We’re closing out 2025 with a highlight reel from Season 6 of JUST Branding.

This year we sat down with some serious heavy hitters, including Mark Ritson, Rory Sutherland, Marty Neumeier (round two), David Aaker (round two), Laura Ries, plus guests like Simon Dixon (DixonBaxi), Michael Bungay Stanier, Jay Clouse, and more.

In this best of episode, Jacob and Matt pull the sharpest clips, biggest lessons, and most repeated themes that matter if you’re building a brand that lasts.

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What you’ll hear in this episode

• Branding basics that still win: meaning, relevance, relationships
• Positioning that actually works (and why “positioning” isn’t the goal)
• Strategic enemies and the power of contrast
• Leadership and alignment (yes, including the uncomfortable honesty)
• Culture as brand, not a side project
• Customer truth and the discipline of saying “not everyone”
• Problem framing and why the first answer is rarely the best
• Brand fame vs hype and playing the long game
• Execution realities, including SEO getting tougher in an AI driven world
• Community vs audience, and what participation really costs

Featured clips in this highlight episode

• Branding earns its keep through meaning, relevance, relationships (Ep. 6.11, Simon Dixon)
• Positioning is not the end, it’s the start (Ep. 6.05, Mark Ritson)
• One page brand strategy thinking (Ep. 6.05, Mark Ritson)
• Strategic enemy creates value through contrast (Ep. 6.17, Laura Ries)
• Leadership endorsement is non negotiable (Ep. 6.01, Steve Noss)
• Brand alignment requires honesty (Ep. 6.03, Brandon Coleman Jr.)
• Culture is the brand, internally first (Ep. 6.15, David Aaker)
• Brands need a real relationship with culture (Ep. 6.08, Cyril Louis)
• Go wide on problem solving, don’t accept the first frame (Ep. 6.09, Rory Sutherland)
• Stay curious longer when coaching (Ep. 6.10, Michael Bungay Stanier)
• Not everyone is a customer (Ep. 6.11, Simon Dixon)
• Talk to your customers, find your core group (Ep. 6.02, Brandon Kim)
• Play drives innovation (Ep. 6.06, Melissa Dinwiddie)
• Hype vs fame, and why the long game wins (Ep. 6.19, Dan Cushing and Diego Borgo)
• Complexity happens for a reason, learn the client’s world (Ep. 6.18, James Greenfield)
• Influence matters (Ep. 6.02, Lida Citroën)
• Be careful entering politics and bandwagons (Ep. 6.04, Jeroen Reuven)
• SEO is harder with AI, so brand matters more (Ep. 6.14, Mordy Oberstein)
• ABM works when sales and marketing actually align (Ep. 6.07, Jennifer Mancusi)
• Audience is not community (Ep. 6.12, Jay Clouse)

Season 7 kicks off late January 2026. Until then, hit follow, share this episode with a brand builder mate, and if you’ve got 30 seconds, a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts helps the show reach more people.

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22 Key Highlights from Season 6:

Branding fundamentals that still win

• Branding is a long term investment. It’s about the future, not this quarter. (Branding in an Age of Autocracy with Marty Neumeier, Ep. 6.19)
• Positioning is not the finish line. It’s the start of being useful. (Branding is Dead & Other Marketing BS with Mark Ritson, Ep. 6.05)
• Branding earns its keep when it creates meaning, stays relevant, and builds relationships. (Inside DixonBaxi with Simon Dixon, Ep. 6.11)
• A strategic enemy is a shortcut to clarity because contrast creates value. (The Strategic Enemy with Laura Ries, Ep. 6.17)

Leadership, culture, and the hard conversations

• If leadership won’t back it, it’s not a brand strategy, it’s a mood board. (How to Go From Bland to Brand with Steve Noss, Ep. 6.01)
• Brand alignment needs honesty. Sometimes the baby is ugly. (Brand Alignment with Brandon Coleman Jr., Ep. 6.03)
• Culture is not separate from the brand. It is the brand, internally first. (What Smart Brands Do with David Aaker, Ep. 6.15)

Customers, community, and real demand

• Not everyone is a customer. Clarity comes from exclusion. (Inside DixonBaxi with Simon Dixon, Ep. 6.12)
• Talk to your customers and find a small group you can rely on. (From Kickstarter to Thriving Brand with Brandon Kim of Brevitē, Ep. 6.02)
• Audiences are not communities. If you want community, you have to earn participation. (Creator Branding with Jay Clouse, Ep. 6.23)

Execution that survives reality

• Complexity exists for a reason. Learn the client’s world before you simplify it. (Transforming Amazon with James Greenfield, Ep. 6.18)
• SEO got harder with AI. The answer is stronger brand demand, not more hacks. (Why Brands Shouldn’t Rely on Google with Mordy Oberstein, Ep. 6.14)
• ABM only works when marketing and sales stop acting like roommates who share a fridge but not a plan. (Smarter Brand Growth with Jennifer Mancusi, Ep. 6.07)

Creativity, influence, and better thinking

• Go wide on problem solving. Don’t take the first framing. (Problem Framing with Rory Sutherland, Ep. 6.09)
• Play is not fluff. It’s a serious innovation tool. (Unlocking Innovation with Melissa Dinwiddie, Ep. 6.06)
• Influence matters because trust travels through people. (Building Influence with Lida Citroën, Ep. 6.08)
• Stay curious longer, especially when coaching and mentoring. (Coaching for Brand Builders with Michael Bungay Stanier, Ep. 6.10)

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Well, hello, folks, and welcome to the best of episode of season six, right? Season six, Jacob, how on earth have we been doing this for six seasons?

We say this every year, another year, another year.

Another year. And well, this year has been particularly amazing, hasn’t it? We’ve had some phenomenal guests on the show. And so I guess we want to first of all start by a bit of gratitude, thanking all our amazing guests. You’re going to hear some clips from them coming up in this episode. Some of the phenomenal guests we’ve had are people like Rory Sutherland, we’ve had Mark Ritson, and a whole bunch of others. We’ve had our Marty Neumeier, David Aaker, Laura Ries. Just some phenomenal minds, haven’t we, Jacob, to come and share their thinking. So massive gratitude to them, but also a massive gratitude shout out to all of you, our lovely listeners. Thank you. We wouldn’t be able to do this, of course, without all of your kind of support and five star reviews and so on. So we want to thank everybody who’s given us a little plug this year. So thank you.

