Inaki Escudero on Mentors & Heroes

AI Summary. In this engaging conversation from Peter Spear's series, brand strategist and educator Inaki Escudero discusses his journey from Spain to the U.S. and his unique perspective on mentor brands. Inaki and Peter explore how brands can guide and inspire customers by assuming a mentor role, emphasizing the importance of purpose and ethics in brand strategy. Through examples like REI and personal anecdotes, Inaki highlights the power of curiosity, meaningful brand-customer relationships, and the potential for building community through shared purpose.

Inaki Escudero is an advisor and teacher who has his own firm, The Real Hero, that helps teams build Mentor brands. He is also a gifted teacher, at Hyper Island, teaching brand strategy, storytelling and ethics. We hit it off almost immediately, and it was a joy to talk to him about this work, and how he works with clients.

I start all of these conversations with the same question and it's a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who lives here in Hudson. She's an oral historian and helps people tell their stories. I always over explain it because it's such a powerful question. I want you to know you're in total control. You can answer or not answer the question any way that you want to.

The question is, where do you come from?

That's a very relevant question because my family and I are just doing the DNA heritage thingy. It's a question that we've been trying to answer, and also the implications of where you really come from. It's funny because if you look at the lower percentages, my kids have 1 percent from Morocco, 1 percent from Nigeria, 1 percent from Mali, and it makes you think.

We know we come from Africa, all of us, but that 1 percent is still in our DNA. There's 1 percent from China, which we all think is the famous Genghis Khan. It's really three quarters of the population of the world are related to Genghis Khan. So it might come from there. When you start looking at the higher percentages, there's 60 percent from Europe, maybe a little bit more and the rest comes from Latin America, because of my wife who is from Peru. When you get to Europe the higher percentage is Spanish, 20, 25%, there's Basque, 10, 15%, depending on who. There is a little bit of Scottish, a little bit of Irish, and a little bit of French.

Where are you from? Where do you come from? Where do you feel you're from is not necessarily the same things because we all come from Africa and we have about 4 percent in our case of African ancestry, but I've never felt in my life that there was anything within me attached to Africa.

I guess I can say I was born in Madrid, Spain from parents who were refugees in Mexico because of the Spanish Civil War. Because of that tradition of moving that my family had, I had to explore what was beyond my reality in Madrid. When I was 28 years old, I left, came to the U.S. and I've been here ever since.

Do you have a memory of being a child? What you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be?

Besides the obvious, I want to be a policeman, a firefighter, a doctor, I never had a calling. I studied psychology because I felt that was the most interesting of the non-traditional paths. I didn't want to be a lawyer, an economist, any of those. None of them called my attention.

I thought understanding people was very interesting. Of course the first day in class, there were about 110 people in class. There were 102 women and four guys in my class. Back in 1982, psychology was perceived to be the type of career women took to become therapists, back in Spain.

There were three guys, I was one of them, and the teacher says, "How many of you are here because you want to understand people better?" Almost everybody raised their hand and said "If that's the reason why you're here, you chose the wrong career." We were like okay, that's a very promising first day.

But I think eventually I understood what the teacher said. Psychology is much more complex than just understanding people, even though it might be at the heart of it. There are other things that you can do with psychology besides understanding people, I guess more the application. But at the heart of it, it is about understanding ourselves and others, and how our experiences impact who we are.

I was struck by how you said "I didn't have a calling." You were so clear about that. What do you mean when you say that?

In Spain when you are about to go to college, you were supposed to put your preferences. I put psychology, politics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Of course when you look at that, none of them are going to give you any money, except maybe politics. But I guess I wasn't looking at choosing a career that was going to give me money. I was looking for understanding, I was looking for what I'm passionate about. What is going to be the easiest way to spend five years learning about something where it doesn't become a burden. At that time, the career was five years. Five years is a long time to be committed to one single path of learning.

I'm curious, I'm really again struck by the picture of you being one of three men in a room full of women, having put yourself in a position to understand people in what at the time was a feminine space. Where do you think that came from? How did it feel to be one of three?

It felt weird because I never felt, I always felt, and I guess this tells you much more than you need to know about me, but I always felt that they were the ones that were in the wrong place. I never felt that I was in the wrong place.

