Nick Liddell on Architecture & Anthropomorphism

Nick Liddell is a brand strategist, author, and founder of Baron Sauvage, an independent consultancy based in London. Previously Director of Consulting at The Clearing, he has over 25 years of experience working with brands including Google, Prada, McLaren, and Samsung. His most recent books are You Are a Fish: The Truth About Brands and The Brand Architecture Book, which argues for understanding brands as coherent systems rather than singular entities.

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine, who’s a neighbor also, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question and a beautiful question is why I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way I am doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control.

And I think it’s really great that you asked this at the beginning of all of these conversations because I had some time to prepare for it, although I’m not sure you’re ever fully prepared. Yeah, I think as with a lot of people, it’s a complicated one to answer.

I was born in Paris. I only moved to the UK when I was three years old. And I initially lived in the north of England near a place called Carlisle.

And then I moved down to London when I was 10. So if I just want to give someone a short answer to it, particularly given that London is a pretty great place to work, if you’re working in branding, then I’ll just say London. But from a personal point of view, I’ll always feel I come from the north of England.

I don’t sound remotely like I do anymore. But yeah, I’m a northerner spiritually.

And what does that mean to be from the north of England? When do you feel most northern?

Well, I think professionally, it means that it’s super easy to get sucked into the belief that everywhere is London.

You grow up or you live in a bubble, particularly when you work in branding or marketing. And so it’s a really healthy way to remind myself that most of the world is not remotely like London or any major city for that matter. And also just personally, it means that the further north I go, the happier I tend to be.

And what was it like growing up? Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Well, certainly not a brand consultant. I had no idea a brand consultant was even a thing until I started looking for work. And then I saw in the list of things that aren’t being an accountant, a management consultant, a doctor or anything else that I wasn’t remotely qualified to do.

Brand consultant was one of the few things left. And so it sounded fun and I went for it. I think I wanted to be a different thing every week when I did it, including ballet dancer and professional footballer and spaceman and everything.

And where are you now? And what is the work that you do?

So now I am, to all intents and purposes, still London. I’m just outside London. And I still do pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 26.

So helping organizations of all sorts of shape and size understand how they can better use their brands to improve their relationships with the people that they need to have good relationships with in a way that ultimately benefits them and helps them achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve as an organization.

Yeah. And when would you say you first discovered that you could make a living doing this thing?

Only really when I started doing it. I went to a careers fair and there were a couple of sad looking types in a corner.

No one was speaking to them. They had an easel with a couple of British Airways planes with some funky tail fins on the back of them. And I don’t think anyone was remotely interested in speaking to them because they didn’t have a really snazzy stance.

They weren’t handing out free things like the Unilever guys and the P&G guys were. So I went and talked to them and asked them what they did. And they told me that they worked at a brand consultancy called Interbrand.

And I asked them about the type of work that they did. And it sounded semi interesting. And so I applied for a job and got it.

And that was pretty much the extent to which I understood what I was doing, what on earth it involved. I learned it all when I started doing it.

Yeah. And what do you enjoy about it? What do you love about it, actually? Or where’s the joy in the work for you?

I love — well, personally, what I love about it is and the reason that I applied was I started working in brand valuation. So I studied philosophy and economics at university. So that’s a really nice mix of numbers and thoughts.

And so what I initially liked about branding was that very often you’re looking at large data sets and you’re looking for some story or idea that you can extract from those data sets. And then there’s the bit on top of that, which you don’t get from an economics and philosophy degree, which is then you can start working with people who actually do things like designers, writers, creatives of all sorts of shape and size to actually make this idea manifest in all sorts of delightful ways that you probably couldn’t have imagined when you started thinking about that idea. And that for me is just a really lovely process that you go through from you can literally look at an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of ones and zeros as input.

And then output is just this really beautiful, compelling experience that’s been really thoughtfully designed that is going to make the right people really happy and get something and want to engage in it in a way that creates value for them and creates value for the people who are serving it up to them. And that’s still 26 years later, just a really fulfilling thing to do with my time.

Yeah, I feel like maybe we started around the same time. And I always say that I feel like when I came into the work world, brand was the new technology. Do you remember on one level? I’m curious, does that resonate with you? Do you feel like that’s valid? And then secondarily, what do you look at 26 years later? It’s a long time has passed. What’s changed and what hasn’t changed when it comes to brand?

