I feel like Steve Gilman and I share so much in common– from leading small but mighty agencies to music and culture. Recently, we had a chance to connect and have a great conversation about our thoughts around branding and marketing on his podcast, “Brand Story.”
Listen to the podcast here.
Or scroll down for the full transcript. Enjoy!
Carolyn Walker:
A lot of people that we’re talking about in terms of audience don’t understand that brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what your customer says it is, and what they say it is based on the experiences they have with the brand.
Steve Gilman:
This is Brand Story, a podcast featuring in-depth conversations with leaders, marketers, and brand storytellers about their professional journey and the impact they’re making on the world around them.
Welcome to the Brand Story Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Gilman, and my guest today is Carolyn Walker. Carolyn is the CEO and managing partner of Response, an award-winning independent marketing agency that serve clients like Logitech, McAfee, NETGEAR, Voodoo, Amazon Web Services, and more. She has extensive experience working with companies on brand building and performance marketing, and co-created the hugely successful Hackable? Podcast by McAfee, which is in the I think the top 1% of podcasts ever produced. Hi, Carolyn, welcome to the program.
Carolyn Walker:
Hi, Steve. Thanks for having me. Very excited to talk to you today.
Steve Gilman:
I’m really excited to talk to you too. I’m so glad our paths crossed and we get to have this conversation. I really think what you all do at Response is pretty impressive. You do all types of different marketing, but I know you’ve done a lot of tech. You’re wearing a Logitech headset right now. Aren’t they a client?
Carolyn Walker:
They are a client, yes. I’m very happy to say we’ve had Logitech as a client for almost 20 years.
Steve Gilman:
Wow, that’s great.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, it’s beating that norm, right, or average. The brand agency relationships is usually two and a half, three years or something like that, and we’ve had them for almost 20.
Steve Gilman:
That speaks volumes. I think there’s something about independent agencies that’s very different than the big agencies, and I’ve had different agency leaders all the way from Kristen Cavallo from Martin to Laura Havlos from FlightView. We’re an independent agency too and our average client life is 10 to 15 years.
Carolyn Walker:
Well, I think it’s a much more intimate relationship, right?
Steve Gilman:
It is. You go through thick and thin. You’re in the trenches together. It’s a very one-on-one relationship with leaders. I think it’s just a different feel and some companies really respond to that and that’s what they want.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, I’d agree. I started my career at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in Manhattan. At the time, it was one of the largest agencies in the world, and it was a totally different feel and experience. Of course, I wasn’t on the client side at that point, but just from being inside the agency, it felt much different than it does leading Response.
Steve Gilman:
Yeah, I bet. It’s a lot less personal.
Carolyn Walker:
Completely, yeah.
Steve Gilman:
I think there’s an expectation in big agencies, whether it’s spoken or unspoken, that clients aren’t going to be there for very long.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that there is. Back then anyway, I think one of the big complaints that we would hear is that the client would get pitched a certain group of people and then the reality of who’s working on their business is quite different. In the small agency world, you don’t have that. We don’t have any B or C players on our team. They’re all A players. What you see is what you get.
Steve Gilman:
I can relate. I mean, I think that’s a huge dissatisfier with large agencies and I think any other large consultancies is that you talk to A team, they pitch, you get excited, and a lot of times you get the B or C team. I’ve seen clients get frustrated with that over and over and over again. I think your company works with brands and you’re really trying to break the status quo of how marketing is always done, but you’re certainly very versed in brand management. Is there anything about Response that you just really want people to know, because you guys do a unique mix of work?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, we do lots of different things, but I would say our line is we help ambitious brands punch above their weight. Those are the kinds of brands we’re looking to work with, brands who are not satisfied with status quo. That could be a challenger brand. It could be a brand who’s leading the pack, but it’s those brands who are like, “We know we can do more and be more than we currently are today.” We love helping brands like that. We don’t like the status quo position. We don’t like to be conservative. We want brands that embrace creativity and disruption and all those kinds of things.
Those are the kinds of brands that we’re looking to work with. And then the punch above your weight side is really, we don’t just suggest to our clients, “Oh, you should do this because this is what we know.” That’s not what it’s about. It’s about looking at comprehensively what’s the problem and what are all the possible solutions to the problem and coming back with really great creative ideas that drive the result for them. That enables them to punch above their weight.
