David Aaker got religion on the power of stories

He’s been called “The Father of Modern Branding.” If you’ve ever read anything about branding or brand strategy, my guest today requires no introduction. I’m talking to David Aaker, author of over a dozen books and hundreds of articles about marketing and branding, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and Vice-Chair at Prophet, a global marketing and branding consultancy.

Given this season is about positioning and brand platforms, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask David directly about his brand vision model, which most people refer to simply as “the Aaker Model.” We also talked about two of his most recent books, some of his favorite brands, a few books, and his advice for junior people in the branding industry.

 

Aaker on Branding

I kicked off the conversation by asking David about one of his latest books, Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success. David says he wrote the book because employees at Prophet were asking him what they should read and he was tired of saying “these 40 pages in this book…these 80 pages in this book.” He wrote Aaker on Branding to “capsulize the main ideas that were in each of those books” into a “Reader’s Digest version.”

Aside from the brand vision model (see below), other big-picture advice in the book includes:

• “Move from brand competition to subcategory competition if you want to grow.”
• Regarding portfolio strategy, “you have to make [a family of brands] work so they generate synergy and they generate clarity and they generate relevance.”
• Develop a “shared interest program.”
• Tell stories.

 

The brand vision model (the Aaker model)

Seven of the principles in Aaker on Branding have to do with what he calls “brand vision,” which others (including Prophet) refer to as “brand positioning.” David says, “There’s a lot of things you can call it…actually, the terminology is not so important. What is important are some fundamental ideas.” He created his brand vision model (originally called the brand identity model) because he was convinced advertising agencies were doing it wrong by attempting to reduce brands to three-word phrases. Brands are multidimensional, so David created a model that allows for any number of elements (some are core, others are extended and “provide extra texture and guidance”). He’s also against “fill-in-the-box” models that force strategists to populate a model with ideas that may not be relevant to the brand in question. For example, a product brand won’t need organizational values and a B2B corporate brand may not need a brand personality.

I asked David what determines whether an idea rises to the level of a brand vision element. According to David, elements should:

1. Differentiate from other brands;
2. Resonate with customers; and
3. Be something you can deliver (either a proof point, which you can already deliver, or a strategic imperative, which is aspirational but attainable).

David agreed, however, that not every element has to meet all three of these criteria, although there’s “no hard and fast rule.”

The model consists of 12 elements arranged into four dimensions: Brand as Product, Brand as Organization, Brand as Person (including brand personality), and Brand as Symbol. David clarified that these dimensions are really there to ensure you’ve thought about every possible way of expressing the brand’s identity, rather than requiring the strategist to answer every question or fill in every box.

 

Creating Signature Stories

Next, we turned to Creating Signature Stories, David’s most recent book. To write the book, David first had to define “what is not a story,” given how overused the word has become in branding and marketing today. It’s not facts, programs, descriptions, or attributes. He says, “It’s a narrative—a once-upon-a-time narrative. It’s involving, it’s authentic, it’s intriguing, and it has some sort of a ‘wow’ factor. It really jumps out at you. It’s something you want to share with others because it’s so entertaining, so informative, so relevant. And it has a strategic message.”

Throughout the conversation, David gives several examples of great signature stories, including UCHealth—specifically, Becky’s story.

 

David’s has four high-level pieces of advice for creating signature stories:

1. Believe in the power of stories. “You just have to get religion.”
2. Find strong stories. Not just any story will do.
3. Figure out a way to get the stories produced so they’re effective. Good presentation is key.
4. Figure out a way to distribute the stories effectively.

As to why stories are important for brands, David says, “Stories are just unbelievably powerful. It’s astounding … It turns out that stories get attention. It turns out that stories persuade—they change perceptions. … They avoid counterargument.” And the emotions from stories are transferred to the brand telling them. This is known as “affect transfer.”

 

Wrapping up

In a handful of wrap-up questions, David shared his appreciation for Dove soap and their Real Beauty campaign and two “elephant books” (Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff and Who Says an Elephant Can’t Dance by Lou Gerstner.

David’s advice for junior people looking to get into the branding industry is to take advantage of the fact consultancies and client organizations are “just absolutely terrified about becoming relevant in the digital age.” If you’re young, he says, take advantage of the fact you understand social media, statistics, or data analysis, and use that knowledge as a way to open the door.

