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Building Authentic Brands with Kelli Corney
442 Plays2 years ago
Today on the show we sat down with Kelli Corney to talk all about brand. Kelli's diverse experience in the media industry has given her a unique perspective into branding, starting from the basics of defining what a brand really is to how to actually build one from first principles. This episode is packed full of actionable advice, we hope you enjoy it!
Learn more about and get in touch with Kelli at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellicorney
Check out Kelli's Brand Strategy for Innovation course at Maven: https://maven.com/kelli-corney/brand-strategy-for-innovation
Subscribe to the Content People newsletter at https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Focus
00:00:09
Speaker
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Content People. Tune in to hear from creatives, leaders, and experts in various media. I'm your host, Meredith Farley. I'm here alongside our producer, Ian Servin. Hey, Ian. Hey, Meredith.
00:00:21
Speaker
On today's show, we're talking all about branding with Kelly Corny. Kelly's had a really cool career in media and creative marketing. She's worked at established titans of industry like NBC and the Financial Times. And she's worked a really lean high growth startups. Kelly was the chief growth officer and mightily. Currently Kelly's a fractional CMO and a consultant based in London. She also teaches a course through Maven called Brand Strategy for Innovation.
00:00:48
Speaker
We really got into the weeds on branding in this one. Sometimes when marketing folks talk about branding, I think the topic can err on the side of nebulous or vague. I find that frustrating. I like details, bullet points, and clear descriptions. Kelly delivers that in our convo today. If you're interested to know what brand really means and how to create one that has staying power, stay tuned.
Understanding Branding: Beyond Surface
00:01:09
Speaker
One thing that she touched on that I definitely agree with is that brand is kind of misunderstood by a lot of marketers. I think some people see it really more as a coat of paint rather than something deeper and more intrinsic to the company. And she did such a great job of articulating what brand actually is, why it matters, and how marketers can go about building brand in a strategic way.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yes, I totally agree with that. It's not a coat of paint. It's like part of the foundation. I totally agree. And I think she makes some really salient points here. And P.S. Kelly is also my friend. Kelly, thank you so much for doing this. This was really, really fun. We hope you all enjoy it.
Kelly's Career Journey
00:01:53
Speaker
So you've worked as a media owner, you've been in the client role, and you have run an agency, so you have a really 360 view of the industry. My plan for this convo is to pick your brain about your career journey for a bit because you've done a lot, and then later jump into branding, which you have a ton of expertise and a lot of wisdom around. But first, how did you get into creative work in the agency world?
00:02:18
Speaker
Like many people, I had a bit of an untraditional journey into my career. I went to a liberal arts university, so I was a little bit confused when I graduated. I knew I loved learning and I knew I was a really curious person, but I didn't have a very specific discipline that just led straight into a job title that matched with it. I studied creative writing and philosophy. I was like, what do we do with this now? I knew I was a creative person, but I wasn't quite sure
00:02:47
Speaker
what shape that would take. And I think also like many girls being a young teenager in like the early 2000s, I had this dream job that was like being in a business suit, walking in my high heels in a big city, and being an editor at a fashion magazine, which was literally every single rom-com that we watched growing up.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so my very first internship actually, like professional internship was at a fashion magazine in Chicago. So I was like, Oh, great. I get to try this. And as soon as I did it, I realized I didn't like it.
00:03:31
Speaker
So again, I was like, what do I do from here? And like most things, life just kind of pushes you in a direction. Because I was living in Chicago, a friend of a friend was like, hey, I work at NBC Universal. We are hiring for this position. I think you should apply for it.
00:03:47
Speaker
So I did, and that was how I learned that I loved advertising and loved media. And my first job was actually in sales, but I thought sales sounded a little bit sleazy. So I was too embarrassed to tell people that. I would just be like, oh, I work in advertising.
00:04:05
Speaker
But actually, it really taught me how much I actually love selling. When I believe in an idea, my favorite thing is to be able to tell people about that and share it with them. So to me, that's all that good sales is. It's just being really passionate about something and sharing it with people and getting them on board with you. Yeah.
00:04:27
Speaker
Thanks for sharing that. That makes a lot of sense as to how you got into it. I think it'll resonate with a lot of people. So for folks who aren't familiar with you, from that point forward, what has been your career journey and what have you done with everything you learned about selling and what you love about media? Yeah, I'll try to make this short because like you started, I've done a bunch of different things so it could take forever. But
Corporate vs. Startup Experience
00:04:50
Speaker
basically, I started my career in
00:04:54
Speaker
the world of media working for NBC Universal. So at the time, it was owned by GE. So it was literally one of the biggest companies in the world. And I feel like I got a really good education in the industry working for them. So the first big chunk of my career was doing that, and I worked for NBC both in Chicago, and then I moved abroad to London.