Steve Gilman:
I think great independent agencies have the ability to make it difficult on themselves over and over and over again. You’re not just finding solutions. You’re not pulling stuff off the shelf and doing what you’ve always done. You’re always trying to, quite frankly, punch above your weight. All independent agencies do that, and that’s where I think the real value is. You don’t get that institutional mindset. You don’t tend to repeat. You tend to do original work. There’s something that you put on LinkedIn about a standup meeting that you had. It was, if you want happiness for an hour, take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. But if you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone. I love that. I’ve heard it before, but it was a great reminder. I feel like that’s at the heart of an independent agency. You’re not waking up every day thinking about how much money you can make. You’re just in the trench just trying to help people succeed.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, 100%. For me, it was never about the money or, oh, I own an agency. I don’t even like the title CEO or owner. I don’t like it. It’s not who I am and what I’m about. It really is about helping people, and I think it’s inherent in who we are as an agency. The money I think comes because you do great work and because at your core you’re wanting to help people. I’ll tell you a quick story about that in terms of not just pulling something off the shelf. McAfee had been a client for about 10 years when we came to them with this idea of Hackable.
Steve Gilman:
I was just about to ask you about that. That’s great.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, thank you. Oh, good. I’m a little ahead of you. I had become a huge consumer of podcasts. This was back in when Cereal came out, when everybody else became a consumer of podcasting. I was like, what is this and why are so many people talking about it? I started listening to Cereal and I could not believe how engaged I was and drawn into the content that I was. I went from Cereal to This American Life to The Moth. I was like, I couldn’t get enough. I was ingesting everything and became a huge fan and realized the value of having content in your ears in such an intimate way.
The theater of the mind that it produced for me was just outstanding. Fast-forward a couple years, I was on my way to California to visit our clients out there on a plane and I read an article about how brands were starting to dip their toes into the podcast waters. My first meeting as I landed was with McAfee. I thought, wow, as a marketer of security, we had this challenge, which was we knew that the number one thing you can do to defend yourself is to be educated about what the threats are. But the problem is that there’s so much apathy about that, about using the software.
Who cares about it? I set it and forget it. There’s apathy about the product and there’s also apathy about even hearing about, how do I defend myself? It really is a set it and forget it situation. People don’t think about it until what happens. They get hacked or they get their identity stolen.
Steve Gilman:
Difficult to sell prevention, isn’t it?
Carolyn Walker:
It really, really is, really difficult. We tried all kinds of things over the years, some with varying degrees of success. I thought, wow, this could be a real opportunity where if we do it the right way, we can engage people in the conversation around cybersecurity. I landed. I didn’t even have a slide or anything, I swear, Steve. Had this meeting with my client. At the very end, I’m like, should I say anything? Should I not? I don’t have anything, but I think it’s a really good idea and it’s totally on strategy.
I shared the idea with her and she loved it. She was like, “This is an amazing idea. I want to pursue it.” Have my trip to California. I’m out there for a week. I come back to my team and I’m like, “You guys are not going to believe what I just did.” Because to your point earlier, we had never done anything like this.
Steve Gilman:
Now we got to figure it out.
Carolyn Walker:
Exactly. We had never done anything like this before.
Steve Gilman:
I think that goes back to what we were talking about, about the power of independent agencies. When you have inspiration and inspiration strikes, you have that direct access to the decision makers, and you’re able to be at a level with them where there’s a trust where you can communicate inspiration without a polished presentation. You can actually have an exchange of ideas in an honest way. I think that’s the strength of what we do.
Carolyn Walker:
Well, again, I think it’s that intimacy of the relationship and knowing someone so well and understanding their business and their problems so well that you can convey it without a slide.
Steve Gilman:
We’ve always felt that we live our clients’ brands along with them.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, I think that’s very true.
Steve Gilman:
Because you wake up every day and, of course, you care about your brand and you care about what’s going on with your company. But I think most days I wake up, I’m thinking about my clients way before I think about me, because I just honestly care about them. That’s such an amazing story. That just blew up too.
Carolyn Walker:
It really blew up. It really blew up. I think there were a few keys to success there. One is that we made the podcast entertaining first. It wasn’t a sales pitch for McAfee. It was really entertaining content. The format of the show was any hacks that happened in pop culture through say Black Mirror or Mr. Robot or even the news, we took these hacks that people were exposed to in pop culture.
