The brand you’ve never heard of: How Minerva Project is disrupting education

Gabriel: Holly, today we’re talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is learning. And the discipline of learning, and creating a brand, and a person who is working for an organization that is transforming learning.

Holly: Right, thank God. We need that. This is Ayo Seligman. And Ayo is one of the most interesting individuals I have ever partnered with in my career. Ayo is now the Vice President of Brand and Strategy as well as Design at Minerva Project, which is a revolution in the education space, as you said.

And, you know, thinking back to my history with Ayo, we go back to days together at Landor. We were absolutely joined at the hip.

Gabriel: And he was a creative.

Holly: He was a creative at Landor. But what’s so interesting is that his entire focus was strategic to the point where the clients actually referred to him as both their strategist and their creative. Which was really beautiful.

And it set the stage for what Ayo went on to do after Landor, which is this, as you said, transformation within the education space. So Ayo is now the VP of Design and Strategy at Minerva Project. We’re going to learn all about it from him in a few minutes.

But what is so cool about this guy and why I’m not surprised that Ayo went to a company that was revolutionizing anything, whether it be education or household goods, is that Ayo is one of the few people in business who truly drops his ego the entire way through a conversation. And he leads with really an affirmative way of developing ideas and brainstorming. And he feeds off you and he lets you feed off his ideas.

And that exchange is super exciting because his ego doesn’t get in the way. So it doesn’t surprise me that a company that was trying to completely carve out a new space pulled in someone like him, who’s a really open thinker, who leaves room for other people’s ideas. So anyway, I just can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

It’s going to be a good conversation.

Gabriel: I can’t wait. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this institution. They are an institution that’s being used by some of the Ivy Leagues to help transform how they’re thinking about learning and higher education.

You know, it may not be the tier-one brand that everyone’s heard of. But my goodness, it’s been amazing to learn about what they’re doing because the future for all of us, for us, for our kids, it is about learning and changing the approach to learning that has been done the same way for 150 years. So let’s bring in Ayo.

Holly: And I want our listeners, by the way, to pay attention because this brand will be tier one. So you will have heard, you will have gotten in on a conversation while it is burgeoning, while it is growing. And it is so exciting. I’m crackling with excitement around this. So all right, enough for me. Let’s get into it.

Gabriel: And last thing, last little teaser, a lot of the things that we see in Teams or Zoom today, the little functions like emojis and…

Holly: chatting, the sidebar chat.

Gabriel: Minerva invented that.

Holly: Way before the pandemic, they were doing pandemic-style communication years and years before it was forced upon us. So this is going to be a cool conversation. Here we go.

Gabriel: Welcome, Ayo. We’re absolutely delighted to have you on today.

It’s even more special to have someone who’s a friend and former colleague of Holly as well. You guys worked together in the late 2000s. Is that right?

Holly: We worked somewhere in there. It’s all a blur. But it was definitely… it was 2004 to 12, something like… anyway, something. We had a good run. But I’m so excited to have you on today, Ayo, because not only are you my favorite work partner of my entire career.

Ayo: Heart emoji!

Holly: Back at you! We actually kind of shared a brain or like we shared a brain space. Our brains were kind of incubating and sloshing around in the same marinade for a while. And I think Ayo introduced me to a concept of… I mean, first of all, he spoiled me. So when I left Landor, I was expecting to just always have Ayos. And that is unfortunately not the case.

What he does is fairly unique in the sense that the strategy and the design pieces of his thinking and that brilliance are completely interwoven, in my experience. There isn’t a beginning, middle, and an end for Ayo in the process. And I think that that was what was so exhilarating about being buddies and partners at Landor – we had this kind of force multiplication together when we brainstormed. And that was because Ayo was equally steeped in design thought as he was in brand strategy.

I’m rambling on. The most important thing is to get Ayo talking here. So I want to pass the baton over to him. But I’d love you to actually, before we get to all the exciting conversation around Minerva and everything that you’re doing in your career today, I want to go back down memory lane a little bit.

No, not to us getting drunk at Sea-Tac airport 600 times, but actually to getting back in your head. Back then there were silos — there was strategy, there was design, there was account management. How did you decide that you could major in both? How did you decide you could be dexterous like that? And how was that received at the time?

Ayo: Yeah, there was also verbal branding, another of those silos. I’m not sure that I even decided. I think I just gave myself permission without asking anybody.

I probably didn’t do that consciously. It’s just sort of how my brain works, I guess. Which can be a positive, but it can also be, to your question, it can also be perceived as a negative, right? Because you’re often stepping on toes or at least seem to be stepping on toes, infringing on others’ territory.

But the best collaborations, like the one that we had for such a good long stretch, the idea of those boundaries was less clear and it wasn’t territorial in that way. There were other colleagues at Landor that I think thought in that way as well. And those interactions and relationships created the best work, I think, consistently.

Gabriel: Newsflash, those silos still exist.

Holly: Spoiler alert.

Gabriel: Most agency… yes, spoiler alert. And not just in branding, but, you know, any agency you can think of. It’s a broad reflection, I think, of our industry. You look at many client-side teams, right? Especially if you know client-side, which is this notion of thinking about job roles and descriptions as being so fixed.

