You Can’t Market Your Way Out Of Mistrust

The market hasn’t just “gotten harder” it’s gotten noisier, more emotional, and far less forgiving of vague positioning. We’re seeing great businesses wobble, and we’re also seeing a flood of surface-level advice that sounds confident but doesn’t match how people actually buy right now. I’m calling out the pattern I’ve heard 3 times this week: coaches and advisers offering quick brand and business fixes that ignore the deeper drivers underneath the numbers.

I’m breaking this all down on a macro level. See the overview of the brand mechanics in a visual map.
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Transcript

Straight-Talking Show Kick-Off

SPEAKER_00 0:03

You're listening to Brand and Butter, for 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 how pairing association, consumer behaviour, and design thinking can impact what people see, think, and feel. I'm your host, Tara Ladd, for sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable, and often unapologetically blunt, founder and creative director of Brandon Design Agency, your one and only.

Workshop Wins And What’s Next

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Hey, hey, welcome to the podcast this week. It's been a couple of weeks because I've had some things on. We have been doing well, we did our in-person workshop, which was a wild success. I had people message to say that I undersold it, and that still happens. But really, I wanted to test this out. I wanted to see how it was going to go, and I wanted to see what people wanted from an in-person experience, and it was just so amazing. I felt so in my element, and it is something that I will be doing again. So watch this space in September. We will be doing the underground take two, and it will be in person again. This time we're cutting the room down to 10. 10 came this time around. To be fair, I didn't market it as well as I should have. So yes, we all still stuff up, but it was just such an intimate group. I couldn't have imagined it any larger. I think it would have lost that intimacy. And we had so many breakthroughs. So it was a really great time.

Bad Advice In A Shaky Market

SPEAKER_00 1:51

On that topic, today I it's a bit of a ranty one because I'm watching a lot of things happening in the market, obviously, because things are feeling quite unstable, even if the businesses are going well, there are still pockets of you know in instability that is happening. And not everything is a brand problem. I should preface that. Like, not everything is a brand problem. It could be a distribution problem, it could be a uh product problem, it you know, all of the above. We're watching some really great businesses go under, and it's really sad. So I guess to say to strengthen some things, a strong brand can help you get out of those shit shit times. It's just that you know, you have to do the work in the long run for it. And it yeah, it just has become quite sad when you see these brands go out that you've really championed the whole way through. But before any of that, I wanted it's a long one. It comes off the back of if you listen to the email this week, listened, read the email this week, it falls in line with that. But I feel like if you didn't, this is really valuable, and if you did, this gives better context to it. So in my email, I was talking about the market being hard, but I was breaking it down, and I'm breaking it down in a way where I just feel like the market is so oversaturated with and I put in adverted commas experts in so many different places that the real people that are good at their jobs are getting washed under brand, performance, bottleneck, distribution, whatever it may be. Everyone believes that they're an expert now because of AI, but not even that. If you've got a if you've managed to figure out how to get a following because you're a good marketer, doesn't necessarily mean you're great at your job. It's like, you know, every good player isn't a good coach, right? But a good coach can be a shit player. It's it's what we really need to look at. I guess the thing for today for me is that I've three times this week, which is what sparked my email, three times this week I have had people come in and tell me that their business coaches have given them advice on their brands and or on their business, not their brands, obviously. And it was wrong. And I'm listening to them talk to me about these problems, and they're not correct. So the advice that was given from all three of these coaches was a really shitty surface-level fix to a much deeper problem. Now, when I say that, I'm talking to repositioning, and I'm talking to scaling, and I'm talking to identifying new markets, and that doesn't come from a shitty little rework of a paragraph of a statement of one of your core statements. It is so much deeper than that. We are watching them deliver services that I guess they say that they can do, but they don't do well. And now that's not to say that they aren't great in other areas, but it is saying stick to your own lane. Because what we're watching is people spend big money at a time when they're stretched on services that are not going to give them the results that they want, and they're going to go around in circles thinking that it's their fault because they're getting advice from someone that is giving them pretty shitty advice. So, Bucklin, this is me on a rant, you know. I try to keep this type of content to the back burner because I don't like to do it, but fuck it. At this stage, I'm at the point where I'm like, you know what? Let's call it out. So, yeah, we're watching coaches give this advice and they don't know the depth, right? And so they're trying to fix a brand problem with a marketing problem. And you can tell because it's in their advice. Like they say this as they're giving the recommendation. But we need to take into consideration that we have moved through mass change, especially over the last decade, so quickly as well. So technology and environment and social structure and leadership, and the response to that is not changing some copy or getting a new visual identity. It is going back to the drawing board and figuring out what it is that you need to be doing with your business. It is, and this is the business strategy plan. So that is their element, but that's not the suggestion that they've been given. And this is what needs to happen. They need to go back to the drawing board. What did we get into business to begin with? Why did we get into business to begin with, I should say? And what is the intention that we want to do now? Because what can happen is that you can grow really quickly, you can scale, and you can really lose or drift away from that original promise that you gave yourself when you started. And then the business just ticks along and you get really confused with what it is that you're trying to do within the business, and you feel disconnected. And a lot of people are feeling really disconnected at the moment because what worked now doesn't, and what you've tried to do doesn't work again, and all of this advice isn't working, and you start to feel like you're not good enough, and you get all this external advice, and a lot of it comes from well, what how I said on a on a comment section the other day that uh seemed to get a lot of um appraisal was people are trying to fix an external problem. Other way around, people are trying to fix an internal problem with an external fix, and this is a problem. So let's buckle in because this is what we're talking about today.

