👋, 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.
This week, I sat down with David Stern — with whom I had the extreme pleasure to work during the epic rebrand of Crabtree & Evelyn.
When David Stern took the reigns as CEO of C&E, the company, and its customers were quite literally dying.
Ask anyone below the age of 40 about Crabtree & Evelyn, and the responses would be the same: “My grandmother likes that brand.”
Most CEOs in David’s position would step in and see that change needed to happen to appeal to a younger demographic. But few would have the courage and audacity to so completely turn over the brand.
Focused solely on a millennial consumer in 12 urban cities around the globe
Shuttered 250+ stores to create an entirely digital model
Shelved 200+ outdated products to relaunch with three entirely new lines
And when it came to the brand strategy and creative expression, the changes were just as profound.
David led us through a fearless reinvention of the fearlessly reinventive brand in a way that was both true to its history and appealing to its target.
We mined Crabtree & Evelyn’s incredibly rich roots for authentic inspiration and gave the brand creative a modern makeover—changing everything but the name of the company in the process.
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.
David and I had such an inspiring talk about all facets of branding — I’ll be publishing this interview in parts, so you can benefit from all of his wisdom.
Scroll below for Part 1 of this insight-packed conversation.
David Stern brings unique expertise in consumer branding, digital transformation, social marketing, e-commerce, and international expansion to Board roles across different industries. During an extensive executive career, David led consumer businesses across the world to rapid expansion and growth.
As CEO of Crabtree & Evelyn, David drove a complete digital transformation from a $200MM, loss-making traditional global retail business to a fast-growing, profitable digital business powered by social storytelling, e-commerce, CRM & Data. As CEO of Ouidad, David grew a niche Salon Hair company via new distribution and e-commerce programs across the US. Previously, David managed the Mass Beauty Business for Kao Corporation outside of Japan, including the John Frieda and Jergens brands. Earlier, David founded Endeavors, Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of premium home and personal care products, and spent 11 years at Unilever, where he held a number of leadership positions including VP of Interactive Marketing and E-Commerce. David now works with consumer-focused companies to accelerate value creation through digital transformation. He is the Chair of Bleach London, the leaders in fashion hair colour, of Lights4Fun, the market leader in emotive lighting, and of Duke+Dexter, the high fashion London shoe company. David also works with a number of leading Private Equity firms to develop companies within their portfolios. And David regularly speaks at conferences, primarily on transforming business for a digital world and on mentoring management teams. David is a graduate of Brown University, holds an MBA in Marketing/Finance from Columbia University, and spent a year at Cambridge University.
1. How would you explain what you do to someone who has no idea?
What I do is observe the human condition more than anything else.
I think branding is about understanding people and understanding people on an ethnographical and historical level.
And you'll really learn that when you start doing international marketing. As you separate out the local languages and the local preferences, you begin to see the universal truths.
You start to look for the universal truths, and then you start to look for the words that people are using to describe their universal truths, and how they do it — because people are fundamentally the same.
So if you see something dramatically different in one country than another, you start looking for the reason. You start trying to understand. You get into the culture. You get into the language.
For example, in China, everything's in the present tense in Chinese. And that affects how people think about brands and products because they don't think about short-term, long-term, yesterday things. They think about, “What benefit are you giving me right now?” and “I'll buy it right now.”
Things turn wondrously complicated from the simple idea of, “I want to sell somebody a product.” But to do that, it takes you into all sorts of areas.
Now, this is not what I would say to explain what I do to the person who has no idea.
Essentially, I would say, “We distill products into people.” We turn a product into a person and a personality, and we build a relationship. And that's what good branding does. It turns a product into a person.
As a follow-up, I asked David what universal truths he’s discovered that have most surprised him…
I think the thing that most surprised me is how similar everybody is in terms of how they process and think.
When I was at Unilever in the mid-90s, we ran a global hygiene project. We researched people's attitudes toward hygiene in eleven different markets around the world, and there were two things that were fascinating that came out of it.
One was that when we got into it — everybody in the world had the same cycle of infection. They used different words, but they thought:
My house is clean.
Something comes in from the outside.
Something makes it dirty.
Something infects me
They all have that same logic. And it didn't matter whether we were sitting in Boston or Bombay, they all thought of it the same — which was really interesting because it got you past the non-universal truths.
The second really interesting thing is that I saw a map of the United States that showed the differences in habits and attitudes toward hygiene.
And when I stepped back, I said to my partner, “You're not gonna believe this, but these are directly tied to immigration patterns.”
We could actually take a look at how in the middle in Minnesota and Wisconsin, their attitudes matched the Germans. In California, it was much more Asian. In New York, it was much more British.
It was just fascinating that hundreds of years after the immigration, the attitudes toward hygiene and what a “safe home” looked like had persisted.
I think the universal truth is much deeper than we expect.
I think that we all, as human beings, are programmed to process things the same way.
And that we're more influenced by our culture in our background than we suspect.
I mentioned a research project I worked on in grad school to David that seemed particularly relevant here…
I worked as a Research Assistant for the Revel Project—an organization that explored ways to create prosperity through venture creation in the developing world, particularly India. My work centered on determining the differences in the presentations of American and Indian narratives, then using my findings to restructure the corporate narratives of American companies to make them more appealing to an Indian audience as they entered India based purely on the elements of narrative structure and flow.
That’s great — because, at the end of the day, the Indian employee wants the same thing that the other employee wants.
They want to be challenged. They want an interesting job. They want to be paid well. They want their family to be safe and secure and taken care of.
But, the language and the approach to communicating is completely different
You always have to come back to the fact that people want the same things.
