The lifecycle of a business includes a tremendous amount of change: from launch, through various growth stages, to eventual exit or new evolution. Every major milestone along the growth journey creates an opportunity to rethink the brand story, and ensure it’s aligned to the audiences who matter most at these crucial moments.
Wherever you are on your growth journey – whether you are the Founder of a startup, the CEO of a fast-growing company, or an Owner planning an acquisition or exit – this recorded webinar will help you understand how your brand strategy and story should evolve to help you reach your intended destination.
Key Takeaways
- Your brand is more than a logo – it encompasses business identity, name, design, and distinguishing features.
- Your brand is a promise you make to the world.
- Focus on creating a message that provokes buyers to engage and refine the message before investing heavily in marketing.
- Ensure alignment of brand archetypes and values in partnerships or acquisitions.
- It’s important to align personal and corporate brands with leaders.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- The Components of Authentic Growth™ Methodology
- How Business Leaders Can Build a Personal Brand
- Brand Messaging Guide: 9 Moments to evolve your brand narrative
- The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes
- Jungian archetypes
Full Episode Transcription
Introduction
Jennifer Zick: Welcome so much everybody, to the next edition of Growth Marketing, a webinar series brought to you by Authentic®. I’m your host, Jennifer Zick. I’m the CEO of Authentic and I’m joined today by a panel of my peers, marketing experts. We’re going to dig in shortly on the topic of a lifecycle of a brand. We’re so excited to have you joining us. Before we get started, I do want to start with a little bit of context on who we are, what this webinar series is about, and a little bit of housekeeping on what to expect, and then we’ll get right into the fun stuff. So first of all, who is Authentic? You might be here without even knowing who we are, so we’re grateful to meet you.
Authentic is a team of fractional CMOs that works with growing businesses to help them Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next step toward revenue growth. And we do that as fractional cmos and advisors for growing and entrepreneurial businesses. It’s a real delight to work with companies in their formative stages of growth and help them reach that next level. And today we’re going to talk about a lot of different levels of growth and what that means for brand and message strategy through various kinds of pivot points and intervals in your business growth. So we are hosting a monthly series of webinars. This is our second in the lineup. Our next will be in May, so stay tuned for details coming on that.
But our goal through the growth marketing series is to provide for you very practical, actionable guidance about how to think about what marketing is and the impact it can have in your growing business. So this series is really designed with founders, entrepreneurs, owners and revenue leaders in mind. But of course, we recognize that you in the audience represent a wide variety of roles, business models, business types, industries and sizes, and at different phases. So we really invite you today to take whatever pieces of this conversation, serve you in your role and in your business, and let go of the rest. We just hope that you come away with at least one little actionable nugget that’s going to make your role and your business better. So thank you for joining us again. And my colleague Monica Bussell is actually running the tech in the background.
She’s doing such a great job. Thank you, Monica. And I want to point out to you that if you take your mouse over the Zoom features, I think usually at the bottom of your screen, you’ll notice there’s an area called Q&A that’s separate from the chat feature so while I welcome you to use the chat feature just to say hello to people, we really want to direct and point you to the Q&A feature of Zoom. So if you’ve got a question as we roll through this conversation today, post it there. You can also look at other people’s questions and vote for the ones that you would like to hear answered.
Because toward the end of this conversation, we hope to have some time for Q&A and we are going to look at what questions you’ve posted to try to pull from the audience and serve you well. This event is being recorded, so please don’t feel that you need to take copious notes unless you love to do that. We’ll be following up with an email with a link to the recording that you can review or share with your team members. So and then finally, at the end of this webinar today, we will have a very simple Zoom live poll to ask for your real time feedback. So if you can stay till the end, we really value your feedback. And of course, you can always reach out directly to me or to Monica.
Our emails might be in your inbox so you can find us on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas on what other topics you’d like to learn about so that we can be thinking ahead how to serve you well through our growth marketing webinar series. So without any further ado, thank you for listening to my housekeeping notes. Hopefully that’s given everybody time to get here. We’re going to get to the fun stuff, and I’d love to introduce you to my panelists. I don’t think you can see their faces yet, but they’re going to chime in and introduce themselves individually. Today with me, I have Kate DiLeo. She’s the chief brand architect of Ennoble. They’re an ally partner within Authentic’s community.
And Kate and her team work with a number of our clients, and even with Authentic on brand and messaging strategies, she’s brilliant, high energy. You’re going to love meeting her today. Steve Grady is with us. He’s one of our fractional CMOs and advisors, and he’s worked with high tech and services businesses and all kinds of sizes and models, and he’s going to have some really great stories for you here today. And finally, Tracy Steeno, another of our fractional cmos and brand leaders. She’s actively working with a client of ours that’s going through some exciting brand transformation initiatives and she’s been a key player in entrepreneurial growth businesses and tech companies as well. So I’m excited to hear what these three have to say and to share with us today, but I’d love for them to say hello themselves.
So, Kate, I’ll start with you.
Kate DiLeo: Well, thank you so much, Jennifer. It’s an honor to be here. And hello, everybody. My name is Kate DiLeo, and as Jennifer mentioned, I’m the chief brand architect. And, you know, we’re a brand strategy firm that really has set our stake in the belief that brand is the path of least resistance to revenue. And so my job as I work with clients is really to ensure that you can create common ground with your audiences so that ultimately, you know, they’re buying from you versus the competition. So it’s helping you create that message. And so it’s great to be here and thanks again.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Kate. Steve, over to you.
Steve Grady: Hi, everybody, I’m Steve Grady. I’m part of the Authentic fractional CMO team. I kind of come from the tech world, so I grew up as an engineer and went to work for Bell Labs back in the day, did lots of engineering, and then found it was really fun to sort of couple the technology and the business problems that the technology solves. And so I’ve been doing tech marketing and telecom software semiconductor services space for quite a while and really love this topic. It’ll be a fun discussion today to talk about brands and how brands evolve and what’s the right way to go about it. So great to be here and welcome, everybody.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Steve. Tracy.
