Episode 14 – Brand is who you are, what you believe, and how you show up – Doug Thielen– Chief Marketing Officer, Outdoor and Lifestyle

In this episode:

Matt Widdoes 

Welcome to Growth at Scale. I’m your host, Matt Widdoes. This is a podcast for leaders who want to bring sustainable, predictable, scalable growth to their businesses. Every episode, I sit down with world -class growth experts across product, marketing, finance, operations, you name it. The hope is that these conversations will give you real, actionable advice for building and sustaining company growth. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Growth at Scale. This week, we’re joined by Doug Thielen, a strategic brand, content, and integrated marketing leader. Doug, thank you for joining us today. 

Doug Thielen 

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Matt, because I’m glad to be here. I’m excited to dive in. 

Matt Widdoes 

So for people who don’t know you, tell us who are you, where have you been, what do you do? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, my career has really been centered around building dynamic, customer -centric brands rooted in community and digital ecosystems, all pulled together through integration and storytelling. So I’ve had the chance to lead e -commerce brands, merchandising, even pop -up retail. The majority of my career has really been on the marketing side, specifically in branding, PR, growth and performance, paid media, product marketing. And one of my big passions is social and content, and really pulling those things through into a cohesive go -to -market strategy that allows brands to scale. 

Matt Widdoes 

Right. And let’s talk about your experience with brand building and merchandising strategy generally, especially in these highly competitive markets like direct -to -consumer apparel. What are some of the key elements of winning in those spaces? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think for me, I’ve got this axis that I tend to look at. It’s got the four different pillars on there. On one end, you have culture and community, and to me, culture is big. That’s what’s taking place across the globe or across the markets you’re really playing in. Community is that niche group. That’s that area you’re really spending time trying to target, grow and understand. And that other axis is content and commerce. And a lot of people will say, well, this is a good idea. those two things can be in opposition with each other. I think the best brands find a way to make content and commerce work together. They’re cyclical and they can drive each other. And when you start to look at content and commerce and culture and community and what really is centered in there, you’ll start to come up with brands, I think that really land that. They nail that area, they have specific activations in their marketing, go -to -market plan and mix, that allow them to play really squarely in that center. It’s not easy, but it’s something that I think brands really do well. The other is having a really strong brand foundation that the organization understands and uses. And I’m not a big fan of brand foundations that live on a wall or sheet of paper that someone tacked somewhere and you forget about them or they’re on the back of the badge. To me, the best ones are simple. They can be repeated and they’re an active filter. There’s something that everybody can use in their day -to -day decision -making that says, Is this working towards who we are and what we believe in? And is this going to help the customer understand that in a way that leads to our different objectives? 

Matt Widdoes 

It’s funny, you mentioned the back of the badge brand components. Is there a… And the answer, I’m sure I already know the answer to this, but is there a kind of a magic number there? Because it seems like nine brand values is too much, but I think we had nine at Red Bull and they fit nicely in a three by three. One is maybe too little, I don’t know. Do you have any opinion on that, on how to organize that in a way so that it can still retain its value in the day to day of a thousand person org or a 10 person org? But it’s a challenge that we face. I’m just curious if you have an opinion. 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think the non -answer may be what’s ever right for the brand. Meaning I’d hate to go, oh, it’s got to be three, it’s always three. And for some, it will say that it’s… I think it’s a number that can be recited back. Nine feels like too many. It’s like, what’s that three ingredient meal? What’s that five things you go to? And at the end, really, is it who we are? Is it something that someone can look at and go, this is it? This is the one thing? Is there one thing? Maybe things fall out from underneath that? I worked at a brand where there was a number of core values and what we were about, but it really came down to, if you asked everyone what they remembered, it’s like, oh, we’re about fun. Everything we do should be fun. Our marketing should be fun. Our tone should be fun. The decisions we make should be fun. When you get the package and the mail, it should be fun. So if we make a decision on, well, what should the tape be? Should it be plain tape? Or should there be some component to some copy written on there? It was all fun. Now, we had other ones in there that we looked at and we decided on and race strategic in the way we built them. But I love when brands can narrow it down to that. I worked at REI and we had our official brand values. But one of the things you’ve heard people recite back a lot, which was, we’re here. It was internal, right? You never saw this on a t -shirt or anywhere else. But we’re mission is to move people from inside to outside, outside to outdoors. That’s it. And so as we go through and make decisions, who should we partner with? Who should we not partner with? We only have so many partnerships a year. The spend that we have can only go so far. We’d always ask, is it moving people from inside to outside? And is it moving them from outside to outdoors? And it’s super simple. 

