Transcript

Jeff Taub

[0:02]It resonated immediately with me and with other members of our marketing team who for years had struggled to find the right way to articulate a brand promise

[0:13]

Introduction to the Brand Journey

Jeff Taub

[0:12]or brand pillars that we never really had. For the first time, we had a messaging platform that no matter what you're doing, whether you're writing a website copy, a social media post, a proposal letter, we have a brand book with internal and external messaging that we could rely on for a starting point as to how to describe who we are, both to current and prospective employees and to current and prospective clients.

Music

[0:33]Music

Jerry Genneria

[0:40]Welcome to The Intangible Brand, where we explore the connection between employee experience and client experience, and the hidden forces that make brands stick. I'm Jerry Genaria, and I'm joined by my co-host, Carl Winstead. Today, we're excited to have Jeff Taub with us. Jeff is Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing at AKRF and an SMPS Fellow. He's spent his career helping professional service firms build stronger brands and clearer stories. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Taub

[1:09]Jerry, Carl, it's great to be here with you.

Carl Winstead

[1:11]Well, Jeff, thank you for taking time to join us. We appreciate you making space for us. I know everybody's going to be interested to hear kind of what we talk about today. But you know, before we kind of get going, I don't know if it'd be great, maybe if you could just kind of give our listeners just maybe a quick introduction to yourself and AKRF, if you can.

Jeff Taub

[1:30]I'd be happy to do that. I'm Jeffrey Taub, Senior Vice President for Corporate Marketing and a senior partner at AKRF. We are 400 engineers, planners, scientists, historians, economists, acousticians, and many other types of professionals based in New York City, where we were founded over 40 years ago, and have 15 offices in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

[1:55]

The Need for Rebranding

Carl Winstead

[1:55]Awesome.

Jerry Genneria

[1:56]Well, let's jump right in. You recently gave a presentation at the SMPS Northeast Regional Conference, and you talked about leading AKRF through kind of a top-to-bottom rebrand that I think only really kept the name in the end. Well, I know it only kept the name. But you described it as a bit of a soul-searching process. What led you and the team to make such a big decision?

Jeff Taub

[2:20]I had been thinking of rebranding AKRF in the first few years that I got here, post-2017, but it really wasn't until coming out of COVID that I turned my attention to a more serious rebrand effort for two reasons. One, we were a changing workforce. In late 2020 and throughout 2021, something like a third of our employees had been with AKRF for only five years or fewer, and 60% of our employees had been with the company for fewer than 10 years. And that's saying a lot at a place where people routinely celebrate 20 and 30 year anniversaries. And secondly, we were really trying to overcome and probably working overtime doing so, the disparate perception of the AKRF brand across many different services, client sectors and geographies. And we really needed a brand that would work everywhere for everyone. So while there was brand equity in the name AKRF, we brought Toki in to help us through a two-year comprehensive rebrand that I'm sure we'll be talking about in a minute. That's interesting, Jeff.

Speaker2

[3:24]I mean, you mentioned that you guys work with Toki. We did the same thing here with Klein. And one of the things that I found really interesting was the amount of time that we kind of spent on internal reflection, like thinking about ourselves.

[3:37]

The Rebranding Process

Speaker2

[3:38]And I just, I'm wondering, like, like that's a, that's a pretty big task to take on. And I'm wondering even from engineering firm, like how that works. So just wondering like how, like, how did you manage kind of that process, you know, inside the firm and did you learn some things along the way and, and, and getting people on board?

Speaker0

[3:57]The soul-searching was deep and intimate. There was a promise I made to the board when I pitched the rebrand back in 2022.

Speaker0

[4:06]That no matter what, the research and discovery phase would be worth its weight in gold in how much we would learn about ourselves. Even if we never went on to change our messaging, our visual identity, that R&D would be really the first comprehensive research effort we ever took looking inward at ourselves, and particularly through the lens of an independent professional branding strategist like Toki. And it was illuminating in the way that that R&D effort, which included employee perception surveys, employee interviews.

