Soyoung Kang on the Architecture of Value Creation

28:39Right. Yeah. How do you know kind of what you need to evolve today, if not tomorrow? And when. Right. Based on those changes. I think I wish that I had a very smart and certain answer for you. But I think that I do, too, because I got an audience to feed. The only thing that I would say is to is, you know, it's something that I think that I've always believed in, which is that we always need to be learning no matter how, whether you're the most junior person on the team or you're the most senior person on the team, everyone should have an appetite for learning. For me, that appetite for learning, you know, in my prior role when I was overseeing marketing and product, it was a lot of being fed by, you know, I literally read and reviewed and watched everything that was being said about our brand and just the category in general.

29:33And so any signal that I could get from the external market, because now in this wholesale role, like I said, it's a little bit harder for me to talk directly to the end consumer. So I personally was reading, ingesting, digesting, trying to sort of like pull the patterns out and find insights from like direct from the source, like social media commentary, product ratings and reviews, all of those things. And so that was my form of kind of like staying educated. And sorry to interrupt it yet again, but as you looked for signal amongst noise, what value did you put on kind of your ability to consume things as an individual, right?

30:19And then the value of all your data gathering and synthesis and analysis to look at it at scale. We need both. Yeah. We need both. The at scale gives you the sort of like the macro view. But to be honest, you miss all of like the beauty of the individual flavor of what does this really mean and how much do I, you know, just to use it. Here's an example. So we have an amazing product line of body care products. We actually happen to be the number one brand in body lotion across America. We have been for, you know, many years running. And we launched it with a product like Pump. You know, like if you pump it, like the product comes out.

31:05Are you talking about what you guys did like a year ago with the lock? We did. No, actually. That's my favorite. This is different. So we had a pump, you know, and the entire category has, you know, every brand out there has a pump, right? So if you look at your competition, you're like, that's how I'm going to do it. That's how I'm going to package my product. The challenge is that consumers were having a harder time actually getting the product out. And this wasn't like widespread data. This wasn't like massive insight that was coming. It could be N of one, which is you're a consumer and you know how hard it is.

31:35And yes, it can be it can be your own experience. And you certainly, you know, if you see something that somebody is saying about your product or your service, you better believe you should be out there actually trying it for yourself to make sure that you understand directly from their perspective what the experience is like. And in our case, it was only a handful of people, but those handful of people, we were like, you know what, they really have a point. And so we were actually developing a prototype for essentially what's not a pump, but like a cap that just opens up for a totally different product.

32:04But it happened to fit the bottle. And we had like 20 pieces of this prototype on hand in the office. And we said, you know what, these like, I can't remember how many it was, like 10 to 20 people who have said something on social media, we're just going to send them the prototype and just ask for their feedback. rather than going through the entire multiple years of R &D. We're not going to vet this like sort of through the official processes and run focus. An informal beta. Just send it to them, see what they say. The reaction was so positive. And it was because their feedback was, you're actually listening to me.

32:37And I can't believe that I complained about you and you didn't like, you know, cease and desist or whatever. But instead, you sent me product and you told me that my opinion matters. And that, to me, is the difference between scaled data and individual insight. Now, fast forward earlier this year, we actually, this is a massive endeavor to shift your entire supply chain to basically all of the production now had, because we decided at that time, let's just do this. Let's do it differently. Because we're getting this overwhelming positive feedback. So we switched over to the packaging design. It took us about a year and a half to get the entire supply chain basically now oriented towards using this type of packaging.

33:18And I'm imagining at great expense, both economic and time. Economic and time. Now, talk about value creation, though. Better experience for the consumer. From a business perspective, obviously, like the goal is for us to continue to win and continue to be number one with our consumer and within the category. But also there were other things, too, like we actually saved plastic when we switched over. So there were things that were helping us to meet our sustainability goals as a company. And just a significant win also internally with our community because everyone felt like we were working directly with and engaging directly with our consumer.

33:57And it was actually a very positive sort of like, you know, just motivator internally within the teams, too. We actually launched this earlier this year and it became our, I think it still is, our most engaged, most popular sort of like message that we've put out there as a brand. Now, this isn't the type of thing that we've put out there as a campaign to win awards or anything like that. But for us, the fact that we were looking for that signal within the noise, the fact that we're putting our consumer-centric hat on and trying to make things better for our consumer, the fact that it became a win-win across all of our sort of three constituent groups makes it a big win for us.

