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Episode 153
Where Brand Actually Happens
7 in 10 people globally say they're hesitant to trust someone different from them, according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. Trust is getting more personal. So where does that leave brands?
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob explore what it means to build a brand in a world where trust is earned through experience, not messaging. They dig into why the gap between marketing promises and reality is so damaging, how to bridge online and in-person brand moments, and what channels like TV do for brand trust that others simply can't. Plus, hear real-world examples of brands that get it right, from Snickers to Disney to Jeep.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer findings on consumer trust
• [03:00] How much control marketers actually have over brand perception
• [06:00] Where marketing promises most often break down
• [08:30] Why marketers over-index on comms and under-index on product experience
• [11:00] The moment where brand actually happens
• [14:00] How TV builds familiarity that carries into other channels
• [17:00] Real examples of brands bridging TV and in-person experience
Resources:
2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Report
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Transcript
Angela: There's a lot of channels that can build familiarity, and that really matters because it reduces that perceived risk, especially in a channel like television. When people see you over and over in a trusted high reach environment, you just start to feel more known.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Boss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. And Rob DeMar is the Chief Product Architect at Misfits and Machines.
Angela: Hello.
Elena: Hello, we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. And today we're talking about where brand actually happens. How should you think about your brand online versus in store? What responsibility does marketing have for the customer experience? And how can advertising make an in-person purchase occasion stronger? But I'm gonna kick us off as I always do first with some research. Today's is from the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. So Edelman, they surveyed nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, and one of their takeaways was this: trust has become increasingly personal and local. So people are pulling inward.
They trust their own experiences, their own circles, and the things that feel familiar more than distant institutions. In fact, Edelman found that the only two institutions that are broadly trusted globally are your employer and business like — business as an institution. So government, the media, NGOs, those all lag behind. For brands, this means trust isn't built through claims or positioning alone. Edelman shows that in an increasingly insular world, people trust what feels close, consistent, and proven through experience. So trust flows towards what shows up reliably in our lives.
The report also makes it clear that shared reality is breaking down. Seven in 10 people globally say they are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who is different from them. Which brings us to today's episode because if trust is increasingly personal, local, and experience driven, then brand isn't something that lives in a campaign. It lives in the moments where expectations meet reality — online, in person, and everywhere in between. And today we're gonna talk about that. Where does brand actually happen and how should marketers plan for or influence it in an effective way?
So I can't be the only one who's heard this phrase: your brand exists in the mind of the customer. We can have ideas of how our brand should be perceived. We can have brand books and messaging templates, but really every brand is just living in our customer's mind, not what we just wish the brands were. I have more of an existential marketing question to get us started here. If a brand is just what exists in the customer's mind, how much control do we think marketers actually have over it?
Angela: I think the first thing to recognize and just to call attention to seems sort of obvious, but we control what we consistently put into the environment, but we don't control what people can remember, I think. That matters because brand is really just that memory, right? Memory gets built through that repetition, through things like distinctive cues that we talk about here on the podcast a lot, through real experiences that people actually have with your brand. So as marketers, we try to micromanage this perception. I think it's better to focus on: how do we engineer the probability that you come to mind in a buying situation and the probability that when someone engages with you, the experience confirms what you promised?
We don't remember when the experience confirms what we promised. We just go about our day. We definitely remember when the experience doesn't confirm the brand promise — we can all think of those situations. I had a terrible experience with an apparel brand over Christmas that I loved and had spent a lot with — three middle school teenage girls — and man, it just destroys it. So that kind of control in terms of what you do own for your brand doesn't come from a better tagline or color or logo or whatever, right? It's your system design. I think fewer handoffs, less friction in the customer journey, fewer surprises. If you actually want brand consistency, you need that experience consistency as well. And that's cross-functional across the businesses, not just marketing.
Rob: Oh, those are great points, Angie, and your examples really tie to the experience with the brand itself and how that reinforces those things. I do think as marketers though, going to this existential question that you're asking, we have a freaking terrifying amount of control on what happens between people's ears. You guys have seen Inception, the movie Inception, by Christopher Nolan. We are in the inception business. We are planting dreams inside people's heads and thinking about the old mirror neurons — monkey see, monkey do — we're showing people sitting in a first class seat in a TV commercial and they're drinking their club soda with that lime. We as humans experience that, we are experiencing the brand even though we are not touching the brand. So we have an incredible amount of control, an incredible amount of responsibility. Then getting to Angela's point, the brand's gotta deliver, but we definitely can make people feel the end benefit of the products before they ever touch it.
