How Brands Are Built

My final guest for season three of the podcast is Denise Lee Yohn, author of the bestseller,  What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest.  She's also an in-demand keynote speaker, and has appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, NPR, and in the  Wall Street Journal  discussing business and branding issues. Denise cut her teeth in lead strategy roles for t...

My guest on today's episode is  Myra El-Bayoumi , Strategy Director at  Character , a branding and design studio with offices in New York and San Francisco. Before Character, Myra held senior strategy positions at Landor ,  Siegel+Gale , and  Interbrand  (which is where I met her). Myra also holds an MBA from the  University of Toronto Rotman School of Management . Given Myra's experience, I wante...

Alan Brew has been in branding since 1985. In this, episode he takes us back to that year to explain how he got into the industry and what he's seen change since then. Along the way, he's worked with clients like Chevron, Elsevier, Tech Data, Royal Bank of Canada, Delta Airlines, and Huawei, as well as a number of startups and small-to-medium businesses. Now a founding partner at  BrandingBusiness...

Ana Andjelic is a strategy executive with wide-ranging experience on the agency and client sides. Recent roles include Chief Brand Officer at fashion retailer  Rebecca Minkoff  and SVP, Global Strategy Director at  Havas LuxHub . Past agency experience includes time at Droga5, HUGE, The Barbarian Group, and Razorfish. Ana also has a PhD in sociology and has published  dozens of articles  about lux...

Dennis Hahn is Chief Strategy Officer at  Liquid Agency , a brand experience, strategy, marketing, and design agency with offices in San Jose, Portland, and New York. Dennis is responsible for the methodologies Liquid uses to address the strategic challenges of clients like John Deere, HP, Microsoft, Motorola, Nasdaq, PayPal, and Walmart. During the episode, you'll hear us reference a  2013 video...

Caren Williams and I met in 2012 at Interbrand San Francisco, where she was a Director of Strategy. Caren's since become an independent brand consultant, working with brands like Google, Sunrun, and Sandbox VR. One reason I wanted to talk to Caren is because of her diversity of experience, which includes an MBA from University of Texas, managing brands at consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms like P...

Fabian Geyrhalter is the principal and founder of  FINIEN , a Los Angeles-based branding agency. Fabian's also a prolific writer; you can find articles he's authored in  Forbes, Inc., The Washington Post, Entrepreneur,  and  Mashable.  He's also written two books:  How to Launch a Brand ,  and his latest,  Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand . Fabian and I talked about...

Today's guest is Ken Pasternak, President of  Two by Four , a full service advertising agency based in Chicago. On the episode, however, you'll hear me introduce Ken as President and COO of  Marshall Strategy , a San Francisco-based brand identity and strategy firm he cofounded in 2002. A few months ago, Two by Four  acquired  Marshall Strategy, so Ken's role changed a bit. We recorded this conver...

Today's guest is Jeremy Miller, author of the bestselling book,  Sticky Branding ,  and founder of a strategic branding and business development consultancy with the same name:  Sticky Branding . One thing that makes Jeremy different from most strategists I've talked to is the way he got into this business: He was working for his family's company, a Toronto-based recruiting firm, when the business...

This past season, I had a great time reconnecting with old peers like  Miriam Stone ,  Tim Riches , and  Erminio Putignano , as well as getting to talk to some other branding experts I'd previously only known through their writing and speaking engagements: Allen Adamson Gareth Kay Adam Morgan Laura Ries Marty Neumeier David Aaker To all my guests, thank you for joining me on the podcast and sharin...

He's been called "The Father of Modern Branding." If you've ever read  anything  about branding or brand strategy, my guest today requires no introduction. I'm talking to  David Aaker , author of over  a dozen books  and hundreds of articles about marketing and branding,  Professor Emeritus  at the  Haas School of Business , UC Berkeley, and Vice-Chair at  Prophet , a global marketing and branding...

Today's guest is  Tim Riches , Group Strategy Director at  Principals  in Melbourne. I met Tim in Singapore, at FutureBrand. When I joined FutureBrand's strategy team in 2011, Tim was running the Singapore office and serving as Chief Growth Officer for all of Asia Pacific. He left shortly after I arrived, but in the few months we overlapped, Tim made a big impression on me. He's a fast-talking, no...

