Dollar Shave Club, Who Gives A Crap and Lynx with David Titman | Strategy Sessions Podcast

David’s career takes in Who Gives A Crap, Dollar Shave Club and Lynx. We explore all of those brands on the show this week.

Listen on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

In this episode we discuss:

• Dealing with depression
• Dollar Shave Club
  • Why Unilever bought DSC
  • Mistakes made as the brand evolved 
  • The need to have a streamlined strategy 
• Who Gives A Crap
  • The charity background to WGAC and how they split profits 
  • Why people buy DTC toilet roll 
  • The roll of the funnel in WGAC’s growth 
  • Naming WGAC
• Lynx
  • A brand that’s bigger than it should be 
  • Men do wear lynx!
  • Repositioning Lynx from a joke brand back to being a dominant player in the sector 
  • Stephen Fry talking about Lynx
  • Using influencers to build the brand 

David Titman

David started his career at Unilever, working across a number of food, home and personal care brands including Lynx.

Previously Marketing Director at McVities and Dollar Shave Club, until recently David has been leading the marketing of Who Gives A Crap across the UK and Europe, guiding the brand’s evolution from direct response to full funnel marketing

Find David on LinkedIn

Links

• BBC’s documentary on Lad culture – Loaded: Lads, mags and mayhem
• Building Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk
• Mark Ritson Mini MBA

Oh, and here’s *that* Dollar Shave Club launch ad

Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis

If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.

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Episode Transcription

This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.

[01:00:00.000] – Andi J

David Titman, what one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?

[01:00:05.620] – David T

I was trying to think back to where I was about 10 years ago. So it would have been 2015, 2016 time. Actually, that was quite a tough period for me. So I’m going to start this off on a really low point. But I was going through some pretty bad depression about 10 years ago. Actually, I I think if we’re going to go 10 years to the day, I probably haven’t really identified it. I certainly haven’t put a name to it. It was just something that I had in the back of my mind, but had never really crystallised into a thing, which is weird thinking back to it because I think probably I was doing some of the best work of my career. I was really enjoying my job, doing some phenomenal marketing, in my humble opinion. And yet I had this thing going on in the background which didn’t to sit right. When I did finally put a name to it and said, okay, I think this is a thing I need to deal with. I went through the standard shame spiral of not wanting people to know, had to take some time off work, told my boss I didn’t want people to know why I was going.

[01:01:16.420] – David T

And so I think if I was able to talk to the guy that I was back then, I think there’s probably a few things that I would want to say, some clichés, some others. It gets better. This something that you just have to identify. As I said, I think it needs space. You need space to admit that it’s real. I think it needs to be identified and to be given a name, first and foremost. I think you need to accept that this thing is a thing. And then I think one of the things that I’m really proud of since is that I haven’t let that define me. It’s something that I’ve not really been afraid of. I think when I came back, having I had a little bit of time off work, it was something that I had gone almost full circle on from starting out with my boss saying to my boss, ‘I don’t want anyone to know, to something I really wore on my sleeve and started telling everyone about, basically, including starting this podcast with it. I used to do a lot of work conducting, this was when I was at Unilever.

[01:02:23.960] – David T

I used to be the marketing support for all of the industrial placement students and all of the grads coming in. And one of the bits of my talk that I did when I was telling them about marketing team and what we did and how we worked was talking to them about mental health and how important it was to find a network and support each other and et cetera, et et cetera. And so I think, weirdly, having gone from a place of embarrassment and feeling the stigma, et cetera, I think the biggest thing has been it now being something that I’m quite proud of in a slightly the inverted way. And so, yeah, I think that will be my big 10-year learning curve.

[01:03:06.200] – Andi J

I think it’s a really important place to start with. And I’ll stick with the marketing industry at first before maybe broadening it out to the rest of UK society. But on this podcast a couple of years ago, it was in November ’22, we had Pritesh Gadhia, who was the MD of Accenture Song. And three quarters of the way through that podcast, he talked about struggles with mental health and how he’d asked for help and how things had got better from that point. I think it blindsided me a little bit because the interview was very functional at the time. And it wasn’t entirely sure how to respond, but I thought it was really important that somebody at Pritesh’s level was having that conversation. I don’t know if you saw it, probably two years ago now, Zed Al-Kassab, when he was at channel 4, he’s now at… Is it Saatchis he’s gone to? Yes. Global MD for M&C Saatchis. And put a post up on LinkedIn and wrote in a campaign or Marketing Week or one of the magazines about how he’s been struggling with depression for a number of years and mental health and how he manages to do exercise and not working too long.

[01:04:13.280] – Andi J

So having leaders talk about that and having people like you when you’re doing onboarding for people talk about it’s really important. But I think the bit I want to talk about is just that as you move down the ladder into depression, really, because I think that there’s some signs and samples that people do where you often try and counteract what you don’t really put on names at first by just working harder or doing more. Did you find yourself hit that spiral at first? And we’re just like, I’ll just work a little bit harder and do a few more hours. The work’s great. So there’s nothing wrong. Surely everything should be fine.

[01:04:46.920] – David T

Yeah, well, I think what I was finding was that work was the one thing I felt like I was in control of. It was everything else that was going on outside of work was what was spiralling. And so, yeah, I found myself knee deep in work and deliberately investing my time in work because that was what felt like I had the ability to impact. There was one moment in particular, which was actually my 30th birthday, which was 10 years ago. It was a Friday and I was originally meant to take the day off. Didn’t have anything to do. I just didn’t want to be at work for the day. And I got called into a meeting. And so I thought, in for a penny, I’ll head into the office, no issue. And I ended up sat at my desk until about nine o’clock at night on my 30th birthday until I finally admitted, okay, I now need to take myself home and just accept the fact that I’ve turned 30 and I’m going home to an empty house. I didn’t have a partner at that point. And so I had to lean into that and accept it.

[01:05:54.280] – David T

And I remember getting into the car and getting halfway home and just bursting into tears. And I think that was really my tipping point, actually, as I say, about 10 years ago, where I felt, okay, this isn’t now a work or home thing. This is just a me thing. And I need to do something about this.

[01:06:13.440] – Andi J

I think there must be something about 10 years ago, that was… Maybe there’s a bad star sign or something like that. Not that I even believe in that type of thing, but maybe it was. Because a decade ago, I was going through… I always said that there’s two types of divorces. There’s the difficult ones and there’s the absolute fucking mess ones. And then there’s a new category that me and my ex-wife invented of just further down that road into the absolute pits. And there was a point where I screamed at the MD of the agency I was at the time in a meeting in front of about a dozen people, told him what I really thought of him and stormed out of that, jumped in my car, got half a mile down the road, and then burst into tears crying and did the same thing. Turned around and drove back, called the MD into a meeting with the owner of the agency, just sat down and was like, I think I might need a couple of days off, lads, if that’s all right. They were like, take your time. But it’s funny, isn’t it? How you store it up.

