And that was one of the common themes that came out of my interviews. And what makes it hard, I think any one of these in itself is mind boggling. You put all of them together, right? And just even all three of those uber sections that I talk about in the book, the Intelligence, Reality and Web three, anyone on its own is game changing. You put all three together. It just, it boggles your. Mmm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of a digital coffee marketing Brew.
And I'm your host, Brett Dysart. And quickly, if you could please just subscribe to this podcast and leave a review. It really does help with the rankings and let me know how I'm doing. But this week we're going to be talking about branding and brand management and everything you need to know about making sure your brand is tip top shape. With Mitch here with me, he's been on TedX. He has a lot of years of experience with this.
I'm actually really excited because I always need help with more branding if I can actually get it managed correctly as well. So welcome to the show, Mitch. Great. It's great to be here, Brett. Thanks for having me on. All right, the first question is on my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Coffee. Anything like specific? Light, dark, medium? No, I'm not really a connoisseur. Probably lighter. Put yourself. Does have the most caffeine. Oh, does it really? I didn't even know that.
Yes. Fun fact, the dark roast has the least and the medium delight has the most. I didn't know that. Interesting. And yeah. And I gave a brief explanation about your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do? Yeah. So I am a brand strategy consultant. I have about 30 years of 30 plus years of experience in brand and marketing strategy.
Started my career in brand management with Unilever and then Coca Cola and then the last 20 plus years or so I've been consulting, but in those same topic areas of brand marketing strategy. So I do positioning, brand architecture, brand experience, things like that. More on the strategy side of branding, if you will. And I have my own firm, Full Surge, and have my second book coming out next week, actually week after next, May 14, called the Future Ready Brand. Gotcha.
So how does a brand become future ready? In the book I talk about three different or really two different areas and they impact a third. So there are societal trends that I think marketers need to be very aware of and also technological. So on the societal trends, or forces as I call them in the book, There is transparency and purpose, health and wellness, changing attitudes towards health and wellness, and then the emergence of Gen Z. So those are in this, what I'm calling societal bucket.
And then there's technological which include AI, machine learning, predictive analytics and then extended reality. So AR, VR, metaverse, and then web3 which would include things like web, sorry, blockchain, tokenomics, NFTs and so forth. And then those technologies and societal trends and preferences are impacting everything from content marketing to gamification, influencer marketing and so forth.
So it's really through attention to those societal trends and forces, if you will, and how best to deal with them and leverage them for to your advantage that therein lies the secret to being future ready. But how I get what you're saying about societal, but how do you really become ready?
Because everything's shift so quickly in the society, it seems like it probably takes a while, we just aren't aware of it until it's like a completely sweeping trend where businesses are like, I didn't know what I said was wrong. Well again, I think in that department there's certainly, there's the entire chapter I wrote about purpose. I think that's a key one, just understanding.
I think purpose has been very, very popular, very top of mind for a while, but it only seems to be getting stronger or more intense. And I think a lot of that is being driven by the younger generations, which as a rule tend to be a little bit more purpose driven, cause motivated, if you will. So I think that's certainly a starting point, right, is just understand, do you as a company, as a business have a purpose? Ideally you do. Ideally it's something more than just making money. Right?
Because that's not what purpose is about. Even though that's a valid goal. And then deciding again, what role does that have with your brand or your brand. So just because you are purpose driven doesn't mean you have to define your brand by it, your brand positioning. But if you do, it's all the more important to activate in a way that's very consistent with that purpose.
A little bit of pushback is just that younger generations, they're so fickle about their purpose that one day one is their purpose, the next day another one's their purpose. How do you do, how do you define that balancing point? Because like I said, younger generations, I remember when I was younger, like everything swung so severely where I was like, I don't even know what I'm doing right now. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I would argue if that's the case.
It's not really a purpose as we're defining it. It might be a cause, it might be an interest, but purpose is something that's pretty deep seated. It's usually pretty ingrained in your DNA and it's something that doesn't tend to change easily over time. I'm not saying it won't ever change and your purpose is your purpose for your whole life, but it's not something that kind of comes and goes. If it does, I would argue it's probably not a purpose in the truest sense. That's fair.