Tracy Steeno: Hi, everybody. My name is Tracy Steeno and I am also a fractional CMO and consultant with Authentic. And over the course of my career, I’ve worked with some pretty amazing brands, from startups to well established firms, primarily in the software, services and retail industries. And while I love everything about marketing, I have a particular fondness for the brand and creative side of the business. I’m excited to be here and I think we’re ready to get started.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Tracy. Thanks, everybody. I love your energy. It’s so delightful to be together and I’m grateful that the technology allows us to do this even in a time when we’re not physically together and invite this community to participate with us as well. So we’re going to get kicked off again.
I want to say the work that we do at Authentic is primarily with small and mid sized growth businesses. Most of our clients are somewhere between five and 100 million in revenue, but the team on this panel have served downstream and upstream from that size and type of business. So we’re going to kind of center today’s conversation in that entrepreneurial growth space, but we’re going to pull in some stories and accolades and anecdotes from outside.
Brand, Message, and Content Definitions
Jennifer Zick: So let’s jump in. Tracy, I’m going to direct the first question to you, and then we’ll kind of chime in around the panel on this. So we’ve already talked about the fact that we have a variety of guests in the room with us today. Some are entrepreneurs and founders. Some are sales leaders. Some are marketers themselves. Those of us who are marketers, I think, understand the subtle but important nuance between words like brand, message, or story and content.
But just to level the playing field, because we’re going to be talking about brand today and messaging and not so much about content and production. Can you give us a little context and clarity on what those words mean?
Tracy Steeno: Sure, I would love to. So let’s start with the brand. Your brand is so much more than a logo. Brand encompasses your business, your name, your terminal design symbol, and any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or services as distinct from those of other sellers. Brand is how a company or product shows up in the market. And messaging. Messaging gives a voice to a brand. It brings meaning to those it serves. The strongest brands appeal to our head. Think about pain, gain solutions, safety, security, statistics and simplicity as examples. And our heart, the emotional appeal for belonging, humor, among other things, or both the head and the heart. An example of mine that comes to mind is Lululemon. Some of you may have heard of Lululemon, others may not. But those who know it and follow Lululemon are kind of addicted to it. Right.
Its very name means something to those people that follow the brand. And Lulu is more than active wear. It is technical clothing for people with sweaty pursuits.
Jennifer Zick: That’s hilarious.
Steve Grady: Yeah.
Tracy Steeno: The premium brand speaks to both the head and the heart.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, that’s so true, Tracy. Thank you. And I just want to add, too, and Kate or Steve chime in on this, but, you know, brand is so much more, like you said, Tracy, so much more than a logo or a name or a color palette. Brand is every interaction with every stakeholder that touches into your business and the relationships connected to it. Right? Whereas when you move downstream to what that brand looks like in content production, that might be a social media post, it might be an email. Right. So there’s a very, there’s a really big range between brand, message and content. But Kate or Steve, any thoughts on this? Kate, jump in.
Kate DiLeo: Sure. Yeah. Tracy, I think you hit the nail on the head. And as I work with clients to talk about the messaging side of branding, which is where I sit in the pie of, okay, where do we, when we talk marketing and branding, that’s a lot of stuff. You know, I think one of the words that I always try and bring people back to is brand is really your promise. It’s the promise of the experience that you can expect to have when you interact or purchase from an organization. And so, for example, in the B two C space, I’ll give some examples. You know, if I were to say Nike versus Adidas, Coke versus Pepsi, McDonald’s versus Burger King, Yahoo versus Google, I think our brands kind of went boom, boom, and we probably picked the one that we preferred.
Now, it’s not necessarily because one shoe or one burger is really better than the rest. And I’ve had people correct me because I said no, one burger is much better. Kate. However, I think what we’re really getting at is there’s something about that visceral, emotional response of what we believe ourselves to be when we do that, when we put on Nike, who do we believe ourselves to be when we eat at Burger King, who do we believe ourselves to be? And so as you guys think about your own brand messaging, you know, and as Tracy alluded to, it’s really about that promise of what are you trying to say that you are and what do you actually, what’s the promise of who you want your customers to be when they interact with you?
Jennifer Zick: Great.
Steve Grady: Yeah. And I was going to dovetail with Kate and Tracy. Kate talked a little bit about the promise, the transformation promise of where you go from today tomorrow if you embrace our brand. But I really liked how Tracy talked about heart overhead in some cases, because most people think they’re logical, but they’re almost all emotional. And how you react to the brand and how you present yourself and the kind of emotions that are associated with that are a key part of your brand in terms of how you navigate the marketplace and how people feel. You can be saying the most logical things in the world, but if you don’t believe it, if they don’t trust you, people are kind of buying with their heart because there’s really only three areas that you can affect and interact with people.
That’s how you change their health and how you change their wealth, and how you change their status, maybe their relationships. And you kind of think through any products, whether it’s B2B or B2C. Those three key areas of how your brand helps them and transforms their health, wealth or status is how they’re going to view your brand. And so it’s really important. And I liked your comment, Tracy, on heart in particular, as how they really feel emotionally about your brand for sure.
Early Stage Brand Development
Jennifer Zick: And we’re going to have a little bit more conversation on connecting with your customers’ hearts, not just their brains, a little further on. But Kate, I’m going to start this next question directed at you. So we, you and I have both worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and early stage businesses, and we are ourselves entrepreneurs in small growing businesses. And so we know up close and personally how things change really quickly. When you’re in startup mode, right? When you’re first launching a brand or a business as a founder, you wear all the hats, right? You’re working on product and service development, your company is sales driven. Your messaging and the way you articulate what you bring to the world changes pretty quickly based on the feedback you’re getting from the market as you start to actually bring in customers.
And so knowing that the story is evolving really rapidly at this phase, like this is the founder carrying around their pitch deck that changes daily, right? So it’s changing rapidly. How should early stage founders think about the concept of story and messaging so that they feel they can make these changes but they still have something in their hands?
