The Brand Builder's Playbook // Smart Spend: Mastering Media Mix for Maximum Impact // With Damon Berger (GAP)

Summary

The CMO Podcast — Brand Builder’s Playbook: “Smart Spend: Mastering Media Mix for Maximum Impact”

Guests: Damon Berger (GAP), Ryan Barker, Kate Lamberton
Host: Jim Stengel
Release Date: November 28, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of The CMO Podcast dives into the art and science of optimizing a brand’s marketing mix for maximum ROI, with a focus on media allocation, marketing mix modeling (MMM), and balancing brand building with performance marketing. Jim Stengel guides the conversation with Damon Berger, Head of Consumer Digital Engagement at Gap, along with regular co-hosts and marketing experts. Together, they unpack how leading brands like Gap thrive by using data-driven models, cultural relevance, and a strong sense of brand DNA.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Brand DNA and Resilience in Legacy Brands

[00:31–04:38]

• Kate Lamberton uses higher education as a case study to explore how legacy brands react to external pressures and the factors that keep their brand perceptions stable amid shifting contexts.
• Search data on higher ed institutions shows resilience despite political and economic challenges.
• Media mix in higher ed is evolving, with student voices and earned content now playing a larger role:

  “Our students are the ones creating the media... who owns what’s going on as there is with all earned media.” (Kate Lamberton, 04:23)

2. Playbooks in Practice: Subaru & Procter & Gamble

[04:48–08:17]

• Ryan Barker highlights Subaru’s effective micro-targeting and clear brand focus, creating strong emotional (dogs, family, outdoors) and rational appeals for their core audience.
• Jim Stengel shares how P&G pioneered cross-functional adoption of marketing ROI, becoming a role model in leveraging marketing mix modeling (MMM) and integrating AI for agile decision-making.
• Kate Lamberton: P&G’s scale and scope for experimentation are core strengths:

  “They do have the scope to experiment until they find the best answer… You can watch changes made in one brand translate into success across a set.” (Kate Lamberton, 07:43)

3. MMMs, ROI, and the Rebirth of Measurement

[08:17–18:34]

• MMM Defined:
  Kate explains MMM as the statistical modeling of product, price, place, and promotion to link marketing tactics to outcomes (e.g., sales), and notes its complexity.

  “It’s not completely not a fight club, Jim; we are trying to figure out what’s strongest and what’s going to win…” (Kate Lamberton, 09:04)

• She contrasts MMM with attribution and A/B testing, emphasizing each approach’s limitations.
• Brand Impact:
  Ryan underscores the multiplier effect: “Brand-led investment unlocks a multiplier effect on performance marketing…”
• Why MMM Matters Now:
  • Explosion of data enables more nuanced attribution beyond simple spend
  • Wall Street’s short-termism and pressure for provable ROI fuels the demand for MMM
  • Modern CMOs struggle to justify long-term brand building over easy-to-measure performance marketing

    “Performance marketing becomes crack...not realizing that brand is fueling this. If you cut this, the fuel goes away.” (Ryan Barker, 17:34)

• Doom Loop Warning:
  Over-relying on performance can create diminishing returns—a “doom loop”—if brand investment is neglected.

4. Gap’s Playbook: Reinvigoration & Cultural Relevance

[20:26–27:16]

• Damon Berger describes Gap’s turnaround strategy under CEO Richard Dixon as anchored in cultural relevance:

  “Relevance is revenue...connecting our brands to culture...that’s how we create relevant content experiences for our consumers on the right platforms at the right time.” (Damon Berger, 25:46)

• Gap’s new playbook is about rediscovering and modernizing brand DNA (e.g., connection to music, dance)—not just partnerships or short-term stunts.

5. Balancing the Mix: Brand, Performance, Content, and ROI

[27:16–35:10]

• Content Creation Over Advertising:
  Gap has shifted from traditional advertising to content creation, especially video, to organically drive cultural resonance and require less media overspend.

  “If the content isn’t there, it’s an overdrive for media and the media becomes less profitable.” (Damon Berger, 29:48)

• Explaining Value to CFOs:
  Performance marketing offers quick, linear returns that CFOs love, but brand investment is less immediately visible (the ‘squishy’ upper funnel). Damon advocates using data and proof points to gradually win internal buy-in.
• Culture of Curiosity:
  Under Dixon’s ‘What if? Why not?’ attitude, Gap fosters experimentation and “creative curiosity” alongside data, innovation, and continual self-disruption.

6. Making MMM Work in the Real World

[35:10–39:32]

• Using Data to Defend Brand Budgets:
  In tough times, MMM and data are key tools to negotiate budget cuts and prioritize spend.
• Welcoming (But Not Worshiping) MMM:
  Damon urges marketers to avoid letting models dictate 100% of the decision-making. Instead, integrate MMM alongside sales data, consumer insights, and cultural context.

  “These are just scorecards in a way to think about how we are doing with those consumers.” (Damon Berger, 38:03)

7. Audience Optimization & Platform Strategy

[39:32–41:23]

• Platform sophistication is leveraged for audience targeting (e.g., TikTok for younger consumers), mapped against Gap’s own CRM and web data to blend broad MMM guidance with tactical targeting.

8. Advice to Brand Leaders: Staying True to DNA

[41:23–44:11]

• Success comes from rediscovering, celebrating, and modernizing brand DNA.
• Gap’s re-engagement with its roots—music, dance, culture for Gap and adventure/discovery for Banana Republic—has resonated with both nostalgic customers and new generations.

  “Rediscovering the connections to music and dance and culture…what is so interesting about the reaction of what we’re seeing today.” (Damon Berger, 43:13)

9. Roundtable Reflections & Key Takeaways

[47:37–54:16]

• Brand isn’t “voodoo” when grounded in authentic DNA and supported by data.

