Brand and Butter

You’re not failing, you’re repositioning (and the answer is in your brand strategy)

• Tara Ladd • Episode 82

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In this episode I'm breaking down the significance of validation in personal and professional growth, emphasising the need for a solid brand strategy in today's changing landscape. I dive into my personal experiences with motherhood and business challenges, and connecting how these experiences shape identity and influence branding. We also tap into behavioural economics, generational perspectives on change, and the importance of understanding audience consumption patterns. Now more than ever we need to understand the evolution of brand strategy, the role of storytelling, and the necessity of competitor analysis in creating a strong brand identity.

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SPEAKER_00:

You're listening to Brandon Button. Straight talking occasionally in your face, no BS branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners. For those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and health caring association with human behavior and design thinking can impact the people saying thinking field. On your host, our life is sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable, and often unapologetically blind, founder, and creative director of brand and design agency, you'll want and only hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode of Brand and Butter. I kind of want to have a conversation with everyone today about validation. There is a real common thread at the moment about people feeling inferior or they're not doing good enough. And it is, well, it has come up multiple times this week. And I want to explain how this is a good sign for you. Essentially, it means you're probably in a period of growth or you're feeling things transition around you and you're identifying that something that you were doing before isn't working anymore. This is a really good sign to start to lay out the plan. So today I'm actually going to be talking to you about the importance of a good brand strategy and why a lot of people are needing to relook at theirs. There have been multiple conversations that I've had this week where a brand has come to us and said we need to get a visual identity, something needs to be updated. And then I ask the follow-up questions, which is, do you have a current brand strategy? In which case people say, Yes, but what do you mean? In which case, a lot of the times that means, no, we don't have one, or we think we have one, and we want you to verify what you think that that is. Now, when I can understand why a lot of people would feel, by the way, if you don't know what a brand strategy is, please do not feel like you don't know anything. There are so many different things and strategies and plans and all of these things that we need to think about now with our businesses that were never really needed before. And now even, well, before I used to suggest that brand strategy wasn't really important for, you know, startups, but now it's kind of it kind of is. And what I mean by that is if you're starting out and you don't know who your audience is, and you're trying to figure it out, you essentially build in motion. So you figure out who your audience is and you start to cater towards the right people and the wrong people based on trial and error. That's a startup phase. What we're actually seeing is brands that have been in business for 20 plus years coming to us saying we need an update. And when I say, Where is your brand strategy? they say we don't have one. Now, the interesting thing about this is that bigger brands haven't really needed to do anything because they've probably got reputation or the word of mouth has been going strong and it's brought them business from through collaboration and suppliers. All of a sudden, we're in a time period where loyalty is drying up unless you have a really strong presence. And I have noticed firsthand the impact of what visibility does. So in 2022, I really went through the shit with your one and only. I obviously came off the back of my firstborn having a liver transplant in 2020 and then having COVID, being like, you know, everyone had COVID, the year of COVID. And then obviously in Australia, if you're listening overseas, we had hard lockdowns here. We aren't in Melbourne, but we had a pretty long one in Sydney second time around. Poor Melbourne really copped it, actually. That's story for another day. During that in-between lockdown period when I thought everything was going to be great, I decided to fall pregnant with my thankfully I was lucky to do that, uh, with my second child, right when I probably needed to be focusing on the business, not realizing what we were about to endure. And so what I can relate to is that feeling of winning and then suddenly not winning. The business was going really well, we were scaling, we had probably one of the best years of 2020, and it was the actual knock-on effect from COVID that caused the issue. And then I had a newborn and I wasn't in the right frame of mind. And I was trying to manage a business with two little kids, and yeah, it really took a toll on my mental health. Uh, and that took a long time to get out of. And so I suddenly felt all of these plates drop. Control of everything that I once had was no longer there. And with