Your Brand Needs Therapy

<p class="" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Graham North is a brand consultant who thinks the brand strategy process is in dire need of reinvention. He works at San Francisco agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, where he invented and leads a brand strategy called Brand Camp, which combines rigorous research, radical collaboration, and a touch of brand therapy to help leadership teams make hard tradeoffs to align on better brand strategies. For his role in building Brand Camp, he was named Campaign’s 2020 Strategic Planner of the Year. </p> <p class="">Graham is also Founder of The Weekend, a weekend-long brand accelerator consultancy.</p> <p class="">In this episode….</p> <p>Graham North says his title is itself a branding issue. He would know as he’s something of a brand consultancy expert. According to Jeff Goodby of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, “Graham is spearheading a new way of thinking and approach to clients’ problems. It is exactly what clients need in this time of crisis and rapid reinvention.”</p> <p>In a 2016 article titled How the Advertising Industry is Wasting Talent, Graham posits the following thought: “Listen more. Doggedly remove barriers in the creative process, and stop trying to swoop in with all the answers.” He remains firm on this point and restates in this interview that his number one piece of advice is to “listen like you’re wrong”.</p> <p>In this episode of What CEOs Talk About, host Martin Hunter and Graham North dive into what exactly makes (and breaks) a brand. They discuss what a brand is and is not, how to get to the core of what you actually do that defines your brand, why listening is a necessary part of identifying your brand, and some of Graham’s process in defining brands for clients.</p>