Brand and Butter
Always straight-talking (occasionally in-your-face), Brand and Butter is the no-BS branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners. Packed with clear-cut advice on the influence and power of branding - and how pairing associations, consumer behaviour, and design thinking can impact how we see, think, feel, and even taste.
Brand and Butter serves up refreshingly honest and never-dull conversations with some of today’s boldest brand strategists and architects. Sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable (and often unapologetically blunt), this is the podcast that you wish you’d listened to before launch.
Tara Ladd is the Founder and Brand Strategist at Your One and Only, a brand and design studio here for brands who refuse to settle. Evolving brand identities to stay relevant fusing psychology, strategy, and design.
Brand and Butter
From Trust to Evolution: Building Brands That Last
Have you ever wondered how the tiniest details can shape your perception of a brand? In this episode, I talk about aligning internal goals with external perceptions to create a seamless brand identity that resonates with all of your people; customers, employees, and suppliers. I also dive into why trust-building is a crucial element of the brand experience, and how every touchpoint should sync with the overall brand strategy.
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you're listening to Brandon butter 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 brand and design agency. Your one and only. Oh hi, welcome back to this week's episode of Brand and Butter.
Speaker 1:So conversation and word on the street is that a lot has changed over the past couple of weeks and I'm feeling some, I guess, turbulence in the air on how people need to be moving forward. But if you're in Australia to be moving forward, but if you're in Australia, we're seeing some pretty good signs of the economy and I mean it only can go higher, I would assume, from here and higher being more positive. Let's hope so. However, if you're in the States, there is a whole bunch of things going on, and if you're in the rest of the world, well, you can join us here in Australia as we watch on in disbelief but some of us anyway. But today what I want to talk about is the importance of understanding the brand strategy itself and the elements and core elements that play a part. So last week I spoke about four core areas that can help your brand win this year. But there is an important thing that you need to understand about a strategy and today I want to kind of break down strategy not necessarily the parts in it, but its role that it has in branding. So the way that I like to put it is that a brand is like a memory. So consider it all of the associations that you build about your business that is what people will remember. I put it really simply in a workshop that I did last year where I spoke about it being like an experience at a restaurant. So say that the restaurant looked really good, they had an amazing fit out, the lighting was great, the acoustics was great, the identity was great, they had a really cool vibe, the culture was great and you saw a million and one great reviews online.
Speaker 1:However, you and three friends go to this restaurant and all three sit down and have a completely different experience. So while you sit down, you realize that you're sitting down in a rocky chair. You know one of those chairs that you sit down and they miss that little rubbery thing on one of the chair legs and you're just sitting there rocking on it all night. So you decide to quickly grab a napkin and shove it underneath the chair. You couldn't get another chair because the seats are taken because the restaurant's full. Obviously it was good on paper.
Speaker 1:So while you're stuffing around with that, you know you're in the middle of ordering drinks. They're ordering drinks and the waiter misses you because you're too busy under the table stuffing around with the chair. So then, naturally, you're then trying to chase the waiter back down to order your drinks, because your friends were too deep in conversation that they forgot that you didn't order. And so then you're all of a sudden looking to chase down this waiter to order your drink. By the time they come back, they're sitting down with their drinks in hand because the waiter has brought them. And then you order. And then all of a sudden you're in delay. So they've got drinks, you're waiting for yours, and the whole night then continues in a series of events just like that.
Speaker 1:Just that one singular experience alone would make you have a completely different perception of that business. Now you're going to remember all of the negative things that happened on that night, which was no fault of anyone's just a seriously wobbly chair, but it can actually put a dampening on things right of anyone's just a seriously wobbly chair, but it can actually put a dampening on things right. And this is the way that I like to describe the brain experience. Your friends would have had a great experience because, you know, everything else was amazing, as per expected.
