Jay Livingston (Shake Shack) | How Storytelling is Crucial to Brand Building

A recurring theme has started to pop up on the CMO podcast, Sustainability. One of our recent guests even incorporated sustainability into his job title. He might not be alone. According to Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report, Sustainability continues to be a focus for brands. While some organizations may want to pull back on sustainability initiatives in times of economic uncertainty, consumers continue to stress that a brand's commitment to sustainability is critical to their preferences. However, only 25% of brands that Deloitte surveyed say their focus for 2023 is on urging consumers to take action. Instead, organizations are recognizing that focusing on their own sustainability efforts can have an even more positive impact on the planet and on their business. For more inspiration on how to make this year be your organization's most impactful year yet, check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report at Deloitte.com slash global marketing trends. Are you struggling to keep up with the increasing demand to create content and feel like your content creation process is all over the place? Well, you're not alone. One of the hot topics on this show is content strategy. How to reach your audience, what content is relevant and whether to do this inside your company or to hire outsiders to help you. Well, Deloitte Digital can help with all of this. They understand the challenges marketers face when it comes to scaling content and they offer an efficient and sustainable way to create, deliver and analyze content at scale, all without hiring additional resources. With Deloitte Digital's integrated solutions, you can streamline your workflows and create relevant and targeted communications to help improve your business outcomes. Visit Deloitte Digital.com to learn how their content supply chain solutions can help you scale your content creation and could improve your customer experience. Now storytelling is a buzz word in marketing. We're going to hear it again and can this year over and over again. And I think it's become one of those concepts that people say the word and don't think about its implications, what's it really mean, how it impacts the work they do day in and day out. So I'd like you to kind of unpack that word for us right now, Jay, when you say storytelling and you're a storyteller and storytelling is critical to brand building. It starts with elevated ingredients and food that no one else could serve at this level. So we're really a fine dining burger in a fast casual environment. And if people knew the extents to which we work to bring the best ingredients in the world, you know, that's my job as a storyteller. And I feel like I don't do a good enough job of is letting people know that. I've been to the farms. I've seen where we get our cattle, our pork, our chicken, etc. And those are the places that if you eat meat, you want to, you would once you're protein sourced from where we source our proteins. And that's a story I think about trying to tell all the time. So those elevated ingredients are first, second is being an asset to the community. So you've probably heard me say this before. When someone says that's my shake shack versus a shake shack, I know that we've kind of, we're in a good place. When they say, my shake shack is the upper side or my shake shack is short north in Columbus. That's a great place because we don't feel like a chain. We feel part of that community. And the fact is it's true. We are local like our general managers run those restaurants like their own restaurant. Hi, I'm Jim Stangle and I help major brands find their purpose and activate it in the profits for seven years. I was the global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble where I oversaw the marketing of hundreds of brands. You may not know it, but the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of all of your favorite brands are trying to connect you with your favorite products and services through purpose. And on this show, I delve into how they do it. My guest today in the CMO podcast is Jay Livingston, the chief marketing officer of Shake Shack, the nearly 20-year-old roadside burger stand Danny Meyer founded in Madison Square Park in New York City. Since its first kiosk in 2004, or by the way, I have enjoyed many shakes in burgers, Shake Shack has grown to nearly a billion dollar brand with locations in 19 countries. Sales for the latest fiscal year grew about 20%. While we use the term Renaissance Man or Woman Too Much, my guest Jay is truly really a Renaissance man. A graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Jay's career path has included a 20-year stint in fact of America, two years at Bark, makers at Barkbox, and now four years plus at Shake Shack. His side hustles are at least as interesting. Active angel investing, he's a co-founder of United America, a non-profit to help bridge the partisan divide, he has produced three feature films, and he likes muscle cars and guitars. This is my conversation with the CMO who describes his career journey more of a meadow than a path. Here's Jay Livingston. Jay, welcome to the CMO podcast. I think it is destiny that we are recording today. Just yesterday, you opened a restaurant in the neighborhood I grew up in in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I will be there just next week and I am going to that restaurant and proudly going in and getting a burger in a shake. Do you want to join me? Super exciting, man. I'd love to join you. I've learned a lot about Lancaster when an interesting town and community that is in the last few weeks as we've gotten that one open. We had a line of a hundred cars at the opening two days. I guess that was yesterday. Yeah, so we'd be really excited to be there. Yeah. No, it's going to be well received by the community. That's right. Believe me, there will be lines for months, maybe even years. It's right by the Wegmans too, which is a great location for you. Yeah, interesting, such a tourist-oriented community and a place where a lot of folks go both from out of town. You may know there's this huge basketball facility and multi-sport facility they built there now and just a very interesting dynamic area. So we're really excited to be there. Well, it's also a destiny. I think we're recording today because about a week ago, a little more than a week ago, you delivered a commencement address at Miami University, College of Arts and Sciences. I watched it on YouTube. It is wonderful and it is hysterical. I highly recommend it, but I have to get you to talk about two concepts that you shared in that speech. And the first concept is Barry doesn't shake hands. And the second concept is the life triangle. So could you could you take us through the Barry doesn't shake hands story? Well, one is when you get, you know, asked to do a commencement speech like that, you're super excited about it for about two minutes, right? And then you start to think, wow, what am I going to write this speech about? Particularly like how do I just opened and bookend the speech? And so like a lot of marketers, my brain sort of thinks in stories. I mean, I'm a natural storyteller. And I thought, well, the last time I was standing in that place was when I was introducing Barry Manelow to, you know, 10,000 people at Millett Hall. And you of course went there in the 90s, right? Went there in the 90s and we had a student run concert board. The only one I believe in the country at that time, we actually, we had our own PNL, we managed the budgets, we managed the production, the bookings, and during my four years, we had parents weekend shows, Bill Cosby, James Taylor, Jay Leno, and then my senior