  "People think brand feels like voodoo… But there’s no good reason for that…” (Kate Lamberton, 47:41)

• Metrics serve curiosity and learning, not just justification.
• Effective playbooks respect both emotional brand essence and statistical measurement.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On MMM and Brand Value:

• “Brand is still in 2025...feels a little bit like voodoo. There’s not a consensus in terms of how we think about scoring our brand health.” (Damon Berger, 00:01 & 23:28)
• “If we starve the upper [funnel], the lower actually starves too.” (Damon Berger, 24:20)

On Cultural Relevance:

• “Relevance is revenue.” (Damon Berger quoting CEO Richard Dixon, 25:46)
• “The BS meter for content creation is pretty sensitive…[Gap] can’t present itself in a way that clunks.” (Kate Lamberton, 47:39)

On the Playbook:

• “You have to stay true to what your brands are...going back to the DNA of why people love our brands in the first place, then celebrating it and modernizing it.” (Damon Berger, 41:49)

MMM as Scorecard, Not Straightjacket:

• “As long as you’re looking at [MMM] and other factors outside...it’s a tool in a broader tool chest for us, and very helpful to look at where we are.” (Damon Berger, 38:53)

Advice to Marketers:

• “Step one: understand your DNA. Step two: have those internal stakeholder conversations and bring metrics… Being able to measure this squishy stuff...and put it into the equation to get them to understand.” (Ryan Barker, 49:23)
• “Metrics-driven…curiosity-driven company.” (Kate Lamberton, 50:18)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:31] Brand resilience in higher ed – Kate Lamberton
• [04:48] Brand focus and playbooks (Subaru, P&G)
• [08:17] Defining and differentiating MMM, attribution, AB testing
• [13:25] Why MMM is resurgent
• [17:16] Brand vs. performance marketing “doom loop”
• [20:26] Introduction to Damon Berger (Gap)
• [25:46] Gap’s turnaround and “relevance is revenue” strategy
• [29:48] Content creation as core media investment
• [32:15] Building a culture at Gap that allows for MMM and innovation
• [33:26] Balancing and justifying brand vs. performance spend
• [35:10] Defending brand budgets in lean times
• [38:53] Tools, data, and cultural context in decision-making
• [41:49] Advice: Stay true to and modernize your brand’s DNA
• [47:41] “Brand isn’t voodoo” – Reflections on quantifying brand value

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Summary Table: Host & Guest Roles

| Name | Role/Expertise | Perspective | |------------------|-----------------------------------------------|-------------------------------| | Jim Stengel | Host, Ex-P&G CMO | Brand-building frameworks, purpose, big company experience | | Ryan Barker | Co-host, marketer, MMM/ROI advocate | Data-driven, equity multipliers, “doom loop” risk | | Kate Lamberton | Co-host, academic, behavioral insights | Critical thinking, brand resilience, media complexity | | Damon Berger | Guest, Head of Consumer Digital at Gap | Hands-on practitioner, Gap’s turnaround and playbook insights |

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Key Takeaways for Brand Builders

• Start with Brand DNA: Don’t lose sight of what makes your brand unique and loved. Authenticity outperforms fads.
• Cultural Relevance Drives Revenue: Connect to and create culture, not just campaigns.
• Integrate Brand & Performance: Treat brand and performance marketing as symbiotic, not either/or.
• Embrace Data, Don’t Be Ruled By It: Use MMM as a guide, not a dictator. Balance quantitative insights with creative intuition.
• Foster Internal Buy-In: Regularly involve internal stakeholders (CFOs, finance) and provide clear proof points for the long-term value of brand investment.
• Stay Curious: Make curiosity and experimentation central to your marketing culture—be eager to ask, “What if? Why not?”
• Optimize Allocation by Audience: Use modern platform tools for smarter audience targeting, informed—but not dictated—by MMM.
• Use Metrics for Learning, Not Just Defense: Quantification helps defend budgets but also surfaces insights to fuel success.

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Closing Thought

“MMM begins with the consumer. It’s our way to understand if we’re making an impact… Be sure the model helps you build a better brand with the people you are seeking to attract.”
– Jim Stengel (53:38)

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Whether you’re a CMO, marketer, or a leader refining your playbook, this episode reinforces that brand relevance, culture, creativity, and sophisticated data analytics all work together to drive resilient, high-performing brands.

Transcript

[Damon Berger]

Brand is still in 2025. Feels a little bit like Vudu. There's not a consensus in terms of how we think about scoring our brand health.

[Jim Stengel]

Welcome to the Brand Builders Playbook, the show for modern marketers who are done with guesswork and ready to implement what actually works well. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the penultimate episode of the Brand Builders Playbook, episode seven. This is Jim Stengel.

[Ryan Barker]

I'm Ryan Barker.

[Kate Lamberton]

And I'm Kate Lamberton.

[Jim Stengel]

Well, we've had quite a bit of fun with this series. Right? Here we are at episode seven. Last week, I think, was a riot. We chatted with Kristen Darcy at True Religion about partnerships, collaborations, and it was such a special treat. And this week we're going to bring Gap Inc. Into the conversation and we're going to dig into marketing mix. Reducing weights, spending, ensuring every dollar drives measurable results and a whole lot more. So Damon is a fabulous guest and he's a believer in the magic of marketing and he's also a believer in mmm. But before we jump jump into this episode on mastering the marketing mix, we always start the episode with a brand playbook that we're all sort of digging this week and hopefully related to the topic of the week. So, Kate, you're our esteemed academic, so we're going to start with you this week. What brand playbook are you kind of thinking about or admiring or questioning this week that may or may not be related to Mastery Marketing Mix?

[Kate Lamberton]

Well, I think everything can be related to Master.

[Damon Berger]

Yeah, I think, yes, you're right.

[Kate Lamberton]

And recognizing that we're recording this a little bit before the time it'll be aired, it'll be interesting to see, even by the time it's aired, what has happened. Because of the world that I live in, I'm really interested by the way that higher education is managing both its brand as a whole and then specific institutions are managing their brand in many cases. These are brands that have been respected, even if not always loved, very broadly, certainly in the US and they're now dealing with contextual shifts that push their entire brand into reinterpretation. So what you're seeing is some, some of these brands are responding by releasing whole new programs, they're creating new products, some of them are coming up with new ways to reduce the cost of education. So they're changing their price. Some of them are coming up with all of these campaigns that you see all over the place, on the sides of buses, you know, in, on billboards, trying to make clear to people what their value proposition is. And Right now when I look at say Google trends for searches related to various higher ed brands, they're shockingly stable. So even though we're hearing a lot about the threats that are happening with regard to these brands, somehow this whole combination of acts may be making them resilient. On the other hand, you do see spikes and you do see spikes specifically related to political activity that could be cracks. And so I'm really interested in the way, first of all, that these incredibly established legacy brands are responding and in seeing what actually happens to them, if anything over time or if they're just, they're just, they might shift, but they're going to stay strong in some sort of interesting new way for a new segment.

[Jim Stengel]

Do you think the value prop has changed over time? Because I've seen some data to say that a lot of Americans don't feel the values there anymore. And I don't know if that would have been the case when I was a kid.

[Kate Lamberton]

Yeah, I mean I think the GI Bill did a lot to a step the value of higher education as a baseline. And what we've seen is in 2015, I believe the number was somewhere in the mid-40s, people who said that they trusted higher education either extremely or a lot. Right now we have drifted down into the 30s. We've seen some bumps up just in the last year, but we are still not at 70, 80% in terms of trust. And certainly as costs have gone up, people are saying, okay, show me, show me what the, what the return is in the same way as we ask for return on everything which we're going to talk about in this episode a lot. So people are, they're pushing and listen, there's no category that doesn't have to defend its value. We're not any different. So we'll see how we manage that. And again, as a marketer, I think it's a really interesting thing to observe.