 

To learn more about David, visit davidaaker.com. That URL will redirect you to his blog on the Prophet website, where you can also read about his latest books and find links to buy them. You can also follow David on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.

Below, you’ll find the full transcript of the episode (may contain typos and/or transcription errors).

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ROB: David Aaker, thank you so much for joining me.

DAVID: Glad to be here.

R: Let’s talk about one of your most recent books Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success. For those who haven’t read it, Aaker on Branding, it seems like it’s a summary of the most useful branding concepts out there, including the ones that you’ve introduced throughout your eight previous books. But what motivated you to write that book and why was this the right time to write that book?

D: Well I’ve written about eight books that are around branding or related to branding, 2,300 pages and just for the people I’m connected with, they would ask me, “What book should I read?” and I would say, “Well read these 40 pages in this book, and read these 80 pages in this book.” It was kind of brutal. So I needed to have a place to go for people that ask me, I’m not going to read eight books, what should I read?

So I wrote a book to sort of capsulize the main ideas that were in each of those books. So it’s sort of 180 pages kind of Reader’s Digest version and it was really kind of nice for me too to figure out what really was important and how do you package that, there’s 8,000 ideas and examples and so on and it’s positioning the 20 principles. Within those 20 principles, there’s sort of five major headings. So you can really access my material a lot better.

R: I know one of the kinds of big concepts that you’ve introduced to the world of branding is the brand vision model. I do want to spend a little time talking about that but maybe before we do that, you mentioned that there are several other concepts that you’ve introduced and that are covered in this book. So I’d love it if you could just go through those four big ideas and give us a little bit of a sense of what those are.

D: Well one was sort of buried in a 450-page book called Brand Relevance—and I’m gonna redo that book and make it sharper and bring in some more digital experiences in the next couple of years—but the idea is that we need to move from brand competition to subcategory competition if you want to grow. If you look at category after category, you see spurts of growth. they’re always caused almost always caused by somebody that’s invented some kind of a must-have changes what people buy, created a new subcategory and then managed that subcategory to grow and so you have things like the Prius, and the minivan that Chrysler came out with. Both of which lasted 16 years with no competition, no competition. Chrysler made 12 million vehicles with no competition until finally, Honda and Toyota came out with a competitor.

That’s the way to grow. My brand versus, is better than, your brand competition is not only not fun but it almost never results in real growth. So that makes a change in business strategy. You have to put a little bigger bet and big innovations instead of marginal innovations and we have to recognize opportunities when they emerge because they don’t emerge every day.

R: And is creating a new subcategory, how much of that is really about innovation versus being able to tell a good story about claiming that this is a new subcategory even if maybe the innovation isn’t quite there. Is it just striking a balance between those two things?

D: Well in most cases, it’s not sort of technological innovation where something new came along. Even if the technology is seen—if you look at all of Apple’s, Apple’s done it seven or eight times but if you look at each of those innovations, they really packaged emerging technology. They didn’t invent anything. That was to the iPod, it was to the iPad, it was too with the iPhone and so on. They just packaged emerging and they were on top of technology and they packaged emerging innovation. Uber and Airbnb, they didn’t really have to invent much, I mean they had some software challenges but they basically were able to marshal what was available to address an opportunity.

R: Let’s get back to those big concepts that you’ve introduced. So I think we’ve got the brand vision model now and the idea of competing as a subcategory instead of on the brand level.

D: Well one is the whole idea of portfolio strategy and the idea that a brand is not an isolate on an island. It’s within a family of brands. You have to make those family work so they generate synergy and they generate clarity and they generate relevance. It’s a big challenge and the problem with portfolio strategy is it’s very messy. It’s really tied to the business strategy which is often ill-defined or dynamic. It’s very difficult as opposed to some of the other challenges we face in branding.

Therefore, what we have to do is to bring half a dozen or a dozen tools and concepts to the party and use them when it’s applicable to solve a particular problem. Like one typical portfolio problem is how do you brand a new product. Do you use an existing master brand, or do you use a sub brand, or do you use an endorsed brand, or do you use a new brand? We have some theories along those lines to help you but there’s no rules of thumb.

R: Yeah, that’s one of those challenges that when brands do it right, it seems like it was an obvious choice but when you’re actually on the inside trying to make that decision, all of a sudden it feels like any of those options could make sense and it’s really hard to figure out what’s best.