We recreated them in the audio format, and then we put them to test with our host, Geoff Siskind, who was the rube in the situation, and white hat hackers. We said, “Should you really be nervous about this or not? “And then at the end, we gave them some tips and tricks. If you listen to a show or two, you’ll know what I mean. It’s very engaging and very entertaining. I think that was one.
Steve Gilman:
Yeah, they are. As a matter of fact, I’ve been a fan of that podcast years ago and still. It was a great program, and I think it had all the right ingredients that people seem to miss in podcasting. It’s about storytelling. It’s about engagement. Man, I don’t know about you, how many podcasts have you listened to, especially business podcasts, where the value proposition just keeps getting stuffed down your throat?
Carolyn Walker:
Oh, it’s horrible.
Steve Gilman:
It’s just below the surface of every single thing. Even when we started this, I just want to tell people stories and meet cool people that I admire. I’m not trying to sell anything.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s too much when it’s two talking heads that are really just trying to pitch the business. No one’s going to listen.
Steve Gilman:
No, it’s gross actually. Congratulations on that. I think that’s just absolutely amazing accomplishment because you were very early to the game, and I think it set some really good examples too.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, definitely.
Steve Gilman:
That was a really powerful one out there at the outset for business podcasting. It was one of the best.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, thank you.
Steve Gilman:
Being audience-centric, it seems like people talk about it a lot, but it always amazes me how many brands don’t do it.
Carolyn Walker:
It’s incredible, right?
Steve Gilman:
It’s just mind-boggling to me. People fall in love with their own features and benefits and just yell them at you. It just doesn’t work.
Carolyn Walker:
Absolutely the wrong thing to do. Actually, I heard you talk about Liquid Death, and that is an example of a brand that really knows their audience.
Steve Gilman:
I’m such a fan.
Carolyn Walker:
Huge fan too. We’ve been talking about them since they launched internally in our agency because they’ve done such a great job at branding.
Steve Gilman:
The laser focus they have on their brand is something any of us can learn from and also other brands can take a page out of that book pretty easily. Let’s talk about brand building a little bit. I’ve seen you talk about and seen you write about how that foundation of knowing who your audience is and really knowing how to speak to them and being focused on that helps set the foundation for brands. You’ve helped a lot of brands. Can you talk a little bit about brand building and your point of view on it?
Carolyn Walker:
Well, I think thinking about brand first is huge. We get a lot of clients come to us that maybe don’t understand totally brand or have complete clarity about their brand. That’s where we come in and help. I do think there’s many things that are very foundational to building brand, and one is understanding what brand is and isn’t. I think one of the big things that a lot of people that we’re talking about in terms of audience don’t understand that brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what your customer says it is.
What they say it is based on the experiences they have with the brand. You better make sure as the company, as the brand, that you are properly thinking about every single touchpoint that you have and making those experiences what you want them to be from a customer perspective to influence what they think about the brand. Because ultimately it is, your brand is what they think it is, not what you think it is.
Steve Gilman:
Man, when you leave experience as an afterthought or as customer servicer or explaining and making sure everyone in the organization is on the same page about what the brand stands for, it’s destined to fail.
Carolyn Walker:
100%.
Steve Gilman:
It happens over and over again. I mean, not to bash Best Buy, but it’s my favorite example of a disconnect between what someone says and what you experience. You go in and you get treated terribly because they don’t connect the dots. I think that frontline experience, I mean, I love hearing that, I think you and I could probably talk about this all day, is that it is 100% about the experience and the consumers decide who you are and what you mean. You don’t get to tell them.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, exactly. I think what you’re talking about in a retail environment where you do have frontline workers who are interacting on a minute by minute, day by day basis with your customers. We have a blog post about the forgotten ones in the restaurant industry, but it’s the same thing in what you’re talking about in Best Buy. You cannot forget about those thousands of people who are your employees who are touching your guest, your customer. They need to be advocates and stewards of the brand to give that customer a great experience, and so many brands overlook that.
Steve Gilman:
Yeah, especially when they’re consumer facing and they’re actually the touchpoint. The way you treat them is 100% how they’re going to treat your customers.
Carolyn Walker:
Absolutely. I think Maya Angelou says something about that. The thing that people won’t forget is how you treat them.