Elena: Yeah. So marketing can definitely set an expectation of what a brand is going to be. And like you said, Rob, that could be a great thing or a bad thing. Angela gave that example of being disappointed by a brand. What happens when the expectation set by marketing doesn't match reality in that poor way? Like where do we think that tends to happen most often?
Angela: I think it breaks down in really predictable ways. It's not super shocking. It's in the speed of delivery, whether or not you get the product at all — in my case. Friction gaps, like I talked about. Inability to process a return. Bad onboarding. Customer service doesn't match the promise. It's quality gaps where something looks great in the advertisement, but then feels cheap or it's confusing or it's frustrating when you actually use it. So it's like these fine print gaps where pricing or fees or exclusions show up later and just create this distrust and this lack of alignment on what you thought it should be. Could also be things like product's not in stock. That can be really frustrating. It's not necessarily that the product was bad or the quality was bad, but you're just like, I just can't get it.
Rob: I heard a term that made me laugh out loud on this topic, which is corporate catfishing. Have you guys ever heard that?
Angela: I have not heard that.
Elena: No.
Rob: It's kind of funny and I think we've all felt that, especially dealing with ads we see in social media where the promises get pretty big and you really get let down. And those tend to be high volume churn models, right? They're just trying to get people in. But those are doom loops, right? They're pulling in people, at some point everyone has a disappointing experience, they drop out, and then at some point they just dissolve. There's no long term marketing play there. But I think the other side of it is, actually in an opportunistic way, don't promise to be the Ritz if you're running a Motel Six. You can be an amazing Motel Six. Like, celebrate and deliver the value that you can offer someone — being a really clean, affordable, amazing place to stay — but don't try to be the Ritz if you're not the Ritz.
Elena: Yeah. So part of that is just understanding what your brand actually is.
Rob: Can you understand the floor? Like what's your minimal viable promise that you can offer your customer? And then measure your marketing against that, just to make sure you're not overdoing it or you're not underdelivering at the same time in terms of what you can offer your audience.
Elena: So sometimes there's this sort of mismatch between marketing and reality, not because marketing wants to promote an inferior product or a bad customer experience, but sometimes because marketing can get disconnected from the product or the product's experience and can't really improve it. So why do we think marketers often over-index on things like comms and advertising and positioning, but tend to under-index on things like product and customer experience?
Angela: I think part of it is just the system design. The comms is what we own as marketers. The customer experience is something we might be able to influence, but the campaigns, the messaging, the media is our lane. Fixing product or service issues is either not our responsibility at all, or it's slower, it's more political, it's cross-functional. And communication is easier to measure in the short term, so it feels safer. And that's our job too. Again, back to engineering probabilities — we do want to come to mind. We do want that experience to be represented in however we talk about the brand, and so that's where we focus.
Rob: Yeah. Just to echo what you're saying, I love the old joke — a drunk guy is looking for his keys under a streetlight. You guys heard this? A cop comes up to him and says, did you lose your keys over here? And the guy goes, no, I lost them in the park. But the light is better here. And I think as marketers, focusing on what we feel good about — these are the levers that we have — but fixing a product experience, holy smokes, that's hard, right? Getting in with your design team, understanding how to deliver for the customer is just messy work. So yeah, we're gonna retreat to the things that we know that are easy. But trying to fix the product through how you talk about the product is a tough game.
Elena: Yeah, I think it's hard because I know I hear a lot that marketing needs to become more involved in product, like marketing needs to get deeper into the business. And I can go along with that to an extent, 'cause comms does take a lot of time, like advertising the business — that's an important responsibility too. So you're right, some of that is on others. But I think it's nice when marketing can bring insights or can drive product changes and has a voice in the room. But putting all that responsibility on marketing seems like a whole lot of work. Alright. So the theme for this episode is fun — like thinking about where does brand actually take place? Does it take place in the message people hear, when they open the box, when they try a product, when they go into a store? There's all these different moments where people can experience your brand. If we had to optimize for one moment where brand actually happens, where would it be?