I'm trying to understand what this is all about and how this works. If you are here because you are hoping to use psychology to be a better mate, I think you are in the wrong place. I always felt that I belonged there.

Eventually I think that if I can pick perhaps the biggest topic to chat with you about is the idea of psychology and how whoever is in charge of designing how we are going to break that down into topics and subject matters that you are supposed to know for you to work as a psychologist, I think that there was a disconnect between the excitement about what psychology means and the subjects that I had to study like logic. Logic was three years. I think, okay, that caught me by surprise. Why is logic and the application of logic to the way we think relevant to psychology? I wouldn't be surprised that if you were to look at the curriculum today that subject is completely gone. The same way that I grew up studying Latin and Greek back in Spain. The classic languages were mandatory even more than English back in the day.

Wow. You still have that in you somewhere. Let's see. How did you, so you said you left, tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're up to now, your work and your life today.

Psychology was a stepping stone, a good stepping stone because I feel that I've applied the basic mental models that I learned in college, I've been able to apply to basically every job I've done.

I teach in a university in Sweden called Hyper Island. I teach about brand society and storytelling, and I also teach about the ethical implications of technology and the rapid progression of technology in our lives. The idea is to help students understand if we have the chance to look into the future, what decisions will be made today that will change your mind about what to create and what not to create. I think it's important. I think Facebook is a good example of what happens when you just grow without looking, without stopping for a second to think about what could be the worst possible unintended consequence of Facebook.

When did you first encounter brand? When did you bump into the idea that you could make a living, that there was a thing out there called brand and that you could make a living?

That's a good question. I was in Houston. I had studied film in New York. I moved to Texas and there wasn't any film industry or very small film industry happening in Texas at the time. A lot of production came to Texas, but the productions came from LA or New York, production being previews from Texas was very limited.

Somebody told me with psychology and filmmaking as your background, maybe you should think about working in advertising. I said, "Really? Why?" They said, "You can write, so why don't you give it a try?" I interviewed with a Hispanic agency to be a copywriter and at the time they were desperate for people who could actually write in Spanish. I didn't have a book, I didn't have anything, but I was hired.

I remember sitting in the office already, I showed up with my suit and they said no, in creativity, you don't wear a suit. I said, "Okay, that was good to know. You need to look the part and creatives are more loose, more creative." But I didn't know any of that. I was 30 years old. I was absorbing everything and learning how to be creative.

That took me to understand at the service of what my creativity was doing and at the time I learned that it is to help brands be perceived in a way that people will want to buy them. I remember thinking about it in a very logical way. So I need to write messages for people to notice them so they could buy that brand. That's the exercise I did. That's the first time I thought of a brand as anything.

How has your thinking about brand changed? You have a beautiful way of talking about it.

Thank you. It has been transformed completely because after 20 years practicing, I learned that brands are very interesting because we have perceptions and feelings about brands. How do you regulate that? How do you create those feelings so people can have a more elevated relationship with a brand beyond the product or the service they offer you?

The realization that the way I feel about Apple is different from just the mere, simple transaction of using your computer or putting on a watch, or the way I feel when I use my Nike app when I go for a run, that is not just keeping my time or the path on a map, but I feel differently when I use Under Armour than when I use Nike. I feel different when I use a Dell computer as when I use an Apple computer. That is the brand.

If you get to work on building that brand, the architecture of emotions that you get to decide and bring to life so people create those perceptions and those feelings towards that brand, I think is a beautiful thing. It is a good job. It's a good job to have. It's a good challenge to solve. It's a good puzzle to look at. I guess the combination of psychology with filmmaking, with creativity, are good skills to have to operate in that business.

What do you love about the work that you do? Where's the joy in it for you?

What I love is right now with founders is that they are building something they believe in and they are looking at it through the very practical lens of this is a great product, this is a great service, this is a great company. When I start to talk to them about their brand, "How about your brand? How do you want people to feel?", they realize that they perhaps didn't think enough about that.