I think one of the things that we’ve really mind melded on is this notion that the future really belongs to the generalist and the creative generalist, and the notion of working in an interdisciplinary way. These all sound great in theory, but (a) because you work for an educational institution, what’s the actual benefit of that?, and (b) how do you create an environment that allows that to work?

Ayo: Yeah. Okay. That’s a multi-layered question.

Let me actually go back quickly and just say that I think those silos which exist throughout the business world, as you said, Gabriel, are a result of the educational system. Which in turn is a result of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, more or less. So you had this approach to learning that was based around disciplines, right? So we’re going to train people to be business people. We’re going to train people to be psychologists, et cetera. And it’s gotten more and more specialized over the years.

I think more recently, we’re starting to see that some of those boundaries break down at more progressive institutions, but there are still a lot of those silos in the education world as well.

So, sorry, getting back to your question about what are the benefits of interdisciplinarity in the educational space. I think they’re the benefits that are also true in the branding space, and they’re also true more broadly. Which is that instead of that kind of fixed non-collaborative way of working, being interdisciplinary allows you to, I guess, commune with other minds as Holly was talking about. That sort of sharing the same…

Holly: Hive mentality.

Ayo: Yeah, and making connections that aren’t… especially in the creative world… that aren’t obvious or self-evident.

Holly: Ayo, one thing I want to pick on is when you got to Minerva, you had the opportunity to… and correct me if I’m wrong… but to craft that job a little bit, because as the Vice President of Strategy and Design, you are tasked with straddling, right? You are responsible for both. Was that your idea?

Did you convince Minerva that they needed someone who could look after both, or did they know that? And how did you frame up the job? Like, what did you tell them you were going to do in your first hundred days, for example?

Ayo: Yeah, that’s a super good question. I think it happened probably more organically than not… and by that, I mean, the institution was a startup. So it was, you know, everybody wearing lots of hats, and there wasn’t budget to build out a massive creative or strategy team.

They knew that they were going to need, you know, kind of a heavy focus on brand. And so they wanted to build a team that was nimble, I guess, in that way.

Gabriel: Holly, let’s talk about Minerva then for a second, because there’s a cliche that we often talk about in branding, which is, “Oh, it’s the best-kept secret in the world.”, but I was absolutely… I’ll use an old English word here… flabbergasted when I learned more about Minerva, because it really is the most innovative university in the world.

We’ll talk about the Minerva University to then Minerva Project, but give people who were like me a few weeks ago, who had never heard of Minerva University, a background of what it is, how it came to be, its role in the world, and maybe then parlay that to then why the Minerva Project now exists.

Ayo: Yeah, okay. Well, the Minerva Project was the initial entity, if you will, but the goal was to build a new university using first principles thinking. So to look at every aspect of an institution and look at… not let’s reinvent everything, but let’s imagine what if everything were reinvented and keep the things that are valuable and good, but do away with the things that are harmful or negative.

So for example, Minerva University doesn’t have organized sports or a college team, if you will, because that’s a huge source of both kind of intellectual friction or whatnot… I guess conflict of interest is the term I’m looking for… with the academic programming and the resources that go into athletics at many of the big schools. Another example was none of the professors would have tenure because that focuses them on research instead of teaching.

Gabriel: Well, and on then being lazy once they’ve got the tenure. Sorry, dad! My dad’s a tenured professor at IU – so not you, except you!

Ayo: To be fair to some of the tenured professors, they may not be lazy on their research, but they certainly sort of at least tend to forget about the core of the undergraduate goals, which is teaching undergraduate learners.

Gabriel: Sorry, I want to say to anyone who is a tenured professor, I do not think you’re lazy, please don’t start sending me hate mail. I retract my comment.

Ayo: Yeah, lots of good…

Gabriel: It’s about the incentive. It’s more about the structure and the built-in incentives in there that tenure creates.

Ayo: That’s right, that’s right.

So the idea was to look at that and to use the research from learning science to inform the pedagogical and assessment approaches. As well as the construction of a new curriculum that would be skills-focused as opposed to information dissemination or content-focused. Which is what the entire educational space is built around.

Gabriel: Many of us have been to college or got kids going to college. Compare and contrast the learning experience at a traditional, you know, even Ivy League college compared to then how Minerva University does it.

Ayo: Sure, sure.

I’ll start with actually kind of a brand-focused answer where we identified kind of early on what the key tip of spear message was going to be. That was about this concept of the global rotation. Students, instead of going to a kind of protected campus environment, would travel during their four years to seven different world cities, starting in San Francisco and moving through Asia and Europe.

Gabriel: Very different to just the typical study abroad, right?

Ayo: Yeah, yeah.

Holly: I want to go back and redo undergrad. I mean, this is…Okay, keep going.

Ayo: So that was the thing that got everyone’s attention. But what we found actually is that the students that were well-suited for the institution heard that and said, “Cool.”, but then they started digging into what the educational model was that made it so different, which was the curriculum and pedagogical practices and all of that that I just kind of mentioned.

The other aspect, I think, at Minerva University that is super different is that all of the classes take place online and have been taking place online from the very beginning. So students live together, travel together, and then join classes that are virtual… but they’re all synchronous.

We learned in the world of work with the pandemic that you can actually do this collaborative thing with video chat and whatnot – something that we kind of had realized about 10 years prior.