Speaker 1:However, that one thing for you cemented something that was quite negative, and as we go on and we talk about brain experience and brain perception, this is a core element that I want people to understand that your brand experience and how someone deals with your business is actually a huge part of the branding process, and so, when we're talking about strategy, what we do here at your One and Only is we break apart the two core elements, which is both internal and external, and so, if you're thinking about internal, it's pretty self-explanatory, but it's all of the things that create the culture of the business. So you have people, you have processes, you have systems and procedures, all of these different things that you do. You have the customer journey so how someone would enter your business and the buyer's journey and the roles that they play in each stage of that customer journey and how you deal and communicate with that customer or client, and all of these little touch points that are involved in that are involved in, you know, also part of external, but it's also like how you set those processes up, and the core thing that we also need to think about is the element of the strategy, which is internal right. So you talk about the audience that you're targeting is something that you're discussing in terms of business models as well, and then you're looking at your values, what it is that you stand for, how you represent yourself, what your goals are, what your mission and vision are, and all of those things are really important because they're like internal objectives. So when you have that down on paper, you need to also be considering that the team that you may hire or the suppliers that you may work with are also looking at those things to work with you or for you, and too often we're seen as trying to create branding that appeals to, I guess, people that will buy from us, but not necessarily people that will work from us, and so it's important that you understand the role that culture plays in whether or not someone wants to work for your business, and so we saw a max exodus of people leaving Twitter after Elon Musk took over and, you know, some obviously decided to stay but some didn't.
Speaker 1:But it was those procedures that they had in place that people really loved about working there. So, you know, inclusivity policies, they had flexibility arrangements and, as we're talking about DEI, a lot in this, you know, I the working space. It's important to understand that DEI initiatives are not only just to include for I guess, in terms of equity of the type of person that you're hiring, but it's also all of these like beneath the surface policies that you don't even realize that you're experiencing, and it's things like paid parental leave or mental health leave or carer's leave and how many hours that you work in a day. All of these things are involved in that process. And so the more inclusive and, I guess, equitable or fun and encouraging and positive environment that you work in, that's going to ricochet externally, because your employees are going to be huge ambassadors of your business, especially if your mission vision are very much cemented with what it is that you're trying to do In terms. By that I mean you're very clear on what the goals are and what you're trying to achieve so that it becomes a group mentality to achieve these goals as a team. It's not just you working for the boss so that they can achieve their goal, and I think that that's something that people are completely missing in the role of brand strategy. It's understanding that workplace culture is hugely aligned to the branding of the business and the messages that you put out.
Speaker 1:If you have an unhappy team, that's going to showcase and people are going to question do I want to work for this company or do I want to hire this company or buy from this company if they treat their stuff like that, and that's something that is really important to consider. But the thing is, and what I always say, is that someone will start a business. They will go here's my business idea. I'm going to get a logo and then I'm going to get on socials or I'm going to start communicating or I'm going to fix my messaging, and what actually happens is that there is a huge element in the center there that people miss, and it's usually with how you connect the internal with the external. So I always ask people why they were in business or why they started their business, and I say this a lot because if you're, why do you exist. This is something that's really important.
Speaker 1:If you don't know that, there is problem number one. And so what I try and explain to people is that you need to understand that core reason at the beginning, or what the overarching objective is, because it should be big, it should be something that you want to achieve. You may never actually achieve it, but the business is contributing to whatever that may be, and there's a reason that we all started a business, otherwise we'd all be employees of someone else's business. You obviously wanted to do something better, something quicker, something smarter, whatever that may be. It's important that you then dictate that message externally, and so then we start to talk about the intricates of what a brand strategy is, and so last week spoke about you know, audience and purpose and positioning and personality.
Speaker 1:But today I actually want to speak to the importance of, I guess, the overarching objective, of the goal and the big picture of how you then communicate the right perception and connecting both the internal versus the external to create the right perception. Because if you don't know what that internal culture is and you don't understand and look, you don't have to know. Sometimes it's a work in progress, but if you don't know what the bigger purpose and the differentiation is, and if someone came up to you in the street and said, hey, what does your business do? Or what does the business do that you work for, and you actually can't summarize that in a sentence, there's work to be done, and so what the goal is is to create the narrative, which is the ongoing conversations that you're having as a brand, to shape the perception of how people see you, and then that's then articulated in copy, in visuals and, of course, in any form of communication and marketing that you put out for people to see, and that is where the perceptions are made. So what I like to say is the associations, which is what people think about.