Kate DiLeo: This is such a fantastic question. And, you know, for context, for those of you that I’ve not connected with before, so, you know, in the past ten years, I’ve built over 200 brands and probably 95% have been in that startup small business space. In fact, I partner with accelerators around the world and specifically come in and teach folks that are going are pre-seed funded in seed stage, maybe they’re just completely bootstrapped. Maybe they are just an idea that they’re coming with as a solo entrepreneur. And they’re in the baby beginnings of wanting to launch a company, but in this bucket of the startup world, in this entrepreneurial space, what I know to be true is that revenue is king. We’re really in a position as entrepreneurs at that stage where we need to find the path of least resistance to revenue.
That’s what’s really going to make or break it for us, right? For going from like a startup to a really solidified organization. And so I always say, and I said this at the beginning, that brand, your message is the path of least resistance to revenue. Because when you guys can tell somebody very quickly whether they hit the website, you know, or whether you’re talking to them verbally in a networking setting, when you can say, listen to my message, hey, this is what I do. This is how I solve your problem and this is how I’m different. You know, that’s the stuff that provokes that prospect organically, authentically to go, okay, that’s interesting. I want to have a conversation. I want to click to convert and buy.
I want to get on the demo call, whatever that next step that you may have is your brand is supposed to provoke. And so I think it’s important to remember as you’re scaling and as you’re growing to be able to put your stake in the ground and to say, okay, we know that our message can and should iterate as we look at the next three, five years, that’s okay, that’s normal. But we’re going to focus on creating a message that truly is not just about awareness, but it’s about how we can provoke buyers to want to have conversations with us. And so in my opinion, I think really the goal here is to focus on getting your message down, recognizing that it is iterative, and then you’ve got to go out and practice it.
In fact, a lot of early stage companies, you guys may not have $20,000 a month to spend on marketing. And you know what, maybe that’s okay. Maybe where you need to be right now is to refine that message, practice it, speak it, and perfect it before you start pulling all of the various levers that you may decide you need when it comes to marketing. So before you start trying to go after every social media platform, let’s focus on the message first and make sure it’s working.
Jennifer Zick: Kate, you prompt me and I’m not on the panel, so I’m going to try not to inject myself as host too frequently here, but you prompt me to. You reminded me of two of my favorite quotes from friends in my network. One was a former boss who would preach, he wasn’t big on all the marketing technology, and we did use all the marketing technology in the company. But he’s like, if your message sucks and then you activate a bunch of marketing technology and channels, you’re just making a bad story suck faster to more people, right? Like there’s a time in a business where you got to get the story right before you start investing in accelerating that story into the market.
Jennifer Zick: And another one of my dear friends, Doug Bird, who’s a successful multi time, you know, multiple entrepreneur, has sold and built and scaled many businesses, spoke on a panel for me, a couple of years ago, and I think it was Doug that shared that he never worried too much in the early stages about the name of the business or the logo design or anybody. It’s going to change, because once we bring this thing to market, the thing changes based on the market feedback. And so we just don’t make that big of an investment upfront until we. Till we get things a little further.
Kate DiLeo: So I think we can’t undervalue the power for entrepreneurs to get out there and speak the brand. You are the brand. In fact, when I work with clients, one of my key indicators is I only work with you if there’s a founder in the room. And, you know, I know that sounds crazy, but I really think it’s because you guys, you have the brand up here. You do, you have the message. Sometimes what’s hard is how do you take the 35 ways that you set it and test it out with your audiences and help streamline that and boil that down into the 1234 that, you know, are going to kind of really crisply provoke that person to want to connect. And that does require practice.
And it does often require that you have to take some time, literally set it aside, and do some form of a messaging exercise, whether that’s on your own or you need to hire people. I think you have to actually block some time off as an entrepreneur to say, gosh, we need to actually sit in a room and focus on this and get this down so we can go and practice and then gain traction. Because where there’s traction with your message, therein lies the sweet spot of how you then can accelerate the message with marketing.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right.
Steve Grady: Kate, I was going to ask you a little bit. As you’re doing this messaging work with your clients, how do you fit the story into that? Because story is so powerful and delivers your brand and your messaging as a story, not just a list of facts on a sell sheet or whatever, how have you found really using story to be important in the brand message creation and delivery?
Kate DiLeo: Well, I think it’s paramount right now. I’ll tell you, one of my odd philosophies is that I think sometimes the word story gets thrown around a lot, and we don’t really know what that means. And often when you say, I’m telling my story, it’s like you’re trying to shout like a megaphone with people and tell them all the information. You know, great brands don’t shout at you like a megaphone. They provoke conversation. And so I think the word that we should actually be thinking about as we’re going through COVID and the craziness of what we’ve all experienced as organizations in the last year is not so much about trying to shadow a story.
But what can I say every step of the way with my tagline, with my value proposition statement, with my key features and benefits and differentiators to provoke the buyer to want to engage and ask the next question, whether that’s mentally or verbally, that’s really the goal. Certainly what that translates into, Steve, is an actual story. As somebody reads your website, as they engage with you, they get a very singular point of view. They feel like they have a single story that’s being told to them as well. But again, I want us to think about not worrying that we have to shout everything at somebody and put so many paragraphs of details out on our website and hope that they’re going to get it. That’s not the story.
It’s about how you can actually give nice breaks and pause points in the messaging to say, I’m going to invite you to ask a question. I want you to ask them to know the next piece of detail that’s more powerful.
Brand Evolution and Alignment
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Well, we could go deep on this early stage storytelling. We could drum up a lot of war stories from our marketing archives about how to get entrepreneurs aligned and on the same page and raging visionaries to get their business growth model on a piece of paper. There’s a lot we could talk about just in the early stages, but we’re going to move because this is the lifecycle of a brand all in one action packed hour. So, Steve, this next question’s coming to you first, there are a lot of stages that happen as a business shifts from that startup entrepreneurial founder mode to a more established early stage entity. Right. So at this point, maybe they’ve landed on the core product or service.
