JUST Branding Podcast – Best of Season 1 (2020)

Listen in as we reveal our favourite outtakes from Season 1 of the JUST Branding Podcast in 2020, including branding insights from creative minds such as:

• Marty Neumeier,
• Chris Do,
• Michael Johnson,
• Melinda Livsey,
• Michael Janda,
• Tom Ross,
• Rob Meyerson,
• Stephen Houraghan,
• Stef Hamnerlink,
• Tobias Dahlberg,
• Valerie Jacobs,
• Motto and more.

Don’t miss this one!

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands.

Hello and welcome to the best of JUST Branding. We’re incredibly excited to go through some of our favorite episodes and share some snippets with you from the best of 2020. We have people like Marty Neumeier, Motto, Chris Do, Stef Hamnerlink, and many more that we’re going to go through.

But before we do that, we just wanted to rewind to where this started. And it was really it was back in March, just as the pandemic hit in 2020. And I was having a chat to Matt, who I was just reaching out to for a friendly chat to talk about strategy.

We just got talking, like, let’s do a podcast. And here we are.

It was really bizarre. Yeah, well, the thing is, Jacob, like, I think I’d heard of you many years ago when I ran my agency. And I don’t know if I’ve told this story on JUST Branding, but I will mention it now that me and my team, so I had a small team, there was about 12 of us.

And we were obviously, as any business should be, looking at our SEO, right? And we were looking at search phrases that were, you know, for example, branding or logo design, and because it was a design agency at the time, so I was really focused on things like brochure design, stuff like that. And on a number of these key phrases that we were looking to hit, some bloke called Jacob Cass with JUST Creative continually like was knocking us off.

So we, you probably didn’t know it, but we were in this SEO war with you doing our absolute best to kind of appear high. So yeah, so I’ve known of you for years and I hated you for many years. And in the best possible way, in the most loving and professional kind of way, and admired you from afar.

And then I think we’d reached out and we’d had a few conversations and then you were like, yeah, let’s do this thing. And I was like, I bit your hand off, didn’t I, because, you know, you’re awesome. So you know, it was a, it was brilliant to be out.

It was. Yep. And yeah, thanks for carrying the show, Matt.

But yeah, let’s talk about gratitude because we were just talking about that before recording and we are incredibly grateful for all our listeners who are tuning in to listen to our rather niche podcast on branding and strategy. So it’s been a steady growth, but a very positive growth. And we’ve been really surprised with how much feedback and comments and messages and reviews that we’ve been getting.

So we really are grateful for tuning in, really.

Yes, seriously. I think we’ve both been blown away by the positive feedback that we’ve got. I don’t think we’ve had much or any trolling or anything hugely horrible happen to us, which is…

We did have one one star. There’s one one star. I don’t know where it came from, but I don’t know, I’m going to hunt him down.

Let’s find them out. Well, maybe I’m just not looking, so maybe that’s it. Maybe we’ve had loads of trolling.

Don’t tell me, Jacob, it’ll just upset me. But no, the thing is, generally, we’ve had a lot of positive feedback and for me personally, I think it’s been remarkable because what it’s done for me, Jacob, is it’s shown me that there is this thirst, there’s this need for brand strategy and for brand thinking, if we can call it that. And I, for one, have learned loads from our guests, even though I’ve been practicing this for many years, and I know you have as well.

So even on a personal level, we’re enjoying it. And I think as long as we’re enjoying it, other people will, hopefully.

Absolutely. And I am incredibly excited for all the new guests coming up, which we’re going to tease at the end of this episode. We already have 10.

Yeah, you’ll just have to wait for it, right? We already have 10, 10 guests lined up. So we have it backed up until, I don’t know, February, March.

So I think you’ll be listening to this in January when it comes out. So a lot of good stuff come in, but we have had a lot of good stuff already. So we are going to highlight some of our favorite snippets, along with a few of our comments as well.

Before we do that, Jake, I just wanted to say one other thing about gratitude, if I may, and cut across you as I often do in the series. So it wouldn’t be the same unless I did that.

It would not be the same.

No, no. No. So I was just going to say in terms of gratitude, obviously, hugely gratitude to our listeners and feedback.

But also, let’s not forget those. We’re going to pick out some of the great guests that we’ve had on the show. People have been so free with their time, with their expertise, with their knowledge.

Totally giving up loads of great treasure for people like you and I to benefit from. And as you say, we’ve got people now queuing up. Did you say 10?

Like queuing up out the door really to get on the show. So I’m just blown away and so grateful for the experts as well. Because even if we had zero listeners, right, I’d still want to interview some of the folks that we’ve had the privilege of interviewing, you know?

And that’s what I’m excited to go through today with you.

We’ve got to mention your beard. We are grateful for our guests. We actually send them a mug, a pithy little mug to all our guests as well.

So that’s our little form of gratitude. We just want to take a short break to let you know about our first sponsor for JUST Branding. We thought long and hard about what would resonate with our audience of designers and entrepreneurs, and we actually came down to something we use ourselves, which is Envato Elements.

Envato Elements is the ultimate creative subscription. You get unlimited downloads, 53 million creative assets with one subscription. And I’m not just talking about stock photography.

You actually get access to things like mockups, presentation templates, photos, fonts, add-ons, graphics, sound effects, music, stock videos, video templates, and so much more with one subscription. If you want access to all of this, head over to justcreative.com/envato for a discounted rate. So that is spelt E-N-V-A-T-O.

So justcreative.com/envato. We appreciate you listening. Thanks for tuning in.

And let’s get back to the show. Let’s jump into it. And I don’t think there’s a better person to start with than Marty Neumeier.

He’s the grandfather of Brandon. And we start off every episode with the definition of Brandon. To hear it from Marty himself, I think would be a great way to start off with this best all.

Let’s do it. I like to keep things simple. So my definition is that a brand is a customer’s gut feeling about a company product or service.

That’s simple. But what’s important about that is that it puts the customer at the center of branding. It’s all about what a customer perceives.

So otherwise, what happens is companies just go ahead and start ticking boxes, you know, like, we’ll do a logo, we’ll do an ad campaign, we’ll make a package, we’ll design a product, etc. And therefore, we must be branding. With this definition, it forces you to look at what you’re doing from a customer’s point of view.

So essentially, it’s not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. So stop thinking about it as stories that you’re telling to the world and think about it as the stories that they’re receiving from you, because they may be different. So that’s really crucial to think about it that way.

And it also sort of wipes out pre-definition of branding as, you know, creating logos or just creating products and calling them brands. You know, you hear people talk about this brand or that brand when they really just mean a product or a company. So brands are constructs.

They’re the stories that customers tell themselves about you. And so, what that does is put people like designers in the driver’s seat. Who’s going to interpret these stories?

Who’s going to be talking to these customers? It’s probably not going to be the chief finance officer, right? It’s going to be somebody who understands how to communicate.

So it’s really important for everyone to understand that that’s our role as designers is to get in there and interpret the strategy of the company in ways that mean something to the customers.

Yeah. Blows you away, doesn’t it? Listening to Marty’s such genius books are phenomenal, but he in person is magnanimous.

And the thing for me about that definition, which obviously had such a huge influence on the way that brand is conducted, is that when you are looking to align a bunch of people, whose opinion wins out, right? And what Marty’s definition does that brings brand right to the fore is it says, actually, it doesn’t make it really doesn’t matter what your opinion is. It matters what the customer’s opinion is.

And that should be the aligning authority that we use in business and in design and in creativity to kind of really, really move things forward. And that’s why it’s such a powerful idea. What are your thoughts on that, Jacob?

Like, how helpful do you find that definition? Because for me, it’s brilliant.

It is brilliant. And that’s why it’s probably the most quoted definition of brand as well. And because people often say that your logo is not your brand, but what is it?

And I love how he’s distilled it down into this core essence. And the brand gap is one of those books that just come to mind to really distill it down to something so powerful. So to hear it from himself, it was just incredible.

And like we heard in Level C as well, Level C is his program that he runs with Andy Starr that helps get Brandon into the C suite. And we both, Matt and I have done the Level C course to become a brand specialist. And yeah, we went through the brand gap and we learned from Marty himself.

And it was just, you just got to really learn about that, that essence when it comes to branding and what it means. So very powerful stuff.

Yeah, phenomenal. He also gave us some tips, didn’t he? Towards the end of that brilliant episode.

Should we listen to those tips now? Those questions that he suggests that we ask the new client? Absolutely.

Let’s dive in.

I like to, when I go into a meeting with clients, which you’re going to do a lot, no matter what role you play, either as designer, a strategist, a brand, you know, CBO, whatever, just memorize these three questions, because it’ll give you the upper hand and it’ll also give you the information you need to do a good job. Three questions are, when you talk to a leader of a company, you say, okay, you just need to know three things. Who are you?

What do you do? And why does it matter? And the third one is the most important, because that’s where you shine, is making, connecting customers with what matters to the company.

But they have to answer the question first. And usually what happens is companies will just stutter, leaders will stutter, they won’t know the answer. Good question.

So you have to go over it really slowly. Who are you? In other words, what is it that, why are you doing this kind of work instead of some other kind of work?

