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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to How Brands Are Built, where branding professionals get into the details of what they do and how they do it. I'm your host, Rob Myerson. Thanks for listening. Today's guest is Alex Foss, a market research and customer insights professional with deep experience in brand. Alex and I met at Interbrand San Francisco, where we overlapped for a few years starting in 2012. Alex was in the strategy department when I joined, but as you'll hear in our conversation, he moved over to the analytics team at some point. We worked together on a handful of projects while there, and I immediately appreciated the careful consideration and analytical thinking Alex brings to everything he works on. Since Interbrand, we've had a few more opportunities to collaborate, two of which we'll get into on this episode. Alex is always so thoughtful and articulate. He's always a joy to talk to. I think you'll like this conversation. Here it is. Alex Foss, thanks for coming on the show.
- [01:06]
B
Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
- [01:08]
A
Let's dive right in. I want to ask you a few questions about your career because I think you have an especially interesting career path. Then we're going to talk a little bit about naming research and a bit about designing Brand Identity, the sixth edition that you helped out with. But to get us started, you know, we worked together at Interbrand. That's where we met Interbrand San Francisco. I was working in verbal Identity. You were on the brand strategy team, but after Interbrand, you kind of took a bit of a sidestep. So instead of doing brand strategy either in house or at another agency, you went to Adobe and you joined the research and Insights team. I'm not sure exactly what they call it at Adobe and you've kind of been in that path ever since. So I'm curious what prompted the shift from strategy to research, if you do see that as a shift? And was there kind of a moment that you realized this is what I want to do instead of more sort of traditional brand strategy work?
- [02:02]
B
Yeah, I should say that the shift actually started before I moved to Adobe. So fairly early on as a brand strategist at Interbrand, I got to work alongside some of our brilliant colleagues on brand strategy projects that had quantitative research components to them. You know, obviously we ran a lot of brand tracking studies, but Inner Brand also has a big brand evaluation practice and I was able to just as like a pure play brand strategist and you know, as we do at agencies, resources get moved around and I got to participate on those projects and I loved it. I Loved that I was helping create new knowledge. I loved the feeling of having evidence to back up what I was recommending to clients, rather than just this sort of like finger in the air thing that it felt like sometimes. And I loved feeling like I was getting better at a process and really feeling like I was stretching a part of my abilities that I hadn't before. And it just got me really excited to go to work and get the work done. And so while I was still at Interbrand, I decided to move into the strategy and analytics practice there where I basically, you know, started doing Insights projects full time. And that's actually what got me plugged into the Adobe relationship and then ultimately onto Adobe's marketing and customer Insights team.
- [03:38]
A
Got it. I want to come back to something you said about evidence, but before we do that, you just mentioned that the shift was not only from strategy to research, which I guess happened while you were at Interbrand. We're still at Interbrand. I think that's after I had left, but also obviously a shift from agency to client side. So what did working in house feel like for you? How was it different? Obviously it's a much, much bigger company than any agency, even though Interbrand is quite a large branding consultancy. So what did that sort of teach you and what did you learn making that switch?
- [04:09]
B
Yeah, so it was a profound shift and one that took me a while to transition to. I think probably the biggest shift in going to the client side was how much more it requires you to focus on the business problem that you're actually being asked to solve. Like, I found that agency side, generally we were on the hook to deliver against a brief and we had to do that with high quality and rigor and we had to be efficient about it and ideally add value that delights the client so that they call us back and be thought of as thought leaders to them. And all of that is great and certainly has its virtues, but on the client side, it's sort of my job as someone who actually commissions research vendors and suppliers now to sort of like actually write that brief that clearly articulates the business problem and make sure that that problem is one worth solving against all of the other strategic priorities for the business. And that that's a problem where I can actually have impact with internal stakeholders and that there's a path to intercepting the decisions that they need to make. And doing that role well requires a completely different skill set and approach from what sort of you're trained to do on the agency side. And I feel like I'VE been doing this now, this client side insights role for about 10 years now and I still feel like I have a lot to learn about how to do it well. But as far as what it's taught me about branding itself, to the extent that research is involved in branding decisions, the biggest thing it taught me is that research is just one of many different inputs that marketers and marketing leaders ultimately use to make decisions. And I think like the best and most robust research in the world will only take that decision so far.
