SPECIAL EPISODE: Biggest Ahas from 11 Healthy Brand Builders
Read time: 15 min
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This is a special episode to wrap up the year. So instead of bringing a guest where I grill them and uncover the value bombs and the gems, I share my four biggest ahas from the 11 previous guests that I brought to the show.
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THE FOUR BIGGEST AHAs
#1 Silos are comfortable, but dangerous
When what you do can change the way the enterprise does business, it can't be left to a function. Branding can't just be left to brand experts. Communications can't just be left to communicators. And it's the same with marketing and DE&I.
“You think the battle's over… I just had this epiphany just a few months ago, you know, disruptive innovation, branding is left in the sideline, you know, and to a large extent, social programs and combating society's scary issues and problems. Branding is not where it should be at all. You've got all these people running around with grants, volunteers, energy goals, nothing is branded. It's all aimless. Without brands you not only don't have something that can guide, that can inspire, but can communicate. It's impossible to communicate all that stuff without branding. So you disappear into a cloud of sameness, and as a result, people are saying, you know, maybe we should cut back on these grants and volunteering because it's costing a lot of money and we're in tough times. We gotta survive as a company. So, you know, then you think, oh, we really there yet?”
“Brand relevance, relationships, trust, should not be left to marketers and communicators and brand experts. That should be the core of any leadership team, right? That, I mean, look at, look, I was watching something the other night, it was a documentary on Boeing, and it was about the 737 Max where they had those, you know, really, really tragic accidents. Hundreds of people passed away unfortunately, and the company was denying it up till the end. They kept saying, our mission is safety. And people were dying. I mean because the brand, the purpose, the efficacy was nothing more than a word. It was a statement nobody was relating it to, to the reality, right? I'm not blaming anybody in this regard. I'm just saying that it can get lost quickly when you leave branding to the brand people or the marketers, right? Purpose can get lost quickly. When you leave it to just the communications people, right? Communications people, brand experts, marketing people. Our job is to infiltrate those things into the company. I tell them all the time, we're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”
“You know, I, I went from, like I said, consumer product goods companies, which is all marketing. Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down of what is the value proposition for this, this opportunity. Who are our customers? Who are our biggest customers? What are they, how are they going to respond to these, you know, products and offerings? And constantly listening and creating a feedback loop and improving and just having your finger on the pulse of insights, community insights, your company insights. There's a loop of communication within those consumer brands that is unlike anything I've ever seen. So everyone is lockstep together, moving forward to produce products that will make people's lives better or more efficient. When I went into healthcare and what I saw from all over the world, traveling to some conferences and hearing this from other individuals, healthcare as an overall, what I saw was they really look at marketing as a tactical kind of resource group”
“To tactically implement a handful of completely disconnected items into the marketplace. There doesn't seem to be a strategic understanding of marketing at the table in order to identify and share insights back and forth with all of your cross-functional teams and a part of engaging the entire leadership team to create strategies. So there really isn't it, and I've seen multiple healthcare strategies. Marketing is a part of every single one of them, but I don't necessarily understand or think that leadership understands that, that, so, so the, the biggest issue I saw is that healthcare leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's almost carved out. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted or, you know, you wanna create some employee engagement and have a picnic. And that is the least of what marketing is. In fact, that's not marketing whatsoever.”
#2 Action beats everything
Whether you are working on bringing the purpose of an organization to life or faced with a tough decision, the most important thing is to take action and start learning. Because every moment we don't is a missed opportunity to get better.
“There's just so many things that, that you learned by just, by just doing. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I'm a huge believer in that learning by doing Trump's trump's learning by kind of reading or seeing all day long, right? You just don't, there's so many sort of unknowns whether known or not, right? That you just don't, you don't, you won't really fully appreciate until you start actually doing. And so it's so that, that's another kind of thing that I'm a, I'm a huge believer in now even at like, even even with decisions that we're making at like fast wave and Crossfire, is that if you're, if you're 80% sure about that, right? We, we all work with enough smart people that have given us a lot of thought. If we're 80% sure, we just like, action trumps everything, right? We need to see momentum and action versus, you know, getting caught in a death spiral of, of, of paralysis by analysis”
“Community health workers on a motorcycle going hut to hut to hut giving people the drugs they needed. And when you see that happen, I mean that, that kind of, of innovation and willingness to think creatively and, and all funded by the US and we turned, we and other countries eventually participated too. But there's no question the US led the effort. We turned HIV in these places where it was always fatal into a chronic condition. It was transformative. But for me, standing there and seeing that, seeing what we were able to do in one of the poorest places on earth, we built the infrastructure, delivered the drugs, transformed healthcare. Cuz once you built the clinic, right, you didn't just treat h hiv, you could treat child mat, you know, children's health and maternal health, right?”
