Brand and Butter

Attract Audiences with Purpose and Action

• Tara Ladd • Episode 41

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Is your brand struggling to connect with today's conscious consumers? Well, buckle up because this ep is all about purpose-driven branding. This isn't just a buzzword, by the way, it's a crucial strategy in reshaping business landscapes and resonating deeply with newer generations like Gen Z.  And, if you like the psych space, I also touch on our brains' reliance on emotion over logic when making choices, and how it places branding at the forefront of economic decisions. 

The book mentioned in the episode is 'Rework', go and check it out.

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Tara Ladd:

You're listening to Brand and B utter a straight-talking, occasionally in your face. No BS branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners here for those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and how pairing associations, consumer behavior and design thinking can impact what people see, think and feel. I'm your host, Tara Ladd, the sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable and often unapologetically blunt founder and creative director of Brandon Design Agency, Your One and Only.

Tara Ladd:

Alrighty. Welcome to today's episode of Brand and Butter. You'll have to forgive me. I have lost my voice. It is as good as it's going to get and I needed to record this one. So here we are. You'll just have to get over my raspy, my raspiness, anyway. So today's a good one because I want to speak to purpose.

Tara Ladd:

I think most people negate this as kind of a I guess a wishy-washy we were kind of term in terms of business, but it's actually really important to business intentions and trajectories and, I guess, your mission to do the right thing business-wise, and a lot of people see it as just some fluffy thing to put on the wall and write down in a notebook and just say, yep, that's what we stand for and this is what we do. But what we're seeing now more and more is the rise of value-driven purchasing and human behavior. Essentially, what is brand purpose? It's like brand purpose is why you're in business. It's the driver that gets you out of bed. It is the underlying reason to making decisions, who you work with, who you align with and, more importantly, why you started a business. And so, a lot of the times, this can go out the window because people feel that they want to start a business because of other reasons, which is totally fine. However, when they hit the shit of business ownership, there are some issues that they need to come up with, and most of the time, well, not issues that they need to come up with, issues that they need to solve. And if you're not in love with what it is that you're doing, you'll find that it's really hard to kind of bounce back. So my definition of brand purpose is like well, it is the way you get up out of what's driving you to make choice, like what's that gut feeling to why you exist? It's that real. You would know who you would want to work with, who you wouldn't want to work with, how you want to be seen, how you don't want to be seen.

Tara Ladd:

All of these things shape the direction of a brand identity, and a brand identity being more than just a visual identity. It is literally your existence of a brand, and so it's important because it generates loyalty, it generates values in other people that want to align with you because of what you stand for, and there are so many brands that are doing this really well at the moment, and more and more brands are going to need to be investing in this space because it is well. It affects not just how you present externally, but especially internally. We hear of a lot of businesses that I think a lot of business owners, or especially in corporate, feel that the employee should feel entitled to have a job, and I actually wrote a comment on one of the features they had, I think on the financial review a couple of months back about this business owner saying that employees should be thankful that they get to work, and I was just like that is so not the right attitude From my perspective. I believe that the brand culture is shaped by its leader, and if your leader cannot lead with intention, then that's going to ricochet through every single touch point of the brand, and your passion and your purpose as to why the brand exists generally starts with the founder, and it's so important that that intention is laid out for everyone to see, because if it's not, people just will make an assumption. So it's important that we dictate our own narratives and we discuss our own directions of what we want our businesses to do Internally. You want people to be able to and not everyone will do this, but you want people to be able to align to a direction or a purpose or a reason for being there.

Tara Ladd:

We're watching the younger gen, gen Z especially move up into the space of wanting to work for companies that do the right thing or someone that they feel proud to work for, and what we're seeing is like the older generation pushing back going. You should be lucky to have a job or you should be working harder, and it's just. There's such a disconnect with communication. But we see this through every single adaptation of a generation is that we evolve and what we believe in and it's so we should, we should be changing. The older generations actually need to also question their own thinking, which I love to do on the daily in. Why do they think that way? Mainly because we've taught them to, but millennials moved into the space of, you know, working hard but also realizing that there is some kind of flexibility in the workplace and trying to bring that culture. Gen X also part of that as well, but we also see Gen Z now firmly believing in the right culture.