They’re building a team, they’re scaling some of the sticky story pieces Kate just talked about, like what resonates, what gets us traction. We found them. We found those little nuggets. Right? So what are some of the indicators, though? That is when the dust is starting to settle around that maybe the company has outgrown its original, its origin story, or the story only the founder can tell. And now it’s time to revisit your overall messaging strategy and equip for that next phase.
Steve Grady: Sure. I think, like you said, we’ve already set up a bit of a foundation to start that path and engagement. And at that point, you’ve had some success. I think as your company grows, your capabilities grow, and the people you serve can potentially change. So initially you have a set of capabilities. They’re kind of narrow, especially if you’re a small company. You do this really well for this set of people. But then as you grow and succeed, you’re finding you can add new products, add new services, features, or kind of grow your portfolio, which means you’re going to be able to address additional needs from not only your current clients, but new prospects in this area.
So you have to be able to, as Kate suggests, as you’re telling your story, say, now, how can I include these new capabilities I have and talk to a new set of customers or prospects in that regard to kind of say, I can help you now. And so you will have to modify and change it. Now that’s going to be an issue. Maybe we’ll talk in a few more minutes about how you manage that messaging? And I across your entire organization is growing, because if you’ve got, I think, Jennifer, maybe you could even relate to when it was you and, or then maybe just a couple of CMOs and now or 15, 16, whatever the number is, trying to keep the story straight across. Everybody gets, you know, exponentially harder, and keeping the story straight is difficult.
And so I think that’s a really key thing, is doing it very in a structured manner and well thought out so that you can say, now we’re going to talk about this. We’re not going to talk about that yet, but we’re going to talk about this so we’re not confusing and kind of all scattershot.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I absolutely can relate. There’s that point in the business growth where you go from having a founder who’s maybe the head of sales, or a partner who’s the head of sales. You’ve got that one person responsible for carrying the story and constantly evolving it to now having to transfer and train and reinforce what pieces of it other folks within the team are going to carry forward and put structure to that. And then it can be frustrating for entrepreneurial leaders. They feel like they’ve told their people what to say. This is who we are, here’s our message. And then they’re frustrated when people don’t convey it correctly. But it takes time. It takes repetition. Great. Anybody else want to chime in on that evolution phase?
Kate DiLeo: I think other things to keep in mind, too, as your company evolves. You know, often I’ll hear symptoms. Excuse me? I’ll hear symptoms around. All right, well, we’ve launched into a new sector. We’ve launched a new product or offering. Certainly those are key indicators. You need to look at your messaging holistically and understand if the umbrella of your message is really covering all of the various facets and features and depth and breadth that you offer as an organization. I think it’s also important, too, to maybe just do a litmus test for yourself internally to recognize, you know, hey, the message has worked really well so far. We found a bit of traction. However, sometimes you may also see areas with particular audiences or segments in the market where you’re going, gosh, we’re struggling to get prospects to the table. Something is a little off.
And so I think as long as you’re going through the process of also thinking about what’s working really well, what’s new that we need to be thinking about. But then also, are there some hinge points where maybe, wow, our conversion rate’s not very strong, or, gosh, we’re just not even seeing any traction over here. Of course, those are important areas where you want to think about how we refine, how do we improve.
Jennifer Zick: And Tracy, I know how passionate you are about the brand and that you’ve been part of a lot of early stage businesses and helping scale and equipment both the executive team toward alignment and the sales team toward alignment. In these early stage growth, what are some of the most important actions a business can take to create alignment at that intersection in that growth period?
Tracy Steeno: I think we talked about the messaging session earlier. I think that is a really important step that we can involve all of the parties in to get their feedback and buy in. I also think along that path, just making sure that we have clear, connected groups and that we’re always on the same page and aligned, that’s really critical along the way.
Jennifer Zick: Right. So I think you’re referencing it. So Authentic is part of our methodology. We use a simple like three hour messaging workshop and then Kate is our ally partner who can go much deeper into messaging strategy. And we’ll talk more about that along the way, too. But the premise there being getting the stakeholder feedback so that we don’t have blind spots. Like as the team grows, there’s a disconnect between the executives and what they see inside the business and the myopic perspective, perhaps from the people going out into the field and the customer service people working with the customers in the end.
So making sure that those stakeholders that we have a process to get their feedback, that we understand who in the business has a voice and who has a vote in shaping the story and the message. I think sometimes that can get really convoluted for entrepreneurial businesses where all the founding team members have always had a voice and a vote. But you get to a point where you have enough teams where there’s a difference between who gets a voice and who gets a vote, and then how we keep the teams aligned. So, yeah, using workshops in process to do that. Super helpful at that point. Steve, I’m coming back to you on this next piece, starting with you on this concept I call maverick messaging.
Because once you get beyond your first core team of employees and like that first layer in your business where you’ve gone from founder to having some people in sales and some other people in service, and you’re building a team, eventually your messaging is at risk of, like, growing legs and running in a lot of different directions. And as marketers, we often enter into accounts wherever I, we can’t believe the variety of decks and pitch materials and proposal versions and sell sheets that this business is working with. And God bless entrepreneurial businesses. I’m often like, I can’t believe they grow as well as they do despite themselves. Sometimes when it comes to maverick messaging, you’ve got the tenured salesperson who’s been there ten years is just doing things the way they’ve always done things.
You’ve got the founder with his or her own story version, and then you’re at the point now where you’ve got operations people and finance people, where if you drop them into a networking event, they might not even know how to tell the company’s story. Right. So we’re at that maverick messaging moment. Steve, you do a lot of work with vision and story alignment before we get to marketing execution. So how do you help teams who’ve been kind of scattered get aligned and then stay aligned as they grow?