D: Yeah and there’s one more thing I threw out and that is the idea that the customers basically aren’t interested in your firm, they’re not interested in your brand, they’re not interested in your product attributes, tragic though that is. What they are interested in is what they’re interested in. what you need to do these days is two things. One is you need to develop some kind of a shared interests program where you get involved in what they’re interested in.

Then you become a partner, an active partner. Like Sephora, it was what they call Beauty Talk and they now call it Sephora Insider where they have a community of people that are interested in beauty and they get over a million people participating each month in that. And the second thing you need to do is you need to tell stories instead of presenting facts, product attributes, or program descriptions. You have to tell stories narratives. So that’s something that I think fundamentally is it needs to be understood by people trying to communicate in this digital age.

R: And that I assume is why you’ve written your most recent book, Creating Signature Stories which I definitely want to ask you some questions about as well.

D: Yeah, for sure.

R: So since this season of this podcast is really all about brand positioning. I’d love to focus for a little bit on that brand vision model and of the 20 principles in the Aaker on Branding book about seven of them or I think exactly seven of them are really related to what you called brand of vision. So the first question is really around terminology, what is a brand vision and how is it different from some of these other terms that are floating out there like brand position, brand promise, brand purpose and so on.

D: I called it the brand identity model initially and I did that because I just wanted to communicate the fact that it’s such a fundamental concept to a brand. But there’s some problems with identity so I changed that in the last book to brand vision. A lot of people as we discussed offline. A lot of the people call it brand positioning. In fact, the company with profit calls it brand positioning because that’s what people are used to and that’s what they’re familiar with.

So there’s a lot of things you can call it. Some people talk about brand values and they kind of mean the same thing. so actually, the terminology is not so important what is important I think is the fundamental ideas and for me, the reason I started branding in the late 80s and wrote my first book, Managing Brand Equity, which tried to define what brand equity was. In that book, I talk about the dimensions of brand equity and then in the next book, Building Strong Brands, develop the brand identity model.

I had three or four premises that I begin with. I was just so convinced that the agency model or an event was wrong and that was you develop a three-word phrase, a single thought, a single concept and then you develop a campaign around it. I thought brands—or certainly B2B brands, but in any brand—has got multiple dimensions. It’s not just a three-word phrase. So that was a fundamental idea of mine. You have to allow a brand to stand for more than one thing, maybe six or 12 things.

R: Right, and when you say agencies were using this sort of three-word phrase at the time, were those mostly advertising agencies? Was this before the era of the modern brand consultancy for the most part?

D: Yes, it was advertising agencies. They were running things in those days. The second thing I really dislike was the fill-in-the-box model. I’ve been an advisor for one of the major global agencies and they had this fill in the box model, it just drove me crazy. They would have eight boxes and you had to fill each one. Of course, it was really designed around B2C things that was most of their clients and if you were a B2B business, there was no box organizational values. You didn’t have it and there was a box of brand personality.

So even though that wasn’t relevant to your brand it had no place in the brand vision, you had to fill in the box, it was a borderline tragic. Anyway, those really were the two things. In my first version of the brand identity model, I didn’t even have a brand essence because I was so attuned to the fact I didn’t want a three-word phrase to appear anywhere. I later added a brand essence because it turns out for a large percentage of the cases, that’s helpful. It’s not always helpful but in large percentage of the cases, it is. So I added that.

The idea is you decide, you sit down and say, what I want my brand to stand for in customer’s minds. Then you make a list and then you consolidate that list. But you don’t have any limit. It can be three, it can be six, it can be nine, it can be 12 and so on. After you’re done, you prioritize those. you pick out three, four, or five that are the most important and then at the core and then you pick out the rest are extended identity which plays a really useful role because they provide extra texture and guidance for something that’s not front and center.

A lot of the table stakes attributes of your brand are there because they’re not going to differentiate but they need to be there. Now you have a home form and sometimes they can graduate from extending the core. One of the best examples of brand strategy is that of the Berkeley Haas business school that I’ve been involved with. They have these four what they call defining principles as opposed to brand vision or values or anything, they call them defining principles.

But one of them is confidence without attitude. I mean half the student body are there because of that principle. They’re so attracted to it because every other major business school in the company is just filled with students that have a bit of arrogance. They got in and then they don’t have to do anything else. In Berkeley Haas is not like that. The interesting thing is that was an extended identity element for three or four years before they graduated into the core. If we didn’t have an extended identity, we’d probably never would have surfaced.

