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The Brand Atelier Show
Most brand advice chases trends. This podcast builds brands that last.
Hosted by Shayne Mackey, a brand strategist with over 30 years working with Fortune 500 companies and legacy brands, The Brand Atelier Show cuts through the noise of viral tactics and flavor-of-the-month marketing to focus on what actually matters: strategic positioning, enduring identity, and brands built for the long game.
If you're a founder, brand strategist, or creative director tired of being told to "just post more on TikTok," this is your antidote. Every episode delivers expert-level thinking on brand architecture, messaging, visual identity, and the strategic decisions that separate brands people remember from brands people scroll past.
No hype. No shortcuts. Just decades of experience distilled into actionable strategy for building brands with staying power.
New episodes weekly.
THE BRAND ATELIER | EPISODE 27 | FULL TRANSCRIPT
Expert Brand: A Conversation with Richard Nordstrom
Cleaned and formatted for reference | July 2026
SHAYNE MACKEY 00:00
Hi, I'm Shayne Mackey. Welcome back to The Brand Atelier.
I have spent the last three episodes building a case about expert brands. What they are, how they work, what makes them fail, and the stewardship discipline that keeps them alive. Today I have a guest who has lived every single one of those questions from the inside. Not as a theorist, not as an observer, but as someone who started in the field, built from the ground up, and ended up leading one of the largest healthcare agency networks in the world.
Richard Nordstrom started his career as a pharmaceutical sales rep in the field, talking to doctors, learning how products actually lived or died in the real world long before he ever set foot inside an agency. That foundation, that market truth built from firsthand experience, shaped everything that came after. He came to Saatchi on the account management side, and that is where we met.
I was fresh out of college and Richard was already someone who understood both the market and the work in a way most agency people never do, because they have never been on the other side of it. He has shaped a tremendous amount of my career. He is one of my dearest friends, and I have wanted to have this conversation on this show since the day I started recording.
He went on to become Chairman and CEO of McCann Healthcare Worldwide. He built companies from the founder side. He co-founded Liberate Health, one of the most ahead-of-its-time patient education platforms I have ever been part of. And he built Northstream Global Partners, where we worked together for years doing strategy and brand work across life sciences and pharma.
He has held the standard at scale, he has built from scratch, and he has made the hard calls that most people never have to make. And he has done it all with an integrity and a clarity about what great work actually is that I have admired for thirty-plus years.
Richard, welcome to The Brand Atelier.
RICHARD NORDSTROM 02:04
Hi, thanks for having me.
THE FIELD: WHERE IT STARTED
SHAYNE MACKEY 02:06
Most people who end up leading global agency networks start inside agencies. But you actually started in the field as a pharmaceutical sales rep. Take us back to that. What did the field teach you that you could not have learned anywhere else?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 02:21
I started for a small pharmaceutical company, Merrell Dow. And what you find in a small company is you do a lot of different things because you don't have the resources. And it was a long time ago, so we didn't have the kind of measurement tools that we have today. You had to do a lot on your own to investigate, to understand the behaviors of your physicians.
And as part of the development process with Merrell Dow, they brought me inside to do brand marketing. Even though I was a kind of a scientific rep because of my background in physiology and chemistry, when they brought me inside, they put me on the OTC brands, which was really more pure marketing. I had no marketing experience, but they felt it was better, in the philosophy of Dow Chemical at that time, to have us train you than have some textbook-trained person. They really spent a lot of time developing your skills as a marketer.
After ten years on the brand side, I decided to leave and go to fame and fortune in New York. I went to Saatchi and Saatchi as an account person in an organization that was really well known for its brand development and how they approached their pharmaceutical partners. That is where you and I met, so many years ago.
Saatchi and Saatchi had enormous resources in terms of what they brought to bear for their clients. We were able to tap into really unique services on the consumer side and bring that into the pharmaceutical realm, which at that time was not being done. People were doing DTC advertising at that time, so that wasn't new. But what was new was bringing the principles of OTC and direct-to-consumer marketing into the pharmaceutical world.