Matt Widdoes 

Now I have to ask, what’s the difference between outside to outdoors? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, great question. And it’s a little nuance for us to kind of some speak there. We hope that saying, listen, if we can get someone from the couch or in their home to their backyard to a picnic, they’re outside, right? You’re getting the benefits that the human body gets from being inside, outside with some vitamin D and some sunshine and some nature. But then there’s outside to outdoors, maybe taking that step a little bit further beyond the backyard, beyond the community park. Maybe you’re checking out a national forest. Maybe you’re going on a three mile hike around the lake. you’re taking a step a little bit further. And so that’s how we looked at doing, you know, some of our partnership work, but it also was how we really took a lens on our creative, on our merchandising strategy, the products we brought in. And what I loved about it is that it was something that every part of the organization can understand and use, and then it helped us scale because we were able to make decisions off a shared value. And so when someone said, well, why did you choose to do a partnership with West Elm versus somebody that would, you know, focus on the peak of the summit, it’s like, well, we’re focused on getting someone from the inside to outside to a better partnership than West Elm because they’re an inside company focused on homewares. So it allows there to be a bit of a filter and shared understanding of how decisions are made. Yeah, makes sense. 

Matt Widdoes 

And given that it’s so, the brand generally is so pervasive and, you know, really touches everything within a business when done well. And this is something we talk a lot about, even on the podcast is, you know, that kind of interdisciplinary, you know, perspective on growth and how these different pillars work with other pillars, you know, in what ways should brand, in your opinion, or in what ways does brand, and when it’s working really well, how should brand or how does brand work with these other pillars of growth, like paid acquisition or data or lifecycle, et cetera? 

Doug Thielen 

I love that question. That’s something I’m super passionate about because I believe brand is everything. You heard me touch on a little bit ago, right? And referencing the packaging that we do, but brand to me is not a separate bucket of marketing that is a nice to have. Oh, that’s brand marketing. That’s something we do when we have big budgets and we’re not really worried about it. And it’s cute and it’s nice and we’ll spend some money on the olden days. It was the 30 that we ran on, you know, linear TV. To me, brand is everything. And especially when you’re a small brand in that acquisition, in that paid performance and growth side of things, making sure you get brand right there. is really critical. There’s a brand that I have not worked with or worked on but absolutely have a lot of love for in this space is a brand called 10 ,000. It’s a challenger brand in the athletic wear space and what I think they have done really well is marry you know growth product marketing and brand marketing into one thing. So you look at the ad you may be served and say well is that a brand ad? Is that a product ad? Is that an acquisition ad? And I think the answer is yes and what they have done is they are able to take a piece of creative and leverage it across multiple places. So it’s in their SMS, it’s in their email, it’s in their paid and it’s consistent so that when you see it you understand what that is. You get that brand very quickly and it allows that to be a space where brand and growth and customer journey and lifecycle are tied really close together so that no matter where you’re at, in that, if you’re just making a decision to add to cart or if you’re just discovering who this brand is, you’re getting a consistent story all the way through. And to me, that is when you’re able to really grow. And also it’s efficient. Instead of having to create unique assets for all of these different channels, you’re able to create a singular asset that they can be used across the entire spectrum. 

Matt Widdoes 

Makes sense. And I think, yeah, that connectivity with brand and creative kind of holistically throughout the org and making sure that those teams, because both of those sit at, you know, creative typically sits kind of at the hub of the wheel of most everything with brand serving that and many other areas, not just on the art side. And so makes sense. The efficiencies that you can gain from that. I’ve, you know, seen having worked in UA and you mentioned how important it is to get brand right on the paid acquisition side. I can’t count the number of times where we’ve had, because oftentimes we have our own design teams that sit outside of the brand team. We maybe are working with an agency to produce creative or paid that for sure sits far outside the brand team and probably has never even seen our brand guidelines and instead are just given a bucket of key art to work off of. And particularly at scale when creative refresh is so important and, you know, a piece of creative may only live for a few weeks before it’s kind of been fully saturated. I can’t count the times where I or others alongside me when doing paid acquisition have said, like, oh, brand’s going to hate this. Or like, okay, but let’s run it and not tell them. Or how did this like, or we’re like looking at performance and we’re like, let’s go look at the best performing ad right now. And we’re like, oh my gosh, this is like the ugliest ad we have. Like brand definitely has not seen this and probably shouldn’t see it, but it’s working. And or, you know, what do we do there? So I’m curious to hear your reaction to that because I think too often brand and user acquisition are at least seen as at odds with each other. It’s cats and dogs kind of. And maybe both sides think what the other side is doing is witchcraft or not as important as what they’re doing, right? You can definitely see this like push and pull and really the best orgs that I’ve worked in and I assume the same is true for you and our listeners as well, is that when those teams are aligned, lots of things go better as a result of that. But as a brand person or somebody who spent a lot of time in brand and product marketing generally, what is your reaction to the quote of walking by somebody who says, oh, brand’s going to hate this? What’s your reaction? 