[Jim Stengel]

It will be also interesting to see how their media mix shifts.

[Kate Lamberton]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jim Stengel]

You already notice things you're seeing anecdotally, but in a mega sense it'll be interesting to see how it shifts.

[Kate Lamberton]

And it's quite complex. Right, because we're not the only ones by a long shot creating the media. Our students are the ones creating the media. And there are some interesting questions about who owns what's going on as there is with all earned media. So yeah, it's a really interesting case study.

[Ryan Barker]

Do I hear another HBR article on HBR for us?

[Kate Lamberton]

Why not two or three? We got a couple.

[Jim Stengel]

Why not? So Ryan how about you? What's your playbook this week?

[Ryan Barker]

Yeah, I'll start with the tagline love. It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru Relevant to our topic today. Here's a brand that's gone through ups and downs. We look at the Barra data today and you can look at a total population perception on the brand or you can't be all things to all people. Let's look at some of the core audiences and I'm a dog lover. I'm a family man. I'm also an outdoor guy. And those are three micro targets or cohorts that we're seeing massive amounts of growth equity. And so you can't be all things to all people. How do you prioritize and optimize your dollars and what are the channels for those? So it's a brand that I think is doing a fantastic job on Focus.

[Jim Stengel]

Are you a driver of a Subaru? Ryan with you sound like you meet their template?

[Ryan Barker]

Not yet.

[Kate Lamberton]

You know, I have two friends who were going to buy a new car and you know, one of them is the kind of person who makes endless spreadsheets to compare things and the other one had a strong instinct to begin with. The instinct one started off by saying, I think we're going to get a Subaru. The spreadsheet maker made about 10 different spreadshee sheets in the end said, I think we're going to get a Subaru. I think what they've done really, in a really interesting way is provide both these affective drivers that, yeah, we all love the dogs in the car and okay, they have a small child and all that feels really great along with plenty of logical, rational reasons why that is a good choice. I think that's a really kind of magical point that they've hit. It's got the reason component and the emotional component and for their target market, given that a lot of them are households with children, both of those are likely to come into play.

[Ryan Barker]

Absolutely.

[Jim Stengel]

Well, I'll close. You know, the playbook I'm thinking about vis a vis this theme this week of kind of marketing mix is actually close to home. It's my alma mater, png. I was CMO there many years ago and when I came in, we were nowhere on on marketing ROI we called it back then. And I don't think we were using the right tools. We didn't have the right partners. We didn't value it. So we did benchmarking. We went to visit companies that we thought were doing a great job. We established a community of practice across business units to see what we could do, how we can experiment. So we started the ball rolling and I think the team has just absolutely continued it. I think if you talk to anyone about who they think is doing great work in this space, eight out of 10 will say P and G. They're leveraging AI into their MMM. You know, they're scaling the capability across countries, across categories, across brands. They segment and target more effectively, they're more agile, they partner better with outside groups. So, and you know, working in a multi brand global company, these things are not easy. And I think they are way further along than I could have imagined when I left. And, and I take some pride. I started the ball rolling, but they've taken it to a whole nother level. Kate, would you agree with that from what you're seeing in the academic literature?

[Kate Lamberton]

Listen, you know, every time I need to find an example of something, I end up at a P and G brand, right? I mean, there are so many strengths there, but one of them is that they do have the scope to experiment until they find the best answer. And I think that's what you often see across the P and G portfolio. You can kind of sit back and watch, watch the changes and see how change made in one brand seems to translate into success across a whole set. And that's kind of a remarkable. And they're only, you know, one or two other multinationals that have and use that capacity as well as P and G does.

[Jim Stengel]

Well, let's jump into kind of the preamble before we bring our guest in. Last week we talked about in episode six, how brands choose the right collaborations and why strategic partnerships like Formula one and Netflix, True Religion and Megan Thee Stallion can drive culture relevance and brand strength. Our guest was wonderful. We had a great time with that. But this week we're going to get a bit more nitty gritty and we're going to talk about the numbers around marketing mix. So Kate, for those unfamiliar in the audience with what is mmm, it's not like a fight club, it's marketing mix modeling. And how does that differ from other types of marketing measurement like attribution, you know, a B testing? So could you sort of set the stage for what is this thing we're talking about and why is it important?

[Kate Lamberton]

I mean, it's not completely not a fight club, Jim, to be fair, because we are trying to figure out what's strongest and what's going to win from a very basic perspective. What we want to understand is how the different elements of the marketing mix, I.e. product, price, place, promotion. And then in some cases, if you had a way to integrate people, you could. But generally those four pieces interact to drive some kind of KPI. So simplest one would be sales. So we might ask, for example, if we drop our price by X holding all else equals, holding all else equal, what's going to happen to our sales? Now, the truth is, it's almost always far more complex than that, which is why you have to take into account multiple pieces at a time. So we drop our price, but we change our product. Right. We take away some feature from the product. We want to understand how those two things might work together to change an outcome. So we have to take everything into account. Usually this data is looked at at a very aggregate level. However, increasingly sophisticated models are allowing us to learn a lot more about what's going on underneath these numbers. Sometimes people just reduce it, reduce it to Media Mix. And I think they do that because that's a difficult problem in itself. So you just, you focus only on your, I think what we would generally consider promotions in that 4Pmodel. And then within that, you're pulling apart the pieces and asking how much each component of your media spend is driving some kind of outcome. And you can see how, because each of those P's has a lot of noisy indicators on it, when you try to roll it all the way up into an overall marketing mix model, there's so much potential for noise to obscure what you're actually trying to see. And it's also challenging because, of course, things change over time. So the marketing mix model, which is usually a regression model that I might run today, two weeks from now, given some change in the macro economy, might be completely different. So there's a lot of pressure on these things, I think sometimes to predict the future without remembering that they're based on past data. And what we really need to do is to understand as broad a range of contingencies as we can. And that's why I think sometimes people also kick to things like AB testing, which is much more causally clean and immediate. I can say today this ad got more responses than this ad. The problem with extrapolating from that, of course, is that if something outside that ad changes, that effect may not be there at all. And so taking the sort of parameters or the weights that come out of an a B test is also dangerous. So marketing mixed modeling tries to pull it all together, but it is a very difficult problem to solve.

[Jim Stengel]

Ryan, you live in this world every day. Anything you want to amplify underscore. And what Kate just said is backdrop for what we're going to talk about.