At that time there was a lot of change going on in the pharmaceutical environment. They were hiring people who were doing OTC brands, hiring people from consumer products companies. Pharmaceutical companies were bringing in Procter and Gamble people to strengthen their capability in direct-to-consumer marketing. It was a really interesting time of transition and a fun part to be part of.
After leaving Saatchi, I went out to Chicago and worked for a company called Corbett. Corbett was at a really interesting point in their life. They had been around for 30 years, a nice small boutique pharmaceutical agency, a lot of small clients, nobody big. When they brought me in, I had experience with big pharma, Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, and Wyeth. They didn't have a lot of that experience at Corbett.
What I was exposed to at Corbett was probably the seminal time in my management career. I was exposed to Omnicom's focus on leadership development and their devotion to the principles of leadership within the agency world. There were two foundational training efforts: The Leadership Engine by Noel Tichy from Michigan, and Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister. Those books were really used as the basis for how to manage agencies in the developing world.
SHAYNE MACKEY 07:53
I want to go back to when you were still at Merrell Dow, how they brought you inside and got you that amazing marketing foundation. One of the things I've noticed over time is that regulation and budgets have so changed how we as marketers function.
Richard is my very first boss out of college, which is really cool. Did you feel like those ten years inside, coming into Saatchi, were really helpful in terms of building out marketing and brand strategy for all of those OTC and DTC and HCP brands you were working on?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 08:47
The information and data continued to get better and better almost every day. We were really operating in the dark in the eighties. We didn't have the kind of individual prescriber information that eventually evolved at all. A doctor would tell a rep they were writing prescriptions for your product all the time, but your sales weren't increasing in your area. So you had to literally go to pharmacies and look at their prescription records, which they allowed you to do back then. There was no such thing as HIPAA. We would be able to go through and look at the actual prescribing information to see how many of those prescriptions were for you or your competitor.
That's how marketing was done when I was in field sales. Eventually it moved from big aggregate data to individual prescriber information. In the nineties we were dealing with three-month-old data. In the early two thousands, we were dealing with last week's data. That became such a powerful tool.
People who are in marketing today have the tools available to them that they can react to a person's behavior immediately. There is no lag time. Fifteen or twenty years ago, that was not possible. It's probably hard for anybody to imagine not being able to get to their potential customer in a matter of seconds like you can today. We were operating in a much different market environment.
SHAYNE MACKEY 11:19
Yes, we were. The other thing about the mid-nineties was the onset of the HMO. Doctors suddenly had to pivot from having as much time as they wanted with patients to having fifteen minutes, and getting very regulated in terms of their time and their payment.
You and I, on several brands back then, had to address that without the data you're talking about. I remember when the first Allegra ad hit the screens, a windsurfer in a wheat field. That was one of the first DTC ads to hit television. And the whole evolution that happened because there was a need and want to supplement education, not only for HCPs but also for patients, because they weren't getting the time and the communication. It was an interesting time in the nineties to be part of that transformation of advertising in such a heavily regulated industry.
RICHARD NORDSTROM 12:39
No question about it. Initially they called it managed markets. That was the buzzword. Everybody was trying to figure out how to contract their brands into managed markets. You couldn't be successful as a brand in terms of sales without that. And so there emerged a whole different group of payer targets that had nothing to do with the doctor. The doctor would then do what they were told based upon the payer decisions and the middlemen that are still very prevalent today in a variety of different formats. Ultimately the same thing, where the doctor is being told which brands they can or cannot use. That all started to emerge in the nineties and really shaped how the future of the market was going to be. The behaviors were driven by decisions that were not being made by the physician and the patient.