I love that moment where I can inspire people to think about what they are doing in a different way, and to elevate that thinking. It's not just the product, the company you're building, but the people that are going to use it. How do you want them to feel when they are using it? The fact that they have the power to choose that, I love that moment when they realize, "How, so I get to choose? And you can help me figure that out?" Then the journey of understanding, solving that puzzle, I think it's fascinating. I love that. That brings me energy.

Can you tell me a story about a moment like that you had?

Perhaps the first real time I had is this woman from Sweden who grew up in Burkina Faso. You could imagine a blonde Swedish girl growing up in Burkina Faso 34 years ago. Her parents were missionaries and they were spending a lot of time there. Of course she was just playing with the other kids and she grew up in that environment.

When she became an adult, she reflected on having this dual experience of growing up between Sweden and Burkina Faso, a developed country, one of the most developed in terms of society, most developed countries and one of the poorest countries in the world. She couldn't live with that reality. She couldn't make sense of how we can all be going about our lives, knowing that some kids, some communities in Burkina Faso are so poor that their issue is whether or not they are going to be alive tomorrow. This is the very first layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - I don't know if I'm going to survive tomorrow.

She couldn't understand how can we go about our lives knowing that in this big community of our planet, there are people who live in that level of misery. So she decided to do something about it. She created a nonprofit called Yennenga Progress, and she wanted to help communities move out of poverty. It's not just poverty, the real term is absolute poverty. There is poverty, but there is absolute poverty.

She decided to tackle that problem in a community that she knew. She went there with her best intentions and she realized something that perhaps not many people realize - the only way to get people out of poverty is by solving all the problems they have at the same time. It's not that we need to solve education and we need to solve water pollution, or we need to solve politics and government and infrastructure. When you are in absolute poverty, the only way to move on is to solve all of them at the same time.

But she didn't know how to tell this story. The first time I asked her, "Tell me about what you do", she spent 45 minutes telling me all the things she was doing to solve the problem and the story wasn't even connected. She would tell me about an an

She would tell me about an anecdote of a little child and then another anecdote about a donor in Sweden.

Because of the work we did together, I said, "Your story is fascinating, but you need to manage a way where you tell the story in 1 or 2 minutes that you can tell people this powerful story in a way that inspires action because you need people to donate to help you."

The realization that she was mentoring donors, basically - remember when we spoke the first time, we spoke about how my perception of branding is that the brand is no longer the hero, the user, the customer is, and the brand then becomes the mentor. If she's mentoring somebody, who is she mentoring? Of course, most people will tell you the communities that she's helping move out of poverty, but they don't need a mentor, they need money.

The person who needs the mentor, her hero, is the person in Sweden or in any other part of the world who wants to help, wants to do something about poverty, but doesn't know how. When she has this clarity that "my hero is the donor and I need to create the communications to show this donor, my hero, that they can help with 5, with 10, with 100, in many other ways", then your communications becomes very focused and with a very specific purpose.

That is a great case study of how all the experiences that I've had narrowed down to helping a founder understand the clarity that she needs to do the job that she needs to do.

It's a beautiful story. That shift is really, you can just feel it's so powerful. It's really wonderful. The mentor-hero, it's so powerful. Tell me more about what you mean when you say "mentor brand", and how you're applying or helping people assume that role. What does that ask of a founder to be a mentor? What happens in that shift for them?

It's funny because if we think about storytelling, storytelling is everything. Everything is a story. Brands are a story. If you think of a brand as a story that is developing and unfolding over time every single day, who are the characters in that?

Of course, many founders, especially founders, feel that they are the hero. They are going through their hero's journey. They are going against all obstacles, having to learn new things that they didn't know to create something. It's very easy for you to think that's the hero's journey and you are the hero of the story. You want to talk about what you do, how you do it, your incredible conviction that this product, this service that you're creating needs to see the light of day.

But every service and every product we create, we do it for somebody to improve somebody's life some way or another. Otherwise, what we try to create is not going to find a market. You need to find a market, and that market is made of people with needs.

Why are you laughing?

It's just I'm just appreciating how elementary it is, but how necessary it is to be very clear. You just did a beautiful shift from, yes, we can talk about markets, but those markets are full of people. You've just humanized the whole process. I'm just appreciating it.

