The Brand Value Equation: Why Your Pricing Problem Is Actually a Value Problem

Bryan Mahoney

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce behind today's iconic — or as I like to say, next-to-be-iconic — brands. We've been talking a lot with D2C, traditional D2C operators lately — founders, VPs, CMOs who grew up in the performance era. Today I wanted to go in a slightly different direction. I wanted to talk to someone who's built brand love from a completely different angle. So joining me today is Doug Zarkin, CMO of Take 5 Oil Change. Doug, welcome to the pod.

Doug Zarkin

Thanks for having me, bud, appreciate it.

Bryan Mahoney

Where am I catching you today?

Doug Zarkin

I am in the global headquarters of Take 5 Marketing, otherwise known as the basement of my house here on Long Island outside of New York City.

Bryan Mahoney

Awesome. So take five minutes and tell me a little bit about the brand.

Doug Zarkin

Sure — Take 5, the stay-in-your-car 10-minute oil change. Roughly 1,400 locations, national brand, primarily in the South, Southeast, Northwest. What we focus on is fast, simple — we take the pressure and the frustration out of getting your oil changed. That oil light goes off, it's one more thing you've got to do on what is inevitably a very busy schedule. So we take the stress out — you pull right in, we hand you a smile and a water, you get to see everything, be a part of everything, nothing's a surprise, and you're in and out in about 10 minutes.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, that's awesome. You're skipping the opportunity to be upsold too — when the dealer's calling you and harassing you for an oil change and suddenly a $50 bill becomes a $500 bill because you bought a bunch of things that are unnecessary.

Doug Zarkin

100%. We do more than just oil changes — tire pressure checks, fluid top-offs — but at the end of the day, our bread and butter is really providing that comprehensive and expert oil change.

Bryan Mahoney

I love it. But not just Take 5 — as I was doing a little research getting ready for this, you've had a pretty interesting career at some amazing places. So outside of Take 5, what got you here? Tell us a bit more about your career arc.

Doug Zarkin

I think I'm probably the first guest who can say, with confidence, that he knows how to change oil and he was an Avon lady. I've had a pretty diverse set of experiences both in and out of the brick-and-mortar world. I grew up in the agency business, spent my first career in advertising, eventually launching the youth and entertainment division of Grey Advertising. Then went to the client side, to Avon, to help them reinvent their direct-selling model, launching the Mark brand for young women — scaled that business to a little over $120 million in about a year and a half. Then went over to a small little business called Victoria's Secret, where I was head of marketing for their Pink business — took that brand nationally, spent a few years in the wholesale fashion industry. But the bulk of my client-side career prior to coming to Driven Brands and Take 5 was at EssilorLuxottica, where I was CMO of Pearl Vision. I led a transformation of that business into the number-one quality-of-care, number-one eye care brand — top 10% of all franchise brands as rated by Entrepreneur 500. Super proud of that work, and even more excited about bringing those skills to this business, which is incredibly unique and exciting.

Bryan Mahoney

I wrote down here in my notebook that you are, without a doubt, the most non-direct-to-consumer guest I've ever had. And I'm curious — as a career franchise CMO, what are one or two lessons you teach the DTC generation when you come across them at conferences or on calls?

Doug Zarkin

I'll give you two lessons. The first is that data doesn't make decisions for the modern-day marketer — the modern-day marketer uses data to make decisions, because data is only as good as the questions that you ask. If you're making every decision by sitting behind a computer screen looking at cross-tabs and Excel charts and PowerPoint slides, and you aren't getting into the live of your business — whether that's working the customer service phone line, working the chat, or actually working in brick and mortar — you are missing where the right data lies. I always caution folks in the e-comm world: become a frontline associate in any way, shape, or form you can. The second thing is, when it comes to the philosophy of how you're building your brand — whether brick and mortar, omnichannel, or straight e-comm — I like to apply something I talk about in my book called the thinking human philosophy. Thinking human is grounded in the notion of treating every customer that comes into your business as if they are the only customer that's coming in that day. It doesn't become customer service as triage. It becomes an enhancement opportunity to strengthen trust. It level-sets how you think about warranties, how you think about discounting, how you think about the conversation you're having with your customers, both live and on the web. Thinking human is something I've built my career on — it's a foundational pillar of how to build an effective marketing stack and create brand love.

