Brand Narrative Vs Content Pillars

Most businesses have confused their brand narrative with their content pillars... and then built their entire presence on the thing that was only ever meant to be temporary. In this episode I break down the difference: why content pillars are seasonal by design and should shift, and why your brand narrative is the strategic story sitting underneath everything. I get into why this matters more than ever right now, and then go deep on the psychological resistance that keeps founders clinging to pillars that stopped serving them years ago.

As mentioned in the episode, the resource that breaks down business, brand, and marketing is called The Marketing Shift. It's here, and it's free – ​download now.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Straight talking, creationally in your face, IDF, branding point, modern marketing, and you want to understand the implement and power of branding.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

You want to know like hey, hey, welcome to this week's episode. I always say that because, well, to be fair, sometimes it's not this week, it's next week.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Because I miss weeks. That's just pure ADHD. I think I overcommit my weeks, but that's fine. So you end up getting something, at least within a two-week period. So I think I got one last week, which is good. Today, though, I spontaneously come up with things that just happen to fall within my content plan, which is fantastic. The past couple of weeks, I have had a lot of people enter the studio with obviously inquiries about working together, which is amazing. That's picked right back up. I love that so much. Obviously, that hard work over that period has paid off. It's questionable sometimes, but it worked. But also the workshop that I ran last month, alongside being on stage on Wednesday, presenting the very same through line of conversation across the board.

Content Pillars Versus Brand Narrative

SPEAKER_01 1:43

And so today I want to talk about the difference between content pillars and brand narrative because they are not the same thing. And I think people are mistaking that. So if I asked you right now what your brand is, most of you would probably start listing content pillars or things that you do. And that's fine, but a brand is more than that. So what we want to do is talk about the differences between what brand narrative is and what content pillars are, how they work together, and why they are different things, and why you should understand why they are different things. So we're going to pretty much break down what they are, explain them with a little bit more detail, and then show why they matter in your strategy. And possibly why you've been having, if you're feeling stuck, or you're at that next stage where you're scaling. Everyone has a stuck stage. That doesn't mean that you're not performing. Sometimes you are performing greatly, and you may not know what that next step is. This is what we're going to have a conversation about and why we're seeing a lot of bigger brands at the moment repositioning, rebranding. They're doing something to shift because culture's changing. It always changes, but it's shifting really rapidly. And that means that the consumer identity is changing and we need to be moving to align with where they're going. So that's one thing I'll be talking about today. So by the end of it, you should know what the differences are, and hopefully you may be able to identify a key problem or a problem within something that you're doing right now. So let's break apart the confusion.

Campaign Planning And The 12 Week Goal

SPEAKER_01 3:42

So step one, they are two different things. They work together, but they are different things. Content pillars. They are what you're talking about this quarter on social media, on all of your channels, basically driving towards something that you want them to do, an objective. This is when marketing strategy comes into the equation. Now, a quick rewind if you're unsure, I also have a download you can download. Download you can download. It's called the marketing shift. And I made it specifically because it's a good resource for people that are stuck and don't really know what they need and breaking it down so that you can understand it. So essentially it talks about the differences between business strategy, brand strategy, and marketing strategy. And your business strategy is essentially what makes you viable as a business. It's your financial, you know, your financial revenue, your profit and loss, your viability, all of those things to like run a business. The brand is the attribute that goes on top of that that makes you want to be related, well, not relatable, but makes people want to buy from you. I like just mentally blanked on that. I'm like, what does a brand do? Here I am as a brand strategist. Yeah, it's like I was trying to figure out the way to explain it best. But you're wrapping that connection piece over the top. And marketing is how you get them to come to you. So the brand is the identity, it's like the person, and the marketing is getting people to, you know, speak to you, essentially. So we break that down really well in this document. It's free, download it, it's great. So this is why this matters because when we're talking about content pillars, we're looking at the marketing strategy. And the marketing strategy means that you want your audience to do something in that 12-week period. This is what a campaign is, a marketing campaign. So many people are just winging their marketing and hoping for an outcome when really you need to have a plan each quarter. What do I want the audience to do in this quarter? And it takes about 12 months to get people to do things. It's that repetition of the same message over and over again. And it's why marketing exists. You want them to do something. The brand marketing, however, is getting people to know you. It's the trust piece, it's the people piece, it's the culture piece. It's getting people to be familiar with you and building that trust establishment, the foundation that makes people want to buy your product. Because at the end of the day, it's like someone walking across the road to you and saying, hey, buy this. You'd be like, get out of my face. But if it's someone that you know, you're more than likely to stop and listen to what they say before you tell them no. And then if it's someone that you really know, you're more than likely to listen to what they say because you trust what it is that they have. They are essentially a really simplified way to explain it. So coming back, content pillars. They are what you're talking about this quarter. So, what is the objective on all of your channels and how are you building, you know, what are you wanting people to do? Then you look at how they shift. So they should shift. How are they moving each quarter? What are we talking about this quarter? They they are not the same thing as brand narrative, by the way. We'll come back to that. So they respond to your market, your audience's questions, and what you are launching. What is the objective that you're that you're wanting them to do? If you have a course that you're running, you're wanting them to do that. If you have a product launch that you have, you're wanting to feed them into that. You will notice how people have spring campaigns at the end of August. Um, well, actually, way before the end of August, and they move in. Watch how quickly people start talking about Black Friday. They will have that feed, they will feed that into you well before Black Friday starts. So that's something to take note of when retail obviously have a very fast occasional kind of timeline. And for business, uh terms of service business, you may have peak periods of the year where you know people are investing. And that's when you would probably put down your campaigns to get people to buy, and you may have a brand awareness period of getting people just to know who you are before you launch that. It's priming the audience to do something. That's marketing, right? So we then look at your yeah, the seasonal by design is essentially what I said. I've got a list so I don't go off off track. I'm answering myself before I get to the next bullet point.

