Brent Vartan: [00:00:00] I wanna know the inner workings of how they really make money, and the other thing I want to know is who loses when this brand wins?

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. Here's a riddle for today. What do you get when you combine an advertising agency with a venture capital firm? The answer: you get Bullish, Inc. A unique business model that blends the worlds of capital, consulting and creation.

Bullish got started in 2015 by Michael Duda and Brent Vartan. Since then, they've been an investor advisor firm for a wide variety of successful super brands, including Warby Parker, Harry's, Casper, Peloton, Hu, Care/Of, NumNum and many, many more. Bullish has also broken down other category walls [00:01:00] by helping Bose launch a direct to consumer hearing aid and helping TaylorMade relaunch Atoms as a direct to consumer business.

Now, there are two reasons I wanted to share this conversation with you. First, Brent's just an amazing human being. He inspired me when I first got into advertising at BBDO, New York in 2007, and I personally just wanted to reconnect with him. Second, I think Brent has fascinating, counterintuitive ideas when it comes to branding.

What really stood out to me in this interview, was our conversation around human desires, immutable human desires like idealism, honor and vengeance. Yes, Even the desire for vengeance and how a deeper understanding of those desires can be important building blocks for today's renaissance brands. We also talk about Brent’s, favorite methods for getting to know the heart and soul of a brand, including an innovative brand obituary exercise that he uses with all of his clients at Bullish; and the surprising results that came out of that exercise with Jeff and Andy, the founders of Harry's. [00:02:00] Before we get to all that though, are conversation begins with the aha moment that inspired Bullish in the first place. Here's Brent. 

Brent Vartan: We love advertising. It's one of the most powerful weapons in business, and we wanted to work more closely with people that got us inspired.

We thought we could add a lot of value to make things go further faster if we were able to talk more quickly, be more direct, and have kind of a whole arsenal of tools that we could use that we weren't beholden to always answer it one way or another, so that started Bullish, which is one part venture capital firm where we write checks and one part brand agency where we take a lot of things we've learned from our portfolio companies and import them into bigger businesses trying to start something up. 

Chris Kocek: So with such a different business model like you just described, do you call the people that you're writing checks to, are they clients or do you call them something else? 

Brent Vartan: They're our founders. So it's a really weird thing. I went to school at Berkeley and studied literary [00:03:00] theory, somehow became a strategist. Now, when I walk in the room, I'm a vc. We are a vc and we write checks, and those are our founders. A lot of people ask us, you're writing minority position checks, how do, you know, influence them? We get them into a state, we nurture, we nudge, we do those things. So I think in a way, we treat them as client, but more like on equal footing because we are an investor, but we can't make anybody do anything. Even if we did have a 51% control, you can't make anybody do anything. We've had many, many discussions over the years, and again, sometimes things get spicy and I remember one company telling us like, why don't you agree with me? Why are you digging in?

It's not our job to agree with you. Our job is to give you an opinion you can bank on. You go from there. We invest in your decision making, is really what it is. So, it's a different dynamic. 

Chris Kocek: So based on your research at Bullish, I've heard you talk about these 16 [00:04:00] immutable desires. This is proprietary research that you guys do, right? You've come up with this idea of 16 immutable desires? 

Brent Vartan: Not exactly, we stole that from academia, but we use it in an interesting way. 

Chris Kocek: Okay, so these are desires like hunger, tranquility, power, family, honor, idealism. Now, from those 16 immutable desires, are there three desires you say, well, these three desires tend to be really powerful starting points for a lot of the brands in our portfolio.

Brent Vartan: Yeah, it's a great question. The way we use that is we made a study that we ran for five years called The Power of Y, and we took the cohorts from diffusion of Innovations, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority laggards, and then we would survey a broad base of people. We'd type those people into those things and we ask the desires, and then we ask kind of their spending behavior from past years, what they project in the future and we did it because we wanted desires to be an early warning system for where things are going. We wanna see if it was, [00:05:00] every time we've done it, there's three bedrock desires. It is family, it's honor, and it is idealism. Those ones are always the highest, but it's really the outlier desires that are the most interesting.

