Brand and Butter
The straight-talking branding podcast for leaders who refuse to settle.
Brand and Butter delivers no-BS advice on how psychology, strategy, and design create brands that work. Host Tara Ladd, founder of Your One & Only brand design studio, breaks down the real influence and power of branding – how understanding behaviour and cultural shifts can transform how people see, think, and choose.
Sometimes funny, always honest, never dull. This is the podcast that cuts through industry jargon to talk about what actually makes brands stick.
Tara Ladd is the founder of Your One and Only, who design brands that breathe with culture through psychology, strategy, and design.
Brand and Butter
The Comeback Kid: Finding Your Voice When Life Gets Loud
This week I return l sharing how my recent personal challenges led to a complete reassessment of my brand strategy of YO&O. I also explore how empathy and inclusion are reshaping the modern consumer’s expectations, especially after global movements and the pandemic disruption.
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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. It's been a hot minute. Welcome to this week's episode of Brand and Butter.
Speaker 1:I went to a conference on the weekend and it was the Comeback Conference by the Digital Picnic. If you were there, I hope you liked it. For everyone else that wasn't there, it was a wild two days of upskilling and learning and engaging and I had just the best time. It was my first keynote. Believe it or not, I speak a lot to you know on podcasts and panels and all of that type of things, but the last couple of years have kind of shaken things up. I think I started your One and Only in 27. I didn't think, I know, but I started you Want it? Only in 2017 and then fell pregnant with my first at the end of 2018. So I didn't really do too much speaking. Some people are probably like I've had kids and I've done it. Yep, that's great.
Speaker 1:2019, I had Ari and he needed a liver transplant at nine months old. So that was peak one. Covid, lockdown in Sydney and, look, he was healthy in terms of his liver. I mean, not until he was transplanted. It was a crappy liver, obviously, but once we had that changed, we then had 37 hospital stays over a three-year period because he was immunocompromised. So having an immunocompromised child in the midst of COVID was a wild time. Let's just say I was opinionated in more ways than one, but it was. Yeah, it was a really interesting time. But I felt pregnant with my second Bly at the end of Bly Sounded like such a bogan then, but at the end of 2020 or 2020, because I had Blyaine 2021 and yeah, he was born in the middle of the second lockdown, which was super. It was like I planned for that, but I mean, just like anyone else, it was a. It was a wild time. I guess you would say it was stressful, overwhelming, and trying to run a business during that time was super hard.
Speaker 1:I think this was a conversation from the weekend. Was that I had this story at the beginning because it was the comeback conference, right. So we were talking about resilience and building back up and also how to address where we're at right now, which is what I'm going to touch on very simplistically, and how that kind of channels into where we are and, in fact, has just completely made me redo my whole brand strategy. Um, so, after Bly was born I'll come back to that I he was colic for 10 months and he just would not sleep. And having a toddler and a child that doesn't sleep, we were just beside ourselves. I think he slept. I am not even joking when I say we had max three hours of broken sleep every night for at least 10 months. It wasn't until he could stand up and start moving that his guts kind of figured it out. I mean he's still not great. Now he's three it out. I mean he's still not great now he's three, three and a half.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it was this whole experience and it really took an impact on my mental health and I've tried to be really open with what I go through as a business owner, as a founder, as a creative. But sometimes these things can be missed and not everyone's paying attention to you. As I always say, you are the side character in everyone else's main story. And, yeah, I feel like people were just genuinely surprised that that I thought I'd told this story and people would be sick of it, but no one had actually heard it. It was a few people, and it just made me realize how much we need to continue to tell our stories, because the conversation that I had was beyond the brand identity, culture and the new consumer, and at the very center of that topic was belonging, and so what I want to do is actually walk you through my thought process when I created this, because it actually did help to, as I just said, realign my brand strategy, and when I say brand strategy, it was just core, say brand strategy, it was just core messages for me, like repositioning messaging, but also like changing certain hierarchy statements that just weren't 100% for me.
