Laura Pearlstein Mills on The Art and Science of Brand Building

Mixing Board Studio Session

Laura Pearlstein Mills is the Founder of Cider and has over 15 years of brand strategy, marketing and communications experience. She believes in the power of purpose and creativity to spark behavior change, business results and employee engagement. She has worked across industries as varied as packaged goods, luxury fashion, logistics and tech and worked in New York and London for global creative agencies including Ogilvy, Landor, and BrandOpus. Laura auspiciously began her career as a WPP Fellow.

In this Studio Session, Laura and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about the evolution of brand and the ways comms and brand intersect, why a rebrand is so much more than a new logo, and finding the right kinds of clients who are willing to grapple with the big issues and work towards real change.

SG: Tell us what you're up to today and how you found yourself doing what you're doing with Cider.

LPM: For the past five years I've run Cider, which is a boutique brand consultancy. It's just me – I am Cider, Cider is me. But because of the nature of the work that I do, I often bring in collaborators, whether that's designers, web developers, or copywriters to deliver on client projects. I work with a huge range of clients, both independently and in collaboration with other agencies. In 2024, I worked in insurance, spirits, consumer packaged goods, logistics and technology. And I really like it that way.

Honestly, I can get bored easily, so project-based work and a diverse client roster very much suits me. This has been the happiest professional chapter of my life. I started off in a very traditional agency world. I was part of the WPP Fellowship, which opened a lot of doors and gave me an incredible foundation and training.

SG: For those that don’t know, what is the WPP Fellowship?

LPM: It was this really great program that Sir Martin Sorrell started a long time ago, but it was run for many years by Jon Steel, who is an iconic advertising planner. I was really lucky to get onto the program – there were about 10 of us hired every year – and we had a really strong sense of a cohort and got great training and global mobility. It was designed to develop the next generation of leaders of the WPP agencies across the world. And a lot of folks did go on to run companies within the group. It also was a really powerful magnet for folks who are driven and entrepreneurial, who ended up chafing at the constraints of the corporate agency world, so they’re now off doing their own things!

SG: How did you decide not only do I want to do my own thing, but I want to do this thing, that you wanted to focus on this specific area of creative services?

LPM: I was in big agencies in London and New York, and then there was this interesting chapter where I left the agency world altogether and went into the family business, which is high-end fashion retail. My family has been in that business for five generations so there was a strong dynastic pull to that world. We moved back to Washington DC for me to learn the trade from my aunt, who runs a really beautiful store here called Relish.

And while we both went in with the best of intentions, it was not a great fit. I can look back now and say there are loads of things we should have done differently, but at the end of the day I learned a lot and I grew up a lot over three years.

I started Cider as a pure play brand consultant. Having worked in advertising, comms, and branding, branding is just where my heart is. I love it the most, I think I’m best at it, and it's just always been my happy place. I spent some time as an account lead as well as being a strategist, which is a distinction I know exists less in comms, but certainly persists within the advertising and brand agency model. I have both of those skill sets, and it’s one of the reasons I've been successful and I've been happy running my own shop. I'm comfortable playing both of those roles.

SG: When you're at WPP, you share a presentation of how you do XYZ thing there's like seven different things that have to happen before that thing actually becomes true. Versus when you're working in a retail store, you're taking $20 bills from a customer and selling them a thing. It's the most direct interaction of a brand possible. What coalesced in your brain after these abstract versus very direct experiences?

LPM: When you're a junior strategist, you do a lot of "customer insight" work. You write these pen portraits and you talk about this compilation, this Frankenstein person who's your target audience. I agree with your assessment, which is to say that at some point it stops being abstract and you start thinking about who these human beings are and understanding that being "customer-centric" isn't just lip service.

If you're standing in a dressing room with someone and they're asking for your opinion or they're asking for you to help them solve a problem or they're feeling self-conscious, there's real humanity there. Not in a nefarious way, but you have to figure out how to tap into that in a way that entices them to buy what you want to sell them. And you need to sell it to them in a way that they feel great about, so that they're going to come back. Because it's not worth it to me to sell you a dress to get my commission if you're never going to walk back through the store again. That doesn't serve me. That sense of ownership and human connection was a really important learning from that period, and it’s been invaluable in running Cider.