[Ryan Barker]

Absolutely. This is a very passionate topic for me and for Bara. I love the way that Kate explained simple levers. Like I changed my price but product could play a role or distribution. You spend all this money on marketing. There are so many different levers and data sets. Well, you know, what is a connective tissue that drives those levers or even absorbs those levers is brand. And quite often brand is neglected in a lot of these marketing mix models. And as you know, we published the work report with a lot of colleagues and what we've been able to prove is that brand led investment unlocks a multiplier effect on performance marketing and it allows all those other levers, some that Kate's mentioned, to work harder and stronger and to continue into the future. I think when we get into today's conversation, it's going to be interesting to see with all these tools it can get confusing on how do I think about doing this? And to Kate's point, it might take six months to set up a model and it's based on yesterday. All the more reason why measuring in real time and the ability to have an agile perspective is going to be so important. So very much looking forward to getting in today's discussion.

[Jim Stengel]

Jim, this whole topic seems to be having a day, right? A moment. There's kind of a resurgence. So maybe there's some obvious reasons for that. But I'd like both of you, Kate and Ryan, to sort of wax on that a bit. Why is this very much in vogue? There's a lot being written about it. There's a lot of innovation in the space. So what's driving that?

[Kate Lamberton]

Yeah, it was funny. I think I started getting more calls about this just maybe three years ago. Suddenly it was people calling and saying, who's good at marketing? Mixed modeling. Really? Really? People really do that? I thought I just talked about it in class, but no, it became more popular. I think the availability of data is driving this. Anytime people have more data, they want to use it somehow. We can now better combine data from online and offline sources which give us a much more complete picture of what is going into each of those marketing mix. Model pictures. And we can even do incredible things like we know when somebody drove past a billboard. That's pretty amazing. That's more than just how many dollars you spend on that billboard. But you can also capture the extent to which people are even exposed to it when you have that kind of data. You want to figure out what it predicts. And it's also becoming much easier to run really sophisticated models which help us deal with some of the things Ryan referred to in terms of changes in brand sentiment that might affect the way we should interpret other parameters or even whether the other parameters matter at all. If we can run a model that updates over time, that allows us to see trajectories without spending six months spent setting it up, we're in much better shape than we used to be. And so the ability to just develop a model that's more cohesive and more compelling by virtue of its completeness I think makes this much more appealing. And of course there's enormous, I think there's increasing pressure on everyone who's trying to build brands. We've talked about this before. If you, if that pressure keeps coming down and if people keep expecting quantification, there's going to continue to be a push for a model that's actually telling a richer story. Then some more simplistic views might push.

[Ryan Barker]

Us to tell to piggyback on Kate I think there are three factors that have really re sparked this is one is short termism, Wall Street's obsession of short term sales that has continued to be very much true today. I think the balance between brand building and performance marketing where performance marketing is easy to measure and folks are questioning and a little bit scared, am I going to kill brand if I don't infuse that into the equation? How do I think about my overall spend? And then I think it's this, this constant need of being agile on these trade offs between short term and long term. And I think from a CMOS perspective, while they believe in their gut, take two steps back on a short term tactic because the reward will be three steps forward. They have difficulty in explaining that to a CFO with data and facts. And so if you're going to make these bets with serious dollars, these tools, does it get to 100%? Of course not. But they're trying to get as close as possible to have a fact based conversation.

[Kate Lamberton]

I think too that you know, when you, when you think about all, even just the elements you just put on the table that you have time unfolding. So you have things in the past, you have things in the future. You have so many different elements across a marketing function, the performance stuff, the brand stuff and then, then you've got people over that are managing the pricing who live in a different function altogether. And then you've got people managing supply chain who are dealing with distribution. I Think there's also a real appeal to trying to figure out how we can pull that stuff into a metric. Like, let's convert that into something that matters to the consumer. Because at the end of the day, that's who's going to drive our business and have something simple and singular that we can actually talk about. And marketing, mixed modeling allows us at least the hope that we can do something like that and do it taking into account the consumer's perspective, not all the noise that's going on in every other meeting that we go to.

[Jim Stengel]

Ryan, you mentioned the work study a minute ago. And I mean, I was amazed. The resonance that had the multiplier effect, you know, massive amount of downloads once you released it, you partnered on this piece of work with a couple other organizations. Maybe you should talk a bit about why that had such resonance. What was it about that?

[Ryan Barker]

I think because the average organization puts performance marketing over here and then they put brand building here. From the work that you guys did with HBR two years ago on brand versus performance marketing, it's still very much solid when these are two sides of the same coin. I think between that and all these people spending a lot of money on performance marketing because you're getting instant sales, instant gratification, it becomes crack. And therefore you think, do more of this, not realizing that brand is fueling this. And if you cut this, the fuel goes away. And to make it stupid simple, you spend $100 and you get success today. Tomorrow you're going to spend 200 just to get the same results until you reach this diminishing returns and what we call the doom loop. And now there are too many companies that are in the doom loop and they're panicking. It's like, help, how do I get out? And so I think it's a common movie, a common trap that many folks, regardless of the organization, B2C or B2B can resonate with.

[Kate Lamberton]

I think there's also a really interesting effect that goes the other way. So if you start pushing on that performance marketing piece in a way that you think gets a lot of attention or gets a lot of clicks or whatever it does, and you're doing that in a way that's not consistent with the brand, who the consumer thinks the brand is, how they should be reaching them, where they should be showing up, it doesn't work authentically, you're also going to destroy your brand 100%. And so you have to have the brand people at the conversation and they're going to get shut out if they can't show that they're providing value. So I think your doom loop is even darker, perhaps.

[Jim Stengel]

So, Kate, we're going to send you out to get some coffee and a tasty cake as we talk to Damon. Anything you want our audience to be attuned to or to be listening for in our dialogue with Damon today?

[Kate Lamberton]

Yeah, I guess. I think it'll be interesting to see how he thinks about getting buy in with regard to these models, especially when you've been on the side of the house where people are less comfortable. Perhaps. Now in some companies there's just a regular comfort level with this kind of modeling, but that doesn't mean that everybody, everybody is going to buy what it's selling. So I'm really looking forward to hearing how he talks about this at Gap and what effect that has on the way the organization runs.

[Jim Stengel]

Well, every week we have an expert join us. And this week we have a real expert in all sorts of things. Marketing. We have Damon Berger, the head of consumer digital engagement at Gap. He's worked in multiple industries, multiple kind of verticals. And by the way, you must be having a blast at Gap. Damon, I just read a long story about what's going on at Gap. Fabulous. Your stock price is like double two years ago. You have all kinds of creative and business momentum. So congrats to you and the team. It's going to be really fun getting to know you better in the next 20 or 30 minutes. So you must be feeling pretty good about things.

[Damon Berger]

You know, Jim, it's not without a lot of work from the teams. You know, those articles come out and everybody has a moment to feel proud about what's going on. But I'll tell you, behind the scenes, the teams are cranking and it's been a lot of fun to be able to work on such a storied portfolio of iconic American brands.

