[MUSIC] >> I'm here with Ije Nwokorie, the global CO of Wolff Olins and we're going to talk about brand leadership in the broader sense. But for some context, Branding Edworf Olins historically has been the heritage around the visual identity of the brand, but you've moved along. Could you tell us a bit about the journey over the last decade or so? >> Actually, Olins is 50 this year. And so, we're spending a lot of time talking about where we've come from and the business actually started as an industrial design company. They took industrial design into the corporation and the whole idea then was that the identity of a corporation exists in the way it manifests in reality. And that really got reduced, because that's what companies wanted. So what became known as CI, a Corporate Identity. But even then, this company has always been on a journey that what that became and how they started defining that was the idea of brand. And so while the thing that Wolff Olins traditionally put out into the world was a visual identity, it was really an idea based on that corporations should have the real manifestation of the world and this is the way you did that. And as the manifestation of corporations in the world has evolved beyond just the visual, our work has evolved beyond just the visuals as well. >> And what is it the center your aspect now if you in manifestation, I guess we're talking about impact in the world. What would that mean? How would you accompany a company on a journey from a branding perspective? >> So, we like to talk about the levers that leaders pull. So we describe ourselves actually, as creative partners for ambitious leaders. We think about brands and great brands, as an outcome of great things that organizations do. So oddly, we define the things we help them do less in branding terms, but much more in terms of things that will therefore result in a great brand and we think about four. Great brands tend to have leaders who have a clear story of what the organization is about, so we talk about leadership story. We think great brands are constantly creating and the people in the organization understand what they're creating. So, we talk about creative cultures. We think great brands put in amazing experiences into the world built around people, built around individuals, so that I can use that organization. So, we talk about experience design and we think great brands tend to have a way to replicate that really well. So, we talk about tools to scale impact. Branding is in all of that and in a way, branding doesn't have to be any of that. It's really that there are things great organizations do. If they do those things well, they'll have a great brand. If they get the story right, if they get the culture right, if they get the experience right. And if they have great tools for promulgating that, the result will be a great brand. >> And those terms you use are quite new in the world of branding. The stories are about leadership, the cultures around what people do inside the organization and experience is something that shifts the focus from the product to the user. >> Yes. >> How do you manage brands differently in that environment? What does it mean for the marketing group or maybe other groups, other than marketing? >> Yeah, I think the first thing that we think is that, I don't know if this has always been true or not, but brands are in effect technology. Brands are things that evolve and change over time. And even when your primary experience of a brand was through a television ad or through a book, it simply was because that was the dominant technology that people used and in a world where people are using tools, and apps, and products, and services, then your brand has to live in those worlds. So the big differences that a lot of our work and the way it's managed is less about abstract concepts of values and attributes, and much more about product attributes. The cultural beacons and behaviors you want in your organization. We manage those things and we make sure that they're having the right impact on that brand, as opposed to managing the brand abstractly in. We manage the things that we know create great brands and technology across both the culture sits at the heart of every single bit of them. >> Ije, over the last almost 20 years or so that you were in the industry, how have your clients evolved in the way they manage brands internally? You mentioned leadership. How has the brand leadership changed, for example, in those organizations? Which companies would you say have done that well, a journey you've been able to observe? >> So the big change is that, because the brand is not the reason you do things, it's the outcome of doing great things. Ownerships of those concepts now spreads right across the organization. So 15 years ago and it might have been at the stage of my career, but I think 15 years ago, the branding people owned the brand. And frankly, the rest of the organization looked at them as the airy, fairy people in the corner who kind of did the branding stuff. And I understand why it's useful, I think, but that's the branding people. Today, the technologist is thinking about, the chief technology officer is thinking about the brand. The chief people officer is thinking about the brand. The chief innovation officer is, the COO and the CEO. Everybody's thinking about the brand and the organization. Now it might be driven from, this is not always the case, but sometimes it might be driven from a marketing function or from a commercial function, but there are implications for the brand right across the other relationship. For me, that's the biggest change. So, if I think about something like Skype, when we got involved with Skype when it was largely defined, as free phone calls on computer internationally and we really felt like there was a phenomenon there. That could be monetized, but the question is how do you monetize the phenomenon without compromising? How do you define Skype not as a disruptor to a dying industry, but its own thing? And the idea we had with Skype was that Skype is actually for doing things together whenever you're apart. And every time you do it, you should be universal. Everybody should be able to use it. It should be useful and it should be wonderful where that really got its arms and legs was in the product, and the technology teams. Frankly, Skype didn't spend a lot of money on marketing and on the traditional things when you build brands and we didn't change the logo. And later on as time went on, we started cleaning up the marketing, but it really was work with the people who define value propositions, the people who define products and with the technologist above all who validated that, that's a great platform for us to go. >> And did