- [06:22]
A
Yeah, I want to come back to that word evidence and you sort of contrasted that to a finger in the air. So without necessarily trying to go negative, I'm just curious whether you feel like brand strategy work is still too often done without evidence. Sort of. What is? Not only what is the role of evidence in creating strong strategies, but from where you sit, what is the sort of state of play right now? There's this whole evidence backed movement coming out of Ehrenberg Bass in Australia that is shifting the way a lot of marketers and branding people think. But maybe arguably not quickly enough in some parts of the world, especially the United States, other people might push back on that and feel like that some sort of art form of strategy and branding is being lost at the expense of this evidence backed push. What are your feelings on that and do you have a sense of whether there are trends or anything that you think is interesting that you're watching?
- [07:22]
B
Yeah. So I'll say that it's hard to overstate the contribution that the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and the work of Byron Sharp and Jenny Romanyuk and Lesbinet and Peter Field, like all those folks have had on the brand strategy and marketing industries. And their insights also like are not new. They existed when I started in the industry and I'm only, I feel like only have recently discovered them. So I think it's actually a really interesting time to just be a pure play brand strategist because there is now so much strong academic literature and peer reviewed work out there that you don't need to be a researcher necessarily to understand and make use of. You can sort of absorb and internalize principles around category entry points, for instance, or around mental availability or in media planning, for instance, the benefits of spending such that your share of voice exceeds your share of market and these kinds of general principles that are grounded in how consumers or how your prospective customers actually think and participate in commercial markets. And all of that is just super, super helpful for guiding the craft in my opinion. Like we no longer have to completely make up how we think brands work. Because there's good information out there on how they work that can guide our creative briefs, that can guide how we engage with clients, and we can bring thought leadership and perspective and an intellectual framework to some of the questions that we might get from clients.
- [09:17]
A
Yeah, I love that. That we don't have to make it up anymore. Which of course implies that we have or had been making it up for a long time. And it's a really interesting point that you make about how long the Ehrenberg Bass research and the research that preceded that institute has been available and out there. And yet. Yeah. When I started in the industry, a little before, I think you started, and then even when you started, it wasn't talked about. And so to the degree that's been this sort of wake up call or like a bomb that's been detonated, that's forcing a lot of people to acknowledge maybe some different ways of thinking about branding. It's like a slow motion bomb that still goes off every day everywhere. You know, for someone that's sort of finally waking up to this, it's really kind of interesting to watch.
- [10:04]
B
Yeah. And to be fair, like, a lot of the branding agencies have their own frameworks that they have either developed internally because they were trying to fill what they perceived was a true knowledge gap, not just for them, but, but for the industry and build a lot of their IP around those frameworks. And it can add unnecessary complexity to a client's question, where it puts consultants in a position where they have to sell a framework that not only doesn't perfectly apply to the client's problem, but may not actually be connected to how consumers actually behave. And also, like, doing this work is extremely expensive and time consuming.
- [10:53]
A
Yeah.
- [10:54]
B
And agencies are also in the position where they need to add value to clients quickly and they can't wait around for it to do the empirical work to establish the foundations that will hold up across all clients.
- [11:07]
A
Yeah. So speaking of this work, meaning research, I suppose, broadly speaking, market research. Let's talk about some market research that you and I partnered on recently. So I had this question about naming research as a namer who talks to a lot of namers, who names things for clients. I'm often in a position where I'm asked about, you know, should we conduct research to figure out which of these names to use or whether there are potentially problems with any of these names that we might use. And I had these conversations with other namers and it sort of felt like it came to a head in the last year or two where just it kept coming up over and over again. And I reached out to you, along with Nina Beckhart at the naming group, and we had some great conversations about how you think about naming research. And then a while later, I decided to conduct some research on this. So it's research on research, asking people what they think of naming research, how they do it, how they think it should be done. And we did a little study. We got, I think, about 60 respondents. So it's not a huge number, which maybe calls into question how much we should trust the results. I'll let you speak to that. We tried to get both namers and research professionals like you to respond. And then to the degree that there are some people that kind of identify as both namers and research professionals, we had a few brand strategists respond as well. And we just asked them these questions. And I wanted to kind of go through a little of what you felt we learned from that. So. And just to be clear, it was sort of my research project. You looked at the questionnaire, gave me some feedback on it. Where you really got involved was in the analysis of the results. So I'm saying that just because I don't want you to take the blame if the questions were poorly worded or something like that. Your involvement was mostly on the analysis side. So I guess when I sent you the results and you took a first pass at just sort of, what did we learn here? What jumped out to you about the way people think about naming research, all these questions that we were asking?