Speaker 1:If you're in the space, everyone's just like oh, you know, the plumber has leaky tap and you know it's the same with design. But I spent all day today just going, like I'm talking eight hours just completely revamping this, and I'm in such a good frame of mind. It's so interesting. I always say this to everyone when you have your brand strategy absolutely firing. Everything else just knocks on from that and I was like why am I not taking my own advice?
Speaker 1:So what I actually did was run myself through my own, my own process, but I used AI, where I would normally do my own conversations. I'd already came up with my creative you know statements and things like that, but what I actually did with AI was I got it to call out my own bias, which is something that we completely miss, and this is the one thing that I always say when I'm working with a client is to call out my own bias, which is something that we completely miss, and this is the one thing that I always say when I'm working with a client is we call out the bias. We always think that what we do is the best, we think that what we have is the best, and we always think that we know what we're doing because we think we're the best. It's ego, and ego is one of the biggest things that stops people from doing everything or doing anything positive, and I was like I need to check myself here. Now. It wasn't that I hadn't like it was egocentric in what I was doing, but it's like your blinkers, you completely miss something because you think you already know what you're doing in that space, and for me it's just a constant reassessment of audience. And this is something that I've worked with over the last two years has completely changed your one and only has been just the assessment of audience. And at the start, I knew audience, but I didn't even get to the crux of our own, and it was like once I started applying my own behavioral science tactics and decision making and really diving into things, I was like, oh man, I've been missing the mark here, but also taking my own advice in really just watching well, not even watching people would talk to you, but sometimes it's really hard to actually filter in what you should be listening to. And I finally got it. And it was me just reaching out to people after I'd done a masterclass or after I'd done a presentation. I'd be like what did you really like about it? What was it that you loved most about it? And obviously there's a consistency and people start talking about what it is that they want, and it was from those conversations that I was like, okay, tweak, start again, tweak, start again.
Speaker 1:And I think that people think that it just becomes this oh, this is what I need to do now, and then you find it, and then you redo it, but it's not. It's not, it's a continuation. Every single bit you learn a bit more, you learn a bit more, you learn a bit more, and then you find out. It's why businesses that have been in business for so long can kind of understand their audience way better than someone starting out. It's why an experienced person will do something so naturally and unconsciously, because it's habitual, and we completely miss that. And I always say now, like with everything moving so quickly, it's so important that we go back and we reassess why are you in business, why do you do what you do and how is it making an impact? And by impact I mean for you, are you doing what you want to do?
Speaker 1:Because this is a one thing that I found during COVID we were making a lot of money and our business was going really, really well, but I found that at the center of it all, when we were getting busy, is that we were working with client, not all. We were working with these clients that I ended up taking on because we needed money, Like and I mean by that I mean we needed, we needed income so I could pay the staff and so naturally that made me hire or take on projects that maybe I otherwise wouldn't have taken on now. And it completely changed a lot of the culture, not internally, but just, I guess, what I wanted to take on as a brand lot of the culture not internally, but just, I guess, what I wanted to take on as a brand. And slowly but surely I started to shift away from the end goal. And it wasn't until we were going through a little bit of hardship. After I was like I hate it because I'm not doing what I want to do. And you know silver lining, I mean, you don't see. You certainly do not see a silver lining when you're in the thick of it. But I was. Now I look back and go. Holy shit, like that was. That was me reassessing. And so now I actually look back and go.
Speaker 1:I studied at the right time, you know, when everyone was doing AI, I was actually going back and studying people behavior and now I feel so confident in that space, Like I am just pulling apart behaviors left, right and center. But also it opened my eyes to a whole bunch of other stuff. Right, I'm neurodivergent, I'm ADHD, I'm very perceptive or not perceptive, very I can. I can recognize patterns and see things really well. And I started to see this happen and you know I was like how do I do things differently? Like I have so much to say and I don't know how to articulate it, and so I've actually had to work with external sources to help me narrow down on my own messaging and I finally feel. I finally feel like we're there. I have this whole ecosystem that we're about to roll out this year and I'm so proud of it. But now I'm in execution phase and so the money's come back in. We're doing really well. Stace is back in my OG that I had to scale back with, and I'm feeling like we're finally building the rhythm.
