Transcript
Lindsay Pedersen
The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. If you're wondering where purpose-driven leaders direct their time, team, budget, and energy, you'll find out here on the North Star Leaders Podcast. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of this show.
Remember, purpose isn't what you hang on the wall. It's what you do when the choice is hard. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Bryan Law.
Bryan is CMO at Nerdio, the cloud management solution. Bryan, welcome to the show.
Bryan Law
Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.
Lindsay Pedersen
I'm excited to have you. To start us off, what's the most energizing part of your role that others on the outside would never guess?
Bryan Law
I would say, in general, what gets me most excited is taking theory and research and putting it into practice. It makes me feel better about all the reading that I do, that I can try and apply it, but I did consulting for a really long time, and I felt many times I was creating frameworks and strategies that didn't always come to fruition, and it's something I really like being able to do now in my role.
Lindsay Pedersen
You get to see it on the ground.
Bryan Law
Yeah.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah, I love that. Well, we were talking before I hit record, because you turned me on to this study from Wharton's Neuroscience Institute, finding the idea of consistent brand message speeding up growth. Not just being better in a subjective way, but literally hastening the pace of growth.
Can you talk about that and how it's affected the way that you lead marketing and think about brand?
Why Consistency Drives Growth
Bryan Law
Yeah, and there's actually, from both Wharton's Neuroscience Initiative and then the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, some very related research that I'm going to talk about. What I found fascinating from Wharton's research was this idea of a collective brain. The more people that have a consistent understanding of your brand, the faster your brand will grow.
I would say that flies in the face of what I learned in business school, which is you need to segment the market in a very different messages part of the market because you want to have it align. Actually, what they found is when there's core tenants that align together, it actually goes faster. Then from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, they talk a lot about this idea of being consistently distinctive.
Essentially, standing out, being distinctive, which is different than being differentiated, which is saying this is what someone does versus us. What they found was that if you understand for your category, what are the things that come up in people's minds in buying situations, and you then do everything you can to attach your brain to those things consistently, you'll grow faster. Those two related premises, to me, I found to be really, really valuable.
It also makes marketing's job a little bit simpler because you don't need to do tons of different messages to tons of different audiences. Ideally, you're laddering up to the same core themes. Then obviously finding nuances where you can apply them to maybe a more technical versus a business-based buyer, but they should all give that same impression of your company.
Lindsay Pedersen
Consistency is, if you do nothing else, do that.
Bryan Law
It is. One of the things I find really cool about AEO and GEO in terms of the answer engine optimization is it's forcing us to do something that we should have been doing for a long time, which is be consistent across different mediums. The content you're creating on your website and the blogs that you're creating should emphasize the same themes as what you're doing getting on review sites or what you're talking to the media about or what you're posting on social.
But many times, marketing orgs get big and you have one team doing their own set of activities and another one doing another one. I think this is just highlighting you actually need to have everyone rowing in the same direction, trying to communicate the same thing to the market. In some ways, AI has been a forcing function to do better marketing.
Lindsay Pedersen
Wow, that's really thought-provoking. Also, consistent is simpler and therefore tends to be less expensive. Complexity is expensive.
Rowing in different directions is expensive. It's doubly a happy way to show up because it's easier. You can spend less money and have more impact.
Bryan Law
In terms of the way I've tried to internalize, sometimes I think when you give visual examples, it's easier to have it resonate versus words or messages. There was a study that was done for Salesforce relative to all of their branding that they do and their assets they create. Obviously, Salesforce is an amazing, very large company.
It spends an incredible amount of money on branding. What they found was of all the assets that they have, really the only two that essentially score at the top on two dimensions, and I'll talk about it in a second, is one, the Salesforce cloud that has Salesforce written in it, and Astro. Obviously, they have tons of characters.
They have the foresty trailhead theme. By and large, all of those don't actually resonate. It's a subset.
