Alex Smith welcome to Brand growth Heroes thank you so much for joining us today where are you calling us in from I'm calling in from suffk uh although I was back in London last week which was a true a true novelty but yeah it's been pretty good to be out in the sticks for all stuff what was London like last week I mean I I haven't been to London since the since the start of the pandemic what's what's it like at the moment quite honestly it was a bit um depressed I thought um actually because I was there a lot during you know lockdown one lockdown two all that kind of thing and obviously you know things were closed and it was quiet but you really felt still a pretty positive energy in the air okay this time it was not more quiet in fact maybe it was less quiet but I did feel it felt just a bit more down than before right okay yeah maybe things are getting to people in a way that they wer you know a few months ago but yeah it's pretty understandable this last one has been has been particularly hard I think so listen Alex for those of our listeners who don't know who you are you are a brand strategist you've got your own consultancy um called basic arts and I came across you because I was Googling uh blue ocean and uncontested Market space and I came across your fabulous Ted Talk which I loved and then I signed up for your newsletter and your your mini email course and kind of learned a little bit about you so tell us what is it that you do who are the clients that you've worked with that our listeners May uh be able to kind of recognize straight away and pin who you are and let's have a talk about some of the things that you and and I have been spending time over the last few months talking about such as this idea of how to find uncontested market space this idea of then you know everybody ending up looking slightly the same and you'll go into that more more detail and I really want to look at this um your very strong idea on brand purpose I know that's an awful lot to throw at you um but yeah there's just so much to to say here so over to you sure sure thanks so yeah like you said you know I'm a strategist which is unfortunately it's one those uh ugly phrases which is essentially meaningless uh but what I do more particularly is as you said I try and help companies find and open up uncontested Market space in their categories now obviously what that means is in principle that you create a business which has got no direct competitors who are the only people who do what they do and then you can obviously imagine all of the benefits that acre from that whether or not it's fast organic growth um not needing to compete on price uh lowering the pressure on marketing spend etc etc etc so that sounds like a bit of an uncontested Market space in Consulting so um pretty impressive you're living you're living your belief system well you know it's funny that you say that because it it kind of is because I think that when um when people talk about you know strategy and I you actually used the term earlier on brand strategist which obviously leads one to think oh okay it's about it's about branding and uh and although that is a big part of it that actually um that actually really isn't you know the whole story or the most important part and and when it comes to what I do I think the crucial thing to put across is that what I'm looking at is sort of uh about creating uh adapting a business to take on that uh that role in the market but by doing it by changing everything in the business simultaneously okay so not just brand no and and and actually there's people always they when they think about their business and when they try and develop it they break it down into sort of tranches like brand is one tranch product is another tranch I don't know distribution whatever it might be is another tranch um and people are very comfortable looking at these things independently and you'll find Consultants or agencies whatever it might be who are experts in all of these things and they can look at them but what you don't get which is what I do is actually thinking about all of these things as a holistic unit okay and developing them all in concept so essentially to to give you an idea of of how this works you know if you are trying to you know claim a certain territory in the market which you which your business is going to dominate obviously the way to do that is that you actually have to deliver on the proposition that you're claiming to have now clearly the way that a business delivers um on a proposition is not just a function of any one thing it's a function of the whole business as a unit so obviously the product has to do what you're claiming it does and then the brand has to communicate whatever that thing is and has to do it in a certain way and all the different like moving Parts they have to come together in uh in this sort of um in this what can we say harmonious way uh and then that creates the business which then goes out there and performs well or badly and and I do find that there are very few people who uh who really think about businesses in this more kind of uh holistic as I say manner I mean to give you an example of this from uh you ask we are some some Brands who I work with I mean in the world of like fmcg uh in the UK uh moju who I know you spoke to Rich last week this was one of the businesses who I worked with um by beautiful Dairy the cafir brand eat natural the cereal bars who were just sold to Ferrero um and then dois and Dam uh chocolate brand is another one and to use that as a particular example uh do and Dam essentially what we decided to do with them was to try and essentially claim the space in the market of ethical dark chocolate confectionary um and when I say confectionary here I'm talking you know the world of cabri as opposed to the world of like pure chocolate like the green and blacks World okay which is actually where the business originated now if you think about if that's what you're going to do if you want to be kind of like it's a bit more complicated than this but if you want to be basically the dark chocolate cabries which is kind of what doise and Dam are it's what they're kind of