- [13:11]
B
Yeah, I have to say, the thing that actually jumped out at me was a quote. It was a verbatim comment was left in an open end in the survey. It just happened to be the one that appeared on my screen as I opened the spreadsheet. And it was from a highly experienced naming consultant who expressed a great deal of skepticism about the value of naming research. And I actually have the quote pulled up here, and I'd love to read it.
- [13:45]
A
Yeah, yeah, please do.
- [13:47]
B
They said until somebody proves it works, I would distrust it all the time. Google, Apple, Vice, Virgin, Yahoo, Monster, Caterpillar. None of those giant brands would have survived research. And the reason that stuck with me was because, like, I had just finished a naming project at my previous role in which I used some of these. The more advanced methodologies that we tested in this survey. And that sort of realization just really made me check myself. There are experts in this field who probably know a lot more about naming than I do.
- [14:26]
A
And.
- [14:27]
B
And how they might perceive some of my, some of my work. So that was a, that was a nice bit of a tasty piece of humble pie. But I think, you know, we talked earlier about evidence based marketing and Ehrenberg Bass Institute's work, and I actually think some of their work around the concept of distinctiveness and making sure that your brand is easily remembered provides a framework for understanding why and how those brands got to be so big. It's not in spite of their weird names, it's perhaps because of it to some extent. And so that comment was just a good reminder to me that if, if you're going to do naming research, especially quantitative naming research, then the questions you're asking are bounded by the role that a name actually plays in customers memories and their behaviors. And I suspect that this individual has seen a lot of disappointing research on that score.
- [15:26]
A
Yeah, and I should probably sort of contextualize that. I don't know who said it, but that comment is indicative of, I would say, broadly speaking, the naming community's perspective on naming research. I think it is, broadly speaking, negative. I think the more sort of senior or seasoned you get in looking at the world of namers out there, the more that's likely to be the case for probably a few different reasons that we could guess. And I think maybe that's changing a little bit, but I'm not sure that's part of what this research was kind of trying to figure out. And then obviously researchers tend to think that there's a lot of value in research even for something like naming. And so I was curious to see whether we would find that in the results. And then obviously, more importantly, I'm curious, like, what do we do about that? Is there a great way to do naming research or even just a better way to do it? Are there terrible ways to do it that we should stop doing it? So I want to talk about a few things that we did learn. We're not going to walk through the whole study, but I do hope to publish it soon. One thing that we learned was that experts seem to overwhelmingly say that research should inform decisions, but not make them. I'd love your take on that and whether that's a consistent finding or sentiment that you have about research. Is it specific to naming? Are there good ways of talking about research with your clients, meaning even the people inside your organizations to try to help them use research in the right way?
- [16:57]
B
Yeah, it's definitely not specific to naming. I think one thing that you notice a lot when working client side is that again, you're like marketing leaders and your stakeholders need to make decisions with so many different inputs. And research is only one of those inputs. And talking about naming specifically, some of those inputs might be portfolio architecture, SEO, legal availability, packaging, how many characters can you fit on a single line of text in the app Store? Implications for other business units. Maybe there are internal politics involved. Do the product and engineering teams like it? All of these factors play into how branding professionals, client side actually make decisions about names. And the best analogy I can think of is like buying a house. That for every hard and quantitative metric about a house, the square footage, the R value of the thermal envelope, I
- [18:12]
A
have no idea what that is.
- [18:13]
B
You've got five or six others. There are lots of things about a house you can quantify, but for each one of those things, there are five or six other soft metrics. Like, do I like the neighbors? Do I like the neighborhood? Is the view nice? And you have to consider all of those things because it's an enormous investment and you're going to be stuck with it for a while. So I think it's frankly something that everybody who's involved in naming initiatives should be reminded of so that A marketers aren't disappointed when they realize that research doesn't provide all the answers and B, so that researchers don't feel ignored when their stakeholder doesn't choose the top performing name based on research.