Brand Narrative As The Long Game

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Brand narrative. Now, let's look at this. This is your strategy. So we're looking essentially, content pillars are tactical, and your brand narrative is strategic. They both need to work in unison. So one is the long game, one is the what you want them to do immediately, essentially. And we look at that from a place of uh the strategic story underneath. So, what is that through line, the conversations that you're having with people to educate them on your messaging, your positioning, your content, your offers, who you are, what you do, what you're about, who you're here for, all of that stuff. And it's not just a mission statement or a tagline or the things that you put down in a document and say, I've done all that stuff. If I were to ask you off the top of your head, what's your elevator pitch and you can't give it to me, you don't know it enough. It should be like embedded in your veins. And then we look at the central belief, that's the core belief. What is it that you stand for? And what your brand holds about the world and the people that you serve. These are so important. If I was to ask you about a brand like Patagonia, for instance, you know what they stand for. Or who else have we got? I'm like, you know, when you have to try and they go, name something that starts with M and all of a sudden your brain goes blank. I'm like, name, yep, Nike, for instance. I use these as an example as they're top of mind. We have them representing, you know, if you have a body, you're an athlete. That's what they were all about. They lost their way there for a little bit but came back. But we're starting to see this real sense of belonging and identity coming through, which I've been talking about for a couple of years back now. So if you want to go back and start listening to some of the older episodes, nothing has changed here. Where it's actually, thankfully, ahead of the game. So where we're moving into now, all of the stuff that I've been speaking to will set you up to be where you need to be. And then we look at the the reason someone chooses you over everyone else. It's not necessarily what you do, it's who you are. And this is identity at its core. And this is why brand has evolved, in my honest opinion, is it's moved from, and it used to be logos, colours, fonts. That's why everyone still says that. But it's adapted and it's changed and it's moved. And it used to be the advertising led, right? Brand was important, but it was like those really big 1950s ads and feature ads, and you know, who had the best ad agency. And we've moved so far from that that it's it's worth working with people that are fully aware of the history of brand. Because working someone that's in the now and they don't respect the past, they will not understand the future. It's really that simple. It's interesting to see those that have had a periodic success. Congratulations to them. This is no hate on them. But when we're looking to people that have profiteered or made it in a period that was winning, it's really easy to replicate that thinking, but it won't work in the current market that we're at. We're in a what is a soft market, is what they call it. And yes, people are still buying. You hear this all the time, but you can't just say people are still buying and completely negate the fact that a lot of people are not buying. So, what that means for you is that you need to build deeper relationships in order for them to want to buy your product. So, relationships and communication and identity alignment and belonging are where it is at. And community, getting people to trust you. If they feel that there is a connection piece there, you are going to be chosen over someone that they don't know who sells the same thing, regardless of how good that other person is at the service or the products that they sell. It is just a no-brainer.