00:05:18
Speaker
and spent about four years working internationally for them. Then at that point, I moved back to the US and I was a little bit frustrated with the corporate world, being really ambitious, wanting to have more impact, feeling frustrated with hierarchy and all of the things that can happen in big corporate environments and got interested in entrepreneurship and thinking about startups.
00:05:42
Speaker
So I just experimented for a little while. I did a startup accelerator. I did a small project to launch a sustainable knitwear line. I started an organic tea company. I was kind of just playing around seeing like, what would I want to do? How can I express my creativity? And I met at that time who would become basically my future business partner, who funny enough, even though I was back in the US, happened to be British.
00:06:10
Speaker
And we started an ad agency. And like I said, I was really in this mode of experimentation and I had no idea if it would work or if it would really go anywhere. But the end of this story is that it was quite successful and I spent about five years helping to grow that business. It was 40 employees by the time I left.
00:06:33
Speaker
We were winning tons of awards for our work, had an amazing company culture, everybody wanted to work for us, getting covered in the press a lot. It was just this really exciting growth story.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, sorry. Were you going to say something? Oh, I did that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, OK. OK. And then from there, I went back to a bigger corporate environment. So I went client side. So at this point, I had worked for a media owner and an agency. And then I became the client and ran a large brand and marketing team of about 50 people, which was essentially kind of like a creative agency, an in-house agency.
00:07:16
Speaker
And then most recently moved from the US back to the UK. I am living in London now. And to work for the Financial Times for AlphaGrid, which was the, or which is the sort of creative content studio at the Financial Times.
00:07:34
Speaker
So I've jumped around a bit between all three, and I think sometimes that can make people feel like it's a little bit hard to place me in what I do. But I actually have found once I'm in a role, it ends up being one of the things people value the most about working with me because
00:07:50
Speaker
I really understand what it's like to be a client working with an agency and an agency working with a client and have been in both of those shoes. And I know, I'm sure you know this all too well, Meredith, that can sometimes be a contentious relationship or it's hard to always empathize with somebody on the other side.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine your knowledge and empathy of the other side as just being an incredible asset to whomever you're working with or for, for sure.
00:08:23
Speaker
You've been at places and had really big jobs where there's hyper growth and they're in startup mode. Like when you're at mightily, you've been in more established, really big funded organizations like Atria senior living. And you've been at places like alpha grid within the financial times, which is kind of a historical institution. So one first question, is there an environment that you enjoy the most? It's a really hard question to answer. Um,
00:08:50
Speaker
because they all obviously have a lot of benefits to them. But I think if I was forced to choose, I would say, I think the most rewarding thing I've done is build and grow mightily or help build and grow mightily. And so that would probably be my answer. I really love building things. I get super excited about that.
00:09:17
Speaker
and building things alongside people I respect and just genuinely enjoy being around. So that can obviously happen within a larger corporate setting, but I think creating something from the ground up is a very unique experience in and of its own and probably what has been the most fulfilling for
Benefits of Large Organizations
00:09:36
Speaker
me. So I think I would choose that, but it is a hard choice.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. If I had to guess, I think I might have guessed that only because when you talk about mightily and that building stage, I think about how what you created was in so many ways an extension of all the amazing things about yourself. And I feel like that's really powerful. But so for younger folks who are starting out in their career, would you steer them in the direction of one environment over the other? And do you think it's helpful to start somewhere in particular?
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to unsurprisingly give the advice that's exactly the trajectory my career took. But I do have some good ways to justify it. I think it's really valuable if you can to start with a big organization. And the reason I say that is because
00:10:32
Speaker
you get a really good education in your industry by doing that. So there are just like resources and access that a big company like NBC Universal has that, you know, if you were to go straight into a startup or straight into a small business, you're just not going to learn the same things and you're not going to have the same kind of resources. And particularly for me, you know, maybe there's a lot of other people who identify with this, but I grew up in Kentucky and
00:11:01
Speaker
I didn't have a ton of exposure to the kind of excess and cultural impact that an organization like that has, and it felt like so world-opening to me to be a part of it, to not only see what can be done through a company that has that kind of history and excess and reputation,
00:11:27
Speaker
but also just for myself to believe in myself, to know that I belonged there, to show up and realize I could not only do the job, but I could do it really well and to know that I could do more than that. That was really affirming and expanding for me.
00:11:46
Speaker
I think for those reasons, it's a great place to start. I've also seen it on the flip side where when you start out just in a startup or just in a small business, it always feels a bit like the Wild West anyway because people are often making it up as they go. If you haven't had a more structured experience, then I think it leads to people feeling like always a little bit of a sense of wandering in the dark and just figuring it out.
