What makes a customer experience memorable?

In this episode, Jacob Cass & Matt Davies speak with customer experience expert and author Si Elliott about the psychology behind how people experience, perceive and remember brands.

Drawing from his book, Customer Experience Thinking, Si explains how behavioural science can help brands create stronger customer relationships. They explore the role of expectations, emotion, identity, effort, personalisation and control, along with the small details that can shape an entire experience.

They also unpack some of the behavioural biases every brand strategist should understand, including loss aversion, framing, anchoring, social proof, the paradox of choice and the peak-end rule.

You’ll discover:

• Why a customer’s memory of an experience may matter more than the experience itself
• How first impressions influence everything that follows
• Why offering more choice can make an experience worse
• The difference between being personal and being personalised
• How emotion and identity shape brand preference
• Where AI can improve customer experience and where humans should lead

If you want to create brand experiences that feel more human, valuable and memorable, this conversation will change how you think about every customer interaction.

Get Si Elliot’s New Book: Customer Experience Thinking: How behavioural science helps you understand, connect and build deeper relationships.

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Transcript

Hello, folks, welcome to this episode of JUST Branding. Brands spend an absolutely enormous amount of time thinking about how they look, what they say, how they present themselves to the world. But we know that ultimately brands are experienced by human beings, by end consumers. And we know that those human beings sometimes, I would pretty much say all the time, are not really rational in the way that they think and behave. We’re all emotional beings, influenced by context and various other key things. So we’re not robots. So if we want to manage meaning, if we want to build brands, it’s so important that we get our heads around consumer behavior, customer behavior, you could call it, and behavioral science. Today, in this episode, we are exploring a simple question. What can behavioral science teach us about creating better customer and therefore brand experiences? And we have an amazing guest to go into this subject with. Today, we’re joined by Si Elliott, a customer experience expert who spent the last two decades exploring the intersection between digital progress and human connection. Si began his career in marketing and today co-owns creative agency, Diversity, and is the founder of customer experience consultancy, Fabrics, where he combines behavioral science with practical strategy to help organizations create experiences that genuinely resonate with people. On top of that, if that wasn’t enough, he’s also an award-winning guest lecturer at Nottingham Trent University here in the UK, the University of Nottingham and the Communication University of China, as well as sitting on academic advisory boards spanning business and psychology. And perhaps most relevantly, he is the author of a new book that’s just come out this year, Customer Experience Thinking, a practical guide to using behavioral science to build deeper, more meaningful customer relationships. Si, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for that introduction. There’s very little I can say now. I think you’ve pretty much cut off everything you’ve done.

Let’s wrap it up. Well, I think we could tuck into one small story, and that’s how we first met. Do you want to sort of, you know, open up that can of worms?

Yeah. So 2004, I think it was, our creative studio was a little bit overloaded with work. So we went out to some freelance designers here in Nottingham, and a very energetic young chap with a lot of hair arrived through the door. Did some fantastic work with us. So I can vouch that the work was very good. And we’ve been in touch ever since. And I think it’s always interesting when you have, and you’ve just reeled off a lot of things that I’ve done. And the reason I’ve done that is because I’ve been around for so long. But I think it’s really interesting when you have more than two decades of experience in a market, in an area, in a niche, to see the people that keep coming back into your, kind of revolving around your world and your ether as well, and your network. And yeah, it’s great to see what you’re doing. It’s fantastic to meet Jacob as well. And I’ve got a few questions for Jacob a little bit later on as well. That’s a whole different thing.

Well, thanks for so much for carving out some time. I think it was a couple of years ago, we were in a Starbucks and you mentioned this book that was coming out. And now it’s here. So congratulations on launching it. We’re going to get into that. But one thing I was just going to touch on, I think what’s interesting about our connection is that, in effect, we’ve both had, I would say similar, but different approaches in our career, which is that I think we’ve gone up the value ladder, if you like, in the sense of how are we really creating stuff that has real true meaning and value for customers? And coming from the design and creative side, that’s where my career has gone more into the strategy side. And I know yours has also, and slightly differently, but ultimately kind of ending up on that side of things, which is less about, I guess, the fonts, the colors and the shiny bits, and more about the true, for you, the customer experience that really kind of generates value.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think you touched on the book, and I’m sure we’ll chat through that a little bit. And that was certainly a labor of love. I know you’re working on one at the moment. I know, Jacob, you’ve been through that process as well. And that was a commitment device. I just told everybody I’m writing a book, because eventually, every time you see someone, they go, how are you getting on with the book? You go, yeah, I need to complete that. But, you know, an absolute curse of optimism. I thought I’d have the book done in a year. It took three years. And hopefully, there’s some value that people can get out from that. But certainly, and I know we haven’t teed up the two letters of AI yet, but we’re never going to get through this without unscathed, without talking about that. That wasn’t even in my thinking when I started the book. But it’s certainly become more important. And the point you touched on now, for anybody working agency side, a designer, people at the moment that maybe have some worries about what’s happening in the world, that moving up the value chain and adding the thinking in is absolutely critical now. It’s never been more important. It’s never. And I think when we touch on what you guys do from a brand perspective, I genuinely think that now might be the most important time in history to get brand right.

Agreed. Well, look, before we tuck in some of that stuff, let’s just start with basics, right? Because we have a varied audience that tune in and we always like to lay some groundwork first. We love definitions on the JUST Branding Podcast just to start us off. So the book’s called Customer Experience Thinking. Perhaps we could get you to give us a definition of what that is. What is customer experience thinking?

Customer experience is just the perception of feelings that people have with the interactions or the experience they have with you, your product, your service or your brand. So in simple terms, that’s all it is and it lives in the mind of the customer. So we’re trying to influence that, but fundamentally, customer experience is always from the other side of the fence and a lot of brands think about what they’re delivering as customer experience rather than what’s been received and trying to fit that on its head and walk in their shoes a little bit more.

Love that. Love that. So why is that important, do you think, to having that kind of mindset around human behavior? Why is that important to creating those experiences for businesses and brands?

Well, let’s think about why does a business exist at all? It’s to serve someone and hopefully have a value exchange where you get compensated for that service to the other side. So I think modern marketing and certainly technology has really driven us down a line of thinking about conversion, thinking about this user, that metric, and we actually need to take a step back and go, we’re actually serving people at the end of the day. A lot of the work you guys will be doing in your day jobs is not just about selling to a business, it’s serving those people within the business. And I feel in marketing, we’re losing a little bit of sight on that. Certainly with big data, certainly when we look at, you know, think about the social platforms and the ability to reach such a large audience, I feel we’re starting to lose a little bit of connection with the fact that it’s the person on the other side that we’re serving. And the brands that do it super well, and I think are gonna be really successful moving forward, are those that keep that in mind and remember, I’m here to serve you. So my book is written to hopefully serve value to you, and therefore it’s worth the money you’ve paid for it, and it creates that value. So I’ve had to write it with you in mind, not in mind of just, this is what I want to say.

Right.

How did you come to the idea of writing a book?

Well, partially, partially there’s a big personal side to it. I’ve got two young daughters, and 11 and 14, they’re digital natives. They’re growing up in a world that is so different to the world I grew up in 40 odd years ago. And I now observe that and think, well, what they’re coming into, how well is it serving them versus they’re serving it? So how much is the technology the master rather than the other way around? So I was starting to just observe this and think about the marketing industry in general, and how we’re, as I say, starting to focus more on metrics, users, conversion rate, rather than delivering out to people. And that’s been accelerated in recent years, but from the start of the book, it was really looking at that and looking at this whole trend of, we’re more connected than ever, but potentially more lonely, we’re a lot more plugged in, there’s notifications going off, I feel it. When I think about starting out in a design creative studio here in Nottingham, I was doing two or three ad campaigns a week, and I used to wait for an ISDN line to slowly tick along, and that’s great. And now I look at the speed that my team are working at, the amount of notifications going off, if you’ve got Slack, if you’ve got Teams, WhatsApp’s going off, emails, people are expecting instant answers on. Everything’s ramping up, but we’ve still got these prehistoric brains that have been formed over thousands of years, and we’re not having hardware updates with our brains as quickly as the technology is. So I’m looking at it and thinking, well, as marketeers, we have a responsibility. We fund a lot of what happens in technical development, because it’s us that is paying these platforms, wanting to have our presence on there. So it’s just thinking about that. And I was seeing a lot of clients having that frustration with, I think, the pace of optimization and wanting to build something that’s a little bit more long term. That was kind of the two things coming together, my two worlds colliding together into a, well, you’ve got an opinion on it, why don’t you start to write a book? You lecture on these things. Why don’t you get it down to paper? Because there’s also only so many conversations you can have in your lifetime. So, you know, hopefully people will pick this book up and go, I did some interesting things in there, but I’m going to move on to the next level. Like the great books I’ve read over the years, that’s part of my evolution in my thinking. I want to just be a little, one of those little ticks in someone else’s evolution along the way, where they start to maybe question things a little bit differently. And I’ve given my daughters the book and asked them to think about their decisions as consumers when they’re trying to buy stuff online as well. Love that.

And I think you’re so right, like short-termism, it can be such a drug, right, for businesses, particularly big organizations where, you know, people are so desperate to justify their existence. And if they can point towards some data somewhere, you know, it feels rational and it feels lovely. And, you know, they can kind of justify their existence when, as you say, if we lose sight of the basic thing, which is as a business, you’re there to serve someone else, you’re there to serve their need today. But if you think just about that, you’ve got a problem, because really you want to be thinking, I’m here to serve you for as long as you need me to. You know, that could be for years. And if you’ve got short-term focus and your teams are all driven, short-term, short-term, short-term, they sometimes might make a decision, which will benefit the customer and themselves in the short-term, but might damage the long-term relationship. And that, I think, is sometimes how businesses and brands get themselves into difficulty. Anyway, what I was going to say was, let’s shift gear a little bit and dive into this like full on, right? Because I know in your book you go through, which by the way, just to lend my endorsement to it, I think everybody on this who’s listening to this should definitely grab a copy. We’ll give details in a minute of where you can get it. But let’s just go into some of the principles that you outline. I think you go through like eight key principles of customer experience. So I was wondering if you’d be open to outlining those for us. And then perhaps we could dive in and unlock a couple and kind of get into some nitty gritty. Would you be open to that?

A hundred percent. Let’s start with why they principles are not rules or laws. And I’m not necessarily the most linear of characters myself. As I would imagine, many great entrepreneurs, business leaders, designers, brand strategists are as well. So the principles because, and my school reports would tell you this, I didn’t always follow the rules. But it’s something that over time that I’ve just crafted these through. So A, where we look at, consider every detail on how they work together, set, manage and exceed expectations, personalised for the individual, on their terms of putting them in control, minimising effort and stress, considering the identity and emotions, learning and building relationship over time and considering all the senses. And they’ll map against whether it’s accessible, functional or emotional or a series of those. And they just help, I think, give foundational building blocks to start planning your work around. The second half of the book dives into Behavioural Science, which takes it to a slightly different place. But that start point is things that we’ve been working with clients for years on, trying to put a little bit of a structure behind it. But I refuse to call it anything beyond principles because I don’t want to be held to it in the fullness of time. We’re allowed to rethink at some point. But certainly, you know, those are the important things that for me, when you guys are doing brand exercise, I’ve got to live up to your brand exercise, putting them through this lens of these eight principles and really testing my metal against that.

Yeah. I mean, some of them, particularly for the designers who are listening in, will be really obvious. Like that first one, consider every detail and how they work together, right? I guess from a visual perspective, a lot of people are familiar with that, but it goes beyond that, doesn’t it?

Absolutely. So as humans, we’re kind of hardwired to notice differences in environment and things that don’t quite join up. Usually that could be, and I’ll quite often talk about our prehistoric roots where you were a caveman. You’d be looking out for those queues.

You’re like the third guest recently that said that I’m a bit caveman-like. I will accept it, but I’m getting a little nervous. Carry on.