[Jim Stengel]

And I like the shirt you have on, by the way. Can you give us a plug for that?

[Damon Berger]

I have all banana today. I have a banana jacket, a Banana Republic T shirt. You can't see my linen pants, even though it's typical San Francisco summer out here, which means about 60 degrees and foggy, but repping the brands well out here.

[Jim Stengel]

So, Ryan, say hello to Damon, an old friend of yours, I think, right?

[Ryan Barker]

Absolutely. Damon.

[Damon Berger]

Hi, Ryan.

[Ryan Barker]

How are you doing? Well, thanks for doing this. Look, you've had a great career. You've worked at some big brands like 20th Century Fox, Mattel, and now you're a little over a year at Gap and a big part of Your history is bringing ROI efficiency to spend and allocation. Well, so for today's topic for our listeners, folks and brands that are perhaps getting introduced into the MMM world, marketing mix modeling. Can you talk about what that involves?

[Damon Berger]

You know, thank you first off, Ryan and Jim for having me and really get into that part. I think, you know, from my perspective, the MMM world requires a lot of alignment with your internal stakeholders. I think that as you begin to think about scoring your own homework, basically, which is what the MMM does, I think what I find really interesting is that your finance counterparts will have one version of looking at an mmm, your brand counterparts will have another version and outcomes of why they're using an mmm. For me, the MMM is a really a scorecard on how you're doing with your consumers. And you can talk about it from the perspective of are we making the right ROI choices? Are we making profitable decisions? And those are really important aspects to what an MMM brings to the table. But to me it's really about the consumer and how are we doing with the consumer? What channels are we looking at a consumer response in and how do we think about our brand health in those worlds? And because obviously if our brands are doing well in our channels, then our sales are going to do well in those same channels. So for me it's really about trying to attune to what the consumer is looking for from our brands.

[Ryan Barker]

It's interesting. Grading our own homework. Well, let's put on the CFO's grading lens for a second. A big part of MMM CFOs quite often like is ROAS, right. Return on advertising spend.

[Damon Berger]

So I've heard. So I've heard.

[Ryan Barker]

So we've heard. Right. And, and I'm curious your perspective. Is brand often neglected when talking about roas, especially in terms of the long term contribution and the compound effect of that?

[Damon Berger]

I feel like you're leading the witness a little bit here. Yes, it is. And it's, and it's really interesting because brand is still in 2025 feels a little bit like voodoo. There's not a consensus in terms of how we think about scoring our brand health, scoring our relevance, obviously. I know, para notwithstanding, as we think about, you know, the, the internal machinations of where to put dollars, it's a very comfortable and very understandable thing that our finance counterparts want to look at a solid return on that ad spend. And you know right away if you're looking at the bottom 2/3 of the funnel, that you're going to get a predictable return on what those dollars are doing for you. Whereas if you're investing in brand, it becomes a little bit squishier and isn't as easily tracked in terms of how those allocations come back to the company. And we know that the brands that are investing in themselves and in being relevant and in ways that our consumers are going to engage with are the ones that will get better roas overall for the bottom funnel. So this is very weird little mirror dimension trick that we're pulling on ourselves that if we starve the upper, the lower actually starves too.

[Jim Stengel]

Well, Brian, I think as we look at your data, everything we've been talking about at Gap when I introduced Damon is holding true. Right. We're seeing some very, very positive trends on baradate on how the Gap brand is doing. So do you want to talk a bit about that and then maybe get Damon to remark on the drivers, the key drivers?

[Ryan Barker]

Yeah, absolutely. So besides the financials, and one of the things we see is financials are the result of growing the equity. Brand comes first. We have seen, and let's just take the Gap brand first from the portfolio we have seen over the last three years, tremendous amount of growth in overall equity, whether you want to call it brand love or the emotional and behavioral engagement among Gap, the ability to not just keep the core loyal customers happy, but your ability. And this is what's most impressive, bringing in the next generation of acquiring prospects into the mix. And that refreshing of the imagery. We're seeing all of those scores trending nicely in a world that's hyper competitive. So Damien, for what you can comment on what's been the secret recipe here.

[Damon Berger]

Well, our CEO Richard Dixon likes to talk about the idea that relevance is revenue. And our world for these brands has really been about reinvigorating. Obviously, we're in a very well publicized turnaround of our brands. And I think he brings to the table a very specific lens on what that means in his world. He has a grand reinvigoration playbook that we're following as we go through this step by step change. And a big part of that is how are we connecting our brands to culture and how if you look at the history of our brands, are we reigniting our DNA, which if you remember, you know, the old school Gap commercials were driving culture, not even just connecting to culture. And so as we think about what does that mean to a modern audience and how do we look at all four of our brands across the portfolio? Connecting to culture. You know, it differs brand to brand, but it's the same goal which is how do we create relevant content experiences for our consumers on the right platforms at the right time that they're looking for us. And so this has been a laser focus across the portfolio and how we're thinking about what does relevance mean? Obviously, it kind of differs audience to audience, and we're trying to serve as many of those audiences with those relevant experiences as we can on any given day.

[Jim Stengel]

No, no, this, this area of relevance has come up a couple times in this series and we had a, you know, I guess a competitor of yours in the broadest sense. We had Kristen Darcy from True Religion on to talk about partnerships. Again, the theme of that, we talked a lot about partnerships and how that helped strive relevance and your connected, your connectivity to culture. But again, that brand has turned around fantastic numbers because of that principle, right?

[Damon Berger]

Yes, they are.

[Jim Stengel]

They're connecting to culture, they're driving culture, they're respecting their heritage, but they're not tied down to it. But if you had to pull one thing out of their playbook, that's really working. It's the relevance and it's the connection to culture. And you're saying the same thing here.

[Damon Berger]

Yeah, I mean, first off, I love Kristen. She's fantastic. And, you know, I love what she's doing over at True Religion. I know that we compete in a very broad space. And I think when we look at what does relevance mean today, I think that it has a lot to do with these things that we have in our pockets that we're all obsessed with and we're all, you know, I think, not even borderline addicted to. And as we think about what the idea of capturing relevance means, I think that there's a lot of relevance to be had in relevant collaborations. We are, we're very much, you know, looking for our brands to collaborate with relevant figures and brands and in the spaces that we're in or even not in. And those help us really kind of become in the stream of consciousness for our cultural collaborations. And I think as we think about what that means overall, that's. That's just one aspect to it. As you think about, if you go to, you know, any of our social channels right now, and you look from where we were a year ago to a year today, is there's a night and day change to how we've approached the content space. What do we think about video and really trying to move away from advertising per se, more towards content creation. As we think about the areas in which we all consume content and putting ourselves in the shoes of our audiences, these are really important aspects to how we think about building our brands and becoming relevant.

