Zoe Scaman: [00:00:00] To be a fan of a winning team is elation. It's a wonderful, wonderful feeling, but you cannot be a fan of a winning team forever because that gets boring and actually that doesn't glue the fandom together.

And what you desperately need is you need harshness, you need disappointment, you need loss. And a lot of people don't understand that. So they think that, actually, fandom is more successful and more positive when you're winning, but it's that depth of disappointment that actually forms the ties, and that actually really shapes the fandom.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to Any Insights Yet, the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. On today's episode, I'm joined by Zoey Scaman, futurist, fandom architect, keynote speaker, and founder of Bodacious, a London based strategy studio that's helping brands like Nike, the [00:01:00] NBA, Netflix and Coca-Cola rethink their relevance in a rapidly changing world.

Zoe's been involved in advertising since she was 18 years old, but her career has spanned the gamut of strategy and communications from unconventional research projects to community building to organizational design. But there's one theme that ties her work together, no matter the category or the subject: her relentless drive to ask better questions, especially when everyone else is sprinting toward answers. During our conversation, Zoe shares the story behind the reinvention of Impulse body spray, resulting in new fragrances, new packaging, and an entirely different brand positioning. We also talk about fandoms, fairy tales, and the surprising overlaps between sports groups and political communities.

Before we get to that though, I wanted to start with one of Zoe's very first “Aha!” moments. What's the first time you remember noticing something where you were like, [00:02:00] “doesn't anybody else notice this?” 

Zoe Scaman: I think it was probably when I was in school and I just was incredibly frustrated with the way that we were learning and the way we're being taught, and just the kind of isolation of subjects, the over structuring of everything, I just started to question a lot of it, and I think it kind of started in primary school and then it got really bad in secondary school where I basically just refuse to partake in most classes. And I just got very annoyed and obviously they got incredibly annoyed with me. I was in an English class, I think I was 13 or 14, and they said, “right, we're gonna study Lord of the Flies again this term,” and I said “what more can I possibly learn from this fucking depressing book about child cannibalism? I don't wanna do this again,” and they said, “well, okay, if you don't wanna do it, you can sit on the step for the rest of the term and you can read any book you want,” and I was like, “great, that sounds amazing. I'll go and do that.” And I did that with most of my classes. You know, Pythagoras, I never understood and I said, “can you please tell me [00:03:00] when am I going to use Pythagoras? What use is this? Why won't you teach me taxes, for example.” And they were just like, “well, this is a critical life skill” and to this day I have never used it, I'm sure some people do, but then I just got increasingly frustrated. So I think I've always been in that vein of just kind of questioning why we do things the way we do. And obviously when I was younger, I didn't realize that it was a potential plus, and I just thought I was a bit of a problem child that didn't fit.

Chris Kocek: Yeah, I often, when I'm talking with college students, I'll say that, you know, when you stand out in middle school, what happens? You get bullied, you get picked on. But that very skill, if you can hold onto it, becomes very helpful as you get older, and especially in the work that we do. Do you happen to remember the book that you read on the Step instead of Lord of the Flies?

Zoe Scaman: I read an obituary of Marilyn Monroe, I read the Color Purple, I started reading the Philip Pullman Northern Lights trilogy, I read so much that term, It was wonderful. And the deputy head teacher kind of took pity on me and she [00:04:00] would set me little essays that I could do for the books that I was reading. And so, you know, over the course of a term, my actual English class read the same book again and just went through the same analysis again and I think I produced something like 10 to 12 essays on different books that I read, and that sort of lit my brain on fire and I loved it. And for a period of time I had hoped that maybe they'd seen something in me or they'd seen a different way of teaching me, because I genuinely enjoyed that term so much but then it just went back to how it always was, and I was essentially told to get back in my box. 

Chris Kocek: You loved learning, but they tried to beat it out of you. Yeah. 

Zoe Scaman: Yeah, I think I didn't realize that I loved learning, I thought maybe I had a problem with it, but I think it was just boredom. I needed variety. I know I needed abstract ways of thinking about different topics, and my brain just didn't work, you know, in the same way as other peoples did. 

For such a long time I thought that was a fault and it wasn't really until my kind of, you know, late twenties, early thirties that I started suddenly to steer it as a strength, but it took such a long time to get to [00:05:00] that point of view.

Chris Kocek: This has come up on previous conversations, but are you neurodivergent? Do you know? 

Zoe Scaman: No, I'm not. A lot of people think I might be when they read my stuff and sort of see how prolific I am, but no, I'm, I'm bog standard, unfortunately. 

Chris Kocek: Okay, gotcha. Okay, so I wanted to ask you about a project that you worked on many years ago, for a body spray in the UK, it was a brand called Impulse, and Impulse was at a bit of an impasse, right? They said, we don't know what the future of this brand is and you were at Droga at the time and you saw an opportunity to do something totally different. What did you do that no one else was willing to do to help Impulse find a new way forward?