What is it that, what’s your passion for? Does this grow straight out of something you believe in? Or not?

You know, who are you? What do you do is what business are you in? What category are you playing in?

Because if you can’t answer that, you don’t even know your job is impossible. You don’t even know who the customers are, who the competition is. You need to find that out.

And then why does it matter is what really what makes you different in a way that’s compelling. So just, you know, memorize that. Who are you?

What do you do? Why does it matter? And you will find that you’re in control of the conversation right from the beginning.

We got it from Marty. So brand from the inside out. This is one of those things.

It’s he’s really distilled it down to those three questions. And I love it. It’s so simple.

And it’s rather difficult to solve, actually, though. So it’s simple, but not easy.

Yeah, I think I think that’s the the essence of Marty’s sort of work, really. So easy to say so easy to get your head around, you know, in the way that he frames the ideas so hard for businesses to do. But that’s great, right?

That’s why people like you and me exist, Jacob. And, you know, most of our audience, I imagine, to help people through that. And, you know, this concept of those three questions, who are you?

What do you do?

Why does it matter? And, you know, Marty says, why it matters is the one that you really need to get to. And, and, you know, the idea that by by challenging leaders and asking these questions, you know, whereas Marty put it, you can begin to control the conversation and, you know, really get them thinking.

I just find fantastic, you know, to add that into your sales process, the initial kind of discovery discussions, you know, really does put the designer in the, in the driving seat, because now suddenly we’re not talking about form. And we’re talking about strategy, you know, and that’s where the value is. And we’ve talked about this a lot on the show.

That’s where the value is to businesses. So, you know, I found, and I don’t know what you think, Jacob, but we had a lot of guests that talked to us about asking the right questions. Yeah, going deeper.

Yeah, going deeper.

Yeah. And to brand from the inside out. So really how I talk about with my clients is to try to separate it between internal brand and external brand.

It just kind of helps them separate them, separate the two, sorry. Internal brand is really the foundation of the brand and your substance. And the external brand is often your identity, your voice.

And if you can think about it, those in separate ways, it helps to, I guess, talk about them easier. And I, when Marty goes through those questions, you really have to figure out like, why does it matter first? Why are you doing this?

Because that’s actually going to lead into everything else. And that’s why it’s such a powerful question.

Yeah, I love it. And asking questions was something that the next kind of best of duo that we interviewed, we had the privilege of being interviewed, really kind of basically, you know, also championed. And that was the episode, remember the episode we have with the founders of Motto, the New York agency, Ashley Hansberg and Sunny Bunnell, who’d written their book Rare Breed.

And we did an episode with them specifically on Rare Breed, which is all about, you know, basically maverick leaders. And we were talking to them about how do we deal, how do we help, how do we deal with, you know, really strong leaders and really strong personalities. And they also touched on this idea of asking the right questions.

So let’s hear from them now.

So we would go into these teams and organizations and start asking these very deep, profound questions. What’s the purpose? Why does it matter?

Why are you doing this? Why are you coming to work every day? What are you trying to accomplish in the world?

And they’ve never been asked those questions. Strangely enough, they were the most simplest questions and yet nobody was asking them. It was more about, you know, what kind of logo do you need?

What kind of website do you need? But no one was actually asking them the questions of what are you trying to do in the world with this business? And what purpose are you fighting for?

And those fundamental questions lead to some very surprising answers. And I think that that’s kind of where we started. And it became the very linchpin for everything that we do.

It now has become not only the book that we’ve written, but also the way we’ve shaped our companies.

That was Sunny Bonnell. She’s brilliant. I love the hat that she wears, you know, from a personal branding perspective.

Definitely check out Sunny Bonnell.

But yeah, I love the way she phrased it as well. It’s not just like, what’s our purpose? Like she put it like, what is the purpose that we are fighting for?

Right?

And when you speak to Ashley and Sunny, they’re very feisty. And I love that about them, you know, that they’re slightly, you know, under the tones of aggression, a lot of what they say. Did you find that?

I love that episode. And it kind of just backs up the asking why, like really, you have to ask these deep questions and dig deeper, go further. I think one of my favorite exercises is asking why five times.

I’m not sure who founded this. That’s probably some smart guy, much smarter than I, but yeah.

I think I know his name. It’s, I’m going to say it wrong. Like it’s something like Konnichiya Toyoda, right?

He, yeah, it’s interesting. He was the one who, basically he was the grandfather of the guy that started Toyota. And it’s a manufacturing technique in the manufacturing part.

He used to, if something went wrong, he used to ask why five times. And they eventually get to the root cause. And you’re absolutely right.

Like to uncover, you know, why, why we’re doing stuff is, and it’s like child, it’s almost childlike, isn’t it? Like kids do that all the time. Why daddy, why?

But the thing is, it’s like, then you’re like, no, you’re forced to really think about it. Like to strip back your assumptions and to really, you know, really examine your motivations and your drivers. And that question, the why, Simon Sinek, you know, famously start with why.

And we never do, do we? We struggle with that. So I just think you’re right, asking why is crucial.

And that’s come out time and time and time again. There was another point in the Motto episode that I think we’d love to kind of just listen to now, because yeah, it kind of helps us segue this conversation on. So let’s dive in and listen to what the next clip says.

We have a saying at Motto, a lot of good agencies can make you look real pretty, but not everybody can make you matter. And that’s the truth. You have to be able to make a company matter.

You can’t just make that, you can’t dress them up nice. You actually have to give them substance. You have to be able to give them something to say, not just something to sell.

And that’s where, you know, I think if I were to give any tips at all, it’d be like figure out what the gifts are, what the strengths are, what the traits are, that you have, that you bring to the table, and then find out what companies and leaders and teams align with that so that when you go to do that work, that you are able to look back on it and say, I didn’t just make something pretty, I actually made something matter. Yeah, I mean, we look for a lot of what is the triggering motivation. So when we’ve got a client and let’s just say they are a rebel, or let’s just say that they are an emotional rare breed or an obsessive, whatever kind of rare breed they are, because you can be all kinds of rare breeds.

Rare breed isn’t just one thing. The most successful that you can be requires you to be able to understand someone else. And so when you can understand someone else, when you can say, okay, now I’m seeing this person and I’m hearing what they’re asking of me, I need to get under that surface.

So I love to be able to work with people. You know, it’s like a date. You’re learning about this person.

Like, do I like you? Do we wanna be friends? Like, tell me about who you are, where you from, where do, you know, all kinds of stuff needs, conversation needs to happen.

You can’t just execute a brief. You have to learn about what someone wants, what they desire, what are they looking to do? What kind of transformation do they feel like they need to take?

What kind of pivot are they in? What do they see for their future? Like, if you can start to understand those things and get clarity around that, you have a much greater chance of helping them succeed in that vision.

I think a lot of people just don’t take the time and effort and energy to understand what our clients want from us and what they need from us. What kind of, you know, what are we here to help them do? Because there’s always a problem to solve.

There’s always a problem to solve and there’s no one client is ever the same. Every client that we have, even though we have systems and processes in place that help us know what to do and when to do it, every client we have is a completely new experience for us because you’re dealing with people and everyone is different. Everyone has their own personality, every team has their own dynamic, every company has their own culture.

So every time we work with a new client, our learning curve is completely new. Even though we know what we’re doing, we have to learn that client from scratch and you have to tailor your approach and your way of doing things to, you know, I think, I believe to do what they need because they’re the ones that you’re doing this work for. So I think understanding is so underestimated and if we just took the time to understand people a little bit more, I think the world and business and design and branding would be so much better.

That’s such a powerful clip, wasn’t it, Jacob? The world would be a better place. I love the way Ashley put that there.

Learn and understand was the key thing that clip really emphasized. And that’s what we’re talking about here, really, isn’t it? It’s not as we just heard it.

As designers, and I know a lot of our audience are designers, you can’t just execute a brief. Like that’s not really being professional. That’s not really doing a good job.

I think everybody has to get into strategy, even if it’s in just a small way. You don’t have to go full blown like some of us have gone, but you’ve got to do a good job as a designer. You must understand more the client.

This comes on when I was very early in my career, Jacob. Well, before I even started my career, in fact, I remember my dad sat me down, and it was like one of them father son chats, right? What are you going to do with your life kind of chat?

I was always good at drawing and art, and I remember saying to dad, dad, you know, I really love creativity and drawing and art.

You should have just done the whole series in that voice.

I should have done. Anyway, dad said to me something along the lines of, well, son, you’re only going to make any money as an artist if you’re dead. And I think he had in mind like Vincent van Gogh or someone like that, right?

So I was like, oh, and that really got me thinking like, because I went eventually to the careers advisor at school and they basically introduced me to graphic design. And one of the differences between art and design is this concept of purpose. See, art is usually, and this is sweeping statements here, but usually about self-expression.

I know. It’s usually about self-expression, right? Whereas design, I think you’ve got to try, you can obviously bring, you have to bring yourself to the work, but it’s not actually all about you.

It’s about the client. It’s about the client’s audience. It’s about the purpose behind the piece of comms, behind the thing that you’re trying to produce.

