How to change peoples minds with Bruce Dundore

Bruce Dundore:
Nothing gets done in our world in terms of convincing anybody without compelling storytelling. That’s how you change minds.

Lee Wochner:
“To thine own self be true,” Shakespeare advised in the play “Hamlet,” and that’s what Bruce Dundore helps clients do as a partner in the branding agency Fundamental Group: identify the truth about their brand, develop their story, and strengthen their culture. It’s the essential first chapter of marketing.

In his career as a brand builder, copy writer, conceptualist and all-around thinker, Bruce has spent his career changing minds — about the benefits of early childhood education, the dangers of smoking, and the reliability of Jaguar automobiles.

How do you go about changing people’s minds? As he says, It starts with storytelling.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to the podcast that lightens the tension when things sort of get hard… That’s What C! Said, the Counterintuity podcast, featuring interviews with leaders and doers who have helped to make our world a better place through their actions — and especially through marketing, communications, and embracing change. Here’s ourhost Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
So Bruce Dundore, it’s nice to have you here, good to see you.

Bruce Dundore:
Thank you, Lee.

Lee Wochner:
The call I had just before this, interestingly, is a prospect in the neighboring city here. They’ve been in business since the 70s, and they called me and said, we’re not sure our name is working for us anymore. Should we change our name? And it made me think of you because you’re… you’re a partner in Fundamental Group, which is a branding agency. Can you give us the, I realize most of us have some sense of it, can you give us a sense of what a branding agency does and what Fundamental Group does?

Bruce Dundore:
Well, I’ll tell you what we don’t do as a branding agency. We don’t do logos. We don’t think branding is logos or name change. Our approach to branding is much deeper. It’s about the purpose of your company, which in another time was called your mission, which we don’t believe in either. So now it’s the purpose of your company, it’s why you exist and why should anybody care? And at that point, you start to move into the culture of the company. And you start to move into the reasons. why people should come to work for you, and then why customers should care about you and put you above anybody else. And then at the end of the day, branding is about how they remember you. And so after that’s established, you can have all the logo fun you want. But that is what we try to do is to find the drama inside companies.

Lee Wochner:
Well, the logo follows that, right? You have to understand the drama as you’re talking about so that you can develop the logo.

Bruce Dundore:
Yeah, because the logo is essentially a story. And the best logo designers will present the logo as a story. The trouble with logos is that they become, give me 20 logos, and they’re all like little chits at a casino. No, the logo is a very deep, very important part of your whole gestalt. And it needs to have a story behind it. Everything, part of the logo needs to hint at something, be a metaphor for something. When you unpack the logo, it should unfold the meaning of the company. That doesn’t happen much.

Lee Wochner:
So the counterintuity logo is a C with an exclamation mark, because our thought is we make an impact. Is this, I hope, to God an example of what you’re talking about?

Bruce Dundore:
Yeah, I think you could put that up there. There’s also some humor in that logo. There’s some levity in that logo. And so you’re isolating the C and putting the exclamation mark, and you’re using the word, which is, by the way, the word is also an interesting word to capture, counterintuitive. Right away, the viewer goes, what does that mean? And whenever you get to what does that mean, that means you can have an actual conversation with someone.

Lee Wochner:
So you used the word story a minute ago, and I know you’re a crackerjack screenwriter. I mean, I’m impressed with, you know, and I love having lunch and dinner with you and talking about movies and story and all sorts of things. So is there a difference between branding and storytelling?

Bruce Dundore:
I think that all branding is storytelling and all storytelling is branding. I think that there can’t be a meaningful brand without a story behind it. I don’t think you can have a meaningful workforce inside a company that doesn’t retain the story of the company they work for. I don’t think the customer, the consumer is going to have to remember you in some way, shape, or form. And that is usually… that is in the form of the advertising you do. And not all advertising tells great stories. Great advertising does tell great stories and leaves an impact on people so that you can be remembered quite simply just by the name of your company. And all of a sudden what floods in is a lot of emotion. So I don’t see that branding and story, they are one and the same. You cannot have one without the other. definite tool to arrive at a brand. It’s a necessary component in the expression of the brand, in the dimensionalization of the brand, and to make the brand more human. Nothing gets done in our world in terms of convincing anybody without compelling storytelling. That’s how you change minds.

Lee Wochner:
because you grab people by the emotions and also because you make a quick, indelible impression.

