[David Aaker] Branding for many firms is more important internally than it is externally to give the employees a sense of purpose, a reason to go to work. You know the old story about the architect walking down the street in 1690 and asked three workers what they're doing. One was laying bricks, one was building a wall, and the third was building a cathedral. Well, people want to build cathedrals.[Voice Over] Welcome to the BRITE Ideas Podcast, where we discuss how brands build relationships with consumers and society through innovation, technology, and marketing. BRITE Ideas is produced by the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School.- I'm Matthew Quint, director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership. And I'm JP Kuehlwein. Adjunct faculty here at the school and principal at Uber Brands Consulting.- BRITE Ideas is sponsored by Lexicon Branding, a specialized consulting firm that develops inspiring brand names and brand architectures for both the Fortune 500 and today's innovative startups. And Kogan Page. An independent award-winning publisher that delivers best practices and innovative thinking from global experts across every key business subject.[Matthew Quint] Today on the BRITE Ideas Podcast, we're passing the host duties to Professor Bernd Schmitt, the faculty director at the Center on Global Brand Leadership who will be interviewing David Aaker, vice chair of Prophet, and one of the seminal thinkers on brand management within both academia and corporate strategy. They'll be discussing the fundamental themes of brand building and their relationship to our contemporary landscape as outlined in the recently published second edition of David's book, "Aaker on Branding."[Schmitt] David.[Aaker] Gosh, it's been a long time.[Schmitt] Yeah, I know. It's been a really long time. We haven't seen each other in many years.[Aaker] Yeah, that's right. I remember I was trying to recruit you to Berkeley and you wanted to see the opera in New York.[Schmitt] I remember you guys had bought me a season ticket even. It was really so nice, but I decided to come to New York.[Aaker] Boy, if our, has our work overlapped a lot.[Schmitt] It did, yeah. In both in terms of academic and then also, you know, impact on business. So it's of course great to have you and very appropriate, David. I mean, you've been in this, in this area of branding both from an academic and business point of view for decades now. And this book "On Branding," in a way, summarizes very well all the work that you've done. And now in the second edition, of course, there have also been some changes taking into account what's happening now in branding. So when you look back, you know, since the 1990s, I think branding, and you were instrumental in what it has become, is major within companies at a senior management level, right? So, so what do you see as sort of the key message that you, that you gave us back then and that you believe is still relevant today?[Aaker] Well, yeah, just a little bit of history. Back in the Eighties, the conventional strategy of the day was, was the BCG matrix where the goal is to increase market share and then you'll get cost advantages from scale and experience economies and, and you will win at the end. And it was very influential. So people were buying market share, and if they were small companies, they could gain a little market share. They, it has been, was proven, using cross-sectional data, of course, that that would give you more return. And of course it didn't, it only cost you money. And so instead of growth, they got stagnation and loss of profits and then there was scanner data, remember that. And then the scanner data came in and, and now marketing could be scientific and what they learned through experimentation was the only way to move the needle was to have price promotions, right? And so they taught the consumer the only thing that mattered was price. And they destroyed brands or really damaged brands, it took years to bring them back. And, and they realized at the end of the Eighties that this was not working. They wanted growth and they were not getting growth. So they were ready for a new strategy. And that strategy was, came in the form of brand equity where you invest in the brand and you create a long-term platform for growth.[Schmitt] So brands are really assets that that should drive the strategy.[Aaker] Yes, yes. And when that came in, it it, as you know, that it changed everything. It, it changed what marketing did. It changed, who did marketing, it changed how it was measured. And we got a seat, at the executive table for the first time. It was no longer a mid management, tactical, Proctor and Gamble branding model function. And so I was sort of at the right place at the right time. And so I, I defined brand equity for the first time and, and I put out sort of the, the 20 ways that brand equity provided value to a business that provided a nice platform, the innovation if, if you can call it that, that I brought was that I said that brand equity is not just awareness and, and image, it's also brand loyalty. And so that, that's what allowed marketing to then change its portfolio.[Schmitt] Yeah. [Aaker] And, and it, so then it become part of strategy and it had consumer insights, segmentation, experience marketing that you brought in the late 1990s.