Zoe Scaman: So Impulse has been around for decades in the UK and it's the female equivalent of Lynx, which in the US is Axe and both of them were underneath the Unilever umbrella. And the idea was that Axe as a spray and, and Lynx as a spray was basically positioned, as you know, men spray your [00:06:00] body and women will flock to you and fall upon you and fall in love with you and you know, this is the sort of the great leveler so that you can, you know, date and be as promiscuous as you possibly want and this is gonna make you an alpha male. And on the flip side, you had Impulse, which was a kind of similar positioning for women in that you would spray it on yourself and you know, you had to kind of trust your impulse and throw yourself at the guy and be that woman who puts herself out there and it was kind of these sort of yin and yang positionings, but it was targeted at young teenagers. And so when they came to us, they sort of said, you know, “we need a new brand campaign for Impulse, the positioning is trust your impulse, and it's about romance.” I kind of put my hand up and I was like, “well, hang on a minute, are we not targeting teenage girls?” And when we say teenage girls, I'm thinking like 13, 14. And he said, “yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.” We said, “right, but how many 13 and 14 year olds are thinking about romance, honestly? And they said, “well, yes, but this has always been our positioning.” I said, “right, but can we have the opportunity before we come back with our, kind of, brand [00:07:00] ideas and we get the conveyor belt turning as we normally do, can we just have a bit of space to think about whether or not this is still the right thing, decades on?”

And they said “actually, okay, yes, you can go and do that.” Which was amazing, you know, from a client perspective, incredibly brave. And we were up against another agency and they also had to take on that challenge of, you know, let's just go and have a look and sort of see what this relevance of Impulse is for young girls.

And so they went off and they did the normal thing that I think the vast majority of agencies would do when you feel like you are time crunched and you just need to kind of quickly tap into, you know, a focus group of two people. So essentially they spoke to the daughters of some of the people that worked at the agencies, and I think that they were just kind of in a confirmation bias mindset where they just wanted the girls to be like, “yeah, yeah, romance is cool, let's just do that.” I just thought, “no, I don't wanna do that.” I don't wanna speak to anyone's daughters, I wanna go out and just hear from groups of girls in a peer to peer setting where they're more likely to be honest, you know, I don't want three men interviewing a teenage girl in a business room, that [00:08:00] would just be weird.

So we went out and we found a couple of different groups of girls. So we found an under-thirteens football club, a girls football club in East London and I went and sat in a shitty gym on gym mats and we put some, you know, Doritos and Haribos in the middle of a, kind of, kumbaya circle and I just had a chat with them about life and challenges and what it's like being a teenage girl today.

And I didn't know, because I've been kind of out of it for a while. We also found a teenage dance troupe, so they'd come and do kind of dance lessons and the woman that taught them was like, “you know, I wanna teach them something fun and something that's a skill and something that gets them off the streets,” you know, after school.

And they were fascinating as well and bit by bit, we just got to the point that romance was like the last thing on their minds. They were not remotely interested and the way that they were thinking about self-expression was also really interesting. So I mentioned makeup and the vast majority of them, even at 13, 14, turned around and says, “oh no, we don't play with makeup.” And I said, “really? God, when I was a teenager, I had like, you know, bright blue eyeshadow on and over, blush [00:09:00] cheeks, an awful lip liner” but they just weren't in that. And actually what was interesting is they were using fragrance as a form of self-expression, and a lot of them were actually using Axe and Lynx, the boys' body sprays, because they smelled stronger and they lasted longer, and they would spray them all over their school uniforms and they would also do mix and match. So they'd spray a different number of Lynxes together, or they'd mix and match Impulse, or they were using Victoria's Secrets body sprays because they had glitter in them and they would spray it on their school ties so their school ties would kind of sparkle. So all of it was the very bare minimum of self-expression, which was scent and mood and you know, that kind of mix and match. I thought, God, that's really interesting. And so we went back to the client and we said, “you know, none of these girls wanted, basically, romance.” None of them wanted to kind of feel like the girl that got the guy, none of them wanted to kind of trust their impulse in that sense and actually, we think it's about self-expression, we think it's about leaning into who they wanna be as people and how they feel that day and how they wanna show up with their friends.

And we won the business, [00:10:00] which was great because we actually spent the time to get under the skin of what teenage girls needed today. We saw the gigantic shift that had taken place, and we said, 30 years on, we have to abandon this brand positioning because it's the wrong one and that started off a snowball effect of a complete reimagination, not only of the brand, but we also decided to create a brand new product range because we felt that actually the, the products themselves were outdated in terms of their actual scent, but also, you know, the format that they were in, which essentially kind of an aerosol spray and these girls wanted to see, kind of, colorful liquids with glitter floating in it, they wanted bigger bottles and they wanted scents that were completely different.

And so we set up a council of these girls, there were eight of them in total, and we brought them into every meeting. You know, we had an R&D session, an innovation session with Unilever, and these girls showed up and obviously Unilever in the UK made ice cream as well, and they had magnums and Cornettos.

They said, “God, can we have this for free?” And I said, “yeah, yeah, you take as many as you want.” So they took like seven each and they were all melting in [00:11:00] their hands and underneath their chairs, they were so excited to be there. Then I matched them up with an R&D guy. So you can imagine a kind of 50-year-old guy in Chinos, in a button down shirt being matched with this kind of crazy 14-year-old that couldn't stop dancing and creating TikToks and off they go for a kind of one-to-one chat. And these men were terrified of these young girls but they came back with just the most amazing insight. One of the guys came back and said, “it's a revelation.” And I said, “well, why? What did she say?” And one of the scents was vanilla and mahogany and apparently the young girl had turned around and just said, “why would I wanna smell like a piece of wood?”

He just never thought about it and so we ended up completely reimagining the scent profile, the format, like absolutely everything from end to end. And we had the girls involved in everything from scent testing through to bottles, through to colors, through to communications. You know, they stuck with us all the way through and we paid them for their time.

