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 Implementation Gap: Why Brand Strategies Fail
In this episode, I discuss the common hurdles in brand strategy and why many strategies fail to connect with their intended audience. I touch on the importance of a solid brand foundation, the psychological influences on consumer behaviour, and the need for consistency in branding. I break down what's needed to develop effective brand strategies and highlight the significance of understanding audience needs and emotional drivers. The conversation also covers the importance of measuring brand strategy success and executing plans effectively for long-term brand building.
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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 say, 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. Hey, welcome to this week's episode of brand and butter. I butter, brand and butter, oh God, off to a flying start. This week.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about strategy and why they fail. I think that a lot of people think that what they're planning is going to work when, in actual fact, it never hits the market the way it's intended, and then people blame the strategy for not working. So there are a few things that I want to touch on, because I've had this conversation recently where, interestingly enough, I've just done a masterclass and one of the women in there mentioned that she was having difficulty speaking to her audience. Where they would. They felt different as people to who their audience was, that was buying from them, and there was a bit of a disconnect there and it all actually comes back down to the original strategy, the strategy of the brand, the strategy of the content that you're putting out, the marketing strategy and then, obviously, the disconnect between why that feels so difficult and it usually comes down to this the initial strategy of the business, when you feel that the messaging that you're putting out isn't connecting anymore. There needs to be some reflection. There also needs to be weighing up of why it could. It might not be that there's a messaging problem at all. It could be that you're on the wrong channel or that you just aren't being visible enough, and so we change and we change and we change, hoping to get more views or visibility, when in actual fact there's other things at play. So I want to kind of break down why strategy fails, the implementation gap and, I guess, finding connection points or opportunities really when. From a brand strategy point of view, because obviously there are strategies for multiple things you have a content strategy and a marketing strategy, which is obviously a subset, and we have strategies for each individual thing we push out. So it really is and if you don't maybe look into that, that's a system, everything is a system, right, so we need to look at it Like if you were to run a marathon.
Speaker 1:I use this all the time. If you were to run a marathon and you had no plan, you're just going to be winging it, winging whatever session that you need to run when you're training for a marathon. They not only go. I only know this because my husband is a marathon runner, but I was doing half Ironman. So I've never done a marathon but I've done multiple half Iron, a half Ironman, three multiple we'll count that as multiple and I've done about seven half marathons. So totally digress.
Speaker 1:The point is that you can't just run that and if you do, you'll be very sore and there'll be some hero that goes I can run that. Great, good for you. You'll still be sore. You need to look at it like I'm about to run a really long distance and I haven't been running this distance before. So I need to put a plan in place. The plan then goes in blocks depending on how far out you're running that race, and it's catered to different things or different objectives based on that block. For my, I won't talk about marathon, because obviously that's my husband's thing. I'll talk about what my block was for my half Ironmans, and that was essentially that I had to train to swim, I had to train to bike and I had to train to run, and all three of those were different strategies because there are three different sports there.
Speaker 1:Yep, so if we were looking at the running element, most people just go, just run. That's actually not what you need to do at all. You have to have a speed session, a tempo session, an endurance session. So you have a long run, which means that you just run for a really long, comfortable time, and then you have a speed session, which is the same thing but opposite. You run really fast for certain periods of time and that's a session. And then the other one is tempo running, so you might run fast and you drop back to race pace or you know. Whatever it is that you're doing, and this is important because all three have different objectives to serve the greater good. So the speed sessions obviously help you to run faster, the endurance sessions help you to run longer and the one in between helps you to deal with the different variances of how your heart rate's going to go, whether you're going to run, walk or whether you're going to run the whole way.
Speaker 1:There's different ways to do it based on who you are, and the same thing is, it's the exact same approach when it comes to a brand. So everything that you do should have some kind of strategy in a plan. It's all a system. If you don't have one, you won't get the results that you need. And but then it comes to the fact, when sometimes it can be too structured, that you can't execute. So, put simply, when we have a brand strategy, the brand strategy is what sets the business foundations. It's who you are, it's what you do, it's what you're about and it's who you're here for.
