From Cornwall to the World: How Finisterre’s community marketing strategy built a global brand

0:00customers don't want to engage with marketing. they want to engage with a brand and product and the people but they don't like nobody loves adverts you don't sit there going oh great it's the adverts are on now like this is this is what i'm here for you go oh you tolerate the adverts and you tolerate marketing in order to be able to access things and so our philosophy and that philosophy of creating through community is more going like what what does the community need that we can then help make better or add to or just go and listen. I'm Eric Fulweiler, and this is Scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains, rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today.

0:43Hey, everyone. My guest today is Bronwyn Foster Butler. She is the chief marketing officer at an amazing UK and more specifically Cornwall-based brand called Finistere. If you haven't heard of them before, you should definitely check them out. We start the conversation actually talking about Bronwyn's experience. She's been at many big name fashion brands, Burberry, Pangaea, but also Lululemon, and was there right after the kind of sheer pants disaster, if you remember that more than 10 years ago now, and really helped to turn the ship around. So she has a lot of learnings about how Lululemon went from something that could have been existential to the business and actually rebuilt it into what is now pretty sure like a 10 billion dollar brand they've had a lot of success over the last decade a lot of that comes from her approach to community that she has taken to finisair and this is not a soft you know build community type of conversation she gets into the nitty-gritty of how actual investment in community is lowering customer acquisition cost for Finicere, which I think is really interesting.

1:51And this is a brand that is very specific and intentional about who they are, who they're for, where they're from. We talk about this idea of sense of place for the brand, which I think is really interesting and could definitely apply to other businesses, but also how you take something that is so niche, but actually scale it more broadly. And then the last part of the conversation that I think is one of the highlights for me is when she came in, she was able to shift the approach and the investment from being very, very heavily focused on bottom of the funnel and performance to top of the funnel.

2:24And that has done amazing things for the brand. But more importantly, she talks about how she was able to get buy-in for that and bring the finance team, the executive team, and the rest of the organization along with that journey, which I think is a learning that all of us could definitely use and apply. So, without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Bronwyn of Finisterre. All right, Bronwyn, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. How are you? I'm doing great. Are you out in Cornwall today? I actually live in Devon, which is something I don't reveal too often, although I've just done it now, because Cornwall and Devon have a centuries-long conflict, mostly to do with scones and jam and cream and what order you do it in.

3:11So I don't live in Cornwall. I live in Devon, but I do commute down to Cornwall, and I am lucky enough to get to spend time there. And I apply the cream and jam in the appropriate order, depending on which area I'm in. All right. Well, that was something that was not in the life in the UK test that I took a little while ago. So you'll have to tell me about it. It should be. Yeah. But I'm really excited to have you on the show. You know, we met briefly at Madfest. But as you heard Viren say before we press record, you and Finisterre have been on the wish list for a long time. Brand is amazing. Business is amazing.

3:48You're doing some amazing things. So really excited to get into it. before we do the icebreaker question that i ask every guest can you please tell us about a challenger brand that you're particularly passionate about right now and why i've got recency bias for this one um and it's snow peak and i don't know if you can call it a i think they're a challenger brand so they're a japanese camping brand and i was just lucky enough to spend this past weekend camping with them in the south downs at an event they do called the snow peak way where they bring everybody super fans new fans people have never even heard of them they all come together and we spend the week camping or the weekend camping and what I love about Snow Peak is they're really challenging the kind of status quo within camping and outdoors is that it's about like survival and conquering nature and like man v the elements and Snow Peak's whole philosophy is that it should be comfortable outside and you can go camping and be just as comfortable camping as you are at home so everything they make is using the highest quality like whether it's titanium whether it is incredibly beautiful brushed cotton it everything is considered and it's always taking into consideration how do we make it fit into a car because their whole premise is car camping and how do we make sure that camping is just as comfortable or camping is just as comfortable as living and we had I took my kids and I went with the chief product officer from Finisterre and her family and it the weather was wild but honestly we had an amazing time and we were incredibly comfortable the entire way so I or the entire time so I just think they are really challenging that status quo and the accepted narrative, which I think is actually a really problematic narrative because I think it does a lot of gatekeeping for people accessing nature.

5:46They think, well, I can't go into nature because I'm not hardcore and need to survive. And I think what Snowpeak are demonstrating is that nature is for everyone and it should be accessible and it should feel as though it's something that doesn't take, I don't know, a beard and a machete to survive. I love that. First of all, your work events are very different than mine. But I'm very jealous. That sounds amazing. But second of all, that, you know, that challenging the status quo, or as we call it, kind of challenging convention is just so core to literally every challenge of brands that we come across that people like it just has to be it is existential to them to exist and to grow.

