Thomas Ordahl Q&A, Part 2

I'll be doing a series of Q&As with great folks to talk about brand, entrepreneurship, and the possibilities of a world in flux.

I'm thrilled that my friend and former biz partner, Thomas Ordahl was the first of these conversations. Thomas is the best brand strategist I know and he’s got a real knack for explaining big ideas in a simple and easy way. He can be reached at [email protected].

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation—you can see Part 1 here. Thanks for watching!

Thomas: And as a brand leader, the thing that's interesting is this tension between standing for something but not standing still. Because there was a school of branding when you and I first started, and still a lot of people have this view, that brands are meant to be very fixed and consistent and rigid and brittle.

And they were these brittle things that we built and the clear space around the logo is off by a millimeter. And it was just that kind of rigidity. And I wrote about it for years. I think people have moved out of it, but it's still in the people's minds around brands.

But also brands can't just be like, whatever you want it to be, like they're also no these sort mercurial things. They have to stand for something. And so that's such an interesting tension. You're right. There is the spontaneity, everyone's influencing, there's conditions beyond your control, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all those things.

But the successful brands stand for something. So how do you master the art of standing for something? And being adaptive and responsive to the world around you? And being inclusive of people? And be willing to let yourself be influenced by events and by people and fans and all that.

There's no simple answer. That's the trick of brand strategy, brand development, brand management – it’s only going to get more true and more complex as time goes on. But that is, to me, the kernel of brand management and brand development today. Is that tension.

Michael: Yeah. You mentioned Dyson and, I think places that have a founder – basically someone who is, at the end of the day who's making the decision, right?

Thomas: Yeah.

Michael: It's much harder when you have a group of people. Cause you're, talking about like a relationship between order and chaos, and you don't want to have such stringent, strict, brittle order that things just atrophy and die--

Thomas: -- Die.Yeah. It’s a death.

Michael: It's death. And you also can't just be an amorphous, total entropy, like the whole thing is just “whatever”. How does that work?

Thomas: It’s a bit what I was saying before: there are essential principles. What do we stand for? Whatever bottle you want to put the wine in, whether it's purpose, or mission and values, or a brand strategy, a declaration, whatever, it almost doesn't matter what the names of those deliverables are. The essential tenet is "Who are we? What do we stand for? Why should anybody care? What's different about us?". So, you do need to articulate that and need to be very clear about that.

But then it comes down to my point before about the fact that it comes down to thousands of micro-decisions every day. And are we using that as the governing framework for those decisions? And they can be behavioral, how we treat each other, how we treat our customers, our approach to quality. And then they become fairly classic culture stuff. They become stories, and that's another part to remember. And that is culture is a big part of its stories. So there's always the stories.

I worked with a good example of this, a good example of the founder culture is Bose, who I worked with for a number of years, about 10 years ago. And Dr. Bose, he was a revered legend, both within Bose and at MIT where he taught throughout his entire career, his life. But there were any number of stories. We've all heard these, different businesses where, like Bose, I don’t know what product it was, but there was some product that was like literally two days from being launched and there was some flaw found in it, that wasn't like diabolically bad, but it was certainly a quality issue that would've not been to the standard of Bose and he killed it at a tremendous financial loss. They took a big hit. And that was a sort of story that was told all across Bose and showed, “Our adherence to quality is such that we will take a massive financial hit in order to not deliver a product that is below our standards.”. And when that story gets told, and you're a new employee and you hear that story, you're like, “Okay, this is how stuff's done around here.”. Right?

So it's principles, it's choices, and it's stories. And those all have to line up. There are lots of examples of people that have done it-- it's not just founders-- there are businesses that have been transformed through, through this kind of discipline.

But it takes staying true to what you stand for and then evidencing it and making those decisions all the time. And it's showing up all the time. And then becoming stories that then people can use to reinforce behavior. And then when people join, they learn about it. They go, “Okay, that's how it's done here.”.

Michael: And I think that one of the things that is just so exciting about it is that what happens when you figure that out, it’s magic. It really unlocks a tremendous amount of, you could say "value", but just energy. It's like an energy source. I think that it activates relationships between people and aligns their efforts in a way that is pretty amazing. You know, we've both had the privilege of doing this work for a long time and when it works, you just stand back, and shit goes wild.

Thomas: I think it's an attractor.

Michael: Yeah.

Thomas: It pulls in. We all know organizations where they're attracting really high-quality talent, or they're attracting innovation, or they're attracting partnerships or they're attracting clients and customers.