00:12:13
Speaker
So to me, I think it's a really strong foundation to build on and a great place to start your career. So you feel like this structure or for you, do you think
00:12:24
Speaker
that starting off somewhere like NBC incredibly established lots of structure, maybe there's a bit of an intimidation factor because as you said like it's not something you were surrounded by.
Defining Brand Beyond Logo
00:12:35
Speaker
Do you think that in some way maybe that helped you avoid like an imposter syndrome because you proved to yourself really early on that you could um I don't know it's the word I'm looking for that you could kind of like
00:12:48
Speaker
you know, you could play on a really big playing field and be successful or no, maybe not. I'm just curious as you're talking. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I, in some ways, yes. I mean, I think imposter syndrome is one of those weird things. Like I feel like it's a, it's like an epidemic. I feel like everybody feels like they have imposter syndrome sometimes. Um, maybe that's just because it feels so hard to keep up, you know, the way how quickly information comes and how fast we're,
00:13:18
Speaker
expected to learn and change and grow all the time, particularly in our careers. I think it just lends itself to everyone feeling that way sometimes. But I do think maybe there's a grain of truth in what you're saying and that definitely gave me an injection of confidence early in my career that I don't know if I would have had otherwise.
00:13:37
Speaker
But who's to say? We don't know, you know? They have no idea what another life would have been like. It's interesting, yeah. With imposter syndrome, I feel like I've started to just kind of think of it as self-doubt that some people have more than others and everyone has sometimes. And I feel like what you're saying kind of aligns with that a little bit. But I can see it being confidence inspiring as a younger person to be like,
00:13:59
Speaker
I worked at this really big organization. I got to learn how the structure worked. I did fine there and feeling like a confidence that you can be equally successful in other types of environments maybe. Yeah, for sure. All right. So brand strategy. I think of this as a particular superpower of yours. Let's get into it. So first and foremost, people say the word brand a lot. How do you define what a brand is?
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's a, it's a great place to start because brand has just become like a nonsense word. Um, if I asked five different people to tell me what it meant, I would get five different answers back. We all have different ideas about it. Um, I'll kind of start from the very basics, which is like people often think a brand is a logo or a color palette or a font and it's, it's not.
00:14:54
Speaker
It's something much more foundational than that. Many people have made many attempts at creating one definition for what a brand is. I'll give you mine. And it's the simplest and easiest thing I've been able to boil it, or simplest and most essential thing I've been able to boil it down to. I think a brand is just the truth. So what that means is
00:15:25
Speaker
When you think about a company's brand, what you're doing is trying to discover what's true about that company and then connect it with people in ways that make them feel something. Good brands make you feel something.
00:15:41
Speaker
I loved it. As you say, a brand is the truth. I feel like it like pings something inside of me. I'm like, yes, it is the truth. I don't think I've ever heard it described that way, but I can't think of a better way to describe brand. Thank you.
00:15:57
Speaker
I think especially when I work with companies that are bigger, more well-established brands, there's this fear that they come into the process with where they think like, oh no, I'm hiring this brand person to come. They're going to go away into a corner and then hand it to me and they're going to change who I am and it's not going to feel like me anymore.
00:16:18
Speaker
The best way that I've come up with of reassuring people about that is like, actually, my job is the opposite of that. You feel inside of you somewhere what's special about what you do or what your company stands for.
00:16:34
Speaker
Because you're you, I can't do this for myself. I have to have someone help me because no one is self-aware enough. We all get a bit overwhelmed with our own business. It's hard to see it from an outside perspective, but I can do it for other people.
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, being able to come in and, uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought for a second. Um, well, no, I mean, actually what you're really sparking for me, which I never thought about is the way that, so it's coming to mind for me is, uh, right. Even just stuff like, um, so I started a newsletter, a sub stack.
00:17:12
Speaker
and writing the about page was one of the most brutal writing experience I've ever had and I still hate what's up there. As I'm going through it, I'm like, why is this so hard for client or some of our friend came to me and had a trillion ideas and be like, well, here's what it's about, type, type, type.
00:17:30
Speaker
And the way that, as you say, creating things about yourself is sometimes the most brutal because you don't have enough space and you need friends or folks to help you. I never thought of it in the same way for a company, but the reason outside eyes and expertise are so helpful for a brand is maybe similar because you need someone with a little bit of distance to really help you extract
00:17:56
Speaker
those kernels of truth is that is that like what do you think about that is that i think that's that's exactly the word i would use you need distance from it yeah right like and that's with anything in your own life when you think about understanding yourself or your own problems you need you like you you go through an experience
00:18:14
Speaker
I don't know, even if you think about like really big experiences in your life, like a breakup or like things that are very emotionally triggering, you can never see the truth in the moment. You need distance to be able to reflect back. And maybe it's a little bit of a digression, but for companies, it's the same thing. It's like you are so, you know, like your goals, you're working on things day to day. You can feel it inside of you, but you just don't have the distance to be able to articulate it. And I think that's exactly why outside help is really valuable, especially when you're working on brand.