year, Barry Manelow. So I thought, you know, when you're that age, you have these distinct memories. And I had a very distinct memory of Barry walking into basically underneath the stadium with his manager into the facility. And it was customary for us to greet the artist. And so I walked up and I stuck out my hand and I said, Mr. Manelow, so excited, you're here, welcome to Oxford. And he had mirrored out sunglasses and a big trench coat, and he just looked at my hand. And he didn't move, not resort. And his manager leaned in and said, Barry done Jay cans. And Barry done Jay cans became synonymous with rejection, a line of rejection amongst my friends. So we would say, oh, you know, I asked this girl out the other night, what she say? Barry done Jay cans. So that became kind of just live that we just used as sort of a funny form of rejection. And part of the speech at the end, I sort of wrapped it around and said, you know, I talked about resilience in the speech and life is going to be challenging. Everybody's going to get hit in the mouth. And Barry's not always going to shake your hand. But as I was doing that in the video, I had the AV guys turn on Mandy, the song Mandy. I heard it at full blast in the arena. And it's such a great kind of Christian. And you were cracking up. I was cracking up. The audience was cracking up. I meant it to be very serious. And then I realized this isn't being taken seriously. So I'm going to roll with it. And any worked out really well. And it's always fun to end with music again, as a marketer, you know, you think, how do I make it? What tools can I add to this experience to really make it pop for the students and the families that were there? So having the music at the end, I thought kind of tied it all together and made it fun. Well, if I ask any questions, you don't want to answer. I know what you'll say. Barry doesn't shake hand. So we'll just keep moving on in this episode. So the second concept I want, I mean, the speech is really lovely in every way. So congratulations on it. And it's always wonderful to return to your alma mater. And you certainly talked about that. But I love this concept, you shared with the graduates of a life triangle and the three elements to it. And to be sure you're in the right place on those at every point in your life and to reflect on that. So I think it's a lovely way to start the show by getting you to talk about the love or the life triangle. Maybe it loves part of it, the life triangle and how you use it in your career meadow of a life, which we will talk about later, the meadow, the meadow metaphor. The love triangle is something totally different. But we can talk about that too. Barry doesn't shake hands. As a marketer, our job is to be creative. But what does that mean? I love George Lois's definition of creativity. George is of course a famous art director. And he said creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything. I love it. The way I think about creativity, I love George's definition, but I think of it as fresh and unexpected ways to solve a problem or to discover new opportunities and new approaches. In the world of business, however, creativity can be a scary word, but it doesn't have to be. In the 2023 global marketing trends report, Deloitte surveyed more than 1,000 top executives from today's top brands to understand how they plan to meet their customers needs this year. Turns out, some of these high growth brands are reimagining creativity in their organizations. At a time when we're seeing a shift from creative skills to analytical skills in marketing, these brands are often doing the opposite. And some CMOs are discovering creativity can be their superpower. Are you looking to make a meaningful impact in your organization in the year ahead? Check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report today at Deloitte.com slash global marketing trends. As creative and marketers, we understand the struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing content demands. And the recent surge of interest among CMOs and chat GPT and other language learning models has added fuel to this fire. Today businesses should embrace streamlined workflows and automated processes to step into the future of the content supply chain. Good news, Deloitte Digital can help. Their content supply chain solutions can help your business improve collaboration across teams, increase efficiency and reduce costs, all while maintaining high quality content. With Deloitte Digital Solutions, you can create more targeted and relevant content without having to leverage your internal resources. Visit Deloitte Digital.com to learn more. The live triangle is this idea that when I was right out of college, I remember thinking, I need some way to kind of set up a way to think about my life and evaluate how I'm doing. And it became kind of clear to me there were three sort of points of the triangle that were really important to how I thought about life. So one was how much I was enjoying my personal life, the city I was in, the friends I had, the extracurricular activities I was doing. The second point of the triangle was how much as I was enjoying work, was I fulfilled, was it challenging, did I like the people I worked with, etc. And then the third point was how much money I was making. And you know it's funny that sometimes regarded as I've said it lately is a little bit crass but the reality is especially at that age how much money you're making is a big part of basically it's a big part of your life at that point. And so what I was always striving to do is understand where I set on each of those areas and understand the trade I might be willing to make. So I might get a job where I'm going to go learn a ton. It would be a fascinating job but it would be somewhere in a city that may not be my first choice and where I don't know people. And would I be willing to make that trade or go take a job where don't really love the job not learning a lot but I'm going to bank a ton of money for a couple of years and that's going to give me optionality down the road. So I just think it's important it's a good framework I think for someone to think about how am I doing on each of those measures of the life triangle and obviously where we'd all like to be is to have high scores on all three but that rarely happens even as you get older that rarely happens and just knowing where that where you are on those I think is kind of a is a helpful framework to think about your life. How do you feel about where you are on those today? It's a very good question. I love my job. I love the people I work with. We'll talk about that but I'm sort of fulfilling a lot of my kind of life goals on the career that I have right now both with Shake Shack and some of the things that I do that are job related. My personal life I just think New York City when I look back at the top five best decisions I've ever made in my life moving to New York City 15 years ago was probably number one or two and it opened up a tremendous amount of doors personally and professionally but there's just so much to do in this city so many dynamic interesting diverse people that you can easily put together and mingle with in ways that most cities just doesn't happen and then hey I'd love Shake Shack to I'd love our stock price to keep moving higher we're doing okay at the moment but you know financially I've been really blessed to be able to work for some companies that have done a great job and it's not cheap to live in New York and it would really not be cheap to raise a family and so forth so that is something you have to keep an eye on but I'm feeling really happy with all three and if you'd have told me when I was 25 if I'd get to that place it would have seemed very daunting at the