So there’s an element of humility in that, which is what I’m really excited to have been learning from some of our guests about, like how they go about humbling themselves to listen, to understand. So that’s why I love that particular clip. So that was great.

No client’s the same. It’s about purpose. I know you’ve got some thoughts on that to move on to some of our other guests.

I was actually going to comment on the careers advisor thing because I actually was, I didn’t know what graphic design was until I went to my careers advisor either. So that was just uncanny. That’s how it happened.

But I just wanted to come back to one of the statements that they made earlier was give the brand something to say, not something to sell. I love that statement because it does help you get down to the purpose. And going beyond just making money.

So what are you doing this for apart from just making money? And to stay curious longer, to ask more questions, to understand people better. I think there’s some really key points in there.

Massive, yeah. So talking about purpose, this is a nice segue into Stef Hamnerlink’s snippet. And we had a whole episode on brand purpose and he had some different views and we’d loved having that discussion.

I’m going to put this snippet on about him and brand purpose.

For example, if you have a purpose, it’s easy to start writing a manifesto or some really interesting copy. What I tend to write, for example, these days is like a press release of the brand. And this is like, if you can have a brand strategy and then you can write a press release that has like all the aspects of the story you’re going to tell.

And your client can see that press release in the right tone of voice with all the right like aspects in the right hierarchy. Like what’s in the short title for the press release? What’s in the longer piece?

What’s in the second paragraph? This is really brand strategy. It’s like telling your story in the right order, in the right hierarchy, in the right tone of voice.

And that’s what’s really helpful. So whether it’s a manifesto, a press release or some kind of creative touch point, you’re creating as the endpoint of the strategy. That’s really powerful.

And it’s more powerful than, for example, positioning statements or other things. These are of course helpful to define your brand, to start clarifying where you’re going. But if you can translate that into something creative that will speak to a consumer and is relevant to them in a way that’s really sparking interest and enthusiasm, I think then you’re at the endpoint of your strategy and you can start building brand identity or whatever creative executions.

Yeah, so if you can write out a press release with your brand purpose and really talk about who you are, that is such a powerful tool to use. So give it a shot. Can you do that with your current brand?

I think it’s a very powerful exercise. What do you think, Matt?

Yeah, I loved Stef. And although he was mildly controversial in some of his thoughts, I still valued his thinking. And that clip that you’ve just played and selected I think is brilliant.

That was one of many great things that he shared with us. The manner, this idea of the press release, I just think it’s clever because a lot of people are familiar with that. Like if you went, oh, let’s write a news article or something for a newspaper, it’s irrelevant nowadays, but a press release, a lot of business people, a lot of leaders are familiar with that.

So I think it’s really smart to bring that to bear. I love it. I love it.

So the next clip we’re going to jump into is none other than Chris Do. This clip is about moving from a designer to a consultant, which is what a lot of our listeners are in transition to doing from what we hear. So let’s jump in.

I forget who says this, but everything that got here won’t get you there. All these skills that you learn in school and in practice, refining something, caring about the beauty and the craftsmanship, attention to detail, it’s just exactly the right point size with the right letter spacing and leading. It’s just, it’s so good.

And the finishes and the printing and the quality, it’s just immaculate. Nobody, no other right minded designer is gonna critique you on that. But what’s happened is you’ve become very myopic to the thing that matters to the client.

They actually don’t really care that much about art. As much as they might say, they really don’t. And that’s evident.

If you just look around the world at how much bad design there is, I’m not talking about graphic design, I’m just talking about just architecture, urban design, fashion, everything. It’s like people aren’t as particular as we’d like them to be. And the reason why we want them to be is because it fits into our narrative that if people care more about the way things look, we are going to be more valuable.

But ultimately people want something very different. They want to grow. They want to grow in all ways, personally, professionally, spiritually, physically, everything they’ll want to grow.

Who’s going to be the person to help them get there? Like if I want to get really jacked, if I want to get super ripped, I want to hire a personal trainer. And the best personal trainer who fits with my style of learning is going to get my money.

And so if you think about a business, what do businesses care about? Yeah, they care about the aesthetics, but they might care about the way that the food is served or the menu, how it’s presented, or how people have a total complete dining experience from beginning to end. They might care about getting more customers or a different type of customer.

They might care about getting the word out so that they can launch a prepackaged meal plan or something like that. Well, where do you fit into any of that? Because the only problem you’re looking for is an aesthetic problem.

So, what you keep thinking is the most important is actually not so important. And we see this happen over and over, and long after I’m gone, the debate will continue. Oh, I hate that logo.

Can you believe that that’s the logo they came up with? That logo sucks. Let me tell you how to design a better logo, you stupid monkeys.

And oh, the logo is the end on be all. It’s the ambassador for your brand. It’s the reputation.

It’s the tip of the spear. Get over it, people. Just get over it.

It’s not, it is not. Have a horrible company, an amoral company that just screws people over with child labor, sells inferior products to hurt people. What’s the best logo going to do for them?

That. And that is not okay. That’s just zero.

That is awesome. I have 100% agree with that. You can have the best logo designed in the world and not make a penny and not solve a problem.

Chris Do is phenomenal. Like he freaks me out a little bit. He’s so magical.

Like he’s so wise. And you know, just yeah, man, seriously. It’s rare that I get a little bit intimidated by folks, as you probably noticed, Jacob, but like they have definitely moments where he maybe just blew my mind.

And I was just like, oh man, you know, he’s a lovely guy, but he’s so smart and he articulates himself so well. It’s very daunting, particularly for someone like me who just blunders through things to kind of to have spoken to it. But I loved it.

And that clip, phenomenal.

Absolutely. And yeah, interviewing Chris was, yes, it was intimidating. He rattled off some really great answers.

And I was just lucky to have a whole list of questions submitted by users like our listeners and some questions that we put together, but yeah, he could answer them so succinctly and communicate the message so easily. And yeah, there’s tons of value bombs in that episode. And it really was a pleasure interviewing him.

So yeah, he went pretty deep. And I’d definitely say anyone who’s kind of creative and anyone who wants to kind of is dealing with sort of personal development and looking to grow themselves, like definitely check out that episode because he goes into some of the biggest mistakes that he’s made and he’s quite sort of vulnerable, isn’t he? And open about some of that.

So, you know, for sure, like that’s definitely one that I would recommend. And one of the perhaps the biggest one of last year in terms of kind of personality that we interviewed and in terms of the content, like it was really deep. So yeah, so check that one out.

Well, I think we could actually add in that clip about his teaching because I think that you touched on the self-development side of things. We can add in the clip about him teaching and where he came from. So he wasn’t always this master YouTube star as of recent.

He did come from a teaching background as many people don’t know this. So I’m just gonna share this little clip from Chris.

Prior to doing The Future, a lot of people don’t know this. I taught at private art schools for over 15 years. I taught at art center and I taught at Otis College of Design.

And I gave my life, sweat and blood to these things when I was there while running a pretty high profile motion design company back in the day. And it wasn’t until I was able to find where all these things overlap that I came into my full power in knowing like who I was and being able to express myself fully. And so that’s what The Future’s done for me.

Now, the idea of teaching isn’t new to me, but the idea of teaching to essentially a camera, a piece of glass, we call it the soulless one-eyed creature and that’s just the camera. And it gives you nothing back. It gives you no energy, gives you no response.

It’s literally or metaphorically like talking to a wall. Talking to a wall gives you nothing back. But if you’re used to and learn how to speak to a piece of glass, I guess you will do better than others.

So we had to learn those skills, learning how to speak in ways that are unscripted, right? You have to learn how to be in the moment and speak to people, not at them, have a conversation with people. And that’s really critical skill that I had to develop.

And I had to just get comfortable with being in front of camera talent versus behind camera talent, which is what I’ve done for the last 20 years.

What you said about teaching for 15 years, people don’t realize this and you’ve gone into that role and you just seem so natural on the future, even though you just came from what people believe the agency world. So to pivot to that, it’s important to consider the background. Yeah, so the point there is that we all start from somewhere.

We have to experience it and we have to suck in the beginning, really. We have to just get on and do with it, go with the flow. And just experiment really and get put yourself out there.

That’s really how you learn and grow. So I love that Chris opened up about that.

Yeah, me too. It was brilliant. And I think that point you’ve made is excellent.

You can’t just feel that you’re educated and that’s that done, right? This is not the world we live in. We’ve got to continually grow, expand our minds to new possibilities, to new thinking.

And that’s why I do this podcast. It forces me to interact with some of these brilliant people. And you, of course, Jacob.

You’re brilliant in your own way. But it does. And genuinely, I don’t know, how helpful have you found interviewing some of our guests?

Have you found it helpful like that?

Actually, in Tom Ross and Mike Janda’s, we talked about personal branding and I do open up about being pretty nervous when it comes to podcasts and video. And I just never really liked being on camera. And I kid that my wife always laughs at me because I’m now doing coaching.

I’m doing podcasting. I’m on video and whatnot this year. So it’s kind of, I just put myself out there.