All right, Matt. How are we going to do this? How many clips we got?

I don’t know. I mean, there’s been so many great episodes, haven’t there? And we can’t obviously replay every single one of them in every every bit of depth. But I think perhaps we’ve got about 20, 22 little clips we could go through just to kind of give a bit of a synopsis of some of the big topics of this year. And I think we should probably start with some of the some of the broad things around brand and brand building. I mean, when we first started this podcast, Jacob, we really did it to shine a light on an emerging area called this mystical area called brand strategy, which I’d been dabbling in as a consultant and you were moving into. And I think that that sort of area is now fairly well established. We’ve got loads of books on it now. There’s a lot of thinking, a lot of training courses, communities around it. So it was interesting to see, to go a bit deeper this year on kind of bigger topics. But we did still have some broad introductory sort of discussions on brand and brand positioning, which were really helpful. So perhaps we could start there.

Let’s do it. All right. The first one we have is from Simon Dixon. And this is where we went behind the scenes of their amazing agency, DixonBaxi. And here he talks about the power of branding, which is the perfect way to start this Best Of episode. Let’s play now.

Identity is only as powerful as the meaning you fill it with. So logo is an empty vessel. So say, for example, you see an Apple logo on a car. What would you think that car is going to be like? Yeah, exactly. You haven’t driven it. You know, you don’t know how much it costs, but you assume it’s going to be good, don’t you? That’s the power of branding. So there is an idea in your mind that comes from everything that Apple has done through humanizing technology, creating e-scoot systems that work, design of a super high fidelity. It raises the bar. So you believe something as soon as you think about that brand. That’s what it’s about. Intelligent identity is rather than just being a surface thing. It’s driven by things that will make greater change for the organization but will also serve people better. And then that builds attribution. It builds conversations. It builds meaning in the world. It’s something that works everywhere. And then ultimately, it’s relevant and it derives the relationships with people and ultimately can drive communities.

Yeah, there we have it from Simon Dixon. And that was episode 11, if you want to hear the full episode. And it’s so powerful, right? We talked about brand strategy as one topic. But the further we get into this podcast, the more facets, the more lenses we see on brand. And, you know, we tuck into different things like marketing science and brand leadership and culture and just brand is so deep and wide as well. So that was a great one to start off with.

I love that. I love that clip because that’s from an agency, right? Who are, you know, world class at execution, right? And to hear Simon Dixon really talk about the brand is beyond the logo, the fonts, right? Which for a lot of designer and creative folks, they become obsessed with. I think it’s such an important thing that we don’t lose sight of. That it’s, you know, really, it’s a strategic endeavor. I mean, my definition, as we’ve used in the podcast over the years, is that the brand is the meaning that other people attach to you. And that’s influenced by lots of things. Of course, the brand is important, as in the brand identity is important. But it really is the value that you’re giving to the market. And I think that’s come out time and time again, that that definition still sort of stands up. Marty Neumeier, who we’ll listen to later, he says it’s the gut, the gut instinct, the gut response of a customer to your offering. So I think that that is helpful as we go through the rest of these clips. We had perhaps someone who really terrifies me, perhaps more than you do, Jacob, on the show. Professor Mark Ritson came on. I got to admit, Jacob, I was absolutely trembling in my boots, and he did eat me a couple of times in the episode for talking about things like archetypes and things like this, which I often get people quoting at me. They’re like, he had you on archetypes. I was like, well, I don’t know if he did have me. I was just being respectful to our guest because me and Professor Mark Ritson, we disagreed a little bit on that. But it was nonetheless an amazing episode and Mark’s phenomenal, isn’t he?

Absolutely. Yeah. And this title for this episode was Brandon is Dead and Other Marketing BS. And that was episode five in the season. So if you want to listen to that one, it’s a winner. He’s probably the most profane episode we’ve had in all six seasons. There’s a lot of beeping and things going on, but that’s his style. And yeah, it was great to have him on. So we’ve pulled a little clip from the episode, and it’s all about positioning, which is a huge part of branding. And the point is that positioning is not an end in itself. So let’s hear what Mark had to say about this.

Most brand managers think that positioning is an end in itself. Positioning is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. And the end is that the brand comes to mind and we, the consumer thinks the couple of things we want them to think. The end. Right? Now add on to that the idea that most positioning is so full of f**king s**t, consumers would never ever deign to think it. Right? I’m still stunned by Starbucks, right? Their positioning is the biggest f**king hilarious carnival of horse s**t I’ve ever seen. About all the things that Starbucks isn’t, right? They overstate it completely. So, for me, the other sin of positioning, other than having too much, is overthinking it, right? Again, 60-70% of it is having the distinctive brand codes that will bring the brand to mind. And the other bit is having the two or three things that relatively speaking, the consumer wants, and you can promise it more than the competitor.

There you have it. And both Matt and I have taken Mark’s mini MBA courses in marketing and brand management and their world-class educational programs that definitely enlightened us to some, I guess, less spoken about areas of branding. And yeah, it’s definitely recommended. We tuck into brand education more in that episode as well, not just positioning and marketing BS, but actual education too.

The MBA on branding that Mark led, I did find amazing and it was a really good kind of course. I thought, oh no, maybe it’s going to kind of completely change everything that I thought. Thankfully, it didn’t. It reinforced it and gave me extra tools and language. And the research and diagnostic section of the brand MBA was really, really helpful. So I, like you, Jacob, would recommend that to anyone wanting to build up their skills. From a very academic perspective as well, there’s a lot of academic backing, Harvard reviews and, you know, papers from Ehrenberg, Bass and all that good stuff. If you want the latest in brand research, definitely check that out.

And Mark is known for his strongly backed opinions. And this next clip is talking about brand strategy. So let’s talk into this one.

Most brand managers and strategists work on a brand for three or four months or longer and five or six hours a day. And they miss the point that consumers really don’t give a f**k about the brand. Think about it for two seconds, have 900 other brands within their focal memory, and they just miss all of that. I’m not exaggerating when I say if you have more than a page for your brand strategy, you’ve got it wrong because you have. It takes many pages to get it down to one, but any fulcrum brand positioning that has seven or eight pages in it, getting it down to a single page is a much bigger challenge. I mean, I did it with LVMH, I mean, these are big brands. We’ve mentioned Don Perignon, Louis Vuitton and Sephora. We had a great 10, 12 year run where all of our brands had the DNA on one side of the page and the brand codes on the other. And we operated these billion dollar majestic things out of that very tight definition. And it was very difficult to get to that place. But once we got to that place, it was much easier to execute.

