Jeff Rosenblum Of Questus: Five Things You Need To Build A Trusted And Beloved Brand

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Prepare for success. We believe that brands that follow the aforementioned advice will grow exponentially. But exponential curves begin relatively flat as brands establish their purpose, culture, content, and experiences that will ultimately create value. The flat part of the curve can lull a brand to sleep, leaving them unprepared for when the curve bends almost vertically as success kicks in. Brands need to build tools and processes to manage success before it happens or they will be unprepared for scale.

As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to interview Jeff Rosenblum.

Jeff Rosenblum is a cofounder of Questus, a digital advertising agency that has worked with many of the world’s most influential brands, including American Express, Apple, Capital One, Disney, The NFL, Samsung, Starbucks, Universal, Wyndham and Verizon. Jeff created a groundbreaking documentary about the advertising revolution called The Naked Brand and the book Friction which explained how passion brands are built. Jeff has lectured at some of the world’s top universities, including Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and the London Business School. He has won some of advertising’s most prestigious awards and presented at many of the industry’s largest conferences. Visit https://www.questus.com/exponential.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I happened to be in the right place at the right time and helped pioneer the field of Internet research. I was working at a research company collecting data using traditional techniques when one day I went on a ride on my motorcycle. I didn’t have it because I was cool; I had it because I was broke. But the motorcycle did a great job of removing the distractions of the office. On this ride, I realized that the marketing research industry, and every other industry, was about to be completely disrupted by the Internet. My bosses, Haldane King and Jacob Brown, saw the vision and greenlighted my efforts. I shifted our methodologies online and decreased our typical project timelines from 6 months to 6 days. (Later, others would shift it to 6 hours and then 6 seconds). Although I was still barely 25 years old, I had clients like Microsoft, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Walt Disney, Levi Straus, and Discovery Channel. I gained access to proprietary data showing that an advertising revolution was about to take place. It showed that brands can no longer be built by interrupting people over and over again. That companies were becoming transparent and they needed a bold shift in their strategies that were commensurate with the bold shifts in consumer behavior. Perhaps even more importantly for my own journey, I learned that I’m not just passionate about simply collecting data and presenting market research findings, I wanted to collect data and do something about it. So, I called my college roommate, Jordan, who was a world-class designer selling his paintings to celebrities like Johnny Depp. He also wanted to do something more strategic and complex, so we decided to get together and build an advertising agency based upon the simple concept of blending data and creativity. Neither of us had ever stepped foot in an advertising agency, yet we had been at the forefront of the industry for the past two decades.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

What makes Questus truly stand out is the culture that the team built. I believe we have a team comprised of some of the greatest human beings on planet earth. Not just great advertisers or marketers, but the greatest human beings. They are kind, caring, passionate, collaborative, dedicated, and fun. I am so proud of the way they treat each other and treat our clients. To be candid, I had to learn about culture the hard way. For a long time, I thought that building great culture meant that we needed to build a fun place to work. We had music, booze, and ping pong tables like so many modern companies. And yes, building a fun place to work is a nice component of culture. But more importantly, I needed to learn that culture is about building processes that enable people to do their best work. That means that we focus extraordinarily hard on who we recruit and how we get them to collaborate. I’ve learned that it really comes down to what I call Talent Acquisition and Talent Collaboration. It’s about building processes to hire nothing less than A+ players, which is much easier said than done and requires a documented, methodical approach. And it’s about increasing the collective intelligence of the team by using processes, tools, and positive attitudes to enable each person to collaborate and build synergies.

Ok let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?

A brand is a company’s most important asset. And many people define a brand as a story. And that’s largely because of the legacy model of building brands through 30-second interruptions. But brands aren’t simply stories. They are cognitive shortcuts. We are now exposed to more brands and more information than the human brain could possibly begin to process. The way that we survive and thrive as human beings is we filter out information. So we can only focus in on the points that matter. Great brands provide a cognitive shortcut. It’s about helping people understand what makes a company different and better than the competition. It’s about helping the target audience understand the value systems of the company so people can understand how they want to invest their hard-earned dollars. Attention in evangelism product marketing, on the other hand, is much lower in the sales funnel, and it’s really about helping people clearly understand the features in functionality for a specific product.

Can you share 5 strategies that a company should be doing to build a trusted and believable brand? Please tell us a story or example for each.