Steve Gilman:
Yeah, exactly. It’s like you can do the best brand campaign, you can know what why is, you can put out the best marketing, and then if someone interacts with your frontline and gets treated badly, that’s all they’re ever going to remember. Guess what? That’s who you are now.
Carolyn Walker:
It is who you are. Guess what’s going to happen nowadays? They’re going to tell everyone else about it too. The first thing you’re going to do is post it to social, send a group chat or whatever.
Steve Gilman:
It amazes me the effort that’ll go into talking about a brand talking about itself and there’s an unequal effort or an unequal effort to actually train and take care of and communicate with the frontline employees. It happens again and again, and it’s like the money and the effort needs to go to both places. The maddening thing about brand is you can’t just do one of them.
Carolyn Walker:
No, no, absolutely. You have to look at every single… The whole 6 360 degree view. Where am I touching all these people? What am I doing? Does my website marry up with my in-store experience? My in-store experience is great and my web experience sucks. It’s a problem.
Steve Gilman:
We could just talk about this all day. There’s something that you talk about and I know you care about that I think is so interesting because it gets misinterpreted a lot of times is when people are trying to apply performance marketing measurement to brand and the difference. I know you all do both. You’re talking about brand building, I work in brand building, but you also work in performance marketing. But I feel like on the client side, sometimes as soon as someone gets a little performance marketing success, they think that those metrics are going to apply to brand.
Carolyn Walker:
I mean, the metrics clearly don’t apply to brand. I think what’s happened in the last 10, 15 year, 10 years I would say, is that brands have… Have you ever been on a whale watching ship?
Steve Gilman:
No, but okay, I love this analogy.
Carolyn Walker:
It’s like you go out on the boat and there’s a whale on the left and the whole boat scrambles over to the left-hand side. The thing tilts over and you’re like. And then there was a whale on the right and you go to the right. I feel like digital marketing has done that to the world of marketers and brands, is that it was the thing that everyone leaned into. Not to say that that’s wrong, I do think that digital marketing plays a huge role in building brand, but it was like the shiny object that became the thing that everyone invested in because of the availability of metrics and the ease of getting the metrics and last click attribution and all of that.
It felt more proven that you can invest in an SEM campaign and you see that you get so many clicks and you get so many purchases. We don’t need to do anything else. All we have to do is put all of our budget into digital and performance and we’re done. We’ll grow the business. Well, what’s happened 10, 15 years later is that they’re seeing that the research shows that if you’re only or mostly focused on performance marketing, you’re eroding the brand because you’re not building brand and you’re base sales are going away, essentially. It’s a big problem and it’s a big conversation that is happening now.
It’s not a contest between brand and performance, and I’m not saying that brand building can’t drive performance. I’m not saying performance has no impact on brand at all. I think that really, really good brand marketing does drive performance, and I think that you need to think about how you use performance to align to brand instead of eroding it. Right now, I think the big issue is that there’s an imbalance in budget between brand and performance, and it’s way too tilted towards performance. I think we’re starting to see it come back. I think at some point it will come back where performance is maybe where it should be.
I mean, Les Binet and Peter Fields, based on all of their research, say that performance should be about 26% of your budget and the rest in brand in the B2C world. In the B2B world, it is a little more equal. It’s a little more 50/50. But the fact of the matter is that in all the brands that I’m working on or a lot of the brands that I’m working on, that’s not the case. It’s a challenge to convince the CFOs of the world that the right thing to do is invest in brand.
Steve Gilman:
It’s a little bit like instant gratification. You can see they love the data, oh, someone purchased, but it’s a short-term game sometimes.
Carolyn Walker:
It is a short-term game. To prove the brand side, it takes time. It’s six months or more of investing in brand before you can actually see the results, because the tracking isn’t… It isn’t instantaneous like that, nor does behavior change that fast. And also, brand building really is about talking to the audience that’s not in market today.
Steve Gilman:
Exactly, exactly. It’s about creating those relationships.
Carolyn Walker:
It’s exactly right. It’s about education and awareness and building the love, so that when they are in market, you get them.
Steve Gilman:
Hallelujah! Man, we need to do an episode about just this because this is something we talk a lot about. The clients that we have that do have it more in balance are more sustainable and more successful over time.