And is there any other, like emerging trends that you've seen in 2024 for managing your brand or making your brand future ready? As you said, is there anything that marketers and PR pro should like really understand and utilize right now? Yeah. So I think, I think a lot of those lie in that middle section of the book that I talked about under the emerging technologies. I think some of those emerging technologies, some aren't even emerging anymore. They're here like AI, right? That's arrived.
It probably arrived a little quicker than maybe we had thought. Some of the other technologies that I talk about in the book extend the extended reality related ones and the web 33 I think are a little bit slower in developing, but certainly on the near horizon. So I, yeah, I think embracing those technologies, just understanding what their potential is for marketing.
You know, a lot of the CMOs that I spoke with, I thought made great points about, look, you don't need to become a data scientist, right? That's the last thing in the world you need to do, right? But you need to know, you need to befriend your cio, right. And you need to understand what the potential is of these technologies and how they can be used in the field of marketing to achieve a competitive advantage.
And a lot of them talked about, several of them, especially in B2B environments, about how these technologies can help really elevate the entire stature of the marketing function and elevate the role of the CMO in the C suite, which I think is pretty powerful, especially AI. Gotcha. I would almost postulate that web3 is actually AI and the blockchain more than it is NFTs and crypto.
I think crypto and NFTs are part of it, but I think web3 is really going to be AI and the blockchain specifically because those are more disruptive things that we've seen. AI is everywhere. AI is everywhere. Everybody's trying to use it, everybody's trying to figure it out. Heck, I've gotten two classes just to figure out how to use it. Well, yeah, agree. I think another, I think a lot of this is just definitional, but some of the CMOs I spoke, we've talked about how.
And I think it's simplistic and maybe not 100% accurate, but almost like the Web3 is the back end, if you will. It is the foundation or the scaffolding, if you will. And the extended reality in the metaverse is the front end, the experiential how we as consumers or website visitors or what have you experience a lot of that technology. But Web3 is I think huge. Right.
It really has very profound implications for how data is going to be used in the future in terms of privacy and data ownership and therefore really reshape the relationship that companies and brands have with consumers. Right. It's going to be a much more direct model. They talk a lot about it eliminating the intermediary. Right. Which today are like Google and Facebook and Amazon. Do you think that there's going to be other intermediaries we don't know about yet?
Because right now we know of meta, Google and Amazon. But there could be other ones emerging that we just don't know yet. Because there's 50 different like AI things you could use. I've have, I've got four or five that I use for my podcasting stuff alone. So could there be emerging like intermediaries that we just don't know about yet? Yes. And yeah, it could be notion is that. Or the theory is that web3 will take. Will eliminate the need for intermediaries. Right.
So kind of relieve the need for Google or Facebook for instance, to serve in that role. Right. And where they hold all the data and you're accessing through their accounts and so forth. Some experts say that there'll just be other metaverse/web3intermediaries stepping in. That's not the idea. Right. I think the idea, at least in theory, is that blockchain technology relieves the need for that and allows for a more direct one on one and private insecure relationship. Right.
Where people are going to feel consumers are going to feel comfortable handing over their data to those who they want to have it and not to those they don't. And not having to have a broker, if you will. So is it almost like the brand for the future could be almost like the broker of individual data in itself saying trust us to give us your data and we'll protect it through the blockchain or whatever else comes along. Yeah, I think that's the idea again, that it is more direct now.
It is more of an opt in, if you will, where there's, it's not necessarily like selling through advertising, right, and buying Facebook ads or buying Google search ads or what have you. It's, it's consumers opting in saying, hey, I like you as a brand and I am going to give you my information and you're going to reward me, right, through blockchain, related assets, NFTs, etc. All right. It's just, it's more of a, again, this is the theory as I understand it and as I took my book.
I'm not, I am by no means an expert on any of these technologies. I, I speak to them from a brand and marketing perspective and largely through third hand. Right. I talk to marketers. I talked to 43, the CMOs, are 43 global CMOs, mostly Fortune 500 and writing this book and overlaying their perspectives, their projections in some cases and overlaying my own interpretation on top of it. But in theory that's how it would work, right? Whether it does or not, I don't know.