Refresh Versus Reposition Versus Rebrand

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Now, brand evolution isn't new, right? A brand evolving and scaling and moving into doing something different is not new. It is the preface of brand strategy. It's you start and you build for a market, the market moves or shifts, and you change and you adapt. Now, I want to be really clear that these things happen and change so often. This is a common thing. So any most businesses on average reposition or refresh. So refresh is like fixing up graphics and I guess like painting, fixing up the paint essentially. A repositioning is a little bit deeper than that, but not as hardcore as a rebrand. A rebrand is like completely changing your identity. A reposition is just keeping the identity but shifting some core parts to be different, if that makes sense. And a refresh is a new paint job. People use it for different reasons, they're my versions of it. But what we really need to look at is every, yeah, every business or average brand will do a refresh or a repositioning every like three to seven years-ish. And the rebrands come every seven to ten years. Now, I would assume now because it is so much harder to get in front of people. And those seven to eight touch points before you are seen by someone would be so much more than that. Now I would double, almost triple that now. Because we are seen in so many different places. Like I think about the way that I use my phone. And I open up Instagram, close Instagram, open up my other Instagram, close that, open up Facebook, close that, and open up email, close that. And these are the behaviors from a lot of people. You're not just sitting on a platform in one spot. So if you're not in a bunch of different places now, then and you're predominantly putting all your eggs in one basket, then you could be being missed. And it's not because you're bad, it's just because you're in the wrong spot. So a repositioning would go in and go, okay, where is our market at right now? Who is our market? And they would re like find where you need to be and position you to be in the place that you need to be in in order to get that, get that crowd, right? That's what a repositioning is. And I've been listening to it all over the internet. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, I feel so disconnected. I don't know who I am anymore. And I'm like, this is it. Like, people need to be looking internally, even if you're not even looking in your business, it's if you're feeling off, it's that's where you need to be re-realigning your values of what it is that you want to do with your own life. It's an identity fix. And so, yeah, so identity and and brand evolution isn't a new thing, it's just happening more frequently now because things are moving a lot quicker. So when we're looking at advice and receiving advice, if people aren't factoring in the changing market and they keep saying markets always change, or yeah, life's hard, but people are still buying, to me, that's just a brushover of what's actually happening.

