How do you reimagine one of the world’s most powerful brands?

Over 18 months, across 15 global markets, and with 50+ sub-brands, Koto partnered with Amazon to deliver one of the largest brand transformations in recent history.

In this episode, James Greenfield, CEO and Founder of Koto, shares the inside story — from simplifying a sprawling brand architecture to modernising the iconic “smile.”

Matt and Jacob dive into how to design at scale, build internal alignment, and create systems that drive consistency without killing creativity.

A must-listen for anyone managing complex global brands.

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Transcript

Hello folks. Today on JUST Branding, we’re diving into the one of most ambitious brand transformations in recent years, and we’re talking about Amazon. Over 80 months across 15 global markets, and with more than 50 sub-brands involved, Amazon worked with KOTO to create a new brand system that delivers clarity, consistency, and confidence at a global scale. And we’re really thrilled and excited because today, we’re joined by James Greenfield, CEO and founder of KOTO, the design studio behind the amazing work. James has spent the last decade building KOTO into a globally recognized creative agency with studios in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Sydney, and a portfolio that we would all saw our left arms off to have that includes the likes of Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Netflix, and now Amazon. James, thank you for doing this. Welcome to the show.

Thanks very much for having me.

Great. Well, I wonder if we could just sort of, sort of dive straight in, if you’d be open to that, to kind of ask like, well, what was the brief? What was the challenge from Amazon at the start before your work?

So I think Amazon had done quite a bit of work themselves. As you expect of a kind of company of that scale and standing where they had kind of assessed where their brand was today, the challenges they were facing. And I think within that, one of the things that they really looking at was the architecture, particularly within the consumer space. I think, you know, there is probably, for many of us in the Western world, a heavy exposure to Amazon. And all of us have a different interaction with it. You know, some people are getting brown boxes to their doorstep and maybe watching things on Prime, but maybe have never even looked at the grocery products. Other people maybe are getting their pharmacy delivered on Amazon, but aren’t watching Amazon Prime. And so you have to really understand that I think sometimes people can think of Amazon as brown boxes and go back many years, Amazon used to be books. And actually, it’s a much more complicated and a much more complex multifaceted experience. And I think what they was they got to the point where I think they felt like a lot of strategic fracturing and we need to be able to help kind of develop something that’s much more coherent for the next stage of their growth.

I have a follow up question. You mentioned research by Amazon. They had some things beforehand. Were you involved in that at all? Or was there enough? Did you have to go backwards or like collaborate with them to find any other research or confirm it?

They had made a pretty effective piece of work done there, to be honest. And I think a lot of people had built into it. I think a company like that, I would expect them to have a pretty heavy research function as well themselves. And so therefore, that said, there was things we wanted to go and check out ourselves, things we wanted to look at. There was some areas of the company that maybe we just weren’t that familiar with compared to. And that leads to what I said a minute ago, which is we all have different experiences and different relationships with this brand. And so therefore, for some of us, for me personally, I’ve never even really looked at the pharmacy products. I was aware that they had bought PillPack. I was aware that that was something they did, just what hadn’t even passed my consideration. And maybe that makes me a very typical consumer and a challenge that they’re facing. I’m also not somebody at that point, I have to admit, who’d ever been in one of the Amazon stores. And so I had to go and quickly rectify that and go and go through that experience. So from a personal point of view, there’s things you need to do to fill in your gaps. But as a company, we generally pull research in in all many different places. And it really depends upon the specifics of the brief and what we’re trying to achieve. Right.

And the vast amount of touch points across regions globally, that must have been difficult to get your heads around as well. Like, I guess there’s translation issues. How did you kind of get your arms around all of that stuff as well?

I think the thing you need to be aware of as well is it’s very different in each of the markets as well. You know, some people are only just getting Amazon delivery in the wild versus some of us living countries that have had that for years. And so but those people have been watching Prime for many years. And so therefore, it’s more akin to a Netflix based experience over here or any other streaming platform. And so within that, actually, the biggest thing we really had to get our head around was maturity market by market and specifics of what was happening and how people saw it and how it turned up in their lives on a regular basis. I think they’ve also got an absolutely humongous digital real estate as well. And so we had to expose ourselves to that and really understand what that looked like, what it did, what it was achieving, what was successful, et cetera. Because I think it’s very easy for you to think about as a designer, it’s very easy for you to go like, I’m just going to start to put order around all this and start putting everything in neat boxes. But actually, that can sometimes be oversimplified. And sometimes you’ve really got to understand that complexity exists for a reason and you can’t just simplify everything. Some things have to remain complex. And so within that, there was quite a lot of work to really do to understand that as well.