R: And do you think it graduated the way it did because the school realized how important it was or was there a fundamental change to either the school or the student body?

D: No, I think they just realized how differentiating and important it was. In retrospect, it’s obvious. I mean confidence without attitude just pulls out at you. It’s the perennial reality and the big problem of all the major name business schools and it’s just not there in Berkeley. Their admission process tries to weed out people that have attitudes.

R: Let’s get into the weeds a little bit if you don’t mind on the brand vision model. You introduced it like you said as the brand identity model, you’ve changed the name of it. It’s also known, I guess you probably don’t call it this, but a lot of people just refer to it as “the Aaker model.” And you introduced it in 1996. You talked a little bit about the situation at that time and why you felt it was important to create this model. But I really want to understand the brand vision elements that we’ve been talking about.

How do you know when you have something that is going to work well as one of these brand vision elements? Are there any rules of thumb, or tests that you can do, stress tests, even mental exercises to say, “Yeah, that’s really going to serve us well” or “That’s kind of a throw away that we shouldn’t even bother to include.”

D: Yeah, there’s sort of three things you’re looking for. One is that, you want it to differentiate from other brands. Second of all, you want it to resonate with customers and you also want it to be something you can deliver. What you’re looking for there is what I call the strategic imperatives or proof points. So it either has to be something you already can deliver and people will accept that you can deliver it, a proof point or it has to be something it’s aspirational but you’ve got a strategic imperative. That means you’ve got a commitment to do it and you’re going to create programs and so forth to do it. If it’s not real, it will become real.

R: Is it true that not all of the vision elements need to check all three of those boxes? Is it okay for some of them to be less differentiating and it’s more about the complete picture? You ensure that with all of them in place, you have something that’s differentiating?

D: Yeah, I think that’s certainly true. There’s sort of no finding it hard rule, it’s kind of a judgment case. Usually what will happen is, if you have three or four different elements for one audience, you might emphasize one, for another audience it might emphasize another. Also, you might spin one a little different for one audience than you do with another. So it gives you the ability to be able to use this brand vision in different contexts.

R: In the book and elsewhere, I’ve seen you mention dimensions of brand vision elements. So a dimension might be personality or organizational values. Is there a list of potential dimensions that you could explore for any given client?

D: Yeah, I think there is in building strong brands and also in brand leadership and that’s where I modified the model to include brand essence. The lists are mainly sort of, why don’t you consider this, why don’t you consider that. It’s not a fill-in-the box model where you have to have one of those in there.

R: Right, it just ensures that you at least ask yourself the question of would this be useful for us?

D: That’s most helpful in brand personality and organizational values because they’re often by tests.

R: Other than the brand essence which you added in later, do those dimensions change over time? I mean just in your own experience, have you discovered any that you didn’t include in earlier books or do you feel that some are maybe less important now than they were when you first wrote those books?

D: No, I don’t think so. I do think that for a lot of reasons, the concept of a higher purpose is more important now than it has been in decades past. I think for a lot of reasons, you have to inspire your employees especially millennials, they don’t want to work for a company that just increase in sales and profits. You want to have a relationship with customers that go beyond functional benefits and you want visibility and energy. Sometimes the way to get that is by having a higher purpose. You’re just not going to get there with a bar soap or whatever you made.

R: Does that idea of the higher purpose dovetail at all with your Signature Stories? Did this idea that purpose was becoming increasingly important help motivate you to focus on signature stores?

D: Well, it is true that in many organizations, if you want to really create strong stories, it’s just not going to happen with your product. I mentioned bar soap. Unilever’s Lifebuoy brand developed a program in Asia called “Help A Child Reach Five” because two-million kids die that are under the age of five every year, mostly from waterborne illnesses that can be mitigated by having better handwashing.

So that handwashing program they introduced started out in some villages in India. they got some video describing those efforts and the results focusing on a mother in each case, they got 44 million views. Again, this is bar soap, 44 million views. So the lesson is, you need stories and you’re not going to get them from your bar soap attributes, but you are going to get them from this help a child reach five. Starbucks is all about inspiring and nurturing people of one cup, one city and one person at a time. It’s very ennobling higher purpose, it’s not about making great coffee.