Speaker 1:These are really important aspects to take into consideration, because a lot of people don't have this in place. They think they do, but they don't. All of this actually derives memory, or it comes from a place of. It doesn't derive memory, but it comes from a place of memorability. So having a really strong DNA enables people to remember you, which is when the memory structures are formed. So there's also psychological things that you need to take into consideration that people will buy. Unconsciously. They are influenced in ways that you don't even realize.
Speaker 1:So, to give you an example, there was a music study done on a wine shop. It was a British wine shop in 1999. I am not doing a good job of talking today. Basically, what they did was they tested certain music that was playing in the background when people were making a purchase. On one day they played French music and the French wine purchases went up 77%. And on another day, just to test it out, they played German music and German wine purchases went up 73%. The important thing about this is that only 6% of customers were aware that their music influenced their choice.
Speaker 1:The key insight here is that subconscious cues drive decisions and not rational features. So when we're guessing, we actually don't have the intel to even guess from. Even if someone says to you that they're buying from you for a certain reason, it doesn indicate that that is the the true reason as to why they're buying from you. So what I like to look at is there's elements of strategy that we need to understand, and that's how we're going to do things, why we're going to do things and who we're doing them for. And when we look at brand, it's about who the business is as an identity and how we're trying to communicate that message to the audience. And so then we set the strategy in place. The strategy is essentially there to create those foundations, to set associations. So brand is a memory and we're trying to create the right associations so that, when the time comes, our brand is considered part of the consideration set. Considered considerations Yep, you get me. Basically, the consideration set is how your brand recognizes certain brands in certain spaces. To give you an idea, if I said to you I want you to go out tomorrow and buy a TV instantaneously, you would have brands that pop up in your head, probably top three, and that will be indicative of the narratives that you've seen, the people that you know, the brands that you're aware of. All of that stuff comes into play. That's what marketing does. Marketing helps to amplify your brand and your brand.
Speaker 1:Associations are the things that you're trying to market. So, for instance, if we look at triggering the right associations, we need to be looking at, say, visual cues, which could be packaging signs, and that helps to trigger the emotional connection and what emotional space that you're sitting in. So when they look at your brand visually, what perception is that setting? Are you edgy, are you luxurious? Like what is it that they're getting in that short period of time when they make that snap judgment? We also need to understand that visual isn't just about graphics, it's also about the atmosphere. It's about the experience of if you are a bricks and mortar store. There's shop fit out. That's why people spend thousands in shop fit outs. That's why people spend thousands in shop fit outs. It's the features that you have in spaces. It's the visual elements, things that they can see murals, you know, interior decorations, all of this type of stuff.
Speaker 1:If you're bricks and mortar and you know what your website looks like is obviously digital, but that's kind of the things that we need to take into consideration. Lighting you know that it's the sensory stuff. But then we look at verbal cues language patterns. They connect to your customer's identity and stories that place your brand in emotional context. We also need to look at experiential cues, which is similar to what I just said before, but we're looking more like you know, a service style that reflects your brand personality. What are the things that you can do that can amplify your brand personality? Or what are the things that you can do for event purposes that can demonstrate your brand's emotional role? Like, what kind of event could you put on if you were, you know, capable of doing? Doing something? You need to look at cultural cues. So what references are you connecting to your customers, values in terms of positioning. How are you looking at that in terms of the cultural conversations that we're having right now? So I guess, if we go back to looking at the, you know the music study every touch point influences a choice. Sound touch, how, the quality of the material that you're using with your product all of this stuff shapes the associations to how people remember your brand, whether it's high-end or whether it's cheap. You know, when you get a wedding invitation and the paper is really thin and nasty versus whether it's really thick and luxurious and textured, that tells me everything that you need to know about. You know the vibe and, whether they intend it or not, it's already set the first intention.
