Katie Dreke: [00:00:00] If pregnancy was a sport, it would be like an ultra marathon or like an expedition type sport or a high altitude mountaineering or something to say this person is not an athlete is just statistically scientifically inaccurate. The work this body is doing replicates the work that people force themselves into in order to become elite athletes, and she's doing it by existing and going through this process.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. In today's episode, I talk with Katie Dreke, a multifaceted brand strategy consultant who has worked agency side and client side across multiple categories and countries, including Amsterdam, Japan, Australia, and the US.

On the agency side, Katie has done award-winning work with Droga5 Wyden and Kennedy [00:01:00] IDEO, and the Wesley School for girls. Katie has a particularly interesting background because she's been on the forefront of women's sports brands for well over two decades, assisting with deep transformations on brands like Nike, New Balance and Arc’Teryx, helping them with a wide variety of strategic initiatives from global brand strategy all the way to product innovation.

During our conversation, Katie and I talk about her work on Nike's historic maternity collection and the incredible athletic feats that pregnant women achieve on a daily basis. We also explore the techniques and questions that Katie uses when she gets started on a new project and how her insights often lead to innovation inside the organization instead of just advertising campaigns.

To get things started though, we talk about one of Katie's first aha moments, which happened when she was five years old.

Katie Dreke: Probably one of the [00:02:00] first things I noticed is we were five when I moved into a different neighborhood. It was a really great place to grow up - a neighborhood filled with cul-de-sacs and we were just riding around like a pack of animals on our bicycles and you know, it was great. But pretty quickly, 5, 6, 7, that age group, I was kind of a rough and tumble kid.

I really wanted to crash around. I wanted to play sports, I wanted to build tree houses and I've discovered pretty quickly like the boys were having a heck of a lot of fun doing this stuff, but the girls weren't there doing it. Most of my peers who were girls in the neighborhood were really excited about other things.

They were playing house or they were playing with dolls and using the dolls to like act out narratives, which is also an interesting kind of play, but it just was like not at all grabbing me and I really bumped up against this thing where like the boys kind of didn't [00:03:00] want me to be there and they would in ways overt and subtle kind of signal that to me.

And the girls also didn't want me to be there because I clearly didn't get what they were doing or really like what they were doing. And I would hang out with them 'cause our parents would put us together, whatever. And it felt like this was kind of an epiphany. I guess maybe when I look at it through hindsight, like what I was discovering was just like the social construct of our gendered society.

There were ideas about what boys do and what girls do, but it, it's a very strong memory of recognizing the things that I like to do - the world wants to tell me is not for me. It's for boys and not for you. I like sports. I like video games. I like technology and mechanics. I like science fiction. I'm interested in business.

The world is trying in overt and, and subtle ways to steer me in another direction. And I, I'm gonna have to figure out how to navigate that. I'm gonna have to figure out how to be [00:04:00] me reckon with the structure that I live in. Not let it shape me into some other artifact. 

Chris Kocek: That's a pretty powerful observation at that young age. But I think, you know, probably a lot of kids recognize that, but they don't necessarily give voice to it. Right? I'm sure kids notice like, oh, boys do this, boys behave this way and girls are behaving this way. I wanna do some of those things that the boys are doing, and when I do those things, I might even be told not to, or I might be nudged in a direction, oh, we, we don't do that.

That's, it's okay for boys. It's not okay for girls, and vice versa. I think maybe the difference is you not only observed it, but you also gave voice to it. And you didn't just say, okay, I'm gonna sit by, 

Katie Dreke: I don't know why, why didn't I fold against the structure? I don't know. It's weird, but it's funny also that it's continued [00:05:00] into the life that I live now.

Somewhere along the way, I guess it was when I moved to Amsterdam that was suddenly working at Wieden and Kennedy. I was working on these big major brands and I was working in a city where my clients were all over Europe. On any given moment, I could be put on a plane. You show up to work in the morning, they're like, you gotta be in London at three o'clock sitting for a pit, you know?

Uh, 

Chris Kocek: well, you mentioned working in Amsterdam, you've worked all around the world. You've done a ton of work for a lot of brands around the world, and especially around female athletes. Mm, mm-hmm. You've worked on Nike, you've worked on arc alters, I hope I'm saying that right. Yeah. 

Katie Dreke: Arc ter. Correct. 

Chris Kocek: And many more.

And, and with all of your deep research around female athletes, what are two things that really jumped out at you during your study of female athletes that you’ve just never forgotten? 

Katie Dreke: Yeah. Like I mentioned, I'm way into sports. I was a three sport athlete in high school and also grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so a lot of sport also translated into camping, [00:06:00] hiking, skiing, snowboarding, mountain climbing, and mountaineering, all that stuff.

And so having the pure joy, frankly, of working at a place like Adidas or Nike or working with a client like Arc’teryx. Specifically pointed at the female side of the business was like super satisfying. But there are things that I, that I think are just like. Sometimes invisible unless you are a woman going through these experiences yourself.

Most of the time when I talk to women about what the things that we would learn and use as data points, they'd be like, oh yeah, of course. But I'd be illuminating them actually to a lot of my male counterparts who are, they're not like, you know, quote unquote the enemy. They're not malicious in any way.

They don't just have the experience themselves, so it's invisible to them. For Nike specifically, there was a really robust body of work that was several years in the making that really analyzed the history of the professional sports system that then created a pipeline all the way down into youth, you know, from [00:07:00] from youth all the way up to professional sport.

Where did it come from? How did it begin? It actually came outta the military. So origin story is very masculine and regimented, and it's also a place where women were not present. And you feel that just in the way that sport as a system is organized. American football, for example, almost feel like war. 

Chris Kocek: I mean, isn't the Olympics just a kind of a civilized way of countries coming together and kind of, uh, showing their dominance in one sport or another?

Katie Dreke: Peaceful  competition? Yeah. Or yeah. Peaceful air quotes, competition. It's a very masculine system. And it doesn't take into account the fact that women have a different lived experience than men and boys do. So there's struggles for young women for different reasons around the globe. Oftentimes, they're culturally connected, really connected to maybe even our earlier conversation about like, what you're taught as a child is your thing [00:08:00] or is allowed to be your thing.

Or even parents saying, I'm not gonna let you do that thing. So girls find it harder to enter that system. Sometimes it's for family reasons, cultural reasons. Sometimes it's because there's not a team to join. Sometimes it's because there's not access to the equipment or uniforms that fit properly or you know, proper coaching, safe coaching.

And then once you're in, there's a marked moment during puberty where a lot of, um, young women opt out of sport. And it's a large part because of equipment and uniforms and coaching and kind of community around them. But their body's changing. They feel uncomfortable. They feel more self-conscious because the world as it is currently designed, you know, objectify looks at, looks at women through often a male lens.