MCCANN HEALTHCARE: HOLDING THE STANDARD AT SCALE
SHAYNE MACKEY 13:57
You started from a very entrepreneurial place in the field. Even at Saatchi and at Corbett, you had that founder mentality because so much of the landscape was changing. And then you eventually became Chairman and CEO of McCann Healthcare. You were navigating offices across dozens of countries with thousands of people and networks under one umbrella. How do you hold the standard for what great work looks like at that scale, when you're not in every room and some of the people doing the work have never met you?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 14:49
It was really hard. First of all, you had to have adaptable creative, which meant that the big idea you could do in the US was going to be very different than the big idea in the UK or France or Japan or China or India, wherever you were trying to do this global brand.
At that time, pharmaceutical companies were transitioning to global brands. They knew that the efficiency of brand spend would be greater if there was a singular brand idea that ran through every single company on a global basis. Pharmaceutical companies inherently knew that because now they had people from Procter and Gamble running big franchises, the respiratory care franchise or the oncology franchise. These people were brand people who understood the efficiencies of a global brand.
To get that done, the mindset internally at the agencies had to shift from multi-local marketing to global marketing. That required training, development, and creating a culture. I started having meetings where I'd bring regional people together who had to work with one another. Some of these agencies that had been bought by McCann had been around for ten years and had never met one another. They had had phone conversations, but never met each other. How are you going to expect them to work together if they don't know each other?
We had to go back to foundational efforts to get people to think about driving a singular idea and how that could manifest itself in 33 or 40 countries. But that's what the clients wanted. They had no idea how to do it either, because their own people didn't want to accept an idea developed in the UK if they were in Germany. They'd tell you it doesn't work in our market. It was very hard. It took us probably three years of really pounding at it with very specific clients. In our case it was Novartis and Glaxo. Those two clients were most interested in achieving global brand excellence. Between them forcing it top down and our forcing it top down, and driving a culture of doing great work that could be used in any market, between those two things happening, it started to come together with very specific global brand successes.
SHAYNE MACKEY 18:06
Was there ever a moment where you felt that standard slipping, when the pressure from growth or from the client or even from the holding company was pulling the work away from what you believed it should have been? And what did you do in that moment?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 18:23
IPG was not very financially sound at that time. We had probably the worst economy we had ever seen in 2008, 2009, 2010. And McCann was probably the most coin-operated organization I had ever been part of. The goal wasn't to be the most creative agency. The goal was to be profitable, and that's how it was run.
As I moved, I was transitioning out of McCann during that period. The need to generate revenue and profit was paramount, and the idea of spending a lot of money on training and development is always the first thing to go when times are tough. And so I think the culture of excellence that I was trying to drive and the investment that I was making in developing the talent within our organization, that became a very difficult thing to achieve.
It's a normal cycle in business. When times are good, you invest in your talent, you invest in your capabilities, you invest in your training. When times are tough, those are the first things that go. And so I think I experienced that as much as anything else.
LIBERATE HEALTH AND NORTHSTREAM: THE FOUNDER SIDE
SHAYNE MACKEY 20:45
Let's talk about Liberate Health. For people who don't know that story, tell them what it was and what the vision was.
RICHARD NORDSTROM 21:00
Liberate was a tool that we developed to help healthcare practitioners capture the conversation that they were having with a patient, so that the conversation could be recalled by the physician and the patient at any time. It was a digital tool that would capture the voice and allow the physician to record the information that they were providing to the patient so that the patient could then take that home and understand what the physician had said to them.
We came at a time in 2014 when that was a gigantic missing digital tool in the healthcare practitioner's world. At that same time, the EHR systems were starting to really penetrate physician groups. There was a lot of consolidation going on in both the physician world and the EHR world.
The tool we developed ran parallel to EHR because it was very difficult to become interoperable with EHR systems. It ultimately led to the failure of Liberate, the inability for us to get into an interoperable state with the EHR. The doctor didn't have to leave their EHR system. By the late teens, early twenties, they were using their computer and they were plugging data in right away, not even looking at the patient.
The fundamental solution we provided still is not being used, although I have seen dozens and dozens of people who have tried to come into the market with the same concept of recording the conversation. If it is not built into the EHR, it is not going to get done. That is the situation we were never able to overcome, which ultimately led to the failure of Liberate.