Angela: This was a hard one for me because where it actually happens — I easily go to product, just because I think of all of those examples in my life where the product or the brand or the service didn't deliver. And at the same time, that's really loyalty, right? And we've talked about what's the key to growth and broad reach and new customers and light buyers. And we know that chasing loyalty in terms of how to grow a brand is sort of a fool's game. We're not loyal because of that. Customer acquisition is so important, and so what I think about, where to optimize, it would be at that mental availability in driving that moment of choice, right? The shelf — it could be the search results page, the dealership lot, the app that they choose in the app store — that's where all the work either pays off or it doesn't.
That's where those memory structures, those distinctive assets, hopefully cash out for the brand. Because in that moment people aren't analyzing your positioning statements. They're just scanning and they're deciding really quickly. So for me, brand happens most powerfully at the point where that attention and that top of funnel awareness turns into action.
Rob: I'm gonna make a plug for one that people probably don't think about when you think about optimizing that brand moment, and that is sound. All right. Now go with me for a second here. Apple Pay — you all have used Apple Pay. I am literally handing money over when I use Apple Pay, but it makes the most rewarding ding sound. I feel like I won. I feel like I just got points in a video game. They have branded that sound. It is in my neural network. What a great branding opportunity that people don't think about. And there's so many places that sound shows up in a brand. If you're a retail store, the sound of your door when it opens — you know, all those Pavlov's dog type reactions that we can use with sound. So making a plug for that. Does feel good though, doesn't it? When you use that Apple Pay, it gives you that little vibrate.
Elena: I was gonna say, I like that feeling too, like when the phone kind of vibrates.
Rob: You are like, yes, yes. It doesn't make you go like you're losing something. You're feeling like you're winning.
Elena: Just so many opportunities for thinking about all the different ways people interact with your brand — different sounds, even like smells. Makes me think about how in the Super Bowl we were talking about how there were so few sonic logos at the end of spots. Like what a missed opportunity for some sort of brand sound.
Rob: Right? When you walk — now, not a sound related one but another sense. When you walk into a Westin, what happens?
Elena: I haven't been in one in a long time.
Angela: I don't know.
Rob: The smell of a Westin. You walk into a Westin anywhere in the country and they smell the same. And it doesn't smell like a locker room. It's a good smell. They actually sell the smell. You can go online and buy like essential oils that are knockoffs of the Westin smell. So the senses — great branding opportunity.
Angela: But what gets me into the Westin so that I can smell it.
Rob: That's true. I'm thinking more about that branded opportunity once you're there and what you can add to it. But you're right, that's not gonna get you into the hotel.
Angela: I don't follow my nose through the hotels. There are probably some that deter me. I don't know. We don't have to go there, but.
Elena: Alright, well speaking of that, Ange — and like that top of funnel, those moments before somebody goes in person to experience your brand — there are ways that marketers can connect brand experiences across channels, online and in person in smooth ways. And of course we think that TV is very great at doing this, at making those connections between seeing a brand for the first time and experiencing it. So Angie, how do you think the broad awareness and the familiarity that a channel like TV delivers, how does that change the way people then experience a brand later?
Angela: For sure TV builds familiarity at scale. There's a lot of channels that can build familiarity, and that really matters because it reduces that perceived risk, especially in a channel like television. When people see you over and over in a trusted high reach environment, you just start to feel more known. So when they encounter you later, whether that be in a store, could be in the search results, could be on a website — that moment is faster. They're not stopping to evaluate from scratch. They just recognize you. And that recognition carries over into other channels too. People search more, they click more, they convert more because the brand already feels familiar. So TV isn't usually the purchase moment in itself — sometimes it is, sometimes it drives that initial awareness and immediate purchase — but TV's what makes the purchase super easy. Familiar brands don't have to explain themselves on the shelf. That's the beauty of a channel like television, to push that power.
Elena: So speaking of TV, Rob, there has to be kind of some creative best practices here, right? Like how do you accurately represent products and services, but also make an emotional, compelling spot that drives people to wanna purchase your product or service?
Rob: Nothing new here. This is as classic as advertising 101, which is just remembering the difference between features and benefits, right? Features — what the product does. Benefit — what it does for me. Classic example: this drill bit is made of tungsten carbide. The benefit is the drill bit creates a quarter inch hole, right? But as marketers, we have to go way beyond that to emotionally connect. So this drill allows you to hang a shelf to please your spouse, and to finally sit on that couch, drink a beer and watch football and feel like a real man. So that's the benefit. I don't know any of those things, but I'm assuming that's what men want. But anyway, so obviously just really leaning into recognizing what the features are, of course — how are we gonna differentiate ourselves — but then really celebrating the benefits of that. It's as old as advertising, but it's so forgotten.