Core Elements of Branding
00:18:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:44
Speaker
Well, so founders and leaders, they are busy, resource-strapped, and I always love the expression that they are building the plane while flying it. When folks are in that startup mode or in a stretch that feels more like, we just need to survive right now as opposed to thinking about thriving, creating a brand or bringing in someone to help them with branding can seem like nicety as opposed to a necessity.
00:19:09
Speaker
How would you advise someone who is like, I want a brand, I just don't have the time or money to really focus on right now? Yeah, that's a great question. I would tell that person, you're not going to have a successful business for very long if you don't. I think we need to break it down a little bit more.
00:19:35
Speaker
Branding and marketing often get kind of conflated. They're not the same thing. Marketing is giving people the right message to the right person in the right environment at the right time. So it's about like frequency and repeating a message over and over again. A brand is the soul of a company. It's why that company deserves to exist, irrespective of financial gain.
00:20:02
Speaker
So brand is a foundation for marketing, but it's also a foundation for the wider business. And I have this little presentation that I give sometimes where I show what a brand strategy is, what branding is, and what a business strategy is, and really defining those things because they often get quite conflated. A brand strategy and a business strategy are equally important. If you only have one, you won't be successful.
00:20:30
Speaker
A brand without a business strategy won't make money. And a business without a brand strategy is just like one price cut or one copycat product away from becoming irrelevant. So there are different things, but they work together and they inform each other. So if you start to think about brand in that way, then it becomes more of a North Star for your organization.
00:20:56
Speaker
or a rubric that you use to make decisions. If you're talking about strategy, any kind of strategy, it's all about looking at the vast variety of infinite possibility and narrowing that down and making choices.
00:21:16
Speaker
So a good strategy is one where you choose one path, and that's your strategy. So your brand strategy is that path for your company. It's your North Star that informs everything you do. So this is how you become a really powerful brand that continues to feel true to people.
00:21:33
Speaker
I think that's really powerful. Sometimes I know there's a perception that brand building is it's expensive, time-consuming, nebulous, soft KPIs, and I know sometimes some people think of it as a little bit of smoke and mirrors. Now for the record, I don't think good brand work is any of that. To your mind, you kind of start to touch on them, but what are some of the non-negotiable, tangible elements of a brand?
00:22:03
Speaker
It's a great question because I think this is how most people come into it. It feels like exactly what you said. But I think when you think back to how we just defined a brand as being a foundational pillar of your business, then would you ask if building a company culture or building a sales team or building a business plan were time-consuming and nebulous? You know what I mean?
00:22:34
Speaker
I think the important point is that without a brand strategy, you really open yourself up to a huge amount of risk of becoming irrelevant or easily outperformed by a competitor who does understand the importance of it. That's just the difference between
00:22:49
Speaker
having a product and knowing that like, think of all, there are so many businesses, so many products, so many startups, so many things that are like very similar vying for your attention. With all things being equal, why do you pick one over the other?
00:23:05
Speaker
I have two brands of toothpaste in front of me. They're exactly the same price. Which one do I pick? That's the power of brand. It gives people a reason to care about you and why you exist.
00:23:21
Speaker
Um, so again, I think not thinking about it this way opens you up to a huge amount of risk and I can kind of break it down and make it more tangible by talking about, you know, what, because even now we're still saying like a brand is this a brand is that, but like what actually happens when you create a brand strategy and talk through and break that down a bit because I think.
00:23:41
Speaker
It's all good to say a lot of these things, but knowing what you do to build it is what makes it powerful. So there are three main aspects to building a brand. It's purpose, position, and personality. So what kind of define and talk through each of these?
00:24:05
Speaker
Purpose is the change you want to see in the world irrespective of financial gain So this is why you do what you do it's the thing that makes people want to root for you and It plays a huge role in aligning people to want to come work for your company It makes people feel a part of something bigger than you know the product itself or
00:24:32
Speaker
whatever smaller things that you're doing inside of a company. So a purpose statement should sound something like, we exist to blank. Some good examples of this that everyone will be familiar with. So Nike's purpose statement is, we exist to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. And if you have a body, you're an athlete. It's a great one.
00:24:59
Speaker
And Google's is we exist to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. So I think the bottom line with purpose is it's not about what you do, it's about why anyone should care. So next is position. Your position is the space you occupy in your target customer's mind.
00:25:30
Speaker
So you know you have a positioning problem if you ask 10 of your customers or employees what you do and you get 10 different answers back. Or if I ask you to explain to me what you do in one sentence and you can't. And like for everybody listening to this, I would just say pause for a moment and think about that because and think about your own organization and you'll probably be like nodding along with me like, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
00:25:56
Speaker
So the risk here is if you don't define your position, other people will do it for you and not necessarily in a way that you'll like. So an example for this might be if we're thinking about shampoo. The experience of buying shampoo, there's like a million choices and it's pretty, I don't know, I'm sure like you've been through this many times Meredith, just as I have, you're like standing there and you're not really sure what choice to make, it's pretty arbitrary.