And so they feel themselves being looked at for the first time very directly. And that be such a negative experience that they opt out. And then if you make it through that and you continue through high school sport, maybe even into college or semi-pro, if you get to [00:09:00] the point where you wanna have a family or something.

Like the system is also not built around you to support you in that endeavor. Maintaining your professional career in sport, or even like helping you find your way back into sport once you've gotten to the other side of that pregnancy journey. So like the, the system that organized sport sits within traditional sport, like game that happens on a field of play with a referee, a winner, a loser.

It's not designed with women in mind. And so women really struggle all the way through, all the way through that system. I have felt that personally as a young woman, I can observe that obviously, you know, just intellectually and when the data just screams off the page and then you're working like Nike, you're like, holy crap.

Like, we need to be doing something about this. And, and, and with a brand like Nike or an Adidas or some of these other brands that have really big platforms and voices, you recognize there's a chance that we can move this system to a more evolved setup. Really fascinating, especially to see the, the momentum behind traditional sport and women [00:10:00] right now, which is very satisfying given all those, that data we uncovered. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. Well, here's a data point that, you know, I haven't officially found it, but, but I noticed something the other day, and I haven't backed it up with data, but my daughter plays tennis and we were looking for a female tennis coach and we found one and she's great. But I started looking at the tour itself, right, both the women's tour and the men's tour on tennis.

How many women's coaches are there? And it's very, very few, even for female athletes. The, the female tennis players are often surrounded by a team of male coaches, uh, for fitness, for, uh, even psychology for various things. And my biggest hypothesis really is that it's because as you age, you know, you may have the experience, there are a lot of female tennis players that could become coaches, but then you've gotta be traveling on the world tour with your tennis player and you may need to be [00:11:00] back at home with childcare or with other things.

And so I was, I was surprised at how few female coaches, uh, exist, especially on the women's tour. Um, but that's my, that's my hypothesis. Why, why there aren't, 

Katie Dreke: If you’ll indulge me in like another little side sidebar. Even what, during the time that I was there, which was like working in the women's business category specifically, we hired a PhD level endocrinologist to join the team to help with sport innovation because science was awakening to the fact that, uh, menstrual cycles would.

Affect physiology, joints, muscles, oxygen levels. The chemistry set that is the woman is, is constantly in motion and is less studied because it is harder to study something that is so fluid and constantly in motion. So a lot of the medical history, whether it's just aspirin and something basic like going under for a surgery, like so much of this has been, this work has [00:12:00] been done on men's bodies only and then like extrapolated over to women's bodies.

And so we're taking medicine all the time. We're getting doctor's advice all the time that actually hasn't been studied on women's bodies. It only was like legislated that there are needed to be equal amount. So sometime in the eighties. So it's, it's, it's pretty ridiculous how late a lot of these learnings are finally showing up.

But I saw an interview with Sue Bird recently where she said, I've had an an ACL knee injury. And the doctor, the very first thing he said to me is, I came off the floor, not how are you feeling or how, what level is your pain, but are you on your period? She's like, that was in the late eighties, early nineties.

So I know that the medical community was aware of a relationship. She was being interviewed by Megan Rapino who said, I've had three ACL tears and injuries and all of them, I've been on my period, so who knows about this? I, that was actually the first time I ever heard about it and that was like this year.

There's some people who actually hyper perform when they're on their cycle. There's other people who struggle to perform. The fact that we can't, as an athlete of [00:13:00] any kind, whether you're an amateur athlete, a passive athlete, or a professional athlete, that you can't understand the relationship in your own body to your performance based on your chemistry is kind of shocking given that everybody's walking around with Fitbits and aura rings and whatnot, and we're mapping our sleep, we're mapping our glucose.

You know, it's just this complicated symphony of chemistry that happens to live inside of women has stayed away from like, it's too hot of a potato, but actually it's the unlock’s there are gonna be so fascinating. Finally starting to happen. 

Chris Kocek: You mentioned data jumping off the page or screaming off the page, and there was a data point that really jumped out at you when you were working on Nike, which I believe was women over 40 were buying a lot from Nike.

But you found out they were not buying for themselves, they were buying for their kids or for their partners. When they wanted to shop for themselves, they were going somewhere else. Where were they going instead and why do you think that was? 

Katie Dreke: Couple reasons. We were able [00:14:00] to see when it comes to products that it was in our competitive set.

You start immediately with sports bras and running tights, leggings, um, that can also be used for fitness, can also be used for hanging out at the house, going for a walk. So there are kinda a multidisciplinary item and then you branch out from that to the, to different sport verticals and then also to sort of the lifestyle aspect, but really at the, at the center is the bra, the type, you could see a lot of entries in that ground and we were recognizing that we were in danger of not being a first choice. You could see Lululemon, of course, starting their company in yoga and as a single gender brand at their beginning for women only.

They obviously had a short of hand with the consumer that Nike didn't have for all the things that I just mentioned. Traditional [00:15:00] professional, competitive performance, sport being kind of a masculine space from day one. Most of the multi-brand brands, whether you say Puma, ADI, new Balance, like they, they all have a certain sort of masculine sort of texture to them.

They all struggle to create genuine, longstanding, always on relationshis with women that feel like they're starting with women as opposed to, well, we did this for the guys and now we're also gonna do it for the women too. So Lulu was definitely someone to keep our eye on because they started with women and and yoga, and now they're branching out into running and footwear and into hiking and, and they have a men's category as well, so they, they're going the opposite direction.

But women also shop differently than men do. So there was a little bit of a lag that we needed to sort out around the marketplace strategy. What does it look like to show up at Nordstrom and consider [00:16:00] them actually a viable merchandising and sales channel? What would it look like to do a shop in shop by now?

Nike's figured out, you know, a lot about this, but at at the time that I was there, it was still kind of a newish oratory 

Chris Kocek: area. And what do you think Lululemon was saying? In particular to women, whether verbally or in visuals or in just context - you mentioned that Nike and sport in general is very masculine coded. Right? It's got a masculine edge to it. 

Katie Dreke: It's also very youth coded, say Nike women. But when you look at the imagery and when you look at the kind of wild trendy patterns and things, and this is not even just only Nike, this is all of the major multi-sport brands, very, you know, 16 to 18 or 18 to 24 might be like their media target for example.

But it's very youthful. And I remember the first time I worked on Nike in 2009, when I [00:17:00] was at Wieden + Kennedy in Amsterdam, I was working on Nike women specifically. I went to a summit. Every brand lead from all the different nations across the AMEA region gave a 30 minute briefing on what was going on in their market.

And more than one made a complaint to say, we call it Nike women, but it's just a bunch of teenage girls. Like, I have a real struggle connecting to women in my marketplace. 'cause the photography doesn't represent the maturity level of women. Lululemon started there, they started with women. There was a maturity level there that was different than what the multi-brand brands typically do with teenage high school, college.