Speaker 1:I used to do wedding invitation that's where your one and only came from the name the name years and years before prior to starting anything to do with brand. Because I was working at my old agency and I was doing this on the side, because I got engaged and was like all the wedding invitations suck. So I made a company and then created brand, created invitations that I felt weren't for me and it went really well, and then I just didn't like working with brides, to be fair. So I just stopped. And then obviously, people were asking me for branding because they liked my designs and that's obviously what I was doing in my old agency and that's how it started. Well, there's a you know little bit of a scenic route for you, but yeah, it is. And so, understanding that design interaction because the invitation was the first, the first thing that you see about that wedding, and if the stationery is off, it's already set the perception of what the wedding could potentially be. So, yes, I did brand my whole wedding, that's exactly what I did.
Speaker 1:But, um, I guess we need to look at it from what makes us different to what emotional need do we have that can fulfill our customers that they can't get anywhere else? And when we look at that, most brands fail to connect because they're functionally identical to every other brand in the customer's mind and people make decisions in like 90 seconds and they're 90% done in the subconscious. Brands focus on what they do, not how they make people feel, and that's when they fall down. So we need to look at it from a holistic point of view and this is where we've developed our framework, which is the D3 framework. We call it the D3, d3 framework because it's three D's. Obviously it's dissect, which is like the psychological response.
Speaker 1:We look at auditing, competitor analysis, behavioral analysis, a market fit. We look at the conversations, positioning other things that are happening, the general cultural conversation, all of that in the first phase, and we a report, we find stats and we find research and love. I love that stuff. Then we move into part two, which is DNA, that's the identity development. So that's where you really start to build the strategic foundation and we look at the psychology of the brand connection itself. So basically that brand connections happen at that emotional level first, and so we need to really like plug in that emotion in the initial strategy. And so what we need to do there is look at what type of brand personality that we need and how that attracts the ideal customer and what purpose means.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people will crap on about purpose not being a thing. But purpose is like the driver. It's like why, why are you in business, why are you here? And one of the reasons that started your one and only was obviously because I wanted to do brand, but a thing that I put down on a post-it note which I still have and I still refer to these days eight, almost nine years later is don't put shit to market. I don't want to be someone that just contributes to noise. I want to be someone that helps brands become something awesome and work with brands that are doing good things, which is essentially how I've ended up exactly where we are today and we're getting really value led clients come through. I'm so excited with what we've done. I haven't put any of the work out because it's obviously a lot of work, but I've got so much stuff to show and I'm really excited because it's so much better than what we were doing before in terms of alignment.
Speaker 1:So what we need to do is we look at purpose statements that actually serve a purpose. They're there to be so much bigger than the product that you do. Product isn't to full transparency. There's multiple versions of branding. We have product branding, business branding, we have systems branding, we have campaign branding and we have, you know, personal branding. There's multiple things to that. So business branding as a whole is like the architecture, and branded architecture is how that brand looks. It is exactly what you think it is.
Speaker 1:If you look at coke, there's obviously subsidiaries of the coca-cola business, the coca-cola company that span off that with sub brands, and so we look at. We look at the brand itself and how it can evolve and all of the multiple plugs that we have to fill in those spaces. And that's an important thing that we take into consideration at the beginning phase as well. If there are multiple areas that we need to take into consideration, what's the primary or the master brand and then what are the sister brands or the subsidiaries that sit underneath that? And how do we brand that? And product is just the thing that you do. The brand can continue without you. We still know Blockbuster. That's a memory. They're not in business anymore, but we still know Blockbuster. So that's an important thing to remember.
Speaker 1:And I guess what you would say is how would you describe your brand to a friend? This is where personality comes in. So we've got to start looking at I guess how you show up is indicative of all of these fine layers of the strategy. Before you even move into content strategy or marketing strategy, you need to know brand strategy, because it's, and then, before that, you even need to know business strategy. What is the purpose of your being in business? Why are you here? And they all kind of cross over slightly, but brand is essentially answering if the business wants to be in X place, this is the identity that we're going to be leading in to do it, and then the marketing is the intention on how we're going to do it and they all come together.