[Schmitt] And, and it can also create equity. I mean I, you know, I'm, I'm teaching a branding course and have been doing that for, for a long time to MBA students to EMBA students, meaning executives that get an MBA and I always start the class with your definition of brand equity, you know, as assets and liabilities they're linked to, to the brand name and so on. And they create sort of value and or, they add to the value of the firm, or they can subtract from it if it's a liability. So that was indeed a, I think, a major, major idea. And in, in one of your books, I believe it is in the Brand Leadership book, you have a, you have a table where you're contrasting the old brand management approach to the new brand leadership approach. And, and I guess the difference is really the way you described it in terms of managing equity rather than doing these more transactional things or these traditional 4P things, right? These implementation aspects of, of branding, right?[Aaker] Yeah. The, the, the Proctor and Gamble brand management model, which was started in 1931 by a guy who later became Secretary of Defense. McElroy. And, and that lasted for 50 years and it was just tired. And of course P&G was the first to recognize that, right?[Schmitt] And if you look at brands' assets in a firm that can drive strategy, what are the core new concepts that one needs to, to leverage that equity? What I mean is you mentioned already, you know, brand awareness, you mentioned also brand loyalty and, and those are sort of concepts that were around. But what, what do you think are the key ideas, the key concepts that managers need to manage brands as assets?[Aaker] I think that the, the fundamentals have not changed. You still need, they get brands that resonate. You need brands that differentiate and you need brands that aren't intriguing for some way, and they're interesting. They have energy and it gets into your experimental, experiential marketing again, but that hasn't changed. Another thing I did was in my second book,"Building Strong Brands" that gave people a way to manage brands is that, I emphasize brand is not a three word phrase. That that agency will tell you you need. A brand is multidimensional. And the second thing is, a brand doesn't have five fixed dimensions that everybody has to have a personality or a, or, or a corporate value or what. You have to develop your dimensions for yourself in your context. And so those are the two principles I advocated. And they're still true, what has changed is, is the environment, first of all, in the communication environment, it's a very hostile, challenging environment. There's media clutter, there is information overload, and worst of all, there's terrible skepticism and lack of trust and, and boredom and lack of motivation. And so conventional will tell you what the story is just doesn't work. So that's one thing, and that's not a change necessarily in 11 years, but it's really magnified. The, the other thing is changed is it hasn't changed either, but it's magnified is is the dynamics of the marketplace. We now have a disruptive innovation. It's completely, it's crazy. I mean, it used to happen every four or five years or maybe every 12 years, I looked at beer data in the, in, in Japan over 35 years that occurred four times and now it's, it's it's monthly or quarterly or, or there's so much disruptive innovation, which creates amazing opportunities. First of all, it's the only way to grow you, you can't grow with 'my brand is better in your brand,' brand preference competition just doesn't ever generate growth with, with rare, rare exceptions.[Schmitt] Yeah, I mean, I, you mentioned these disruptive changes. We, we, we should get to them in the conversation along the way, like AI for example, and also you mentioned communications, what, what it does to communications when you can design these communications now with AI, but you have this idea of, you know, in your book you use the term brand vision, creating a compelling brand vision. That seems to me to be still extremely relevant, right? That[Aaker] Yes, absolutely[Schmitt] Beyond, beyond all of this. You, you need to know what the brand stands for and where it's going and, and, and how you're reacting to these disruptive changes as well, right? So you need, you need a broad-based brand vision.[Aaker] Yes, that's for sure. And,[Schmitt] And, and what does that include? I mean, what what would you tell, like the, the listeners to this podcast are brand builders. They're, you know, from major companies. So what would you tell them? What is part of that brand vision now that they need to be concerned about?[Aaker] One approaches that I advocate is to find out what are your brand pillars? What does your brand stand for and what makes it, what makes it special? I remember working with the, the Haas School of Business and in, in a, in a day when every business school wanted to be global, entrepreneurial, socially oriented, and, and you read their, what they're about, they're all the same. You can't tell you one from another. And then the Haas Business School came out with a, a different take on, on innovation instead of just we're innovative, it's,'we challenge the status quo.' And then, and then they came out with 'confidence without attitude,' which turns out to be a home run because every single business school we compete with had an attitude. The students had an attitude and the faculty had an attitude. But Berkeley really, it wasn't. And, and there isn't because they've, they've now, this, this pillar has permeated everything they do. And, and so it, it, it provides something that resonated with people. It's, it differentiated Berkeley. And it, it's, it was not just we're a global business school that's innovative and entrepreneurial. I was working with a non-profit, helping people stay in their home. They also needed to have an objective about helping people communicate with each other, have a social benefit. And so it kind of changed what they did. And that's often the case. You look at what do you put, what do you stand for? And it it, it leads you into a strategic thinking and it can lead you to say that, well, we really wanna be more than this functional benefit. We wanna do more, we wanna do more than keep people in their homes. We wanna help them have a social life.