that came parenthood, and also ADHD decided to spiral right at that time. Loved that for me. So I needed to really dive into micro areas to figure out what it was that I needed. Now, after having a baby, if you're a woman, you go through an identity crisis, and I mean not all, but I know a lot do. And it's one of I had an other an old podcast that I was recording during this period, which I stopped because I found myself using it like a journal. And it's fine, it's there, but it it actually people still message me about it. But the highest download on that podcast was how women's identities change after they have a baby. And I swear, if anything, motherhood has really opened my eyes to the systemic issues that we face in society. Being an empathetic person and someone that just loves to think deeply, this sparked my curiosity to want to learn more about people. I've always wanted to know about people. I've learned about anthropology and you know, all anyway, I could dive about this topic for years, but when I decided that I was feeling inferior because people around me were doing these things, and when you have a baby, everything feels like slow motion, and it feels like the world around you is continuing while you're stuck in this bubble. Be in the bubble. I know so many people say that, and I I feel like I dissociated when I had my say I I also went through postpartum depression, so that didn't help, but I feel like everyone is is kind of chasing something that they feel they should already have, and I want this episode today to level this out. This is an emotional episode today. This isn't about five ways to or what you need to be focusing on, it's more meeting you where you're at emotionally, and this isn't just for women, this is for everyone. So I went back to study because that's what I always do when I'm finding that I don't know enough. And it doesn't mean that I needed to learn anymore, it just validates me. It's my own way of doing things. But I wanted to do something different. I'm a creative, I love to think deeply. And in fact, one of the biggest compliments that I always get is when someone says, I love how your brain works. I have so many messages with that saying, and that's when it really hit me where I was like, Well, maybe it's my brain that people like. And it was exactly that. They loved the way that I dissected things, they loved the way that I analyzed things and thought deeply about things. They liked the fact that I took on feedback and that I kind of gave my opinion and that I had these deep conversations. Now, a lot of this was happening in my personal Instagram because it wasn't really a conversation for your one and only. And all of the things that I was pushing out for your one and only were, I mean, they still went well. But we were going through a really big transition period. We've seen it. You can't do content that you were doing two years ago. It simply won't work. And with that came behavior change of society. So at the same time as I'm simultaneously studying behavioral economics, if you don't know what that is, it's literally how we make choices with emotion, essentially. It's like our behavior. Like I say to you, would you buy a bottle of water for$500? And you would say, Not a chance in hell. And I said, What if they have a loved one for ransom? You would be like, shut up and take my money. That's the difference. It's how emotions actually drive how we spend our money. And this is why economists can never peg what's going to happen in the market 100% accurately. Accurate with accurate you know what I mean, accuracy. They because we don't know how people are going to act. And this is what makes everything so hard. When someone says they're an expert in something, it means they're meant to understand people. And you can't, no one does. No one does. No one knows how someone's going to respond. You can say to yourself, in one week's time, I'm going to have to put down my pet of 10 years. And you can prepare yourself, but you're never going to know how you will feel on that day. You can guess, but you will never know. That feeling and that emotion will only hit you on that day. And it's this really weird time that we're going through. We're seeing lots of changes happening and people don't like change. So we're seeing a big pushback in society at the moment is everyone feels like they need their mum. It feels like everything's chaotic. What a lot of millennials, I know for my age group, they feel like what they were told they would have by the age that we are now hasn't happened. And so they're in this state of disarray. And you've got the younger market, Gen Z, coming through with literally no hope. Like it's they're looking at the world like everyone's just effed this up for us. And so they're angry. And everyone's going, Gen Z this and Gen Z that, and then you've got that on top of them. I'm like, well, I saw a reel yesterday that spoke to Gen Z and said that they don't, and he was saying a Gen Z was saying that we don't know anything in American politics aside from Trump, Biden, and Trump. And I was like, that is so true. We refer back way earlier than that. You know, I'm thinking Obama. Older people would think of presidents prior to that. And we put our own perspective and our own lens on the world. And this is the biggest problem for people is that they put their own glasses on and shape that as if everyone is