- [18:57]
A
That's a great point and a great metaphor. I mean, maybe I'm just speaking from personal experience, but with homes, I feel like often those soft metrics, so to speak, are going to trump the numbers because you can look at the house on paper and feel like it's the right choice and you go do a walkthrough and it feels wrong. I mean, it's too big of a decision. You're probably not going to pull the trigger on that. Whereas I do think there's a real bias in naming and probably in other market research contexts, that the second you put a percentage next to something, it feels more real. And so even if you have, you know, marketers that you trust telling you that strategically we think this is the right name and this is the wrong name, if you then say, but consumers, you know, 84% of them like this one and only 73% like that one, it feels more comfortable. It feels safer to just say, I'm going to go with the numbers on this because, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to look dumb and make the wrong decision.
- [19:55]
B
Thank you for that vote of Confidence in my profession.
- [20:00]
A
I wasn't saying it's the right thing to do. I just. If it's what people do, I'm not sure whether it's the right thing to do.
- [20:06]
B
Well, I think research and insights professionals have a responsibility here, which is that when we are involved in naming research that we have to acknowledge this reality. When we deliver our insights and put the research and those numbers in appropriate context with all of those other factors, that's what allows us as consultants to show up as someone who's helping the client or the stakeholder make a decision as opposed to just providing the ingredient to one.
- [20:40]
A
Right, right. So another thing that we found, another pattern that we saw in the data was we asked about how influential research should be. And as we kind of just alluded to with that namer's quote, Namors tended to think that research should be less influential. Researchers tend to think that it either is influential, as influential as it should be right now, or it should be even more influential. And then we also saw when we tried to sort of cut it by how experienced people were more, highly experienced people were more likely to think that research should be less influential, less experienced thought it should be more influential, seeing that in the data. And also, you know, I did say this was a pretty low n. And so anytime you're slicing and dicing with a small number of respondents, it gets a little dicey.
- [21:27]
B
We're in firmly directional qualitative territory right now.
- [21:30]
A
Yeah, well, and so that's sort of my question is how do you interpret the results? And so that's, I guess the first part of your answer is that it's not, it's not going to be statistically significant, right?
- [21:40]
B
Yeah, but we'll make some very confident sounding inferences. Anyway, that was a really interesting finding for me as well. Was this disconnect between what researchers and namers think and what less experienced and more experienced people think. And with regards to the nemer and researcher dynamic, there's I think, an obvious like, everyone thinks their own work matters more dynamic to it. And there's perhaps something to that. Researchers believe in research and nemers believe in the creative process. But I think it, it goes a little bit deeper than just the professional bias. The experienced namers aren't necessarily saying that research is worthless. They're saying that they've seen its limitations play out over and over. They talk about like legitimate research concerns, like familiarity bias, where respondents will just gravitate towards safe and descriptive names and, you know, penalize ones that they're unfamiliar with or that seem outlandish or unfamiliar to them. And more experienced namers have also watched research override good creative instincts like you, like you mentioned earlier, where they just, they get a lot of great strategic advice but then choose the one against all of those recommendations that happens to have a larger number associated with it. Meanwhile, the less experienced non namers seem to have the opposite concerns. They're worried about the highest paid person in the room overriding evidence. And it seems like they've seen executives go with their gut instincts rather than what the market is actually telling them. I think what's happening is that both groups have been burned just by different things.
- [23:47]
A
Everyone's just bitter, right?
- [23:50]
B
I've seen enough.
- [23:51]
A
Yes. Yeah. So we also did ask a pretty detailed question about different methodologies that can be used to test naming. And I guess just broadly, was there anything interesting in terms of what specific tools or techniques, best practices, specifically how to do naming research? Are there some tools that we should avoid even though they've been used historically? Are there other things that we should be pursuing that might be interesting for people to learn about?