Speaker0

[4:40]Desktop competitor analysis, and client interviews, highlighted areas where our self-perception either concurred with or contrasted with the external perception of the AKRF brand. And whether it was how we viewed ourselves in terms of our employee experience or our client experience, we came out of that R&D phase with, I think it was a hundred slide presentation that Toki shared with us that went real deep into everything we needed to know about ourselves to carry forth with

[5:12]

Engaging the Team

Speaker0

[5:11]a full rebranding effort. And then during that messaging phase that followed, it was an incredible soul-searching series of programs, including such interesting exercises like having the branding committee members write individually a presumptive obituary about the company and a solar system exercise where we created the universe of AKRF to really home in on how best to articulate kind of our own genuine, authentic selves in a way that we've never done previously.

Speaker2

[5:42]Okay, that's pretty interesting. Did you find that, and I don't know, just like the size of group you had you talked about kind of your brand committee out of the size of your firm like how many people really kind of were kind of that core core group

Speaker0

[5:55]So our branding committee was comprised of seven people, our CEO and president, Karen, which really made the whole process incredibly worthwhile and ensured that we had the top voice in the company involved throughout, all the way from the proposal phase to the launch of the website. So we're talking about a two-year process where we never had to worry about a powerful individual kind of coming into the middle and saying, hey, I don't like this. We need to send it back to the drawing board. And in addition to Karen, myself, and our creative director, we had four other senior partners. So we had a quarter of our partnership, myself and Karen included, involved in this branding committee from beginning to end to ensure that we really spoke for the partners and spoke for the entire company every step of the way. Okay, great.

Speaker2

[6:41]Well, thanks. That's interesting to hear kind of what your makeup was. Right, yeah.

Speaker1

[6:45]So you talked about the team and the involvement of the team in the process. How have they responded so far to the new brand? Anything that's been surprising or validating in some of the feedback that you've received?

Speaker0

[6:59]Really nothing too surprising. A lot of validation. This was a rallying cry for the company. And I always said from the beginning that we were going to come out of a two-year rebrand. With a real unification of self. And that's really carried forth from the moment we launched last September 12th through today, where there is still a clamoring for newly branded material, merch, swag, and anything that people need. So much so that I have people in the company pointing out to me where we have an old logo still on stuff. And it might be a little interior signage sticker or some old mugs, but everyone was ready to kind of dispense with that 20-year-old dated brand. And start fresh with new messaging, a new visual identity, and the expression

[7:46]

Feedback on the New Brand

Speaker0

[7:44]of both throughout our marketing world. So really nothing surprising, not too many complaints. You know, there's always the person who says, I don't like red and someone who doesn't like green, who prefers serif to non-serif. But really 99.9% of the time, we've had nothing but positive feedback from people on the new brand. And really the expression of our brand promise, our guiding belief all the way through the VizID has been really rewarding. Okay.

Speaker1

[8:11]That's awesome.

Speaker2

[8:12]Yeah. So we had to kind of lean into a rebrand ourselves and you talked about kind of getting rid of stuff. And it was actually, it was actually funny to see how many people would like bring their old pads of like paper with the old logo or their old notebooks or whatever it was and, you know, kind of pile them in this, you know, boxes to sort of go away and not to be seen, seen again. So it's kind of funny. We had, we had come with the same thing, And, you know, thinking about your

[8:41]

Originality in Branding

Speaker2

[8:37]rebrand that you did, it really kind of leans into the idea of originality. So I'm wondering, can you talk a little bit about how that idea connects what you do internally for your people and externally for your clients?

Speaker0

[8:51]When Toki took all of the R&D and all of the messaging exercises and brought it together into a brand promise, original perspective breaks through. It rang true immediately. And I've told people who have asked me about rebranding since then, the real benefit of the rebrand through the independent lens of a branding expert is that R&D and messaging. We have writers, we have designers, we could have designed a logo, we probably could have come up with a halfway decent slogan, but we never would have come up with original. And we never would have come up with original perspective breakthrough.