Carolyn Walker:
100%. I’m not surprised by that.
Steve Gilman:
No, I’m not either, and it’s amazing to see. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with performance marketing. It is a powerful tool, but it is just a tool. It’s not the ultimate answer. And then what happens is it gets talked about, or at least it used to, not as much now because I do think it’s turning, it got talked about like it was the end all and be all and it would just kill everything else.
Well, yeah, if you’re selling a widget online, you know what I mean, it’s an interchangeable widget, at that moment, yes, that was exactly the thing to do. But in the long term for any kind of consumer brand in the world we live in today, the perception and the relationship, it’s so emotional the way people buy. There’s nothing emotional about performance marketing.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, no, there isn’t. It’s about what you’re doing. Simon Sinek talks about it. It’s like the how, the why, and the what. You focus on the what and who, okay, that might work just to get them to convert that one time they’re in market. But after that, you’re in trouble.
Steve Gilman:
It doesn’t create loyalty. It doesn’t get them to come back. They’re just going to click on something else the next time.
Carolyn Walker:
One thing I will say, Steve, about building brand and going back to Liquid Death, because they’ve done such a… Water is a commodity. Let’s face it, right?
Steve Gilman:
It’s brilliant.
Carolyn Walker:
Brilliant job. When you do branding right, your brand is worth something and it drives your enterprise value up. I just read that Liquid Death is valued at $700 million. Their sales are $150 million. I would argue that a huge chunk of that difference between 150 and $700 million is their brand value, and that should perk up the ears of every CFO f on the planet.
Steve Gilman:
I mean, that is where the value is. The truly successful brands understand that. When you get to a certain level sometimes of whether it’s CFOs or CEOs, they really start to understand the power of brand. The companies we all hold up and use as example are usually the ones that are getting it, the Mints of the world, the Liquid Deaths.
Carolyn Walker:
The Apples. The Nikes.
Steve Gilman:
Apples and Nikes.
Carolyn Walker:
Yes, exactly.
Steve Gilman:
I mean, boy, does Nike get that. I think that’s why I love the Liquid Death example, and I just love how laser focused they are on their audience and how their philosophy of like if it’s a bad idea, let’s go do it for creative. That’s just so much fun and it fits them so perfectly. I like that it’s unique to them. Not just anyone could do it with any brand. You have to figure out what’s unique to you. You can’t just do what the other guy is doing.
Carolyn Walker:
Exactly. They become very differentiated by their unique ideas and how they market themselves. Their differentiation really is marketing.
Steve Gilman:
That is 100% what it is and I think that’s so cool. Let me ask you a couple questions about you, because you’re an accidental entrepreneur. You got into this. You’re very successful. You guys have tons of accolades and awards, and I love your work. What’s a surprising thing that you’ve learned about leadership, something that you really didn’t expect? Because I don’t think you jumped into this to be a CEO.
Carolyn Walker:
I didn’t. I feel like leadership is so many things. Like I said, I didn’t set out to be an agency owner, but I think leadership is really, for me, about… A lot of it is about listening and learning and knowing that I don’t know at all. I don’t. I’m constantly trying to educate myself about what it is to be a good leader. I’ve learned so, so much about having empathy to the people who work for me and understanding the people that work for us. We went through a Workplace Enlightenment Certification through the 4A’s, and that was completely eye-opening.
It made me think about things that I would never have thought about before. You don’t think that you have bias, but in reality you really do. It’s just being aware of that stuff. I think that we’ve had a really amazing experience with our team, and we have a lot of team members who have stayed with us for a really long time. I’ve been told that people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers. Having people who stay with us this long makes me feel like we are doing something right as an organization and the culture.
By the way, my business partner, David Kleinberg, has really been influential on the culture of our organization. I just feel like as a leader, being open to the ideas and stuff that have been brought forth to create that and to allow that to happen was a big lesson for me.
Steve Gilman:
I like what you call that about empathy and listening because they’re the old model that people thought and got taught by bad example. They had a leader that acted like a “boss.” That authority trip thing that leaders get on thinking they should have all the answers. I think it’s just a very human endeavor. I think the better you can listen to people, the better you can have a sense of what people are going through and be there for them when they need you. It’s not a transaction. You don’t use people as a business.