The one I love is vengeance. It's really, really interesting when you see that thing begin to move around, and that's probably not a really fun answer in these kind of very divisive times. But when we started doing work in and around like what are the desires that move people, everybody across those cohorts. Everybody's three were the same, but it's their fourth, which was different. And it gave me a whole new look at innovators, because for innovators, vengeance was their fourth desire more than anybody else. 

Chris Kocek: Can you unpack vengeance for me? Like how does a brand like Warby Parker, or maybe Warby Parker doesn't use vengeance, but like what, how does that work?

Brent Vartan: I think this goes back to just some really good human ways about [00:06:00] thinking about building a brand, which is to have an enemy. And I think that is very inspiring for people. For Warby Parker, the enemy was Luxottica. Harry's, the enemy's Gillette and the price of those things. That's where I think it's okay to have a little professional vengeance. I think that's a healthy frame to work within. To try and right a wrong from those perspectives, which then becomes a kissing cousin of idealism around those things. 

Chris Kocek: So there's Harry's, there's Gillette, and then there's that, that pesky other one, Dollar Shave Club. I think they wanted to right the wrongs of the Gillette world and say, Hey, it's Dollar Shave Club, It's a dollar. 

Brent Vartan: Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: How do you find that daylight between yourselves? And Dollar Shave Club and Gillette in terms of, you know, finding that positioning that works for Harry's, that makes them, 'cause they've grown quite a bit. 

Brent Vartan: I think the difference between Harry's and Dollar Shave Club is the tortoise and the hare. So Jeff and Andy, we do this exercise, I can't remember where we [00:07:00] got it from. I think we got it from Zag, from Newmeyer. We have the companies write an obit (obituary) about why the company is no more. Jeff and Andy are like, to this day, the people that did that exercise so poorly. Because they just didn't want to do it.

Jeff in particular was like, I can't, I'm not doing this exercise. Like, it's just, I don't want to ever go away. So they both wanna build a big, big company and you can see now they are doing exactly what they set out to do. They're building a kind of a modern packaged goods company that's trying to think about just being a really agile conglomerate in and around, like where people want things. Dollar Shave Club was, let's get out fast and let's make something really exciting. And they did a great job. That brand was much louder, much more, I would say, exciting than Harry's was. And it is just the DNA of the founders.

One was a trained standup comedian and was magnetic. The other two are just like salt of the earth guys that are just gonna hammer through and, and build this thing out. And we're definitely playing a long game. I don't know. They [00:08:00] both attempted to and did kind of siphon business off of the Gillette, just like what, 85% at the time market share.

But they've done it differently with very different missions and visions. So they both had a very clear source of business and a very clear enemy. And it turns out that they could build a really interesting business on secondary and tertiary benefits, which is very novel, like, that's a crazy thought if you come into venture because it's always like product led growth and it's gotta be like 10x better, and you're like, and Gillette makes a pretty good razor, but the way they give it to you kind of sucks. It turns out Harry's can make a really nice business building something out that's all just a little bit more human. 

Chris Kocek: Hmm, that's very interesting. In a recent interview, I heard you mention 20th century toxicity and a 21st century renaissance, and that framework really piqued my interest. So, first of all, can you elaborate on what that means to you? 

Brent Vartan: Yeah, as I've gotten more and more into business and I've become to understand, and I don't think I'm the first, and I'm certainly not the last, but [00:09:00] there's a lot of stuff that was built through the Industrial Revolution on a global scale, which is amazing.

All kinds of things happened, you know, really after World War II, tons of discovery, tons of innovation, tons of, maybe, what can we make versus what should we make? And you see some of that begin to tail off in, in the seventies. And I think. There's a bit of like cracks in the system across society, across economy, across politics, across technology.