“It's infrastructure. All of a sudden, you, you transformed healthcare. So I'm standing there in the middle of nowhere, Uganda <laugh>, one of the poorest places on earth. And I, I remember just saying to myself, if we could do this here, there is no reason why we can't have a healthcare system that works in America. We've got the wealthiest country in the history of mankind. We, we have resources that are just, it, it, it's, it's hard to even count the zeroes behind how much we can spend. And yet we're d yet our healthcare system doesn't work for everybody. That's not acceptable. That can't we, we just can't let that go on. And I, and then I say to myself, ABNA, you can talk about this. You can, you can moan about it and, and talk about it or you can do something about it. Here's your choice. Moan and <laugh> and, and, and, and vetch about it or do something about it. And that's when I decided that I was gonna start what has become same Sky health. Cause I said I can't, it's not enough to talk about it. That, that we need to do better. We, we need to actually do better, right? So I want to be part of, of doing better and that's what I'm trying to do with SameSky Health.”
“There's someone, there was someone who once told me the nannies come from Trinidad. So don't tell people you're from Trinidad. Just tell them you went to school in Canada, cuz that sounds better. It's like amazing the thing, the microaggressions that like you see in it here. But I mean, I kept on trucking because my mother famously said to me before she died, when I experienced something terrible at work at the time, she was like, one of these days, your haters will be your waiters. Just keep that in the back of your mind. And so that's one of the things that has just also kept me going. You know, I also truly believe in leaving a legacy for those who are also coming up behind me, right? Because I was like, if I fail, what does that say and mean for the people who are more junior to me?”
#3 Your brand is not about you
It's what the audience wants. It's who the customers want to become. When you focus outwardly on those you serve and wish to influence, your stories will start to matter and your brand will start to gain true fans.
“And so when you study the science of influence, you realize that you have to communicate a couple things really well. One, what you make, absolutely what do you make? How is it better? What are the functional facts, features, benefits. But you also gotta communicate what you make happen. And what you make happen is a feeling. And for so long as strategists and as creatives you'd see on the creative brief, we want people to feel confident, we want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel peace of mind. And to execute against that was, you know, these are like bankrupt words that we see every brand. Chances are every healthcare brand wants their target audience to feel empowered, peace of mind in control. And so what we did was we dug deeper and we realized who really knows how to influence people, role models, role models, know how to influence people. And when you know how to role model something, then people don't just wanna buy you, they wanna be you. That's the goal. So then we said, okay, well how do we role model? We have to go a step further. What do you make? Yes. What do you make happen? Yes. What are you gonna role model is based on your target audiences fantasy self.”
“You know, the challenge is your goal from a company point of view is to have your story and your wording and phrasing used by the journalist. And journalists don't want that. You know? As a journalist when I was at Bloomberg, you know, I, we had, I had four screens in my desk with headlines constantly streaming up. And my goals were at a story or a headline. So amazing that you stopped your tracks and clicked on that story and shared it with your friends. And so a journalist wants a story that hasn't been written before, or an angle or a perspective that hasn't been told. Because, you know, it's like, say you pitch a story to your editor and they just google the topic and there's like a hundred their stories or the exact same thing. It's not really interesting, right? So they're gonna say, well come up with something different.”
“So the challenge is for, for companies is how do you, you know, give journalists something unique and special at at when they're interested in it? And again, you know, as a journalist, I was kind of loathed to do profiles of companies cuz it felt like we were fawning over them. You didn't wanna wanna be seen as in the tank for a company or, you know, wanting to support a company. You wanna be neutral. So the other kind of thing challenge I see is from a comms point of view versus a journalist's point of view. This, a lot of times the journalist, I'd write a story that thought was really balanced and a showcase a company, but it talked about that quote unquote to be sure paragraph. We always had a Bloomberg where, you know, this sounds awesome to be sure. Some people say it sucks, you know, or it won't ne it'll never happen to give balance. And a lot of companies at pr, people I was friends with coming after go, we thought it wasn't worth doing the story because of this to be sure paragraph. So I think, you know, it's important to set expectations like, look, you know, you can get a story in a media, but it may not come out like you want, or it may have, you know, your opposite or or competitor mentioned. So if you're, you know, not fine with that, you have to rethink your approach”
“When they've gotta go out and raise 20 million or they need to attract employees or they need to sign on to vendors who don't have space for them, but they need their capacity in order to get their work done. Even in the early stage, even before patients, before you have, you're in humans. And then don't even talk about like, then you're recruiting investigators and you're recruiting patients and the families of patients to wanna come on and put and i I and take a pill that no human has ever taken and you're already sick. Like, just think about that, right? Like, what does it take to be willing to do that? So I think there are, and, and of all those people, of the investors and the employees and the potential investigators and the patients and the vendor partners, all of those stakeholders, sure there may be some that are just laser focused on tell me about the atoms and molecules and tell me exactly about how this science works.”