If you think of the company, I'm obviously many times smaller. If I'm trying to have lots of different messages or lots of different assets or visuals, it's unlikely that's actually going to pierce through people's brains. I mentioned two axes.
Those axes are essentially fame, which is when someone sees something, whether it's a message or a visual or whatnot, how often do they think of you? Then the other one is uniqueness, which is when they identify someone, how often is it you versus potentially misattributing you to someone else? You want to be recognized a lot and correctly in a high proportion.
That can apply for messaging. It can provide for logos, sounds, lyrics, anything like that.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah. Why doesn't everybody do this? It makes a lot of intuitive sense.
What do you think impedes that adoption being kind of how all marketing is?
The Problem with Traditional B2B Marketing
Bryan Law
Yeah. A couple of thoughts. Something back when Peter Weinberg and John Lombardo were leading LinkedIn's B2B Institute, they had a slide that they used that I thought it really resonated with me, which is you can either be right or wrong, and you can either do what everyone is doing, or you can go against the grain.
If you're wrong, it doesn't matter. If you are right, you're doing the same thing as everyone else. It also doesn't matter.
It's being right and doing things that are different. The sweet spot is always figuring those things out. A lot of the things I said are very common in B2C.
They're just not leveraged in B2B because we think our buyer is incredibly rational and data-driven, and that's true, but actually what research has found, there was a neuroscientist, Demasio is his name, where he did studies of people who were missing the part of their brain that processes emotion, and what they actually found was that you can't make a decision without emotion, without that part of your brain working.
Many times what we do is we then layer over and we help explain to ourselves why we made a decision. It's important to provide both. One, you need to appeal to people's emotion, but then you need to help us explain to ourselves and others why we made a decision.
I think that's a fundamental challenge is that we think differently about B2B buyers. I think the second thing, when I was in business school, I took a lot of classes that talked about the importance of really segmenting your market, and people would go through and evaluate all the options they have, and that all makes sense in a lab where everyone has perfect information, but in the practical world, I care as a CMO about many different decisions I'm making, but I don't care enough to do all the research on all of them, and I just don't have the practical bandwidth to do it, and I'm being bombarded by many competitors, but not all of them in the industry, and unless I've really done thorough research to identify who they all are, they may never even come into my consideration set. I think a lot of the premises for our approach towards marketing are based on flawed research around how people buy.
I'm sure there are lots of other reasons as well, but those are sort of some of the core ones that I think about.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah, and it strikes me, this whole idea of rational versus emotional, first of all, it strikes me as a false dichotomy. Things that are emotional often are rational, equivalent with the logic of there being this big gap between them. But also, it's funny because, and maybe this truly is more true in B2B, there's no such thing as a rational purchase because of what you just said, because emotions are always somewhere in the decision-making.
And maybe even way more than we think. But we don't like, at least a lot in the B2B world, what I found is, more than in the B2C realm, people like to think that they are making a rational decision, regardless of whether they are. So then you're also doing this funny thing as a marketer where you know that the reality is they're going to make a decision based on lots of things, both emotional and logical, but you want them to think that they're making it based on rational because they like to think that they're the kind of person who makes decisions that way.
There's a lot going on that you're trying to do brain-to-brain in that relationship, in that interchange, and it feels like it's so powerful to just honor that a person has a lot that drives what they do and how they think and how they decide. Some of it is prefrontal cortex, and some of it is brainstem.
Probably a lot more of it is limbic system than most of us like to say, for whatever reason in this culture.
Bryan Law
Even just thinking of a conversation I was on just before I got on with you, we're making a decision about a particular technology, and the team member that I was talking to said, I keep whipsawing back and forth on my decision in terms of which is the better vendor to go with. As I was talking to her, I was actually thinking a little bit about this topic, which is I could convince myself that either one of these is a good decision to make, and then once we've made the decision, you don't really have the ability to validate was it the right decision or the wrong one because you didn't move forward with both of them. Even if you have done a full POC, you still get imperfect information.