Doug Thielen 

I love that. It’s so true. And I think I’ve heard it. We’ve all heard it. It’s something that happens. And I think in one way, it’s like, why do you think brand’s going to hate it? To me, that’s telling, right? That says, you know what the brand is. This thing is not the brand. We better not show them. So there’s something culturally interesting happening there. If you’re paid and acquisition team understands the brand and understands that the piece of content that’s working is not aligned to the brand. So then I think it’s a matter of like, how strong is that relationship? And can you have a conversation? And let’s start to really dive into and not be so, not have so much hubris that you’re like, well, that’s not the brand. We can’t do that. And also on the paid side, understanding like Why is it working? And also let’s dive into what do we mean by working? What’s happening here? Is it working in terms of conversion rate? Is it working in terms of return on ad spend? And then what’s the long tail effect? And then there are other assets that are similar and how are they performing? And is this outperforming them by 10x? Then let’s dive in and understand why. And is there anything we can do to tweak it to make it on brand that doesn’t slow you down? Is it, oh, all we need to do is add a colored background? Great, that’s closer. Can we just update the font to be our brand font? Like are there small tweaks that we can test and say, hey, this is getting it closer to where we all know we need to be while still not affecting the performance? And I think sometimes there’s a great example where we were testing at an apparel brand two different homepage lead images. And my digital counterpart said, well, we’re going with this one because it won. And on the brand side of things, we weren’t necessarily loving it. And we said, okay, well, walk me through. Like, okay, it won, fair and square. How much did it win by, by the way? And it was like 0 .01% click through more. And it’s like, okay, well, that’s not winning. That’s a tie. And in their minds, they were right. It technically won in terms of a better click through rate. But to me, those are even. And if given that, we’re going to go with the one that’s more on brand. Now, if it was something that was 20x better click through rate, okay. Like, let’s understand like the customer wants that instead. Let’s make sure that we can, you know, take that learning for the next time around. But it’s got to be to me, it’s got to be a conversation. It’s got to be a willingness to not look at things as absolutes, you know, and know where, if something is winning, why is it winning? If something’s not working, what are we measuring it not working on? And trying to understand the big picture at all times. 

Matt Widdoes 

Yeah. And I think it’s easy sometimes for use acquisition teams to get zeroed in on that early data where, you know, maybe it’s some, now it is not click through anymore, but maybe it’s early revenue or something that’s really short -sighted and not really thinking about the broader picture. Even on the revenue side, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that as far as leveraging data generally in partnership with brand, within brand and in partnership with some of the other teams. I think that was a great example. Any other areas where you’ve experienced that or any other areas that highlight that need of using data in brand and elsewhere? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think having a great relationship with your BI or your CI team, if those exist to understand the customer journey and what’s happened. I’ve been at brands where we were having a certain ad perform really well. What they were purchasing though was a low repeat purchase. While they were coming in as a first -time customer, they were purchasing an item that we knew typically didn’t result in a second or third purchase. We had to take a step back and say, okay, it’s working. now, but what is the long -term effect from a customer lifetime value perspective versus this other ad that maybe isn’t performing as well in terms of an initial revenue perspective? But are they purchasing a higher ticket item that we know that if that’s their first purchase, they’re more likely to come back two to three times a year? So taking a bigger zoomed out view and saying, can we run them both? Are there learnings in one that we can apply to the other? And again, I think it’s conversation and really being curious. That’s something where I think that’s been a piece of my career that I’ve tried to always apply as curiosity. Just continuing to ask questions. Oh, it’s working. What do you mean it’s working? Well, it’s driving a lot of revenue. In what way? How much more revenue is it driving than the other pieces? Is it the most that we’ve ever seen? And it’s come back to this little ism that I have, which is like, it’s something that unique, but it’s info insight, action. Info is it’s working. Return and ad spend is four. Cool. Insight would be that’s 10 times higher than an ad like that. Great. What’s the action then on that? And so leveraging that very simple mindset of info inside action and looking at things in maybe a little bit of a zoomed out view allows us to have a dialogue with those different channel partners. 

Matt Widdoes 

And I’m curious, are there any signs that when somebody’s self -reflecting or even just looking at external viewpoint of seeing ads on the internet or on TV, any signs that a company has a brand problem or if a brand is, quote, good? What are some of the components that when you look out, you mentioned the brand 10 ,000 earlier and you gave some examples as to why, but any other areas that would help identify where somebody’s on the spectrum of good to not so good? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think looking at a brand and saying, is this brand good? I think at first as an understanding of what makes a brand good. And I think for me, when brands are humming in a really tight space, they’re really integrated. There is a customer journey in age. unique customer experience from every touch point that all ties back to the same brand. It feels like you’re talking to the same person versus, oh, when I’m on their website, I get this person. But when I talk to the person in the physical retail store, wow, it’s so different. Apple’s probably one of the best at that. We’ve talked about that before, right? From the physical unboxing of the thing to the website to the store, it is consistent. And maybe that’s the right word, right? It’s consistent. The really strong brands are consistent. You know what to expect. So what you see in that first ad you encounter and when you click through to it, is it shocking when you get to their website? Are you just head scratching in terms of, wow, this is, I did not get this? That’s going to generate a really different consumer experience than one that has those consistent pieces. So you see the ad, you follow them on social, you then sign up for email or their SMS. Is there consistency? Mm -hmm. And I think you get that internally by having really strong alignment. There’s a great quote from a football coach that I love that says, you know, leadership is alignment. Are we all aiming and moving in that same direction? And if you are, those individual channel leads are able to build something that looks like it’s all hanging from the same clothesline versus a very disparate, disjointed brand that may say, well, my channel is working. I’m winning. And that’s really myopic view versus are we winning? You know, that’d be like saying, it’s like a wide receiver, you know, really stoked on the stats they had, but you lost. Yeah. That’s not a win. 