Speaker0

[9:25]And how genuine it is and how dedicated it is to the real work that was done really blew my mind. And when I heard that for the first time, no exaggeration, I said, wow, that's the word. Original is the word. So much so that when there were a couple of the branding committee members who were maybe hyper-focused on original as a boast, like we're the original or an original, which isn't true in either respect, we really had to have some good conversations within our branding committee to focus on original thinking.

Speaker0

[9:58]Original work, original engagement, the way original applies to who we truly are. That it's not in an arrogant way, it's not that kind of a word, but original and originality is what came out of the client interviews. It's what came out of the employee interviews and all the workshopping that we did. It really honored that work. It wasn't some buzzword that Toki came up with for us. It wasn't the word of the day. It was the word for AKRF. And it resonated immediately with me and with other members of our marketing team who for years had struggled to find the right way to articulate a brand

[10:35]

A New Messaging Platform

Speaker0

[10:33]promise or brand pillars that we never really had. For the first time, we had a messaging platform that no matter what you're doing, whether you're writing website copy, a social media post, a proposal letter, we have a brand book with internal and external messaging that we could rely on for a starting point as to how to describe who we are, both to current and prospective employees and to current and prospective clients.

Speaker2

[10:55]So when Jerry read that that brand story for the first time for the room did anybody get goosebumps

Speaker0

[11:02]I got goosebumps throughout. Jerry really teased us with it by spending 45 minutes walking us through all the R&D work, because I know that's near and dear to his heart. But the same way when the Viz ID was revealed and everyone's waiting 45 minutes to see a logo, you know, I pointed out to our team afterwards, it's not about the logo. The logo is the natural byproduct of all the work that we did for months and months on messaging and on R&D. I don't know how it was like for you, Carl, when, you know, your brand was revealed internally. But yeah, that was a that was a goosebump moment, at least for me. I could speak for myself and I'm willing to bet for a lot of people in the company.

Speaker2

[11:37]Yeah, I would say the same was true for us, too. And it was the same thing that we kept, you know, he kept building it slowly and slowly and slowly. And then it was like, wow, we are amazing.

Speaker0

[11:47]That's exactly right.

Speaker1

[11:50]Well, build up aside, one of the things that matters a lot to us, And I think what you're describing kind of captures the intent and what I think should be the intent, no matter who's doing a rebranding effort is about capturing that internal culture, because we think that and the premise of the show is that the brand is really

[12:11]

Cultural Impact of the Rebrand

Speaker1

[12:10]the experience that people have. It's not the messaging that we create or the visual identity. As you pointed out, those are really just artifacts. It's really about the experience that your clients and your team is having. So I'm wondering, from your perspective, as you've rolled this new brand out, what's the impact that you've been seeing on the internal culture? Are there ways that you see it shaping day-to-day behaviors or decisions?

Speaker0

[12:38]You know, cultural impact within a company, I think, is really difficult to quantify. And I'd be very interested in, Carl and Jerry, your opinion on ways to do that. But I will say that we never sought to change company culture. This wasn't a change agent rebrand. As Jerry knows, this was a rebrand about honoring our culture and finding ways to articulate the culture in a way that really feels authentic. So we hope that people don't change the way that they interact with each other at AKRF. Through the rebrand, the rebrand is a layer upon which we could build many meaningful engagements inside and outside the company. So I think the success of the rebrand is that you don't really notice much of a cultural change inside of the company. But again, that morale boost, that rallying cry, where now there's more connective tissue in a way that everyone feels the same way about a brand, because it speaks to them. It's not something that they inherited by joining us. And it's a brand that's never going to change. They realize that the company took a big step forward in changing a 20-year-old brand to better reflect who they are and what they mean to the company. So we don't want to see too much cultural change because of the rebrand. What we want to see is better articulation of who we are and what it means to really honor originality inside and outside of the company.

[13:53]

Originality in Client Experiences

Speaker2

[13:54]Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I think we sort of found the same thing that the new brand for us really, yeah i mean it got people excited it got people engaged and and and it's still still doing the same thing you know here we've been launched for almost almost two years now so that's great well you know i want to i wonder we talked about originality as one piece of that and i i just i wonder if you could could talk a little bit about sort of the experiences that you you guys create and that's whether it's you know for your teams or for your clients but any stories about how originality plays into what you've been doing.

