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How brand can become your company’s greatest asset - Jonny Bauer

Uncensored CMO

Wed Aug 27 2025

Summary

Uncensored CMO: How Brand Can Become Your Company’s Greatest Asset

Host: Jon Evans
Guest: Jonny Bauer (ex-Chief Strategy Officer, Droga5; former Blackstone; Founder, Fundamental Co)
Date: August 27, 2025

Overview

This episode delves deep into how brand thinking can be a company’s most crucial asset—not just from a marketing or advertising perspective, but as a core driver of business value. Jon Evans interviews Jonny Bauer, whose career has encompassed influential roles at BBH, Droga5, and Blackstone, and now with his own venture, Fundamental Co. The conversation explores why strategists deserve a seat at the table, the evolution of brand thinking in private equity, and how to integrate brand strategy into the DNA of an organization for meaningful value creation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Often-Underappreciated Role of Brand Strategists

Strategy vs. Creativity in Agencies ([01:43]–[02:35])
- Jonny recalls how BBH uniquely valued strategists and gave them an equal seat alongside creatives, allowing strategy to inspire the work, not just post-rationalize it.
- Quote: “They really had a seat at the table...not just used to sell work or to post-rationalize work.” — Jonny ([02:36])
Cultural Differences in Strategic Planning ([03:11]–[04:04])
- Strategy in advertising originated in Britain and was exported to the US, often dominated by expat Brits in New York.

Early Brand Innovation: Axe/Lynx and Shifting Emotional Territories

Transforming Axe/Lynx ([04:09]–[08:50])
- Jonny reflects on helping reposition Axe from a functional antiperspirant to a seduction tool for young men—an emotional territory that built a new category.
- Innovative moves included the creation of entertainment properties: a TV series, a movie, a film festival, and more.
- Quote: “If you put a different scent on it, you charge a dollar more for it and you reframe the benefit...as a seduction tool, essentially…” — Jonny ([06:54])
- Extensive innovation pipeline emerged from honest, holistic insight into the emotional needs of consumers.

Droga5: The Rise of Strategy-First Creativity

Building Droga5’s DNA ([09:43]–[13:37])
- Jonny was recruited early at Droga5 and built the strategy department, with David Droga giving him power to shape it.
- The agency’s philosophy: go beyond creative stunts—use deep strategic thinking to reduce reliance on luck and cultivate repeatable fame.
- Quote: “We were trying to take the luck out of the fame.” — Jonny ([11:35])
- Example: The fabled “Air Force One” viral campaign, which blurred reality and brought the notion of viral/earned media into sharp focus.
Campaigns of Strategic Pride ([15:36]–[17:29])
- Standout campaigns: Tourism Australia (Crocodile Dundee dupe), The New York Times (“Preserve Democracy”), Puma’s “After Hours Athlete”—all rooted in finding a differentiating category insight.
- Quote: “At the time, they didn’t have the credentials to go after [elite] athletes…so we created a new category called the After Hours Athlete.” — Jonny ([16:47])

The Move to Private Equity: Brand as a Value Creation Engine

Why Private Equity? ([18:08]–[21:08])
- Jonny wanted to see if brand thinking could escape the “marketing silo” and inform wider business transformation.
- Private equity provided “a radically different context” with receptive companies at inflection points after being acquired.
- Quote: “Brand is...a set of ideas that you can truly organize a company around.” — Jonny ([18:49])
- The PE shift: Moving from “efficiency-based” to “vision-based” value creation.
- Quote: “What could this company’s next chapter be? What could it become over the course of this investment cycle?” — Jonny ([20:20])
Integrating Brand Strategy Upstream ([24:02]–[25:31])
- Bringing brand thinkers in early—rather than at the comms stage—aligns the business and clarifies decision-making across functions.
- Alignment is the “biggest effect”—everyone knows what to do and how it’s measured.
- Quote: “If we’re becoming this thing, this is your role in becoming it.” — Jonny ([25:26])
Lessons Learned at Blackstone ([28:47]–[32:28])
- Jonny learned to be more useful across many (non-consumer) business types—like infrastructure or data centers.
- Quote: “Blackstone's portfolio is mostly not consumer...all these companies you don’t normally get access to or understanding from...” — Jonny ([29:59])
- Brand can play a crucial role from acquisition diligence to “exit readiness.”