This week's guest is  Miriam Stone , an independent strategist who works with agencies around the Bay Area, including lifestyle branding agency Noise 13, where she's Strategy Director. In addition to her brand consulting work, Miriam's helped create and develop brands from inside the organization, as a Co-Founder of  Swing Left , a national political movement, and previously as VP of Business Deve...

This week's guest is  Allen Adamson , Co-founder and Managing Partner of  Metaforce , a boutique, hybrid marketing services firm focused on growth strategies. Allen was previously Chairman, North America of  Landor Associates , and has written four books: BrandSimple : How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed BrandDigital : Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World The Edge : 50 Ti...

Erminio Putignano  is founding partner and managing director of  PUSH , a brand strategy and design firm based in Melbourne, Australia. He's also an adjunct professor at the School of Economics, Finance, and Marketing at  RMIT University . When I met Erminio, we were both working for  FutureBrand , where he was managing director of Australian operations and I was strategy director for Southeast As...

When Adam Morgan wrote  Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders  in 1999, he introduced a new term to the marketing, advertising, and branding worlds: "challenger brand." Avis, with their "When you're only No. 2, you try harder" campaign from the 60s, is the most commonly cited example of this concept. But Adam, also the founder of a brand consultancy named  ea...

Gareth Kay believes brands should show, not just tell Gareth Kay is cofounder of Chapter, a San Francisco-based creative studio. Before Chapter, he was Chief Strategy Officer at Goodby Silverstein & Partners , the advertising agency known for work such as 1993's iconic "Got Milk?" campaign for the California Milk Processors Board. I was excited to talk to Gareth because, while he's a strategist, h...

The concept of brand positioning was introduced to the marketing and advertising world in the 70s and 80s by Al Ries and Jack Trout in a series of Ad Age articles and a subsequent book titled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. (If you haven't read it, Positioning is definitely recommended reading for anyone in the branding world.) Today's episode features Laura Ries . Laura is Al Ries's daught...

Within the branding community,  Marty Neumeier  needs no introduction. But just for good measure, here's a quick rundown: - Director of Transformation for the  Liquid Agency - Author of  The Brand Gap ,  hailed as one of the best 100 Business Books of All Time - Also wrote  Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands ,  and  Brand A-Z   Marty and I kicked things off talking about his l...

Today's episode marks the end of season one, but certainly not the end of this podcast. Plans for season two are already underway, and I'm very excited about some of the guests who've already signed on. But I won't be ready to release those episodes for a little while, so…to make sure you're the first to know when they're available, please make sure you've signed up for the newsletter at HowBrands...

Eli Altman runs  A Hundred Monkeys , a naming and branding agency in Berkeley, California. A Hundred Monkeys was founded by Eli's dad, Danny Altman, in 1990. Eli grew up helping his dad come up with name ideas, and the second he was old enough to sound like an adult on the phone, he was taking on freelance naming projects. In addition to running A Hundred Monkeys, Eli wrote the Amazon bestselling...

Scott Milano is Founder and Managing Director of Tanj , a boutique brand language firm specializing in names, taglines, stories, messaging and voice strategies, and copy. Scott has over 15 years of experience in verbal identity and has worked on names like Scott's worked on some big brand names, like Nintendo Wii, Ally Bank, Sony Bravia, and Film Struck, among many others. Scott and I talked about...

Laurel Sutton is a co-founder of Catchword , a Bay Area naming firm behind names like Asana , Vudu , and many of the activity trackers from Fitbit , like Zip, One, Flex, and Force. She is also the Information Officer for the American Name Society ; but Laurel's not only a naming expert. She's also a trained linguist, with a Master's Degree in linguistics from UC Berkeley . Laurel's expertise in na...

Jonathan Bell is Managing Director of  Want Branding , a brand consultancy with offices in Miami, Denver, and New York, and clients like  Bose ,  Royal Caribbean , and  Call of Duty . Jonathan has about 30 years of experience in the branding industry, during which he's completed over 800 projects and worked with over a third of the companies in the Fortune 100—companies like  Google ,  Apple ,  Co...

On this episode, I spoke with Amanda Peterson, formerly the Head of Naming and Leader of Brand Management at Google . While there, she helped establish Alphabet , Google's parent company, as well as sister companies like Waymo , Alphabet's self-driving car company. Before Google, Amanda headed up naming at HP —before I held that role—and also worked at Logitech and Landor . She recently left Silic...