, doesn't necessarily mean you will suffer, only that you're willing to do so in order to achieve your vision. If you are pursuing a worthy vision, something that matters deeply to you, something that you can see clearly, an optimistic vision, and you are driven by confident ambition, you will at times experience suffering. When you fall short, it will be painful.

Todd Henry [00:03:47]:
You will have to walk through difficult times. You'll have to figure things out, wade through uncertainty, find clarity, make decisions in the face of uncertainty. You're going to have to walk through discomfort, failure, in big ways and small in order to pursue that vision. To continue to cultivate brave action, you have to stay rooted in a productive passion, something that makes it all worth it. So we have to understand the deeper why of our pursuit, and I don't mean the deeper why of why we're here on this planet. The deeper why of the vision that you have for the work that you're doing. What outcome are you so deeply committed to that you're willing, if necessary, to walk through discomfort in order to see it achieved? That, friends, that is the root of optimism. It's the root of optimistic vision.

Todd Henry [00:04:34]:
When you have a clear vision of what matters deeply to you and of the person you want to be, that clarity cuts like a knife between bravery and cowardice. That clarity allows us to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. It becomes infectious. Other people gravitate toward that kind of clarity. Other people want to work with you, and they want to follow you. They want to help you achieve that vision. They may not always like you, because sometimes people who are decisive, people who have clarity, are polarizing. And that's okay.

Todd Henry [00:05:05]:
Not everyone will like you, but they will respect you, and they will respond to your clarity with clarity of vision, driven by productive passion and moments of testing. Your decision to do the right thing, even when it's uncomfortable, becomes more bearable. At your testing point, everything you truly believe will be revealed. All right, that's a little excerpt from my latest book, the Brave Habit. The Brave Habit's available wherever books are sold. It's also the email that I sent to our email list last week. So if you want to get articles just like this sent to your email every week, you can subscribe@bravefocusedbrilliant.com bravefocusedbrilliant.com that's the website where you can sign up to get the email newsletter. All right, when we come back in just a minute, we're gonna have Peter Wilken.

Todd Henry [00:05:53]:
He's gonna be talking about his book Dim Sum Strategy, what makes a great brand, where great ideas come from and how we can have them more consistently. We'll be back in just a minute.

Peter Wilken [00:06:15]:
Hi, I'm Peter Wilken. I'm an ex admin from the tail end of the kind of golden era of Mad Men advertising. I run my own brand consultancy and I called the brand company and I'm the author of Dim Sum Strategy and just more recently the Ten Commandments to build a strong brand and steer your ship by.

Todd Henry [00:06:36]:
There's so much that we could go into and I know that this conversation is going to be of tremendous interest to the people in our audience. Could you give us a little bit of you touched on it that you're from the tail end of the Mad Men era of advertising. Can you just give us a little, just a little overview of your career, brands you've worked with, some of the work that you've done and then we'll dive into some of the concepts in the book.

Peter Wilken [00:06:58]:
Okay. So. Well, my last, my last job corporate role was running BVDO Asia Pacific out of Hong Kong. So I looked after their 14 markets, ended up overseeing 1400 people or so whatsoever. I'd worked with Burnett for five years before that running their Southeast Asia operation. 11 years with Ogilvy. The University of Advertising started in London with McCann. So I've been lucky to work with the kind of smorgasbord of clients and great brands and everything you can imagine from Coke and Pepsi to Visa to BMW to Shell to Disney, you name it and be there.

Peter Wilken [00:07:41]:
And and also my brand consulting work. Small and middle sized brands and businesses, but also some huge names. Son and Kai Properties, biggest property developers in the world. A Swire Group Cathay Pacific, you'll know aia, aig, people like that. And I've had the ability, just the good fortune, to work with those agency groups, Burnett's, BBDO and Ogilvy, who were true creative leaders in their markets and have had the privilege of running what was at the time one of the real hot shops in Ogilvy Philippines, a tiny little agency that out punched its weight and became famous for quite a couple of campaigns, was the third most awarded network within Ovilvies. Caught the attention of Sir Martin Sorel, head of wpp, and we became his favorite foxhole to experiment with different ways of doing things by being completely clearly focused on being led by our creative product and being unequivocal in saying we would be creative leaders in the market, we would be driven by the quality of our product, which was BBDO's motto as well, was work. So it was always driven by creative leadership. I was a suit, which is cursed word for the creative world.

