Welcome to Damn Good Brands.

Today we’re talking to Director of PR at Capital One, Sukhi Sahni.

Sukhi, she was added to The Holmes Report’s Innovator Twenty-Five list of top PR movers-and-shakers and prior to joining Capital One, Sukhi worked in Communications at Sprint Nextel and before that she was a part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

We discussed a lot of things, but primarily Sukhi will be sharing with us her thoughts on insights-driven PR and her work on Capital One’s Purpose Project; a fascinating creative initiative that focuses on the many ways card users are rethinking the power of travel as a vehicle for personal change and improvement.

All of that and so much more on this week’s episode of Damn Good Brands. Now, please give it up, for Sukhi Sahni, PR Director at Capital One, in conversation with Lippe Taylor president, Paul Dyer.

Key Links:

• Capital One
• Sukhi Sahni
• Purpose Project
• PESO model

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Here are some of the main takeaways from our visit with Benton Crane, CEO of Provo, Utah-based Harmon Brothers

• The most effective creative collaboration starts in a vacuum. Benton said that, in every Harmon Brothers project, four writers are tasked with writing four separate initial scripts. No exchanging notes, no bouncing ideas off one another. Then, the client is called in for a reading of each script. Until this moment, no higher-up in the agency has seen or weighed in on any of them. This may seem like a huge risk, but the clients love it because it allows them to get involved in the raw creative process, resulting in a superior final product that is closer to what they want.

• Test EVERYTHING. Every Harmon Brothers campaign undergoes an insane amount of testing - for instance, in the conceptualization stage, the initial script is read to 10 semi-disinterested people. During the reading, their facial reactions are captured on video. A scorecard referred to as a "laugh graph" correlates the reactions to each part of the script in order to gauge whether it's a hit or not.

• Learn from Pixar and Create a Brain Trust. Harmon Brothers operates a Pixar-style creative brain trust that exists in part to identify weaknesses in the scripts, storyboards, and shoots. Benton said this group never overrides the agency’s quintet of creative directors but do offer constructive feedback for them to ponder and utilize (or not). This concept was borrowed from Pixar who operates similarly. You can learn more by reading Ed Catmull’s pinnacle book, CREATIVITY INC.

• Learn REAL Storytelling Structures like Joseph Cambell’s Hero’s Journey. Benton spoke about how humans are hard-wired to pay lasting attention to stories featuring a protagonist on a quest. He said the hero’s journey formula is a solid-gold framework to approach ad-writing with because no other archetypal structure makes as deep of an emotional connection with audiences. However in Harmon Brothers ads, the viewers are positioned as the hero INSTEAD of the product. Instead, the product is the ‘sword that slays the dragon’ or the bridge stands between them and the prize—typically a happier life.

Thank you for listening to Damn Good Brands, don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!

Key Links

Benton Crane LinkedIn page

Harmon Brothers website

From Poop To Gold: The Marketing Magic of Harmon Brothers by Chris Jones

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller

Squatty Potty ad

Poo-Pourri ad

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Welcome to Damn Good Brands. Today, as part of our Influence 100 series in partnership with The Holmes Report, we are speaking to Ken Hong, the Head of Global Corporate Communications at LG.

Ken has been at LG for over ten years. Throughout the course of that time, he has witnessed and led the company through a number of technological and overall changes in the marketing landscape. Ken currently resides in Korea, but his position has taken him all over the world, giving him a very globalized perspective on consumer technology and the state of communications.

We discuss Ken’s philosophy of leadership during comprehensive company evolution, and his overall thoughts on today’s state of communications. Here are some key takeaways from this conversation with Ken Hong:

Study psychology and political science or hire those who have. Ken is very vocal about the importance of lesser-mentioned disciplines that better enable communications professionals, specifically political science and psychology. Ken claims that his studies in both of these fields helped him tremendously as a communications leader since they gave him a fundamentally better understanding of humanity, culture, and therefore communications.

Think global, stay local. Despite working in five international cities, Ken finds that experience in global comms is in low demand, whereas local expertise in any given market is much more valuable. Ken recommends that comms leaders have a baseline understanding of global communications but remain focused on their local markets, since global expertise is rarely important to local clients.

Keep your challenger mindset. Part of Ken’s success comes down to his refusal to rest on his laurels even when LG achieves market leader status in certain categories. In Ken's view, there is no fundamental sense of “having arrived,” considering the speed of change. In an industry like electronics with its diverse array of products, it’s critical to always be cognizant of the brands that aren’t market leaders and keep pushing them forward to remain vigilant.

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