Rebranding in a Pandemic — An Amazing CMO Story
Imagine you’ve spent the past year preparing to rebrand your organization. You’ve ticked off all the boxes—strategized with a cross-functional team, developed a robust communications plan, and defined your brand purpose—and you’re finally ready to start rolling things out, but then, the COVID pandemic brings the world to a halt. This is a moment for a big decision, do you still rebrand? Or do you put things on hold?
For Julia Fitzgerald, CMO of American Lung Association, the answer was to forge ahead. After all, if they were going to make their new brand promise real, if they truly were dedicated to fighting lung disease, then this was the perfect opportunity to do it. The rebrand didn’t come with all the bells and whistles that it normally would have, but this, perhaps, makes it that much more real. After all, as Ben Franklin once said, “Well done is better than well said.”
Tune into this week’s episode to hear about all about American Lung Association’s rebrand and how they’ve agilely pivoted their marketing efforts amidst the COVID pandemic, and if you want to learn how a rebrand can translate to demand generation, check out our recent report, here.
Full Transcript: Drew Neisser in Conversation with Julia Fitzgerald
Drew Neisser: Hello, Renegade Thinkers! Let’s say you’re the CMO of a well-known—make that really well-known—organization and you’ve been working on a brand refresh for, let’s say, a year or so, one that would help propel your brand forward another hundred years. Then COVID-19 strikes, overwhelming health systems, disrupting economies, and dominating the conversation around the world. So, what do you do, do you put the rebrand on hold? I have to say, most would, and, in fact, many have, but not the American Lung Association for reasons that will become clear after you hear from Julia Fitzgerald, their CMO. What’s amazing to me about this story is that it demonstrates unusual strategic agility, the ability to stay committed to your purpose, while adjusting to rapidly changing circumstances. With that, Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Fitzgerald: Thank you, Drew.
Drew Neisser: For the guests, I know where you are, but where are you right now, and maybe you could share how COVID-19 and the pandemic have impacted you and your family.
Julia Fitzgerald: Well, physically, I’m in Chicago, and even more specifically, I am now in my home office as is just about everybody, in the suburbs of Chicago. Still working, miraculously, side-by-side with all my colleagues.
Drew Neisser: There you go. How smooth it has been for your organization to get through these work from home challenges?
Julia Fitzgerald: I would say we’re probably on par with most organizations. We already had some infrastructure that was decentralized, so for some of our colleagues, it was an easy pivot. But then there’s that whole notion that we’re all going someplace different, and we moved through that pretty smoothly. I would say the real challenge is being the American Lung Association. COVID is a lung disease, it’s basically a respiratory virus. Our whole focus switched overnight and keeping pace with that running train was three, four, five times the challenge of our physical relocation.
Drew Neisser: Yeah, and to have those two things happen at the same time, not only did you have to deal with physically moving everybody and building a new infrastructure, you are right in the middle of the story and all sorts of things. But before we dive into that, and we will, before you jumped to American Lung Association, you worked exclusively for for-profit brands, I noticed Hallmark, Sears, and Sylvan Learning, among others. What made you make the jump to the nonprofit world and, probably more importantly, what new skills did you have to learn to navigate between the differences between for-profit and not-for-profit?
Julia Fitzgerald: I really came to a point in my career where I wanted to do something that made a difference. I wanted to do something that was important to me personally, and I felt like the years of skills that I had accumulated would go towards a greater good. I started looking around for something that connected with me and because I have personal connections to lung health and lost my own dad to lung cancer, this really spoke to me. When I heard about the opportunity. I went about stalking our CEO until I could convince him that the only logical thing to do is to bring me on.
Drew Neisser: There you go. Yes, indeed, commitment and relentless follow-through to get it, and I think it is amazing. I’ve talked to a number of CMOs who have been in the nonprofit space and many of them after a couple of decades doing it in the for-profit, but I know that there are some differences. There are some things that you’ve needed to probably learn or relearn because of the way decisions are made, I’ve often heard that it’s very hard sometimes in a nonprofit to get a decision because of the need for consensus. Have you felt any new challenges? And again, I’m thinking pre-pandemic.