I feel like I have to apologize before I respond to that. I think the funny thing for me is just how little that resonates. And I think probably the interesting thing about doing something for so long is you get into it and you forget. You forget some of the fundamentals after a while because you’re just used to the process of doing things. And so once in a while, I just find myself thinking, actually, why do these things exist? We’re so surrounded by brands in particular.

Right. You can get up probably on a daily basis. You interact without really knowing it with thousands of brands.

It’s in the tens within about five minutes of waking up. If you’ve brushed your teeth, picked up your phone, looked at the shower, stared out of the window. And so I think it was about 15 years ago.

I just started thinking, well, hang on. Yeah, why? Why do brands exist in the first place? When did they start existing? And maybe I can just learn a little bit about how it all started. And there was a really interesting academic research paper that I stumbled across that basically said, you go back to the earliest civilization in the Indus Valley, something like 4000 BC.

There is evidence of what they call proto branding. But effectively, it’s the same thing as what we’re dealing with today. And you’ve got merchants who are putting bulls and fertility gods like images of things onto their wares to signify where they come from.

But also there’s symbolic value to those things. And that’s what we’re still doing today. So I would have — I used to go along with the story when I was at Interbrand. We always said the same thing. Brand comes from this Norse term to brand something.

So that’s how old it is. It stretches back to Viking times and it’s all about asserting ownership. It’s complete nonsense.

Brands go back about as far back as civilization goes, as far as we know. Yeah.

And consequently, there’s just something innate about people when they get together and they produce all sorts of things like these artifacts of culture and brands happen to be one of those things.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m happy to be corrected on that front. That’s beautiful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anthony Shore. He’s a namer.

But he pointed out there’s some science and research that talks about how names — they change the brain. We interact with names differently. And in a way that affirms what you’re saying, that the things that we’ve called things that we make and share or sell are fundamentally different than other things in our life.

So tell me, what kinds of projects do people come to you for? What are the kind of problems that you like to solve?

Well, part of the thing I love is how varied they tend to be.

So I think a lot of the time when people talk about branding, lots of the books and literature about branding focus on positioning. So how do we construct a belief system or create meaning around an organization and then use that meaning to help provide a sense of direction for people? And that’s some of the work. But then there’s a lot of stuff which is closer to what I call portfolio strategy, which is — so I’ve got a dog that I need to keep letting in.

And some of it’s portfolio strategy. So that’s just a question of, we’ve got all of these different moving parts. Most organizations don’t sell or create one thing for one audience in one place and sell it through one channel.

So how do we take all of these different moving parts of teams, divisions, products, services, solutions, families of products? How do we take all of that and make sense of it and help people navigate their way around it and make sure that it ladders up into that overarching meaning that we have set for ourselves?

And then there are architecture projects which are about how you create a system of visual and verbal signposts that make it easy for people to find their way around it.

And then there’s brand experience stuff, which is basically how do you take that idea in your — whatever you want to call it, positioning, proposition, promise, purpose, whatever word begins with P, vision, mission. How do you take that idea and how do you turn it into something people can experience, a service ethos that they can feel? Of course, there’s a manner of speaking, but really just how do you create something that you can envelop someone in where they will get it and benefit from it and want to continue that relationship?

And that’s the interesting bit because that’s where you’re working with designers and creators of all sorts of shape and size to just create, make something happen in a better way than it would have happened otherwise.

So most recently, your book on brand architecture popped up on my feed is what inspired me to reach out. But you’ve written a couple other books before them, all of which I recognized even not knowing, which is pretty cool. So Wild Thinking was the first one, right? Is that right?

Wild Thinking was the second book I wrote. Yeah, sorry, I have to remind myself because first book I wrote was called Business is Beautiful.

Oh, yeah. Nice. And what was the inspiration for that? Or how did you become a writer on top of being a brand consultant?

Well, when I worked at Interbrand, which is where I started working, it wasn’t really an option. I worked in brand valuation. It was one of the more prominent parts of the business in terms of how Interbrand markets itself.