But you, evolutionary, have to look out for risks. So you look for inconsistencies, slight things, and then you go, do I trust this now? And it will be the same in any brand exercise as well, where we need to be consistent across the piece, because otherwise I won’t believe your claim. If in three places you say it, but in one place you contradict it. And that’s when I just think about wording and the things that you’re promising. Before then, I look at what you’re doing visually. So if I think about consistency visually, you say, we are an authentic people first brand, and then you’re using AI generated content on social. I don’t believe your first claim now. So consistency is really important. And I think that’s a tough one for designers, because you like novelty. You like to change things up, freshen things up. So for then someone to go, no, no, we need to be super consistent is tough. And a couple of episodes ago, I can’t remember your guest’s name now off the top of my head. But when they talk about Marlborough and then designing things in green, everything’s got to come back. Consistency is a tough one. It is a tough one because we also like novelty ourselves. And when you’re working on something so much, you forget that it’s 100% of your head space. But for the consumer, it’s that fleeting thing that they see once every four months for three seconds.

That’s a great point and I see it all the time. On a macro scale, you get a new CMO and they want to stamp their authority upon the brand, literally take it in a different direction. And again, going back to that first point, is this how we serve people well? I’m working on a big project at the moment in the US and it’s a brand relaunch and it’s going to market. We’ve got ad TV spots and all sorts going out. And I had to have a really serious conversation with the brand director over there because they asked for, in this particular project, for example, different strap lines to the end of every ad. And my position was, look, we should stick to one really strong because we want to kind of be really clear about what we stand for. And they were like, yeah, but don’t you think consumers will get bored? I was like, literally, someone’s going to see one of your ads and then not see it again or see anything to do with your brand for a day or two, right? You know, even with the best funding in the world, that’s the reality. So what we need to do is we need to think exactly this, you know, consider the detail and be really, really clear about the experience. And yeah, I think I won that one, but hey, we’ll wait and see. Time will tell. Yeah, time will tell. I also think like there’s a new rebrand that’s been echoing around the interweb of, you know, the way Coke has been refreshing there. I don’t think that they’ve gone live with it yet, there’s been some sort of leaked Coke things. And what I think is phenomenal about Coke, if you think of a brand with the longevity of say Coca-Cola, how the level of consistency around, you know, some of their key brand codes has been absolutely locked in for many, many years. The red, the ribbon, the way the can and the bottles work and all of that stuff, for years, consistency pays off. And now, yeah, they’ve tweaked a few things, typographies, tweet, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately, look at brands like that, I would say, to and consider your business, your brand and consider how frequently you’ve changed over the years. You know, a lot of B2B brands change every two, three years and they think this is what it’s about, but perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s about consistency.

There has been some dilemmas around with the packaging design and Coke Zero. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but they can’t tell the difference between Coke Zero and regular Coke because the black has gone and people are picking up the wrong thing and sales are going to go down because of that. So when we talk about how things all work together, I think that is one of those things, even though the system would say to do that, we have to make a decision of like, well, does it actually help the brand and sales? I don’t know. Time will tell on that one.

And that’s where behavioral science comes in and we’re going to get to that. We’re going to get to that, but let’s keep going through these principles, right? So that was number one, consider every detail and how they work together. Number two, set, manage and exceed expectations. Kind of like, how does that work? Like that’s a tough one, right? Like how do you exceed expectations, Si?

Before we get into that, Si, I just had a question because you mentioned these, like building blocks and we want to make them usable and practical, but before we get into this, for the context of how we actually apply this, using these principles, how do you generally work with clients if you’re going through these principles and like make it usable?

So typically a client will either come in and go, let’s look at the whole of our experience, map it out, so customer journey map it right the way through. Or alternatively, they may, the spot point might be, we don’t think this bit’s working. Can we have a look at that? And then you end up expanding out from there. So they’re looking to sharpen up a certain elements they might see that they are customer satisfaction scores are through the floor. Or our NPS all of a sudden has gone massively backwards. We don’t know why. Or alternatively, we’re having this issue over here. Yeah, we used to get this response rate is now dropped down to this, or we’re seeing a higher churn in some of our customer base. So it could be any one of those. And for anybody doing this as well, you don’t always need to grab someone like me and you can just start to pick this up and look at it yourself. But I would always say where you think the problem is, is rarely where it actually is, and you have to expand it out. So they’ll be like, right, our conversion rate there is bad. Okay, why? And that does kind of come on to Matt’s next one, then, which is about set, manage and exceed expectations, which we often talk about, let’s exceed expectations. But that’s firstly, the start point actually is take a step back and go, does Jacob actually understand what is required? So let’s think about getting a mortgage. Do you know the component steps when you’re first time buyer of getting a mortgage? No, you don’t. So from the outset, we’re going to be super clear and go, right, okay, Jacob. So nine step process. First bit, you’re going to get dead excited because we’re going to tell you exactly how much money you can borrow. So then you’re going to jump over if you’re in the UK, some like right move and start searching for properties and get all excited at that point. But by the way, just to give you a heads up, there’s going to be a really boring point where we ask you to show us all your credit card statements, all your bank statements, go through that process of due diligence. That’s a real emotional low point in the process. So we’re going to have to work really hard at that point. So to start with, in a lot of purchases, we don’t have background record or history to know what we’re doing. Yeah, go to pick up a can of Coke in a local supermarket. We’ve done that handful of times, so we know what we’re doing. Although if we picked up Coke Zero, it’s a bit disappointed now because of the color scheme. But we know what we’re doing. But in a lot of cases, we don’t. If it’s the first time you’re engaging in the space, you don’t. Or alternatively, if you are the first direct, when they first came out from a banking perspective, you’re doing things differently to the other guys. You got no branches, it’s all online. Well, I’m going to have to walk you through that process. So, starting that out, and personally when I think about that, I want to lean back in on the team that’s done brand creation to go, right, what are we setting in how we talk to people? What are we setting those expectations? And expectations will also be set from external factors. So, I am setting up a little shoe shop here in Nottingham, doing lovely tailored shoes. Yeah, Jacob, you’re like, I want next day delivery because Amazon Prime has got me on that page. I can’t deliver on that. So, I need to explain to you very early on, these are tailor-made, they’re going to take us two weeks to create the shoe. We’re going to send you out a measuring chart so we get your size of foot absolutely right. And then it’s going to be delivered out to you. And then ideally if we can deliver that in one and a half weeks, well, that’s where we’ve exceeded the expectation, but we’ve got to set it and then manage that along the way as well. And if any brand leaves a gap in the management of expectations and things, and we’re not going to be too clear, we don’t need to mention that. One of your competitors who’s more aggressive in any space will have set a different expectation. Amazon, as I say, has changed all expectations and changed a lot of consumer behavior, so we plan less in advance. So now, my boutique shoe shop all of a sudden has to work really hard to overcome that and give you the story of maybe the individuals who are making your shoes behind the scenes as well. So you get that emotional warmth to it and you go, this is what I’m buying into, I’m buying into this experience.

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Yeah, personalization is a tough one and it happens at scale when you have longer relationships because you have more data to put on and more understanding. And things don’t always have to be at a huge scale. There’ll be a lot of small businesses that will get a lot more data points quickly because of the nature of their transactions with people and B2B very much so. So B2B, for me, when I look at personalization and B2B, so everybody in marketing goes, oh, let’s personalize, right? So we’ve got a first name tag on an email. Great. Okay. But actually, have we thought about our clients who are buying from us and those individuals of Jacob and Matt and actually what their needs are and how we’re now presenting to their needs? So we’ve got this advantage now where technology allows us to tailor things a lot more, but only if you’ve got really good steer on the person first. And that’s where with a lot of the brand work we do and a lot of the planning work we’re doing, it’s looking at building up customer advisory programs and things like that to start to understand cohorts of customers. But then it is about, a lot of it is data driven, but doesn’t always have to be big data. It can be the things that if you’re having a conversation with me and I’m your client, you’ll be making some notes about things. And it might be, SIA CMOs have a real battle with the CFO because they’re trying to drive more performance metrics in the next six months, because that’s really important for these reasons over here. Okay, I now know with my proposal how I personalise that. So depends where you are. And obviously when it comes to mass marketing, I’ll probably talk about an American brand called Zappos quite a bit because they are literally world class in customer experience. So I’ll talk about those guys a bit, but they’re the one I will use to people when they go, but this doesn’t scale because they sold to Amazon for 1.2 billion. So that’s enough scale to evidence it. But you have to have the desire to really want to get close to Jacob to understand his world, to be able to deliver a really personal service.

I think that’s such a great point. I mean, sort of the gimmicky side of it, you’ve got like Starbucks writing my name on my cup. And I just love that, like, you know, with a little kiss or a little smiley face. Always makes me feel wonderful. That’s personalised, but I think with the rise of AI and the tech space, like you were saying, the data that we can now use and then leverage, it goes beyond that. I was excited to see Hilton doing, you know, they have like smart rooms, right? So you go into your hotel room, you can set the temperature, you set the lighting. And most people set that and they don’t really change it beyond like turning it off at night. And then they go out the next day and then, you know, you fly over to New York, you go into Hilton, flip, you’ve got to set it all up again, right? So what Hilton are doing is these, I can’t remember what it’s called, I think it’s called Hilton Connect, this concept where they know you, they know your preference in terms of temperature, heat, lighting and stuff. And that’s just automatically set when you walk in the room. That to me is like hyper, you know, hyper personalized, such a beautiful thing for them to do as a service to their customer. And then I don’t know if they’re going to do this, but I imagine they’re going to leverage that as a differentiator, right? So that now if I have to choose a Hilton versus something else, and I have a travel lodge or something, I’m going to choose the Hilton because I know I’m getting that extra level of kind of service. So that’s where I think we can get to if you really, as you say, get close to the customer and look for opportunities to build brand experiences that go beyond.

So yeah. Why have they come up with that? Because of course, that will be linked into a lawyers program where I can get you to sign up. And obviously then I’ve got you on that database. But why have they done that? Because they’ve walked in the shoes of people staying in the hotels and thought of those points of annoyance, those little points of annoyance and friction points and gone. How do we make that just that little bit easier?

Like the observation of that is super smart, isn’t it? Like they would have, as you say, like would have had to have spent some time either as customers themselves or with customers to see, oh yeah. And notice what I think is smart about that is, it’s not like they followed a customer into one hotel, right? As you said earlier, they’ve sort of zoomed out. They followed customers throughout maybe a year of interacting with the hotels or six months, and then figured out that this is a little pain point. That the customer might not have even thought that they had, right? Because like who would expect the same room setting from when you last visited hotel? How interesting.

Or they may have borrowed that idea because someone in their leadership team might have been in Uber, and knowing that in Uber you can put your settings in of temperature, whether you want a conversation, whether you want music, and they might have gone, why aren’t we doing this? And so I’m all about borrowing from other brands and seeing what other people are doing around in similar space and different space and going, how can we apply that to what we’re doing?

As an ex-designer, I can vouch for borrowing as a very exciting way of leveraging your work. That was number three, by the way, to personalise. Let’s get into number four. You’ve said on their terms and put them in control is principle four, which I guess is what we’re talking about here as well, isn’t it?