Amazing. And then your view was, had they let… I mean, I don’t know if you can answer this, but I’m going to ask it anyway, but do you think they’d let it go too far and splinter in terms of the visual identity? Or do you think it was… Was it the right time to do it then? Or would you sort of thought it would have been better to do it prior to that? What are your thoughts on the timing of the consolidation work that you were asked to do?

I think if I was really, really honest, I’d say it’s a brand that needed it, definitely. Sometimes you work on projects and you go, well, what we’re replacing isn’t that bad, but you can see that it could be better. Whereas in this case, I think they had a lot of really big problems. I think over-reliance on logo was definitely a challenge that they were facing, not necessarily helping people navigate around the fact that there was these various aspects of the B2B and the B2C experience and how you could collate that, not helping people through discovery. I think brand could do a lot of heavy lifting there. I think it speaks to a trend we’re seeing generally, which is I think people used to just advertise heavily. It didn’t matter what brand it was. Advertising was the way to build awareness, to build sentiment, and in a way, it almost excused the challenges that people had with brands. But now, I think in a world where people are a bit more fractured in terms of how they interact with brands, I don’t think you can say that everyone’s watching the same TV program on a Saturday night. So you can’t just throw X million dollars and go, I’m going to put that out there. You have those rare moments like the Super Bowl and other things where you probably have got a lot of eyes, which is why there’s such a premium on media in those moments. But I don’t think we can guarantee that we can collect everybody in that kind of universal way. Even water cooler TV is not as what it was previously. People are watching kind of shows in very different ways at very different times. And so within that, I think brand building has really become up the agenda for a lot of people. And I think in Amundsen’s case, this is me guessing, but I think maybe some of the things that they’d launched weren’t necessarily getting the traction that you’d expect. And within that, I think that’s the point where you go, actually, why are people not discovering this? Why are we not doing this? And so it’s a common challenge. We’ve seen it with other brands.

OK, so let’s shift on into how you began to attack the challenge. You’ve talked about the research and getting at your heads and your team’s heads around all of the complexities. So after you’ve done that, what did you do next? How did you actually begin then to move this project forward?