Bruce Dundore:
You do that and you also tell them that, you know, and Lee, you know this because the real format is that the world is okay and then something goes wrong with the world and then there’s something that comes in that is going to solve what’s wrong and bring it all back to the breast ring, which is the world turned back to normal. You know, there’s no story in Gotham if something doesn’t go wrong with Gotham and then, and Black flags Batman down and then the beginning of the story of the adventure in Batman is always Batman’s trying to find a way to solve the problem. And so that’s that is the structure of story Marvel does it very well they told me they’re classic storytellers. Star Wars did incredibly well, it was so that the journey the journey the hero so but you know every company somewhere along lines has a story and it usually starts. It’s somewhere lodged in the founder’s mind. Now what happens when the founder leaves? Founder dies, founder sells. And all of a sudden three more companies take over that company. Pretty soon that story is somewhere in an attic, real dusty, full of cobwebs. No one knows what it is. And that has to be resurrected. We like to come in to companies just like that, that have lost their way in terms of story. They no longer know really how to communicate what they do.

Lee Wochner:
You know, you remind me of Hewlett Packard. Like, I can’t even explain to you why I love the idea, the history of Hewlett Packard so much, except it was Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard in a garage, and I respond to that.

Bruce Dundore:
Yep.

Lee Wochner:
And yeah, right? And then what happened is Carly Fiorina put herself in front of the garage, and I resented it, and I don’t know what she did to the company, and I don’t know what they represent anymore, but. But now it’s all tarnished. It’s meaningless to me, Hewlett-Packard. I don’t know what you’re about.

Bruce Dundore:
Yeah, what she did was the greatest sin. She stepped into the shadow of the founder.

Lee Wochner:
Mm.

Bruce Dundore:
And it is a crime to step into the shadow of the founder. I think that Tim Cook has done a very good job of not being Steve Jobs.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, he’s an operations guy. Steve Jobs

Bruce Dundore:
Yeah,

Lee Wochner:
was a visionary and Cook is an operations guy and knew it.

Bruce Dundore:
But Cook’s first big misstep would be coming out in a black mock turtleneck and blue jeans.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah.

Bruce Dundore:
And he found a different laid back Silicon Valley fashion, but he is not imitating Steve Jobs. You find that a lot. You find that they try to imitate the founder, the legend, and it’s a mistake, it’s a mistake.

Lee Wochner:
So Fundamental Group specializes on the tech sector, and that’s what we’ve been talking about a little bit, but you’ve done a lot of work with nonprofit companies and public agencies. Why is it important that a nonprofit, a public agency, a company, any of these, how crucial is it that they know their story? I mean, can’t they just putter along without that?

Bruce Dundore:
Yes, they can putter. But puttering is not necessarily change. I think that the nonprofits probably are the greatest need of story overall, because they are, in essence, trying to change behavior. I mean, every company is trying to change behavior. The change of behavior is by me, not them. But But a nonprofit, generally, an issue-oriented nonprofit, is trying to get something done in a societal way that is asking for a change, an adoption of a behavior. And the only way you can change behavior is with compelling storytelling. That’s how we came out of the cave. That’s how it continues to exist. So the nonprofits need as much of that storytelling ability as anybody else. maybe even more. I’ve been through a lot of, and boy, you struggle with it. You struggle with it. Because trying to get nonprofits, and IE put into that government groups, very hard to convince them of a lot of stuff. But it took a long time for us to find the appropriate story to stop tobacco use. It took us a long time to find the components of the appropriate story. One was policy, and the other was communication of the policy. I would go back to my time on anti-tobacco, which the singularly most important thing we did was secondhand smoke. And secondhand smoke was a thing that changed the game. Because once you could find the research that said that it caused all kinds of dilemmas, then the story is, you’re right, stop at my nose. And all of a sudden you do policy places because now you’re harming other people. So then you have the, I remember going through the no smoking in restaurants and I said, okay, then it was no smoking in bars. And we were nervous about that because we said, oh, geez, Chris, what are you going to a bar for in the first place? But the only thing we could do is put forth all the bartenders and waitresses that suffered the dilemmas of your smoking in the bar. So, you know, you find these stories and they have to be incredibly compelling and they have to be in nonprofit based on a real good truth, a verifiable truth. And so yeah, as far as stories can say, it’s even more important. I have more of a passion for that than anything.