Such a great clip, isn’t it? You know, when you hear of Mark’s kind of approach, that idea of simplifying the complexity down for customers and also internal teams is so important. And as Mark said, I can see it’s so difficult, even in my work as a consultant. People love to make things more complex than perhaps what they need to be. But it’s hard, isn’t it, to make decisions and choose what not to do, as well as to choose what to do.

And someone that talks about this a little bit further is Laura Ries, who has a book called The Strategic Enemy. And we talked into that. And it kind of talks about positioning and just that you need a strategic enemy to offset your value. So should we talk into that one?

Most times you’re always talking with a client about them, them, them, right? They only want to think about themselves. Yet many times it was, what are we going against? How can we contrast this to something else? And that became much more important. And that was very helpful in selling it to them. And not only that, it was witnessing examples. And one of the greatest was the iPod. I remember when the iPod came out and it was truly, you know, very revolutionary. But it faced a very important strategic enemy because at the time, all the flash, you know, drive players that were cheap, that was dominating. The Rio, you’re probably too young, but I had a Rio. And, you know, what did Steve Jobs do? He created a new category called the hard drive music player. It was more expensive. This was going to be hard to sell. But what did he do? He positioned it against the enemy in the said, you have a thousand songs in your pocket. That oversimplified message. And it was so powerful, it brought the company back. In 2006, they named it the Gadget of the Century, which I think was a little bit premature. But it certainly did put Apple back on the path of being one of the most dominant companies in the world.

Another Apple reference.

Yeah, I was just thinking that. I wrote that down. I was like, we’re like five minutes in, we’ve dropped Apple twice.

I mean, it’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it? Let’s be honest. But, you know, it makes sense. And what Laura was saying there was absolutely solid. I loved her episode and her new book is fantastic on the strategic enemy. It really does give brands a kind of a focus to know what they are not as well as what they are. And as she says, to keep it really tight and simple around that is crucial. And it links to Mark Ritson’s point right before.

Yeah, simplification. It’s hard to do, but once you get there, it’s so much easier.

One of the most amazing episodes was actually one of the first ones we did in this season. And we heard from a chap called Steve Noss from an accountancy firm called Cooper Parry that I’d come across in my work and done a bit of work with in the past. And that sounds really dull, doesn’t it? Like an accountancy firm coming on a branding podcast. But what’s amazing is that with Cooper Parry is they have such a rebellious approach to accountancy and to how they position their brand in market. And so his story and the Cooper Parry brand story, I’ve been wanting to get on the podcast for ages. I always use them as like a little example whenever I do some public speaking about kind of daring to be different and standing out in the sea of sameness. And he really makes, you know, that episode is phenomenal. So if you’re looking to kind of learn like maybe you’re working with a service based business or in a commoditized marketplace, the first episode, episode 6.1 with Steve Noss is a recommendation from me. But what I wanted to do was really kind of put a highlight on this clip from Steve because he makes a really, really important point around being brave in branding.

What makes this happen and how can it come alive? Is it being driven and endorsed from the very top? If it isn’t, it will fail. It will singularly fail because in terms of a structure, it’s a fast moving business. If there isn’t the buy-in from the top, everybody begins to question it. Say, well, yeah, are you sure? No, I think when I spoke to AID, he wasn’t 100% sure. And suddenly, it’s like a deck of cards. It just comes crashing down. I’ve been lucky enough to have 100% endorsement from AID and the senior team right through the journey. It’s kind of one of those things where, well, one, it’s seriously odd having a head of creative firm of accountants. I don’t know any others. And that in itself kind of speak the volume for how they, the business, believes branding is central to the growth journey.

That was a really great point. I mean, Steve Noss is the head of creative at Cooper Parry, and he tells the story of how they’ve really got to a position of hyper growth in that sector and how brand and the attention to that culture around brand was crucial and how he got buy-in from leadership, right? So when you get your positioning set, it’s not just a marketing thing, is it, Jacob? It’s something that the whole business can get behind.

Yeah, and it comes back to that big idea we’re talking about, that you can all stand behind. And there’s one thing to have the idea, though, but how do you actually transcend that through the whole organization? And that’s what our next clip is about. It’s about brand alignment and the fact that you have to be honest. So let’s get into that. This clip is from Brandon Coleman Jr. and his book, Brand On. This is from episode three. So let’s get into it.

First thing you need to do is be honest with yourself. I can’t tell you how many times C-level people were dodging the truth, and they’d try to feed my consulting team and a bunch of, you know what, trying to get to an end result on an ad campaign. Doesn’t work. If we’re going to really, truly make a brand alignment correction, we need to be able to tell you your baby is ugly and you need to change his name, and you need to be able to hear it. And if you can’t, we’re not going anywhere with this project, because great brand alignment have to start at the top, nowhere less, and they have to be championed by that leader. And I’m not talking about the CMO. I’m not talking about the vice president of marketing. I’m talking about they have to be championed by the man or the woman, because it has to go that deep into the core, and they have to be honest. And if that company is having issues and they’re not being honest about those issues, I’ll tell them, maybe you’ll be 60% successful. You’ll never hit 100. And because most of our clients were successful anyway, it was about taking them from hitting at 70% effectiveness to hitting at 100. And the only way you get to 100 is truth.

I love that. I mean, you know, telling someone their baby is ugly is quite a funny analogy. As he says, you have to have that trust to be able to do that with your clients. And talking of babies, not ugly babies, but I think we should give you a little shout out, Jacob, because this year you became a father again, didn’t you? So congratulations to you for surviving that and recording with me and our guests, sometimes in quite tricky circumstances, supporting Mrs. Cass as well along the way. So, so lots of love out to the Cass family.

I appreciate that. It is a bit of a circus down here. We’ve got four muppets running around seven, five, three and now two months. So, yeah, it’s quite a handful, but love it. Work from home and you get to see them all the time. And I love the lifestyle. So, appreciate the shout out, Matt, and yeah, likewise. So, thank you.

Now, just keep keeping this conversation going. I think one of the other really interesting guests, I mean, we had loads of interesting guests, but another kind of big name that we had, I guess you could call him because he’s written so many books in this space is, is Mr. David Aaker, who was so generous to come on the show and to share his thinking. And again, just going back to this point around getting alignment from leaders from top to bottom around the brand and what it stands for and the value it brings to customers. He spoke to us about that as well, didn’t he? Around the strong culture behind the brand.