Because it was important for us to kind of have their voice along the process, but it was also really important to me and the rest of the team having met them, that they felt [00:12:00] a sense of power and autonomy to actually drive this brand forward. We didn't want to just mine their insights and say, “thanks very much, see you later.” You know, these girls had come from quite impoverished backgrounds and you know, they were just sort of desperate to put their creativity out there and what we wanted to show them was that their ideas mattered, you know, and their thinking could actually be pulled all the way through to stuff that they could then see on billboards and on television screens and it was just the most wonderful process from end to end. And I think full credit to the client for trusting us to essentially completely dismantle decades old brand and rebuild it from the ground up, trusting a bunch of 14 year olds to guide the way. 

Chris Kocek: That's pretty rare. Was there something that you felt you did to encourage that trust in you? And also, did it ruffle anybody's feathers that you said, “hey, we're not gonna go with those two people you spoke with that just said, rah rah, let's keep doing what we've been doing.” Did did that ruffle any feathers?

Zoe Scaman: Weirdly no, I don't think so. I think that that account and that particular brand had been [00:13:00] on autopilot for such a long time.

The fact that somebody actually took the time to say, let's pause, let's just sense check this and let's just kind of see what else is out there. I don't think that anyone had really done it because they didn't think the brand was worth it, it was just, you know, it's a cheap body spray that you sell for a couple of quid in boots, you know, in the corner shop for teenage girls, and nobody really took it seriously.

And so nobody had actually said, “this is important and we need to think about this, we need to do things differently.” So I think that there was a real view from them that it was refreshing, you know? And it was exciting and there was something new here. And so I actually think that the appetite for change was massive once we uncovered it and I think that, you know, the client really trusted us to drive it all the way through, but was also so grateful that we didn't just treat the brand like shit on the bottom of our shoe and just do the same old stuff over and over again. And I also think it was incredibly important for these girls to kind of be in touch with a company like Unilever to see the process from end to end, and for Unilever to want them there wholeheartedly the entire way through.

I 

Chris Kocek: I mean that [00:14:00] phrase, “let's take a pause,” I often try to get clients to take a step back for a second. That's a really hard thing to get people to do because everybody is sprinting, sprinting with their hair on fire to the next quarterly report. How did you get them to take a pause? Was there something that you said or something that you showed them, maybe a data point or something that made them say, “oh, you know what, Zoe's right, we need to take a pause.” 

Zoe Scaman: I think it's that I covered the pause in terms of a time bound thing. I didn't say a pause indefinitely, I said, “give me five days and I'll come back to you with something really interesting, which will either completely validate where we already are or completely invalidate it and take us in a different direction.” And they were willing to give me that time. So I think a lot of the time, if you quantify it and you also not only quantify the time, but the potential to do something drastically different, which could be so much more powerful, I think that's really helpful. I also think, as you [00:15:00] said, you know, running from goal to goal with our hair on fire, we are so stuck now in this short termist mindset that it's a race to the bottom.

All we're doing is basically creating risk-free plans that we can laminate and wave in a manager's face that we can get our bonus and off we fuck. And it's a, it is a dreadful way to work, it's a dreadful way to push creativity because you can't, you know, you're just basically death by a thousand cuts and just speed over anything else.

And so I think the pause and the ability to ask better questions is such a critical skill, and I think it's the role of strategists. That's the role we should be playing is to ask better questions and to say, “do we need five days? Do we need five minutes?” You know,”let's have a think about this.” And I think at this point we're just under so much pressure, the easier thing to do is to just take the brief, recycle the same old shit and call that a success. 

Chris Kocek: Do you think that AI could have helped you get to those same “Aha!” moments as when you were sitting on the gym mats and just having a kind of a free flowing conversation? 

Zoe Scaman: No. [00:16:00] 

Chris Kocek: Why not? 

Zoe Scaman: I don't think that I would've got the same level of insight from AI.

I think I put something out about this a couple of days ago about this idea of synthetic research, and I do think synthetic research really does have a role to play in certain instances, but I think the real messy human, complex, weird stuff comes out through conversation, and there was so much that came out of those conversations with those girls that I was not expecting.

I thought that a 13 or 14-year-old girl would be experimenting with makeup. I had no idea that that wasn't a thing, and I don't think that AI would know that that wasn't a thing. I had no idea those girls were wearing boys body sprays and why they were wearing boys body sprays. I don't think that would've come up in AI research. I didn't know about the mixing and matching, you know, of different scents, for example. I didn't know about the importance of a glitter spray to give your school uniform, which everybody else is wearing exactly the same, school uniform. The glitter makes you feel like you've added [00:17:00] some pizazz to it, or you've added some level of self-expression to it, again, I don't think that would've come up. And so I do think that kind of frontline, messy, kind of, difficult conversations is so, so critical, and it's a skill that I think that a lot of maybe junior strategists haven't got and the reason for that is because research budgets and time, as you mentioned, are being cut, left out right and center and that ability to connect with real people and have real conversations is seen as a luxury or a folly in some instances, and it's not encouraged and so they don't learn that muscle. For me, that muscle has been so critical throughout my career, and it's been the one thing that I think has kind of turned some of my work into the best work it could possibly be because it's those kinds of messy, uncomfortable conversations.