Matt Widdoes 

Totally makes sense. And I think that investment of, you know, you mentioned it earlier, but having the simplicity and the clarity and the work that goes into that because defining, you know, distilling anything down to something, you know, manageable and easily understood and equally understood so that there’s no confusion is a difficult task to begin with. And then knowing that that’s going to serve as the bedrock of nearly every decision we make where it’s going to be an influence of every decision that we make moving forward is no small task. So it’s a huge investment on getting that right. And then the next hurdle being that ability to get alignment and that everybody’s bought in so that they’re using it and that they not only understand it, but that they’re putting it into action is a huge piece that I think it just comes over time. And it’s something that it’s a reflection of your company. It changes as new people come in and out. It changes as your company gets bigger. It changes as you expand generally. When you think about defining a brand in the early stages, when it’s still kind of a blank slate, any examples there, any thoughts on that for people who, you know, listeners who may be early stage founders or early stage marketers with less experience and brand that they should be thinking about when building out, you know, brand in the early days. 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, that’s a great question. I have some experience in that in a couple of different areas. Way back kind of the beginning of my career, I started working at some restaurant startups and, you know, ones that went from 30, 40 restaurants to begin with and leaving and exiting them when they had 600. And other spots I’ve been were DTC, sporting good brands, that had a brand for a little while, but when I came on board, it was all about ramping that up and going forward. And a lot of times brand feels like this amorphous thing for at least the founders of these examples, where it’s what is it, and how does it work? And it feels almost like a nice to have. And I’ve found that in my conversations and kind of the work I’ve done with them, really changing and asking, well, what’s your mission? What is the one thing you are about? Why did you set out to do the thing you’re doing? Whatever that may be, be it restaurants, or selling pickleball gear, or creating an apparel line, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? And it’s interesting because most people in those founder situations are able to really dial that in and say, I saw an opportunity that looked like X, I believe that we could solve that problem with Y solution. And so starting to take those conversations, and unpack them a little bit and play them back and say, so here’s what I’m hearing. You are about these three core things. That’s the foundations of the brain, right? We’re about the worker and supporting the person who works in a blue collar space. We’re about fun and delivering fun in the fastest way possible to the fastest and most fun growing sport. Whatever those different pieces are, we’re about choice. And the restaurant space, one of our key differentiators. So I worked against Chipotle, right? And so what we were about was choice. More choices, more flavors, the opposite of kind of what they were bringing to the table. That was their unique proposition. And so that became our brand identity. And the decisions we made in terms of both operationally, do we add things? Do we remove things from the line and the menu? Do we decide to go with this limited time offer or not? 

Doug Thielen 

All ran through that filter of choice. That was brand, right? But like if you ask the people who started it, they didn’t see it that way. They looked at it as a unique, kind of their unique selling proposition. So for me, I think that it’s kind of taking the brand and label off of it a lot of times, having conversations about the why and what are we doing? And then being able to translate that to the organization. And that’s where you start to see the growth and the scale when people can go, we’re all about this. I know why we’re gonna do this. And you can have different channels, different departments, all operating independently, while all marching in the same direction. And that’s where I start to think you have that cohesiveness of those really great brands. 

Matt Widdoes 

And so you’ve also worked at some large, well -established brands. And when you go into companies like that, where do you even get started on making an impact given there’s so much heritage and history? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, you know, Filson comes to mind with that, as well as Dickies. I think Filson is one that’s over 125 years old, for those that aren’t aware, it’s a brand that started up here in the Pacific Northwest. People seem to have not either heard of it or they love it and they’re gonna give you a 25 minute story about the brand. It’s a piece of clothing or apparel or gear. I mean, I have the bag sitting right here in my office. That was my grandad’s, that was my dad’s, that was mine. And coming into that. something we had, I had to do is make sure you honor that past. While also having kind of one foot into the future and looking towards that. And a lot of times there can be a reaction from a marketer to come in and say, I’ve got to make an impact. I’ve got to do something big and grand to prove my worth, to show I belong here. And for me, it was again, going back to curiosity, spending time with the different departments, spending time with merchandising, spending time with product, spending time with e -commerce, understanding what are we doing? What are our goals? How are we hitting them? And what came to mind really quickly or became obvious is a real lack of integration and that everybody was operating in these silos. And it really came back to blocking and tackling. And it was the simple things in terms of making sure that we’re having a culture of launch, that we’re coordinating all the pieces. So it was web, email, social. Are we all firing on the same? direction at the same time. Do we know what the key products are for this season and are we supporting those in the right way that we’ll actually meet that goal? And so it really was not that sexy. It was a lot of blocking and tackling. It was a lot of GTM integration and then figuring out how does something get to market and how do we reverse engineer that as a group that works for everybody so that we can have that coordination and alignment across. 