2. One of my favorite quotes about branding is this one from Wally Olins:
Fundamentally, branding is a manifestation of the human condition. It is about belonging; belonging to a tribe, to a religion, to a family. Branding demonstrates that sense of belonging. It has this function for both people who are part of the same group and also for the people who don’t belong.
What brands have made you feel like you belong in your lifetime? These could be brands you belong with right now—or in the past (say, when you were a teenager).
First, to address the quote.
I don't think branding is as much about belonging to a tribe or a religion as it used to be.
I think that might have been more of a phase, than part of the human condition.
One of the things it's occupied a lot of my thinking over the last couple of years has been the impact of social media. And how social media is leading us to a world where human communication is more fragmented and people are forming communities of people of like-minded interests, and they're also trusting third-party sources.
I'm more likely to trust Bob who had a heart attack down the street than I am the guy who invented the heart transplant because I know Bob.
And they're walking away from mass media. They're walking away from mass distribution.
You're seeing the emergence of indy brands and storytelling brands, and what I'm wondering is — is the last 150 years of branding the rule or the anomaly?
Are we returning to the world that it was like in 1870 where you chose to live in a place where you had people who shared the same ambitions and goals? And the community was more important. And you did trust that person down the street.
I wonder whether we've gone through an era that’s false? And actually what we're doing is returning more and more to a human condition with all its positives and negatives.
So I don’t know if the branding is about going for belonging or a tribe — or if that's our natural inclination, and the branding reflects it.
And for a period, branding was creating tribes, but now we're discovering different tribes. We're getting back to finding our own tribes, so what's the role of branding in there?
And then I think branding becomes more about a relationship than it is about providing access to something.
I mentioned to David that it's a little bit like the chicken and the egg… do the brands or the tribes come first? And which one is driving the other now and in the future?
He responded with these insights on the history of branding.
If you go back to the history of branding, branding really emerges in the 1860s, which is a promise of quality in a world where there's a lack of quality. That's the first promise.
Then around the 1880s or 1890s, it's a promise of the benefit: “You can get this benefit.”
Then, it's the promise of an image. “You can have this lifestyle that you can change.”
Then with the Proctor and Gamble model, it becomes about mass communication and brands become communication devices.
But you follow that pathway along and you reach a point where the consumer is passed that. They know this game. They know the story they're living. They're choosing their own tribes.
So you get back to branding — now what's that relationship based on?
You're almost back to the beginning. Originally it was about quality. What's it about today?
Then you into this conversation, “Okay, who's doing it well?”
You look at what Soho House is doing in terms of building relationships. What makes them different than every other hotel out there is that they've got a relationship approach and they stand for something.
You look at Nike — and you've got the shoes, but you also get the running clubs. You see Lululemon taking their stores and putting the pictures of local stars up there.
You got examples of the really good brands in today's world that are focused more on relationships and less on selling an image or selling something.
It’s about the relationship. And if you own the relationship, the product follows.
I don't know if people buy a brand anymore because they want to belong to a tribe or religion, or they buy a brand because it's somebody who reflects their values with whom there's a relationship, and a relationship that persists.
Speaking of persisting relationships… which brands have you had the deepest relationships with during your lifetime?
Sometimes it’s brands that came into your life at a particular time, and you have an emotion with them. For me, that’s Levis.
Levis is something I’m desperately loyal to no matter how much my wife tried to talk me out of them because they were the first clothing I chose on my own. That was my statement of independence: I want to wear Levis. I want to wear jeans.
I still associate Levis with a little bit of rebellion, a little bit of independence.
It's about when it came into my life and what it symbolized.
There are brands that form interest groups. I've always been a major skier, so for me, certain ski wear brands really mattered to me.
I was very loyal to Bogner because I used to ski in Europe. And I wore Rossignol skis way after they were good skis. I chose skis because of the community that they evidenced.
Those are the two that pop into my mind based on the community we choose and the life we led.
I also wore Timberlands when I was growing up — the old heavy work boot. And I sort of got away from Timberlands.
But when I moved to England, I started wearing Timberlands again because it was just very American. And it was a little bit of a loadstone, a touchpoint, of someplace that I wasn't anymore.
3. What event or interaction in your life has most shaped who you are today as a marketer?
The business-related event that influenced me the most as a marketer happened when I was in charge of Dove in 1991 and we were testing face care.
I was the one who killed Dove face care because I said Dove is soap — it can't go to facecare.
And I realized later that I was wrong, and it really made me rethink what a brand could be.
That was where it crystallized that it’s not just about the product. It’s about the relationship. It's about the promise. It's about the benefit.
And having gotten that so wrong, when I was starting my career, really shaped my thinking on marketing afterward.
The second business-related interaction happened while I was at Unilever.
I brought the British agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty to the US because I was working on a project and we needed a different type of branding. I went to London because they were doing the best branding in the world.
I had lunch with John Hegarty, and I asked him, “What made a great brand? “
We were at Scott’s seafood restaurant in Mayfair. And he pulled out a paper napkin.
Then he drew a triangle, and he said, “It's three things…
It's a functional benefit.
It's an essential humanity. If you walk into a bar, who do you wanna go out with?
And it’s a point of differentiation. Because if you're not different, you don't ask anybody to change the processes."
And that was it. This little triangle.
Now, if we’re talking non-business related — I had a strange upbringing.
My father was a retailer and my mother was a fashion designer, so I had one parent who was all left brain and one parent who was all right brain. I grew up understanding unrestrained creativity and spreadsheets.
I ended up in the beauty business because I needed both. I needed to be involved with the creative because I love the creative side of it — and drawing energy from the creatives and their thought process and their energy is something that keeps me going.
But I also can bring structure and order to it, because I know how not to kill creativity.
I think I was sort of born to do what I do.
Read more of my interview with David in next week’s issue of Brands That Get You.
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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.