This is like, I'm beyond all that. I'm doing yoga, you know, and I'm, I'm more sophisticated. I'm more mature. My price point is higher. Uh, from a commercial point of view, they enjoyed like a, a higher price point. And then, uh, the last thing that's kind of like burying the lead basically is their product was so strong [00:18:00] and the materials were quite advanced.

They were supple, buttery, and the language that they would use to talk about their materials and their manufacturing and like the elevated nature of it, gave it a price point that was just. Way higher than anybody else. So they were coming at it from a completely different dimension. Yeah. It wasn't a shocker that like a a 40-year-old woman with a credit card, two kids and a husband in the house, or a, you know, a spouse and partner and children might struggle to find something for herself  at nike.com outside of footwear.

For Nike women apparel was really important. We were trying to grow that business, so we were really fixated on that. These destinations also would reflect back to her herself. Like she could see herself in Lululemon, she could see herself at Nordstrom. She could see herself at some of these smaller boutiques, and it would show her herself with clarity, aspiration, dignity, and an understanding of like, oh yeah, we got you.

We get you. It's [00:19:00] cool. 

Chris Kocek: Well, it's interesting because I never thought of it this way before, but Lululemon starting in yoga, yoga traditionally, as far as I know, is not competitive. The idea of a yoga competition is, is almost an oxymoron. And so in, in traditional masculine coded sports, there's winning and losing, and there's this deep competition, which, like you said, comes from a military or war kind of base background and so appealing to women, it's like we're all in this together or we're doing this together. It is not, I win, you lose, we all look good doing our yoga as opposed to beating up on each other. 

Katie Dreke: It really is a mindset of, of betterment, of care, of progress, of showing up for yourself. Making the commitment. I'm gonna spend an hour, I'm gonna be here on the mat, me and my mat, regardless of how it goes today, each day is different than the last.

It's a journey [00:20:00] and it's a practice. I show up, I show up to my practice, I show up for myself, and I show up for everyone else in this room. The fact that we're all here, even though we are not talking to each other during the process, we're not engaging during the process. It's a subtle reminder that this is a community of people that think the same way.

It's a completely different angle in, and of course, from a product point of view and from a commercial point of view, what do you wear when you do yoga? Sports bra, tights, like. And from there you might extrapolate a couple other things. You know, a jacket to wear before you arrive when it's cold in the winter, or maybe some soft shoes to slip into and da da da, you know, you can start adding on the accoutrements.

But when you get that back to that core bullseye, you know, a female athlete starts with a sports bra, that's the first thing you start with when you start getting ready for whatever the activity might be. It's the one thing that a, a female athlete uses that a male athlete won't. If you can't get that right, that product you've signaled to your audience that you don't really understand.

Chris Kocek: This is so interesting because, uh, I, I, I [00:21:00] recently started taking Pilates. 

Katie Dreke: Oh, wow. 

Chris Kocek: And I am, I am the only man in every Pilates class that I go to. 

Katie Dreke: Yeah. It's hard. 

Chris Kocek: It is all women. It's very rigorous. The, the exercises, I mean, it's so much core. I thought I had a pretty good core, and they're like, and we're going to be in tabletop for the next 10 minutes, basically.

But what's interesting is the dynamic. Before the class begins. Mm. Right? Mm-hmm. Like people are sitting on their reformers and they start chatting with the instructor, who's usually a woman. Not always, but usually. And I sense that dynamic, and I sense this kind of bonding that happens that I, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen in male sports, obviously, you know, guys get together and they're getting ready on a soccer field.

They're warming up and there's probably, you know, there's some chatting and whatnot. I played tennis on a team. Uh, but it's just different. It feels different. 

Katie Dreke: If you think about men and women who play sport, who are interested in [00:22:00] sport, who like it, either for the competition or for the community, it doesn't really matter.

And you create a Venn diagram of those two people, there will be more overlap than not. The overlap in the middle is a passion for sport. For mastery, for progress, for competition, for camaraderie, for the anguish of losing and recovery with your teammates or, or for the victory. And, you know, euphoria, all that happened in that big juicy middle and that overlap.

And then on the outside are these crescent moons where men need a certain sort of coding to feel like it's about them, for them and to really, really invest 110%. And women require that as well, or, or as you were just describing, it's, it can be tonality, the community is there, but the tone shifts when you're in a room full of women versus if you're in a room full of men.

And when a brand gets that middle right, you know, that's what we see a lot of on like Super Bowl ads and all that kind of stuff connected to the emotion. But [00:23:00] in the experience of being a customer is where these crescent ones really come alive. What are the dressing rooms like? You know, where is the product?

What's the customer service like? Can we help you do a bra fitting or not? You know, like all these little things they indicate, are we here for you or are we not here for you? Do we really believe in you or do we not believe in you? Are we just trying to sell you something or do, or are we trying to get you better?

Chris Kocek: Mm. Those are great questions. 

Katie Dreke: Yeah, and it happens also like in the mountain sport area too. I have a lot of work I've been doing recently with outdoor companies and in some cases I would say the problems that you see in terms of like lack of parity, lack of equity, lack of appropriate attention, where attention needs to be some, in some cases in the outdoor industry, it's even worse.

There are a few handful of brands that are founded by women and they're dual gender brands and they do incredibly beautiful product, but you always feel, I'm invited here. And then there are other outdoor brands where you're like, oh, I'm, I'm invited to visit. This wasn't built for me. [00:24:00] This was built for him, and I'm just invited to come along and for the ride and get something smaller and then a pastel color when the time is right.

But like they're not designing to me. They don't actually see me or are aware of me. 

Chris Kocek: All of this is reminding me for some strange reason of one of my favorite Italian restaurants here in Austin. It's called Mandolas, and in the bathrooms, both the men's and women's bathrooms. I can't say for sure the women's bathrooms.

I think my wife told me yes, it's like that in the women's bathrooms too, but in the men's bathroom, they have a full on changing station, stocked with diapers and wipes and other things, and it looks kinda like the thing that you would have in your own home if you were changing your, your child. And I just thought it's such a nice touch.

It's something that says, we are a family restaurant and if you're going to come here with your family, we're not gonna give you just one of those koala plastic changing tables. And so that little extra touch means a [00:25:00] lot to me as a parent. And so those things on the edges that you were talking about with those crescent moons, those vibes, those little touches, they can make a huge difference.

Katie Dreke: Totally. And really I think what a lot of people focus on, like that comes up a lot in parenting circles, particularly amongst the women. Like I always have to be the one who has to get up from the table and leave the meal and take the kid into this restroom environment, which is like, uh, is this gonna be even clean?

And then there's this plastic thing with the weird seatbelt and it's like this, I have to do this, but what if you just flip it a second and be like, the men don't get to do this. This experience you have with your child is actually very bonding. And a lot of men miss out on the ability to do that because again, the environment that we live in, the, the social environment, the system doesn't enable them.