SHAYNE MACKEY 23:45
It was a brilliant platform. It truly was ahead of its time. What did that experience teach you about the difference between being right about the vision and right about the timing?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 24:00
The first thing it taught me is it takes a lot of capital to play in the game. I invested an enormous amount of money in that organization and never got the payout we thought we would get. So we were chasing capital and investors a lot during that time period.
We had some great partners. Publishers saw the ability to sell advertising within the system, both digital and traditional media. Journals saw this as a real opportunity to provide advertising directly to the physician and to the patient. But we were unable to move from a parallel technology to an integrated technology. That was ultimately where we went sideways.
SHAYNE MACKEY 25:18
Let's pivot to Northstream Global Partners. You were able to build on everything that had accumulated over a career. What has it felt like to own the standard entirely rather than to hold it inside someone else's institution?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 25:43
The idea of Northstream was to provide big brand thinking. Senior agency people, creative people, strategists, account people who could deliver that thinking at a more reasonable cost and in a more reasonable amount of time. Kind of addressing the problem of faster, better, cheaper.
We targeted areas of therapeutic expertise that we had in eye care and oncology and neurology, areas where we had a lot of experience. Small companies, kind of going back to my Corbett days, we moved from small companies to big brand companies. Northstream looked at just the opposite. The small companies are where we can play, because they don't want to spend a lot of money. In most cases, these phase two and phase three products have no marketing people, no commercial people in the organization. They are all doctors or PhDs.
Our target was to help them get through the clinical trial phase and establish brand awareness amongst the specialists who are going to use that brand, in a way they could afford. Then when they do get FDA approval, they can turn it over to a big agency with the resources necessary to launch a brand, which was never our intent to build.
We were a small shop with the idea that we can get to know your business very personally, help you take the journey, and move from no awareness to a high level of awareness. Along the way we picked up a lot of projects around how to educate patients to participate in clinical trials and how to work with CROs to help build awareness of the clinical trial. With my experience and the experience of people like Shayne who had a lot of different kinds of experience in the pharmaceutical marketing world, we could help clients and bring that resource to them at a reasonable price.
THE STEWARDSHIP QUESTION
SHAYNE MACKEY 28:41
I want to talk about stewardship of the expert brand. In my last episode I talked about the stewardship principle, that idea that expert brands like ours are not owned, they are held. That the discipline is protecting that irreplaceable application of the thinking, and evolving faster than the market absorbs you, and knowing the difference between what you give away and what you protect. When you hear that framing, what lands true from your experience and what would you push back on?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 29:30
Your concept of brand stewardship is spot on. Whether you are doing it for an organization or you are doing it for a product, it is spot on. Someone has to be responsible for that. And what I have found in today's world is that less and less brand stewardship actually occurs. More focus on profitability and cost savings rules the day.
Does a brand steward have to exist within an organization? Yes. Whose job is that? Typically it's the CEO. Your example of Ogilvy is so true. As soon as the founder who built the organization on a concept of brilliant thinking hands off the reins to the next generation, the first thing they do is want to be successful making money. And they forget that the reason they were successful making money is because they had a brand steward like David Ogilvy.
Whether you are in a small company or a restaurant or a burger joint, the brand steward is the person who is going to interact with the client on a daily basis. They become the representative factor of the brand. You see this done really well in small businesses. The cleaners. The small restaurant where the owner isn't there but the person running the floor is. That experience, the only way to have a great experience is that they all look at what they are delivering as being brand stewards for that restaurant. I think that is a lost art, and the people who have figured it out are the ones who are the most successful.
Because it's not about how fancy the room is. It can be a dive bar. But if the dive bar's culture is to cater to the people who come there for that dive bar experience, then that's what wins the day. The idea of a brand steward isn't the CEO's job. It's really every employee. And you only develop that if you develop a culture that helps create that brand stewardship and helps people understand why they are doing what they are doing and why it is important for the outcome of the organization.