So these people have needs. If you are creating something and you are aware of the needs of these people, then you create something that people need, but also improves their lives. When you look at marketing and brands that way, and you add the layer of storytelling, and you ask yourself again, what role, not only what role you play, but what role do you want to play?

I think the brands that have inspired me the most are the brands that have been in my life for a long time. Nike - first pair of running shoes I bought in 1999 to train for the New York Marathon. 25 years later, they still are my mentor. The messages they put out for runners, the products, the services they put out for runners, they behave like a mentor. This is the way you do it, I'm going to mentor you into becoming a better runner at every stage. When I wasn't a runner, there's a step up. When I'm a runner that runs every day, there's always a step up. There's somebody to look up to.

If you could choose what kind of brand you want to be, why not choose to be the mentor? The mentor is the person who is constantly by your side when you need them, offering you wisdom, solutions, when they need to give you an artifact for you to fight the dragon. They give you a pat on the back to encourage you - "Don't give up, I believe in you." They are there to tell you that. When they need to tell you you're being ridiculous, "Get over yourself, you need to stay focused", they do. They play that role too.

If a brand could play a role, I would say that playing the mentor is fascinating because it also allows you to look at your customer, not as a transaction, but as a hero. If you see your customers as heroes, then the type of products, services and communications that you create are beautiful.

How do you know when you've gotten the client to that place, like when is there a moment when you feel like, okay, they've gotten it, they understand, they're communicating in a way or they're thinking in a way that is - because that feels like a pretty powerful shift. I'm just curious, how do you know when the work is done, when somebody's assumed the mentor role?

You know what, Peter, once I tell this story to people, everybody wants to be a mentor. I have found no resistance whatsoever from anybody saying "No, but Iñaki, hold on a second, I need to be the hero." Nobody has ever said that to me. I think mentor also means that there is a level of, there's something fascinating about the world needs your wisdom. The world needs you to be a mentor.

I think it's a role we all want to play someday. People get it. It happens very early. From then on, it's telling people "Because you're a mentor, these are the type of messages you do. Because you're a mentor, this is where you need to be. You play the long game, you're here for them for the long term, and you're not just interested in a transaction. The transaction is a consequence of your behavior. Even if you don't get a transaction right now, if you get it six months down the line, that's still a win."

It's all applying the storytelling, even today with the trilogies, it's not just one movie. In the case of my daughters, they were watching yesterday's Spider-Man. There are five different Spider-Man movies. When you play the long game, Marvel had to plan out 17 movies to tell one single story. To me, whoever at the studio approved that is a visionary, because you need to come with a long page that says, "Okay, we are going to produce this movie. But this movie is actually related to the seventh movie, which is eventually going to resolve the conflict in the 11th movie."

What I love about the mentor, and I shared this with you, I can't resist sharing this story every time the word comes up, because when somebody told it to me, it blew my mind. The mentor is the character that Odysseus leaves his son with. So Mentor is his name in one of the oldest stories of time and that man was responsible for raising the son, I think Telemachus is his son.

That struck me as so amazing because I had found mentors in my own professional life. I feel very lucky that I found men who taught me how to do what I do. I had one mentor professionally, I'm really grateful for.

But it also speaks to that idea of brands as myths, which I geek out about. As a culture, I think Grant McCracken says the responsibility of culture is to raise an adult. We're supposed to help us grow up and assume responsibility for our life and our place in the world and all that stuff.

What I love about mentor is that it, and maybe this is a thread that we share clearly, but through all of your work, brand isn't really only this sort of marketing thing, it is more significant than that. I'm just wondering, maybe if this is a bridge, it's a bridge, but maybe not, but you teach about, you teach ethics. So what is purpose and what is ethics? What is purpose driven? What is the responsibility of a brand, of a brand builder as you see it?

I think I have to speak about myself for me to be able to put this in perspective. Helping others, when I started to speak on behalf of Hyper Island in front of 40, 50, 100 people talking about digital transformation, at one point, there's always a slide with your picture when you need to tell people who you are. You do that enough times, and I was doing it maybe once per month, so 12 times per year. There is a picture of yourself on a slide on the screen, I need to tell people who you are.

