Innovative brand strategist/agency leader and author of Super Strategist, with 25+ years global/UK/US based experience in developing, leading, integrating and managing Brand Planning, Decision Science, Connections Planning, CX, Business Intelligence and Digital Strategy disciplines. Lesley is an expert in integrated approaches to consumer marketing and the use of research and data to optimize insight, business strategy, channel planning and her specialization, customer journey mapping. She has extensive experience across automotive, financial services, food service, retail and fashion categories, working with complex and iconic brands including Mercedes-Benz, Dunkin’ Donuts, The American Red Cross, Toys R Us, Fisher Price, Smith Barney, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Calvin Klein (globally), Planet Fitness, Party City, Frontier, Optum Health, WW and BetterHelp amongst many others.  Lesley has held leadership positions across many world-class agencies including McKinney, Merkley and Partners, Digitas, Hill Holliday and currently, she is the Co-CEO/CSO of NYC based full-service independent ‘Positive Behavior Change’ agency leaders, DiMassimo Goldstein.

Positive Behavior Change With Lesley Bielby

How Standing Next To Your Mission Can Mean Leaving Your Customers Behind

I’m excited because this episode is truly amazing. We have Lesley Bielby. She is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-CEO of DiMassimo Goldstein or DiGo. DiGo is an advertising agency and brand agency out of New York. They are an amazing company. I have had the great pleasure of working with them on various projects for the past few years. I have gotten to know Lesley. She’s a joy to work with and she is a brilliant, brilliant person in the advertising industry, but also from a perspective of understanding and really knowing your customer.

I have learned so much from her and I’ve been in this space for several years and listening to her in meetings and how she thinks has been phenomenal. You’re going to pick that up in this episode here. The one thing I want you to listen for is how she thinks about the customer journey. We talk about the customer journey and customer experience world all the time but we talk about it most of the time from the perspective of the company looking in – How does the customer use our product or service? How do they engage with us? When Lesley looks at it, she steps back and says, “Show me the life of the customer. Show me culture as a whole. Let me understand the big picture.” Then she looks at where the company fits in and what they need to do on those moments in the journey that matter. We’re going to read a lot about that.

Tony, her perspective, and this was honestly the first time I had met her, I know you’d had a chance to work with her, but as somebody just meeting her, I was blown away by her brilliance and also her vast experiences. She’s lived all over the world. What she brings, and I think it’s fascinating, is that she got professionally trained in Psychology.

She brings that to the table as well. She’s been in this agency world for the vast part of her career. She’s been to a lot of different places and has such great perspective. I found her to be a fascinating woman. I felt honored to have her on the show. With that, we will get started and introduce you to Lesley Bielby from DiMassimo Goldstein.

—

Lesley, thank you for being here. We’re so excited. Welcome.

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Lesley, as we told our audience in the intro, you have this good career. Walk us through your journey. I know you’ve worked in lots of different places around the world. Tell us where you started and how you landed at DiGo.

I’ve had a 30 year career so far that’s been split into fairly even thirds. The first third was in London and the second third was in pretty much Boston, I’m sorry New York, and then the last third has been New York. Boston and New York were kind of interchangeable, which is why I mix them up sometimes because there were times when I commuted to New York from Boston as well.

The advertising industry is one of those industries that evolve so quickly.CLICK TO TWEET

I started my career, I stumbled into an agency called Collet Dickenson Pearce Partners when I was in my early to mid-twenties. I’d left university. I’d gone to Paris for a couple of years to teach English. I came back, did a post-grad. I didn’t know what to do. I did a temp job and ended up at CDP. I got very lucky. They agreed to put me on their graduate training scheme. I started out in new business. I then went into traffic for a year and then I moved into account planning.

I’m originally from Scotland, but the industry is very small up there and it certainly was back then. I got a call from a head hunter about a job at McKinney & Silver when I just had my first two children. We decided, “Why not? It could be a good adventure for a couple of years.” I went over to McKinney to work in America. Two years turned into three, turned into four. McKinney was fantastic.

At that time, we were maybe a little bit young for Raleigh. I could do it now, but back then, I felt that we wanted to get to the big city again. We moved to New York, and then I worked for agencies like Merkley and then ultimately into Hill Holliday. I started going from Hill Holliday to DiMassimo Goldstein. I’ve worked with DiGo three times. This is my third time. I worked with them for a couple of years, then another couple of years, then I went away for five years and then came back as Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer. That is a very short version of my career.