Elena: One thing I was wondering when thinking about this topic was — you've been involved with a lot of TV commercials over a lot of years. Have you ever seen marketers do a really good job of bridging the TV commercial with their in-person experience?
Rob: Oh, yeah. Obviously one of the favorites out there — who doesn't love the Snickers campaign — when they talked about you're not you when you're hungry. It's such a great campaign and they actually took that so far as to rename the candy bars on the shelf like Grumpy or Whiny or Spacey. What a great way to bring the brand into the shelf from some really great advertising that was done. And there's a lot of other ones. Domino's did a great one years ago where they talked about the importance of having good streets in order to deliver your pizza, because you don't want it to shake and whatnot. So they made a really funny campaign out of that. But then they actually went around America and filled potholes and put the Domino's logo into them. I don't know how they got a permit to do that, but hey, that was great. So yeah, lots of great ways. It's really an invitation to have fun, right? How do you take your media message and bring it home in a fun and surprising way in retail where people are making their purchase?
Elena: That's funny. The Domino's campaign — I didn't remember that, but as soon as you described it, I think that also makes it really memorable when you can bridge both mediums. Alright, to wrap us up here, do we have a favorite example of how a brand's in-person experience or product experience felt really well connected to their brand personality, their distinctive assets? Any best in class examples?
Angela: Yeah, I loved this one. It was obvious for me. It's Disney.
Elena: I knew you were gonna say Disney.
Angela: You guys know me well. We're a big Disney family, but they're just the gold standard in my head of turning brand into experience. When you pay attention, especially, you see how they engineer every detail to deliver that. And Disney's had a rough go recently related to injuries — the cruises, they lost a kid. I still trust them. They have this optimism and magic and safety to them that they do really well and they do it really well in person too. Obviously there's people filtering through their ecosystem. But.
Elena: I was thinking about Disney too, but I knew you were gonna take that one. But even the first time I opened the Disney Plus app, that felt magical. The way they have the Tinkerbell thing — the first time I opened it, I felt like it was very, very Disney. That's like the power of a great brand, that they can go through all these different things and it's just amazing the feeling you get from Disney.
Rob: That's a funny one to me, 'cause I totally agree. And it also violates itself when it goes from the Disney Plus logo to a banner of Deadpool. And you're like, how does that happen?
Elena: There's been some disconnect. I'm even wondering — aren't they gonna combine like Disney Plus and Hulu?
Rob: Yeah, and I wonder how that's gonna feel. It's a bit of a mashup. But you can see why they do it. But I mean, holy smokes, you talk about an IP mashup between Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney, and you're like — but yes, that opener just makes your heart happy.
Angela: Totally.
Rob: I think vehicle manufacturers do a really good job of trying to bridge that experience — from how they talk about their car in the commercial all the way into the showroom and beyond. For me, I've always talked about it endless times, but I think Jeep does a great job of that. They hide Easter eggs even in their products themselves. I know a lot of cars are starting to do that now — find hidden Jeep symbols — and they call their loyalty program the Wave, which is something all Jeep owners do. So I think Jeep has always been a great brand beyond just the commercials. How about you, Elena?
Elena: Mine was hard. I was thinking Disney in my head. But mine's a newer brand that I like a lot, which is Alo Yoga, and I experienced this in person with them. I like their clothes. I'd never gone into a store, but we were walking through a local mall in Minnesota and I saw the Alo store. They're known for sort of big color blocks — like they have this brown color people really like and a green color. And I think of them as being very consistent in their coloring. And when we walked by, it was the beginning of February and the whole store was like red, just the whole front. And it just felt so connected to when I'm on their website and just the experience of their product — these big bold colors. And I dunno, I thought that was a cool brand experience, 'cause not everyone wants to buy red clothes, but it felt very in tune with them and it definitely caught my attention. So I think they're a fun brand to watch too. Good competitor to Lululemon, I think.
Great. That was a fun topic. I think it's fun to think about different opportunities for how our brand can show up offline and in person, how we can bridge it and make those connections. Because clearly it does have an ability to help you remember a brand in a different sort of way when there's really good cohesion there.
Angela: Absolutely. It all matters.