Consistency Trust And How People Consume

SPEAKER_01 11:45

That's why recognition matters in terms of consistency. So posting a lot. Not, I mean, when I say that, I don't mean going and posting five times a day. I mean posting frequently so that you're always present and fresh. This is why you may feel that your content fails when you go to all the effort and you do maybe four weeks of content and then you drop off the bandwagon, you go, no one's, no one did anything. But you've got to think about all of the way people are consuming content now. Like they're not just, and I think I've said this in one of the other podcast episodes was the way that I consume now is I'll open up Instagram and I'll flick through my personal and then I'll jump onto my business and I'll flick through the business and then I'll jump onto LinkedIn and I'll flick through LinkedIn. And I'm like jumping between all of these platforms. And so we need to be taking into consideration the way people are consuming. So are you getting the attention of that consumer in that short period of time? And if you are not, maybe the piece of content that you put out was just not seen. So if we're doing like these sprints and then gapping for a couple of weeks and then coming back to it, that you're missing, you're kind of coming up, then dropping off and coming up. It's like the yo-yo diet kind of vibes. So we need to look at the key distinction between brand narrative and content pillars. Content pillars can shift. So whatever you're talking about, they need to move based on the objective. The brand narrative should stay. Who you are, what you do, what you're about, who you're here for. I always say that if we're going to build a brand, a content strategy, that you need to have at least, at least one of say you're posting four times a week, one or two of those pieces should be brand, should be brand narrative, should be brand story. Who you are, what you're about, who you're here for, the way you do things, all of those things in there. That's their trust building pieces, especially now. If you're in a sales period, you may move away from that, but you have periods where you go through, say, that 12 months, uh 12 weeks, sorry, and you have that three-month period of the strategy that you're working for, the quarterly plan. You may do month one as brand awareness, brand two is you know, the acquisition and trying to get them to download a lead magnet. And, you know, then the last month is more about getting them to buy something. And this is why you need to work with marketing strategists and understand marketing campaigns. And when we're expecting founders to know all of this stuff, this is why it feels really hard because you're essentially doing four jobs. You get someone that is really knowledgeable in the spaces that they're doing, and you'll have a, you know, a great day. You'll get people tell you exactly what you need to do and from the right angles, and you will be able to just execute. It's like having a running coach when you're trying to train versus you just winging it. You're not going to know what to ask, you're not going to know what to train for, but that running coach will give you the plan and you just do the plan. Like that's that's the difference. So we always aim to work with people in really good spaces, great content strategists, great marketing strategists, great marketing executors, um, content executors, designers, like all we have a massive supply network that are at our standard. And we use them specifically because when we're working in, I remember working with one of our old web designers and specifically saying, if you want to work with our bubble, like our connection of people, you need to raise your prices. And that was great for her because what I was saying to her is that we're at this standard, and I'm gonna need you to come up to me. And you are there, but internally you're not telling yourself that you're there. So when she did that, she was able to produce better work and get better clients and love her for that. So it really isn't about price, it is about reputation, recognition, what you want to be known and seen for, but it also is about the people in the collaboration that you're working with as well. When you have a really good people, a really good people, really good group of people around you, you are more than likely to get the results that you need. Do not feel that you need to do this alone. Now, if you are one of these people that are not at a scaling stage, this is where most of our clients are. But if you are not there and you're just winging this and you are at a low-cost budget, I know this. I went through hardship during like two or three years ago, off the back of my son's transplant. I went through all of that. So when someone says to you that they've won and they keep winning, that's not always right. We were doing really well, then this shit happened, we sunk, and I had to do a whole bunch of changes, then I'm rising again. So, what I like to do is talk about that because it's really hard to relate to people that just keep winning because without them understanding what that loss feels like, I honestly believe that they think that they're just better. Not all, not all, I say that, but a lot of people think that you have just done something wrong. And obviously the choices that you make is indicative of where you got to, but we need to also understand the psychology of where we're at in certain times. For instance, me being in hospital 37 times over a three-year period because my child had a liver transplant and was immunocompromised. That is a pretty damn good reason as to why my mind may not have been in a marketing strategy. And you know what? That's my life, but shit happens to people. There are marriage breakdowns, there are family deaths and grief. And we need to be a little bit more empathetic about what people are going through because I believe, going off tangent, slightly