Like there's a lot of cracks and I think that's fine. It's all about creative destruction in a way. But, you know, to use an often beat up word now these days, but like there has been a rather big enlightenment, around things, thanks to the democratization of information, the internet, all these things and just kind of the exponential effect of people beginning to understand more and breakthroughs now only being sped up by AI and those things. So when we look at it, we just see a lot of characteristics. It was inspired by a conversation from someone from BMG actually in the early days of [00:10:00] Bullish. There are a lot of characteristics that are a lot like the Renaissance, there's a lot of private capital, there's a lot of new understanding around things, there's a lot of people on the edges of the society being financed to try new things, and there's this really beautiful discovery of new ways to make things, new ways to provide for people, new ways, and we've got so many problems. None of this stuff is solved, but we tend to think about longer horizons and the Renaissance, as you know, is hotly debated about how long it lasted. And I think we're at the start of that where we're trying to take vantage points that are seven to 10 years, and then putting our head up and going, where else are we going around those things. And it's not just Pollyanna optimism, I just think it's just gonna keep building on itself as we discover new things and cross learnings from one category to another, to another, to a discipline, to a practice.

So we're excited. We're really, really excited. Some people have said that there just aren't [00:11:00] really interesting people coming into consumer, like there were in the early Warby Parker days, but we have met some incredible founders from all different kinds of backgrounds and circumstances. We're investing in them. It's interesting, our fund is near best in class, in and around female founders, people of color, and the interesting thing is we don't start there, but we're, we're really proud to be ending there and it's a pretty good portfolio, and I think it just is a kind of a nice piece of evidence that there's all kinds of ideas coming from the edges right now, and it's exciting.

Chris Kocek: Now, I assume that many of the brands in your portfolio are the ones that you look for that are having that 21st century renaissance approach to their business model and their branding. What are a few of the brands that you say, yeah, these ones gave very clear indicators when we did our due diligence, when we looked into them, these are the ones that have that 21st century renaissance mentality or approach to business. 

Brent Vartan: Yeah, there's a raft of businesses that are still being created [00:12:00] today, which we call premium value brands, which are like, what is just a better way to go to market and have a healthier relationship with your customer, and you can put Warby in there and Casper in there, and Harry's in the first year in there, you can put Ray in there. You can put a lot of businesses in there, which is again, premium value brands, which are really quality X at a fair price delivered to you with service on the backend that's genuine. You can get broader and less romantic about that idea of 21st century Renaissance when you look at something like Sunday Lawn in our portfolio. One of the reasons we're so excited about that business was one, there's just these tectonic shifts in the idea of millennials at the time. One of the things I always like to remind myself and everybody of is, I think the oldest millennials now are like 45, but somehow when people bring 'em up, they still think of them as very young.

But for the last couple of years, biology and just life stage has been taking over and people pre covid were moving outta the cities into the Austins and the Portlands and the Idahos of [00:13:00] the world to explore that classic truism of getting away from the city and having some grass and, and doing that. So you had that kind of mega trend going, now they're bringing all these like metro and millennial ideals of why can't it be better to the burbs so that you've got that renaissance starting to happen. So that's really, really interesting. Then you have this understanding that Sunday has, which is the lawn fertilizer that you put on your lawn is extremely toxic.

This is ahead of some of the class action suits against on Roundup. So they found a way to make a, using technology to make a way less toxic thing, and very effective grass treatment plan, and they figured out a way to use technology to customize it to your actual land on your zip code, on your address. It gets great results when you do that.

Turns out they were able to access some very public available data, make a product that was easy to use, and then be able to create a relationship with a brand where they were teaching you a high order skill of [00:14:00] very few of us are born with, which is to how to have a green thumb and how to work in the space outside of the walls of your house. You and I know, most of what home improvement cares about, especially for the DIY person, is inside the four walls. If you look at the category now, it's very not modern when you get outside, it's still very much for a pro. So they were making that way more accessible, way more easy, and you had a leader in culture who started in IDEO and understood about designing for what should be instead of what could be.

Those are just some really practical things of a cultural tailwind driving a new set of desires around a group that's literally pun intended, migrating into another part of the country, and then using a basic data set to create a really advanced relationship with a customer, and now they're a consulting brand, and that's what we think's happening, is it's this new era of consultative commerce that's coming through,[00:15:00] where brands actually begin to understand something about our user and really advise and consult around that stuff. And again, AI's only accelerating this, and we were talking about this in 2019, so that's that renaissance of what we think will be 21st century brands. 