Absolutely. And yeah, we’ll talk into that. I have some comments around building the culture with our community as well. So I’ll comment on that shortly. Let’s play the clip.

If you’re in a strong culture company, you kind of know what’s acceptable and what’s encouraged and what’s unacceptable and not encouraged. You just have a feel for them. And it’s not a matter of memorizing a culture manual. I think that if you have a strong culture, you’re going to have stories, you’re going to probably have symbols like the sledgehammer and the Chinese company. You’re going to have visual symbols around. Maybe it’s of the founder or this founder stories. And there’s going to be employee stories about like the Nordstroms. Like this employee did whatever and everybody thought and he thought or she thought it was okay because that’s the culture. And as I say, I’ve seen many times people brand a cultural component, something that employees are expected to do and do. And I think if you look at any strong cultural company, you’ll see those kind of things.

Yeah, so David talked about branding a cultural component. And recently, I’ve had to go through this with our little community that we’re building a brand builders alliance. And we had to really look inwards and understand like what we we stood for, how we think and how we act, how we build together. And it comes from the founder, but also needs to trickle down to your community managers and your team and how everyone should show up. And it was quite an experience to apply it to your own business and build culture that way. Like I’ve been a lone wolf for nearly 20 years. So to build this and actually go through the process for your own organization or community, it was kind of illuminating. And we actually did brand that cultural component and we called it the Alliance Way. And we define like how we act and build together. And that came down to like a slogan or a manifesto that we created, which is, no one builds alone, which reflects the culture that we want to have inside the community, that we are in this together and that no one builds alone. We build together.

Love that. Yeah, I find it very helpful with my clients when we do stuff like that, because what it brings right is alignment and a common understanding and a shared language, which I often say language defines reality, right? So if you’ve not got the words to describe something as being good or bad, then it’s hard to kind of create that as a reality. So it makes so much sense that you’ve done that and shout out to your community. In my community, the Matt Davies Mastermind, it’s utter chaos. So there’s two contrasting offerings. If you like some chaos, come over to mine. If you want a bit of order and some sophistication, definitely join the Brand Builders Alliance. But no, in all seriousness, I think community building is crucial for brands, however big or small. And having that alignment around how people show up and how a culture can be created and what good looks like is so essential internally.

And something worth pointing out there is values. You often talk about values, but how that actually translate to behavior is something else. So rather than just have values printed on wall, like how does that translate to how people behave within an organization? I think that’s the missing link. A lot of people just pass over. So I just want to comment on that.

Yeah, that’s a great point. And a lot of businesses don’t even define that, right? So some of the work that I’ve done with some of my clients is, like I see a value, it’s almost like an agreement. It’s like the customer values this thing, but we value it as well. So it’s like the high level contract between the brand and the customer. But then internally, how do you activate that? As you say, what does that mean? How does someone show up to show that you value that thing? And then the managers or the people managers usually, particularly big organizations, I love to work on defining the behavior. That’s like what you see when the value is being enacted. That demonstrates that that person actually does value that thing. And then here’s another little tip, just one other thing on top, is some organizations, they have juniors, midway and seniors within their teams. And obviously how a value shows up, say in a warehouse, is going to be quite different to how a value shows up in a sales team, right? So what I try and do is get the people leaders in the different departments to think about in their department how that value should show up. And then at what level they expect certain behaviors. So a junior, let’s say the value is innovation, a junior might be like, my junior in my sales team, I just expect them to come up with some ideas or to float some ideas. Whereas for a senior level, I’m expecting them to drive forward change programs, like to really kind of make change happen. And there’s a difference in how I would expect that behavior to show up at different levels. So yeah, just some thoughts there.

You can get really dirty about this. I think we need to add an episode on this, Matt, to go deeper on activation and culture and values. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, let’s do it next season. Right, season seven. There we are. Keep an eye out for that, folks. Let’s keep moving though, because, you know, yes, culture is important internally for a business and a brand to manage. But also brands show up in the world, don’t they? And we had an amazing guest on my old friend Cyril Louis, a very thick, heavy French accent. So apologies on Cyril’s behalf for that one, if where we put it on. But no, I love Cyril and he’s, you know, he’s done some amazing work. He’s worked with brands like Heineken and we talked a lot about his work. And one of the things that he focuses on as a brand builder is how do brands show up in culture? So let’s listen to Cyril talking about how he views those things now.

It means earning your place in people’s lives, not interacting with them, but being like invited in. People wanted you in their life because you add values. It’s where they can inspire, they can provoke, they can support or even comfort. That’s like powerful. In today’s world, I talked about where attention is short and also skepticism is very high. Things are moving a lot and people also expect a lot more than brands like today’s than it was like 10 years ago. So like in the way they engage with that cultural relevance isn’t optional anymore, it’s existential. Like brands need to understand people and they need to be wanted. Otherwise, not only they have to spend millions and millions to be able to be seen, they’re not listened to. If you’re not in culture, you’re out of mind.

That’s a strong point, eh? You’re not in culture, you’re out of mind. And yeah, it’s people. And that’s what it comes down to. We’ve been talking about, you know, we’re going to get into customers soon, but just it’s all about people. People run brands. And yeah, what are your thoughts, Matt?

Yeah, customers build brands, right? You know, you’ve got to put them first. Like that’s the whole approach to solid brand building. It’s not about making money. The money comes after you’ve created value. So why focus on the outcome? Why not focus on the input, right? And the input is how are you adding value and meaning to people’s lives? Cyril’s episode is amazing if you want to kind of tuck into that. But we also had another episode 8. Episode 8, yeah, episode 8. Absolutely. We also had another amazing guest, right? Midway through the season, episode 10, 6.10. And it was the one and only very well spoken Rory Sutherland, who we were so privileged to get on the show. And he’s just written a book called Alchemy, if I remember correctly, yes. And so he came on to talk a bit about some of the features in that. And it was around problem framing and problem solving. So, you know, making sure you’re showing up in culture, yes. But knowing what problem you solve is really, really important as well. So let’s listen to what Rory had to say around that.

There is this fundamental tendency where I think we take the problem as it is currently defined. We work on it using the approved sequential logical methods proceeding from that definition of the problem. And whatever is our best shot at it following that process, we then deem to be not only right or interesting or worth testing or worth exploring, we deem it to be the only right answer. And the point I’m making there is that actually in many cases, the problem isn’t as currently defined or by describing the problem in a different way, you arrive at a completely different avenue for exploration.

