Uncovering Your “Why” | Brent Baldwin

.

Streaming here

“Why” can often feel like the word less traveled in marketing. Yet, it’s one of the most revealing questions to ask. Brent Baldwin, Founder of NYOO Agency, lives by the word “why,” curious to uncover the intent behind campaigns, messaging, and data-driven tactics. In this episode, Tom and Kyle chat with Brent to discuss his “why” philosophy, the reason leadership resiliency is often tied to “ego,” and strategies for brands to differentiate themselves in the market.

Learn more about our guest:

Brent Baldwin, Founder @ NYOO Agency

Transcript

Tom: Welcome to Commerce Chefs, a quirky and thought-provoking show for a future focused commerce leaders. We're going to pit the world's most brilliant, inspiring and driven DTC visionaries, the Commerce Chefs with riveting questions to uncover their secret ingredients at the intersection of passion, performance and leadership in practice. 

Kyle: For the past decade, we've led teams of designers, strategists and digital wizards at one of the leading eComm agencies in the country to help brave brands become enduring classics. 

Tom: And we're here to indefinitely borrow the strategies and tips that will make us all better leaders and make the brands we lead better, too. 

Kyle: Now that we're officially finished our first season, we've decided to spice things up a little bit over the summer for your listening enjoyment.

Tom: Every two weeks, we're releasing some of our favourite interviews from season one, but in long form so we can share even more delicious insights with you. 

Kyle: The secret good stuff that you didn't get to hear. So listen in. Grab a marg-ear-ita. 

Tom: No, no, that's awful. Awful sounding and probably tasting, too. 

Kyle: OK, OK. Grab a daiq-ear-i. Enjoy some easy, breezy listening by the poolside with your favorite podcast hosts and let us know what you think of the reviews section. 

Kyle: In this episode, we're sitting down with Brent Baldwin, genius marketer and founder of NYOO Agency who's worked with brands like Disney on Ice and the Harlem Globetrotters. You might remember him from episode two, The Failure in Resilience. 

Tom: We're going to learn some NYOO insights, about NYOO leaders in the NYOO age of the digital economy. 

Kyle: OK, OK, Tom, we get the pun.

Tom: Too much? I NYOO it. 

Kyle: Yeah. 

Kyle: Anyways, one of the many things we love about Brent is his generosity and genuine desire to see others succeed. I actually met Brent through a random LinkedIn post and he jumped on a call in the midst of a pandemic to encourage and brainstorm with other leaders. It was the epitome of the life lesson. You never know where a curious conversation will take you. 

Tom: In this interview, Brent reveals why he's obsessed with the word why. How leadership resiliency is centered around the ego and how resilient brands evolve to continually differentiate themselves. 

Kyle: Let's get right into it. 

Brent: My name is Brent Baldwin. I currently the founder and the chief strategy officer of NYOO Agency it's N.Y. O. O. Crazily, it's the phonetic spelling of the word new. 

Tom: I never knew that 

Brent: The puns are endless. I mean, I should be wishing you guys a happy New Year. It's currently in the month of January.

Brent: But yeah. See if we can keep the puns to maybe twenty or less or so in this conversation. 

Tom: No promises. 

Brent: No promises. Yup. 

Brent: But NYOO is it's relatively new to me as well. I've been doing this for about six or seven months now. Nothing like a global pandemic as a time to launch and start a business. But I got a little bit of a shove from the universe and pointed me in the direction that I'd been wanting to go any ways. At NYOO, we're really focused on helping brands discover there why. So I think in the world right now, so many people focus on who, what, where and when. But they forget the most important question, which is why and when you can really understand and discover your why. That's when you can really start to engage and connect with customers around your brand. I think that's why it's so important what we're talking about today, really building brand resiliency. 

Kyle: So, I want to dive in to resilience everything before we get there. Tell us a bit about kind of your the cred, the expertize you brand you worked with lots of great brands. You've had a really tenured career. Maybe just kind of give us a bit of that before we jump into it so people know what we're talking right now. 

Tom: The brain behind the brand. 