Lee Wochner:
I remember driving around town and seeing billboards that mocked the Marlboro man. And let’s talk about him for a moment. The Marlboro man is a very good looking, sexy, brawny guy out with a horse on, you know, out on the ranch. And he’s attractive and he can do things and he smokes Marlboro. And then my friend Bruce Dundore put together a billboard campaign. where the Marlboro man stand in says to his friend, Bob, I’ve got emphysema. And we’re gonna put that in the show notes because you can still find that online. I looked, Bob, I’ve got emphysema. And you kind of cut the knot of their story. And now it’s like, you know, the Marlboro man’s telling his buddy he’s gonna die from the cigarettes.

Bruce Dundore:
The whole purpose was to interrupt their story. So now our counter story was basically interrupting their story. And we knew that, by the way, the only one that we got away with was the Marlboro. And the legal machinations on the part of the state were pretty hilarious because we got challenged all over the place. We had Newport campaigns, we had camel campaigns. Remember the camel? And we had campaigns that were going after every single one of the cigarette brands that were major outdoor advertisers. We got sued that we couldn’t do those things, but somehow the state made a point that, well, you can’t own cowboys. You can’t own cowboys. So we got away with that. And I missed my lumbar, barbaryfemizema. And then we did the impotence billboard with the Marlboro man with the flaccid cigarette. But we got away with Marlboro because it was OK because Marlboro represented smoking. But I don’t know how we didn’t get away with Newport where people coming down a water slide. I’m like, well, because water slides are owned. It was a very strange logic. But I think it was back then in the 90s with the settlement and the tobacco industry was pretty much kind of dancing and dodging stuff in terms of what they were going to be able to get away with.

Bruce Dundore:
And the state was vigilant. The state was good. They were strong in this.

Lee Wochner:
The other thing this makes me think of is, you know, in the eighties, there was a lot of drunk driving in this country. And I mean, I certainly saw a lot of it, and I saw a lot of accidents because of it. And you could tell that that’s a drunk driver right away. I don’t think I could tell you the last time I saw a drunk driver. And that’s because of mothers against drunk driving, getting real active and vigilant and putting this together and going after it. and started by a mother whose kid was killed by a drunk driver. And so they kind of took on that story, and it was mothers against drunk driving. So I guess my question here is, why is this not working with gun control? Is it that we just need a campaign or something, or what’s different?

Bruce Dundore:
Because we have this mythological constitution that basically gives people this statement that they’ve already chopped in half to only allow the second part of the statement. I forgot, I guess they did that in the 80s or 70s. Where is your right to bear arms versus a well-regulated militia. I don’t think we have the guts for it. And for some reason, it’s a third rail deal. You know, the crazy thing about it is that Scalia himself basically said the word arms is open for discussion. So Scalia, the conservative justice, right, allowed for the restrictions of automatic weapons. But did that get buried fast? I believe it did. No one talks about that.

Lee Wochner:
Oh, well, let’s not give up hope. So in your developing the story of a brand, does the story already exist and it’s obvious to others, but not to management itself? Or does the story get created or is it some amalgam of both?

Bruce Dundore:
I had this great boss years ago in New York, and he was Bill Backer. And he was the legendary guy who wrote, I like Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony.

Bruce Dundore:
Big, you know, one of the great mad men guys, absolutely, without a doubt. And he used to say, hey, you guys, we all struggled. We have a box of something on your desk that you’re trying to do an ad campaign from. And you just gotta listen to what’s inside the product. They had campaigns inside there. You just got to coax it out.

Bruce Dundore:
And he always said that was a seersucker suit, and he had waxed hair that would go back. He was really a character very much like the character in Mad Men, the actor, the guy’s name, the older actor. But I think that there’s two, I think there’s, yes, I think at the time of the founder, the story is clear. I think that what happens later on is the story gets, you know, I think the worst thing that happens to companies is that they come up with a mission statement. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen mission statements that say absolutely nothing about the company whatsoever. And it’s an old idea. We don’t like it. It’s a military idea. You know, your mission. We’re going to take the hill and stop it. that the real story of companies starts to dissipate when the founder dies. Now look, look what happened at a certain point with Apple. Now Apple didn’t necessarily have their story right off the bat. They had a lot of good stories. But when Steve Jobs did, and you know, 1984 was a big story but it’s not gonna be like 1984 again, I got it. But when you really look at what happened with Apple and they did think different. think different. That’s when Apple nailed their story. That’s when Apple gave everybody the right to raise their Apple products in the air as a matter of pride and because this is what we do. We think different.