Bryan Mahoney

So sitting at the center of that marketing stack, if I'm understanding correctly, is this connection with the customer that's rooted in something human. And if there's something you can fault the performance generation for, it's some of the language we use — targeting. Targeting doesn't seem to me to be so focused on the human, it's more about winning an equation, it's arbitrage. I think the iconic, or next-to-be-iconic brands are the ones that understand their customer, that have that strongest connection. So how do we look at data, how do we be data-informed, but ultimately keep our customer at the center of everything we do?

Doug Zarkin

Phenomenal point. The first thing is we live in an age where almost everything can be measured, and there's a big misnomer that because it can be measured, it's meaningful. That is not the case — not everything that can be measured is meaningful. I like to think about the Big Five: if you are measuring more than five key KPIs, you're likely going to spend less than 20% of your time on each of those, which means you're not going to be able to move the needle on any of them. Identify the key five. Once you've identified them, within the key five you can drill down into 5A, 5B, 5C — but be relentless in your pursuit of excellence on those.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, relentless is a term I adore, I've been using it all the time with my team. Just because we can measure it doesn't necessarily mean we should — I talk to brands all the time who almost feel like they're drowning in data, and instead of moving the needle, they're trying to figure out why two similar-looking KPIs are different, instead of getting closer to the customer or closer to a decision.

Doug Zarkin

The key to complex business problems always lies in the simplicity of what the answer is. If you're facing a big screen of dashboards and charts, it's almost impossible to see the connecting points. What you've got to try to do is figure out what are the key things that drive your business, understand the layers that go into it, and then you'll become a master of your data — and you'll be able to use it for good, not for evil.

Bryan Mahoney

I like that. Whether it's brick and mortar or DTC, those lessons apply universally. And it sounds like you're a framework thinker — I've read about the framework you're well known for, the brand value equation. Let's unpack that. I'd be curious how it developed and how you use it.

Doug Zarkin

If there's anything in the book worth remembering, it's the brand value equation. For me, in creating it, it's a very simple construct: whether you're making $50,000, $500,000, or $5 million a year, everybody wants brand value. Brand value equals, as your numerator, experience, and as your denominator, price. The greater the delta between your experience and your price, the greater brand value you have, and ultimately the more brand love you're going to get. It's liberating, because if you walked into McDonald's — I'm just picking on them because they're the first brand that comes to mind — and they wanted to charge you $10 for a hamburger, you probably wouldn't do it. If you walked into Smith & Wollensky's, Morton's, any fine steakhouse, and they wanted to charge you $10 for a hamburger, you'd be there every day for lunch. Why is that? It's not just the quality of the meat, it's the experience — the linen tablecloths, the environment. Experience matters. And if you deliver an amazing experience, you can charge them whatever you want, as long as that ratio is four-to-one, five-to-one — the consumer's going to come away feeling like they got a lot of value. When you stay at the Ritz-Carlton, you're not thinking about how much you're paying at the Ritz-Carlton. When you stay at a Courtyard Marriott and your room isn't ready and the Wi-Fi sucks and the towels are the size of an 8.5-by-11 sheet of paper, it doesn't matter that it's $99 — you feel like you got a raw deal. So it refocuses brands and brand marketers on what's most important. When somebody says you have a pricing problem, more often than not, you have a value problem.

Bryan Mahoney

Right. So how do you measure that over time? How do you apply the framework at Take 5?

Doug Zarkin

Great question. You can do brand health studies — we do a brand health tracker at Take 5 where we're measuring awareness, consideration, sentiment. Google star scores are probably the most aggressive way to measure it — I call it reputation commerce, there's a whole chapter in the book about it. Star scores are shoppable reputation. Most consumers today have the opportunity to strap on their beer muscles if they want to vent on Facebook or X or whatever you want to call Threads. But when they leave you a Google review, they have to have a Gmail and they're assigning an identity to that point of view, and it is invaluable. What your star score is may not be the actuality, but it is the reality of what is happening, and if you take stock of it, you'll have a very good sense of your brand value equation and your brand health.

Bryan Mahoney

Especially when it's so public that way, it becomes something you need to manage. And I'd imagine this notion of value, important on the first purchase, is crucial for what it's going to take for someone to come back and buy again or book another appointment — where you've got a following because people love you, and they're going to tell not just their family but all their friends.

