Ed Little

In your opinion, what makes good brand strategy?

There are lots of different guises that brand strategy takes. Many shapes and forms. Sometimes to inspire creative, others to articulate a clear brand narrative – their unique story, place in the market and the relationship they have with consumers.

For me, good brand strategy comes back to your business objectives. What are you trying to achieve and how can strategy guide the course? It needs to be simple, easily understood and repeatable. If you can’t remember it, you’re missing the point.

What are some brands you love and why?

I like brands that disrupt the status quo. Who come, seemingly out of nowhere, and make you rethink your relationship with the products you buy or the entire category itself. Values you didn’t know you held until they were brought into question. A few notable examples come to mind.

AllBirds – Turns out the world’s comfortable shoe is made from wool
Hinge – Designed to be deleted.
BackMarket – Screw New.
THIS! – This isn’t meat.

How did your podcast – People Doing Things – all begin?

I used to listen to lots of podcasts from Guy Raz’s How I Built This to Monocle 24: The Entrepreneurs. I remember listening to a particular episode with Julian Hearn, the founder of Huel, seemingly bragging about how he was about to build a £40mn factory and how all the decisions he’d made to date were the right ones. For me that didn’t feel empowering. It felt quite the opposite.

At the same time, I admired the people around me who’d taken the bold and daring move to ditch conventional careers and forge their own path. For them, I wanted to create a communicative platform where they could share their journeys, have some more support and learn from others. The proposition is ‘inspiring entrepreneurs of tomorrow’ – which has a nice double meaning. It’s who we have on the show but it’s also our purpose, providing the inspiration for people to take the most important step of all – the first one.

Your top 3 tips for being an excellent podcast host?

Preparation – preparing well-edited introductions helps land the magic but sometimes it’s hard to find the time.
Curiosity – asking the right questions is hard but invaluable. Going deep quickly keeps listeners hooked.
Rapport – the better the rapport, the better the podcast. If you can get to know each other first, it’ll make the podcast feel more like a conversation than an interview.

Your dream podcast interviewee list?

George Lucas – I’m a big Star Wars fan
Yevgeny Zamyatin – wrote my favourite book ‘We’, which inspired 1984
Michael Burry – first investor to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis, one of the main characters in The Big Short. Has a lot of predictions on where the markets will go.

What's next for People Doing Things? What's the big vision?

The podcast is deliberately niche. The goal is to continue breaking exciting new founders, businesses and brands to the world and be the first to document their journey. My hope is that their stories will inspire others to take the initial leaps and write narratives of their own.