[Ryan Barker]

So that's interesting. Content creation. And as this topic is about resource allocation, how do you explain to a CFO riding the different cultural waves, social versus tv, how do you get them to understand the short versus the long term contribution that they're going to get?

[Damon Berger]

Well, first off, I'm not going to poo poo TV because I do think TV still has a use within the toolbox of modern marketing. I do think there are pockets of TV that still are driving some relevance. I don't think it's as broad as it used to be. I think that we can all agree on that aspect. I think as we think about the idea of the return, if you think about the most relevant brands right now, the brands that are out there are the ones that are creating content experiences. Now, you can use media as a lever to amplify those experiences, but if the content isn't there, it's an overdrive for media and the media becomes less profitable. So overall, the whole chain has to be kind of looked at from a perspective of are you driving the right results with the assets that you have and are those assets then needing to be overbought against because they're not the right assets in quotes? And I think that's a big piece of how we look at ROI and how we think about our own effectiveness. If we have effective assets, our media spend theoretically can be lower because you're driving better relevance with the organic aspect of those assets. And then the idea of driving media outside of that is an easy amplification as opposed to if the asset isn't that effective. Now you're paying too much money for media and that's something that I think any CFO would agree is not what they're looking for.

[Jim Stengel]

Hey, Damon, Ryan's going to, I think, take us into some more depth on MMM in a second. But, you know, I want to come back to something you said a few minutes ago about this is kind of a scorecard for how you're doing with a consumer. And I think it's a delicate balance to build a culture which embraces things like marketing mix modeling, which is the theme of our show today, but also embraces the consumer and also embraces the kind of culture that creates new things, that enables you to connect to culture. So could you talk a bit about what you and your team and your CMO and your CEO are doing at Gap today to build a culture where MMM can thrive and the insights from it and you're always looking around the corner and you're building a culture of innovation and cultural relevance. So can you talk a little bit about your playbook on that front? Because I think it's, if you don't have that, you're not going to get the kind of results in MMM that will build your brand.

[Damon Berger]

So that's a great question. As we have embarked on this reinvigoration, one of the things that we have really championed is a culture of curiosity. Our CEO, Richard Dickson likes to ask us, what if, why not? And that attitude has really pervaded our brands, pervaded our entire central services organization. And I think as we think about championing creative curiosity, these are the things that really don't necessarily show up on the hard scoreboard, but they're things that allow us to constantly innovate, constantly disrupt ourselves. And through that culture is all of the things that we're trying to unlock from our brands.

[Ryan Barker]

Going back to the MMM piece for our listeners, a big part of the optimization is how much to spend in brand, how much to spend in performance marketing. And the explosion of performance marketing, which theoretically is easy to measure in brands, difficult. It becomes crack to CFOs and CEOs. How do you navigate that conversation and what are some of the tips and the painful lessons perhaps that, that you've gone through?

[Damon Berger]

I mean, I feel like I could, we could spend the next three hours talking about this particular subject. It's. It's a tricky dance, isn't it? It's something that we all have had experience with in terms of how do you move away from one versus the other. I will say performance marketing is not something that to me is kind of a dirty phrase. I think it's one of the most important parts of being a modern marketer. I think that the tools that have evolved are so strong and are so deep that it is a thing that I believe every company needs to be good at. What is harder to do is moving away from, to your point, a very, as we were talking about earlier, very specific, specific idea of what, where your return on that ad spend is going to look like versus something that tends to be a little bit more alchemic almost at this point, where the return isn't as linear, the returns aren't as quick in terms of the investments. And I think that piece is something that, as tools like Vera and others come along, that becomes a little bit more comfortable to start at least taking that leap of faith. And I think the other thing too is once you do again, like I said earlier, we. We've seen as we've invested more in our brands, the actual overall roas actually increasing. So there's. Now that we have those proof points on the board, it's becoming a much easier conversation internally to have that. As we get more developed in our brand playbooks, these things are actually starting to pay off from the consumer perspective.

[Ryan Barker]

What about during difficult times and CFO comes and they said, look, we want the same results, but we're going to slash your budget. How do you use MMM or perhaps other tools to navigate that conversation?

[Damon Berger]

Well, I mean, we have all the data in the world at our fingertips, so I think the data conversation is a very important one. I think as we think about how we navigate the conversations around, you know, budgets and around how our brands are navigating the world, you know, budget shift, that's how a fact, a fact of life. I think, as any marketer can attest to, that's just part of the gig. And I think as we think about how we deploy our budgets, prioritization is always one of the big things that we're trying to stay focused on and where we need to be putting those dollars. So in any given moment, we know where the areas are that are kind of areas that are less proven and areas that we're trying to experiment with. So those are usually the budgets that go first. And I think as we think about where we deploy dollars, brand versus performance, we're always trying to measure and balance the right balance between those things, because we know that if we don't invest in our brands, then we're not doing what our jobs are. So I think there's always a healthy debate on how we think about those things, but we're always the ones who are the practitioners trying to keep those things in balance.

[Jim Stengel]

Hey, Damon, you've had experience in lots of organizations. What is your counsel to our audience on kind of leveraging MMM in their culture, getting people to welcome it, believe the data coming out of it, act on it, and integrate it in the way you do business. I mean, I'm sure you've had some cultures which were more challenging on that front and less challenging. So what's your counsel to those who would love to bring this in as a helpful tool to build their brand and build their business?

[Damon Berger]

Sure. I think the thing, to me, I haven't really experienced, thankfully too many. I mean, I'll say this with a tremendously large grain of salt that I don't know that anybody believes or disbelieves mmm at any given moment. It's a really interesting trick that the organizations that I've been with, you know, outside of Gap, have pulled. I think we at Gap are extremely data driven. So at Gap Inc. We really are focused on the consumer and center on the consumer. And I think from our perspective, you know, there are directional aspects of the MMM that you take into account when you make decisions. There are other aspects where you know where the blind spots are and you try to figure out how to account for those. But I think overall, because we champion data here, because we are so data driven and so focused on the consumer, these are just scorecards in a way to think about how we are doing with those consumers. So we incorporate it across almost every decision we make, but we're also not trapped by it because a lot of the times that MMMs come out on the kittens that they do, it's easy to look at those and say, this is what it is. And now it becomes almost a checkboxing of how we approach our own mixing of our media. So what we're trying to do, again, is we're constantly trying to disrupt ourselves before we are disrupted. And that is one of those things that an MMM helps provide a guidepost to. And I think it's as long as you're looking at that and other factors outside of the mmm, your actual sales data, the things that are going on from your consumer account, how you're looking at the broader trends of the world, all of those aspects are kind of how we look at understanding where we are in our world and how we are showing up to our consumers every day. So it's a tool in a broader tool chest for us, and it's something that is very helpful for us to look at where we are.