Brent: Yeah, I have been extremely fortunate to work with some amazing brands and to kind of get to steward and shepherd them in the right direction. Before starting NYOO, I rebrand marketing for the world famous Harlem Globetrotters. It's really exciting to kind of get to sink my teeth into a brand that was ninety four years old at the time and yet still had an opportunity to really grow and develop. A lot of what I did with the Globetrotters was really reposition the brand. They had been so focused on basketball and comedy antics and really the heart to the DNA of the Globetrotters is that family experience, that shared moment between parent and child. And the expression of that was basketball and through comedy. So we really just kind of reposition that brand. It was a lot of fun prior to that, I got to work with Disney on Ice. My very first show that I worked was frozen. So it was really it was the Disney movie show made for Ice. And it was also just kind of like a printing press for money. It was wonderful. It was a unique indoctrination to working with Disney, but it was also really challenging because Disney was that this kind of pivot point to use our term from twenty twenty, that we way over youth and had always been Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Goofy, what they called the Fab's, the Fab Four. And all of a sudden there's this Anna, there's this Elsa and Olaf that are equal power star to them. So much more than any of the characters, a princess or a Buzz and a Woody or any of them had ever been. And so we really worked and helped them kind of understand how we could turn the Disney portfolio into talking about all of the characters and inclusive of Frozen as opposed to just the traditional Fab Four. And as if I hadn't spent enough time working in the kid in family space, I actually cut my teeth working at Cartoon Network and Adult Swim kind of around the time that Cartoon Network was going through this resurgence with their originals. So Adventure Time actually launched on the day that I started at Cartoon Network, which has become kind of like this new cultural animated show, regular show followed shortly after that. I was there with Adult Swim when Rick and Morty launched. And so, you know, I was there as a Cartoon Network, was really thinking about their brand as well. TV everywhere came on board. Hulu came on, Netflix started streaming. And as an organization, we all had to think like, OK, so traditional sitting down with the remote and watching linear TV is dead. How do we, as a brand and his organization, kind of choose to pivot once again? And for Cartoon Network, a lot of that was on gaming. So there was a big emphasis on when they built their app. It was about the dual screen of you can sit and watch an episode of Adventure Time and you can play a game on your iPad at the same time that's relating to what's going on with the episodes. So a lot of fun, a lot of exciting stuff there. My secret bit of my history is that I actually was a trained focus script moderator for about five years as well, traveling all over the country and all over the world, living out of a suitcase, I think that's why I fell in love with the question, why did you get to sit in the room? You've got eight, 10, 12 people sitting around a table and you ask a question and somebody answers that and you go, no, no, no, no. But why? And then you have to have that comfort level with silence and kind of just being able to sit there and go, OK, I know they need to process for a couple of minutes, but I have to be comfortable with the silence and letting them do that processing and not trying to feed answers to them all the time. And so that inquisitive side of me is what I think really comes through with some of the brand marketing work that I do now. 

Kyle: Oh, man. So many launches we could take from that. Launches, launches, launches, launch. There it is. Both we could take launches and launches. This is actually the genesis of this topic about brand resilience started back in the conversation that you and I had at the beginning of the pandemic over a Zoom call. And it was about understanding your why and understanding how does that stay relevant in a big change is happening. And so I just I want to start there. I think, like when we started talking about the outline of this episode and what we want to cover, it came back this I had this amazing conversation with this guy named Brent. And we are on the Zoom call and we were just talking about what's happening the world. So let's start there, kind of the point that has always stuck with me is we were talking about right in the heat of the pandemic, brands needed to question, not there, why they need to have their why study, but question how it kind of came to life every week. And one thing I thought was so interesting and so inspiring, it's like not left me since that conversation like eight months ago is I don't know if these are the exact words, but you said something to the sense of like, I hope we don't forget that when the pandemic is done. I hope brands don't forget that every week they still need to wake up and go, why am I relevant? Let's let's start there. Is that I do your words good on that or what? Do you remember that conversation? 