And let me tell you, like sitting on a gym floor, trying to get a bunch of nervous, giggling, cliquey, 14 year olds to talk to you is terrifying. Because I'm sitting there and all I'm thinking about is God, I really hope they think [00:18:00] I'm cool, and I really hope they open up to me and they don't wanna be there, they don't wanna talk to me, they don't wanna tell me about their love lives and you know how challenging certain things feel, or what it feels like to live in their bodies at this point in time. And so you have to break through that initial discomfort and you have to get them on side and you have to develop a rapport with them to get that stuff out and that takes a lot of effort and a lot of understanding of how to be with humans 'cause 14-year-old girls are terrifying in packs. I was one of them, I know. And so that in itself is difficult and uncomfortable and I'd rather not be in that situation if I can help it but I knew that we needed to do what we needed to do.

Chris Kocek: Yeah, and most brands, they would go into it and say, “all right, let's talk about our fragrances.” Let's talk about basically their assumptions, they wanna talk about themselves. And you started in a different place, with these girls, you were just asking them some questions about themselves and about their lives, 

Zoe Scaman: about life, about friendship, about moods, about how they wake up in the morning, about confidence [00:19:00] and I didn't get to fragrance until right at the very end because that wasn't what I was after. And I also think if I had kind of forced it into a brand situation too early, I would've cut my nose off to spite my face, and I would've not gotten so much of the richness that I got. 

Chris Kocek: You mentioned writing something the other day about synthetic research, and you've got the musings of a wandering mind, that's your substack, right? And you have this wonderful piece, you have many wonderful pieces, but this one about the synthesized strategist, and you say that the synthesized strategist is someone who wields AI like it's a sixth sense while maintaining razor sharp human judgment. And by the way, whenever I read your stuff, I feel like I'm Meg Ryan, and when Harry met Sally, I'm just like, “yes, yes, yes.” And so when you think about a project that you've worked on recently, can you share some ways that you used AI to help you sharpen your thinking about a subject?

Zoe Scaman: Yes. So I have created a number of different GPTs, and they've all got different [00:20:00] personalities. So I've got one GPT, which is just me. So I've uploaded every piece of writing that I've ever done, and some people say, “oh, what about copyright?” But I'm not fussed about that. I fussed about moving my mind forward so that GPT is essentially me, but AI. I've got another one who is my worst critic who basically is really sarcastic and really shitty and just kind of helps me think in different ways. I've got one that is essentially a research monkey that is really good at that stuff and I've got a couple of others and I use them interchangeably when I'm building out new work. So for example, when I'm putting a kind of big new piece together, I'll go into the research one and I'm just like, right, I want sources, I want stats, I want quotes,

I want white papers, I want robust data and research and they'll pull it together. Then I'll go to my sarcastic one and I'll be like, “alright, is this shit?” And the sarcastic one will be like, “yes, absolutely. I feel like I've heard this 10 times before. Yours isn't even the best version out there, like, what is the point of even putting this out into the world?”

And I'm like, “oh, great. Okay, cool. So, [00:21:00] um, how would I make this more unique?” And they're just like, “wow, you know, I don't think you can, but you know, if you wanted to try, you might wanna go down this avenue.” And so it kind of pushes me to go past the obvious and then past the obvious again and then try and get to something that feels really unique and different in terms of an angle. And I’m constantly saying, like, “ask me questions. Why am I interested in this, specifically? What is the angle?” So I almost get that AI to interrogate me and then that really helps distill my thinking. And then I will take a lot of that and I'll put it into my GPT and I'll be like, right now, do this in a Zoe angle, you know, what kind of angle would I take on this? And then going through that whole process really helps me to kind of tighten my work. But all of it is trained on how my brain works, because even if I didn't have those AIs, there's GPTs set up, I would go through that process naturally anyway. So I'd go through deep research, then I'd go through the whole, like, “is this shit? How do I make it better? How do I make it different? How do I make it more unique?” And then I'd go through like, “what's my unique angle on this? Why do I have a right to [00:22:00] write about this? What am I gonna say?” And then, yeah, I kind of go from there but now I've sort of rebuilt that process in GPTs, which just allows me to do it so much faster. And obviously the more I'm feeding these GPTs, the more I'm interacting with them, the tighter the training is and the better they get. 

Chris Kocek: I have never heard of this idea, but I love this idea of a sarcastic version of myself. 

Zoe Scaman: Yeah, you need it. You need it because I think also, I don't know if you've tried the latest ChatGPT model, if you've signed up to Pro, it is such a sycophant.

It's like, “you are right. Oh my God, you're so wonderful. You can do no wrong.” It's like, I can't deal with that. I need criticism and I need someone to be like, this is bullshit, this is really boring, nobody's gonna wanna read this, you need to push it further. And that really helps me to kind of think about, you know, am I bringing something new to the table? Am I pushing an angle that I haven't really seen before? Is this a new white space that I can explore? How do I add to this conversation? So I'm always trying to look at whatever I put out into the world, it needs to be additive, it can't be repetitive. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, that's a great point. [00:23:00] And I think, you know, strategists, we thrive on pushback, it makes the idea stronger. And what's interesting too, with ChatGPT, is that maybe because it's written, I dunno if you use the microphone version where you can have a talk with ChatGPT, but I think sometimes because it's in the written form, it's softer, right? Like if you got that kind of pushback from a human standing in front of you saying those same things, you might be like, whoa, your tone's starting to get a little hot here.

Whereas with chat GPT, it's like I know what to expect. So in that same piece about the synthesized strategist, you also encourage strategists to find the underlying patterns that connect domains. You say, “build your pattern library, notice connections everywhere,” and you ask some really provocative questions.