going after in order to do that not only do you have to have a brand which adheres to that market position but you also have to have products that are going to deliver on that you also Smarties rather than the green and blacks you know wrapped up individual chocolates it's the format which which which delivers on telling people what the occasion and the need state is that they need that product for is is that what you mean precisely yes precisely for format is just as important or if not more important than brand in that case yeah obviously from a sales perspective you're speaking to a different buyer you're looking at a completely different distribution strategy now if we just take those three parts there let's say brand the product SL format and distribution strategy in order for doy and Dam to become the business that they are trying to become you have to work on those three things simultaneously and you have to do it underneath an overarching strategy and uh and so that overarching strategy and then the resultant changes to the different parts of the business this this is what I do and I think this is the only way that you can create a truly coherent business which really claim aims and owns and dominates a particular Market space and clearly there are a great many very successful businesses out there who haven't done this and who don't think this way uh but uh it it's extremely unusual I think to go through a process like that but but ultimately it is I think a common factor that binds a lot of the sort of really aspirational sexy Brands which everybody looks up to you know all of The Usual Suspects um in various different categories so I've got a dilemma here then and and this is not to put you on the spot but actually to ask your help or advice on thinking this through and I suppose I'm not looking for the answer to this but how would you think this through so take for example and this is something I've been I've been struggling with over the last few weeks or months to imagine you have a fabulous uh healthier chocolate bar right let's imagine that it is um and it was born in the kind of um it's high in plant protein it's plant-based it's high in protein and it was born originally in the um protein bar area okay but it doesn't necessarily deliver as much protein as uh the protein bars because you've decided that it's going to be an indulgent protein bar okay so it's wrapped in chocolate and it's quite indulgent and it's a bit higher in Sugar um and lower in protein so it doesn't necessarily tick the boxes for the protein bar people so then you you think okay well in some stores some of my Independents are putting me beside the eat Naturals of the world and they're putting me with healthy snacking and that's all fine um but really where I'd like to be is besides the Mars and the Snickers of the world okay and I have a product that I is formulated I could look that and I could change the wrapping and I could change the brand positioning to be in around the Mars and and the Snickers and be in that kind of confectionary countline Market space and I would be the only plant-based high protein bar there right how do you decide whether that's a whether that is a move that you can make safely or whether that is a move that's way too big and dangerous to make I mean because for a small player that's a that's a pretty big move to go into up against the big guys so you might be I suppose the point I'm making is you might be going into an uncontested Market space but you have to have the idea the feeling might be that you'd have to have an awful lot of resources to help you win there what what would you be thinking through this uh this might not be a direct answer to your question but uh you do touch on something I think is very interesting which is that a lot of um sort of new trendy fmcg Brands they are all very much of a type with each other and they do all tend to compete with each other and they do tend to leave a lot of the big massive Legacy Brands kind of untroubled and untouched I saw I was looking for a bit of research about something at the list the other day the gross 's top 100 value selling um uh food products in the UK I mean maybe three of the top 100 were what you would call in some sense um Insurgent Brands Insurgent Brands yeah um like and you know longin the tooth Insurgent Brands like innocent for example like you know innocent was about as sort of cool and Challenger as it got you know most of them are things like pot Noodle and frosties and uh and the reason that I think a lot of this happens uh to a to a greater or lesser degree is because of the H it's actually I was about to say the cowardice but actually isn't cowardice um it's more the snobbishness of Founders I think actually rather than fear itself who don't want to go up against Brands and categories um and design their products for audiences who aren't like them and who aren't uh and who aren't uh Discerning you know who aren't Discerning who don't reflect those value their values and so on like a lot of these like big product categories like the ones you're describing you know like the world of marsbars for example the reason that these are the same Brands still selling there for years and years I think to a large degree is because nobody nobody is willing to put themselves down into the gutter to speak in order to challenge them because everybody wants to make a product which is like the most environmentally friendly the most ethical the most Millennial to use that dirty word um uh and and Ticking all of those other kind of boxes which are somewhat cliched in the in the startup space nobody ever nobody ever thinks that they could actually make a much much bigger impact if they were to make a dent on those old Legacy categories and so yeah a going back to your question a part of that is probably because people think oh how could I possibly compete with brands with those resources so and and that's fine there's an element of that but I actually think a much bigger part of it is um is in a way a kind of a refusal to sort of sacrifice perhaps the founders principles uh by making something which is more sort of Mass Appeal friendly