On Brand: A Podcast About Branding For Brand Builders, By Brand Builders

“The marketplace has changed so much—there are so many brands on the retail shelf—the packaging is all there is. We turn the traditional brand development world upside down.” As a partner and leader of the research team at brand strategy firm SmashBrand, Michael Keplinger has a bold new approach for inventing and reinventing CPG brands. We discussed all of this and more on this week’s episode of the On Brand podcast. About Michael Keplinger Michael Keplinger is a partner at SmashBrand, an agile brand strategy agency for consumer packaged goods that specializes in a complete approach to market research, product design, and testing. After earning a degree and early career in computer engineering, Michael’s entrepreneurial drive took hold and he soon found himself developing market strategies for his own consumer product business. There, he quickly found a talent for connecting seemingly unrelated dots to discover room for innovation and opportunity. At SmashBrand, Michael makes ample use of his philosophy regar