You ask, “how does a street fashion trend spread like a meme? And “what shared patterns connect sports fan bases, and political movements? So I wanted to ask you, what are a few of your favorite overlaps [00:24:00] between sports fan bases and political movements? 

Zoe Scaman: I think what's really interesting in sports fan bases is, a lot of people don't think about this, but sports fan bases need disappointment in order to thrive.

A lot of people kind of go, you know, it's great to be a fan when the team is winning, so let's take the Chiefs, for example, the NFL team that up until recently could do no wrong and we're kind of winning everything. And to be a fan of a winning team is elation. It's a wonderful, wonderful feeling, but you cannot be a fan of a winning team forever because that gets boring and actually, that doesn't glue the fandom together. And what you desperately need, is you need harshness, you need disappointment, you need loss and a lot of people don't understand that. So they think that, actually, fandom is more successful and more positive when you're winning but it's that depth of disappointment that actually forms the ties, and that actually really shapes the fandom and I think that's really interesting. And then if you then take that and put that into a political party, it's [00:25:00] exactly the same thing. So people go deep into their values when they're not winning, you know, they really dig their heels in, they really start to kind of partake more so, they start to look at grassroots organizing, they start to look at being a more active member of a particular party. When they're winning, they're absolutely fine and actually, politics kind of falls to the back of their mind and they don't think about it that much. And I think that's a really interesting tie from sports into politics and you know, you have to just look at what's happening in the US at the moment, obviously with kind of MAGA and obviously what Trump is kind of incited over there.

And even though he has won and he is president and the administration is in power, the entire demeanor of the MAGA party and what that means to be a MAGA supporter is this sense of righting wrongs. They basically feel like “we need to go out and we need to kind of fix all of the stuff that, you know, the woke liberals fucked up.”

And it's that sense of collective disappointment, which is then that rallying cry that they're all getting behind. And so there's a real overlap between the two [00:26:00] of actually, you know, it's the disappointment that is pulling people together and really cementing those ties and those values and those belief systems so that you can then ride that euphoric wave when the win comes.

Chris Kocek: How did you discover this point? 'cause it's so true, the struggle and the disappointment tightens the bonds between people and without it, you may just have a bunch of Fairweather fans actually, right? Do you remember the situation or the moment where you're like, “wait a minute, it's actually the challenges that really glue people together, not the winning.”

Zoe Scaman: It's the work that I've been doing over the last couple of years, not been one moment, necessarily, but the work that I've been doing with the NBA over the last couple of years. I've also been doing some work for an author and her fandom and you know, a lot of the times the pushback is we need crisis comms. Like what do we do when the fans get really pissed off? When they get really upset and how do we go out there and how do we smooth things over? And the pushback that I finally got to after a lot of research, a lot of work in this space is you don't, unless you've done something horrifically wrong, you know, as a league, as a [00:27:00] publishing house, as a record label, and you need to go out and do a mio culpa, you don't do anything, you leave it. And this is part of the process for fans, you have to let them be angry, you have to let them get pissed off, you have to let them get disappointed and really upset because that is the point where they're coming together. That is the kind of crucible that the fandom needs in order to strengthen itself.

And your natural response as a brand or as a league owner, for example, is to try and kind of smooth things over because you don't like rough seas, but it's the rough seas that create the magic. And so actually the process of me trying to figure out how to write crisis comms was basically me saying, you don't need them, we need to reevaluate what actually constitutes a crisis. 

Chris Kocek: You also talk about furries in fandom and that furries can teach us quite a bit. So what are some specific things that furries do to create belonging that other brands should take note of? And I guess before we answer that, maybe for people who are [00:28:00] not familiar with furries, a quick background on furries and then what do they do so successfully to create a sense of belonging?

Zoe Scaman: So furries are fascinating, and I don't think they're a fandom per se, they’re something else and essentially, it is adults who enjoy dressing up as anthropomorphized animals. And so they have these elaborate costumes that they create. But I think the first thing that's really interesting is when you become a full-blown furry, you go to a furry creator slash fashion house, and you essentially get a costume constructed for you, but it's not just a costume, it's an entire character. So it's the name of your furry, it's the background, it's a personality, it's the look. You know, absolutely everything from the ground up is kind of created for you so that you can then enter into this furry landscape.

And a lot of people think that, you know, the furry community is about sex and you know, sexual preferences, and there's certainly an aspect of that, but that's not all of it at all. What's also interesting is they create their own media, they create their [00:29:00] own entertainment. So a lot of them have started their own mini record labels, they've got fanzines, they've got kind of, you know, streaming channels, and there's so much, they've got kind of community organization, they've got their own conferences, and so the glue that binds them together is just everybody pitching in and playing a really interesting participative role in how do we push this fandom forward? How do we create more opportunities for connection, for belonging, for shared interest, for coming together? 

I think that's what's really interesting, is there's that freedom for everybody to contribute in a way that they feel is meaningful and for it to be the sum of all parts as opposed to dictated from on high by a, I don't know, a chief furry who kind of goes, “oh no, that's not on furry brand, you can't do that.” Like, they don't have any of that, that's what makes it so interesting and so rich. It's because of the co-creation and the constant pursuit of let's build this out, let's create this ecosystem, let's pull it in lots of different directions, everybody's voice matters, everybody's participation is critical. It’s so [00:30:00] important. And I think, you know, sometimes when we look at this from a brand perspective, we've got the guardrails on, you know, we've got the legal guys scratching their heads and we kind of go, “oh yeah, we'd love you to be a fan, but not in that way.” Or, “we'd love you to do some co-creation, oh, could you just not touch that bit?”