Julia Fitzgerald: Yes. I would say it was a give and take. They probably had challenges dealing with me. I had challenges dealing with them, but the fortunate piece is that one of the core infrastructure needs for American Lung Association is identical to any big organization, and that is the ability to communicate digitally and the ability to have a strong and meaningful brand. Those happen to be things that I’ve had years of experience building. So, I had something to offer that they needed, which gave them the patience and grace to wait for me to catch up to their way of thinking and processing.
I had been working in private equity organizations prior to coming to American Lung Association, and there, it’s generally a really tight timeframe. You’re thinking in spans of three years and things have to happen, happen, happen. But for organizations like the American Lung Association, they’ve been around for 115 years and were in for the long game, so I really had to change my mindset about what we’re trying to do. I also had to learn a lot of new vocabulary, things like “database,” which they refer to as “a house file.” So, we’ve had any number of very funny conversations where I think they’re saying one thing and they’re really saying something else. Again, it takes a little bit of humor and grace to stop and laugh at each other and say, “I got you.”
Drew Neisser: And it’s interesting that when you think about nonprofits and your ability to say, “we’re thinking long term.” It’s true. When I talk to CMOs at private equity companies and VCs, it’s very much about “in the quarter” and what did you do to drive pipeline. It is an opportunity to think about it, here’s the irony. In the last four weeks, it has been anything but long-term planning, it’s been absolutely the opposite of that. In our prep call, it occurred to me that many of the things that you’ve been able to do during the pandemic would be inspiring to the listeners and rather than leave that to the end, as we did in our first call, I thought it’d be good to do now. You’ve managed to do so many things and adjust your organization because you are right in the middle of the conversation.
I thought, for example, about your weekly sessions with your Chief Medical Officer as an example of a new product that you rushed to market. Could you talk about that? And then we’ll get to some of the other things that you’ve been doing.
Julia Fitzgerald: The first thing to do is to try to understand in the moment what our constituency needs from us. It’s information. They need trusted information that’s easily accessible, so one of the things that we were able to do was take our Chief Medical Officer and set him up every Monday to do a webinar. This was first promoted and talked about to our patient base, people who have COPD, asthma, any type of lung disease, but word quickly got out and these are very heavily attended webinars. We also found medical spokespeople who are in our network and we had them do “Ask the Expert” sessions with our online support groups and these were also very well attended. We were able to go out and talk to all of our medical spokespeople, they are writing all of these very on-point insightful blogs, and these products just really were able to materialize in no time at all.
Drew Neisser: It’s interesting when you describe it in a different language. If you’re a product manager right now or a CMO at a software company, the idea of an AMA, ask me anything, is something that you had in your kit, but you wouldn’t have necessarily thought of right now. One of the things that we’re noticing is you know that we’re getting to the point for business brands were webinars are already getting to burn out, but if you have and this Chief Medical Officer, someone with real authority and real knowledge who’s going to be available every single week to answer questions, especially as things are changing as quickly as they are, it speaks to the importance of quality and the individual who’s doing it. You are right on the front lines.
Another thing you mentioned was influencers. You also share this idea of Virtual Advocacy Days and I was thinking about that. A lot of companies are struggling with how to do face-to-face meetings, and you had something that used to be a face-to-face meeting. Can you talk about that?
Julia Fitzgerald: This is actually the cornerstone of our lung cancer efforts and it’s with our Lung Force Heroes. They are lung cancer survivors. We always bring one from every state across the country and on advocacy day we convene in Washington DC and march to Capitol Hill where we have all these great meetings setup where they advocate for more health care and for adequate funding for NIH. It’s a very moving day and we hated like heck to cancel it, but you can’t take people who have these immune issues, put them on an airplane, and move them to DC, so it was even before everything was on lockdown.