Lee Wochner:
I remember that vividly. I remember driving down Highland here in Los Angeles and seeing
that the whole building made out with Think Different.

Bruce Dundore:
Right.

Lee Wochner:
And it was Gandhi, it was John and Yoko, it was Einstein, and Apple had 2% market share.

Lee Wochner:
every day I’m getting my ass kicked in the market like I’m an idiot for sticking with Apple products, right? And they started that and and it made me feel so good. Like, oh good, look, I’m one of them. That’s why I’m one of the few with a Macintosh because I’m one of the, so I was a total sucker for that. They totally bought me with that because I’ve always preferred the Apple platform and it’s like, oh, thank you. There you go, I’m a genius. I’m an incredible creative force because I bought your product. That seems like traffic and branding.

Bruce Dundore:
We all, it’s brilliant branding and it’s big time storytelling. It is massive storytelling. And, you know, if you look at Nike and you’ll see the same sort of strategy. We all remember, you know, nicely the rainy five, four o’clock morning where the woman gets up and she goes for a jog and it’s just do it. That was like one of the first early spots. But when you really look at the success of just doing it, you see that all of a sudden there’s some. I forgot what the legend is, but there’s some stories somewhere in the Bay Area that had some guy had gotten Charles Barkley on a shot of a throne with Nike. All of a sudden that took off. Michael Jordan comes along with that unique contract, that great movie by the way, if you haven’t seen it. We want a piece of our heroes. We want to follow or somehow be in the shadow or in the light of our heroes. And Nike did a lot of that idea where a pair of Nikes represented a piece of a hero. An Apple product represented an Ali or an Einstein or all these people who basically were villains at one time. They were villainized at one time. And the whole idea of think different was be villainized. Doesn’t matter, think different. That’s the whole purpose of it. I mean, gosh, you go back on Ali’s history. I mean, here he was, you know, the draft dodger and this and that, and you know, the big mouth. Now, of course, he’s a legend. He’s, you know, he’s always mythological to me, but, you know, it’s, it’s like, that’s what you want to own. And that’s a, that’s a very clear strategy that was extended to a very good strategy. By the way, it’s also authentic to Apple. So the key to the story is an authenticism towards the, I, towards the, the will of the founder, you know. As you start going away from the founder, the stories get wobbly. That’s why we come in and try to reinvigorate and re-strengthen that story.

Lee Wochner:
So how do you, let’s say that you are, let’s say your nonprofit’s been around since the 1970s, like the gentleman I was speaking with before this talk we were having. How do you go about finding that story? How does Fundamental Group or anyone go about finding their story and shaping that story for today?

Bruce Dundore:
Well, we don’t do anything without, we believe that the most important people we can talk to on any of our assignments is going to be the customer, the consumer, the audience, the public. So we do a very big deep dive in what the customer consumer audience public, what their, what their, what their relationship or their opinion of the product or service, whatever it might be is. or we talk to the people that are in that general category you need, we don’t bother talking to the company until we have that down. Because what the company says is meaningless. What the audience, the population says is vital. So we find that out. Now, for example, in a public service or a nonprofit that’s been around for a long time, you have to find out what are the attitudes today that did not exist a long time ago? What’s changed? What’s the psychology now? Because things change. The mood of the story has to change. The tone of the story has to change. You might be more allowed to do certain things than you were before. But we talk to that group first. That’s the most important one. And then we talk to internally what they think and what problems they’re having selling their story or selling their product or service or selling the issue. What are they having? What word is the eyes? go, where does the eyes glaze over? Then we try to come up with a way that we can get past that. And then that’s basically just the skill of storytime, the outlines.

Lee Wochner:
I had a client who some years ago couldn’t understand why then Fox host, Megyn Kelly was getting tarred and feathered for essentially putting on blackface for Halloween. And he said, well, we did that as kids. And he just didn’t, he didn’t understand. And I said, do you remember the movie, Arthur? And he said, yeah. So Arthur was the most incredibly funny movie I saw in that period about a guy who’s a raging drunk and drives around in his car and crashes into things and whatever. And what happened is in the 2020s, alcoholism is not so funny. It’s not such a laughing matter anymore. And, you know, our sense of what will fly changes.

