CEO Scott Bedbury

Three Decades Shaping Iconic Brands

"Which Nike are you from?" It was an odd question from Steve Jobs in our first meeting. He probed my past like a master sommelier in search of the vintages within an organization. Not following him, he said. “When were you there?” Steve knew a few things about the ups and down of organizations, the rise and fall of great teams. He had just rejoined Apple after an 11 year exclusion from his own board of directors. He was a long-time admirer of Nike but even he knew it wasn’t perfect. 1985-86, for example, was a bad time at Nike, despite having just signed Michael Jordan. What the movie “Air” did not reveal was how the head of marketing and design who helped lead the company both left two years after signing Jordan, and began their own consulting company to help Reebok with Jordan back to the brand he wore in college. Revenues dropped 25% at the hands of Reebok, which brought women into a category which they redefined as sports and fitness. 10% of the Nik'e’s workforce was terminated in the Fall of ’86, and Wall Street had begun to short the stock. In 1987 I joined Nike as head of advertising to help reposition a brand at the back of the pack, well behind Adidas and Reebok, as something more than just for elite jocks and teenagers — as a more relevant inspiration to the rest of us. Blessed with a tiny but talented Portland agency, Wieden and Kennedy, we launched the “Just Do It” campaign six months after joining, followed by norm-breaking campaigns like "Spike and Mike,” "Bo Knows" and the “Women's Empathy” print campaigns that were voted the best on earth. In a few years, we forever changed how the world thought about the swoosh, the meaning of three pedestrian words, and the physical as well as emotional rewards of sports and fitness.

After seven years at Nike, I left to write my first book and create a consulting firm. At the request of my agent, I sent a few early chapters to five different CEOs I had never met, each of them from industries I knew nothing about, for review. One of them, the CEO of a fast-growing regional specialty coffee company in Seattle that had just gone public a few years earlier, invited me to his office to discuss the manuscript over a French press of aged Sumatra. Before our second cup, Howard Schultz asked if I would consider joining him as Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer to help disprove the naysayers that thought a coffee house chain was an oxymoron. Together we redesigned Starbucks stores beyond coffee as a warm and welcome “Third Place” experience between home and work. In the first year working together, Starbucks increased store openings from one per week to one per day, launched Frappuccino, opened it first international markets, and crafted an enduring brand purpose – to lift the human spirit one cup, one customer, one neighborhood at a time.

With Starbucks on a solid trajectory, I left Brewtopia in 1998 to resume writing and consulting, and create Brandstream, an advisory firm for CEOs hoping to leverage best practices developed inside Nike and Starbucks, and to learn the eight principles in my first book, “A New Brand World,” published in 2002. Brandstream has also served as a mechanism for helping clients recruit subject matter experts that have shaped some of the most iconic brands. The league of extraordinary men and women with global skills in consumer insights, experiential marketing, storytelling, business strategy, product and retail design, brand equity monitoring, corporate culture, and store development. Such “dream teams” were assembled for Coca-Cola, Corona, Microsoft, Ferrero, Kaiser Permanente, NASA, Starwood, Samsung, Cordis, Dignity Health, and many others.

The relationship with America’s largest and oldest managed healthcare system, Kaiser Permanente, began with a request to help with advertising but ended asking for a fundamental repositioning of the brand across all touch points from Hawaii to Washington D.C. Our work began with a “Big Dig” insights study in 2003 that revealed an aching need to move beyond a broken sick care system in America to more preventative total health care. Working directly with Kaiser’s Plan and Physician executive leadership teams, we began transforming a blue-collar, slightly post World War Two-era institution into a more progressive and trusted 21st Century healthcare leader. A new battle cry, conceived in the form of the “Thrive” marketing campaign, was a bold departure from all healthcare marketing. The repositioning drove record enrollment, won numerous awards, helped inform a $40 billion facilities investment over eight years, inspired 165,000 employees and caregivers, left competitors slack-jawed.

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In 2001, one of the most iconic and enduring brands in history asked for help in strengthening its waning relevancy among younger consumers around the world for its flagship carbonated products, and to explore opportunities for beverage portfolio expansion. Consumer insights were conducted across 10 countries to rethink Coca-Cola’s existing approach to customer listening, to advertising, package design, and health concerns. The Modo Group, led by the former head of brand development for Starbucks, explored opportunities for experiential marketing and a new visual brand language that could be applied anywhere on earth. Midway into the project our deliverables shifted in the wake of 9/11 to include deep exploration into global perceptions of brand America, American institutions, and the most American company of them all, Coca-Cola, in a tumultuous, terrorized world.