Absolutely. And look, we all like the autonomy. We love freedom, don’t we? That’s our autonomy to be able to make decisions. Well, if you’re selling to me, but it’s all on your terms, the way I can communicate with you is only via certain channels. I had a real annoyance of being stuck in Copenhagen Airport when Heathrow, they had a fire, so the airport was shut for the first time in decades. I couldn’t get in touch with BA to have a conversation. Sadly, I could only do stuff through the app, and I was getting a lot of contradictory advice. On my terms at that point means I have the ability to press a button to bring someone. 95% of the time, my interaction with them is great through the app, but in those moments, I need to do that. All the power is taken away from me, so I was hugely frustrated. Now, it’s not really the brand’s fault. There’s a big factor of influence in them externally, but it didn’t meet up to my expectations of a premium carrier, and so it took the control away from me in the moment. That adds stress, just builds up your annoyance, and of course, I’m not going to blame myself. It’s never my fault, so I’m not irrational. I’m not unreasonable, so that’s their fault. So it is really important, where possible. You can’t always put people in control. So when Jacob’s getting his mortgage with me, I can’t say, yeah, don’t worry about sending me the credit card bills. I don’t need to see those. There are certain things that you have to do, but I just need to go, how’s the best way to serve Jacob? What are the best channels for him to get in touch with? And if there’s a point where I go, yeah, this bit is going to be frustrating. How do I sweeten that a little bit, soften it a little bit when I need to get that information? But yeah, absolutely everything is about putting you in control, which is why your SatNav will offer you three different routes to go somewhere, even though it knows the optimal one, it knows you’re probably going to hit the optimal one every single time. We don’t want the machine telling us what to do. I want to choose from it. So it’s curated me three options and I’ll choose the option. It’s the one that was in the darker blue that was the fastest route by six minutes anyway. So it always knew I was going to do it, but it gives me the options rather than just presenting one. And I think that’s a really important thing as well, is that the choice and allowing people to have that opportunity to have choice doesn’t let them feel in control of the zone, even if they’re always going to go down that same darker blue six minutes.

Right, it gives them the option on the one in a millionth time they might want to try something different. They know that that option’s there. So as you say, they don’t feel trapped or pushed into an area. I think as soon as you start feeling like a brand or a salesperson or anyone is pushing you, at least for me, with my… I don’t know, is it a British thing? I don’t know. It’s like my wife, if we ever go into a carpet like a retailer or something, and there’s a salesperson that’s overly eager, she just walks out. It’s like brutal, brutal response to that. So if you feel pushed sometimes, it can have a real negative effect. Principle five is minimize effort and stress, which again, it’s interesting how these all feed into each other. I just wondered, is it often with your work that removing things can actually enhance a customer experience? What are your thoughts on minimalism?

Absolutely. We live in such a busy overloaded world. Wherever we can make things simple for people, when we come on to behavioral science, we’ll talk about cognitive load a little bit, which is just our thinking, the amount of thinking we have to do. There are so many decisions we need to make in a day. So where you can make things a little bit easier for me, remove the stress out of it, then I’m absolutely going to welcome it. And that just take friction out of that loop. I think that’s really important. And I think nowadays we do try and overload too much of everything and just paring it back is really important. Now there will always be as well, these are principles. And you’re right, because it’s almost like, if you pick up a fishing net, all of them are, you may pick up the one where you go, this is about identity and emotion, but everything else comes with it. And this is how you see how these work together. But yeah, if you start to think about how busy and how overloaded I am, how can I pull this back and make it easy, except if I’m in a space where I actually want to make the cost of entry difficult. So if you want to get a Rolex, that is not simple. But that’s part of the experience, is I have to actually go through this process of being on a wait list, buying four other Rolexes to be one of their key customers. Or when you look to think of the Enzo Ferrari, it was invite only to purchase it when they released that. Now, you would think, well, actually, I’ve got two million pounds to pay here. Can I just have it? No, you can’t. And so some brands and in some spaces will go the other way. So if you wanted a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, you have to have owned to think at least four or five Porsches before you’re allowed to go in and spend the 300,000 pounds on it. And so all of these things as well, you have to look at context of where you are and what your experience is, because some things you would ramp that up because that should be part of the experience. But in 95% of the cases, you want to be trying to just make it as easy as possible for that person to make the best decision for themselves. That’s an important factor, not the one that makes Matt the most amount of money on his SaaS product. But what is the right one for Jacob to be buying? Let’s make that right. Loyalty will come longer term. Recommendation comes longer term. So we’re not just trying to upsell him into the enterprise tier because he’s never going to use it and eventually he’ll drop off. We go, you’re in the pro tier. That’s the exact right one for you. So how do you make it easy for him to get to that decision point?

Yeah, I think that’s so smart. And also it’s about serving the person. So for luxury brands, like you mentioned, like the Porsche or Rolex examples, you know, scarcity is part of that identity that you want to create for that individual, right? You don’t want… It’s like I was listening to a podcast bizarrely. I listened to all sorts of podcasts, as well as the JUST Branding one, of course. Listened to all the back episodes every single time, don’t we, Jacob? But it was on the royal family, right? The British royal family. And one of the things that this commentator was saying was that, you know, it’s a scarcity thing, right? Like the royal family, part of their success is that they create that sort of very scarce interactions with the royal family. They’re not going to be walking down the street with a plastic bag full of shopping, right? It’s curated and it’s scarce, which makes it an attraction to certain people. So I think that’s a great point. Sometimes it’s not about removing things. But if you’re going to put things in the customer’s way, I think what your point is is that you should design them carefully so they service that customer and what that customer wants in terms of the value it’s getting from the brand. So scarcity being one of those. Rather than what I see a lot of brands, and you probably do as well, Si, is like there’s frustrations in the customer journey that they’re not even aware of, right? And therefore, if only they could just become more aware of that, then they could take steps to remove that stress. And I think that’s your point, isn’t it?

Absolutely.

Yeah, brilliant.

It perfectly leads into the next one around their identity and emotions. I see what you’ve done here, Si.

Smart.

Hopefully, it flows quite nicely. And that probably answers why it took three years to do the book. Yeah, I mean, look, every purchase really is partially us signaling what I want the world to see about me. So before we came on this, Matt was like, are you on Mac? I’m like, no, I’m on PC.

Oh, that old debate goes back decades.

Yeah, whereas Jacob, you’re like, okay, here’s how we do the settings. Whereas Matt couldn’t have a PC because he needs to be on the train to London with everybody seeing that he’s creative and a little bit different. And that’s what the Mac immediately screams. But I jest with that a little bit, but it’s so true. Those choices and decisions we make are often, with brands, is what this says about me to the rest of the world as well.

Tribal, aren’t they, yeah.

So that’s why we are thinking about identity. Car purchases, you are buying into not just a car, but what the car says about you. So it might be that you want to be seen as sensible, family man, you’ve got the Volvo or something along those lines. Whereas, you know, maybe it’s, I’m going through my midlife crisis, so I go out and buy the Ferrari or something. Therefore, I want people to see, oh, he’s successful, you know, he’s liquid, he’s got money, he’s got a Ferrari, he likes design, he’s a good driver. Although, you know, you’d probably question that later on. And so thinking of people’s identity is really important because again, you put yourself in their shoes. And then when we think about emotions, how much in certain moments in time does the emotional state change the reaction from someone? And how can we help be sensitive towards that? Back to my point at Copenhagen Airport, I was just frustrated. So the first person I speak to when I’ve got back to seven days later, I’m probably not as reasonable as if it was just a normal call to find out about some points or how I can claim a reward seat. So yeah, identity is so important and we like to think, we love to think that we’re totally logical and we’re not driven by emotion. And that we’re not these kind of egotistical people that have to show the world I’m brilliant. But the reality is we’ve kind of got that bubbling under the surface. We need to be aware of that and aware of the people. So if you’ve got a product, let’s say in a construction trade category and you talk about it’s the professional product, well, that’s going to attract people that want to be, they might pay the premium to be buying those professional products because they want to be seen to be there. And when we think about the construction trades, it’s very tribal when it comes to what tools you’re using and what you’ve got on site. And you can see the tribes separate out and they’ll mock, oh, you’ve got the red tools, oh, you’ve got the green ones. But again, that is them virtue signaling when they go on site, this is who I am and this is the kind of tribe I’m part of.

So principle seven is learn and build the relationship over time, which I guess almost brings us full circle. We were talking about short-termism and long-termism. But what changes, Si, when brands and brand leaders start thinking longer term about the customer relationship as opposed to short-term, do you think?

I’ll give you one executional point that gets right away. You don’t have this crazy first sign-up form that’s trying to extract 18 different answers and therefore has a really poor conversion rate. Because you’re asking for that information over time, you’re building up, you’ve got value exchange in there as well. So to be able to do the whole thing of personalization, I need your information, but don’t be too over familiar too quickly and don’t start asking Matt for every bit of detail. Back to Jacob and we’re doing that mortgage again. To start with, I know I need to get him in gradually by going, what’s your earning? So I can give you a number so you can start to look for properties and build the excitement from there. No, right, now give me your credit card details. All of these are on the way as well. So it is building those bits out and some of those bits within that mortgage process will be very much around. These are functional things I need to deliver for you, but other things is how do I enrich it? So back to my shoes. Well, start with, I just want to know about Jacob’s feet so I can send him those lovely brogues out. And then eventually it’s like, okay, start to understand, right, we’ve got a young family. Okay, right, we do a range of kids’ shoes. These will be nice for Christmas. Start to build that out, but I’m not going to ask him that when we’re first talking about the shoes he needs for a meeting in a month’s time, not the day after, because otherwise, sorry, head to Amazon Prime, you know, in a month’s time. I’m not going to start extracting that, but over time as he gets to know the brand, he’s going to be a little more comfortable. And there is quite a a persistence, especially in the younger generation as well, on their data and protecting their data, which I think is great. You know, understanding the value of your data and how it’s shared with people, I think is something that should be taught in schools. I think it’s really, really important. So we as a brand want to, I want to get that from you, but I’ve got to do it slowly. Look, I’m building up hopefully a long-term relationship rather than one night stand with you. So I’m not going to last too much straight off the bat. I want to marriage with you eventually as a brand and as a business. That’s where I want to get to, not a series of one night stands that are just constantly churning through people. But it does take time and our impatience often means that we are trying to extract that too quickly. I think you’ve really got to pose the question, how much I’m asking for Matt and Jacob’s benefit versus how much I’m asking for my benefit. Right.

It’s about volumes. Okay. Last principle. Should we do that?

Absolutely.

Consider all the senses. This is an interesting one. I’d love to get your thoughts on this in relation to the digital world that we’re in. Because obviously with digital, we sometimes limit the senses to what the sight, possibly hearing, I guess. But how can brands start to do this and think about all the senses, particularly in a digital world? That would be my question.

You got to work hard in a digital world because the senses are at the moment, at the moment, who knows where we’re going to be in 10 years’ time, the senses are fairly limited. From a brand perspective, I would say that vision is the sense that 99 cent of effort’s gone into and the others come for the ride from time to time, where possible. But if I’m an online retailer of clothes, I’ve got to make sure the copywriting really brings the fabrics to life. So that’s where I want to work with really talented writers to achieve that. Otherwise, it’s very hard for you to go, well, this woolen knit sweater, OK? And I’m not a copyright. So I can’t give you a great description right now of how I should write that. But I would want to try and bring that to life. I would also want to make sure that I’m investing in really great photography to get the right angles to bring that to life as well. So to start to build out those senses. It is tough, as I say, for digital brands. And in some space, it doesn’t lend. And that’s why the principle is because somebody is going to need to forget. But when I look at a brand who spans digital and the online and in real life, I look at, there’s a guy called Matt Siebeck, who’s Chief Experience Officer at St. Louis City Soccer Club. I went to spend some time with them. And those guys, the MLS New Boys, they’ve been around for five years now. And the way they’ve set up their customer experience is anybody gets a chance to go and watch a, and I will try and call it soccer, because I have to remember to do that, to pay homage to them and talk about, on the pitch and things like that, as they would talk about it. But they looked at every sentence when they would, they would design the stadium. So the rake of the stand, the angle of the stand, was designed to be still safe, but the best acoustics that will bounce the noise back from the other end. They’ve got a Chief Flavor Officer. So a guy who curates the retailers, the food retailers.

That’s like my kind of job. I’d like that.