That was an amazing episode where we tucked into that idea of problem framing and really rethinking problems in a way that kind of would be of high value to customers rather than just assuming you know what the problem is and assuming therefore you know the obvious solution. So yeah, it was amazing. There’s another clip I’d like to play you, which is this one here.

You know what, Matt, now that we’re talking about that, I want to play the clip from Michael Bungay Stanier on Staying Curious Longer. It seems to be, I know I’m messing things up, Matt.

This is what we do. This is how we roll. Let’s mess it up. So why don’t you play that one? That’s a great shout, Jacob.

OK, Michael Bungay Stanier is an amazing author and speaker. He often talks about coaching and mentoring and staying curious and taming the advice monster. And this is what he had to say about staying curious longer.

Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly? Because most people are advice giving maniac. They’re like somebody starts talking and after about 30 seconds, you’re like, I already know the answer. I’m now pretending to listen, just waiting to add value to this conversation by telling them what I’ve already decided. This super power of actually staying curious just a little bit longer, like 90 seconds longer, can actually revolutionize the experience of a conversation. Then how it’s related to something like mentoring, Jacob? Well, mentoring, broadly speaking, is somebody who’s walked a similar path to you and it’s just a little bit ahead of you going, I’ve got some understanding of this landscape that you may not have. Whereas with coaching, you can stay curious a little bit longer with anyone. You don’t have to have had particular subject matter expertise to kind of assume that role with them.

Such an amazing quote.

Just to recap what Rory was saying about trying to figure out the actual real problem or reframing the problem, you can do that by staying curious longer and listening.

I found that in my coaching, I coach a handful of folks and yeah, Michael’s book on the coaching habit is like so helpful.

That was a game changer.

Yeah, for sure. Like if you are in a leadership position or looking to coach people, definitely grab that book and definitely get that episode, which was episode nine of this season, season six, because he really explains like he did in that clip, this kind of problem that we all have, which is to jump to offering suggestions and solutions before really being curious and understanding it. Also, when you’re curious as a coach, his point is that you get the other person almost to come to different conclusions as well, rather than you sort of dictating to them, and it’s more powerful if they can come to that conclusion themselves. Jumping back though to Rory, I’ve got another clip of his that I’d like to play because he really talks about the power of brand and brand fame. So I’d like to listen to this one.

Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode. People inherently trust you more, people are happier basically making an impulse purchase from a brand than they are from someone they’ve never heard of. So a brand has an effect in lots and lots of ways, which I think grow by the way exponentially with brand fame. And we shouldn’t be afraid of simply saying a large part of branding is being famous. One of the things I think we tend to do is we tend to have a very Newtonian approach to investment in brands, which is we define what the brand activity is supposed to do very narrowly, and we then measure the value of that activity only to the extent that it obtains the objective we defined in advance. So all other positive spin-off benefits of that investment in branding get lost because we’re defining in advance what we want this thing to do. We also tend to measure the value of a brand relative to competing brands when the real value of a brand consists in having a brand at all.

He’s a smart dude that guy and like you said well spoken and he has like six stories in his head at one time and he can like loop back to all the stories and eventually come back to his point then return to another story. It’s like he’s a smart dude. I love this point there.

Yeah, it was fun to keep up with wasn’t he on that episode? My brain works like flipping fast but his was like next level so I was like wow. But no, amazing thinker and definitely check out Rory’s episode, a highlight for me from the year. But this idea of positioning and fame and so on, it kind of came up quite a bit, didn’t it? So, our next guest that we want to highlight was Todd Irwin and he talked about depositioning brands which I found quite an interesting and contrary perspective. What did you think, Jacob?

Well, that’s what we do on JUST Branding. We have the contrarian opinions come in and we learn different perspectives from different people and it can change how we approach things. So, let’s hear it.

I think the problem is that agencies are focused too much on differentiation and creativity and they need to be briefed differently. Some people say to me, well, what does that mean? The creatives go away or creative becomes less important? No, creative actually becomes more important. But it’s the way that you brief the creative teams. It goes back to Trout and Ries, right? The original positioning book, right? Own one singular big idea. That’s one of the principles, right? But if you’re owning the wrong idea, you’re steering the ship the wrong way. Remember, customers care the most about you solving their problem. Yeah, there are times maybe when you want a different this or a different that, right? But it’s proven. The psychology of consumers, the first thing that they’re looking for and the first thing they care about, solve the problem.

There we have it. So we do have a few more clips on customers, and it’s quite important because this is what Brandon’s all about. What clip do we have next? We had Brandon Kim. Yes.

Yeah, I wanted to sort of give a little shout out to Brandon Kim. And this is kind of like a highlight, right? For anyone working on a brand that wants to be on the show, like particularly a brand founder or an owner, right? If you’re building a brand, please reach out to us. Brandon reached out to me, I think it was, wasn’t it, Jacob, with his story from Brevity Bags, where he basically started this business and built this brand and is in the process of building it. So he’s an amazing entrepreneur and an amazing story about how he uncovered a problem and wanted to solve it. So please do, folks, reach out. We want to put a highlight and a spotlight on people in the cold face, if you like. We do talk to experts, but we also want to talk to practitioners. So please do reach out. Me and Jacob are all ears, particularly if you’ve got an interesting story, challenge, difficulty or whatever, that you want to come on and talk about. So, yeah, he came on and he had some amazing insights from his journey, which we’re going to share. And this was one of them.

Digital District, there’s a disconnect. Thousands of people are coming through your door, but you don’t see them. It’s all data points. And so there’s a few ways we’ve gotten around that. We all attend all of our trade shows now and we make sure we work the booths. Before, when we used to work those booths, people would come up to us and be like, who are you? What is this? Why does it matter? And now we go to the trade shows. And the last one we were at, I think our bag was the most common camera bag I saw at that show. Now we maintain a calendarly and a post-purchase flow. So we’ll try to take a few meetings every week with customers, chat with them, kind of keep on kind of hearing those patterns. I maintain like my own list of customers that I consistently send surveys and ask questions to, which has been brilliant. Like you don’t need to be like bombarding your post-purchase customer, right? You just need to find a group of people like who care to give feedback and like opt into that process with you and you can be very iterative with it. And so that has been certainly transformational in our process.