And yes, I’m gonna cringe when I, well, I do cringe when I look at these things and I try not to, but I’m out there putting myself out there and yeah, growing with the process.

No, but I massively admire that about you, mate. Like seriously, like I think, yeah, for me, I find it pretty, you know, pretty natural, but for you and for you to have opened up about that, I think that’s inspirational, you know, because we need stories like that. You know, we need to push ourselves.

And so I think it’s brilliant. And that episode with Mike Jandan, Tom Ross was brilliant. And you really, you know, there was some real kind of part string moments there from you.

I love that. I hoped you would start crying, but you didn’t. So I was a bit disappointed in myself, but you know, yeah, close.

Well, you know, just going back to Chris Do for a second, you know, we got some great wisdom from him. And I think one of the things that I loved about the work he’d done in the future was how he brought people into the fold, if you like. He does live, he did live coaching.

He does a lot of really exciting kind of in the moment stuff. And one of the episodes I remember watching some years ago was this episode with this really timid lady called Melinda Livsey, who’s now gone on to be absolutely phenomenal. But Chris was kind of coaching her, challenging her, developing her thinking.

And she’s now turned into a massive superstar. And so we were really privileged, weren’t we, to sit down with Melinda and really talk to her about her journey and to get her to give us some tips. So why don’t we hear some clips from that episode, because I think that would be really interesting to hear.

Can you let us know how you actually onboard a client and how you go through these sessions?

Yeah. Yeah. And I know that we, Jacob, I think we talked a little bit about how to sell strategy and onboarding them even in the sales meeting of positioning yourself as more of the consultant and helping them get to some kind of clarity even in the sales meeting.

It’s not about pitching at all. It’s about helping them get clarity in what they’re trying to do on that desired future and seeing if you’re a good fit for them, if you’re a good personality fit, if the project is high risk, high value, and really something that you can sink your teeth into, that it’s a big problem to solve. So the first part is positioning yourself in the sales meeting, if not beforehand in your marketing.

And then that and then going into the process, it’s an in-person or Zoom like this. It’s an in-person workshop versus what I used to do previously, which was just send them a questionnaire. Just ask them, what’s your target?

Who’s your target audience? What brands do you feel you resonate with? Describe your company in three to five adjectives.

That’s what I used to send. And then now it’s a very intensive two-day workshop where we meet every week after that for about three to four weeks to check in with brand strategy document and get closer to the clarity that we needed. So it’s a huge difference.

Yeah, the tip there is to position yourself as the expert and not the order taker. It’s just positioning is such a huge part of becoming a consultant and to really be respected and to be able to, I guess, charge more because you can solve bigger problems. And this message really resonated with Melinda because I also came from that background of sending a questionnaire and just being an order taker.

I send a questionnaire and then go and execute. I didn’t really listen. I didn’t really dig deeper.

And as we’ve just explored in the first snippets of this show or the best of, asking the questions why, why, why and digging deeper is so crucial to understanding better and to really create a better, stronger brand. And it’s such a powerful point. So did you have any thoughts on that, Matt?

Yeah, I just think maybe Melinda is super smart and she made some brilliant points in that whole, in that whole episode. In fact, it’d be great to hear a couple more in a second, but this idea of positioning is ironic because we often, you know, talk to clients about how they position themselves in the market. And rarely do we turn the spotlight back on ourselves and say, okay, well, how am I positioning myself?

You know, so I’m probably similar to you, Jacob. I hear from a lot of designers and they want to get into strategy and they say, well, you know, no one’s really interested in strategy. You know, I’m just being asked to fulfill briefs, right?

And you say, well, let me look at your website. And the first thing you look at on the website is, you know, I’ll design you a logo or whatever is it’s screaming, I’ll execute on a brief. So it’s like, well, of course you’re going to get briefs tracked at you because you’re positioning yourself as someone who will only execute on a brief.

Where’s the stuff around a discovery call? Where’s the stuff around strategy? Where is that?

It’s not there. So of course you’re not going to get that work. And of course it’s going to pass you by.

So Melinda’s points around positioning and then, you know, being smart around the questions that you ask on the outset is an absolutely bang on. So I, you know, I love Melinda. I think she was really smart in that episode, really great tips.

Yeah. That’s kind of leads into the next snippet, which is about brand strategy tools. So to get this information out of your clients, you need to have these tools.

You need to have a backpack on. Let’s go into this and see what I mean by that.

We learn more and more about brand strategy. It’s like we’re filling our bag with a bunch of tools and we learn possibly design sprint. We might learn like the, what is it?

The lightning decision jam from Jonathan Courtney, that there’s all these different ways of doing design thinking. And the more that we can put in our bag and know like, oh, something Marty Neumeier said in a workshop, I can use that. Something I read in this one book, I can use that.

So the more and more we learn about it, we just keep putting it in our bag of tricks so that we can just be present with the client, ask them what their problem is, where are they trying to go? And then sift through our bag of tools and pull out what it is that we need. I don’t think there’s one, like you said, Jacob perfectly, there’s not one right way to do it that we can start forming.

We can just take out all the tools in our bag and say, okay, what can I use to help the client get to where they’re going? And that’s really fun.

I’ve never forgot that metaphor, the tools in your backpack and it is go get them out when you’re ready. And that’s really how you can have some fun with these workshops and actually figuring out what the problem is that they’re trying to solve. And the point is that we’re not just solving design problems, we’re solving bigger business problems.

And that’s really what brand strategy is all about. It’s the integration of business thinking, marketing, design, and branding. So it’s such a good, great metaphor.

Yeah.

And constantly finding new tools and putting them in your backpack is definitely what we should be about. I love looking at design thinking. I find some of the workshops AJ and Smart do, workshopping, there’s some really interesting things that you can borrow from completely different areas of business, of kind of thinking, product design is another wealth of area that you can kind of develop your tools and your thinking in and just apply it to them situations.

So for me, that’s kind of my mission really to widen my mind as much as possible to these things so that when a particular problem’s up, and Linda said, you can rummage around in your metaphorical backpack and you’ve got a tool to help that client get through it. And that is something that I think we’re in a brilliant place to do as people operate in this space. So yeah, awesome.

So that kind of leads into the next snippet, which is about brand strategy deliverable. So what does the document actually look like? Or what’s the end result of brand strategy?

So this is Melinda’s take on it.

Can you talk us a little bit through like, what is a brand strategy document for the sake of our users, first of all? And secondly, do you deliver anything after that? Or do you kind of step off and how do you play it?

Yeah, so I used to include brand identity, like we had talked about. So that was a little bit longer process. But if we’re just talking about the strategy, I call it a roadmap.

The people have different terms for it. Some people just do a one sheet, just a one paper with the positioning, target audience and a couple other things. But I have a, it’s usually a PDF document.

It includes the goal of, why did they even come to me in the first place? Like what were they dealing with? What was the problem?

What’s the vision? What’s that beautiful future that they’re thinking of that they want to get to? Like where are we headed?

So I outline that. Other things are positioning. So what’s the company’s positioning in the marketplace?

How will they be perceived in the minds of their market? What makes them different? That’s the positioning.

The other thing is, so everything about the brand, what makes them unique. I also include brand attributes. There’s an ideal client or customer persona.

So it’s the most ideal customer, and it’s more to do with mindset than anything. If your brand, I kind of talk about it like this, if your brand had a best friend that was the evangelist that would talk about your brand to everyone, that would share it on all their platforms, that is just your ideal person, that if you had every single customer be that person, you would be happy. Who is that?

And we make a persona out of that. So we pick photos that represent their day, that represent their life. So we know that when we see those people out on the streets, we’re like, oh, that’s Susie.

But we usually give them a name, and so we can identify them. And I’ve had clients even tell me, they say, oh man, I went to this conference and there were Justins everywhere. Justin the Connector, that’s what we called him.

He’s like, I met so many Justin the Connectors. So he was able to have this focus or what he was looking for. It’s kind of like, go look for a red car.

And now every single, or you buy a red car, now every single car you see out there is a red car. So your mind is now looking for that, and that’s what we do with the persona. So we describe that person in photos, in a list of hobbies, and people they’re following, what they’re reading, what they’re into, what their problems are, what their goals are, and how is the company or brand helping them either solve a problem or get to their desired outcome, the ideal client’s desired outcome.

So that’s something we do. We also do, sometimes we’ll do a customer journey. So what’s the relationship look like between the customer and the brand?

All the different touch points. And we’ll do a broad overview of that. And then the last part is the action plan.

So within the next three months, what needs to be done to connect the brand with the ideal customer? So really it’s three main parts. If you just wanted a simplified version, it’s the brand, it’s the ideal customer, and it’s the action plan.

And those are the three main sections, I would say, that go into the roadmap.

So just go back to that point, right? I made at the start when I first came across Melinda, like she is not timid anymore. Man, she knows what she’s doing.

She’s a super smart cookie. And that was just an example of one of the great tips that she gave around what she puts into her brand strategy documents. And I think that was really helpful for a lot of our listeners to hear because it’s great theorizing around this stuff, but she really went into the depth of how she delivers on some of the things that we’ve been discussing around the questions you ask, the workshops you might run.