I just find the space fascinating, and it creates a lot of opportunity as a marketer to figure out how do you influence, and sometimes I think influence has a bad connotation. I think back, it's now 10 years ago, I was at a conversion rate optimization conference and took a class the day beforehand, and it was about system one, system two thinking, essentially sort of- Climbing, yeah. Yeah.
Using an example of a website where you could just do little things, like you could have a little arrow embedded into the bottom of a panel, and that significantly increased people's movement down the page. You didn't even necessarily notice it was there because it was just sort of a slight design feature, but when you think about our, whether it's emotion or sort of heuristics, just sort of the automated decision making that we have, it's really powerful, and as marketers, you can use it positively, you can use it negatively, but there's lots of ways you can actually influence behavior that I don't know that we always lean into, and I certainly don't take advantage of, despite the fact that I read a lot that tells me I should be doing.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah, it's cool because we marketers are also humans with this human brain that we too have kind of motives and limitations, and so yeah, I think that's so rich. We were talking before we hit record about, to listeners, Brian and I both were psychology undergraduate majors at Georgetown, and so Brian, you were starting to tell me about this professor in the class psychology and law, about something that you learned that sort of foreshadowed what you're doing now as a marketing leader, so tell my community about that.
The Hidden Power of Storytelling
Bryan Law
Yeah, actually, I mean it was one of my favorite classes when I was at Georgetown, and it was essentially the application of psychology to justice and the legal system. There were lots of things I learned about that that were enlightening, and some that were disheartening in terms of just how our judicial system worked.
One of them was that prosecutors disproportionately win, sort of over 70% of the time, for two reasons. One, they tell stories, and secondly, they use emotion. And so you think, obviously, it's overdone a little bit on TV, but the prosecutor gets on stage and tells this amazing narrative about why the person's guilty and did these terrible things, and they pull on your heartstrings. You come away maybe with a little bit of a tear in your eye, and then the defense attorney tries to come up and says, "Well, you know, point one that they made isn't completely true, and point two is inaccurate."
Rather than telling a counter-story, many times they try and poke holes in stories using logic, and our brain is very willing to just overlook gaping holes in stories because we like a nice little story. And again, if you tie into emotion, it works out.
One of the things that I was doing, I was going to do a conference presentation a couple years ago, and I was like, "Oh, this would be a really fascinating thing to pull up, how the industry's changed based on all this research that showed this was a problem." And unfortunately, there's a bunch of new research that shows the exact same thing because the legal profession largely hasn't changed in terms of how prosecutors and defense attorneys approach things, particularly when people can't afford their own attorneys.
One of the studies that I was looking at was showing, with public defenders in murder cases, what was the change in terms of people getting convicted if the defense attorney just told the counter-narrative. All they had to do was tell a story about another potential plausible outcome rather than the traditional recitation of facts. And what they actually found is that people who were going away for life in jail had more than a 50% reduction in conviction rate if the defense attorney just told the counter-narrative.
And so the point that I made there was, you have jurors who are sitting there. They hopefully fully appreciate the seriousness and the gravity of the decision they're making. They're trying to use all of their faculties to really ensure that's the just decision, and something as little as a counter-narrative can completely sway the outcome.
And in marketing, we're not doing anything like that. We're just trying to get you to purchase something that you may care a lot about, and maybe you don't. And so, if it can be that powerful in a life-or-death scenario, just imagine how powerful putting a little emotion, a little story, into your marketing is in changing someone's willingness to buy your product, capabilities, or services versus someone else. I thought it was.
Lindsay Pedersen
That blows my mind. It's amazing how our brains just can't resist a story. There's like a magnetic pull, and I notice this a lot with parenting, because especially like teenagers, they don't like lessons or lectures, imagine that, but if I just say, oh, I remember this time, and something opens up like even the teenagers can't resist a story, there's probably a lesson buried in there, but we just can't resist it.