[Schmitt] Finding that brand vision is really important. And, and the example you gave us at like the Haas School at Berkeley, I think it has a lot to do with being real, being authentic is sort of the term that one hears a lot. And I believe it resonates with lots of brands. This idea of being, not putting up a, putting up, putting on a show and, and yes, and being, you know, arrogant or something like that and talking down to consumers, but being, being authentic, being relevant to consumers' lives.[Aaker] It's not a communication task, this brand vision. It has to reflect and drive the strategy. So on one hand, as I said, development of brand, brand vision can drive strategy, can, can help you shape really where you want the strategy to go, but it also has to support and reflect the strategy. So it can't be out there sort of empty words and, and you're not doing that. I talk about you need proof points. You need to have hopefully branded programs that support what you're doing and help you communicate what you're doing. And if you don't have proof points, you've gotta have a commitment to generate them in the near future.[Schmitt] And, and you also talk in the book about the brand vision, you know, you have to bring it to life. So you have these brand building actions and they are not just communications, they are also employee involvement, for example, mobilizing employees, creating stories for the employees. So it's not only the external communication part, but it's also the internal management, isn't it?[Aaker] It is. And well that's, there's two issues there. One is that branding for many firms is more important internally than it is externally to give the, the employees a sense of purpose, a reason to go to work. You know, the old story about the, the architect walking down the street in 1690 and asks workers, what they're doing. One was laying bricks, one was building a wall and the third was building a cathedral. Well, people wanna build cathedrals. And so the internal branding to communicate the purpose and to have a purpose is, is really important. But as far as customers go, that is even more true. I advocate that these, these serious challenges that have been magnified, they represent amazing opportunities. So if, let's take the, the communication, the hostile communication context, there's a terrific, terrific opportunity there. And it gets into your experiential marketing, and you can't rely on talking at them. Telling them how great you are. You, it, it's, it's always been problematical, but it's really problematical today because you, you, you can't even reach people. They're not watching television anymore. They're not reading articles, especially young people. And so what do you do? And one answer is you have to be, as you again point out, you have to be really creative. You can't just turn the crank anymore. And you have to look for big ideas and, and you have to look at experiential marketing. And so the kinds of things now that have become much more important are, are events and event sponsorship, you know, like the FedEx thing, that that now reaches 200 countries and they've got all kinds of programs surrounding that. And they, that programs have a common denominator. They're, they're experiential may sometimes it's vicarious, but it's experiential. It's, it's not telling you what FedEx does. The second thing is stories. And stories are more important than ever. But you have to have stories that are memorable, that are shareable, that have a visual symbol that, that have some permanence. And, and some, some can be a founder story, can be a customer story, can be employee story. And the third thing is brand communities. And you talk about brand communities, but that's really the home run. If you can create a brand community where you become an active partner in something that gives people great self-expressive benefits, that's integrated into their lifestyle in, or their values, that's a home run. The Harley Davidson brand community or the, or the Salesforce brand community of all people that are interested in, in their software and the problems they solve. And interact with each other, and if you try this and you know, this will work here. And those things have always been around, but they're now so powerful and the alternatives are so messy and so ineffective that you can, and they're now enabled by digital. We didn't have that before.[Schmitt] Let's talk about these things. So, so we started earlier on in the 1980s, 1990s, you just mentioned that back then we were not in a digital environment, take sort of 2000 and somewhat arbitrary beginning of, you know, the digitization of brands. So for like 10, 15 years there was the, call it, first wave of the digital revolution, right? You know, the smartphones, the social media, the ability now to to track customer information more efficiently and so on. And, and now we are entering in a way, a second wave, which is especially driven by AI, artificial intelligence, genAI to some degree also the metaverse. So, if you could just maybe lay out for our listeners these changes, like what has digital, the first wave, changed and what do you think the second wave of digital, meaning genAI for example, will do in the, in the near future?[Aaker] It has a a lot of upside it, one of the things that does is that enables disruptive innovation. And so, and not just AI, but the whole digital thing, the websites, the ecommerce, the social, the Internet of Things and, and then you put AI on top of that, but all that enables disruptive innovation. And that has created this incredible dynamic environment. You either create it as a source of growth or you have to respond to it as, as a way to survive.