Brent: I do. I do. You know, it's interesting that one, when we were kind of talking about doing this conversation, I was thinking back to that conversation and I thought that conversation is the example of why I do everything and is the example of why you and I are still talking, why I've met Tom and why I still know that we work together on projects now, you know? Like I need help, I reached out to you guys because I understand your why. I understand like the heart of your company and, you know, it sets you apart kind of in the space of like when there's just clouted like, you're not a vendor to me. It's like we have a relationship and we work together on things. And so it's funny that like that that conversation has kind of crafted this relationship that has lasted nine months and has brought us back to this conversation. And, you know, candidly, I would say I feel like that was a really, really great advice I gave about nine months ago. I don't know that I've taken it myself every day as I've sat through it. You know, I mean, as I think about what's happened in my in my lifetime since then, we had that conversation shortly after I went on furlough from the job that I was at. I thought it was going to be short term. And so I did. I said, OK, what's my why? What needs to happen today? How do I kind of like think about what I need to do today? And so that became investing time with my family. You know, it was like, OK, let me let's put together, like, the list of all the things we wanted to do that we never felt like we had time because dad was always away or always at work. What's that honey do list that needed to be? I called it my furlough fix up list and still sitting on my frigging is still maybe 50 percent done, you know. But, you know, I think there are a lot of companies that have done that, that have constantly thought, OK, we thought this was going to be three months and we could just kind of ride it out and it didn't happen. And now we're at six months and nine months and there's a vaccine that's out. Who knows how long it's going to take for it to roll out and everybody be excited about taking it. And there's a lot of brands that I think, unfortunately, are kind of getting some flack for making the wrong decisions. But I feel like we should be applauding them for at least trying. It's interesting, when I was thinking about what brands feel like they've been resilient, which ones have really got up every morning and said, like, what do we need to do to execute this? And one that kind of came to my mind was like Marriott Hotels. I mean, the entire hotel industry has been just decimated. And they're doing things that we would have never thought they would ever do. I mean, as a brand, you have your never list. It's like I'm never going to do this. Why wouldn't Marriott ever say, come rent our hotel for a couple of hours? Like, that's that's not what Marriott is. That's where the sleazy motel down the street place. Or why would Marriott say, hey, don't sleep in our beds, but sit at our desk and work for eight hours when you need to get out of the house? I mean, it's interesting, you know, their DNA as a brand were there for people when they need us, whether it's a place to sleep, when they're out of town, whether their AC goes out and it's it's way too hot at night, like they just decided to say our DNA is still what our DNA is, but our offering and our product is going to change and shift based on this unique environment that we're in. And I remember when I started seeing some of the press and the publicity, I was actually a little bit critical of them because I'm like, who has ever said the chair and the desk at a Marriott? Yeah. Isn't that, like, the absolute worst thing when you're like, Oh, man, I really need to sit down and focus for a couple hours. I'm out of town. I got to sit at my desk in my hotel room and I was pretty harsh on them. But at the same time, like, it was pretty smart. They were sitting there thinking, OK, let's leave no stone unturned, no rock, you know, and let's try to figure out what we can do to create an offering that customers actually need that is unique in this situation. 

Tom: You mentioned this this term of DNA, so I think as as business leaders, as brands, if you were to put a list of 10 adjectives to describe what makes a, you know, a great brand, a magical brand, people would have resilience as as one of those because you just you know you know, you have to say that. But why is it important? Why is resilience important? Why is it a word? Or a philosophy or an approach that brands believe to be important. First of all, why do you think that's the case and then I've got to follow up on that one. 

Brent: Because I think by their very nature, brands are not designed to be resilient. When you hear Bill Gates talk about the Gates Foundation and the things that they want to cure and the things that they want, they want to do with their with their funding and their philanthropy, they have a focus of up to 20 years after their death because they believe they've been specifically gifted to solve the problems or help solve the problems of the world at this time. And people in the future are going to be gifted to help try to solve the problems of the future. I think that exact same principle applies to brands, applies to organizations. I mean, there is a reason that in the 40s and the 50s, the department store was the model that we needed at that time and became the example of retail. There is a reason now that traditional brick and mortar is faltering and we're all going to Amazon and every other delivery service that is possible because the brand has decided what our need is and how they can best fit that current need. So just by hard wiring, brands are not meant to be resilient. They're meant to be kind of flighty. They're meant to come in, fill a specific need, help us out for a short period of time and give way to the next brand that's going to come around. So that's why when you think about it, if you want to have longevity, you have to be resilient. 

Tom: That's a challenging thing to hear and I think for our listeners to to kind of come at this knowing that brands aren't designed for longevity, they're not designed to last. And we and we see this, you know, Fortune 500 companies, the lifespan of those companies is coming down every year by the decade almost. And that's a wake up call. But I think it's also a good challenge. So to loop back to the DNA, anything that you'd mentioned. So if we know resilience is important, if we know that brands and our businesses aren't designed to accommodate it, what does the DNA of resilience in a brand really mean? What does that look like? And how do we think how do you think we can get that? 