Positioning Clarity And The Creative Process

SPEAKER_01 17:18

coming back in a minute, a lot of the world went through collective trauma during COVID. And that's not me overusing that. That is me genuinely speaking, that we were socially isolated. And I don't care, this isn't a stance on how you feel about that period of time, but it was, it has done a lot to the minds of people, and it also changed a lot about how we work now and how we live in the society that we live in, and it also is responsible for a lot of the behaviors that we're dealing with. I believe it has ramped up horrible behaviors, but they have been seen faster, so we're able to rectify and course correct. And I think we're in this pattern at the moment. I will leave that open to interpretation to however you want to handle that. If you follow my personal page, you will know exactly where I stand on that issue. However, coming back to why this matters, if we look at brand strategy as strategy, brand narrative as strategy. Let's slow down, Tara. Brand narrative shapes your positioning. Your positioning is everything. If you don't have a strong positioning in the market, you are just going to be like everyone else. So we need to understand what shapes you and how you differentiate. So it answers the question that your audience is always asking. Well, they're unconsciously asking questions, right? So even if they don't ask you directly, there's something that they're thinking they're not always going to know either. There's something there that they want to know. And the minute that you answer that is a win for them. So they're always saying, Should I trust you with my problem or my money? And they're always looking for a reason to say no. So there was a really good sales psychology book that I read a couple of years back, which was talking about getting them to answer a question first. They want that control of being able to answer a question. So it's asking them something really easy at the start so they feel they have a maintain, they can maintain that ability of control. Super good book. It was like 50 minutes, might drop that into the show notes as well if I can find it. If it's not there, I haven't found it. But that is a really important thing to take into consideration, is like, what are they feeling? What's the feeling? It's we're always like, oh, they're gonna work with us, or how can I sell myself to them? It's more about how can I understand them before I try to sell to them. If you try and sell too quickly, they're going to get their defense up. And anything that you say to them beyond that point is going to go in one ear and out the other because there's like a defense mechanism up. So it's really about what is it that they're coming to us for? Let's let's get them to talk more than than we speak. Let's get them to listen, which is something I've had to learn a lot, by the way. So when, and you can learn this. It's not, you don't go, oh, I can't do this. I always interrupt. I yeah, I do this and I have to like pull myself back sometimes. ADHD trait. But you can control it. So when the narrative is clear, so when you know what you're talking about, your positioning gets really sharpened. Like it's super clear. This has been a progress too. So don't think that you're just going to get it one day and go, bang. Working with this is why our process, we've slowed our processes right down, because people find these little gems that come out through the process. And people come to us and be like, I need a brand developed in three weeks. And I'm like, not gonna happen. I am so sorry. Go somewhere else. And they usually end up staying with us because they understand why. But some of our best ideas come from that manifesting in the, you know, you sit in there and you're like asking questions. And it's how are you ever supposed to find time to come up with great ideas if you're always on a timeline? So it's like when you put someone under pressure, you're like, you've got a minute, think of as many things as you can, like, ah, and you give them, I don't know, half an hour. They're gonna give you a whole page of things. The creative process was never supposed to be pushed on a really tight deadline. And so what we're seeing is absolute shit being produced everywhere because everyone's on this tight deadline. So we've actually, Sam and I did a post on this on Instagram the other day. Sam and I have stepped off the hamster wheel. I'm like, you know what? I only want to work with people that want to do this the right way. So anyone that does and is super serious about it will, and we're getting the best clients in. Like when I say the best, I'm so interested in what they do and so aligned with what they do that I want to buy from them as much as they want to buy from me. And I'm giving my time to things that are like almost self serving. It's it's so valuable and it's it's yeah, there's that. So yeah, it's it really is about finding that. It's not always about getting money in the door. And I think you will find that if you've found if you've lost your way. You will be scarce in trying to bring that money. And please, I know what that feels like. But you will be trying to get the get these people in that you don't align with. And then all of a sudden you've grown this business with all of these misaligned clients, and then you've lost who you are. And boom, you've got yourself into a position where you now need to kind of reposition, which means that you then kind of go back to square one. And it's not always that fun, to be completely fair. But that's business. And that's why a lot of people get into it. And we understand the risks that are involved in that. So we need to look at your narrative being super clean so that your positioning becomes really distinct and people know exactly who you are. That's one thing that we've nailed now. And like we're being um found by AI now. It's coming up through AI, I can see it all and analytics. It's really cool. So hard work, long time, consistency, repetition, saying it over and over, being really clear, and not changing things every five seconds. I mean, that's a lie. I did, but it was the positioning stayed the same, but the way I was saying it shifted, and that's essentially how it works. That's why messaging is really important. But you need that foundational layer baked in at the base first. But when that's missing, everything that you put in feels interchangeable. And it's it's just like it feels like it could belong to anyone. And so now we're seeing all this AI crap come out. It's people feeling like it's easier, but it's just the same because no one's working with these big thinking creatives anymore. They think that they can cut that process out. This isn't even to drum my own drum, by the way. Um, because I actually inquired with other creatives to help me get out of my shit because I'm biased to what I need. So I couldn't even find what I needed through AI as a bloody expert because I'm too close to my own brand to do that. So I had to get other people to see and hear what I was saying and pull that out of me. And boy, did that change. And by the way, this took three different people. The first one made me identify something, the second one made me identify something different. And then I was able to kind of start finding it from that point forward. And each thing that you see, and it might not be a person that you work with, it might be a talk that you go and see. And these are why I really like these little workshops or you know, you listen to audiobooks and they help you to find these things, right? So, yeah, when that feels like it's missing, everything feels like it's it's hard, like you can't figure it