And we just kind of put these false parameters on that lock them in and I think the most interesting communities that are so dynamic and so interesting are the ones that have given us that level of freedom. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a brand out there that you feel is doing an amazing job of tapping into the kind of fandom that you've written about?

Zoe Scaman: I think I definitely put Lego up there as one of the best. So Lego has understood fandom for yonks way longer than most of us have. They've had, you know, the cultivation of AFOLs, so adult fans of Lego for decades. Their chief fandom officer, if you want to call her that, actually has a PhD in fandom, which I didn't even realize was a thing, she's incredible. And I think that, you know, they really take it seriously. They, you know, all the work they've done with Star Wars, the stuff they've just done a couple of days ago with F1 for example. They understand the importance of taking Lego and [00:31:00] tapping into other fandoms and other interest groups and kind of drawing them in and Lego almost becomes this anchor point for so many different niches. But I also think the cultivation of the creativity of the fandom itself is so interesting. So, you know, Lego World Builder, they're constantly saying, “tell us what you think we should do next, tell us where you think we should invest our energy and our resources.”

It's basically saying, we do not know where our next gigantic IP franchise is gonna come from, maybe it'll be you guys. And so they put these briefs out and they ask for stories that could potentially become toy franchises, gaming franchises, movie franchises and such, and whoever rises to the top in terms of that particular brief will then get an equity stake in what that turns into.

So there's a level of, kind of, trust, there's a level of reciprocity and openness to basically say, “we value your creativity.” And you know, the fandom does generate that level of creativity, and we want that to come in. “We don't think we know best, this isn't a one-way relationship, you know, you've been playing with our toys and our kits and our games and our [00:32:00] entertainment for years, decades, and some instances. Why would we assume that we know better than you?” And I think that attitude is incredibly helpful to keep them relevant, to keep them on top of all of this stuff, because they can't possibly do that purely with internal talent. They've got to create those networks in order to stay abreast of what matters.

Chris Kocek: Do you have a favorite Lego innovation that's come up in the past five to 10 years? 

Zoe Scaman: I think that the work they've done with Fortnite is really interesting, it's that idea of continuous evolution. So, you know, Lego has always been about the brick and the brick will always remain core to what Lego is and what Lego is about.

But what they were starting to see, was the evolution of what constitutes play and where a lot of kids and teenagers were spending time playing. And obviously, you know, Fortnite and these, kind of, battle royale games are enormous and so going to Fortnite and saying, we don't wanna compete with you, we want to collaborate with you, is an incredibly smart but humble business move. But also, I thought what was interesting is they didn't just kind of go, can [00:33:00] you just make us a Lego skinned Fortnite? Because obviously Lego wouldn't work with a battle royale, that would be against their values, and that would be very different to what they offer as a company and as a brand. And so they understood that actually the brick and the act of creation and the act of building as play and as gaming was something they had to stay with. So actually, you know, the kind of Lego world that they've built within Fortnite has nothing to do with Fortnite, it's nothing to do with any of those game mechanics or team setups or anything. It is first and foremost a sandbox creation game, which stays very true to what they are and, and kind of how they do it.

And I think that was a really smart, smart move. And obviously the announcement from Disney as well, but Disney also saying, “look, you know, we can see gaming as the future of entertainment,” you know, “for a lot of these kids and we can shake our heads at it, we can say, you know, we are the best and we are Disney and we're always gonna be on top, that would be stupid. Instead, what we need to do is we almost need to cannibalize ourselves in order to push ourselves forward and evolve the way that we need to evolve with the right cultural trends and the right audience metrics,” et cetera. And so [00:34:00] again, you know that partnership with Fortnite is a really smart move, but I think businesses that have the humbleness but also the smarts to look at what's coming next and to not push against it but actually find a way to embrace it in a way that feels right for them is a really great way to do business. 

Chris Kocek: You speak just like you, right Zoe? I mean, it is just like, so cogent and so well put together, it's like a little Lego tower. You have another piece, you wrote another wonderful piece on musings of a wandering mind called From Frameworks to Flywheels.

Zoe Scaman: Oh, so that's a vintage one. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: This line made me laugh out loud because it's very true. You wrote, “trying to keep up with the speed of change in culture and technology is like subjecting yourself to aggressive whiplash several times a day whilst running in heels on a treadmill with matchsticks in between your eyelids in case you nod off for five seconds and God forbid, miss something.”

Zoe Scaman: I stand by that, I think [00:35:00] it's more relevant than ever. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, I mean you wrote it, I think, during the pandemic, right? Yeah, it was right around the pandemic. So I mean, I think it's just as relevant today as you, you calling it a vintage piece and in that piece you talk about the flywheel effect and the difference between static frameworks like pyramids or matrices, and much more dynamic systems like the flywheel.

So first of all, what is the flywheel effect in a couple sentences and what's one of your favorite examples of a brand implementing the flywheel effect? 