The combined team was very innovative on how to set this up as a virtual day. All of our heroes were still connected virtually, and we also kept all of the appointments. Every one of our congressmen, every one of our senators, still took their appointments via telephone and it was a great and very empowering success. But it started to paint for us the way of the future. For however long, we need to find ways to have virtual events, so when you think about taking on event innovation, we had to put it on overdrive.
Drew Neisser: Okay, we’re going to take a break, and there’s a lot more to talk about, so stay with us.
BREAK
Drew Neisser: We’re back. Events are really a big part of a lot of marketer’s playbooks. They’re looking now at 2020 as a lost cause. It used to generate lots of leads that generated income. Well, in the nonprofit world, I know that events are important, particularly galas and you were starting to talk about some of the things that you have done to turn your physical events into virtual events, maybe you can speak to those.
Julia Fitzgerald: Absolutely. This time of year is really important to us for one of our signature events, which is called The Climb. Across the country, we have a lot of climbs where people gather and raise money and climb up skyscrapers. Of course, we can’t really do that, but we have been really innovative and getting ideas on how to do this from all corners of the organization. We have figured out how to do a virtual climb, so we have about eight of them that we’re getting ready to deploy. We have a trek across Maine, a bike ride, that we’re figuring out how to do in a virtual way.
Will it work? We don’t know. We’ll find out, but people are pretty forgiving. Even like we just saw ourselves, sometimes Zoom drops you, sometimes things happen, but you have to start someplace with your innovation and give it a shot.
Drew Neisser: It’s so true. And I love the idea of a virtual climb. I’m curious exactly how that will play out. That’s certainly a way of keeping the folks thinking about things differently. I’m curious, as you do that, are you also thinking, “this isn’t going to work as well, so we’re going to need to make some adjustments?”
Julia Fitzgerald: Definitely. We’re also looking at what else we can do for different types of fundraisers because we know for certain what’s going to happen this year. We’re going to lose a certain number of events. What we can’t see is what’s going to happen for not-for-profits in the foreseeable future in the next 12 months. Will we come together for events? Will the economic downturn really dampen people’s philanthropic spirit? There’s just a lot of variables where we wish we had crystal balls, so we’re trying to things that we didn’t really have going on before. We’re much more aggressive with Facebook fundraisers, with peer-to-peer fundraising.
One of our Lung Force Heroes, actress Shantel VanSanten, actually started a virtual climb, doing mountain climbers on her Instagram as a full-on challenge. There are a lot of things that we’re trying that are on a very accessible level, but we also made a really big announcement last week, we are putting forward something that we call the COVID-19 Action Initiative. In the face of all of this uncertainty, we are certain that we need to step up, so we are committing $25 million dollars to the COVID-19 Action Initiative, for research, education, and advocacy and to convene leaders, both in the public health and private industry, to commit to preparedness in the face of future respiratory viral infections. Not only are we saying we’re going to figure this out, we’re going to double down because this is very important to public health.
Drew Neisser: First of all, kudos to you for the ambition of this kind of program. Where is the money for this going to come from?
Julia Fitzgerald: The first piece of it, which is about $8 million, is coming from our reserves and from core money that we have that we can invest. We have that to start with, and we are going to be very aggressively and enthusiastically fundraising to find the balance. To do that we’re looking at a couple of different ways to go about it, but we’re also turning to our corporate partners, we’re looking to new corporate partners, we’re looking to public health, we’re looking to foundations. We’re also looking to individuals who are very motivated by getting ahead of this and the next pandemic.
Drew Neisser: It seems to me that it takes a lot of courage in the middle of an economic crisis and a health crisis to make a big commitment like that. Where does that come from?