Doug Thielen 

And what that allowed us to do was really scale and it allowed us to take assets and creative and use the dollars that we’re going into separate shoots and separate pieces and use them in a way that allowed us, I would say, to squeeze every ounce of blood out of the stone. And then what it did is it started to have an exponential effect from a customer experience perspective because it didn’t look disjointed. The ad that brought them in was familiar when they got to the website. We were hosting a lot of events and experiences. We were leveraging talent and speakers that they would see inside of the catalog and the stories we told on YouTube were similar to what you saw on the blog. And so it started to create this world of Filson, but it all started with integration, coordination and good old fashioned GTM blocking and tackling. 

Matt Widdoes 

Well, and it’s funny how much the fundamentals hold. I mean, it’s why they are fundamentals to begin with, but so many, there’s like a unnecessarily a desire, but certainly a tendency to want to skip some of those things or fast track or like, Okay, well, we’ll like go light here and, you know, similar to building a house or anything else. Like there’s some steps that if you skimp on them, they’re going to cause havoc later. We see this a lot also in data where really fast growing companies early because they’re succeeding because they’re growing quickly. They’re trying to keep up with the data needs and the infrastructure for that as they’re growing and as the house is on fire in essence. And they end up with multiple systems because the marketing team is using one thing, the dev team is using another product, people are using another team. They have multiple third party softwares or applications that are sometimes doing the same thing or similar things. And then they wake up two years later. in five years in and it’s this complete kind of rats nest of infrastructure. And we are oftentimes brought in to help kind of unwind that. But if you go back and you look at it, you say, well, if we had just done, if those teams back in that moment just took the time to take a breath and say, okay, let’s invest the plan, the time it’s going to take on the planning, let’s put that here, you actually save all of this. I mean, there’s so many parallels in health, just like the human body, all sorts of things that if you just invest a little bit early, it has these massive paybacks. So it’s no surprise to hear that even at massive scale, coming back into fundamentals, basic blocking, tackling, and particularly as it relates to aligned vision and coordination amongst teams that goes a long way. And we oftentimes see that too, where the bigger the scale, the more apparent and the more immediately recognizable the benefit is because it is at scale. 

Matt Widdoes 

A lot of brands talk about their brand values and keeping those at the forefront of everything that they do. It can be a challenge at times and particularly in periods of growth or just change amongst the org. Any examples in your career where you’ve had an opportunity to put brand values first in a meaningful way? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think the one that comes to mind that I’m really proud of is having the opportunity at REI to work with just a phenomenal team on the opt -out side program. And for those that don’t remember, that was a program where on Black Friday we made a decision to close our doors on the single biggest retail day of the year, but we did it as a way to build a platform. And so the closing of the doors was a moment. It was a decision that was made based on really clear brand values and looking for a way to put those brand values front and forward and then leverage that not just in that one day or once a year, but throughout all of the marketing and building a way to get people to make a choice to opt -out side, to go outside or outdoors, whatever that may be, as a way to help discover something different about themselves. And obviously, yes, in the downstream customer journey, that benefits REI as the largest outdoor retailer. If people start to choose to go outside, we hope they see REI as that source of information, content, expertise to help find those answers to those questions. But to me, it even comes back a little to the good old adage of the difference between brand and marketing. And so for me, I remember Hoover said this, brand is who you are, what you believe, and how you show up. If you have that, then you can do marketing, which is where are you showing up, when are you showing up, and how are you showing up. So opt -out side, that day was the marketing, but you couldn’t do that without first knowing who you are, what you believe. believe how you will become. And so I think that a lot of times you’ll see brands and companies, organizations, jump to the execution. What’s the idea? What’s the stunt? What’s the thing without first maybe answering, like, well, why would we do that? And as I said, that stunt wouldn’t work, but it may be somewhat hollow or not have the value that it could have if it was tied back to an organizational foundation that said, we believe in this. Therefore, the decisions we make are rooted here and those actions, those events are proof points of what we believe in. Patagonia is probably one of the best examples of that as well. Decisions they make as a brand, their marketing, their product choices, then as a company, are rooted in their identity and who they are from a foundational perspective. 