Zoe Scaman: So the flywheel effect is essentially saying that each part of your business feeds the next and so on, and so on and so on. So what we tend to do, what we have done historically with communications and marketing is, you know, there'll be a product or a service. We then do some marketing activity around it, vomit it out into the world, and then we repeat the process and it's quite linear in the way that we think. So it's annual planning, it's quarterly planning, it's thinking in a way that we [00:36:00] are just constantly kind of pushing things out, but then we don't really think about, well, what are we tying that communications onto next? Like how is that then feeding research and development? How is that feeding the next product iteration? How is that feeding our distribution strategy? And then obviously coming back into marketing and so on. And so we fill in these kinds of static frameworks, I'm sure you've done many of them, you know, brand onions, brand keys, if you're Unilever, you know, brand houses, if you're Coca-Cola and you know, all that kind of stuff. And it's just static belief systems on a page and we are missing a trick when it comes to how we are creating more dynamism and connectivity in the way that we operate as a business. And also, you know, how are we putting brand building and marketing at the center of this as opposed to just kind of, you know, the glitter that we roll the turd in before we shove it out the door.

And I think that that is something that was missing for me. And I think what I've been really fascinated by is these businesses that actually have the flywheel built in from day one. And so, you know, one of those businesses, for example, would be, Hello Sunshine, you know, with Reese Witherspoon and the way that she's [00:37:00] built that is just so smart.

Obviously that's been sold to Candle Media now, but starting a book club and finding these really interesting up and coming authors to then push them out to the book club so that everyone's kind of engaged and you're creating a sort of community of people who get excited about these titles, but then buying the rights to said book and then translating those rights into production, which she then funds through her production house, and then selling that movie or that series to a big network knowing that you've got the buy-in of this huge community because they've already read the book and now they're gonna see it coming to life on the screen.

And so that is a flywheel in motion. Basically, you build the audience, you sell them the title, you buy the title, you turn that into a produced asset, you sell that to a platform or a network with the promise that you've got this built-in audience that you've already spent time cultivating and so the flywheel turns, and I think it's just a really fascinating way of looking at a flywheel in action, and so on.

And so I just think that those businesses are so smart. And that's not to say that every single business needs to [00:38:00] operate like that. But I think you can find a way of making the flywheel applicable to you as a business, it's simply connecting those dots. It's looking for dynamic moves that you can make between audience understanding and product development and communications.

And a lot of the time we just broadcast stuff out into the ether and people scroll past it in six seconds and we've spent six months on it. And then we do the whole thing all over again and there's no connection, there's no feedback loop, and I think that that is a real lost opportunity. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, it makes me think of synergies and harmonies, like trying to find those synergies between different parts of your ecosystem so that everything is kind of growing up together essentially.

You know, I was gonna ask you if you could wave a magic wand and change something in an organization to help them build a flywheel effect, what is the one thing you would change? But actually, in writing that question down, I realize that's kind of a bad question because it's usually not just one thing that you have to change, right? And my conversation with Greg Hahn, he shared a finish sailing [00:39:00] phrase, which is, “don't curse the wind, learn to sail.” And I've been thinking a lot about that lately and so in order to get a sailboat to move in adverse conditions, you don't just change one thing, you have to change several things typically to catch the wind. There's tacking, there's adjusting the sail, reading the water, all those kinds of things. So with that in mind, what are some of the first things you look for in an organization? Or what are a few questions you like to ask to understand? What's really preventing this organization from reaching their goals?

Zoe Scaman: I think it's a number of different things. So I think that, you know, one of the questions I always ask is, “is the challenge that you're asking me to address fully within your remit, or does it touch other departments within the organization?” And the answer is always yes, but you can never solve a problem in its entirety if you are only dealing with one part of where it matters and one part of where it has [00:40:00] impact. And so that then leads me to the other question, which is, “what are the lines of communication in between departments like here?” And a lot of the time they're non-existent. And then you'll go into, well, why are they non-existent? And then you'll often find that the P&Ls in departments are different and that is a huge problem. And so what that means is you've got the marketing organization optimizing for the metrics that they've been given by the board that they need to hit, which are completely at odds with the customer service department who have been given completely different goals, who are then actually being incentivized in a different way which are then totally different from the trade team, for example, who are negotiating based on their own kind of goals and objectives and what you'll find is that the biggest enemy of progress in any organization is the incentive structure. It is always the incentive structure. So who is incentivized to do what? Why? And then how are those incentives actually at odds with one another? Which is the main issue with every organization I've ever come across [00:41:00] is that the incentives are clashing in many instances, they’re direct opposites and as a result of that, you can never get cross departmental work streams off the ground. And if you can't do that, then you haven't got one single organization running in the same direction, you've got a fragmented organization running all over the place, like absolute nutcases, and nothing's ever gonna get done. 

Chris Kocek: Everything is disjointed, basically and it's one of my favorite topics, which I call brand scoliosis, you know, where you've basically got these disjointed parts and then someone comes along and says, “could you just apply this cream?” You're like, “applying a cream is not going to fix the scoliosis.” You know, “just change the words in our ads” and you say, “no, no, no. We need to do deeper work here, we need to align some chakras.”

Zoe Scaman: Yeah, and it's aligning incentives to understand, you know, out on the table here, you know, distribution, what's your number one incentive that you need to get to in the next six months? Cool, marketing, what's yours, R&D, what's yours? [00:42:00] And just getting it out on the table and I think sometimes those things are unspoken and the active simply stating them and writing them down in black and white next to one another shows the disjointedness, but also sometimes opens up the conversations to go, well actually, we can help you with this because you can help us with that. And it's basically a quid pro quo scenario, but they need somebody to come in and actually uncover that, to create the circumstances for that conversation to take place and then to help them navigate it.