6:25and actually you know with the work that we do around brand positioning and go-to-market strategy and all that stuff that's literally part of the process and so i'm saying that for people listening because for people that have listened for a while every example that people give for that icebreaker question is some example of a brand that is challenging the convention of the category and a lot of them you know finister certainly at the top comes from just kind of the dna and the natural, you know, vision and being of the business. But there is a way to get there through the process if you are not that or you feel like you need to do it more, which is to sit down and this is the way that we do it and literally map what is the category convention?

7:04What is everybody else saying? And in established categories, I think what you'll see pretty quickly is that it ends up being kind of a sea of sameness. And once you kind of see it like literally on slides or on a wall of just how similar the convention and the norm and the status quo is, it becomes a little bit more clear where there's white space to do things differently, as long as it's authentic to who you are. Yeah, a thousand percent. Yeah, great example. Okay, so let's get into Fidester. For people who may not have heard of the brand before, can you please give us an overview on what it is and what you do?

7:41Yes, absolutely. So we are a B Corp certified outdoor apparel brand based out down in beautiful St. Agnes in Cornwall. We were founded in 2003. So we're about 22 years old now. And it's interesting that you talk about Challenger, you know, because we were born as a Challenger brand. And although we are over 20 years old, we shouldn't still consider ourselves a startup, but we do and we behave as a startup. But that original white space that Tom, our founder, saw was in the surf industry and in how surf was represented across all the major surf brands. And he was a surfer and he was living in Cornwall and he was bobbing out at sea one day waiting for the next surf or set to come in.

8:29And he was just reflecting on the industry and how it didn't at all represent or reflect the reality of the surf industry that he knew or the surf culture that he knew. which for anyone who's surfed in the UK, it is cold, it is gritty, it is dark. It is not the sort of overly sexualized turquoise waters, chiseled bodies, bikinis, board shorts, flip flops. But that was the dominating and still is the dominating narrative in the surf industry. And understandably, because the brands that have dominated have always come from Australia, California, Hawaii. So that is their reality. But no one was addressing the sort of lesser known, perhaps slightly more resilient surfers that populate the colder waters of the world.

9:21And that was really this moment or that moment that Tom was out at sea. He had this realization that there was an opportunity to create a brand that spoke to these people that lived in this way. And that was the start of Finisterre. All right. So we are going to talk about Finisterre, of course. But we are first going to talk about community marketing through the lens of your past experience. So you've worked at some pretty established, amazing retail fashion apparel brands, Burberry, Pangaea, but also Lululemon, who have been in the news a bit recently. Maybe we can talk about that as well. How did your experience at Lululemon at the kind of critical time that you were there, the inflection point of that brand and business, as we like to say, how has that shaped your approach at Finisterre?

10:14I mean I was I feel so grateful for the experience I got at Lululemon I joined in 2014 which was for anyone especially in North America it was right after the sheer pants scandal that wiped millions off of the the share price of of Lululemon at the time if not more than that And it all came down to a product quality challenge, which was that the black pants or leggings that Lou Lemon was famous for that, you know, famously charged$100 for, which at the time was unheard of. They had dropped the ball on quality and they were sheer when you bent over, which for anyone who does yoga is really problematic.

10:59And so I think in 2013, one of the leading brand publications put Lululemon like right at the top of the list of the brands that they predicted would not exist in 18 months time. And at the time I was at Burberry having a great time with this under the incredible leadership of Angela Ahrens and Christopher Bailey. And it was this sort of very magical, exciting, high performing time for Burberry. so when I went in and said to them that I was leaving to join this and I was I've lived in the UK for over 20 years I was working in Burberry office in London and I went in and said I'm I'm leaving and I'm I'm joining this little Canadian brand called Lululemon they were like what what Lululemon is it a juice brand like what what are you why would you be leaving us right now but I was I'm Canadian so I had always known about Lululemon was always an incredibly proud fan of the brand and user of the brand and I just knew I was like they're going to get through this like this is not going to be the end of them the product is too good the brand is too good and their customers care about them too much so I joined as the first brand and digital person in market there was a few other people that had been hired ahead of me we had a few showrooms but really it was the start I feel like we were kind of that first the first graduating class of Lululemon EMEA and about 12 months later maybe 24 months later I was at the annual leadership conference in Vancouver that Lululemon did every year where they brought store managers from all over the world and then managers from across their various store support centers together and they had just been bought partially by Advent International.