Peter Wilken [00:09:08]:
And my superpower, if you like, was the ability to recognize and motivate fantastic creative ideas that may have been discarded and build the confidence and the teamwork of a creative team to deliver that. My curse was not being able to do it myself, ever. Like a theater critic, you can see brilliance in front of you, but you can't do it. So it's very frustrating. But at least once you've come to terms with your own shortfalls and your shortcomings, you can manage it in a way. So. And anyway, so I can relate to that in a way, I am. And if it sounds a little conceited, Todd, but I am very proud that I'm actually one of the few suits that has got a canned gold lion, so I can speak the language.

Todd Henry [00:09:57]:
First of all, I try to teach leaders that your most valuable asset is your intuition. It's your ability to spot ideas, to intuit not just what could be done, but what should be done. And it sounds like that's what you're describing. And I would not in any way say that is not a part of doing the work. I think, as a matter of fact, that might be. Somebody has to greenlight ideas. Somebody has to spot the hidden value in a discarded idea. To your point, somebody has to have the intuition to be able to take the risk.

Todd Henry [00:10:27]:
Did you have a specific process or a way that you looked at things that gave you that unique edge or that unique perspective, the ability to spot those ideas? How do you spot a good idea, I guess is the question I'm trying to ask, or how do you Spot a good idea.

Peter Wilken [00:10:45]:
There are plenty of good ideas out there that do the job. And we'll come back to this. I used to say there were three things that you really needed. A creative idea to recognize what a creative idea is. So many concepts of campaigns don't have that. To have craftsmanship, which is 90% of the work's real quality professionals to craft your work, whether whatever medium it's in, digital, print, TV or whatever. And the last one was courage. To be able to do things that are really different and that shake people up.

Peter Wilken [00:11:20]:
There are very rarely new or brilliant creative ideas, but you can begin to tell the ones that really excite people because they polarize, they scare people to death, and they excite people on the other side. You can put certain processes in place and they're helpful. It's not just down to me or my gut feel. We'd have our creative department review our work and assess what it was against those kind of cre. Is it really going to be breakthrough, relevant, compelling, effective seller? The business in Burnett's, they used to have a wonderful, and I probably still do it, eight ball thing where they would gather all their international work and review it against the criteria. Does it hit an eight ball standard or is it one or two or three out of ten? And that was their way of selecting what work they put into awards, so they didn't waste a lot of money. And so there are processes like that, but even those become a little bit machinated. The true thing about great creative work is, like I said, it really scares you and people scares you, but excites others the minute it starts tipping.

Peter Wilken [00:12:30]:
Great ideas have many fathers, the ones that are not our bastards, and everyone wants to take ownership of it. You can sense when you've got something, when you're rolling with it. But.

Todd Henry [00:12:41]:
But I can.

Peter Wilken [00:12:42]:
I keep telling all my clients. Now, the creative people, big ideas don't start off as big ideas. They start off as small ideas. And like a little seedling in a pot, they need nurturing and they need care and they need water and they need an environment and they need a shield to protect the pecking crows from ripping its leaves off and killing it before it's there. You know this as a creative. How many wonderful ideas are suffocated at birth because they're not given a chance? So I always say, look, let your seedling grow. You don't know whether it's going to grow into a weed, a cactus or a mighty oak, but give it the chance to be planted as a seedling.

Todd Henry [00:13:25]:
I love that way of describing it because I do think you're right. I've often heard it described as piling too much firewood on a fire before the kindling catches and you basically suffocate the fire and. But I like what, I like the way that you describe it better because you don't know what it's going to grow into. You might kill the seedling and you have no idea if it's going to be a mighty oak or if it's going to be a cactus or what it's going to become. I love that. So one of, one of the things that you are known for is being the father of brand DNA of that phrase, that way of talking about brand. What is brand DNA? I've heard that by the way, I've heard that phrase for years and years and years. Never under, never knew the genesis of that.

Peter Wilken [00:14:03]:
I'm flattered that I'm given that label and people know me as that. And I guess with some justification, although can you own that word DNA? We developed this like 25 years ago as part of the brand company. And a brand DNA is basically it's a template for replicating consistent desired experiences to build a strong, differentiated, relevant, credible and compelling brand. And it came about when, you know, me and I colors we set up the brand company and we'd observed that there was millions and millions of dollars spent on what we call the superficial packaging of brands. That is with due respect, visual identity design, fresh websites and even communication advertising I've been spending my last 20 years doing. And not that they're not important, but they're not as important as the substance of the experience of the product or service that you are delivering. And we found that there were tons of strategic models that were pointing towards the superficial things, particularly vision, mission and value statements was used and they were over abused. You would go into a client's office and they'd be up on the back of a glass frame thing and it would be all to be the best in our category, to be the best employers in this.