00:26:25
Speaker
So, are you familiar with the company Prose? Yes. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I feel like any millennial woman especially who's on Instagram knows what Prose is. We've all seen the ads. Yeah. They're great ads though. So, Prose did something really smart, which was instead of playing in the category of shampoo, which is overcrowded, really nebulous, they created a different category and decided that they're going to play in the space of custom shampoo.
00:26:54
Speaker
So now, if you want a custom shampoo, you only think of pros.
00:27:01
Speaker
And that's a really smart way to think about positioning yourself. It's, I kind of call this like the 50-50 rule, and you can use it in any sort of other positioning or like sales process, which is I always want my competition, all of my competition to be in a group together and for me to be in a standalone group by myself. So people really only have one of, you know, they only have two choices. They either want the thing that you are, in which case you're the only choice, or they want something else, and you can let a bunch of other people fight over that.
00:27:30
Speaker
There are ways to break this down even more. You can modify an existing category, which is what pros did. They aren't shampoo, they're custom shampoo, or you could create an entirely new category that never existed before. Uber is a good example of this. They created ride share. That word didn't exist before Uber. It gives you a really strong competitive advantage as well because there's so much that comes from being first to market.
00:28:00
Speaker
that you get to skip a lot of the mess and honestly make sure marketing dollars more efficient, customer acquisition more efficient, all of those things. Just to break down a little bit the difference between purpose and position, your purpose is more of a long-term thing. It should last you for about 10 years. I mean, it could last you forever, but I would say you want to be thinking that long-term when you're crafting purpose,
00:28:26
Speaker
Your position is shorter term. It should be true for at least the next 18 months. I mean, it can be longer than that, but a position is a little bit more closely tied to a product. So that can evolve as you launch new products or your product offering evolves. And a purpose is more just about the company as a whole.
00:28:48
Speaker
And then the other thing I would say that's different between them is while they both can be both of these things, purpose is more emotional and position is more functional. And I think in marketing and branding, this push-pull between emotional and functional is always kind of, again, something that's a little bit hard to wrap your arms around. So I think that sort of is a nice way of thinking about it.
00:29:10
Speaker
And then the third thing is personality. So this is like literally how you show up in the world. It's what do you look like? How do you speak? It's what gives you a point of view that people can connect with and makes you feel more human.
Authenticity in Brand Strategy
00:29:27
Speaker
So I like to think about this in like, if this company was a person, what would that person be like? The most interesting brands have tension in them, just like real people do.
00:29:41
Speaker
For example, I have a friend who is super stylish. She's always showing up in the coolest outfits and is very fashion-forward and modern, but she only listens to old music.
00:29:59
Speaker
That's an interesting tension. That makes me want to understand her more and find out more. This tension between modern and nostalgic, a brand that embraced those two things, there's a lot to play with there. When you say that, you perk up a little bit and you're like, what's going on there?
00:30:16
Speaker
A lot of companies fall into the trap of just being a lot of the same thing. We're trustworthy, we're reliable, we're honest. It's all one note. You're saying the same thing. It's not very interesting to anyone and it just starts to lose meaning and it doesn't feel very dynamic or real.
00:30:38
Speaker
So those are broadly the three elements. I think that personality is probably the least KPI driven part of what we've just talked about, but I think it's hopefully really clear how the others are really tangible, critical parts of building a business. And just to distill it down to its most essential thing, building a good product or business doesn't mean anything if no one cares about it. And this whole process of building a brand is why anyone should care about what you do.
00:31:07
Speaker
So one other question then, of the three P's, it sounds to me like there's the potential that one and two, so that would be purpose, and what was the second one? Position. So purpose, position, personality. Does position intersect with business planning to your mind as you were talking, I thought it might, but how did those two play with each other?
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's a bit more functional than purpose. So it does have a little bit more to do with the product itself and how you want to think about where it sits in a market. So in that sense, yeah. But like I said before, I think all of these things, to divorce anything about brand from an overall business strategy is to be very short-sighted.
00:32:02
Speaker
Your brand position should be the North Star for your decision making across everything that you do. So for example, if you are a company that cares about sustainability and you're making a financial decision, you need to kind of check yourself and say, does this financial decision help to support
00:32:28
Speaker
the fact that we are a company that cares about sustainability. If the answer is no, then you probably need to find a different solution.
00:32:35
Speaker
And that's really key because we all have had experiences with brands that just feel kind of gross. I mean, I think that the secret unspoken thing behind all of this is that, I don't know, honestly, I'm sitting here glowing and advocating about how important branding is. But I have this conflict within myself quite often, which is that, do you always want your brand to care about everything?