Steve Grady: Sure. Sure. I have kind of a two part answer to that, and the first part of it kind of goes back to the other question, too. Is your brand evolving? Let me go to the Authentic bookshelf back here off the shelf. This is a really cool book called the Hero and the Outlaw and what it introduced. It’s a really neat book by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson, about 20 years old. But man, is it so super spot on. And they talk about brand archetypes, because we really haven’t talked about sort of who you are as a company and how you go to market. And there’s twelve archetypes. I’m going to read them. So I don’t forget them all, but they’re pretty cool. Creator, caregiver, ruler, jester, regular guy, or gal lover, hero, outlaw, magician, innocent, explorer, and sage.
And as you think about those twelve different types of archetypes, you can see how companies like Pillsbury Doughboy were kind of a caregiver, a nurturer brand. But Harley Davidson is an outlaw brand. And so you have to really be conscious about what your brand archetype is. And so as you start out, you might be a wizard or a magician brand, and then eventually you’re a hero. And if you get really big, you look at archaeology, Cisco, over the years, or Intel, they started out as a wizard and wound up as a king ruler brand. And so it evolves. And you have to be sensitive to that and understand that now people are also have their brand archetypes, too.
And so, Jennifer, to your question about what, you know, how you get Maverick stuff is because when engineering talks about your product, they’re creators, right? When customer support or service talk, they’re nurturers, right? When salespeople talk, they’re heroes. So we actually have our own brand archetype that will color how we even talk about our company. So it’s good to talk about those things. And the four steps that can really help you get everything together is first you got to have a very clear client value statement, what value you bring. Everybody in the company needs to understand who you help, how you help them, what the success outcomes look like, and how they should be fans for life, right? And so everybody understands the three unique values. It’s kind of an EOS technique that’s on the VTO is what makes us really unique.
And everybody understands that you have to have company meetings, talk about it openly. And then once everybody understands that, then you have the brand and marketing police. You need to batten down the hatches on what we’re going to say, how we’re going to use it, what we’re going to talk about, all these same materials with my clients. We use, for instance, Monday.com to create a board that’s got all the content, all the different areas. Everything is approved. You can draw on this any way you want, but you don’t get to be all that creative with it. You know, use it, put your own color on it, but don’t change it. And don’t, because you do want to put your own brand, stamp on it, verbalize it, but don’t change it.
So however you have that content available, especially social, and I love Kate and Tracy’s people get really maverick on social. And so I’d love to hear some of how we keep people from kind of saying the wrong things that way.
Jennifer Zick: Oh, I’m a social maverick, but the good news is I’m now a CEO, so I get to do whatever I want whenever I want.
Steve Grady: But, Kate, you do not. You have to stick and stay on brand.
Jennifer Zick: Jennifer, Kate, I want to hand off to you because first of all, I’m soon going to give you an unsolicited promotion for the services you provide around everything Steve just talked about, but chime in here on what Steve just lobbed our way.
Kate DiLeo: So I love this because part of the process that I take clients through and Jennifer and the Authentic team have gone through is we do what we look at archetypes. Who are your archetypes for your organization? And I think it’s a beautiful way to look at those jungian archetypes. And Carl Jung created these to help you kind of narrow down and understand who we are at our core. I think along with that, when you think about going rogue, I think what’s really important with the different personality types that you may have. When you have a COO who cares about one thing and a CFO who cares about another, and the CTO who cares about another, and the sales team, I think it’s important to remember that you guys all want the same thing, which is success for your organization.
And so one way to ensure that you create alignment in your culture internally and you prevent people going rogue on the messaging is, believe it or not, to just have your mission and vision in front of all employees. I think a huge opportunity that you have, believe it or not, is to give your people access to, day in and day out, your core external customer facing message that they begin to see everywhere. Slap it on your walls if it’s not COVID land, right? You know, put it on water bottles, give them decals for their computer. Do they know the language of what you’re saying to your customer that actually works? Do they see this day in and day out of your tagline and your value proposition statement and your differentiators?
You know, you say that you have to hear something seven times for it to click, and there’s a power of seven yeses. Are you putting your message in front of them, or are you just expecting the marketing team to just serve that up on a silver platter and your sales team, only if they’re doing a sales call, or only if it’s on your website or only if it’s on social media. If you want your people to embody the brand, put it in front of them, get them excited about this, because what you’re doing is you’re giving them an opportunity regardless of where they’re at in the organization and maybe the way that they process to understand and buy into. I am a part of this, I’m a part of this and I’m going to buy into this.
And I want to say this because that’s provocative.
Jennifer Zick: And Kate, I don’t even think that’s possible in an entrepreneurial growth company unless the founders/owners believe it. They believe it so passionately that they can’t not talk about it and reinforce it. And this is where I give you an unsolicited plug. But, you know, we’re a CMO team. We’re a bunch of brand leaders and marketers ourselves. And I love this stuff. Like, I used to consult around this with other clients all day long, but in my own business, I know well enough how myopic people within their own businesses can be. So we brought Kate in, and when she told me that we would be meeting at least six times to really dig through all this, I’m like, how am I going to have time for that?
But as I went through this effort, it’s like, how would I not take the time to do this diligence around our formative story? We were at that time approaching four years old as a brand, and, you know, our story had evolved a lot and the dust was settling. And Kate really helped lead us through a series of questions and having to have the owner in the room to really believe it. And now it’s like, it’s so easy to share that and keep that in front of the team.
So I highly encourage you, if you’re listening in and your company doesn’t feel like you’ve got that alignment, bringing in a third party to pull the stakeholder nuggets out to help you identify the pieces that really are real and true for you and find your three uniques and find your voice and find that narrative is so helpful. And it’s an exercise that within the life cycle of a brand, I think is imperative to do at major critical intersections of growth. So, moving on, though, because we’ve got limited time, we’re going to talk about kind of where we started in terms of not making your business that, not yelling through a megaphone about everything about us, right. But making the conversation and the story customer centric, making the customer the hero of the story. So I have a confession to make.