Mass Appeal yes and friendly for the for the everyday consumer yeah and I think that's a big thing isn't it this finding this balance between um a product that has the type of ingredients that you would want to put inside your body or you'd want to put inside your kids bodies or that you really adore eating the cost of that product to produce is going to price you out of many mass Market markets really uh and I think that's something that a lot of Founders in this in this group of young startup Brands find themselves in all the time Plus on top of the fact that they've got you know expensive ingredients they also have small runs and if You' got small runs even if you're ingredients are relatively averagely priced your your product cost is going to be much more expensive but back to the the idea of if I could sit in three different areas how do you go about choosing where to compete what and I'm not asking for like an answer on that but what what are the considerations so um a huge part of it depends on the how mature The Branding question is okay now essentially most of the projects I do are with Brands who have already have traction and who have already you know in the case of let's say uh uh grocery you know are already listed in a couple of the major Mals that type of thing so they know that something is working okay um and in that case the ex the the Strategic exercise strategy for me for the most part um for businesses should be a backwards looking exercise it's an exercise in in looking at okay what is this thing that we have inadvertently created here um you analyze the business you sort of ask the business you know you sort of ask the business to tell you what it is and uh and then whatever that whatever that is whether it's in line with your original intentions or not you lean you lean into it so it's very similar process to you've probably heard of product Market fit in the tech world yeah so it it's just product Market fit exists in every single category you know you create that initial rough version of the brand you put it out there in the world you don't know what's going to happen you watch to see where it goes you learn from it and eventually it clicks and you're like oh right okay this is the thing I've created and TW you double down yeah so but that of course that only applies for businesses who have already achieved traction who have proved they're doing something of value so this hypothetical brand that you're talking about if this was already in a couple of the Mals for example you should be able to learn enough from the performance of the business for example which SKS have worked which SKS have failed which formats have worked which formats have failed which particular type of um retailer or which particular channel do we perform well in which particular channel do we perform badly in it what type of person is buying the product etc etc all of these things are Clues which will tell you what the business really is and you need to figure that out and then that should effectively answer the question for you and you'll be like of course you know it should be X if you're a brand new product you can't do that you have to be much much more speculative um but you could test each of those things couldn't you you could see your launch as a beta launch rather than seeing your launches that's it we're out there now this has to work you could see this is and this is what I always say to clients is you know don't put that pressure on yourself if you can manage it test your three or your your two different um Channel stroke uh um Market opportunities by placing your product with a particular buyer in a particular Channel um on a particular shelf and seeing how it goes if you have that luxury um but usually you do because because the volumes that you're going to be committing to up front at the beginning in terms of what most people can afford to pay for in terms of runs would allow you to do those small tests wouldn't they yeah yeah definitely I mean I would certainly always suggest exactly as you say for a for a sort of young sort of start upy type brand do as many different flavors as you can do as many different packaging formats as you can and get into as many different uh retail channels as you can including ones that you on the face of it don't think are right or which you have no interest in because you you're in a process of trying to generate data which will tell you the way the business is going to go and and you have to go into the process assuming that you know absolutely nothing and every single hypothesis you have is is completely wrong now of course now of course this is a tricky balance to strike because at the same time if you want to maximize your chances of being successful you need to have a a spiky focus and proposition even if you're going to ditch it eventually and so I mean going back to the do and Dam example like their original hypothesis for that business was it you know it was it was in in hindsight it was completely wrong they were basically their idea was superfood chocolate you know superfood chocolate it it it didn't work it doesn't work um but what it did enable them to do was to create something which SE seemed vaguely interesting something which seemed vaguely coherent which then gave them a platform from which to experiment so you do need to begin with that and of course now they've ended up in a place that's completely different so they're not super food chocolate what are they now then I don't I I haven't yet had the opportunity to taste them I mean I know they're beautiful colored packaging it's really like fabulously standout and that they're in different formats but what are they what do they represent are they fun playful premium chocolate sustainable premium well um to the uh to the consumer there isn't a kind of a straightforward like line like superfood chocolate but what they what they essentially have done is they have exported all of the kind of uh values and attributes which are completely standard in the block chocolate world in the green and blacks World which is dark chocolate ethical lower sugar all of that stuff and they've taken it to The