She really kind of helped frame that for a lot of people.

Yeah, that was one of my favorite episodes. And you can start to see that there’s so much more to building a brand than a logo or a color scheme, that there’s so much internal thinking that goes on and not just in design, but brand thinking and marketing thinking, design thinking and all of that put together. It really does create a strong brand.

So I wanted to jump into Michael Johnson. This is another great guest.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love Michael Johnson.

Yeah, yeah. So here’s some little snippets about position yourself as a strategist. And we touched on this a little bit earlier, but to hear from Michael, let’s dive in.

As designers, you can waste a massive amount of time producing these amazing solutions to the wrong problem. Yeah. And I think I spent most of my 20s doing that, actually.

Now I look back at it. I get massively frustrated. I’d walk out of meetings.

I was like the enfant terrible of whatever design company I worked for, because I would just get really, really annoyed at why people couldn’t see what was in front of their eyes. Now, the truth was that really, I probably hadn’t spent enough time trying to work out, well, what would be right for this market or this client? I hadn’t really sussed out the strategic background to a project.

So maybe I was designing a good solution, I don’t know, really, but there were solutions to the wrong problem. And so what we find now is that people come to us with a fairly open book. They usually say, look, we think there’s something wrong here, we want to do this, we think we want to go this way, but they very rarely come to us with a written design brief.

That’s super rare for Johnson Banks. Normally, people sit in our boardroom or on a Zoom call, and they say, we want to go in this direction, we think. We think there’s a problem here, but what do you think?

And so we tend to start the process much earlier. And that’s why we started writing down this idea, well, let’s investigate the problem, but then let’s think about the strategic and the narrative implications of that before we go anywhere near the design stage.

Absolutely spot on. And really, it’s just, when you hear some of our guests talk about it, it’s kind of obvious, but then it’s really hard if you’re not in that place or you’re not stepping back, looking at your positioning. It’s really hard to kind of do that.

So I hope some of that adds huge value to some of our listeners.

And it just repeats what Linda was saying as well, and Chris, in terms of how you position yourself as the consultant, the expert. So there’s another snippet that I’d love to pull out from Michael, which is about the blue duck. It was a little story that’s from one of his, from his book.

So let’s-

Yeah, I love stories like this.

Let’s do that.

There’s a lovely story in the book, which I was told years ago, which is called the blue duck. Have you heard about the blue duck?

No, tell us about the blue duck.

The blue duck. I learned this a long time ago. And apparently back in the days of Marker Visuals pre-computer, there was an advertising agency in London who, and they would do these kind of, quite carefully worked out Marker Visuals, which you’ve probably, you guys are probably so young, you’ve never seen them, but this is the way that we presented them.

You would have an idea and you would do this slightly drawing, but then you’d try and explain to a client what you really meant. With a bit of luck, they would get it. Yeah.

Especially if you’re doing an advert, because you would have to shoot it or film it. So quite a lot of, quite a jump, really, for a client to take, really, to kind of see what you meant by these things which sort of look like cartoons, really. It’s quite weird.

Scamps.

Scamps, yeah. Yeah, but it takes a bit of a leap of faith, really. Anyway, there was this famous London ad agency whose name maybe will remain nameless, but apparently what they used to do is they used to put a little drawing of a blue duck into each of the layouts.

And what they learned was that the client would go, well, this is really interesting. I really love this idea. There’s just one thing.

And the agency would go, well, what’s that? And they said, well, can we lose the blue duck? And the agency would go, oh.

And sort of make a bit of a faff about this, but really inside they’re thinking, yeah, that’s absolutely fine. Because the duck had been put in there as a psychological device, so the client had something to fix. And then the client would go, oh, you know, I really put them straight because they were really on the wrong track.

I mean, the idea was quite good, but the blue duck, that was a waste of time. But I told them, I told them, you know. Anyway, I always loved this story.

And I was told it when I was like, you know, 12 or something. No, I was in my 20s. And I thought it was a great story.

Great story, wasn’t it, that one, Jacob? Like, I love those anecdotal stories. And have you ever used a blue duck technique?

I’ve never, you know, done anything quite as radical as that.

It’d probably be pink to tie it with our brand colours.

Yeah, exactly. You’d be like, Jacob, can we remove the pink flamingo from all of the lines? But I love it.

No, no, get it out. Yeah, no, I thought I was really smart. And, you know, the thing about Michael Johnson, you know, his book, I’ve got it up on my shelf, Branding in Five and a Half Steps, is brilliant.

That’s got tons of great questions in it. That’s got tons of really amazing tips. And as he was going through, you know, he shared a wealth of knowledge, not just in terms of brand strategy, but then how he takes that thinking and, you know, help it, you know, basically creates phenomenal concepts that then he uses to help his clients communicate.

And, you know, that was one of the anecdotal stories that came out of his discussion with us around that. And he was just a wealth of knowledge. So definitely check out Michael Johnson and his episode with us, because that was great fun.

It was, it was. And the branding in a five and a half step. So what is the half step?

I think you’ll just have to read the book, but it’s something about a gap between what to say with it. But yeah, let’s jump into Rob Meyerson. This was a great episode that was on naming and brand positioning.

Yeah, it’s frustrating how many definitions of brand you can find, isn’t it? The way I think of it is, I guess I have a pretty broad definition that tries to capture a lot of the different, I think, intended meanings of brand. So I like to say it’s the ideas that sit behind the identity of and the experience created by a organization, whether that’s a company or it could be a product, whatever it is that you’re creating the brand for.

But I like to break it up that way, ideas, identity and experience. I feel like, you know, as much as I’d like to make it more succinct than that, that really captures the full gamut of everything that I think of when I think of brand.

Fantastic. And in terms of brand positioning, how does that sort of fit into ideas, identity and experiences?

Yeah, it’s actually interesting the way you’ve asked it, sort of comparing it to that definition of brand. It really, I think a lot of it connects to the idea part of the definition of brand. And it’s a little bit easier to define positioning.

There’s a little bit less diversity in definition. It’s really about owning a conceptual territory in the marketplace or in the mind of your customers, vis-a-vis competition. So that’s a really important part of it.

You can’t position a brand in a vacuum. You have to understand what else is out there, whether that’s direct competitors, or if you are the first to market in a new industry, you still need to think about positioning against whatever people have done before. So that’s how I think of positioning.

And it really, you could think of it as impacting, definitely, identity, even down to visual identity, and certainly the experience created by a brand as well. But it’s really at that idea stage where you’re still talking about strategy.

You can’t position a brand in a vacuum. I love that. And also owning a conceptual territory in the mind of your customers.

It makes me think of beer, for example, like Corona for some. I don’t know why, but it just made me think of beer because when it comes to owning a territory in your mind, beer comes to mind for some reason. I don’t know why.

But Corona, I’ll get to my point. Corona, so what do you think of when you think of Corona? For me, it’s a beach, right?

Like they’re owning that territory in my mind. Budweiser, for example, I think of football. So a lot of different brands, they can start to own a gap in your mind or a spot in your mind by using branding and connecting or owning a place.

And in the case of Corona, it’s like a physical place, right? It’s like a beach, they’re owning that place and that experience and that emotion. You get to a beach and you want a Corona, right?

With the lime in it, probably. So that was my point in why I think of beer, when you’re trying to own a conceptual territory. What is your thoughts on how he defines position or how Rob defines positioning?

Well, I love it. And by the way, just a small point, I also think Rob had one of the best voices on our show. It’s so deep and manly.

I wish I had a voice like Rob’s, he’s genius. But anyway, just going on to what he said and what you’ve just said, not to design a brand in a vacuum, what a great way of putting it. And you’ve mentioned Corona there, right?

So here’s the thing, obviously the context of that word in 2020 has completely changed how it was in 2019, where we had not even heard of a virus that had a name close to what we’re talking about. So for me, context is everything, right? Now, you probably wouldn’t go near that word, even though it is a location, even though you can have a great experience on the beach in Corona.

You just wouldn’t go near it because of the connotations. Whereas, prior to this point, you would. So that is a great example, even on its own, of context and owning space in somebody’s mind and being thoughtful and mindful and considerate about your target audience before you choose a name like that, you know, post 2020.

So, yeah, I agree. Yeah, for sure. But to be honest, I actually heard, and I don’t know if this is true or if I’m just making this up, I think I’m making it up, I actually heard that their sales actually went up for Corona beer.

I think people buying it ironically, and obviously, as a brand, I don’t think they engaged on any level in regards to that, which was quite noble of them and right of them too. So yeah, I mean, that would have been an absolute unique challenge to manage that brand through 2020. So hats off to the folks down there and to the brand managers at Corona for not engaging or in any kind of way on the current issue.

But yeah, tricky, really tricky. What else did we hear?

Yep, the next snippet is also from Rob. We’re going to jump into differentiation, which is a huge part of branding and positioning. So let’s see what Rob has to say about that.

Well, every project that I’ve ever worked on has to start with discovery or immersion, fact-finding. And so that’s usually your phase one of a multi-phase project. And the easiest way, it may be an oversimplification, but the easiest way to break down the way that we would approach discovery usually, I think, of the three Cs.