12:52And Advent had been one of the original funds that had invested in Lululemon, but then had sold and had sold around the time of the sheer pants scandal. And the chairman of Advent stood up on the stage and he said, I did not expect to be here. I did not expect to be buying and backing Lululemon, but here's why. we eight 12 months ago we started a research project to figure out whether or not lululemon still had any life left in it and we went and undertook huge qualitative research with customers and he's like i've been in the business for 40 years and i have never encountered a customer base who was so desperate for lululemon for a brand to turn themselves around and he was like they were mad at you they were pissed off they felt as though trust had been broken but they were ready and waiting to back the brand again as soon as you sort of took responsibility and got your shit together and he stood there and he's like so we're buying back I think they were buying about seven percent of the of the business and he said and we're going to grow this business to be a 10 billion dollar brand and we're going to do it one customer at a time and it was just this I mean I get shivers even just thinking about it now because in this world of like performance and you know growth marketing and hacking it's like it all just comes down to relationships like that you know I get sent all this martech out there that's like oh do this do this do that and I'm like marketing is so easy it just comes down to relationships with your customers like that's it I can I can have whatever tech stack and I can do whatever on meta and whatever on TikTok but if I don't have a relationship with my customers it's never going to work or at least it's never going to be efficient and profitable.

14:34And so having hearing that from him and then getting to be part of the ride for the next, I was there for six years in Europe, we went from a$5 million brand to a North of a hundred million. And that time we went from one store to 30 and the brand itself went from, I think 2 billion to North of 6 billion in that time. And they've just cracked 10. I think they've just cracked 10. So it was being able to witness that turnaround that It was led through community. It was led through, we're going to do this one customer at a time. And then just seeing and feeling the physical evidence of that and how that worked was one of the most remarkable.

15:13I don't think I'll ever replicate that in my career again. Marketing can feel lonely at the top unless you're in the right room. That's what Rival Amp is. A global community built for senior marketers and brand leaders. Inside our private WhatsApp group, you'll find unfiltered conversations, sharp insights, and bold ideas you won't see on LinkedIn. Straight from some of the brightest minds in marketing. It's exclusive. It's application only. And it's designed for challenger marketers who want to push boundaries together. Apply now at wearerival.com and join the marketers rewriting the rules. So how did you, how did you like practically go about rebuilding the brand and the business one relationship at a time?

15:58What did that look like? It started with listening. So, you know, one of the great operating principles at Lululemon was that the educator is the most important person in the business. So that's not a customer, actually. It's the people in the shop floors. And the reason they're the most important is because they do speak to our customers. But also we had to make sure that they were happy and healthy and thriving. And so everybody spends a lot of time in shops when you work at Lululemon. You have store shifts. You go, you know, you spend five days of everybody's onboarding, no matter what your position is spent in the stores.

16:30And the great thing is about that is you're getting the time with the educators to find out what's working, what isn't. But then you're also getting the time with the customers and the community. And so there was doubling down on that of just making sure, are we going out? Are we listening? Speaking with our ambassadors. so Lululemon had an incredible ambassador program I it really was the the first ambassador program back in 2003 everybody did athletes and it was sponsored athletes but nobody was really doing grassroots ambassadors which was what Lululemon did it was who's the local yoga teacher that whose classes are always full like that's who's going to be the next Lululemon ambassador and they were all linked to stores so they had a sense of place and the community and so we spent a ton of time with the ambassador network just listening and and take your responsibility i mean the first thing was that they did a product recall and they pulled back i mean i always have the number 70 million i don't know if it's 70 million i think it must have been 70 million dollars worth of product they just pulled and they said this is not fit for sale so they took accountability and had integrity um and i think for a while for about eight months you could barely get black leggings which if you think of a lemon store that is a big chunk of their profit that they just wiped off because they said if it's not good enough, we're not going to put it out.

17:44So that restored trust. There was a ton of comms around it too, of being really open and honest and sharing the journey. And then it was just going back to what had, you know, what had made the brand great in the early days. You know, I heard Mark Ritson speaking about this yesterday. You know, what is the best thing you've ever done? Go back and do it again. Like that should be every marketer's first trick whenever things start getting a little bit hard. and so they just went back out and they listened to customers they made better product they invested in community they built through community not for community which is something I think we may speak about um and they and they just doubled down on who they were as well like the brand was at the time I feel as though they changed since then but at the time they were really irreverent they were bold and punchy and they weren't afraid to sort of piss a couple people off with something that felt a bit funny.