[Schmitt] Indeed, indeed. I mean, because for the brand builders, it's huge opportunities, meaning the brands themselves. But for the supplier system, for example, the agencies, I mean, this is a huge threat because you can now easily create communications with, with genAI, you can create videos with it, right? I mean, so, so the entire business will change. A lot of it may be brought in-house, meaning the agent, the agencies will no longer be needed. So I, I fully agree with you David. This is a, these are dramatic times in, in the branding business.[Aaker] Well, I think the, well, first of all, something like half of advertising as we know it 30 or 40 years ago is gone. It's gone to social. They don't use advertising agencies in, in a conventional way. I'm not one to give advice to agencies. A lot of them are still pretty healthy, but it's pretty clear to me that they have to get into the brand strategy business that, that you and I are in. They have to get into event planning, help people develop brand communities and, and do these alternative ways to connect to customers. But I think they can do that and have, and create stories, and they're very good at stories. I think they will still have a role to play, but they're not the healthy growth engines they once were, but they, I think they still have a place if they adapt.[Schmitt] You know, I teach my new branding course entirely with genAI. Now, what I mean by that is the following, I have a little lecture where I talk about, you know, brands as assets for example, and then, you know, the brand experience and brand strategy and employee branding and all of that. So that's a segment of say an hour, but then the students are actually creating a new brand and they're doing this with, with genAI and they're focusing on the concepts that we've talked about in the first hour. So that's sort of, I think what I believe will also be happening in companies soon they will be using massively AI to, to do their branding campaigns. Do do you agree with that view or do you think it's too early[Aaker] Well, I, I don't know how, how fast and how far AI will go, but right now in the company I'm associated with, Prophet, and other companies like it, we, we, AI is used to sort of jumpstart the creative process because first of all, you usually had to do, you know, two or three weeks of background research to understand the consumer, to understand the competition. And now AI can get 80% of you, you there in minutes and, and then you just have 20% of the job to do. And then it comes the ideation part of it. And that would take weeks and weeks and weeks and refinement and so on. And again, AI can get you 80% of there and then you build on that and do the other, the last 20%. That's kind of where we are now. And, and of course for some purposes AI can get you the whole distance. Right now we're not at that point,[Schmitt] But, but, but there is increased efficiency and, and cost savings too, frankly, for, for, for many firms isn't right.[Aaker] Well, and not only that, but speed. Because, you know, look at these guys in political advertising, something happens in the morning and they have an ad out in the afternoon, and AI has, has helped that process, but that, I should say, has has substantial risks. I've noticed that political advertising tends to be ad hoc and fragmented and there's no memorable issue at the end of the day. They're not very good at taglines and well, taglines, it's not easy to be good at taglines. It's not easy to create a,'the ultimate driving machine.' But, so as a result, at the end of the day, you don't take anything away from there that you remember. And so this business that you can make your ads topical on a day by day basis is true. You can do that, but, and with social media, you can, you can literally have something happen in the morning and you write an ad and get it out that afternoon. You know, I have a, a chapter in the book called Consistency Still Matters or something like that. And the, and if you look at the really strong brands like BMW and the ultimate driving machine, they've had something that has worked for 30 years. And it's not something that they, that has a, a shelf life of a day or a week or a month.[Schmitt] Very true. But at the same time, you also stress agility, right?[Aaker] Yes.[Schmitt] So, so how do you do, how do you bring these two together, right? Or isn't there a tension between consistency and agility?[Aaker] Yeah, I wrote the chapter on consistency because although the whole theme of the book is agility, responding to the dynamic markets that we face and trying to generate disruptive innovation or responding to it, yeah, agility is really important. And, and that gets another topic is brand portfolios. It, not about building a brand, it's about building a portfolio and that's part of the agility, but as a result of that, you have permission and a bias toward changing too frequently. And so what I argue in, in the book is that you need to have discipline. You have to really argue, is it really the case that I should make this change? You know, think of the, the change of, of Facebook to Meta and how it was based on a presumption of technological change that in fact did not happen. And they made that enormous equity damaging change. So, you know, my favorite story is, is in the sixties there was an article in Harvard Business Review to say, check writing is dead, in five years you'll be out of business. For 25 years after that check writing grew, then it plateaued and it's still going on 50 years later, they're still writing checks. So you have to have discipline in, in making these adjustments and changes, and you don't wanna throw away equity in doing that.