Brent: If you think about DNA is how we are made, it's how we're hardwired. It's the one thing that we don't have control over. So if we go back to some of those same examples and we take a retail again, I mean, the DNA of a company like Amazon was they wanted to shake up and to unsettle the read, the traditional retail experience and the brands that have been resilient. I mean, think about Coca-Cola, one hundred plus years old. I mean, their DNA is to provide refreshment and it gets executed by a whole bunch of different brands, by a whole bunch of different products under that portfolio. But they all have to relate to that idea of of refreshment in some sense or another. And so I don't know that DNA of your brand and resiliency maybe go as hand-in-hand as we would like for them to. I think maybe your DNA is something that's incredibly hard wired. 

Tom: So speaking of Coke, we'll use your example, Brent. I know you're a big believer in, as are we, that people buy brands, not products. So if Coke's DNA is to provide refreshment, their products are the things. They're the tactical, you know, consumable that allows them to help pursue that. So from buying the brand and maybe resilience is part of that, that DNA, maybe it's not. Maybe it's something that that they're striving and it's a goal to incorporate into their approach tactically. When a brand has it, when they've got that, when their approach is we're going to roll with punches, when we get knocked down, we're going to get back up like that really famous Chumbawamba song, I think, you know, people don't play it enough. It's a great message. 

Kyle: I play it every morning. It's my wake up song. 

Tom: That's right. So what does resilience look like for the brands that wield it? And when from your experience, when can you see that it's just not there? And what does that look like when things go wrong? 

Brent: Resiliency, I don't think means that you get it right every time and that you have all the answers. I think resiliency ties back to that conversation that Kyle and I had. We just you have to be open. You have to be adaptive. You have to be both inward and outward reflective, and you have to go back to whatever your brand standards are and constantly evaluate them. Going back to that idea of nevers, Coke would never do this, but did something happen? And has the world changed enough that they need to evaluate? Is that still on their never list? Probably the most famous example of Coke is New Coke in the eighties, where they just absolutely got it horribly train wreck like 2020 level bad. Yeah, exactly. But what's so funny is in recent years, stranger things, you know, they brought New Coke back and they made fun of themselves and their failures. And they they short term relaunched the brand and used it as a stunt. And basically, I mean, you know, a previous CMOs that was probably on their never list, like they've got a giant poster with an X through it. That's like he should not be named. That's right. Like, never, ever, ever speak of New Coke unless you want to go collect your things. But I mean, like, how brilliant was the team to be to be confident enough in their brand and to say that's what resiliency looks like for us. You know, we're going to say like, let's be open, let's be receptive to some of these things and let's kind of challenge the norms and the nevers that we thought we would never put forward. 

Kyle: Yeah, there's this level of I just encourage it always comes back to courage for me if you have a conversation with me. So but it really is like it's a courage that to look at that never list to try things that maybe fail before or just to try things again when they have failed last week and just this continual ability to get up, try again, be OK with failure. Do you see that in a lot of like when you look at brands that are short term resilient or I know brands like you're saying from a DNA perspective over 50 hundred years, like they're not designed to last a millennia, but in a short term, do you see that kind of ability to just continue to keep at it and the courage to try again and to look at failure in a different perspective than brands that aren't resilient is something that you see? 

Brent: Yeah, I mean, think about Toys R US. I mean, talk talk about one of the most epic traditional brick and mortar retail failures where over the span of about a year they were like, we're going to close a few stores. We're going to kind of tighten the belt a little bit to complete and total bankruptcy. And like I think they were selling Geoffrey the Giraffe from the headquarters just to pay off some of their last debts. But, you know, they've come back as a resilient brand. I mean, they've partnered and said, OK, if our core DNA is toys and fun and the magic of a child receiving a toy and that experience of playing with it, that doesn't have to mean that we're a store where everybody comes. And so you see things like the Toys R US pop up shops inside of Target and partnering with somebody that's getting the executional side a little bit better. They put together actually an experience. They partnered with some toy brands where there was the Toys R US experience that was traveling the country and kids have got to go and they got to play and kind of the Melissa and Doug world and have fun. And so they really thought about what's our core brand DNA, that delight of a child when they get to play with the toy and how can we execute it in new in different ways? How can we be resilient? And instead of being so focused on this is what Toys R US is going to be for forever, let's experience it or let's introduce it as a as a new and different experience. 