Speaker0

[14:33]I can give you an example from the marketing department that's pretty fresh in terms of the original approach we recently took on a suggestion from our AI consultants to explore AI-driven proposal automation tools. I think given that mandate or that suggestion by an AI consultant, the conventional approach would be to go get demos from some of the commercial AI tools that are out there and see what might work for us. But along with our marketing director and one of our operations manager, we worked backwards. I put out a call to my SMPS network to find other marketers who were using proposal automation tools that were driven by AI.

Speaker0

[15:07]Cliff and I, our marketing director, conducted half-hour interviews of marketing leaders from about seven to 10 different AEC firms around the country over a two-week process and put together our own research and discovery phase, I think enough so that it would have made even Jerry proud, to really determine what we wanted to get from this tool before we ever reached out to some of those AI companies to get demos of their products. And those demos then became real conversations because we knew how their users were actually using the products before we even knew what they would take. And to this day now, and this has all been done over the last month or two, we're right now trialing one of the kind of prominent AI proposal automation tools that are out there and still investigating another one we just heard about to make as informed a decision as possible. I think it's not to pat ourselves on the back, but it's one example of an original approach. I've always said where there's a will, there's a way. No one has taught me or taught our marketing leaders in this company how to go about a project like that. And whether we're doing a proposal time audit, like I did last year, or exploring, adopting an AI proposal automation tool, you have to come up with original approaches to get that work done and it very much echoes or mirrors the kind of originality you see around the company if you're doing a land use approval project in new york city you're operating under a guidebook that we contributed to the same is true of stormwater regulations in philadelphia.

Speaker0

[16:33]We've done original independent research on the effects of climate change and offshore wind construction on the North Atlantic right whale, which is an endangered species. So there's a lot of originality and a lot of examples of that throughout the company. And we try to mirror that in marketing and I'm sure our other resource teams as much as possible.

Speaker1

[16:50]It's interesting talking about AI and particularly when we're talking about this topic of originality. I'm curious, those internal conversations that you're having with the marketing team and your leadership team, is there concern about losing some of the originality that you put into your proposals now if you're utilizing AI to help with that?

Speaker0

[17:15]I love that question because it's something I think about throughout this process. Two to three months ago, I would have categorized myself in a binary situation anyway as an opponent of using AI for proposal automation. And here I am a proponent and trying to find the best one for our team. I'm very worried as a writer about writing and editing skills. I'm very worried about the erosion of critical thinking skills. It's clear to me that whether it's six months from now, a year or two years from now, if you're not using AI proposed automation tools, you're going to be behind in the industry. And I think part of originality and really, frankly, just part of being a good professional and a good competitor looking for work and business for companies is making sure that if we're going to be using AI, we're going to do so responsibly, responsibly and productively, which is really the mandate of why we hired an AI consultant to work with our

[18:10]

Future Growth and Planning

Speaker0

[18:07]AI working group in the first place. And as much as possible, you know put original thought into how we do our work and how we train our staff and how we Hire the right types of people to work kind of under a paradigm that none of us even knew was possible a year from now a year ago, right?

Speaker1

[18:25]So, you know, we've been looking back at the rebrand, but now looking ahead, how do you see the new brand shaping how you're planning for the future? Is it changing in any way how you're thinking about growth or new opportunities for the firm?

Speaker0

[18:40]We just completed our next three-year strategic plan, of which I'm a co-chair, and the rebrand was essential to that work. We shared our brand book and Toki's R&D findings presentation, not just with our planning committee members, but all of the participants who were in a focus group or a workshop, which we conducted back in February, all had access to those products. They had them anyway, but also encouragement to read through them. And I can say with certainty, looking at the strategic plan now, which we just presented to our partners a week ago, there's a trace of every goal and strategy back to things that we learned because of the research and discovery that we did with Toki back in 2022. to. Every goal, every strategy has elements of the rebrand kind of infused within them and the vision, mission, and goals. I'm sorry, the vision, mission, and values that we came up with Toki as part of our internal messaging and external messaging is not just documented in the strategic plan, but we went through all four goals and all the strategies thereof to make sure that there was real alignment. And we weren't planning on doing anything in the next three years from a business standpoint that would contradict what we learned about ourselves and the way that we want to express ourselves going forward. So the rebrand has been critical to strategic planning, and I'm sure there are going to be many other ways in which the rebrand finds its way into planning efforts in this company.