Every year they produce this annual study of world’s most valuable brands or best global brands, as they call it. I used to manage that. And so I was very used to writing about brands and talking about brands and going on news programs and discussing brands that were in the public spotlight.

And when I moved job, I think there was an idea that I was just the numbers guy. And every — at that point, we’re talking probably about early noughties. Everybody wanted a league table because they felt that was a way to get attention and market your consultancy.

And I was really bored of them by that point. So I just said, well, why don’t we not do a league table? Because everyone’s doing a league table. Why don’t we write a book instead? And why don’t we write a book about the importance of intangibles in organizations and intangibles like creativity, for example? Why don’t we write a book about that? And why don’t we give it a really nice counter cultural title like Business is Beautiful, because certainly at the time businesses were getting bashed left, right and center.

And fortunately, because it was a French organization I was working for. And if you want to get French person interested in something, then just make it counter cultural. And then much more likely if you’re a bit contrarian, then that’s going to work a little bit better with them.

And so they said, yeah, great. Let’s not do a league table. Let’s do a book and let’s make it about all of these wonderful intangibles that organizations run on and thrive off and grow through.

But no one really ever talks about that. So it’s good fun.

Yeah. And I want to return to — you’ve connected us to the ancient roots of brand, I guess. So what do you feel has changed or has not changed when it comes to building a brand in twenty twenty five versus when you started?

I think surprisingly little has changed. I think the fundamentals of it are pretty similar just because whatever technology exists, whatever systems exist, you’ve still got a person in the middle of it or a group of people and all the messy ways that we interrelate with systems, we’re always the weak link there, the limiting factor. And so you can only really design a great system to the extent that you can really understand the messiness of humankind and our imperfections. And so whatever technology has sprung up, I’ve only been working 26 years in that time, we’ve had the dotcom boom and bust, we’ve had one and a half, maybe two financial crises. We’ve had a pandemic. We’ve had, of course, social media come up. We’ve had AI. And they’ve all had a cosmetic impact for brands. But the fundamentals — it’s a different channel.

That channel works a little bit differently. But at their core, there are a few basic things you need to get right. If you’re a brand and you need to get them right, no matter what time you’re in.

I just don’t see any technology particularly changing that unless that technology changes humans to the point where humans no longer interact with their world in the way that they’ve interacted with the world for millennia.

What are the things that you have to get right? What’s your working definition? I have a perverse attraction to foundational ideas, to the basics. When you talk about brand, what does it mean?

So I think when I talk about brand, probably like you, right, when you talk about brands, depending on who you’re talking to and what their level of interest is, then you’re going to talk about a different facet of it. Because you can talk about brands from a legal point of view. I don’t know much about trademark law, but I know enough to at least know what I need to speak to a trademark lawyer about a piece of work. There are all of these really lovely facets.

And I’ve only started, 26 years in, I’ve only really started wrapping my head around some of them. But I think one of the things that really piqued my curiosity about brands, and fundamentals of branding, extended from that idea of when did brand start? Oh, I can’t really tell when they started. So then why do brands exist? Why are they this almost, they’re not innate, but they just seem to be some chronic aspect of the human condition, or at least in the context of civilization.

And again, I found in another academic paper, this really interesting idea of anthropomorphism, and how, initially, it was identified as how interesting it is that when you travel around the world, people in different cultures recreate gods in their own image. And that’s a wider phenomenon. And we do it in all sorts of places, all sorts of times, we do it with our pets, and we do it with toys, when we’re younger, we do it with our cars, we do it with all sorts of inanimate objects.

And I think, fundamentally, brands exist, because humans have this tendency to anthropomorphize or humanize things that aren’t human. And there are specific situations in which we tend to do it. And those are the specific situations in which brands tend to flourish.

And so I have a theory that if you understand why people tend to humanize non-human things, then you probably also have some insight into branding, and what good looks like, and what not so good looks like as well.

Yeah.

What role, I came up as a researcher in a brand consultancy, so I identify very much as a researcher. And I’ve always been curious how people think about the role of qualitative, but just research, how do you learn for a client? Or how do you advise clients in terms of understanding the relationship you’re talking about between people and the objects that they’re trying to have a relationship with?