[01:07:06.900] – Andi J

Do you think this is a male thing? Because male mental health is a big problem. That’s where we’ll zoom it out beyond the marketing world. But do you think it’s a male thing to just bottle it up and try and get on with it? I’m not talking a toxic masculinity thing, but just a… It can’t be that bad. I don’t live in South Sudan. I’m not doing these things and live in a nice house and the job’s good. You have belittled some of the problems you’re having, almost. Do you think that is a male thing or is there something else to it?

[01:07:37.920] – David T

Yes and no. I think elements certainly are related to maleness, masculinity, et cetera. I think partly that’s actually, and again, I’m speaking about probably how it was 10 years ago. I think it’s much less the case now. But I think guys tend to have not less of a network, but I think certainly have a different relationship with their friendship group than girls would do, which doesn’t allow them the outlets and the ability to explore and work through things with their collective network as much as girls would. So I think that is part of it. I think that has changed and is in the process of changing. And I think very much for the better, there’s a lot of stuff that’s happened in the last 10 years, which I think has advanced that conversation. And in all sorts of positive ways. But I do think that the stigma element is broader than a male/female divide. I think there is still a broader social stigma about mental health. And yes, there are good conversations.

[01:08:45.080] – Andi J

Whispered about in corners, don’t you? Exactly. I’m just not quite up to it anymore.

[01:08:51.360] – David T

Yeah. And even my experience of trying to find help and going and speaking to GPs, etc, it wasn’t the reaction that you want to get Sorry, did you just get the…

[01:09:03.360] – Andi J

Do you have a tablet for that response from your GP? Weirdly, no. That’s what I got from mine.

[01:09:08.040] – David T

My initial response from the GP I went to was, quote, you don’t seem that bad to me. Come back to me in a few months if you’re still feeling bad. Was how my first one went. And so I effectively thought, oh, maybe it is just a me thing. I’ve got to go and pull myself together. And I, three, four, five months down the track, realised, no, no, this is getting worse. I need some support. I need some help. And so, yeah, finally went back, saw a different GP and had a slightly different reaction.

[01:09:39.760] – Andi J

And with the caveat that I don’t think anybody listening needs to hear, but I’m going to have to say it anyway. Obviously, clearly, I am not trained as a mental health counsellor. Anything like that. David and I are both talking from personal experience rather than anything else. But that doctor’s response to me sounds like this is how problems escalate by someone being brave enough to come and ask for help and just being knocked back by a doctor who doesn’t think you have it, not taking the time to explore that. This is why mental health is one of the leading causes of suicide for men. Part of the reason is that in certain circles, it’s not taken by certain people, it’s not taken seriously. And you would hope that medical practitioners wouldn’t be part of that circle, but they are in some circumstances, aren’t they?

[01:10:28.360] – David T

Yeah, and I wouldn’t want to tar all GPs with the same brush. I think the NHS, particularly from a mental health perspective, is under enormous strain. We talk about the idea of it being a mental health epidemic, and it is. There is a real problem in the world, in the country at the moment. I think, particularly now, GPs and health care professionals are having to operate under really difficult circumstances where they are having to prioritise people who are the most in need of that mental health support. And unfortunately, it’s the people probably that I would have fit into that category of you can probably figure this out on your own or we’re going to have to let other people ahead of you in the queue. They are the ones that are being missed out by the system. Fortunately, I was lucky enough that I had the means that I could go and get some counselling privately. And as I say, the GP eventually did prescribe me some antidepressants and things like that. But, yeah, I think the Mental health isn’t prioritised as health right now, and the system just isn’t able to cope with the volume of requirement that exists in the country.

[01:11:42.000] – David T

I think that is to give GPs their that they’re due. I think that’s their biggest challenge right now is they’re having to prioritise the people that are most in need.

[01:11:50.860] – Andi J

One of the things that you said about getting access to services, and when you do have the means and the ability to get access privately, it can change things. But I I think certainly for counselling, which is a relatively accessible entry point into mental health support, if you’d have asked me 20 years ago what my view on counselling was, it would have been something along the lines of that’s what people who are bonkers need or something along those lines, which wouldn’t have been particularly helpful was possibly of its time or possibly just shows you how much of an asshole I was back then, or maybe a collection of all of those things. But from pushing back to my doctor and saying, Look, Here’s the things that are causing my depression for me to feel shit. I don’t think I called it depression. I wanted to call it depression. But here’s the problem. I can’t make any of those go away. They’re all external factors. Medication is not going to make them go away. I just want someone to talk to, and I got access to some counselling from there. Since then, I’ve been going privately to a counsellor.

[01:12:50.900] – Andi J

Hello, Anne-Marie, if you’re listening, and she won’t be, and continue to talk to her on an ad hoc basis. I think one of the things I would say from my My personal perspective is, anytime I talk about counselling to anybody now, advocate, get it before you think you need it. Don’t wait for things to feel broken before you start talking to a counsellor. If you have a chance to talk to one, do it now. Start out, treat yourself, do six sessions, do six weeks, take a break. Then go again in six weeks time.

[01:13:21.220] – David T

It’s fantastic. I couldn’t agree with that more. I think the challenge I had actually with counselling was that it’s actually relatively impermu, but I think there’s a lot that’s changed. You’ve got apps and et cetera, et cetera, that facilitate that much more than it was at the time. When I was looking for a counsellor, it was literally a, log on to the British Association of Counsellors or whatever it was, find ones in your area and send them an email and see what they do. But there’s so many different types of counselling and therapy, and you, I don’t know what type of therapy I want. I just want to speak to someone and make myself feel better. Actually, I did a course of CPT and I didn’t find that worked for me. I think it works phenomenally for some people, but my reasons, the cause behind my depressions were multifaceted and I needed a lot of stuff to process. Actually, what I found was that I didn’t… What CBT is really good at is teaching you the mindfulness of identifying when you’re getting into a bad state and then giving you coping mechanisms to get you out of that.

[01:14:23.780] – David T

What I found that it didn’t treat the underlying cause of why you got into that state. I wanted to right the way back there. I want to lie on a black leather couch and talk about my child and figure this shit out, and then I can deal with it. I want to go right back to the thing, not just get a prescription for a coping mechanism. That’s what I found worked for me. There’s still elements that I’m aware of, and I recognise it’s going to be something that I’m going to effectively be coping with for the rest of my life. But I know what those triggers are. I know what where those red flags are. I know what to look out for now, and I have ways that I can cope with that before, as you say, before it becomes an issue.

[01:15:09.440] – Andi J

Brilliant. Look, David, thank you very much for that. It was a really great place to start the show. We’re going to go to a quick introduction, and then we’ll be back with the rest of the episode where we’re going to talk about Dollar Shave Club, Who Gives A Crap, and the teenage boys’ favourite, Lynx.