Speaker1

[20:06]That's really cool.

Speaker2

[20:07]That's interesting, Jeff, because what you're saying really is how, I mean, like how important that is to planning and future, you know, your future growth and everything that you're doing. And I love to hear that because I think sometimes it's easy for people to not realize that that those core values, those core things you learn about yourselves, like that really does drive who you are and who you're going to be. And to fold that into planning is great. But I think it's a thing that, I don't know, I think maybe other firms may have a hard time doing and thinking about that and get into that core,

[20:46]

Advice for Rebranding Efforts

Speaker2

[20:43]their core brand, or as we would call their brand truth. So maybe kind of thinking about how you guys got there, is there any advice that you would give to other firms who were trying to figure that out?

Speaker0

[20:55]I'll share what I learned from Jerry's colleague, Alex Ray Atoki, with whom I presented at the SNPS Northeast Regional Conference, that it's difficult to find consensus in a rebrand and you want to aim for alignment. And that's true of our guiding belief, our brand truth, as well as anything else we did to come up with our messaging and our visual identity.

Speaker0

[21:16]Our branding committee, the seven of us, we didn't always have consensus on how to move forward, but we were always aligned on the basics. There were three principles, whether we articulated them at the time or not. Looking back at it, there were three principles that really guided our work. One was we wanted to do a comprehensive rebrand. We were not interested in just a logo or just a website or just a logo on a website. It had to be all or nothing. Number two, the brand had to work everywhere for everyone. One, we weren't interested in any possibility of micro brands in the future that, you know, an office in one region would want to talk about itself in a way that's different than another region. And third, that the rebrand, both the visual identity and the messaging would follow modern sensibilities or at least reflect modern sensibilities. And we really feel confident that the alignment on the basics is what moved us forward throughout this project. We were never derailed by a lack of consensus. And the fact that our messaging is just a foundation that works well for everyone continues to hold true when we're doing proposals, marketing products, presentations, or exhibiting at conferences. It doesn't mean that our Connecticut office doesn't have something in New York City upon which works with a collector or a series in the land ever.

Speaker1

[22:30]Interesting yeah that thing with you viewer much of it i'm gonna kind of well i don't know that that view actually changes things all that much but i'm hoping that you could talk just a little bit about the room my i'm planning to invite benjamin to to be on the podcast and you know in a few in a few months and talk more about it but it's it's such a cool space you sound amazing in the space so can you talk a little bit about the room you're in

Speaker0

[22:58]Well, the great thing about this room is that it's better heard than seen. So you're seeing me sit in front of acoustical wall treatments. I'm in a room that we named Pindrop. It is quite likely the quietest commercial

[23:11]

The Significance of Physical Space

Speaker0

[23:10]room in all of Manhattan. I'm sitting here in midtown Manhattan, surrounded by traffic, subway lines, mechanical noise, elevators, and you can't hear a thing. And music sounds amazing in here. And the reason why our acoustics, noise, and vibration practice created this space is to prepare acoustical renderings, for architects, owners, developers, space tenants who want to hear what their space will sound like during the design process. So they can make decisions that sometimes total up to millions of dollars about the windows, the doors, all the treatments that they're going to have in their space to make sure that whether it's a school, a hospital, a luxury residential building, a hotel, a basketball gym, that the space sounds as good as it looks.

