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
Brand Positioning Gold: Mining Your Opportunity Zones
What if your brand's perfect position is hiding in plain sight? In this episode, I discuss how to map competitors, understand customer psychology, and find the gaps others have overlooked. Learn why "great customer service" isn't a differentiator and how our 4 opportunity zones can create your unique market space. Plus, the $50 million Tropicana mistake that proves why positioning research matters, and how your business can map a path to distinction that competitors can't copy.
PS. Want the same research framework I've used with clients who've finally found their space and broken through their growth plateaus.
Check out our Market Advantage Gap Workbook is part of our extensive step-by-step process we use with our brand development clients and is made available at an accessible investment.
Inside, you'll get:
- The competitor positioning map template that reveals untapped market opportunities
- Customer psychology frameworks that go beyond basic demographics
- All 4 opportunity zones fully explained with practical examples
- Research methods that uncover what your competitors are missing
Visit https://youroneandonly.com.au/
Follow YO&O on IG https://www.instagram.com/youroneandonly_au/
Follow Tara on IG https://www.instagram.com/iamtaraladd/
Connect with Tara on https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarajoyladd/
Sign up for the Design Mind Theory Email – See how other Brands use psychology to nail their strategies.
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. You're One and Only. Hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Brand and Butter. I am going to be talking to you about our process that we have here at your One and Only, and that is our D3 framework, and talking about ways that we dive into these. Think of a diagram, a Venn diagram, and you have dissect DNA and design, hence the D3 framework. What it is is our approach to understanding brands and understanding more business really, and the internal dynamics of how to build out something that is authentically aligned, and not only to the business itself but to the audience that they're trying to attract. The biggest thing that I hear is how do we stand out, how do we get people's attention? And a lot of that comes down to positioning and differentiation, which most people have no idea about for their own business and you could say what do you do that's different to someone else, and they will give you something like oh, we've got great customer service, or we are cheaper or I don't know really, we have quality, and it's like these are like basic. They should be basic, fundamentals in your business. They're not specialty or differentiation. So it's really finding that unique difference and it's actually a lot easier than you think.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people believe that this has to be some big, creative, disruptive thing and it just doesn't. It's really coming down to data, it's coming down to conversation and it's understanding timing and where we're sitting at the moment in terms of culture and societal conversations and really building in that alignment. When you understand this, trust me when I say everything will open up for you. It is something I've even done on our own business and it's hard to do your own stuff because you are biased, so you do miss things. You seem to ask yourself the same things or do the same things repetitively because it's all you know. So, even asking AI, if you're working with AI as a solopreneur or you know just because you can, you will find that again, you will only prompt it as good as the information that you know, and even saying you're a social media analyst or you're a brand strategist, or that just won't work because what also comes into play is experience and emotion and it's just not built there yet. So I know this because when I'm doing things with AI because, yeah, I use it all the time when I say to you I'm getting up to like revision 18, that's with my knowledge and AI at the same time. So if you're not getting what you need from it, know that it's not your fault. It is simply because it is not an answer, it is a tool. So, coming back to why you should listen to me, because you're probably like well, what do you know more than me? Well, I have had 18, 18, 18. Yep, that made sense.
Speaker 1:18 years of experience in the branded marketing space. 10 of those years were in a well across Sydney ad agencies. So I got used to working really fast, really quickly, and having to think of things like the umpteenth hour, like it's 4pm, we need to get a 5pm press ad in. You know when they used to do newspaper ads, you're like you have to have this in the press by this date. Blah, blah, blah. Quick. You know all that type of stuff. You know, sending other agencies things on CDs like Viacoria. That's where we're at. But now we're in the days where we can just upload and refresh, which is great, but yeah, it was coming from those days working with higher end brands, dealing with multiple branding guidelines across the board. So you get a real feel of what you should be putting in there and what shouldn't. Be how brands correspond like tactical marketing versus strategic marketing. Be how brands correspond like tactical marketing versus strategic marketing.