Why Brand Strategy Comes First

SPEAKER_01 24:33

out. And so then we come back to talking about too many people looking at content marketing and skipping brand strategy entirely because they think that everyone needs to be online. But the brand strategy is the foundational layer. It is essentially like your blueprint to your house. You can't paint the rooms unless you know what room you're painting or who's going to be in that room, or where the room is. Like, is there light there? Can you shut can you paint it that color? Is it going to be too dark? All of these things are questions that you can't answer until you've got that foundation baked in. It is, I think for every neurodivergent person, a brand strategy is a really good visual. And I say this, if you're neurotypical, there's no issue there. But what I'm saying with the neurodivergent mind usually needs a much larger map, like a macro map. So if you start talking to me about messaging, I'm like, that's great. But how does that fit in the wider scale to me? How does that fit on the wider, you know, if I'm looking at a house plan and you're only showing me the bathroom, like I want to know what the whole plan feels like so I can make that feel like there's cohesion running through the house. Do you know what I mean? So when you're talking about one aspect of branding, which may be voice or it may be visual identity, like we're only looking at the pockets of what brand identity truly means. And we've actually baked in another layer underneath what most people are talking right now, and that is behavior, because I'm studying it and I have been for the past five years. And it's bringing that behavior-based belief shifting ideologies into who are we targeting here and what are we really trying to say to them and how can we connect with them on such a level that will blow the competitors out of the water? And that's working really, really well for us. So we go behavior, DNA, design. And the cool part about that is it's called our D3 framework. And the cool thing about that is we I've studied all aspects of it because I am so into that stuff. So not only am I a trained designer from print to digital, like end-to-end, which was a specialty in itself, I understood brand strategy and development because I obviously trained and learned that throughout my career as well. So I was working in both aspects. It was like a crossover Venn diagram. And then I added the behavior layer on top. So we've got like this three-way part crossover that a lot of people don't do. So, and obviously, I can't do everything at once either. If I have a design idea that I really want to execute, I just ask someone else that is amazing at that space to execute. That's called creative direction, by the way. So there's that. So coming back before I go too far off topic, is that we need to make sure that we're looking at the brand strategy at the layer, at the base, before we start baking in a content strategy, which is where I was talking about my container. Your brand narrative is like a container, and you put in certain things inside that container. Not everything about you, your life, your business, everything needs to go into that container. Only the things that you feel are going to shape the perception that you need the audience to have about you should be in that container. That's the most important thing. They are your associations, they are what people think about you, and they are how people will choose to buy from you. And that is what I've been teaching people at the moment. So we then look at your marketing should be answering your much bigger business strategy, not the other way around. So this is what I was referring to when we talk about those three business marketing and brand pillars that cross over into one another. They all need to serve one another. If we look at marketing, that even then breaks down into its own Venn diagram. You've got content, um, you've got video, you've got all these different ways to then execute marketing strategy, design, graphics, video production, like I mentioned before, you like in-person events, like all of these things are executions of how you can ricochet out that strategy. So you say, I am trying to explain X, Y, Z about our brand, and they then get to marketing and they go, This is all of the ways, or these are all of the ways that we can do that. That is the most important thing that we need to understand. Because if you don't know what you're trying to say, how are you going to know how to execute all of those things because there's no through line? Strategy, it's important. So the hierarchy, the pillars serve the narrative. The pillars should always come back to the narrative. It should also come back to what is what it is that you're trying to sell. So the brand narrative is like, what is it? Who do who are you as a brand? What are you trying to do? What are you about here for? And then you'll have all those things underneath that that you do. And the narrative serves the business. So that's what it's about. And it's it does sound nuanced, and um, I feel like I should have had a whiteboard here. This is what we need to do. Maybe it is something that I need to do. But when you get that order right, and it is an order, your content will stop feeling really uh scattered and will start to build. You will start to build a execution, which is what happened to us. We were winging it. I knew I knew what I was saying in certain places, but I needed it to be put together. So there were bits and pieces apart, but I needed it to come together. And that was because I didn't know where we were heading. We what I knew what we were and what worked, and I knew where we were going and what I wanted to do, but there was this interchange bridge moment where we were kind of like, ah shit, what do I post here? And that's where the big thinking happened. So if you think about a brand that you follow, and when they change what they talk about, um, you don't unfollow. Um, because the narrative is really like what you're connected to. It's not the topic that they're talking to, it's the narrative. And what you're saying, this is when we hear about people saying, is it on brand or is it off brand? And they may go off script and talk about something, but if it's something that they believe in in terms of their value alignment, then it 100% is part of their narrative. And it won't feel off-kilter, if you know what I mean. So it's in contrast, I guess, with a brand that um shifts topic constantly, it will feel off. You can't really make a connection with them, you're not really sure what they stand for anymore, and you start to disengage. And this is where you have trusts eroding. And that's because the brand only ever had pillars. So there was nothing really holding them together. And the minute they spoke about something else, everyone dropped off because there was nothing else holding it together.