Tara Ladd:

Well, rephrase that they firmly believe that they should be working for a culture with intention, and they will call companies out, they will take them down, and what I love about this is how driven and how, I guess, vocal they are about just not standing for shit, and a lot of people say, oh no, they shouldn't do that. But I beg to question whether it's because we've just been shaped, the older generation being shaped to fit to the conformities of what we believe is right. And so I think that these brands that are actually shaking up the game, which I am so here for who gives a crap? You know? Thank you, patagonia, tom's, all of these big brands that are actually have some kind of social activism. I should mention Tom and Jerry's. They were probably one of the OGs in this space, but they're fueling their brand with intention and purpose.

Tara Ladd:

And that's not to say that you have to go and align to some form of activism, but it is generally what a lot of people align to in terms of beliefs and values. So that doesn't mean that you have to go, like I just said, you have to go and find something, but it does mean that you should be leading with intention as to why you love what you do and why you exist, and all of those things should be plastered everywhere, because when people are part of the united front, it's like you get that team mentality, that culture, that alignment to want to do something and achieve a goal together. And I think that that's what's missing in a lot of big corporations. Especially when you have a lot of employees, especially when you have a lot of employees, it's hard to maintain culture and you'll see that there's been success with big companies like that that break up into teams, like they break up into locations and have they, they have like micro teams in more spaces so that they can keep that internal culture. I think they said it's something like beyond 15 or 20 it's the culture starts to break a bit and naturally humans would then split into those like subcategories or you know the sub subgroups anyway within the big organization. But it's really important to kind of note that the brand will extend from the inside. So you need to fix inside the house.

Tara Ladd:

And there's a lot of businesses. I'm like people aren't we keep getting the wrong type of people or we can't seem to market properly, and it's like, why don't you start with you? Start with you. And this is why I think a lot of people aren't realizing that there is a lot of identity work that comes with running a business, especially if you're in that growth stage. You know, when you're moving beyond you into like multiple people within the team, it usually kind of starts to really come to fruition. You know around three or four and then it kind of blows out and then you have to really have someone in charge of managing the employees within a space, because what can happen is that they can be disconnected with what you want the brand to do versus what the team wants to do. And then, yeah, then there's a whole bunch of problems and I watched this I was.

Tara Ladd:

The reason I paused them was because I was thinking about how this happened in my old agency. It's like you kind of want it to go somewhere and and the um, you know, you as the employees are kind of like, well, that's not what I signed up to do, and there's there's a disconnect, and so it's important that you know, if you are going to change direction, that that is actually a conversation that you need to have with the people that work for you, because they are actually attached to the business. The business is a part of their identity. It's part of who they are, and it's why you see people leave companies when they do the wrong thing, or it's why you see people boycott companies when they're not doing the right thing. It's because that then becomes an extension of who they are as people and they're like no, thank you very much. So, the more that people are open, and that's why transparency is key, because people want to know what you're doing.

Tara Ladd:

If you are very honest and open with what it is that you stand for and what you do, no one can smoke you Like. You know what I mean. No one can get online and try and find some bullshit that they can then go out and go. Oh, this is what they said 10 years ago. When you hold yourself accountable, people just trust you, and it's like when we're looking beyond profit, and I think that that's now we're watching the world change and we're seeing so many people try and fight what's happening instead of going with it, and what you'll see is people that will succeed or brands that will succeed. Employees as well are the ones that kind of go with the flow. We shouldn't be so fixated on what we want the goal to be. We should just kind of keep the goal on paper but also be willing to adapt and be flexible, because sometimes there is a key thing that you could be missing and stumble upon by complete accident, and then that could be missing and stumble upon by complete accident, and then that could be what takes your business to a completely different place. But sometimes a lot of people are very hard-lined into no, this is the end goal and this is the direction that we need to take that they miss those opportunities because they're so stuck in their own bias as to this is the direction and this is the only way to be successful, and they miss these micro opportunities.