Yeah, and I love it, absolutely. I always feel like it’s an unfair thing that people pin on research. Certainly, there was a while when people used to roll their eyes a little bit at organizations that spend a lot of money on research, because particularly from a creative point of view, there was an idea that it’s some limitation factor, or it’s just indicative of just a lack of imagination on the part of an organization that they want to look into research all the time.

Actually, I think another way to look at it is that the firmer your evidence base, then the more confident you can feel in doing more creative things, just because you’ve got a solid platform on which to build. So if I possibly can, I like to build off a solid platform for the people that I work with, particularly if you’re going to ask someone to do something quite extreme for them. The more you want to take someone out of their comfort zone, I think the harder you have to work in terms of justifying why they should, and very often research is a way to do it. Qual, sometimes, quant, often, more often than not, some combination of the two, and ideally with Qual, I think, I’m really interested in where you come out with this stuff is the weirder, the better sometimes, as far as Qual is concerned.

I tend to be less interested in six or eight people sat in a room for two and a half hours being asked questions about a subject, but I’m always super interested in ways people get prodded without them necessarily knowing about something in other ways to reveal something that they would not otherwise have revealed, that they may not even be aware of themselves. That’s the stuff I really love about Qual.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any examples, or can you tell a story? Anything, weird is a beautiful invitation.

Weird, yeah, I used, I really, for quite a lot of positioning work, I’ve really enjoyed stuff that builds on metaphor elicitation, and Jerry Zaltman and all his thinking, and you get people to collect images and tell stories about those images and use metaphors, and I do find you just go to some really, people take you to weird places, and will very often say they’re discussing things that they hadn’t necessarily thought about before, which I really like, and I really like the idea of if you want to test for one thing, you ask about another. So if you’re working on packaging, rather than show a couple of examples of packaging and ask people what they think of them, you put that thing in the packaging, and you ask them to taste it and tell you what they’re tasting, knowing yourself that that is the same thing in both packs, and so any difference they reveal is likely to be a difference that they perceive from the packaging, and I think it’s that sneaky, we’re going to tell you that we’re asking you one thing, but actually we’re testing for another thing that I think really attracts me to that aspect of Qual.

Yeah, absolutely, and I feel like that’s where I had a weird upbringing in that I was, I learned Qual at a brand consultancy, and so everything I learned was weird, it was all deep, projective, free association stuff, which I think is, well, of course, it’s unbelievably powerful, and I often say that what you learn, you can’t learn a ton, but what you learn has massive leverage because it’s so deeply true or connected to the emotional experience. Yeah, that’s beautiful, and I’ve got a sense of that, your work Wild Thinking was also, you’re advocating for just getting out, you seem to have a contrarian streak, is that fair when it comes to the discipline?

Well, I couldn’t have said all that stuff about the French, and admitted to having been born in Paris, and got quite a big French family, and not have a little bit of that rub off on me, I think, yeah, yeah, but weird’s another word I keep coming back to, as well, for a lot of the right type of client will respond well to a sentiment like, good positioning is sometimes just about finding out what makes you weird, and really embracing it, some organizations hate that sentiment, and just aren’t comfortable with it at all, but the right organization will take that as a prompt, and then go to an interesting place.

I want to talk about the brand architecture, what, why write a book about brand architecture? What’s the state of that? That’s not something that feels like an inside baseball, that’s a bad Americanism, perhaps, but an inside baseball topic. Why write a book on brand architecture?

The simple reason that it didn’t really exist yet, and I’d just, the book that I’d written before was called You Are a Fish, and that has all the stuff about anthropomorphization, and it’s really and anyone can pick it up and read it and understand a bit more about brands, even if they don’t feel particularly interested in them, that’s why that book was written, and I thought, after that, I should probably write a super technical book about this important but not particularly well covered subject about brand architecture and brand portfolio strategy, and it’s super geeky, I think you have to be really, really, really committed and interested in branding and brand strategy to really want to pick that book up and go through it. I know I’m not particularly selling it, but I also wouldn’t want to misrepresent it, and it always surprises me that there are people out there who do want to pick up a book like that and are interested in how you construct a portfolio strategy and once you get out of the trap of the house of brands or branded house, how you have a more nuanced way of talking about something like brand architecture that’s just a little bit more helpful for organizations.