Lesley, tell us what about this world that you play in is attractive to you personally and professionally?

Do you mean the world of advertising or the world of DiGo or both?

Both. It’s very interesting that you’ve come back three times to DiGo, so both.

There’s something that keeps pulling me back. Advertising is one of those industries that has been evolving so quickly that at any time in my career and typically every 7 or 8 years, I had the pang of, “Should I be doing something else? Should I go client side? Should I go for not-for-profit? Should I be going to another country?” All these questions have rattled around in my head.

Every time I get there, something seems to happen to keep me pulled back in again. For example, years ago, it was digital, then it was social, now it’s data. We’re moving into AI and all sorts of interesting innovations that keep it fascinating and interesting. I’m at a point now in my career where I want to stay at DiGo for many years to come. Leading an agency at this point in my career is the right thing. Letting others move into the strategy role that I’ve occupied for quite a long time is the right thing to do as well.

The industry keeps me fascinated. It’s evolving quickly. In terms of DiGo, the fact that I’m a three times boomeranger. I’ve done that in other agencies, I was at Merkley twice and I was at Hill twice. When I work with people that I love to work with, I stay close to them and I hope that they will be happy to work with me again at some time in the future. That’s what happened with DiGo as well. I’ve known Mark DiMassimo and Lee Goldstein for well over a decade. I’ve kept a close eye on them and how the agency has evolved. It’s an exciting place. It’s independent and smaller. They’re not afraid to take risks. There’s no holding company above them.

Positive Behavior Change: You can go back to an agency if they’re really changing and are all about positive behavior change. That they are not just saying those words but actually living by those words too.

This new space that the agency has moved into was particularly fascinating to me and probably one of the main reasons why I wanted to go back this time, not just in the Co-CEO role, but also because the agency is now all about positive behavior change, and that’s not just a set of words. I’ve worked in many agency repositionings where the agency doesn’t necessarily live by those words that are chosen by the team.

In this case, I can tell you that they truly are living by this ethos or credo, or whatever you want to call it, because it’s something that the agency has been doing for years and excelled at for years. The decision was made fairly recently to 100% focus on that now. What that means is working with clients to help them help their customers or consumers do the things that they knew they should be doing, but for whatever reason, they’re hard for them to do.

It could be anything from taking your meds to not taking meds that are bad for you to using less plastic, to drinking more water, to exercising more, to not cutting your pills, but figuring out a way to help you afford your pills. It can expand into many different areas and it’s all about helping consumers do things for the better that are ultimately going to help a client’s business. That’s what we’re focusing on. That was appealing to me. It’s also been very appealing to a lot of the people that have joined us. It’s making the agency extremely attractive to the next generations of planners, account people, and creatives, which is fantastic to witness.

It’s an interesting approach and quite different. Tell us how that plays out in practice and in how you work with your customers and the problem you’re helping them solve. Walk us through what that looks like in terms of client engagement.

DiGo has had a natural affinity towards those kinds of clients in the past. Again, this has become the sole focus now. It’s interesting to be in a position where you can choose the clients that you want to work with. There are some clients that have come our way that we’re desperate to work with. We look at the business and say, “Are they the kind of client that wants to create positive behavior change?” If they’re not, we pass. It’s hard to pass, especially at the moment with our industry being tight, but pass we will, because if you’re going to stand by something, you have to stand by it with conviction.

The kind of clients that we’re attracting are those that are in the mental health space, exercise space or eat healthier space. We’ve taken on a couple of clients that are in the healthcare device space where they’ve created devices that help people with our health in general. The way that we work with those clients is there are a few tools that we use. The one that is probably most important is the customer journey, which is at the heart of the process that we use that we call the 3Ms process.

The 3Ms strategic process is essentially understanding. The first M is motivation. What’s the trigger? What is the thing that makes that individual feel that they have to change? Did something happen to their health? Were they told by a doctor that they were overweight or unfit? Is that person had a change in their financial situation? Is that individual trying to lead a healthier lifestyle? Is that individual having problems with drugs or alcohol? It could be any of those triggers. That’s the motivation.

What we do is we track the customer’s journey, how they make decisions once that trigger has happened. That moves us into the second space, which is momentum. How do they make decisions, explore, get information, how do they choose which brands or companies or services to align with? Is there a point along the journey where they fall away? Sticking to things that are good for you is hard. The hardest part is keeping up the good habit. How do we keep them moving along?