So, it also becomes not just a push out in terms of making stuff and putting it out into the world. People are also coming to you. It's a fire that you want, that everyone wants to gather around, right? Because there's stuff happening here.

Then when it does goes right, it becomes this sort of self-sustaining, self-moving, perpetual motion machine in a way, because your culture specifically, but also the business in general, kind of reinforces itself because the organization attracts a certain kind of person who is aligned with the values and the behaviors and the beliefs of the organization and does not attract people that are not.

We've all experienced this. We've seen someone come into a company, let's say, who was not aligned to the culture and their practices were quite divergent. They don't last, right? The organ is rejected, right? And that's a beautiful thing when that works. Now the trick is keeping it dynamic and allowing and being responsive to the evolutions in your business and category in the world, right?

Michael: Yes.

Zooming out a little bit now we started with the dotcom era and what was the specific moment there? I want to talk a little bit about the present moment, which, I think it's not controversial to say, feels like a chaotic time. It's a period of accelerated change, like the late nineties were. At the risk of asking a question that is unanswerable, what do you think the opportunities and risks are today?

Thomas: Boy, that's a big question. I've got a few areas of interest. Look, I've always been most interested in technology in the context of its knock-on effects, like what are the secondary effects of tech? So I've never been really, I'm not really a tech nerd.

But I'm interested in tech. I was always interested in technology. I did digital consulting years ago, but I was always interested more in okay, how's this going to impact human society? And often that's less predictable. It's more predictable what tech is going to do.

Michael: Yeah.

Thomas: Back to the pandemic thing, would anybody have ever predicted we would have a massive global housing price run up and a booming economy during a global pandemic? Would anybody have ever said that was going to happen? No. So the prediction game is very, very hard. But what's interesting and what I'm interested in is, okay, what are the impacts of all this?

And let's pick AI for example. That's a good one. There are two things that interest me with AI. The first is -- there was an article written many years ago, Harvard Business Review, that claimed, and I agree with it, that technology is never a lasting competitive advantage.

And I feel like now we're rushing and surely in the marketing services world, I see it, the big holding, everyone's rushing. They have to be AI-relevant and be within the categories being reinvented as a consequence of AI. All those things are true, but is it going to be a lasting and meaningful differentiator? I'm more suspicious. I think everyone's going to have it. And then it's going to go back to -- I remember dotcom again, and with people, there were, there was that land grab, I want to be the --

Michael: -- the first mover.

Thomas: The first pet food, website, whatever. None of that. They're all, gone.

Only like eBay's left and Amazon. That's it. They're all gone. So, you know, that whole idea of, if you accept the fact that in the end we're all going to be using AI and it's all going to give us fairly consistently and equal advantages. How are we going to differentiate?

How are we going to innovate in that new world where the new level, the new floor, is now different and has changed human behavior profoundly. But differentiation-- which is what we're most interested in as brand people-- what do you do uniquely? That's going to be an open question. So that I'm probing that quite a bit. I'm interested in that area and I've been doing some thinking, and a lot of reading on that.

The second area, which again, I'm hearing a lot of messaging around in the marketing world broadly. And this is one I've always been obsessed with. You might remember I did a talk, this was almost 10 years ago, at The Economist, and it was a debate between me and at the time, the head of Pandora [Music]. I forget what she did, but it was the head of Pandora, I think, development? But about will big data. And the topic of the debate was, “Will big data kill creativity?”. And I'm always interested in this topic, but what you're hearing a lot now from a lot of leaders is about hyper-personalization, right? Mass personalization at scale, right?

Like, “I know Mike Megalli and he lives here and he fly fishes and he likes to travel and, he is 53 years old.”. So I'm gonna create an ad, I'm gonna produce, on the fly, a communication or an ad, which we think, based on all of our understanding of him, is going to be right. And boom. That’s their nirvana. That's being tossed around now as I'm hearing it from a lot of people. That's the nirvana of AI. And I think it's a fallacy. I don't think people want what they want, or they say they want. That's the interesting thing, back to spontaneity.

Michael: Yeah.

Thomas: I use the example in that Economist talk about how we all had the friend who was the rich kid that had everything. Actually, I think you were that rich kid. No, I'm joking! But there were friends that had everything. They had the newest TVs, they always had the newest cars. But then there were kids like me whose parents were beatniks and we didn't have a TV and it was like, we were playing with wooden toys. But there was something about the dad is jamming jazz or something, or whatever. There was something unusual. So, the kid always wanted to be at my house, not at his big, beautiful house with all the toys. Because they wanted what they didn't have. And I wanted to be at his house because I didn't have all the toys.