Every time I read marketing content on websites and brochures and ads, and I see this all the time, I just cringe when I see the phrase we take pride in. It’s like, pat our backs. We take pride in this. Like, of course we should take pride in, and these are conversations we should have internally with our employees. But when it comes to talking to our customers and prospective buyers, it should really be about their pains, their gains, their needs, the solutions we can offer them. So, Tracy, I’ll start with you on this, but what are some steps that businesses can take to make sure their brand really is customer centric and that the customer is the hero of the story? And you’re on mute right now, Tracy. You’ll need that. Virtual meetings.
Tracy Steeno: Sorry. I think that some of the steps that clients can take is you can go or businesses, you can really ask yourself, what is it that you create that will resonate with those that you’re trying to reach and take a look at that, answer those questions so that you really understand that, and then identify your audience’s pains and gains. We talked a little bit about that earlier, and certainly in messaging workshops, you know, we examine buyer Personas and focus, you know, a lot on those decision makers and influencers and, you know, to really then get into customers and what the customers think. A deeper way to do that is to go through some research. Now, I know research can sometimes get overlooked, deprioritized, even cut from budgets, but doing something like a voice of the customer research is so imperative.
It gives you such valuable information from a different viewpoint than you probably have had. A lot of companies tend to look a little bit more inward at that. Also, I would say to get testimonials. Testimonials are, you know, one of the best things that you can get from your clients. And I know one of the ways that Authentic does it and that we recommend is including that ask in your contract. In other words, you know, from day one, put it in the contract to have the client or your customer be a reference for you. Now, they may not be ready on day one, but when that time comes, when they’re ready to talk about the story and tout the message, they’ll be there for you.
And certainly, and I know a lot of businesses may already be doing this, but if you don’t have an advisory board, establishing a best customer advisory board is a great way to bring good clients or your best clients into the fold. Have them help you guide your path, but also bring them close so that they can advocate for you, and there’s nothing like clients that can advocate for you. So I think those are some steps that businesses can take.
Jennifer Zick: I especially love that last point, and I, in many of the customer client accounts that I have worked in and that I worked in the early days of authentic brand, before building out the team, that wasn’t even something they had ever thought about. A lot of companies stopped short at just getting a written testimonial, maybe, or writing up a case study of the work effort. And of course, depending on your industry, if you’re B2C, or you’re an e-commerce store, you might get testimonials from, you know, consumer reviews and other things like that.
Testimonials take different shapes in different kinds of companies, but for b, two b companies who have deep, long term customer relationships with multiple stakeholders, I have found that most clients who have had a positive experience with your business, when asked if they would consider being part of an advisory board, consider it a great compliment as well, and are happy to help shape the future of the offering so that it can serve their business and others well. Kate, I think you had something to add on this.
Kate DiLeo: You know, I think the only comment, and Tracy, is just such good points, I think once you guys have evaluated all of these data inputs, right? So you think about customer feedback, doing some research out there, all of what Tracy is saying, critical for you to have a deep understanding of the stories that your customer support team or that you’ve heard from clients, even on the phone. Like, think about all the things that you’ve heard. Right. I think helping boil that down by asking yourselves a really key question, which is, at the end of the day, when it comes to the product or service we offer, what do our clients need? What is the bottom line need that they have as it relates to our product or services?
At the end of the day, what I have clients do is a bit of root cause analysis. I do this thing called five whys. You can do this on your own. If you answer that question, at the end of the day, what is the bottom line need our customer has as it relates to our product or service? You’ll say something, write it down, ask yourself why, then respond again. Ask why, respond again. By the time you go through that four or five times, you will get at the root cause of the deepest level heart pain of what you’re really solving for on an emotional level, which, as Tracy and Steve have talked about, that’s really what we’re trying to drive for is what pain do we really solve for them?
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. And Steve, you’re ready to chime in on this? Take it away.
Steve Grady: Oh, just a super short upside to this. You know, as Tracy and Kate just talked about getting your existing customers on an advisory board, you know, usually as you look through the kind of the client lifecycle you land, you expand, hopefully become exclusive provider to them. If you sit down and talk with those folks, they need to go into new areas, too, and where are they going to build their business and how you can support that. It’s called new territory. So the cool thing is, as you talk to them about where they’re going and helping them strategically, probably a lot of your other clients are thinking about those same kinds of things. And as you develop new products or services to help clients, and lo and behold, they probably help most of your client portfolio with that area as well.
And so it’s a great way to understand what kind of products and services will be market winners without guessing and sending it out there and it bombs. So you’ve already got an advocate. You can already shape the products and services you’re going to introduce, and they’re the first people to buy because we know it’s always easier to sell to your existing clients. So if you’re really shaping that well, then it goes back, way back when we talked about how your company is growing and what you can provide and who you can serve those new territories to help you expand your client base and how you can tell your story and expand on your brand.
Brand Lifecycle and Acquisitions
Jennifer Zick: Right. Well, so much we could keep digging in here. I’m thinking about neuroscience and decision making and marketing into the pain, but that’s a whole different topic. In an attempt to leave some time for Q&A, because I see some really good questions coming in. This is our last official question for the panel. Then we’re going to take some audience questions. So I’m going to start with Kate on this one. So many growing businesses in the lifecycle eventually reach a really huge milestone, which would either be raising funds for continued growth, considering acquiring other businesses, considering selling and being acquired.
So in that process of looking at investor relationships or acquisitions, how should, if I’m an entrepreneur right now and an owner of a business who’s thinking, you know, in two to five years, I’m ready to exit and I’m probably going to be looking to be bought or looking to acquire or some other evolution in my life cycle, what should that be meaning for my messaging and my positioning today?
Kate DiLeo: Oh, such an amazing question. You know, I work with venture capital groups all the time. Most of my, probably over 90% of my clients are going through some form of fundraising or in an m and a situation, candidly. And so this is kind of what I deal with day in and day out. And I want to give you guys a couple pieces of confidence that you can cling to. I think, number one, you know your goals, understand clearly what you really want to achieve, and write it down. Understand, do we want to be acquired? Do we want to exit? Do we want to have an IPO happen in the next five years? Whatever it is, okay, write it down, know it, own it.