I think there's a lot of analogies drawn back to the early days of dot com, right. The early 2000s and there were a lot of theories and projections about how the whole data, the whole digital transformation would unfold. And some of that came true, other of it didn't. And I think it's similar here. We can only conjecture at this point. Agreed. We're just postulating because Web3, like you said, is taking a little bit longer time to actually build out.
Because from my understanding, like the past two years, everybody's talking about Web3 as cryptocurrency and NFTs and blockchain as well. And that didn't work out as well as people thought it would. NFTs completely crashed and no one. And they were almost worthless. And then crypto hit pretty, was hit pretty hard. It's back up now, but it got hit pretty hard. And everybody's. I don't like this Web3 reality. Yeah. And I think it does it really. You have to get into the finer details.
There's cryptocurrency. Right. And then there are like NFTs more broadly which are digital assets. And then there's the notion, at least as I understand it, is the primary market and then secondary markets and the primary, I think that's certainly where brands are and companies are rewarding consumers directly. And I think that has the potential to have stickiness.
I think when you start getting into secondary markets for NFT assets and you start getting into cryptocurrency, that's where a lot of the skepticism and the questions and where I think things could very easily go wrong. But again, just opinion of one. Agreed. And how do marketers manage their brands right now? Because you said societal changes, but also technology changes. I feel like we're in an inflection point right now because of AI, because of Gen Z emerging as more adults.
They're in college and everything. So how do they manage this inflection point? Because it's massive changes and it's hard for one person to keep up. A lot of times it's incredibly difficult. And that was one of the common themes that came out of my interviews. And what makes it hard, I think any one of these in itself is mind boggling.
You put all of them together and just even all three of those uber sections that I talk about in the book the Intelligence, Reality and Web three, Anyone on its own is game changing. You put all three together, it just, it boggles your mind. But the advice I was hearing and basically the plan that I think a lot of the CMOs I spoke with are following, there's a spectrum, right? Some are much more advanced.
I think some of the European CMOs I spoke with are just, if I were to generalize, are a little bit further along the technology path and their US counterparts. But one common theme I think is dabble, right? Test and learn, experiment. Don't just sit on the sidelines and wait, right? It's very tempting to say, you know what, there's just a lot of uncertainty. I'm going to wait and see how this all shakes out. I'm going to wait and see how this technology evolves or doesn't evolve.
I'm going to wait and see which Metaverse platform is the winner, if there is in fact one single winner. And that's probably not the best way to go. You have to jump in cautiously and wisely, right? Don't be careless. But the CMOs I'm talking about, even the ones that aren't quite as far along in the learning curve, they're doing something right and they're testing and learning, even if it's on a small scale, because they think that they will, they're not behind the learning curve now.
It's not a disadvantage for them now, but if they wait too long on the sidelines, they will be sooner than later. So I think that's some of the advice that I got and that they're following and that I would convey to you is just. And some of these, especially the AI ones, the. The barrier to entry is so low, right? The technology, very accessible, very inexpensive, most of it, especially the generative AI, but really all a. All AI, especially ones that aren't necessarily custom or proprietary.
Those are things that you could be doing today and understanding what their capabilities are. What sort of advantages do they. Do they offer a brand? I've tested out Gronk, which is Twitter's own thing, or X. I've tested out Perplexity, which is actually pretty good for researching Claude. Claude actually has some pretty good prompts that they've put on our own website. And then obviously ChatGPT, I've tested out as well. We talked about the Metaverse, but you ask any gamer.
Gamers are not on board with the Metaverse right now. We shy away from it. We're like, nah, we don't really like this too much. VR is trying to catch hold, but it's still not there yet. So would you say that for marketers, testing out AI would probably be the first step and then wait and see for the Metaverse to figure it all out? Because if gamers aren't on board on the virtual world, it's not going to catch on quite yet.
So a couple of things, I think, in general, yes, I think the priority by far and away is AI over Metaverse, let's say. First of all, I think the. They both obviously have a lot of potential, but I think the AI's potential to disrupt in a positive way is far greater. Certainly at this point, if you're only going to look at one of those two now and you're not doing either, I would say certainly AI.