Yeah, what a great job. Yeah, what a great job. When I met him, he was also one of the happiest men I’ve ever met. I don’t know why. But Matt was talking to me and he was saying, what we’ve done as well is we want the best smelling stadium in the world. So most stadiums will take the exhaust fume from where you’re cooking and fire out the stadium. He’s like, I’ve got such good food vendors, I send it down the concourse. So he’s thinking about all of those elements. And ultimately, it’s just a soccer match, right? People are just turning up to watch that. But in doing that, 65% of revenues before the game kicks off, they think about simplicity through, they’ve got contactless supermarkets at half time, they’ve got city pay that’s on their app that speeds stuff up. But they’ve thought about all of the senses when you go to the stadium and really give them a little thought and then how they’re bringing them back into the app experience as well. So yeah, it’s tough in a digital interface to get all of those across. And if you can’t, don’t worry about it. But you do need to start to think of those and actually, as I say, going back to the retailer when we’re thinking from a clothing perspective, don’t just AI generate some functional copy, bring it to life. What am I going to be feeling when I pick that item up and really spend time on that? I’ve done a lot of work over the years with Dulux Paints. Just look at the name of the paint colors that they come up with. That’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make it feel more of a sensory experience.

Yeah, I think everyone can learn from that. And even, I guess you’d call them, primary digital brands often could, if they had the desire, enter the physical space potentially as well. Jacob, I’m thinking of your… I’ve just got this here before me. Jacob runs a community called the Brand Builders Alliance, right? And I’m a coach on it. And I remember, Jacob, you sent me this lovely medallion coin. I’m a resident coach and it’s there. And it’s kind of like, you didn’t have to do that, right? But it kind of connects me in a different way. I’ve got a field to it. I’m just sort of spinning around in front of random people. But, you know, and it’s true, there’s opportunities to build longer term relationships to enhance brand meaning through different senses. So I think that’s absolute. And we often overlook it. So that’s super smart. I’m just mindful time is running on rampantly. And we’ve kind of got through the first half of the book, there is the whole second half, which we’ve been alluding to. So I definitely want to touch on that. That talks about behavioral science, talks to us about biases and how behavior is influenced and how that kind of changes our understanding of brands. I’d love to just dive into a few random ones, if I might, off the card. So I’m going to pick like a handful and then perhaps, you know, folks, if you want more, they’re all in the book, but I’m going to pick randomly like a loss aversion. Let’s talk about that for a moment.

Yeah, so in the book, just to give a little bit of context, eight categories of behavioral biases that we frequently use in customer experience. There are far more, but we need to keep things simple. Otherwise, the book would have been far too long and probably a little bit too dull of me droning on by the end of it, in eight categories, but yeah, loss aversion. So-

This is in anxiety, which is the first kind of negative behavioral bias.

Yeah, so anxiety is a category where we worry about stuff. And you will, if I ask you something that you’ve been ruminating on for the last week, that happened to you last week, it’s usually the negative things that come to mind first. And that’s normal, that’s the survival instinct. We should focus on the negatives, because the threats are the things that probably used to take us down more than the positive things. So be mindful of that big line over there, rather than the fact that there’s beautiful sunshine on the far side of us. But loss aversion really looks at the fact that psychologically we feel the pain of a loss twice as much as that of a relative gain. So you losing 10 pounds is feels the equivalent psychologically as you gaining 20 pounds. So you can start to think about this and people will protect themselves against losing. And with the behavioral biases, like that idea, you put on one loads of other ones, some of them are interrelated to it as well. So then that will take you down the route of things like status quo bias where the best way to not make a mistake is to make no decision at all. But we find that in language and terminology and Carphone Warehouse here in the UK, mobile phone retailer did it where they just changed it from rather than saying saved, saying you could be wasting 194 pounds a year on the wrong tariff, we can help you. So straight away, that’s actually more powerful psychologically. So we look at loss aversion and we look at the things I’ve got and I’ve built up are mine and giving them away is quite painful. So it is just that considering that even in some of the language and some of the copy that you use and just the way that you’re phrasing your benefits to people might be not always about what you’re saving them, but you may be bringing them. And anxiety is a difficult one because you don’t always want to lead with a negative. You don’t want to scare tactics all the time. So you’ve got to be very, very cognizant of how you’re presenting it. But you’ve got to know it’s there because if we know people got these things, you can provide reassurance. So with anything anxiety based, I’d say you need to address it with reassurance rather than just going deep in, oh, Matt, you’re going to lose out on all these things because that’s quite a scary space.

I think some companies do this quite well, like car companies where you can borrow the car overnight and you get to try it out. You don’t want to give it back. Apple, I put my laptop into repair. They gave me one to use and I didn’t want to trade that back in for my older one. So that sort of thing, they get you.

Yeah, I mean, a car salesman is, when you look at some of the, let’s say their behavioral science nudges, tricks or hacks, use car salesman as some of the best because they give you the car key. They take you on the test ride. I mean, absolutely right. That’s not my car for the time being. And then it’s like, you got to give the key back now. There’s just that little trigger of psychological pain that helps maybe convert you a little bit more. And I will take a step back within the behavioral science element as well to remind everybody, we are here to serve others. We are here to create the best customer experience for the customer. So it’s not how we make the most out of you by using these as tricks or using the dark arts to try and get you to spend a bit more. We’re just going to try and simplify your decision making using these biases to allow you to process and make that decision as easily as possible and be able to figure out what’s best for you.

Yeah, I’ve had people throw that at me sometimes like, are we being manipulative? It’s like, no, we’re not being manipulative. We have to write the instructions for downloading and using the app. Right. We might as well write it in a way that will help people with what we’re trying to serve them with. So we might as well do it in a way that’s easier for them, like you were saying. So I think that makes complete sense. The second behavioral bias that you mentioned is about being right, and you go through things like confirmation bias. So that one’s really quite interesting as well. I’m like a kid in a sweet shop, Si, we could go on forever, but I’m just mindful that we’re running through. I’m going to jump to number three, which is about context, because this is one I’m particularly excited about. Can we dive into framing? That’s a behavioral bias that we have, how things are framed. I wonder if you could talk to that briefly.

Yeah, I mean, no decision is made in isolation, is it? Everything is within the context that is around us. So how you frame your offer can be incredibly powerful or incredibly demotivating, depending on what sits around that as well. So if visually you’ve got a really busy web page and someone’s already overloaded and then you want them to absorb your message or that structure to the offer that you’re putting forward, that’s going to be really tough. But when I think of context as well, I like to think if you want a nice ice cold bottle of beer, you’re going to go into the supermarket, you might pay a couple of pounds for it, maybe $3 for you, Jacob, I’m not sure. But now you’re on the beach, you’re on a holiday, it’s absolutely boiling. Someone walks up with a bucket of ice cold beers and offers you one for 10 pounds, you’re probably going to buy it. That bottle of beer is exactly the same, the temperature of the beer is exactly the same, but everything else in the context has changed. So all of a sudden your value case of what you’re willing to pay, because you wouldn’t do it in the supermarket, your value case has changed. So we often think, oh, I’ve really got to work on the pricing element of my offer. But what’s all the other stuff around it? And how does that all influence it? And you get into things like when you look at anchoring. So the first number you see, you then adjust, you anchor to that number, you adjust around it. So if I was like you two, and I might be teaching how to suck eggs here, like a super successful brand consultant doing massively high value ad stuff, I would start with the client by saying, and in getting this work right, we are going to create an incremental five million pounds worth of value. So then Matt, when I’m asking you for 100,000 pounds, you go, well, that feels really good value. Whereas if I start asking you for 100,000 pounds and then try and build up the value case, I’ve anchored to that first number. So context and framing is something that’s really important for people to consider.

Yeah, people should totally take note of that. Definitely all those consultants out there that I speak to, I always say, like, how much do you charge? And I always find that people charge way too low for the value that they bring. And it’s exactly because of what you said, because we anchor into not the value that we’re going to bring. So, so important. Number four of the behavioral biases is around, like, memory, and priming is quite an interesting one that I think maybe we could tuck into. What’s priming?

Well, priming is that we start, and it’s very similar to anchoring, we start with the first thing we see, and then everything is built from that. So first impressions really do count. And fundamentally, we’re trying to build up good memory structures with people. There’s a lot of great evidence-based marketing now that we’re starting to see around memorability, and that is really important, because what we have to remember is we’ve got two cells. So you’ve got your experiencing self, and typically living in about three second segments, and then everything else goes to the remembering self. So life is the story that we tell ourselves that we’ve been down, and actually it’s not always that factually correct, but the bits that are salient, we will remember. And one of the things that is going to be salient is the first time I see something. So the first time I come across something, that is what’s going to be salient. And one of the things, I love serial position effect. I talk to marketeers about this all the time, because it’s a mistake I made for at least two decades of my career, which was we’ve got five features benefits, whatever it wants to be, and we just put them in priority number one to five. And the reality is first and last of the most memorable and the ones in the middle of the list are more likely to be forgotten. And it’s only when you look at primacy, recency, that you start to understand that. It’s just those little tweaks that this allows you to bring in that just makes it easier for the person to remember it. And as I say, building memory is probably the most important thing that we’re doing from a brand perspective, from a customer experience perspective, because living in the moment is so fleeting and life moves on so quickly.

Right, right. So some of the other principles you talk about in relation to building memory are like overconfidence, like optimism bias, for example. Talk about simplicity and then that’s where you talk about anchoring amongst other things. Number seven is social. I think it might be worth tapping into that, particularly like social proof, like how that affects you, because I understand that from a psychological perspective, if you’re the first one in your social group to do stuff, to do something, to buy something, to own something, you’ve got to overcome that weirdness, right? Because why are you the first one doing it? The first person to buy solar panels, for example, in the street has to overcome this weirdness where we’re all going to be looking around going, oh, you’ve got your social panels heavy. And so you’ve got to kind of that we have to navigate that social side of things. How would you sort of advise brands who are trying to do something new that have to kind of figure out that bias against people kind of taking a double take at the new thing that they’re doing?

I think let’s understand where it comes from first, right? We are social animals, we’re herd animals. So through thousands of years of evolution, we had a higher survival rate if we’re part of a tribe, a clan, part of a community. So that is what deep down drives us. You’ve just touched on that, you don’t want to stand out from the crowd. If we go to a new city, two coffee shops next to each other, there’s a queue out the door of one, the other one’s empty. On a logical level, it’s quicker to get my coffee and get out and get on with the rest of the day if we go to the one that’s empty. I’m going to join the queue because firstly, I’m delegating the decision to the rest of the tribe and secondly, they must know something that I don’t know. Now, if I’m a new brand or we’re moving into an innovative space, I would come back to the bit that I was chatting to Jacob about, which is, okay, let’s go and find the people who’ve got that identity of wanting to be an innovator and be different and make sure it’s not too psychologically uncomfortable to be different. But actually, to be the guy in the street that drives a Tesla and has the solar panels and everybody knows is the king of net zero if you’re based here in the UK and actually wants to be known by their green credentials and wants to step out from the crowd. But social is just so important. And out of all the categories, that’s the one just remember we heard animals. And so you’ve got to do the hard yards to start with. But that’s then when the flywheel kicks in and all of a sudden, it starts to drag a load of people through. And then, okay, maybe I’m trying to expand into a different area of the solar panels. Well, I might use the case study of the people that are in Tunbridge Wells, different area of the UK and go, you know, all these people have done it and this is what they’ve seen and try and give evidence to get those first people over the line. And then I would be promoting to the rest of that street, the solar panels and saying, how clever is your neighbor? They’re saving all of this money. Why aren’t you on it yet? And then they’re probably going to go and talk to the neighbor and the neighbor is because again, we’ve got this ego, I’d like to be right. The neighbor’s not going to go, yeah, they’re a bit of a nightmare. They’re brilliant. Yes, best thing I’ve ever done. I’m the first one on the street. Aren’t I clever? I’m playing into my identity and emotions once again, and they’ll do the sales job for you.