Identity Shifts And Culture Driven Buying

SPEAKER_01 30:52

So now we talk about the identity shift. And this matters more than anything right now because consumer identities are shifting, and how people see themselves is shifting and what they value and what they associate with. We see this in buying behaviors, with what brands people buy and what they buy in private. Um, we see the brands people choose are part of who they are as people, their identity alignment. Like, you will stop buying from someone or something or a brand if it is supporting or doing things that you don't agree with. We've seen mass boycott from huge brands in alignment to political issues. We've seen mass, you know, boycotts from brands that treat their staff badly. They're like, oh, if that's how you treat your staff, I am definitely not buying from you. But we also see people win business from that as well. We're watching the Patreon CEO at the moment. He's like countering this the AI narrative and is really like championing AI uh creatives. And he's building this, like finally, someone there's there's someone on our side that's in this space. And he's really, he's really interesting to follow at the moment. Um, but there's also this halo effect of how that works with their product, and the same thing with the Stanley CEO, for instance, when the girl's car, if you've heard of the car fire, when the Stanley cup was still perfect in perfect condition with ice inside after a car fire, and it went viral, obviously, because that's pretty cool. And like, how good is that product? And then they bought her a car. The CEO bought her a car, did a special mention, probably because they got a huge amount of brand impressions from that piece of viral content. But it was also made them look even better. So the product looked great, but now, oh wow, the culture is amazing because they bought her a car. It was, yeah, that's what we need to think about with how consumers are aligning now. So they're going to then shift how they spend if they think, wow, if that's what I'm investing my money in, then I'm going to go and put it into that business. And the younger generation are very, very uh identity aligned in how they how they buy. So if you think that, oh, I don't buy like that, that's not correct. Even some things that may seem tedious or boring, is there's still an emotional alignment there. There's some kind of trust or some kind of comfort that you buy, like sauce or condiments in the cupboard, maybe something that you had when you were growing up, or it might be something that you bought with a friend and it reminds you of them. And you're not even sure you don't even know why. Like you may not even know why. These are just reasons that your body will tell you to do, or your or your mind will tell you to do, and they're so deeply unconscious that you aren't even aware of it. So these are the identity things that we're now seeing. People are very loud about who they are now. We're seeing this come through. Um, and if your brand identity hasn't evolved alongside that, then you're speaking to a version of your audience that no longer exists. So we need to be kind of jumping ahead to see where they're going and where they want to be, and being the solution for when they get there. That's essentially innovation. Yay, love that for you. Love that for us. This is our job. This is our job to future-proof market, why we assess behaviors, why we're doing all this, because this has been, you know, the pattern recognition has been off the chain and it's worked. So it's the brand narrative as the anchor for your evolution, how you grow and how you scale, whether that's periodically or instant. It is um, it gives you the foundations to evolve with your audience without losing yourself or the people within the business. And there's always going to be people that leave along the way as you evolve, and that's fine, both internally and externally. And your pillars change and your tone might shift and your offers may grow. But the narrative is the thread through all of it that keeps it consistent and coherent. So it lets you um, or it lets your brand identity, I should say, move with culture instead of chasing it, which is why our our tagline, which is actually used, is uh brands that breathe with culture. Because you're moving, it's like a heartbeat. You're kind of going along with it. And I like to call our brand identities fluid. So they're kind of constantly adapting to stay relevant, really important. So if you don't have that thread, every pivot will feel like a rebrand. It shouldn't. You can just reposition every now and then. And with with it, every evolution will feel like growth. That's the difference between a good brand and one that's been, I guess, pieced together. And that doesn't mean that if you've done that, I'm all about scrappy building at the beginning to get to where you need to be. But I think if you're an established brand and you've been in business for a while, then we need to be looking at getting proper systems built in because that's what brand is. Brand is a system.