experiencing the world through their own reality. Plot twist, they are not. Whether that's a plot twist, I don't know. But it's that is exactly the point of understanding people because if you that is a danger zone, if you then go, my life is like this, everybody else is like this. People can empathize and understand the differences, but unless you literally consume and understand and ask questions and be willing to hear things that you don't want to hear, you're never going to change your mind. And in fact, this is a problem that we're having in society at the moment is that when people are presented with factual information, they will turn their nose up at nose up at it and say, I don't want to hear that information because it will shake their very perception of the world. What we're seeing with business is a direct correlation of the environment that we are living in right now. And I've been trying to have this conversation as simplistic as possible over the last few years, but I feel like people are starting to see it now. We have, for instance, I spoke about this recently, but we had the Disney backlash off the back of Jimmy Kimmel. We've seen the rise of support for Black Lives Matter off the back of George Floyd. We've seen brands like Ben and Jerry's support that they put a post up that said we will not support white supremacy or we must abolish white supremacy. It was something along the lines of that. And I was like, well, that's ballsy. Now, they've had some issues recently. Um, not them doing anything wrong, but their mother brand Unilever. Uh, Ben and Jerry's company themselves are suing their mother brand. So stipulation in the contract. I did a four-part series on that. You can go and have a look on Instagram, but we're seeing people aligning with brands that share the same values. So what we're seeing at the moment is an identity alignment, which I spoke about a couple of weeks ago. And so, with an identity alignment, that sees people choose brands based on who they are. So when we are putting content out, we actually have to understand who it is that we're talking to and know the direction before we can start to create. A lot of people are just going, this is what's trending at the moment, and then they create the thing, and then the thing flops, and it's because nothing is optimized. This is why ads don't work. If you don't have everything working in unison, the wrong message gets spread. It's all about trust. So, what brand strategy does is it's mission, vision, values, yeah, everyone understands that that's what it is. But they flake it, they think it's some hour meeting that you can sit around a table, come up with some bullshit paragraph, and say, Yep, that's how we're going to run the business. I've done a past episode called Business Strategy versus brand strategy versus marketing strategy, which is a really good one if you want to go and listen to that. But it's a it's important if you want to succeed in the evolution of brand at the moment. People now see your brand as something they want to align with. There are so many brands out there that are just not good enough, and it's not because they're not good, it's because they don't know what they need to do, and that's because things have changed quite rapidly. Before brand used to be considered a visual identity, where you would have logos, colours, and fonts, and now we're realizing that there is so much depth to that. Copywriters have been screaming about this forever, by the way. But what we look at in a brand strategy is an array of things. Before we would even touch a brand strategy, we go through what we call our dissect phase of our D3 framework. We have three areas dissect, DNA, and design. The dissect phase is the research development. It is the audience analysis, it is the product viability, it is basic understanding of where we are in the world right now. The problem with this part is if you are biased, which you would be, to your own brand, you are going to miss the blatantly obvious details that sit right in front of your face. I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people where I'm like, how's your internal culture? And they say, Great. Meanwhile, it's burning inside and the employees are crying. And they still think they're doing a good job because in their eyes, they think they're amazing. Or it could be that there is something that's happening on the right side, and they may have done that before. And so they don't revisit it because they tried it, they did it, it didn't work, they move on. Whereas the timing may have been out. So maybe revisit old ideas. And so it really is a matter of, and the QR code is a perfect example of that, by the way. We were putting this on Telstra catalogs back in like 20, well it wasn't even 20, it was 2008. And then no one used it because the technology hadn't been placed in phones. It wasn't until COVID that that QR technology really took off. So they were just too early to the game. So it's about timing as well. But what we're seeing at the moment is it is timing. So we're seeing big shifts. People need to understand it's about people. Everything to do with what you're doing isn't about the content you put out. It is it has to rely on who you are focusing on. So I just had this conversation with two people recently this week. I think I spoke about this in the last episode, but it's it's subcategorizing. So we see it as brand