SHAYNE MACKEY 32:34
I love the dive bar example. The minute you introduce some frou-frou drink or some half-price app to that group, you lose everything about that brand. Once you lose that trust, it's gone forever. You and I have seen countless brands over the years try to recover it, and it's really, really hard to do.
I have one more question. If you were sitting across from someone at the very beginning of building an expert brand, someone who reminds you of either of us when we started, full of conviction but not quite sure how to protect it, what is the one thing you would tell them?
THE FIRST RULE OF POSITIONING
RICHARD NORDSTROM 33:29
The hardest question.
I think you have to answer this: Am I going to sacrifice? The first rule of positioning is sacrifice. You can't be all things to all people. You have to be something to your target audience. I have seen this mistake made over and over and over again. They don't want to sacrifice anything. So they are going to be all things to all people. You see that in pharmaceutical marketing all the time. You can't. You have to be what you can live up to. You can always build on that to expand your market or your target audience. But you really have to understand what is important, what are you solving for, and what are you willing to give up in order to be successful initially?
Because that is what it is all about. In today's marketing environment, companies don't stick around a brand that is not successful or at least living up to their expectations. I worked on brands over the years that did $250 million their first year and maybe $350 million their second year, but were looked upon as failures because the marketplace was over $2 billion and they weren't achieving their share of the expected results. Which is really unbelievable when you think about it. But they had to hit a billion dollars. They weren't looked upon as being a long-term investment for the company.
In large part that was because there wasn't a focus on where they were going to be successful versus trying to make it successful among every person in the target audience. And that just wasn't achievable.
WHAT'S NEXT
SHAYNE MACKEY 35:32
That is a very good point. Last question. What are you up to now and what are you paying attention to or thinking about in this chapter?
RICHARD NORDSTROM 35:47
I am really kind of learning to retire, and that's really hard. But it's something I want to do and I'm working on that. I'm working on my pickleball game and contemplating a few other things. I'm really trying to figure out how to live an engaged life while being retired. I have let go of a lot of the work I was doing on the nonprofit side. I just think it's time that I passed whatever I was doing on to the next generation of leaders. I feel really good about that. I've helped build some organizations from nothing and they do a lot of good work.
I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to enjoy my life in a way that keeps me intellectually engaged, yet not working my butt off. I do things like day trade and play around with understanding that whole process. That has been really interesting, but it's not something I want to make a living at. It's just something I enjoy learning, something completely new.
SHAYNE MACKEY 37:20
So this has been an amazing conversation. I'm wondering if you'll come back and have another conversation with me on the podcast at some point.
RICHARD NORDSTROM 37:36
Happy to. I think what you're doing is phenomenal. I think the ideas you're going to put forth on this podcast are really going to help people understand how to learn and how to market their products. I think you're onto something very big here, Shayne.
SHAYNE MACKEY 37:55
Thank you so much. Richard, this whole thing means more to me than you know. Thank you so much for being here today. Let's do this again. Let's pick a topic and do this again in a couple of months.
RICHARD NORDSTROM 38:07
I would be happy to. Anytime.
SHAYNE MACKEY OUTRO
SHAYNE MACKEY 38:10
To everyone listening, this is the Expert Brand module of The Brand Atelier. We have gone from the deep dive to IDEO to Ogilvy to my take to this conversation with Richard. If there is one thing I hope you carry out of this module, it is the stewardship question. Not as a framework, as a daily discipline. What is the thing only you can do, at the level only you can do it, in the way only you can do it?
Know that thing. Protect that thing. Evolve that thing. And never let the pressure to grow faster than your foundation can hold talk you into giving it away.
If this episode made you think, I want to stay in touch. The link to download my Four Pillars of Brand Architecture white paper is right in the show notes. It maps the four brand architecture types operating in today's market. It's free and I'd love for you to have it.
I'll see you next week. I'm Shayne Mackey. This is The Brand Atelier. We're here to build something that lasts.