So that’s company or client, competition, and customer or consumer. So we do research on the company itself. If it is building a brand for a company, that might be internal interviews.

It might be reading through materials that they’ve created. If it’s a small business, you might just read their business plan. Or you might talk to the founder about what her or his vision is or was for the business.

If it’s a bigger company that’s been around for a while, then you might have a whole bunch of brand guidelines from 20 years ago that you can reference and really start to get a feel for where the brand has been and where it is now. Then looking at customers or consumers, you want to understand what’s relevant to them. Who is it that is a buyer or a potential buyer?

So that could be quantitative research. If you’re doing sort of a large scale project, you might have surveys, you might have third party data that you can rely on for smaller projects or for more sort of niche brands. You might just get a handful of customers in a room and do a little focus group or something like that.

And then for competition, you need to, again, get an understanding of how the competitors are positioning themselves, either intentionally or unintentionally. It could be that you look at a competition and realize that they’ve really intentionally positioned themselves in certain parts of the market by the language that they use, the design. When you look at the competition, you’ll notice that they maybe have positioned themselves based on the language that they use.

So we might call that verbal identity or based on their visual identity or even just based on the ideas that they seem to have built their brands around. A lot of times you’ll look at industries and see that everybody’s basically saying the same thing. The kind of overused phrase for that is a sea of sameness.

Everybody looks the same, sounds the same, especially in a B2B space. A lot of times you’ll see things like that. But you need to get an understanding of what they’re saying and how they’re perceived.

And then based on those three Cs, so I often draw that as a Venn diagram with an overlap between those three circles, you want to find something that is true to the brand. So you do that by doing that internal discovery that’s relevant to customers. So you hopefully achieve that by doing some research with customers and that is differentiating, which is typically referred to as one of the most important aspects of building a strong brand, is that it’s unique or distinctive.

And so that’s impossible unless you have a really solid understanding of how the competition is positioned.

That was an amazing insight there from Rob, wasn’t it? I just love the way he simplified that whole construct. Phenomenal.

Yeah, company, competition and consumer and finding something that’s true, relevant and different. And by doing that, you have to really understand the competition and you have to understand your consumer as well. And that’s really how you’re going to find the gap in the market.

So let’s jump into Stephen Houraghan, who was another of our favorites.

Yeah, we love Stephen.

We talked about brand personality and archetypes in this episode. And archetypes, it was something that he is very passionate about. So I really loved learning from him.

And he has a great article online about brand archetypes. So if you’re new to it, definitely hop on online to find, learn more about brand archetypes. It’s so fascinating once you actually understand what they’re for and how to use them as a tool in your backpack.

And let’s jump into how he defines brand personality.

I like to really step back and think of the brand as a person. Like I really have this philosophy of the human brand. And I speak about that quite a bit.

And the idea there is, look, we all connect with people in a certain way. We all gravitate towards certain characteristics, certain sense of humor, but we all gravitate towards human characteristics. And we’re seeing this play out in the branding spectrum.

We’ve seen that transition over the last 20 years or so. And we’ve seen more and more brands become more human. So first and foremost, that’s where the position that I like to think of a brand from.

So from the internal brand, to me, that’s kind of the soul of the brand, the values and the mission and the vision and the purpose. These are all things that we all have as individuals, but we don’t necessarily talk to other people about them. There’s a lot of businesses and a lot of brands that come across vision, mission, values and see them as something that you need to put up on your website.

But if you think about yourself as a person, these aren’t things that you go out and just open up to people about. You don’t sit down at a barbecue and meet somebody that you’ve never spoken to before and all of a sudden start unloading your purpose and your values onto this person. And that’s how I look at the internal brand and that’s how I look at branding as a whole.

If you look at your brand as a person, then you can see how all of these pieces of the puzzle fit in. So once you have your internal brand and that’s how you think, how you feel, and the things that as a person you would internalize to yourself, that’s your core, that’s what you’ve got as your foundation. And then you need to start to understand who your audience is, the competitors in the marketplace and that market landscape, so you can define how you’re going to be different.

But the key to really pulling out the personality for your brand is in understanding who that audience is, because that’s the person that you’re trying to connect with at the end of the day. Like when you take a step back and ask what your brand is or distill what your brand is, it’s an entity that is trying to connect with a certain audience. And unless you know that audience intimately well, then you’re not going to know how to connect with them, how to resonate with them, how to speak with them, what kind of challenges they’re going through, what emotions they’re going through.

So we’re back to internal and external, you know, the concept that you mentioned earlier, and I love the way you framed that. You know, you’re not in a barbecue kind of unpacking all of your kind of your deep why purpose mission vision, you know, it was great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that would be that would be really peculiar. Although I think I have actually met a few people. We don’t have barbecues in the UK, but, you know, at social events who do sometimes unpack everything and just like, well, these are my core values.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. No, but he framed that really well.

And thinking of brands as a person, you know, is such a powerful concept for clients and particularly one thing I found is to align lots of minds around, you know, if Melinda actually mentioned earlier in the clip, you know, particularly when you, you know, almost when you think of your target audience as being the best friend of your brand. What we’re doing here is we’re personifying these ideas into people. So that’s really easy for us to connect with.

But archetypes is really powerful. And I know Stephen talks, you know, and explains it really well in the next clip that we’re going to listen to.

Archetypes for those who don’t know them, it’s a personality framework of 12 personalities. And this framework goes back, it goes back a decade. It actually goes back to Greek mythology originally with that, with Plato.

But in the early 1900s, there was a psychiatrist called Carl Jung, and he created this personality framework. And essentially, there are 12 personalities, and these personalities make up pretty much everybody. You will fall into one of these personalities more than the rest.

So it’s a set of behaviors that we all instinctively know. And if you’re able to identify your audience and what their desires are, then you can, using this archetype framework, you can map them to an archetype that will be most suitable to that audience, that will appeal to that audience most. So that’s where I start.

I start with the archetypes by first understanding the audience and then mapping an archetype that will be best suited to speak to that audience. But again, this is still just a starting point because the archetype framework is just a framework. It’s just a guidepost for you to understand the kind of general direction that your personality should go.

But it’s not a fully formed personality because, you know, look, at the end of the day, if you think of a personality framework and you think of 12 personalities, well, you think to yourself, well, you know, I’m an individual. Like one of those personalities, they might be closer to me, but, you know, I’m myself, I’m my own person, and I would differ to, you know, even the one that I’m closest to because I’m an individual. And it’s the same when it comes to brands.

Yes, you define which archetype would be best suited to appeal to that audience, but you develop that out then, you know, you give it opinions, you, you know, you give it an outlook of life, you give it a tone of voice and a way that it’s going to speak to that audience to really appeal to who that audience is. So I know there was quite a lot of detail in that, but just to distill it, you define who the audience is, you understand their personality, you use an archetype framework as a basis to find a direction for your personality, and then you develop that personality out with fine details, so it feels like a real person.

Yeah, that was fantastic hearing from Stephen there. And I used to archetypes all the time in my work, and they’re really powerful. So if you haven’t yet come across them, definitely check out Stephen’s episode with us, because we go into archetypes in a big way and we discuss it to some depth.

And as you say, Jacob, it’s a massive tool for your backpack. Definitely get that one in there.

Definitely, definitely. It’s one of my favorites. And when I first learned about it, I was like, my head was blown away.

It’s such a powerful tool, really it is. And I do emphasize to Google it again, because he has got a great article on archetypes. And I think you do as well, Matt, you have a few articles on archetypes.

I do. And I think why they’re super powerful is because they help you categorize, well, they can actually help you categorize brands. So you can do like competitor analysis off the back of it.

They help you align leadership teams as to the personality and the traits that they want to begin to show up with in a marketplace. They help you differentiate, you know, in a marketplace, because if you’re in a marketplace full of, I don’t know, magician archetypes, for example, they help you position yourself as something different. So, you know, this is a huge tool.

And if you can start to use it and it becomes very powerful to the strategist. So, yeah, so that’s why I’ve been using it for some time. I read a book called The Hero and the Outlaw by Margaret Mark and Carol S.

Pearson. It’s a pretty heavy book. Psychologists kind of, they’re basically psychologists in the added industry about, you know, I’m showing my age now.

I think the book was published about 20 years ago, but the principles in there, neon archetypes, is phenomenal. So if you don’t fancy the heavy book, you know, one of my articles probably simplifies it. And I actually do go through it in my book, Story Ategee, which talks about this, you know, this principle of using archetypes to think of your brand as a person, the customer’s story, and it might show up.

So yeah, got a bit on that. But Stephen’s stuff is brilliant as well. So check it all out.

It’s all there to be discovered, folks.

Coming back to the person, it really does come down to how you connect with people, right? And the more aligned you are with the other person, the better you connect with them. So just like the people you hang out with, you connect with them on a more personal level because you like them, you have similar interests, similar backgrounds, and that’s why you connect.

And that’s what brands do. You craft this perception so you can connect better with them. So this is kind of like a nice segue into Tobias Dahlberg, who talks about brand mastery.

So we have a few clips on this. And the first one is on creating systems.