[Ryan Barker]

So within your tool chest, one of the challenges with MMM is you can't optimize by audience. You get your overall allocation. What do you do in terms of ROI and audience optimization? Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Damon Berger]

Sure. I think there's a little bit of, as you think about the platforms that are out there, the platforms themselves are really sophisticated audience engines at this point. As you think about the big five technology companies out there that are finding audiences, I think we try to use those platforms as much as we can to understand where those audience signals are coming in and map that a little bit against what we are seeing in our own websites, what we're seeing on our own customer files. So it's not necessarily as clean as audience optimization, but it is a process that we are using across all of those different aspects of platform, website and our own file to start to understand how we are affecting the consumer. Are we driving those consumers through the funnel in the ways that we want to? Are we adding new customers? Are we retaining those customers? And obviously, as you're thinking about the media side versus the direct marketing side, you know, those tend to have different aspects between audience reacquisition and retention. And so as we think about those aspects, we are constantly trying to optimize, you know, depending on what we're trying to accomplish. For instance, we know that for certain audiences, younger audiences, TikTok tends to be a really good area to be able to generate heat and buzz with younger audiences. So if we're on TikTok, we're generally talking to a younger audience. And if that's, you know, that it's not as precise as, hey, this audience is only a young audience. But we know that there are aspects to platforms like that where we can kind of generalize where we believe those audiences are and then we can kind of measure based on the outcomes that we see on our own websites and in our own files.

[Jim Stengel]

But listen, you referred to your playbook at Gap Inc. And Richard's playbook earlier. So you're counsel to people out there who are trying to refine their brand building playbook. You obviously have one. It's working. It looks like your whole team's aligned to it. So what's your counsel on those people who are listening to this series? We have one more episode. They have lots of notes from it. They have ideas how to make it happen on their brand.

[Damon Berger]

It's a great question. I think you have to stay true to what your brands are. And I think that is one of those, those things that people can get really right and people can get really wrong. And we've seen examples of both very recently. And I'm not going to call anybody out because I know how hard these jobs are and I don't, you know, these are not something that I don't think anybody takes for granted. I think as we look at what that means for us, it means going back to the DNA of why people love our brands in the first place. And I think they all represent very different things. But I think as we think about what that reinvigoration looks like, really kind of understanding what that DNA of your brand is that people love and then celebrating it and modernizing it and bringing it to audiences in new and unexpected ways, those are the things that have made it so fun for us to really rediscover the things that we love about our own brands. You know, if you look at what Gap has been able to do, and their cmo, Fabi Torres, an absolute genius in this space, has done a really good job of rediscovering the connections to music and dance and culture and art, and those aspects that we remember fondly from what Gap meant in years past. I think, is what is so interesting about the reaction of what we're seeing today. Because for the older fans of the brand that know that DNA, this is a nostalgic rediscovery for those fans, for the newer fans that don't necessarily know about the history of our brand, these are things that we've seen, you know, work again and really reignite that aspect of. Of who we are. And so from. From our perspective, it really is about staying true to ourselves. And, you know, you could say that across the brands, Banana Republic has had a phenomenal resurgence of late. And I think one of the big things is as you think about what that brand was back in the. In the past, you know, adventure, travel, discovery. Those aspects of who we are as a brand are what is carrying us today. And that's the same across the entire portfolio. So for us, that's the real. That's the real aspect of why these things have been successful for us. And I'll tell you, it's been a lot of fun being around it.

[Ryan Barker]

I love it. Besides all the formulas and math and statistics that go into these sophisticated models, you still got to go back to the roots and the emotional connection and the essence.

[Damon Berger]

That's exactly right, Damon.

[Jim Stengel]

This has been so fun. Ryan, anything else before we let Damon go?

[Ryan Barker]

I think this is great. Looking forward to seeing the continued success across the portfolio.

[Damon Berger]

Thank you so much, guys. Thank you so much for having me. And let me know anytime you want to nerd out on marketing. This has been really fun. There we go. Excellent. All right, man.

[Jim Stengel]

Thank you. All right, take care. All right, Kate, how are the tasty cakes?

[Kate Lamberton]

How did you know I was eating tasty cakes?

[Jim Stengel]

I just somehow knew because I'm in.

[Kate Lamberton]

Philadelphia, and that's what we do in Philadelphia.

[Damon Berger]

That's what you do.

[Jim Stengel]

What's your favorite tasty cake, by the way?

[Kate Lamberton]

You know, I have a thing of butterscotch crumpet things in my desk. And it's funny you say that, because I actually use the tasty cake brand when I talk about brand valuation. It's such a great example of a brand that means something within this geographic region, but anywhere else in the world. We have no idea what you're talking about. Right. So it's fun because I have a diverse group of students. Some have been eating tasty cake since they were two and some are terrified by this food I put in front of them. So it's a good example.

[Jim Stengel]

It's a great regional baking brand for those.

[Ryan Barker]

Exactly.

[Jim Stengel]

And what about coffee? What's your go to coffee when you take a break?

[Kate Lamberton]

Oh, Diet Coke. I go to coffee.

[Ryan Barker]

Potato Coffee's uncle.

[Kate Lamberton]

That's right.

[Jim Stengel]

Diet Coke and butterscotch crimp. And how old are you? 17.

[Kate Lamberton]

Only on the inside. Only. Really interesting conversation with Damon. One of the things that stuck out to me was early he said people think that brand feels like voodoo. And I thought, yeah, it kind of does. Right? People think if they just stick the right pin in the right place, then somewhere and some remove something is going to happen. But I think this conversation we've had today makes it so clear that there's no good reason to for that it's a comparison that intuitively say, oh yeah, brand is kind of magic. But there's no reason it has to be that when we talk about a brand inside a company. I also thought it was interesting that he pointed out that our finance counterparts are often uncomfortable with what he referred to as squishiness. You know, sometimes I think marketing is held to a different standard because heaven knows, determining the return on spend for about a hundred other things that companies do is equally squishy. Right. But the pressure always comes down to marketing and specifically to brand to justify their existence. I'm thinking, you know, what's the return on average or return on investment when we buy new office furniture? That's pretty squishy, but nobody gets too upset about it. So I thought that not only can we do better, we're just going to have to continue to because it's always going to come down to us.

[Ryan Barker]

The heartstrings are not tickled when it comes to furniture. That's why.

[Kate Lamberton]

Exactly, exactly.

[Jim Stengel]

I was thinking of you when Damon talked about when I asked for his advice for our listeners on adopting a playbook because they're obviously doing it pretty well at Gap Inc. And the results are coming in. He quickly went to, you have to start with your DNA.

[Kate Lamberton]

Yep, exactly.