time. Yeah for me too. Hey speaking of the life triangle and the three corners of it you're founder and chairman Danny Meyer seems to be doing pretty well on all three of those I've had the great pleasure to meet him in the past and to get to know him a bit we did something together with the Lexus company and just he's so personally so wonderfully such a lovely human being so I just like it a riff a little bit as we get started here about you know I know he's not your CEO we'll talk about him in a minute but what areas of marketing and branding do you occasionally talk about with Danny if you do. Danny's chairman of our board and Danny's just a special human I mean he for instance right after I gave that commencement address sent me a note immediately I'm not even sure where he saw it he he watched it sent me a note he gave thoughtful commentary on how the speech went you know and that's the kind of person Danny is you've probably been around these people too you may be one of them is you wonder how does this person have enough hours in the day to send so many personal thoughtful notes comments you know he's the first one to help in and jump jump into something to help make connections or he's a constant idea machine he's just one of those people they say be careful meeting your heroes but he really lives up to so much of the hide which has been a lot of fun and and what Danny has is that sort of instinctual feel for hospitality I'll just give you one quick example of we were down doing a tasting maybe a year ago at this point and we had launched can wine and we had a couple of labels I had a couple of labels I was debating about what the can wine would be and he looked at him and he said there's just one rule here it's you should make them fun if the label's not fun and if drinking wine and shake shake isn't fun if you worry about anything else it's kind of a miss and you know he just synthesize that immediately like that immediately basically told me one the label I was thinking was wrong because the label is too serious it wasn't fun and he's got a way of sort of seeing through things to just get to that core essence of what's going to motivate people and that's something I really appreciate about him what else have you learned from Danny over the years I mean this idea of simplicity and cutting through and being and being so darn personal I mean I just called his office a couple weeks ago to ask where I should celebrate New York for this story that a couple colleagues and I did for the Harvard Business Review was we worked on it for about 13 months we never met each other in person and we were all coming to New York to celebrate they got back to me within minutes had a great restaurant recommendation we had a great table we had a great time you know it's just that's his vibe I'll tell you the best thing I've I've learned so many things from him but one of the one of the main ones is this concept of a charitable assumption and so we're going to treat everyone or anything that is sort of done to you or that you engage with with a charitable assumption right and I have a little bit of a fighter in me I'm Scott's Irish I may come by that naturally and there's a book about the Scott's Irish called Born Fighting and you know I'm competitive and I tend to if I if I met with some resistance I tend to my instinct is to come back with that resistance Danny's idea of like I'm going to give everyone a charitable assumption so is such a great way to walk through life right and it helps you neutralize and take a step back that instinct some of us might have I've always wondered if Danny actually has it or not or if he's just that he was born with a charitable assumption but you know regarding in hospitality is always a series of little problems to overcome and if you approach all those problems as a battle it's going to wear you out but if you approach them all as something where I'm going to assume this person has the best intentions and just might have made a mistake or having a bad day etc it's really helped me with not just my work life but also me as a leader and as a manager and just even in my personal life of of leading with that you're probably see a lot more of your CEO than you see of Danny and I've heard you talk about you have a terrific relationship with Randy so could you talk a little bit about what makes that relationship terrific obviously a CMO CEO relationship is crucial when it when it's not working the brand is usually not healthy the company's often not healthy so I've heard you speak about Randy so could you tell us a bit about how you built such a productive and and positive relationship with him well I've joked before that if the CEO doesn't necessarily see eye to eye from a personality or a taste or a creativity standpoint with a lot of other C team members but they're fantastic at what they do it's really not that big a deal right you can you if you've got an incredible cheap technology officer you may not sort of vibe on a certain level but they really get the work done that can be very successful if you don't really get along and vibe at some level with your your CEO when you're a CMO and creatively you see things very differently you have different responses and things it's gonna be a problem it's gonna make both of your lives not as fun and it doesn't mean you don't add and see things you know have different points of view and one of the things that I think Randy and I we see a lot of things the same way but where we don't we have the trust in our relationship now to be able to debate it and to be able to really push back on the other one he gives me a lot of ability to push back and he's certainly not afraid to push back on me and I really appreciate that and so but having that kind of he loves marketing he is an entrepreneur like Danny they really built this brand from nothing and that means they have really good core instincts on what's right for the brand and so my job is to both understand that and take that and then help help expand that vision and bring it to life even more with the skill sets that I bring to the table but at its base you gotta you gotta be excited about the same things or it's gonna be a struggle in your in your daily life and it's gonna be stressful for you as the CMO how do you keep as you expand and you open I think I've seen the data like a store every four days I don't know if that's still accurate yeah you open one of my hometown this week how do you keep it all consistent right great brands are creative they're enduring they're also consistent as hell right if you buy it if you go if you go to LVMH to buy one of their luxury brands and you buy something in Tokyo or Paris or New York it feels looks and the experience is very very similar how do you do that when you're expanding as fast as you are do you have a framework that you follow a set of behaviors principles lots of communication I mean what is it that's because I visit many of your stores restaurants and I kind of feel a similar thing when I go in I feel I'm having fun I'm eating great food that people are super it's buzzy there's a lot of people around so how do you keep it so damn consistent it's a lot of work but I would say we have one huge structural advantage to how we decided to build the company which is we own them all in the US so we don't franchise we license to airports and stadiums but otherwise we actually own the restaurants and so we're not in this situation where so many restaurant chains are managing franchisees who all have different opinions about what it should be like in their particular region or what they're passionate about or not passionate about you know the tradeoff of that is you can't always grow quite as fast I mean if we had franchise we might have a thousand shake