Tara Ladd:

And there was a really good book that I read. It's called Rework. Almost certain it's by the guys from IDEO. I don't want to quote that wrong, but it's called Rework and I suggest you go read it. And I read this before I started your one and only, or it was in the very early stages and they speak about having a business plan, but letting that business plan be somewhat, I guess, flexible, for you to kind of be open to seeing these things come up, because it might be that you know, you start to start a business for an intention or a service and then suddenly people want something else from you and then if you just keep going along with that you know the first reason as to why you started you could completely miss this whole pot of gold over here as to why people really want to work with you.

Tara Ladd:

I was having this discussion with Sam, my sister, today. She works with her husband or my brother-in-law and they're called CNA Mobile and they do a lot of like auto electricians, truck installations, car audios, like big you know camera systems for trucks and on the road things, and they've got this cute little I shouldn't say cute, it's not cute this little side thing that they've been adding into their projects which has, you know, caused a bit of a stir and I was just like keep an eye on that because that could be something that you know and it's actually nothing outstanding, but it is a really emotional personal touch and I said just to keep watching who's asking for that and seeing how that generates conversation, because this could be something that ricochets or expands a lot bigger than what you intended it to do. And these things are just staying open to you know, and so long as it aligns with the end goal, then so be it, just go with the flow. Okay, but we see purpose-driven brands out there all the time, and purpose-driven brands don't necessarily, like I said before, have to be something that's aligned to a social activism or political alignment. But what we're seeing now post-COVID and actually we were seeing it trickle through before that but what we were seeing, especially after the Me Too movement we're seeing huge societal changes. We're seeing big political differences and emotional differences and people are actually spending based on those intentions.

Tara Ladd:

Emotion always, always, always trumps logic Every day of the week. It does not matter what you think you're doing, there is some form of logic. Economically, if we were to make a rational I put in inverted commas rational choice, we would have to go and look at every single option of what we were. To make a rational I put in inverted commas rational choice, we would have to go and look at every single option of what we were trying to purchase and put it down on paper Like every single option, every single attribute, every single price point of every single thing in the whole wide world. It's actually impossible to be able to do that. You would spend so much time in research and probably would never, ever get to listing every single option that you had available to you.

Tara Ladd:

And so what happens is our brain collates information and we will go and have a look at what's out there, and then we get to a point where we're like that's enough, and our brain just stops searching and then it starts to choose, and that's the basic decision-making process. And what happens is all of these little micro things that you've seen in these brands, or at least part of the consideration set, which is what this group of brands or choices that you've selected become. They become part of the consideration set, and then you make your choices based off that consideration set. And so you go through these and then all of these things that are so far beyond a price point start to matter. Who you are, what you stand for, what you're about, who you're here for, how you lead, the reputation that you have, the perception that you lead by, the narrative that you tell. All of these things are hugely important, and this is why brand matters, because if you don't have these things set down and you are just a product or a service, the only thing that people can make an assumption on you is how much you are or how much you charge your cost of your product and what it is that you sell, and then you just become a commodity, and what you don't want to be is a commodity, because it is an emotionalist choice. You want to make sure that people are choosing because they believe in you, or choosing because you stand for something that they want you to stand for, or they're spending their money with you because they believe in how you lead. Whatever that may be, it's so important.

Tara Ladd:

In the next episode, we're actually going to dive more into this subject, but it is so important to make sure that you have these things set, because these are what people actually choose by. They're associations. When you think of Apple, you yourself, as a person, will have your own assumptions and associations based on those choices, and they're from experiences that you've had personally or things that you've been exposed to or things that you have heard, and you yourself, with your own brain, have shaped your own perception, and that's why it's so important for brands to continuously be speaking their truth and what they do and who they're here for, because it's these micro things that embed into the brain. So when someone is ready to make a choice, they come back up with all of these associations and that's brand. You see marketing where someone may say 50% off and they might buy it, get a quick purchase, but that's not building loyalty.

Tara Ladd:

What you want is repeat customers. You want advocacy. You want loyalty. You want people to keep coming back for more. You want people to think about your brand in 5, 10 years time and how much that made a difference in their life.

Tara Ladd:

And how do you do that? You don't want to be just another number. You want to be something different. And you do that through creating these purpose-driven intentions. And so where do you start?