But even regarding Metaverse, what I learned through some of my discussions at least, is just let's tease apart some of these definitions, right? There's the Metaverse, which is a place and a concept, and then there's the extended realities, right, which are the tools, right. And the enabling technologies. And there's a lot of cases where things like virtual reality that are very often associated with the Metaverse, they have application outside of Metaverse.
The augmented reality is being used today very heavily in a lot of different environments, not the least of which retail, right? Overlaying technology onto physical environments, again, that's not Metaverse. And then the other thing I would say about. So there's that point. And then the other thing about Metaverse is. And some of the CMOS called it, I'm not sure how Universal, this term is. But they refer to it as. They're in web 2.5, right between web 2 and 3 and what that is.
It's like an Oculus Metaverse, right? That there's advantages to being, having a presence in the Metaverse, even if it's not the fully immersive virtual reality experience. So that's. And they're in there, right? In that way. So there's. It's just not an easy answer. Right. There's different variations at different degrees to embracing the technology. And it's not an all or nothing. It's not a one size fits all. Yeah, I would agree. I think.
I mean, we talk about the Metaverse, but also Epic is building their own through Fortnite with virtual concerts. I think that has a bigger disruption, inflection point than Metaverse right now. Because I think, I think a few weeks ago I saw Billie Eilish is going to have a character on there. Kiss is going to be doing their virtual conferences. They have Lego now. They just announced, I think today, LEGO Star wars is going to be a part of it. So I think there are different ones.
You have Metaverse, you have Epic, something Steam, Valve, which is a big gaming distribution. It's like the biggest one. They have their own VR type thing. But I do agree with you that the AR section of it, which I always like more, is what we should be looking at more. Because you have Apple Vision Pro, but that's still too expensive. It's $3,500. I don't know how many people have $3,500 to just throw down.
And it looks weird when you see people in public use it because you're like, I don't know about this type of a thing. We say for like marketers to test out AR first and then let VR or whatever, virtual worlds play themselves out. Because I don't see really like an emergence of. I see a few companies doing it, but I don't see a leader quite yet. You know, I think it potentially, I think it really depends on the first and foremost, the nature of your business. Right. Are you B2B? Are you B2C?
Regardless how experiential or how immersive does the experience need to be or can be, I think those have implications. What are your competitors doing? So I don't think there's one answer to that question. Maybe as a generalization you could be right. But I think even the virtual reality in the Metaverse, as much as we think about that, a lot of times that's synonymous with gamers, as you referenced earlier, and what I talk to a lot of B2B client or CMOs, including in professional services.
Right. You can't really get further away from a quote unquote gamer. And they're talking about how they believe virtual reality will impact their business. And they could envision conducting business in a, in a hybrid virtual and real world, right. Where they're conducting meetings and some people are live and some are virtual. And yet it's almost impossible to distinguish between the two.
I know it's hard to get your head around, but this is what they're talking about and this is not gaming, right? This is, you know, this is everyday real world business and commerce. So that's why I said it's really hard to give a blanket answer to that. It's really more about what's suit what's most appropriate for your industry and what suits your company and your goals. Agreed. I think I Google had something for virtual conferences that made you look 3D.
The technology seemed like it was progressing and you didn't have to have as much of their expensive stuff to actually make it work, but you still had to have a very specific like webcam to make yourself look 3D or like in the room. So I agree with you that there's some aspects of I guess the virtual world or Metaverse or whatever that is very applicable. Applicable app can be used for businesses apparently I can't say that word, but can be used for businesses like that.
Like teleconferencing, making you feel like you're in the room instead of a flat screen like we're in right now. I had it, yes. And I had an interesting conversation with Financial Services, a banking cmo and we were talking about Metaverse and why would you ever need to be in a Metaverse and why would anybody ever want to conduct banking transactions with an avatar? And she said, think about this, think about somebody who is looking to apply for a loan, right?
And they're a minority, a person of color, what have you. And they're concerned that they're going to be discriminated against and all of a sudden they have an avatar, right. Which doesn't necessarily give away their aspects of their identity that they'd rather not reveal. All of a sudden you're saying, yeah, wow, I never really thought about that.