Confectionary world cabri and Mars where all of those things are not amazingly yet and not only not standard they they effectively don't exist at all you know it was mind-blowing you know when we were doing the work when you realize that you know dark chocolate was in double digit growth I think milk chocolate was maybe in slight decline so this is just about just in the world of block chocolate and you realize that well so far nobody is actually doing the kind of the Cab's confectionary treatment yes to to to Quality dark chocolate so if I'm a consumer who likes dark chocolate of which there are loads and they're a growing group but maybe I also like to have things in interesting formats colors you know something that's a bit more fun to eat and a plain bit of chocolate so you know I like things like Smarties malteasers whatever it experience that playful type stuff you this is a very obvious um but how do you then compete on [Music] price so imagine you're a Founder then in in today's food and beverage industry and you're yourself right I'm going to I'm going to really you know this makes sense to me I'm going to take this on I'm going to look for some uncontested Market space and I'm going to find that balance between being in a part of the market where there's no one like me playing and also answering oh can you hear the uh hailstones that's ha that's hailstones isn't that mad yeah wow sunny here no we're middle of the Irish Sea Isle of Man we just get like the worst of everybody's weather like being on a boat basically but anyway so you say to yourself I I want an UNC tested Market space but I'm also clever enough and Savvy enough to know that I need to be in a category that has got really high footfall right um and I need to be in in a mass Market category basically so that means that I'm going to take my product my proposition and I'm going to I'm going to tweak it or evolve it so that it answers the same needs a samrs or a or a cad Breeze right but because I am a a a startup and I don't have this the size of runs right for my product and I and I have much better quality ingredients I'm going to end end up with an RSP which is much higher compared to your Mars or your your your Snickers are people willing to pay such a premium for are some enough people should be the question willing to play a premium so for example with do and Dam I don't know that business very well and I'm not asking you to to share secrets but there obviously were or you obviously guys together did consider that there would be enough people willing to pay extra and I'm sure it's more than a 20% Premium versus cadb so how do you make that decision and take that risk so I mean there are quite a few different factors in there I mean the F the first and so none of these are particularly an answer to the dois and Dam one but just about the general question um overall okay so firstly the the trend of premiumization which is happening all across the supermarket is of course real and is of course something which um which new brands can exploit and you know in a lot of categories haven't been successfully premiumize and when I say premiumize of course you know we got to recognize that you know premium uh um premium can also be Mass so classic examples of mass premium brands are innocent and Ben and Jerry's both of whom we might even say kind of like locked in a new normal price for their categories so I don't think that people actually look at something like Ben and Jerry's now as being an outrageously expensive product um but if we were to con compare it to something like you know whatever the ice cream Market was looking like in the '90s then that and when it was all sort of walls soft and stuff like that then then then then it was a really really massive change so that type of mass premium idea I think is the most appropriate thing for a lot of these new startups to have now as you say there is a limit generally speaking to how much more expensive you can be and yeah the 20% thing I mean I I've never sort of like put a particular number to it but that does sound about right and obviously in every category you can kind of do a sniff test I think you know you can go in there and you can look at the other products on shelf and you can just you even without any science you can just say well I can imagine that a product that cost X is kind of acceptable and a product that cost Y is kind of unacceptable but then of course you know that that is purely for a product which is just essentially a posh version of what you're replacing and and being a there are exceptions but for the most part just being a posh version of the status quo that is not a meaningful proposition you know I I I spend a lot of time talking to Founders about how the number one error that they all make is trying to build their brands and propositions around the idea of being better quote unquote than the other businesses in their category better is this poisonous word which has sunk many many companies you could never ever be trying to be better but so many Founders are trying to be better better ingredients better for you better for the planet so why is that so wrong it has be because basically the market it doesn't the market doesn't recognize better the market only recognizes different you know if you are like if you have two Brands who essentially have the same proposition but one of them is claiming to be sort of offering it 5% more than the other one um as far as the as far as the man on the street is concerned those are basically the the the the same Brands and and that's where you do start getting into these sort of like these uh brutal competitive battles overprice marketing and stuff like that you have you have to be offering something a value to the market which nobody else is offering now sometimes your betterness if you like could be so extreme that it does actually represent not only a difference in degree but a difference in kind but my point is is that if you are just not a posh version of the incumbent but if you are actually delivering a genuinely new proposition to the category then to a degree that completely breaks the kind of like the pricing structure