Chris Kocek: So what I'm hearing is that, at least with the Harry's example with Sunday Lawn, maybe Warby Parker's in there as well, but it seems like there's some kind of, not only a perspective shift, but there does seem to also be a little bit of a technology breakthrough. It doesn't have to be like a mega technology breakthrough, but like you said, it can be some sort of technology breakthrough. So with Harry's, you know, Gillette was always focused on add more blades to the razor, and just keep focused on the product, the product, the product. And Harry's comes along and says maybe it's about how we get the product to people that's the innovation play. With Sun, with Sunday Lawn, you mentioned a little bit of a breakthrough in technology there as well, [00:16:00] accessing publicly available data, but then also there was a technology piece there as well for Sunday Lawn.

So do you look for that in, in the brands that you guys invest in, that there's some kind of, you know, small to large technology breakthrough that nobody else has picked up on yet? 

Brent Vartan: It's part of it. And this is on our website, but we look at three circles overlapping. One of them is about kind of a calcified category, either operationally or in manufacturing or something like that, just kind of block and tackle supply side stuff. 

The biggest one is really just these big cultural tensions we look at, that again, it's on the site, it’s the the big ones we track and we're looking for those to see if there's any, we would say just pre-emergent specific desire. And then there's the technological one. You know, when you have the web become a proper commerce platform, that technology gives rise to Warby, Casper, Harry's, when you have 5G come on, you can have Peloton. When you have AI come on, what's going on with [00:17:00] Sunday is gonna be nuts. I think it is when you have those three things, when you have just complacency on the supply side or you have attention, which is gonna make an emerging personal desire, and then you have a little bit of a breakthrough in technology, you can make some really, really cool next generation brands.

Chris Kocek: I love that, next generation brands. So what are three questions that you really like to ask when you're getting started on a project with a new client or a brand? And these could be either questions that you ask, the data, you interrogate the data a certain way, or they could be questions that you or your team ask the CEO or members of the team that you've just invested in.

Brent Vartan: Yeah, we haven't talked much about the agency practice we have and, and I'll answer it from that perspective then maybe I can answer it also, just very specific, there's one very specific question I'm interested in when we invest in things. I wanna know how they make money. I want to know the inner workings of how they really make money, how they make profit, where the revenue comes from, and all the processes that go into [00:18:00] it. I want to know where the dependencies are. I don't wanna ask that in a, you know, polite, probing, respectful ways, but I want to know like, what runs this business? Because money has that funny thing of shaping decisions.

I wanna know who the decision makers are on this and what they have vested in things going one way or the other. Anytime we start a project, we do stakeholder interviews. We ask 10 very specific questions. We've asked over a hundred times now in, in an unapologetically formulaic, but still charming way, and it gives us a really good sense of how everybody's either on the same page or not on the same page.

And the other thing I want to know is who loses when this brand wins? When we're starting to build strategies and we're thinking about what's going on, we wanna play chess. We wanna understand the incentive and motivations that are in the bones of the business, we wanna understand the personal dynamics that are going on in there, and then we want to understand the external factors that are rooting against [00:19:00] us that will maybe even get aggressive and combative as we begin to get successful and we wanna plot and plan against that. Those are the big ones, and then we just want to get into it and do the work and trust in that consumer and the culture. We want to get in with people and we wanna know what their values are and their core customer base and their next customer base, we wanna know what they think, feel, and do. We, we are big believers in mapping people's journeys and using that as a way to think about the category differently, but that's the stuff that we start our projects with and we're like, okay, this is what we're gonna go do together and we, we build that learning together, but the stuff I wanna know is that stuff that maybe they don't really wanna put in a document, I wanna do some classic stuff where we're just doing one-on-one interviews and try and get them to say the thing that they don't normally say so that we have a good handle on it. That's the agency practice. When it comes to investing, when we first start meeting people, we invest so early, series seed, series A. We've invested in a deck and an idea and [00:20:00] a team. We've invested with tiny revenue. We've invested with some revenue. So much of what we talk about in the agency and practice in the investing fund is about the need for remarkability in this world of the attention economy.

What I like to ask if I get in front of like a spreadsheet with a financial model is where are they gonna overinvest to do something remarkable? And if someone has said like, oh, in the product, in true consumer, I'm not talking about Silicon Valley software consumer, when in true consumer goods and services, if you say product, we're usually not gonna have much more of a conversation after there, because there's a lot of good products out there.