Chris Kocek: Well, one of the things you brought up earlier was that, you know, there's all these essentially invisible systems at play, and I sort of think of that as [00:26:00] like dark matter. It's dark matter that's sort of obscuring what's going on. You don't realize it unless you're taught to look for it, I guess. And of course there's always the danger that if you're taught to look for it, you'll start to see it everywhere.

You'll see patterns where maybe patterns aren't always there, but there are definitely a lot of patterns that are there in these systems that have, you know, grown up from a hundred plus years ago and are still with us today. And one of the things that I know that you, you, you mentioned in one of our earlier conversations that I found fascinating is around language.

And you've mentioned it here as well, which is that there's a coding. Right, that people code things through the visuals, through behaviors and actions. And when you were studying women for various Nike projects, you really went deep into understanding pregnant athletes, not just female athletes, but pregnant athletes and [00:27:00] how they would talk to each other.

What were some things that you found out in terms of phrases they use, topics that would come up, things like that. 

Katie Dreke: Yeah, that's a great example. I was lucky enough to be present on the team when it came time to go to market with Nike's first ever maternity collection. They've never made something for the pregnant body before.

And so it was a real sort of reckoning from the marketing and communications side where we're like, how do we do this? Like how do, how do we talk to an athlete that's pregnant? We've never spoken to pregnant people directly before. How do we even learn how to do this? There was a really brilliant idea that was spun up out of the Valiant Labs.

That team in that building was filled with what people who were called entrepreneurs and residents, they were given hunting zones, which were like new opportunity spaces for Nike to be thinking longer term, deeper into the future about, and that those entrepreneurs and residents were meant to [00:28:00] build potentially new businesses, new channels, new angles.

And really pilot them and put them out into the public eye. So we tapped into them to say, are you guys already thinking about pregnancy down there? And if not, could we incite you to do so for us? 'cause we're getting ready to go to market in about six months and we, we need to get smarter than we are today.

What do you reckon? And they were like, actually we were kind of playing around with an app for pregnant people who are interested in staying busy and mobile. And there's still a lot of doctors and OB’s who advise women to slow down and to not, you know, and Nike was realizing there may be an opportunity here to actually help women get accurate health and fitness information that keep them in their, in the athletic game through pregnancy onto the other side.

So it was, it was a conversation that was kind of nascent and we turned some gas on it. You know, long story short, they built an app. It was not Nike branded, it was pushed out on the Apple App [00:29:00] store. It became filled with several thousand pregnant women who were conversing about all kinds of topics about, you know, nutrition and sleep.

And, uh, what did your OB say? My OB said this, you know, classic sort of when your body has been hijacked by this crazy process called pregnancy, and you've never done this before. Like, yeah, you're leaning on every single person you can find to figure out as much as you can and make it a positive experience.

So we softly nudged those conversations into some zones that we wanted to learn about. We observed them talking. To each other about things we were definitely paying attention to, like the tone and manner. We saw that there were some women who were stepping forward and like leading and mentoring. We saw other women who were showing vulnerability and asking and saying literally things like, I'm scared, I'm anxious.

I don't know. I feel strange. You know, like all of these, I [00:30:00] mean, very vulnerable, safe place. And then occasionally very softly, we would sprinkle in some community moderated questions around product. Like, what are you finding you need? What are you finding that you can find? Or what can you not find? And what gives you the most confidence?

What gives you the most comfort? What gives you the most strength? All those kinds of things. You know, we wanted to answer this question of like, what do, what do pregnant athletes talk about when they talk to each other when we're not, we're not around. And what does it reveal about their state of mind, their state of experience, and their state of emotion?

Chris Kocek: What stood out to you? Was there, were there a couple things that you were like, this is interesting? 

Katie Dreke: Well, I think the thing that stuck with me was the overt vulnerability, which is really different from the classic sport tone, which is swagger and confidence and you know, shit talking and performance and winning 

Chris Kocek: chest thumping.

Katie Dreke: The classic sort of like [00:31:00] professional sport, classic sport is more of an overtly masculine sort of feeling. So this is a very. Naturally vulnerable space. So we, we were gonna definitely need to look at copywriting and we were gonna have to figure out how to talk to women. I've also been pregnant twice, so I could, I could really understand, especially the first time where you're just like, what the hell is going on?

So there's a lot of confusion. There's also mixed messages. You're getting, Nike is seen as an authority on sport in so many ways. So we needed to be careful about what we said and what we didn't say. We were gonna need to be nuanced doing this for the first time. So we didn't wanna over promise, we didn't wanna over rev and confused and I thought you were Nike, but now you sound like something else.

Like I don't, we still need to try and figure out how we could be ourselves and also reflect back to her that we see her through a clear lens. [00:32:00] And when it came down to talking about product. Nike Excels at product and marketing through a technical lens. Features, functions, performance advantage, et cetera.

How do we translate that into something that has a completely different performance agenda? This is about keeping you safe and healthy while you're doing some of the hardest work your body has ever really done, and most importantly, from a philosophical level and also from a commercial level, keeping that woman in sport, not letting her fall away.

A lot of women lose their footing in pregnancy. Sometimes they have injuries, sometimes they life gets busy on the other side and they can't find their way back. They can't get back into the rhythm. The juggling of work and parenting responsibilities. You put yourself third and you never make your way back to sport.

And so it was really about like, we gotta keep her here. And also we were finding in the data that when we do keep her in sport, when she has her child, she models sport to the child, encourages the child to play sport. The spouse is also, you can see it in the data. The spouse is also more [00:33:00] engaged in sport.

So from a commercial point of view and also from a, if you have a body, you're an athlete point of view, like we owe this to her and also to the future of our business. Really critical linchpin person support her through this journey. 

Chris Kocek: There were some additional data points around pregnancy that I just found mind blowing.

What were some of those data points around pregnant women and the state of their bodies, the way their bodies function during pregnancy? 

Katie Dreke: And you know what's wild? When we dug up these data points, like these were things as someone who had been pregnant twice, I had never heard from my doctor, from any of the books that I had read, any of the podcasts I'd listened to.

So how come we don't even know this? But it's one of the most biologically, extreme and frankly, awe and inspiring endurance feats. I think that the human body can never undergo, and it's a total trip from the inside. But things like pregnancy can raise a woman's metabolic rate [00:34:00] by 15 to 20%. That's part of why she's more hungry, you know, or more often, and needs to snack all the time.

It's actually equivalent to running a daily half marathon for months and months and months. The blood volume in her body will increase by 40 to 50%, and her heart actually grows in size during pregnancy so that it can facilitate and pump all of this blood through the system and through the child's system, and it creates an aerobic load in the body that rivals any kind of elite training.