they change the internal structures as a result? Do they now have a cross-functional brand team, for example? >> They don't have a cross-functional brand team, but the notations of universal, useful and wonderful and how we measure that work right across the customer experience. So people who think about acquisition, think about universities for wonderful people who build product. Think about universities who are wonderful. People who manage service, customer services. Think about universities who are wonderful. So they become living attributes, given qualities and principles in the organization. But it isn't about the brand team manager, it's about whoever's responsible for putting something in customer's hands, thinks about those principles. >> And are those are metrics in some sense, which are brand based metrics. >> Yes. >> They are now in different functional areas, so you can execute the same strategy, I guess. Are they also present at the board level at Skype? >> They are driven from the board. And so the person who stands up and I think this is the other big thing, the person who stands up and talks about the brand, I would say in every single one of our clients to be very successful is the chief executive officer. She or he are going to be, because they are not saying, this is about how we look and feel. They're saying, this is the business we're creating. This is the impact we want to have on the world and only the leadership of the organization can say that, which is why I always think the first thing you've gotta get right if you're going to build a great brand is that leadership story. And once the leader says it and once you're clear about the imperatives to make that real in the organization, it really begins to take off. >> So, the role for the marketing director in this scenario is also shifted. Historically, they were facing outward in many ways with their back to the organizations, gathering customer insight and then communicating the brand promise. >> Yes. >> Now, it's an about turn they need new manager skills and new ways of working. >> Yeah, they still have to do that, but that's kind of like book ends of the process. The greatest CMO's these days are cross functional collaborator. They're going to go into a product meeting and they're going to be able to add value. They're going to go into the culture meet and then they're going to be able to add value. They really have to be, if you like chief collaboration officers across different parts of the organization and the best ones of them absolutely do that and do that very well. >> How do you manage a brand across the globe in some sense? >> With much difficulty [LAUGH] is the first and different organizations take different ways to do this. There is a constant that says, if you're clear about what you're trying to achieve, you distribute responsibility, you're right as close to the customer as possible. And everybody gets the principles and all branding then is about, how do I interpret every single real interaction with the customer and I really deliver that. I love that notion. Operationally, it can be almost impossible, but it is a great skill to have. I think the other extreme is with ridged consistency, so you have a really good centrally driven machine. That really gives everybody at the edge, not just the tools, the specification for how to do that. I think that's the other extra amount, I think is wrong. The truth is this is a difficult mix of bringing things together and because brands are changing, I think that's absolutely fine. So brands globally, I think as long as you are clear about what the brand is about and then people are equipped not with rules, but with tools to make that relevant for each individual customer, you'll get there. And it might mean that when you see an ad in Mumbai, it's very different from the one you just saw in Mombasa. But if delivering value for the user, that's great. So the latter part you mentioned is the old command and control approach to branding, but the former one is again, it's a different skill set you would need as a branding expert, because it is now at the coal phase that the people facing the consumers and customers. That have to interpret the brand and adapt it to the local environment. >> Yes, yes. And that's where really not thinking about brands as rules, but thinking about them as tools. Not thinking about the reason you're doing it or your metric as being in order to create a brand, your metric is in order to satisfy that customer in order to create a great experience. Or if it's something internal in order to help that worker be, as creative as possible towards a common goal. When you think that way and you just think about therefore giving them the tools that do that in our way, you really can unleash organizations to do amazing things. >> And it takes something very different to design tools rather than visual identity or rules. Could you give an example of what a tool design would be in practice? >> We have educators, people whose job and these are the people who think about tools, who think about how do you turn a principle into a curriculum that somebody can learn how to do something. Organizations that do this very well, Peter BC has done an amazing job. And if you know anything about Peter BC, it's a partnership with I think there is something like 1,200 senior partners. Everybody can decide whether they want to be on Brand or not, I think it's a hyperdemocracy. And so when you give people rules, I don't want to follow that rule. When you give me a tool that helps me sell more, that helps me be clearer about the value we deliver, people adopt it. And so things like, even right down to how do I write a great presentation in six easy steps? How do I define a value proposition by thinking about five big questions? Tools like that really work very well, but it takes a different skill set to create those. >> So you're really a changed agent and I think what you've just defined is very much by understanding your internal people as customers, because- >> Absolutely. You have to understand their needs and all too often, our design guidelines are restrictive where this is really about enabling people. >> Yes, yes. At the heart of our brand is ultimately people. And sometimes, I might have been guilty of this, I'm sure I was certainly ten years ago, maybe even more recently of thinking of the heart of the brand as the brand. It's not and it's people and it's what people are trying to achieve, what jobs they're trying to do, what need they're trying to meet. And we have to make brands and branding, and anything we're, and experiences at the service of people as opposed to have the service of the corporation itself. Thank you you very much, Ije. >> Thank you. [MUSIC]