shacks in the US right now we have about 300 but it gives us so much more control of that experience and I think for what we do that's been a really important decision and then we're in 19 countries now and we license to one licensee per country overseas it's often a local family that has deep relationships and doing successful retail and we have pretty strict guidelines about how those licensed countries are going to work we we ship a lot of the product if we can't get exactly what we want to our specifications there we keep the menu really consistent with a few exceptions on you know we'll have a falafel burger in the Middle East or we'll do cherry blossoms shakes in Japan or these kinds of things but we really try to stay understand what makes Shake Shack Shake Shack not compromise on ingredients or any of those things and if you've got that sort of foundation that they're all working from it makes the decisions on when you do want to customize something it makes those much easier we're going to talk more about your role at Shake Shack but before we do that we've been talking about some of your bosses right Danny and Randy you had an incredible boss at Bank of America and Finnecane who was head of strategy marketing from what 2005 is to 2015 you were there for 20 years what did you learn from Anne that's helped you be the leader you are today and really built an organization that was just so professional I mean you know banking the stakes are high the level of you're dealing with people's money and their finances and something that is like extremely important to them and you're constantly under fire when you work for like one of the two or three biggest banks in the world and what I thought Anne built was an organization there and we had a couple of really good leaders of the marketing or before Anne too really raising people's game learning to say in each of these functions of marketing I want the top level of professionalism we can find we worked with the best agencies in the world no matter what that function was if it was your creative agency your digital agency your PR agency etc we had high standards for everything around sports marketing or if we did anything on the ground engagement wise everything we did in the digital sphere was really top-notch so you kind of learn okay this is a level that this is how to do things at a very high level at a very massive organization and that served me really well when I went on to work at growth companies down the road who were all about being scrappy and fast and I had to learn a little bit how to get faster and how to get scrappier but when I sort of learned that balancing that deep experience with how to execute complex projects at a really high level that has served me well I think it's been a nice combination you are shake shacks first CMO and when you join this was already kind of a hot growing brand why four years ago did they decide Jay that they needed a CMO I think they realized they had hit that point of growth where what had gotten them to that point was not going to be where they needed to go from there to really scale and scale the business and you know when you start to really ramp up that hockey stick kind of growth you want to professionalize the group and I think that's what I was brought in to do which was really professionalize and think about okay how do we keep our creativity but also put some processes in place that are going to keep us on the road how do we bring guest insights and analytics and data into more of our decision making because we had always been purely instinctual and what I've said in other podcasts and places we like to be instinct led and data supported and when they ask me in the interview who would be the first hire you would bring on to the team and I said I will build a guest insights and analytics function because right now if I walk in to Randy's office the CEO and we both have an opinion on something I know how that that's going to go if I don't have data behind my thinking and so we've really built a great function around understanding our guests much more and we still want to lead with instinct we don't want to follow the crowd we don't want to be a company that does things by focus groups on the other hand data helps highlight opportunities for us it helps keep us from making a mistake and it's really I think given us a lot more a lot of balance to that sort of instinctually led approach now four years later you built out guests analytics and insights how else is marketing different from when you joined four years ago at Shake Shack what capabilities have you built and what kind of things have you focused on with your team well I really told Randy at the time that I never really want to be the marketer where someone just hands me a product and goes and says sell it and then when it doesn't sell or if it doesn't sell it said well we didn't market this well enough you know we didn't have a product I have a background in product development too so I really asked like our deal was if this goes well I would like to also add our culinary and menu innovation to my team so that I got to oversee the product so we could do something that I call really building marketing into the product so instead of being handed that thing to go sell we start from the very beginning and say what's interesting about this item and I'm not somebody that gets in there and says oh the mouth feel of this is wrong or the acids aren't balancing but what I am saying is like what's the story behind this white truffle burger let's say that we're going to do for what we call an LTO which is a limited time option we're just ending what's been a really successful run about white truffle burger and as if if building marketing the product is all about all right what is it during this time in the economy that are going to make white truffles really interesting to people well it's tough out there right and white truffle is like one of these little affordable indulgences that we can really bring to the world and portray it that way like we had a billboard that said we only got I've ever done a couple billboards ever and it said truffles in this economy and we were sort of playing off this idea that you can still have that affordable luxury and that to me is building marketing into the product from scratch and being able to oversee that function along with the digital guest experience the shack app and web and all those things that I oversee we really get to build that soup to nuts guest experience and I think it gives us a big advantage I have heard you talk about the importance of being accessible as a CMO and I have to say when I was at PNG I was sometimes criticized for being too accessible and I was out there a lot it was very open to people and to interruptions and to ideas so it's something I you know worked to balance so just any insights from you Jay and how you manage that being accessible and still getting the work done that needs to be done as CMO of a fast growth company so I read I think it might have been a hardware business reviewed article but I read years ago that the two qualities that people most one in a boss and this was four CEOs but really any boss were reliability and accessibility and I thought that was so interesting right because you might say if you didn't know better well I want a visionary boss or I want a super smart boss or I want a boss that is like you know constantly driving the team forward but then when I even thought about my own personal experience reliability being does this person do what they say they're going to do and that's really how they define reliability and that study as I recall and then accessibility we've all had managers that like you couldn't get a hold of and you couldn't get answers and they