so classic example of this you know I read the other day which I still can't quite believe but I think it's correct that grenades carb killer is the number two confectionary product in the UK not the number I mean obviously it's the number one protein bar but no I mean the number two confectionary product I you were talking about Mar bars and stuff like that now that's what I'm not sure three times the cost of a masar but the consumer is using it in place of a m bar and it does to all intent of purposes occupy the same category as a marar but it's totally broken understandings of what that category is and it's totally broken the price bound now obviously in that particular case it's about sort of having an extreme degree of functionality so it's not all about functionality you could do this in various different ways but functionality functionality is one example so and and actually like this is another very important lesson I think for Founders to take on particularly in the in the supermarket Market world is you need to be thinking of what I call true categories as opposed to supermarket categories now Supermarket categor is obviously the categories that you know delineated by buyers and the data that supermarkets give you and Isles and all of that but those do not the those barely represent categories as they as they exist in consumers Minds which are much more fluid things and where like they actually will be comparing to brands that sit sure you know five aisles apart in the super need States an occasion isn't it in consumers Minds exactly and so that's so another trick that you can do regarding the price is you know you might be thinking about you know well who are you anchoring yourself to you talked about moju earlier on you know moju is a very expensive product and they're really flying but moju a moju shot is not anchored to a bottle of orange juice even though they're both quote unquote made out of juice you know em moju shot is anchored to something like depending on which shot it is maybe an espresso or a baroa or a Red Bull or I don't know these these products that exists in different categories so like when people go up and they see oh look at the price per milliliter of em moju shop versus a Tropicana grab and go orange juice it's it's a completely false equivalence so there is a hell of a lot more flexibility for for for Price than I think when people just say oh I want to attack so and so Mass Market brand but I can't compete with them on price I mean it's yeah it's the least of the worries to some degree okay okay and that's really interesting it's actually something I'm going to be doing an episode on with a with a friend of mine who um who is a market research scientist in Dublin and he taught me all about the fact that consumers and shoppers make their decisions in a frame and that every category has uh price bands and if you can mess with the frame of reference and mess with and often doing that by offering something totally different or you know that all of a sudden that's how you disrupt the category and and so that's a really interesting point and one of the things I want to because I'm I know that we we're this is fascinating I'm really learning a lot here but I really want to talk about this idea of Blanding that you spoke to me about before and then I really do want to talk about this other idea of that purpose is being misunderstood and it's actually ending up being a negative thing for lots of scaling Brands right now so let's start with the Blanding piece what is Blanding and what do we need to be afraid of so earlier on I mentioned this idea that a lot of Founders are kind of afraid or too snobbish to Branch out of making products for people like them which is of course a very small portion of the market and um and this means that you know a lot of these startup Brands you know they kind of look and feel the same and this is something I've been talking about for a long time and then I was uh delighted then when I actually saw that was an article in Bloomberg which were which um took on this idea gave it a name Blanding uh and started to sort of like codify the entire world around it and so I encourage you to look up the article it's really it's really great and if you just search Bloomberg uh Blanding I'll put a link to it in the podcast episode notes great uh and so yeah it's just uh this this way that because all not all but most new startup brands have very similar propositions very similar values they belong to a very similar kind of cultural space they're made for very similar type of people they are all essentially very similar in general and what this results in is them uh essentially clustering their Market leaving a lot of fruit unpicked on the tree so to speak and and the great yep and the great irony of it is uh as the guy actually references in the article is that because all of these Brands they like to think of themselves as disruptive the kind of look and feel of what is disruptive has become a cliche in and of itself so the more disruptive they try to be the more syy they actually are the the first example of that that I'm just sorry to jump across you is probably the innocent speak do you remember back in the day when innocent came out first and they were the first to do the kind of funny funny chatting on pack and then everybody did it and then that was the thing that everyone's been doing for 15 years and and people have stopped doing it now but that was probably an early example of of Blanding wasn't it people group think and everybody following well that's what if I'm an Insurgent brand that's what I need to do exactly oh that is that is that is so true that is so true and uh and and of course like the irony is then that um I mean going speaking speaking of grenade it would be fair to you could probably make a case to say that grenade is the most genuinely dis uped brand in the UK supermarkets in the past 10 years and they look like some sort of like Lads magag 1990s cliche yeah because ironically what is disruptive is obviously the opposite of what has come to be seen as disruptive um it's kind of Gone full circle in that way so uh so yeah you you