Matt Widdoes 

Well, I think having that and to that previous point, it’s that they make sense when you have that and that’s the bedrock of how those decisions are made. That the one -off event or whatever in and of itself makes sense and you say, okay, that makes sense. I can see why X company would do that. But the important piece and part of what you flag there is that when you zoom out and you rewind and you say, what have they done over the last 10 years and you look at all of those collectively as a in a group, you’re like, oh, okay, every single one of those. I think one of the things that comes to mind on my side from my experience is at Red Bull with our live events. We were very careful. You always wanted it to be a surprise and unique and interesting and you never wanted it to be dull or repetitive. So you won’t see Red Bull doing the same event in the same city very often. You’ll never see them do it back to back. And so events like Flugtag where you see that people build these things and launch them or we did essentially a human size. I don’t know what it’s called, like a derby. It’s like a race car derby thing where you have people going down this hill in Du Bois Park in San Francisco. They end up crashing at the end in some hay and some other things that are safe. You always want to surprise people with it and you want them to be shocked and awed in its size and in its intensity and cultural uniqueness. And so you have to balance that with you want to be able to look back. And so if you ever talked to anybody and say, have you ever been to a Red Bull event, yes or no? And then they say yes. And you say rate it on a scale of one to 10, there should be all 9s and 10s because they’ve kind of adhered to those guidelines where individually they seem right. But then when you zoom all the way back out, all these make sense and they add up and they’re consistent and it’s because of some of those other values. We’re not going to repeat it. We want to make sure that it has these certain elements but within that framework you can still do lots of things so long as you’re not violating any of those core principles. 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think a great brand guidelines are. guidelines. They’re not handcuffs. They allow brands to have a space to play and to be creative and to build the spectrum to say what’s you know, what’s core to the brand, what’s believable, and what’s an outlier. Now most of our stuff shouldn’t be in the outlier, it should be in the core and believable space. But those are those are what great guardrails are for. And I think something that popped to mind, but I’ve had a lot of conversations about recently, specifically when it comes to like brand and brand values and who we are, I think a great measure, you know, I’d going back a few questions in terms of like, what makes a great brand, it’s can the customers tell you who they are. Right. Like I think Red Bull is a fantastic example. I don’t know Red Bull of brand values or what they stand for, but I’m pretty sure. Like I could get pretty close based off of the consistency in terms of what Red Bull has delivered in terms of its marketing, its content, its stories, its events, it all ladders back up, right? It’s like how someone identifies what chili is, right? Like you’re like, well, there’s beans and there’s meat and it tastes like this. Oh, I know what this is. This is a chili. Now, if you, if you’re a chef and you made something, you said, this is a chili, but none of your customers could tell you that it was chili. Like, yeah. Right? It’s a weird analogy, but I think brands are that same way where if, you know, we may think we’re doing a great job, but if our customers can’t feel it, they can’t see it and it looks completely disjointed and they’re like, I don’t know what this brand’s about. 

Matt Widdoes 

I was just going to say that on the, on the Red Bull side to that point, I think another piece that plays into that and why, and why it’s worth protecting to your point because you have to, if you want to, we talked a moment ago about how hard it is to distill those things to begin with. And then if you want to keep it distilled, you have to keep it from, you have to protect it from dilution of confusion, kind of entering into that. And so there’s so many examples of that on the Red Bull side that I always found interesting because it, it bucked the trend that you would see oftentimes where, you know, a big part of Red Bull is tying into, and this is no, won’t be a surprise to anybody, is really tapping into the core of existing, really niche down communities, right? Whether that’s kite surfing or rock climbing or, you know, or bouldering or whatever and there’s a difference there or break dancing or any number of things that are culturally relevant to a given area. And so Red Bull might go and sponsor a very small local break dancing event where they might go sponsor some overnight, like 24 hour mountain bike race, right? I’ve been to both of those types of events that are small, that isn’t being promoted by Red Bull. And in many of those cases, Red Bull will be the number one contributor as far as cash goes. And we had to fight this all the time because people would often do it without permission is they never ever in a million years, ever, ever, ever. want their logo on the shirt that says, hey, this was this niche bike racing event or whatever. Whereas every other person who’s sponsoring it, they want the biggest piece of the shirt, they want front center, all these other things. And Red Bull One never wants to be on with a million other logos. You’re never going to see. It’s very rare. I can’t think of any situation where you’ll see Red Bull’s logo alongside anybody else’s logo because now there’s confusion. Like, why is Red Bull and Toyota? What do they have to do with each other? And now I’m questioning things so they can keep that kind of distillation. And they’re not there for the masses. They’re not there for the people to see the shirt for the next 50 years as you walk around. And some of the Red Bull sponsored that. Nope, they’re there for in the moment for the riders. So what you would see in a good example of this, from my experience, is there was this huge event held in Oklahoma City. And it is the top like 10 bulls, like they fly in these bulls from internationally, the top 10 horses, the top 10 riders, the top 10 everything kind of thing. And it’s this essentially, it’s like, it’s one of the biggest, I think this other one is held in Las Vegas, but it’s like this, I think it might be the biggest international rodeo competition and huge sponsor. Red Bull put in all this money to help them get it off the ground, et cetera. And funny enough, so did Toyota. Well, at halftime or whatever it is, at some point at the beginning, Toyota has a truck with an American flag in the back and they’re driving around this indoor rodeo. And it’s like this whole thing about Toyota and their front and center, they’re on all the branding and all the signage and all this other stuff. Red Bull I think had contributed five to 10x more in cash, but at nowhere, and there were maybe 30 ,000 attendees to this. If you were an attendee, you would have no idea that Red Bull had sponsored anything because nowhere in the arena, nowhere outside of the arena, full stop, there was no branding anywhere. But what Red Bull did do is behind the scenes in the locker room for the bull riders, in the area where they get treated because they break ribs and stuff. And essentially in like, I don’t know what you’d call it, but like the rehab room, in the press room, in various areas behind the scenes, there would be a Red Bull, it’s like a refrigerator, but it’s a can shape, and it’d be stocked with Red Bull. And so the riders can grab a Red Bull before they go if they want it, there’s nobody pushing it on them. The people telecasting or the people talking behind the booth, they had some. And so what would happen is in this big event, multi -day thing, a handful of people in the event and only in the event might be looking over the railing at some guy who’s about to go on a bull and see that he just finished a Red Bull and threw it away. That’s what they’re after is for you to say like, wow, that guy is drinking Red Bull. And so the impact of that, that that has on the local market for these core people that actually showed up to the event, right? Not just watching on TV or whatever, and not that saw the shirt 10 years later, that’s a really important moment, but that might only happen a dozen times. It’s not meant to be front and center. What’s meant to happen is that those bull riders go back to Buenos Aires, they go back to Buenos Aires. back to wherever. And they got introduced to Red Bull behind the scenes at the biggest event of the year and that their association with it, their personal one -to -one association with that brand is now so strong that when they’re out in their day -to -day, they’re reaching for a Red Bull and that everywhere they go, there’s a Red Bull can around them because of that interaction that they had with the brand behind the scenes. And so it’s so injected to that so that then they can carry that forward and that it self -propagates from the inside out of these communities versus like being forced on you with billboards and other elements. So anyways, an aside there. 