I came to this tension - do I tell people what I do or do I tell people who I am? Because they are not the same thing. I felt that what I do was a combination of different things. I was a facilitator, I was a learning designer, I was a speaker, I was a strategist. It was very complex for me to say what I did or define myself as "this is what I do." I didn't necessarily like being defined by what I do because what we do doesn't really speak about the higher long-term building of our character.

I decided that I wanted to speak about who I am and who I am could only be explained about my intention in life, not who I am, where I come from or to your first question, but who I am aspiring to become. I found after many iterations of it, and I wouldn't bore you with iterations, but because I was doing it very often, at one point I was doing it even twice per month, I was able to test which one of these versions felt better.

I ended up using one that based on the feedback of people felt very true - Iñaki Escudero, my purpose is to inspire people to fall in love with learning again. It came from this conviction that as we grow up, we lose the passion for learning. Most people, not all of us, most people, and I think it's to the point of Sir Ken Robinson on education, the school takes that incredible imagination, incredible thirst for learning, that curiosity that all kids have - it's taken away from us. "Don't be curious. Don't ask why anymore. Just stay in your lane. Choose one thing to do and stay on that lane."

I've always been very curious. It seemed to me like the purpose of inspiring people to fall in love with learning again was explaining who I was, like I want my curiosity to be contagious to other people and use that to learn anything you want because when we learn we can transform ourselves into anything.

I was curious about film. I studied film even though I had studied psychology. My parents went, "Are you crazy? Are you going to change your career? You have, you barely started." "Yeah, but I'm very curious about it. It's your fault because you forced me to watch all those black and white movies growing up and you made me fall in love with them, so I blame them."

What movies?

All of them. My father was a huge film fan. From the Japanese Kurosawa movies to the Italian films to anything - the westerns from the U.S., the gangster movies with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, the classics.

In New York I met many people studying film and we were talking in a party or a social event and they're like, "Yeah I have to go home because I have to write a paper about the role of film noir in American society." I was like, "Are you crazy? That's the most fascinating assignment I could think of. I need to give it a try. I don't want to be 50 and regret never having done this."

I think the main thing to take away for me at that time was that when I express my purpose, I express not only what my intention is, but the clarity that I have when it comes to choosing what I want to do next. If I could inspire people to fall in love with learning through being a coach, I could teach a class, I could write a blog, I could do a podcast. I could bring that purpose to life in all the different ways that I wanted to do. It's not limited.

Once I had that clarity, eventually I came to the realization that helping people with the same level of clarity - if you have a purpose, then you open the possibilities of what you can do. I wanted to help other people see that level of clarity, have that level of clarity about themselves and eventually turn that into a business if I could.

How's that going?

It's going great. I've had 12 times in the last 10 months, people from all over the world - Mexico, Argentina, the U.S. It's really rewarding because it seems to pay off pretty much everything we've been talking about with your very insightful question. It's a consequence of everything that I've learned how to do and all my passion. It's the intersection of everything I'm good at, and this is the Iñaki guide, everything I'm good at with everything I'm passionate about.

Congratulations.

Thank you. I'm 58 years old, so for people who are younger than me, be patient. For people who are older than me, just be intentional about that. It's not going to come to you. In my case, it was because I was forced to speak about who I was. That led me to that intersection of, is it what I do or is it who I am?

It's so interesting that you just talked about it, that you had to do it in front of other people in a way that maybe this wouldn't have happened in isolation.

It wouldn't have, because it's an easy question to say, "I'll do it tomorrow, I don't have to think about that right now. Let me watch Netflix."

We have a few minutes left, and I want, I'm curious about the idea of ethics because I feel it's just been, how do I want to articulate this question? The idea of brand purpose captivated everybody, the idea that brands needed to have a social mission, and the social mission was the brand purpose, and I always felt like brands already had a purpose, and maybe social mission is an additional purpose, but they shouldn't be confused.

I feel like we conflated them for a while. Now with AI coming, we're in this place where there's this whole other - I'm not doing a very good job with this question. What do you mean about, what does brand purpose mean today? You talk about ethics in brand building. What do you mean? Or what are you teaching when you teach ethics?