Episode 153
Where Brand Actually Happens
7 in 10 people globally say they're hesitant to trust someone different from them, according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. Trust is getting more personal. So where does that leave brands?
This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob explore what it means to build a brand in a world where trust is earned through experience, not messaging. They dig into why the gap between marketing promises and reality is so damaging, how to bridge online and in-person brand moments, and what channels like TV do for brand trust that others simply can't. Plus, hear real-world examples of brands that get it right, from Snickers to Disney to Jeep.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer findings on consumer trust
• [03:00] How much control marketers actually have over brand perception
• [06:00] Where marketing promises most often break down
• [08:30] Why marketers over-index on comms and under-index on product experience
• [11:00] The moment where brand actually happens
• [14:00] How TV builds familiarity that carries into other channels
• [17:00] Real examples of brands bridging TV and in-person experience
Resources:
2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Report
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
Chief Marketing Officer
Rob DeMars
Chief Product Architect
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
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Transcript
Angela: There's a lot of channels that can build familiarity, and that really matters because it reduces that perceived risk, especially in a channel like television. When people see you over and over in a trusted high reach environment, you just start to feel more known.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Boss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. And Rob DeMar is the Chief Product Architect at Misfits and Machines.
Angela: Hello.
Elena: Hello, we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. And today we're talking about where brand actually happens. How should you think about your brand online versus in store? What responsibility does marketing have for the customer experience? And how can advertising make an in-person purchase occasion stronger? But I'm gonna kick us off as I always do first with some research. Today's is from the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. So Edelman, they surveyed nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, and one of their takeaways was this: trust has become increasingly personal and local. So people are pulling inward.
They trust their own experiences, their own circles, and the things that feel familiar more than distant institutions. In fact, Edelman found that the only two institutions that are broadly trusted globally are your employer and business like — business as an institution. So government, the media, NGOs, those all lag behind. For brands, this means trust isn't built through claims or positioning alone. Edelman shows that in an increasingly insular world, people trust what feels close, consistent, and proven through experience. So trust flows towards what shows up reliably in our lives.
The report also makes it clear that shared reality is breaking down. Seven in 10 people globally say they are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who is different from them. Which brings us to today's episode because if trust is increasingly personal, local, and experience driven, then brand isn't something that lives in a campaign. It lives in the moments where expectations meet reality — online, in person, and everywhere in between. And today we're gonna talk about that. Where does brand actually happen and how should marketers plan for or influence it in an effective way?
So I can't be the only one who's heard this phrase: your brand exists in the mind of the customer. We can have ideas of how our brand should be perceived. We can have brand books and messaging templates, but really every brand is just living in our customer's mind, not what we just wish the brands were. I have more of an existential marketing question to get us started here. If a brand is just what exists in the customer's mind, how much control do we think marketers actually have over it?
Angela: I think the first thing to recognize and just to call attention to seems sort of obvious, but we control what we consistently put into the environment, but we don't control what people can remember, I think. That matters because brand is really just that memory, right? Memory gets built through that repetition, through things like distinctive cues that we talk about here on the podcast a lot, through real experiences that people actually have with your brand. So as marketers, we try to micromanage this perception. I think it's better to focus on: how do we engineer the probability that you come to mind in a buying situation and the probability that when someone engages with you, the experience confirms what you promised?
We don't remember when the experience confirms what we promised. We just go about our day. We definitely remember when the experience doesn't confirm the brand promise — we can all think of those situations. I had a terrible experience with an apparel brand over Christmas that I loved and had spent a lot with — three middle school teenage girls — and man, it just destroys it. So that kind of control in terms of what you do own for your brand doesn't come from a better tagline or color or logo or whatever, right? It's your system design. I think fewer handoffs, less friction in the customer journey, fewer surprises. If you actually want brand consistency, you need that experience consistency as well. And that's cross-functional across the businesses, not just marketing.
Rob: Oh, those are great points, Angie, and your examples really tie to the experience with the brand itself and how that reinforces those things. I do think as marketers though, going to this existential question that you're asking, we have a freaking terrifying amount of control on what happens between people's ears. You guys have seen Inception, the movie Inception, by Christopher Nolan. We are in the inception business. We are planting dreams inside people's heads and thinking about the old mirror neurons — monkey see, monkey do — we're showing people sitting in a first class seat in a TV commercial and they're drinking their club soda with that lime. We as humans experience that, we are experiencing the brand even though we are not touching the brand. So we have an incredible amount of control, an incredible amount of responsibility. Then getting to Angela's point, the brand's gotta deliver, but we definitely can make people feel the end benefit of the products before they ever touch it.