you do have this problem for for all startup Brands which is that by following this kind of template and classic examples of the temp template they're not fmcg but Brands like Casper mattresses Harry's shave you know these are real kind of like prototypical blands um you uh you actually really damage your ability to uh to stand out and disrup to disrupt and to deliver new value to deliver new value to the market you you're copying without even realizing and I wonder as well you know the stronger the community of startups that you are part of the more you're Lear earning that The Closer you are to the other brands in your community and the more group think can come into the situation and the more you're looking at everybody else's Brands and the color palettes they're using and and that's an interesting one as well because what I suppose there's there's nothing more beautiful than a really really strong community of entrepreneurs right or scaling Brands but as long as you're aware that that group thing can happen and that you can be influenced by all of these other brands and that you don't lose sight of all the white space out there that we've talked about earlier on in this episode um then you get the best of both worlds don't you the best of the community and all the help that you get but at the same time you're not losing sight of become you don't want to become the same as everybody else do you yeah it's a very good point I do think that probably the prevalence of Blanding owes a lot to how strong the community of Founders has become which as you say in general is an excellent thing uh but yeah it does have this one significant drawback and and actually I was um uh I did a presentation about this the other day and the problem is is that I actually genuinely believe that even if you're aware of this phenomenon I think it's almost impossible to resist it because when you're doing it's about more than design and and branding right but that's the most obvious area of it so when you're let's say looking at let's say you're doing a Rebrand and you're looking at the design options you'll see one and you'll be like oh love that that's it and you'll just be so visle viscerally drawn to it but probably the reason that you're being drawn to it is because it looks like everything that you see all the time so you just have that feeling of comfort with it and it sucks you in and I don't believe that you can really overcome that it's being it's about being aware of our cognitive biases as humans isn't it as well because there's so many cognitive biases that we're not aware of so what's that conformism that one I think it is where you like we feel more comfortable if something conforms it absolutely but my hypothesis is is that even being a prevents you from stops you from actually you still can't quite break I get you break free from it so what one thing one technique which I think is quite interesting just to throw out a little kind of thing that I've been sort of toying with is that embra you it might be a good idea to embrace your inbuilt drive to copy things and the way that you sort of weaponize that and and stop it from damaging you and make it help you is you simply yes copy your heart out but copy brands from completely different categories to yourself so very classic examples would be you know the way that Lush copies fresh fruit and veg and the whole aesthetic around that kind of industry or the way that vitamin water back in the day copied Pharmaceuticals and kind of built their whole brand around Pharmaceuticals like if you can't avoid copying which I don't believe you can then at least make sure you copy from someone who in no way overlaps with your brand and use the codes those brands have created to to your advantage yeah to to communicate the benefits that you and the value that you're offering to your consumer so as part of all of this you know Brands um positioning in similar ways one of the big things that brands use to position on at the moment is purpose and purpose has come to mean sustainability and good to people in the planet um and a balance with profit you have something to say quite strongly on this don't you which I think is really interesting yeah well uh it is definitely related to all of that Blanding stuff because clearly one of the characteristics of all of this kind of wave of new school Brands is their desire to be quote unquote purposeful and that meaning all these different sort of type flavors of of social good which come underneath that umbrella now that is to be clear obviously it's not only fine but good and admirable to be as kind of responsible as you can be but you need to recognize that there's a big difference between being responsible um and uh and good so to speak um in your operations as a as a method of just uh running the business and using that as your method of positioning yourself and your value proposition a value proposition is about the value that your product your business delivers to the market it's a very Market oriented thing now occasionally there are businesses out there whose value proposition is actually also something sort of noble and purposeful so someone like The Body Shop you know classic example their value proposition is the same as their kind of brand purpose like or Tony's chuckle only one of my favorites yeah although actually I mean it's it's it's a whole rabbit hole but I but but I believe that uh actually Tony's um the vast majority of people who love Tony's have got absolutely zero idea of their the the ethical side of their business they like it because it's twice as thick as other products tastes great has amazing packaging but that's but that's that's a hypothesis and that's a side point but yes if people are certainly buying it for the reasons they want them to buy it then that would Al be an example okay um but um uh but clearly like for the most part like in every Market there can probably only be one or two Brands who really build themselves on claiming that sort of ethical territory and once that ethical territory has been claimed basically you probably can't take it from them that's kind of like a box that has been ticked in