Loss Aversion And Sunk Cost Traps

SPEAKER_01 36:19

So now we look at the psychology aspect. Love this part, by the way. And this is the layer, as I mentioned, that most people aren't talking about at the moment. And they're the two forces that there are two forces that keep you anchored. So we look at loss aversion, which is the feeling of pain is two times more than the feeling of gain. And you may have spent months, look, to be fair, it's probably years as well, building around certain content pillars. This is one of the things I find with a lot of our our clients or people that we workshop was 100% centralized around this. And it's because they feel familiar, right? And they feel like you or they feel like your brand. But the idea of letting them change, shift, or move into a new direction feels like that you're losing part of who you are, or losing the brand that you've built, but that's not what it is at all. So we overvalue what we already have simply because it's ours and we've built it. And there's emotion there. There's always emotion there. And so you hold on to pillars that stopped serving you a long time ago because letting go feels like you're losing ground. This is fear and ego, by the way, my friends, which is what I always say are the two core drivers for stopping growth. Whatever one you sit in, they're very closely aligned, to be completely fair. So you're not protecting your brand, you're actually protecting your comfort zone. And this is a psychological thing because your brain likes to keep you in places that feel safe. Doing something new that hasn't been done feels uncomfortable. And we look at this across a range of different things. If you're changing your lifestyle and you're eating different, that will feel completely different when you change. When you change and you do it, you're gonna feel amazing. But doing those first few steps feels really uncomfortable and really hard. You start a new job, it's going to feel really different. Getting into there and learning all the systems and finding out, you know, making new friends, all of that feels really difficult. School, similar thing. You're you're building those new pathways and those new ways of doing things that will become consistent. But if you leave after the first two months, like it's you're not ever going to build those relationships because you haven't allowed the time for them to build. It's the same thing with brand. The same thing with brand. It's why we say brand strategy or brand is much harder to manage in terms of performance metrics, because it turns up in different ways. So for instance, word of mouth is 100% a brand thing because your reputation is your brand. And that is a metric that you can't really track, but is 100% a brand metric. How people think of you, top of mind, if someone says, oh, I need to get XYZ or I need to buy XYZ and your brand pops up in their head, that is brand. And so it's that what you are and what you do and how you're perceived to the consumer, and it's pushed through your marketing. But if you don't have a consistent message, then you're not going to be the person that they think of when that positioning needs to happen. When someone says, I need someone that does X, Y, Z, that's positioning, that's brand recognition coming to full play in one whole sentence. You want those to do the core part. So it is, yeah, it's really about letting go in order to move forward. We say this in relationships too. You know, if you've ever had a breakup, you will leave that person and then you'll want to get back with them because it felt safe and may not be the right thing to do, but it felt comfortable because you everything feels hard. But then you have time to heal or time to move past that, and you realize it was a much better decision to do that or not, and you get back together like my husband and I. So, but it allowed you the time to do that. So now we look at sunk cost, so the sunk cost fallacy. You're invested, or you have invested, so much time, energy, and money into a particular content direction that walking away feels like a waste. So I actually spoke about this in one of my essays and was talking about how biases play come into play. And I used my business because I thought it was a really good learning point to see how it was being assessed. And I spoke about the Suncos fallacy of letting my studio go. I felt an emotional connection to that studio because I had spent all of those years prior building that connection. And the studio was a large part of the presence of your one and only. And needing to let that studio go felt like such a hard loss. And so I held on to it and I held on to it and I held on to it, and it was costing me money that wasn't coming in till it got to the point where I needed to let it go. And when I let that go, nothing changed. It was my mind saying, but everyone knows that this is making us look better and blah, blah, blah. And nothing changed. We just secured probably our biggest client that we've ever had in November from home. So it had nothing to do with that. A studio is great when you've got a large team. I think it's great to have that space for collaboration and if everyone's within the same location. Um, and if you're in that stage, absolutely. But if you can't justify the cost to the means, then it had to go. And that was a massive, that was some cost fallacy at play there for me. It was like, what are people gonna think if I don't have this? And it was it was external validation for something that needed to be internally driven. So yeah, that's a whole thing. But it's a I guess the logical the thought is it sounds more like I've posted about this for two years or I've spoken about this for two years and I can't change now, which was my problem. And that that keeps you anchored to a thought or a strategy that was over meant over, I guess meant to be a period. And for me, that period was over, and I had to start a new one. And yeah, it was it was something that you need to come to terms with, and it it feels like grief, it feels like loss. So when I say that you go through an identity shift or an identity change with the business, it's there's there should be parts of you that feel like you're grieving. Those people that just do up their identity and move on, the same shit is still underneath a pretty picture. Like, do you know what I mean? It's the you're not doing the work, you need to do the work. All things that lead to good change have some element of hard. And that's what I talk to about that space there. So you're not staying because it's working, like in my case, you're staying because you've already paid the cost for that. So mine was I put in all this effort to get here, and I've spent all this money to maintain it, but it's not serving me the way it was anymore. And I'm now at that point where I have two contrasting values that are fighting each other, and one had to win. So I let it go. And that was the choice that moved us forward. A lot of people actually don't do that, and it costs them, hence the sunk cost fallacy. So the connection between the two is that content pillars were never supposed to be permanent if we're connecting the two psych pieces, right? And that they're supposed to be um serving something bigger. So what it's like your strategies are working to get you to somewhere, not to to necessarily keep what you currently have, it might be to let go of something in order to get something different. A lot of people talk about this in terms of relationships. There's relationships that keep them back. Similar things. The choices that we make aren't always easy. Sometimes they can be really hard. And sometimes the choices are so deeply aligned to who we are as people that we don't even know that that's the choice that we need to be making. And they're the conversations that we love to have with people. And so when you don't have the bigger thing, which is your brand narrative, the pillars become the whole identity. So the brand narrative for us was always we don't need to be an agency on the harbor. We only need five or six, uh, and this has been from the get-go, by the way, that didn't change. Five or six people in the studio ever grow to grow to, and we would rather have a wait list out the door for 12 months than to take on too much, grow too big, lose the culture. It was always, we want to stay small, independent, creative, and boutique. And we're now closer to that more than ever. And that just meant I had to the studio was there for my own ego, to be completely fair. Um, I have a studio, yay, look at me. And I loved it, don't get me wrong, I loved it and it served me. It was my creative space. And would I get another one? Yes. Does that serve my ego again? Yes. Did it create me an environment that I needed to be in to thrive? Yes. So a creative space outside of my home was really important to me, except making bank was also really important to me. So that was a change that I needed to make at that time. So we need to be figuring out what that bigger thing is and whether we've actually been pushing the pillars as the identity as opposed to looking at the brand strategy. And so, yeah, changing them does feel like losing yourself, but also that's not strategy, that's attachment. I really like to listen to people. It's funny because you watch these people, I've got plenty of them at the moment that I know that will talk about things like, um, I'm really good at making decisions, or, you know, I make them really easy. And it's like, but a quick decision always isn't always a good decision. So, first, that's not always a good thing. Two, a the hard decision should sometimes take time to make. You're not gonna go and buy a house in a day unless you've already kind of done pre-work there. And it's the the conversation that I have with people, I guess, when we're talking about um reflection is a lot of people think that they already have the thing that I'm trying to challenge them on and they don't. And I you can't, you know, you can lead a horse to water type vibe, but it really is a matter of they have to do that work. It's like I can't even use it. It's like anything. You can anyway. I'm trying to think of multiple examples and none of coming to my head. Because if you talk of fitness, it's like you can give someone a nutritional plan, but you're not the one eating the food, right? You can give them all the things that they need, but they need to be willing to do that. The plan needs to obviously work for the person, um, which can be a lot of issues, also, is that people can build plans or strategies for you that actually don't work for you. So therefore, you're trying to build or work to a strategy that doesn't work. We try to build our strategies around the baseline of that person. So what is actually achievable for you, not what you want, what is genuinely achievable for you. Because you would rather succeed and goal tick and hit those things, and then when you have capacity to move into the bigger space, be there. But if you start the capacity at a higher space and you actually can't hit it and you fail, you will think that everything has failed when you just needed to do it a different way.