The last part of the 3Ms is the moments that matter most is identifying the moments along the journey where your brand matters or doesn’t matter. Where the category matters and where there are holes and gaps, and how you can fill those gaps by doing more research to understand more about the gaps. Most importantly, figuring out the best channel and message to fill that gap so that the consumer or customer is thinking about you the whole way.

If you’re going to stand by something, you have to stand by it with conviction.CLICK TO TWEET

That in turn not only informs strategy it informs creative and media planning as well. It has become a useful tool for our media partners because we can work with them on the journey and identify places that syndicated may not be able to identify based on the collective work that we do. These journeys are very much informed either by the client. In research, it’s going to be a combination of their research and then some proprietary research that we do together.

That’s the 3Ms process. That’s the shortened version of it. The longer version, if we have a client that wants a complete repositioning and has more time to do it, is we’re looking at culture and other factors of consumer behavior. We’re doing more thorough work around competitive analysis, but the journey even then is at the heart of the whole thing. There’s a real process and real science to it as well.

What I’ve been impressed with reading your book, Super Strategist, and diving in and being able to work side by side with you as we’ve explored this is brand strategy. I’ve worked with a lot of big brands and well-known brands. I don’t think any one of those brands ever thought about the customer journey pre-engagement, pre-purchase, the way you think about it. That has blown my mind. It made me re-evaluate a lot of things that we do on the customer experience side of things.

What you described is really knowing your customer or who you want to be your customer. I love the depth of research you go into. Talk to us a little bit more about what brand strategy is. I know that’s your expertise and a role you play, but it’s also much more than that. The way you go at it is so much deeper. Share a little bit more about that.

Brand planning is something that has many different names, but there’s a reason why people of my age group have this accent because account planning, which is the original name, was invented in the UK by two agencies, JWT and BMP. They both had two slightly different approaches. JWT was more quantitative and BMP was more qualitative, but the role was to represent the empty chair in the room, which is the consumer who was not being represented at all until that point.

The account folks and creatives were making judgment calls based on how they felt that day about the work and about the business. Having the consumer inform you, but not make decisions for you, became an important part of what a planner did. The planner worked and still works in close collaboration with account management and in particular, with creative, to make sure that the work stays on strategy and that the work is effective.

Over the last 30 years, everything’s changed. The days where we would do a piece of call and then write a brief. That brief would go into the creative vortex for six weeks and then get popped out the other end, hopefully with work that was on brief, 50% of the time maybe not. If the work was great, we changed the brief to match the work. There was some success there, but there was also a lot of throwing stuff on the wall to see what stuck to be perfectly honest with you. It wasn’t particularly scientific.

Now, with the internet, social, all the other tools and data that are at our disposition, we can use many of them to make sure that we are developing strategies and journeys and work with surgical accuracy. The scale is to make sure that you don’t forget the most important thing, which is the creative, because the creative is something that typically cannot be quantified. It’s not how the human brain works.

Positive Behavior Change: You have three Ms to help in the customer journey process. The first is finding their motivation. Then you track their momentum. Then identify the moments that matter most along the journey.

To me, the role of a brand planner or a brand strategist today is to straddle those two worlds. It’s how do you make sure that the creative is revolutionary and different and differentiated. To be so, it has to be unlike anything that you’ve ever seen out there before. At the same time, how do you help convince a client and yourself and your own team and do the right thing by putting it out there safe in the knowledge that it is based on what you’ve learned, probably going to do well?

You can never be 100% sure, but you can at least be 70% or 80% sure. Doing that foundational work so that creatives can do their best work to me is the role of a modern account planner or brand planner. The journey plays an important role there. The journey, Tony, I wanted to add, is not just tracking how the customer navigates the category. There’s a piece at the bottom that we call the emotional index where we understand, based on research, how the consumer feels on every stage.

If you’re dealing with something as unbelievably emotional and sensitive like mental health or drug addiction, they may start on an incredibly low point. As they start to learn more, you might discover that they start to feel a little bit better because there’s a solution out there, or you might find that they get unbelievably confused and there’s a jagged part in the middle of the journey as their journey and their emotions ebb and flow along the journey.

As they get to a point where they feel that a solution is in place when they’ve made their decision and they’ve started doing the work, at that point, you might find that the emotion will start to go up if they have a good experience. Pinpointing the emotional index to us is a huge part of journey development as well. It’s not just about rational left-brain stuff. It’s about the right-brain stuff too.

Lesley, I have a question for you. As you shift from your focus throughout your career of being more of that strategist to now leading the company as Co-CEO, how do you instill that positive behavior change into the culture at DiGo?