1. Focus in on empowerment over interruptions. Brands that grow exponentially focus on improving their customers’ lives one small step at a time. They don’t simply rely upon paid media to interrupt the audience while they watch TV or pop-ups on digital media. They create content and experiences that have real meaning in people’s lives. My favorite example is Fender guitar. They faced the challenge that young musicians were gravitating towards computers rather than guitars for making music. So the brand invested in Fender Play, a platform that provides high quality, personalized music lessons. It empowers guitar players to learn how to play better. The platform is much better than typical online music lessons because of the production quality and because it helps each student on a one-to-one basis, enabling guitarists to go on a journey towards better playing. It not only grows the entire category, but it authentically promotes the brand while creating a new revenue stream.
2. Recognize that modern marketing is a value exchange. People invest their hard-earned time, attention, and dollars in brands. In exchange, they’re looking for value at every touchpoint in the consumer journey. They want to get back more than they are putting in. One great example is Capital One, which is a client of ours. I just got off the phone with their customer service and the quality of the support I received was the best I’ve received in any category that I can remember. They answered promptly, treated me kindly, answered the questions I originally had, and answered new questions that came up throughout the call. That might sound like table stakes, but I think we can all agree that great customer service is a rarity. By receiving more value than I expected, they didn’t simply make me a happy customer. It made me a brand evangelist because now I’m telling my friends, my family, and your readers about how great the Capital One experience was. It’s critical for brands to recognize that each interaction should be treated as a value exchange. When consumers get more than they put in, they shift to brand evangelists. When they get less, they shift to brand detractors.
3. Leverage the entire purchase journey. Brands can no longer rely upon interruptions via paid media at the beginning of the journey to get people excited about a product. Those interruptions work, but we are asking them to do way too much. We need to understand every step of the consumer journey to ensure that we are providing the exact content that is needed at the exact moment it is needed. An example is Super 8 Hotels, which is also a client of ours. We leveraged the entire consumer journey to help people become aware of their tastefully redesigned rooms. Rather than simply focus on the designs of the room, we emotionally engaged the audience with a compelling story about how people do incredible things on the road. We used emotional content about veterans giving hugs to fight PTSD in a story called The Human Hug Project. That story worked in the beginning of the journey, but then we created content at every granular step that people went through on the accommodation decision process. We provided extensive content that showed the quality of the rooms and the amenities available to guests. We then followed that functional content with targeted promotions to convert prospects into customers. The content was served chronologically on a one-to-one basis, so the story unfolded throughout the purchase journey: Emotional content in the beginning of the journey, functional content in the middle of the journey, and promotions at the end of the journey. For non-impulse categories, people spend hours deciding which brands they want to buy from and recommend. It’s important for brands to create the granular empowering content that is required at every step of the purchase journey.
4. Focus on culture more than anything. Culture has become a trendy topic in recent years, but most companies seem to think it’s simply about having a bold mission statement or toys like foosball to make the office space fun. My favorite example about culture comes from our own agency, Questus. Frankly, we didn’t fully understand culture for the first decade that we were in business. We always knew how important it is. We invested in toys, games, dinners, drinks, and music to make our agency as fun as possible. But what we’ve learned in recent years is tall of that stuff is only the icing on the cake. What really counts is empowering the team do their best work. Great team members work extraordinarily hard and they want to be put in a position to succeed. They want to do work that they’re proud of. They want to do work that advances their own career. It’s about creating processes and tools to break down silos and get people to most effectively work together. If brands can’t get culture right, no other advice really matters because culture dictates how well organizations can execute upon their strategy.
5. Prepare for success. We believe that brands that follow the aforementioned advice will grow exponentially. But exponential curves begin relatively flat as brands establish their purpose, culture, content, and experiences that will ultimately create value. The flat part of the curve can lull a brand to sleep, leaving them unprepared for when the curve bends almost vertically as success kicks in. Brands need to build tools and processes to manage success before it happens or they will be unprepared for scale. My favorite success story comes from Rodney Scott, a restauranteur from South Carolina. Rodney grew up in his family’s whole-hog barbecue restaurant, started working at six, did his first all-night cook at eleven, and was working full-time by seventeen. After decades of hard work (the flat part of the curve), his business, Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ , was recognized in a glowing review by The New York Times and then won a regional James Beard award. Investors came along to help him grow exponentially. What he realized is that he needed processes to facilitate that growth. For example, Rodney could simply listen to the fat render off the meat and drip into the fire to understand if it was the right temperature. That’s not a scalable process. He had to break down every part of his business so that he could become a great leader and teach others to do what he knew how to do innately. Rodney now has multiple restaurants, and his brand has become a household name. The big lesson is to prepare for success before it happens. Once the growth curve turns vertical, it’s too late to start building processes and the growth curve can quickly invert.

What role does social media play in your branding efforts?

Social media is absolutely critical for branding efforts because the typical person spends over two hours per day on social media. Brands need to be where their target audience spends time and they need to be there in a way that authentically provides value. It’s important for brands to understand that the algorithms have changed. Social media doesn’t provide the reach that was once promised to marketers. It is now a pay-for-play world, so brands need to not only create great content, but they need to invest in making sure their audience actually sees it. Organic social content is insufficient for meeting brand or revenue goals.

What advice would you give to other marketers or business leaders to thrive and avoid burnout?

The most important advice that I can give to other marketers and business leaders is surround yourself with world-class human beings. Surround yourself with colleagues who can inspire you every day. Obviously, there are many articles that talk about the importance of mindfulness and rest and work/life balance, and while all of that is important, I’ve found the people are what keep me from feeling burnt out. And to be honest, I’ve never felt burnt out one single day in my entire career. I am truly the least valuable player at our agency. And trying to keep up with the quality of people that we’ve found puts wind in my sales every day.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would like to see focus on empowerment over interruptions. This means brands need to focus on improving people’s lives one small step at a time. While it would certainly be great for every brand to focus in on saving the planet like Patagonia, I’ve learned that people don’t wake up in the morning expecting every brand to hug trees and save the manatees. That would be great, but it’s not actually needed. But if brands can find an authentic way to improve people’s lives every single day, given the power and scale of corporations, we truly could make the world a better place. Some of these efforts may be fairly humble, but collectively they could have a massive impact. It could be as simple as helping people learn how to play guitar, helping people cook a great family meal, helping people get better organized, and helping people be more comfortable, healthier, and happier.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth over-doing!” What that means is that we all need to recognize that we have one shot at life, so lean in. Don’t be lazy. Have fun. Treasure relationships. Take care of your friends and family. Do your best. Don’t fear failure. Learn to take a punch and keep going. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. Enjoy the ride!

We are blessed that very prominent leaders in business and entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have a lunch or breakfast with? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

That’s a great question. To be really honest, my favorite breakfast is at a greasy diner with my wife and kids (and dog hiding under the booth). If you could help schedule that for this upcoming weekend, that would be awesome.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-rosenblum/

Instagram: @TheJeffRosenblum

Twitter: @jrquestus

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.