Speaker 1:Your brand is like a tree, and so each good thing that you do is like adding a branch to your tree, and the more branches that you have, the more positive associations that you have. And so when people are thinking about your brand, it's almost like a trust building phase. So you go from step one to step whatever 10. And each one of those steps then includes you bridging that trust gap through tiny little consistent steps. It's an ongoing narrative that's played out consistently all the time so that people then understand who you are, what you do, what you're about and what you stand for or who you're here for, and that is so important because it's taking longer now for people to actually build that trust system. And that kind of sits in the space of the consideration set.
Speaker 1:If you're looking at a marketing funnel, where you have the awareness stage, which is where no one really knows who you are, and then the consideration stage, which sits in the center of educating people on what you do, how you do it and all of those like pieces in the middle, and then, of course, there's the point which is the conversion stage, which is getting them to buy from you. Now that's a really simple three-part process. There's obviously retention that we can talk about, and brand loyalty later, which I can discuss next week, but right now it's actually about understanding that trust building process. So what's happening now is that people create top of funnel stuff which is obviously the brand awareness stuff, which is visibility and shareable content, and it's usually relatable stuff and people want to see it and that's what causes or what gets visibility. Something that's relatable, whatever it is, it's easy, it's digestible and it's something that kind of provides an entry point for you to then move into stage two, which would be consideration.
Speaker 1:And then there's the consideration set, which a lot of the time is that trust building process. It's the educational content, it's the how we do things, it's the why choose us, it's the manufacturing process If you have a product, it's where things are made, it's the people that do it, it's that whole area in the middle of connection. And then you have the last part, which is the conversion, which is the sales pieces, and each one of these stages is a different message and it's about understanding how to speak in each of those messages. I always speak to the digital picnic in this space, who do a really good job of understanding or educating people to understand the top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel content. We also have lots of others, obviously. We know a lot of other people, but the digital picnic are obviously our go-to in that space and they just explain it really well. And when you understand that, it's much easier for you then to understand how to communicate your message, because if you're then going, I need to put an ad out and you have no idea which area you sit in there.
Speaker 1:What's the objective? There always has to be an objective. This is what your mission, vision, values do for your brand as a whole. Your brand is ongoing. It's evolutionary right, so it should be changing and evolving with the time. You shouldn't stay stagnant, because you will simply go out of business, just like Blockbuster did. And so when I say evolve, I'm talking about the way you do things, the conversations that you lead, the products that you sell, and it's all of these things and the technology that you use. All of these things contribute to the evolution of your brand. If, all of a sudden, you were the top dog in what you did and now you're finding yourself very on the norm, you know that there's an upskilling space there for you, or you get really damn good at doing what you do well, so that there is literally no other competition. However, if you do that again, like I said, you need to make sure that you are evolving and being the best in that space at the thing that you do At the end of the day, because it's kind of been all over the shop.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to explain in this episode is the objective of what your brand identity is portraying. So what is the goal of your business and how does your brand help to identify and position you in that space. Then you obviously have to wrap in that personality alignment and all of this stuff then comes through the way that you execute visually, the way that you execute your voice and your messages, and who you're speaking to and where you're placed. And once you know all of these things, then it's really easy. It's kind of like are you creating an event and then once you say yes and you go, okay, you creating an event. And then once you say yes and you go okay, who is the event for? What type of event is it? What is the dress code? What type of food are we having? That is the same type of thing. It's like planning your brand is like planning an event and it's making sure that all of those touch points that is part of that event are suited to the event itself. You're not going to have the same type of things at a festival or music festival versus a high-end wedding. Once you know those details, it's much easier for you to then be able to create the things that go underneath that banner.
Speaker 1:The problem is people are being too wishy-washy at that top area because, to be fair, brand has really taken off over the last couple of years. It is very prominent now more than ever. I actually see brand marketing being two sides of the same coin. I don't see it as brand sits under marketing, which a lot of people would say, because brand can exist without marketing. For instance, we still know who brand, we still know who Blockbuster is, we still know who Kodak is. We still know these brands that are no longer in business or no longer trading, purely because they've still got brand equity, which means that they live rent free in our head, based on the last and past associations that they've developed. And so they can still exist and they could still reignite their brand because they've got a lot of space in the market to be able to do so if they were to re-enter I think Nokia did this really well and reposition and come back with a different strategy than to completely disappear, because they have a pre-existing memory in people's heads, so the recognition is still there.