Elena: Yeah. So marketing can definitely set an expectation of what a brand is going to be. And like you said, Rob, that could be a great thing or a bad thing. Angela gave that example of being disappointed by a brand. What happens when the expectation set by marketing doesn't match reality in that poor way? Like where do we think that tends to happen most often?
Angela: I think it breaks down in really predictable ways. It's not super shocking. It's in the speed of delivery, whether or not you get the product at all — in my case. Friction gaps, like I talked about. Inability to process a return. Bad onboarding. Customer service doesn't match the promise. It's quality gaps where something looks great in the advertisement, but then feels cheap or it's confusing or it's frustrating when you actually use it. So it's like these fine print gaps where pricing or fees or exclusions show up later and just create this distrust and this lack of alignment on what you thought it should be. Could also be things like product's not in stock. That can be really frustrating. It's not necessarily that the product was bad or the quality was bad, but you're just like, I just can't get it.
Rob: I heard a term that made me laugh out loud on this topic, which is corporate catfishing. Have you guys ever heard that?
Angela: I have not heard that.
Elena: No.
Rob: It's kind of funny and I think we've all felt that, especially dealing with ads we see in social media where the promises get pretty big and you really get let down. And those tend to be high volume churn models, right? They're just trying to get people in. But those are doom loops, right? They're pulling in people, at some point everyone has a disappointing experience, they drop out, and then at some point they just dissolve. There's no long term marketing play there. But I think the other side of it is, actually in an opportunistic way, don't promise to be the Ritz if you're running a Motel Six. You can be an amazing Motel Six. Like, celebrate and deliver the value that you can offer someone — being a really clean, affordable, amazing place to stay — but don't try to be the Ritz if you're not the Ritz.
Elena: Yeah. So part of that is just understanding what your brand actually is.
Rob: Can you understand the floor? Like what's your minimal viable promise that you can offer your customer? And then measure your marketing against that, just to make sure you're not overdoing it or you're not underdelivering at the same time in terms of what you can offer your audience.
Elena: So sometimes there's this sort of mismatch between marketing and reality, not because marketing wants to promote an inferior product or a bad customer experience, but sometimes because marketing can get disconnected from the product or the product's experience and can't really improve it. So why do we think marketers often over-index on things like comms and advertising and positioning, but tend to under-index on things like product and customer experience?
Angela: I think part of it is just the system design. The comms is what we own as marketers. The customer experience is something we might be able to influence, but the campaigns, the messaging, the media is our lane. Fixing product or service issues is either not our responsibility at all, or it's slower, it's more political, it's cross-functional. And communication is easier to measure in the short term, so it feels safer. And that's our job too. Again, back to engineering probabilities — we do want to come to mind. We do want that experience to be represented in however we talk about the brand, and so that's where we focus.
Rob: Yeah. Just to echo what you're saying, I love the old joke — a drunk guy is looking for his keys under a streetlight. You guys heard this? A cop comes up to him and says, did you lose your keys over here? And the guy goes, no, I lost them in the park. But the light is better here. And I think as marketers, focusing on what we feel good about — these are the levers that we have — but fixing a product experience, holy smokes, that's hard, right? Getting in with your design team, understanding how to deliver for the customer is just messy work. So yeah, we're gonna retreat to the things that we know that are easy. But trying to fix the product through how you talk about the product is a tough game.
Elena: Yeah, I think it's hard because I know I hear a lot that marketing needs to become more involved in product, like marketing needs to get deeper into the business. And I can go along with that to an extent, 'cause comms does take a lot of time, like advertising the business — that's an important responsibility too. So you're right, some of that is on others. But I think it's nice when marketing can bring insights or can drive product changes and has a voice in the room. But putting all that responsibility on marketing seems like a whole lot of work. Alright. So the theme for this episode is fun — like thinking about where does brand actually take place? Does it take place in the message people hear, when they open the box, when they try a product, when they go into a store? There's all these different moments where people can experience your brand. If we had to optimize for one moment where brand actually happens, where would it be?