Julia Fitzgerald: A lot of it comes from our CEO Harold Wimmer. He is a man who makes no small plans and he also takes the responsibility of American Lung Association very seriously. We’re very like-minded with Harold. When he tells us that this is not a time to be afraid, this is time to start thinking and figuring out how to what is our role in this, how we can help, we all shoulder up to do it.
Drew Neisser: It’s amazing. That’s what leadership is about, recognizing opportunities in the middle of craziness and saying, “We have a role to play. We’re part of the solution, not just today but tomorrow,” and that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you right now because we’re in the middle of this thing. I think it would be helpful before we talk about the rebranding which we are going to do to just talk a little bit about the history of the American Lung Association. As we discussed, people know about it, but may not know a lot about it. Talk a little bit about some of the critical things that the American Lung Association has done in its 115 years.
Julia Fitzgerald: Well, we were founded to eradicate tuberculosis, so these are familiar grounds for us. Tuberculosis was the lung disease of the day and actually, back then, the American Lung Association founded the whole principle of tackling a public health issue by combining research, education, and advocacy. We pioneered that model that has now been adopted by many public health organizations, but we also know that if you’re in this for the long haul, these infections, these lung diseases can be beaten. So, we come to this with a big sense of optimism that we know how to see this through.
Over the years, though, after tuberculosis was largely kept under control, the Lung Association also did other huge things. Most of the smoke-free laws are because of our participation. The reason people don’t smoke on airplanes anymore, thank the American Lung Association. We’ve helped millions of people stop smoking. We have advocated for the Clean Air Act. In fact, the guy who runs our advocacy division, his dad wrote the Clean Air Act. We’re huge proponents there.
We are also really involved and have been able to increase the number of people who get scanned for lung cancer. The things that the American Lung Association has been able to do over the last 100 years? I could fill a page.
Drew Neisser: You mentioned that public health nonprofits see research, education, and advocacy. I’ve been on the board of the Urban Green Council here in New York, which is dedicated to sustainable green building, not just in New York, but around the world. I would say that education, advocacy, and research are the cornerstones of that organization and it really helps if you know that you can take advantage of it.
But I know that there’s a brand story here, too. Let’s take a break and we’ll come right back.
Julia Fitzgerald: Sounds great.
BREAK
Drew Neisser: Okay, we’re back. Part of the story here is that the American Lung Association actually rebranded and announced this rebranding right in the middle of the COVID crisis. I mean, it’s just astounding. I can just think about you, a year ago, “Oh, we’ve got this nice plan, we’re this company, we’ve been around for a long time. You know, we’re going to just work our way through it systematically.” I’m curious, as you got to the point where you were ready to go and then this hit, was there a moment where you said, “We shouldn’t do this?”
Julia Fitzgerald: Well, there was a moment where we seriously took stock and said, “What is at risk?” What’s at risk if we put it on pause, and what’s the risk if we go ahead. One thing I’d have to say about the rebranding is that the rebrand is done in service to the mission. We are not trying to make a headline with our rebranding, we’re trying to present ourselves as a reliable, trusted champion for the next 100 years. When it started becoming obvious that the coronavirus crisis and our brand launch were on a collision course, the thought was, well, do we go ahead with our old brand? Do we present ourselves to not just thousands, but millions of new people, new constituents, new citizens in our old dress, or do we put on who we plan to be for the next 100 years and greet them as such?
We decided to go ahead and present ourselves in the new best light. Now there are some practical sides to this too. Part of the new rebranding involved a new website. The website actually makes it easier for people to come and find us to get information, to decide to donate, to find the best resources for themselves. This was all in the wings, all the new branding, so it became a multi-layered decision. You have to think, what’s going to be best for the constituent, and what’s going to propel us into the next hundred years? That made the decision easier.
Drew Neisser: I get some of it. I get the new dress, and I think we talked about moving from the red mark to the blue mark and that makes a lot of sense just in general because red is a much harsher color, and this is a very positive organization. But a new website is a really tricky thing because there’s always a risk that your search traffic will drop and here you are in the moment where you are at the center of this because, as you said, this is a lung disease. That’s a tactical thing, but was that at all part of the conversation?