weren't available to you and that gets really really frustrating and so I don't think I'm ever going to beat people on raw you know at the bank and other places I've worked with some super brilliant people and I'm not going to go in there and just crush everybody on raw horsepower so if that I was always relieved to see reliability accessibility those are two things that are in my control so I can help craft an environment where people feel both of those things and I've really focused on that and yes there is a trade-off at times with that accessibility part that if you're all over the place you're maybe not as focused as you need to be or can't always concentrate I've had some successful leaders that I would not describe as accessible necessarily but for me it's just part of my personality and something you know a strength that I've chosen to lean into and I hope it results in people feeling more comfortable and getting things done more quickly. How intentional are you Jay and how you spend your time I mean do you think that on Sunday and I ate about the week coming up I mean there's some people like the famous Jim Collins the author who like tracks every minute of his life and how he spends his time I'm not quite that disciplined but I'm just thinking you want to be an accessible or reliable manager and inspiring manager successful leader how intentional are you and how you look at your calendar and your time I don't think I do nearly as good of a job of it as I could and it's something I think about a lot what I've always been good at is I'm a list maker so going back to those Franklin Covey do you remember the Franklin Covey pointers yeah right and I was always really diligent at that left side being a calendar and the right side being the tasks yeah I would accomplish and rolling those over to the day so I've always been good at lists and working through lists and so that right there I think is is a helpful combination of being good with time management I don't sleep a lot I think I squeeze a lot of things into I'm very thoughtful about like what does my week look like how am I scheduling all this I have a couple non-negotiables like getting exercise or some sort of competition I have to have that my life in the mornings and knowing what your non-negotiables are what I don't think I do I think I procrastinate too much I think that I am often not as disciplined about establishing okay those two to three things that you really want to get done you know the the Jim Collins of the world will say you got to be minutely focused on those two or three because everything else doesn't really matter and so I think about that a lot but I'm not always great at putting an execution it is something I'm always working on what are you hyper focused on right now well I was focused on that commencement speech for about two weeks it showed it showed by the way and it felt planned it it felt intentional but it also felt that you were playing to the energy in the room which I think is the hallmark of a of any great speaker any great leader you know it's funny there's there's a little lesson in there somewhere which is procrastinators famously you know when they study procrastination they also realize that people can't get their heads fully in the game until right before doing the work at times I actually was riding that speech up until 20 minutes before I went to the arena which is why I actually read it off a laptop because I was still typing typing the speech in and I got a bunch of stuff in in the last 12 hours of even arriving on campus that I think helped it feel fresh and topical if it did and as a marketer and a storyteller that's such a big part of it is not feeling canned right of feeling that you're touching the moment and so the tradeoff of that is when everything happens at the last minute it can both stress you out and the people around you out quite a bit and so I think about a lot in life of how exactly can you keep that spontaneity within what you're doing but also do it in somewhat of a planned manner now I listen to a lot of talks you gave and I read a lot of things about you in preparation for this in addition to the commencement speech and I would have to say the word you seem to use most often is storytelling and you've already used that in this in this discussion when you talked about the product and building this story in early on to the product now storytelling is a buzz word in marketing we're going to hear it again and can this year over and over again and I think it's become one of those concepts that people say the word and don't think about its implications what's it really mean how it impacts the work they do day in and day out so I'd like you to kind of unpack that word for us right now Jay when you say storytelling and you're a storyteller and storytelling is critical to brand building how does that come to life with you how does it affect how you work how does it affect how you see your role as CMO shake check I think what great storytelling does is it elicits emotion of some kind right it's not just about sharing information we all know that great stories make you feel something it's funny some of my side hustles that I've done as I've executive produced a couple of films I've got involved in some political stuff and part of that is those are all cousins to good marketing like I think if you've you know you've shot a lot of commercials in your life a commercial is just a mini film and the best commercials really make you feel and I am constantly thinking about how do we not be in that sort of gray middle and it means taking chances it means sometimes risking offending or risking causing some controversy and knowing who you are and what your guidelines are become really important if you're going to be in the provocative storytelling game but ultimately it's about emotion and it's about I want people to say I love Shake Shack you know if people say like oh it's a good it's a good value oriented meal you know that's not who we are and that's not what I'm going for I mean we're really all wanting to create with a hospitality touch or an amazing burger we say it's not about the food it's about creating an uplifting experience at Shake Shack and so that experience that word experience and uplifting are very intentional that is almost you've been a part of the story if you feel that way and that's just kind of the core of everything we do and everything that I enjoy doing when you think about the Shake Shack brand are those the kinds of things that you want to see differentiation on uplifting experience loving the brand are those the kinds of things that you track and that you measure in terms of your success at building the brand yes for sure one of those is are we create it's not just about the food it's about an uplifting experience we really have three right our food raises the bar it starts with elevated ingredients and food that no one else could serve at this level so we're really a fine dining burger in a fast casual environment and if people knew the extents to which we work to bring the best ingredients in the world you know that's my job as a storyteller and I feel like I don't do a good enough job of is letting people know that I've been to the farms I've seen where we get our cattle our pork our chicken etc and those are the places that if you eat meat you want to you would want your protein sourced from where we source our proteins and that's a story I think about trying to tell all the time so those elevated ingredients are first second is being an asset to the community so you've probably heard me say this before when someone says that's my Shake Shack versus A Shake Shack I know that we've kind of we're in a good place when they say my Shake Shack's the Upper East Side or my Shake