Angela: This was a hard one for me because where it actually happens — I easily go to product, just because I think of all of those examples in my life where the product or the brand or the service didn't deliver. And at the same time, that's really loyalty, right? And we've talked about what's the key to growth and broad reach and new customers and light buyers. And we know that chasing loyalty in terms of how to grow a brand is sort of a fool's game. We're not loyal because of that. Customer acquisition is so important, and so what I think about, where to optimize, it would be at that mental availability in driving that moment of choice, right? The shelf — it could be the search results page, the dealership lot, the app that they choose in the app store — that's where all the work either pays off or it doesn't.
That's where those memory structures, those distinctive assets, hopefully cash out for the brand. Because in that moment people aren't analyzing your positioning statements. They're just scanning and they're deciding really quickly. So for me, brand happens most powerfully at the point where that attention and that top of funnel awareness turns into action.
Rob: I'm gonna make a plug for one that people probably don't think about when you think about optimizing that brand moment, and that is sound. All right. Now go with me for a second here. Apple Pay — you all have used Apple Pay. I am literally handing money over when I use Apple Pay, but it makes the most rewarding ding sound. I feel like I won. I feel like I just got points in a video game. They have branded that sound. It is in my neural network. What a great branding opportunity that people don't think about. And there's so many places that sound shows up in a brand. If you're a retail store, the sound of your door when it opens — you know, all those Pavlov's dog type reactions that we can use with sound. So making a plug for that. Does feel good though, doesn't it? When you use that Apple Pay, it gives you that little vibrate.
Elena: I was gonna say, I like that feeling too, like when the phone kind of vibrates.
Rob: You are like, yes, yes. It doesn't make you go like you're losing something. You're feeling like you're winning.
Elena: Just so many opportunities for thinking about all the different ways people interact with your brand — different sounds, even like smells. Makes me think about how in the Super Bowl we were talking about how there were so few sonic logos at the end of spots. Like what a missed opportunity for some sort of brand sound.
Rob: Right? When you walk — now, not a sound related one but another sense. When you walk into a Westin, what happens?
Elena: I haven't been in one in a long time.
Angela: I don't know.
Rob: The smell of a Westin. You walk into a Westin anywhere in the country and they smell the same. And it doesn't smell like a locker room. It's a good smell. They actually sell the smell. You can go online and buy like essential oils that are knockoffs of the Westin smell. So the senses — great branding opportunity.
Angela: But what gets me into the Westin so that I can smell it.
Rob: That's true. I'm thinking more about that branded opportunity once you're there and what you can add to it. But you're right, that's not gonna get you into the hotel.
Angela: I don't follow my nose through the hotels. There are probably some that deter me. I don't know. We don't have to go there, but.
Elena: Alright, well speaking of that, Ange — and like that top of funnel, those moments before somebody goes in person to experience your brand — there are ways that marketers can connect brand experiences across channels, online and in person in smooth ways. And of course we think that TV is very great at doing this, at making those connections between seeing a brand for the first time and experiencing it. So Angie, how do you think the broad awareness and the familiarity that a channel like TV delivers, how does that change the way people then experience a brand later?
Angela: For sure TV builds familiarity at scale. There's a lot of channels that can build familiarity, and that really matters because it reduces that perceived risk, especially in a channel like television. When people see you over and over in a trusted high reach environment, you just start to feel more known. So when they encounter you later, whether that be in a store, could be in the search results, could be on a website — that moment is faster. They're not stopping to evaluate from scratch. They just recognize you. And that recognition carries over into other channels too. People search more, they click more, they convert more because the brand already feels familiar. So TV isn't usually the purchase moment in itself — sometimes it is, sometimes it drives that initial awareness and immediate purchase — but TV's what makes the purchase super easy. Familiar brands don't have to explain themselves on the shelf. That's the beauty of a channel like television, to push that power.
Elena: So speaking of TV, Rob, there has to be kind of some creative best practices here, right? Like how do you accurately represent products and services, but also make an emotional, compelling spot that drives people to wanna purchase your product or service?
Rob: Nothing new here. This is as classic as advertising 101, which is just remembering the difference between features and benefits, right? Features — what the product does. Benefit — what it does for me. Classic example: this drill bit is made of tungsten carbide. The benefit is the drill bit creates a quarter inch hole, right? But as marketers, we have to go way beyond that to emotionally connect. So this drill allows you to hang a shelf to please your spouse, and to finally sit on that couch, drink a beer and watch football and feel like a real man. So that's the benefit. I don't know any of those things, but I'm assuming that's what men want. But anyway, so obviously just really leaning into recognizing what the features are, of course — how are we gonna differentiate ourselves — but then really celebrating the benefits of that. It's as old as advertising, but it's so forgotten.
