Light Light Q+A

Michael Megalli: Hello, Lisa Light.

Lisa Light: Michael. How are you? How are you down the street from me?

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, exactly. I'm good. Thank you for agreeing to have this Q&A. It's the second of these conversations that I've been having. And so just by way of introduction, you and I are two of the three partners in the Djinn Dept. And we're a brand consultancy.

And it's funny for me to be publicly talking about how I actually make a living because I've been out here doing these videos about brand, and history of brand, and psychology of brand, and what's broken, and what could be fixed. And I don't talk much about the consulting business in these forums.

So, it's exciting to have a chance to have this conversation and to share a little bit about the Djinn Dept. and the work that we do because it's all very cool. Lisa, you and I have been friends and collaborators for a long time. Not to date ourselves, but over 25 years. And you are an incredibly original brand thinker with lots of experience building and strengthening brands for some of the biggest and most creative and forward-thinking companies in the world. You're also the best living naming person --

Lisa: -- so says you.

Michael: No, but really, it's true.

What we've been thinking about this conversation is to talk a little bit about our philosophy of what brands are and how they work.

Brand is everywhere now. People interact with thousands of brands in their lives. And what we really want to do is draw back the curtain a little bit and talk a little bit about the mechanics of how these things work, why they're powerful, and why they are so endlessly fascinating.

Lisa: I would also say that thinking deeply and trying to find a way to articulate this is exactly what we had to do to finally make a website and announce that our secret studio that has been chugging along for these few last years is really out there. And that we do have a perspective on what brand is and what it can do that is different from the general understanding of what a brand agency is.

Michael: And the people can see it at djinndept.com

Lisa: Yes!

Michael: And I hope they do go check it out. It’s amazing how hard it was to do it for ourselves,

Lisa: Yes. We do it for other people all the time. Telling your own story. What are you about? How are you different than other folks? What is the deeper meaning?

So, at the Djinn Dept, we came together to work on projects that were thorny problems that needed deep thinking and deep investigation to get to the bottom of a company in a moment of transition. Meeting startups that were sitting on a major new technology, meeting major technology companies out here in the Pacific Northwest who had lost market trust or market share, meeting companies that were just simply incumbents that were losing attention in the new attentional economy.

And all of these companies started realizing that they had lost the thread of who they were and what their story was, what the central core beliefs were that really drove everything that they did as a company, as a product developer, but also what their culture was that would be sustainable when they had to make decisions about how to conduct themselves in the market. And so, we developed a process that is custom to each client, but starts with the understanding that inflection, points of transition are real moments of opportunity to do some soul searching and resurface what is essentially true about an organization and play that back to them to help create a roadmap for incredibly authentic growth moving forward.

Clearing the cobwebs out and going and digging inside of the thinking of an organization and its output in order to be able to find those core truths. Brands are not just this surface level visual, this surface level insignia. They are the container for the deepest meaning, like the DNA of an organization that replicates in everything a company or organization does, but is sometimes not very visibly seen as a logo or as a brand campaign, or as a personality who's selling their brand in an entertaining way.

Michael: Yeah. And it is archeology or journalism or psychology. We're not coming in to make something up, right? To dream up some communications platform that maybe will help awareness about the brand or the company. We're really digging in to find those animating truths.

Lisa: Yes.

Michael: Those things that are distinctively true at the heart of that organization.

Lisa: And each time we go into an organization or a project, it's really important to remind folks that branding is not marketing. Brand is the code that helps you create productive, successful, authentic, resonant marketing. And we start with that step back. If you go all the way back to the core, then you can move forward with a lot less friction through decisions that affect all kinds of marketing decisions.

We've found that helping companies take that step back in order to leap forward is an efficiency in the end, it's a real investment that has all kinds of dividends when you can teach an organization how to practice what it is that they're doing and what they believe. It’s really rewarding to be able to meet folks at that kind of a moment.

Often it comes at a point of transition or crisis where a company must look inward. But more and more companies understand that creating an authentic culture that is as true inside as that it is on the outside is how to attract talent, how to create the best new product, how to create the best new service, and then how to continue to stay relevant with a vastly fast-moving marketplace that's out there.

Michael: Yeah. And as you said before, they're looking for a roadmap in times of transition. We’ve always said that we work with companies in these moments of transition. It could be new leadership, it could be new products, or new technology.It could be new competitors, it could be a merger…

Lisa: Acquisition.

Michael: Something is happening to the business that is changing the business and is requiring them to think about who they are and what they become on the other side of that transition. And I think what's interesting right now is that the whole world is in transition.