Speaker 1:Um, different forms of copywriting, different forms of design, different departments. There's mass like when I say to you there is multiple departments in a big agency, you would not believe it. There's like an above the line team who do like the creative that goes across tv and radio and print and you know, I would assume like online now, and then they do that and then that is then repurposed across multiple areas. So they do LAM, which is like local area marketing, where they will do that campaign but they will put the suburb in it and go hey, blah, blah, blah, hey Brisbane or hey, melbourne, and yeah, it's to target, you know, because it primes you. And so there's all of these different pieces that are involved in, um, I guess, a wide stream campaign, and then you look at the studio team which would do, you know, the repurposing of that. So they would create that and repurpose that across a magnitude of different sizes, and then there's, like a production agency, that they didn't produce them across many, many, many different sizes. So there's all of these different departments digital departments, you know, social departments yeah, a lot, there's a lot, right.
Speaker 1:So when I started your One and Only in 2017, I got to work in the brand space because that's what I had been studying. So I'd done media comms, art direction, copywriting. I was really balancing between both of them for a while, but I ended up going down the art direction route. So, trained as a designer, moved into that space of big thinking. Brand strategy and development was something that I did with ad school, did a lot of courses with ad school, which is industry accredited, and then, yeah, studied media comms via correspondence with Griffith University, and then just did a lot of little things in between.
Speaker 1:This is something that I've always done is a constantly, you know, upskill, and I remember early on, someone said to me expand horizontally, not vertically, and I was like that sounds so weird, but I did, and that absolutely saved my ass. So, having dabbled in multiple different things, so I studied web development and code. So I actually can code. I hate it, but I can do it and what that actually does is it gives me an insight. So when someone comes to you and says, oh hey, I need to get this done, and then you can brief someone in, you can really understand the language that they're using so you don't get taken for a ride. So I've got multiple areas of expertise and then, obviously, over the last you know, four, four years, I've been studying behavior um, something I've always been really interested in, but behavioral economics, which is basically the emotion of how people buy.
Speaker 1:So while we would say something like, uh well, the stock market recently was a perfect example is did anything happen? No, but that was emotions that drove that result of the stock market. Nothing had actually happened yet. It was simply this is doom and gloom, this is what's about to happen, and people used their emotion to figure out where they wanted to put their money. And again we saw it again when they paused the tariffs and then they went back up again. So it's understanding the differences between logic and emotion and, to give you a full transparency we use. 90% of our decisions are done unconsciously, so that's emotion and without knowing this, you are missing a big part of your communication strategy. So that was something I dived into, studied behavioral neuroscience, which is like cellular level, which I mean, didn't really work too much in this space, but it was super interesting to know because I'm an ADHDer. So it was just like lots of different things that I had been studying. So, yeah, cleaned it out of the park and started to embed it into you Want it Only. So, yeah, cleaned it out of the park and started to embed it into you Want it Only.
Speaker 1:What I am really interested in is understanding biases, the way people work, why we think certain things, and when you know these things, it's much easier to communicate with people. For instance, I remember doing a masterclass recently, I mean, of course. I remember I mean sort of, and the conversation was about Uber Eats and I was mentioning about, you know, buying Uber Eats and what that actually means, and blah, blah, blah. It's like a time-saving thing, and one of the girls afterwards posted a story and there was no hate in it. She was just like I don't understand when people buy Uber Eats. I've just never done that. I just find it weird. You can go out and get it yourself. And I was like, do you have children? And she said no. And I said and there is the issue. So I buy Uber Eats on the occasion because it saves me time. It's time is something that you can't get back. So spending money to save myself time so that I can spend time with my kids while someone else is dealing with the tedious task of making dinner, bringing it to the door hot and ready to go, so that I can spend that time with my kids, and that's emotion. So it's spending money to buy time, not spending money because it's easy to get. That's just another part of it. So when you understand these psychographics and the reasons for people's motivations as to why they buy, then you're much more able to create messaging and communication that will resonate at a much deeper level.