Yeah, Tobias is great because, you know, that episode with Tobias did was he took it to a next level, didn’t he, when we were talking to him. He really has gone super far into the strategic and business elements. So yeah, systems.

Let’s hear from Tobias.

Making a brand work is all about building systems. I don’t believe in fixing one thing, even doing brand strategies. You ask a plumber to come in and fix one part of your system, it’s just going to have a leakage somewhere else unless you look at it as a system, connecting everything inside the business to the customer and the ecosystem around it.

So that’s my religion.

I love thinking of brand as a system. It’s so true. And I love his metaphor with the plug-in, the holes in it, with the pipes.

It’s so true. Everything has to be aligned. Everything has to work together.

So if it’s not aligned, it’s just not going to gel. And you can start to see through the cracks and you’ll get those leaks to continue that metaphor. But yeah, what’s your thoughts on branding systems?

Yeah, for sure. It is a massive system. And when you think of business, anyway, a business is a system, right?

Customers, if you think of customers from a systems perspective, their systems, so when we went through that episode with Tobias and the way he thinks in systems, it’s really smart because what he was basically illustrating is that brand and brand strategy as a system is one thing, but it needs to connect to everything else. And so as a designer, you then actually have an opportunity to, if you so did wish, to work in some of those other areas of the business, some of those other systems, your people strategy, your innovation. And I know we’ve got some clips on that in a minute.

So what he was showing us was once you solve or begin to align around a key issue, you’ve got to then connect everything else to it. So as a strategist to do strategy properly, there’s an opportunity to then begin to learn about some of these other systems that perhaps we wouldn’t naturally do. And I think that’s where I am, but basically in my journey, I’m sort of getting more and more involved in some of these other perhaps areas where I would never normally have been segued into, left to my own devices when I, like a lot of us, we were sort of designing and executing some briefs.

But now you realize that’s where the value is. And so as time goes on, you have that opportunity, if you wish, to sort of begin to explore other areas and use your skills in other areas of business that you wouldn’t normally do. So I love that concept of thinking in systems and designing systems, which really kind of is really exciting when you actually get the privilege to do that with a client.

It’s fantastic.

Well, let’s hear what Tobias has to say about innovation and collaboration.

Get people to play with it and to get ownership. Because once people adopted this idea, they did all the work. They came up with these beautiful, fun ideas.

How do we greet each other when people show up at a meeting? Everything about the company started changing. There’s this playful, fun, vibrant culture now.

And it all started with just simplification, giving people clarity and direction, and also answering. Because there are all these people who don’t get to play the brand game, who also might feel that we’re not entitled. It’s just the marketing people, and so we’re doing the serious stuff.

We’re bringing in the business. We’re creating the products. I would say, no, include all of them and co-create it, but set clear guidelines and ask them to be part of it and say, okay, if we’re going to be a healthy food company, it means we have to hold ourselves accountable to certain ideas.

But we’re also going to use this idea to inspire innovation. And I think for me, to summarize in a way, I guess brand building is more about innovation than communication today.

Collaboration, that’s the key, isn’t it? That is the key for a lot of businesses. And that’s what they really struggle to do.

And that’s why we’re in a great position as sort of strategists to help them begin to do that.

And to understand what your core values are and your core ideas to help build your brand as well. So knowing who you are really is key. So let’s jump into his next snippet, which is talking about the only choice and hidden layers of value.

So let’s see what he has to say about that.

You know, I talked about being the only choice. And so I teach how you become the only choice. And of course, it’s a theory that is difficult to become the only choice for everyone.

But the point is you will always have your best customers. So like the theory behind that is like there’s only three ways to create revenue. You know, you can increase the number of customers, you can sell them more to those people so they buy more, or you can sell more often, make your customer life money.

And so if you think about, well, you could run around and try to shoot, you know, for everyone to use a military expression, which is totally inappropriate. Or you could be very, very focused and meaning that you search for only the right type of people and then you grow and scale from there. That’s surprising what these mass brands were doing in the beginning.

They become so relevant that people think of them as like, I wouldn’t want to substitute this brand for anything else. I love them because they, and again, I studied this, they like provide the utility, you know, the thing the products and services are supposed to do. But more than that, they provide a great experience perhaps.

And more than that, they provide the meaning and the connection, the belonging. And maybe more than that, they do, they provide a whole transformation. They change my identity.

They make me a better human being or more of what I want to become. And when you hit those different layers of value, then you’re building a strong brand. And that starts small.

So yes, you can start just being a solopreneur and use the same models.

I told you Tobias went deep, Jacob, didn’t I?

It’s insane. Yeah.

Brilliant.

Many layers.

Many layers. You know, having that dissected for us by a genius like Tobias was, I thought was super high value because, you know, it’s, you know, thinking about a project, thinking about a brand in those ways, you know, does add complexity and meaning and depth to it in ways perhaps that, that you would never normally kind of think of unless you came across someone like Tobias. One thing I was going to say was his concept of the only choice is brilliant, isn’t it?

It’s based on, and he admitted, you know, admitted he sort of shared that the, that it was based on Marty Neumeier’s onliness statement, which I often say to my clients is kind of like the pinnacle positioning statement. And if you’ve not come across it before, it’s our brand is the only brand that blank, you know, so what is, what is this brand? The only brand that does something, you know, and if you can, if you can get to that point and it’s highly relevant to the target audience and valuable to the target audience, you can become, and this is what Tobias talks about at length in our episode, the only choice for that customer.

And that’s where you want to play because then customers are willing to spend, I think it’s around 60% more for your product. And so you can really dominate the space. And that is, that’s super smart.

So how we get there is the challenge, but that should be the objective to become the only choice. And I love the way he phrased that and has packaged it in his training courses. Absolutely brilliant.

If you’ve not come across Tobias from Helsinki, check him out. Because he’s really fantastic. What did you make of it all, Jacob, when we talked to Tobias?

It was so enlightening. It’s like just the knowledge and how deep he went. As you said, it was just, it was incredible.

So it also was another favorite of mine as well. And like we said at the start of this, like we’ve learned so much from our guests and just how they think about branding and how they actually execute on as well, because they’ve come from these corporate worlds often. And they’re just so different there, right?

And then how you can apply this thinking to your own consultancy work is just so beneficial to hear how it’s done. So I love that one. The experience, the meaning, the connection and the belonging, these are some really big, he just skipped over them, but these are big things, right, when it comes to branding.

And he’s just rattled them off. But if you can actually do that, you can actually distill your brand down to the only choice, it’s just so powerful.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you’re right, a lot of our guests have diverse backgrounds, some corporate, some agency, some freelance and consultant. One of the ones that I think had the strangest background or perhaps the most unusual is probably a better way of phrasing it, was our good friend Valerie Jacobs, because she came from a fashion design background, and she had some nominal things to say about trends.

So let’s hear what Valerie had to say about trends from our episode earlier in the year.

I discovered trend forecasting, which has always been a part of a fashion designer’s process. No fashion designer would ever make a runway collection without looking at trends. And I really started thinking about not just aesthetic trends, but zeitgeist, like social and cultural movements, and how fashion designers were really great at also capturing the spirit of the time that they were in.

And so I really kept exploring on that and realized that you could capture trends in other categories. It wasn’t just for designing concept cars in the auto industry or runway shows, that there were beauty trends, there were food trends, there were beverage trends. So there were trends in categories.

There were really big social and cultural trends, like health and wellness or sustainability. And so that led me to start my own trend agency. And I had a lot of really great clients right away.

I was quite lucky. And then I ended up situating my trend agency within LPK. And that was amazing because what that enabled us to do was basically turn in the very beginning of every project, like the phase zero zero was a trend exploration.

So what trends are appropriate for the business, the culture of the consumer. And we started applying that to all of the brands that we were working on. And I think it not only gave LPK a competitive advantage against other agencies, but we believe it delivers a competitive advantage to our clients because they’re thinking about things in the future when they’re designing.

And like I said, we work with lots of big companies and sometimes we’re working on things that aren’t going to launch for 10 years, five years. And you just can’t be designing for 2020 if you’ve got a technology that’s going to be fueling products in 2025.

I think Jacob, that was a great example of what we’ve been talking about about going out into perhaps unknown or untypical areas and borrowing tools for the backpack and then applying them to brand strategy. So that’s, you know, and obviously we’re talking to someone who’s basically set up a whole arm of LPK, which is a huge global agency. And how, you know, we were privileged, weren’t we, to discover how she approaches this idea of trends and how that really was influenced from her fashion background.

I thought that episode was great with Valerie, you know, thinking about trends, thinking about a marketplace, thinking about the future, you know, and how she sort of went through with us, how, you know, she brings that to her work. Brilliant, amazing, mind-boggling stuff. What did you think about it?

Yeah, I completely agree. And we have another snippet to share that she goes into more detail and she talks about future fluency and using data from the future and how you can actually turn data into insight. So this is really what is so crucial about, I guess, the future of branding is actually seen into the future by looking at trends.

So let’s hear what she has to say about that.