The number one thing we had to do was to work into a number of cohorts. And so therefore really organize the brand through a set number of these cohorts. And so within that, how do people see the various aspects of the estate? How do they navigate around that? And so therefore, the entertainment cohort, there’s gaming, there’s shopping, there’s all these things. How do you organize that? And within that, it’s very easy to look back on something and then kind of oversimplify it. But from our point of view, it was really about trying to use colour in a really effective way. And so Amazon has been for many years orange. And so we really lent into that and made sure that we really focused on getting that. And so it seems like a graphic designer tweak, but we kind of made the orange a little bit more impactful. We made sure it stood out. So therefore, when you know that Amazon is advertising to you, you get this very strong orange. You’ve got the smile. We tweaked the logo and sometimes I think people tweak logos for the sake of it. In our case, I think what we really felt was modernization needed to happen. You know, this was a brand that had an iconic logo, but as much as it was for an internet store, it was the mid-90s, which is ultimately a pre-internet age, whether we like it or not. And so therefore, the way that graphic design was applied, it wasn’t thinking about scaling, it wasn’t thinking about legibility, it wasn’t thinking about any of these things that we discovered throughout the 2000s. And so therefore, by revisiting that, we felt that we could digitize a brand. Now, that seems a bit funny, talking about, you know, Amazon is one of the original internet brands, but that is the way that designers had to catch up with the internet over the 25 years we’ve had of this century so far. And so within that, I think a really strong use of color and understanding of actually this logo needs to work tiny and needs to work massive. It needs to be in times square in the biggest way possible, but it also needs to be a few pixels on an icon somewhere. And what we found was it couldn’t do both those things. If you made it really, really big, it maybe felt a little bit old fashioned and it felt like it hadn’t really been created in the time that we live now. And if you really made it really small, it really struggled and you had lots of filling challenges and stuff. And so therefore, you know, think about the kind of two extremes of that. In terms of the color, really thinking about how do we really go, you know, this is grocery, this is what happens here. Green is a clear signifier. You know, we always pull on a piece of data which is majority of people in most markets are visual first and verbal second. And I think many brands think about people, you know, they use copy lines and clever headlines. Now, we all know that that’s important, but most people have a visual reaction to things before they have a verbal reaction to it. And, you know, when you’re scrolling, as we all know, a lot of things are going past our brains in a very, very quick succession. And so we really need to lean into color within the Amazon ecosystem to really be able to use that. So color very strong. And then the final part of that is we really early on set up on this idea that actually we needed a universal typeface. Yet again, designer habit, simplify everything, make it really easy, make it. But ultimately, what we found was if we could get a simple, singular typeface, which had impact, which had character, which really stood out, which made you think, oh, this is Amazon. The combination of that with the updated logo, which used the same type style and the color, we’re able to do that. And the other thing is that you talked about the top of the show, 50 sub-brands, those sub-brands had all been made in a silo. And so some had the smile, some didn’t have the smile, some were one color, some were two color. It was an absolute wild west. And everything had a logo. So there was also a question we had to answer, which was what deserves a logo? Because ultimately, if you start slapping smiles on everything, then everything starts to lose that kind of impact, that ability to stand out. That’s a common challenge I’ve seen on many, many brands that I’ve worked with, which is this team decided they need a logo. And you start putting logos on features, you start putting logos on little services, internal stuff, external stuff, et cetera. So a massive artist of all of that. And we worked with our type partner, NAM, and they made a logo typeface. And what that means is that anyone that works in Amazon can type out the logo and the logo file auto-generates for them. And so it’s a kind of clever technological solution, which means that you also don’t have that really common problem we have, which is people going, has anyone got the logo? You know, and these emails bouncing around that we get. I had one of those recently where a brand we worked on eight years ago, someone emailed me and asked for the logo, which I thought was a new record for me. Hopefully someone that works there’s got it, but maybe not, anyway. And so I think, you know, early on, it was all about working out what the key pillars were going to be. So the use of color, the use of typography, and this new logo system to really understand that actually, if we could get that universally all cracked, then we would have a foundation which would allow us to start to express the other things that brands needed. Because, you know, if you’re selling, I don’t know, groceries, you need to be doing a very different story than if you’re talking about, you know, Hollywood’s leading content within a prime environment. And so therefore, there’s a lot of flex that’s required there, but also we need that consistency that sits between.

Nice. I’ve got a couple of follow up questions. Obviously, what you’re talking about there, it sounds to me like kind of like distinctive brand codes, right? That you were going to kind of codify, simplify and then use. To how much research did you do like in competitor markets? I guess that would be quite difficult, right? Because say the grocery is right, you’re going to go green and you’re going to make it look a certain way. Obviously, you might find that that is quite distinctive in the UK. But then when you go over to Spain or something, you know, a competitor that looks a little similar. How did you kind of get your heads around the complexity of that on a global scale? Or did you not worry too much about that and think, right, we’re going to do this and, you know, stuff, stuff the competition kind of thing?

Every brand needs to be competitor aware, but not competitor obsessed. And I think that is like the number one thing. And I think some people become competitor obsessed and what they do is they put themselves in a box. Because you know, the greatest will in the world, there is a color wheel. Everyone in most brand areas, where you’re working in an area of like high concentration, has used all the colors. And if a color is not being used, it’s probably for a reason. Now, you know, that’s not the case when we’re looking at like emerging technologies or certain areas. And you know, you get those rare moments. Many years ago, I worked on the e-rebrand and there was a really nice teal and yellow section that was completely unused by telcos in the UK. And so therefore, you can kind of step into that. But I think in this case here, you know, because it’s such multifaceted brand and because it’s probably one of the world’s most recognizable brands, we weren’t too competitive in success. What we did, particularly with things like grocery, which you pull up in the question, is we did quite a bit of packaging design for their own lines. And so therefore, really understanding actually in an environment where someone’s shopping digitally, how can we make sure that whether we’re looking at the various ranges that they sell under the Amazon brand, and actually what that does is that becomes quite a useful thing for you to then compare to leading retailers in other markets. And it’s the combination of the brand overall, plus their own lines, and also thinking about the context of the way that that’s put for sale. So yes, competitor awareness, but not in a way of like, you know, company X’s use green, so we can’t, because let’s be honest, a lot of grocery brands use green for a reason. And so therefore, I think for me, it’s all about the combination of the elements together. You know, we’re lucky enough to work on some of the world’s leading brands as well. And so therefore what you do is you build up a pretty good natural repository of brand awareness as well. And so therefore you are aware of when you start to stray into other signatures that other areas have.