And then women will often lose about 30% of their lung capacity towards, especially towards the end, due to their organs being compressed and reorganized, moved around because the child gets bigger and bigger, even though they're oxygenating for two people at this point. So they're doing all this extra metabolic work, they're pumping 40 to 50% more blood through the system and they're doing it with [00:35:00] 30% less lung capacity like they are an endurance athlete.

Through this process, and this data actually helped us in many ways convince the, the wider organization who were skittish for various different reasons about even launching this collection to understand this is an athlete to say this person is not an athlete is just statistically, scientifically inaccurate.

The work this body is doing replicates the work that people force themselves into in order to become elite athletes. And she's doing it by existing and going through this process. If pregnancy was a sport, it would be like an ultra marathon or like an expedition type sport or a high altitude mountaineering or something.

Except the stakes are that you're actually creating another human being at the same time. So like spiritually, existentially, metaphysically, like there's a baby on board, there's a new human on board. This is wild. The layers of le and levels [00:36:00] that you could get into by serving this person, like with emotional communications, with like philosophical communications, practical things, it's a really rich zone and it's as, as a woman who played a ton of sport who struggled myself to stay in sport through both my pregnancies 'cause it is a trip.

And who's worked inside of two of the largest sports, multi-sport organizations in the world. It, it boggles the mind that older brands like Nike's over over 50 years old, ADI is older than that. How is it possible you haven't nailed this yet? Like, and I, the only thing I can go back to is to reflect again on this, on the larger system.

It's just not built to even see this cohort of people. And it's ridiculous that I even say cohort because women are 50% of the planet. But still 50% of the planet is not understood, seen, or designed for. 

Chris Kocek: That's crazy. Those statistics just completely blow my mind. And I love what you're saying about this is an athlete just, just by [00:37:00] virtue of of being pregnant and undergoing all of these changes, the physical endurance, the stamina, all of these things.

Scientifically, you are an athlete and we need to serve these women as athletes. So after all is said and done, you launch the Nike maternity line. How did it do? 

Katie Dreke: Well, the North America market for Nike and for many of the sport brands out there, 'cause North America is so huge and so sport bonkers all the time was the biggest market, but felt a little uncertain about it.

And the AMEA region was like brilliant. They just raised their hand and said, we're gonna lead. We're gonna take it. We're gonna launch it in Nike Town, we're gonna launch it connected to membership. You need to sign up to become a member to access the product. And we're gonna work with Wieden and Kennedy to create a beautiful pack of film materials.

We're gonna talk to Serena Williams to get her voiceover, like we're gonna go for it. [00:38:00] And the team there completely owned and really stood behind this work in a way that North America was a little skittish and a little nervous to do. Immediately it sold out. And so then there was a second run of product to feed the demand in ea.

Chris Kocek: And just for our listeners, AMEA is Europe, middle East, and Africa. 

Katie Dreke: So 

Chris Kocek: it's Gotcha. All 

Katie Dreke: the European continent as well as Russia, and then parts of the Middle East and Africa. Yeah, so a second run from the factory was ordered. They had done sort of a minimal viable like test. This is a new thing.

Immediately went back. North America was like, woo, okay. We went in on that and then we realized, okay, good. Now we're tapping into the main vein in terms of like commerciality, and our goal was for this to not be a one-off. We really were like, this needs to be an always on. We've been talking to ourselves amongst the team about the collection being a 3, 6, 5 sort of evergreen offering that a pregnant woman at any point in time could come to Nike and find something, [00:39:00] but we were worried that if it didn't do well, maybe it would damage its viability for a future longer term solution.

But it took off. And I just checked yesterday on nike.com just to see what the collection's looking like and they've added in the last year some new additional pieces like um, a fitness dress that you can go for, walks in a new sort of fitness shoe that is easy in and out, no laces, which for people who've been pregnant, understand how important that is to not have to try to bend over and tie your shoes so you can slip in and out of these shoes that will allow you to walk and train and continue to move around in a sport like way.

It was just a great sign for me, you know, five or six years later to see the core collection is still in. They're expanding the collection and it is always on. There's a couple people that I think were really mission critical to that success. Stephanie Ankara, for example, she was the brand lead in a, in ea at the time.

I wanna just give her a huge shout out. She took on a lot of [00:40:00] risks. She also worked with, uh, we and Kennedy on bringing a lot of that work to life. And the GM at the time, Rosemary St. Clair, who was kind of an icon inside of Nike. 

Chris Kocek: That's a wonderful story and, and I'm glad that it's been so successful. I want to rewind a little bit, uh, to when you're getting started with a client, whether it's Nike or it's any of the clients that you've worked with.

You know, I know that you don't like the plug and play approach. Right, because every project is different. The world is always changing, categories are changing, people are changing. So when you're getting started on a new project, you're, you're kind of like an investigator at a crime scene. Are there certain places where you like to begin for clues?

And if so, what are those places and what are some of your favorite questions that you like to ask to try to understand what the real problem is? 

Katie Dreke: I wouldn't say it's like a tried and true method. I have found a little bit like the Wieden + Kennedy [00:41:00] statement of like “Walk in stupid.” Like I try to start every project from taking full advantage of my ignorance and it's harder if it's a client I've been working with before or if I know quite a lot about, but I try to be as ignorant as possible on day one.

And tactically, this just means I don't immediately open up all the provided materials. I don't immediately spend a several hours with the brief highlighting that, you know, I just give it a scam. I understand what the issue is, and then I set it aside and don't look at it for a couple weeks or maybe a couple days, and I will interact with the brand in a passive way like a customer would, or like a citizen of the world would, you know, do I feel anything from this brand? Do I see them anywhere? Where do I see them? What are they doing there? What do they feel like? What do they sound like? I'll visit a store maybe in a downmarket situation, like a factory store or in a mall, and I'll go to their premium pinnacle store.

I'll interact with the people who work there. I'll ask 'em [00:42:00] questions about the product, about how they like working at the company. Some people will tell you quite a lot if you just ask them a few sort of leading questions. I'll try the product. I'll sometimes buy it online so I can get an idea like, what is that user experience like?

What is the packaging when it arrives, what is the return process like? Sometimes I'll buy two so I can return one and see what the return process is like. I'll look at their socials obviously. What, what content are they making? What's the fidelity? How often are they posting? Um, are they posting with other people?

Are they posting other people's stuff? Sometimes I'll call the customer service department. What is this process like? Do I talk to a robot? Do I talk to a person? What is the script that person is using? What sort of invitations are they making? I read reviews. I read the news. You know, are they being covered?

Who's covering them? What are they saying? Are they showing up in Forbes or are they showing up in buzzfeed? Like where are they? Show up and I'll skulk around and Reddit and I'll skulk around and. You know, and under the dark of night, I try to create a little bit of a understanding who are these guys?

[00:43:00] What are they up to? Especially if it's a brand that's not a startup and has been around the block for a while. What were they like 10 years ago? What were they like 20 years ago? Are they currently at their apex or was their, is their apex behind them? What did their apex look and feel like? I need to understand what their high watermark is.