And then I think the second thing that I want to just give you extreme confidence in is, believe it or not, don’t change the message for an investor or a partner if it’s working seriously. So I always give this example we get, by the way, there’s a lot of people that tell you need to have one deck for an investor and then one separate message for the customer. Incorrect. How many of us have watched Shark Tank, right? You watch these companies come on, and you know what they do first? They pitch the shark. They pitch Damon John as if he were to be a buying customer, in fact, that’s the power of it, right? By the end of it, they’re clapping. I want to try it. I want to taste that. I’m going to see it.
They hooked them with the exact same message as if they were going to be the consumer. So when you think about your message or if you’re sitting here going, I gotta get a pitch deck together, Kate, next week for an investor, or I got a meeting with somebody that’s looking to acquire us. I want you to remember that. Really, you actually want to stick with the same pitch. You want to have a strong understanding and lead your message with who you are and what you do, how you solve your customer’s problem and why you’re different from everybody else in the market, set the stage with that piece of your brand message. Then you can move into the details of how it works and explainer, video, etcetera. Then you can move into traction. Then you move into your metrics and your financials.
You know, believe it or not, if you can hook them on the front end, they’re going to buy in and be so stinking excited about wanting to work with you that the rest becomes a breeze. They’re going to know the right questions to ask you guys, so lead with the messages. If they were your customer, well, and.
Jennifer Zick: A little bit of neuroscience, even on buyers and investors, is they’re still human. And humans make decisions with our hearts first and we rationalize it with our brains later. So hook them at the heartstrings, then give them the data that makes them feel really good about their decision. I’m with you, Kate. Any additional inputs on this one from the rest of the panel?
Steve Grady: I have a quick one, Jennifer, and that is as you go into, especially M&A. I’ve done a ton of m and a on both sides. From a brand perspective, in terms of who you are, what you represent, who you help. If the acquirer is different, they have different brand archetypes, they help different people. They have a different view of the world. Boy, that’s going to be really. You have to pay super attention to the integration if it’s going to come together, because it’s really going to be a struggle. Usually the acquirer wins and crushes the life out of the acquiree, and you must be the Borg. And if you go, which is really unfortunate, because they bought you because of who you were, but then try and change you. So just be cognizant of especially looking for partners.
And this even applies to who you work with, other companies and other partners. Do they share? Do they understand your Persona? You understand what you’re about? Do they share your values, how you do business and underpins your brand? If not, you’re probably not going to be a good partner or you’re not going to be, you know, a good part of the new company, something really to pay attention to. I’ve seen a lot of them struggle or even fall apart because that didn’t match up.
Audience Q&A
Jennifer Zick: I’ve seen that, too, Steve, and that’s no fun and especially heartbreaking for a founder to see the culture and the value proposition eroded. So choosing well with values alignment and messaging, alignment matters. All right, we’re going to move to the audience Q&A portion. There’s a couple here that I’m scanning that I really want to lob out to the panel. So, hey, audience, if you’ve got a burning question, there’s still time to throw it down, and I’ll try to read through and tee up some ones. This one’s a fun one from Anonymous. All right, so what advice panel do you have for companies whose capabilities have expanded and the name they launched with is now holding them back or pigeonholing them into one category of service when they can do so much more? The brand is established. Would you recommend a rename?
Or how can they leverage what they have and still engage with customers in new ways. Naming. And that’s expensive to rename.
Kate DiLeo: Kate, I get this question a lot. I’ve done a number of renames this year. We’ve done four already, believe it or not. Four renames in 2021. What the heck’s going on? Post COVID world, guys? Okay, so actually this is a great question and I think a couple thoughts that you may want to think about. And granted, I don’t know the depth of your business, so bear with me as I’m coming in blind here, but when it comes to naming, I think the first question to think about before you worry about the name of your organization, first and foremost is the messaging around your products and services. And sometimes what can happen is if your current messaging doesn’t solve for everything that you’re doing, I would recommend that you create a layered approach and more of a structured brand architecture.
So what can happen to help solve this is you still call your company Westcott, let’s say, I don’t know, Westcott. And you have product A and your product B and your product C, right. Maybe just very different product lines you’ve evolved. Okay. With that, what you may find is you have specific product brands. Okay. If that is the case, what you can then do is create an upper architecture where your message is very clear with an overarching value proposition. Tagline differentiators for the company as a whole. But be prepared then to do the exact same thing for each brand. Okay, each product or service offering.
What some companies decide to do is instead of trying to rename the whole organization, you simply ensure that through the deployment of your brands, you not only have a presence for all of your ABC across your corporate website, but you may find if one of them is a B2C product, you’ve got to create a separate marketing strategy and channel over here with a separate website that’s going to sell this way with a separate logo for that product and so on and so forth. If, though, after thinking about that question of do we just create a layered architecture and that solves it and creates cohesion? If that’s really not supporting you and you feel like the name is really tripping people up, then yes, I think that you need to go back and look at the name.
Only if you have gone through the messaging exercise though, to get that thing nailed down for all of your products and services. Because if you blindly go and try to change your name, I can guarantee you’re going to be throwing darts at a dartboard and you’re going to feel really frustrated with yourself, and. And you could end up losing customers if the story is not compelling and clear as to why you changed the name in the first place.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Kate. That was rock solid. Great. All right, someone else asks a question that’s short, sweet, and sounds simple, but it’s not. What are some indicators to know your company is ready for a brand refresh? Kate already gave some really good tips as it relates to naming. Okay. Because we started this whole conversation saying brand is not. It’s a small world word of a big universe. So brand refresh might mean new name. Brand refresh might mean new logo design. Brand refresh might mean a different customer experience. Design. Right. So how do you know if your company’s ready for a brand refresh? Who wants to take the simple, complicated question?