- [24:20]
B
Yeah, in terms of what the research points to as best practice, I think there's generally consensus on what is typically done and what people would recommend doing. Those techniques include just getting open ended feedback, head to head rankings and individually evaluating names. So those three techniques really point to more qualitative assessments about a name that you know, don't necessarily mean you're assigning a percentage or some quantitative value to each name. And these are also fairly straightforward methodologies to pursue. They're not that expensive. You can do them with fairly small sample sizes and fairly unsophisticated recruiting and you can still derive a lot of value and get a world class name out of it and have your approach be more or less unimpeachable.
- [25:28]
A
And then I have one really specific question because it's kind of haunted me. We were talking about the way namers think. I don't know, there's a little bit of, I don't know, lore or just kind of. There are phrases that I feel like every namer says. And so one thing that we often say is that a name that is polarizing or a name that makes you uncomfortable at first can be one of the best names going back to the list that you gave earlier or that namer supplied of Caterpillar, Yahoo, Google, I can't remember what was on that person's list. But these names that seem crazy and yet were or are quite successful. And so I'm Wondering either from this study or just in your own experience whether there is evidence that some people hating a name and some people loving a name on a survey or even just within a decision making group is a strong signal of that name's quality or how we should interpret that versus everyone feeling kind of good about a name, but nobody really loving or hating it. What's your thought on that distinction?
- [26:33]
B
Yeah, I disagree with the point of view that a good name is a polarizing one. The questions that come to mind for me is what's the business value of a polarizing name? What's the right amount of polarization and polarized on what dimension is it based on what people like? Is it based on whether it evokes a certain feeling or perception or not? It's one of those things that is really undefined and can be whatever the branding consultant or the naming consultant wants it to mean. And I think at best your brand won't be recognized by your buyers consistently or understood by your buyers consistently, which Ehrenberg Bass Institute would suggest is a problem. And at worst you're actively alienating a material portion of your market who won't buy your product simply because they don't like your name. And so I have to think that there's a needle one can thread where a name is both distinctive and not polarizing and evokes a more positive perception amongst a larger share of your market.
- [27:53]
A
Yeah, and you make a great point about polarization. On what dimension is it really love? Hate? Is it just sort of pure sentiment or is it on some other dimension I suppose matters quite a bit. I think the. Well, I know the argument that some namers will make is that there is either really or theoretically some correlation between how memorable something is and how polarizing it is. And so it may be sort of short term pain for long term gain in that even if it's off putting to some subset of your audience at launch that you know, if you're one of those lucky businesses that survives for three or five or 10 or 20 years, that it'll start to pay dividends. Because that slightly off putting nature of it for some reason also seems to make it a stickier name versus something that is benign but forgettable. And so there is some research that supports that theory. I don't know how convincing or sort of definitive it is, but it's a. Yeah, it's an interesting thought experiment.
- [28:54]
B
Perhaps the way to think about it is again like what's the outcome we're trying to optimize for in choosing A great name. Is it polarization in itself or is it memorability? And a highly memorable name might come with a certain amount of polarization to it, but if we optimize for polarization, then we may be left with a name that's either not as memorable as alternatives we could have chosen, or in the worst case scenario, one that's actually alienating potential buyers.
- [29:30]
A
Yeah, that's a good point. So let's shift gears and talk a little bit about Designing Brand Identity, the sixth edition. So another thing that we have collaborated on was this book and you, like many others, are an expert that I called upon because in working with Alina to revise this edition, there were many things that I myself am not an expert in that Alina is not an expert in, but that we called on experts to sort of weigh in. And one of them was this section on market research. It was five to 10 pages about, you know, different sections, sort of an overview of what is market research, and then kind of zeroing in on a few different aspects of it. I'd love to just hear a little bit about it from your experience. When I sent you those pages from the 5th edition and asked you to review and give me your sense of what deserved to be updated in this next edition, what was kind of your initial reaction? What stood out to you as something that should be updated?
- [30:29]
B
My initial reaction was, oh, wow, this is how you know you've made it in the field is when you're, when you're invited to start editing textbooks. That's the top of the Ziggy.
- [30:41]
A
I'm glad, I'm so glad to hear that was your, your emotional reaction.