Tara Ladd:

I think a lot of people are really stuck with where to start on purpose. I'll give you mine straight off the bat. My purpose was to not put shit to market that simple. I was working in an agency and I was watching the work that was going out and I was like this is just so mindless and boring and just contributing to oversaturation of the market and marketing for the sake of marketing, and I was just like how can I change this narrative? On top of that were a whole bunch of underlying reasons. Um, you know, there was a lack of diversity in the workplace. Uh, both disability and, you know, gender roles all of these things have contributed to the rise of you want, and only.

Tara Ladd:

I also am a little bit opinionated and like to do things my way, um, or not necessarily way, but a different way. And there were too many boxes that were involved in the ad space, also limitations and glass ceilings, so I did not want to be part of that narrative. I also hated. There was a really nice fine line of privilege as well People that anyone that works in the space of advertising will tell you that you need X amount of years experience to even enter the game. And so who do you think is going to be able to do free internships, which I will never do I do any inverted commas because it's the people that are able to put their kids or allow their kids to go and do those free internships, and a lot of people don't have that capability or financial support to be able to do that, and so you know the privileged kids are able to kind of do that, whereas you know, I was out Southwestern Sydney again another driver where I would never move away from. I love where I live, I love the community that I live in and I am so for, you know, building up that different reputation and I was all about creating the space that we needed to out here without being shunned. And that's not to say that you know, everyone was like that. But there was a definite undertone to conversations like especially when you mentioned where you lived.

Tara Ladd:

And what I didn't like about that was like I had to work my ass off. I called everyone in the yellow pages showing my age here to get a job every week until someone got sick of me and had to bring me in for an interview. That's essentially what it was. And I got a job and from there that's where it kind of blew up from. But I had to work and then I started half admin, half designer and then moved my way in and look, that was just incredibly hard and like when you don't have parents to be able to support you financially to be able to do these things, like I had to go to get to the train, get into the city, like that was an expense every week, you know, for someone that was making minimal money, spending most of your you know money on transport and petrol. You know it was just not feasible.

Tara Ladd:

So you could see how that power shift was happening and I was like I just didn't want to be part of that. And that's not to say that you know, people don't work hard that, uh, you know from from those places. But yeah, I just found it. There was a little bit of inequity there that I didn't want to be part of. I also found a very um, well, it was very male-driven environment and I just did not feel that, especially when you're communicating on such a wide scale across the game, there needs to be women injecting their voices into widescreen advertising communication. Because if all we're seeing is ads from a perspective, from a man's lens not saying that there's anything wrong with that we're missing a key demographic. And then we're also leading by that narrative. And now you can see why the change in society is happening, because we're seeing how our world has been led.

Tara Ladd:

And yeah, I was from a young age trying to fight that narrative because, you know, photoshopped women and never wanted to retouch a woman's body and you know, taking out all the you know, making them look absolutely airbrushed, polished, finished, and it was just like ugh, I hate this. And so when Dove came out with their campaign, I was like, oh my God, fuck, yes, it's about time. So watching these narratives change over time have been really good, and it's so important that brands need to realize how much we actually play a part in that. The conversations we lead, the, the images that we depict, the campaigns that we run, how we portray people in our ads, who we include in the conversation, is so deeply important, and I just did not feel at the time that that was happening.

Tara Ladd:

You know, I even remember um choosing images for a well-known brand, and the conversation was um, you know, I need, we need to show a few people from. You know they don't look Australian enough, and I was like what does Australian look like? Like that is a very yeah. So you could see how someone like me was just like. I don't like it here. Please don't get me wrong. My agency had a very great culture we had put down to the fact that. You know, I am who I am today because I worked in a with a very, very good team, who we all, very much, are still in touch with each other today, after 10 years, and that's where Stace, my old colleague, um, you know, came from.