Or maybe they've never achieved it yet. They're still on their way. So after that, I have a pretty strong but not fully formed point of view. It's an outsider's point of view. And then I feel really confident cracking open the materials and listening to them tell me or tell themselves about themselves.

So it's an internal dialogue now that I'm participating in. And here's where you can start to go, oh, now I know why the customer service didn't feel that great. They have a new head of customer service and they, I can see on this chart that they've got a three year vision and we're in year one, and it hasn't gotten fully started yet.

Oh, I can see what they're trying to do and oh, I agree. Those are the gaps they should probably fill in. [00:44:00] So sometimes you see that. Sometimes you see, oh, they've got problems, and they're not even on the map internally. They don't even recognize that they're there or they recognize 'em. They're unwilling to talk about 'em.

Chris Kocek: I love this investigative journalism approach, and I love going in basically like a secret shopper and experiencing it for the very first time, even though you may have been a customer of the brand before, but now you're just kind of trying to go in and just be like, okay, I, I don't know anything. I'm an alien on this planet and I'm experiencing it for the first time.

And then when you go to their branded materials, you're kind of doing this assessment where you're trying to bridge the gaps, if you will, between, here's their story, here's their vision of themselves, and here's what I experienced firsthand and or here's what I learned from people I spoke to who experienced the brand firsthand, either behind the counter or as a customer.

And the gap could be quite large. I [00:45:00] would imagine sometimes between how the brand sees themselves and how you and the rest of the world sees them. Is that fair to say? 

Katie Dreke: Yeah. And sometimes you find stuff that the consumer is feeling, the staff is feeling, the organization is feeling, but nobody's managed to kind of like articulate it. With Arc’teryx, you go into their store, they're beautiful, pinnacle product, highly engineered, stunning. They have a very iconic. Design silhouette. They're recognizable on the ski hill. You can, that's our terra. It's beautiful stuff. But because I was being tasked to work on the women's side of the business, I walked into the store, you know, with my women's consumer hat on and I'm like, I don't know where to start here.

I don't know where the women's section is. Everything is for everyone. Now, someone could say, that's great, it's gender neutral. But I actually disagree. Like the outdoors are manifestly a masculine place. Women are looking for themselves in the outdoors [00:46:00] all the time. You do need to signal something.

You do need to do something with the, with the way finding in the store or even with the staff. I had a conversation with one of the staff people who kind of played back to me, the feeling I was feeling from their own observation of customers. 

Chris Kocek: Hmm, what did they say? 

Katie Dreke: Unprompted unprompted. Like he, he said, oh yeah, women come in and they kind of go, where do I go?

And we recognized really quickly, like there's some small things we can do without, without having to like reinvent the wheel or anything. Just even the way the staff talk to women about, can I put something in the dressing room for you? Like mimicking some of the things that women experience in other shopping environments.

You know, women wanna touch, they wanna try, they wanna try it on, they wanna try it on with a couple other things. Can I wear this off the mountain or is it only on the mountain? And then I need to switch to something else. If I go to the bar later, can I keep this on? Does it still look good? You know, so they're thinking about different stuff and they're looking for support from the staff in different ways.

There's some low lift service layer stuff that we can do. Typically, what I [00:47:00] also wanna do after like getting a chance to get under the hood myself, you know, walk myself through it, then I allow them to walk me through it through their data. I typically will get the opportunity to talk to people, just classic stakeholder interviews.

You know, the more senior the better. 'cause you, you kind of wanna get an idea of like the rarefied air up in the board C-suite where the pressure's higher and there's certain messages they're trying to land. And there's also certain blind spots that they may or may not be aware of or be willing to deal with.

And I also wanna talk definitely to people whose necks are on the line if the work doesn't. Come to fruition the right way. They're very direct, they're very concerned. And that, and that level of just like quick fire is usually like wonderful to balance out everything else. And then lastly, I will usually request, do you have an archivist?

Do you have somebody who's running like the vault who's keeping track of history around here? I don't have someone that's usually a flag. If they do have someone, I definitely wanna talk to them. There's usually like an OG, a, a legend teller, somebody who sits around the campfire and [00:48:00] helps the company remember who they are and what they're about.

But I also wanna talk to the young bloods, like people who are straight outta college, they're in their twenties, they're coming, coming in hot, you know, and they're, they're fired up. They understand all the new tools of the trade, and they're frustrated by the old guard. They're frustrated by the ways of working, you know, and they, they often will poke holes at different things.

Some of them are not real problems because they're young and inexperienced than, they're just more irritants to them personally, as opposed to an actual problem. More often than not, they do see something. And then I always wanna talk to the critics, like who's the, who's the Eeyore? I wanna talk to the person who's bummed out all the time about everything.

I wanna give them a, give them a forum to kind of just bitch and moan, and that's where I get my solid sort of phase zero. Starter work and I, I try to, you know, if someone asks me for a proposal, I'm always trying to put a phase zero into the work because my assumption from having been on the brand side and having been on the agency side is oftentimes [00:49:00] by the time a brief is created, it's been rushed to a certain degree and there's stuff that's been left out that I probably would really wanna know or could really work with.

So I just make a generalized assumption that the brief is great, but not complete and I wanna put, do a phase zero to like fill it all in and then we can race. And usually by the time we finish phase zero, myself and the client, especially like the lead client who we have like trust tree conversations about everything that's going on, politics and whatnot.

By the time we get done with Phase zero, we're like, oh my God, we know exactly where we're going. Now it's just a matter of getting all the meat around on the bone and then doing the internal road show to convince the rest of the organization that they see it as clearly as we see, see it. 

Chris Kocek: Well, I love your information gathering process and how you're using these little bits of information to not only potentially impact messaging, but also impact little innovations inside the organization, whether [00:50:00] that's small changes to the retail experience, small changes to the, uh, staff interaction with the customer experience. There's lots of little things that can make for much better experiences, which then make those customers become part of your word of mouth marketing team because they, they buy the stuff, they talk about the stuff, they say what a great experience they had that can be worth its weight in gold, right.

Compared to spending a million dollars on a new advertising campaign. So your, your insights have a pipeline directly to innovation inside the organization and I love that. 

Alright, so, uh, we're at our speed round and we're just gonna jump right in. What's your favorite word in English or any other language?

Katie Dreke: I'm gonna say, uh, I lived in Amsterdam for four years and I love the Dutch word "Gezellig" and you know the Dutch, they put their Gs in their back of their throat. It's a G word, [00:51:00] S and I actually have a tattoo of it on my arm. 

Chris Kocek: Let's see it. Oh, there it is. I got it 

Katie Dreke: when I left. Because the word s means or captures kind of a feeling where you have like the right people, the right vibe, the right food, the right atmosphere, and it's, "Gezellig"that's a word that they use a lot.