Holly: I was going to say, you guys were already there well before the pandemic forced us into this. Did the pandemic change anything for your business then? I mean, in terms of people flooding in and giving it a chance who might not have otherwise considered you? What did the pandemic do to you guys, for good or for worse?

Ayo: Yeah, that’s another really good question. Before I answer that, I have to kind of explain the difference between Minerva Project and Minerva University.

Holly: Yes, please.

Ayo: So, as I mentioned, Minerva University was this flagship institution that the corporation that I work for built. And the corporation that I work for is called Minerva Project.

What we did was build this institution as a proof of concept. And what we’ve been doing since is consulting with other institutions around the world to help them innovate using all or many aspects of the model that we developed at Minerva University.

Getting to the pandemic question, it actually, contrary to what everybody assumed during that time, ended up being harmful. Where before we had a specialized technology that was designed specifically for educational purposes, but it had aspects that lower cost and more accessible technologies like Zoom and Google Meet and the rest have in common, multi-stream video. And some of them actually copied from the Minerva platform, which is called Forum, things like emojis and sidebar chats and things like that, that we had implemented very early on. So anyway, all of a sudden we had a whole host of technology competitors where before we didn’t have any, or at least we had very few.

Holly: Minerva Project is also a technology company. So it’s not only a guide and a consulting sort of support arm, like a transformational partner for universities, but also they may just tap into your tech. Was that part of the business?

Ayo: That’s exactly right. The value proposition is that the technology enables the model.

And so we have to help universities adopt the model, which involves training. It involves re-architecting their curriculum, et cetera. And then it involves licensing the platform for them to be able to collect the data, manage all of the new curriculum, and specifically maintain and aggregate the skills assessments that are at the core of the learning experience.

Holly: Okay. That is so interesting. So we have almost a model that has multiple facets to it. It isn’t just education. But I’m curious… if we back up a little bit, we’re starting to get a picture of the Minerva Project’s mission… when you walk in there as VP of Strategy and Design, what was…

Ayo: Well, I came in as creative director.

Holly: As creative… okay, forgive me. You earned that VP title, bitch.

Okay, so when you walked in there, what was your mission that was linked to their mission? What did you want to get done for the brand at that point?

Ayo: Yeah, that was what was most exciting for me – coming into a startup institution with aspirations to take on the Ivy League. So, how do you build an educational brand in… call it a couple of years… with the kind of level of awareness and prestige… and of course, it’s still getting there in terms of awareness. As Gabriel mentioned, it’s the best-kept secret. But for those that know, it does measure up in terms of prestige with those Ivy League institutions… How do you do that in a couple of years against institutions that have had 200 years?

Gabriel: Essentially, you’re not trying to break into the education–I’d argue, not trying to break into the education sector when you were starting Minerva Universe, you were actually trying to break into a luxury category.

Ayo: That was exactly how I thought about it. Yeah, because you’re exactly right, Gabriel, that Harvard, Yale, Stanford are…

Gabriel: They’re luxury goods, they’re not educational establishments. They’re luxury goods who build their brands on creating… and it’s not just because of the obscene price that you pay, but because they’re actually built on building scarcity.

They pride themselves on, “Oh, our acceptance rates…” and even the public universities. So even when you think about the University of California system. Thirty years ago, UCLA had an acceptance rate of 65%, 70%. And now it’s like at 6 or 7%.

Holly: Gabe set the stage that this is a luxury category. You’re breaking in, are you the biggest disrupter to ever walk into this category? Or were there any also-rans before you?

Ayo: No, I mean, I think most of the other entrants… The kind of one that we looked at closely, but it wasn’t anywhere in kind of the same disruptive league, if you will, was Olin, which was focused on engineering. They were using some really interesting curricular and pedagogical models and kind of focused a lot on design thinking and some of those aspects. But it was not as comprehensive and they were kind of playing in the same ballpark, if you will, as other institutions.

So, no, I don’t think that we had a parallel to look at. So when I was thinking about the brand, I was looking at luxury goods. I was looking at hospitality experiences. Part of that was the global rotation piece of it. And that kind of thinking really informed the student experience in a way that I think made it pretty magical for them.

Holly: How did you begin to even capture that as the brand leader? Because first you’ve got to educate… ironically or coincidentally, what have you… because the first mover as a disruptor also carries the burden, the onus is on you to also kind of educate like (a) this is a thing, and (b) it’s a good thing because it’s this and this.

I want to go back to and be sensitive to the fact that this was not a resources-rich environment perhaps, right? Like it was a startup?

Ayo: It was a startup.

Holly: But maybe that’s an unfair supposition. Maybe you were rolling in it. But I’m wondering how you mapped out a plan for brand and such a big takeover with such a huge category. Did you have the resources? And what was your plan?

For those who are listening, even if they’re at a big, well-established brand, even if they are not having to educate their audience, there’s always a challenger aspect, right? We always want to throw elbows just a little bit, you know. And so I’d be curious what we can pull from your playbook around, “I only had so many resources to go around. This is where I began.”

Ayo: Yeah, every story needs a villain. I think a couple of things.