Speaker 1:So, coming back to the whole purpose of the podcast today is the three parts of our framework dissect, dna and design and today I'm talking about the dissect, which is insight and research, and so what we do in this phase is basically piece together the puzzle. So what it is is that most people have answers. It's not that they don't know what they're doing, and this is the problem. People think that they have the answer, but they actually haven't got the pieces that connect them together. I call them the bridge gap, bridging the gap. And you may have all of this information on side A and then all of this information on side C, but no idea on side B. There's only two sides. You know what I mean? Well, it depends. We're talking triangles now, okay, and no, yeah, not enough on side B, and so you can't get there because you haven't figured out the piece yet. Triangle was a stupid reason because you can just go one way. Anyway, moving on, you get the point.
Speaker 1:What we're trying to do is piece together that gap, and that comes through research and data. Data doesn't lie. Conversations don't lie. People are all out there saying the things that need to be said. The issue that I find with people is that they aren't going deep enough. So the way that we do it is we start with a competitor positioning map and if you haven't done one of these, we have this in our new digital product. I actually haven't released a digital product before like in terms of like a PDF, so I'm pretty excited about it and so far we've had some wild response from it. So I'm like people were just waiting for me to send this stuff out. And yeah, it's a document that I've poured my soul into because I genuinely want people to win. Like that is no bullshit. I genuinely want people to win and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 1:As someone that is all about DEI and equality, I wanted to start your One and Only with the intention of multiple people at the smaller level diversifying the income stream as a big F? You to the bigger corporations, just so that there's a bit of disparity in the way that we have wealth distributed. And also grassroots have much better ideas. They have these great ideas and you know, some people, without funding, can't ever get off the ground. So if I can somehow give them that step to move to Patsy with a digital product, then have at it. I know that we do one-on-ones, but they are sometimes out of people's reach, so I wanted to make sure that there was something there that people could access, and that is our Market Advantage Gap Workbook. So within this document, I have four core areas that we speak to, and they are the opportunity zones, essentially. So within the document, we speak to part one, all of the parts that are in the dissect stages of our process, you know, of our framework.
Speaker 1:I'm like totally just lost in my train of thought then, but I want to start with the competitor positioning mapping. So what we do here is we find all of the competitors. Now I know that a lot of people are like I don't want to look at my competitors. Well, it's kind of crucial that you do do this, and it's not that you're trying to be competitive. It's that you're literally trying to find a way that you differentiate, because if you think that you're the only person that a customer is looking at to work with, you are severely mistaken, and so, with that, you want to make sure that you become the only choice that they choose, and the only way that you can do that is by knowing what those around you are offering, and we have some amazing people in our space, and a lot of them are more centric around design.
Speaker 1:We do design, obviously it was what we've always done, but we're actually really focused in the strategic advantage now. So we're really heavily aligned with brand strategy and this part, which a lot of those other ones don't do, and if they do them, they don't do them to the depth, that we do them, and I know that because I've worked with many brands recently that have come from other places wanting this specific information. So what I see us as is, you know, in the space of larger agencies but targeting small to medium enterprise. And you know, I'm happy to tell people that because, at the end of the day, I've done a shite ton of study and years and years of experience to get to where I am today. So, you know, unless they're going to go and do the same thing, like, feel free, it's just, everyone does things in their own way. But that's where we really find that strategic advantage.
Speaker 1:And even if you don't use the design element we're working with people at the moment just building out the initial strategy Then that gives us ability to work with people that are other designers. So we work with other designers, work with other creatives, and it gives them the ability to then take that third part and do themselves based on the information that we've given them. So we work with competitor positioning. So you find what others are doing and usually put it on an axis, an X and Y axis, and at the top you might have expensive and at the bottom you might have affordable, and then you might have quality and quantity as an example. They're obviously not what we use. There's much more ways that you can execute that, but you put that on the map and then you start to plot down your competitors until eventually you start changing what's on the X Y axis until you find where you can fit on your own. And that takes time and that's fine, but it that's what we've got our, it's what we've got our document for, cause it actually breaks down how you can do that, which is a process.