Doug Zarkin

A Harvard study calls out — I can't remember which one — that it is between five and twenty-five times more expensive to acquire a customer than it is to retain one. So ask yourself, for all these subscription services, why do they give the best deals to new members instead of the renewals? When Sirius hits you up for auto-renew, your promotional rate goes up five times. Thank you for your service, we're going to screw you on the pricing — doesn't make any sense.

Bryan Mahoney

Well, because implicit in that is that the switching cost is high and customers are lazy — so if we can hook them, they're not going to want to abandon us. What if we turned that on its head and said, we got them in, now we just get started establishing a relationship with this customer so they love us — we make the renewal easy.

Doug Zarkin

You just nailed it — it's a relationship. Think about your personal life: you meet someone, you date, you're on your best behavior, the wooing is there. Once you're married 20 years, are you still wooing? The key to successful marriage is you never stop the woo. You always have to think about how you're reminding that person why they love you. And that doesn't mean grand gestures, it's actually small moments — finding the opportunity to say thank you, to express gratitude, to offer a little bit of value each and every time you come.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, it sounds so obvious when you say it. The advice I'll offer up is I want to work with brands who treat their customers the way I want to be treated. I have a pretty high bar for that — whether it's the way you're using my data to make my experience better, to make the product better. Just do right by me and I'm going to keep coming back, because you've proven you care about that relationship.

Doug Zarkin

The answer to complexity often lies in the simplicity.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, sometimes distilling it down to something super simple just makes an awful lot of sense. So let's segue — you literally wrote the book on this, Doug. Tell me about that. What was the transition like from CMO to author?

Doug Zarkin

When you put something out into the world in print, not only do you have to stand behind it, but it is very, very vulnerable. For me — one thing I cannot spell, and I am a multiple assault-and-battery victim of autocorrect — my biggest fear was writing this book and having autocorrect take the culmination of a chapter where I meant to say 'this is why you don't do it' and have it say 'this is why you do do it.' I probably tortured myself. I wrote the book in 16 weeks, every day. It was right after I'd left Pearl Vision — took the summer to write it before starting my next gig. For me it was very cathartic. It gave me an opportunity to go inside and figure out all the things I wanted to share to help people avoid some of the mistakes I've made. I've been very fortunate in my career — I've worked with some amazing people, and also some of the worst bosses on the planet, and you learn as much from the terrible people you work for as the gracious ones. What I love about the book is that when people read it, they have an understanding of who I am as a human being, not just as a marketer. I'm a husband and a father — my daughter's a freshman in college, my son's a sophomore in high school, I've taught both their business classes. I'm not sure they fully understand what I do for a living, but they know I'm pretty good at it, and their friends tell them to read the book because it's good.

Bryan Mahoney

That must have been a pretty special feeling, walking in to teach a class where your kids were in the audience.

Doug Zarkin

I've been very lucky. My work at Pearl Vision is the subject of a Harvard Business School case on brand rejuvenation, but there is no more terrifying experience than walking into the incubator business class at your child's high school and sitting in a room with them and all their friends — half of whom you used to coach in lacrosse or baseball — and having them look at you like, 'wow, he's kind of interesting.' It's been very cathartic, for sure.

Bryan Mahoney

I remember being invited to speak at an MBA class, and the professor was an old customer of mine from a decade ago — I remember feeling this overwhelming imposter syndrome, like why is she inviting me to talk to this class. The first 45 seconds were nerve-wracking, before I settled in and realized I had a lot to offer. It's one thing to stand up there and tell everyone what they want to hear — but if you can be honest and vulnerable about your mistakes, you're potentially saving people from making the same ones.

Doug Zarkin

Look, every one of us is a brand. Especially when you're talking to high school kids figuring out how to market themselves to the college of their choice — giving them a sense of how to think about themselves, not what to think about themselves, is helpful. I'm very involved in a few mentoring programs at the high school and college level, and I get a lot of joy out of it.

Bryan Mahoney

Sometimes getting an opportunity to teach something forces me to always be learning, in a weird way. I contributed a couple chapters to a book back in 2000 or 2001 — I'll date myself — on Flash and a technology called Cold Fusion, if you remember that. Those technologies didn't stay relevant for very long. You certainly have. I'm curious if there's a chapter or two in the book you think has the greatest chance of being evergreen.