Bruce Dundore:
Absolutely.

Lee Wochner:
And, you know, Al Jolson was a very popular entertainer in the 20s, and nobody wants to know about it anymore. And so whatever sector you’re working in, you have to be aware of what will fly now and what is now reprehensible.

Bruce Dundore:
And I would say that the past, I think the second decade of the aughts was a time of such unbelievable change in terms of movements and levels of consciousness and a whole other generation that is fairly numbered coming through that is saying, no, we don’t really dig this anymore. Yeah, if you’re not paying attention to the population, if you’re not paying attention, then you have no business being in marketing. Stay out of it.

Lee Wochner:
We’re gonna take a short break here, but when we come back, Bruce Dundore and I’ll be talking about changes, his work marketing Jaguar, his ideal gig, and how to actually change people’s minds. Stick around.

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Lee Wochner:
And we’re back, with advertising and branding expert Bruce Dundore.
One of the things that interests me is the story of cities, not just their history, but their their brand identity and I’m in Burbank and the two cities next to us are Glendale and Pasadena. And I don’t think I could even tell you why, but I view them rather differently. And then the gentleman I was speaking to on this podcast consults for all three of them and said, they view themselves rather differently. They have a different brand, a different brand identity. And then of course there’s New York and there’s Chicago and Los Angeles and those major cities are very different as well. So, And New York brands itself as New York and markets itself around New York and Chicago does that. Is branding important if you’re a city? Like is it important to have a city identity to stand out in some way?

Bruce Dundore:
If you want it for tourism, it sure is, I guess. You know, you want to have a simple way to think about the place you’re going to. I’m from New York and now I’m from LA. And you know, there was never really a clear identity of a city than New York in this country, including with the name of the Big Apple. And then of course that song. I got a plane here. But then, you know, moving to LA and the other Randy Newman song, which is another source of great pride. So you know, the deal is that these stories of cities create great pride for the inhabitants and also great identity outside. So yeah, I think a city is a product, you know, and it’s a product that’s made up of its ingredients or culture. And so how do you get the culture out? How do you get the attitude out? What does the packaging of a city look like? What is the glean of it? Chicago has another identity, but from New York we dismissed it, we don’t really care.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, of course.

Bruce Dundore:
And then of course there’s a town called Boston, which we also don’t talk about.

Lee Wochner:
Hahaha

Bruce Dundore:
But listen, you’re in Burbank, what’s a New Yorker’s impression of Burbank?

Bruce Dundore:
Well, it’s Johnny Carson, beautiful downtown Burbank. So I always… I wondered what the hell, you know, it was cars, it’s a beautiful downtown bird bank in a satiric fashion. And when I first got here, I was at Bird Bank, I was like, well, this is Bird Bank. So, it’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. You know, but yeah, of course the city needs a good mantra, a good story behind it, good imagery to it. And the spirit that is based on the culture of the city and what it wants to promise and what it wants to be, not what it is, what it wants to be. And… And it’s all about making the inhabitants feel pride about people wanting to move there and people wanting to visit. So it’s no different than any product on a shelf.

Lee Wochner:
Where I grew up, there’s none of that going on. It wasn’t big enough to have a city and you get a lot of people who leave. I’m from what a friend called years ago, the Alabama of New Jersey. That’s where I’m from. So now it has a brand in my mind. It’s the Alabama of New Jersey.
He saddled me with that. So you were the creative director behind California’s first five campaign, which works to get preschoolers and their parents a head start. And what was your, so Bruce Dundore, talk to us about your involvement in that, how you developed the message, how you spread the word. And I believe you told me you had worked with Rob Reiner even before that to get it going. Is that right?

Bruce Dundore:
Yeah, it was the California families, California children’s families commission. And at that time, Rob took that on, you know, he was just, just a major advocate for.