Doug Thielen 

I was a recipient of said marketing. I act in a 25 so years ago. I was in a waterski tournament, remember a waterskiing. And Red Bull was there. And all the athletes who were participating got Red Bulls. And it was the very first time I ever tried a Red Bull. I still remember it. It was a capital city lake fair, waterski tournament. 1990 something and yeah they were big sponsor of the of that talk about a nice odd community right like in that. 

Matt Widdoes 

Yeah and then and then you go out and I think that yeah that ties back into that memorableness of it that exclusiveness of it that a premium list of it where it’s just like wow all that was done like that was that was a nice activation where it seemed like everything was thought out and put together because it was. But it was meant for a very few amount of people that are highly influential in their kind of respect of areas. 

Matt Widdoes 

So you know i’m curious from your perspective in growing and redefining brands anything that you know you found useful or beneficial kind of across the board or any kind of core fundamentals that you point towards. 

Doug Thielen 

I think we touched on a lot of them but I think it’s integration coordination having the ability to be curious and ask a lot of questions. And then the alignment piece is key you know that’s how I have seen brands quickly grow is when there is the adoption of called the brand strategy called seasonal campaign called this the seasonal priority products. And alignment and how we’re going to get there across the board that integrated go to market strategy when there’s that alignment you know it is an identity of the team. I look at it I never played football I play football for like four weeks to broke my hand and realize I was a better runner than I was football player. But I love a great analogy and I think you see some of these dominant teams who have an identity and every coach in that organization understands who they are. We’re a run first team we’re a run first offense we’re going to draft for that we’re going to coach that we’re going to play like that. And that allows the head coach to not have to go every single day and remind everybody remember us we’re a run first team. They know that they know who they are and there’s an alignment on where they’re headed. And when I’ve seen brands click or turn over in a good way not turn over as people but turn over in the in the move that right direction. There is that shared agreement on where we’re headed and how to get there. And again it’s guardrails it’s not handcuffs and that’s where you start to see additive ideas come to the table. When everybody from the CMO to the secretary understands who we are as a brand, it’s pretty incredible to see what can happen. I think having that focus and having that really singular sense of what we’re doing and where we’re going, that’s the juice I’ve seen brands then really build from. 

Matt Widdoes 

As it relates to apparel, because you’ve spent a lot of time in direct -to -consumer apparel brands that are adjacent to that and e -com generally, any specific advice that stands out from some of that general advice, any unique elements there to highlight for somebody who might be trying to grow an e -com or clothing brand? 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think really strong creative. I think looking at having a really dialed creative partner or creative agency that can create and build visually the thing is a map app to who you are as a brand. That as it shows up, people quickly understand it. I’ve referenced 10 ,000 as someone who… saw their ads, I got it right away. It was like, okay, this is the anti comfort clothing. This is tough. It’s gnarly. It lasts. It’s for strong, sweaty, burly dudes who get after things. It’s like, it’s gonna last for anything I put it through. I got all that from the image and the consistency of that image. And that creative allowed a challenger brand to stand out and it allowed you to say, okay, I know who this is for and who it’s not. It’s okay to say like, oh, that brand is not for me. That’s all right. And then because what it does is it does say for other folks that brand is for me. And so I think, you know, having really strong brand foundations, bringing those to life with a really dialed shared understanding from a go to market perspective, and then having creative that executes against that, that looks like it’s coming from one place allows you to acquire new customers and have a consistent customer journey across the board. Specifically, I think that works for a lot of brands, but specifically in that apparel space where, let’s be honest, a black t -shirt is a black t -shirt. What they’re buying or not buying is if it’s for them or not. Is that a brand? Is that a badge I want to wear? And that’s all it’s all done through the brand and creative set up. 