One, we weren’t resource-poor, but we were taking on a massive undertaking, right? It wasn’t just let’s do this one thing. It was let’s do a technology build. Let’s build an entire faculty. Let’s establish seven global locations in under four years.

Holly: Yeah, and just like some curriculum while you’re at it, just like casual.

Ayo: Let’s completely reinvent the curriculum and retrain all of these instructors that have spent their lives lecturing in an active learning approach.

So it’s not that we didn’t have resources, but it’s that brand and marketing and the outreach team for student acquisition were only a sixth or even a seventh of the whole undertaking. You know, and a typical startup is like, “Well, let’s build the tech.” or “Let’s figure out this one audience that we’re serving.” I think the good news for us was that there was already a desire on many students’ part to do something that wasn’t the typical college experience.

As good strategists do, we started from our own first principles and defined what is the mission, what is the vision, what are the values. Translated those into a set of guiding principles that ended up being really persistent for the institution and helped tie together all seven of those kind of crazy aspects.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we were also unaccredited and incubating within another institution. So there were all kinds of other politics at play and whatnot. And so we also had to achieve accreditation.

All that’s to say that the brand had to kind of stretch to all of these different parts and make sense for a former professor of philosophy who was coming in now to teach an interdisciplinary program, as well as an African recruitment lead, as well as a student life specialist or mental health specialist. So we really had to do the job of kind of communicating what the ethos was and what the brand meant.

I think, in a way, that with more focused organizations, it’s maybe a little easier.

Gabriel: Go back to the students for a second because you were going after the top of the top. It’s the same talent that the Stanfords and the Ivy Leagues are going after. I try to imagine… not just the kids but convincing… that conversation with the parents.

I can go to an Ivy League school that pretty much guarantees me I’m set for life. Again I’ve got this luxury good now on my resume for the rest of my life, not to mention the current network, the alumni network, this huge endowment fund and everything else that comes with it. I’m gonna leave all of that behind and go to a pretty much kind of… very little heard of university that’s creating a better experience.

What was the segmentation or the common denominators of those students or families that allow them to take that kind of life risk and go so much against the grain?

Ayo: Yeah. Well, I mean you’re pointing to a couple of things, one of which Holly mentioned, the word “challenger.”

These were all students that were seeking some kind of a different kind of challenge. And the other thing was one of our guiding principles was “Unconventional”, right? So we were looking for people both to hire… so the team that we were building was unconventional thinkers… and we were looking for students that were also coming with an unconventional mindset and wanted to do something different than their peers, wanted to do something different than maybe their parents.

When the students got together it was remarkable because these were literally global… a global population. I think there were only, in the first couple of classes, like 15% US the rest was from ex-US. They would get together and they were like, “Oh my god, these are my people.” And it wasn’t because they were all math geeks, or they were all science geeks, or they were all into English Lit or whatever, it was because they all had this really kind of different way of seeing the world, their own place in it, and kind of wanting to challenge the status quo.

Holly: Was there anything risky in your mind about owning that message or that narrative that you are not the status quo? Was there any pressure that you felt ever, as a brand strategist or within the company, to use a playbook or use any part of a very approved and successful playbook that exists in terms of how to go after students? Or did you know that you could put yourself out on a limb and say, “This is totally different. We are selling a completely different experience.”? Was your strength in that difference or was there any fear around that risk of identifying yourselves as wholly different from the average experience or the average?

Ayo: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, we definitely struggled with some of that.

Gabriel, you mentioned the parents, convincing the parents. We actually did have to host dinners and help them understand that, you know, we’ve got your kids, we’re not going to let them fall apart or bring them to Seoul and let them starve on the street or whatever.

Gabriel: Yeah, but then they’re asking, “Are they going to get a good job coming out of… are they going to get opportunities coming out?” So then I think about those relationships that you then need with the employers. You know, to have them come and recruit. A lot of it comes down to that. It’s something we hadn’t talked about, right? The employer/recruiter audience.

Ayo: That’s interesting as well. I think for many of the students, they were… I mean that kind of unconventional thinking also comes with entrepreneurial thinking, so many of them, especially the early ones, were kind of budding entrepreneurs.

But getting back to your question, Holly, the difference there from a branding perspective was nothing but thrilling right? I mean, that’s what you always want is differentiation. And it was like overt. It was like there’s no hiding it.

Holly: But don’t forget what Walter Landor says from the grave about over-rotating on differentiation and losing relevance. Remember relevant differentiation or have you had to bury that in years of post-Landor therapy?

Ayo: No, no. No, I think about it all the time.

Holly: That’s the tension. I’m curious about how far could you go with selling this sort of uniqueness of this experience? How did you find that tipping point where it was like if we go any further and look any more contrarian, to Gabe’s point, the parents are going to be like, “Yeah. Hang on, this just doesn’t feel safe.”?

Ayo: Yeah, I think the main thing that, for parents and students, anchored the relevance was the skills focus. It was this idea that the world is changing, we don’t know what the jobs are going to be that you’re going to actually be pursuing, so it’s foolhardy to train for a job that’s not going to exist. And I think we’re seeing that, you know, in real-time playing out now. With AI there’s going to be all kinds of that disruption in categories that, you know, may have seemed secure five years ago.

Holly: Yeah, that’s fair.