18:37Nowadays, you can't do that, it seems. And so they stayed true to who they were, they listened to their customer, they invested in the community, and then they made really, really good product. Yeah, to the Mark Ritson quote, the thing I think about all the time, and the advice that I give is, oftentimes, there's so much more opportunity in just doubling down on what's already working than trying to figure out what you're not doing. I think especially in this world where it's like, all the technology and all the data and all the AI and stuff like that, It's not like you don't need to worry about that and focus on that to a certain extent, but I feel like it can sometimes be easier to just look for something new, but actually often more the opportunity and particularly the opportunity that might be more of a competitive advantage for your brand is going to be doubling down on what already works.

19:23so coming back to finisterre and sticking on the topic of community so you said something in our prep call where you said your philosophy around community is that brands should create quote through community not for community what does that mean and how have you applied that at finisterre so the first thing is finding out what does the community need that we can uniquely that we're uniquely qualified to deliver. I see a lot of marketing and especially like a community or experiential where they go, well, we know what the community needs. And then they create a big all singing, all dancing campaign or social experiment or event that is really just a huge marketing initiative.

20:10And like customers don't want to engage with marketing. They want to engage with a brand and product and the people, but they don't, like nobody loves adverts. You don't sit there going, oh great, it's the adverts are on now. Like this is, this is what I'm here for. You go, oh, you tolerate the adverts and you tolerate marketing in order to be able to access things. And so our philosophy and that philosophy of creating through community is more going like, what does the community need that we can then help make better or add to or just go and listen? So it's September now we are about to launch into community the community season is hot for us right now so we are at conferences we are at film festivals we are traveling all across North America all across the UK and what we aren't doing is hosting our own thing we're simply showing up at existing events and bringing Finisterre in a way that can add value last year we were lucky enough to show up at kendall mountain film festival for the first time it's the largest outdoor film festival in the world it attracts 30 to 40 000 people to kendall in the lake district every year and we'd never been there before because it's all around mountain and we are ocean but we had been speaking to the founders scott and jackie and we said you know if you ever have an appetite to bring ocean to kendall we would we would love to be that partner for you if you think that's what the community there wants so they reached out last year and they said you know we'd really like to try do you want to come and and and we showed up and we showed up in a small way really just wanting to to see what it was about and to see what resonated but we also hosted the first ever um ocean and seas film section or film program if you will and it was two hours of programming that we pulled together of stories that celebrate ocean and seas and and the people therein.

22:02And it was brilliant. And it was great. And we had incredible feedback. And it was practically sold out. And straightaway, Jackie and Scott were like, can you come back again next year and do it again? But can we do it even bigger? What else can we do? And so it would have been really easy for us to come in with a lot more ego of going like, hey, we need to bring Ocean in a really big way to this mountain film festival. And that probably wouldn't have landed as well. Or they simply wouldn't have invited us. Or we could have gone and go, oh, you know, we're not going to do Kendall we're going to do our own film festival because we're going to be in competition with them and we're like the Finisterre Ocean Film Festival or whatever and you know that may have worked to some degree but the impact we were able to have by actually going and and reaching a lot of new people like this is it is so easy to just keep speaking to your fans over and over and over again but if you're going to grow a business and if you're going to especially to grow up profitably now, we've all got to be obsessed with acquisition and new eyeballs.

23:00And so finding the people that hadn't heard of Finisterre, bringing them in in a way that felt like we were adding value to their life and their experience and expectations of what Kendall was about, we were then able to learn and listen. And this year when we show up, it'll be even better. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how we can improve for following years as well. So building on that point, community can sometimes be seen as a long-term, maybe unmeasurable kind of brand investment. But to what you just said, and the question around kind of customer acquisition costs, so you actually said that your customer acquisition costs, you can see them come down the more that you invest in the community.

23:42So I think you talked a little bit about how that works, but if there's anything that you want to expand on and then is that kind of like, are you able to kind of directly tie those community activities to the CAC? Or is it you're just seeing the increasing, is it more correlation or is it direct causation? It's definitely more correlation, but we do have some direct, like we've done a lot of work of making sure when we are hosting events, like how can we capture data in a way that feels, you know, not in or not obtrusive. So even just our store events or showing up at communities, seeing if we can get the invite list after and then running through the database to find out, OK, who came of the people that came, who was new and who was existing.