Speaker 1:Part two is understanding customer psychology, and we do that, which is a process. Part two is understanding customer psychology, and we do that through an analysis. So what are they really seeking? This is psychographics 101. We have so many people out there at the moment that are telling you to understand pain points and pleasure points, but they don't tell you how to do that. Like, it's easy to find a pleasure and a pain point, what keeps them up at night. That stuff's great. How do you find that? A lot of that is through conversation. It's through research, analytics, it's through commenting and seeing what people are engaging with. Look at the competitors. What are they engaging with the most. All of these types of things are what build that understanding.
Speaker 1:Exactly what I said to you before about the Uber Eats and the emotion is that's just not going to be said. You have to know their way of life, their way of thinking and who they hang around and what they're reading and what they're consuming, because a lot of these narratives are what dictate how they buy. And without knowing that information, you're just guessing, and that's not ideal. So to get to where we are today, it's taken me a good 18 months, and I say that because I was testing different things, and when you know a lot about what it is that you do, it's hard to figure out what people actually want from you at times when you have such a diverse range of things that you can do for them. And so what I actually did was created my podcast and created the email list, which has been going for over a year now, and then same with the podcast nearly two years, maybe two years, I actually don't even know how bad is that. And so same with the podcast nearly two years, maybe two years. I actually don't even know how bad is that. And so what that's done is that it's given me a library of data.
Speaker 1:Without having that, I would not know what people want. I'm just winging it from a random social post and that could be that someone thought it was funny. It might not necessarily be that it's a want or a need. Then you have to manage your website traffic and analytics and figure out what people are actually gravitating to or if you go to an event. So there's all of these different things and metrics that you can align to, and that's why it's important to track. It's all good to go and create stuff, but if you have nothing to track your performance, then you're not ever going to know what's working for you.
Speaker 1:So finding out what people needed came from the over 12 months worth of content from the pod. You know the most downloaded episodes, and then you also have to take into equation ones that may have featured someone and obviously they've shared to their audience and their network. Therefore, you're going to get more reach and more engagement because it's had more visibility. But the general consensus is just to go by ones that are similar, right? So if I release one every week and I don't have anyone on it, it's like okay. So who, which ones were they inclined to listen to, and there's a definite pattern happening now to the point where I'm like I knew it and I nailed it, so I know exactly what my audience are looking for right now.
Speaker 1:On top of that, it's also then understanding the terminology. So just because they know that they want to know this thing or this topic doesn't mean that they're going to actually search for that terminology to find what it is that you're selling. It's coming from different ways. I remember when I first started, it was like logo maker, not logo designer. At the time, it was like logo maker was a word that was used and so you need to find this terminology to use so that you can be searchable and across many ways, many things right.
Speaker 1:So TikTok and Instagram are basically search engines. Now AI is now a search engine. I've been getting referrals from ChatGPT and things that allow people to search for you. So what are you saying in your SEO on your website, which is also a way for people to contact you that they can get in touch with you with? So it's understanding the customer and what their intentions are and how they consume media. So if you're trying to target and I've said this before you know a high professional business owner. Of course they're going to be on Instagram, but they're not looking for maybe not be looking for work on Instagram they may on the occasion, but sometimes they're opening that up for entertainment, whereas over on LinkedIn, that's work 101. So if you're not there and you're trying to target higher end you know professionals like that's a missed opportunity, in my opinion, and you're going to be spending all of this time executing work and time and effort on Instagram when your big people are over on LinkedIn and it's just understanding those dynamics. And now that again is different for everyone. So that's why you need to track your own data, because what works for someone may not work for you, which is why I find it hilarious that people say this is how I did, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:It's like you could have also gone to a networking event where you met someone and they came into, buy something from you and took you know, shared you to everyone. So it's like timing actually plays a role. Timing hard work. As obviously it's like timing actually plays a role. Timing hard work. Obviously it's not just you just winged it. You can't just get there and wing it. There is time work, consistency, sheer crazy determination, as I've said, and, obviously, community. So getting people to share advocates, word of mouth, reputation, credibility, all of that type of stuff. And so it's understanding the customer analysis, um the psychology of your customer, but it's also like finding the gaps that others miss.
