E42 | FizzPopBANG: Creating an amazing brand by cultivating a brilliant culture with Carla Cringle and Imogen Pudduck.
Today’s guests are Carla Cringle and Imogen Pudduck, co-founders of FizzPopBANG Ltd. Their tagline, “making people whistle on their way to work,” says all you need to know about these two upbeat people. They met 15 years ago when they worked together at Red Bull as Head of Brand and Head of HR.
Carla and Imogen realised that to have a truly amazing brand that consumers fall in love with, you need infectiously passionate and loyal people that drive that ethos forward. Today, a strong business “plan” is no longer good enough to drive success.
They left Red Bull to share their collective knowledge and inject a little sparkle into the working lives of others. Together they created FizzPopBANG, a small but beautifully formed consultancy specialising in brand employee engagement.
On today’s podcast:
- The power of brand ambassadors
- How to empower people to make brand decisions when you’re not there
- Why you should show, not tell, what you are as a business
- Culture is the common denominator of your business.
- The importance of brand values
- Culture is built from within, and it’s based on a million different things
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Today’s guests on the podcast are Carla Cringle and Imogen Pudduck, co-founders of FizzPopBANG Ltd, a small but beautifully formed consultancy specialising in brand employee engagement. They met whilst working at Red Bull as Head of Brand and Head of HR, quickly realising that to have a truly amazing brand that consumers fall in love with, you need infectiously passionate and loyal people that drive that ethos forward.
Today FizzPopBANG works with a wide range of clients including some from the music, art, fashion and food worlds—people such as Stella McCartney, Sony Music and England Cricket Board. Both Carla and Imogen passionately believe that in order to get great business results you need a winning combination of highly motivated people and a strong brand.
So if your company could do with a culture reboot, Carla and Imogen have shared a few top tips to help get you started.
Brand ambassadors
To have a fantastic brand that consumers or customers fall in love with, you need people who believe in the business as much as you do, who are loyal to the brand and who are willing to spread the message far and wide for you. You need an army of brand ambassadors. Having a strong marketing or business plan is no longer good enough—culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Be willing to change
FizzPopBANG only works with people who already have the mindset in place to embrace change, and who want to have the very best company culture they can and to realise the importance of employee engagement.
FizzPopBANG has gone into reluctant businesses before saying “you need to do this,” and found inspiring change to be an uphill battle. Now they only work with companies who truly “get it”—with people who want to make a difference and be brilliant.
Empower employees
One of the most difficult challenges of building a brand if you don’t have complete employee buy-in is empowering people to make decisions when you’re not there. For example, how do you ensure a group of brand ambassadors are capable of making complex brand decisions when you’re not there to guide them?
The answer is through creating a great culture. At Red Bull, for example, Carla and Imogen created a competency framework that was embedded in everything all employees did, allowing people to experience the desired behaviours, such as creativity, day to day.
Recruit passion
Red Bull recruited 250 students every year and ran assessment days to test them. These days were filled with fun activities that linked back to the competency framework. They wanted to see how recruits worked in a team, how creative they were, how entrepreneurial they were and their ability to problem solve.
Overall, they wanted to recruit people who had a passion in a particular area. Hard skills are fine, but these can always be taught; soft skills like the ones for which the students were assessed, you want to be ingrained in a person’s personality. And for marketing, you want someone who can tell a great story.
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