Mark, Lee, myself, and the rest of the leadership team are working hard on this. This is a relatively new focus for us, but it hasn’t been a new expertise. Over the years it’s become our sole focus. Putting yourself through your own process is where it begins. It’s developing your journey and where the gaps are. At what point does the client coming in experience the notion of positive behavior change? It probably begins with your website. It begins with all of the content that you have out there. It’s when they learn more about us. It’s the cases that we put out there. It’s the consultants knowing that’s our expertise. It’s understanding our process.

It’s how we evolve our process to make sure it includes. It’s primarily focused on positive behavior change. It’s the people that we recruit. It’s the people that we train and how we train them. Everything has to go through that lens. Putting ourselves through our own rigorous process. The cobbler’s children are always the worst shod. We’ve made that a priority.

We started making changes to our website. There’s much more to come. Mark DiMassimo has been actively involved in creating content around the space because he’s been a student of this space for many years. We have more content than we know what to do with that we’re posting out there, making sure that we’re present in social and other channels.

Most importantly, it’s not just making sure that the way that we put our face on out there is about positive behavior change. It’s about living it every single day. It’s about the leadership meeting that we had this morning where we ask ourselves questions, “Which of these prospective clients are going to be the most likely candidates for positive behavior change? Which ones do we focus on? Which of these briefs points to positive behavioral change?” It affects our creative brief as well.

Live, breathe, eat, sleep across every single potential touchpoint your client prospect has.CLICK TO TWEET

Is there anything in the work that this client has asked for that isn’t about positive behavior change? If so, how can we evolve it? That’s what we’re doing now. It’s living, breathing, eating, sleeping this across every single potential touch point with every client, prospect, consultant, and employee, and prospective employee.

Where do you see positive behavior change in reading marketing as a whole? It’s such an important thing. You talked about a lot of different categories where people have never thought about those as positive behavior changes. They’re thinking, “I’ve got to change my behavior.” There is a great book I read, I can’t remember the author’s name, but Change or Die was the name of the book.

It talks about how even though people are presented with this idea that they had a massive heart attack or some other health related issue and if they don’t change, they’re going to die within months or years. When we look at the culture around us and we see all of these opportunities from mental health to eating better to locally sourcing food, where’s your perspective of where this is going? Is the rest of marketing going to follow, do you think? Will it be a small set of boutique agencies that do this work?

First of all, I don’t think this is going to be niche. This was one of the challenges that we had when we were introducing the idea of a 100% focus on positive behavior change to our internal audience, our own agency, because we in leadership, and before I got back, had been living with this idea for a long time. The immediate place that people spring to is that you’re going to work on not-for-profit only or that you’re going to work on sustainable products. That’s not the case.

This is about making a difference where you can across a multitude of different situations and categories. The way that I see it in my mind is it almost falls into three equal thirds. The first tranche is going to be those not-for-profit, ad canceled types of executions and projects where you’re genuinely making a difference in sustainability or addiction or health behaviors. The focus is going to be on those.

In the second tranche, it’s almost by default, challenger brands. Challenger brands, they’ve always been about positive behavior change from the get-go typically because they’re challenging the conventional wisdom or the status quo within a category. They’re coming up with an idea that’s better. If it’s better, it’s about encouraging consumers and customers to do things in a way that’s different and better. Again, by default, they’re positive behavior change agents because they exist. I see maybe a fat third of being those challenger brands.

The final tranche, I see being big corporations and big institutions, like pharma companies, banking, where there’s often an ESG or a component of those organizations where they focus on doing good in the world. That would be more about sustainability, helping feed the hungry, helping people with compliance issues. It is a major issue in the pharmacy industry.

Are we going to take on huge, big pharma accounts? If they’re willing to do positive behavior change work, then yes. The likelihood it’s probably going to be a factor or a section of those companies where that’s their primary focus would be most appealing for them in us.

It’s being anywhere where change for the good can be made. You talked about change your diet. We have this chart that we use that I talk about in the book, that is called the Brand Family Chart, where we plot where we think a client is. The quadrant that you don’t want to be in is the dead dog quadrant, which is up in that the far right. Those are brands that are on their last breath. They’re going to be on their last breath because they didn’t do something to help make them relevant in the era that we’re living in. I won’t go into who they are, but we all know who some of those brands are. It’s almost impossible to recover from being in that quadrant.

Positive Behavior Change: The role of a brand planner was to represent the empty chair in a room, which was the consumer. Back then people would make judgment calls based on how they felt that day.