the market and so when you're bringing your product out there you need to think purely in terms of the value that you are bringing to consumers in that market and if consumers can already get the the purposeful ethical value then you are not going to have a very good time if you simply try to copy that you just it's just another way of commodifying your brand you can commodify yourself around purposeful positions and I think we're seeing I think we're seeing an awful lot of that and actually in the world of fmcg it's even worse because frankly a lot of categories in the supermarket l or wrongly the consumer just simply doesn't respond to those type of messages um they only really work in categories where there is a sort of a recognized enemy so it works for Oatley because they have the enemy of milk you know it works for oh I don't know um Tesla and as no no it's not fmcg because they have the the energy the enemy of internal combustion engine if you try and bring out a sustainable um Cal for sake of argument the consumer doesn't perceive there to be be a problem with the status quo there so so so you what you essentially have in your hands is a very weak value proposition even if you're even in that case actually if you're the only one doing it so what I think most Founders essentially need to recognize is that all the stuff which is coming underneath the the banner of purpose is all stuff that they should be doing but they should be doing it just because it's the right thing to do not because it's going to sell product for the most part it isn't going to sell product it's a under the-fold background piece of information that if a consumer happens to have a look they'll be like oh that's nice but it's not actually the thing that's going to move uh that's going to propel growth okay wow I mean that's just fascinating I I totally see where you're coming from on that um it would be great you know what it would be great Alex if you had a couple of a million quid to uh actually test all of these fabulous hypothesis which you know I bet if there was some econometric testing behind a lot of the stuff you've said you'd have empirical proof that you're actually right on a lot of us well I mean I do think that there is empirical testing happening all the time because I think you see it with brands that brands that are failing and brands that are flying um you know I think you can you can you can often you know all all all of these things are fundamentally based on observation yeah you know what's working and what's not working yeah they're just they're just based on observation of the market and you know the whole purpose thing it of course the the idea that purposeful Brands succeed and sell better and all that type of thing that in itself was based on a strong observation in the past but that was Bas but really what was happening there was that there was a period of time when these sort of ethical propositions were new and fresh yeah and Brands who came long and absolutely nailed it Brands like Patagonia and so on they then flew and everyone said oh w why is Patagonia selling doing so well oh they're doing so well because they're ethical no no no Patagonia are doing so well because they had they had a fantastic proposition which they executed in an incredibly aggressive and forceful way the fact that they are ethical is neither here nor there Red Bull also has a fantastic proposition executed in an incredibly aggressive way there's nothing ethical about it but they are both in my way of thinking very very purposeful Brands they are both Brands who have got very powerful um way of delivering value which they which they um which they push to really extreme degrees the the ethical side is complete red herring in these particular okay and I think that that'll probably be very divisive for listeners out there um but you know you you stand strongly on that I would probably caveat that by saying it's as we've said before on other calls it's a h it has become a hygiene Factor if you're not the only person if you're not the only brand in the market the first brand in the market positioning on it really strongly then it's something that you you need to do uh in order to satisfy today's consumer but it's not the first thing they're going to choose you on they're going to choose you on how you add value to a needs date or an occasion in their lives better than better than anything else out there I mean Red Bull I I don't know at all but I dare say that Red Bull has got an incredibly high amount of uh um sort of social diligence going on under the surface in that business because what what Big Brand these days can get away without that but the thing is as a consumer you don't know and you don't care because that's not what that particular business is about so they should be doing it and maybe some consumers they would look into it because they do care and they would find it and they would be and they would be um uh reassured by that but you know it's not the the mass part of that business businesses can be about different things businesses should be about different things you know if we are we going to enter this world where every single brand is the same bloody brand just repeated again and again because that's the quote unquote right thing to do no the right thing you should be doing all the right things under the hood but what your business is about that should be as diverse as possible okay well look on that note Alex that is just a great way to finish thank you so much for all of that today um it's been a fabulous conversation I've really enjoyed it uh and thank you thank you for coming on and sharing all that with us I think you'll probably get a lot of inboxes on on LinkedIn after this um I hope so yeah yeah I hope so yeah and uh yeah um I strongly urge everybody to sign up for your newsletter they can find that on basic arts.org is basic arts.org isn't it yeah yeah that's right there's the um the the what do you call it the little sign up box the sign up box okay um because it's fabulous and yeah um we will talk soon and thank you so much for all of your insights and expertise thanks very much for inviting me on br