Ayo: So yeah, I think that because they were super bright, because they were unconventional, they recognized already that skills, and not information that was free on the internet already, was going to be the key to their success.

Gabriel: So you establish Minerva, Minerva University is now established… I know you said you started with Minerva Project… your role, at least, then moves kind of full-time into focusing on Minerva Project. Which kind of feels like it sits at the intersection of being an ingredient brand and a movement brand because now your audience are other educational institutions who are realizing that the world is changing and that they need to think differently about learning and experience and want to bring some of this combination of the curriculum, the licensing, the technology, and the consulting. We’re talking about Yale and other Ivy League schools and schools in Asia and in South America. Now your audience is like the Dean of these colleges.

Is that characterization of ingredient and movement brand accurate? Is that how you see it?

Ayo: Yeah, I actually couldn’t have put it better. I think that’s dead on. And it’s challenging, right? I mean, (a) it’s challenging to build a movement and kind of maintain a movement brand, and (b) the idea of being an ingredient is also a little bit anathema to wanting to also be the kind of foremost educational innovator in the world, right?

So, how do you kind of balance that? We talk about Intel a fair bit and you know how that kind of inside

Gabriel: It’s NVIDIA now. NVIDIA is the new ingredient brand.

Ayo: Right, exactly. But they don’t have a cute jingle, at least not that I’m aware of.

But yeah, so also helping our partners see the value in the ingredient. Because, you know, many of them, the Yale’s of the world especially, don’t necessarily see that, you know, they sort of… they’ve got the brand thing covered.

Gabriel: Yeah, well, they want you to white label, right?

Ayo: Right.

Gabriel: Because they don’t want your borrowed equity, they want to bring everything for themselves. Whereas maybe… does that differ then… I imagine in different parts of the world that’s different.

Ayo: It is. But it’s also different based on the kind of perceived prestige of whatever institution we’re interacting with. Which relates to their Global Ranking or their US News and World Reports Ranking, and that’s sort of such a flawed metric, if you will, but it is the one that gets used.

Gabriel: So how do you position the brand then, given that the core audience is different, but you still kind of want to reach, I suppose great pull through the end users, the students, and believing that education is transforming, and when you think about transformation and innovation you want to think about us? How do you then go about positioning and creating that distinction with the Minerva Project brand compared to Minerva University?

Ayo: I think from Minerva Project we actually don’t really concern ourselves that much with the students. It is more a B2B.

Gabriel: It is B2B, okay.

Ayo: A B2B play. Although there is some visibility of the brand in the student experience, it’s not the focus of our brand positioning. What we are focused on is actually what Holly articulated before, this kind of services plus platform that enable innovation.

Holly: So you’re in this tech company that’s in academia or you’re in academia building a tech company. How versed were they in the notions around brand? In the principles around brand? I can’t imagine, and someone can correct me here, that academics think a lot about brand. And then technology companies, when they’re first growing, certainly brand is on the mind but it is not necessarily where they are pouring all of their intelligence and all of their resources. How did you prioritize brand?

In fact, I think, when you first got to Minerva, you and I chatted and you said that someone told you that brand was a dirty word or something. I was like, “Oh, get out. Ayo, get out! Those are the wrong people.”

But, truly, how did you put brand front and center? How did you enable that discipline to grow? And to build a team around that? And did you find you had to do a lot of education within your own ranks?

Ayo: I certainly had to do a lot of education, but I cannot take credit for the kind of embedded ethos of the need for and power of brand. Our founder, Ben Nelson, recognized at some point while he was doing his fundraising and pitching the idea for Minerva that it was, like Gabriel mentioned, a luxury good, it was a brand play, and at the end of the day the most valuable thing that would be built would be the brand. Yes, technology. Yes, IP and all of these other things that were being reconceived. But it was a brand play from the very beginning, and that was another thing that attracted me.

I had this founder who was an incredible educational visionary, but he also understood that brand was the most important thing. And then his first hire, the woman that hired me, Robin Goldberg, also recognized the power of brand and was versed in it. So I think the three of us created a strong enough triad that we were able to make brand not so much a dirty word. Although we did still use lots of euphemisms like “reputation” and “prestige”.

Holly: “Reputation” is great, I rely on that. I think the “R-word” is very important.

Did it feel really different to you from being in an agency?

Ayo: Oh, a hundred percent.

Holly: And did you ever miss the agency kind of jam? Or did you feel like you found your place?

Ayo: Oh, a hundred percent on both. Yes, it was very different. In the agency context, you’re always trying to please the client, but at the end of the day you go back to your office, they go back to theirs, and the contract ends, and you can…

Holly: Move on with your life, right? Yeah.

Ayo: Here, you know, it was like this never-ending, “I want to please. I want to please. I want to please.” It took me like years to figure out, “Oh, wait a sec, I actually need to take a vacation and please myself once in a while.” So that was one, I think, major difference. I just worked my arse off.

Holly: Yeah.

Ayo: Missing the branding jam… I think recently with the consulting work I’m doing I’ve gotten a taste of that again. But for sure that variety that you get… which again comes from the, you know, on to the next, on to the next… I started to miss that. Although I will say that, because of the size and scale of the undertaking, I never really had a dull moment. It was definitely lots of different kinds of, I guess, stretches for me that didn’t exist in the agency world.

