Mario Natarelli, Managing Partner at MBLM | How Brand Intimacy Can Make or Break Your Business

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Remember Gain Grow Retain on the HubSpot Podcast Network. Today my guest is Mario Natarelli. Mario is a managing partner at Emblem. Emblem is a marketing firm that focuses on brand intimacy. Now what is brand intimacy? Brand intimacy, the definition is the emotional science behind the bonds we form with the brands we use and love. In 2020, Emblem did a study to measure brand intimacy. This was the list. Apple, Amazon, Google, Walmart, YouTube, Toyota, Disney, Netflix, Chevrolet, and PlayStation from first to 10. Those are the brands with the top 10 highest brand intimacy. Now why does brand intimacy matter? Well, across revenue growth, profit, stock price, brands that have the highest brand intimacy with their customers outperform everyone else. So there's a huge revenue component tied to having high brand intimacy. And this is what Emblem studies. And this is what Emblem helps their customers with. Mario himself is the author of the Amazon number one best seller brand intimacy a new paradigm in marketing. He is a regular speaker and has been featured on Yahoo Finance CNBC Fox TV mornings with Maria and NASDAQ market site amongst others. He also speaks globally at conferences and industry events. So let's jump right into this. Let's understand brand intimacy and how you can improve your brand intimacy with your business. This is Mario Natarelli, managing partner at Emblem. Well, the fast version of that story is thanks for having me, by the way, Scott, the fastest version of that story is I graduated as an architect at a time of a recession in Toronto. And I love architecture. I love the education of architecture and the application of it. And I practiced for about five years and really struggled and saw this career trajectory that was going to take me multiple decades. The recession was a blessing. I ended up doing everything to kind of survive. A lot of it was marketing related. And I started a digital marketing business at the beginning of the internet, essentially, with some colleagues. And we had a lot of success very early on. We were one of the first companies to use virtual reality and a lot of the exciting things that were happening in the internet in the early days. We got acquired. And this little company from Toronto was then part of a big marketing conglomerate called Interpublic. I moved to New York. I thought it was going to be a two year move. It ended up now in my 20th year here. Along the way, I learned a lot. I joined a branding agency within Interpublic called Future Brand. I led the digital practice there for a good five to six years and then eventually worked my way up to CEO of Future Brand in North America in the Middle East. I worked on brands of every size, scale, nature. It was really my indoctrination to all things branding. And along the way, I learned that there were a lot of parallels between the study and the education of architecture and the building of brands. And about 11 years ago, we decided that we really needed to rethink marketing and branding and we decided that starting a new company called emblem would be a better vehicle for doing that. And so here we are in our 11th year of proving out that theory. So first of all, congratulations on the success. I'm sure that exiting a marketing firm is not easy. But still, that's very impressive. Even the early career pivot and the success they're very impressive. I didn't even know you were from Toronto. I'm Canadian as well. I'm also from Toronto. A little bit younger than you. I didn't go through the recession and the early stages of the internet, but that's still incredible. I'm curious. Okay. So two questions out of that. First of all, what are the lessons that you've learned in architecture that carry over to marketing? That's an interesting lens that I don't think many people have. Architecture is a wonderful education in art, science, technology, culture, really understanding how cities work, but also how we live in the environments around us. So you really have to be tuned to a lot of things and really be masters at many of them to be a successful architect. And I think that's what really intrigued me about the profession. It's sort of felt like this entire lifetime of journey to arrive at building spaces that will remember and that will change the way we live or the way cities work. There's something very ambitious and bold about brands. They're culture-driven things, right? Great companies are great cultures building those from scratches analogous to how you form a building or how you form a city. It's also analogous in that it's art and science, right? A lot of this can be measured and can be engineered and some of it is instinctual, creative and whimsical. And so there's some parallels there that are interesting. I think the other thing about architecture is it gives you a training in a critical eye, understanding the role of history and how to judge, critique, evolve, create, collaborate is really important in architecture and also in marketing. So those are just some of the things that I draw parallels to. I love the analogy and the parallels that you see in architecture versus