Doug Zarkin

I think the chapter on thinking human, probably because it's a philosophy that's timeless. I think the brand value equation. And to me, the introduction of the book, even though it's not technically a chapter, really sets the tone for the entire book. I'll tell you the story — I had to turn the book in the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, and Saturday of Labor Day weekend I had the final manuscript, but I hadn't read the entire thing cover to cover because I'd written it in bits and pieces. I remember sitting at the pool with a hard copy, reading the introduction, making notes, getting to chapter one — okay — and chapter two, and I'm like, this is really boring. I said to my wife, I'm going home. She's like, what do you mean? I go, I've got to go home and write. I rewrote the first three chapters, including the introduction, in about five hours, because I realized that if I didn't tell a great story at the beginning, no one would continue with it. It's like a movie — if the first 15 minutes suck, you're just praying someone sticks it out because they paid $20 for the ticket. I wanted to make sure that from page one, paragraph one, I got you to lean in. I've gotten some nice feedback that maybe I've done that. Crisis of confidence happens to anybody — I'm glad I had that epiphany and a little humility to say, good isn't great, I want to make it great.

Bryan Mahoney

I sometimes struggle to go back and read something longer-form I've written and I obsess over it, but having the grit to sit down and rewrite it to hook people in — that's awesome. So, in the era of AI, as we move away from the human and toward human assistants, where does that come in when you're building a brand? Maybe not always the human that has the relationship with the brand that helps with discovery — and maybe this is where your roots as a marketer are directly applicable to this era.

Doug Zarkin

Technology, like data, can be used for good or evil. An algorithm is only as good as the information fed into it. AI is not going to replace the modern-day marketer — it's going to enable us to have more choices and options, to articulate things in different ways, and may allow us to go faster, but sometimes you go slow to go fast. It's a tool you have to master. I'm a tennis player, it's my hobby and my passion — it's one of the few things in my life I wish I was better at, because I put a lot of time into it. Because you have a great serve doesn't mean you don't have to have a good forehand. AI is not going to replace having a good forehand — it just means you now have a good serve. It still goes back to customer insights. Marketing's job is to motivate the consumer to do what we need them to do when we need them to do it. To do that, you cannot just simply automate everything — if you could, everybody would do it, and it'd become a race to the middle. Think about the stock market and how much information people playing it have had at their disposal for decades — they still don't know what's going to happen. Think about weather modeling: the best part of being a meteorologist is you can be right 50% of the time and still be great. Even with all the data in the world, the reality is you need somebody behind the screen who understands what the hell they're doing.

Bryan Mahoney

Have you shifted your approach at Take 5 in terms of how you think about reviews, given that the algorithm is only as good as the information it's fed? How much do you and the team think about that?

Doug Zarkin

A lot. We know that for the algorithm — for SEO as a good example — SEO crawls content, and that content has to be written so it's relevant. You have to understand how to write for SEO, but you also have to write content that's clickable, shareable, meaningful. It requires you to balance art and science. We spend a lot of time thinking about not how to game the system, but how to play in the system. The house is always going to win in blackjack — counting cards only works for so long, and when it comes to technology, if you try to count cards, inevitably you're going to lose. The best thing to know is you've got to know how to play the game. You don't split tens — I don't care what you're counting, you don't split tens in blackjack, ever, even when the dealer has a six. You've got to be able to apply that humanity into playing the algorithmic game. I get twisted when media people say, we're going to let the algorithm set it — no, absolutely not. I need somebody hands-on-keyboard who is working it, looking at the results, factoring in what we know about our consumer, because we're getting smarter about our consumer every single day. The arrogance to be a marketer has to be paired with the humility to realize that you will never know everything about your consumer. You can strive to, but you never will.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah, they will consistently surprise you — that's been my experience. So is it fair to say, in all things AI, you're thinking about it, but ultimately it doesn't replace the hard work brands need to do to keep humans at the center of everything, and it brings us back to the brand value equation?

Doug Zarkin

That's an on-point synopsis, for sure.

Bryan Mahoney

Awesome, that's probably a good place to wrap us up, Doug. This was great — I expected maybe a bigger delta between DTC and omnichannel, but ultimately, when it comes to building brands, really fortunate to have had this conversation. You're one of the sharpest minds out there. Before I let you go, where can I find the book?

Doug Zarkin

It's available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, and if you want more information, you can go to dougzarkin.com.

Bryan Mahoney

Awesome. Thanks, Doug.