[01:15:23.940] – Andi J

Eyup and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I’m the host of the show and the Chief Strategy Officer at Eximo Marketing. Thank you for listening. I’ve got David Titman on the show today, and we talk about, well, a lot of direct to consumer brands. When I got the chance to interview David, I couldn’t believe my look. Everyone has a view on what happened to Dollar Shave Club, and I get a chance to talk about someone who is on the inside of it, Who Gives A Crap, great brand, great story. Also, we talk about Lynx, beloved of teenage boys and not just teenage boys, and done some really, really interesting stuff in the last few years as well. And guess what? David’s been there, too. We’re going to unpack all of that in the next 45 minutes.

[01:16:03.520] – Andi J

Now, before you go, if you’re listening to this show and you think, oh, that’s really interesting. I know someone who’d care about that. Just open a little message and ping it onto them. It really does make a difference to me and to the show, generally, if people share this. So if you know a colleague or you know a friend who would find it interesting, please do forward the show on today. Enough of me. Let’s get back to the conversation with David. Here we go. David, thank you for joining me on the strategy sessions. Do you want to give people just a two-minute bio to yourself so they know, oh, yeah, David, he’s that guy.

[01:16:36.140] – David T

I started my career at Unilever, spent about 15 years in various roles there, starting in Marmite, did a bit of time on household cleaning, working on domestic, and then spent the vast majority of the back end of my career working on male grooming. So on Lynx and Dove Men + Care. And then most latterly worked on the Dollar Shave Club brand when Unilever acquired that. So I’ve firstly launched it into the UK and then went over and took on a global role over in Los Angeles. And then from Unilever, I’ve done a few bits and pieces. So spent a bit of time at Pladis working on the McVitties brand, which was a massive honour. And then most recently, I have been at Who Gives A Crap for the last three years, refining my e-commerce skills and basically converting the UK to sustainable toilet paper.

[01:17:29.260] – Andi J

I love when you talk to people from Unilever or P&G. I know I think they’re at war and hate each other, but you hear about Unilever careers and you just get this, yeah, marmite, Domestos, Dove Men + Care. It just sounds like, are you all right? Is this just a shopping list for the weekend. But really interesting companies, aren’t they? How they manage and grow and just beast it, looking after the brands that they have within their stable, mostly.

[01:17:58.760] – David T

Oh, yeah, phenomenal. I refer to my period at Unilever very much as my marketing education. I think Unilever, and to be fair, P&G, as much as I could never work there having spent 15 years at Unilever. But they are phenomenal marketing universities. They really understand what makes brands tick and what makes consumers buy brands. And so, yeah, I wouldn’t change the time that I spent there for anything.

[01:18:27.420] – Andi J

Well, let’s start with the The controversial one, the bit that maybe they didn’t get quite right. Let’s start with Dollar Shave Club, because everyone has an opinion on Dollar Shave Club from the YouTube sensation founder-centred ad, the whole new business model, how everything was different, bought in by Unilever, Unilever destroyed it entirely. So I think my first question, David, is are you the man who destroyed Dollar Shave Club?

[01:18:53.500] – David T

No, it’s the short answer.

[01:18:56.300] – Andi J

What a shit of a question. You can say, Shut up, Jarvis. Let’s ask a better question.

[01:19:01.620] – David T

No, you’re right. I think there’s a lot said about Dollar Shave Club. I was there for three and a half years, really over the transition period. I saw all of the very initial stuff. A lot of things obviously have happened since I left there, not least, obviously, the resale, or the majority, back to private equity. I think, look, there’s always things that you’ll look back on I would have made different decisions or I wish we hadn’t done that. But I think for the vast majority of the things that we did when I was at Dollar Shave Club, I would absolutely do again. I think there’s enough things that I agree that we did the right thing. What I actually think was the fundamental challenge was that Dollar Shave, at the time, was going through too many transitions in trying to become a Unilever brand in inverted commas. I think Unilever had put a huge amount of requirements on the type of brand it wanted DSC to become. Sorry, the type of business that it wanted DSC to become. Actually, I think the brand piece, they very much devolved and said, Look, you guys know the brand best.

[01:20:12.520] – David T

Carry on doing what you’re doing. You’ve proven your marketing chops there. But I think the business was being moved into places that it felt uncomfortable being. And so there was just too much transition all happening at So we were obviously in a position where when I joined, we were a D2C only brand. And Unilever very, very rapidly decided actually it needed to be omnichannel. We needed to use Unilever’s expertise to build a brand into Walmart and Target and all of the pharmacy chains of the US, which is a big enough job in and of itself. But the business was also trying to become profitable at that moment in time. It still wasn’t in the black. And so there was a lot of change already happening on the core business that was just trying to move to a place of profitability. And then on top of all of that, we had a really interesting brand challenge whereby, obviously, Mike Dubin, the founder, had been very central, very much the face of the brand since its inception, since the original viral video. He’d appeared in all of our marketing communication. He’d been in all the TV ads, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:21:21.560] – David T

And obviously he was still the CEO, but no longer the owner. And so there was a very active need for him to take more of a back seat and for us to move the brand into a post-Dubin world. And I think if you took any individual one of those challenges and really focused on that, you would have come through with flying colours. It would have been a really turbulent but really manageable job. I think trying to deal with all three of those at the same time meant that the business did lose its way. And I would disagree with some of the rhetoric that has been used about it. I think the new CEO talked about how Unilever muted the brand voice, and that is his diagnosis as to why the brand isn’t as strong as it once was. I actually, again, particularly for the time that I was there, I don’t agree with that. I was there for three and a half years of Unilever’s ownership, and that wasn’t the direction of travel. We were very clearly wanting to remain humorous and use that quirk, the brand and the wink that the brand has grown up So I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of the diagnosis that are out there.

[01:22:34.280] – David T

My view is I think it was too much too fast. I think there were too many challenges and the business was pulled in too many directions.

[01:22:41.800] – Andi J

So just to step back and set the scene a little and shout I don’t know if I get any of this wrong, but the shaving world is dominated by dominated… Male grooming, sorry, is dominated by Gillette. So something like 90, 95 %, it’s a ridiculously high percentage of the market, isn’t it, is Gillette?

[01:22:59.280] – David T

Yeah, it varies by market. You do have smaller brands, Wilkinson’s sword, King of Shaves in the UK, for example. But yeah, the very, very vast majority globally is Gillette.

[01:23:11.860] – Andi J

Gillette, which is a Procter & Gamble brand. And Dollar Shave Club launched. If you haven’t seen the video, I’ll put a link in the show notes. But if you haven’t seen it, you are one of only three people in the whole marketing universe who haven’t seen the video. Dollar Shave Club came along with, not only were they blade to dollar, they were supposedly pretty good quality, maybe not Gillette for triple blade, but very good quality or good enough quality. But we’re also sold on a direct to consumer model. So they were cheaper, sold in a different way, of a reasonable quality, and it came up as a plucky challenge brand. But that bit into a chunky, sizable market, didn’t it, in the US, which actually made everyone in that sector go, Oh, shit, what’s going on here? Including, as I understand it, Gillette. Then roll forward a little bit, Unilever jumped in and bought Dollar Shave Club. The marketing world were like, This could be the end of Gillette. And then two years later, the marketing world were like, Unilever are idiots. They don’t know how to run a brand. Maybe not two years later.