[Schmitt] You mentioned portfolio and at the same time we've already talked about this idea of having a strategic vision and this idea of the brand having a simple, unified concept behind it. Now in a portfolio situation, do you need that overall brand vision for the, for the corporate brand or, how do you bring these things together like portfolio on the one side and a strategic vision on the other?[Aaker] Well, if you look at the concept of building a strong brand, if it's Life Boy soap or whatever it is, you have to recognize that it's not just the, the brand itself. A brand is gonna have endorsing, endorsing brands. It might have sub-brands, it might have co-brands, and all those make it stronger and more differentiated, more intriguing. It just happens like that. I mean, you, you have put another brand on it, and give it a role, and it helps the brand. And then there's what I call silver bullet brands that are low hanging fruit. You, you ask a person, why are you special? Why is your brand special? Why, why do you like it? Why should people like it? And they can give you an eloquent three minutes. And I say, why don't you brand that? And so I talk about branded energizers and, and social programs can play that role. Like the Dove Real Beauty provides a lot of energy and visibility for, for Dove, it made the, the brand grow from 2.6 billion to 6.5 billion all on the basis of this social program. And it was branded. And it, it caught fire and changed the life to hundreds of millions of women. But it increased that business more than almost triple. And then you have branded sources of difference, branded differentiators I call 'em. And the problem is, when you differentiate, you get something that differentiates. If you don't brand it, you lose it. Not only do you use it, but you can't even communicate it in the first place. So it's hard to communicate anything without a brand. So you have Uniqlo with Airism and HeatTech, their branded fabrics that they own that brand. And then you have branded source of credibility. So you, you say you're innovative, that's fine, but so does everybody else. But if you've got the Toyota Synergy Drive, you've got something that's branded, then you've got a proof point and you've got credibility, you're gonna have trust, you're gonna have authenticity. And if you just say, I am innovative and, I hire a whole bunch of scientists and I spend a lot of money in R&D and, and I've got so many patents that doesn't ring any bells,[Schmitt] David, these are all very important concepts and I'm sure our listeners will find them very useful to sort of use and implement in their business. And you've, you have them in your various books and also in, in Aaker on brands, on the new book, the second edition that we are talking about here,"Aaker on branding," sorry. So that's, that's all great. And we've talked about also about some brand successes, but you also mentioned in your book some struggling brands and, and some challenges to those brands. So for example, you mentioned IBM, you mentioned Starbucks. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about why you see them as struggling brands and, and what your advice would be for them going forward?[Aaker] Well, there's really three reasons to struggle. One is you lose energy and you become what I call a graveyard brand. That's a brand that everybody knows about, but they never think about. These brands aren't unable to create energy by talking about their offering or say we've got a new flavor this week or something. So they gotta find something with energy and attach it to it. And that's where we started out. We talk about event... use of events or sponsorships or, or social programs or something. Things that have energy and you attach them to the brand. And the second is you become irrelevant. Incidentally, I no longer talk about brand awareness. I talk about brand relevance, which is awareness plus credibility. So you have to not only be aware, but you have to be credible in a way that's believable. If you have a problem with either visibility or credibility, then you need to sit back and say, okay, somebody's got a disruptive innovation, I've got several choices, I can leapfrog it and have a even better disruptive innovation and make them less relevant. Or I can, I can be what Kevin Keller calls 'good enough.' I can have parity. The idea is that we don't have this disruptive innovation, but we've got something pretty... good enough. Good enough, so you don't have to exclude us because of that. It's no longer you need to go to this innovator to get it. We, are good, good enough. The the third thing is you can say, forget it, I'm gonna keep making film and let somebody do digital video and I'll, I'll ride this cash cow until it disappears. And it might, it'll probably have a long life, it'll probably generated me a ton of money. I can invest on a disruptive innovation somewhere else, instead of fighting the digital camera. I'll just keep making film and I'm making a ton of money on film and I'll use that to create other businesses. Or you can walk away and say, well, it's been a good ride, I'm done.[Schmitt] Yeah, yeah, yeah.[Aaker] So those... But then the third issue is if, so if a reason not to buy emerges, you have some scandal or something happened, you know, the sudden celebration of Audi or, or the, the dislike of Walmart. Well then you, you have to refute that, but you also have to change the conversation. My favorite author is George Lakoff and he talks about controlling the conversation. And so in the Walmart case, they developed 7, 8 years ago an environmental program, a climate change program that was phenomenal. And an article came out 'it's hard to hate Walmart anymore.' So they provided an alternative conversation. You, when you name Walmart, you didn't automatically talk about screwing over employees and hurting suppliers. There was an alternative conversation to be had.