Speaker 1:So when you're looking at a competitor analysis, you're wanting to make sure that you know you tick all the boxes that everyone else is doing, but you're also ticking the boxes that they're not doing, and there's ways to figure that out through reviews, like negative reviews, and what are people saying about them? Is there a consistency there? Um, what are people saying in conversations? Word of mouth, do some search? All of these things are really important for finding out the, I guess, the areas that you can step into. And this is from like a base level. It's also, I will say that the thing that got me into our own space was just assessing the market and pattern recognition. So, because I've been in the game for such a long time and you can see the market go up and down it happens all the time.
Speaker 1:This is the same kind of scenario that we were experiencing post GFC and the rise of, you know, social media and web 2.0 and user generated content. It's, we're in that exact same period and this is where everyone's like I don't know what's going on. It's because there's such a dramatic shift happening right now and what that does is aligns with culture. So we have our strapline, which is brands that breathe with culture, because brands do breathe with culture. Cultural relevance is so important to the conversation that you're leading.
Speaker 1:A good example of this is QR codes. No one gave a shit about a QR code prior to COVID. No one cared about them, but because that technology was needed during that time, they have now. Qr codes have now become, you know, common practice, and that's a perfect example of being ahead of your time or maybe being behind it. So it's understanding market viability. Timing is so important. Like we saw, anyone that had a really good online offering pre-covid would have profiteered, would have had no like no issue profiteering during that time. Obviously, marketing helps and all that stuff, but having something there when people needed it would have been beneficial. Anyone doing it after may not experience that rise dramatically because people behavior has changed. That doesn't mean that people aren't buying, I should say, but it's harder to do it than it was back then, mainly because everyone was inside and on their phones. So it is finding the trying to be ahead of the game, but also just watching the conversation, because it does happen. So it's all of this type of stuff.
Speaker 1:Now, a great example of a failure or a brand failure here is Chopper Kana. Anyone in the design space knows about this, but what they did was that they changed the packaging of their orange juice. They're obviously an orange juice company Well, not obviously. You didn't know that until I just said that. Then they changed the packaging of the front and everything changed quite a bit so that I just swallowed them. I was like perfect example of me going LA natural. What they did was they changed the cover, the packaging, so that the unconscious brain, which would normally scan the shelf for that visual it, had changed and they could not identify it. So their sales dropped dramatically because people they could not identify it. So their sales dropped dramatically because people simply could not identify that brand anymore. And they had to revert back and they did something again that was really similar and I was like have you guys not learned? But it's a really good example of understanding and the way out of that would have been to like do a focus group Like that's not even reliable 100% of the way out of that would have been to like do a focus group, like that's not even reliable 100% of the time, but it would have shown them. You know, and if they did do a focus group, maybe that wasn't good enough.
Speaker 1:To give you another example Mars have actually increased their sales on their Mars bar by 20% and they did that because they ran people through an FMCG machine, which is FMRR machine sorry, spitting out acronyms all over the shop. Basically, what that does is it monitors the behavior in your brain. So when they were looking at a whole bunch of different stimuli, it was obviously the receptors in their brain lit up and that's unconscious, right? We can't sometimes articulate what we're thinking. We're like we just don't know, I don't know, like we actually can't articulate what it is. And so what they found was the Mars bar glossy wrapper was impacting women purchases. So women were not buying the Mars bar as an impulse buy at the counter, because it felt like a guilty indulgence. They did not feel it felt dirty and they didn't feel good about it. And it wasn't until they changed the wrapper. Obviously there's environmental skews to that as well, but they changed the wrapper to be matte and completely shifted and it became more of an upmarket quality type purchase and it increased their sales. That is things that we're going to see happen over the next few years.