Speaker 1:Being on stage on the weekend was amazing. So Cherie is also one of my long business mates. We've been friends for a while, you know. Before she took the reins of the business on her own, but she had me on stage on the weekend and and I mean obviously we did their rebrand. So it's just this long relationship that we've had. It's a fun and a creative relationship. We always take the piss out of each other, but her putting me up on that stage put me in front of people that otherwise would not have heard of me and it gave me the visibility. And that was such a knock-on effect because everyone that was then talking about the event and tagging me in the event that went out to their audience as well. And so suddenly I've been noticed by all of these people that were external, that were watching my name being tagged, and all of these people have just got in touch.
Speaker 1:My messaging was down pat. You know who I am is down pat. The way we show up was down pat. Everyone's saying it's your content or what you're putting out. It actually sometimes just isn't that. Sometimes it's just that you need more visibility, and more visibility doesn't mean creating more content. It just means being more strategic in where you show up. And I even say this to people myself put yourself in places that you otherwise haven't been and if you can't do that, create it.
Speaker 1:Tdp created this conference and the conference was so fucking awesome because it was neuro-inclusive. I am neurodivergent. Everyone in that room mostly was neurodivergent. It was such the conversation that I was listening to the whole day because I'm in brand, obviously, and I was feeding back information. The conversation or the repetitive message that I kept hearing people say it's so safe here, I feel so comfortable here, I feel like I can be vulnerable here and not judged, and I was like holy shit, this is it. This is something that YouWantAndOnly has always built Like. Dei has always been at the center of it. Deia, I should say diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, Because it's one of the core reasons why our business exists. So, full transparency.
Speaker 1:I was working in an ad agency, an in-an-ad agency. Speak, speak too fast. I drop all my annunciation, um, and I noticed the discrepancy with, you know, women going and having babies and then coming back into the, the office and just being treated like second-class citizens and it wasn't like I mean, no one was giving them disrespect, but it was just like I mean I guess it was giving them disrespect, but it was just like. I mean I guess it was like their career that they had had had died, and they were like you're no longer this role, You're now this role, and it was a lesser than role. It was like and then there were other guys in the studio that were a parent, like dads, obviously, and a completely different scenario.
Speaker 1:Now I saw that as a young 20-something and was like is this what my life is going to be like, when you have to choose between being really successful in your career or being a great parent. I'm like I wanted both of those things and neither of them. I wanted to jeopardize each other. Now, that's not saying that you can do it all at once, because clearly that's a fucking hoax, but it means like just being able to, you know, have the ability to do the things when you need to. And I can tell you right now that if I didn't have my business when I had my kids in all of that shit storm that was, there was no way in hell that I would have kept a job. It was just not a chance. I had to be at hospital, like all of those times Like I was able to work, I was able to pay myself superannuation, I was able to top my wages up to a livable wage, and all of these things are things I'm so deeply embedded with or so deeply passionate about championing in the world, Obviously in your inclusive workplaces.
Speaker 1:That was not even heard of back in the day. You know I've had you on, and only for eight years, in May, and yeah, I used to do things. Now I'm like, oh yeah, that makes so much sense now, and people always say to me like I wish I had known that I had, you know, ADHD or autism when I was younger, and I'm like you know what? It wouldn't have made a difference. I knew when I was 11, I'm 39 this year. It made fuck all difference, because the people that are teaching you and people that are around you have to be inclusive as well, and they weren't. They actually thought it was a load of shit and so what?
Speaker 1:The only thing that I can say is that I went and did this neuro test, um, where they had to check your intelligence and you know all of these other things, and the only thing that I got validation from was I did this comprehension test. That was a closed passage and I had to fill out this 30 you know 30 gap space, you know comprehension test, and they went away. They said you got 20 minutes and they went away. And they came back and I was like okay, um, they were like you've got five minutes and I was like I have not. I do like three. I was like shit. So I had to go and quickly answer them in. I did that and did spelling test. I had to watch this. It was like a dos, like 8-bit screen, was like a little white light flashing and then like the light would flash and then you'd have to press the button when you saw it and then obviously I'd get distracted and I'd press it a few extra times just to catch up. It's like listening tests, all those types of things, but when those results came back, the results came back to tell us us being me and my mom that I had actually scored in the top 5% of the state in comprehension and I was two and a half years ahead of myself in spelling.