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Another follow up question. As you were sort of developing the creative, the colors and all that stuff, did you do much in terms of customer research, like to get kind of, I guess, the response from the market? Or again, was that something that you basically lent into your team’s experience on?

I think you have to be really careful about what you’re testing in a brand environment. I think you can do things like legibility within typography, which we did do for this project. I think you can do things such as talk to people when you put advertising together and see how they respond to an idea. I think if you put a color in front of someone and say, is this a nice color? I think you’re taking them into an area where they’re not really actively thinking about those kind of things. Similarly with logos, if you say to somebody, is this a good logo or not? You’re probably not going to get a really useful answer just because people aren’t walking around going, that’s a logo, that’s a logo, that’s a logo. Because by design, we don’t want them to be doing that. We want them to be looking at whatever the message or whatever it is. Therefore, I think testing has to be really carefully considered. In this case here, we didn’t test the logo particularly because we were evolving a logo that already existed. Therefore, we had to lean on ourselves there. Where we did use testing, we only used it within areas where we really think in our experience as consultants, you’re going to get a read that’s actually useful for the project as a whole.

How did you work in collaboration with the Amazon’s in-house team, you and Teda?

Obviously, a very large company. There’s a central marketing unit, which we were our direct clients, creative directors and designers there, strategists, various other people, a chief creative officer of Amazon, I worked quite heavily with. Within there, I think it’s very collaborative. As a company, generally, co-creation is one of the key tenants of our work. We know that our clients are not passive audiences that are going to just sit there and expect us to present to them. I think there is this slight misnomer within certain areas of the design world that that’s what should happen. I think in our area, in the brand consultant area, we’re very much more focused on what are you trying to achieve? How can we augment your team? How can we take your internal knowledge plus our external experience and combine those together? Because one of the things that I find is a really interesting challenge for internal teams is if they’ve been successful in their career, they’ve probably worked at a reasonable level on four or five brands. Whereas, us as a company, we’ve worked on hundreds of brands. And so we can bring in an absolute encyclopedia of experiences in all areas, which can be very additive. You know, they can say to us, Oh, how did company X do it? And we go, well, it’s such a really interesting. The challenge they had there was X, Y or Z or, you know, they were struggling with imagery or, you know, whatever the challenge was or in the digital realm, they found, you know, this. And so we bring that experience in and so that kind of multifaceted plus their depths of knowledge, you know, what we always say to our clients is that we’re never going to know as much as you do about your brand because you’ve worked there every day for five years and we’re coming in and, you know, however hard we crunch for like the month or two months of research, we’re not going to hit that depth and we’re not going to understand all the use cases and everything. And so it’s really about that one team mentality. So high interaction. So lots of conversations every week. People spread all over the world. So heavy use of video to do that. This project was mainly run out of our New York studio, but I was based in London and in various other places while I was traveling, while I was doing this. And we worked with people globally to really bring this together to make sure we had that global perspective. And so, yeah, it’s high kind of interaction, making sure that you’re really understanding what the challenges are, high preparation of materials to make sure that people that aren’t necessarily on the calls can then be updated. We had to make some materials for quite senior people in the business for them to feel like they’re updated. And so therefore, you’ve really got to make sure that the two teams working together really crack the story telling there. And so someone who’s maybe not sat in four hours of meeting that week and is going to look at something for 15 minutes is going to make sure that they’re tracking against what’s happening and what’s important and what we’re trying to discover. And then, you know, don’t try and attack the whole thing at once. Really try to think about it in a much more kind of like incremental piece and just really trying to work through each challenge as you go because then you’re kind of taking consideration to it. And so with an internal team that has the experience and has the background that the Amazons did, that made it a really interesting. I’m not going to claim it wasn’t challenging. Of course, it was challenging. You know, a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of things to overcome, a lot of things happening as well. That was the thing, you know, we’re not like working on a fixed asset that, you know, the first day we sat on it, we just everything else paused. This was a company that was launching new products, launching new services, constantly changing things all the time. And so for us, we kept on having to tweak and adjust that. And so internal team is vital to keep us on top of that as well.