There are a few notable exceptions, like Old Spice. They did an amazing job pulling themselves out of that, back into the alpha space. We would work with clients that are in there that realize the only way for them to get out of that is to create positive behavior change. Those would be brands that we’d love to pull back into the challenger space and recognize that the only way out of this is to do something radically different that’s radically relevant. Radical relevance means that you’ve got to go out there and show the consumer that you’re culturally relevant and that you share their values, and that you have strong values, and you’re purpose-led, and all the things that come with modern brands.

To answer your question about do I think that all marketers are going to point in this direction? Many of them will start to point in this direction. If these terrible eighteen months has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t go back to the way things were professionally as companies and as individuals. Otherwise, what has it taught us?

Coming out of this, as hopefully we will, into whatever the future is going to look like, we have to take some stuff with us. We have to remember about our priorities and what’s important. Remember that there are some things that are simply more important than anything else and not to leave those behind. Positive behavior change is going to be a critical part of that. Learning to eat with family. Learning that friends and family are the most important thing. Learning to spend time with people. Learning the touch and hugging and all those things that we couldn’t do are important. These are all positive behavior change. It’s learning to change our ways for the better.

If companies come out of this not having learned that there’s a place for positivity for change within their organizations and certainly within their consumer basis and their perspective consumer basis, then they’ve got an issue. We’re not going to be short of opportunities, I put it that way. So far, it seems to be working well.

One of the things that Tony and I spend a lot of time talking about with our guests and we talked about this in our book, we have conversations about this, it seems like a lot, the shift between generations and how much the generations now are demanding companies that are doing things for the greater good. Can you touch on how that looks from your chair as Co-CEO of DiGo?

It aligns obviously with positive behavior change. The minute we told our employees that this is what we were about and explain the different types of businesses that we thought that we would appeal to the energy and the excitement over the future of DiGo was palpable. As we’ve explained that to different consultants, perspective clients, and perspective employees, that palpable positivity has been there.

Some companies are in a really tough spot. The only way for them to get out is to create a positive behavior change. You either change or die.CLICK TO TWEET

I believe in particular for Gen Z or younger Millennials to an extent, but Gen Z or anyone around that 25 and under range, if you’re not a company that is doing work for the better of humanity, and that extends to ad agencies, if you’re not doing work for the better of humanity they’re not going to be interested. That’s where they want to put their business and their lives. That’s where they want to be.

It’s important for the future of our industry that we create not only an agency but an industry that is ready for that generation because they’re coming in. The last few years, unfortunately with COVID, but we’ve been pulling in interns and younger employees that are from that generation. It’s what they want from their work life as well as from their personal lives and the kind of brands that they want to work on.

This is a generation that will say, “I don’t want to work on this,” if it doesn’t feel right. It’s interesting for somebody of my age. Back in the day, you’d work in anything you were put on because that’s how the things were, but in your gut, you felt, “I don’t like this. I don’t like what I’m doing on this.” A lot of people would say, “You can’t work in advertising and have a conscience because everybody works on stuff that they don’t believe in,” but we think that’s changed. We do especially for a smaller independent.

We’re in the enviable position of being able to choose the clients that we want to work with. Those kinds of clients are going to be attracted to us for all the right reasons. That in turn is going to have a big impact on keeping our employees happy, especially those in the younger end of the scale. Attracting modern talent into the industry and the agency in the future is going to be a critical part of our industry moving forward. There’s no question in my mind.

It’s inspiring being somebody that’s in the latter part of our collective careers to see how they are standing up for that thing. I know for me, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve got Millennial children and employees, and it’s been inspiring to change my paradigm when I’ve thought the same way as you. You do stuff you don’t want to do because that’s the nature of it. It’s a fascinating time. You bolt on all the stuff you were talking about in terms of COVID, what matters. It’s an awesome time to be leading a business right now.

I have three Millennial children myself. I learned as much from them as they learn from their parents. This next generation, they challenge you as well. It doesn’t matter how senior you are, they’ll challenge you, “Why do you think that’s right? Is this business we should be going after?” They have no problem in putting it out there, which is fantastic. We have to learn from each other. We have to keep moving forward.