Bruce Dundore:
He was such a major advocate for, you know, at that point we had the first research that was the first three years of a child’s brain development. We’re like, you know, exponentially important. So he said, well, we’ve got to stop ignoring that. We have to really pay attention to it and really make a big effort of it. And we did the early work for him. He was a very funny guy to work with. He’s just a real big heart, too. big personality. And of course, you know, there’s a point where Rob Reiner and Barry Levinson in a course of like a couple years never made a bad movie. So
it was kind of impressive. But I worked on that. And then I rejoined it later at another agency where it was a far more mature effort. And it was first five. They extended the years to five years versus three because there was a need for the schooling situation. And I do remember that there was a lot of attempt to get that damn, you know, we business people tend to think that, you know, 80% developed in first, you know, five years, 80% of the brain, 80%, 80%. I tried all kinds of ways to find a way to get the 80% out. I tried every single way to put it to just the right moment of a commercial. to get that 80% out. People see a number and they just, I don’t care what it is, they just don’t remember numbers. So we tried this and all of a sudden, this simplification of the entire effort to talk, read, sing, which is basically the three things you can do with a child, talk, read, and sing. And of course you can play, but at that point it was talk, read, sing. Those are the three workhorses, the three war horses of education for zero to five. And then, of course, there’s an awful lot of brain development stuff that says that children learn by rhymes. They remember words by rhymes. And then they said, if you put rhymes to music, it’s even better. So I said, you know, here I am in LA, the home of the hate of jingles. And I came from New York, which was all jingles. I said, I really want to go revisit and write a jingle for this. And I go. I don’t want to get Jay-Z talking about it or doing something like that. Let’s write something specific to us.” So I was like, boy, now I’m not going to find a jingle writer in LA. But what we did was we wound up with the composers of Everything is Awesome from the LEGO movie. And we had the right lyrics and stuff like that. And we did this song, Talk, Read, Sing, It Changes Everything. And I established three characters, three birds, songbird for sing. the Al for talk and the, no, the Al for read and the parrot for talk. So perfect matchup. We have characters, you have a song, it rhymes, you have a very clear strategy, talk, read, sing. No 80%, no nothing, no tech, no rationale, nothing. We let that stuff go and pretty soon there was an 87% recognition of first five, which became like the most recognized. public service campaign ever, ever. So we sit around and we work real hard trying to educate people, but be better if we entertain them with a very clear singular strategy of something you can remember, which is talk, read, and sing. So you’ve worked on a lot of public sector campaigns. I mean, Los Angeles Department of Health, Ontario International Airport, a couple of hospitals, Metropolitan Water District, and thank God for them so we have water, et cetera, et cetera. But before that, most of your work was in the private sector. And in fact you were creative director for a spark 44 the ad agency For Jaguar Land Rover, which was jointly owned by Jaguar Land Rover. What what was that like? What was working for Jaguar?

Bruce Dundore:
It was interesting. Well, it was a very interesting model. It was basically almost a venture capital model where the client would be would be would be financing the agency. The agency would be working directly for the client. And then there’d be an arrangement of shares and whatnot, all that kind of good stuff. And we weren’t allowed to take on another client for I think three years or five years. I forgot what the number was. But we were focused completely. on Jaguar Land Rover. I was North American creative director. There was a UK creative director. And then there was a creative director in Frankfurt that was basically in charge of all non-English speaking countries. Okay. Then there was a small operation in Shanghai, which was a partnership operation because you want to open a business in China, you better hook up with the Chinese company first. So there’s four… branches. Of course, North America was the most important market because it’s, we, it’s in North America. It’s got the most cars. Yeah. So that was very interesting. It was a very, you know, cars are tough. Marketing cars is tough. You’re dealing with you’re dealing with the brilliance of the car designer, which is going in Cullum. who probably gave me, and in retrospect, we all should have paid much more attention to the designer and how he came about his decisions for the new designs of Jaguar. Because in his discussion of how he designed everything, the story of the brand emerged. And of course, the marketing guys don’t wanna listen to the design guy, because the design guy causes all kinds of problems. It’s, I don’t like how you shot the car, da, okay, but. Ian had a very clear sense of why he did his things, why he moved about and created these things and he was forced to have that. Because when he first went in to present new designs of Jaguar as soon as Tata had bought them and the president Jaguar said, why did you do that? He says, because it just felt good. He got kicked out of the room. He says, don’t come back to me because it feels good. Come back with a reason. So
he started developing this sort of big nomenclature. story behind the fabrics, the sheet metal, the designs, all the stuff. And you put all that stuff together and it was fascinating stuff. That stuff needed to be downloaded more by us, the advertising guys. It was probably the most important thing we could have possibly had. And then you move on, you move on and you start to develop the advertising and every market is different. I know works, the populist stuff that works in United States just falls flat in the UK. The UK somehow just wants to do their thing and it’s usually, I found it always to be slightly bit vague. And United States was far more doing, I was doing more Spielberg and they wanted to do more Godard. So that was an interesting cultural thing. But it’s interesting in trying to resurrect a brand, trying to bring it back. First thing that had to happen, of course, was that the cars had to be made better. So without, skip all the advertising, the cars had to be made better. And Ian had designed them in a way, there’s a case coming off a lot of Austin Martin design sense. And the cars did start to all of a sudden get modernized versus being sort of tricked out forwards, which is where they were throughout the 90s. It was very interesting working globally, in the culture stuff that you run into, the language things that you run into, the need to work very, very much arm in arm with your partners in different countries. So, you know, it was a big learning experience, big learning experience.