Behavioural Economics And Buying Under Stress

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Because those buying behaviors that have changed, people are still buying, of course, but you need to now understand the buying driving behaviors or the what's driving their buying behaviors. Because if you don't know that and you continue to carry on with the old playbook, you will not get in front of the next audience that you need to be getting in front of. I let me repeat that. You have to be innovative, you have to be proactive. Waiting back and sitting around and waiting for things to kind of normalize is not happening. I consider this a parallel to the Web 2.0 when we were in the print era, when the print era ended and we moved into digital. Now, yay, for me, I have both print and digital experience, but that was a huge thing. Like the print industry was like, what's going to happen? But it didn't die, it just diverged, it moved. So the pe the thing that people skip most, me jumping through my words because I talk too quickly, is economics is economics, right? Put plain and simple, but almost no one references behavioral economics. That sits underneath, hence me talking about the underground and all of these things that sit beneath the surface, because this is where people behavior begins. So people choose with emotion and logic comes second. And the same choices may carry less emotion, which means that like some choices, like I don't know, buying a pen, if it's not that emotional to you, it then it's a much easier decision to make, right? Because there's not as much emotion to it. But when life feels chaotic, especially to your consumer, you better believe that their choices are coming from a place of chaos. Especially if their life is a bit all over the shop, like I said, chaotic, they're in scarcity mode, they're in panic mode, they're in needing security mode, right? And it's why someone will grab a chocolate bar at the end of a you know shopping center at when they're leaving a grocery store, is because it's like there, they're feeling emotional, they'll grab it, you know? It's it's an impulse buy there for a reason. It's like an emotional purchase. You're not buying it because it's good for you, you're buying because you want it, you're feeling like you want it. I've had a good day today. I'm gonna reward myself with a chocolate bar. And it's why I always I will always say this: it's why you would never spend $500 on a bottle of water if I asked you to your face. But if I said, what if they had a family member ransom? You there'd be no, you you wouldn't even question it. There'd be no questions asked. It's because behavior shapes the decision. And there's a name for this. It's called the effect heuristic. Now, if you're across this, awesome. But for those that don't, the effect heuristic is the shortcut people reach for when they're stressed or uncertain. So they stop weighing up things that feel um rational. So they don't they don't think rationally, and they start to decide on how something feels. So they they're intuitively purchasing. So if your brand doesn't feel like the answer, there is no amount of marketing that you can do and no amount of selling that you can do that'll make it one. Because what happens is uh they're going back to what they know, what feels comfortable, what feels familiar, and that will always be brand building. So being in there, being present, being consistent, being there, being in the top of mind, you know, things that people remember and feel safe and trust about you, right? That is why brand is so important. So they stop weighing things up and they go by how it feels, right? So you if your brand doesn't feel like an answer to them again, the marketing won't work. So there are too many people right now looking at the old playbook, right? Or the old blueprint, whatever you want to call it. It's the old way of doing things. You do X, you get Y. That's no longer working. We need to go, you do X, you get Y, but then you move to Z. It's probably and then start back at A B again. And so we've gone to this new way of thinking or a new way of doing businesses, uh, doing businesses, doing brands, and businesses don't know this yet. And which means that the people that are teaching you these things that don't know that don't even not for their own brand yet, let alone know how to teach you about it. And this is why I believe that we're moving into the role of the specialist.

Brand Equity And Trust Bricks

SPEAKER_00 14:45

So I say a niche is really important, a niche in terms of the role that you have in what it is that you do, because things are so diversified now. And this is why I moved into my role to get really specific on brand identity systems and how a brand is seen. So that is my goal is how are people perceiving the brand? That is that was my number one goal is your one and only is the psychology psychology first brand studio that does design, but we are focused on the human connection aspect and how they think. So the psychological psychology that's at play for how people make decisions. And I've got the experience now backed behind me to do that from my uni degree. So, what we're doing is building in years of experience of me in design, moving into brand strategy, you know, 20 years of that, and then adding on the behavioral aspect of that. So it's really specific and niche, and that's something that we're being noticed for now, which is something I've been building, by the way, for the past three to five years, and now it's only starting to be seen by people because it's a want that people need now. So, what I want to say is, and what keeps getting confirmed is I've been talking about this for five years, as I just said. And the thing that keeps proving is that a lot of brands are now heading into that repositioning and rebranding stage. Now, I want to be really clear that it isn't a messaging or a visual identity swap. Now, don't get me wrong, it might it may be, but you'd have to get someone to oversee that. But a lot of I would say nine times out of ten, there's a repositioning that needs to happen if you haven't had one within the last 12 months. And not necessarily a reposition in terms of what you need to do, but maybe who you're trying to target and the behaviors of your of your customers and how they're feeling right now because the world's changing so drastically. So if you look at the psychology at play, we're looking at how people are feeling. We're looking at the environment that they're living in, we're looking at the economic climate, and we're looking at all of this feeding psychological safety. Do they feel safe? Because when people don't feel safe, they don't spend. It's really that simple. So when people value something, they do. It doesn't matter how hard times are, if they value it, they will spend. Hence, spending $500 on a bottle of water if they're holding your family ransom. Right? So most businesses are not diving deep enough. And I cannot stress that enough. These are the things I drum into our our clients at the moment, is like, right, let's let's get beneath this surface. How can we differentiate here? What are we looking at that that differentiates us from our competitors? And how are our markets seeing us right now? Because what you think that they're saying, and you cherry picking certain people from your audience versus getting people that give you that feedback honest and center, don't get defensive over that feedback because that feedback can be gold for you. And if they're giving you that feedback to your face, then they probably care nine times out of ten. So this is what we're trying to cut through at the moment. And now, again, this is where brand comes in. So brand has multiple facets. Something coming out soon, I'll let you know. But brand equity is one of the things that most people are not familiar with. So it's how valuable someone sees your brand over time and it's built on trust. So trust goes up brick by brick. Every little thing that you do, every small association that they have, every good association, brick by brick by brick, right? And then it takes time to build that. Mistrust or something happening, something negative, a negative association will erode that. So it will knock down 13 positive bricks. And this is the thing that people need to understand because I say that a lot, because I'm like, just listen. The mistrust is the thing that is killing you. It's the trust that needs to be built because no one is trusting anything at the moment. So the minute that someone stops trusting you is the minute that you start to erode. So you need to keep people trusting you by being consistent, by being the person that they go to, knowing that there's no change and staying really consistent with what you do by that. I mean, not just um consistency in posting, I mean saying what you're gonna do and delivering what you're gonna do and being really safe and knowing so that they can expect that because safety comes from an expectation. So they know what they're going to get from you. And this is something I had to learn. Uh, and yeah, that's what I've noticed in a lot of businesses and brands, especially when founders are at the core and they're we're emotional ourselves when we're doing our own marketing, and obviously we know what's going on in the back end, so we're trying to manage, you know, books and payrolls and all these types of things that that can come through our marketing and it can also uh make us make stupid decisions, and that's why we also need someone else to flag us. I think that's a really important thing. But what I see that um, yeah, that I guess the thing that gets in the way most of the time is fear and ego, and I've seen it in so many different businesses, it's the fear of being able to take the risk, but it's also the ego of someone thinking that they know what they're doing and they don't, and they and you you see it just fall apart and you're like, Stop. But it's not up to me to tell them that. It's uh if someone wants my opinion, I will give it to them, but you know, you can only say so many things, unfortunately. So when you I guess coming back to what I was saying before, so when you do when you when br spit it out, my gosh, I'm trying to think three sentences ahead. So when the things you say don't match the things that you actually do, like I said, that the bricks will come down, that the tr the mistrust starts happening, and eventually you'll stop being valuable to that person or the can yeah, to the consumer, and they'll leave, or they won't buy, and we don't want that.