Kyle: But why don't we shift over into putting this into action? What are some of your thoughts on? Like if we know that being resilient is important? We talked about brands that got it right, brands that didn't. How do they stay resilient? What does that look like? What can leaders do to kind of help their teams move in a way that acts resilient? 

Brent: Yeah, I think probably the most the most practical thing that everybody, every brand can do right now is take your 40 page strategy deck and consolidate it down to one page and print it out and plaster it on every team members desk, send it to them at home and frame whatever you need to do. And then look at it every morning and maybe every morning is a little bit of an exaggeration. But the idea and I was guilty of this for so long in my career, once a year, you would build the brand strategy and you'd build out your 18 month calendar of what are your typical executions and then what are our tactics and what's going to be our message from time to time. And that just doesn't exist anymore. So how do you make your strategy document be a little bit more of a living and breathing thing, something that doesn't feel like it's cemented and in place for 18 months at a time right now? And that's really challenging for some major organizations. I mean, think about traditional CPGs like Kellogg's. Everything's done on an 18 month timeline. I mean, think about manufacturing. There's the development cycle, the production cycle, getting your slotting and your spacing in retail. I mean, everything is done on these huge timelines. And it's been really, really hard for a lot of these organizations to kind of shift that thinking and that mindset. But I think that's the biggest thing. And and maybe that's why I keep thinking about that conversation that we had so many months ago with, because it's it's actually a simple thing to do. I mean, to go look at it and go, OK, are we still all these things today? Like what has changed? You know, like when we're taping this, there was a pretty major election in the US yesterday in my home state.

Brent: So, you know, so so I wake up this morning and I read the news and I go, OK, so what's changed in my life today now that it feels like two weeks from now the US government's going to be significantly different. But I mean, what in the outward environment, but also in our internal organizational environment has changed. And all of these truths that we put on paper still truce. And how many of them do we need to go back and adjust and update. And I think it needs to come top down. I think the next group of great CMOs are right now probably at that director level and some really big brands. And they've got some amazing ideas right now. They're the ones that are solving this resiliency issue for these big brands. And part of it is they don't have a lot to lose. You know, it's kind of OK if they come out with this far fetched, crazy idea. But if they don't have support from the top down, from the CMO level down, then it's going to be really hard for them to feel like they can go and bring that forward. 

Tom: Yeah, well, and let's talk about these people for a minute. Like, we've we've really been focusing on the brands, the entity itself. But as we all know, there are individuals and teams at the center in the heart of all of those. So as important as it is for that DNA, for this attitude or approach of resilience to be part of a company at the brand level, I think a lot of the examples that we're seeing of of failures in this area likely come down to the leadership decisions of individuals. And and so we've talked about courage, Kyle always talks about courage. This will be a theme in every conversation and podcast that we have, every episode. But how have you seen ego play into the failures or just the pace that brands have been seeing through even even through recent months. And do you feel that there is still importance in at an individual level to drive change and resilience, even though you might feel like a small piece of a really big brand? 

Brent: I think ego is probably the biggest thing that is holding a lot of these big brands back from success, and there's been significant turnover at a lot of these brands over the past 12 months or so. And a lot of it has been getting traditional marketers out of that CMO role and bringing more digital savvy marketers and people that have a little bit more of a background in strategy or even people that maybe came up through the ranks of creative and are more of kind of a creative person as opposed to a traditional marketer. And you can see those organizations are succeeding and are kind of thriving. You don't have to look a lot further than like we work and kind of just like their tragic downfall with their founder and his massive ego and how he just thought that that entire company was his for the taking, for the profiting and everything. And it's sad because they're obviously hurting because of the pandemic. But I don't think they would have survived long term anyways just because of the horrible situation that he left them in, because of, again, ego and just being self centered. And so a lot of that new crop of leaders, it's because they demonstrated that characteristic of resiliency, of being open and being receptive. I kind of try to translate it when I'm working with people to transparency. I try to be extremely transparent when I'm working with my clients, everything from pricing to telling them the things that I am great at, telling them the things that I'm not so great at, talking them out of ideas that wouldn't be right for them. And I think this new crop of marketing leaders and brand leaders, they they kind of share that. They understand their strengths, they understand their weaknesses, and they've built and are building teams around them that kind of complement and support that. 