They developed a program called the up standards where they found candid stories back in a couple years ago of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for positive good. They had some amazing stories. Of course they have a lot of control over the media but they got 80 million views from those stories. That really, a) supports a higher purpose and b) provides them with visibility energy and warm fuzzy feelings for the brand. That came from a higher purpose, it didn’t come from…

R: Coffee beans.

D: How do we communicate that the fact that we make great coffee.

R: Well, this is a great segue into your most recent book Creating Signature Stories. So first question on this is just, how do you define that term signature story?

D: Well my daughter taught storytelling at the Stanford graduate school of business for six or seven years and during that time, I got to learn about how powerful stories were and the challenge was, we tried to figure out what is not a story? Because if you say, what is your brand story? You’re going to get for bullet points of product attributes. Finally, we decided that a story is not facts, program descriptions, or attributes, it’s a narrative.

A once in upon a time narrative, it’s evolving, it’s authentic, it’s intriguing and it has some sort of a wow factor. It really jumps out at you, it’s something you want to share with others because it’s so entertaining, so informative, so relevant or something and it has a strategic message. So that’s what a signature story is and that kind of laid the foundation, the platform for the book.

R: Yeah, you mentioned this term brand story that’s floating out there. Again, another buzz word. It’s very popular right now but I’ve noticed also that people really use it to mean totally different things. If you ask about it sometimes you get what’s more of a brand positioning statement, sometimes you get in an ad that tells a great story but it’s really just an ad, it’s not so strategic. So it sounds like you are really trying to tease those things apart and that’s I suppose why you’ve come up with this new term signature story.

D: Yes. It was really motivated by my learning that stories are just unbelievably powerful. It’s astounding and there’s hundreds and hundreds of studies in the psychology, communication and marketing literature that proves that. Really good experimental studies and it turns out that stories get attention, it turns out that stories persuade. They change perceptions, they do that because they avoid counter arguing. I mean it’s a story, it’s an argument. It works because the audience learns for themselves the message. You’re not telling them the message.

It learns because there’s a lot of affect in stories. If people like the storyteller, they like the plot, they like the result, they like the hero and that gets transferred to the brand that’s associated with the story. It’s a common sense but it’s a well known psychological finding under the label affect transfer. And it can inspire and energize because the story can have emotion, you’re not going to get that by communicating facts.

R: So what’s one of your favorite examples of the brand’s signature story?

D: Well one of the best uses of signature stories that I’ve run across, and I’ve got a lot of them, but one is UCHealth. And I encourage anybody to go to their website that’s the University of Colorado regional health organization called UCHealth and if you go to the website, all you see is stories. They’re not talking about their facilities, their doctors, their anything else, they talk about patient stories.

One of them you can look for is Becky story. Becky was celebrating her 5th year anniversary in Breckenridge ski area. She got a heart attack at lunch and she was helicoptered to UCHealth and her heart was practically dead on arrival when she got there. they put her in the room in UC, her doctor come in the room and you see her asking the doctor, “Do we have a heart?” and he said, “Yes.” and then you see that the team of six people transplanting her heart. You’ll see her afterwards talking about how she’s going to go to the mother of the donor and allow her to hear the heart beating of her daughter and learn what is going to accomplish.

I mean you can’t watch these videos without crying and they have a hundred of these videos and they were named one of the top 10 healthcare facilities in the nation alongside Johns Hopkins and Cleveland Clinic and they’re just a regional healthcare thing in Colorado. It’s all about these patient stories. It’s really phenomenal.

R: So that’s a great example of a signature story that’s about the well let’s say the customer although in this case it’s a patient. Can a signature story be explicitly about the brand or about the customer or could it be maybe not so much about either but just kind of a story about something that the brand cares about?

D: Yeah, you could have a story like Caterpillar might have a huge earth moving equipment that took down a mountain or something like that, or you have a big ship that docked in some port and the story of that can be fascinating. You can have a founder story or take Haier which is now the largest appliance manufacturer in the world. In the mid 80s, they were a fading little company that was putting junk in China and this guy took it over. This middle manager took it over and the customer came in and said, “I got a defective appliance.” he says, “No problem. Go to our stock and pick out one.” and they went there and they found that 30% of them were defective and he put those on the factory floor and they got a sledgehammer and destroyed them all.

I mean that story to this day, everybody at Haier knows it and most of their dealers know it too. It sort of symbolizes their commitment to quality that they made at that day. It’s been one of the platforms that have led them to be this leading manufacturer.