[01:24:09.680] – Andi J

But that’s a very quick synopsis of probably a seven-year period, isn’t it?

[01:24:13.860] – David T

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that is the trajectory, certainly. I think when I joined, it wasn’t clear what Unilever wanted from DSC. They bought a direct consumer business. They didn’t have another direct consumer business at the time. And so this It was a really interesting foray.

[01:24:32.300] – Andi J

Sorry, I know. If you can’t answer this question, feel free not to, but do you think they bought it because they thought they might have a Gillette killer?

[01:24:41.500] – David T

Possibly. I think from a US perspective, it had certainly given Gillette a bloody nose. Actually, I don’t know. I wasn’t in the room, obviously, when Paul Polman at the time and whoever it was that was in charge of that acquisition decided it. I don’t know the strategy behind it. Part of me, possibly the more cynical part of me, does wonder whether this was an opportunity for Unilever. As we’ve said, Unilever and PNG are in battle, locked in battle and have been for generations. The cynical part of me does wonder whether this was an opportunity for Unilever to give PNG a bloody nose. If we distract them over here with their crown jewels, does that mean that they’re going to forget about Ariel and suddenly, Persol can steal a march?

[01:25:29.200] – Andi J

I don’t know. It’s one of P&G’s crown jewels, isn’t it? Absolutely. It’s one of their major hero brands. Yeah.

[01:25:35.340] – David T

Not only from a size perspective, but I mean, the reason why they command the price premium they do is because the brand is so incredibly strong. And as a result, it’s a very profitable brand for P&G. And so I think the bigger Unilever could make Dollar Shave Club and the more margin they could make P&G need to spend to to overcome that with Gillette, maybe there was an element of competitiveness of distracting them on their high margin crown jewel of Gillette in order to have to move some focus away from the aerials or the whatever’s of the world. So I don’t know is the honest answer. But I do wonder whether there was a view from Unilever that there was a quicker win than there probably was. I think they thought we’re buying a D2C brand. And there’s one of two ways you can go with that. You could either put Unilever products onto Dollar Shave Club’s platform and use a ready-made advertising network effectively and captive audience to buy more Unilever brands, or you can take Dollar Shave into Unilever’s world and bring it into retail. And then obviously, you’ve got the international expansion beyond that as well.

[01:26:50.860] – David T

They were only really operating in three markets at that point. So there were a lot of directions of travel. And I think the problem actually Unilever had is they tried all of them rather than really focusing on the big opportunities.

[01:27:04.520] – Andi J

Because I wonder, again, not in the room, never worked for Unilever, but I do wonder if that expansion into retail makes absolute sense if you try and tell us to give Gillette a bloody nose? If you’re just trying to sell more Unilever products via this new channel, which was all the rage at the time, everything was direct to consumer, forget about retail, then that route seems slightly the one to get behind. But either way, it’s a big strategic strategic decision. Often with big strategic decisions, the best way is to get all in on one of them rather than trying to be a little bit in on two decisions.

[01:27:39.160] – David T

Yeah, I think the retail one is a fascinating one as well. Because I think arguably, and this is where I do agree with the new CEO, the power of the brand really was in its D2C proposition in that having that much more direct relationship with the customer, using that data to really provide the brand experience and the product experience that people really wanted. And inevitably, you do miss and lose some of that by moving into a retail landscape. So I think D2C, there was something special. It was one of the early D2C darlings, but it was a D2C darling for a reason. So I do think that it was always going to be a challenge in moving into retail. Actually, I think probably part of that was driven by the retailers themselves. They’d lost a huge amount of business from the Walmart and the targets of the world. People had moved to Dollar Shave Club. I think at the time, DSC was the US’s second largest razor retailer behind Walmart. So it sold more razors as a brand, direct consumer, than target sold lasers. And so if you’re a Unilever, probably you’re getting calls from head of target and head of Walmart saying, All right, you’ve stolen enough money from us now.

[01:28:52.680] – David T

Now let us have a piece of the pie. So I think there were a lot of competing strategic challenges.

[01:28:58.860] – Andi J

I don’t know I wouldn’t even like to guess what the value of Unilever sales through Walmart and Target is, but I’m going to guess it’s a bloody big number. What’s interesting, I’ve used the Dollar Shave Club previously, and I don’t do it so much anymore because I looked at it and thought There’s too many people externally having an opinion on this and not knowing what they’re talking about. But for me, when I’ve taught it to students, I did a bit of lecture at Liverpool John Moores Uni. One of the things I loved about Dollar Shave Club is that it was a great way to teach the 4Ps. It was like, actually, a lot of brands can struggle to stand out on any of the 4Ps other than promotion. Promotion is probably the easiest place to stand out. But Dollar Shave Club, the only P didn’t really stand out on was product. I guess the product was broadly similar to most of the other products on the market. But the price point was really different. The promotion was incredibly different, as they referenced in the viral video, there’s no Roger Federer. And the place was different.

[01:29:57.760] – Andi J

And at the time, it’s like, you’ve now got three. You’ve got this competitive advantage. I would argue that competitive advantage probably doesn’t really exist in the way most people think about it does. But when you can wrap three of the four piece together, maybe it might actually start together. And it just felt when going into retail, just chopped the whole everything that made the brand great. It was just chopped about it because all of a sudden, you know, well, actually, now you’ve only got promotion to fight on now. And you said, well, what’s the point?

[01:30:28.270] – David T

Funny enough, that’s one of my, I think, biggest regrets of the time that I was there. There was one big change that we made, which was because we wanted to move into retail and we recognised the power of the master brand as the way it was Dollar Shave Club that was the thing that was selling these products. When I joined and it was D2C only, all of the individual sub-ranges, sorry, all of the individual categories had their own sub-brand. So Dollar Shave Club was the brand for the Razors and all of the shave prep products. But we also had a range of body washes. They were on a completely different brand name called Wanderer. We had a range of antiperspirants, they were on a brand called Groundskeeper. We had a range of hair products under a brand called Boogies. And all of those had their own unique personalities and history and lore, which was special. There was something really cool about all of these individual parts of the brand. And it made the Dollar Shave Club experience online, I think, feel much more interesting than just having one big federated brand and 50 different SKUs that you can choose from that all look the same, the same pack colour and et cetera.