Sounds like chaos. What were the biggest challenges? You mentioned a few there, like the politics even, and keeping people updated, but what were the operational or creative challenges you experienced?

I think the biggest challenge on any project to this scale, and this isn’t unique to Amazon, is change. And the idea that some things that have previously been very successful, it’s time for them to change. And so that’s typography, big challenge. I think a lot of people are very used, particularly within the product team, to typefaces that they’ve been using for many years, and we’re coming in and saying we’re going to change that. And so therefore, you know, out of the day-to-day evolution of those products, that’s a big question. I think obviously you’ve got a lot of people utilizing their digital realm on a daily basis. And so everyone’s very concerned that you’re going to see, you know, some kind of down lift or you’re going to break something or something’s going to go wrong. And so therefore, you got to be really, really careful with that stuff. And then I think really making sure that you didn’t get sucked into like individual challenges and lose the overall vision of what you’re trying to achieve, which is consistency basically, you know, and I think consistency is an interesting thing because everyone knows they need to be consistent, but people probably don’t get out of bed in the morning and go like, oh, today I’m going to be consistent. You know, it’s not it’s not necessarily the most motivating factor. And so therefore in that, I think our job very much was to kind of have discipline to that and not get distracted and keep on kind of go like, you know, what we’re trying to achieve is X and this is why it’s important. And to do that, you have to keep on making the case for it.

It’s funny you mentioned typography has been one of the biggest hiccups or things have changed.

Yeah, I’ve experienced that many times in my career, you know, some poor product team and we turn up and go, oh, yeah, by the way, we’re going to change all the fonts and they go like, right. Okay. And, you know, it depends how things are coded, how things are built, all that kind of stuff. You know, in Amazon’s case, they’ve got a lot of signage to work through as well because they got a lot of stores around the world. So, they’re going to now go through that thing, which is really difficult, which is spot the old logo. It’s changed again since, but many years, I worked on a PayPal logo change, and for about six years later, I was still watching, seeing old logos everywhere. So, you know, it’s a big thing.

It’s a tough one and an investment, right? And as you say, unless you’re making that kind of business case, I guess, for efficiency and, you know, recognition and, you know, and that side of things that it’s gonna always kind of frustrate someone in the finance team somewhere that they’re paying for signage, you know, still. So, yeah, so it’s a tricky one. When you had started to get traction on this and decisions had started to be made around the brand, the colours, the fonts and so on, were you asked to get in and to kind of help them understand it or get the rams around it, different teams across the world? And how did that kind of work, that kind of internal buy-in or education of the new system?

Yeah, they brought us in to many things and that’s like a classic thing again, road showing work, it’s really important when you’ve got a lot of teams that you need to talk to and kind of get in. And so, some of our teams went to Seattle and did some sessions there. We had many, many Zoom calls and the equivalent and really a lot of that kind of work and interacting with a lot of people and really trying to understand their particular part of it and what the challenges were. I think like all things, it’s all about communication and we were lucky, we were working with a client who communicated heavily internally and so we weren’t dealing with the problem that we do have in other cases where you turn up on a call and people go, what’s this about? And so then you have to go right back to the beginning and so, yeah, everyone turned up with context, which is the most vile thing.

Amazing. And now it’s been done, let’s sort of talk about the impact. Have you heard from them in terms of how helpful, successful, useful it’s been? What sort of, I guess, growth, anything you can share on that? Like, in terms of…

I think the heaviest thing is they’ve seen a double increase on recognition and recall, and it’s a really strong brand sentiment, which for us is, you know, the kind of be all and end all for this stuff, as we want people to recognize this brand, we want people to have increased sentiment, we want people to be able to recall it. It’s a very interesting common challenge we find all the time, which is we’ll see a lot of marketing work put out there, and then it’s put in front of people and people misconstrued who was advertising or what the product was or whatever. I’m not going to reveal who the client is, but there was one I heard recently about a Super Bowl advert where they spent a lot of money on this Super Bowl advert and 90% of the people that watched it thought it was for their biggest competitor. As someone who’s creative, I cannot even begin to understand how that happens because you see the end and there’s a big logo, and so therefore I don’t understand how someone does that. But that’s the thing. It’s like just because I live in this awareness bubble, which is irritates my wife massively. Everywhere I go, look at that, look at that brand, that’s a bit weird, I don’t like that color and all the other things that I’m constantly pointing out day in, day out. That’s not people’s live reality. And so therefore, us getting that uplift is the most important thing. There is also, as well, I think, hopefully going to be in the long run a cost saving piece to it as well because when you have a fractured brand, you’re having to roll it out in all these different ways. And so unification will lead to that. But I think we’re a bit early for that. We’re still doing work today on the brand refresh because there’s a lot of things it has to touch and get to.