Bridging the Gap: Brand, Finance, and the C-Suite

How Finance Sees Brand ([32:46]–[33:52])
- Blackstone sees brand as central, both for itself and as a genuine differentiator for investments; brand foundations come before activation/advertising.
Advice on Bringing Brand Strategy Upstream ([34:20]–[36:42])
- Start by asking: Not “why do you exist?” but “What kind of company are you—and what do you want to be valued as?”
- Transformational change can mean either “becoming bigger” or “becoming something else of higher value.”
- Quote: “Know that the right kind of ideas can take you from one categorical placement into another of higher value.” — Jonny ([34:37])
Senior Sponsorship and Cross-Functional Alignment ([36:42]–[38:32])
- CEO-led mandates ensure brand is company-wide, not siloed; essential to have everyone use the same language and metrics.
- Quote: “If the CEO is saying, you all need to care about this...he or she can make it a thing everyone needs to care about.” — Jonny ([37:19])

The Fundamental Co Approach

From Blackstone to Fundamental Co ([40:14]–[41:17])
- After proving the model at Blackstone, Jonny spun out Fundamental Co, keeping Blackstone as an anchor client but expanding to serve other PE and public companies.
- They offer value creation strategy—the intersection of brand, business, and investment strategy.
Process: Value Creation and Roadmapping ([41:29]–[43:27])
- Work begins with strategic alignment—defining the brand’s potential with input from all major stakeholders.
- Roadmapping prioritizes the fewest, highest-value actions to reach the desired repositioned state.
Execution: Custom, Not Cookie-Cutter ([43:28]–[45:25])
- No one-size-fits-all playbook. Fundamental Co assembles bespoke teams and external partners as needed for each transformation.
- Core focus: Making sure the change is visible and understood, internally and externally (especially to potential buyers or investors).

Application & Case Studies

Recent Projects ([47:23]–[51:31])
- Working with several top PE firms and their portfolio companies across industries (Spanx, power grid, SaaS, private aviation, and more).
- Public company examples: Delta, Visa, and notably CLEAR.
- CLEAR: Reframed from “the airport queue jump company” to a “connected identity company” supporting frictionless verification across travel, healthcare, and more.
- Olaplex: Transitioned from repair-focused haircare to a “foundational health and maintenance” company—inspiring everything from internal R&D to advertising briefs.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On early strategy’s seat at the table:
“I was very attracted to so much work that BBH was doing...Then I understood that they were quite unique with, you know, giving strategy a real seat at the table to help inspire work...” — Jonny ([02:36])
The power of reframing:
“The thesis was if you put a different scent on it, you charge a dollar more...and you reframe the benefit...as a seduction tool, essentially...” — Jonny ([06:54])
On reducing luck and repeating fame:
“We were trying to like, take the luck out of the fame. And there was a lot of like, deep, deep thinking and understanding to inform the creative and help steer it...” — Jonny ([11:35])
The centrality of alignment:
“So the biggest effect that I think that this has is...around alignment and...togetherness. And it sounds so, so obvious, but...we call this process like purpose propagation.” — Jonny ([25:39])
Brand as business transformation:
“Brand is...a set of ideas that you can truly organize a company around.” — Jonny ([18:49]) “What happens if we brought brand much further upstream in the sequence of value creation?” — Jonny ([22:51])
Categorical transformation:
“The biggest lesson learned is: for a company to become more valuable, one way is for it to become bigger. Another way is for it to become something else that’s of higher value.” — Jonny ([35:00])
Execution and change management:
“People need to see it from very far away. And we're getting pretty good at thinking how to do that.” — Jonny ([45:18])
Making change visible to investors:
“The only people to signal the change to are potential new investors that need to understand the value that has been created.” — Jonny ([46:22])