Speaker 1:And so when we look at the brand identity aspect, we're looking at it from, I guess, energy level and communication styles and social roles and values, and you know how we show up in that space and and having all of that there in terms of, um, who you are as as an identity yourself, but then also having the audience psychology and, uh, who they are in terms of demographics and psychographics, and psychographics being more in the belief system phase. So if we look at demographics, we're looking at, I don't know, say, a woman, that's 25 to 50, income of 75 grand lives in the bush, don't know, that's that's demographics, age, sex, all that stuff. The psychological stuff, the psychographic stuff, I should say sorry, is like identity drivers and you know how they see themselves and emotional needs, so what they're seeking to feel, and decision drivers, so what motivates them to act. In cultural context, what movements and values do they align with? This one is so massive right now.
Speaker 1:Keep trying to talk about cultural intelligence, because this is a big, big big thing in terms of product alignment, brand alignment. So basically, your messaging should make your customer, or your ideal customer more specifically, think like does this brand understand? This brand understand me? Not, does it it should? This brand understands me. This is made for someone like me and this aligns with who I want to be. So demographics tell you who they are, psychographics tell you why they choose, and emotional needs will drive purchasing decisions more than rational benefits. The cultural alignment creates stronger brand loyalty than product satisfaction, and specificity in targeting increases conversion rates and reduces marketing waste.
Speaker 1:So we really want to be looking at all of these finer details as we're developing out the strategy, as we move into why strategy fails. It's really when you go to all the effort so you could be creating all of the right things to be looking at in terms of building the strategic framework, so you could have the bridges. So it's how do you get from the strategy to the audience, and that's when you need to understand the audience, because this is where most people go. This is what we do, this is what we're about, and you're like great, do you know how to bridge that to connect with your audience and this is where most of the time they fail. So if you look at, I guess, the four connection pillars, is sensory connection, so you look at visual identity that triggers immediate recognition, packaging that communicates personality, your physical appearance, obviously that reinforces the brand memory. Then you've got two, which is like emotional connection, so stories that resonate with customer experiences. You've got language that reflects their inner dialogue, moments that validate their identity and choices. And then you've got three, which is social connection and that's experiences that strengthen relationships, reasons to share and recommend or community around those shared values.
Speaker 1:I've just done a series this week on the Ben and Jerry's story, which obviously leads back to the podcast episode I did last week, but I'm talking about those in like little micro details which talks about why they essentially blew up their brand and that was all about shared values. Fun fact one of the founders, or original founders, has moved away from the brand because they are moving in a different direction and they don't like it. So they've come out publicly only just today and said something about it, which adds perfectly to the end of my series. That I will do because I spoke on the court case of Ben and Jerry's taking their mother brand, unilever, to court over falsifying their or not falsifying anything. They were taking them to court because ben and jerry stipulated in their contract when they were purchased that they needed to keep their social activism up with the brand and unilever dropped their ceo for being too socially political or politically aligned for social activism. And yeah, that's a whole thing. So you can go and have a look at that. But yeah, and obviously still value aligned to what they're doing, which is a real shame that the brand but yeah, that's a whole thing. Anyway, again, I digress, it's what I do.
Speaker 1:But number three, so that's obviously social connection and cultural connection, sorry. So if we're looking at it, I guess we need strong brands to activate the multiple connection types. At the same time, you need to kind of have all of those crossing over and different customers also connect through different pillars. So it might not be values. Who gives a crap is a really good example. They have really cool packaging, they've got a really cool personality. They've also got an altruistic approach. So obviously they're doing a social approach to buy this and we give by. What is it by? What is it by? I forget what it's called the giving back. That's what it is Slipped my mind completely. They've got a giving back element, but it's also going towards something that's for the greater good. So there's multiple ways that you could answer that. It might not be for the social aspect. You might just be like, hey, they've got cool toilet paper or hey, it's recyclable toilet paper.