Tracy Steeno: I’ll take it.
Jennifer Zick: All right.
Tracy Steeno: So I’ve worked with a lot of clients on brand refreshes and gone through this many times. And, you know, I think that one of the things that is important to understand is, you know, where are you headed versus where are you at right now. In other words, if you are trying to, as a company, be at a certain place in the next year, two years, three years, and your brand doesn’t reflect that, then it’s time for a refresh. And I think there’s a lot of equity in the name, but perhaps it’s time to really look at is your logo as modern as it can be? Do you have a good strap line? Do you have good imagery? It’s the whole kind of look and feel of how your brand is portrayed to match where you want to be, not where you are today.
So if you’re here and you want to be over here, as I said earlier, that’s a time when a brand refresh makes, to me, sense to go through that process.
Jennifer Zick: It’s almost like using your brand to create a manifest destiny. Right. We are where we become, where we point our focus. When you have a plan, it’s much more likely that it’s actually going to happen than if nothing ever gets planned. So by creating a brand presence that is bigger or stronger than you even are today, you’re setting a stage to move in that direction and to fulfill that promise to yourself and the market. So that’s a good tip, Tracy. All right, this one’s a fun one. I’ve got thoughts on it, but I’d love to hear from all of you. How do you have a hard conversation when leadership’s behavior is in conflict with the brand message, and in this case, the leader is always on stage so people will notice it immediately. So there seems to be a conflict in messaging and behavior.
Has anybody ever dealt with a rogue leader?
Steve Grady: We all have. But Jennifer, I’d like to hear your answer.
Jennifer Zick: I love this. So just yesterday, I gave a talk to a bunch of visionary executives about building a strong and authentic personal brand and what the difference is when you’re a founder and a leader and having a personal brand and having your business brand and how they must complement and support one another. And somebody asked a question by follow up email about, you know, is it ever a bad idea? Like, can a leader detract from the corporate brand by building their personal brand? And my answer is, yes, they won’t. They’ll support it if they’re, if their value system and their messaging and their audiences are in alignment, but they’re just bringing more of who they are to the world. That’s awesome. And that’s what I try to do for Authentic.
No perfect example that I try to like, bring my whole self to the market and aspects of me professionally and personally that deepen trust and relationships and therefore support my business brand. But there definitely are rogue leaders who, in bringing their full selves to the world, expose that. Maybe their values or their voice or their interest is no longer even in their business. And in doing that could create confusion for buyers. Like, oh, if Joe is over here talking about this, is he even paying any attention to this business I’m working with where his name is still on the leadership team? Right? So for those leaders, first you can try to have the hard conversation, and you should, and they might understand and be willing to create better alignment with your business.
But most often, if they’re an owner or an entrepreneur or visionary, they’re on a path. In which case, then the hard conversation becomes, is it still appropriate to have you as a spokesperson for the brand? Maybe you’re an owner of the business who’s no longer involved in the day to day, and you should go be a speaker and author and keynote on a different topic. And that’s fine. You’re still a stakeholder here. But trust the executives to lead and represent the business. So sometimes you have to separate those brands if the direction and the focus and the alignment is moving somewhere else. Kate, you had a thought.
Kate DiLeo: I think it’s okay to recognize too, if you recognize the leader does still really care. They do care, and maybe they don’t know that they’re doing this. You know, it’s kind of like ignorance is bliss, right? Maybe they have no idea that they’re doing this. And even if they’ve been told once or twice, they don’t think it’s that bad. I’m still supporting the company. I’m still doing great things. I care. Come on, guys. So this is the thing if you have an opportunity. You have an opportunity to actually partner with this individual, to pull them in. If you’re working on the messaging for the organization and the brand, to actually say, you know what?
If we did look at doing messaging together, that not only does the corporate brand message, and we’re going to look at that and really together as a team and pull in this founder’s perspective or this leader’s perspective, but at the same time, you can at the exact same moment create personal brand messaging that’s in alignment. So think about it this way, if this person doesn’t have a script, how are they supposed to know what to say? Sometimes in our exuberance and our excitement to get out there to the world, we go out without anything written and without anything scripted. And you know what? We do our very best. But you have an opportunity to help create a story with this person individually that they feel so excited about that is still so them and still supports the brand.
And so it, don’t let it be a missed opportunity, if you can, in the course of looking at your messaging, actually have a double whammy win right there.
Jennifer Zick: That’s awesome.
Steve Grady: Yeah. And just real quick, this is a tough discussion to have, and I’ve had it several times. And to Kate’s point, one of the easiest ways is to sit on the same side of the table and say, this is what our corporate brand is. This is what we talk about. Do we still believe it? Are you invested in it? Do you understand it? This is really what the whole company is saying now. The things you’ve kind of done and said are a little counter to that. How do you feel about that? Or why do you think that happened? Or, you know, is there a need to move our brand, or do we just need to get better alignment?
So once you sit on the same side of the table and look at it from a company perspective and then kind of look at the behaviors or kind of what? Maybe how they’ve gone rogue is another instance of going rogue. Right. They can kind of see, yeah, I see how I’ve strayed from that. And then you can decide what actions to take from there. Like you say, Jennifer, either person goes off and does other stuff, or, you know, they kind of come back home and to Kate’s point, follow the script.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, great. Well, there’s so much more we could dive into at all of these moments in the lifecycle of a brand and for our audience. Thank you so much for joining here today and contributing your questions and engaging in this conversation with us. I want you to know we didn’t get to every question that was asked and you might have other questions, so welcome you to reach out to Authentic.
We would love to help answer any other questions you have about messaging and branding and help put you in touch with professionals who can assist. Because sometimes the right answer is bringing in a third party who’s neutral and whose voice might be able to be heard in cooperation with yours to get to some resolution and clarity, a path forward.
So we’re grateful for the chance that we have to serve and support brands through all these evolution points.