Speaker 1:The neuromarketing space is becoming really big and understanding the data in here and what you can access in terms of that is really important. But what we do here is find all these gaps and figure out how obviously a small business is not going to have the budget to go and run people through an fMRI machine, but it's basic understanding of how people think. Tropicana could have definitely done that, but again, before their time. We're talking about newly created technology, so what we do when we think about the psychology of pattern recognition is the different cognitive styles and how people process information, because there's obviously visual people are very visual there's auditory and there's written.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of different ways that people consume content, and this is a perfect example of that. So if you are a listener, you're more than likely to walk around with a podcast than you are to sit and scroll through your phone. Or you might be a doom scrollerer, and in which case that's where you kind of target those people. It's so important to know behaviors. I know that I have a blog, I have an email, I have a podcast, and that's not saying that you need to go out and do all of those things. By the way, that's like a lot, but it has been simultaneously, you know, drip fed and a lot of people listen to my podcast in terms of the building of the connection. So we get a lot of conversion through the podcast and that's because it's a longer form of content that people can build trust from.
Speaker 1:But also, I listen to podcasts as well, so I will do my hair in the morning and I'll have a podcast in my ear or an audio book, and that's important because if you're in the morning and I'll have a podcast in my ear or an audio book, and that's important because if you're understanding the demographics and which is also part of the psychographics, so to give you simply is demographics is who they are like age, sex, location, all of that type of stuff and the psychographics is you know the values and intentions and belief systems and all of those like internal drivers, and so when you actually understand these types of things, then you can figure out how to actually position your content, because if you're going out and you're putting your content out in all of these places that you know just simply won't hit. It doesn't mean that your content won't perform. It simply means that you just may be on the wrong platform, and we've seen this so much with a lot of the big content creators going. We put this on this one and we got 3000 likes. We put it over here and we've got a million likes.
Speaker 1:Try to diversify in a way that lets you test. I'm not talking about going out, and if you really want to be on a platform, then just own that platform and figure out how it works, because there are mechanics to it. It's not just about you know, hoping to God that you get organic content. There are ways to work the systems and that's when the tactics come in right. So you need the strategy, but you also have to know the tactics as well. But it's like all of these different things is understanding how to build out the opportunity zones, and so the four opportunity zones that we discuss is underserved, unaddressed value and delivery method. So you can find those in, or find that link in the show notes.
Speaker 1:I've dropped that in there for you to have a look at, but I believe this is something that will give you just something to think about. Even if you find one thing from this, it's just a different way of thinking. It also gets the ideas out of your head and onto the paper and helps you to understand, I guess, a different trajectory of how you can approach things. So what I will leave you with is that it's important for you to understand that if you're struggling, it may just be that you have not found that unique positioning yet and that's simply could be something like your culture at work. I know that the digital picnic do this really well. They have a neurodiverse culture. It's something that people really gravitate towards, because there's something that I said last week that we're moving from aspirational marketing, which is by this, and become that, to affirmational marketing, which is by this, because you belong here, and I think that that's what people are really needing to understand that the more that you are you, the more that people will buy, and if you are a bigger organization, it's the same thing. It's what culture that you lead by and how that comes out, and obviously, the way that you portray yourself as a brand and the intentions that you lead by and the actions that you take is to what's going to draw people to you.
Speaker 1:We will talk about this more in the coming weeks, but I hope that you liked this one. If you have any questions, please drop into my DMs. You know where to find me. If you don't. There's a little snippet afterwards that will tell you all the handles that you can find us on, and I hope you all didn't eat too much chocolate on that long weekend, because I just binned all mine yesterday because it was way too much, and I will talk to you all 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 yourwannanonly underscore au on Instagram.