I think this is a perfect clip to play after Todd’s one that was focused on solving the customer’s problem. And they have done this so well. They’ve gone super deep with who they were targeting. So photographers with a photography bag. But it was a very competitive market. And how they solved a particular problem was by talking to dozens and dozens of different photographers to really find out what wasn’t working with existing solutions, what they actually needed. And they crafted a solution as a product designer. And they have turned the brand from a Kickstarter into this cult brand. And it’s like he said, his bag is literally seen everywhere at trade shows now because he just nailed that customer’s problem.

Yeah, amazing. And this brings us nicely onto the subject of innovation, doesn’t it? And even within businesses and kind of within teams, such an important thing to create culture and to create situations where you are coming up with new ways of solving issues. And that’s kind of an area of branding perhaps that we don’t often think about. We often think about perhaps the execution element or the strategic element. But sometimes it does come down to a product and an innovative culture. So our next clip from episode six was with the amazing Melissa Dinwiddie. So perhaps you could play us that clip, shall we, Jacob?

Play is not a distraction from productivity. It is a catalyst for it. When we’re under pressure, our tendency is to double down, work harder, get more serious. But that approach actually activates our stress response, which literally shuts down part of our brain that is responsible for creative thinking and innovation. And play does the opposite. It activates the brain’s networks that are associated with creativity while at the same time calming down our stress response. It’s actually the most practical approach to innovation in a fast-paced environment. And I’ve seen this firsthand with tech teams on impossible deadlines, just 10 to 15 minutes of intentional play can completely reset their thinking and lead to breakthroughs that might have taken, I don’t know, days of grinding to achieve if they even achieve them at all.

Yeah, a lot of clients I work with struggle with how to enable their workforce to come up with new ideas. It’s so tricky to create that space when everybody’s focused on their day job, if you like, to help them look up and look beyond that. I play a lot. Do you play a lot, Jacob?

I try to.

Yeah. Well, you might only get a little bit of play in. But I even think that’s a wonderful thing about kids. They constantly are playing all the time. Their heads are in an imaginary place most of the time. I just think we lose that, don’t we, over as we grow. There is something about looking at kids and spending time with kids the way they see the world. My daughter thinks she’s a dog half the time. I don’t know why. My sons are occasionally warriors and running around with spears and stuff. You’re like, mate, you’re 10 years old. How is this a thing? But they love it. And it’s so lovely to see, isn’t it?

Absolutely. And we do lose it at some point. And it is a shame. But that whole episode was talking in how to unlock innovation, how to actually play, how to drive success through creativity. And that was a pretty rare episode we’ve had throughout. We’ve had, I think, one or two other episodes on innovation. But this was actually a very practical episode where you can actually apply it to your work. So worth a listen. That’s 6.6.

I think you can apply it at all levels, can’t you? Whether you’re doing creative execution, having a play, having a test, trying new things, or whether you’re doing really strategic work and you wanted to test some things out with customers. Like that idea of testing, design thinking, playing, prototyping, iterating, exploring, it’s just something that we should all be doing like all the time. So 100% and what an inspirational episode that was. We’ve got another clip now from the amazing Simon Dixon from DixonBaxi because he had some interesting things to say about customers, solving customers’ problems and this idea that not everyone is a customer and that’s okay.

We don’t call them customers. It’s important demarcation because not everybody has a monetized relationship with the brand. I’ll give you two examples. Coca Cola is worth 100 billion just for round numbers. They have 5 billion pounds worth of assets. There’s another 95 billion. What is that? It’s not sugar and water. Or if you took Ferrari, millions upon millions of people wear a Ferrari cap. Very few people drive a Ferrari and almost nobody will ever buy one. But the brand’s relevance is that idea, that meaning. So it’s not always about someone being a customer. It’s about the value of the relationship, some of which are monetized and some of which are not. As I said earlier, an Inter Milan fan has a very different relationship with AC Milan, but that love-hate thing is still a very powerful driver for their brand.

Well said, Mr. Backsy. And yeah, the idea and the meaning were two words that kind of stood out there. I know you talk about meaning quite a bit, Matt, and for him to say that there I think is important because it is, if you think about a relationship, that’s what it is when it comes down to brand and comes back to Marty’s definition of the gut feeling. How do you feel about this brand? How is it relevant to you?

And that point around innovating, it’s not just for customers like as Simon Dixon was saying, it’s for partners, it’s for people outside of that, it’s to create value from a business perspective as well. So it’s important that we are thinking, we keep our options open and we keep a wide level of thought. Rory Sutherland mentioned brand fame and to do brand properly in his clip just that we looked at earlier, he said it basically allows you to play the game of capitalism on easy mode, which I thought was an interesting way of thinking about it, if you’ve got that kind of traction in the market. We had Dan Cushing and Diego Borgo on who are really interesting. They’re from a branding agency called Thumb Corp. And I’ve worked with them a little bit. And the way that those guys think is next level. And where they really focus and specialize in is in the tech space, mainly the Web3 space, actually. And they’ve done a lot of work in crypto and so on, which is a really kind of murky, technical, very sort of strange world. But they came on to talk very much around the difference between hype and fame, which is what Rory was talking about. So let’s have a listen to how they frame things.

The companies that we’re talking to, those people that do have the bonafide utility, the biggest education piece that exists is making people aware of the difference between hype and fame, as we say. So are you becoming famous for a legacy? Are you becoming famous for something that outstrips what your product does? Are you committed to a single promise? Is there something you can stand by resolutely that you can defend, scale and own? Now, just by kind of introducing that as a concept, what you do is you start to level the playing field and it kind of reduces your market. And it’s taken us a lot of time to kind of sieve through that and see where they stand. But I would say that takes out a large percentage of who we talk to, because hype exists for a reason, right? And if KOLs are putting t-shirts of their product on and they’re pumping the token value by X amount, that’s sometimes all they need. We get that. We’re not here for those people. We’re here for those utility makers. We’re here for the guys that are looking and saying, right, how do we become meaningfully different to the people outside of our bubble who understand that the easy wins within the jar will only take us to a certain threshold?

It goes back to that long term value you want to add to the market, not just hype, but actual fame, actual value, longer term. Amazing. And one of the brands that’s really successfully done that, right, is Amazon. And we were lucky enough to have one of the orchestrators of the new rebrand of Amazon on the show, weren’t we? So in episode 18, his name was James Greenfield from KOTO. And he came on to give us a behind the scenes sneak peek at how KOTO approached that complexity of that project. And I think one of the interesting things that he highlighted was just in terms of executing for a brand like Amazon is just incredibly complex. So it’s a great episode if you’re into execution or trying to manage brand identities in a consistent way. And this is what he had to say about that.