Speaker 1:There's actually a lot of things that they've done there in terms of value stacking or association stacking for positive outcomes, and then we need to also then check that everything is consistent across the board. It's all good to say one thing over here and then another thing over here, and what things do when they're not consistent is it breaks trust, and in order to gain trust, things need to be the same. People need to have that routine and feel. This is why the society is so stuffed up at the moment is because there is no consistency. Everything feels like something new is happening every day. So people don't feel safe. They don't feel psychologically safe and it's creating everyone to feel really stressed and anxious. It's the same thing with brands is when they do something out of pocket or out of alignment, everyone goes what the hell? And yeah, so people need consistency for safety in order to want to buy from your brand. So you need to eliminate that risk.
Speaker 1:It's a really important thing that you need to test each touch point as well. So which connection pillars do they activate? So you know, do you know which clients or which customers are aligning to which activation? That's something that you need to take into consideration. You also need to find your unique connection points. So each industry has connection points and it's finding whether they're coming through those connection points and then finding out whether they're underutilized spaces. So you know it might be that it's finding out whether they're underutilized spaces. So you know it might be that it's really stereotypical, like each industry has their own categories. Right that you should be good at Industry standard. They say so what are the standards for your industry? And then, having a look at what's not happening, what could be happening and how are there ways for you to enter that space.
Speaker 1:So when you've got all of that done, I needed to kind of give you that to understand why the strategies fail. Is that usually it's because the they never. Well, did you know? Did you know that 67% of strategic plans never get implemented? Crazy, I can tell you. I probably fit into that. Probably 30% of it.
Speaker 1:And I think it's because we think we're trying to guess what customers want, right? We don't want to spend time on something that's not going to work. The problem is we don't know what's going to work. We're just assuming, everyone's assuming. Even data can change. Vanity metrics obviously skew this as well.
Speaker 1:If you don't think you're performing because there's not enough views, then you know you think you're performing because there's not enough views, then you know you go and change your whole strategy in order to fix that. Within actual fact, our engagement has never been lower on Instagram at the moment, and we've had our, we've had the highest conversion rates in the last month, so people are coming. So the content that we are putting out, while it's not reaching many people, it's reaching the right people, and that's all that matters to me right now. And you know, then there's an ad strategy that you need to bring in, which I'll talk about in a moment. So when you create your brand strategy, that then dictates how you show up in your marketing and how you show up in your content and how you answer people and how you talk to people and how you show up and what you align with and what you value, and all of those things matter. So if we don't have the original brand strategy sound and set every single thing after that, it's like a domino boom, boom, boom, boom. It'll all fall down.
Speaker 1:So that's why I say to everyone and I keep harping on about why brand strategy is so important because if you miss that first step, it's like not training for the right thing for the marathon or for the half Ironman, whatever we're training for, the next things aren't going to matter. So the shoes aren't going to matter, because you're not running the right race, it's. Or if you're not increasing muscle, like you're not going. You know what I mean. Like I don't need to go into detail about that. You get the point. If you're not doing the right thing from the beginning, or setting the frame for the house, if you're not laying the slab, the frame will fall down. So it is really about all of these step-by-step things. It's like it will, it's like a stepping stone and whenever we unravel someone's brand strategy, it's almost always at the end comes down to someone missing just just a slight step and you go oh, there it is, plug it and you fix it.
Speaker 1:So 90% of businesses fail to execute their strategy effectively. This is, I see this all the time with brand strategy. I give someone a brand strategy, they then change it because they think that they know better, not realizing that the brand strategy takes years. It's like ongoing, consistent things keeping things the same If you don't. Too many people want impulsive change. It's like the weight loss industry If you don't see something change, they try something quick. That's not hating anyone that needs to do something quick, but it is very much. People are impatient. They want things to happen fast and when you can sell something quick, obviously that's when things go off. But sustainability is always what's going to be important. It's the long-term messaging. And so again, we've started to really tick back up again and it's been because we've two years consistently saying the same thing and it just so happens that now we're in a time where the conversation is aligning and that was obviously future-proofing.