That totally happened to us. We live in a super rural area here in Wales, and I think I was having issues with the internet all the time. I was having really bad wired internet, and then I got 4G, really annoying. And then I bought Starlink, and then loads of people were talking to me about Starlink. Now everybody’s got Starlink, but I found it quite weird. At first, I did have that thought like, well, if this is so good, why am I the first person doing it? And it does cross your mind, that thing. But once you see a few around, then it becomes easier because you don’t have to stay.

And that’s a great example, because two years ago I sat in a coffee shop with someone talking about, moaning about my Wi-Fi, because I live next to a farm. And that person, who sometimes looks a bit like a caveman. So I’ve got Starlink, and it’s absolutely brilliant. So I’ve now got Starlink. A brother of all that lives across the field from me has now got Starlink. And it expands out from that. And that is social, the power of social.

I forgot I had talked to you about that. Like, last one is value, which Starlink gives me lots of value. Just sort of touch on that. What do we mean by value in behavioral science?

Well, we’re not. The interesting thing in behavioral science is that we’re often economists. So behavioral economics basically starts to look at… If you studied economics, you would assume everyone was like Dr. Spock, a bit of a human calculator, working out the best possible option and then just going with that. But we’re far more Homer Simpson, where we’re driven by the donor. We’re irrational, I should say. We are beautifully irrational. And so value, we don’t just go, oh, that is 12 pounds 78 pence, therefore it’s worth it. We’re relating, what else can I do with that? It’s because that’s how we used to manage resources. So if I’m trading meat with UMAP for something, it’s like, how much do I want to trade there? Because I’ve got to trade some others. So I’m managing my pile of resources. And just so happens now that we look at it as money, in most cases, sometimes it might be our time as well. So we’re always trading things off. And you’ve got things like effort heuristic, which is around if we demonstrate how much effort went to the production or something, people value that higher. So all of a sudden, if you just went brand exercise, three bullet points and then just number at the bottom, then I go, okay. But if you then went, and I’m using this framework, I’ll do this, and follow this, and do these stakeholder meetings, and this happens, and then we do this mapping, we do these workshops, and then same number. Same outcome, very different feeling about the effort going into it, and therefore the value that sits within it as well. Then you’ve got things like Veblen Goods, which we touched on Rolex earlier on as well, which is actually the more expensive something goes, the more desirable it is, because again, it’s showing that I am super successful. If I do have a Rolex on my wrist, which I don’t, if you do have a Rolex on my wrist, all of a sudden it’s showing in the world that I’m super successful, because everybody knows that was really hard to get my hands on as well. Value is very much something that we often look at it and just think solely based on price elasticity, but there’s so much more you can do to build out that value. Just look at the way that Jack Daniels talk about their Tennessee bourbon. And actually the way they talk about 130 years of craft, our craftsmen, this barrelman, seven generations, etc. They’re just building that out. So you go, a lot goes into that little bottle of light brown fluid. But they’re building that out in their communications and what they’re doing. And clearly, I mean, I noticed this probably about four or five years ago from them, so I’m not sure how long they’ve been doing it for. But clearly, there’s something within the business where it’s going, we need to build out the value case in the mind of the consumer. We don’t just want to race to the bottom on price, where we’re having to discount to get bottles off the shelf. We want to really reinforce that. So value sits in the eye of the beholder, but it’s how can we therefore just start to influence that?

Love it. A lot of work I do with leadership teams is to try and get them to focus on the unique value that they can only bring to market, that their competitors can’t do very easily or won’t do. I love to help teams focus on that. If you can get that and orientate a business towards it, absolutely, gold dust. I’ve done it a few times and it’s been great. I think it’s good to see it in the behavioral science bit of the equation. Well, look, we’ve gone through absolute s**t loads there. We’ve basically done a whole run through the book. But folks, we’ve hardly touched on any of really what Si has put in the book as well. So although we’ve gone through the high level, there’s a lot still in the book. So I want to encourage everybody to get that. I want to do a quick fire round with you now, Si, and then we’ll wrap. Is that, are you good for that?

Let’s go for it.

All right, Jacob, you up for up for some quick fire questions?

Yeah, let’s do it.

Should we go first? Yeah, go.

All right, best customer experience you’ve ever had?

It’s got to be St. Louis City Soccer Club. Matt Seebeck is genuinely, we often say visionary about people. Not everybody lives up to that title, but this guy absolutely nails it.

Most frustrating CX mistake that brands make?

Rush to automation when you need human in the loop. That’s only getting worse. We’ve seen big brands say they’re getting rid of 700-odd customer service executives, then to realize actually that their customer experience has gone through the floor and have to bring it back. It’s often just a cost-cutting exercise rather than thinking what’s right for the customer.

One behavioral bias every brand strategist should understand?

Our Starlink example there, everyone is social animals, so you’ve got to think about how to create that herd mentality. If you’re in the early innovative stages, then you’ve really got to think about how you find that lead user community to really start the flywheel.

Nice. One brand that really understands customer experience and not the one that you gave earlier.

Okay. I can’t use Zappos again.

Give us another one.

They are great. Okay. I touched on Dulux Paints. I’ve worked with them over the years. If you probably won’t thank me for saying this, if you ever have a problem, they just fix it. They are fantastic for that. Also do a lot of work with WD-40 as well. They are another brand, household name. But if there’s ever a problem, which there rarely ever is, the speed that those guys solve things is impressive.

All right, and the last one, one piece of advice for anyone wanting to create more human customer experiences.

Walk in their shoes, get them in the loop. If you can, get a customer advisory program up and running to help shape it. It’s amazing how we become a little bit blind to it and can’t see the wood for the trees. External perspective is super valuable. So if you’re not bringing in a customer advisory group, then get a consultant. In the same way, I would say, if you’re working on brand and you’ve been working on your brand for years, get someone like one of you guys in, because that fresh perspective helps you see the things that you think simple, that you’ve got widening your brain. That’s really straightforward. And they go, I didn’t understand that. Okay, we can take a step back. So get to the point.

I’m going to step in as well and answer that one and say, buy Si’s book on Customer Experience Thinking. And on that note, he could say that. He’s not paying me to say it as well, folks, but it is a cracking book. On that note, how do people get hold of it? How do people follow you and your work?

So books available, Amazon, all the bookstores, sielliot.com to find me, fabrics.agency for the consultancy, or just jump on LinkedIn, sielliot, double L, double T. Drop me a DM, loads of people do, and just go, I’ve got this slight problem. Where would I start? I love those ones. So fire that my way and just get into my network.

Awesome. Awesome. By the way, I love throughout the book, how you’ve got Si tracks and Simon says, or Si says, just I love how corny that is and how gorgeous that is. So well done to you for squeezing those in.

I’ve tried to avoid too many side tracks during this because we’ve run out of time.

We’ve been quite focused. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot to get through, and thanks so much for carving out the time. Really appreciate it. Your book’s amazing. Keep up the good work and keep in touch, and hopefully we’ll grab a Starbucks sometime.

Absolute pleasure.

Take care.

So I analysed every keynote, panel, Q&A and workshop from the Summit. That is roughly five or six full length business books worth of ideas covering brand strategy, design, marketing, business, creativity, community and AI.

The speakers came from different disciplines, backgrounds and perspectives, but across all that content, the same themes kept surfacing. And they point to a significant shift in the branding industry.

AI is making production faster, cheaper and more accessible. Logos can be generated in seconds. Copy can be drafted instantly. Images, presentations, concepts, research summaries and marketing assets can be created at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

That does not make brand builders obsolete. But it does change where our value comes from.

The future does not belong to the person who can produce the most assets in the shortest amount of time. It belongs to the brand builder who can think clearly, exercise judgement, make better decisions and help people move forward.

Here are the eight lessons that stood out.

1. Make decisions, not just deliverables

For decades, much of the perceived value of creative professionals came from our ability to produce things other people could not. Logos, layouts, campaign concepts, presentations, illustrations, messaging and websites all required specialist skills and significant time.

Today, AI can help create all of them faster than ever. But generating an asset is not the same as knowing whether that asset should exist.

A logo can be beautifully executed and strategically wrong. A campaign can be clever without solving the business problem. A positioning statement can sound impressive while saying absolutely nothing distinctive.

This is where the value of the brand builder begins to move upstream, into brand strategy and the decisions that inform the creative work. Instead of simply asking, “What should I make?”, start asking: What should be created? Why does it need to exist? What problem are we solving? Which decision needs to be made? What outcome should this work create? How will we know if it worked?

There is a major difference between executing a brief and helping shape the thinking behind it. The latter is much harder to commoditise.

This is also why a strong brand strategy and design process starts well before visual exploration. Discovery, research and strategy create the criteria that the creative work should ultimately answer.

Before opening your design software or prompting an AI tool, ask: What does this brand actually need to achieve, and what is the right response?

That is where the more valuable work begins.

2. Be different, not just better

AI is extremely good at producing plausible work. And that is exactly the problem.

Generative AI systems learn from enormous bodies of existing material. As a result, they are exceptionally capable of reproducing familiar patterns, styles and category conventions.

Ask for branding for a premium skincare company and you will probably see elegant serif typography, muted tones and minimalist packaging. Ask for a disruptive tech company and you may get gradients, geometric typography and futuristic imagery.

Everything can look competent. Everything can also start looking the same.

This makes differentiation more important, not less. Brand builders need to understand the conventions of a category and deliberately decide which ones to keep, reinterpret or reject.

As Sally Hogshead puts it: “Different is better than better.”

That does not mean being weird simply to attract attention. Difference needs to be relevant. It needs to mean something. The goal is to create a brand that is recognisable, memorable and difficult to compare directly with everyone else in the category.

That distinction between strategy and expression matters. A successful brand identity should not simply look good. It should express the positioning, personality and strategic choices behind the brand.

Ask: What could this brand own that competitors would struggle to claim?

The answer may come through positioning, story, language, personality, product experience, visual identity or the way the organisation behaves.

Whatever the form, meaningful difference becomes increasingly valuable when everyone has access to the same powerful creative tools.

If you want to explore this further, I have also broken down what makes a good brand and the fundamental elements that give brands focus, consistency and relevance.

3. Guide what happens next

There is a common failure point in branding projects. The strategy is approved. The identity is delivered. The guidelines are handed over. Everyone celebrates. Then the branding team disappears.

The client is left to translate all that strategic thinking into marketing, sales, culture, customer experience, content, product decisions and everyday behaviour. And that is often where a strong strategy slowly begins to fall apart.

During the Summit, Stephen Houraghan described the opportunity for brand professionals to become guardians of the brand. I think there is enormous opportunity here.

Instead of seeing delivery as the end of a project, help organisations work out what should happen next. Where should this strategy show up? Who needs to understand it? Which teams need to act on it? What needs to change internally? Which opportunities should be prioritised? What could prevent this strategy from being implemented?

Most importantly: What should we do next?

This moves the relationship beyond deliverables. You become an adviser, facilitator, strategic partner and, in some cases, an operator.

Clients rarely struggle because they do not have enough PowerPoint decks. They struggle because turning decisions into action is difficult.

Help them do that.

4. Build community, not just reach

AI can create an almost infinite amount of content. It cannot automatically create genuine belonging.

That distinction matters. An audience consumes. A community participates.

Several Summit speakers, including Marissa G., Chanel Clark and James Martin, demonstrated how generosity, participation and genuine connection can create opportunities that reach alone cannot. A large audience may create visibility, but community can create relationships, referrals, collaboration, trust and shared identity.

I have seen this firsthand through the Brand Builders Alliance. What began as a way to provide more education and support has developed into a year round community where designers, strategists and creative entrepreneurs learn from one another, collaborate, share opportunities and work through the challenges of building brands and businesses together.

For years, the default online growth question has been: How can I reach more people?

A better question might be: How can I help the right people connect and contribute?

That could mean creating recurring conversations, making useful introductions, giving people a place to share their work, connecting clients with one another, sharing opportunities, inviting your audience to contribute ideas or creating events where people participate rather than simply watch.