Timestamps for Important Segments

[01:02] — Jonny’s early strategy training at BBH
[04:09] — The Axe/Lynx reinvention and holistic brand thinking
[09:43] — Building Droga5’s distinctive strategy-first culture
[12:35] — The story behind the Air Force One viral campaign
[15:36] — Standout, strategically-driven Droga5 campaigns
[18:08] — Moving brand upstream in private equity at Blackstone
[24:02] — The logic and benefits of integrating brand into business strategy
[34:20] — How to move brand strategy upstream in your own organization
[36:42] — The need for CEO/senior sponsorship
[40:14] — Spinning Fundamental Co out of Blackstone
[41:29] — The Fundamental Co process: value creation and roadmapping
[47:23] — Real-life examples and application of the value creation model

Tone & Takeaways

The tone is candid, practical, and both reflective and forward-thinking—true to the “Uncensored CMO” premise. Bauer demonstrates how marketers and strategists can (and should) think bigger about their impact—inspiring companies to move beyond seeing brand as a cost or a communications tool, and to see it as the architecture for business transformation and valuation.

For practitioners:
If you’re a marketer, strategist, or business leader, this episode provides actionable insight into how to reposition the value of brand, get a seat at the big table, and rethink how your organization can create and capture value—whether in private equity or the broader business world.

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Transcript

Jonny (0:00)

Foreign.

John Evans (0:06)

Welcome back to the Uncensored cmo. Now something I'm really passionate about is demonstrating the value that marketing has on a company. Now I've worked in private equity in the past and in private equity they are razor sharp about creating value, creating growth and identifying the role that the brand has to play. Now my next guest is the person, perfect person to talk to us about this. He has been the chief strategy officer of Droga5 and he went from there to Blackstone, the world's biggest PE company. Now he really knows how to uncover value in an organization and he's now set up his own business called Fundamental Co to do just that for his clients. So I caught up with Jonny to find out about how marketing can better extract value in an organization. Here it is. Jonny, welcome to Uncensored cmo.

Jonny (0:52)

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

John Evans (0:53)

Now we share a bit of a common interest early in your career and we actually overlap for a while. But you sort of cut your teeth early as a strategist, didn't you at bbh?

Jonny (1:02)

I did, yes. The Black Sheep crew. I had a really very lucky start to my career working with some very big strategy brains like Charles Wigley and Emma Cookson, David Terry and had an unusual amount of access to really senior people for someone in their early mid-20s at the time. And I'd spent a little bit of time in the London office and then they shipped me off to Singapore and then brought me over to New York where I was there for, in the New York office for another four years during a really, you know, period of, of growth of that part of the company.

Interviewer/Host Assistant (1:43)

Yeah.

John Evans (1:43)

I often think that strategists never get the kind of credit they deserve because we celebrate the creative so much, don't we? We've got the awards and obviously everyone sees the creative, the client talks about the creative. But it's the work that happens, you know, in the run ups that that's often so important. Why is it we don't get the. I mean, I know BBH probably, you know, probably different in that respect, but why don't we celebrate the kind of strategy and thinking more?

Jonny (2:05)

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a fair amount of like award schemes and systems and things like the FES and IPA where, you know, the effectiveness gets mostly conn connected with the strategy folks. But it's up to the creatives to, you know, translate the thinking into things that stop people in their tracks. And so, you know, it's. And I really, what I really liked about bbh, they kind of, I didn't really understand the strategy was a thing.