[01:31:39.260] – David T

They were all different and it felt like a real shopping experience. The decision was made, it was the It was quite a decision for the strategy, but that is why I think this strategic challenge was just a frustrating one. It was in order to move into retail, we needed to federate all of those products into a single brand. One of the things that we did was moved all of that this uniqueness and specialness about all of those individual products under the Dollar Shave Club proposition, which meant that everything suddenly lost, I think, in my opinion, a little bit of its magic. It lost the history of why it was called Buggies because it was named after, I think, one of the original dogs of the office. And we had a range that was named after the original road that the office was on. And all of this had this history and specialness, a majority of which no consumer I would have known, but they all had personality. And that, I think, was a loss to the business. Done for the right reasons. I wish there was a different way that we could have kept some of that.

[01:32:42.100] – Andi J

The interesting thing is that I think JP Castlin calls it adjacent possibles, where you can’t ever just have that sliding doors moment where if we didn’t make that decision, let’s see how this would have worked out. Because there is a thing, there’s possibly a very good suggestion that actually moving a brand like into Unilever might have always ended in disaster, no matter which way you took it. Trying to roll a very US, the name dollars in it into lots of different markets might have flopped. There’s lots of different ways it could have gone south, and maybe a few ways it could have worked as well. Who knows? But is that the one decision or is the one decision maybe you look at and you go, Oh, if we had not done that, other than the brand decision, or is that maybe the only one?

[01:33:27.540] – David T

There’s probably a couple. I I think one of the big reflections, again, post being there was in part of that programme of federating things under a single brand. I think really, and easy to say now, we changed too many of the distinctive brand assets. The things that really made the brand famous, Mike Dubin being one, he took much more of a back seat, and that was already a distinctive brand asset that we had lost. We changed the logo because we wanted to harmonise the brand and we wanted to mean more than shaving, which is really difficult when the word shave is in the brand name. So I think the colours changed, logos changed. Mike Dubin wasn’t as present. There was too much change I think where we ended up, it was beautiful, visually lovely. But I think there was just too much change all in one go from a pack and a promotion perspective. And then all of a sudden we were popping up in stores which people weren’t to. And the brand had spent seven years at that point talking about how buying raises in the supermarket was such a terrible experience because they were all housed behind plastic and you had to call over a person to get them and blah, blah, blah.

[01:34:43.000] – David T

And all of a sudden we were doing the same thing. I think there was a lot of brand code and distinctive brand asset challenge would be my big challenge, but my big annoyance of the decisions that he made.

[01:34:56.920] – Andi J

I was in Sweaty Betty, the lead to Black Friday and wander around the store shaking my head in utter disbelief at the complete fucking mess they’d made of their Black Friday promotion. There’s a brand that in my mind probably shouldn’t be touching a Black Friday promotion anyway, but that’s a different debate. But as you walked in the store, there was a sign on the window that said up to 30% off. And then it had different colour-coded bands that were, if it has this sticker on, it’s 5%, if that’s 10, then 15, 20, then 30. Then there was another sign hung on the door which said, Black Friday Special, 50% off certain lines. And as you went in, they weren’t segregated. It was just like on one rail, one top could be 5% off, the next one could be 50% off it. But the prices then you had to then go and ask the staff, Come and ask us what the price is, and we’ll tell you. And the reason I tell you this, because I was just wondering, I’m going, Who signed this off? And there’s certain things that actually when I stepped back from it, I looked and I was like, everything about this promotion made sense in the room where that decision was made.

[01:36:05.100] – Andi J

Nobody in Sweaty Betty is bad at their job. Nobody’s deliberately going, what can we run that’s going to really annoy consumers and put the worst promotion out there this Black Friday? This It’s a multi-level product. It looks like you go, so here’s the revenue impact, and we do these products at this price. And on the deck, it looks fantastic. With the finance team in the room, the marketing team, the brand team, the store team, everything looks great. But when you pull it together and actually execute it, it was just a mess from a consumer perspective. It just wasn’t like, it couldn’t be arsed. I just left.

[01:36:38.740] – David T

It smacks of being challenged by guardrails that exist in the boardroom that consumers don’t care about. What that implies to me is something like the stores team would have said, Our store staff don’t have enough time to go around and manually label all sale items with their new price. And so we need a solution where people can understand what the discount is without involving the store staff. That’s the guardrail that would have been applied at Sweaty Belly HQ or something of that ilk. And then the marketing team would have gone, Okay, well, if that’s the guardrail, then this is the way that we have to do it, and it will be like colour coded, etc. But in no way or shape or form has the consumer been brought into that conversation to say, well, hang on a second, what is going to make the experience in that store the most seamless or the easiest or whatever it is for a consumer to actually purchase our goods. I can hear those conversations happening. I’ve been part of those conversations, but yeah, that’s what it would imply to me.

[01:37:38.780] – Andi J

And the reason I bring that up, not because I think the Dollar Shave Club was as much of a mess as what I saw in Sweaty Betty that day, but do you think that maybe there was some things that made absolute sense in the decision making room because of the impact on the finances on the brand and the way we were trying to take the brand in five years? But actually, when it just hit the stores and the consumer, it just didn’t make the same sense that it did on the PowerPoint presentation.

[01:38:05.250] – David T

Oh, 100 %. I think, and retail is probably a good example of that. I think Dollar Shave Club had a very clear brand and a personality and a strategy up until the Unilever acquisition. And I think post-Unilever acquisition, there was so much immediate need to find a way to profitability that it was a little bit scattergun as to how to do that. Let’s just grab every short term opportunity we have. You neither have got a load of experience in getting into target. Great. Let’s go into target. But that decision, that individual thread of, okay, let’s go into retail, has all of these knock on implications around, well, is the brand ready? Is the product ready? No, we need to do a redesign. Okay, so let’s redesign the products. Well, if we’re going to redesign the products, is the brand ready? Well, no, because we’ve got all these different sub-brands and we need to harmonise it under a single thing. Okay, well, if we’re going to do that, how does Dollar Shave Club, the emphasis on the word shave, show up on a body wash? Well, okay, well, we probably need to change. There’s all this knock impact of this one central decision of let’s go into retail.

[01:39:18.420] – David T

And look, I’m not saying that going into retail was the wrong decision. That’s not the moral of the story. I just think that there were, back to that point of not having the consumer in the room, there were too many hurdles to get to that strategic outcome of being in retail, which had compromises from a consumer perspective. And all of them were minor individually. But when you added all of them back up again at the end of the process, it was a big leap. It was a very different brand. People were experiencing it in store in a very different way than what they’d ever experienced on TV or online.

[01:39:58.500] – Andi J

I think that the whole story is It’s fascinating. It’s still being talked about now because it was such a great brand when it exploded onto the scene. To capture what it did in the US, the market share it took in the US, I didn’t realise it was the second biggest raise of retailer. From nothing is utterly mind-blowing. You think of… Even in the early days of D2C, where you could probably throw a lot more and get better returns out of performance marketing, even then, it’s still unheard of to do that. So it’s an incredible story of what’s happened from there. And to jump to a different part of your career with Who Gives A Crap, which is a D2C brand, but just explain Who Gives A Crap to anyone who doesn’t know the brand. It’s maybe not as well known as the Dollar Shave Club was, but it’s still relatively well known.