A lot of people in the branding world really already understand that they should be using insights. And they, you know, I kind of like to think of these things in layers. So the first thing is we all can get qual or quant data, but that’s just an input.

The same thing has happened with trends. They’re commodities. If you will Google trends, you will find tons of free reports.

So it’s actually not that fancy that we have trend forecasters in LPK because you can get it for free. And if you have a really well curated Twitter feed or a great Instagram feed, you’re basically surfing trendiness all the time. So you have to turn all of this into something.

So I think we’re all getting pretty good at turning data into insights. And then what we need to do, the special thing is turn trends into foresight. So when you can put together insight and foresight, then you actually have some competitive intelligence.

You’ve got usable, you’ve made them actionable. And I think the magic comes because you’re bringing the two things together, your insight and your foresight. When you do that with enough repetition, you develop what I’m calling future fluency.

And I think right now, especially even coming into 2020, we were at the edge of global anxiety epidemic anyway. And no one wanted to think about the future. And even science fiction writers weren’t really writing about the future.

You know, in the 20th century, science fiction writers were writing about the 20th century all the time or the 21st century all the time. But now we’re not writing in that same way. And I think William Gibson said it the best.

He’s a famous science fiction writer. He said, we’re future fatigued. And I don’t blame people for being future fatigued.

It kind of feels like it’s hard to get through the day. So imagine a trend forecaster, a futurist, you know, me going, oh wait, the whole world is filled with people who are future fatigued, and I’m trying to get them to think about the future. But I think when you can immerse yourself in change and understand the complexities of the world, there’s actually statistics that have shown that it makes you more optimistic, and when you think about the future, you can more clearly see yourself in it.

So I think we have to develop a capability inside ourselves called future fluency. And I think that when you asked me earlier on, we were in a previous discussion, you’re like, what is future forward design intelligence? I’m like, this is being future fluent.

It’s immersing yourself in change, in complex dynamics that are operating in the world, and when you act on that intelligence with repetition and success, you basically are developing your anticipation muscle. And I believe that this is future fluency, and it’s a capability that we can develop inside ourselves.

Valerie, where would we go to develop that? Is there training programs or is it just at this moment in time, is there something that we have to use our initiative and gut to go and do?

I guess there are places where you can study strategic foresight, there are master’s programs. There are, you know, often there will be someone taking trends in design schools. But I guess what I’m talking about is honing your own ability to be a surfing culture and putting that as an input.

And if you are good at translating data from people and, you know, qual or quant, and you can turn that into insight, start practicing, what is the, what’s the futuristic insight that I’m getting from a trend, if you want to think about it that way. So that would be foresight. And I just call trends data from the future.

So if we kind of quit trying to make it all special, I would just say keep using those same muscles that you use in one part of your business and put them over here. And, you know, I’ll have to think more about that because I’ve only been really noodling on future fluency for the past year or so. And because I was like, this is, you know, trends are all out there.

The problem is not with having trend information. It’s with knowing what to do with it and using it to bring more value to people. And when I say people, I mean your clients, your colleagues, your brand.

Future fluency, Jacob. That’s a word and a half, isn’t it?

Absolutely is. And I think what she’s tapping into there is that what we do as strategists is actually turn data into insights. And that’s really key and paramount to what we do to listen to our customers or our clients and to figure out the real purpose behind what these brands are trying to do and turn into insight.

And to craft into like a really strong brand. And that’s really key. So I loved her thinking on future fluency and actually using data to create foresight.

Yeah. And I think, you know, we had a number of phenomenal guests throughout the year, you know, that brought us great ideas, great concepts like that. Obviously, we’ve only been able to touch on a few, you know, and in terms of helping a business or an organization brand themselves.

I think it would be great if we finished up, though, with some clips from that episode that you referenced earlier on, by bringing it a bit more down to us personally, right, to personal branding, because we had a phenomenal session, didn’t we, with Tom Ross and Mike Janda about personal branding. How about we finish off with some stuff like that, do you reckon?

Yeah, I think that’s a good way to close this out because, yeah, we all have a personal brand. And as you’ll hear, you have a personal brand even if you don’t know it. So let’s hear Mike Janda and Tom Ross’ snippet on that.

That everybody has a personal brand, whether they know it or not. Unlike a business, you know, a business, a lot of these startup businesses, they have to define it from ground zero because there is no history. There is no, there’s no story of how it grew from infancy to what it is today.

Unless you’re doing a rebrand of a business, then yes, you have that. But from a personal standpoint, from the time where we are little kids, we are building a personal brand. It’s shaped by the way that we see things, the experiences that we have, the challenges and successes we have in our lives, the things we start to like and dislike in the world.

And all of that echoes into our personal brand. So being truthful, like you’re saying, is all about just embracing the uniqueness of your own life story and then not being afraid to share that with other people. And all of a sudden, boom, you’re an authentic, real, unique personal brand because there is nobody like you.

Matt and Jacob, Tom, there’s nobody like you in all the world.

And there’s no one like you, Michael.

And nobody like me.

One of a kind. This is getting very Disney very quick, guys.

Embrace who you are, embrace your uniqueness, and then that’s the start of your personal brand right there. Now, as far as sharing it, sometimes that’s the trick for people, is that they struggle to share their personal brand because of insecurities or whatever. Oh, will anybody even like it?

Will anybody like me? And the answer to that is yes, there are people in the world that will like you. So don’t be afraid to start sharing you to the world, especially when you do things like what Jacob just did, showing a little vulnerability and a little authenticity.

All of a sudden people resonate with that because he’s not pretending to be a brand that he’s not.

There is nobody else like you. And that was that episode when you really opened up. I thought it was great.

Brilliant. Mike Janda was brilliant, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he a fantastic thinker on this question?

You have a personal brand, you have a story. And that was super inspirational, that episode.

Yeah. And Tom Ross actually has some pointers on telling your story. So let’s jump into his final snippet for this best of episode, actually.

So thank you for staying with us. But let’s hear Tom Ross.

Look at notable celebrities. And the more open they are, the more they’re in a transparent box instead of an obscured box, the more the public perception of them tends to go up and increase. And a great example of this is Mark Zuckerberg versus Elon Musk.

Mark Zuckerberg has a very, there’s actual stats that show his kind of public approval rating, and it’s very low. He’s like this kind of distant robot. No one knows that much about him.

They can’t connect with him on a personal level. Elon Musk, on the other hand, he’s known as a bit of a madman, very volatile. He smoked weed with Joe Rogan.

He does all this crazy stuff and he shares quite a bit, but he’s actually got a significantly higher public perception because he opens up and because he shares. And this kind of fits into what I like to call macro branding versus micro branding. I think the macro branding is the kind of top level what you’re known for.

So in Elon’s case, that’s like SpaceX and PayPal, et cetera. In The Rock’s case, it’s traditionally wrestling and now, you know, Hollywood action movies and stuff. But then there’s micro branding moments.

So I know all kinds of stuff about The Rock, like his love of tequila and his epic cheat meals and the fact that he’s kind of a big softie and like a great dad to his kids. And he’s got this caring side and, you know, all kinds of things about his values and what he stands for, you know, dozens and dozens of these small moments. And they give greater opportunities for connection and resonance with the community and with the wider industry and so on.

And I can pick out all of my favorite people on social media. And quite often it is the micro-branding, little small personal idiosyncrasies that draw me into them because I see alignment between us.

So alignment was a key point that he ended on there. And that really is what branding is all about, having alignment. And branding is the act of managing that meaning, that alignment.

So I couldn’t think of a better snippet to end this on because that is what branding and personal branding is all about. And the more aligned our brand is to the customer, the better the connection will be and then the better and stronger the brand. It’s really that simple.

Absolutely. And it is simple. But as we said earlier on, easy to say, hard to actually execute on.

So I think we’ve had such a fantastic year at JUST Branding. I really do want to thank you as well, Jacob, for all your efforts and putting up with me over the year. Thank you to our listeners.

It’s been brilliant. You teased the audience at the start, Jacob, because you said we’ve got some super guests lined up. Any particular, you know, come to mind that you want to kind of wet people’s appetites?

Denise Lyon, guys, these are big hitters. These are great. Yeah.

Anyone else?

Sagi Haviv.

Oh, yeah.

Brilliant.

Logo designer extraordinaire. We have Armin Witt from Brand New. We have Bill Gardner from Logo Lounge.

Joseph Pine. So we have a lot in store. That’s just the start.

We’re not stopping anytime soon. So keep staying subscribed. And if you love us, we really would love a review because it helps us get more listeners, which encourages us to do even more shows.

So we really do appreciate reviews. So thank you again for tuning in to all of our episodes and listening to the best of 2020. Thank you, Matt, as well.

I just want to return that because, yeah, it really has been a pleasure. And I love the back and forth with a little bit of banter and a little bit of strategy thrown in. So it’s been really great.

What you’re saying you like insulting me, which is fine, which is fine. I can handle it. I’m big enough now.

I’m used to your crudeness. No, not at all. And I guess the final kind of thing to say to our listeners is, you know, Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Have a great 2021. It can’t get worse than 2020.

Really. Now have a great one. We’ll see you soon.

Thank you guys.