and then sub brand and then sub brand, or it's more about interest. So, say for instance, you have music, then you have subcategories of music, and then you have sub-subcategory of music. And by that I mean music, rock music, pop music, classical music, all the different types of music, and then you have a subcategory of rock music, which would be pop, you know, pop rock, uh Screamo or heavy metal, you know, whatever. And that's where we're focusing on now. So we're like in the second layer, and it's needing to understand really intricate details. So if you're just talking about music in general, you can now understand why people that want to know about pop rock are not even going to listen to the stuff that you're talking about because you're two layers too surface level. You need we need to be digging deeper now. And so when I talk about, and like these are discussions, right? If you're in an industry and the industry is changing, people want you to talk about the things that are happening in your industry. And if you refuse to talk about the things in your industry, then they are not going to see you as someone that's an expert. So if you're talking about content and people aren't talking about different variations of content and only talking about one platform, then people are not going to listen anymore. This is the issue. It's that those that have done well in an area before may not understand, or you know, a service or whatever it is that you're doing, they're not diving deep enough. And it's not that you haven't done it wrong, it's just that they're playing it safe because it's what's worked, it has worked, but unfortunately, things are changing. And so what we need to now do is understand that put it all out on the table. In a brand strategy, you would have your mission, which is what you want to do. What is the mission of the business? What's the core objective? The vision is the overarching, right? So I like to say that it's a big picture idea that you want to achieve. And you may not ever achieve it, you're just trying to get there. So our vision is to like make things equitable. We have a much nicer saying, but we want things to be equitable and we want people to be that that are changing the game to create a safer world because it creates a ripple effect of change. And then second to that is our mission, and so that's how we're going to do that. So the vision is this, the mission is how we're going to do it, and then the purpose is what is driving you to do that. Now, the values are what you stand for, they're your beliefs, everything about what you do as a business. And you should live and breathe these, these are actions. So we've got talk hard truths, and that's important. We've got like something like um, I can't even remember. Um, I've got nice words for them, but it's um, I've just mentally, you know, when you you try and remember a word and you can't remember it, I'm going through that right now. It's like name something that starts with N and you're like, uh, uh, it's that. But yeah, we we have um, you know, chat channel the inner rebel is another one. And that's essentially like just don't be afraid. Just say the things that you want to say. And people will come to you that agree, and people that don't will go away. And that's essentially what you want. You don't want to appeal to everyone. Trust me, you don't want to appeal to everyone. If you ever go viral, you will know why. Not everyone is good uh in terms of who you want to be talking to. There will be people out there shitting on you just for the sake of shitting on you. So virality is what people think that they want when it's really just engagement in terms of the right audience. So we need to also understand that the values are what drive your business, and you should be rocking up every week, leading by example with the like guiding principles of the business. Then you have a brand personality. So your brand personality dictates how you show up. Are you serious? Are you funny? Like all of these, and obviously it's way more in-depth than that, but it then dictates your tone of voice, it dictates what messages you say, it dictates how you show up visually, all of the it dictates how you have photos and how you cut video and all of these, like it is everything. And so people start with a mood board or they go, we're rebranding, and they go straight into Pinterest or straight for inspiration or looking at all these different things, and of course you're not gonna find anything you like because none of it is in alignment to what it is that you know you're doing because you haven't done that yet. It's like picking paint for a house without picking the plan for the house yet. Of course, you're not gonna know what color to paint the room if you don't know what the house is gonna look like. This is this is the problem. So now everyone's having to rewind. And if you don't know what you need to do, you need to go back and look at what bigger brands do because bigger brands are the ones that will show you when they start rebranding, that's when you really need to be like, oh, things are changing. Big brands will go first because they've got the cash to do so, and they've already gone. The the the bigger brands went a year ago. We did ours a year ago, a year and a half ago. Um, visually, we've just fixed it now to refresh it a little bit, but we did ours ages ago because we know what's