Community is not another content channel. It is a relationship system.

And in a world filling rapidly with synthetic content, real relationships become considerably harder to replicate.

5. Develop a point of view

Producing more content will not make you irreplaceable. Developing a perspective that people recognise, remember and trust might.

AI can summarise thousands of existing opinions and generate perfectly acceptable commentary on almost any subject. What makes your perspective valuable is not simply access to information. It is what you believe after experiencing the work yourself.

Your judgement. Your convictions. Your failures. Your taste. The patterns you have noticed. The ideas you are willing to challenge.

This is something we explore regularly on the JUST Branding Podcast, where conversations with strategists, designers, marketers and business thinkers often become most interesting when people move beyond frameworks and explain what they actually believe about building brands.

James Victore is a strong example of this. His work is memorable because the person behind the work is visible. He does not disappear behind safe, polished industry language.

In James’s unmistakable spirit: “Get off the f*ing fence.”**

You do not need to become provocative for the sake of it. But you do need to decide what you believe.

Ask yourself: What does my industry regularly get wrong? What have I learned through experience that others might find useful? What am I willing to defend? Which commonly accepted ideas do I disagree with? What do I want to become known for?

A point of view gives your work a spine. It also gives people a reason to follow you instead of simply following the topic.

6. Strengthen your judgement

When generating options becomes cheap, choosing between them becomes more valuable.

AI can create 100 logo concepts. Someone still needs to decide which one is right. It can generate 50 campaign headlines. Someone still needs to know which one actually expresses the strategy. It can create multiple positioning territories. Someone still needs to understand the customer, category, commercial context and organisation well enough to recommend one.

This was central to my Brand Builders Summit keynote, 5 Keys to Becoming the Brand Builder AI Can’t Replace.

Your value does not come from rejecting AI. And attempting to compete with AI on production speed is probably a losing strategy. Your advantage comes from being able to direct the technology intelligently and recognise when the output is generic, strategically weak, inappropriate or simply wrong.

Good judgement also begins before concepts are generated. A strong brand strategy workshop can clarify the brand’s purpose, audience, competitive environment, positioning and strategic priorities before anyone starts debating fonts or logos.

Judgement is then built over time. Study great work beyond whatever happens to be trending on Instagram. Define criteria before generating solutions. Compare creative choices against the strategy. Learn to articulate why one option is stronger than another. Review the outcomes of your work, not just the visual result. Expose yourself to ideas outside design and branding. Develop the confidence to reject an attractive idea when it does not solve the problem.

The person who can generate the most options is not necessarily the most valuable person in the room.

Increasingly, it may be the person who can choose, explain and defend the right one.

7. Build confidence through action

A surprising amount of creative careers can be spent waiting. Waiting until the portfolio is better. Waiting until you have more experience. Waiting until the website is finished. Waiting until you feel qualified. Waiting until you know enough. Waiting until you are confident.

The problem is that confidence rarely arrives first. It usually follows action.

You do the work. You solve a difficult problem. You present an idea. You receive feedback. You survive the uncomfortable conversation. You publish something. You raise your price. You lead the workshop.

Each experience creates evidence. And that evidence slowly changes what you believe you are capable of.

As Robert Smith, RGD, CDP puts it: “Find your weird. Find your power.”

That power is not discovered by endlessly preparing behind the scenes. It becomes clearer when you make something, share it, test it and learn from what happens.

This is especially important for designers moving into strategy. Reading about strategy is useful, but confidence develops much faster when you actually facilitate conversations, ask difficult questions and apply the thinking with real clients. My Brand Strategy resources hub includes frameworks, articles, courses and tools for anyone looking to strengthen that side of their practice.

If you are waiting to feel completely confident before publishing, presenting, selling strategy or stepping into a more senior role, you may be waiting for a very long time.

Pick one visible action. Do it. Then let the evidence replace the hesitation.

8. Turn knowledge into practice

There has never been more information available to creative professionals, and AI has accelerated that dramatically.

You can ask an AI tool to explain brand architecture, customer research, positioning, pricing strategy or practically any established framework within seconds. Information itself is no longer particularly scarce.

Application is.

You can save 500 posts, take 20 courses, read 100 books or attend 44 hours of Summit sessions. None of it creates value until something changes because of what you learned.

The better question after consuming an idea is: What will I do differently because of this?

Where can I apply it? When will I test it? What outcome am I expecting? How will I know if it worked? Should this idea become part of my process?

Knowledge becomes useful when it survives beyond the moment of inspiration.

This is one of the reasons I believe practice matters so much in branding. Frameworks help. Education helps. Theory helps. But eventually you need to sit across from a client, make a recommendation and accept responsibility for the decision.

That is where knowledge becomes capability.

Where AI is moving the value of branding

The common thread through these eight lessons is not that AI will replace creative professionals. It is that AI changes which parts of creative work remain scarce.

Production is becoming abundant. Options are becoming abundant. Information is becoming abundant. Basic execution is becoming easier to access.

That means the more defensible value increasingly sits elsewhere: in judgement, strategic context, taste, decision making, leadership, relationships, facilitation, responsibility and knowing which problem deserves solving in the first place.

Execution still matters. Great brand design still matters. Craft still matters. But execution alone becomes harder to defend as a premium service when the tools used to create it become increasingly accessible.

The opportunity for designers, strategists, marketers and creative entrepreneurs is to move closer to the decisions that shape the organisation.

Help clients understand what matters. Create meaningful differentiation. Guide implementation. Build relationships and communities. Develop a recognisable point of view. Strengthen your judgement. Turn knowledge into action.

That is how we move from simply producing brand assets to building brands.

The short version

After analysing more than 432,000 words from 48 Brand Builders Summit speakers, I keep coming back to three capabilities:

THINK clearly. Make better DECISIONS. Help people MOVE FORWARD.

AI will continue getting better. Production will continue getting faster. The tools will change.

Those three capabilities will remain extraordinarily useful.

And they are worth strengthening whether AI is involved or not.

Continue your Brand Builders Summit journey

Brand Builders Summit 2026 brought together 48 speakers across brand strategy, design, marketing, business, creativity and AI.

If you want to revisit the ideas in this article and explore the complete Summit, the Brand Builders Summit VIP Pass gives you lifetime access to all session replays, including the keynotes, panels, workshops and Q&As, plus more than $3,000 in speaker resources and VIP bonuses.

The current VIP Pass offer ends September 24.

Get lifetime access to Brand Builders Summit 2026

And if you are looking for ongoing support beyond the Summit, the Brand Builders Alliance is our year round community for designers, strategists and creative entrepreneurs who want to master branding and build stronger creative businesses.

A huge thank you to every speaker, attendee, partner and community member who helped make this year’s Summit possible.

The conversations have only reinforced what I believe about where branding is heading.

The tools matter. But the person making the decisions still matters more.

I’ve judged creative work across branding, logos and audio, but digital experiences bring all those disciplines together. A great website or app needs more than an attractive interface. The idea, message, usability and technical execution all have to work for the people using it.

That’s what I’m looking forward to seeing in this year’s entries.

For its 25th anniversary, Horizon has reorganised the competition to reflect the work digital teams are creating now. You can enter websites, advertising and marketing campaigns, interactive and immersive experiences, apps and digital products, video, and digital learning projects.

There are also dedicated categories for AI native and AI hybrid video, as well as AI powered learning. I’m curious to see where creators are using these tools to make genuinely better experiences, not just faster ones.

What makes digital work worth recognising?

Horizon judges entries across five equally weighted areas: UX and design, creativity, technical execution, message and effectiveness.

That last one matters to me. I love distinctive work, but I also want to understand what it set out to do and whether it succeeded. Who was it made for? Does the experience make sense to them? Is there a strong idea behind it?

The competition uses blind judging wherever possible, so judges do not receive entrant or company information during evaluation. The work has to speak for itself.

Enter your work

If you’re a designer, developer, creative studio, agency or in house team with a digital project you’re proud of, take a look at the 2026 categories and entry requirements.

My advice is to give the judges enough context to understand the work. Explain the audience, the challenge, the thinking behind your decisions and the results where you have them. For a private app or an experience that can’t be explored directly, a clear walkthrough can help show what makes it special.

Entries close 11 December 2026. You can enter the Horizon Interactive Awards here.

I’m grateful to have judged with Horizon since 2019 and to return for its 25th anniversary. It’s another opportunity to recognise thoughtful creative work, alongside my judging roles with the Designity Awards, LogoLounge, Signal, Indigo Design Award and LogoWave.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve made.

AI is no longer simply helping consumers make decisions. It is becoming an active participant in what they discover, trust and buy. In this episode of JUST Branding, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies speak with Asha Parmar, founder of Élan Intelligence, about the changing relationship between brands, buyers and AI.

Asha explains how AI is compressing the traditional customer journey, influencing brand discovery and creating a new kind of AI enabled consumer. The conversation explores “machine equity”, the role of reviews and third party conversations, and why brands must now communicate clearly with both people and machines. They also tackle a bigger question: if consumers increasingly outsource their research, decisions and even personal reflection to AI, how will that affect identity, values and brand loyalty?

You’ll learn:

• How AI is changing consumer behaviour and purchase decisions
• Why the traditional marketing funnel is being compressed
• What machine equity means for brand builders
• How brands can become more visible to AI systems
• Why transparency and genuine customer experience matter more than ever

How to research AI behaviour within your category The next buyer choosing your brand might not be human. Is your brand ready?

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This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript

Hello, folks. Welcome to this latest episode of JUST Branding. This one is going to be exciting. We are going to be pushing the boat out on that lovely buzz phrase of AI. Before everybody groans and dies inside, this is going to really shift your mindset. We have with us the most amazing person to discuss this with, this Asha Parmar. She’s an award-winning insights leader with a decade of experience in global research and strategy at the intersection of culture, audience brand, and product innovation. I asked Asha before this, can I drop some of the people that she’s been working with into this bio and she said, no, Matt, because I’m so wonderful. I’m NDA’d. But put it this way, folks, she’s worked with some of the top AI brands out there to kind of uncover consumer intelligence in this new age of AI. She’s been advising those leading tech companies around AI search, consumer behavior, and agentic product development. So she’s the perfect person for us to tap into today. I’ve just got a couple of other notes that say that Asha has built a global footprint in the industry from conference stages to podcasts. She’s recently received wonderful awards from Dreambook and Women in Innovation for her contributions at the frontier of AI and innovation. And today she is the founder. How do I say this, Asha? I should have probably checked with you before. I’m going to say Élan Intelligence, but is that correct?

It’s technically from a French word, but that works. Élan Intelligence, yes.

Élan Intelligence. What confused me, folks, is there’s a little squiggle above the E. And the language ignorant person, I don’t know what that means, but Élan Intelligence, so E-L-A-N, intelligence, a boutique consultancy focused on AI and consumer brand dynamics. That was probably the worst introduction I’ve ever done, but welcome, Asha, to JUST Branding.

Thank you, Matt. Just, I guess, to clarify Élan in French means momentum. So I think a lot of what I’ve been focused on is, as the big variables are shifting, what does that mean for human behavior and the dynamics between consumers and brands, and how do you find and forward, path forward and maintain that momentum? So that’s really where the idea of the name came from.