Tara Ladd:

So, yeah, the, the, but there are still things that you look back on now and go, oh, um, but yeah, that. But that comes with change, and so it's up to us to to change that narrative. And so that is my purpose for starting your one and only, and I think that, when we're looking at the wider scheme of things, the, so the brand is so much more than just design. It's so much more than just, uh, helping brands to establish a connection. It's actually about helping SMEs, which is exactly where I want to target. It's helping them to become the change. It's helping give them a voice, it's helping give them a platform, it's aiding them with the right strategies so that they can do the right thing. And so now you start to see how all of my foundational values have funneled into what I do, who I work with, how I work, how we lead, how we represent ourselves and, especially, who I hire. And it's very much down that road, and I, as a person, obviously am very assertive, I am very empathetic, but also very assertive and opinionated, and so that's where the brand needed to be. It needed to be a little bit disruptive, it needed to ruffle feathers, it it needed to be ballsy, and that because that's just who I am as a person and everyone that we work with and work for um aligned to that. And it's such a huge part of understanding how to build the business is by when you start to really wrap that authentic approach into the way you communicate and how you portray the brand, then you bring in people that are very much in alignment to that.

Tara Ladd:

There are so many people in this world. You cannot appeal to everyone, and I was using this as an example of watching this comedian that I've been following for a really authentic comedian. I've been following on my personal page on Instagram and he's super funny. He talks a lot about parenthood and all of a sudden, one day there was something that happened and he decided to speak to. It was a social thing and he decided to speak to it and, oh my gosh, the comment section were hilarious. So he saw so many things. Oh, you guys are going woke, blah, blah, blah, like this big thing. Anyone that's offended by the word woke is pretty hilarious, if you actually understand the intention of the word, it's actually calling out people using it. But anyway, I just thought it was a bit ballsy of him with brave how funny we say it's brave to talk to things. But it kind of is brave because you know that there's going to be backlash and you're then out on your own to to defeat these people that are going against your values, and you know this happens across the board. But yeah, he was very vocal in what he stood for, how he stood for it, and there was a lot of people in the comments that were just hammering him for it. But do do you know what else it did? People like me that were watching. I was like I really like you more now, and so what that did was make people that loved him love him more and people that didn't align with what he had to say repel.

Tara Ladd:

And that's exactly what you want to do. You want to make sure that you bring the people that love you on board and the people that are hanging around and maybe aren't sure you get rid of them, you know, say something that might get rid of them. You don't want people that are sitting on the border. You want people that are fans and people that will rave about you and people that will share you to their friends and their family, because you are an extension of what they believe in, what they stand for, or even have the ability to speak to things that they probably otherwise wouldn't have. And this is where we're seeing everything move those that are playing it safe, and they're playing Miss Generic or Mr Generic on the fence. What we're seeing is that eventually they're going to be phased out, because the only thing that they're going to be offering is something that everyone else is offering and there'll be absolutely no substance to them.

Tara Ladd:

And this is where I say brand comes in, because when you start to tell the story and you start to build the momentum and bring the people along for the ride, then they become invested in your story and it's so, so, so much deeper than just what you sell. It is about who you are and what you believe in and what you're doing, and people feel that they're investing in something that means something to them. Or they've watched this thing happen, or it's like a flower that's grown and they've been part of that process. And you know, these are why we're seeing brands really aligned to things that matter, and they're calling things out and they're actually repelling Bonds do this fantastically. There are so many people that jump on their page every day just absolutely slamming what they're doing, but I am so here for what they're doing. They're talking about inclusivity, they're putting it out there and they are very much in the front line in that space, and kudos to them for being, you know, really ballsy, because, yeah, there's a lot of people that are not liking it, but for every person that hates them, there's going to be two more people that love them. So that's also what we need to take into consideration as well, and also what the long-term brand effect would be.

Tara Ladd:

What we're seeing is, you know, older generations believe in certain not all, please don't get me wrong when I say that and even some of the younger generation can be quite skewed. But you know, we all have a thought process, and this thought process is built from unconscious bias. It's what we believe in, what we've been shaped by, the ideologies, the movies we've watched, the locations we live in, the income that we've been brought up on All of these things shape our perception of the world. Our own reality is our own only, and this is what people need to understand. Your views are yours and my views are mine, and how we see the world is based off our own experience with the world, and some people will align and some people won't, and so this is what we see. We see people being very vocal with what they stand for, and that's absolutely fine so long as it's not being harmful to other people, and we we're seeing more and more people wanting to invest their money into brands that are willing to do things that align to their personality.