Speaker 1:When I say that my jaw nearly hit the ground, it was crazy because that was not coming across at school. That's the only thing that I could say was the best thing that I learned was because I knew that I wasn't dumb, I just learned differently. So keeping that in mind when I got to my work environment, is that no again, no one knew that, but I would always not want to answer the phone. I would be doing something. I would be hyper fixed on it. You know I didn't know this now, but if I was doing a project, I wouldn't even I wouldn't leave to have lunch, I would stay at the desk, completely finish it, and then I would like knuckle down and just ignore the world. So you know when they would all be like come to have lunch, I'd be like, nah, I'm like in the in the zone.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile I'm freelancing on the side, you know, because I'm doing all the things at the same time and studying. Now I look back I'm like, yeah, this all tracks. But there was also like I have so many accreditations, there's like 15 certifications that I don't tell people. I just like, like it's almost like an, like a career. At this point it's like what do you do? I study for a career, but I just love, love, learning, learning new things. So I know all of this like random, like I'm great for trivia, totally great for trivia, but then also some of the things are so complex that it's also useless for trivia.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so, like you know, having those fluorescent lights above my head in the studio, I used to like one broke one day and I was like this is so good and my boss always tried to replace it and I was like you can't do that. He's like why? I'm like I will not stay here under this, I will move somewhere else. You have to keep that out. He would always get super frustrated or I would always get in trouble. When I was drawing in the meeting room, everyone be in there and I'd be like doodling on a page and he was like, are you even listening to what I'm saying? Little did he know. That was my way of listening because if it like me stopping and looking them in the eye, I hate eye contact. I partially do eye contact or I look at something on their body, but I can't do it. I'm like a flickerer. A flickerer. Does that make sense? So there's all these little things that that were coming to fruition.
Speaker 1:But the one thing that also ticked over the edge was that I worked in the city. I was from southwestern Sydney and, as you can imagine, there's a whole postcode snobbery, especially when you work in the city. It was like the coasties versus the westies, the coasties and the westies versus the inner city and it was just this, like they just thought that they were better and it was like a joke between the team. We're all like, we're all good mates, but you could tell that there's an underlying insult. But when I started in agency, I remember looking around trying to get a job. It was so hard to get a job. It was either you needed to have two years experience, I mean I used to call everyone in the yellow pages this is how old we're going like pre-dating proper websites, and I would call every day for like three weeks and I finally just think I've made people get sick of me and got a job. Persistence. This is the type of person I am. I'm still this person and I got a call in.
Speaker 1:So I realized that there was these free internships that were at all the agencies that I wanted to work for. But I couldn't do a free internship. I needed to work. I needed money to get into the city, Like at the at that's so cheap. Now you think about it, it was, like you know, 50 bucks to get into the city to to work every week, and I, like I had to earn that. Then I had to drive there, I had to pay for petrol. I mean thinking in scheme of things, how cheap that is now, but, like you know, when you're not earning any money, that's a lot. My parents couldn't afford to pay for that and so I didn't get that opportunity to do that because my parents couldn't afford that.
Speaker 1:And so I look at that and I'm like that's such a privileged take and I don't think we realize as a society how much these little things impact progression and status. And just having a safe family is a privilege, a safe house, living under a roof and I know that people may be doing like having hardships, but it's not. It's not saying like, oh, I don't deserve to feel shit because I'm privileged, it's just having basic empathy to understand that you know some people have to climb over a barbed wire fence, to understand that you know some people have to climb over a barbed wire fence, fight a tiger and swim through a crocodile infested water to get to the exact same place that you've gotten to. And so I noticed this and it made me empathize with those that were like people of color or extremely difficult circumstances, like abuse or trauma, or disabled people that are more disabled than I was. And it's it really opened your eyes.