Julia Fitzgerald: It was part of the conversation and for all those CMOs that are out there and they’ve been part of a big new website relaunch, you’re usually hunkered down in a big room with all your colleagues and your buds and this great “Alright we’re live, here we go!” You watch the SEO and your traffic to make sure you’re not dropping. So, instead of that big moment, we’re all in our bedrooms with our office setup across all these different sites. It really exacerbated that sense of, “Oh, please let it work. Please, let it work,” but the due diligence had been done prior to pulling the trigger and we have a great team of folks around this. It did work, fortunately.
The CMO’s worst nightmare that you make this investment and then you start to see organic traffic drop like a rock is not what happened. In fact, quite the opposite. That was a win. Our board was with us, our whole team, everyone knew was at risk. It was a well-vetted decision and people are really happy with where we’ve turned out.
Drew Neisser: All of that is good. I want to talk about some of the components of the brand refresh. I’ve already mentioned the logo, but let’s talk about the logo for a second, because I know what that logo was being a history buff. How have you given it new meaning?
Julia Fitzgerald: I’ll roll back a little bit. Why did we embark on this brand refresh in the first place? The American Lung Association had not touched its brand in 100 years. This is the 100th anniversary of our mark and the association is associated with a lot of good work, but when we did our due diligence, we found that people didn’t necessarily understand what that mark was. They either didn’t associate the mark with the organization, or even those who should know what it is didn’t understand the meaning.
About 100 years ago when American Lung Association decided to eradicate tuberculosis, they adopted this double-barred red cross from the Crusades as a symbol of a “crusade against tuberculosis.” Now, go figure, iconography that supports a crusade is not as popular today as it used to be. But even more germane, is that, even as an organization, we didn’t imbue that emblem with any meaning. With our refresh, our mark now has symbolism to us. The first bar in the cross stands for “education,” the second for “advocacy” and it’s held together with “research.” Even as we show our brand, every time we look at it, it reminds us of what is core to us.
Drew Neisser: Education, advocacy, and research. See, and I can remember that. The rule of threes is good. I also want to just say, see, I told you, listeners, that we would get here. One of the things when we talk about marks is, do you need one or not? If you do think you need one, make sure it means something.
Julia Fitzgerald: One of the challenges for me, and any CMO that has a heritage brand, is being able to bring the past to the point where you can pivot and bring up new constituents in the future. When we were looking at the brand and how it’s visually represented, there was a line. You have to be able to keep it recognizable. If somebody who has been contributing to you for 40 years gets a direct mail piece, you want them to say, “Oh yeah, this is the same organization. Look, this is new and refreshed.”
That is actually one of the very big parameters, but I also want to go back to the why. You only change your brand if you know that you need to make a pivot for the future, and we’ve already discussed all of the great things that the American Lung Association had been able to pull off in its history. But if everyone just thinks about what is happening with lung health and they’re like, “I don’t think about lung health.” Give it a second, sure, you do.
In the last year, the youth vaping epidemic? Huge. This didn’t use to be a concern. Now, it is an epidemic as defined by the Surgeon General. Climate change, and the effect of climate change on health, that is a huge impact that we need to address. Now, with COVID-19, we have a whole new set of lung health challenges and a whole new set of people that we need to be able to reach out to. So, it’s very important that we sound, look, and appear as a trusted resource and a trusted champion.
Drew Neisser: You use the term “trusted champion” and I know that’s code for an archetype. We don’t talk about archetypes much on the show, but I think about them. These are 12 Jungian archetypes; you can go on online and search “archetype test” and go in and answer the questions to come up with the archetype for your brand. I have two questions for you. When you went through the archetype exercise was this about who you were or who you wanted to be? That’s a very tricky balance. And then secondly, there is no “trusted champion” as an archetype in the Jungian model, so let’s talk about that. Where did you start?