They’ve also got an absolutely humongous digital real estate as well. And so we had to expose ourselves to that and really understand what that looked like, what it did, what it was achieving, what was successful, etc. Because I think it’s very easy for you to think about as a designer, it’s very easy for you to go like, I’m just going to start to put order around all this and start putting everything in neat boxes. But actually, that can sometimes be oversimplified. And sometimes you’ve really got to understand that complexity exists for a reason and you can’t just simplify everything. Some things have to remain complex. And so within that, there was quite a lot of work to really do to understand that as well.

Yeah, so that was a great episode to kind of get to know the client’s world and understand the detail of the execution and a global brand like Amazon. The complexity was immense. So it’s a great episode to tuck into for that side of things.

Yeah, I remember that episode and I’m talking about all the different facets of Amazon. Like there was dozens of different sub brands and the global nature of all the different markets and understanding of and relevance of the brand in each different country and certain products being available in some and not others and just having a unified system that was consistent and cohesive was a real challenge but they absolutely nailed it and Kodo is like one of the best branding agencies in the world in my opinion based on their work and I was honored to have him on to talk about that. All right, we’re going to jump ship now into the world of personal branding and this is someone we had early on in the in the season, Lida Citroën, who was talking about building influence through the lens of branding. So let’s jump into that.

When we often think of influence, we think of influencers and then we think of Kardashians, you know, and people who monetize their online presence, which I mean, that is for some people what their path is. But influence is really the opportunity in a small or a large way to have credibility, to have clout. So if you believe in something and you want to advocate for something that people will take you seriously, that they’ll listen and they’ll want to hear what you have to say. And it’s having that sort of established presence that allows you to do the things you’re most passionate about. So again, I felt like it was such a natural place for brand to go, because at the end of the day, whether you just want to have more say in a meeting, or you want to start a movement, you have to have influence.

So true.

That was a great episode for anyone looking to kind of build and sharpen up on their personal brands and, you know, become, I guess, build their reputation in the market like really, really smart thinking. I mean, around influence.

Totally. And talking about influence, maybe one of the most influential people in the world of brand is Mordy Neumeier, who came on the show for the second time, which we’re honored to have him come back. And this little clip is talking about the value of brand and the fact that it’s a long-term play. And we’ll tuck into that now.

Well, there’s a sort of golden rule in branding. Now, you have to remember what branding is all about. Branding forms a contract with customers saying that we’re going to give you this stuff. And in return, you’re going to give us some money and some loyalty. If we do our job right, that’s the deal we have. If the deal isn’t fair for a regular company, you’ve got no customers, or you’ve got a really lousy group of customers. So that’s really important. The other thing is that you have to understand that branding is a long-term investment. And it’s not marketing. Marketing is more tactical and short-term and super important and very difficult. But it’s hands-on every day, you know, creating sales and making sure products are distributed in the right place at the right time. This is super complicated. Branding is more strategic. So, you know, it’s actually more CEO level stuff because this is about the future of the company. Providing the CEO thinks there is a future for him in the company. That’s one of the problems is, if you know you’re only there for three years, how much are you going to look into the future? How far does your vision stretch? It certainly is important for private companies, founder run companies, because this is their baby, right? So I wish there were more of those and less of the shareholder owned companies, because it’s such a temptation to put shareholders before customers. So anyway, but it’s a long term thing. So branders have to remember that to remind their clients and bosses that it’s a long term investment and anything you do to undermine the long term investment by doing something short term, you’ve got to think twice about that.

Yeah, so really amazing episode again with Marty and that goes on to influence, right? Because if you’re working on brands, you’ve got to be able to influence them somehow. And Marty’s point is so true, isn’t it? Branding is about long term thinking, strategic thinking. And so to bring our influence to bear on that can only be a good thing for a business. But Jacob, what’s amazing about this season is how, I guess, political people got on our episodes. Marty was talking very much around branding in the age of autocracy, a really interesting take on that. And feel free to tuck into his episode. It was episode 13, really insightful, as you’d expect, from a big thinker like Marty around how brands can be a force for good in this world. And we also had another kind of political, if I can call it that, kind of take on things where we had Jeroen ReuvenSEO to us. He wanted to talk about should brands get political and a really fascinating and interesting episode that we had with him. And this is what he has to say.

And a park marked car next to a Tesla and there were quite some Teslas parked there. Tesla is very, very popular everywhere, right? They can’t make enough. So this is in an area that’s considered very conservative, by the way, on Long Island in New York. And I got struck by looking at this, at a bumper sticker, like one of those round stickers that looks like a, you know, like a do not enter kind of sticker. And it said Elon, right, on the sticker was a black sticker with a red stripe through his name, right? So Elon with a red stripe on a Tesla. I should have made a picture of it. So this is an interesting, this is an interesting phenomenon. I mean, you like the Tesla brand, you drive the car, but you want to distance yourself from the owner, right? He’s not necessarily the founder. I mean, it was founded by two other guys, I believe, and he bought it and then he kicked them out. But whatever, he makes it possible.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting clip there. I mean, that episode goes into the risks that brands take if they get political, or in that instance, if their CEO gets really political, right? And it’s kind of very well worth a listen if you’re navigating that or thinking about, you know, potentially joining on any kind of cultural bandwagons in relation to like social justice or anything, we tuck into all that stuff. So, yeah, it was a pretty intense episode that one. And we’re not political, are we, Jacob? We tend to try and stay politically neutral. But it’s worth obviously being aware of politics and being aware of how brands can play a place both for good and for bad in difficult situations, you know, politically.

And we couldn’t go through the best of episode without mentioning AI. So this next clip is a clip focused on Google and the changes that have happened because of AI and how brand is intersected with search AI and so forth. This is with Mordy Oberstein on episode 14. Let’s get into that clip now.