Let's talk about ethics in the context of purpose because they are related. You can only be ethical if you know the boundaries you are willing or not willing to step beyond to remain true to your essence. Purpose is very much related to ethics.

If we go back to purpose, there's this example I use in my classes, I use it with my clients, it's fascinating. I'm going to tell you a little story about REI, the store. They are an outdoors store. They compete with every other store that sells outdoor equipment from Big 5 Sporting Goods to Patagonia, Walmart and anybody. Academy here in Texas.

If you are thinking "I need a tent to go camping this weekend with my family", all those options are an option for you. But if you are a little bit more conscious about what kind of company you want to buy from, then you do a little bit of research. If you come across REI and you dig a little bit on their website, you learn that REI was founded by a group of people who love climbing and they love climbing so much they wanted access to the best equipment, but the best equipment was in Europe. They didn't have money to buy the very expensive equipment from Europe, I'm talking about the 1950s.

They had an idea - "What if we come together, pitch in, put all our money together, and we buy that equipment and then we take turns using that equipment." It's not a coincidence that REI is a co-op, it was born out of the idea that when we collaborate to do something, we achieve more than when we are by ourselves. That's why REI is a co-op and not Patagonia or Academy or any other store.

Going back to the origins of the founders' story educates the purpose. The purpose of REI - no, the moral of the story of REI, which is more important, or the first step than the purpose, is because they were climbing so much and their idea of sharing resources allowed them to spend more time doing what they love. The moral of the story of REI is that we find our true selves when we are in the outdoors. That's the lesson they learned, is that we find our true selves when we are in the outdoors.

If you're going to create a company, obviously your company is going to have to promote that lesson that you've learned to other people. Because you know this, but other people don't. And you want other people to know what you know. The purpose of REI, as declared by them on their website, is to inspire people to spend more time in the outdoors, because when you're in the outdoors, you find the best version of yourself.

Again, I guess I completely picked on logic, but I keep using logic. The founders had that experience. They learned that lesson. They create a company so other people can learn that lesson. If the best version of ourselves is found in the outdoors, then ethically, I need to protect the outdoors because the outdoors represent the best version of humanity.

To me, it's all related. Patagonia has found the same different moral, different purpose, different path of evolution as an outdoor company, because the founder is a different person and he had a different experience. But eventually they agree on the basics - we need to protect our planet. Patagonia believes this because we need to protect what's most precious. REI believes that we need to protect it because we find our best version of humanity in the outdoors. Similar lessons, similar principles, but different approach to it.

Patagonia is helping other businesses because this problem can no longer be solved by individuals, it can only be solved by companies. That's their mission right now. REI continues to focus on if I can get one more person to enjoy the outdoors, and in the long term relationship of that because they might sell you a tent, but then they offer tours to escalate your experience of the outdoors to better, more professional. They take you like a true mentor, from the very beginning stages of enjoying the outdoors to the ultimate - go and climb the Himalaya if you want to.

They are a true mentor brand. This is REI. Clear purpose.

I feel like that, I mean, it's all, it fell into place listening to you. When I think of REI, they're the ones they did the Black Friday - "Go out, get outside". That's them. It makes sense. "Get outside." Just tell me if I'm wrong, but purpose comes first. When you have a good idea of purpose, then the ethics could flow out of purpose.

Absolutely. Also, purpose - the mentor relationship, if they've assumed mentorship for the outdoor enthusiast, then it's obvious what to do on a Black Friday. When everybody else is shopping, what would you do for somebody, what would you do for somebody if you wanted them to have an experience of their best self? You would tell them to go outside.

You're right, I find it, I like how you've bashed logic in the past, but the lessons come in a logical fashion. See this is how it works. They are a co-op, and belonging to the co-op costs you one dollar, and it's a lifetime membership. That's how much they want you to become, to fall in love with their outdoors.

Beautiful. Listen, we're at the end of the hour, this has been, it's really easy to talk to you, a real joy. I thank you so much for your time, I'm so glad we were able to make it happen.

The funny thing about this, Peter, is now it's your turn, so we need to coordinate our time so I can interview you because I had to beat my time not to ask you questions like 25 times.

That's great.

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