Yeah.

So when did you start the work, if you don’t mind my asking? I think it was about 18 months ago, I heard.

But yeah, I think we’re almost at two years now.

Yeah.

Yeah. How long do you imagine it’s going to be? I mean, you mentioned, was it PayPal? It’s still eight years later. Do you think that you’ll be spotting old Amazon logos for the next few years? Do you reckon?

I’m sure we’ve probably got a little while longer yet. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of things that people need to work through. And change is hard. It’s an absolutely massive organisation. Someone once told me that either directly or indirectly, one in 17 people in the world works for Amazon. I can’t qualify that statistic, but it sounds kind of right. And so, even if it’s not right, it’s the kind of thing that makes you go like, yeah, that’s a pretty big company.

Yeah. I heard somewhere they’re trialing drone deliveries, like that would be cool to see your logo on a drone, right? Like that would be amazing.

Yeah. The nicest thing that’s happened so far is two things. The first time someone handed me a box with the logo on at my front door, and I just absentmindedly, my kids were running around and I got the box handed to me, and I thought, oh, yeah, that’s nice. That’s something real that came to me. Yeah. And then the other one was we designed some van liveries as part of the kind of testing to see how it went. And I was walking through New York on a very rainy day and the van drove past with the delivery on. And I was like, oh, there we go. That’s real. And it was something I’ve looked at so many times. And then suddenly there it was in Brooklyn driving past me. So they’re the nice little moments where you let yourself kind of take a moment and congratulate yourself.

Definitely. And, you know, very well deserved as well, because, yeah, challenging to deal with all those moving parts. What lessons do you think perhaps other large, really complex, maybe splintered brands could take away from your work? Like, have you got any advice or thoughts based on what you’ve done at Amazon that you think other brands should consider these things?

I think, you know, to kind of build on something I said earlier, which I think doesn’t matter whether you’re a big brand or a small brand or whatever, consistency is hard and I think too many people fold on it. And what I think happens is the need for uplift, whether it’s using marketing, whether it’s social, whatever, means that people throw the consistency out really quickly. And so what you see is, as a kind of viewer of consumer of that, which we will have all experienced is, as a kind of individual, let’s think, let’s kind of talk in the consumer space, I can feel when they have an agency change, when a new marketing director or a new agency comes in, you can kind of say, oh, they’ve changed, I don’t think you should be able to feel that as a consumer. I think, you know, if you look at great brands, whether it’s Guinness or whatever, you have the same codes that appear again and again. And, you know, the adverts can be really, really different, but they have tonality, they have heart, they have something about them, which people really associate with. And I think too many brands will go through some change and then something else happens, whether it’s a business factor, an environmental factor, a political factor or whatever, and they just quickly go like, oh, and like run away from it. And what happens is it maybe helps them in that minute, but over time, you’re not building a brand. And I think, you know, the big example of that in recent times is we saw Nike get obsessed with D2C. It aligned at the moment that COVID was happening, and so it hit it. But for me, as like a brand expert, I could see that there was no innovation coming in that brand. They were selling the same shoes, which were historic shoes. And you know, they were making good money out of it. And so everyone’s like, this is all great. This is all gonna be good. This is the future, et cetera. But in doing that, what they failed to realize was that actually you really have to think in decades for brands and too many people can move away from that. And so I think what’s great for us with Amazon is having done the work with them, I can see that they’re being really consistent in the way that they do that and the way that they really go. Actually, you know, we’ve evolved what we were, but we’re also still doing the same things and consistently branding ourselves in the consistent way. And that’s turning up in their marketing. It’s turning up in all the other things they do. And so for me, whether you’re a small brand, whether you’re a big brand, as boring as it is, discipline and consistency will get you there in the long run, I think.

Brilliant advice. And to leaders, specifically, within those businesses, is there anything you would say to them, if they’re thinking about a rebrand? Is it around that, be careful, don’t just have knee-jerk, have a good, considered thought pattern before you just commission this? Or what would you say to a leader who’s thinking about a rebrand at that scale?