Matt Widdoes 

Yeah, and creative, I think across the board is super important. I mean, you think for, if you want to ask yourself, as a brand, are we consistent? Are we easily understood and recognized is you should be able to pick out with the best brands, you could remove the logo and just say, Hey, take a guess at who this is for, even unprompted, you could just like you could most everybody could just you mentioned Apple earlier, you could just spot an Apple ad or a Nike ad, right? Or and if you were to say is this ad Nike or Lululemon, most most people who are anywhere near their target would be able to very quickly be like boom, boom, boom, because of consistency in color, consistency in imagery and feel consistency, and you could remove the logos and control for all that. And I think that’s one of the ultimate tests there and same, actually. with Red Bull, if we go back to that, if you take especially a Red Bull TV ad, I mean, they’ve chosen totally wild animation that almost looks old. It’s always got some surprise ending where wings are involved, right? There’s always something where it’s like, it just stands out. You would just never confuse a Red Bull ad for that. I mean, there’s just especially TV ad, they’ve been consistent over 30 something years. It’s like instantly recognizable. I am granted, I’m a little more connected to it, but that’s ultimately what you want is that you don’t even need the logo for it to hit and that logo is just kind of a friendly reminder or it’s there for people who are new to the brand that they can understand what it is that they’re looking at. 

Matt Widdoes 

And so, when thinking about, a lot of our listeners don’t have an experience in brand, and I’m sure have been very interested in our conversation, are there any books or resources or newsletters or podcasts or anything that you’ve come across that you find helpful? It doesn’t even necessarily have to be for brand specifically, but stuff that you think might be worth reading for people who have taken a lot of value out of today’s conversation. 

Doug Thielen 

Yeah, I think one of my favorites I read a few years ago was The Compass and Nail. And it really talks about brands and the customer journey and how you build that and how you move people through kind of the funnel and into advocacy and what that looks like. And it gives great examples from Patagonia, kind of particularly into the outdoor industry side of things. But it does a wonderful job of really articulating the value of brand. And then one I just reread, I think for any entrepreneur is Phil Knight’s shoe dog. It’s a great story. It reads really fast. And it is a great narrative in terms of what it takes from a persistence and endurance perspective to build a company. And it’s great because it’s what we all know, but to go back and see how it started and this the tenacity he had and relentlessness and what he gave up and what he did to get there. I think, from any founder perspective, that’s a must read. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvonne Charnard is a fantastic one on culture and what brands can do. It’s an older book. It’s probably 20 years old now, but it’s a fantastic read. I remember reading it and thinking every CEO needs to read this book as someone who when I read it was not in a position of leadership and just trying to learn about culture and what that means and how you do things. And then one that has nothing to do kind of with business at all. It’s called The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. It’s a great book on just human performance and us and what we have the ability to do as humans from a from a getting uncomfortable perspective. And I think any founder or entrepreneur is naturally putting themselves into the fire and into that uncomfortable space. And while his book really deals with a lot of the physicality of uncomfort and what we need to do as humans, that talks a lot about the benefits to the brain and the mental state people have. So it’s a good one that you could read and find a lot of value in. And then similarly from a podcast perspective, I’m a big fan of Michael Gervais finding mastery. Michael Gervais is a sports and performance psychologist at some point. who lives outside of Seattle, I know him from his work with the Seattle Seahawks, but he’s worked with rugby teams like the All Blacks and the US men’s and women’s surfing team. And he brings on people who are masters of their craft. So that can be anybody from Kyle Leni, one of the world’s best surfers to the, you know, the CMO of Google. And there’s, he’s just fantastic in asking questions that uncover what makes them unique and how they’ve gotten to the positions they’re in. And then you could just pick one. He literally recently had one with, I’m going to forget the exact position the gentleman had, but he basically was in charge of the naval reserves, something that has nothing to do with my work. And I listened to the two parts. And the second part to me was the most impactful, because I listened to it in the car and came home and listened to it again and took notes on just the thoughts he had on leadership and how to lead an organization. So that’s a fun one that I always find myself just picking something random. And I don’t think I’ve ever walked away not having. and the negative insight that I could use in my day to day. 

Matt Widdoes 

Great. Well, I’ll subscribe to Finding Mastery now. I haven’t heard of it, but it sounds awesome. And it’s similar. Well, I won’t put this in the same camp, but we’re focused on this podcast on bringing in experts within the various functions of growth. So it sounds like there’s probably, everybody would benefit from also listening to that, I would think, on our side. Well, Doug, thank you so much for joining us today. Great hearing your insights into building and redefining brands. Really look forward to next time. Always a pleasure.