We do something called the Remarkability Index, where we study the factors that drive breakout brands. We've been doing it for a while. Good product, a little bit better or better than the incumbents, need it. Really good branding, need it. Really good team, need it. After that, those are the levers you pull that actually do something that's sustainably remarkable, enduringly remarkable that lets you get around the Uncle [00:21:00] Zuckerberg tax or, or the Googly Boogly tax and actually gets you customers in a way that you can nurture them, have relationships with them, make them want you to send you an email, be interested in the next product you're making, stay for a while, have some lifetime value. We want to know in the beginning where are they gonna do something that drives an experience that's worthy of notice, attention, sharing with another. 

Chris Kocek: Is it imperative that they have their data analytics in place or is that something that you help them with in the first 90 to 180 days?

Brent Vartan: That's a great question. The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is once they get going, what we want them to understand is they're gonna start acquiring customers, and that can go one of two ways. It can go, we're gonna chase the lowest cost customer we can get, and in our experience, that's a poison pill, Because it's really hard to get off of that. Usually [00:22:00] when you chase low cost customers, they're kind of fly by night customers, they're opportunistic customers, you start just farming outta that pool, then you have to go to another pool, another pool, and that can get you far pretty well, but if you don't start to think about the analytics, if you don't start to think about CRM, you're really missing an opportunity to build a real consumer brand. A lot of ways we look at this as like what's a consumer business that can become a brand? And when we think about that, it's, it's really, can we get some really good AOV? Can we encourage them to buy more? Not through force, not through tricks, not through crazy behavioral economics, but just also because we're making stuff that they want.

Can we think about our next best customer as our current customer? Can we get them to hire us to do another job with another kind of product? Can we get them to come back organically to the tune plus 40%? And that's the stuff we want to have up and running. And that's the stuff that we wanna make sure we're all aligned on. Like that's the trick. If you can have a good AOV and you can have a good lifetime value, yes, if you can have a good net promoter score, if you score well in what we do in our [00:23:00] Remarkability Index, you're gonna have a really, really valuable customer base. And frankly, that's the most powerful thing.

That means you have a really strong brand. If you have a rabid customer base that loves you, that wants to talk about you, that's delighted with you, you're in pole position. You have power over retailers to go in and start negotiating terms for when you might come into retail. You can begin to call your shots a little bit about what products they will get and what will remain on your site so that you can still have a relationship with your customers.

Now you're starting to have a real omni strategy, and then you start to attract the ire of incumbents that will first ignore you, then dismiss you, then fight you, and then, uh, want to be you and then maybe wanna buy you. But a strong, strong customer base that loves you is the most powerful thing in the world.

Chris Kocek: It seems like a lot of brands want to go after lowest cost per acquisition, but I hear you saying that's not where you guys like to start. I mean, of course you wanna keep costs down, but what's [00:24:00] more important is that even if the cost is a little bit higher, you're getting somebody who's a rabid fan.

Brent Vartan: Yeah. We are plenty happy if our companies are paying a little bit more as if customers just are on a shelf. We're paying a little bit more to get a quality customer that buys more things and talks more often than if we're getting an inexpensive customer that, we can never reacquire organically.

There's a lot of intermediation still in the world of quote DTC, Google and Meta are a big intermediary to people. Retail, still a massive intermediary. The way in which we can get really good people that love what we're doing, we're probably much more willing than most to have a higher cost of acquisition if we are proving out that those are really quality customers that we can get to come back organically and maybe even do some work on our behalf because they are evangelical and advocates.

We just have a different relationship with cost of acquisition. 

Chris Kocek: Now, you've worked with a lot of brands over [00:25:00] your 20 plus years in the business, and I'd love to hear about a couple of your favorite unusual research methodologies or FURM for short, whether it's something you guys have done at Bullish or something that you did earlier in your career, like at BBDO, New York, or at Deutsche or anywhere.

What's an example of an unusual research methodology? That led to some breakthrough thinking and then that led to either an awesome innovation, a fantastic new campaign platform, something along those lines. 

Brent Vartan: I would say, this is a hard question for me because I'm not that exciting here and I've been thinking about this and, and I'm not sure I have a good answer for you.

