👋, I’m Kimberly. I’ve been creating obsession-worthy brands for the past fifteen years. And now, I’m giving away my secrets every week in this newsletter.
Welcome to the Secrets of… Series — in which I’ve carefully designed a series of eleven thought-provoking questions to tease the most interesting and insightful information out of the best brand builders in the world.
Today, I’m incredibly excited to share Part 2 of my thought-provoking conversation with David Stern, the fearlessly reinventive CEO who drove the complete transformation of Crabtree & Evelyn.
To replicate this kind of groundbreaking rebrand — you need to act as a historian with a rich cultural knowledge of your company, a futurist with a forward-thinking vision of your customer, and a sociologist with a deep understanding of humanity’s universal truths. This trifecta is where David’s magic lies.
If you didn’t catch Part 1, click to catch up here.
4. What is the marketing-related book you would gift to someone who isn’t in marketing? And what is the non-marketing-related book that’s had the most impact on you as a marketer?
My Marketing-Related Book:
None
I would never give somebody who is not in marketing a marketing-related book.
I don’t read them because I feel like they push me down a formula, and I don’t want to be formulized.
The best thing you can do in marketing is observe the human condition and really get down to the core elements of what motivates people. And marketing books try to make something formulaic that should not be formulaic. It should be deeply personal.
The best marketing people are the ones who don't go in with a pre-set notion of how things are going to go. Instead, they look at what's in front of them and look at what it could be.
When Bobby Kennedy was running for president, he used to say, “Some people to look at the world and see things that are. I look at the world and see things that are not.
And I think marketing has to be a bit like that.
You have to look at things and say, “What could it be?”
My Non-Marketing-Related Book:
The Science of Fear by Dan Gardner
Gardner starts the book out by saying that if this book were the history of humanity and it was this thick — modern humanity would be a paragraph on the last page.
Then he asks, “So, what makes you think we react differently than the previous six million years of evolution would have things?”
Gardner goes on to talk about all sorts of concepts like immediacy.
He asks why are we more worried about airplane crashes, than car crashes? So many more people die from car crashes every year…. but we’re obsessed with airplanes going down.
This is because as humans, we evolved to be more worried about the unexpected near threat than the mundane everyday threat.
And he breaks it down to the idea that this is the way we're wired. Our heads and our guts don't talk to each other.
Why don't focus groups work? Because people feel a need to say something, but they don't have the connection between their head and other gut — so they make things up.
They think, “I have to say something, and I don't really know what to say…. but let me say something!”
The book highlights how fear drives our perceptions. We evolve for safety, and a lot of our activities are driven by self-preservation and how we evolve for self-preservation.
And a lot of our marketing and branding decisions are based on how we process information.
He talks about the scare in the 1970s about how people were dying from breast implants. Actually, the data showed that no more people were dying from them in 1973 than were dying from them in 1968.
But it became “a thing.” And as humans, we’re wired to worry about “a thing.”
We think, “Should I worry about this? This is getting all this press! It must be serious! It must be a danger.”
So, it becomes a thing.
We’re programmed to react. If something happens 3000 miles away, it’s not a problem. If it happens down the street — oh my god!
Climate change is a great example of this.
We're struggling with climate change because we're not programmed to deal with it.
We're not programmed to deal with that sort of esoteric worldwide threat. We’re programmed to deal with a lion that’s in front of you that you need to get up and run from.
5. You're getting put into the Marketers Hall of Fame. What campaign do you want to be remembered for? And what campaign do you wish would be forgotten?
The campaign to be remembered for would have to be the Crabtree & Evelyn storytelling campaign — where we turned Crabtree into a brand of exploration again,
And the campaign to be forgotten? God, just about anything I did in my years working in Japan.
We used to have to run all of our campaigns through Japanese testing — which was meticulous and managed to turn everything into the same ad.
We had ads for Biore that were just horrific. They were so boring. They didn't say anything. We ended up with lines like “Frothy Bubbles!” and things like that.
The campaigns I regret are the ones where I wasted time not thinking about the customer and what we were really promising. The campaign where I was trying to just sell something… instead of trying to build a bond and a relationship.
Those are the campaigns that you look back on and you think, “What a waste of money. You made something for thirty seconds that didn’t last beyond that.”
6. What marketing principles do you think great marketers overlook all the time?
You always have to remind yourself…
It's not about you.
It's not about what you want to say. It's not about what you want to tell somebody.
It's about what they want and what they need to hear.
If you're going to do great marketing, you have to constantly take yourself out of the equation.
I asked David how he keeps himself from going down this path…
Staying humble is a good way to do it.
Humility is an often undervalued asset in anything. The more you go through your career and the more mistakes you make, the more humble you get.
I find myself constantly reminding the marketers I work with that it's not about you.
They come in saying they want a campaign to do something: increase conversion rate by 30%, for example.
And I say, “I'm very pleased that you'd like to increase your conversion rate by 30% — but what are you doing, what are you offering that's actually going to get you there?“
You’ve got your business on one hand, and you’ve got your customer on the other. Now, how are you going to grow those two things together because of what the customers need from you?
That's really the answer.
If there's a reason for a product to be on the market, there's usually something you can build with it. Even if it’s the seventy-fourth one out there, if there’s a reason for it to be there, then you can start thinking about how you build a relationship.
7. What advice would you give your 26-year-old self—both career-related and not career-related?
Non Career-Related Advice:
Also… It’s Not About You.
It’s about others. It's always going to be about others. And the more you grow in your career, the less about you it gets.