Would you ever predicted that, like the millennials would've been hipsters, and like slaughtering their own goats in a Bed-Stuy parking lot? That was a big, “We're all gonna get back into butchery and making our own soaps,” and this kind of return to almost medieval practices and food and I think in a way that is the human response.

I think there's a fallacy that's being bandied about now around how hyper-personalization is gonna be this magic machine where we're gonna give people exactly what they want. Because that presumes that people want what they want. And what people want is actually often what they don't know, or they want new experiences.

And we're coming full circle to the beginning of the discussion because there's a memory, but they also want a bit of a surprise. So again, branding is never one or the other. It's like, I have a memory of what an English Pub is like and I have an expectation of that, but I also want it to feel a little bit different.

Or, you want a mixture, right? And that's what creativity is. And this is why I think creativity will only be more and more powerful. But people want to have experiences which are unexpected, right? And so I guess the question is, again, can AI deliver spontaneity? I'm not convinced. And I'm in no way an AI expert, so maybe they will say it can, but can it deliver an authentic, spontaneous experience?

Michael: No, look, you're not an AI expert, but you're a people expert, a human expert. And I will be thinking about that insight, about people not wanting what they say they want, and not even maybe knowing what they want. And it's not a math problem.

Thomas: Yeah. And people want brands to change them. In some ways we buy a certain new clothing brand, or part of this is that we want to be changed by the brands we buy. So, there's a push pull between expectation and desire.

So when I hear about, “Oh, we're gonna build this beautiful machine that's gonna deliver exactly what people want.” … If you want to get really esoteric and spiritual about it, I was listening to some Alan Watts over the holidays. He has this famous -- it was like one of those mind-blowing ones that like in college, people would listen to and be like, “Wow.”, but it's true. Imagine if you could dream the perfect life, if you could have complete control of your life. And you could have nothing but pleasure, nothing but joy, nothing but every pleasure you've ever wanted. No stress. You might do that for a thousand years, live in this perfect world, like a heaven of perfection, right? But eventually you'd be kinda like, “It's getting a little boring, like I need a little spice.”. Right? You might build a few surprises into it. And then you do another hundred years of that. And he goes on to say that at the end of it, what's the life that you’d end up with if you had control? It’s the life you live right now.

Michael: Right.

Thomas: You know, that this is the life you would choose. In the end it’s a life that's got stress and it's got surprises and it's unpredictable and you fall in love, and you break up, and the whole drama of existence. I think it's an oversimplification to think that if you just give people hyper personalization based on big data and AI, we can create, on the fly, the perfect ad for Mike Megalli. I don't buy that. I think AI is going to produce all manner of new opportunities for brand building. But that particular framing of it, which I hear a lot, I don't think makes sense to me.

Michael: Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the conversation we were having earlier about order and chaos and needing to have that dynamic tension between those two things. We’re in a world where "innovation", just that word means "technology", it's synonymous almost with technology. And so everything that is a technical advance is immediately considered an innovation, right? And every innovation needs to have some technological advance. And the truth is that some of the most interesting innovations that we can imagine really don't require much.

Some of the most interesting experiences we can imagine don't require much.

Thomas: Or to my point before, it's the knock-on effective technology. It's not the technology itself that created the innovation. Or the technology itself is not the innovation. The technology has altered the fundamental operating conditions that then lead to innovation. And smart people see those windows open up and go, “GPS and a smartphone. Uber.”. Boom. Peanut butter and chocolate. Amazing. I remember one I used to work with said something that I always thought was an interesting definition of a brilliant idea: it’s both unexpected and yet seemingly inevitable.

And that's the knock-on effect of technology. And we're going to have a lot of those out of AI.

Michael: Yeah. Thomas, it’s been great. Anything else that you think you want to share?

Thomas: No, look, it's been such a rich talk. The thing about branding that's great is that branding is a concept, right? It's a mental framework. It's existed, to your point in your lectures before, for thousands of years, and it will exist for thousands of years.

And as long as there's humans there will be brands, but it's also constantly changing. And yet there's something enduring in it. So that's that. I think that's why you and I got into this crazy business and why we stayed in it, because it has this kind of mercurial, ephemeralness to it. But also there are concrete business assets that actually can be quantified and measured and meant to accomplish things.

And so, it lives in these different worlds at the same time. And to do it properly, you have to love ambiguity, and I think you and I both enjoy ambiguity. Some people hate it, but that's the dynamic, that's the playground of brands and we all know that when they work really well, they create incredible value, financial value, innovation value, cultural value.

They are -- when they're working, they are an incredible asset.