Speaker 1:But the gap is usually between knowing and doing is where most brands fail. So you know what to do, but it's articulating what's up here and bringing it out here and getting it to the world. That usually is broken because we're trying to think that we know what people want, when it's usually like three or four steps back. We know a lot about our industries, so we fail to see what people want unless we've done our research and we do our data mining and all of that type of stuff and we ask people, and even then it can change. So that's really important to know, um, and when it comes down to really figuring it out, you kind of have to have a plan. You have to execute the plan. You have to.
Speaker 1:This is why campaign periods they can go from anywhere from 10 to 12 weeks and it's because they take time. Right, people are being consumed by so many messages over and over and over again that you've got all these things coming at them and they're getting overwhelmed. And so when you're saying the same message over and over and over and over and over and over again, you need that time. Especially if you're trying to sell something, there's a product launch or there's a brand launch or you're doing something. We need to break them into quarterly campaigns, which is why you have quarterly marketing plans and strategies. This is why your marketing people come in. They go okay, what's our plan for the next three months? This is the goal for the three months. We're then going to do everything in those three months to now lead the customer or the client to do the thing we want them to do. At the end, what's the objective and that's what you do with a strategy is you create the strategy and then you execute the strategy.
Speaker 1:If you don't execute the strategy, you're going to be doing these little like I'm going to go buy some new shoes to go and run a marathon. Well, you're not doing your long run or you're not doing your speed run and by the end of it you're actually not going to hit the marathon or the half marathon to the speed or the quality that you want because you have tried to jump around. I can guarantee this. Even I do this. It's just a human nature thing. It really does take discipline to stick to the strategy. So I have stuck to my long-term strategy. I've changed different ways of doing it, but the strategy has remained sound has for the whole eight years being in business. You know in what we do, we've repositioned and we're targeting new people, but everything has come down to that Don't put shit to market and who we're in alliance for and who we're here for and why we're working the way we do. So it's all just. It's essentially just gotten stronger over those years.
Speaker 1:So if we're looking at, like, creating a plan, this is where your monthly content plans come into place, because it's creating, like the foundation action. So build strategic clarity first. What are your quick wins? So what are your easy implementation things that you can do to show immediate results, like, how can you do that? And then look at the long-term brand builds, so investments that compound over time. So that's the way. The quick wins are your tactical marketing approaches and your long term is your brand building. It's your strategic brand building, and you need both messages to go out at the same time. And so, if you were to put that into marathon terms, the tactical quick win is buying new shoes right, getting the watches, buying the quick dry outfit, whereas the long-term builds are your strategic messaging who we are, what we do, what we're about, who we're here for. This is what we do, this is what we're about. You know all of that stuff happening behind the scenes the process, the case studies. It's the trust building phases. The case studies, it's the trust building phases, and then eventually, when someone's ready, you've chipped away over and over to build that trust that you then become that brand that sits within the consideration set.
Speaker 1:If you stop marketing, you stop being visible. Trust me, I know I've done this. I went through my period where there was a whole bunch of stuff going on and it was evident that that's what it was. So I've had to pick a whole bunch of stuff up. If you're looking at this now from a paid ads point of view which I think needs to be part of most brands marketing strategies now, because organic reach is really difficult to achieve, people will do it and they're obviously still making money from it. Um, but I think paid ads is a way to, once you know your audience, to be able to target really specific messaging to them so that they become visible.
Speaker 1:So we're not sure where someone is in their buying journey. When we're looking to promote organically, we're just hoping that someone sees it, whereas when you're targeting your ads specifically, whereby we're just hoping that someone sees it, whereas when you're targeting your ads specifically, whereby we're targeting them through behaviors and interests and everything that they're aligned with based on behaviors, so which I just said so you're more than likely to get warm, hot leads come through because they're in that mind space and that's when they're going to take action. It's like Google ads. They're obviously searching for someone to buy and you then come up with the ad. So they're already looking, versus jumping on Instagram to see some reels or some memes and some entertainment and then your brand stuff comes up. They might just not be ready then Doesn't mean it didn't work, they just may not be ready.