[01:40:47.740] – David T

Yeah. So Who Gives A Crap is an Australian-born, primarily toilet paper company, although expanding into other products now. They set out with a really clear mission, Which was there are, well, at the time when they started, about 2. 6 billion people in the world that don’t have access to clean water and sanitation, now down to about 2 billion. So going in the right direction, but still a lot of work to do. And there’s not enough money in the charity sector, basically, to overcome that challenge. As I say, we’re making movement, but I think at the current rate of change, we won’t have achieved We’ve achieved universal access to clean water and sanitation until 21: 50 or something ridiculous. And that’s not acceptable. It needs to be much quicker. And so the founders came up with this idea that there’s a load of money sloshing around in the capitalist system, and people are buying things that they have to buy, toilet paper being a great example. What happens if we invent a product or create a product that people have to buy or in a category that people have to buy, but where some of the proceeds of that product actually go to helping the issue that we care most about?

[01:42:05.820] – David T

And so Who gives a Crap was set up with a mandate of donating 50 %, half of their profits, every year to projects and charities in the WASH space, water and sanitation and hygiene. And they do that by selling sustainably made toilet paper, so either made from bamboo or from recycled paper, and as I say, expanding into other sustainable products as we speak. So that was the mentality behind it. And the business now has donated, I think, close to 12, 13 million pounds over the course of the last 10 years, which is money that just wouldn’t be in that charity field without Who Gives A Crap.

[01:42:48.650] – Andi J

As a direct to consumer brand, there are a couple of things about shipping toilet paper that maybe don’t immediately make sense. One, it’s big, bulky, which makes it difficult to send. It doesn’t go a letter box, which means you’ve got to be in when it arrives. And it’s also something that’s essentially don’t run out of. So I can get a grey snack box in the all day sent to me. And if I run out of a snack box and it arrives two days late, yeah, that’s all right. I don’t mind. My toilet paper runs out for two days. I do give a crap at this stage. So there’s a lot of things about it that don’t seem to make sense that it’s going to work as a D2C brand, but it did. It does, doesn’t it? It flew. And do you think that is down to the mission of the brand? Or do you think there’s more to it than just people wanting to do something warm and fuzzy?

[01:43:40.820] – David T

I think there’s more to it. I think that is part of it, certainly. We did a lot of work when I was there about what are the things that are the real turn-ons? What are the reasons that people buy the brand? And equally, what are the reasons why people don’t? And convenience is a really interesting one because as you should say it hovers somewhere in the middle of both of those things. On one hand, you can sign up for a subscription. So back to that point of never running out, you can subscribe and make sure that that doesn’t happen. And toilet paper is one of those things that you go through the same amount of toilet paper at pretty much the same rate. Once you’ve got a relatively static house, unless people move out, etc. Your toilet paper usage rate doesn’t really change. And so it’s relatively easy to predict how much people will need.

[01:44:25.320] – Andi J

Is that measured in sheets per person or something like that?

[01:44:28.220] – David T

There’s a really complicated Yeah, toilet paper economics, we used to call it. But yeah, really complicated equation. Oh, shit. That convenience is a really interesting one because, yes, it’s convenient to have it shipped to you, but realistically, people are going to a Tesco or a Asda, or whatever every week. And picking up a pack of Andrex isn’t the biggest challenge in the world if you’re already taking the car or whatever. Sure, if you’re getting the bus, maybe slightly different, but universally, it’s not that much more convenient, particularly. So the reasons really that switched people onto the brand, one was exactly that, that mission. And I mean that in two different parts. One was the sustainability side. So there are a million trees cut down every single day, every single day, one million trees, to meet the world’s toilet paper needs. That is the scale of deforestation just for toilet paper. Just to wipe your ass on. Just to wipe your ass. So if you can start to give people an alternative to that, that is quite beneficial to the world. And so sustainability was a real driving force. Very early on, that was the lowest hanging fruit, I guess, was waking people up to the challenge and giving people an alternative to using virgin paper.

[01:45:49.080] – David T

So that was the mainstay with sustainability. But then the donation, half of the profits, going to standardisation charities, that was another big part of it as well. We always used to talk about sustainability Sustainability was what got people in, and the donations was what kept people buying. But a little bit of both was certainly true. The other thing which I think we didn’t talk about enough, and was certainly a moving or a direction of travel towards this when I was there was one of the other reasons that Who Gives A Crap is so loved by its customers is because it looks really good. Each roll It’s all these wrapped individually. It’s wrapped in sustainable paper. It’s a bamboo paper. But they’re all wrapped in beautiful designs and funky patterns and colours and et cetera. They do limited editions where you get quirky Christmas wrapping toilet paper, et cetera. That’s awesome. You can’t get that anywhere else. It’s a really odd not tension at the heart of the brand. On the one hand, people want to buy the product because it’s really altruistic. I’m doing my bit for the I’m doing my bit for people, they’re donating a load of money.

[01:47:03.100] – David T

But actually, there’s a really selfish element as well, which is I just want my bathroom to look good and people coming over for a dinner party to look at my toilet paper in the downstairs loo and think, Oh, they’re doing all right for themselves, or they’ve got the posh loo roll or whatever. So there’s this real altruism and selfishness at the heart of the plant.

[01:47:20.260] – Andi J

We’re back to three of the four P’s again, aren’t we? I’ve never bought Who Gives A Crap, but I think the price point is broadly similar. It’s not really a standout point, is it? But in The terms of the product because it’s wrapped looks different, the promotion is different, and the place because it’s D2C again, you’ve suddenly got those three, that trifecta of three of the four P’s and how different. And now you’ve got something you can work with and something you can stand out on. But there’s an interesting story behind the wrapping of the individual roles, isn’t there? I love the marketing accidents. Tell us about that.

[01:47:51.770] – David T

Yeah, when the team started out, so they originally wanted to launch into retail. That was where they thought they were… The millions were to be made. That’s where people They were obviously buying their toilet paper. And back in Australia, no retailer took them seriously, basically, when they were starting out. And so they pivoted the business very early from, okay, well, if we can’t go into retail, we’ll do it ourselves. We’ll send direct. And that was how they made it to D2C. It wasn’t a pre-ordained decision to be in D2C. That was a happy accident. And in order to then send through the mail, they needed to wrap roles for hygiene for the same purposes, basically. And there was a particular legal minimum, I think, which was it needed to be a minimum of six roles had to be wrapped together from a hygiene perspective. And the team looked at that and realised that actually by making a couple of tweaks in terms of the thickness of the paper and things like that. They could wrap each roll individually using the same amount of material that it would have taken to wrap six rolls, because if you’re wrapping six, the paper needs to be slightly thicker and blah, blah, blah.