Google search is a hard way to build brand. I feel brand is a lot about consistency over time and search is all about not consistency over time. You don’t know where you’re gonna wait, where you’re gonna show up, when you’re gonna show up. It’s hard to build that consistency, to really build that presence, to really build that connection with your audience through the medium of Google search. That’s hard. I’m just saying it can’t happen or it doesn’t help your brand, but building a brand that way, that seems backwards to me. So Google always has been, and this is where I think it’s becoming, okay, what kind of vehicle? But it’s a vehicle. It’s a vehicle to help you be found. It’s a vehicle to help you spread your content. It’s a vehicle to do a lot of different things. And the conversation around what is Google from a search and traffic point of view has shifted back to, okay, it’s a vehicle. It’s not a be-all end-all. What type of vehicle is it and how? Is it a 2025 Audi or is it a 1987 Chevy? How reliable is it? Not very.

Yeah, so we go in much deeper into why brands shouldn’t just rely on Google. And the fact that it is just a vehicle, just like many other things like social and so forth, you can’t just rely on it. It is very unreliable, especially with the shifting landscape of AI and LLMs and all of that stuff happening right now.

Yeah, Mordy goes into that into massive depth, doesn’t he? And in terms of like how the algorithms are changing, how even the search results that you’re shown are changing, is it Google mode, I think is coming out.

The AI mode, yeah.

AI mode, there you go. See, that shows my level of intelligence around that sort of stuff. But ultimately, though, Jacob, one thing I came away from the Mordy episode was to think, well, again, you can’t do this with silver bullets, right? You have to create value in the market, right? You can’t manipulate. You’re not going to be able to manipulate people. The technology will catch up with you. So keep creating good content that solves problems and helps people. That’s the key. And I think for any brand builder out there, it’s about getting back to principles, not relying on those kind of, yeah, that it’s great to get tactical and great to try and leverage that. But ultimately, you’ve got to add value to customers in market.

It has to be cross-functional, Matt.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Cross-functional. And that does… I’m loving the little bridgeways here into the next episode, which is… We spoke to Jennifer Mancusi in Episode 7 around account-based marketing, which basically, in my simplified brain, is all about making sure you’re really looking after your customers and growing accounts once you’ve got a customer. So very, very interesting. And she talks about aligning a whole business around that approach about bringing value to customers. And this is what she had to say from her episode, which was Episode 7.

I think account-based everything is really about adopting an account-based strategy at the company level. And that’s kind of the… I’ll try not to tease too much into the seven steps for success, but that’s kind of the first step is adopting an account-based everything strategy at the highest level. I am a firm believer that if account-based marketing is implemented by marketing alone, it will fail. It will fail if it sits with marketing alone. So it can’t be just account-based marketing anymore. And that doesn’t mean it’s not owned by marketing or that someone who is specializing in account-based marketing doesn’t sit within the marketing team, but it has to come down from the top at the company level and be a cross-functional effort and have cross-functional shared success metrics in order to really work.

Yeah. So a great episode that was, she talks about seven steps to really practical tools. That’s what we like to ship. That’s what JUST Branding is all about as well. It’s about theory, but it’s also about ideas that businesses and brand builders can plug in to their companies, to their teams, to really kind of get success in today’s world. So that’s a great episode around account-based marketing, or as she says, account-based everything. We’ve got one last final one to play for you, haven’t we? What’s that one about, Jacob?

Yes, we want to end this on community. And that’s all of you guys, not a crowd, not an audience, but our community. And that will make sense in a moment. But we had someone called Jay Clouse on the show, Episode 12, to talk about creative branding. And he is the founder of a very successful community. And he has a lot to say on that.

To me, a community has mechanisms for creating peer-to-peer interaction. I think some people say audience, but what they mean is a crowd. If you went to Las Vegas and you saw a street performer, you might see a crowd gathered around that person. I don’t know that I would say that group of people is an audience for that performer. To me, an audience is something that is a little bit more enduring, like it returns. It’s there to hear from you specifically. Whereas on a lot of these platforms, the audiences are just groups of people that you’ve effectively captured their attention in a fleeting way. You can think of these as concentric circles, I suppose, where at the top level you have this crowd, this group of people that have come into your orbit. Inside of that is probably your audience, this group of people who are a little bit more familiar and they return. Then inside of that, if you have a space and a mechanism for people to interact with each other, I would say that is probably a community.

I love his definitions there and most of you listening to this are in our audience. But if you would like to go through that inner circle, both of us run communities that would love you to be a part of. Matt runs a mastermind and I run the Brand Builders Alliance, which is a community for brand builders. What makes us unique is that we have a mixture of community coaching and resources to help you level up. You can master brand in but also build a thriving creative business. If you want to learn more about that, you can head over to joinbba.com. For Matt, I’ll let you have a little pause.

For mine, mine is more niche and focused mainly in people wanting to get into consultancy, using brand as a way to consult. We have about 70 people from across the world at the moment and growing. We will meet up every once a month. We have a platform as well with some resources and we will communicate on there. It’s interesting, isn’t it, to think about building community for brands. Also on top of that, here’s a newsflash announcement because we’ve not done this to date and I’m going to announce it here and I’m not sure if Jacob knows what I’m going to announce. This is going to be great.

What we want to do is…

Yeah, well, around our podcast, right? So, you know, the communities that we’ve mentioned are paid for communities. But hey, I also want to think that we’ve got a community here on the JUST Branding Podcast. So if you want to connect with brand builders for free, come on to our LinkedIn community, which we’re going to be spending a bit more attention to over the coming year as we enter season seven of our JUST Branding Podcast. So jump on there, jump on LinkedIn, follow me, follow Jacob, get into our community. We’re going to be making sure all the episodes drop on there, so you’ll be able to kind of see and get attention to the latest episodes. And also we’re going to be discussing them and putting questions and polls out and allowing you all to connect with each other on that. So JUST Branding, check us out on LinkedIn. And we look forward to communicating with you more in the coming year on that one. And with that closed, Jacob, I guess we say, you know, well, thank you again. We’ll finish with a bit of gratitude. And I’m really looking forward to season seven. We’ve already got some interesting people, world-class guests lined up. But as I say, this isn’t just about the big names. We would love to hear from you, if you are in the midst of building, even startup brands and so on, to come on Share Experience, particularly people at The Coalface. So keep an eye out, keep an ear to the ground. You know, keep listening. We want to thank you very much. And if you could drop us a little comment or five-star review, it really, really helps. So thank you, everybody. And thank you for tuning in for this Best Of Season Six. It’s been amazing, hasn’t it, Jacob?

It has. Thank you, Matt. And yeah, I couldn’t do it without you, mate. And I appreciate you.

Same to you. And thank you for putting up with me and my terrible sense of humor. I do appreciate it. All the very best then, everybody. Take care. See you in Season 7.