Shack is short North and Columbus that's that's a great place because we don't feel like a chain we feel part of that community and the fact is it's true we are local like our general managers run those restaurants like their own restaurants and so that's a big part of it and then that third thing is that uplifting experience that comes through a combination of yes is your hot food hot cold food cold was the order accurate did it taste really good but it's also did I get a touch somehow in the restaurant where somebody dropped my kid a little cup of custard because something wasn't delivered quickly or do I love the design of what's happening in the restaurant etc those those are the things when we get those three things right we're in a pretty strong position I also found in my research a couple zinger quotes from you so I want to talk about maybe two or three of them the first one is the bigger we get the smaller we need to act tell us I believe that is a Danny quote initially Randy might be upset me it might have been Randy's but I think that's Danny and it's just this idea of you know we cook everything to order we want to be local in part of the community and that means as you get big you've got to be really careful that it just doesn't start to feel industrial that you know there are very few scenarios where you know the best food experience as many of us will ever have is that local mom and pop restaurant we got delivered this incredible meal with love and with a taste of what was going on locally and we had a great environment and that's what we strive for and so I think that's always a little bit of a caution of like let's don't get too big so that we lose being able to liver that personal close experience next quote mine has been more of a career meadow than a career path and you talked a bit about that in the commencement speech but and I love the thought so tell us about that quote well the advice to me when I was really struggling in college to figure out quote what I wanted to do everyone was asking me what do you want to do I had friends that knew they wanted to be an accountant or they wanted to be a doctor or they wanted to be a lawyer and I was just not in that place I was curious and interested in so many things so liberal arts major and I really loved all my various coursework and I was struggling with that because I it wasn't pointing me any one place and I met with someone that was a friend of my father's who's listened to me heard me talk about what I liked and like he said listen a lot of people are going to tell you they're going to ask you what you want to do with your life and where do you want to go he said don't listen to those people for you it's never going to be a career path it's going to be a career meadow you're going to wander the meadow you're going to have to test different things and see what you like and don't like and explore those interests and if you fill a lot of those in you'll be fine but that's going to be you don't frustrate yourself thinking that you're going to be one of these specialized things and for those of us whose brains work that way that is very liberating to hear that and just takes a lot of the pressure off so I've always regarded my career as a bit of meadow and of course it shows in the in the various places that I've worked in the kind of functions that I've gotten to oversee there's a lot of upside in that thought is there any downside sure it's wandering the meadow is it's easy to get distracted right and it's easy to run down lots of different areas that might not be productive so you have to be comfortable with some of that that may not lead to anything that gets back to some of that discipline around career planning I don't think someone who's head works the way mine does is ever going to be someone who is just maniacally focused on that one thing that'll always be a challenge for me it's an important one that I want to balance with but for me I have to explore and I use that to inform everything else I do it's one of the reasons that I do a lot of the angel investing I've done it's not because I think I'm ever going to make any real money at that it's really to be around all these founders young people that are doing really cutting edge things in spaces that are not similar to what I do because you take little aspects of that you can apply it to your day job you can apply it to your storytelling and I get a lot of inspiration from areas that are way outside of food or retail or even consumer facing businesses well let's talk about this career meadow a bit more Jay you took a two-year hiatus after leaving Bank of America after 20 years there and I'd like you to talk about what your thinking was then what was your strategy how did you approach it what was your learning about yourself during that time was that easy for you difficult well one is I started I was recruited at my university to nations banks and started basically three weeks out of undergrad and I'd worked 20 years with no more than I don't think 12 days in a row of you know 14 days of vacation that whole time and so I loved my career at the bank and everybody I worked with it was such a great I think about it all the time of what I learned there but after the financial crisis we went from what was really a huge growth company you know we bought 450 financial institutions why was it nations bank we including one being Bank of America and then changed the name to Bank of America and I love that growth orientation of the company and I think when I started we were a midsize regional bank and then 16 years later we were the fourth most profitable company in the world so sometimes people ask me like we'd never worked for a growth company really before before Bart Box said no that's that's definitely not the case but once the financial crisis hit and then we bought Merrill Lynch in Countrywide and we became federally capped on our deposits that we could make the job just got a little less interesting to me because at that point we were in aircraft carrier that it just took thousands of people to move you know a tiny amount one way or the other at the same time I've been doing this angel investing in these growth companies and was really just enjoying being close to these founders that were pivoting moving quickly they were close to the customer I've gotten really far away from our core customer and who we were so the bank had a thing called the Rule of 60 which is your age plus years of service that allowed you to retire when that came up and so it had been they got rid of it years ago but I was grandfathered in and I said you know when I turned 41 in a year I think I'm going to take that retirement opportunity which allowed me to have some insurance benefits and some of my options vested etc and they said the first question was we didn't even know that still existed and then secondly like okay well what are you going to do and I said I'm going to take a year and a half off and I just want to spend time with family I want to travel the world I wanted to restore an old loft in the West Village and restore a muscle car and I was working on this political project which called Now United America that I was interested in and I just wanted to explore some of these other paths and when I said moving to New York was one of the top five decisions I've ever done taking that time off was second and I've come to realize it ways I didn't even understand when I decided to do it but you know if we could all structure our life to have a couple of long sabbaticals like the value of having that sabbatical and stepping away and getting into another head space you can't do that in two or three weeks and I did a lot of investing I just all the travel I got to do where I deeply immersed myself in place