[Jim Stengel]

And understand what it is and how to amplify it and bring it to life in a way that's culturally relevant. Interesting grabs, attention makes people want to be part of something. So maybe you could talk a bit about that. I think it maybe was a bit unexpected coming out of Our mmm themed episode. But could you talk about that a bit?

[Kate Lamberton]

I think it makes perfect sense. You know, he was talking about content creation. The BS meter for content creation is pretty sensitive at this point. GAP can't present itself in a way that clunks. It's funny because I was thinking back to my earliest exposure to some of these brands. I remember we used to get the Banana Republic catalog that came on sort of nubbly paper and it actually had like pictures of jungles in it. It was clothes for your safari. And. And I loved it. And I just realized I'm sitting here wearing Banana Republic because something in that DNA still works. It still feels like the luxurious adventure. It still works. And their content creation is still giving you that feeling of, you know, a luxury that's going to go with you into your real jungle of life, whatever the heck that is. Right. A sort of a nice experience out there in the wild. They're still doing that. And certainly Gap has this long history of being connected to music and being just enough counterculture to appeal to its target audience. And yeah, if they had content creators that were deviating completely from that, I think to your earlier point, Ryan, it wouldn't matter how much they spent on getting the loudest influencer, it would absolutely crash. And what the research shows is, in fact, if you get, if you hire influencers who have a number of followers that's too large, often it doesn't work at all because their messages are so diffuse and non specific. Like they lose connection to DNA because they have to be so broad that they're not effective anymore. That DNA is absent. Absolutely. A moderator for what they're spending money on.

[Jim Stengel]

Ryan, what was your takeaway? Any surprises, any themes, anything that kind of struck with you?

[Ryan Barker]

Yeah. So like you the DNA piece, starting with that as from a playbook perspective, amplifying it, figuring out how to celebrate it, and then part on where all the numbers, statistics come in is how do you take that cultural measurement, that cultural relevance, and then infuse it into roas? And what I love is he starts the conversation with stakeholders. A lot of folks just wait for the CFO to say, here's your budget, when meanwhile, the consumer's in the center of the equation and marketers and brand builders know the consumer. So step one, understand your DNA. Step two, have those internal stakeholder conversations and bringing metrics. He said, Gap Inc. Is a metrics driven organization. I think most are today. And so being able to this squishy stuff, measure it to the best you can and put it into the equation to get them to understand. I thought it was a thing of beauty.

[Kate Lamberton]

And you know what he also said? He said metrics driven. The other thing he said was it's a curiosity driven company. And this brought me back to my question of how are you going to get people to accept all these numbers? And I think that's the good news about marketing mixed modeling. It can just be a response to curiosity. I want wonder what's going on rather than being threatened every time a model comes in. If we can say, huh, I'm curious and I actually want to know, then suddenly these metrics are going to make some sense. Kind of spoke to me about, you know, a little bit of a mindset, mindset shift that we're all going to benefit from. When we start looking at the way these things unfold over time.

[Jim Stengel]

We always wrap up the episodes with one thing that we might ask the brand builders who are in our audience to consider adding to their playbook or supplementing their playbook or questioning their playbook. What would that one thing be from everything we discussed today? Ryan, what's your one thing today?

[Ryan Barker]

I think a lot of these tools churn brand, which is often discounted as this cute thing, into an asset and that this asset absolutely needs to be integrated into these models to optimize for short and long term. And to Kate's point, a lot of these things take time and it's based on yesterday. You need to modernize, you need to have a real time pulse and optimize and be agile as the world and culture shift so rapidly.

[Jim Stengel]

So be sure you're working within a framework and a model that's agile and that is forward leaning and forward looking and not backward looking. Kate, how about yourself?

[Kate Lamberton]

Yeah, I mean, I think for me it is this idea that rather than feeling threatened by this kind of data and the analysis that we do, I think we can see it in two ways that are helpful. One is that it can, yeah, it's going to help us understand and defend the spending that we're doing. I think in a lot of cases, understanding that something has a non zero effect is very, very powerful. And so rather than looking at numbers or different kinds of analyses and feeling as though you're just trying to quantify my work and that's reducing it and I don't like it and we're going to push back against it. Understanding how we can use it and finding sources that are actually valuable to us should help us feel stronger and more confident in what we're doing. The other Thing that I think I've seen when people are exposed to data that does, as Ryan said, look at pulsing over time and actually capture trajectories and changes, particularly relative to competitor brands, which I think is also kind of magic. Like your own model is one thing, but. But when you can see what other people's models are doing, that's even better. But what often happen is people see a data point. Right. Or they see a trajectory and they say, you know what, that makes perfect sense because X, I think these models can actually help us pull together what we understand and what we've experienced in such a way that we don't only see the threats, but we also understand the reasons behind our success. And that's also something we should be learning from.

[Jim Stengel]

And that will make your whole playbook better, right?

[Kate Lamberton]

Exactly. And I think what happens is when we have a brand catastrophe, we all sit around and point fingers at each other and try to learn from that. And that's great. But when we have success, we should also sit there and say, what's going on that's making this work right now? Because those are the things that we need to protect when people come knocking and pushing on the budget.

[Jim Stengel]

My one thing from the conversation, he said it right up front and it's a beautiful thought. You know, he said it begins with the consumer. Mmm. Is our way to understand if we're making an impact with the consumer. So. And I'm not sure in every company we're linking consumer sat and consumer delight to marketing mix modeling. And he did that in his first minute or two in which we spoke to him. So be sure in your playbook, you reinforce and make sure the model helps you build a better brand with the people who you are seeking to attract to your brand. Anything else, Kate or Ryan? Before we sign off, we only have.

[Ryan Barker]

One episode left, so it's a little sad, but it's been a wonderful ride so far.

[Jim Stengel]

Damon wants us to do episode two or season two and he's agreed to wardrobe us, so come on, I'm excited. How can we not do it?

[Kate Lamberton]

Yeah. He also pointed out you guys have great voices for radio. My dad used to tell me I had a great face for radio, so. Oh, dad, that you got.

[Jim Stengel]

I disagree. Kate, respectfully disagree with your dad. All right, you guys, thank you so much and see you next week for episode eight, our final one of the Brand Builders Playbook. Thanks for listening to the Brand Builders Playbook, where we explore the real strategies behind resilient revenue driving brands.

[Ryan Barker]

If today's content conversations, spark new ideas, or help you see things differently. Do us a favor. Follow the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a review and give us a like or rating.

[Jim Stengel]

It really helps others find the show and keeps our conversation going.

[Ryan Barker]

And if you know a brand leader or marketer who needs to hear this, share this episode with them. And don't forget to check out the worksheets in the show notes.

[Jim Stengel]

We'll be back next week with more insights, more playmakers, and more of what it takes to build brands that last.