Peter Wilken [00:15:18]:
Delivering highest quality excellence in all meaningless generic rubbish. Not rubbish, but not differentiating anything. We said, look, we can do better than this. We can create a strategic template that gives something that is much richer and much more like an individual thumbprint for a brand, but still keep it succinct and concise enough on one page that people can make it memorable. So we developed this, what we started off. The DNA has five key components. It has the role, the reason you exist, your raison D'ETRE Simon Sinek's why. But years before, Simon was doing his why, which he's marked in brilliantly.

Peter Wilken [00:16:00]:
Chapo to him and all the rest of it. But we were saying that what's the reason you exist beyond making money to serve your clients and customers in a meaningful way? What are your core beliefs? What are the kind of things that you're going to die in a ditch for? Don't give me honesty, integrity, quality, because if you didn't have any of those, you shouldn't be in business anyway. Give us something that's really different. So roles and beliefs. The core of your DNA was your promise. What's the overarching commitment you make to your most valuable customers, which force you to also do a little bit of what we call practical segmentation. You can't appeal to everybody. What's the benefit that they derive from you delivering against your promise? And then how do you go about it? We called it the spirit or the culture, which is often the way in which you differentiate.

Peter Wilken [00:16:49]:
We then added on things like icons and attributes, things that can trigger the rest of the DNA. But that wrapped up in a kind of blue velvet bag with a gold ribbon, became your cemented positioning. This is what you stood for and stand for. And it remains cemented as a guiding beacon to guide you through the mist and the dark and the storms that inevitably come that will always consistently position you in that way in, in your most valuable customers minds. So that's what our definition of a brand was. Owning a desired territory and key associations in your most valuable customers minds. And the DNA is the blueprint for ensuring that you get there and consistently deliver it.

Todd Henry [00:17:36]:
What would be in your experience? What are some of the bad habits or bad decisions that cause a brand to erode? Because I think a lot of organizations start with a sense of, okay, this is who we are. They have a strong positioning, a strong brand, and then over time the brand kind of erodes. What are some of the bad habits that we get into that cause the brand to erode?

Peter Wilken [00:17:57]:
Trying to please everybody, trying to stretch beyond your elastic limits. The strongest brands actively exclude people who don't believe in what you believe in. Put the barriers up, that's mate time and time again over investment in the superficial, trying to push the things that you can measure. Particularly in this, a new age of digital performance marketing, it's all about what can you measure and if you can't measure it, it's not important. Let's take a look at the click throughs. Even though half of them are bot sites anyway. People are obsessed by that. It is more complex than that.

Peter Wilken [00:18:32]:
People have different thinking preferences. If you're a left modal thinker and you prefer the rational analysis side, which is not unimportant by the way you have, you're going to naturally lean towards that shorter term thing. If you're a right brain person and you're a conceptualizer, a strategizer, an unconventional thinking thing that challenges conventional wisdoms, that pushes things new creative boundaries, you're going to not pay so much attention to that rational measurement. You're going to take more calculated risks. Those are the kind of mistakes that encounter all the time. And trying to jump to executional solutions before having done your strategic homework is probably the biggest one. I call it Ready, Fire, Aim and I see it all the time. People are surprised when they don't get the results they want.

Peter Wilken [00:19:20]:
I use the Lighthouse for my Lighthouse France Gallery Academy online program. Lighthouse is a wonderful metaphor for brands and brand DNA because the buildings that are built with a purpose, built to last a century or more, more often than not on solid foundations of rock. Those core beliefs that we were talking about, that you would die in a ditch for really what your role is, your understanding, but they also, they have a unique beacon of hope out there in the darkness and a foghorn when it's foggy, you can't see. And it says this is who we are. This is what we stand for. This is what we believe in. If you believe in the same things as us, come to us. Come to the light.

Peter Wilken [00:20:05]:
You've come to the right place.

Todd Henry [00:20:14]:
Peter Wilkens book is called Dim Sum Strategy. You can find it wherever books are sold. Hey, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to receive articles every week, you can get them for free to your inbox@bravefocusedbrilliant.com Again, that's bravefocused brilliant.com. my name is Todd Henry. You can find my work, my speaking, my keynotes, my books, all of my work@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.