like Japan and Brazil and Montana and you know you could just get into all these interesting places it stimulated a lot of thinking in me and and then after about a year I was not ready to go back I said I'm going to take another year and then I was lucky enough to be able to do that and then after about nine months into that second year I started to realize you know I am missing a little bit of that fulfillment that I get from a career I'm missing the paycheck to but I'm missing I'm missing being into something that I really control I don't want to be a consultant all the time at this phase yet and so I decided you know I think it's time to jump back in and be a CMO somewhere and so I had a bunch of conversations and luckily some of that angel investing allowed me some credibility in that space and I was able to go to bark box and be their first ever CMO and learned a ton there so but that time off was really so valuable and if we could structure our dream scenario I do think everybody would get a hunk of time at some point in their careers I've seen some people retire and they didn't they really didn't need to retire what they really needed is a year or two off but it's just hard to do that if you if you were to take us sabbatical now how would you spend it differently well I'm a project person so it wouldn't be completely differently I've always got a bunch of projects I want to work on I mean I love old cars I love architecture and design having a restoring a renovating an old loft was a great sort of foundational project to keep your attention that you know in between the travel and everything else I had to really spend time like working on that I think if I was going to take that I think I'm super invigorated right now I'm not feeling that need as much as I was so I don't have that burn out feel I listen I'd love more time in the day I'd love to be able to still go take another spend a month in Japan again and cruise around there but you can't do that easily and get deeply immersed in a in a very serious job so I'm not really in that headspace where I would want to take us sabbatical at the moment five years from now maybe and what I don't want to do is necessarily I don't like this idea of retirement I just like someone like you has obviously done so many interesting things route I don't think we serve people well at all when you just say you know I'm gonna hang this job up and I'm gonna retire and I'm not gonna have that source of fulfillment etc I've got some friends that are financially lucky enough to be able to leave their jobs early and now they're kind of missing it a little bit so I mean I have lots of thoughts about yeah about that would you restore my 1963 alpha rameo 2600 would you do that for me as a side project no Italian no because the Italian cars are in a completely uh another ballgame from American muscle minds at 1968 Pontiac Firebird convertible oh that's a modern car yeah so I thought I might hear Barry doesn't shake hands to that question so you that's kind of what you said in other words I'd love to ride it or drive it sometime it's not it's not operating right now like most good old Italian cars hey I want I want to shift to the creative brief you have a lot of side hustles and a lot of interests and one of them is producing films and you've done a few of them what's your favorite film you have executive produced well I've done three and one of the things you learn in the entertainment industry is that as you know creative endeavors are very uncertain for how they're gonna turn out and it really is art it's like uh you've got to combine the script with the director and the producer and the talent and then the sets and the cost of everything has to work and then sometimes there's just a magic that makes them work or not work um I learned so much through those three films even just being an executive producer which was like I had small involvement on the creative side and kind of helped put some of the financials of the films together my favorite is driveways which is this little film that made no money we shot it for a million dollars uh basically in upstate New York it's a charming adorable script very well acted with a bunch of people that have gone on to do some really cool things but at that particular moment the nobody was buying these smaller independent films and what's ironic to me is um it of the three it did the worst financially but it's the best film in my opinion and you know it's a combination of what I talk about a lot art and science right and you got to get both sides right and it's the combination what I think makes a great CMO is someone who when you're around creatives they feel like you're one of them and when you're around the business people they feel like you're one of them and you're not necessarily the best at either but you can really bring the two together and that's so much of what filmmaking is uh and in that case I think we did most of the art pretty well but the science was not was not there for it and so it didn't really make money but man I love the process of filmmaking it's it's super fun and it's very enlightening um if you're a storyteller what's the first brand you remember making an impact on you growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee so I know this is a question you you um ask a lot and I think I'm going to give you the best answer you've ever had in this question. There you go if it's not the best it's going to be one of the most unique. You're a good storyteller Jay yeah I think I've never told this publicly before when I was in third grade I was sitting in the line outside of our gym uh and this kid looked down at me this kind of scary kid that was in our class and he said I see you're wearing booty buddies and he said I don't like booty buddies and if you show up with those booty buddies tomorrow I'm going to beat you up and down this hall and my first question is what are booty buddies I don't even know what that is and I said something to him about what are booty buddies he says there's no name shoes. Now my dad uh and I'd say this if he was sitting right here he was tied his two coats of paint as somebody would say but we got our shoes from a place upon Kingston Pike called athletic house out of a grab bin that they were not a brand right so they were completely unbranded. I got home that day and I said did you know you've got me wearing booty buddies I need some shoes right now that have a logo on them and my dad said well you know there's not a lot of sympathy for that he's like tough it out you know I'm not buying you new shoes um just because you're getting picked on a little bit at school and I mean I avoided this kid for like a week by the way he later went to prison I'm pretty sure for murder oh oh boy true story so this I avoided this kid for a week good for you it's like I got to get I got to get some brand name shoes in here so we ended up in in that PE class about a week later and it was one of these deals where this is good 80s exercise the gym teacher just said just run in circles in the gym for the 30 minutes who ever runs the most laps you know as the winner so I was luckily a pretty good runner and I beat this kid he came in second he begrudgingly came up to me at the end of class he goes I guess those shoes do all right but despite that I waited for a good sale and there were some pumas on sale at the athletic house and I got some pumas shoes and I felt much better than I had a real brand and if there was ever a story that reinforced the power of a brand right the power of a logo yeah even to a third grader that was a good visceral one for me well the shoe business is not a great job of building brands right yeah for sure it's an emotional decision and one that says a lot about who you are