[01:48:58.040] – David T

And so that was I don’t know how it was born. It was originally driven by hygiene. And then it becomes a very easy sell to say, well, if we’ve got all of this real estate, let’s make sure that every roll becomes a billboard for our brand. Let’s make sure that this is something that people want to have in their bathrooms and can feel proud of, feel proud of being part of the Who Gives A Crap community.

[01:49:21.960] – Andi J

I love stories like that. I think it’s fascinating how when you put restrictions around the brand, how that drives creativity. I love not pushing against the restrictions, but actually bouncing off them and going, Okay, how do we make things better because of this? That’s fantastic. So you joined Who Gives A Crap to help grow it in the UK or globally, or what was your role there and what were the best things about working there?

[01:49:45.900] – David T

Yeah, I joined. So the business was already in the UK, the US and Australia. There are three main geographies. When I joined, all of that marketing was being done remotely, effectively. So actually either from Australia itself or from the US. There was nobody based locally in the UK. And actually the company had identified the UK as a big growth opportunity market and so wanted to embed a local team with local experience and local expertise and to really invest and grow the local market. So I joined very much with the remit of the UK and Europe. And we built the brand from already a pretty sizable brand. It was a pretty decent scale, but nobody knew about it. I think the brand at the time was about a 30 million pound brand that had about 10% aided awareness in the UK. So people that knew about it loved it. There just wasn’t enough people in the funnel and aware of the brand. And so a lot of my and my team’s mission really was to build awareness, make more people aware of who we are, what we do, and why they should care about it, and bring more people to the cause type thing.

[01:51:01.600] – David T

So as I say, partly from a sustainable place, but partly from the more people we have in and the more we sell, the more impact we can have in the world, the bigger the donation that we can make. So that was really our mission. And as I said, I did that for three years. And I think by the time that I left, I think we got that aided awareness from about 10 % to just shy of 50, which was, if I pitch myself for my next role, that’s going to be my leading, my leading bullet point at the top of my CV. Some big gains and some big revenue swings as well as a result of that.

[01:51:37.960] – Andi J

Two big D2C stories, really. And brands, hopefully people know of. It’s a marketing podcast. I’m sure they know both Who Gives A Crap and Dollar Shave Club. Just a quick thing on the name Who Gives A Crap. Very Australian name. You could see, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been called that if it had come out of the UK. But was there any… You talked about changing some of the at Dollar Shave Club. Was there ever any conversation about that or is that sacrosanct as a name? No one’s changing it.

[01:52:05.320] – David T

Probably more sacrosanct, but I don’t think for any big lofty reason other than the name works. When the company launched, there were two names that they tested. Who Gives A Crap was one of them. And they also looked at the name role model, which I think is quite clever and quite quirky, but really, I think, pared-bit over clever, almost. Yeah, exactly. And very much anchored you in toilet paper, which, as I say, the business is expanding beyond now. So, yeah, there were two names that they toyed with. I think Who Gives A Crap is done deliberately. It’s done to deliberately create awareness right from the word go, right from the brand name, which I think is a really important part of why the brand has been successful. It’s polarising, sure, but I think the best brands really need to be. They’ve got to have a bit of backbone. They need to stand for something. It’s not going to something that’s going to be in every bathroom in the UK. I get that. It raised some interesting challenges. I had to petition Clearcast to be able to get a TV ad using the word crap on air.

[01:53:14.280] – David T

So I think I’m right in saying that I am the first marketeer, possibly only marketeer in the UK, to have aired an ad with the word crap pre-Watershed, also on my CV, if anyone’s listening-I’ve got point number two on the CV. If anyone’s listening and wants to give me a job, So there were some interesting challenges with the word crap. I got banned from London Waterloo because the station manager at London Waterloo doesn’t like the word crap. So yeah, some interesting I think the challenges that it raised. But actually, as I said, I think it gave the brand more than it took away because it’s so evocative and so, I was going to say shocking. Probably shocking is a little bit too far, but it’s a bit more in your face and it drives There’s a lot of awareness in and of itself.

[01:54:02.020] – Andi J

The thing is, to quote Ritson, and I know you’ve done the mini MBA, but people don’t wake up in the morning thinking, what toilet roll am I going to buy today to save the planet? You’ve got a couple of brain cells you can influence for the moment where they need and go, I’m going to have a look at that. And having a name that if people like it or dislike it, they’ll remember it. That’s it. Job done. Move on. Let’s move to the next phase. Before we finish, come not background to where we started, but when we kicked off right at the beginning, we talked a little bit about masculinity, which brings us a little bit to the end of the podcast when your work on Lynx. Now, Lynx, were you just in the UK? Just Lynx or were you across Europe? Okay, so just call it Lynx. Wonderful. Is it Axe in Europe?

[01:54:48.880] – David T

Axe, yeah. Axe everywhere. Yeah, so it’s Axe everywhere except the UK and Australia, which is in its Lynx.

[01:54:55.040] – Andi J

Which, as I said at the beginning in the intro, is beloved by teenage boys or this teenage boy in particular loved it, but a few years ago now. So you worked on that brand, but there’s a couple of interesting things that you did when you were there. So firstly, just give us a sense of scale of the brand. Is it just teenage boys that wear it? And then tell us about the work that you did there That was different.

[01:55:15.780] – David T

Yeah, Lynx is a fascinating brand. I loved it. I worked on Lynx for about five and a half, excuse me, about five and a half years. It’s a fascinating brand because it’s much bigger than it should be. At the time that I was working on the brand, we had a price index to the market of about 160, so 60% more expensive than an equivalent body spray deodorant that you could buy. And yet it was absolutely the market leader. And so operated in a very premium position, but with pretty strong penetration, which the price premium wouldn’t necessarily suggest that it should be. And that penetration was really driven by two cohorts. So there was very much the younger cohorts. There were the younger 13, 14, 16-year-old guys who wanted to be cool. And Lynx was a cool brand. And that’s the brand that their older brother used to use.

[01:56:15.380] – Andi J

I should say as well, sorry. I remember when Lynx released Lynx Java, which was the worst thing that could ever happen to someone called Jarvis, whose nickname was Java. It just be, oh God, here we go again. But I was very much a Lynx Africa wearer. Thank you.

[01:56:29.700] – David T

And that’s the other cohort. You’re exactly right. Lynx Africa is the number one fragrance and is worn by a lot more people than you would expect it to be worn by. So the other cohort is-Be right back.

[01:56:43.110] – Andi J

I’m just going to go on by some. Exactly.