In fact, one of the things I've liked about not just your latest book, but your books, is they've given me ideas about some new techniques, so thank you for that. One of the things I love about everything you do is it's very practical, it's very usable, and that's been great for me. So I'm trying some new things out.

So I'm not gonna tell you anything that's not new to you or not in your books. But you know, in the early days [00:26:00] we were in very weird forums doing some stuff for Kodak and in chat rooms before they were a thing. Found some awesome stuff there. We're pretty old school and we'll always be in this school that it's good to get out from behind your computer and to get into people's lives and walk a mile in their shoes sometimes right with them. One of the things that I've always been intrigued about, but I've never been able to do, is just kind of ambient monitoring of people. Anytime we've done stuff where we've asked them to take a week and log their lives, you know, with consent and all that stuff, that stuff's always really interesting.

But it's a long way of saying, I don't have a good answer for you here, Chris. Other than I read your books and they're really helpful, 

Chris Kocek: Your praise was enough.

So consumers lie, right? They will lie. They'll put their best foot forward, their aspirational selves or their idealistic selves. Is there [00:27:00] anything that you do, or the team at Bullish does to get past those intentional or unintentional white lies? 

Brent Vartan: It's rare that we do any quantitative work without qualitative, either before or after.

It's really wild when you think about it. Like you just gotta go have a conversation with a human, as a human, and you gotta get real comfortable. I've been doing this for a while. I still do interviews. I still moderate focus groups. I think it's a skill to atrophies, but I really love doing it because if you can establish rapport with someone, you can have an honest conversation. If you can see them and make them feel good in this moment, you can push through the lies and over the years you begin to understand when someone is giving a normative or performative response, and the more you are in their setting you can check that stuff. I have been in people's living rooms having a conversation where they tell me something and not only was able to kind of pull something back from an earlier conversation, but because [00:28:00] something I saw over their shoulder in their house, I was able to talk about, well, what does that thing mean relative to this conversation?

And when you do that, like the, the consumer's an expert and you make them an expert in that moment, but then you kind of level the whole ground and then you can have an honest conversation. You can do kind of things around that stuff. You know, one of the things we do is we work a lot with a guy named Mari Nave, who's a PhD cultural anthropologist, and he's wonderful at just living in silence and awkwardness. You know, we got a lot from that, and we do it in our own techniques, and that stuff's great. You gotta find a way to create rapport, level the playing field, and have a one-to-one conversation around that stuff, oftentimes you will get a lot further than a 10,000 person quantitative study about the attitudes, awareness and usage of lawn care products. It might make you feel good that you have this quantitative data, but you really haven't unpacked the why. 

Chris Kocek: What's one of the ways that you like to build rapport?

How do you get someone to kind of be vulnerable in [00:29:00] front of you or feel like, okay, I can open up to this person. 

Brent Vartan: It's the Colombo move. It's. Being a little aww shucksy. It's creating vulnerability, it's self-deprecation, it's compliments to them, not pandering about things that are really helpful to you.

One of the techniques too, is sometimes people don't just respond to the answer that was given, they just go through their list, have a conversation, make a little point about the thing they just said, and then move on and ask your next question. Sometimes people just blast through this stuff and use them like a data source versus trying to have a visit with someone and understand things.

I'm happy to say most of the time when people leave our interviews or that I have done or anybody on the Bullish team has done, people are like, that was nice, I enjoyed that and that that's what we want. We wanna maintain, you know, control of the conversation so we get what we need, but we want it to be a pleasurable experience.

So I think some of those things where you just [00:30:00] be courageous enough to make yourself vulnerable, it just eases people's minds, and we've been able to talk to all different kinds of people from all different types of backgrounds and create that rapport. It's so critical. The truth is out there if people feel safe.

Chris Kocek: Yeah. I love it when that happens. I've had similar experiences with focus groups where people walk out and they say, that was really enjoyable. That was a good hour and a half of my day. 

Brent Vartan: Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: And it feels nice. 

Brent Vartan: Chris, you're great at this too. I mean, from day one, untrained when we would start talking to people.