34:37And I think we really believe that we've created a significant amount of value there. I want to get actually two awards you've won and very specifically about one that you've won two years in a row, actually. But before I do, I want to spend a second on the internal conversations as you made this shift, because I think one of one of the challenges that faces a lot of businesses of every size is is the good enough. Right. Most outside of beauty for this, most products and services are good enough. They get the job done. Right. Whether it's a cloud computing construct, an AI relationship or your paper towels.

35:25Right. There's a lot of good enough out there. And I have to imagine in many companies, the conversation to incur the expense you had to incur to change that packaging would have been greeted with, oh, why? What value are we creating for this incremental expense that we're incurring? And is it really worth it? And I'm wondering how you would go through making the case for that investment, for value creation that might have seemed, you know, who the fuck knows at the time. I mean, first of all, I feel incredibly fortunate to work in an organization where keeping our consumer and our customer happy is probably the number one mission, the number one objective that we have.

36:16And it's a shared goal across the entire C-suite and my CEO. And so, you know, just to kind of put a finer point on that. Jonathan's a good one. And he gets it. So, you know, we even reviewed the timeline for this change. We reviewed the timeline and we at the risk of getting in trouble for talking about the inner workings at EOS. But we reviewed the timeline and we had to evaluate, are we going to wait on this and basically have to figure out what to do with millions of pieces of componentry? Or are we going to go earlier and basically make our consumers happy earlier? And it was a no brainer choice.

36:55So we're sacrificing all of this production capacity and inventory that we had in order to be able to get something out there that we felt was going to fundamentally make our consumers more satisfied with our product. It seems to me that inside this story is a very simple truth that applies to every business in the history of the world, past, present, and future, which is the surest path. It's not certain, but surest path to value creation for the enterprise is being valuable to your end user. Absolutely. Because when you're valuable to them, value accrues back to you and that's what you're monetizing.

37:33You're monetizing that value. And yet I think it's been kind of an undercurrent theme in our conversation. I don't think people understand that. Right. I don't think that enough enterprises, product service, large, small, understand they are, we are all in the quality of life business. Right. For somebody else. Yes. Right. Jamie Dimon's in the quality of life business for his board and institutional and individual investors. Right. And his employees, too, of course. We're all in that business, but we're all in the business fundamentally of quality of life for the people we're selling to. which I think again brings me back to the very beginning and what you said which is that's how they move through the experience we provide them and if we put up roadblocks that erode that experience well that's where destruction begins so I said I wanted to get back to awards you have won along with your partners your agency partners at Mischief No Fixed Address the second year in a row from remind me which organizing by was it the EFI?

38:41Effies. Yeah, the Effies, who for those who don't know, are all about effectiveness. You have been named the most effective marketer in the world two years in a row. Yep. Right. Which is like bravo, brava, brava, brava, brava, whatever. Well done. What makes your work so effective? Like from a framework perspective, a systems perspective, what can, you know, if you guys got to become a case study soon, what's the case study? So you said it. You said a systems perspective. To me, the reason why the work is so effective is because the entire system is effective. And, you know, as you mentioned earlier, I am not a marketer by training.

39:28I am a, I don't know, am I an architect, a consultant, a retailer, a business person? You would have been a bad one. I would have been a bad one. I could have been one, just a bad one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too. Don't trust me with your house. But I think that, you know, I'm not a marketer by training, that's for sure. and while I have a tremendous amount of and a deep respect for what the function does, but I also have a deep respect for what supply chain does and what product does and frankly what finance does to keep all of that going. So I do believe that when all of the systems are working in concert to deliver the best possible solution for your external constituent, for your consumer, that you drive and deliver outsized performance.

40:19So in this case, we have, yes, thank you. We had the, for second year in a row, most effective marketing campaign in the world, right? And we don't take that honor lightly. And it was because we were firing on all cylinders, us and our partners across the entire thing. Really, really deep understanding of our consumer and what it was that they were looking for. And an understanding of how they talk about things within our category that's different than the way that maybe the category speaks to them. So they talk amongst themselves in a way. The category brands talk to them in a certain way. There's a disconnect happening there.