[01:56:45.380] – David T

But yeah, the other cohort were those older people who had grown up with Lynx and migrated or got themselves to Lynx Africa. And then were Lynx Africa, whereas into their 40s and 50s. So they were the very early initial of Lynx cohorts. And that was the brand’s two audiences, really. So really, it’s a fascinating brand. I absolutely adored it. But I think when I was working on it, I’d identified the biggest challenge that was coming down the tracks like an absolute freight train was that Lynx had evolved… Sorry, the market had evolved from that ’90s lads mag culture, but the brand hadn’t. It had taken the brand, or it was taking the brand a little bit of time to really identify what it was, what it stood for in that 2010s era. And there was work happening, but it was a bit slow. And effectively, that Lynx had just become this joke brand. It had become the brand associated with 14-year-olds in school changing rooms, and it didn’t sit particularly well with me. I knew that there was more that we could do. And so for a few years, we did a lot of work in much much smaller campaigns, but looking very explicitly about masculinity and how we could uncover all of these truths around what it meant to be a guy and live in this new 2010s coming into the 2020s world.

[01:58:15.920] – David T

And that led to a couple of activities. So one, actually, while I was going through my depression, we did a partnership with Calm, the male suicide charity, to raise awareness of the issue of male suicide. It’s the biggest killer of guys under the age of 45. And nobody really knew about it at the time. Certainly, nobody was talking about that. And so we did a big campaign with them called Bigger Issues, which was raising awareness. We used social listening to see what was being talked about online, basically all of these really topical conversations about new albums of bands or Starbucks launching their Red Cups campaign or whatever it is. We paired that against more people are talking about this thing, which It doesn’t matter, than are talking about this thing that really does and raising awareness of male suicide as an issue, which from a brand that was associated with 14-year-olds and school changing rooms was quite disarming, I think. We, I think, raised awareness by, I want to say 50 % or nine on, about 50 %. More people after the campaign were aware of male suicide as an issue, but with relatively little spend.

[01:59:27.180] – David T

And so it was the start of a number campaigns that we did alongside the big fragrance launches and the big product development stuff. But I just wanted to start moving the conversation on from it being this joke to being something meaningful. The apocryphal tale of this, by the way, is that the reason that brief went into the agencies was I had a Twitter notification set up for tweets that had the word links in. And the one that came through, which It really got on the wrong side of me was a tweet from Stephen Fry. He was one of the most prolific tweeters at the time who said he was sat on a bus and a bunch of kids had sprayed links and he was being smoked out or whatever it was. I can’t remember the exact tweet, but it was basically a joke about how terrible Lynx was and it should be banned and made illegal and blah, blah, blah. I said, From that moment on, this ends now. We’re doing something that is much more meaningful. That campaign, Bigger Issues, that talked about this beautiful full circle moment was when Stephen Fry tweeted about that campaign, raising awareness of what links were doing to draw attention to the issue of male suicide.

[02:00:40.910] – David T

And I thought, finally, we’ve had this full circle moment, which he was the reason the the inspiration of doing something. And he’s now been part of, hopefully, the solution to raise awareness of the issue.

[02:00:53.080] – Andi J

That’s amazing. Now, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to something which doesn’t sound like it makes sense right now, but there’s a BBC documentary Hopefully you can watch it, if you’re not in the UK, about ’90s lad culture. It was told through Lads Mag, Loaded FHM and stuff like that. James Brown, who was editor of Loaded, doesn’t come out particularly well from this documentary. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I know from the stats, because I’ve just been looking at them for the year, that a number of people who listen to this podcast won’t remember the ’90s lad culture. So if you don’t realise just what that was like, watch this documentary. You’ll probably watch it with behind your hands, looking through your fingers. I grew up at that time. It just felt perfectly normal, if I’m being honest. It was just how it was. But looking back now, you just put you like, Oh, good God, that didn’t age well. But for a brand to grow to hope at that time and then to try and find its feet again. Actually, it must be really, really difficult because nothing from the ’90s makes sense anymore.

[02:01:53.080] – Andi J

Nothing at all. Everything about lad culture, well, it was wrong at the time. We just didn’t know it, but it just looks very, very wrong now. It must have been a real challenge to try and drag the brand forward at that stage.

[02:02:05.140] – David T

Oh, huge challenge. Again, looking back with new eyes, there’s absolutely things that we did wrong or I would have done differently knowing what I do now. I think one of the big things, there was certainly an overcorrection. There was a lot of stuff thrown out. And again, not necessarily directly by me, but by the broader brand global brand team, where we retired the links effect, for example. We moved to a completely different slogan, a brand new proposition and brand platform, which I just don’t think was needed. Back to that distinctive brand assets piece that we talked about earlier. That is such a clear articulation of everything that you need to know about links. What I think is that that needed to be redefined. What is the links effect? The new links effect needs to be different to the old links effect. But I think we did a little bit throw the baby out with the bathwater in trying to course correct, and I think it resulted in a bit of an overcorrection in that sense. So it was a challenge. I think the team now have done a phenomenal job of finding the right balance, of updating the brand through association.

[02:03:22.910] – David T

So again, one of the things that I did when I was there, and the team have continued, was really redefine how links works with influencers. And make influencers really central to what the brand means and how the brand exists. That’s what new lad culture or new teen and early 20s culture is. It’s social, it’s online, and it’s driven through creators. And so, yeah, I think the team are doing a phenomenal job of advancing in that direction now. But yeah, at the time, it was a big challenge to overcome. And I think as a result of it being It was a big challenge, we made some big changes. Some of them were probably too big.

[02:04:04.800] – Andi J

I found this last hour fascinating in terms of the challenges and the mistakes and the successes. It’s been amazing. So two things to finish up with David before we go. One, is there any book, recommendation, podcast, things that you think people should read that would help them think like you or challenge like you like to be challenged? So any recommendations?

[02:04:25.960] – David T

I don’t have anything, any specific thing in mind. I think the biggest There’s a real consistent thread in all of the big learnings that I’ve had in my career, which is about brand codes and distinct to brand assets. And so there’s a myriad of different amazing publications or modules in mini MBAs and all sorts that talk very much about brand codes. Mark, if you’re listening, I’m more than happy. This isn’t sponsored, but I’m more than happy to do another mini MBA if you want to sponsor me there. But yeah, I think for For me, if you can get your hands on something about understanding distinctive brand assets, the importance of brand coding, and that whole world is something that I think I learnt too late. And as I say, now reflecting back on some of the biggest challenges or mistakes or the things that I wish I’d done differently. It’s not fully understanding the importance of and the power of distinctive brand assets. And so, yeah, Jenni Romaniuk’s book, I think, is the original the original, the Bible of, but there’s a myriad of different places to go. But I think brand codes is sadly under looked and underrepresented in a lot of marketing conversations, and I have been as guilty as anyone of that.

[02:05:44.310] – Andi J

David, thank you very much. If anybody wants to get hold of you, then my final question, how do they find who’s linked in the best place?

[02:05:50.210] – David T

Yeah, one LinkedIn, probably the easiest place.

[02:05:53.710] – Andi J

Perfect. David, thank you very much for your time.

[02:05:56.390] – David T

Thank you very much.