Gabriel: I want to ask question about… because you were talking about how much the founder… how much of a brand advocate he is. I wondered if there was anything around the connection story to the name because as I was doing a bit of background… Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom, war, and the arts, associated with strategy and learning. And your logo is a circle with three folded segments So you’re both a circle brand, which has this connotation of unity, holiness, safety, and community, and a triangle, which communicates strength, balance, process, and dynamism.

What statement do you think you were making about the future of education by invoking Minerva’s name and what do you think you’re suggesting about the role of wisdom and strategy in the future of learning?

Ayo: Well the Minerva mission is “Critical wisdom for the sake of the world.” That’s how we ended up kind of articulating it.

Gabriel: Critical wisdom for the sake of the world. It’s beautiful.

Holly: I agree, I think that’s beautiful.

Ayo: Thank you.

Holly: There’s actually a give-back part of it inherent and it is very special. So it’s not just for self-edification, and to follow your path, and reach your success, and achieve money, and stability, and all those things. It’s actually about Society at large – that’s pretty wonderful.

Ayo: Thanks. I mean, that kind of ethos was another thing that attracted me to the company. Invoking the Roman goddess… I know that Ben Nelson had a number of things in mind with that. One was the Roman Republic and, you know, some of the structural things that existed there and that informed the Enlightenment. The sake of the world part actually relates to the original purpose of the liberal arts, which was informed citizenry. So all of that I think was really attractive.

You talked about the logo. That was easily the most difficult Identity design I have ever undertaken.

Holly: Even harder than when you and I tried to brand something called Isis? Which is another story for another time folks, we’re still…

Gabriel: Separate episode.

Holly: We’re still in recovery.

Gabriel: So talk more about that.

Ayo: Well, you know the founder has this grand vision. The founder understands the importance of brand. We had already defined our essence as “Achieving extraordinary”, so let’s swing for the fences, folks.

So what logo is going to be good enough? He wanted it to last for centuries.

Gabriel: So why did this one work? Or if you want to talk about… it may be more interesting… what was the process to get to this one? The PowerPoints with 100 pages of the discarded ones that were part of the process of getting here.

Ayo: It was thousands of discarded ones, but oddly the core of the idea, which is kind of related to the things you just mentioned in terms of the symbolism, happened really early.

We were looking at the competitive space and everybody had shields. So I was like, “Well, okay, if we’re unconventional, what’s the un-shield?” Well, maybe the shield is the negative space. And so that was what spawned the basic form. But then the question was “Okay, well, how do we make it, you know, super special, ownable, timeless… all of these things?” So that was what spawned the multi-thousands of iterations process.

What we ended up getting to, which I think was just such a phenomenal solution… it actually was kind of collaborative as well, you know, I was talking to all of the founding team just like, “What ideas do you have? What ideas do you have?” I’m like running out of stuff because I’ve gone through you know, “What if we do this? What if we do that?” And the founder had said, “Look, you know, it can’t be too perfect. It’s got to have some kind of imperfection to it.”

And so I was just wracking my brain – Okay, what’s imperfect but also perfect? What might actually kind of balance this idea of, you know, kind of pure form?

One of the things that initial mark, or graphic graphic idea, led to was the idea of a Möbius strip. The whole team really liked that idea of kind of continuous change… but it’s all the same side or you know… and there’s this kind of mathematical impossibility/possibility to it that kind of felt really right for the brand. But then how do you kind of make that imperfect? How do you make this kind of pure scientific idea, or mathematical idea, imperfect?

So I started playing with… as, you know, one wants often does… the Illustrator paintbrush tool and kind of was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. What if…?” So what we ended up doing was finding a master Japanese calligrapher.

And, again, multi rounds of iteration here. I think she was ready to fire us by the end because I was like, “Well, what if you…? Could we just…?” And you know the calligraphic approach in Japanese tradition is one motion. And so I was asking her to do something that kind of broke with her tradition in order to achieve this perfect imperfect form.

Finally we got to it.

Gabriel: How did you know you were done?

Ayo: That’s a good question. I can’t actually remember how we…

Holly: It got approved?

Ayo: Yeah, I mean, there was no sort of like moment where it was like, okay, signature on the proof.

Gabriel: Do you have a name for the imperfections that are in the mark? Again, it almost looks like it’s a… this might be heresy, so I can cut this out if I say it wrong… almost like scuff marks.

Ayo: No, we never gave those a name. No, it was just sort of this kind of painterly approach to a kind of mathematical form. Yeah, that’s eh… scuff marks. Here we go.

Holly: At least he didn’t say skid marks. To bring us back to our…

Gabriel: Thanks, Holly.

Holly: Yeah, well we were talking about South Park when this conversation started. So, you know, I was back in the body of a seven-year-old boy.

Gabriel: When we think about what’s happening in the world right now, there’s been this movement where for years, many organizations… every organization was a tech company and every organization was a healthcare company. When we think about the transformation that’s happening, do the companies that are going to succeed need to now think of themselves as a learning company?

I mean, I think about Satya Nadella at Microsoft and the cultural change they’ve gone through. A big part of that was this idea of shifting from a know-it-all company to a learn-it-all company. It’s really, really kind of stuck with me. I see such a kind of connection between that idea and what Minerva Project represents as an ethos. Not just for your brand, but as something that we all need to be thinking about. And what all organizations need to think about in order to succeed in this evolution from, I guess, you know, creating experiences to the transformation economy.