And when you, I first moved there, I was like, what is this word I keep hearing? I don't understand. Took me a while to figure out how to use it myself. And then when I got ready to leave, I realized my time there was, so I wanted to like get a, get a mark on my arm to take away with me. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, that's beautiful. That's the souvenir. That's right. That you took back with you. Did you get the tattoo there in Amsterdam? 

Katie Dreke: I have a tattoo there. I got it from a place called Salon Serpent. It is a. Female run tattoo parlor. Also, the typography I chose is a design that's called Curl, K-R-U-L-L, or basically translates to curl.

And in the neighborhood that I lived in [00:52:00] called the Yan, they have these things called the brown bars or brown bars and they, it's because people used to smoke in them and the walls are like the wallpaper's all brown, but the windows on front, the name of the bar will be done in this particular script and it's very iconic.

And so when you walk around Amsterdam, you'll see this sort of like hand painted Krull design. One of the ad agencies I worked at there, 180 Amsterdam, our client was am still beer amt, still beer, named after the Amstel River. And we hired a typography artist to do Krull design on the art direction for the print materials.

And so I found that guy and he took the word "Gezellig" and made it look. Appropriate and perfect. And I took it to, uh, this woman at Salon Serpent to try to get my most authentic mark to, to walk away with. 

Chris Kocek: Oh, that's a wonderful story behind the tattoo. What was your favorite subject in school? 

Katie Dreke: I always really liked English.

I just really liked story [00:53:00] and I was lucky that there was a really strong. English program at my high school, and we got to do everything from like Beowulf through to writing college papers and blue books and practicing like long form writing and, and a lot of like, uh, team type writing. And I just feel like being able to communicate through the written word is really a beautiful art form.

Chris Kocek: Well, as an obsessive reader, what is a, uh, recent good book you've read? 

Katie Dreke: I've read recently this book that I also gave to my daughter who's studying marine biology. It's called The Mountain in the Sea. The author is Ray Naer, N-A-Y-L-E-R. And without giving too much away, it has some incredible uses of ai.

It's also about the sentient nature of underwater life and also the fine line between AI and uh, becoming another form. So there's a lot kind of going on in this book. Some of it's pretty dark and be, can be a little disturbing. Some of it is [00:54:00] just like incredibly beautiful. 

Chris Kocek: Now speaking of kids, I know your kids are older now, but is there something that one of your kids said or did when they were very young that made you go, huh, that's interesting. You just made me look at something in a totally different way. 

Katie Dreke: You know, when my daughter was three, like every parent, you know, you look at your kid and you're like, oh my God, you're amazing. And I've always thought my daughter was very wise and I even, I would take her to get her hair cut and the hairdresser would be like, oh, I'm sorry, I just kind of started talking to your daughter because she's such a good listener.

And I just started talking to her like an adult. I shouldn't have done that. She kind of draws people out that way. She's an old soul. And she was, I think only three when she was asked to be a flower girl in my cousin's wedding. And she, my cousin was getting married in Denmark, so we flew with my mom and my aunt and my sister.

So it was, uh, this girl's trip out there. We were sightseeing and we were on a tram. Um, I think we were in Prague at the time and. Ella looked out the window and looked [00:55:00] around and she looked at me and she goes, mom, I wish, I wish we were the same age so we could be friends. And I was like, we are friends.

And she's like, no, but like, you know, but she was like three. But she, but she just, I think she liked traveling with the grownup ladies and I think she just was like, I wanna be, your peer is, was this very sort of grownup sentiment that came out of this tiny little person. And I started to cry of course.

'cause I was like, whoa. I agreed with her at that. I'm like, yeah, that wouldn't be fun. I mean, now she's 21 and I just went to mom's weekend at OSU and we went bar hopping. So, I mean, I guess we're doing it now. Mm-hmm. 

Chris Kocek: And you got tattoos? 

Katie Dreke: No, not yet. Well, we'll eventually we've been talking about it. We've been scheming. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: Is there a brand whose work you really admire or that you think to yourself that's so good? I wish I'd come up with that. 

Katie Dreke: Okay. So there's a brand. Sweden called Houdini, the [00:56:00] former CEO Ava Carlson. When, when I was doing work for h and MA couple years ago, every time I came to town, we'd grab dinner and they're such an impressive organization.

Very, very focused on circularity and responsibility to the planet in a way that they're really driving and putting pressure on that industry to think more deeply about materials and end of life. And they just demonstrate constantly what, what that looks like. They, they did a tie in with a ski hill where you could book your ski, your boots and your ski kit so that when you arrive to the ski hill, you can just fly in with basically clothes.

And then when you get to the ski hill, your ski parka, ski bibs, you know, jacket, pants, whatever, and boots and skis are all there for you to borrow and then you're done. And then, so you don't have to spend $500 a thousand dollars. You can just borrow it and book it directly at the ski mill. They also have a hub [00:57:00] location in Stockholm where you can shop new.

You can shop secondhand and repaired or just reclaimed or owned by somebody for some duration of time you can subscribe to, which means, oh, it's winter and I want to have a down park at, think it goes from my chin to my ankle 'cause it's really cold here, but now it's spring and I don't need this anymore.

So now I'm done subscribing to it. I'm gonna bring it back. Depending upon the state of that garment, they might sell it as secondhand or they might just let it remain a prescribable object. I mean, they are really trying. So many different things. And then the other thing that really impresses me is the aesthetic of their products.

They have a design aesthetic that starts from a female perspective, but is very easily dual gender for men and women. Men can see themselves in this brand. Women definitely see themselves in this brand. The way they shoot the product, the way that they editorialize the product. Really, really stunning.

Very thoughtful. And they are a company that has a 66 year plan to [00:58:00] circularity. They are working towards it and they're putting their skin in the game. And then the only other, a additional example I would definitely wanna talk about is something called Benim. Denim, which was a company, a brand that was created to be shut down.

So it doesn't exist anymore. It was founded by two guys, uh, again, both from uh, Sweden. They had a connection to dead stock denim, and they saw that there was a big, substantial amount, a big roll. And so they made a collection of denim for men and women pants and like tops and jackets. So I think it was only three pieces. Really like deep indigo, beautiful, rigid, sort of salvage level denim. They made it, they named it denim and they shot the launch photography like it was at a funeral. 'cause the goal of the product launch was to sell out and then shut. The company concept is just incredibly attractive to me of [00:59:00] taking something that already exists, which is dead stock, creating a brand, creating some desirable product, create some heat around it, sell it all the way out and shut it down.

There is no aspiration to scale. There is no aspiration to go global. There is no aspiration to own the market. But just like startup to shut down the mantra is like the undergirding of all this thing is like so funny. I really love it. 

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?