Jurors can't resist it, even when the stakes are really high, but I also wonder with what you just told, like, why don't defense attorneys just start using the secrets of prosecutors and start using, like, why?
Bryan Law
So certainly, I mean, attorneys that are getting paid a lot of money, I think do that effectively. I think the thing that was interesting in your public defense, many times these attorneys are way overloaded with their cases. They don't have enough time to adequately prepare.
Many times they're showing up and they're just sort of reading the details and can't do their client justice. And so I thought that was where it was particularly interesting, because it was sort of, it highlighted, even in those scenarios, there's a pretty significant gap and difference, but to some of the comments you made around stories. So there's actually a decent amount of research that shows like when we hear stories, our brains release sort of increased levels of sort of dopamine or serotonin or cortisol.
And what we actually ended up doing essentially the way that our brain works is we have a bunch of memories that are filed away in our brain and they're constantly being surfaced and new information is being attached into them. And so there was a study that I thought was actually pretty interesting where when people do planning, so you're thinking about, Hey, what do I want to do for next year? Personal life, my, you know, our company priorities, the part of your brain that is actually lit up is the part that stores and allows for retrieval of memories.
So essentially what we're doing when we're planning is we're rapid fire. We don't even realize this. We're referencing our database of memories and projecting out what might happen into the future.
And so in the same way, when you hear a net new story, it essentially activates that part of your brain. And then you can actually sometimes encode that story into your personal memory and think that you experienced something in the past that you actually didn't. And there's just a lot of like interesting research around how our brains work and how marketing can be effective.
And I think it speaks, because certainly as someone who grew up on the demand gen side of marketing, you know, you always think about, Hey, you know, how do we sort of eke out this incremental conversion and the importance there. But as I've learned more about the space, what's really highlighted to me is you need to spend a lot more of your time trying to think of, you know, what is the message that you want to convey? How do you get people thinking about you prior to entering the buying situation?
And there's definitely things you can do to shift people's mind once they're in the buying situation. But Bain and Google is now two and a half years ago, did some research and they found that, you know, depending on the B2B service or product category, 80 to 90% of buyers have a day one list. 90% of the time they choose from that day one list.
And there was some separate research that Google did with Comscore that said about two thirds of the time, there's only one account or one sort of company or vendor that you're thinking about on that day one list. And so there's actually a lot more marketing can do to add value on the front side. I think the biggest issue as a marketer is how do you convince your CEO?
How do you convince your CFO? How do you convince the rest of the leadership team that you need to be spending more time at the top part of the funnel and ensuring that you're going to actually come to mind when people want to purchase something. And I think that is the challenge.
And I've had sort of a couple of things that I've done that I've found to be successful, but obviously a lot I could still learn. One is when you can do, and I've done this with LinkedIn, but you can do it sort of with StackAdapt, do the same thing. When you expose an audience to brand messaging and demand gen messaging, what we found was that not surprisingly, people are going to click through on the demand gen stuff at a higher rate.
You certainly would hope so. But what we found was in aggregate, that spend on brand and demand was more efficient in generating the conversion than just the demand gen spend. And so it was actually cheaper.
So I could go to my CFO and say, this is cheaper than if we just did the demand gen. And then the second piece, because as you know, particularly as you're going into larger accounts that you're trying to sell into, it's not just one person that's being connected through and sometimes it's hard to do that tracking, is we would do holdout groups. So let's say you have a hundred accounts you're trying to win or push down the funnel, do the brand advertising to 80 of them, not the other 20 and see, you know, do opportunities advance faster?
Do they close at a higher rate of the larger deal sizes? And what we were able to show is in that case as well, it was effective. Obviously your brand advertising needs to be useful and convey the messages that are relevant.
And so there's some work you need to do to understand your market when you build that out. But that to me, I certainly have a lot to sort of learn on how to do that effectively. But that to me is a really exciting opportunity for me to sort of grow and for, I think, companies to do more on.