Speaker 1:I like to call it the ladder of I don't like to, but it is. I call it the ladder of oppression, where you have you know sorry guys patriarchy. The white male is at the top, Then you have the white female, white woman. I should say, let's be inclusive. So you have the white man at the top, then the white woman, then you have the black man or the person of color, Then you have the black woman, and then it goes down, like you know the pecking order, and it's like, well, it's not even black, it's people of color, right, it's all the people that are just not in that top rung, and then it's, you know, there's disability, and then there's financial hardship and there's all these like things, and even like the schools that you go to and I hate the fact that you know it is this way. But like the schools that you go to is the people that you hang around, it's the circles that you get into. It's all about who you know. Like it's so about who you know. I mean sorry to be political, but that's literally Donald Trump's cabinet, but if we actually look at the wider scheme of things, it's really good to like look at things from a wider lens, and so what I'm talking about today is this is important.
Speaker 1:My story kind of segues into it is that the conversation that I had was about culture, identity and the new consumer and how events over the past few years have actually triggered this effect of change. You know, me too, changed the narrative with women. They started to share their experiences. There were no more fighting and catfights against each other, which the media always used to do. Now it's a bunch of women fighting for hey, that's not right, that's changed. Brands have to change and adapt to that narrative. And then we look at George Floyd. This is exactly the references that I used in my keynote George Floyd movement, Black Lives Matter. You know, injustice, fighting social injustice, oppression, realizing that some people just don't have the same pathways as us, Understanding COVID, how that impacted heaps of people.
Speaker 1:We saw in Sydney the North Shore get locked down periodically but then, you know, half of the Eastern suburbs in Sydney and all of those over there were open, while the Western suburbs were shut down. You know, we understand that there was COVID from that my LGA wasn't, I'm in Camden, but yeah, we weren't shut down. But yeah, it was just very weird. There was a bunch of political shit happening. And then we saw, you know, the differences between those that had to work and those that didn't have to work, Like all of these things have completely impacted the way that we buy, the way that we engage with brands, institutions, relationships.
Speaker 1:Covid changed how we act as people. You know we realized that going into the city as someone that lived in Southwestern Sydney. If I had to go into the city every week versus working from home, that saved me 15 hours. That's two working days. Work that out over a whole year. It's like you actually work out the discrepancy between how much hourly rate that you have and you're paying more to get to work. And then other people will say to you well, move to where you can afford, and then people have to live far away and it's just this whole. People are just not empathizing and it's like everything that we are at the moment as a society has been from a lack of empathy. And don't get me wrong, there's some amazing things happening and this always happens, and this is what I said in my talk. There are always brands that adapt and innovate.
Speaker 1:This is a time for people to get loud. It's a time for people to stand for what they believe in and actually like build their businesses around. Good, this is something that I've always wanted to do. Something that I've always said that I wanted to do was to not put shit to market, and so that's why I haven't put anything out for the last couple of weeks, but I'm about to fire back. I'm really excited with where everything's about to go, and I guess this is my call out to you too.
Speaker 1:If you're in business and you're feeling a bit stale, chances are you're not actually saying what you want to say, and so I guess it's my challenge to you is to figure out what it is that's going to make you happy. What is it that you want to say? This is what you can say. Now, obviously, there are guidelines. You can't just go out and ramble hate speech Not that I think any of you will, especially if you're listening to this podcast but it's about having tough conversations, empathetically, to drive change.
Speaker 1:That's what my business is about. That's what I'm hoping. I get to work with a lot of people, like what the intention is. Working with a lot of people, and that's what I would love for the world to become is to create a ripple effect of positive change, which is also in my strategy. So I mean, it wasn't a takeaway session today or a conversation today, but more about a. This is where I think we're going and where I think people need to think of what people need to think about. And, on that note, my kids are home, so I hope you have a good day or a good week, and hopefully I'll talk to you next week. Stay tuned. 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.