Speaker 1:You also find that pockets of the year that more people are buying. I know that now we're heating up. I said this to my husband the other day. I said, oh, we're about to enter the busy season. Sure enough, in the last two days, bang, bang, two massive leads came through and it's about using those quiet periods to build up and know that the work that you're doing in those quiet periods is essentially building to those longer periods.
Speaker 1:So I guess if you're looking to measure your impact, you need to kind of look beyond the vanity metrics and see the real results, right. So you've got to look at brand awareness percentages and they brand awareness and if we know where the brand works always comes from long term. So the way I say it's like everyone's like oh, the brand didn't work. I'm like how long have you given it? Because sometimes it takes people like so long to start. They've got to unlearn things, relearn things. They're experiencing multiple things coming at them on a daily basis and that's really important to know. So it really is just about um understanding how to measure understanding, recognition. So if you go and design something, maybe run it by people seeing the emotional response to things.
Speaker 1:This is when our research comes into it. How do people feel Like, are they feeling the way that you want them to? And then we also look at like the cultural signal effectiveness, so like are you connecting with intended values, the decision influence? So how are you? Or how intended values the decision influence? So how are you, or how do you influence choice versus consideration? And obviously the memory structure, so like how quickly do people think of you in the category which is the consideration sets, recognition?
Speaker 1:So when you're looking at it over time, you've got to look at like increased referral rates, like if you know that it's working. Higher conversion rates. Improved, improved customer lifetime value, so obviously they're staying around for a lot longer and their their amount they spend with you goes up. And then faster sales cycle. So you know you're not, it's not taking you a long time to get a client over. You can sell them pretty quickly. We also need to take into consideration the economic climate. Um, people will say, oh, you know, people are still buying. Of course they're still buying, but people aren't buying as much as they were. So if you've been in business for a while, you would know that the things have stagnated and so, while you still can get people to buy from you, it's just a lot harder to get them to. So, yeah, it does take good marketing, good messaging, making sure that the marketing is down pat and consistent so you do get those sales in. Obviously, once you start, it's like a steamroll.
Speaker 1:You do need an action plan. You need to establish baseline measurements. You need to track your lead indicators so what's the emotional response? Monitor the lagging indicators, so the business results. And you also need to look at regular assessments and strategy adjustments. So, while I say you don't update like do the strategy for 12 weeks or 10 weeks, whatever it is, and see how it works or see what's working If you find that something's drastically not working, you always have to measure up to how many hits to the website, how many followers you're getting or how many people are messaging you, signing up to your stuff.
Speaker 1:And then you've got to also look at some things like? Are you putting the right things out for people to access, like the other day when I was realizing that my email rate was slowing down and I'd taken my pop-up off my website and forgot to put an access point for them to sign up to the email. Since doing that, it's already generated email people onto the email list massive forehead slap. So it is about just monitoring and making sure that everything's in place. But my end rule for you is make sure when you're doing a strategy, that you stick to it, don't just keep changing it, because it's creating inconsistencies. At the end of the day, you want that compound effect of doing the thing over and over and over and over again so people know that you're showing up, when you're showing up, how you're showing up what you're saying, and that creates the trust and that takes time. So, anyway, that's it for today.
Speaker 1:I hope you liked that episode. Again, as always, if you have any questions, please slip in to our email. Also, if you want to score yourself, we have created the Brand Gap Finder, which is our scorecard, and that gives you a long list of things to assess yourself with and rank yourself with, and on completion, you will get the obviously your score when you calculate and the following email will give you a link so that you can see what you need to do and some actions. Post that and you can download that in the show notes. For now, that's it for this week. I hope you like that one and I will chat to you 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