00:33:05
Speaker
Is branding really like, does it feel authentic all the time? Do I feel like I'm being manipulated by companies? I think people have these thoughts, especially when brands present inauthentically or they say one thing and do another. I remember seeing a lot of things, especially like deep in the middle of the pandemic where there were a ton of articles coming out about like, does my mayonnaise need to care about human rights?
00:33:32
Speaker
There are just these kinds of opportunistic stances that companies will take under the guise of branding that actually has nothing to do with what their core brand strategy is. I think that's where things can really veer off-track. When you look at branding as the truth, when you define that really clearly,
00:33:57
Speaker
Then when you make company decisions, using that always as a gut check for literally everything you do, then it will always feel true, it'll always feel authentic, and the people that connect with it will do so in a very real way, and it'll feel meaningful. It's when you create a brand position and you're like, that's just some marketing stuff that we do, and then go and make decisions that are completely opposite of that.
00:34:25
Speaker
It's both a misunderstanding of what branding is, the power of it, and it starts to create a brand that falls apart and people don't trust and feels inauthentic. I veered a little bit from your question, but I think this does have to do with, you know, it's kind of bringing together like what it means to have a business strategy and what it means to have a brand strategy.
00:34:47
Speaker
No, I think that's helpful as you're talking. I'm thinking that or I'm interpreting what you're saying as brand is actually much more. It is the integral structure of an organization. It's not the paint on the outside of the building that you can kind of change out on a whim. Is that right? Absolutely. Absolutely.
Branding in Product Development
00:35:11
Speaker
So a couple more questions for you about branding. One, I'm curious about this. If a company is launching a minimum viable product, do you think that they also need to have a brand established, or is that something that can come a little bit later in the process? Yeah, I think this is a pretty simple one. I mean, it depends on what your goal is for that minimum viable product. If you're testing functionality,
00:35:40
Speaker
You don't need a brand. Say you're building an app and you're trying to see, do people get confused with how well is the UI working? Are they taking the actions we want them to take and using it? You don't need a brand. You're testing and trying to learn about your product. If what you want to test as part of that minimal viable product is like,
00:36:03
Speaker
Is it competing against, is it standing up against certain competitors or is it holding the space in the market that we want it to? Is it holding the price point that we want it to? Those are things that you would probably want to have a brand established for. So I think it's variable, but most often when people ask that question, it's because they're testing functionality or just trying to work out kinks in a product and refine it into what will be the thing that they'll truly launch to market.
00:36:32
Speaker
And no, I don't think it's just not an important factor at that point because you're trying to answer a different kind of question.
B2B Branding Insights
00:36:39
Speaker
That's helpful. Thanks. Similar, well, in my mind, do you think that brands matter as much in the B2B space as they do in the B2C space?
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah, this is a great one and something I've spent a lot of time working in being in big news organizations that mostly speak to other businesses as their customers. The answer is yes, absolutely. I think it's almost trite to say this at this point, but whether you're B2B or B2C, there's a real human being receiving your message.
00:37:15
Speaker
So like, I don't know, there's some strange thing that happens in people's minds when they do B2B that they think that they're talking to like a high rise or something, you know what I mean? Yeah, there's actually a human being who's reading what you've written or getting the ad, right?
00:37:32
Speaker
There's a real human being there. It's a real person who, like you and me, can't fall asleep at night because they're ruminating on a real problem that they're dealing with every day. A critical part of building a good brand is deeply understanding your customer's real lived experience and clearly articulating the problems they either knowingly or unknowingly need a solution for.
00:38:01
Speaker
articulating a problem that a real person is feeling and providing a solution for it. That's what all good brands do. But particularly when you think about the business space, it's super important. And a couple other things I'll say about this. One, a trap that often
00:38:20
Speaker
people often fall into in the B2B space is being overly technical. And a good check to kind of see if you're doing this is to think about explaining that problem that we just talked about to a non-technical person. So I as a non-technical person should be able to understand what you're talking about when you explain to me the problem that your customer has.
00:38:46
Speaker
So explain it to me as if I'm a bored but smart teenager. You still need to grab my attention and you need to make it simple enough for me to understand. Once you're speaking in that language, you know you've fallen out of the trap of becoming too technical, too insider speak. Because again, you're not speaking to a robot, you're speaking to a human being. And then the second thing I would say is,
00:39:13
Speaker
I find this to be a really helpful framework to think about what you're doing. Is it a painkiller or is it a vitamin? Yeah, it's a really nice framework to use. So as a business, I think you want to be a painkiller or when you're doing B2B, you want to be a painkiller. So painkillers are must haves, vitamins are nice to haves.