Katie Dreke: It's probably that clunky first job you have right after college where you're like, I'm so smart and I've got so much energy. Somebody gimme something cool to work on, but you really just can't get the doors to open. You've, you know, eventually, as I did realize, I just gotta get something going here. I need to move outta my parents' house.

I need to have my own apartment. I need to get going. And my uncle was working at a software company in Seattle, and Seattle was booming at the time. It was kind of the.com era. It was tech center. And he's like, I think [01:00:00] we're hiring for a receptionist. I'll, I'll put your name in the hat, you know, and eventually I got to come and meet the CEO and interview with him.

And I was the receptionist at this software company. I think a lot of people who have either like waited tables or pulled coffee. Might have similar experiences where, where you are very publicly, like the bottom of the totem pole, the way people interact with you is so interesting. Some people just shit on you.

Like it just, they're really dismissive. They ask you to do shit that they know they're not supposed to ask you to do. And then occasionally like a new employee would come. I remember we hired this guy named Harvey Storm and he such a great name Harvey Storm and he moved from California to become the new channel marketing director.

And his first day he came and he chatted me up. Like he just wanted to know everything that I knew. He was really savvy. He knew that the receptionist knows what's up. I knew who was having an affair. I knew like [01:01:00] who was about to lose their job. 'cause I overheard people talking about laughs. Like you end up becoming actually very.

Central. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, you're, I mean, you're on the front lines with people who are calling in or coming in and you're interacting with everybody in the organization. It's kinda like a cab driver. 

Katie Dreke: It was funny, it was that Harvey Storm character though, um, because he was new and he didn't know anybody. And we went to lunch a couple of times and I was asking him, so what are you doing?

And he is like, well, I'm, I'm in marketing. It's a specific kind of marketing called channel marketing. And for software that means, you know, we need to get our stuff pointed really narrowly at specific audience types. I was fascinated and he's like, you seem like someone who's kind of grokking this stuff may maybe you have a future on marketing.

He was the first person who even just thought about it for me and I realized, yeah, actually this sounds like it would be kind of fun. So eventually I did find my way into marketing. Thank you. Harvey Storms. 

Chris Kocek: He saw something in you that you didn't even recognize in yourself at the time. Yeah, 

Katie Dreke: I did not. 

Chris Kocek: Last [01:02:00] question.

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? 

Katie Dreke: I think it was my friend Sean Stripling, who I used to work with at an ed agency. She was the head of planning and she introduced me to planning and brought me into her planning assignments and pitches, helped me transition into that world.

And she said something along the lines of, you just need to act like you already have the job you want. If you walk around the building like, yeah, I can do this. I am doing this. No big deal, whatever, people will look at you the way that you are looking at you, but you have to believe it first. And you have to embody that concept and show them that it's not a journey that you're on.

You're already there. Even it helps when, when you go into pitches. Um, I remember being on the agency side, just I'm walking into the room like, you guys are already my client. I'm gonna talk to you like you're already my client that works for chemistry reads, I'm gonna present this work. Like it's naturally the best solution.

We figured it out. My confidence will become your [01:03:00] confidence. So acting like you already have the job you want is kind of interesting. And what it does for me now. When I'm consulting, it's a little more of a head game. It's a little bit of a twist 'cause I'm not, I'm working for myself. I actually have the job I want.

I gave myself a great job. It's wonderful. So I fabricate a story when I'm working with my clients, I act like I already have the job internally that they have seen fit to bring me in and fill that gap. So in some cases it's a head of marketing or it's a chief brand officer looking around across the entire enterprise to like synchronize things that are out of sync.

Sometimes it's a head of advertising, sometimes it's a creative director. You know, just depending upon what the brief is and the problem as you start to understand it through that phase zero work. And so I act like I'm an employee here. I say we, I say us, I say our product, you know, and I, I step into the role inside the [01:04:00] organization, like I'm already endemic and a part of the body and the beast, and it creates a better flow with the project.

We are in it together. I am, you know, linking arms with them as like a comrade in the trenches. I'm no longer an outside person who has all the answers, but I'm the person who comes and is gonna work really hard side by side to find the answers or the answers that, um, work right now 

Chris Kocek: on a subconscious level that is very sports team of you, right? You're already on their team by saying, we us not you guys, or this organization, you're already part of that team. And I think probably on a subtle subconscious level. It makes them feel like you're already one of us. You're already with us on this journey. 

Katie Dreke: It's kind of wild how quickly I slip into it. I have caught myself a couple times saying it and seeing across the table like a flicker of like, you don't work here, what do you know?

And I'm like, oh, [01:05:00] maybe I said it too soon in the relationship. I need to pull back a little bit. And then maybe like, you know, the next meeting, that sort of thing will work. But I slip quite easily into it now and sometimes I have to pump the brake. But it helps, it helps me so much to just do it. I now organically do it and, and I do think it maybe does come from sport.

I mean so much of people's business success, they will, without prompting attribute to being on sport, even if it's just as a kid, learning how to bend, learning how to lose gracefully, learning how to fill a gap when someone is injured or unable to play. Learning how to show somebody something that you master.

Learning how to be the student when somebody else has mastered something, you don't, learning how to take criticism from your coach. You're not ready to play goalie. You're not ready to start, you know, like, okay, what do I need to do, coach? And then learning how to work on performance and, and progression.

And also sometimes knowing when to quit. Like just being like, you know what, this isn't my jam. Like, I remember I quit the basketball [01:06:00] team my senior year and my two sports that I was the strongest at were volleyball and softball. And basketball, we had the best team in the, in the state for, I don't know, a 10 year span.

There was two, six footers on the team. Like there was a, a left hander who could shoot the three, like with her eyes closed. Like I just, I wasn't gonna be starting, I was gonna be maybe a second stringer. I just, and I was like, you know what? I, I'm gonna put my eggs in this other two baskets over here where I'm at my A game.

I'm at the top, I'm in the newspaper. I'm feeling good, like I was getting some looks from colleges and stuff. I don't need to also play basketball. I'm actually gonna take myself out of that one and feel good about it. So it was. Sometimes just knowing when to walk away too. 

Chris Kocek: Well, Katie, from your aha moments that began when you were five years old to your aha moments around the Nike maternity line and everything that you've shared today.

Thank you [01:07:00] for. Sharing those, uh, with me and with all those who listen, and I really appreciate your time. 

Katie Dreke: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Katie Dreke, founder and CSO of DRKE, a global strategy collective based in Portland, Oregon. If you want to connect with Katie, you can find her on LinkedIn. 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 see this is what I'm talking about, insights!” If you're looking for even more ideas and aha moments, head over to chris koeck.com. There you can find some of my newest online courses, case studies, and creative exercises. You can even sign up for one of my hands-on workshops where I show you firsthand how to build effective insights faster.

The workshops are great for helping with new business pitches and for creating culturally contagious [01:08:00] campaigns. Special thanks to Megan Palmer for editing, sound mixing, and production support. Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking what if more often.