Tara Ladd:

When we buy things, it's so much deeper than you think. We move out of home. Chances are we go and we buy the products that we grew up on. If you had a happy home, of course, you go and buy the products that you know mom or dad bought and and it because it's nostalgia. This is why nostalgia is so important. It's like it reminds you of something we're seeing um, I've seen lenny pierce's djs, the one of the guys from justice crew, the purple new purple wiggles, brother john and um, he's now got a dj set. It's like the he's paired with the wiggles and he's like made a ravers version of the Wiggles songs and that taps into the parents of the millennial market and then it taps into the kids on a new, like generation, and so you're bringing in two cultures. Disney do this so well with cross-generational content. They make sure that they're bringing people in for the ride. Every single generation usually has a new adaptation of what that movie means to them. And it's just, and you sit down as an adult and you watch the movie you watched as a kid with your child and it builds this connection. It's like this. So it's so much. It's so much deeper than what you think.

Tara Ladd:

So when you define your brand values and you're very open with what you stand for, people will be attracted to that and people won't be, and that's fine. We're not here for everyone, but if you want to really build a community, it's so important for you to be speaking to these things and making sure that you're showing up as these things and positioning yourself correctly in these places, because you know you could go into a room full of people and speak your truth or what you stand for, and you could be booed out of the room. You go into another room with the same amount of people and speak your truth and you could be loved like love bombed hard. So it's about finding the right place, speaking the things that you believe in so that you feel super authentic in how you come out, but making sure you're in the right room positioning, which is where a lot of people are going wrong at the moment. The world is changing, people are changing.

Tara Ladd:

The audience, who you're trying to attract, has changed and the way they buy has changed, and it's so important for us, as brands, to be able to navigate what they are doing now. Who are your people now? How are they buying? Where are they sitting? Where are they hanging out? And it's the same marketing. You know research that you would do for everything, but it's in a new era and we're seeing a big generational shift. You know we're starting to see millennials move into those senior leadership roles and baby boomers retiring and yeah, that's kind of where we're at at the moment.

Tara Ladd:

So I guess the key takeaways is to really understand why you're in business and to look into the deeper purpose as to how you can communicate that it's not just about what you sell, it's not about how much something is, but it is about why you've built this brand, why you think it's different. And I say this to everyone you can enter an oversaturated market and absolutely change the game if you can believe that you can bring your perspective to change something. We've seen this with Rihanna and Fenty. She is absolutely killing it at the moment with bringing in makeup that has actually extended the shades so that it brings in a whole different range of inclusivity, and absolutely nailing it. And now she's now bringing out, like an extension, hair extension because it targets, like African-American audiences that are notoriously, you know, not included in the conversation, and so what we're seeing is more inclusivity and more understanding of audiences and more niche marketing, and the better we become as brands to understanding the micro needs of our audiences and personalization, the better you will be at attracting the right audiences and building long-term loyalty and community.

Tara Ladd:

So I would suggest that anyone that is really interested in this space is to just define your purpose like literally write down the reasons. So like you know, why are you not working for a big agency or you know a big corporate or someone else? Why are you working for yourself? If you're a business owner, and if you are someone that is an employee and in like the marketing space or brand space and you're trying to figure out, why do I work here? What is it that I'm trying to do here. Why did I decide to take a job with this place? Like, what are the things that come to mind when you start to write down these things? Sometimes they're an unconscious choice. You might've had this gut feeling that they were doing the right thing. This is why people go leave big high-end corporates and go and work for that small seed startup because they want to help make a difference. It's so deeply aligned to who we are as people, our identities and what we stand for, and you'll find people that attract and gravitate to you as well. So go and figure that out and if you need help with that, you know where to find us.

Tara Ladd:

Aside from that, I hope you really enjoyed this episode. We're diving more into brand strategy over the next couple of weeks and I think you're going to really like it, but for now, that's this week and I will speak to you all soon. That's this week and I will speak to you all soon. Did you like that episode? I hope so, because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you listen on and rate and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at yourwannanonly underscore au on Instagram.

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