Love it. Love it. We’re all about momentum here on JUST Branding, as Jacob will testify to. Before we get into this, it’d probably be worth just saying, me and Asha have a funny story because, Asha, I think you thought I was in New York and you were visiting New York, weren’t you? And you were like, people, I think we’d been connected for a while. And you were like, hey, let’s meet up for a coffee. And I was like, yeah, I’d love to meet up for a coffee. But it was the most bizarre message. It was like, I’m in New York. Would you like to meet up for a coffee? I’m like, I’d love to, but I’m in South Wales in the UK. So that’s going to be tricky. But we decided to have a conversation, didn’t we? Because this subject of how consumer dynamics is changing is on the forefront of at least my mind as a brand builder. And you’re right there at the cutting edge. So I’m really thrilled that you agreed to follow up our conversations and eventually come on the podcast. So thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Matt. I think really where my story begins with all this, I’ve spent the last decade in a kind of combination of consumer insight, brand. I’ve jumped around like many of us in the industry have, sort of taking little leaves out of the different playbooks. Most recently, I was specializing in tech sector, working with some of the biggest tech names, at a big agency in New York. And then AI happened, right? AI sort of exploded onto the scene, and I found myself completely enthralled with what was going on, how that was changing the way that consumers behave, what’s it doing to our psychology, and the possibility for how it changes, the way that we relate to brands and interact with them. So that’s sort of a bit of background as to how I got here. What I found really sort of surprising to begin with is that so much of the conversation was really around AI efficiency gains, how do we optimize process, how do we cut costs? And we were sort of pretty distracted from the bigger strategic opportunity, at least as I saw it. And that’s really what led me to ultimately go independent and start this business where there’s a lot to unpack in terms of the mechanics of how consumers work and what that means for brand strategy.

That is so smart. And that’s why I think this is going to be really interesting because I think you’re right, I go to lots of conferences and speak all over the place. And the mistake I see a lot of businesses focusing on, if you like, they don’t think it’s a mistake, this is just the way they think, is they’re exploiting what’s already there, if that makes sense. So what they’re doing is they’re looking at what they’re doing already, and they’re thinking, how can we make this better? How can we save money? How can we fire half the sales team, cut wage bills? How can we build digital workers and agents to basically do what we do right now, but with agentic AI? Which is fine, right? I mean, I don’t know what your thoughts are, Asha. I kind of think that kind of makes sense. But what I love about what you’re saying there is, is that that’s not the big picture here. There’s a bigger picture around customers and consumers and the way that behavior is shifting. Now, we are presented with, I guess, artificial intelligence that can support the consumer. Is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think as you say, Matt, I think it makes sense. It’s a very logical place for people to start. It’s super tangible. We can optimize things. We can immediately see the return on whatever we’re cutting, whatever we’re optimizing. So it makes sense. I think the challenge with AI is, A, that it’s changing so quickly. Like keeping up to pace with what is actually happening in the developments of these tools is not really a minefield, but it’s happening so fast that you sort of have to be immersed and really close to it to even get a sense of what might be happening in the bigger strategic picture. And because of that and because it’s so murky, I think there’s a lot of sort of ostriching, right? Heads in the sand as to, well, what does this ultimately mean? And that’s why I’ve decided to go super niche on it, because I think you need that genuine immersion to actually understand what’s changing, to apply it to what that looks like in terms of consumer behavior, and then to extrapolate that on to not only what does it mean for brand building as a sort of fundamental discipline, but what does it look like category to category? And I think, again, there’s so many variables that are a part of it. That’s why I’ve sort of decided to go in quite niche on it.

Smart. So in terms of changing consumer behavior, perhaps we could start there. And how would you sort of describe that shift? I know you’re fully immersed in this, and a lot of people on the podcast will be fully familiar with some of this, but let’s just sort of start simply, and then we’ll build the complexity into the conversation.

Yeah. So I think let’s start before we get into brand specifically. When we look at the data on AI usage in daily life, in personal life, I mean, even this data is maybe even a little old, a little old now, maybe six months old. But taking Europe as an example, you’ve got more than four and five people that are using AI in daily life, whether that’s for work, whether that’s for personal planning, moral reasoning, which I’ll come to a little bit later, why am I being ghosted, that sort of thing. It’s already become such a big part of-

Jacob is obviously up for now.

It’s already become such a fundamental part of people’s lives. Yes, it’s a tool, but it’s become a lot more than that in people’s life. It’s become a companion, it’s become a bit of a trusted friend when we talk about this moral reasoning or relationship guidance even. It’s got influence over the way people think, how they behave, what they’re doing, where they spend their money, and that’s really where brands come into the picture. I wanted to level set on that broad behavior before we get into it. When we look at actually how it’s come into decision journeys, into the brand mechanics, we’ve got, again, this data maybe is a few months old, but you’ve got more than two and three European consumers, at least I’ll use that as a bit of a bellwether for now that are using it upstream in the journey. So in learning about a category, in discovering new brands, products, in evaluation, in comparison, and it’s particularly high in the more research-intensive categories, perhaps that’s not super surprising, but I’ll use a personal anecdote here. It’s not just young people. So my parents were planning a road trip to Canada to go and visit my sister who lives out there. My dad texted me a few months ago saying, you won’t believe this, but I’ve just used ChatGPT. They had sort of super specific needs for this road trip. My sister was joining for some of it. They had some flexibility on certain dates, all these sort of very nuanced specific needs that in the end he was going mad trying to use Google for this. He just put it all into ChatGPT and he ended up booking somewhere that was recommended by ChatGPT. He did it through booking.com, but he went for somewhere that was recommended by ChatGPT because it allowed for him to come with that super nuanced, highly contextual intent signal. That’s what I mean where I’ve written about the decision journey or the funnel collapsing. It’s not necessarily that it doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s being compressed. You have so much of the activity, so much of that upfront process happening within one interface, within one surface, that by the time somebody comes to interact with a brand, that they’re coming much closer to the decision point. It raises interesting questions around how much influence or flexibility a brand has over those earlier touch points when so much of it’s being mediated through these platforms.

That’s such a great point. I’ve got another, there’s loads of studies out there, aren’t there, but one of the studies I found quite interesting was one from Stanford. Again, it’s probably a little bit old now, but what they found was that this is 2026, so it’s this year, Stanford 2026 AI index report, if you want to look it up. It found, for example, that 53 percent of the population that they interviewed, which was US, I believe, they basically had 53 percent adoption within three years. This is over half the population within three years had adopted AI, and it’s probably going way up now, because it was earlier this year. But why that’s amazing is just to give us all a bit of a pause for breath, is that’s faster adoption of a technology than any other technology that humanity has ever seen. So faster than the personal computer, even faster than the Internet across the world’s population. So 53 percent now of us across the world, at least 53, it’s probably gone up, are using AI. So that’s like mental next level, and it’s mildly scary, right? Because as you say, Asha, like if it’s affecting behavior, right? Like, you know, that’s very worrying. It really is. I like to think that there’s a lot of governance in place, but I do worry that it’s not. We’ll get to that.

Yeah, well, we’ll definitely, I definitely have some opinions and thoughts around, around, you know, what the governance and what it means in terms of, you know, the data that it’s trained on and what that means for power and things like that. But yeah, I mean, as you say, it’s being adopted so quickly. It’s changing behavior so quickly. And that’s where I think there’s a sort of oversight or short-sightedness within brands, even within agencies, that like there’s so much to understand and unpack and stay on top of as to how this is changing and what that means for the dynamics between the brands and the consumers. And I say dynamics, I know it’s maybe not a super common term, but I think it’s more than the relationship, it’s more than the interactions. We have this sort of unpredictable, unknown entity now that is mediating it, this sort of go between that no one has control over. The brands certainly don’t have control over, that consumers are, it’s sort of refracting their experience of the brand. And I think, and Matt, we’ve talked in the past about narrative control. And I think that’s a really, really, even for IP lawyers, right? This extends beyond sort of people in house and in brand teams to the sort of legal ramifications. And I don’t want to walk myself down a legal rabbit hole here because I don’t know too much about it in terms of IP law. But when we think about how the narrative around a brand is refracted through these systems and what that means in terms of lack of control, it raises questions around, well, how do brands keep building equity nowadays when there is this intermediary?

Right, and this intermediary, so this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot for some of the projects I’m on. The intermediary, I’ll tell you a little story, actually. So one of the classic things that I do within leadership teams is obviously try and help them think about the consumer at the end of the cycle of what they’re doing as they’re building their brand. So my work is very customer-focused. And so I was working with a project, it must have been about eight months ago. And one of the things we do is create ideal customer personas like at the top level. So I do it with the leadership team, right? And I bring research in and I say like, who are we trying to orient, who are we serving as a business and as a brand? And we’re going through this exercise, it’s all classic, typical kind of exercise. And I’m in this workshop and someone says, yeah, but we’ve got another persona that no one’s thought about yet. So what’s that? It’s the agents. And I was like, what the heck? How do I build a brand persona for us to speak to agents? And they were like, they were super passionate about it. And I just thought this person was off their heads. Anyway, I went away and thought about it and thought, actually, this is actually true, like exactly what you were saying. I still haven’t quite cracked how I build a persona for an agent because the agent, in effect, becomes, and I’d love to get your thoughts on this, my agent, like my chat GDP, if I’m losing it at a low level or even if I’ve got an agent, is a manifestation of what I’ve put into it, roughly. And I’ve framed it and it wants to please me. So it knows my values, it knows how I think, it knows the quality and what I want from whatever product I’m trying to buy. So it’s kind of a reflection of the ideal consumer. But there’s one massive difference, which is that, this is how I see it. It can research at lightning-fast pace, make decisions without really consulting me based on its assumptions about me at lightning-fast pace. And therefore, I’m starting to use this term like AI-enabled consumers. So I’ll give you a quick example. Let’s say I’m super into the climate change and the planet and stuff, and minimizing my carbon footprint is a huge deal to me. My agent will know that. So when I go and say to it, what lawnmower should I buy? Right. It’s going to be like, OK, I know Matt’s super keen on the environment, and it’s going to be not only assessing price, quality, size of lawn, all the things that it might ask me about, but it’s also going to be thinking, right, what’s going to be the most energy efficient, what’s going to be the most green option, and then make recommendations. It may not even mention to me, hey, Matt, I’ve recommended this because it’s an electric lawnmower, and actually the carbon, that will help you with your carbon footprint values. It might just offer it up as a thing. And that’s the kind of the dynamic shift I think we might be witnessing. Say like with your dad’s example, like he wants to plan a trip, etc. It will know certain things about what your dad values and enjoys in life that might start offering those up as part of the itinerary. It might not say on day three I’ve offered this particular restaurant because I know you’re a massive fan of fish, but it will do it. So is that the sort of shift that you’re seeing and the sort of things that you’re starting to think about? How do you think about some of those things that I’ve mentioned?

Yeah, so I think I’m so glad that we’re talking about this. So I think one thing that I want to maybe clarify is that LLMs, your chat GPTs, your clods is not the same as an agent. Agents are so new, they’re really like piloting in the US at the moment. They’ve actually not really sort of made headway yet over here in the UK and Europe. So I think a lot of what I’ve been talking about so far relates to people using LLMs, for example, or AI-enabled experiences within brand interfaces. I will come to agents in a second, but I just wanted to start off there. So as you say, there’s a sort of part of the LLM that has got to know me, that knows sort of the kinds of ways that I ask questions, the things that I value. It has built some sort of picture of who I am. There’s also the part of it, and here we sort of get into, well, how does this sort of recommendations process work in this sort of AI black box, and the sort of question of how does that machine equity, as I like to call it, work? So just to take a bit of a step back, a lot of the machine sort of mentions and recommendations come from a couple of things. So there’s the sort of part that the brand can control, which is how is my native data structured? Is my brand narrative consistent across different touch points, across my different surfaces? Is it machine legible? So when somebody comes to an LLM and says, I’m looking for a brand that is XYZ, that offers XYZ, is my data clear enough to be able to read that need, interpret that from my native content and say, hey, there’s a match here. This brand answers that specific question or need that that person has. That is part of it, but it’s not the biggest part. The sort of major part of how these machines recommend is actually from third party UGC, right? It’s going to, when you see on ChatGPT or on Claude, when it’s sort of scanning through those different sites that it’s pulling the responses from, you’ll see Reddit come up a lot, because Reddit is a massive citation source that it references. And so we have this situation where actually the human equity that brands build, where you have consumers being vocal about the brand on socials, on Reddit, that is actually informing the machine equity, what it ends up recommending and suggesting. So you have this sort of interesting cycle where obviously brands need to keep building equity with people as they have done in the past. But not only is that just to build that mental availability, the emotional resonance, everything that we know already about brands, but actually now that feeds into how the machine equity is built when it’s reading about how people are being vocal about the brand on things like Reddit, and that is feeding into it. It’s then of course overlaying it, as you said, with this sort of persona that it’s built of you as the user in terms of what you value. So there’s so many sort of things that come into it. Parts that the brand can control, as I said, how the data is structured on their native content. But then things that they can’t control, which is what are people saying about the brand online? And how do those marry up? Is it consistent? So I think that’s why I talk about human and machine equity, and that sort of being the new mandate that brands have to work towards, because it’s no longer just the human at the end, it’s the machine at the end. But they share a lot of commonality and root in how to build that equity.