Speaker 1:Marketing helps to push the word out. Brand is who it is. You can't change who someone is or forget who someone is. It's the same. If someone was to pass away, you still would remember that person. They may not be existing, they may not be talking and communicating with people in life, but their memory still lives on. Think of that. I know that's a really bad way of putting it, but think of that like brand. And another way to think about it is what stories and narratives are you evolving with? You can't? It's important to maintain consistency in what you say, right, but the world changes, and so we grow as brands, we grow as people, and so our opinions and what we believe in shifts and changes, just like the consumer does, and so we need to also make sure that what we're saying is aligning and adapting and evolving with that consumer. When you hit the mark in what the conversations are that you lead, that's when you will build that connection with your audience and that's when you'll start to develop a much deeper bond and resonate a lot better with the audiences that you're trying to target. If you aren't hitting that yet, that doesn't mean that you won't ever do that.
Speaker 1:We've seen businesses that have been in you know, in the game for years and years and years. Stanley are a really good example of this, of how they started off in you know Stanley knives and doing all the hard tradie work, wear of you know stainless steel on site so it doesn't get wrecked. And then all of a sudden a mummy blogger spoke about how she really liked it. And then it blew up in that instance and they completely shifted and added a new category to target women with pastel colors and just a lot more like fun and out there and vibrant kind of marketing, and they made millions, like hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it was something like they made $600 million in such a short period of time.
Speaker 1:You know, it doesn't matter how long you've been in business. You can still have these moments and all it takes is just a bit of creativity, a bit of disruption and really looking at the picture, too many brands are reactive, they aren't proactive, and by that I mean they are simply just answering or responding to what is already happening in the market. To be proactive, you need to be in front of that. When you're in front of that, then you're seen as the authority, then you're seen as the go-to, then you're seen as the person that everyone wants to work with. It's a lot like when Spotify came to the market with streaming music before Apple did, and people now still stay loyal to Spotify because they were first to do it. It almost made Apple look like a Me Too brand or the secondary brand. That's what you know. That's what, by the way, a secondary brand is called a Me Too brand because they're trying to be just like the other brand.
Speaker 1:Anyway, in a nutshell, what your goal is with business is to understand the internal, external narratives. So what is it that you want to represent internally versus what it is that you want to represent externally? Because the two are interconnected. Internally think staff, team procedures, experience in terms of how you're going to navigate, how a customer enters and then goes through the process and then exits or is retained. That is really important to know because you could have, like I said at the start, you could have a phenomenal visual identity, phenomenal messaging. You could have, you know, really great word of mouth, but if you have someone that has come to you and they have a really bad experience, all of that stuff doesn't matter because it's lies centric to how they feel about that brand.
Speaker 1:Every single person that engages with your brand has their own experience and their own perception of your brand. Every single person should be treated as their own kind of person. You have your processes to obviously appeal. You can't be sitting there tailoring every single thing, but when you can personalize and have automations in place that can make them feel like you've done that. It's a really good way to assess with data. For instance, if you start taking surveys and getting more and more about people, then you can really start to segment your audience based on their likes and their beliefs and what they really value, and then you can target market with really specific things and then they will feel like you're listening to them. At the end of the day, people want to feel like they belong, they want to feel heard and they want to feel seen, and if you can do those things and connect with them on an authentic level, then you will absolutely knock it out of the park and, even though this is going to sound really weird, you could have the shittest visual identity, but the most amazing service and people will still go to you. This is why you have that local corner store that may not have really amazing branding or social presence, but the word of mouth of community spreads and people know that they're great and so they don't need to worry about that, because that community bond is so strong and, so long as they maintain that, it can kick off.