Some do a really good job of it already.
Lindsay Pedersen
It's interesting as you're describing this and like this whole conversation, it's what you started with. You're so energized by taking these conceptual truths that we've learned and applying them on the ground in a company. And now you've spent our conversation kind of talking about a lot of those kind of loud convincing truths that you now can bring to bear in what you're doing as you're leading marketing for this company.
So you just gave an example of that, of how you do that. And that wasn't another way that knowing what you know about the neuroscience and about the memory neurology and that affects what you do with Nerdio.
How Marketing Shapes Decisions
Bryan Law
And this one's definitely been an evolution for me. So I mentioned the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and they've written a number of books and I've been corporate sponsors of them a couple of times. One of the things they talked about in terms of how to leverage that knowledge and apply it was essentially you have buying situations or what they would call category entry points, reasons that you would enter the category.
And you could think about that as B2C example of I'm hungry might be a reason that I might enter a food category or I'm tired but I can't go to sleep. You might think these are different medicines that are there. But you start with those buying situations.
You then understand in those buying situations what are the mental triggers you have. So those could be thoughts, feelings, emotions. And then understand what brands are attached into those buying situations or those triggers.
And if you actually think of your brain as a bunch of nodes, any time a node fires, it's going to fire less strongly related nodes. And so ideally what you want to do is create like a mental map of like how your brain fires in different buying situations. So read all that research.
I was like, this is really cool. How do I do something with it? And so, you know, at the time I was talking to the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and they had their thoughts and I was like, I don't know that that's the way that I'm going to bring this to life.
And so I started looking to see who was doing interesting research in the space. And I came across a guy, Marco is his name and he was doing research around brand density and sort of brain mapping. And we started talking and I was like, oh, like the way you're doing your research tied into this, I think there's a way we can sort of gel it together.
And so what we did is we went in traditional panel surveys. So we would reach out to CIOs or sort of, you know, directors in IT, or we were also looking at data and analytics folks because this was back when I was at Tableau. And, you know, we said, hey, when you're thinking about these pain points, when you're thinking about these buying situations, when you're thinking about these categories, what comes to mind?
And it was just, we tried to get as much qualitative, you know, right as much as you can. And we'd say, no, no, no, really tell us more. And then we ran all of that through machine learning models and we turned it into sort of brain maps of like, what were those connections of terms?
What was the strength of connection between the terms? And then we had also asked, you know, how much do you think about Tableau versus how much do you think about Power BI and others? And we then sort of understood sort of what were those strength of connections, but also like how strong we, at the time versus our competitors attached in to know like where we needed to lean in, where there were gaps.
And that was fascinating. It was an involved process. We spent a lot of money on the surveys and convincing people to fill them out.
And so I kept thinking, you know, how could you iterate and get better on that? And so Peter and John, I mentioned they were leading LinkedIn's B2B Institute. I got to know them when we were talking about it because they were also fascinated by this research.
They've actually now created their own company called Evidenza, which uses synthetic audiences or sort of AI generated audiences to do everything I just said. And so I was their customer one. At Zoom Info, I used it at Sentinel One and I've used them here.
And I mean, I have found it to be really effective to the point where sort of one of those companies, I brought the research to our CEO and he said, first one, yes, this makes sense. Second one, this makes sense. Third one, this is terrible.
They're wrong. Almost invalidating all of the work. And I was like, oh, I'll take it back to Evidenza and let them know that there's something that they need to fix.
But first I talked to the CRO and he said, no, no, no, actually this is a really valuable buying situation. We're seeing it come up more and more. And so Evidenza and their synthetic AI audience actually had uncovered something that our CEO who had founded the company wasn't aware of.
And so I thought that was pretty powerful. And so like what we did in each of those companies we're now trying to do here is use it as the baseline for that messaging framework. What are the things that we're going to use to stand out and be distinctive so we can ladder up into those core messages rather than having different messages for our different products, different messages for our different audiences.