When you're a CEO, you don't get the luxury of thinking about yourself – not if you're a good one. You're responsible for all these people. You’re responsible for their growth. You’re responsible for what they need. You don't get to think about yourself.
I think that if I had gotten a better start at that when I was 26, that would have been great.
Career-Related Advice:
Don’t Just Jump At the Challenge; Look at the Big Picture
I wish I had spent more time thinking about the larger picture of the challenges I took on — because I always loved the challenge.
I've always loved taking on the challenge, but it often leads to underfunded opportunities.
To succeed in a complex world, you need an alignment of things. You need ownership that has the same goals. You need funding. You need the actual capabilities or the means to acquire the capabilities to achieve the business plan.
And too often I jumped at thinking something would be really cool or really fun.
David and I talked about how important it is to understand both the business situations you’re getting into — and your potential business partners.
I've been advising a business that has a revolutionary product, and we're helping them get financing. They were offered seven million pounds of financing by a private equity house that was the wrong one for them.
I had to say, “Don't take this money.”
And they said, “Are you kidding us?”
I said, “No. Don't take this money because you're getting in the bed with these people for the next five years — and here are all the reasons not to. Look a what they're doing right now and the kinds of questions they’re asking…. this is what you're up against.”
Thankfully, they listened. And they found a better group.
8. What’s the most valuable positive feedback you’ve ever been given? And what’s the most valuable negative feedback you’ve ever been given?
Positive Feedback From a Boss:
You’re curious.
I had one boss who told me to say curious and to follow my curiosity.
Positive Feedback From Those Around Him:
Seeing other people succeed.
I think for me, the most positive feedback I ever got was seeing people who I’ve mentored and helped succeed — and having them come back and tell me what I've done that helped them succeed.
That's always what's mattered most to me. You feel like you made a difference.
At the end of the day, most of the companies I've been in have sold soap, and no one was going to die if we didn't sell soap.
But people's lives were influenced by the company in terms of what they accomplished and how they grew. So that was the thing I most looked at.
We lived this at Crabtree.
We had someone like Ashley Souza who came in to lead product development and ended up as the Chief Brand Officer two years later. We had Emma Bates who came in as a global accountant and was Chief Operations Officer three years later.
That's really what this is all about.
Negative Feedback
Don’t be so American
A lot of the negative feedback I’ve been given has been around being American.
I was told a lot in my career, “Don't be so American.”
And I never really knew what that meant. But I learned over time that it was about cultural sensitivity and about listening.
The American instinct is to go into meetings talking — and you should go in listening. And when you’re in different countries, you should listen even more.
I remember my first mission down to Italy for Unilever. I was there at 8 am, saying “Let's get this, this done, this done, this done.”
And nothing got done.
Two years later, I went down to Italy with somebody new, and he asked, “What are we going to get done today?”
I said, “Nothing all day. We're going sit around, and we're going to go to dinner, and then we'll talk.
He said, “What do mean?”
I said. “Nothing's going to happen during the day. It's going to happen at dinner, so just relax. Go through your day, get to dinner, and we’ll talk.”
Early on, the Italians at Unilever did a number on me.
I was running a factory, and I kept calling and saying, “I'll come down next Thursday.”
They’d say “No, it’s Saint Sebastian Day!”
And I’d say, “Oh, ok, we’ll pick a different day.”
Then I’d call a week later, and they’d say, “No, it’s Saint Valentine’s Day!”
This went on for about two months, and then I realized they were making up saints.
I did finally make it down there. And I said, “You guys were making up saints.”
They said, “Mmm… maybe. We’re a very religious country. Let’s talk about it over dinner.”
9. What motivates you to get up and go every day?
It’s the people.
At the end of the day, we’ve all done amazing things and we're going to do amazing things. We're going build amazing brands, and we're going build amazing businesses.
But none of that's going on your tombstone. And none of those brands are coming to your funeral.
If you're looking for a legacy, it's your two-year-old. It's the people you touch. It's the people whose lives you impact and the opportunities you create for them. That's the legacy.
The business is interesting, and it's fun.
At the end of the day, no one's going to remember my campaign for Crabtree & Evelyn twenty years from now. But there are some people at Crabtree & Evelyn who will remember what we did there.
10. Who do you most admire—and what question would you most like to ask them?
I know this is going to be a strange one…
But I would like to ask Jeff Bezos, "How did you think about this? How on earth did you come up with this? How did you start with books and build this company that does all of these things?”
It just blows my mind — that business plan and that vision and that long-range thinking.
I know it's not a sexy choice. I should pick, oh I don't know… Abraham Lincoln, and ask him, “How did you hold the country together?”
But, I can read about that.
How do you get in the mind of somebody who's so far thinking and so ahead of his time? That’s fascinating to me.
11. Last question—what's a secret?
Is there such a thing as a secret anymore?
I guess in the pre-social media age, I would have said a secret is something that you're embarrassed about… something that reflects something about your sense of conscience.
But I've seen that now turned into an asset, in both our presidents and our influencers… that a lack of shame. And it's a good thing in some ways.
I’ve lived my life on the assumption that there were no secrets and that I never wanted to be called out.
I never wanted to be the person who was caught doing something, so I just don't keep them.
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About Me
I help early-stage founders create the kind of brands that get customers so obsessed, they’ll do your advertising for you.
Based on my experience founding my own consumer brand, I developed The Branding Sprint—a uniquely collaborative, streamlined, and agile approach to brand creation.
Click here to learn more about The Branding Sprint, or schedule a call with me.