40:55So any disconnect offers opportunity. And that was really the sort of like the creative. Any disconnect offers opportunity. I love that line. That's so good. In this case, that offered us a creative way in that was unique. So, you know, strategy and idea, firing on all cylinders. Creativity, the willingness to go there and be bold and put things out there that maybe, you know, nobody else was willing to do because we felt like there was that truth at the heart of it. Right. So, like, if you're, you know, if consumers are speaking about, you know, shaving their private parts, then we want to talk about shaving private parts because we want to be the product that you think of when you're talking about shaving your private parts.

41:33But, and, not but, or shaving your butt, and you chose to do it with the language of one of your customers. That was the disconnect. Right? So just fill people in here. Yeah, so in this case, this is what's, I've said this to you before, this is what's going to go on my, like, headstone when I die. I'm going to be the lady who put that EO shave cream is the secret to bless your fucking cooch on our product and sold it because because that's how people talk. And that's the disconnect that I'm talking about is that the disconnect was that, you know, brands were speaking in these sanitized, you know, proper corporate terms.

42:19people are speaking to each other and saying words like cooch and dropping f-bombs and saying hoo-ha when they're talking about a very real very normal behavior which is grooming yourself the way that you want to groom yourself and we saw the opportunity to be able to use you know to partner with somebody who was using that language and putting it more directly on our products that we're the we're the brand that you think of when you're doing this you know everyday self-care routine. And it worked. And by the way, when I say we're firing on all cylinders, we believe we have a superior product on the market.

42:54And we also worked to get it to an affordable price point through our supply chain. And, you know, there are all these different ways in which we were, you know, using the system to our advantage. And as a result, now we have over a quarter of the market. You know, that's our market share. And that's an incredible thing to go from being a challenger in the industry to being the dominant number one player. And so, essentially, that is why we are the most effective marketer in the world. Do you know my first, and I think perhaps only play experience, I was in the Sound of Music, which is, you know, in camp.

43:29These are a few of my favorite things. So a few of my favorite things amongst them and amongst the amazing work you guys have done. And I kind of thought this is where you were going to go when you were talking about the package. Which I think I'm right in that maybe it's just a campaign and not, in fact, a product or a post. But did you guys put a lock on the lotion to keep boyfriends away? Yes. So we. It was so fun. What was the line? This was another. It was called the lotion lock. Yes. Yeah. And this was another great. I think a really great example. Man, the EOS team. They're just like constantly like just, you know, killing it with like the consumer insight.

44:13But this was another example where, you know, I don't know if you know, our product is like pink and purple. It's got like a big pink logo on it. It smells like, you know, vanilla cupcakes. Like, you know, it's not necessarily something that you would look at and go, ah, I bet that's for a man or even it's for like, you know, it's for anyone. I think it kind of projects very sort of like stereotypically, you know, girly. And, you know, we randomly caught this guy, you know, posting about his experience. And he was like, he was like, yo, I don't know if this stuff is just for the girls. These are his words.

44:52Like, I don't know if this stuff is just for the girls. But like, I went to a bar and he's like, and my homie said, what are you wearing? You smell so good. You smell delicious. It was amazing. It was like the best piece of content. But the better part of it was how pissed women got. Like this was it was as if it was their secret. Because they were like, you are going to ruin this for all of us women who already are having a hard time finding the product because it was selling very well. It was like, you know, it was like hard to keep in stock. And they're like, you if you I will come and F you up if you sell out my favorite.

45:27You better gatekeep this shit. Exactly. So it was all about. So this was our response. Our response was and it was a prototype. It was it turns out it was like very expensive to actually produce this thing. But but the idea was that we would we would prototype a lock that would keep your man out of your lotion so that it would just be all for you. But it's just another fun way of, you know, looking at what are consumers saying? How are they feeling? And rather than sort of like ignoring things that are happening out there in culture, really sort of leaning into them by having an appreciation for where they're coming from and how they're feeling about it.

46:04In this case, it was really leaning into the fear, the annoyance, a little bit of the anger. You know, it reminds me when we were talking about Bless Your Cooch that it takes a brand that has earned its place in people's lives the permission, to be given the permission to say that and it not just being like nails on a chalkboard. Yes. Right. Because, you know, so many products and services try and speak in the language of their of their end user of the humans who they're selling to. And it's just like, dude, you are trying way too hard. Yeah, I definitely and I very much respect that distinction as somebody who is not of the generation that is necessarily our core target audience.