Three Checks To Find Leaks

SPEAKER_00 20:40

So what we want to do is look at the stages and why they're so important. And like I said, there's always the wave of innovative brands that come through. There always there's always a brands that succeed in some kind of downfall. So in the last like GFC, that was like when Uber and Airbnb and all of these brands popped up, Netflix popped up, like they they came off the back of a of the dying old let's that's when things change, right? It's turning of the guard, and that's when it changed over. So I guess we need to be understanding that we're looking at innovation now. Innovation is creation, and we're inventing, which is why it feels so hard for people, because you're coming up with new concepts and new ideas, and that's not easy for a lot of people. So that's why creatives are the problem solvers. It's why people go to them. It's not necessarily for what they can do, it's how they think and how they come up with new ways of doing things. And that's why I believe that a lot of people are struggling, is because that creativity is being siphoned out and they're exporting or I guess outsourcing that out to something else. So I guess the ones that are creative enough to make something genuinely different are going to be the ones that will win. And alongside the ones who know their people and who they are as a brand, and at the very Core of it, and what I say all the time is belonging and connection. So it's a core human attribute, and it drives motivation, it drives loyalty and trust, and it drives behavior. And the problem is that too many people are focused on the wrong thing and then they spiral. So there's three things that you can do without hiring anyone, and you need to name the feeling. So number one, name the feeling. So strip your brand message back to one emotion. And if you can't say what someone should feel after they hit your brand, your audience certainly can't. Number two, I would say to run the gap check. So ask five people what they think you do and then line it up against what you actually do. And the distance between those two answers is usually where brand equity is leaking. And then there's number three, which would be to test the justification. So if your offer needs explaining before anyone sees the value, you haven't built enough emotional weight yet. So the $500 water, I guess, doesn't come with a brochure now, does it? And that gives you something to act on this week. So that's just the start though, not the depth. So one thing that we did in the workshop was we dived into the depth and we cracked open a whole map, which was finding the ideas. So a lot of people think that you can whip up a repositioning or a market analysis in a day or two, and you can't. And that's where they're so very wrong because it takes time and it's unraveling and it's identifying and it's fixing. But once you've done that, you rebuild. So you shed an old audience and build a new one, and that aligns. So that's when you go back to the drawing board if you want to and rebuild with the focus that you had from day one or the one that drifted while life happened, which is what I mentioned before. So I'm not saying that every expert is wrong, but I am saying that a lot of the time that people giving advice built their brands in on a different set of rules. So those rules don't apply now, which means that we have to get creative in the new way of thinking, come up with new ways of doing things, and a lot of people need that guidance. But sometimes the guidance actually comes from you. So I like to make the map. And what we're watching is I guess younger generations are moving into prime buying years as well. And how they see the world is drastically different from the generations before them. And if we're not understanding the way they buy, then we're going to miss opportunities for them to connect with them, you know, and for them to find us because we're not going to be relevant to them. And if you're a younger brand, then you know, it's the same thing with the older brand. At the end of the day, it's about understanding the buyer that you're trying to target and how they sit in the world and how they feel. And just because two people are the same age, it doesn't necessarily mean they have the same thought process. So then you need to dive into the behavior and the emotions and the what they value, and that is work. That's what we do in our psychographic profiling. So then we look at the knock-on effect. Uh, and this one's mine. So it's an example of the things that we did, and I want to explain how it worked.

