Interview: Max Reyner, General Research

As ‘brand strategy’ isn’t on the list of tried-and-tested professions that academia usually makes us all aware of as options for our future (unlike advertising), Max studied business at university. It was only after moving to London and taking on trend research and insight team roles at agencies like The Future Factory and Protein that he realised there was a job which would allow him to work with creative people without being a ‘creative’ himself. Eventually, after going freelance, Max realised it would make sense to join forces with Debae and create a new type of brand consultancy.

As one of their first orders of business at the start of 2016, Max and Joss assembled The Slow Fast Report to show prospective clients and interested parties the type of research they’re now undertaking. Positing that most effective modern brands work at varying speeds, it is a study delving into the ways that mindful organisations can attract contemporary consumers. Slow brands, such as H&M, Mercedes and Louis Vuitton, succeed by making moves with purpose, using long-term thinking and ethical approaches that will stand the test of time time. Fast brands like Tesla, Adidas and Starbucks, on the other hand, take an innovative, loose, spontaneous approach that allows them to react quickly to a rapidly changing market. We spoke to Max to gain insight into General Research’s work and find out how brands can, as they put it, ‘think slow but act fast’:

We went through a long process of figuring out what this thing should be. We thought, ‘If we’re starting a consultancy, how do we make that different?’ At the moment, in terms of consultancies in this space – brand strategy – there are lots, but so many are actually medium-sized, they’re getting bigger, they’ve maybe been around 10 or 15 years and have a high profile. It just felt that there might be space for something that’s really small. And, by being small, just a partnership of 2 freelancers, we could use that as a strength that makes us really agile, flexible. We can work in-house if they need us to. There’s this general perception now that the consumer industries and brand markets are all operating at such speed that there’s this requirement from clients that they want projects really quickly. We felt that being small could be an advantage in this context. 

A lot of work I’ve done in the past has been with what you’d class as lifestyle industries. So that could be travel, drinks, retail, fashion. But, increasingly, I’ve worked with more non-lifestyle industries, but that still have a great deal of consumer engagement. So, something like finance, insurance, aviation. These more traditional industries that are maybe, at first, seeming a bit corporate, yet because they’re so important to people there’s so much space in terms of what they can do, how they can help people. And actually generally because they’re inherently slow, they need a lot of catching up. I think that sort of space is really interesting. 

Whenever I’m asked, ‘What’s your dream client?’ I’m inclined to say a brand that I really respect. But actually, whenever I’ve worked with brands that are of that caliber, I’ve found the projects not that interesting because you’re helping a brand that’s already really good. I think it’s much more interesting when you’re dealing with clients that probably have some sort of existing brand equity but maybe they seriously need to modernise or maybe they have a challenge or they’re maybe slow in their market to catch up or they want to enter a new category or territory and it’s quite removed from what they already do. 

In order to be good at what we do, we have to continually be aware of what’s going on around us, both with consumer culture and in the industries we would potentially work with.  When we do more rigorous research, that would always be connected to a project that we do. 

We use research to rationalise decisions. We’re using it to figure out the best approach for a particular brand challenge. We use it alongside other techniques of market positioning. Research is there to initially explore what’s going on, get a sense of the context of what the brief is about, but later on to begin to understand the best approach, who’s doing this well and why, why are consumers behaving the way they are, and using this to hone in on solutions.  

When we did the report, we looked at it in terms of how do brands do this slow aspect of branding and how do they do the fast separately. Having done it, we then concluded that, actually, it’s more about a mixture of the two. A lot of people talk about brand purpose and the need to think about the long term because, in the future, there will be even greater constraints to what a brand can do. While that side of things is crucial, there’s also this increased speed of markets and consumer culture, so that you’ve got these two speeds running in parallel. What we concluded is that a successful brand needs to be aware of both things at the same time. We phrased it as, ‘think slow but act fast.’ It’s about setting goals in the long term that make sense and that will exist within any future constraints and give the brand a clear vision that everyone can work towards. But then in terms of organising the company, it needs to be inherently flexible so it can constantly react to all these changes that are going on around it. 

As I mentioned, the companies I’m most interested in working with are not the most successful. In terms of the one that probably has, I think I have to say Nike. Which is an easy choice. I have worked a bit with Nike in the past and I’ve got a sense of how they operate. I really respect the fact that it’s all based on performance-led product design. Everything is about sport. Nevertheless, it is adopted even more than other brands that do court the fashion crowd by the fashion crowd. Although it does have a really strong legacy in sport and also fashion, it’s not reliant on that. It’s constantly making new products which become modern icons. To be able to do that is so impressive. Sometimes when you talk to brands they talk about having target consumers that are about a certain level of early adoption. Nike manages to do everything at once. It’s divided up its marketing internally to reach different types of audiences with completely different products in completely different ways. I can’t think of many brands that manage to do that, that manage to be mass and also quite niche and boutique and the same time. 

Branding itself as a concept seems to be getting increasingly deep in its significance and its role. Now, everyone talks about brand purpose and how to act in the long term. With technology and social media, it means that consumers are interacting with brands in a completely different way. It’s less passive, it’s more interactive, and brands have to shift how they behave all the time in response to these changes.