coming. So when you do have that messaging down pat because it will align to what you're trying to do, then you figure out the audience, which should be part of this process anyway. So if you're trying to target specific audiences, you're going to want to make sure that your tone of voice and your messaging and your visual identity is going to attract that audience. If you're talking Gen Z slang to a boomer audience, they're not going to connect. So, and also the platforms that you're on need to correlate. So if you're talking to an older market, getting on TikTok can be great. There are people that are on there. Don't come at me with I'm, you know, I'm on TikTok. But the vast majority are not. They are still on Facebook. It's understanding how people consume. Do people read blogs? Are they listening to audiobooks? Can you do all three to capture the audience in multiple ways? This is where we're at right now. It is understanding the diversification of media, understanding where people are consuming content, and the reason it feels so hard is because that has spread out. They are not all in one spot like they used to be. People are in different spots. In fact, when people get bored on one platform, they close it and they open another one. I think I'm flicking between social media apps, you know, three or four different apps multiple times a night. So you need to have something that resonates. And if you're not talking to your audience and you're just giving basic shit, they're not gonna they're not gonna listen. Also, it's also important to understand what they're on the platform for. So on Instagram, not everyone is there to be sold to, especially at night. So your peak audience might be on between six and nine, but maybe they're topped out for the day and they want to hear anything about business and they're just scrolling for fun. So they might everyone might be online, but they're online to look at entertainment. They're not online to learn about business. So shift your time frames. It's if you do want to talk about business, LinkedIn's just sitting over there. That's what people expect you to talk about there. That is a platform underutilized, it's growing, but it's underutilized. But then we also look at distribution. So where are your access points? You'll be have people saying, I can't get any work, and there's no visibility. It's like saying you are having a party and not handing out an invitation. How do you expect people to know that it's on? So ad campaigns are important. Where you're placed is important. You could put a big campaign up and say that there's a festival coming for uh for a Gen Z market and put it in a local council and no one's gonna see it there. But you put it down in the local cafe or wherever the the they're hanging out these days, the pub, wherever, they're more than likely to see it. This is where marketing really comes in. It's your product, place, promotion, people. That's where marketing comes in. So your brand needs to appeal to the audience before they're going to even connect with your marketing. So the biggest things that we've seen, and it's happened in multiple instances, is that people are trying to market before they've actually set their precedent of who they are. They don't know who they are. And so people are not going to buy from you if there's any kind of break of trust or convincing of who you are. If you aren't rocking up and being like, this is us consistently multiple times, then each time you rock up periodically and they see you every now and then, there's no consistency. I can tell you now the brands that are winning uh know who they are, they know who their audience is, they know how to produce the content because they're consistent with it and they have a framework for it. Most people's problem isn't that they're trying to do it wrong, it's that they actually, there's something missing in either the brand strategy or they're executing in the wrong places. Or they have a pipeline and they're not utilizing it. So using different platforms to be seen and heard. I can tell you now, if you're comparing yourself to someone else, they've probably got 10 ads that are going out for visibility. So of course they're going to get the work in. This is the thing with the transparency that I really dislike is that when someone says, we've had this many people come in or we've made this much money this month, it's like, how many ads have you put out? And that's fine. Like, that's the point. But it's creating this false perception that these people have just come to them out of nowhere. Like, there are ways to get people in. In-person events helps. Standing on stage has been something that has been really great for us. When I go and present, we have people in the room that can feel the energy, they sense the passion, they can hear me talk, they see my body language. This is why stories are important. This is why reels are important because people can hear you talk, they can see your body language, they can start to resonate with who you are, and it becomes familiar. When I say that a lot of brands are like a millimeter from winning, I'm not joking. It's usually that they've missed something and they're literally dancing around the point. What I want people to see is that it really just does, it really just does come down to your differentiation as a brand. If you're a corporation or a big big business, that comes down