SG: Mixing Board very intentionally intermingles brand people and many comms people, and that's not an accident. There's a lot that each side can learn from each other. I do think they're different, just to be clear. They are different paths, but I think the paths go to the same place. How do you see brand evolving?

LPM: Good brand building hasn’t changed at all. A strong, well-defined, well-expressed brand has always been deeply rooted in customer insight, market opportunity, cultural trends, all of those things. That hasn't changed. When social media started and the channels started proliferating, when the speed at which everything's moving increased, brand became more important than ever. You need to have the foundation set so that you can be responsive, so that you can relinquish control, so that you can let your consumers create content on your behalf and form communities and build their sense of identity and tribalism around that. The art and science of building that brand foundation, I don't think has changed – it's just become more central and more important.

I actually think comms has changed more. You have to be up on the intricacies of an algorithm on a daily basis, and responding in real time. That’s not my role as a brand consultant, because the day to day conversation on those channels shouldn't really affect your market position and the principles by which you're making decisions and your values and your tone of voice. It becomes a new lens or a new stress test or maybe a new use case to optimize for. But the brand should be more constant.

SG: Where comms has evolved and where it is mostly bleeding into "brand" is not so much the output, but more the input. By that I mean, the role that people take inside of a company, or influencing the operations of a company to stay closer, to establish a firm POV, purpose, mission, all the things that effectively create alignment internally that then do the most work in shaping your brand impact writ large. That is where brand and comms are really intermingling the most.

LPM: Because I sell brand strategy for a living, I've had to take a stance on how I define brand. My definition is: brand is the meaning that people associate with you and your product or service. Brand strategy is a plan to manage that meaning. We can manage that meaning in loads of ways, we can manage that meaning through how we look, how we sound, how the product works, what we say, and all of that.

I agree with how you characterized what good brand work should be trying to do and the role it can and should play within the organization. From my perspective, and I say this as a lifelong agency person, a lot of it comes down to what the company culture is like within the client org. I've worked with clients where I never crossed paths with a comms person, which is ridiculous. I certainly wouldn't advocate for that.

And then I've been in client organizations where marketing and comms are working hand in glove. That's no question the better path. A lot of it has to do with the stage of the company, a lot of it has to do with tradition and company culture and how they grew. Did they grow organically? Through acquisitions? There are so many factors that set that tone, but it should be a dialogue. It's a vital input to the brand development process. A marketing or brand person within an organization is just not going to have the finger on the pulse around that day to day narrative in the way that a good comms person will.

SG: And who are even our audiences anymore? In comms, the audiences are bridging far away from just reporters. That’s such an antiquated thing, but it was like 80% of the job 20 years ago. Now it's all these small subgroups – it's communities, it's this type of archetype, it's these influencers, it's these people. And who's handling that? We’re getting to a point where it's not just like, "Hey, I want to give you some details and you're going to write about my company." Instead, you're actually trying to influence emotion. Those people are going to be more driven by emotion than information, or some of them will be.

This is an over simplification, but if I were going to delineate things, comms is very much the intellectual head of it and brand is the heart of it. I've done projects with brand people and we are literally working on the same exact thing and we almost get the same exact request. It's like, let's come up with our story on what this is. Me, the comms person would write up this three page thing in a Google Doc. The brand person would take that same information, that same knowledge, and come up with this beautiful deck that's evocative, has literally 20 words in it, but a bunch of beautiful photos and a story that makes everybody cry.

People are barely reading through my whole three pages. Those three pages of detailed information are great, and will be used for so many different things. But that arc that was given by the brand person, that was a motive. That got people to pay attention in the first place so you can get to this place where you can tell the longer story. This is why, to me, it's not the same thing, but it's very complimentary. We need to do a better job of cross-pollinating this stuff.

LPM: I have such a bias because my career has been spent on the agency side, and I'm a little bit cynical about it now. At the end of the day, it comes down to whose P&L is getting the revenue. It ends up being this turf war, which is unhelpful. I want to interview you about your experience being a comms person on the inside! I have seen comms teams be territorial about their work just as I've seen brand teams be territorial about their work. They want to work with their agencies and they think that they should be driving the ship – as opposed to thinking more broadly, agreeing that we're all on the same team, trusting that everyone will get paid, it'll all be fine.