marketing because I definitely agree that all those things are what makes marketing so beautiful. And what I've seen more and more and I want to get your input on this is that it seems like people are focused more on transactional marketing versus that beautiful culture that the whimsical and the creative mix with the tangible ROI on marketing dollars spent in this particular thing. And I'm curious as you've basically been in marketing since the internet, which is very impressive. Have you seen. Or some marketing. Yeah, no, well, listen, it's you have you have such tenure in the industry, have you, what have you seen change in what marketing is over your career to what it is today or has the main core threat of what marketing is stayed the same. Well, I think there has been some major pivots and the one that you started the question around is this ever increasing focus on the near term and the tactical and I think the more tools that we have to measure things, the more the executive layer of organizations see look to see immediate returns on actions initiatives and marketing tends to fall into a dangerous zone when you think of it in short term. And especially when you think about the culture of an organization, how long it takes to mold the culture and then shift it. It's hard to measure those things in the media terms. It's also hard to measure things sometimes on tactics. So, you know, our job as helping clients transform brands, we try to help move them upstream and think about the wider view, the longer term, but that's a perpetual challenge for executives and for CMOs. I mean, we're here on the agency side. Our challenge is significant, but on the client side, I imagine that's even harder and probably why CMOs have such short tenures. And all revenue leaders have increasingly short tenures, CMOs in particular, CROs, VP sales, it's difficult because especially in an increasingly venture backed world where you have to have results on steroids or you're out, which I don't think is healthy either. You know, Ponka has a whole set of issues. So, when you started in marketing, what would a client come to you to achieve when you first started your firm? Well, on the digital side of the business, you know, these were the early days when people were enamored and sort of digital was romantic in a sense. So, really, just having a presence was the achievement. So, in the early days, it was, you know, rather simplistic, you know, can we build a digital version of this brand? You know, we spent a lot of time even convincing people that there was a reason to do that if you can believe it. So, we've long since passed those hurdles and challenges, right? It's almost funny to think about at some of those initial conversations that we have with brand owners trying to explain to them the role of a digital player. I have a website. Well, I have a website, right? What is the commerce and what do I need it? Those are almost cute nowadays, right? And now, when you, when you, when brands approach you and emblem, what are they, what do they need now? What's the, what's the, you know, as an agency, I'm sure you specialize and I want to unpack what emblem actually specializes in. Sure. But what do brands approach you about because they see you, they see the work that you've done and they say, I want to achieve what? Yeah, clients come with to us with similar pain points. Generally, they're in a transformation of some kind, you know, we are trying to move from X to Y. We're growing and we're maturing and the brand needs to keep pace with that business growth or sometimes two brands are coming together and they need to form a new entity or a business idea needs a brand from scratch, name identity, you know, strategy execution. So those tend to be the reasons people join or come to us initially. One of those pain points is, is generally prevalent. In addition, we do do some surgical work on big companies that have well established brands and that could be things like helping them rationalize their portfolio. Do they have too many brands? Are they the right brands? Are they organizing the right way? Or tactics sometimes are important. We need a campaign. We need a new web presence or we need a new strategy and social or, you know, we have some interesting thought leadership. We need you to help us package it or activate it. So those tend to be more surgical deployments compared to the more larger brand transformation work. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode Netsuite. Now picture this. This is it. The putt to win the tournament. If you sink it, the championship is yours. But on your backswing, your hat falls over your eyes. Is this how you're running your business poor visibility into what's actually happening because you're relying on spreadsheets and outdated finance software to see the full picture. You need to upgrade to Netsuite by Oracle. If you are a business owner, you need visibility into what's happening in your business. Netsuite gives you that visibility. It gives you visibility over your financials, your inventory, HR, planning, budgeting and more. Netsuite is everything you need to have visibility, to have control and most importantly to grow all in one place. 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