R: I’m sure the book is chock full of tips for making sure that you’re writing a strong signature story. But do you have any that you can share just kind of quick tips to get people started if they’re thinking about writing their own signature stories for their brands?

D: Well I think that there’s four things that are going to happen if you want to have a program that works. One, you have to really believe in the power of stories. I mean you just have to get religion. You can do that by understanding the evidence but you can also do it by trying it out and see how powerful it is. The second of all, then you have to find strong stories. Just any story won’t do, it has to be a story that has that wow factor that pops out at you. And the third thing, you got to figure out a way to get them done so they’re really effective.I mean great presentation won’t help a bad story but a great story can be killed without good presentation.

So you need to got to have access to videographers or editors, people that can really put together a story. Now UCHealth, they have a staff that lives with a patient for three days. They really get to know them, become really intimate with them so when they tell the story, it really works. They always tell from the eyes and mouths of the patients themselves. The fourth is, you’ve got to have media expertise. You have to have a way to distribute the stories. Of course, social media needs to play a role but you need to distribute the story.

R: Why don’t we turn to a few wrap-up questions. You’ve talked about so many great brands today and all of the examples you’ve given but are there any brands out there that you just feel like they’re doing everything or almost everything right. From brand vision to signature stories and everything else that you would recommend whether it’s a big company or a small company or a product brand.

D: Well besides UCHealth, I think that I’m so impressed with Unilever and look at what they’ve done with not only Lifebuoy I mentioned that but Dove with the real beauty stuff. They’re just so passionate about having a higher purpose and doing things meaningful alongside their business. I think that’s really impressive.

R: A question that I like to ask authors given that you’ve been so prolific, are there any books other than your own that you recommend or that you’ve read recently and really taken something away from whether it’s a branding or business book or just something else that’s kind of informed you’re thinking about brands and business?

D: Yeah, well I really read books and love books and I wish more people did but anyway. There’s these two elephant books that really have affected me and my thinking over the years. One is a book by George Lakoff who was a professor at Berkeley. It’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. It’s just an amazing book because he really gets at the essence of branding and communication. It’s all about framing discussion and he talks about why that’s important and how you do it and how it works.

He uses a lot of example from the political sphere and how good the Republicans over a long period of time in framing the discussion. And once you have framed the discussion, you’re kind of screwed because if you talk about tax relief, if that’s the way it’s framed, who’s against tax relief?

R: This is like the pro-life versus pro-choice and all of the ways that semantic is going to be.

D: Exactly. Then you have these Democrats who have fallen to the trap of, they’re pro-abortion instead of pro-life. Anyways, it’s all about framing the discussion. That’s really what branding gets down to. If you can frame the discussion in a certain way that the key question is about cleaning your mouth or sanitizing your mouth or something. If you can frame the discussion that way, then that’s the way people will come to the decision and come to their use of experience as well. So I thought that’s really I think an important book.

Another elephant book is, Who Says an Elephant Can’t Dance? by Lou Gerstner, who told the story of him taking over IBM, who is basically a failing company that was going to be broken up in the early 90s and what he did and the problems he faced. There’s such a typical problem to silo from. I wrote a book called Spanning Silos. The way he took that on, the way he took the brand issue and how he found out from customer research what the brand should stand for and then he made it happen. And how he consolidated all the spirit run messaging that was going on. It really draws a force in it, it’s a delightful read and I go back to that a lot.

R: And just a coincidence that they’re both elephant-related I suppose.

D: Yes, they both have “elephant” in the title.

R: It makes it easier to remember, though. So final question for you, just given your success in your career as a brand thinker, what advice do you give to young people that are entering the world of brand marketing whether they’re on the strategy side or the design side or just interested in getting into the field.

D: Well, I think that companies today and not only client companies but consulting companies are just absolutely terrified about becoming relevant in the digital age. One of the advantages you have is some of the kids coming out of college or graduate school is that you’re young and you understand social media. So it wouldn’t hurt to go in as a social media specialist or as an analytical specialist if you happen to be good at statistics and so forth to be a data analyst. I mean, they’re just desperate for people that can do analytical work or even if they can interact with people that do analytical work even if they understand it. I think that those are two ways to open the door.

R: That’s great advice, David. Thank you so much for spending time with me.

D: My pleasure, thank you. This was very enjoyable.