There's so much that's challenging just about the interaction between the client and agency that sometimes the incentives aren't aligned to do that cross pollination because you're worried about getting your revenue and your agency fees paid for the next quarter. You're not incentivized to get to the answer and get to it quickly.

SG: You mentioned that you work with this broad range of clients, but you have a type that you like or there's a similarity that runs through them all, even if they're really different on the outside. What types of organizations are you drawn to and why?

LPM: I am drawn to people who are decisive and ambitious. As a company of one, a lot of my experience comes down to the people that I work with. I joke about having gone totally feral – I’m not sure I can go back to working in a big agency anymore, because I have lost the ability to have the worker drone blank stare, when you are just dealing with the mundanity of making tweaks around the edges. I like working with decision makers who want to do stuff. The point at which a brand needs someone like me is at a moment of inflection. If everything's going fine, you probably don't need to change what you're doing. People who see a problem and are interested in doing something about it are folks that I like working with, because they're open and willing to grapple with the big consequential issues.

SG: What is that inflection point? What is happening? How do you help them get from point A to point B in that inflection?

LPM: A lot of conversation. In any engagement, I do a really robust discovery phase. For me that’s less about reams and reams of custom research instead it’s just a lot of straight talking conversations with different stakeholders within the business. Really vitally, that has to happen at different levels of the business. And I always want to make sure that I'm not just talking to the executives. Middle management has to be represented, as well as frontline workers or call center workers. It's really important to make sure we're getting the full picture of a company's culture.

Anyone who has worked with me tends to remark on my candor. I don't pull a lot of punches. I am both very candid and sort of indefatigably optimistic. I like pointing out the problems and then I like figuring out how we're going to fix them. People who are sensitive to that or get defensive about having challenges pointed out, tend not to be good fits for me.

SG: For people who don't do this work right, what happens to them? And for the people who do this work right, what's the before and after picture?

LPM: When you don't do this work right, you have a new slogan and a new logo and it's pretty, and you say, "Look at this, we've rebranded." But there's not been any self-reflection or a meaningful shift in strategic direction at the company level. Brand is a powerful business lever, it's not just a surface level aesthetic decision. That's what a bad rebrand looks like. There's a big announcement, everyone has new sweatshirts and then that's the end of it. No one talks about it ever again.

The proudest I felt after leading a company through a brand strategy transformation was when some of the language that we defined in the process, and then ended up going into the value statements we developed, started to be incorporated and used on a daily basis by people in a just conversational way. That is the biggest point of pride. Because we did something that actually seeped into the consciousness of the employees who are ultimately the biggest ambassadors and delivery point for the brand.

SG: Do you have a type of project that you like? What's one thing you really want to work on? What would you want to change?

LPM: I'm based in DC and I've never worked in politics. I spent most of my childhood here declaring I would never work in politics in any way! But I was really inspired by the session in Austin with the political minds who were up there, they were just brilliant. I don't know exactly how my skills would best be of service to a lot of the causes that I care about, which for the most part are aligned to the Democratic Party. I would love to figure out how my experience could be best applied at this moment that is a real reckoning. I'm going to regret saying that because now I'm going to have to do something about it. But that's top of mind for me right now. Talk about a brand inflection point!

SG: If you're a young person who's in this field, and maybe they're working for a WPP or an Omnicom or some other big holding company and they're like, "Gosh, I just really need to break out and do my own thing." What's your advice for a young brand strategist in 2025?

LPM: Don't let the bullshit of the trappings around you in your agency get in the way of grappling really deeply with your client's business problems. That was my big a-ha when I went out on my own. As an overachieving, Type A, ladder-climbing, title-obsessed Ivy League graduate, I cared a lot about being seen as this smart kid in the room, about being seen as the best at my job, having my boss think my deck was really smart. I don't think I ever deeply thought about my client's businesses until I went out on my own. I was trying to get the pat on the head. That’s on me, but I’m also not sure the system was set up to require me to do that. That's a shame. I lost a lot of years. My advice for a young person is to avoid that trap.

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