- [30:46]
B
But yeah, I, I think that in reading the spreads on, on market research, I think that the first reaction I had was really to just try and sharpen the guidance around being really clear about why you're conducting research. And of course, like, this is a fairly broad ranging reference resource in designing brand identity. And it can be really hard to anticipate all of the reasons, all of the reasons why someone might want to do market research in a branding scenario. But I do think it's important as the person commissioning the research to be clear on that reason.
- [31:30]
A
So you may have just answered this question. I suppose this is probably part of it. But if a young strategist or researcher picks up this sixth edition of Designing Brand Identity and reads these pages that you helped update for this edition, what are you kind of hoping that they'll learn about research or take away from it, that they could actually use in their next job.
- [31:55]
B
Yeah. Well, I hope that they take away a sense of for how powerful research can be in an organization or how influential a market researcher can be to an organization. Because being the person that can bring clarity to an ambiguous or difficult decision is a really exciting and rewarding position to be in and allows you to engage on topics that are like way above your pay grade. And I think that's really fun and exciting. And I don't say that to toot my own horn, but no, I hear you.
- [32:33]
A
For a young person, they may not have the experience to draw from, but if they're the research person, they have the facts to draw from instead. So they can have value in that room with maybe far more experienced people because they're the ones that did the research. And so maybe they're the only ones that can say, well, here's what consumers are actually saying or whatever the, you know, the research topic was.
- [32:56]
B
Absolutely. Or when you get wind of the fact that executives are trying to make a big decision about, you know, do we enter this market or do we launch this product or do we shift our strategy in X, Y and z ways. You can come to that conversation armed with an evidence backed point of view and contextualize your insights with what leaders are thinking about and staying up at night are wrestling with. You can add a tremendous amount of value to the business. And that is just really exciting. It's very gratifying to know when you've succeeded at that. And I'll say, like you don't. Successes are not a given. There are plenty of failures too, but it's really fun when they come.
- [33:47]
A
Yeah, I mean, to bring the conversation sort of full circle. I feel like you could say a similar thing about being a strategy consultant. That one of the things that I think I liked about it and that a lot of people like about it early in their career is that it gets you into these, like you said, conversations that are sort of above your pay grade. You may be some 20 something kid talking to a 50 something CEO and actually having value if you're doing your job right and doing it well just by virtue of sort of what you're doing, what you specialize in the research that you've done. Because I think, you know, even if you're not a trained researcher, maybe you're just doing a competitive audit or something and you're bringing new information to the table and hopefully new thinking to the table. So yeah, I hear you and I think research is a really powerful piece of that.
- [34:34]
B
Yeah.
- [34:35]
A
So let's wrap up with just a few questions. What's interesting to you in the research slash branding world right now? What's something you're reading or watching or paying attention to?
- [34:46]
B
Well, working at Anthropic, I've got Claude on my mind and AI broadly. I've been now using chatbots and various AI tools for the last couple of years and I'm really excited to see all the ways that AI can help market researchers do new kinds of research and solve new problems in a fraction of the time that it might have taken us otherwise. Over the last few years, you know, I, I've just really enjoyed experimenting with these tools and implementing them into my own process and work and, and finding new, new ways to leverage them not just as an operational and executional partner, but also a thinking partner. I don't know everything about market research and research methodologies and having a tool like Claude at my disposal to help me think through some methodological problems is just an incredibly valuable resource. That's the thing that I'm probably thinking the most about is how can I make best use of this technology and, and where is it going to go and how should the practice evolve?
- [36:02]
A
Yeah, it's on everyone's, everyone's mind, but I can only imagine from where you sit you have an interesting perspective on it. I'll definitely want to check in with you on that in a year or two as you learn more and as the technology continues to shift. Are there thinkers, researchers, writers, whether they're in the branding world or not, that are influencing how you think about your work other than Claude?
- [36:27]
B
Claude writes a lot of content. I, I have to give a shout out to Vemer Snyders, whom you introduced me to a few years ago and I recently picked up his book Eat your Greens and that is just one of the best collections of evidence based marketing literature that's out there. And I, it's like the essays are digestible, they're sharp, they have conflicting points of view. So like it really, it encourages you to balance the evidence in the same, in the same text, which is, which is really interesting. But overall like they're just like very insightful and actionable and there's something in there for everybody, whether you're a researcher or a, you know, a brand strategist that, that you can take away from it. So I've really enjoyed reading those essays.