Ayo: Yeah. I mean, I think so.

I think one of the things that resonated for me early on at Minerva, and I think I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I’ll repeat it – this idea that you have to unlearn behaviors in order to actually learn again. And so there’s this kind of process of unlearning, and I think AI is going to accelerate that. But I think we’ve got other forces at play that are also asking us to unlearn some of the ways that we’ve done things. I mean, you know, climate is another one. These big, almost like, you know, tectonic trend lines that are asking us to unlearn in order to relearn.

But I think, yeah, we’ve got to be, as a society, and therefore as companies within a society, adaptive in that way – in the way that learning asks us to be.

Holly: I wonder if there’s… to carry Gabe’s thought forward, because I think that’s an interesting notion, and I’ve noticed that some of the most dynamic and interesting brands right now are the ones that are teaching about their product… and I would put the cosmetics industry right at the front of that, they’ve realized that they have to have education and connection with women. You cannot just sell mascara. You can’t just throw products at women… But I’m wondering now if there’s something that Minerva could do to not only bring educational models to institutions focused on education.

Can you bring learning models to companies like Revlon? Or to companies like Mercedes? Or to companies like Hilton Hotels? And say, we want to teach you how to make learners out of either your own staff – “I want lifelong learning mindset here, growth mindset here among my staff” – and/or potentially the customer base at large.

Gabriel: I love that. How do you sell a learning experience… not just an experience, but a learning experience as part of your brand?

Holly: Yeah, and Airbnb is another example that did that. It wasn’t just about, you know, rent this gorgeous house. It was about “Come here and become a local. We’re going to teach you about this area.” They had all these add-on services.

So yeah, Ayo, could you see Minerva or another company coming along and teaching other companies how to teach?

Ayo: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, it’s interesting you say that. Some of our first partnerships were actually with corporations. We were doing some work with LG, another Landor brand, early on. We got, I guess… not distracted, but we got a lot more focused on higher ed, and I think maybe for better or for worse.

There is definitely interest and I think a need certainly for the kind of upskilling of employees. I mean, that maybe goes without saying. That’s something that I think all major companies have embraced. But I really like this idea of brand-focused organizations orienting around learning and, you know, kind of how teaching and learning can be a part of the story, a part of the promise. That’s a really interesting idea.

I don’t think it’s probably Minerva’s future, but I can definitely imagine.

Gabriel: I think it might be bigger than that. I’m wondering if, in some ways, this speaks more personally to set a vision for the future of brand teams. Like, Holly, we often talk to the brand leads, “How do you ensure that you as a traditional, as a corporate brand team stay relevant?” “Oh, okay, now you have to get more into demand and, you know, be more connected to P&L. You can’t just sit at the corporate top.” You know, that’s been one of the tracks in the connection of brand and advertising.

But I’m wondering if you take it the other way, and when you think about the cross-disciplinary skills that most brand leaders have… how one of the shared skill sets is this notion of being able to see everything from across the organization, the ability to build relations, understand the connection between brand culture and experience. I wonder if the future of brand teams is to be able to drive–because they’re uniquely positioned–to drive a learning environment inside their organization.

Holly: It’s so exciting when you think about it, because one of the biggest issues that I have as an in-house brand strategist, versus when I’m in an agency, is that we get in our own way because we don’t understand each other. Sales cannot understand why they need to partner with marketing unless we educate them better about it. Marketing is never going to express product to its full potential if we can’t fully sit with product and fully understand and be educated in a way.

I watched deck, after deck, after deck trying to learn about products at Ciena. Now, granted, it was wave division multiplexing, so it wasn’t exactly like learning about strawberry ice cream versus Rocky Road. But I think that that learning gap was felt across marketing. We were desperate to try to understand better what we were marketing. I think even at other companies like Unilever that has a bigger world agenda, they’re trying to make a better world in many regions, like what could they be teaching each other?

There’s so many areas I could see applied to in-house and bettering teams as well as bringing your product into new markets, maybe growing markets.

Ayo: Yeah. I mean, what you’re saying… what you just said actually around deck, after deck, after deck just keyed something for me, which is that we’ve all learned how to teach from a flawed instructional model. If we’re trying to educate one another and we’re doing it based on this thing that doesn’t work, of course, it’s not going to work. Of course, we’re going to continue to have this.

Gabriel: [sarcastic] Are you saying the hour-long webinar where you take people through the brand guidelines and how to use the system doesn’t work? And that we’re just robots because all we’re doing is regurgitating? And that we could actually do something about it?

Ayo: Shocker.

Holly: I mean, guys, we’re going to need another hour for that. I feel like the conversation just started. This is a whole new thing we need to unpack.

Ayo: Yeah. I mean, I’m game.

Holly: But it’s inspiring and I think that we need to peek inside worlds like Minerva more, and not just talk to the big obvious brands, because of things like this. What can we learn and how can we actually take some of this into our own organizations and actually benefit from what you’ve done?