Yeah, yeah, well, I guess I’m that guy. I don’t know that I’ll be spending the time to read all of it, but certainly the getting into the weeds about what brand architecture is and why it’s important is something I feel is thrilling in a way to me, which is strange. But it’s funny, I guess I hadn’t really acknowledged the degree to which there wasn’t a lot of literature about it, right? You’re saying it’s sort of there was house of brands.

What’s the state? What’s the general idea about? It seems like your book is what I’ve read about it. You’re reframing it from this hierarchy to a systems view, but what’s the state of thinking on brand architecture and what does the book bring?

Well, I think maybe it’s one of those things where David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler, 26 years ago now, I think it basically coincided with when I started working in branding. They wrote a book about brand leadership, and then that was followed up by David Aaker with a book about brand portfolio strategy.

And that’s where they introduced the idea of the brand relationship spectrum. And at one end, you’ve got a house of brands and the other got branded house. And there are seven steps in between them.

And they wrote that, they introduced the brand relationship structure and they created it. And they wrote the book that they wrote together with the idea that this is quite a nuanced area and it’s quite complex. And they wanted to create a helpful way for people to deal with that nuance.

Unfortunately, unwittingly, what they did was they invited people to collapse that spectrum into two opposites of branded house and house of brands. And I do still find whenever a client organization or marketer wants to talk about brand architecture, then they collapse it into that dichotomy. And so over the intervening years, not a lot, if anything, has been written about brand architecture that doesn’t just regurgitate that brand relationship spectrum.

And some people have house of brands, branded house, and in the middle, they’ve got an endorsed or something like that. But it’s not helpful if you’re a practicing brand consultant, because all of these things are really unique. And so but that’s not a helpful thing just to say to people, forget that model, just focus on something unique, because then you’re not really giving them anything helpful that they can use.

And so I thought I’d just write a book about the steps that I tend to go through when I think my way through a portfolio and architecture projects. And out of the end of it came this ludicrously large, but quite geeky book that is the brand architecture book.

And so what I would love, to the degree that you’re interested, I’d love to hear your approach to brand architecture. What’s the role that it plays for you? And what are the steps? What makes it valuable?

Well, I think at the heart of it is a distinction that I didn’t come up with. Someone I used to work with described this to me. I’m pretty sure it was someone called Ruth Ingram, who I think is now practicing in the United States.

So some of your listeners may be aware of her, but she described to me this difference between roles and relationships. So in any branded system, one job is just to work out, well, for each part of that system, what role does it play? What’s it there for? And that’s one challenge. And that’s what I now call the portfolio strategy bit is just what roles will be assigned to all of the different bits of your portfolio?

And then the second thing is, well, once you know the roles of these things, then you can start having a coherent conversation about what the relationships between them should be. If things play a similar role, maybe you group them and maybe they become a family. If different parts have contradictory roles, then maybe you actually want to create distance between them, and you can get into questions of, well, if you want to cross sell a lot between, or if there should be lots of cross talk between the different parts of your system based on their roles, then you actually want to make sure that visually and verbally everything feels similarly tight and coherent. On the other hand, if you’ve got lots of contradiction in there, or you want to speak to a really heterogeneous group of people and cover a really broad set of needs and requirements and markets and channels, well, actually, maybe you need to pull things apart a little bit more and have a system.

And so at the heart of the approach is really that distinction. First, let’s work through the roles, three things that I think of when I think about how you define roles, starting with the commercial side of things, working back from the positioning, because the role should refer in some way to your positioning, and then just making sure that in the context of what you want to achieve as an organization, and what your customers or audiences want to achieve, that you can then define a clear role in terms of how they win and how you win in each of those areas. And then once you’ve done that, and you’ve got a clear enough role defined for each part of the organization, that you could explain it to a five year old, then you start thinking about the relationships and how many levels or what the hierarchy is, how you create fixed assets, or what some people would call distinctive brand assets, but also what’s flexible, and then how you design an entire system around that, that you can future proof.

So it goes from the very, very commercial through to the very, very creative.

Yeah, and who does it really well, would you say, or who’s doing it badly?

I think the answer on badly is super easy, because most organizations get away without having a particularly great system.

And what’s the impetus to get one’s house in order?