Kyle: It's like a personal resiliency, like a leadership resiliency around ego. Like when you talk about simplifying a 40 page strategy into one page put on your wall, you're like asking the team to act with agility, to come with ideas. And there's this like leadership resiliency is what I'm hearing. Tell me from if I'm on the right page saying, like, I'm OK, if my idea is in the best, I'm OK. If leadership is about unlocking 40, 50 people around me. Not just me presenting some master beautiful mind plan that everybody executes. And that is like a personal resiliency, I think, that you're touching on that is maybe overlooked in great leadership and brands. 

Brent: And it’s humility. It's really hard to have humility, to be humble in those moments because your your path to climb up that up that ladder has been based on being right so many times or potentially your team being right. But you're the one that kind of reaps the benefits and the rewards of being right. And you're right. This new crop of leaders, they show humility. They're transparent. The old saying and the only idea I like better than mine is is a better idea. I mean, it's so true. It rings with these people. But it's also, you know, I feel like it's a little bit humbling and it's a little bit also you have to have that ego in a good way. You have to have that self-confidence in a good way that I'm very confident in my abilities, what I bring to the table, that I'm OK surrounding myself with people that are smarter than me in certain areas. And because we have this two way street of trust and because I know that when they succeed, I succeed and I want them to grow when they want me to grow. It's understanding where your ego and what your intentions of your ego actually lie. Are they pure and are they true or are they just purely selfish? 

Tom: Yeah, I love that. I mean, we're really big believers. And I, I'm sensing that this is starting to come out of this conversation where at least I would have enough ego to say I feel like the brands that are most resilient are the ones that build their team or their leadership in particular with resilient, humble, open, creative people, the ones that are looking to the right goal, the right end in mind, the right way and holding that close and that that these big moves, these big successes and big failures are predicated a lot on the makeup in the composition of the smaller parts being the people making the decisions that are ultimately going to drive the outcomes. 

Brent: I absolutely agree. And great leaders, they're magnetic. They're easy to follow. I mean. You know, I've followed some great leaders down the wrong path that we knew was the wrong path because I trusted them and I believed in them and along the way we discovered it was wrong. I've also been very hesitant to follow some poor leaders down what I knew was the right path because I knew we were going to butt heads and we were going to argue and fight the whole time. And even though there was ultimately success with that plan, I just knew that that was not somebody that I could follow and somebody that would be a good leader for me to to work with. 

Tom: I think so then if we were going to look to pull all of these pieces together, we know that resilience is important. We know that it may or may not be part of the DNA of a brand and that brands are made up of a collective of individuals. So how can we put the call out to those individuals, those leaders that are listening to step up, to hold resilience as something that is a test of a lot of different measures within their leadership wheelhouse? And how can we look to reinvent every day, every week, every month and try to still strive for that end goal and that that purpose that we're that we're working for? 

Brent: I think the simple call to these leaders is be better, and I think that if you get up every morning and you think, how can I be better, how can the work be better? How can my brand be better? How can I be better about providing value for somebody? Then you will go down that right path. And I think it's very simple. It's something easy for us to think about. In some days we're going to knock it out of the park and some days we're going to struggle mightily and we're going to go in the wrong direction. But I think it's OK as long as every morning we're getting up and our mindset is focused on that and on being better. And a lot of that comes through just continued reflection. And I think this is a theme that we've heard a lot, too, is it's just you have to be reflective on everything on yourself, inside your organization, outside your organization, reflective on what your brand looks and feels like today compared to yesterday, because the pandemic has taught us so many things. But one of them is that every day something is going to change and we have to wake up every morning and be reflective on what that is. And I think that extends beyond just the work we do as brands. I think it expands into the work that we do as humans and we do as people. And so every morning, how can I get up and how can I be better? What can I do in my neighborhood and my community, the people around me, the circles that I run, the people that I call family, whether they're real or kind of just adopted through the neighborhood. I mean, I live in the back of a neighborhood on a little culdesac, and there's like five of us families that have just really bonded together through this. Some of them have kids, some of them have become adoptive grandparent. Some of them are the cookie, and uncle with too many cats and dogs and birds. And, you know, and like it's it's what's become our family in this. And every morning we get up and we support each other, just like I think all the brand leaders, the great brand leaders are doing out there. They're getting up every morning and they're saying, how can I support my community, the people that look to my brand for hope and for inspiration and to fill whatever that need is each day, whether it's just having a bowl of cereal in the morning, whether it's kicking back and watching Netflix at night or enjoying a Coke in the middle of the day, whatever, whatever it is. And you know, what's interesting to me is that this actually should be the easiest time for us to do this. When it's probably going to be hard is when things return to some sort of a normalcy, because we'll feel like we can just go back to the way things were. We can feel like things aren't going to change every day or every week. And so it's going to be really easy to go back to a lot of those old habits. And hopefully this new crop of leaders is going to take this concept of resiliency to heart, and it's going to become part of their DNA as a leader. And they're going to supplant it to the DNA of their brand. And they're going to say, man, this worked so well for us when things were hard. Let's keep doing it when things hopefully are a little bit easier. 