You’re there to support them in their lives. If you can do that honestly, your brand’s going to be more successful. It’s a little what we talked about, about frontline people, but I think it goes even beyond that when you’re an organization that’s built to help others. The independent agency, we’re here for our clients. We’re going to get in the trenches and try to figure something out for them. Sometimes it’s urgent. Well, if we’re not taking care of ourselves and each other, we’re not going to be very good at that, are we?
Carolyn Walker:
That’s exactly right. I mean, I think you said it really nicely, we are in this together. We rely on each other. We trust each other. We treat each other with respect. Those are all the things that you need in order to be in a service business, number one, and give a good product to your client, number two.
Steve Gilman:
What event in your career has shaped you the most as a person or as a professional? What do you think really got you to who you are today?
Carolyn Walker:
Well, that’s a good question. I think what shaped me as a professional probably goes back to my Northeastern days and having those amazing experiences with the brands that I worked with back in college. I can honestly say I would not be where I am with without that, both that education and the experiences that I got with them. They really set me on my path. Incredibly grateful for that and incredibly grateful to my parents for paying for me to go to Northeastern and get the education and experience that I got. And then I think shaping me as a person, I think nothing can compare to the experience that I got or I’m getting at Response.
I have changed so much by being part of Response in the things that you’re talking about. I’m way more empathetic than I’ve ever been in my whole entire life. I’m way more collaborative than I’ve ever been in my whole entire life. I’m living in way more joy than I’ve ever had in my whole entire life. I just couldn’t trade that for anything. Maybe that part of that is just getting older too, I don’t know, but I think it’s getting older in the right environment maybe.
Steve Gilman:
Yeah, I think that’s great to hear. I mean, I always love when I talk to people who are in the right place and having a great experience in their careers. It is very personal. Our work and our life are inextricably linked. Where you are and the people you’re with and how you experience that every day has a huge impact on how you develop as a human being and your daily experience and what you can bring to others. You’re doing some really cool things. I know you’re out there on podcasts, and I’m so happy you’ve joined me today. I’m having a blast talking with you. What would you name this chapter of your life right now?
Carolyn Walker:
That’s a good question. I would call it the sponge, meaning that I continue to learn so much. I was just in Arizona with the Jade Forum, and we’re talking about agency growth and positioning and M&A and talent issues. I’m a sponge. I’m learning everything I can from them. I’m learning so much about entrepreneurship. I continue to learn more about branding. I am just soaking it in and applying it to the clients that I work with.
Like I mentioned before, I’m learned so much about DE&I, not only for ourselves, but we actually helped Carrier launch a DE&I brand internally. Brand valuation, just all these things are… I’m just soaking it in and learning as much as I can and applying as much of it as I can. I would call this chapter of my life the sponge.
Steve Gilman:
I loved that. That was absolutely wonderful. The movement for DE&I and the people starting to truly respond to that instead of programs in corporations is, I mean, we need that. Let me ask you one final question. I mean, we could talk all afternoon, but I know you probably have a few things to do. If you could give your younger self any advice, what would it be?
Carolyn Walker:
To my younger self I would say, really appreciate the experiences that you’re getting. I completely undervalued the experiences that I got at Saatchi & Saatchi, and I undervalued the experiences that I was getting at Dart. I just didn’t know. I was so young. I didn’t realize how much I was being exposed to and how much they taught me. I’m certainly very, very thankful for all of that, because again, I was able to apply all of that going forward to these smaller companies and businesses.
But I just feel like I didn’t really know exactly how fortunate I was at the moment. I think related to that is that every decision matters. You can make a decision to go to a company and move to another state and it changes your life literally. That can literally change your course of your whole life. It certainly did for me. I would say every decision matters.
Steve Gilman:
I think that’s a great place to end because I love that sentiment and I love how it applies to us as people and it applies to brands. Every decision matters and every touchpoint matters. I always loved the saying, you can do whatever you want, but everything matters for brands. You can act however you want. Sure, go ahead. But every single thing you do is going to matter.
Carolyn Walker:
That’s exactly right. You’ve got to think about all of it and make sure you’re doing the right thing every step of the way, for sure.
Steve Gilman:
For you and for your customers and your clients. Thank you so much for your time today. This was so wonderful. I had a great time talking to you.
Carolyn Walker:
Likewise, Steve. Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.
Steve Gilman:
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