Julia Fitzgerald: You smarty pants, you blew my cover! But you’re right. There is none. I’m going to start with your first question, is it who we are or who we want to be? A little bit of both. We went through a really disciplined, very data-oriented process, and then we started looking at the archetypes with what the data from our internal sources told us and what the data from external sources told us. When we did all of the audits of how we show up, how we sound digitally, from any place that we show up. You really have to pull this together and analyze it, and it became pretty clear that we’re all very dedicated to our mission. We are very optimistic. We’re trustworthy, reliable. We do what we say we want to do. That really would point to an archetype that’s called “the innocent.”
Drew Neisser: Yes, let me pause for a moment. It’s so funny because if you are on the agency side and you get there, there’s this moment where you think, “I can’t tell the client. I’m not going to walk into the CEO’s office and say they’re an “innocent.” They’re not going to like it.” Even though Disney and Dove are two brands that fall into that archetype, and a lot of brands would feel really good about being a Disney or a Dove, it’s a tricky one. The point simply is, you don’t have to use the name. You got to “trusted champion” and that’s a little bit different than the “innocent” archetype. You blended some other things in there to make it your own, right?
Julia Fitzgerald: We had a lot of elements of “the hero” archetype. And let’s face it, everyone thinks going into this they want to be the hero archetype, but when you’re true to the data and you’re true to who you really are as an organization, not everyone shows up as the hero. We are truly “the innocent,” but that’s not a motivating term and most of the organization is not in marketing. What I tried to do is market the marketing and take some of the terms that come out of the innocent archetype and bubble those to the top.
By the way, it wasn’t just my marketing team doing this. We had a cross-functional team that included board members as well. We had a nice sized group and we vetted these conversations. Once we got to “trusted champion,” you know those light bulb moments where everyone’s head starts nodding and everyone sits up a little bit taller in their chair? That’s what we were with “trusted champion” and those terms aren’t always supposed to show up in your public-facing communications, but “trusted champion” actually works both internally and externally for us. This is one of these terms that really works for our organization and sums up who we try to be in the conversation.
Drew Neisser: One of the things you couldn’t do was have confetti and bells and whistles. You had to jump ahead in the plan. You’ve changed the website, you’ve changed the logo, you have this new “trusted champion” descriptor, what did you do other than a press release that took advantage of this new brand? How did it inform the activities that you’ve done in the last several weeks?
Julia Fitzgerald: We had a pretty robust communications plan, starting with internal stakeholders that we were rolling out from January 1st on. By the time we got to the end of February, that’s when we had to make the big decisions and what we decided to do is take the opportunity to talk about the brand and invert it.
What would have been the headline of “American Lung Association refreshes brand after 100 years” became paragraph three. The headline and paragraphs one through two are all about “American Lung Association focuses on COVID-19. Here’s what you need to know.” At the bottom, it became, “As you find these resources on our website, you may notice we have a new look. Here’s why.” 10 months of sweating every detail came down to, “We have a new look, and here’s why.”
Drew Neisser: I have to say, earlier today I had a huddle with 10 CMOs from a wide range of industries, and one of the conclusions that came out of this particular call was that right now is not the moment to be selling or talking about brand. Right now is the moment to be as helpful as you can be in the context of who you are. The irony to me is that we used to talk about this at Renegade in terms of marketing as a service, do marketing that is of inherent value, and then the rest will come. It’s “sell by not selling,” educate, bring people into your brand by doing something for them. Your decision to jump to how you’re helping and creating all those programs made the new promise that much more real.
Julia Fitzgerald: When we were looking at a brand refresh, what became clear to us that 75% of your brand is not the color. It’s not the logo. It’s not the font. It’s how everyone behaves, and it’s having that same interaction with American Lung Association in Seattle as you would have in Orlando, in our Chicago headquarters, in our DC advocacy office.