Very often, it’s just people get a sense that everything is out of control. And they waste a lot of time doing things that don’t make sense. So when I think about the briefs that I got, I’m working with an automotive company right now.

And they’ve innovated really quickly. Generally, as a rule, I would say, the more innovative the company, the faster their pace of innovation, the more screwed up their architecture is likely to be because they get excited about something, they give it a name, it launches, it may succeed or fail, but they’ve already moved on to the next thing. They’re now excited about that.

They want that to have a name, but they want that name to stand out. So it’s going to be different from every other name they’ve got. Then you just see it happen over and over again.

And before you know it, they’ve got 500 things all with completely random names. Some of them seem to be working, some of them don’t, but everything looks different. It doesn’t look like it comes from the same place.

Every time they launch something, they have to reinvent the wheel. And at some point someone says, this is super inefficient. It’s crazy.

We’re so confused. Our salespeople can’t explain what we do. I can’t explain what we do. I run the company. Someone has to stop the madness. How do we stop the madness?

And that’s when you arrive.

But what that means is that generally the problem’s got to get really bad. Most organizations have pretty poor brand architecture systems. They muddle on. Okay. So it’s a fair challenge.

Once in a while, people say, well, if it’s so bad for most organizations and they can be valued in the billions or trillions, then how bad an issue is it? And I think there’s probably a threshold at which it just becomes unignorable.

And until you’re at that threshold, then I completely understand why organizations do ignore it because it’s really difficult to get a good architecture system. You need so many different bits of your organization to work together. Your product innovation people and your salespeople and your marketing people and your brand people, if you have them, and then your HR people, all of those teams need to agree on a single thing and then agree that they will sacrifice their autonomy for the greater good. And there’s loads of organizations in which that level of discipline doesn’t really exist.

I’m curious. The other context you mentioned before was there’s brand architecture, but then brand experience and developing brand experiences. How do you work with teams to do that? And how has that changed?

Generally, I would say that happens by increment. Once in a while, you get a really lovely brief or an opportunity to map out someone’s entire brand experience, and then work with them to identify the pain points, the pleasure points, which aspects of the experience are going to be most impactful from a user point of view, and then to work with them to design more thoughtfully around it. Sometimes you’ll already have a guideline in place before you do that. But that’s not in most cases.

In most cases, you’ve worked on a brand project, you’ve created a guideline, and then it’s a little bit like when you move into a house, right? And I remember the first house I moved into, and I remember thinking the walls are a disgrace, wallpapers peeling off the walls. And so we fixed the walls, but then I noticed how terrible the floor looked, because now that wasn’t up to scratch. And I think that’s how it happens in a lot of jobs is you develop a positioning, you work through some portfolio strategy, some architecture, you develop a set of guidelines, and then someone notices actually, our environments all look rubbish.

And so you get into a, okay, fine, we’ve designed a nice business card, but if our offices look terrible, then we need to fix our office experience. And then, okay, our offices look great, but actually the rest of our colleague experience sucks, because none of the rest of it is up to scratch at the office. And so you find in increments, you fix the thing next that needed to be fixed most after the last thing you fixed.

And then over time, everything becomes more coherent, it makes more sense for people, their impression of it improves, and only a few people know why, because it happens slowly, and without much fanfare.

So that’s wonderful. So I love the fact, the story of your name of your company, would you tell that story? And then I’m just curious how you work with clients to embrace the same spirit?

Yeah, well, I suppose, yeah, I’ve got to be really careful that this doesn’t sound like desperately amateurish. But I was just in a position where I needed to set a company up really quickly.

Yeah.

I’d worked on enough projects that involve company naming to know that if you go for an intelligent, if you go for an intelligent name that anyone in their right mind would want, then probably that name is already taken. By someone, because there are lots of intelligent people who make good decisions. So if you need a name in a hurry, you need to come up with a name that’s dumb that nobody would want, or maybe is brilliant, and no one thought about, but that’s 0.01% of names you’re likely to come up with.

So I just came up with a name that nobody would want. Baron Sauvage is the name of my business. And it was the name of, or the title of one of my ancestors, again, French ancestry. So there was a Napoleonic general in there called Pierre Sauvage.