Bringing It Home And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 47:45

So let's bring it all home. Hey, when we talk about, I guess, the belief shifting, it it the repositioning and identity work really does come from a place of letting go. I have done complete brand strategies with people, and I know that they've got to the point where they've changed that brand strategy so much that I know that it still isn't gonna serve them. And it doesn't matter what I say to them, they will still go and do something else somewhere else to try and find and fill that void, and it's because they haven't done the work that they needed to do in the first place. So there's always that. You have to be willing to meet the person that you have to be willing to change. So the container will hold your narrative. Not everything needs to go in there, but it needs to be strong. And the pillars are just what you talk about for that quarter. So the container never really changes. It's essentially you're who you are, what you do, what you're about, who you're here for. And then the conversations that you have outside of that is what you push out through marketing, genuinely on what you're talking about for that quarter or for whatever whatever it is that you're trying to sell. And the narrative is what keeps the audience connected. So that's the brand trust, brand narrative, brand strategy piece, brand story. People. And so if you're not sure whether you have a brand narrative or a set of content pillars, I would suggest just sitting with that because that may be the core piece that you need to look at. And we are bringing back the if you are interested in an in-person workshop, we are bringing back the underground for part two. I was going to push it out in September. I think might push that more to October and get people kind of cooking for the end of year um planning for 2027. What the hell? How are we even there? But I have got some sneaky things that I've got planned that are coming up. I'm really excited about. And I'm trying to do that slowly. I've always been the type of person to push things out really quickly, and then I lose momentum. So I would rather do little tiny sprints on the things that I'm planning because they are, to be completely fair, they're amazing. Um, and I'd rather them get built with purpose. And we're working with amazing clients at the moment too, so I want to make sure that they're getting all of me as well. And I'm not the bottleneck, which I currently am, but I'm building that out too. So if you are interested, I have a new piece coming out in the coming weeks. It's called the brand map, and that's going to pretty much give you that macro version of what is involved in a brand strategy, and then we will be releasing something after that, which I'm working on now, which should help you to build that out on your own, or you can do it with us. So if you're interested and you want to get in touch, you know where to find me. Links are in the bio or the show notes, and I've dropped a link in there for the market shift if you want to download that too. So until then, I hope this you found this episode useful. I'm trying to provide more in-depth understanding of what's going on at the moment so that people realize that it's not a you thing. It's uh, well, it can be a you thing, but really it's an external thing that's forcing a you thing, if that makes sense. So, yeah, it is hard and it's meant to be hard, but business is never made to be easy or we wouldn't all be doing it. So I will chat you next week, hopefully.

SPEAKER_00 51:24

Did you like that episode? Hope so.

SPEAKER_01 51:26

Because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you're listening on and click and feel it? It's much appreciated and helps us know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at you wanna know link underscoreau on Instagram or head to www.uwananolink.com.au.