LEGO built one of the most powerful brands in history by standing for one simple idea: limitless creative play. So what happens when that same brand introduces a Smart Brick and leans into connected, tech-driven play at CES 2026?

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In this episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders explore whether LEGO has drifted from its core identity or whether this Smart Brick move represents a bold evolution of what play can be. Look at LEGO’s history, the psychology of brand trust, and how even the world’s most beloved brands can stumble when growth pulls them away from what made them iconic.

Most importantly, translate this moment into lessons for founders and small business owners who are trying to scale without losing what made their brand special in the first place.

If you’ve ever worried about growing too fast, following trends, or losing your brand’s soul, this episode is for you.

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Gift cards seem simple... but they reveal something profound about brand trust, psychology, and power.

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In this episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders unpack how Starbucks generates over $215 million annually from unredeemed gift card balances, why consumers forget to use gift cards in the first place, and what this tells us about trust, psychology, and brand power.

Explore how strong brands convince customers to prepay for future value and how that “stored trust” quietly becomes a competitive advantage.

Reilly and Scott translate these insights into practical lessons for founders and small business owners: how branding influences cash flow, why pre-commitment is a signal of brand strength, and what it really takes to build a brand people believe in before they buy.

If you’re building a brand and wondering how trust turns into revenue, this episode will change how you think about gift cards, loyalty, and long-term brand strategy.

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Most founders think they have a marketing problem. They don’t. They have a positioning problem and it’s quietly slowing every part of their business.

Brand News: Guess what brand paid $450 Million for Peanuts...

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In this episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman breaks down why positioning is the lifeblood of your business, not a marketing tactic. You’ll learn how perception shapes growth, why framing beats features, and how to identify the hidden gaps preventing customers from “getting it.”

Reilly also shares his Positioning Flywheel™, a proprietary framework that shows how brands build momentum through Association, Alignment, Fit, Perceived Affordance, and Kinship.

⁠> > See Positioning Flywheel diagram here⁠

If you’ve ever felt stuck, misunderstood, underpriced, or overlooked, this episode will show you the real reason why… and how to fix it.

Perfect for founders, marketers, and anyone responsible for guiding a brand’s direction.

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Holiday marketing usually means louder ads, bigger discounts, and more noise. Dunkin’ took a different approach.

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In this episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down the ingenious holiday campaign from Dunkin' that transformed Munchkins from a product into a festive character. They used nostalgia, personification, and storytelling to embed the brand into the emotional fabric of the season.

Rather than selling donuts, Dunkin’ sold feeling: warmth, familiarity, joy, and togetherness. By leveraging psychological principles like nostalgia bias, anthropomorphism, and seasonal identity cues, the brand created a holiday narrative that felt timeless instead of transactional.

• How nostalgia increases emotional trust and brand affinity

• Why personifying products creates stronger memory encoding

• How holiday storytelling outperforms promotional messaging

• The psychology behind turning products into cultural characters

• How to align brand assets with seasonal emotion (without feeling salesy)

This episode is a masterclass in modern brand storytelling and seasonal strategy and proof that the strongest holiday campaigns don’t push products, they build traditions.

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Santa Claus didn’t always wear red, and what founders can learn from good ol' St. Nick.

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So how did Coca-Cola help turn a beloved cultural figure into a billion-dollar brand association without most people noticing?

In this special holiday episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders of Motif Brands dissect one of the most masterful brand strategies in modern history.

Coca-Cola didn’t just sell soda, they embedded themselves into the global cultural fabric by consistently aligning their brand with Santa and Christmas over decades.

While Coke didn’t invent Santa or his signature red suit, their disciplined, long-term approach helped standardize his modern image and permanently associate Coca-Cola with the most emotional moment of the year.

You’ll learn a blueprint for achieving enduring market positioning, including:

• The Power of Association: Why owning a feeling or cultural moment beats simple brand awareness every time

• Consistency as Capital: How decades of disciplined repetition compound brand equity into multi-generational assets

• Cultural Standardization: How strategic consistency can help shape a unified global icon

• The Invisible Brand Move: Why the most powerful strategies don’t feel like marketing at all
This episode is a masterclass in patient capital, emotional branding, and cultural positioning and proof that the strongest brands win by showing up consistently and letting culture do the rest.

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Founders can learn from this $5 store and why it is now a top-performing retailer.

Brand News: Eggnog is back at Starbucks!

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Five Below is one of the most surprising winners of 2025. While many retailers are shrinking, Five Below is scaling and its stock is crushing the market(up 67% YTD).

In this episode, brand experts Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down how a brand built on $1–$5 products became a retail juggernaut and what founders can learn from its explosive rise.

You’ll learn:

• The origin story behind Five Below’s unique brand DNA

• How it turned value shopping into an emotional experience

• Why it thrives during economic uncertainty

• The psychological engine behind small-ticket luxuries (the modern “Lipstick Effect”)

• Strategic lessons founders can apply to their own brands in 2026

Whether your business is growing, plateauing, or ready for reinvention, this episode shows how a brand with constraints turned those constraints into category dominance. This is brand strategy in action; clear, bold, and wildly effective.

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Founders often obsess over what they sell, but consumers are driven by why it matters.

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Every toddler discovers the same magic word. A word that Einstein, The Beatles, and Steve Jobs also relied on:
“Why?”

In this Brandy episode, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders explore why the question why is more than a phase kids go through. It’s a fundamental part of human nature, consumer psychology, and brand-building.

Founders spend enormous energy perfecting the what and the how, but the real value — and the real decision-making power —lives in the why. Why choose this brand? Why is this product better? Why does this matter to me?

Along with behavioral science and classic brand strategy, this conversation uncovers how “Why” creates:
• Meaning

• Story

• Perceived value

• Emotional connection

• Differentiation in crowded markets

• Why every consumer (consciously or not) is driven by “Why?”

• How toddlers reveal a universal psychological truth about buying behavior

• Why “why” is the fastest way to add perceived value to your brand

• What founders get wrong when they focus only on features and benefits

• How brands like Apple, Dyson, Tony's Chocolonely, and Space X embed their “Why” into every touchpoint

Because the most successful companies don’t just answer what people buy.... they answer why they should care.

What You’ll Learn:

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You won't believe what 42% of Lays Chips consumers think about the product...

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Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders offer a meaningful thought to chew on this Thanksgiving: inaction isn’t free.

We’re biologically wired to play it safe, to preserve the status quo, and to assume that doing nothing carries no cost. But in business, in branding, and in life, inaction is a decision; one that often carries more risk than the action we’re avoiding.

In this reflective episode, the conversation explores:

• Why founders instinctively overweight the perceived cost of action

• The fallacy that the status quo is “safe” or “neutral”

• How inaction quietly drains opportunity, momentum, and relevance

• Why Nvidia's success is built on risks 20+ years ago.

• Why the greatest rewards (in business and in life) require stepping into the unknown
• How this mindset shapes marketing, risk, innovation, and strategic decision-making

Drawing from psychology and business strategy, Reilly and Scott challenge founders to rethink the role of fear, risk, and exploration to see both action and inaction as choices that shape the future of their company.

A timely reminder that the biggest danger may not be trying something new… but holding onto something old.

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