Ideally each of those need to ladder up into those pillars that are self reinforcing. And so, yeah, I would say that's probably, it's been fun to sort of see how that has been evolving over time and how AI can be really effective in allowing you to just get to that much.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah. Do you think that it's a kind of human blind spot that allows for something like Evidenza to uncover something that seems so counterintuitive that even the founder of the company didn't see it? Like, why is it that that would uncover something so sharp?
Using AI to Understand Buyers
Bryan Law
There's a lot of potential reasons. I would say at that company that we did a good job of sort of understanding and talking to customers, but there's always limitations of what you can do there. And someone actually asked me, I was talking to some CMOs and said, well, I mean, you do all the call recordings now with like a gong or a chorus.
Couldn't you do the exact same thing there? And I said, I mean, you could, but you have to remember the market is this big and the people who you're talking to with your SDRs is a subset smaller, and those may not be recorded. And the ones that are actually talking to your salespeople are a smaller group.
And so it's not a truly reflective representation of the market. And maybe just another example, because I always love using this. So in website creation, you can do something called card sorting where you essentially take all the different pages and you ask people to organize them.
And then you can do tree jack testing, which allows you to then validate, Hey, if I asked you this thing, how would you go find it? And now there's a couple of companies as well. You know, you have marketing, do that exercise.
You have sales, do that exercise. You have your customers do that exercise. You have prospects do it.
And it's been the same each time where marketing and sales don't agree. And you come back to leadership and you say, Hey, this is fascinating. You guys think this, you guys think this who's right.
And both times I got to say neither of you, because you have a very sort of company out version of the market, which doesn't align necessarily to be their customers. And it certainly doesn't align with your prospects. And so I think it's just a function of like, where are you collecting your information from?
And one of the benefits of AI is it's collecting from a lot more sources. And it just has the ability to process. And to me where I think the AI and human connection is powerful is AI is really, really good at synthesizing information quickly.
And it's scale, which then allows us to put judgment on top of it and then determine what we're going to do with it.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah. And you use the word scale. It's like there just simply aren't enough SDRs or without AI, you simply can't get as large of a representation.
And the law of numbers would suggest you're just going to get more fidelity when you talk to more people.
Bryan Law
Yeah. Going back to your original question, just constantly being able to learn and find new things. I just, it makes it fun.
And people to me are just endlessly fascinating sort of, you know, decisions we make, why we make the decisions that we make. And as a marketer, you get a chance to sort of dabble in that space a little bit.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah. What's your growth edge right now as a marketing leader? What are you working on?
What's Next for Marketing Leaders
Bryan Law
So as I'm getting up to speed at Nerdio, I mean, when I joined, one of the things I was really excited about is we have a fun and distinct brand, but I don't know that we're communicating it as broadly as we can with stories and video and things like that. And so that's definitely something that's top of mind for me and trying to leverage AI to be effective there. And then I think one of the things that I actually going back to my Zoom info days, one of those pillars we had was this idea of how do you engage customers consistently?
And I think most companies struggle between what your marketers are saying when your SDRs are saying and your sort of new business AEs and your sort of account managers and your CSMs. I think there's a real power to what AI can do to align those conversations to create consistency across what you say, not just in your marketing, but across the entire organization. And so I'd say that is an area that we're like actively dabbling in and trying to make progress on. And it's honestly, one of the things I've loved about Nerdio is the way the leadership team comes together on some of these ideas.
And it's like, wow, this is fun. Let's try and solve this together rather than at other places I've seen where it becomes, hey, this is my turf. You're not going to interfere on how I'm doing it or I'm not going to get some of the ownership of it.
So I'm not going to lean in. I haven't experienced that yet. So with a couple of my counterparts, we've been having a little bit of fun as we're starting to lean in and do more in this space.