to culture. Who you are, what you're doing, what you're investing in, like how you have your policies. All of these things are direct indications of brand. Internal, external branding is a thing. The people that you hire will become indicative of the brand. This is why big agents, creative agencies will hire big creative award-winning teams because it then that reputation is like a halo effect and then comes over to the brand or the agency that they are then poached for. It when we're going through, it's hard to be able to identify the problem areas without starting here. And the dissect stage is where this comes into fruition. Looking at the competitor analysis. What are they saying? What do they look like? Where are they placed? How many people are following them? What are the reviews that people are saying? What products do they have? All of these things will help to shape. And so many people say to me, I'm not interested in my competitors. I'm like, that's great. Well, how are you supposed to know how to differentiate yourself if you don't know what they're doing? How are you meant to go left when they're going right if you're not even looking in the direction that they're going in? This is the biggest problem I ever see. It's got nothing to do. It's like saying people saying, I don't like to sell. What do you mean you don't like to sell? If you're offering you if you're in business, you love to sell. Like that's the goal. You just don't like the feeling and the connotations that are aligned to it. So do it in your way. The conversation has been this week that we've seen so many people wanting the visual rebrand, and then once we backtrack, we realize that there's actually points that they've missed. I can't create a visual identity for you unless you know who you are, what you do, what you're about, where you're going, what your intentions are. How you're positioned in the market, all of these things dictate what the visual identity looks for. If your personality is edgy and fun, then that's got to correlate and align to what the visual identity will look like. If you are upmarket and luxury and you're speaking with affluent language, then that visual identity needs to align. The imagery that you choose, the fonts that you choose, the colors that you choose. When we go straight into the design without understanding the underlay and the foundations of the brand, I like to say you're just rolling a shit and glitter. You may have it looking nice, but the substance is still missing. So what I will say to everyone that is feeling like they're behind is don't get caught up with the time. Everyone feels like they need to hurry. Time is is if you're in scarcity mode, it can feel really hard. But when you're feeling that pushback and that pressure, it's it's a sign for you to do something. When things feel easy, people can become complacent. So things ebb and flow. You will have your time. Like I said, those that went through Struggle Town earlier and have probably picked back up, that's us. We have picked right back up. It's because we did the work earlier than the people that will now be experiencing some struggle. And that's because the world's going up and down at the moment, and consistency matters. So it has taken us, taken us a good two years to 18 months to find our footing again. We've been testing and putting things out and finding what we want to do. And you know what? I would never change that process. It has been resilience building 101. It has been hard. You hear this from every single business owner that has managed to win and get really successful, every entrepreneur, is that they went through a period where they literally almost went broke. The differences are when you're reading about that and it all sounds great, to being in it. And again, we come back to behavioral economics again. That feeling of not knowing when your next paycheck comes in or your next income drop is deeply scary. And so, but we have a choice to either put ourselves out there and try to figure it out or ask for help. There are plenty of resources out there. AI is not just the only one. Sometimes it can be a conversation with someone that knows you. In the past, we've developed a visual identity for one of our businessmates that when we were going through the initial process, they were talking about what they wanted. And this is a problem in itself. They were briefing me on what they thought that they wanted the brand to look like, and I said, That's not you at all. And they said, Oh, what do you think the brand should be? And I created them a mood board, and it was the best thing that we ever did. Fletch Digital, if you ever want to go and have a look. They were coming to me with palm springs and you know vibes of the beach and palm trees, and they are nothing like that. They are my amazingly nerdy friends. We created like an eight-bit, you know, video game vibe with dinosaurs, and they told me that their celebrity that they aligned with was Jeff Bloom, what's it Bloomberg? And I was like, this is nothing like Palm Springs, but I knew them. Like I knew them personally to be able to call them out on that. And now their brain is amazing and aligned. But so many people come to us in that process, and that's why we have our dissect stage. Because if you give us your design brief, I can guarantee you that it's probably wrong because you're biased in what you think you want. And