Positive Behavior Change: When people think of positive behavior change, they think of working for non-profit only or sustainable products. That’s wrong. It’s about making a difference across a multitude of situations and categories.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the snapback in our industry has been extraordinary. When was the last time you saw a ‘Help Wanted’ sign? They’re everywhere at the moment. That includes in our industry. There’s a lot of competition out there for talent. Making sure that we’re best positioned to attract the best talent that can serve our clients the best way moving forward with this new focus that we have is important. We’re finding that it is attracting the right talent because it shares their values. It’s what they believe in.

Lesley, you’ve talked a lot about behavior change here and what DiGo is doing in that realm. Talk to me about what you’ve brought to the table as an agency to lead the charge here.

There are a few things. First of all, I mentioned that Mark has been a student of positive behavior change for many years and has written extensively about positive behavior change. There’s a lot of content out there. If anybody wants to catch up on it, have a look, there’s some great stuff. Secondly, for myself, I trained many years ago as a psychotherapist. I took a break in advertising and went on to practice for a very short period of time. I decided it wasn’t for me. I brought all of that learning back to the industry when I went back into the ad industry.

Understanding not only the consumer attitudes and behaviors but also their mindset has been an important part of the way that I’ve been doing my work as a strategic planner. I’m bringing that to the fold, but very importantly, it’s not enough for a bunch of ad people to do this. We have developed, and Mark has developed over the years, a panel of experts that we have tapped into and can tap into.

These are people in behavioral science, clinical psychologists, people that are experts in behavior change, that have influenced how we’re going to market, how we’ve positioned ourselves, the tools that we’ve developed and the tools that we will develop moving forward. They’ve been a very influential part of this and will continue to be so in the future. It’s important that we have that external perspective. Because of all of this, it puts us in a good position to own this territory which is quite unique.

What a fascinating thing you can bring to the table from where you thought you were going to go, and then didn’t. It fits. It’s very cool. One of the things we’d like to do is give our guest on the show a chance to talk about any nonprofit or a charity you support. Is there anybody we can give a shout out to?

Radical relevance means you have to go out there and show the customers you’re culturally relevant and that you share values.CLICK TO TWEET

There are many, but the one I want to give a shout out to is National Jewish Health. It’s one of our clients. We’ve been working for them for quite some time. They are a not-for-profit hospital that’s based out of Denver, Colorado. They specialize in helping people breathe easier and in all aspects of respiratory care and beyond. They do extraordinary work that helps people literally to breathe easier because there’s such a prevalence of asthmatic conditions and other breathing related conditions out there. They’re the leading hospital in the nation. They do extraordinary work.

Thanks for that. I remember my young cousin having to move out to Denver when he was a child because of breathing issues. That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that.

They are also non-denomination despite the name, so anyone can get treated there.

Lesley, thank you much. This has been an incredible conversation. We appreciate your time. We love what DiGo is doing. We know Mark DiMassimo. We’ve had him on the show. If you haven’t had a chance to read his episode, please do. Best of luck moving forward in your new role and with DiGo. We’ll be watching.

Thank you very much. It’s lovely to talk to you both.

—

I love this interview with Lesley. Readers, as I told you, she’s brilliant. Betsy said the same thing as we started off here. The thing that stands out to me is this whole idea of positive behavior change. It’s not just about stopping smoking or helping with addiction. It’s looking at the industry and saying, “What is it that this industry needs? Where can it go? How can a new company challenge the old way of doing things and do things better?”

As we dig into this, the Gen Z and the end of the Millennial generation, and the fact that they live in a different way, they consider the long-term impact. They want to work with companies and to use companies and brands that care about things like the environment and about people and equal rights, and all of these other types of things. There’s such a wide range of companies and brands that they can work with that are in the positive behavior change space.

I have seen, I’m sure you have too, Tony, where companies are trying to be opportunistic with those generations and like, “They care about this, so we can make money off them this way.” When you talk to Lesley, it’s not about that. It’s so much sincerity that comes through in what they do. The part of the conversation that I embraced was about how they have it in their culture, but they have the discipline to say no to a client if they don’t fit that culture.

They have the ability to do that. It’s hard to do any time to say no to somebody who wants to pay you for your work, but they have the discipline and the commitment to that culture of working with people who are sincere about the changes they want to make. Thanks for introducing us to Lesley, Tony. Thank you everyone for joining us again. We’ll see you next time on the show.

Important Links:

• Lesley Bielby – LinkedIn
• DiMassimo Goldstein
• Super Strategist
• National Jewish Health
• Mark DiMassimo – Previous episode
• ProphetAbility: The Revealing Story of Why Companies Succeed, Fail and Bounce Back
• The Congruity Group
• Tony Bodoh International