Lee Wochner:
So the most important question I think is, did you get a free Jaguar out of this?

Bruce Dundore:
Every year.

Lee Wochner:
Oh.

Bruce Dundore:
Every year we got another XF because we had to drive the cars. We had to know what they were about. It was one of those perks. You have to get in the car. So every year we get a new Jaguar. Honestly, I am not the big car guy. I’m not. But having a 500 horsepower Jaguar in Los Angeles is is showing up at a party, you know, with balloons. I mean, there’s no way you could take that car out and do anything with it. You know, and the times I tried to drive it fast, I knew I was breaking laws. So you spend a lot of time in bumper to bumper traffic in this beautiful car, which, by the way, insides were more exquisite than most luxury cars. There’s no doubt about it. So it was fun. It was fun. It was a nice time.

Lee Wochner:
When you work in the commercial sector, as with Jaguar or anybody else, right? And then you’re working in anti-tobacco, first five, et cetera, is the process the same? Is the work the same?

Bruce Dundore:
Um is the process the same. I’m going to say that ultimately there are things that have to be done on both sides. You have to talk to the customer. You have to talk to what the attitudes are in the marketplace. You have to understand the place you’re going into. You have to understand the spend. What is the spend that allows you to make your message and where does it need to be hardened? And then you have to develop ideas. And then you have to have really, really good clients that are willing, that have good intuitions. are willing to take a chance, and you ask them at the end of the day with what you spend, what do you own? They have to think about their advertising in a different way also. What do you own? What will advance our cause? I think the process is very much the same when it works perfectly. But it doesn’t always work perfectly. And it doesn’t always work the same. And great clients get great work. without a doubt, great clients get great work. When you see lousy work out there, somewhere along the line, there’s someone who didn’t buy a good idea.

Lee Wochner:
Interesting. I’m going to ask this because in 2023, a lot of people seem very locked in with their opinions about a lot of things. Is it getting harder to change people’s minds?

Bruce Dundore:
I think it’s getting harder to find them. Where are they? There’s no fireplace anymore of communication. It’s all over the place. So there’s the question, where do you find them?

Lee Wochner:
When you say them, what do you mean them?

Bruce Dundore:
consumers.

Lee Wochner:
you’re talking about changing client minds?

Bruce Dundore:
I’m talking about like, I mean, you’ve worked on anti tobacco, you’ve worked on we need parents to think about their children in a different way, behave a different way. You’ve you’ve told Bob, he you know, the guy has emphysema, etc. You’ve helped people understand that the Jaguar is not the I’ll say it piece of shit it was in the 80s. I remember that well. And and there were some mind changing going on there. And I’m wondering in the social media era where, man, I’m in this tribe and you’re in that tribe and you’re not going to win me over no matter what and I’m immune to facts. I think there’s a lot of that. That’s my supposition. So my question for you, who works in really brand and story and changing people’s minds, alerting them to things, is it getting harder to change people’s minds? Because I sure hope your answer is going to be no. But let’s find out.