Speaker 1:I like to look at it like an attribute in terms of how people would choose to work with you. Think about when you buy a product. You usually pick two or three things that you would choose from, even services. You would do this. You kind of then weigh up what they're saying. You look at what the people are saying about them, how they're priced. You have all of these attributes right. Branding is essentially just another one of those attributes. What do they look like, what do they sound like? It's just another thing. So if you know that two other businesses that you're going against competitively have really shit branding, then that would give you a leg up in making sure that you look good against them and that would make someone go, oh okay, they look really good, they are going to make me look really good by using them. Then I'm going to use that brand. It's just another attribute. However, your brand identity, its core, what it stands for that needs to be solid, because when you know that who you are, what you do, what you're about, who you're here for, then you can then execute the branding like the visual identity, the messaging, all of that stuff to target and it will coincide with who you are as a brand.
Speaker 1:So remember that when you are branding or talking about your brand, brand, marketing, I should say, is actually communicating your brand story. And your brand story is, you know, evolving as well. It's how you started, it's who you are and it's telling the audience who you are and that should evolve as well, based on the, I guess, the things that you experience as a brand and what you've come up with. I know that your one and only has shifted, especially since I've had children and how that's kind of repositioned us and that's part of my story as the founder. However, your brand narrative is the conversations that you have. So your brand story is the, you know, it's like the pillar of why you exist and what you actually communicate to the audience as that relatability piece. But the narratives that you lead by are almost like the subcategories of what it is that you want to be known for, and I think that there is so much like confusion in the market about what it is that it should be that or what it is that it stands for that people are just like that it should be that or what it is that it stands for that people are just like I have no idea what I'm doing anymore, and you know, at the end of the day, that's why I created the laboratory, so that we could really break down these elements, so people could understand what they are, which we will be pushing back out soon. This isn't a sales pitch, by the way.
Speaker 1:So, at the end of the day, your number one mission is to know your brand objective, so your business objective. What is the long-term goal that you're constantly chipping away at? How is that then communicated through mission, vision, values, into what it is that you stand for, who it is that you are and how you lead, because that not only just attracts people that want to buy from you, it attracts people that want to work for you, and that is hugely important. And then you also want to make sure that you've got those things going out that are a constant narrative, so that they understand who you are and what you're about and what it is that you stand for in the narrative, not only just selling your products, which is also something that sits under the brand, it is also the relationship that you're selling. It's the people and the way you do things. That's a lot of the mark of what people are buying into.
Speaker 1:That is brand marketing the products that you sell is like tactical marketing in terms of getting people to understand and buy that product. That can be still emotional, but that's what we call product branding. That is a whole conversation that we will talk about in the coming weeks, but at the end of the day, your goal is to build trust. You build trust by being consistent and build trust by being vulnerable and transparent in what you do and leading with integrity. And you also then do that by having a really thriving culture, because when you have a great internal culture, that will then ricochet out, because the staff will then become personal brand ambassadors for that business. If you have all of your staff communicating and talking about how good that business is, that is more likely to bring in revenue and it is another form of advertising. So they've said that a founder brings in seven times the amount of leads and I think it's like a personal brand for an employee can bring in three times the amount as the business going out on its own. So if you think about all of these really happy staff members that are just constantly screaming your brand to everyone that they know, they're actually becoming internal ambassadors and that is like the biggest compliment that you can have.
Speaker 1:And if you don't have a team because a lot of the times there are people that only have. You know, one or two people that may work for them, or even just the solopreneur, and you have, you know people that work with you as a supplier they are still doing the same thing as a supplier, they are still doing the same thing. I know that when I started out, when I was working with other suppliers, I was like how is this person going to be in alignment with our brand and what reputation are they going to have? And if I refer a client to this person, are they going to uphold the same level of standard that we have? And if they don't, they just simply don't get referred. So it is a level of I'm very, very meticulous with who we share our referrals to, and that's been because I've done the process of culling and really building those relationships and knowing that I can trust the people that I'm sending them to. So think about it like that At the end of the day, trust is the biggest thing that you're selling, but you need to know the wider objective and you need to make sure that that is the bigger mission within the business that everyone is striving to align with.
Speaker 1:So that is it for this week. I hope you really enjoyed it. If you have any questions, as usual, please shoot through a DM on Instagram and we will get back to you. Until then, I'll chat to you next week. 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 yourwantandonly underscore au on Instagram.