Ayo: Yeah. I mean, you’re just making me think about this. The idea of reshaping the educational model, the learning model, maybe the cultural model inside organizations based on the learning science that Minerva has applied would probably have this just transformative effect on collaboration and teamwork and productivity and performance. It would be earth-shattering for the organization that adopted it.

Holly: Yeah. Learning and training inside big companies is so ineffective and painful. Even in a company like Google.

When I first got to Google, we sat through probably two to three weeks of education, right? That you’re not going to touch anything… I was in large customer sales as a marketing liaison into agencies, and you’re not meant to talk about anything until you’ve gone through all this education. I could no more tell you the difference between AdWords Extra versus AdWords Pulse versus… I mean, you just get absolutely bogged down.

And I was taught, not to learn, but to absorb so that I could pass a test. That was exactly my education system summed up. I was not interested in learning, I was interested in getting A’s.

Ayo: A Lecture-test paradigm.

Holly: Right? And we absolutely studied for tests. I didn’t study to enrich myself – and I wish I could go back and do it again. I studied so that I could pass that test with flying colors.

To your point, that’s brilliant what you just said about–we’re just bogged down in the same learning models and we’re expecting thousands of employees to watch these videos and go forth and prosper.

Ayo: Right.

Gabriel: So what are some practical ways in which you can apply some quick principles? Because Holly, what you were saying,I really started to think about that. I’m starting to get the idea that, “Oh, well make things more hands-on, like do a simulation.” You’re not going to then all of a sudden do an ad campaign, but Google probably would have the resources to say, “All right, you learn a little bit. Now what you’re actually going to do over the next couple of days is you’re going to do an AdWords campaign.”

Holly: Yes.

Gabriel: So you take a simulated client and here’s the thing… and it kind of narrows in what you can actually do so that…

Ayo: Yeah. The term from the learning science is deliberate spaced practice.

Gabriel: Deliberate spaced practice. What is that?

Holly: I’m writing this down.

Ayo: You get introduced to a concept, AdWords, and then you take that concept…

Gabriel: Let’s use a brand example. Like, I don’t know, some aspect of voice. Like applying the brand voice. That’s something that every agency does. And it sits in a PowerPoint and no one ever knows how to use it.

Ayo: Right, that’s a good example.

Holly: Good example.

Ayo: Okay. So, let’s say an aspect of the voice is being provocative. How do you make sure that people write in a provocative way? Okay. Well, first let’s define what we mean by provocative. So that’s introducing the concept. And then you say, “Okay, Holly, now I want you to write a sentence.” That maybe is taking an existing sentence, and this often happens in the agency…

Gabriel: The rewrite. And I bet the client learns a lot from the agency doing that for them.

Ayo: Right, exactly. Exactly. You have the before and after.

Instead of the agency doing the before and after, the client does it. And then the agency says, “Great, you might want to tweak this here.” or, “You know, kind of adjust this there.” “Maybe a little too provocative, Holly, with the skid marks, you know, I don’t know.” And then you go back and maybe talk as a group – “Okay. So Holly did it really well. You know, Gabriel mentioned this thing and both of those were kind of nice examples, but there are these things we could all work on.”

Okay, We’re going to move on to the next attribute and that’s going to be… you know, whatever…

Holly: Authentic. Which is one of the worst.

Gabe: Human.

Ayo: Everybody’s authentic.

Holly: Authentic and human.

Gabriel: Bold.

Holly: Approachable.

Ayo: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So the next one’s authentic and then next week we’re going to go back to provocative and we’re going to try that again.

Gabriel: [sarcastic] You’ve done it, why would you go back to it?

Ayo: Right. Cause that’s the space. That’s the spacing.

Holly: I have heard about this. Yes. It’s a method of studying now where the students are encouraged to go back to chapter one as they advance, then go back to chapter two. Now you’re in chapter seven, you’re going back to three, four, five. You continuously bring the whole thing along with you. Whereas we used to just abandon that knowledge as soon as we got through that test.

Ayo: Right.

Gabriel: So that’s called spacing?

Ayo: Yeah, that’s the spaced practice part. The deliberate part is like, “Let’s focus on this thing.” But, what you do then the second time is not just go back to provocative, but you do it provocative and authentic. So it layers the complexity as you go forward.

Gabriel: Then what? Then what do you do? Like, what’s the next step?

Ayo: [joking] Then you’ve got it. No, no…

Holly: Then you’re a genius.

Ayo: No. I mean, then you keep building, right? You keep building, you keep scaffolding the learning… this is another kind of learning world term.

Gabriel: I think we might have to do a separate episode where we use this brand voice example as like a tease. Maybe we take different aspects of things that we do in business regularly and try to rethink… “Okay, how might we re-approach these things through some of these principles of learning?”

And if anyone who’s listening to this has any ideas that you want us to rethink, things that you think that we need to unlearn just because they don’t really work, drop us a note and we’ll do a follow-up with Ayo.

I mean, I start to think about workshops, and presentations, and, I don’t know, all types of different things. We can talk about other disciplines. Again, things that we do in our day-to-day business or some things that are specific to brand itself.

Holly: I think it’s a conversation worth continuing. Ayo, this has been so great. Thank you! We appreciate you so much and all your wisdom. You are the right person to work there because I can attest to your wisdom and it’s just really a treat to learn from you today.