Tom: That was perfect. I have I have nothing to to add to that. 

Kyle: I say those are perfect closing thoughts. The only thing I want to add is I think we could call them NYOO leaders. It's obviously spelled N.Y.O.O.

Brent: Way below the 20 puns that that I promised. 

Kyle: I know you promised.

Tom: I did bite my lip a number of times, but and I also didn't I didn't interrupt when you were talking about Disney on Ice and some idea of like skating through or slam dunks, you know, with with the approach with the Globetrotters. So I think overall we did we did pretty well, too. 

Brent: We did pretty good.

Tom:  Pun free. 

Brent: Yeah, we did pretty good. 

Kyle: Before you go for my own, for my own pleasure, but maybe for the show. What's on your bookshelf right now? 

Brent: Oh, man, I can't get to my bookshelf right now. 

Kyle: What's on your virtual bookshelf? 

Brent: I know I'll tell you, I actually, let me see if I can find it. I picked up a new like planner type thing that's focused on setting goals on a daily, weekly monthly planner. It's called the full focus planner. And so it's not on my bookshelf, but it's how I'm trying to kind of tackle the the new year. It's by a guy, Michael Hyatt, put it together, who writes a lot of like self-help books and things like that. I'm reading Soonish, which is a book about like disruptive technology. And so all these things that we thought or 50 years down the line are actually probably only about 10 years down the line. And how some of this technology going to disrupt thinking. So the book's probably about two years old. So A.I. is probably a chapter that I haven't gotten to. It's already come to fruition and things like that. And then for me, it's also been a lot more about like reading articles that get posted on medium and finding them through LinkedIn. And I love that snackable content stuff that I can sit and read, you know, in two to three minutes. That really addresses a specific topic. Right now, I'm spending a lot of time and energy on like changing set behaviors. So some of my clients are kind of entrenched and really established and mature markets. For example, you know, this also company, they're in a very mature condiment market and nobody really knows that there's this whole category of refrigerated salsas. So it's not only just pushing them to that brand, it's pushing them to this whole kind of tangential market within the market. So I'm researching and reading a lot about like change behavior. And how do you get people to stop doing something that they've done every single day for, like their entire life? And it's a lot harder than like twenty eight days makes it habits. Oh, yeah. So if you guys have ideas or thoughts or you you want to help you solve that Pythagorean theorem over there for me send on my way. So I would appreciate it. 

Kyle: I was just going to say, once you crack the code, maybe send it to us. I think we need a little brain trust next time. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. Brent, thank you so much for for this chat. 

Brent: Of course. 

Tom: So for Brent, brands understand their why and bake it into their DNA is what sets them apart from everything else out there. 

Kyle: And as leaders, understanding your why creates resiliency. 

Tom: The next generation of CEOs and CMOs get this and they're focused on bringing teams together that complement the strengths and weaknesses. 

Kyle: Brent, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us and share your recipes for success with the commerce chefs community. 

Kyle: And that's it for today's episode, we hope you found it helpful and gained some new ideas to make the brands you lead even better. 

Tom: If you're looking for even more insights and recipes for success, make sure to follow us on social @CommerceChefs. 

Kyle: And remember to join the Commerce Chefs community launching this fall. 

Tom: Save your spot and join now at CommerceChefs.com/Community. 

Kyle: In the meantime, we're currently deciding which spicy interview, to share with you next. Make sure to tune back in on September 16th to find out who it is. 

Tom: And lastly, if you like this episode and you want to support us. You know, you want to. Make sure to hit the subscribe button and leave us a five star rating and review. Until next time. This has been a dash of Tom.

Kyle: And a pinch of Kyle and a scoop of Brent. 

Tom: We'll be cooking with you in two weeks.