I just think there's a lot of stuff we don't know and a lot of applications and implications that this technology has that might make it more relevant than we foresee and perhaps even sooner than we Might think. Yeah. When I thought that too. Yeah. Why would you care about an avatar in banking? Okay, what is it? Wells Fargo and Chase have their own chat or AI things now through their apps that you could use to send money to people, I think. Or was it bank of America in Wells Fargo?
It was one of the big ones that were basically using AI to do a bunch of different tasks through your voice. Yeah, I spoke with Wells Fargo and Ally Bank. So I did speak with a couple of financial services companies and they actually were some of the further ones along the XR metaverse that others who you might have thought would be.
And so pivoting onto like, how could you protect your brand Right now, For example, colleges have been hampered by a bunch of protests and one side is very upset that they allowed the encampments. The other side's like, why don't you allow the encampments? That's just an example. But how do you protect that brand and manage that brand to keep it at its reputation? Because one false step and you lose all your reputation or quite a bit, most of it. Yeah. And I think that's true with anything.
We saw what happened with Bud Light and in the influencer space. That's nothing to do with technology per se, but one. That's just the nature of marketing. But yeah, I do think that there are things that, that can be done to protect your brand. In, in with technology, especially AI, there's a lot of tools that are. They guard against offensive, certainly offensive things, right. Putting out content that is offensive in some way. There's even more sophisticated tools. There's way.
There's custom tools that allow you to take an off the shelf GPT like chat GPT and customize it or train it over time so that it represents your brand point of view and your brand voice and personality. Right. And it's true to your brand. So there are things I think both on the front end that you can do to increase relevance and on the back end to protect your brand. But one of the.
Another common theme along these lines that came across in the interviews is you just, you can't turn your brand over to technology. Right? These technologies, as potent as they are, they're enablers, they're very powerful tools that when used right, can really yield a competitive advantage. But they're not turnkey, they're not standalone, they are, as One of the CMOs I spoke with, they're an amplifier to human creativity, Right. They do things that humans can't do.
Humans can do things that it doesn't do as well. And when you bring the two together, that you have power. And I think part of that topic you're talking about, like brand protection and brand safety for the foreseeable future is going to be in the hands of the marketer to the extent that they can.
Like I always say, I've talked to a bunch of marketers and they've said the same thing, like, use it as a tool or your assistant or an intern, like a virtual intern or whatever, but don't make it your boss of everything where you just kind of let it do its course. You'd never oversee it. Yeah, and you wouldn't. And that goes for anything. Right. When you're creating ads, do you turn it over to your agency and say, we're looking forward to seeing the ad commercial on air? Nothing works that way.
You have to have oversight on everything that you're doing proactively. And this technology is no different. I think the temptation is, wow, it's the I in AI is intelligence. Right. So it's gotta be right and it's gotta be good. And I should be able to just turn it. But no, you can't. Right. We all know that there are data integrity problems. There are a lot of times these models have systemic biases that might be subtle and we're unaware of. So it always requires, I think, that oversight.
And so people are listening to this podcast and they're wondering where they can. Where can they find you online to Maybe to learn more about brand management. Maybe you learned more about your future, the future of branding or how to get your book. So again, the name of my firm is Full Surge. F U L L S U R G E. So my website is fullsurge.com and there's information about the consultancy as well as the book and my previous book, the Indispensable Brand.
Both of them are on my website and then also available on Amazon and virtually all other retailers. All right, any final thoughts for listeners? I think just have fun, just suspend disbelief. And like the CMOs were telling me that they're doing, and I mentioned earlier, is just experiment. Right? You go in, eyes wide open. Go in. Certainly don't be careless and make foolish decisions that can't be reversed.
But you have to start playing with some of these technologies and seeing what potential they have and how they can impact your job and your business, your brands. All right, thank you, Mitch, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on branding, brand management. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, Brett, and thank you. For listening as always. Please subscribe to Digital Coffee Marketing Brew on all your favorite podcasting apps with a five star review.
Really just help with the rankings, let us know how we're doing and join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR industry. All right guys, stay safe, get to understanding how you can future proof your brand and manage your brand and see you next week later.