So much about our brand journey throughout that year was deciding how we show up as this trusted champion. A little back note to that, the organization had a big shift. Maybe two and a half, three years ago, they were eight chapters and one national umbrella. These changed to be one organization, so part of my motivation as the CMO was to use this as the clarion call for all of us to show up together in the same way and it’s been a huge internal unifier and motivator. It has an external, long-game purpose, but for right now, it has also helped us speak about COVID-19 in the same vocabulary with the same enthusiasm, the same sense of purpose.
Drew Neisser: I haven’t been able to mention Ben Franklin in a show for a while and he is my hero. Believe it or not, there’s a natural segue here. You talk about how the brand shows up and the way I look at it is, Franklin said, “Well done is better than well said.” As we think about brands, we think about the actions that the brands can do that make whatever promise that you make, particularly if you have such a clear purpose.
I love talking to nonprofit organizations that have gone through this process because there’s a clarity of purpose that for-profit brands could so benefit from. You know that every day you’re coming to work to help fight lung cancer, to help fight lung disease, and that’s such a powerful, clear, and simple purpose. I think, and I’ve seen it, this is the moment where brands that have a very clear purpose are finding their North Star. It’s a lot easier to make decisions, and even if they are in tough financial situations, it’s guiding them to make informed and better decisions. It’s a wonderful thing that you’ve all been able to do. I’m quite curious as we wrap up this show from the refresh exercise that you’ve gone through, what would you say have been the biggest lessons? This has been obviously an unusual brand refresh in terms of the way it rolled out, but what have been the biggest lessons for you?
Julia Fitzgerald: Well, operationally, and this relates back to going from a for-profit world to a not-for-profit world, creating an internal committee to do a brand refresh together is huge. I don’t think the brand would have been such a unifier if we hadn’t taken that careful step. Understanding the role of organizational behavior was new to me, and that was a huge learning. When it comes down to pivoting, I guess the other lesson we have to sometimes relearn all the time is, don’t get too precious about your plans.
Drew Neisser: Yeah, don’t get too precious. Precious is such a great word and, yes, we’ve had a number of conversations on this show about successful rebranding and not one of them was able not to include the CEO and a member of the board and others, because if you don’t bring the executive team along, it just feels like a coat of paint. That’s the last thing that you want to do, just change the color here and call it a day. So that’s great. And being able to be agile, this is a really good moment for agility.
I have really enjoyed this conversation. I think it’s tremendously relevant to any brand and the challenges that you’re facing right now in terms of if it’s time to rebrand. If you haven’t started one this may be a difficult time, but you may need to. One of the things that I think CMOs need to be thinking about now is, we may not be able to fill the pipeline the way we did before for the next two months or three months because your customers are thinking about survival or other things. If that’s the case, maybe you can spend a little time, maybe you could have committee meetings internally about the brand and your purpose and your values and have conversations that you didn’t have as soon as your CFO gets his contingency plans done. Assuming those are done, then there may be some interesting conversations that you can have about that. Number two is, if you have a brand purpose, now is absolutely the time to make sure you’re being true to it because if you’re not, it’s not real. And then, three is, this is a good time to be agile. Really agile.
Julia, thank you so much for being on the show and taking the time to talk. I certainly wish you the best of luck. I’m wondering, if the listeners wanted to help the American Lung Association one way or another, what would be the easiest way for them to do that?
Julia Fitzgerald: Go to our website lung.org and there’s plenty of donate buttons all over the place or you can go to lung.org/covid19.
Drew Neisser: There you go. For you, listeners, thanks for staying with us. I always really appreciate the time, I know your time is precious, and we’re trying to make these shows a value. You know how to get ahold of me by the way and suggest other topics. Text me, I’m waiting for your input. I’ve been getting some interesting texts lately. And lastly, until next time keep those Renegade Thinking Caps on and strong.