Speaker1

[23:55]Yeah. So I can, first of all, I can attest to having been in this room a couple of times now, it absolutely is dead quiet. You can hear your heart beating when the door is shut and everything's turned off. It's a pretty remarkable space, particularly for being in what's not a new building in Manhattan, a good building, but not a new one. But what's fascinating to me and why I want to have a further conversation with Benjamin about acoustics and office vibe and the room itself is we talk a lot about experiences and how do brands create great experiences for their employees or for their clients. And you've created something that both helps designers and owners understand what the experience is going to be like, but it's actually a very powerful experience for your clients as well. Something that they don't see or experience anywhere else. Can you talk a little bit about what's the impact to AKRF to having a space like this, not just from the technical ability to demonstrate what the sound profile is going to be in a room when you're done, but just as a way to, you know, kind of express who AKRF is and back to that idea of originality.

Speaker0

[25:14]It's a great perspective, Jerry, and I'm glad to have it from you as someone who visited this space on a couple of occasions, because this space, not just the pin drop in which I'm sitting right now, which for those who can't see the totality is literally a conference room, but the entire space that we inhabit here on the ninth floor in Midtown Manhattan is an expression of our brand. And the space in the pin drop was completed pre-brand. The space outside of the conference room throughout floor nine was during the rebrand. But this is a message. The design work is all biophilic. We have biophilic soundscaping.

Speaker0

[25:48]We have our natural resources and our acoustics team based here on the ninth floor. And we've had people visit this space and ask whether this is an architectural office. They quite literally don't expect to be walking into the offices of an engineering and environmental science firm. And that's a statement. And it's been very important to Benjamin and others in the company that this space, I guess it is a sound simulation room. It's a place we prepare really high-end, sophisticated acoustical renderings. This is a company resource. This is our flagship conference room. We hosted you here, Jerry, for Toki when we literally kicked off the rebrand. We've had senior partner meetings here. We've had meeting greets here. And while you can't redo all of your office space in a year or two, we hope that as we modernize other spaces in the 15 locations that we have, the six states in which we primarily work that not everything's going to have a pin drop, not everything's going to have high-end biophilic design and soundscaping, but we carry on that message as well because as much as the website might be the most common expression publicly of our brand, this physical space that we sit in is an amazing message to send to our clients and our employees as well. No, it's 100% true.

Speaker1

[27:04]And I'm really excited to dig a little bit deeper into it in a future episode.

[27:11]

Key Takeaways from the Conversation

Speaker1

[27:09]But I think we're getting close to the end of our time. So, Jeff, what's the one thing that you'd love for everyone listening to take away from our conversation today?

Speaker0

[27:18]It's incredibly important to do the work before the branding. You know, people think the branding is a logo. They think it's even a slogan or a brand promise. The brand research and discovery that we worked on with Toki led to the messaging. The messaging we worked on led to the visual identity. The visual identity led to a launch day celebration that transcended all of our office space. And the impact and the joy that people felt was so strong that many of those offices remained decorated to this very day, nine, 10 months later. So I just encourage everyone and people have reached out to me to ask about their own branding projects, to hire professional branding consultants and do the work, do the research and discovery, do the messaging work and let your visual identity be an honest reflection of who you are authentically, not just a cool logo that a graphic designer designed. It's got to be more than that to really kind of have the impact that you hope it will have on your company.

Speaker1

[28:15]Yeah. And I think on that note, what I would echo back is the importance of how you brought senior leadership to the table early in the process and consistently through the process and how important it is for those of you who are listening to have someone as strong as Jeff leading this process, being able to gather the feedback, the insights and things from the team. And frankly, when you talk about things like the celebrations, those weren't things that we came up with. Those were things that Jeff and his team dreamed up as the ways to effectively launch the brand internally. So kudos to you for taking it from not just the original thinking, but carrying it all the way through to something that, you know, I can see tangibly when I visit the office in the excitement. I remember a recent visit with you guys being stopped in the hallway by somebody that we interviewed in the process, just gushing about everything that had taken place. And it, you know, that's not a reflection of us. We're just there to help, you know, Sherpa, you know, Sherpa you through that process. So we appreciate that partnership.

