Brand Strategy and Creative Breakthroughs with Zach Foster of Foster Brands

Marketing Growth Conversations with Michael Fasciano

Zach Foster recently joined the pod to discuss trends in brand strategy, building flexible A-teams of marketers, modern approaches to research and more. Zach is founder of Foster Brand Strategy, a strategic collective helping brands and agencies use agile research and insights to shape brand strategy that sticks. Zach has led strategy teams at top tier agencies such as Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Droga5 and Venables Bell & Partners. He’s worked on iconic brands such as Intel, Under Armour, Audi, Verizon and Upwork. Before Foster Brands, Zach built the creative strategy group at indie research and strategy shop, Brado.

Highlights from the discussion:

• The process of creating breakthrough work is just as much about the composition of teams and putting the right people together. Working with good-hearted, brave people often leads to breakthrough work. Rather than committing entirely to full time teams and the perceived weight that comes with that, why not find the best possible people to nail a given project and objective, across full-time, flexible contract and modern creative collectives?
• Brand research is an industry that’s long been in desperate need of a makeover. By embracing modern research platforms and tools, teams can bake more agility and creativity into the research process and get to richer insights more rapidly and frequently. Brand research, often thought of as expensive and drawn out, is going through reinvention and democratization, presenting an opportunity to drive innovative approaches to get to powerful insights.
• Marketers should think about internal intelligence and insights with as much reverence as is traditionally given to external work. Research initiatives can become content that organizations embrace, and even use in shaping their own employee culture.
• Brand Conviction is critical to identify today. What is your brand uniquely fighting for and against? There’s tension in that; tension is compelling.
• It’s often better to be interesting than right as a marketer and a brand. Starting with a compelling perspective elevates all marketing disciplines and craft.
• Precious brand planning is the antithesis of great work. Be generous, be collaborative, be open, don’t focus on making it perfect right away.
• When marketers allow themselves to think about work as play a little bit more, the output is often improved.

Not only does Zach cover thought-provoking perspectives on brand and team-building, he also shares great anecdotes from working on the front lines of iconic campaigns that drove growth for businesses and his own marketing career.

Pod and article originally published here.

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