Elena: One thing I was wondering when thinking about this topic was — you've been involved with a lot of TV commercials over a lot of years. Have you ever seen marketers do a really good job of bridging the TV commercial with their in-person experience?
Rob: Oh, yeah. Obviously one of the favorites out there — who doesn't love the Snickers campaign — when they talked about you're not you when you're hungry. It's such a great campaign and they actually took that so far as to rename the candy bars on the shelf like Grumpy or Whiny or Spacey. What a great way to bring the brand into the shelf from some really great advertising that was done. And there's a lot of other ones. Domino's did a great one years ago where they talked about the importance of having good streets in order to deliver your pizza, because you don't want it to shake and whatnot. So they made a really funny campaign out of that. But then they actually went around America and filled potholes and put the Domino's logo into them. I don't know how they got a permit to do that, but hey, that was great. So yeah, lots of great ways. It's really an invitation to have fun, right? How do you take your media message and bring it home in a fun and surprising way in retail where people are making their purchase?
Elena: That's funny. The Domino's campaign — I didn't remember that, but as soon as you described it, I think that also makes it really memorable when you can bridge both mediums. Alright, to wrap us up here, do we have a favorite example of how a brand's in-person experience or product experience felt really well connected to their brand personality, their distinctive assets? Any best in class examples?
Angela: Yeah, I loved this one. It was obvious for me. It's Disney.
Elena: I knew you were gonna say Disney.
Angela: You guys know me well. We're a big Disney family, but they're just the gold standard in my head of turning brand into experience. When you pay attention, especially, you see how they engineer every detail to deliver that. And Disney's had a rough go recently related to injuries — the cruises, they lost a kid. I still trust them. They have this optimism and magic and safety to them that they do really well and they do it really well in person too. Obviously there's people filtering through their ecosystem. But.
Elena: I was thinking about Disney too, but I knew you were gonna take that one. But even the first time I opened the Disney Plus app, that felt magical. The way they have the Tinkerbell thing — the first time I opened it, I felt like it was very, very Disney. That's like the power of a great brand, that they can go through all these different things and it's just amazing the feeling you get from Disney.
Rob: That's a funny one to me, 'cause I totally agree. And it also violates itself when it goes from the Disney Plus logo to a banner of Deadpool. And you're like, how does that happen?
Elena: There's been some disconnect. I'm even wondering — aren't they gonna combine like Disney Plus and Hulu?
Rob: Yeah, and I wonder how that's gonna feel. It's a bit of a mashup. But you can see why they do it. But I mean, holy smokes, you talk about an IP mashup between Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney, and you're like — but yes, that opener just makes your heart happy.
Angela: Totally.
Rob: I think vehicle manufacturers do a really good job of trying to bridge that experience — from how they talk about their car in the commercial all the way into the showroom and beyond. For me, I've always talked about it endless times, but I think Jeep does a great job of that. They hide Easter eggs even in their products themselves. I know a lot of cars are starting to do that now — find hidden Jeep symbols — and they call their loyalty program the Wave, which is something all Jeep owners do. So I think Jeep has always been a great brand beyond just the commercials. How about you, Elena?
Elena: Mine was hard. I was thinking Disney in my head. But mine's a newer brand that I like a lot, which is Alo Yoga, and I experienced this in person with them. I like their clothes. I'd never gone into a store, but we were walking through a local mall in Minnesota and I saw the Alo store. They're known for sort of big color blocks — like they have this brown color people really like and a green color. And I think of them as being very consistent in their coloring. And when we walked by, it was the beginning of February and the whole store was like red, just the whole front. And it just felt so connected to when I'm on their website and just the experience of their product — these big bold colors. And I dunno, I thought that was a cool brand experience, 'cause not everyone wants to buy red clothes, but it felt very in tune with them and it definitely caught my attention. So I think they're a fun brand to watch too. Good competitor to Lululemon, I think.
Great. That was a fun topic. I think it's fun to think about different opportunities for how our brand can show up offline and in person, how we can bridge it and make those connections. Because clearly it does have an ability to help you remember a brand in a different sort of way when there's really good cohesion there.
Angela: Absolutely. It all matters.