“And I will with a completely cold heart determine whether that science appeals to me or not. I'm sure there are people in that system that I just described that don't need to have a feeling, but I would argue that most of those people need to have some level of trust to give us their money, give us their bodies to test things on, give us their capacity and space, which has an opportunity cost for other clients that these vendors could have give us their livelihoods as an employees. That is not nothing. And it is very rarely completely on the like front part of your brain that you make those decisions. There's a do I fundamentally trust these people? Do I feel good about being attached to these people? How will I think, how will people see me if I'm in, you know, standing in the same room as, as this group of people? Well then how are, how is everybody seeing this group so I know what kind of halo effect I will or will not have as I'm connected? I mean, I think that's just human nature.”
#4 Take the opportunity before you and ask what if
We have a tendency to wait, wait for the right role, the right problem, the right opportunity, then we will really do what it takes. But time and time again, learning from my guests, one thing is certain, don't wait. Use the opportunity in front of you and make it what you will. The limits we artificially place on ourselves are the limits of the opportunity in front of us.
“Wow. You know you, you, you move your family there to launch a product which is, which everybody was super excited about. And then the FDA doesn't, you know, doesn't accept the file. So that that forced our team to figure out, you know, how do we survive? You know, how does the business survive? How are we gonna keep our employees? How are we gonna keep our customers? What, what are we gonna do? We're just gonna lose market share. That's a whole nother, that was a whole nother experience that wasn't a lot of fun when it first happened, but probably wow, probably the most probably one of the most valuable lessons I've learned by, by having gone through it. And it was about a five to six year technology gap.”
“When I started out, I was making no money. I had an entry level job wire cable company, a thousand people upstate New York get in there and I, they, there's a four page newsletter and they say, Gary, you know, this is, you gotta publish this every month. It was bowling scores and all this other stuff. And I started walking around the mill and I realized within, you know, two or three months, it's like nobody talks to each other. These people hate leadership. Leadership doesn't like them. There was a union involved. There was strikes every two years. And so I did two things which changed the company. I, I basically redesigned the newsletter to be. We, we sent it to the home instead of just distributing it. We became 12 pages. I talked about the business, I talked about competition, talked about the marketplace, how we priced products.”
“I gave profiles to people. I took pictures. I mean, we, we were, we were producing 3,000 copies for a 1,000 person workforce because people wanted extra. And then the other thing I did is I got a grant from the federal mediation and conciliation service to, to form a labor management committee. I was 22 years old and the Labor Management Committee was, was every month we sat down outside of the contract, 12 union people, 12 management people on each side of the table. And we talked about everything but the contract, safety, communications, you know, not, you know, all the things outside quality. And within what maybe 18 months they signed their first six year contract. They, there was no more this side was labor. They, they were actually intermingling. They were, we had holiday parties together. We broke the barrier because we discovered each other. I was only 22. I'm not saying I'm smart, I'm just saying all, all I'm saying is communications can, can do that.”
“It's a lesson I'd learned later, but I think, I wish I had known it earlier. And that is that every person that comes into your life has something to give you. And you've gotta be humble enough and open enough to acknowledge that and to receive it and to, to see people as sort of opportunities to learn and to grow that they have something to give you. And if you haven't figured it out, that's on you. You need to keep, you need to figure it out. I think I missed a lot of opportunities and didn't take advantage of them in the way they should because I didn't understand just the importance of people in your life and that they have something to give.”
“Businesses are in a position where they can help regardless of industry. And it's just as long as it's aligned with your values, it's aligned with what your employees believe in, what your CEO, what your executives believe in, it can be beneficial. You say we're not Patagonia, why can't we be Patagonia? Yeah, you're right. We're not Patagonia, we we don't make clothing, we make medicines, but that doesn't mean that we can't go beyond what we're doing from a medicine standpoint, as you rightly pointed out. Why not? Why can't you? And I think it's just, it's broadening the thinking and really digging in to think about what your brand is, not only internally, but what it means externally and what you're putting out there. And I think that saying we're not is obviously an obstacle. And I'm always asking people why, why, why can't we do that? Who else do we need to involve? Why, why can't we have these crazy ideas?”
Conclusion
It’s been incredible to interview leaders in marketing, communications, branding in the world of healthcare and learn from their experiences. I hope you've enjoyed this special episode and took away something that can help you build your brands and your career.
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