Lisa: Stasis will kill at this point. But staying still and not being fluid with what's happening in the world is different than having a core sense of identity that you carry with you. So, it's about stability that allows you to be adaptive. And helping companies find that stability when everything around is in flux and transformation is a big gift. And every company has it that's trying to create an innovation or put something out and has been succeeding at that in the marketplace has that core DNA. That code. But it's amazing how easy it is to lose track of it when you only start looking outward at the hall of mirrors of what everybody else is doing

Certainly, a huge part of what we do is research based and really learning what is going on out there. But then, like any creative process, you have to shut that noise out and go and look at what is inside and what is real that you can play back to an organization that they can hold onto in a really substantial way.

Michael: And I think one of the things that's so gratifying about doing this work is what happens when you get that right. What happens when you are able to define that nucleus, that center, and unlock all of the energy and get everyone pulling in, in one shared direction that is broadly understood.

It's very powerful.

Lisa: Yeah, and it's almost viral. And this is one of the interesting things about what we do, and I think it's worth stopping to say that both of us and our partner, Glasgow Phillips, we're all writers. So, one of the things that is unusual about our studio, our agency, is that we do carry the strategic piece of everything we've just been talking about the strategy of a brand into storytelling, into execution.

Michael: Right.

Lisa: And when you find a language, and a voice, and an identity for a brand in the way that it talks about itself and the way that its employees and leaders talk about themselves, then you start to see this natural adoption of a personality of a core way of being.

Or as your friend, Thomas Ordahl, talked about, it’s how things are done. What you see when you give a company a language as well as a strategy, is that all of a sudden over here in this product marketing group that has nothing to do with the people you were working with, they're adopting the language and the voice.

Michael: So, one of the things we've had a lot of fun talking about over the years, and that I've obviously been writing a lot about, is the idea that brands have always been part of how humans make culture. And, unlike me, you're a true sports fan. I think sports are such a good example of brands out in the world of culture, and teams generally.

Lisa: I would go even so far as to say it's not that brands are part of how we make culture. Brands are how we make culture. Common meaning is such a precious commodity. And brands that hold common meaning amongst a group of people, and that can spread to include newcomers to a group of people, enter a set of common understandings. It’s a way of creating a really functional civic society.

And for me, I come from Chicago. I am genetically obligated to be a sports fan. It's just in the blood. My father was a south sider and rooted for the White Sox. My mother was a north sider and rooted for the Chicago Cubs. My whole childhood, they could not watch a baseball game together on the weekends. They each had the TV going and in their separate spaces yelling at their team on the TV. But where we did come together as a family was football. And so I started going to football games when I was at Soldier Field when I was seven, maybe six. I don't even know how I learned the game of football.

It just, I absorbed it by osmosis and I absorbed all of the really wonderful and great things about the collective experience, the collective social cohesion that going and sitting in a freezing stadium with a whole bunch of other freezing people, with avid fans, watching a losing team for years and going anyway, what that did to the kind of euphoric sense of belonging that I associate with a great sport experience.

That was the whole experience of my attunement to football with the Bears. And what's super interesting now is that the Seahawks are a very different culture. They do not have this huge tailgating, generational culture. It's a newer team. We are coming through this age of a generational coach, Pete Carroll, who has now left.

But I just have to talk to you about the fact that right now the Seahawks have radically rebuilt their culture. They hired a new coach last year who is the youngest coach in the league. He's a defensive genius, and in this off season, they completely scrubbed their incoming incumbent lineup and have been poaching from the Chicago Bears.

And it's just an ongoing living culture that I get to be a part of now, and to watch this very radical decision to innovate and to get rid of everything that was known in a team, in a club because ownership, Paul Allen's family, said, “Go ahead, do it.”.

The coaches are young. They said, “We don't have to hold onto what was. We can move forward into the frontier and do this in a completely new way.”. And, the culture in Seattle, which has always been about risk and frontier mentality, to take the risk and to go forward in a way that is not conservative at all.

Michael: I was going to ask, because it is very place-based, right?

Lisa: Absolutely about place.

Michael: These brands are rooted in that place.

Lisa: So, the Bears are one of the oldest teams in the league with the Green Bay Packers, and they pursue greatness. They have the best available incoming head coach to the league in Ben Johnson, who is this wunderkind in Minnesota, coming from another central division, rough and tumble, OG football in the mud, in the snow, in the rain, playing through everything in absolutely almost rugby-like conditions. And the appetite for complete revolution in the Midwest is not the same as it is out here in the Northwest, where it's, “Okay, let's do it. Let's completely change our enterprise and build a culture.”. This isn't about the players that they're signing, it's about the fact that everybody is attuned, the owner, the general manager, the head coach, who is the defensive coordinator, the new incoming offensive coordinator to say, “We're gonna build a new culture.”

And out of that culture will come belief, and out of belief will come energy, and out of energy will come the best in our players.