24:23And then having that as a metric for our community team to deliver against. So making sure that, I don't know, for example, if they're doing an event in a new area, making sure that 80 percent of the attendees are new customers versus doing something down in Cornwall. We know it's going to be a lot harder to have new. So having the metrics that would make sense for that event. And then, but we also look at others. We don't always just look at CAC. CAC is a huge indicator. And what we do see is the more all of our channels are focused on acquisition and new, CAC just continues to remain super efficient for us.

25:00But in community, we also look at CLTV repeat rates. A great example was a few years ago, we did an initiative called C7, which was all around the G7 that was happening in Cornwall at the time. And we didn't like the fact that the G7 world leaders were all descending on Cornwall, which is really an ocean-focused community. Generations of fishermen, I mean, fishing and mining is the backbone of Cornwall's heritage. And so it felt sort of fictitious that they were coming down and taking over all the fanciest hotels. And then they weren't even seemingly talking about the ocean. And if they were, it was all behind closed doors.

25:40So we wanted to challenge that. So we pulled together some programming with amazing leaders within the community to talk about ocean health and what needed to happen in order to improve it. And we put this programming out and we had 5 ,000 customers sign up to receive it. And what we've been able to track is the CLTV and repeat rates of those customers since then. And we can do that against a control group of, you know, a similar number of people that interacted with us during the same time frame. And what we can see is the people who interacted with C7 content, which is all about like activism, speaking truth to power.

26:16Like this was not commercial messaging at all. If anything, it was sort of anti-consumption, anti-capitalism messaging. And those customers are more loyal and more valuable to us and continue to be so. And so, again, that's more of a causation. And it's about recognizing what are the right metrics for what elements of community that we're measuring and making sure that we're keeping an eye on all of them. But CAC is super important, but it's not the only one that we're looking at. Yep. So let's talk a little bit more about the brands, the positioning, and kind of the purpose-led approach that you have to building the brand.

26:54So you talked a bit about kind of the origin story, owning the sea, all that. But you also mentioned in our prep call that this idea of like a sense of place is really interesting and also differentiated for the Finisterre brand. So what does it mean for Finisterre to have a sense of place and how does that come to life in the marketing that you do? I mean, if anyone has ever been to Cornwall, it is so strong. Its identity is so strong. um the most cornish people don't consider themselves really a part of the uk or a part of england that's offensive um they really see themselves as a separate celtic nation like wales like ireland um like many people in britney would like to be and so that you know they have a language they have a flag um a heritage it is there is when you cross the tamar from Devon into Cornwall, which I do every week, you really get this sense of having arrived somewhere else.

27:59And that is always where Tom, our founder, has chosen to keep the brand, which is also pretty, I mean, pretty brave. I think Finisterre probably would have been a bigger brand if he at some point hit up Styx and moved to London. But that was not what he was up for. He wanted to bring jobs to, Cornwall is one of the most economically deprived areas of the, well, formerly Europe, now UK. There's not a lot of great quality jobs for young people in particular that aren't related to, you know, six month contracts for tourist based employment. So it was really important to him that we were able to bring high quality jobs to Cornwall.

28:39But also it was just so intrinsically linked with the origin of the brand and who we were that it's never felt right to move the brand from there. um there's also a sense of place within our name so the name finisterre comes from the shipping forecast which if anyone here is a seagoer or an insomniac and you listen to the bbc in the middle of the night i think it comes on at around 4 a.m the world the shipping forecast will turn on and it's the longest single running this is longest running piece of content in history because it's been going for 200 years and you listen in and it's essentially just giving a forecast of these all this different shipping areas around the united kingdom and uh france and spain and when tom was growing up he had these vivid memories of his parents bundling him in the car from they were in norfolk driving down to cornwall and they'd turn on the radio and the only thing that would be on would be the shipping forecast and he'd listen to it and he just had this picture of all these fishermen out at sea bobbing around in this huge big wild ocean and the idea that this shipping forecast this voice which is incredibly iconic was the only thing guiding them home to safe harbor was just an incredibly visceral feeling that Tom had as a little boy that he still remembered as as a grown man and so Finisterre was was one of those traditional shipping forecast areas it's since been renamed Fitzroy and so when it came to finding a name for the brand he wanted to have a name that was evocative it also means um where land ends so where land meets sea finisterre so um end of the earth and so all of that and combined like the cornish heritage this sense of the shipping forecast and finisterre and where land meets sea it all sort of culminates together into this really rich sort of flexion point and or inflection point of uniqueness for us as a brand versus perhaps some of the other brands that are playing in the same space, which tend to be less around place and more around natural feature, aka they tend to mostly be around mountains and conquering mountains.