00:39:38
Speaker
So, for example, if I have a migraine, I literally can't do my job. I'm stopped. If someone gives me something that will solve that, someone gives me an ibuprofen, I will pay anything for it because I need it versus if I want to take some kind of vitamins to optimize my performance at work.
00:40:02
Speaker
It's not that I don't want that or that I wouldn't be willing to pay for it, but it's just solving a different kind of need. So it's not that you can't be a vitamin, but particularly in B2B situations, people are willing to pay to solve painful problems. So if you can identify a problem and then show them how much that problem is costing them, they'll really value the solution that you bring.
00:40:29
Speaker
I love that concept of painkiller versus vitamin. And as you were talking earlier at what you hit on too, I think sometimes where the B2B world can fall a little bit short or miss an opportunity,
00:40:45
Speaker
is not investing and spending the time to get to know the person that is the target demo in that role, which is kind of in line with what you're saying. You know, I think we're B2C companies, they know what time of day their target client or target customer wakes up and like, you know, what music they play first thing in the morning. And so they get such into the details of who is that consumer.
00:41:10
Speaker
In B2B, I think it tends to just be, well, it's the VP of operations at a mid-size XB company, and there's missed opportunities to intrigue and delight those folks. It's like, don't we deserve intrigue and delight in our jobs too? That's interesting.
00:41:28
Speaker
Yeah, and it's an interesting, this isn't a B2B example, actually, but I think it's still a good avatar to use for it. Sometimes your target, the person you're talking to isn't actually the person you think you're talking to. So for example, when I worked at Atria Senior Living, you might think that you're targeting the older adults who are gonna move into a living space.
00:41:57
Speaker
But actually, they're not the ones making the decision, it's their adult children. So you're actually, you're not targeting, you know, an 80 year old man or woman, you're targeting their children who are like probably in their 50s.
00:42:11
Speaker
So it's a different target with a completely different mindset. And I think this often happens in B2B where, like you said, we think, like, everybody wants C-suite marketing. You know, we all want to talk to the top executives who are making the decisions. Well, a lot of times it's the data engineer who's, you know,
00:42:28
Speaker
really passionate on Reddit and on different forums looking for new tech solutions. There are other people in the organization who are actually the real influencers behind these things. It's not always just who we think the key decision-maker is. I worked on a project for a little bit about this and are in a similar space. We narrowed it down and identified, okay, it's not actually the CTO who's making this decision, it's the
00:42:57
Speaker
the data scientists and what are they like? They love superheroes. They love video games, you know? Like there are all these interests they have that when you start to think about like, oh, well, let's create like a cool gamified experience. Let's do this. It starts to become something a lot more interesting and engaging instead of just the same old boring
00:43:16
Speaker
white paper for a C-suite executive to read, which they're probably only reading a few lines of or not reading at all.
Maven Course on Brand Strategy
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah. They're sent that five times via email by the data scientist who eventually is like, can you please rubber stamp this? And the CTO does. That's really interesting.
00:43:35
Speaker
All right, well, I really want to dig a little bit into your Maven course, Brand Strategy for Innovation. So for anyone, maybe first, for anyone who is not familiar with it, could you talk a little bit about what Maven is and what your course is about?
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I just started teaching a course, like you just said, Meredith, called Brand Strategy for Innovation. And it's on a platform called Maven. So Maven is just an online platform for cohort-based courses.
00:44:10
Speaker
And I'll explain for a minute what cohort-based course is. And speaking of good branding, Maven is a fairly young company. They're less than two years old. And they created their own category of cohort-based courses, which was not something that anyone was talking about or really existed previously.
00:44:29
Speaker
So, good job Maven. If you think about how online learning has traditionally happened, it is a very passive experience, you know, like Corsia or Udemy or some of these other platforms. You kind of pay a fee, you get a bunch of videos and you sort of watch them whenever you want. The completion rate is super low for those because people just lose interest.
00:44:52
Speaker
Cohort-based learning is, it happens real time. It's really similar to like a university course that you would take. There's an instructor who teaches live, which would be me. You enroll cohorts of students together.
00:45:08
Speaker
So you are in a live course that's happening on specific days and times with a bunch of other people who are all showing up on Zoom together to attend. And the advantages of doing this is not only do you get the benefit of being able to interact real time with an instructor and
00:45:31
Speaker
questions and get their knowledge, but it's not just like a lecture happens, you're listening and then you log off. It's a really interactive way of learning. You're getting to meet the other people in your cohort, so you're networking with peers and other people who do similar jobs to you, probably at really cool companies that you can learn from.
00:45:51
Speaker
And we do a lot of live workshopping in the course. So I'm kind of presenting concepts, and then I'll say, OK, here's an exercise. Go do it. And you'll do it with other people in the cohort. So you're kind of learning alongside each other and from each other. And then when the course is over, you walk away with actual work done. So it's.