Bruce Dundore:
Um… Yes, it is harder to change people’s minds. But the point is, it’s always been hard to change people’s minds. Always been hard. Unless you’ve got something that just absolutely changes people’s minds, or you say it in a way that is brand new. I think that, it’s always hard to change people’s minds. I’m gonna say it again. Look, I worked on Light Beer for Miller, right? You know how long the idea of light beer, dyed beer, Gavlingers, et cetera, was sold for years and years and years as concept of light beer? Light beer. And it never went anywhere. No one wanted light beer. No one wanted it. So it just went on until we found a way to sell light beer, which to put B-level retired athletes drinking this beer and talking about how it tasted great and was less filling. The whole idea of less filling. told a whole new generation of kids coming out of college that they could drink twice as much. We never talked about diet or anything like that, or how you can drink a beer and never lose your shape. We talked about less filling. So every single time, advertising works brilliantly. It works because there’s just something that you find, some nugget you find, that instantly changes minds like a thought virus. And you have some statements that you look back on, you go like, cavity-prone children. Oh my God, I’ve shut the doors, nailed the windows shut. I do not want my child to be cavity-prone. All children are cavity-prone. But you raise that to a level of alarm, and everybody’s out buying toothpaste. You say less filling, and people go, well, I can drink twice as much. You don’t deal with diet. All these things have that thing that you find, it’s the gold, it’s that nugget of gold in communications that turns people just like that. That has always been hard to find.

Lee Wochner:
Last couple of questions. Whose story right now do you wish you could fix? Something you could grab with both hands and really turn around.

Bruce Dundore:
Well, I’m going to have to say that the video that Joe Biden just put out on Bidenomics needs to be completely redone. I’m sad that his people put him next to a whiteboard because we all love whiteboards. And did this doctoral conversation of simplistic economics with Joe. I would, it’s like, it’s like, come on, man, you guys got to be kidding. You’re trying to get, you want to get Biden, Biden economics across the line, knowing, knowing the things that it does or can do, et cetera. And you did this. It’s like the advice was terrible. So I’d like, I’d like to read.

Lee Wochner:
When I ask people this, Bruce Dundore, what campaign, whatever would you change? Including Josh Weltman on the previous episode of this, they all say Joe Biden. They seem to like him, but they don’t like the story he’s putting out at all.

Bruce Dundore:
Well, he’s, you know, he’s a, he’s a, the, the voice box is weak. But yesterday’s, what I saw on LinkedIn was the, was this. Bidenomics dissertation. And I was like, Oh my God, you are not doing this. Are you? And who advised you to do this? Um, I’d like, sure. There’s a lot of other people I would tell. I would tell different stories. I would, I would tell a different story for Land Rover. I would tell a different story for Jaguar. I think they’re all off right now. I think a lot of cars are off. I think there’s a lot of products that are off right now. I can’t really name him right now. I think probably the people that crazy, the people that used to do the worst advertising in the world are not doing the best. All the insurance companies are all doing pretty good work. And unfortunately, it’s the one category that is going to be the most hated category of all because they’re all… Florida… Florida’s insurance companies are leaving, California’s are leaving, so now it’s gonna be, so it’s pretty interesting, it’s an interesting dilemma.

Lee Wochner:
Last question, what’s the one thing you hope people take away from this conversation that we’ve had? What do you think? What’s the nugget here that they should find?

Bruce Dundore:
Well, they should definitely hire the fundamental group for any branding that they need, that’s number one. Two, I think that what we do, it’s not frivolous, it’s important. If we’re gonna have a economic system and a societal system that we have, then it’s important that companies get… get their stories together. I’m really, really concerned right now about what I would call, which I don’t know whether it’s true that there has ever been a corporate culture. I find the idea of culture and corporations to be a little bit of a laugher. Culture is a very big thing. Countries have cultures, you know, language and art and this and that. But I would say that companies that are needing to come out with the pandemic need to re-examine the meaning of the thing that they call culture, and they should be investing in getting their people back into understanding why they are working there. And because there certainly are demanding they come back to work. These buildings need to be fed. The commercial real estate deal is a big black cloud right now. But I’d like them to focus on bringing people back in a way that… gets them engaged emotionally in the company that they’re working for. Because what we’re doing, all this remote is fine from a work standpoint, but we’re remote with each other right now. We sit at tables and restaurants on our phones, remote. We are remote all over the place. We are secluded. We have secluded ourselves. So that’s the one thing I would say would be the thing that I would love to be beating a drum about. Invest in your brand.

Lee Wochner:
Well, Bruce Dundore, I think that the next lunch or dinner is on me. So I’m looking forward to that. So we got to pull out our schedules and get that going. And it’s been a lot of fun having you here. Thanks so much.

Bruce Dundore:
Thank you, Lee. Thank you very much.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Thanks for listening! We’re glad you came. That’s What C! Said is produced by Lisa Pham and engineered by Joe Curet. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit Counterintuity.com to sign up and learn more.