Speaker0

[29:26]I appreciate you say that, you know, it takes a team. And while, you know, we started with a small team of marketers and designers on the branding committee, the second that the brand was done, we used that runway, that nine-month runway of web design and development to bring more people into the fold. That's where, you know, the marketing team was the first group at AKRF to see the new brand before the senior partners, before the board, because of all the work that had to be done. And we just brought an amazing team together here of marketers and other professionals to implement this brand such that when it came to launch day, it was truly a celebration that was kind of managed by others. I came in as a participant. You know, those elevator doors opened on the seventh floor and I was completely shell shocked. I was blown away. It was an emotional moment because of all that work that had gone into the rebrand and knowing that we were unveiling a brand to the public that was the best possible reflection of our company. There was nothing manufactured, nothing made up. It all came from research and data. And that's the love language of the people we work with, right? That's the engineers, the planners, the scientists. It just, it rang true to everybody.

Speaker2

[30:30]Yeah, that's awesome. Well, and I think it's great too, the idea of celebration for a launch too. We kind of did the same thing too. And I think, again, you've worked, you know, you saw it kind of, you know, grow and happen. But I think, yeah, when you open it up and, you know, your staff and everybody else gets excited about it and gets a part of it, that is truly something to celebrate. Right. So I definitely encourage people when you're at that point to, yeah, to make something big of it because it is it is a big deal. Well, I know we are trying to wrap up. I've got one more thing I'd like to ask you. We always like to sort of find out from our guests like, hey, you know, is there a book or a podcast that you think we should all be paying attention to? So I'm going to see if there's if there's something that comes to mind for you.

Speaker0

[31:12]You know, those are real personal recommendations right now. I read a lot of nonfiction. I actually read exclusively nonfiction and that's not for everyone. But right now I'm reading a book called Character Limit, and it's written by two New York Times technology reporters about the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. And you can just imagine the takeaways in this book, in this story on marketing, branding, messaging, management, customer experience. It's been unreal. I'm about halfway through. And then podcast, that's my escape. That's my escape from work and life. I listen to primarily two comedy podcasts, The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast. And this is important from the workaholics guys both those podcasts make me laugh on the train or bus into the city and that everyone needs their escape from the realities of branding and marketing and.

Speaker2

[32:00]Of course you will be adding the intangible brand to your list of podcasts to be

Speaker0

[32:04]Paying attention i'm sure and not just my episode good.

Speaker1

[32:09]Plug carl i love seth meyers it's it's a dream to make it to one of the tapings next time i'm or one of the times when i'm in new york Jeff, I think you would be an amazing resource for people who are tackling branding

[32:24]

Connecting with Jeff Taub

Speaker1

[32:22]or how to launch a brand or just questions about that. Where can people find you online or learn more about AKRF?

Speaker0

[32:30]AKRF.com on the website. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. People know where to find me there. For my fellow SMPS members, I'll be at Amplify. If this comes out before then, I'm findable in the directory. I'm not a hard guy to track down. And my email address is JTAUB at AKRF.com. and I live by my email. So you'll get a response pretty quickly if you reach out to me.

Speaker1

[32:51]That's amazing. Thank you for being so open. And thank you so much for just being here, sharing your perspective, talking about the journey that you've been through. We really appreciate it.

Speaker2

[33:01]Yeah, Jeff, I

Speaker0

[33:02]Can't thank you enough.

Speaker2

[33:03]Yeah, I'll echo that too. I mean, we really appreciate you being here. It's been a fun conversation, one that I can sort of have some parallel twos, but I also think that if there's a lot that people can pick up from what you've shared today, So we appreciate that very much.

Speaker0

[33:18]You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on as a guest. This has been a great conversation and I'm available to talk anytime.

Speaker1

[33:25]Awesome. We appreciate it, Jeff. Thank you.

Speaker0

[33:28]Take care, guys.

Speaker1

[33:29]Well, that wraps up another episode of the Intangible Brand. If you enjoyed today's conversation as much as we did, we'd love it if you'd follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. It helps us keep bringing these insights to folks like you.

Speaker2

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Speaker1

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Speaker2

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Speaker1

[34:07]Thanks for listening to The Intangible Brand, where the strongest brands are built on the experiences they create for their clients and their teams. you