Chris Kocek: So you're like, part strategist, part United Nations negotiator. 

Zoe Scaman: Yeah, it's something that I wanted to train myself in. So when I was 30, I basically went to New York and I worked with Undercurrent who at the time were a kind of cutting edge organizational design consultancy and they were all about abolishing hierarchies and creating slam teams and looking at new ways of working.

We worked with Pepsi, we worked with American Express, I personally worked with the Climate Reality Project, Al Gore and the whole thing was, how do we get these [00:43:00] organizations unstuck? How do we understand human psychology to get them working differently? How do we overcome bureaucracy? And it was a rude awakening for me 'cause I'd never done work like that before.

And it was deeply uncomfortable and it was hard. It was people work, which wasn't necessarily, you know, my forte at the time, but I knew that in order to be the strategies that I wanted to be and to be able to kind of push through more interesting work, I needed to understand the psychology of this and then also how to undo it and so I wanted to actually, basically retrain myself in organizational design and psychology, and that's what I committed to. 

Chris Kocek: Fascinating. We'll have to have you on for a part two to learn more about organizational psychology 'cause it's huge. Time has flown by, we're at the speed round, so we're just gonna go boom, boom, boom. Ready? 

Zoe Scaman: Do it. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: What's your favorite word in English or any other language? 

Zoe Scaman: Fuck. 

Chris Kocek: elaborate. 

Zoe Scaman: Incredibly satisfying, my favorite form of punctuation and something that I think we need to say [00:44:00] more of. 

Chris Kocek: Alright. What was your favorite subject in school? 

Zoe Scaman: English, always. English literature. 

Chris Kocek: If you were talking to a five-year-old, how would you describe what you do?

Zoe Scaman: I would say that I put lipstick on a pig. That's probably the best way of thinking about it, yeah. I couldn't say roll a turd in glitter to a five-year-old just yet but similar to that. But yeah, basically I take really kind of gnarly, ugly things and I make them slightly easier and prettier.

Chris Kocek: What's the most recent good book you've read or a movie or TV show that you've watched? 

Zoe Scaman: Books are a bit of a thing of the past at the moment with two kids. I pass out after reading two pages, but I've been really into audio books recently. Recently finished Hidden Potential by Adam Grant, which was fascinating. I love his work in general, he's fantastic. 

And TV wise, I'm devouring Mob Land, which is the new Guy Richie series, which is British gangster, lots of swearing, lots [00:45:00] of use of the word fuck, which obviously works very well for me and Tom Hardy, which is a perfect combination. 

Chris Kocek: You seem like you get interested in a lot of interesting subjects. But what is one subject you recently got super interested in and you just went down a rabbit hole, not because it was related to a project, but because of insatiable curiosity?

Zoe Scaman: Fairy tales, folklore and mythology, which is currently where I'm at. So I am speaking at Russell Davies’ Interesting conference next week, and the idea is you get 10 minutes, you are not allowed to talk about anything remotely work related, and that's it. And I've been reading loads of fairytales to my daughter recently and I just thought, well, that'd be interesting. What if I could reframe fairy tales? And so I wrote 10 minute Talk, which was fairytales as emergency survival manuals for civilizational collapse.

And it was the kind of tongue in cheek jokey thing to start off with but then I started going deeper and deeper and deeper, and now I have 42 pages of in-depth narrative and story around mythology, fairy tales, [00:46:00] folklore, and what it means for modern day society and potentially how we can start to reconstruct the future with new myths.

Chris Kocek: What's one of the most interesting jobs you had before you got into the work that you do now that has helped you do your job better? 

Zoe Scaman: I didn't really have a job before I got into advertising when I was 18. So the only jobs I really did before was waitressing, which I got fired from babysitting, which I was shit at because I had no patience for it. And so I worked at Gap for a period of time, which was God, that was awful. So I had to stand at the front door and say Happy Holidays, and a fake American accent during Christmas, and it was just horrendous. Never again. 

Chris Kocek: So everything comes from your various incarnations in advertising because you've reinvented yourself many times.

What's a piece of advice that you got early on in life or in your career that you still remember to this day or that you think of often? 

Zoe Scaman: I don't know if I got advice early on necessarily that I remember, but one [00:47:00] of the best pieces of advice, especially as an independent that I ever got was from Cindy Gallop, who I adore, and she said, “ask for the biggest amount you can say out loud without laughing” when we were talking about pricing and I always keep that in the back of my mind. She's fantastic on that front. 

Chris Kocek: That's great advice. Well. Zoe, it has been a pleasure to talk to you. We've talked a lot about glitter. I feel like I'm covered in glitter from all of the ideas that you shared today. So thank you so much for taking the time, I really appreciate it.

Zoe Scaman: Thank you for having me. 

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Zoe Scaman from Bodacious. If you want to connect with Zoe, you can find her on LinkedIn. You can also access all of her brilliant and beautifully designed thought pieces at her Substack, Musings of a Wandering Mind. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with colleagues and clients who could use some inspiration.

Just send them a link and say, you'll see this is what I'm talking about, Insights. [00:48:00] If you're looking for even more ideas and “Aha!” moments, head over to chriskocek.com. There you can find some of my newest online courses, case studies, and creative exercises for building insights and breakthrough ideas. 

And while you're there, make sure you subscribe to the Light Bulb Newsletter. Every Thursday I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire your next project, creative briefing or campaign. 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.