00:46:13
Speaker
There's real, you really get something at the end of it. It's not just all intellectual. So I feel really passionately about it. I think it's a great way to learn. It's really reinvigorated me as a leader to kind of think about how I present concepts and lead inside of a business.
00:46:36
Speaker
thinking about it more through the lens of teaching and kind of relooking at it in that way. So that's been really interesting for me. That's kind of what Maven is and how the course works.
00:46:50
Speaker
I feel like I've, I always learn a lot anytime we talk and as I said, like put on a branding clinics out. I can't even imagine how beneficial that course could be. Like what type of exercises would you do with folks? What would they come away with it with away from it with?
00:47:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I ask everybody to come in with a company in mind. So it can either be like the company that you work inside of, or it can be a company you want to launch, or it's really good for early stage founders. I think back to your earlier question, there's this perception that like, and truly it can be quite expensive to hire a full agency team to, you know, we've worked in agencies, we know what it costs.
00:47:38
Speaker
when you are pretty bootstrapped and you just literally don't have the money. So it's a good solution for that, where as a founder, you can really learn about the importance of building a brand, how to build an effective brand. And then you walk away, basically, with a platform. You've got something down for your purpose, your position, and your personality as a playbook that you can launch from.
Integrating Branding with Business Planning
00:48:06
Speaker
So everybody comes in with a company in mind, whether it's your own. It's also really good for marketers who don't work in brand. So whether you're a content marketer, a product marketer, growth marketer, if you want to understand
00:48:21
Speaker
how to be a better brand marketer at the same time, which all of these disciplines work together, then it's a really beneficial thing to do as well. I've also had interest from venture capitalists and people in the innovation world who are dreaming up and building new companies, but don't necessarily have any kind of education in branding or marketing and want to better understand that side of things.
00:48:51
Speaker
So, you know, some of the workshops we do is there's a fun little like word game that people play with each other where, you know, everyone writes down, they try to define their category and write down their position. And then you have to actually speak it out loud as if you're sitting at a bar having a beer with a friend.
00:49:10
Speaker
and people start getting really tripped up on their words and you start to realize very soon, very quickly, how easy it is to fall into meaningless business speech. Yeah. It is speaking like a real human being in a really simple way. So it gets you out of your head and being like, ooh, what does a, you know, what would I actually say to people? What makes sense?
00:49:32
Speaker
That sounds very useful. And as we were talking about it, the concept of founders taking it was making me think about just what we talked on earlier, how kind of integral creating
00:49:46
Speaker
a brand is to creating a business and how if you can allow your business plan and your brand to be really symbiotic with each other that you probably gonna make things a lot easier for yourself as time goes on.
Closing and Engagement Encouragement
00:50:01
Speaker
Definitely. It's what I advocate for. All right, Kelly, thank you so much. You have been an incredible guest. You have educated me. I'm sure you've educated some listeners. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
00:50:15
Speaker
Thank you. It's been so good to chat with you, Meredith. As always, love talking to you and love having the opportunity to do it in this platform. So if folks are really intrigued by some of the things you talked about, the course, or they just want to follow you, where are the best places for them to kind of look you up? Yeah, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Kelly Corny.
00:50:37
Speaker
That's kind of where I share everything that I'm doing and getting up to. And then if you go to maven.com, you can type in my name or if you just Google maven and brand strategy for innovation, you'll be able to find my course and you can sign up on my page there to get on the wait list for my next cohort.
00:50:57
Speaker
which will probably be at the end of April. I'll be releasing the date quite soon. Would love to have you there. Amazing. And one question. So if folks have a credit with their organization that they can apply toward courses or learning, are they generally able to do that through Maven too? Yeah, that's such a great question. The majority of people who take courses through Maven,
00:51:18
Speaker
use their learning and development budgets from their organizations. Awesome. It's a great way to put it to use. The testimonials and ratings from courses across the board just because of the type of learning it is are super high. Actually, the last thing I'll say about this is the benefit of the type of content that's typically taught on Maven, including my own course, is it's the kind of things that
00:51:46
Speaker
you would like to learn at a university level but isn't really taught there because it's more professional skills. So you're getting to learn from people who have the real world experience of doing this every day in their jobs in really reputable positions and organizations and teaching them to you at a really high level. So yeah, it's a great place to learn. Amazing. Well, we'll definitely put a link to your course in the show notes too for anyone who's interested. Kelly, it was such a pleasure. Yeah, thanks, Loretta.
00:52:17
Speaker
All right, everyone. We hope that you enjoyed our chat with Kelly. We'll be coming to you next week with a new episode. If you like the show, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe in your podcast app. That really helps other folks find the show. And also consider subscribing to the content people newsletter. The link is in the show notes. And that's it, folks. Thanks so much for listening.