46:58And so we always have to be really thoughtful about getting it right and making sure that we're leaning into moments that feel like true. I do think that one of the things that we do very well is to kind of leverage our audience's language instead of putting words in. And number one, not putting words in their mouth. But like, you know, or trying to create something out of thin air. We're not like trying to invent some sort of really like cool, like, you know, communication platform. We're just amplifying the words that are already being said. I mean, but hearing you say it that way, it's like it's so much easier to do it that way.

47:34Right. And I don't mean that it's easy or simple, but it's like, why aren't we all doing that? Like, you know, we live in a world where anybody with a keyboard, and that's everybody, I'm pretty sure, can influence the trajectory of a brand or a business. And yet we're not, we're too often not letting them influence it for the better. Well, I think that it goes back to this perspective of like, if you're having the perspective of looking outside and figuring out how to bring that in versus looking inside and trying to push it out. Yeah. Which I do think that there are, you know, no one on the EOS marketing team.

48:10But, you know, I've definitely heard of marketers who are like just we're going to create something. We're going to create culture and we're going to push it out. That makes me crazy. And so, you know, for us, it's really all about recognizing, appreciating and respecting what's already happening in the outside world. And then just being there for the journey. And and like I said, having a little bit of fun along the way by amplifying it. Well, I mean, to me, what that brings up, agreeing with you completely. And when marketers talk about creating culture, like it is never followed by in order to create more commerce, which makes me insane.

48:46It's like an objective in and of itself. but it speaks to the role of the strategist and the strategic the strategist mind inside the creative process which you know could be its own um series because i think strategists strategists are in marketing not inside the agency world but i think oftentimes inside the client world they are akin to film editors in in motion picture um because once i was in my first edit studio, I couldn't understand how these people were not like getting Oscars that were, you know, amongst the most cherished of, because they are the storytellers, or they're certainly helping the storyteller.

49:31And, you know, people say film's a director's medium. Sure, it is, as opposed to television, which is much less so. It's a showrunner's medium. But yeah, it's an editor's medium. Yeah. Because they can make the whole world go round. Well, if they don't do a great job, then the product only lives in the director's head, right? That's right. So they're actually turning it into reality.

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51:45Okay. So you're not a traditional marketer, although I really do. You don't have a traditional marketing background. That's right. A year ago, almost a year ago, you get promoted from CMO to president. I'm wondering if in the balance between I got promoted to president because I look at the world as I look at marketing as a business function, which of course it is. And I was promoted because I did my job so very well that they needed to give me more responsibility. Like, where does it land for you? If I can ask you to flatter, not to flatter yourself because it's all truth, but to kind of do that diagnostic.

52:36And then I'm wondering as follow up, if your perspective has changed, been informed by new things in the last 10 months, 8 months, 9 months, whatever it is in this president's role. Yeah, I think that I've always been somebody that is who who thinks sort of beyond the direct like sort of functional area that I that I'm in. I mean, frankly, even in the other roles that I was in, if you think about what it means to be, for example, a management consultant, it means that you're thinking about the whole end to end picture. And to me, this shift in my role means that I get to officially think about the end-to-end value chain in a way that maybe before I only sort of like was officially able to think about one piece of it.

53:21Now, unofficially, I've always thought about the entire thing. And I think that as a leader have always, you know, it's not even something that I'm trying to do to show up as a leader that understands the entire business and our model. It's just, that's just the way I think, you know. And that's the way I engage. And so, therefore, that's the way that I show up. And so I do think that the move in the role and the promotion was in large part a recognition of a lot of the ways that I was already operating. now with that said I think there are some things that I've learned many things I've learned in the last less than a year about how I need to to you know understand other areas that are newer to me in the same way that eight years ago when I took on this role as first time CMO I had to kind of like get up that learning curve really quickly and that's been so fun for me like what's what What are one or two things you've learned?

54:20So I have to understand commercial terms with retailers. I have to dig really deep and understand how that works. I have to understand if I'm responsible for a bigger part of the system, I have to understand how all of the different parts and pieces come together and where we have opportunities to drive closer connection across functions. I mean, going back, sorry, I'm looking. Any disconnect offers opportunity. That's the same internally, right? Yes, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And we are also at a phase in our journey where as an enterprise, we're trying to get to that next level of growth. And that means that I have to sort of think about what does an organization at this level scale look like that's different than the organization that I've experienced up until now.

