Hi, this is Greg. Look for my book The Agile Brand on Amazon or on my website at the

agile. World.

Welcome back to the Agile World Podcast. this is Greg Kielstrom.

I've talked a bunch about some of the basics of branding,

what makes a successful brand.

In this episode, I thought I'd talk a little bit about my introduction to branding and how I kind of got

interested in it in the first place.

And it actually goes back quite a few years.

So as a child, I was really interested in cars and I found cars pretty fascinating.

I memorized statistics and I knew all sorts of things about them.

I tried to convince my dad to buy all sorts of outlandish things that he was

fortunately sensible enough to not buy.

But over time I kind of realized that part of my fascination with them was really, I think

cars and car branding is a pretty fascinating exercise in hierarchy. And so when I mention hierarchy, I mean there are brands like Cadillac and Chevy and there used to be Pontiac and Oldsmobile, but they're all owned by GM.

And so you have this GM brand, but it's not really a brand so much as a collection of brands.

And at an early age I somehow found this fascinating.

I didn't really have a word for it.

In third or fourth grade they don't really teach branding so I

didn't really have a word for it. To use my terms I didn't really have a vocabulary for

what I was talking about. I just knew that I was kind of fascinated with it. And I also like drawing, so I came up with my own line of cars. I drew them. I'm sure they're not very from an engineering standpoint very technically accurate but

what I found fascinating again was this idea that I actually created a brand a couple brands of you know just through doing these

drawings and you know I kind of outgrew that and outgrew following horsepower and wheel bases of cars and stuff like that.

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