The Brand Map And How To Start

SPEAKER_00 24:55

So once you know what to identify, everything becomes fixable. And so mine was that I have something coming out, and it's the brand map. I've mentioned that before. I'll chuck a link at the bottom. And it's something that I've been building, and it comes off the back of the workshop that I built. It and it was really one of those moments where I was like, of course it's this. So when I went in to promote it or look at how I was going to promote it, um, I had to lean on the intel from the workshop feedback, which were real people, real experiences, and the stuff that I couldn't do on my own and couldn't mine out of AI because obviously it's from a lived experience. It's someone else's personal experience, and that's the connection piece, it's the emotional piece. But the second that I had it, I saw the gap and I saw how I was promoting it or potentially trying to promote it, and it showed me that I had a messaging issue, which then showed me that the website had been shaped wrong, which took me back to the buying profile of one of the personas, which then had me rewriting the psychographics and the emotional purchasing points, which then had me ricocheting across every piece of content that I make and applying different thought processes. So one real insight, and it knocked into literally everything that we did. And that's the important importance of understanding the macro view of what it is that you're building. But the part that most people skip over is that I've spent 18 months heavily into this positioning aspect. And it wasn't the the messaging, it was the positioning. So who we are, how do we want to be seen, who do we want to work with, who do we not want to work with, how do we speak, where do we show up, and how? And every one of those was what I say is a stepping stone. So everyone brings you closer to the goal and everyone's trying to jump the stepping stones. Every stepping stone you turn over, there's a new gem behind it. I even built a whole program and then retired it because the better one came off the back of it. So it wasn't a wasted, it wasn't wasted, it was but it was an experience of knowing what to do. So I guess my suggestion for you is to slow down. Because everyone wants you to be doing things quickly, everyone thinks that they're on a timeline, that time's running out. Like what time? Step off the hamster wheel. Because this is the bit that most people don't want to hear, and I'll guarantee I didn't want to hear it either. But everyone wants it immediately. Life, everything in life they want immediately because the real and we all know that the real success comes from time, you know, it's it's the process. And I know that that's not the thing that people want to hear, but it's the truth, honestly. So if you're wanting to be somewhere in 12 months, you need to start now. And waiting 12 months down the track is only gonna put you 12 months behind. Now, I'm not trying to say that to make you feel like there is a timeline, I'm just saying that if you want to build something genuinely, that's how long things take. So you need to, you know, get into the mindset of being slow and uh understand that the process is where the energy should go. So that's why we made it intentional to slow our process down, and that's why our work has been way better because of it. Now, that's today. I wanted to go through that to make sure that you know who you're working with and where you're spending your money, because sometimes spending it on the next bloody framework that you see, ironically, that's what I'm looking at doing, but like they're not always what you need. So I would suggest like having a look and identifying what you need, which is what I've created. So from the workshop, what I found out was that everyone keeps telling you to do these things like fiction messaging or fiction visual identity, but no one's actually explaining from a macro level what a brand looks like. So I've made a map, I've made a mind map that shows you what sits at the center, the parts that come off it, and it's done in a visual way so you can kind of identify which areas that you need to be looking at. So that's coming out soon. I've I'm in the process of building it. If you want that when it comes out, it's a free download. If you want that when it comes out, I will drop the link in the by in the show notes and you can grab it from there. But until then, if you are wanting to work on this one-on-one and really dive into what it is that you think you're missing, we are always here to do that one-on-one work. So slide into our DMs on Instagram or send us an email, you know, go through the website and click on the contact form, and we can do that together. That's literally what we do. And then once you know where you're heading and what it is that you need to be doing, then you can go, great, I need to fix my offer, or then I can go, I need to fix my messaging, or I need to go and get a visual identity, or whatever it is that you need to do. But until you've mapped that process, you can't be building on a broken architecture. Like the the foundation's shaky. So when the foundation is strong, then everything can be built from there. Until next week, I hope you have a good week and we will be diving more into this in the coming weeks. I will catch 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