55:08And so these are all things that I'm learning and trying things out for the first time. And fortunately, we have a team that is very used to a lot of change and a lot of sort of growing, like talent growing with the organization. We're incredibly proud of the fact that we have very low turnover within the organization. But that means that a lot of people are doing jobs that they've never done before. It means they're either growing into much more senior roles as first time, you know, fill in the blank, or they're taking on bigger scope like myself. And so but we'd rather do that with a team that's been there and understands the history where the brand came from, but also has an appetite to kind of continue to move into the future than to continue than to maybe like another organization would do.

55:50Go and find somebody who's already done it somewhere from the outside. Because the reality is that if we were to bring in somebody who's done this from the outside, they probably have their own kind of playbook and history and baggage that comes along with it. And we like our baggage just fine. All right. But actually, I want to build or get you to build on that by taking you back to 2018. Right. That's when you joined EOS, right? Yeah. So not only were you the first CMO for the company. First time CMO. First time marketer. First time marketer. And coming into a business that if I'm right and tell me if I'm not and we'll edit it out.

56:28Just kidding. We keep everything in. It was in need of a turnaround, right? Growth had slowed. Yeah. And I'm wondering what the business, like, that's a whole bunch of bets. Yeah. Right? That the business took, right? First time CMO, first time traditional, you know, in a marketing functional role. in the midst of the urgency of needing a turnaround. What was the hypothesis that the leadership of the company you joined was making about how value would be created? Well, look, I think, yes, the business was not in a particularly healthy place, and I was brought in to rejuvenate not only the brand, And but just also our entire sort of like our entire growth strategy.

57:26And I think that we as a brand, I think that the leadership has always had a history of doing things in maybe unconventional ways. And I genuinely think that the taking taking risk didn't scare this leadership team. So taking a risk, you know, bringing me in was taking a risk. You know, I understood sort of the product side of the business very well based on my experience. But like you said, first time CMO, first time marketer. And they were entrusting me with this brand, this precious thing that they had created. Were you terrified? I was terrified. I don't know. What's fear and what's excitement?

58:09I don't know. It becomes all jumbled and mixed up. I think that when I announced that I was leaving Forbes, you sent me a note that said, are you the appropriate amount of excited and terrified or something like that? To your point, right? There's like, yeah, I was kind of scared, but I was super excited. And, you know, that's all healthy. That's when you know you're making a good move. The worst thing is to go in kind of feeling like, here we go again. Who wants that in their career, especially at this stage? Like, you know, time is too precious for that. But so, you know, I and there were so many days when I would walk in and think like, whew, like I have no idea what's going on around me, but I'm just going to dive in and I might look stupid to the rest of this team, you know, because I've never done whatever this is before.

58:56But we're going to figure it out and we're going to do it together. And I do think that there is, you know, I'm always grateful for the fact that, you know, Jonathan, my boss, was, you know, he had an appetite for just like trying new things and doing things differently. And it's like if the last like few, you know, it had been about a year and a half, you know, that they knew they needed this kind of jolt of something new and fresh. And if that didn't work, then, you know, what the hell? Like how much worse could it be? Yeah. I mean, actually, a fair amount. But let me ask you to, or let me digress for a second and ask you to offer some counsel maybe to the non C-suite folks in our audience who, regardless of where they are in their careers, maybe in this moment or the next are going to be in a position where they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

59:52Yeah. How you kind of, not that you didn't know to that degree, but how did, how did you gain enough confidence to be like, I don't know it, but I'll figure it out. What advice can you offer them? So, you know, I mentioned that I did come in with a very, very deep understanding of category strategy, product strategy. And so I think that having, you know, call it like 50, let's call it 50-50, 50 % of my job that I understood, like, you know, to my core. Right. And then 50 % where I literally was like, I don't know what word you just said. What was that word? It was media. Something like that, right?

1:00:34I think that that balance is very helpful. Now, I always encourage people to take on roles that scare them where they're going to do something they've never done before. Because how else do we grow? I mean, none of us want to be doing the same thing for 20, 30 years, right? Yeah. We all are going to reach these inflection points in your career where you're doing something you've never done before. Every single one of us, whether you're at my stage, like right now, right now I'm doing it, right? Me too. Or earlier on in your career. And the way that you can help sort of, you know, the way that I did kind of protect my fragile ego and also protect my maybe save face to the broader team was to ensure that I had moments where I could shine in the things that I knew what I was talking about and things that I knew how to do very well.