Jonny (21:13)

And so when I spoke to my, my friends, you know, in finance, they were, you know, through my thesis and my, my, my ambition to affect greater parts of the company, it was unanimous of like, you need to go to Blackstone. And I was to a degree, like, what's Blackstone? Like, of course I knew, but I didn't really understand like the scale and the breadth and how many different kinds of businesses they have and how many portfolio companies they have of a different nature. And they were recommended to me as like being the highest integrity folks, like very high integrity, but also like always evolving and experimenting and rethinking the model. And so I approached them with a thesis around could brand take a different position of intentionality within your process of value creation for your portfolio companies? And they had just, you know, at the time got a new head of their portfolio operations that was looking to also, you know, make changes and additions to this group of operators that she oversaw and was thinking, I think like kind of thinking many of the same things. And you know, I think it was like 40 interviews later, you know, and lots of, you know, background checks. And, and this is all at the very beginning of COVID too, you know, going to meet a different organization to. But the thesis was really simple. Companies are required and there are a ton of different, you know, interventions to, you know, transform that company or to make it more valuable. And then very often, not just in Blackstone, but in the PE back context, the brand people are then brought in to say, like, you know, who are we? And the thesis was, what happens if we bought brand much further upstream in the sequence of value creation earlier and Translated, you know, an investment thesis into what we call or at fundamental co we call like value creation strategy, which is a set of ideas and tools and words and things and objectives that everyone can grab onto that connect these interventions and can be used as a filter to inform decision making. If we're going to become this thing that we're all agreed on and using exactly the same words, you know, it's not just about what we say in the advertising, but can potentially be connected to what we're making, who we're hiring. You know, do we need to buy another company, do we need to change capabilities? And then of course, once these, you know, transformations are happening in place, how are they branded, how do we communicate them and how do they then start to show up in the world? So it's a very long, you know, walk for ham sandwich there. But that like kind of explains like what I was trying to do and why I thought, you know, this context could be a good place to try out the theory.

John Evans (26:17)

I mean, one of the things I learned, I had four years in private equity myself, which was a real wake up call actually for a couple of reasons. One is actually counter to maybe perception, actually I found that the PE company obsessed about brand because when they were valuing what they were buying and valuing what they could be selling, the research mattered a lot. I mean, the advice I got also it's interesting that they bring marketers in really early because they were going, we need people that understand the brand, that can solve the positioning, that can kind of get the design and start the innovation plan. So they absolutely obsessed about that. And I remember them saying to me, right, we want you to find the world's best design agency and strategy agency and do that. And their advice was that the teams that they put in place that get that work done, you know, that nail that first time are the ones that are successful because they really recognized that what they were going to sell on exit in a few years time was, would be a brand and they needed to kind of establish it. And in fact, I remember actually one of the things that I found really helpful is on day one, they got us together and said, write the investment memorandum for a potential buyer of the future. What would it say? And they kind of had four boxes and they said, what would it say about the brand? What would it say about the market? What it say about finance, what it say about operations and supply chain? So we kind of went through and said, you know, well, revenue will be 2x, profit will be forex, you know, margins will have doubled. You know, the brand would then be in these different kind of segments of the market. We'll have proven that it could stretch into here and go over there. And it created this real clarity and it was rather than, I think in marketing, we. We think in narrow senses in terms of our role. You know, immediately I was thinking about the whole business and, you know, how would I fund the sort of market I wanted to do? I need to earn the money before I spent it as a shareholder. I had to think about what's going to get the best return for me and us, because all our incentives were aligned, because we all won and lost based on the same metrics, whether we were the operations director, marketing director, or sales director kind of thing. So I certainly, I found the sort of purity of the approach really refreshing as it's real business. And I think I worked out, I probably spent no more than 10% of my time on marketing and the way that most people think about it as communicating to the consumer. And I found that kind of closeness to business really refreshing. But I'd love to know from, you know, I mean, I was in a boutique, kind of quite a small PE house, and Blackstone's obviously the biggest in the world. What do you learn in those, in those years from the team at Blackstone about how to kind of run successful business?