you're probably thinking about what you want that brain to look like, but that's our job to be able to dictate dictate that to you as well. Dictate, not necessarily dictate, but collaborate collaborate with you. So when we go through that process, what we're doing in the initial stages is we're finding the contradictions. You will say things and then say something else, and it will contradict what you say, and it's up to us to analyze that information and make it correct. Like I said when I was talking to a couple of my friends this week, where who also have businesses, is that a lot of it comes from validation. It's you're sitting in that sticky spot, and I can't, we can't say how long that sticky spot's going to be. But it when you're in that spot, it forces you to think and it makes you question. And I like to say it's always at the point when you're going, if you're founder-led, it's going through a point of identity alignment. So where you are in your life will also impact where the business is. And that's why if you have a corporation, the team comes together to think outside of that. But founder-led businesses are always thinking along the lines of where they're at in business and what they want their business to do for them, in which case the business values then should align to what they want that life to look like. And then we look at exit periods if you want to exit the business and where you're at with that. But when we're looking at corporations, which is one of the businesses that we're working with at the moment, who has a magnitude of staff, by the way, we're working with teams. And we're working with teams that aren't emotionally connected. Well, they are, but not like the founder is of the business. There is a different intention and there is a different drive to what they want for that brand. It could be ROI, it could be more visibility, whatever it is, you need to find out what the decision maker wants, and you then need to align the messaging to align to who they're talking to. I found this out when I launched the Brain Lab in the first instance, where I was talking to founders, and then I realized that it wasn't necessarily all founders, that a lot of the businesses that I was speaking to were more creative founders who were doing the work themselves, or service-based people that do this for a job, and they wanted to implement what I know into their work. And that has been the best shift ever. If you want to know about that, the Brain Lab is now accessible on demand on the website. So that's something that I've been building in the background as well. It's identifying what the need is and realizing that for us, we should have been focusing on service-based clients over program clients first, because the service-based clients allow us to or fund us to do these other things for the business. And that's when halfway through last year, I was like, switch, and it was the best thing that I ever did. But just know that when you're repositioning, you will lose an audience, you will lose community that have been there for a certain message because you then grow into the next one, and that allows you to then up-level your message and create a new community and a new conversation with the next level. But that requires time. So then you have to trust build. What we see is that people then do the change, freak out because no one's watching, and then they revert back. So no one ever crosses the bridge fully. The ones that do stick to it, stick it out, and that's really what it comes down to. So if you're feeling really stuck at the moment, I want you to know that this is an identity realignment and that what you're going through is completely normal, especially in the world that we're living in right now. Every business is experiencing something. Even if others say that they're not, that's fine. There's obviously going to be winners and losers of every economic, you know, downturn. But now I'm feeling there's a big shift, and I think people are realizing, or they're either getting comfortable being uncomfortable, or they're realizing that things need to change. And I'm feeling optimism again, which is which is really nice. So if you want to reach out, please jump on Instagram and find me. I am happy to have a chat because I know that business can be quite lonely, but know that that feeling of not doing enough, it is exacerbated by the rise of AI. Because AI is like, do it now, do it fast, and everyone's putting things out. And I would challenge you to step back from that and don't let someone else dictate your time. Because time, when you have time to do things, you come up with better ideas. And the better ideas are the ones that always win. As I would say, as a creative, you never go through with the first idea, it's always the third one that usually wins. So that's it for today. I hope you liked it. Um if you have come out the other side, I would love to hear about it. Please let me know. I know that I'm feeling super optimistic as we lead into 2026 because it finally feels that that strategy that we built has finally turned around and started working. Um, but yes, I hope you guys have a good week 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 your one and only underscore AU on Instagram or head to www.youwan and only.com.au

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Tara Ladd

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