1:01:22and then balance with the areas where maybe I was sort of like over my skis on the content. Yeah. Yeah. It is that balance, to borrow a word, between the protection that lets you be resilient in the face of not knowing. Yeah, for sure. And feeling vulnerable and unprotected. All right. I got two more questions for you. What do you think matters most, broad brush, for value creation? And what do you think contributes most to value destruction? So I think that for value creation, I think that I'll probably go back to another word that I used, which is empathy. And I say that because, you know, that's not just me sort of, you know, deflecting on the hard answer.

1:02:18But it is actually very hard in your day-to-day when you're heads down in your job to remember that you have to actually put on somebody else's hat and think about something from their perspective. Whether that is your consumer, because we talked a lot about empathy and perspective of the consumer, or just frankly internally as well. Because I think that when you think about how to best orchestrate, if you're able to orchestrate a systemic solution that helps to create value, I think that the best way to do that is by creating the empathy internally so that you have the ability to kind of connect the dots across functions.

1:02:57It's not an easy thing to do. It's much easier to just sort of like stay in your own swim lane. And so getting everybody on board with a vision that you believe is going to ultimately be the right thing because it's coming from, you know, an understanding of the consumer. But then getting that like through and getting it, like we said, to permeate throughout the organization, that requires empathy, too, internally. And so I really think that having that perspective and that way of thinking about like who you're speaking to is incredibly important. I often think, you know, to dig a little deeper on this one again, I think for me, and I've talked about this publicly before, but like I think that being an outsider my whole life has created an ability for me to sort of like look at situations and people and try to understand things from their perspective.

1:03:47because I literally did not speak English till I was five. Right. And so when you are always thinking about what is this person trying to tell me and what am I picking up from signals and cues, when you grow up that way as the outsider, you get very attuned to being perceptive about kind of putting on somebody else's hat because you're just you're literally trying to understand and communicate with another person. There's not enough of that in today's business world. Let me play armchair shrink for a second. which is to say there's a part of that, especially as a five-year-old, but I don't know that it changes as we get older, where I have to imagine, back to your use of the word protection, you were trying to protect yourself.

1:04:33And what does a five-year-old want? To fit in. Yeah. Right. And I'm wondering if the notion, the framing rather, of fitting in, right? Brands, businesses, products, services are all intended, are all trying to fit into the lives, the need states, the want states of the end user. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you, is that just saying what you said differently or is the, does the, again, the framing of fit in bring us somewhere else? I think it's actually, it's similar to a couple words that I used before because I think about, I use these words a lot, about reputation and recruitment. It's all about like, what do I want to be known for?

1:05:18And how do I get people on my side? Is there a difference between known for and known as? I think so. Right? I'm known for doing X, but I'm known as somebody who can do X. So it's like more identity driven. I would agree with that. So maybe known as it would be the better way to frame it because I think of reputation as being, you know, identity but externally communicated. What do you want to be known for versus what do you want to be known as? Yeah, I think it is the latter. Yeah. I think it is the latter. But I also think it is the, it's the recruitment piece as well, which is how am I going to bring people over to my side?

1:05:56How am I going to get people, how do I get people to like me? This is all like, talk about like a therapy session. But like, no, it is actually true. And I think that even within businesses, a lot of what we think about, not just in marketing, but across different functions, is how do you get people on your side? How am I going to get my retail partners on my side? How am I going to get my organization, my team on my side? And that to me is really fundamental to, you know, being the type of leader who can hopefully create that shared vision that ultimately results in value creation. And then what's the flip side?

1:06:36What are the contributing factors to destruction? I'm guessing that most of the answers have been like literally the opposite. Yeah, that's what I was wondering. That's my guess. But going back to the something that we talked about earlier, I do think that a lot of businesses are way more concerned about looking at the competition than looking at like ultimately who they're trying to service. And I feel like that has led to a lot of value destruction across many different categories and business models. You know, I've not thought about it this way before, but as I heard you say that, if we look at the competition, it can become like a game of telephone.

1:07:16If the competition isn't looking at the end user and I'm looking at the competition, I'm looking at somebody who isn't looking at the end user. And so it just, we get further and further away. of mediocrity. And this is what drives, this is what drives that good enough mentality that you were just referring to earlier, because everyone's just like, I only need to be good enough to be better than this person. But guess what? Somebody, this is how all massive disruptions have happened. Somebody else comes along and they're not just thinking good enough. They're thinking, you know, light years, light years better.