- [37:22]
A
That's great. Yeah, that's a cool book. It's a collection of essays from many luminaries. I have it somewhere here in the office. It's A fun read. And it's nice also that you should eat your greens, you should read the whole thing, but you can also kind of pick and choose based on what's most interesting or most relevant to you because of the way it's written and put together. So, yeah, that's a great one. Last question is just any advice for people getting into the branding world or the research world? You know, we talked about your career path and some of the shifts along the way. So what have you learned that you might pass down to the next generation of young people getting into this or sort of a similar career?
- [38:02]
B
Yeah, I'll say my biggest piece of advice is to read. Read each of greens, but also read lots of other things and seek out people in the industry who are publishing in academic or industry journals and try and follow along with the people who are engaged in healthy scientific debates about how marketing actually works, because that will give you a framework and a vocabulary to bring to these conversations with stakeholders and clients so that you can actually help them solve problems and act as a marketer who's an expert in research and consumer behavior, rather than just a pure play researcher. Because I think the latter is pretty well commoditized at this point. And certainly AI is getting better and better at all of the executional aspects of it. But the AI cannot bring, does not bring an intellectual framework to these problems. You have to provide that framework. And whether you provide it to the AI to operate within those constraints or you add it as a layer on top of that is up to you. But I think that making sure that you have a point of view that's grounded in the literature will serve you well. And then you can always adapt to new methodologies and new tools that are out there and learn more about advanced analytics and things like that. But the most fun and the most valuable parts of the industry lie in just the foundational knowledge.
- [39:47]
A
Yeah. It reminds me of an interview I did a long time ago with Tim Riches, a colleague of mine from Australia, where he said it's our responsibility as consultants to be across that work, which I guess we say in the US but it struck me as sort of an Australianism to he just said we don't have to read everything necessarily. We don't have to understand deeply how the sort of science works behind some of these Aaron Bird Bass papers, maybe, but we have to be across it. We have to sort of have a sense of what it means and why it's important. Yeah. I love that you talked earlier about the Finger in the Air and I do think that brand strategy, for better or worse, for a long time has been, it's almost like a word of mouth training ground. You learned how to do it from the people who did it before you, and they just sort of taught you on the job and talked to you about how to do it.
- [40:39]
B
A lot of osmosis.
- [40:40]
A
Yeah. And even some of the stuff that you could read was, you know, it was sort of like an oral history written down, but it was just like one author's opinion on what mattered. And a lot of it was. Yeah. The conventional wisdom that Byron Sharp likes to poke fun at. And rightly so. I think even more than reading, I think I love what you said about sort of seeking out people who are having intellectually honest debates about the right ways to do these things and sort of surrounding yourself with those people and their thinking is a great place to start. And maybe never knowing the perfect answer to any of these questions, but just sort of swimming in the content around like what might be the right answer, what's a good way to think about this? And being familiar with that is a huge, a huge win and a huge way to grow in your career.
- [41:29]
B
Right. It also makes the job easier, I'll say, because you're not reinventing the wheel every time.
- [41:34]
A
Right? Yeah. Great point. Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Love talking to you as always and looking forward to keeping in touch, hearing things, how things go at Anthropic and what you learn there. We'll talk about AI maybe in a couple years if there's a seventh edition of Designing Brand Identity. I'll want you to weigh in with everything new that you've learned about the best ways to do research. So thanks for being here and I'll chat with you soon.
- [42:02]
B
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [42:05]
A
Thanks for listening to How Brands Are Built. If you like the episode, please leave a rating and review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about Alex and his work, find him on LinkedIn@LinkedIn.com INS Alexander Foss, F O S S We'll link to his profile in the show Notes. We'll also link to the results of that research on naming research that we talked about as soon as it's ready to be shared. Follow me on social media or sign up for the How Brands Are Built newsletter to be notified when it is. To learn more about Designing brand Identity, you can visit dbibook.com or find the book on Amazon or wherever you buy books. How Brands Are built is a production of Heirloom Agency, Inc. Our theme music is by Eisha Erskine Project. I'm Rob Meyerson, and I'll talk to you next time.