what you're wearing so yeah it's a great category hey you you've done a lot of angel investing what's the most interesting interesting company or founder you've invested in man I love one of my close friends one of the first businesses I did is lingerie rated wear business called flora de mall and Jennifer Zucarini who's a close friend who had started a great brand before that was designed director of Victoria Secret was thinking about starting this new this new line I thought she was so talented you know you look for when you when I think about a great founder let's say in the fashion business are you a great designer but you also understand technology and the financial aspects of the business that's very rare it's very rare it's like having a direct what makes a great director on a film is often they understand the talent how to motivate people they understand the story but they also understand the technology and the the financial aspects and she really has those three things and so it's been super fun to be involved in that business and kind of watch her and it grow but there are all sorts of businesses out there that I've I've had hands and everything from a more recent one like Ali Pop which is done really well and it's been super fun to watch them game traction in a very established tough business you know if you go into a if you're on the west coast in Airwan or anywhere else the whole foods and you look at that beverage compartment and see about a thousand different brands in there to stick out from that is so hard and they've done an amazing job through a lot of really not just a great product but guerrilla guerrilla marketing and being really up to speed on things like TikTok and the creator economy and you know I've learned from that I've learned from watching what those guys do so having this range of different like industries in areas where people are investing in these kind of cutting-edge things I've enjoyed almost all those even a couple of them that have gone out of business which is never really going to happen if you if you do enough of this kind of investing you believe curiosity is a really critical skill for for everyone how do you keep building your curiosity skills reading is the best thing I'm just always been a avid reader I get up in the morning first thing and I go through all the newsletters and this is where I think we're not don't think I managed my time as well as I could I get too many and then I feel stressed about having to read them all but you know I love reading not just the basic stuff New York Times Wall Street Journal all the those kind of rags but also getting a few weird ones here and there and listening to off-shoot podcasts of people that are really into their specialties I think that you know if you listen to a great podcast it should inspire a curiosity to want to go do something that you heard on that podcast and that happens to me all the time it gives me something else to explore so I think reading is number one and I think traveling is number two and by traveling even if you're a if you're a chief marketing officer or frankly an executive the number one thing people don't do enough of even the ones that think they do is get out in their stores and and watch your employee and your guest experience and being out there not just in the one down the street all the time but in the one that's on the other coast or the one that's in the Midwest and you know I know you live in Cincinnati happy year we're about to open a Liberty Township there it'll be our first one in Cincinnati we'll open a couple of more there before long but you know you can sit in this New York City bubble and think everybody looks and thinks like you do and it's not true I have the benefit of growing up in Knoxville Tennessee going to college in the Midwest and I really realized like we're not going to change who we are when we go somewhere else but we've got to we've got to figure out how to relate and connect to a town in the Midwest or a town of Southeast in the same way we do in Brooklyn or in Queens so that is something where the only way to do that is to get out and see it and realize you know there's nothing better from combating bigotry or any of these things than traveling and seeing seeing the way other communities and other countries and cultures do things so I would say reading and traveling yeah I agree 100% who has been the most inspiring person in your life definitely you know I've joked a couple times that I have like three gifts in life there there was I don't hear it quite as much lately but there was this thing for a while as people would ask you what your superpower is yeah right yeah and I always said I think I have three superpowers a very fast metabolism which used to drive me nuts when I was younger because I couldn't get any weight and then when you work at Shake Shack when you're older you're like hey this is a pretty good pretty yeah two burgers in a shake please yeah the other one is judging character and quality and others very quickly that ability in life I think has which is both instinctual as well as pattern recognition I think it served me well really well and the third kind of I think gift I have is just great parents and so my mom and dad to answer your question directly they're probably my biggest inspiration because they had this great combination of my mom is both smart and artistic and puts those things together in a way that few people I've seen can do and my dad was competitive and took no excuses about anything and he was the ultimate in resilience and so I got a nice combination of those two I think certainly I got some picked up some bad habits too but for the most part they were probably the biggest influences realistically Jay this has been a wonderful conversation I'd love to keep it going over a shake maybe sometime or we're a canned wine with the fun label yeah new labels you got to check them out so let's let's meet at a restaurant in Cincinnati or Lancaster or San Diego or New York how's that thank you so much and thanks thanks for taking the time and enjoy your thoughtful interviews that was my conversation with Jay Livingston three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life the first one is do you have a life triangle that is important in your life this is the concept that Jay went through in some detail it's one that he tries to bring to life in his life the triangle is personal life career as an financial life he tries very very much sometimes they're out of balance but he tries very much to keep them in balance because he thinks that keeps us very intentional about our life and our time second take away a great leader is both reliable and accessible Jay talked about how he has felt for many years that that's the criteria for being a great CMO and frankly for being a great leader of any kind to be reliable to meet your commitments and to be accessible people when you're that kind of leader you stay in touch and you can be counted upon third take away curiosity Jay's about as curious as they get he has lots of side hustles which make him a more interesting person help him in his his mainstream career he took a sabbatical of almost two years after 20 years of Bank of America to explore ideas to renew himself he is someone who thinks very very much about keeping his curiosity skills honed that's it for this episode of the CMO podcast if you found this helpful and entertaining I would be so grateful if you could share our show with your friends and I would be super happy if you subscribe so you can be updated as we publish new episodes and if you really want to help leave us a five star rating and a positive review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen the CMO podcast is a gallery media group original production