Lindsay Pedersen
I feel like that's such a neat point for our careers and for work writ large is like to have this curiosity and fun about whatever it is. We don't know. It's fun to not know it makes a moment like this, especially neat and yeah, like not letting it be fun actually just like prevents you from having all of the richness of this.
And the culturally you're in a good place now.
Bryan Law
Yeah. I mean, as part of that, you're not always going to be right. So sometimes you're going to try things and it's not going to work.
And I've seen that even since I started, I mean the number of areas where, you know, I wanted to try something that didn't work out perfectly or want to sort of my counterparts, but there's that openness to like, Hey, let's iterate on it. And if it doesn't work, let's quickly decide and sort of push it back. I feel like at many companies you've talked theoretically about that being the case.
Yes. Afraid of making a mistake. And yes, it's just been a refreshing culture that I've gotten the benefit of joining.
Lindsay Pedersen
Yeah. I love that. Well, this has been so thought provoking.
I have like 20,000 more questions for you, but we need to finish. I have a handful of rapid fire questions for you as we finish. Are you ready?
Bryan Law
I am. Okay. I'm curious to see what these are.
Lindsay Pedersen
Okay. What's the most recent song that you have had in your head?
Bryan Law
So I have two girls, five and seven. And so we listen to sort of a lot of kid music. Actually.
It's that silly stories. It's not even music. It's what we listen to in the car all the time.
It's silly stories for kids. So yeah, that's probably the one that's.
Lindsay Pedersen
I love that.
Bryan Law
Yeah.
Lindsay Pedersen
It's very much a sign of this era of parenting. Okay. Next.
What is your favorite salty snack?
Bryan Law
Salt and vinegar chips.
Lindsay Pedersen
What is your favorite trait in a person?
Bryan Law
Sincerity.
Lindsay Pedersen
What was your last splurge purchase or any memorable splurge purchase?
Bryan Law
I was actually talking to my wife about this yesterday. I love experiences. So trips are the big thing for me.
So getting to spend dedicated time with my wife and girls. And so, yeah, it was a sort of a trip we took just before I started the job.
Lindsay Pedersen
What was the destination?
Bryan Law
Dominican Republic. So we just went for a couple of weeks.
Lindsay Pedersen
Oh, a couple of weeks. Okay. And last but not least, what would be your death row meal? Like if you only have one meal left, what do you choose?
Bryan Law
Ribeye for sure. And then, so I'm originally from South Africa and there's a dessert called Malva pudding that is just amazing. It is so unhealthy, but yeah, I would say Malva pudding, M-A-L-V-A.
Yes. Malva pudding and a ribeye.
Lindsay Pedersen
And a ribeye, which is awesome. Well, this has been such a fun conversation. Where can people find out more about you and Nerdio?
Bryan Law
Yeah. So Nerdio, getnerdio.com and me and LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. Just by my name, Brian B-R-Y-A-N, last name Law, L-A-W.
Lindsay Pedersen
Awesome. We'll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app.
If you know of a North Star Leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.
Meet Lindsay
Lindsay Pedersen is a brand strategist and creator of The Ironclad Method™ for brand building. She is author of the best-selling book, Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader’s Guide. She has advised companies from burgeoning startups to national corporations, including Duolingo, Starbucks, Expedia, Accolade, Pantheon and IMDb.
Lindsay’s background as a P&L owner at Clorox fostered in her a deep appreciation for the executive’s charge: increasing the company’s value. There, she led mature, billion-dollar businesses and newly-launched categories, from Clorox Bleach to Armor All to Brita. In each case, she was solely responsible for expanding the value of the business.
Thanks to her executive perspective, Lindsay demands that brand serves as a crystal-clear North Star to grow the business. Her brand strategies are tested in the crucible of her proprietary Ironclad Method™. Lindsay arms CEOs and CMOs with an empowering understanding of brand, and an Ironclad Brand Strategy, so they can grow their business with clarity, conviction and focus.