1:07:47And then it completely disrupts the entire category. Yeah, I'm reminded of, you know, what do they say? Like if you're in the woods with somebody and you come across a bear. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than the next person. Oh, I thought it was the other bear in the woods thing you were going to talk about. The one like the Pope? Yeah. All right. I mean, I actually, my feed has been filled with bear encounters lately. I don't know why. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Fortunately, they've all worked out well for the people who've encountered them.

1:08:23Last question. It's the last question we ask everyone. You do not have to answer it wearing a business hat, but you have to answer it thinking about tomorrow and tomorrow only literally within 24 hours from now. If you had all the power in the world and you could create anything tomorrow, what would it be? And then the follow up is, of course, what would you destroy tomorrow? And not business related? It doesn't have to be. You can make it business related. But I want to open that, let you open the aperture if you choose to. Yeah. Choose your own adventure. I would say if I had all the power in the world to destroy something, it would be probably divisions and silos.

1:09:03I think that there's a lot. Organizationally and or socioculturally. That's what I'm saying. Exactly. You can think about it in business, but you can think about it just related to humans and the world. Yeah. And like I said, I'm sure most people are doing the flip, but I'll give you a saying that I one of my former CEOs once once told me and I've always really liked this, which is perspective, because his his his thing was that he said fresh perspective is worth 60 IQ points. That's wisdomous. Yeah. And so I have always loved that because, you know, I do think that that's very, very tightly intertwined with this empathy kind of conversation that we've had.

1:09:43But it's something that I really believe in. And I think that sometimes it means like putting yourself out of your day to day, like, you know, just break your routine, get away from something, walk away from a problem and then come back to it. and so I think that it would be great to be able to give the world or at least my organization the fresh perspective. And your kids. And my kids. And myself. Yeah. I mean look the definition of wisdom that I offer for those interested in a one page website at wisdomist.ltd is it's the plural of perspective because I've always had this perspective that it's the most important thing in the world.

1:10:29And yet so often it's just a silver lining and a cloud of tragedy, right? We don't really get perspective from good things by and large. And it's so fleeting, right? But it's like, oh, we get perspective if we've been fired or somebody got sick or we got sick or something, you know, we got into an accident. And that silver Overlining matters a lot. And I've always sought to figure out a way to literally bottle it. I obviously have not decided, which is why I'm doing a podcast with you. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it didn't come through tragedy? Yes. But if it's something that, you know, I think a lot of us don't think to search for the meaning when good things happen to you.

1:11:13You just think good things happen. So, like, let's search for it. I was just saying this to somebody the other day, which is we get a bad diagnosis and we go for a second opinion. We get a good diagnosis. We're like, that's it. I'm done. I don't know. I think we might want to get a second opinion on that just to make sure it's right. Yeah. Like how many? Anyway. So Young, thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate it. To bring the show to an end, consider this. If I asked you what a diamond means, you'd probably say love, commitment, forever. And you'd be right in the sense that meaning is whatever enough people believe for long enough.

1:11:50But that meaning, as relates to diamonds, is as synthetic as a cubic zirconia. Because before 1947, proposing with a diamond wasn't the standard. There were engagement rings, but they were as likely to have sapphires, rubies, and sometimes no stone at all. Until a copywriter named Frances Garrity, working at the agency N.W. Air, may it rest in peace, wrote four words for her client De Beers. A diamond is forever. And from here and from then, diamonds and love became inextricable. And within a decade, diamond engagement rings went from optional to all but obligatory. Garrity and De Beers didn't discover that diamonds mean love in some mind somewhere.

1:12:28They created it and then communicated that decision so consistently across so many touch points for so many decades that today the connection feels inevitable rather than invented, which is exactly how meaning accretes and works when it's built well. It accretes slowly through accumulated acts of association and reinforcement until what began as deliberate and chosen feels to the market and to the people in it implicit. And this isn't just marketing, or at least not just what we call marketing. It's the deliberate sustained construction of meaning across every touchpoint over time. This of course is what marketing actually is, whether you're a diamond company, a software company, or the grocer down the street.

1:13:10Every business and every brand is either building meaning and the value it creates in turn with this kind of intention and consistency, or they're watching it erode and destroy through the absence of both. The companies that understand this create value, while the ones that don't keep wondering why their pricing power, competitive advantage, and shares shrink a little bit more each year. That's something to consider. Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Julian Villar, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman from the Vox Media Podcast Network and The Wisdomist Company.

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