I think the most common mistake that I see people make is don’t get everybody on the bus at the beginning, which is if you’ve decided that change is going to happen, you need to build that consensus and you need to make sure that, you know, now that doesn’t mean that everyone might agree with it, but you have to give them awareness. And what I’ve seen happen a number of times is a brand or a marketing team will go off, do stuff in their own, and then won’t necessarily have considered the rest of business, won’t have considered everything else. And yes, they’ll have like belief and strong credibility and then it gets put out in the world. And if there’s any kind of pressure on it, everything folds because they didn’t get everybody in the first place. There isn’t consistency, there isn’t that consideration about why we’re doing this and what it’s going to lead to. And I think, you know, that’s getting accelerated in this unfortunate situation where we find ourselves where marketing teams have very high turnover. And so, you know, there’s that stat that the average CMO is only lasting about 18 months at the moment. That is terrible for brands because what that means is that each CMO comes in, has to do change because that’s the expectation on them. And when they bring that change in, then typically throwing a lot of what’s just been done out. And so therefore what you have is you have this kind of high change thing. And what happens is most audiences will survive a couple of changes within a five-year window. But if you start to change again, you’ve lost people. They’re no longer interested in what you’re doing. They just see this thing that’s all over the place. And so for me, I think building consensus and building momentum is all about making sure that everybody’s aware, they understand what’s happening and you bring them in. And the trouble is, that’s hard work for a lot of people.

Very wise. Good advice. Good advice. Jacob, any sort of questions as we start to come to the end?

Thinking about the future, is there any wisdom you want to share about what the future of global brand systems look like?

I think the really, really hard thing for a lot of brands, which we haven’t even begun to see really come through yet, is getting attention is going to be really, really tough. In a world where search is suddenly an LLM interface, I’m not necessarily turning up in that channel because it’s not owned by me in the way I want to. And so, therefore, when you’ve got, and this is more from a consumer point of view, but if I’m doing search and thinking about it in that way, that gatekeeping means that I don’t have the ability to be able to build the brand that I want in that way. I think the second thing is, in the social space, people seem to think that if you put logos on things, it’s not successful. You don’t get likes, you don’t get interactions, et cetera. And so they’ve got rid of all of that, which is fine, which is, you know, I’m not a social expert. I don’t understand what gets traction and what doesn’t. But in the area where you do own it, you’re not building any recognition. All you’re building is memes and clever stories and things that people interact with. But how does that translate to get people in there? And so, you know, a good example at the moment is, Currys in the UK seem to get loads of love for their social and isn’t it clever and isn’t it amazing? Yeah, great. If you go into a Currys store, it’s an absolute bin fire of a place. And so it doesn’t matter how great their social is, if they can’t convert it into people actually wanting to go and spend time in a retail environment. And so I think the challenge that we’re going to see for brand systems is really understanding where they have impact and how they can have impact there. And so it’s going to be the real world. It’s going to be experience. It’s going to be those spaces. I think advertising is going to continue to lose its luster in the biggest way possible. We will struggle to have, you know, meaningful interaction with advertising unless we really get new innovation and thinking there. And so to do that, brands are going to have to work out how they turn up in people’s lives and how they get there. And so that’s going to have to be quite clever. But when they do, they don’t want to be trying to create the first awareness. They want people to already know a bit about them. And so therefore that’s going to really, really put pressure on the brand system to make sure that when I see something from that company, wherever I’m seeing it, I recognize it and I have a relationship with it. Because otherwise it’s going to be very, very tough for people to build any kind of meaningful traction with their customers.

Right, right. Well, look, James, thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy schedule and for coming on our show. We really appreciate it. And I’m sure our listeners will be so thankful as well. If you haven’t yet seen Koto’s work on Amazon, jump into Koto’s website where there’s a whole case study where you can kind of see the actual graphics that we’ve been discussing. James, is there anywhere else that people can kind of follow your work and your team’s work and yourself, like any sort of URLs you want to drop or social links?

Yeah, follow us on Instagram at Studio Koto, which is S-T-U-D-I-O-K-O-T-O. We’re pretty heavy updaters over there, so that’s a good place to check us out. And if you’re so inclined, you’ll find us on LinkedIn as well.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much, James. It’s been an honor to have you on. And super, you know, super thrilled to kind of have a little peek into the work that you’ve all done there. Kudos to you and your team. Thank you so much and have a good rest of your day, folks. Cheers.

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