In 2005, Grupo Modelo leadership in Mexico City asked for help strengthening its flagship franchise, Corona, the third largest beer consumed around the world. Qualitative and ethnographic research on five continents informed a more unified brand positioning and a shortlist of strategic brand initiatives that could serve all markets. New guardrails and processes for evaluating distributors, channel decisions, marketing programs, promotions and licensing opportunities, were applied to help one of the most authentic beers in history navigate the headwinds created by microbreweries and to optimize opportunities for industry consolidation. Modelo went on to be acquired by Budweiser/InBev for $20 billion US, and Corona’s US business was acquired by Constellation Brands for $4.8 billion, two positive exits for the client.

“My brands are all over each other,” complained the new CEO. “I need you to help clean them up.” And, so began the repositioning of Starwood’s five flagship brands – the St. Regis, the W, Westin, Sheraton and Four Points by Sheraton — in 2004. Within weeks we were in the field on four continents to map the experiences and timeless human needs each brand was uniquely positioned to deliver. Working with brand presidents and their teams, each portfolio company’s positioning, values, voice, and character, and how well they met some of the most timeless human needed, were distilled to a page, a paragraph, a sentence, three words, a three-minute video, and for some, like the W, reduced to a single word: Flirty.

"We’re building a brand that will stand next to Apple and Nike,” said Brian Chesky in Airbnb’s third year of business, a cold call to my cell phone. He didn’t say it as a wish, but as a statement. “Can you help us?” The three founders of Airbnb rolled up their sleeves in December 2011 to see how a Silicon Valley tech platform that had almost gone broke two years earlier, could do more than talk about bringing the world together, like Facebook, but actually do it. To not give lip service to trust, but to actually build it with guests and hosts, and in thousands of neighborhoods around the world. No client has ever worked harder and had more patience in crafting and communicating core values and beliefs capable of establishing a brand foundation big enough to align and inspire millions of guests and hosts across 192 countries. Where some Silicon Valley Unicorns like Facebook/Instagram (Meta), Twitter (X) and Uber have buried their horns in the sands of controversy and rejected the responsibilities disruptive brands must accept, others like Airbnb embraced them and learned to fly.

Ferrero International entrusted one of the world’s most loved and unchanged products for a half century, Nutella, to Brandstream to assemble a team capable of designing, developing and opening the first free-standing Nutella café in the world. Experts from the Starbucks store design, real estate and experiential marketing teams, including the George Murphy and his Modo team, were joined by some of Apple’s original flagship store design, development, and operations team members, to deliver consumer insights, retail and graphic design, operations, HR, supply chain, real estate and retail marketing. Focus groups on three continents refined customer segmentation, store location, product development and cafe design, while a three-month menu development process gave everyone on the team a few extra pounds. The first store, in Chicago, exceeded revenue projections by 40% and proved that the world could, indeed, consume more Nutella if given the chance.

For Samsung to compete effectively with Apple meant more than improving product features and benefits across refrigerators, wide screens, lap tops, tablets and cell phones. It would require defining the brand experience at its best at every touch point, and the exploration of new retail concepts from store-in-store to pop-ups to branded flagships. Working with Samsung’s CEO and global leadership team in Suwon City, Korea, Brandstream and the Modo Group developed the consumer insights, brand strategy, and business model assumptions needed to inform architecture, design, and construction management firms capable of keeping pace with one of the most aggressive, fastest growing companies in the world, embroiled in a lawsuit with one of the world’s most respected brands.

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Campbell-Ewald, advertising agency for Navy Recruiting Command, asked for advice on its pitch to retain its Navy recruitment business, one of the agencies largest clients. When informed that they were about to pitch “The Best Job on Earth” as a new tagline to Navy leadership, I offered to help find another way forward. For insights, I conducted a “Noah’s Ark” exercise on the base in Norfolk, Virginia, with 15 groups of two that represented a cross-section of fliers, surface ship mates, base support, submarine “boomers”, and special forces SEALs. Winning hearts and minds of young men and women (and their parents) in America was important, but so was shifting opinions around the world where brand America was losing trust in an age of controversial military involvement on foreign lands. The new tag line, “A Global Force for Good,” highlighted the ways America’s Navy kept vital sea lanes open, provided rescue and relief services in the wake of natural disasters, and helped remove terrorists who threatened America and its allies. The campaign demonstrated the growing need for both soft and hard power to avoid misperceptions, of America’s most potent military force, how it helps address some forms of terrorism at its roots, and can prevent avoidable wars. Unfortunately, the positioning fell victim to the rising “America First” isolationist movement six years later, in 2015, as America began to turn away from the global power for good that it once defined.