You are, you're just very warm. You're very personable and you know, some of that's just a gift, some of it can be learned, but you're great at this. It's just such a skill. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, thank you very much. So we've got our speed round now. Okay. 

Brent Vartan: Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: This is fast answers. Boom. Fast and furious. So is there a brand whose work you admire or that you think to yourself, I wish I'd come up with that?

Brent Vartan: Jolly Rancher and the Jolly Rancher. I love that piece of advertising. I love anything that, [00:31:00] anthropomorphizes, if I said that right? The thing, it is a perfectly branded thing and it is hilarious. I wish I came up with that. Awesome, simple advertising. 

Chris Kocek: What's the most recent good book that you've read?

Could be fiction, could be nonfiction, could be anything. 

Brent Vartan: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Wild book about negotiation. Just, just super interesting, practical and inspiring. 

Chris Kocek: I have read it. It's amazing. His examples are amazing. 

Brent Vartan: I also just love how he's like, I was a New York cop preaching behavioral economics ideals in negotiation against these academics that were like, oh, everybody's a rational actor.

I love it. I love it. I love it for that. 

Chris Kocek: What's a piece of advice that someone gave you that you still remember to this day, that influences your work and strategy? 

Brent Vartan: I think there's two. A piece of advice I always think about honestly is people are liars for sure. So create the conditions where they can tell you the truth when you're trying to understand [00:32:00] people, consumers, behaviors, decisions of those things.

The other piece of advice that I always think about in my professional life is you'll never win by losing yourself. In my professional life, I want people to be happy, I want to create an environment where people can be intellectually ambitious. I've talked time and time again about, you know, the role of a strategist is to create the conditions where creativity can actually drive commerce in a really fun, exciting, returnable way.

That's a delicate, very human thing. I have gone down that path so far that I've lost myself. That advice is just never lose yourself in a project so much that you can't maintain some objectivity about it, and that's really important. 

Chris Kocek: Hmm. I remember when you were on your way out, when you were leaving BBDO, New York, I asked you what's a piece of advice you have for me on your way out the door and you, you told me, just show 'em that you care about their business.

Show 'em that you're, you're thinking about their business and that you care about their business and that [00:33:00] will be enough. So I still remember the advice you gave me. 

Brent Vartan: That's awesome, Chris. The other way I've said that is find a way to care. If you can find a way to care about someone's business, it's such a lovely way to work with someone.

There's so much trust and understanding, you've got all those conditions to do something fun together. That's awesome. I love that. I love that man. I love that. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a particular song, last question. Is there a particular song on your playlist when you want to get into the zone, when you want to focus?

Brent Vartan: LCD Sound System, North American Scum.

I love that song for so many reasons. I love the way it makes me feel. I love what it says. I love, I relate to it on so many levels. That's, that's my jam. 

Chris Kocek: Excellent. I hear a puppy dog in the background trying to get your attention. 

Brent Vartan: Yeah, it's my neighbors, we're trying to, sorry. 

Chris Kocek: No worries. No worries.

It makes it real. It's authentic. 

Brent Vartan: It's authentic. 

Chris Kocek: That's right. Well, Brent, I really appreciate our time today. This [00:34:00] was wonderful to catch up with you after so many years, and thank you so much for your time. 

Brent Vartan: Likewise. It's great, Chris. I love what you're doing. I'm so proud to have worked with you and know you.

Thanks, Brent. Alright, buddy. Bye for now. 

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Brent Vartan. If you want to connect with Brent, you can find him on LinkedIn. If you wanna see the latest happenings or groundbreaking research they're doing at Bullish, make sure you visit Bullish.co and then sign up for their newsletter, The Brief.

I get it every month, and I can tell you I'm a smarter person because of it. If you're looking for even more ideas and inspiration, be sure to check out my own newsletter, Light Bulb at chriskocek.com/newsletter. Every Thursday I share three aha moments that are guaranteed to inspire your next project, creative briefing or campaign. Or check out my latest book, Any Insights Yet, connect the dots, create new categories, transform your business.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with [00:35:00] friends, family, clients, colleagues, even your enemies. Special thanks to Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios for producing this episode. And thank you to Megan Palmer for additional editing and production support.

Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking “what if?” more often.