[Schmitt] David, both you and I are academics, right? I mean, we've written academic articles, we've been in the academic field as professors for, for decades. What do you think we as academic thinkers can contribute to business and and what do you think you have contributed to business through your, through your writings, which were in part based on academic ideas, but of course also very, very practical.[Aaker] I've been away from academics long enough that I, I feel a little presumptuous to give advice to the academic community, but I think what I observed then and still exist is that academics spend too much time on third order problems and not on first order problems. And even on third order problems, they're sometimes not able to come up with practical solutions. So I'd love to see academics work on first order problems.[Schmitt] Let me rephrase the the question a little bit. Why should a business leader ask an academic, let's say, to come into the firm as a consultant? What can an what can an academic contribute that the the business people, the managers themselves cannot, cannot do?[Aaker] I think that you're a great example and, and I think that the academic comes to the situation -- and I don't know if, if academic is the right way to classify this type of person because there are those that can do this outside -- but that comes to the field with a different perspective and a different... if you have a tough medical problem, I'd rather see five doctors that are mediocre than one outstanding one, because you have five different perspectives. And so you come to the party with a knowledge of psychology, a knowledge of experimentation and, and a knowledge of maybe statistical analysis. So you, you can guide people away from relying on cross-sectional data. So you can, you can get people away from flawed experiments and mislead using data and, and you can help people create big ideas by giving insights into consumers that they, they wouldn't normally think of because they just don't have that training in psychology or economics or sociology, that gives them that different way of looking at things[Schmitt] Now, at the end of this podcast, which is BRITE ideas, right? We ask usually what was your BRITE idea? Meaning your big idea. If you, if you reflect back on everything that you've done in the area of branding over the many decades, what do you think was your BRITE idea?[Aaker] Well, first of all, I think in, in academic research and a career and in strategy, if we don't know anything else, it's that it evolves and, and there's a lot of luck to it. And this idea that you can have a vision at the beginning of a strategic exercise and then see that come to fruition five years later is nonsense. And the same as with an academic career. So, you know, I was the worst brand in, in history when I, in around 1990. I was all over the map. I was a statistician, but I was doing behavioral experiments work in advertising. I was doing business strategy stuff, I was doing advertising stuff and I was so ill positioned and then I got into branding and suddenly I became well positioned. So, but I think the two things I did in branding, that has really changed things is that I introduced brand loyalty into brand, into branding and brand equity. And before that it was all about awareness and image. It was all delegated to middle management and to advertising agencies. And most people said, oh no, brand loyalty is an outcome of brand equity. I mean, Kevin and everybody else. And, and so I was a little lonesome saying, no, brand loyalty is part of it. And I think that was the one thing that had probably the most influence. The second thing was when I said that it's more than a three word phrase, it's multidimensional and there are no preconceived dimensions. And, and, and maybe if there was a third thing, it was the, the idea that brand portfolios are an important discussion. And I think to this day I'm, I'm only one that written a book on brand portfolios.[Schmitt] Yeah, that's great. A very last question that we ask always in our podcast is, what is your favorite brand currently?[Aaker] I, I think Dove Real Beauty is, is such a wonderful, wonderful example and it, and incidentally that is done more for a business than any other brand I know as far as our, our documentation is concerned. And an observation I would make is nobody accuses Dove of having this just to make money. They, they don't accuse it of they're just in it for building sales and profits, even though that's exactly why they are in it. And that's exactly what they've done. But nobody accuses them of that. And it's because of their passion, it's because of their decades long commitment. It's because of the, the impact and it's because of the quality of, of the programs they've done. And it's because of the engagement those programs have attracted[Schmitt] And you have featured Dove and, and many, many other brands in, in your writings and analyze them and, and really made a major contribution to the area of branding, both in academia and more importantly also in in the business community. So thank you very much David for this conversation and, and good luck for all your writing in the future and, and your work with companies on, on, on their brands. Thank you very much.[Aaker] Certainly reconnecting with you Bernd, and we're gonna have to pursue that, that, that connection.[Voice Over] Please subscribe to BRITE Ideas on your favorite podcast service. We'd like to thank once again our sponsors Lexicon Branding and Kogan Page. For more information about the BRITE Ideas Podcast and Columbia Business School Brand Center, please visit briteideas.co.