He was a Baron. And I just thought, I’m going to call it Baron Sauvage because no one has it. No one has it.

The domain name costs 69p. And also if this thing fails spectacularly, no one’s really going to notice that.

And it turns out five and a half years later, it’s still going. And it’s caused lots of client mirth in the meantime, as well. This is another great thing about the difference between Northern and Southern, all my London based clients are extremely polite about it. My early clients was from the North, Accrington.

And they revealed after a little bit of working with me that behind my back, they call it Baron Sausage. And I just thought that was brilliant.

And so if I need to set up another business, it might be Baron Sausage.

Yeah, well, I was just curious, after all the time working with brands, what the experience was like, you caveated by saying you were worried it would appear amateurish in some way, but what was it like to try to brand yourself or to go through that process for your own identity and your own company?

I think it, well, I can’t say it revealed much to me. But what it did confirm is something that I’ve felt for a super long time, particularly all the time that I’ve worked, I’ve been so lucky that I’ve worked with some really great creative directors. And one thing I would observe is creativity is enormously undervalued in most organizations that I work with.

But the real missed opportunity there is that creativity, if exercised in the right way, can save you an incredible amount of money. If I had had more resources, I could have thought about a sensible name to call my company. And someone would already have had the domain name, I would have had to have bribed them to give me the domain name, I would have had to have probably challenged a bunch of people in terms of securing trademark rights, it would have cost me a lot of money.

I think if you don’t have money to spend on something, then you’re just going to have to get more creative with it. And I think we tend to do it out of necessity. It’s like the last resort.

But actually, more organizations, I think, would benefit from using creativity as a first resort for saving money, just doing things a little bit smarter. And working their way around problems in more imaginative ways that actually create solutions. A lot of the work really is ultimately about that.

Right? I’d be surprised if you didn’t have similar experiences.

Yeah. We’re coming near the end of time. And I was curious about, I wanted to shift into just your sense of the state of things now. There was something you said earlier about, you’re talking about how constant it all has been, that there’s a lot that hasn’t changed. And I think you said, unless some technology comes along, and it changes the way people relate with the world around them, I couldn’t help but think about AI and its most extreme manifestation, it’s pretty transformational. So I wonder, have you given it any thought as to what the implications are? And what do you say to somebody, a client who might ask about what’s coming, and what it might do to brand?

So I am always really honest with people that I am the least qualified person to ask about AI. If I had to, someone put a gun to my head and said, what’s AI gonna do to transform branding? My response would probably be less than you think.

Partly because most of the stuff I read about it, and I’m interested in AI, I read about AI, I read about how marketers and branding people and creative people use it. It’s not for lack of curiosity. It’s just that I genuinely don’t know.

And I’m really comfortable talking about brands and branding. I’m super uncomfortable pretending like I know about something that I don’t really know. But unless AI, so we go back to conditions in which we tend to humanize things, also being conditions in which brands tend to do really, really well.

And one of those is conditions of high uncertainty. So typically, if you can’t judge whether something’s good or not, or right or wrong, then you’re going to rely more on something like a brand to help you decide. Do I know much about life insurance providers? No. But it’s a really important thing for me to get right, because then if I die, my family’s entirely reliant on that provider.

So am I going to go for someone that I’ve never heard of, who started up yesterday? Or am I going to go for a company that’s 200 years old? Answerable to regulators? Well, I’m probably going to go for the 200 year old company that I’ve heard of, right. And so AI, if I have gleaned anything from what I’ve read about it, is heightening our degree of uncertainty. Certain individuals feel very certain about AI and what it does, but most of us I think don’t.

I think it probably makes us even less trusting of what’s going on. And throughout time, the more we have needed to trust stuff, and the less we’ve been able to objectively, the more we tend to rely on brands to fill the gaps. Now, I’m totally hedging my bets, because those brands might be AI brands.

I might be talking about Claude or Anthropic. I might not be talking about Apple, or pretty much anyone GE. But some brand at some point, if we continue to feel uncertain about all of this, it will be brands that probably help bridge that trust divide that we will hold responsible for things that go wrong as well as right.

And I don’t see that piece of technology fundamentally changing that dynamic.

Awesome. I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation out of the blue and just being generous with your time and all your experience.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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