30:49And we think part of our distinctiveness is having this really true sense of place, but also this connection with where land meets sea. So I'm going to jump around a little bit in our brief because I think now is a good time to ask this question. I think it builds really nicely on that. How do you scale a business that is so rooted in a specific place and a very specific philosophy, way of life perspective? Something that is, you know, niche isn't really the right word, but you know, it's not like, I remember we worked with Reebok and they were like, our market is anybody with feet. That is of course not who you are.

31:24How do you keep that kind of small brand mentality and the power of that as you get bigger? Like how do those two things kind of go together? The scale that I assume you want from a business and a commercial perspective, but also the maybe not exclusivity, you can correct me if that's the wrong word, but the specificity of who you are. You have to have the confidence that you can scale through a niche. I was lucky enough that I learned that firsthand at Lululemon because the contrast from being at Burberry that was incredibly sophisticated marketing and then Lululemon, which was entirely decentralized so we were sort of given a playbook and then just told to go versus Burberry was all about asking permission and everything was centralized um the way they that Lululemon had the confidence of doing that was they created for two people they had muses and they spent a lot of time training everybody who joined the company on who these two people were and then they just let us go and so because we were so singularly focused it was so easy to make decisions because you just ask yourself like oh well we called them ocean and duke like would would they do this would this be where they're at would they wear that and it was just easy and powerful and and gave everybody confidence and then because they were decentralized they had hundreds of people and community teams all around the world just going away and and activating and and marketing i suppose through this really confident feeling around the niche not spending time going oh well is this going to this addressable market but maybe over in this country we don't have that so if it wasn't that it was just like well no we know that these people exist.

33:13We'll find them first. And then also we know that they appeal to enough, the idea of them appeals to enough people that even if, you know, the Lou Lemon Muse was a 31 year old woman and there was all sorts of iterations of how she was described, but the customer base was 16 to 65. And we knew that. And we also understood the tension between that. That was okay. We also were incredibly confident with knowing we weren't going to be all things to all people and that was okay and so we weren't trying to reach everyone with feet or everyone who did you know who wanted to do yoga we were just like well we'll bring yoga to the world and we'll bring yoga to the world in a way that you know through talking about yoga but also making product in particular for women because at the time nobody in the sports industry was speaking to women and designing women first um and so it just gave this huge amount of confidence and then it was highly effective.

34:11And so at Finisterre, our niche is cold water surf. That's pretty niche. There are not that many cold water surfers in the world. But the lifestyle they live and the romance and resilience and ruggedness that comes with being a cold water surfer is something that we believe speaks to a lot of different universal human truths. You know, this sense of having, of wanting more from life, the sense of wanting to push yourself more than you think is possible. You know, ultimately this feeling of when you eventually die, a feeling as though you've truly lived, like that's a really powerful unifying force, which we tell through the lens of cold water and ocean and coast and surf.

34:56And that won't appeal to everybody. And that's okay. There'll be lots of other brands that they can find, but we do believe and we've got the absolute confidence that we can stick to this niche and tell the stories around it. And it will bring in a wide and wonderful group of people who hopefully we can then at the same time also educate a bit around sustainability and activism. But primarily it really just comes down to speaking to those universal human truths and then telling the stories around them. What does the future of the CMO really look like? Does the role still belong in the C-suite or is it about to be replaced by AI.

35:33And if you're just a creative, should you be worried about your job? In the future of the CMO documentary presented by Rival, Eric talks with leaders from Mastercard, Shell, Dr. Schall's, and more to unpack what tomorrow's marketing leaders need to know today. Together, they explore the future of the role, what will be expected, and what you need to know to stay relevant as a marketing professional. So what does the future of the CMO actually look like? Watch the full documentary through the link in the show notes. And now back to the episode. So we've got a few minutes left. We're not going to be able to get to everything, but I do, I think the last bit of the conversation that I do want to make sure we have time for you to share on is around essentially how do you do more with less, right?

36:21Like challenger brands, obviously in a very competitive space with brands that are spending so much money on marketing, on paid advertising. You as a David kind of taken on the Goliaths, have to make sure that you are getting more out of every dollar in every hour that you invest in marketing. That's essentially kind of the fundamental nature of what it means to be a challenger brand. So given budget constraints, and I think everybody listening is probably dealing with budget constraints to a certain extent, what are the strategies or tactics that have proven most effective for you, either at Finisterre or past jobs, in driving growth and delivering the biggest bang for the buck?