I’m so pleased that you clarified a couple of those things.

Let’s take a little break from today’s conversation. If you are enjoying this episode, I think you’re going to love the Brand Builders Summit. You can join me, Jacob Cass, Matt Davies, and more than 40 leading brand experts from September 8 to 11 for four days of free talks, live Q&As, workshops and panels. You can reserve your free ticket at brandbuildersummit.com. Now back to the episode.

When you think about what Asha’s just said, folks, right, listeners, can you imagine like this? What this means to me is this goes back to what we talk about a lot in terms of brand strategy, right? That the brand is the meaning that other people attach to you, right? That you don’t own the brand as the company. In fact, the customers own the brand. It’s in the eye of the beholder. So what AI is enabling is basically that on steroids, right? On steroids like that, you can’t fudge stuff anymore, right? If you’ve got a NAF brand, a NAF product, a NAF offering, a NAF service, it’s going to be damaged. Anyway, sorry, Jacob, I know you wanted to come in. In fact, I think we’re about half an hour in.

Yeah. It’s very unusual. I’ll get one question in. I’ll get one question in. It’s really interesting that you say that we can control the data within our brand and it’s important to structure that correctly in the best way possible. That’s what we can essentially control in the UDC content. We can’t really. So what can brands do to control that data better? Because I’ve seen, for example, on web developers sites, I’ve been on a few of them recently and they have these buttons where you can see what the agent can see behind the scenes. So it’s like, hey, this is the visual front end. You click this button and now you can see exactly what the agent sees. And it’s just like a bunch of code. And he’s kind of promoting his knowledge of AI and development, showing that, hey, I can structure data for brands and websites, so agents can actually read it correctly. So you’re actually sending the right data. So how important is it to control that sort of data in terms of websites and everything on the back end? And what can we actually do better today to control it?

Code is not my bag, right? So in terms, I’m sure that sounds incredibly helpful in terms of being able to see what the machine would be able to interpret. But in sort of natural language, right? For sort of the general population, what can we do? Well, it’s honestly really simple things. It’s like having bullet points or tables. And yes, you might, from a sort of visual brand perspective, nobody necessarily wants tables on their website. But in terms of how you actually structure it, whether you adapt it so that you don’t actually visually see a table or whatever, in terms of the actual structuring, if you think even in hiring people, when people are using these ATS systems, these AI systems to read CVs, people have to structure it in a certain way now so that the machine actually can read it and sort of distill their experience from how it’s structured. Nobody wants a super boring CV when they’re sending it through. But you have to adapt it now to what the machine can actually read to make sense of it coherently and pull it out in the right way. So from the visual branding perspective, there’s things you can do to mask those very formulaic structures that the machines actually need to be able to read it. That’s a combination of design team and developers and website getting that stuff in the right order. From the UGC perspective, obviously a lot of it you can’t control, but I’ve been speaking to brands and it’s really talking about, well, digital PR, what can we do about that in terms of building community and actually doubling down on how we build equity with people through community, through the things that live outside of AI that ultimately are going to benefit how the AI reads it.

I think that’s worth unpacking, how to actually build equity for both man and machine. How?

I know one of the things that we talked about earlier, Matt, in the notes was, do we need a totally brand new player, do we need to rip up everything? I don’t think that’s the case. I think we need to sort of reframe the playbooks that we’ve had already to make sure that they still work. There are things that we need to double down on. As I said, it’s still the sort of fundamental thing, the things that Sharpen, Ripson actually did agree on at Cannes this year, right? It’s like there still needs to be this mental availability, but it’s the mental availability not just for humans, but for the machines. How visible are you online in terms of the actual like mass share of model that’s coming in? It’s things like authenticity and consistency. So is what your brand is saying, does it match up to the actions, the behaviors that the brand is actually enacting? AI, as you said Matt before, AI can like digest swathes of data at lightning speed. It knows when a brand’s claims aren’t going to stand up to scrutiny and it will penalize for that. So it’s really, I’ve said this on a post before, it’s like it’s really bad news for anyone, pink washing, green washing, rainbow washing, that stuff isn’t going to, it just isn’t going to fly anymore because the machine will penalize it and we’ll see when that’s happening. So a lot of the traditional fundamentals still apply, but it’s just making sure that we’re doubling down on those things in a way that the machine can read. As I said before, there is this cycle of building this human equity that then informs the machine equity and that being a virtuous cycle. Maybe this is where agents actually is a good time to bring in agents because there’s the third part of that which is, well, once you’ve got agents owning some of those end-to-end decisions or finalizing transactions or completing these choices, that’s where the machine equity ends up getting cemented. So if you’ve built this human equity with an individual who’s going to your brand directly or who is being vocal about your brand on these public forums, that is feeding into the machine equity where it recommends to other people to go for your brand or your product. Once we start seeing agents actually acting on those decisions, transactions, completing those journeys, then you have that sort of cemented machine equity where it becomes the algorithmic default. Again, obviously, this varies by category, but it’s sort of the framework of how I’m thinking about it.

So, Asha, we’ve been talking about agents for a little bit. I think it would be good to define that for our listeners. Like, what is an agent? How is it different to LLMs? And what are they doing on the back end? Like, how do they work as well?

Yeah, so an LLM is what we know of as ChatGPT of Claw. It’s like, it’s, I was about to say basic interface. It’s obviously not basic, but it’s the sort of very kind of commonplace interface that we see now. It’s essentially search on steroids, you might say. Like, you can use it to do your research, to evaluate. It’s a lot of those kind of top of funnel, upstream parts of the process. Where agents come in, and it’s less perhaps about agents live natively within these AI platforms, and more about how are brands implementing agents as part of their experiences. Agents are autonomous decision makers, and they can act and decide within whatever confines and bounds a user gives, right? So I might say, if I set up an agent and say, look, there’s a pair of sneakers that’s like limited edition that I really, really want, but I will only pay X amount for them. Keep tabs on what’s happening in the resell market, and when it drops to that price, just buy it no matter what. That might be a very sort of specific set of confines that I’ve given it. It won’t do it until it hits that price, and it may never hit that price, or I might say within this certain price range, or only if they’ll ship from Germany, or whatever it is, it can act autonomously, but within parameters set by the user. And I think, again, we’re not quite there yet. This is where, I don’t know if you guys saw the Google IO conference in May this year, Google is starting to introduce these more agentic experiences into search, where you can kind of have these assistants essentially running in the background for all manner of things, where you set individual kind of custom agents to take care of certain things that you want. But it is very different to a user interacting with an LLM and maintaining that control over the process versus an agent which is essentially AI acting autonomously.

Understood. Thank you for defining that. So where are we going from here? The strategic opportunity we kind of dropped at the beginning, we haven’t kind of unpacked what that may be. So what is the strategic opportunity here for brands?

As we’re moving away from this focus on efficiencies, I think so much of these sort of purchase journeys and broader brand building is going to be increasingly mediated through these entities, right? This is sort of why I’ve called it both an existential threat and a golden opportunity, because brands that don’t respond to this aren’t necessarily going to survive it. They might in the next 10 years, but if we’re thinking super long-term, I mean, who knows where we’re going to go with this technology and what that’s ultimately going to do to culture and behavior in the longer term. But you can’t only lean on the human equity forever. We need to be still monitoring and baking in how does that relationship work between the humans, the brand, and the machines. This is what I mean by dynamics. It’s this push and pull, this fluid relationship of power in that dynamic. I think brands that we’re now are going to be the ones that respond to these changes that are purposefully building equity with the humans and the machines and keeping tabs on how those things are changing.

Yeah. One of the things that crossed my mind around this was, in terms of when we think of opportunity, as you rightly point out, now if we have AI-enabled consumers, that in effect can research, the claims of a brand, and they can verify to the best of the AI’s ability, the claims. It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a rise in what I would call radical transparency from brands to differentiate. I think there’s opportunities to differentiate themselves in market. For example, if I’m in a B2B brand, I don’t know, I’m selling ball bearings or something, and I know my competitor is using very dodgy manufacturing techniques, and as you say, maybe they’re greenwashing, maybe they’re using labor that they shouldn’t be using in parts of the world. That’s pretty unethical. Whatever it might be, maybe they’re sourcing material from mines that have all these issues. I don’t know, whatever it might be. If I then say, right, hang on, our differentiating point is that we’re going to back up our claims. Okay, so what we’re going to do is make our supply chain open. There’s been a concept for a while in, I’m just going off on a tangent here, but this concept of open book, which is where we’re going to share what everything costs, where everything comes from, like coffee sourcing, for example, fair trade, all that good stuff. I think we might see more of a rise of that side of things, so that now, when an AI is scanning my industry, they can see quite clearly that what I say is true and right, and that I’ve been open about it, versus my competitor, who I know would find it very hard to open up their books, if you like, to use that ancient expression, on their supply chain. So there might be things like that, which we start to see as an opportunity for brands to stop fudging it, to start standing by these claims that they’re making and really opening themselves up to scrutiny. That’s what I hope, because I think the world will be better for that.

Totally. And I think that’s a really important point, like this shift, I think it’s basically going to make brands like pull their socks up, right? You’re going to have to be more radically transparent, more radically authentic. I mean, I think there’s the machine part of it, what you’ve just been mentioning, Matt. It’s going to know when there’s inconsistency and it’s going to penalize that. But from the human point of view, if we think about the world around us today, it’s because of AI largely, it’s like a super flat, samey world. It’s really fragmented. There’s a lot of just flatness. And I think people, I think, you know, I do a lot of cultural research as well. People are gasping for meaning. I think we see a lot of narratives in our industry at the moment of like, weird is good, right? It’s like the antidote to AI slot, this algorithmic flatness that we’re sort of seeing around us, these media echo chambers where this sort of nothing has that much meaning anymore. And as consumers, we’re sort of starved of that. So we’ve got this sort of on the one hand, weird is good, reintroducing intentional friction into brand experiences, spiky edges to really have some distinctiveness, some level of friction and meaning in the experience, helping brands kind of cut through the noise. I think that’s a really, really important part of it. But I guess this sort of brings me to a slightly bigger philosophical point that I’ve been thinking about recently quite a lot, which is the way that we understand ourselves as people, as consumers, when we think about who are we, who do we want to be, what do we align ourselves with, what are our values? We’re outsourcing a lot of that kind of thinking, or increasingly so, to AI. So when we’re talking about the sort of moral reasoning, am I being ghosted? Okay, maybe that’s a funny example. But actually, how do I navigate this tricky conversation with someone? What career path should I take? A lot of the thinking, not just in the work, in how we use Excel, a lot of the sort of personal introspective thinking that we’re doing is being outsourced to these machines. And maybe this is slightly tangential, but I think it’s really interesting from a sort of consumer identity brand point of view where our sense of self as individuals is, I think neuroscientists, psychologists, you know, philosophers agree on this, is that the sense of self is derived from the stories we tell ourselves, right? These narratives that we build, it’s the same for brands, but for us as people, it’s built from this very active process of reflection, introspection, participation in that. When that’s getting outsourced, what does that mean for how we understand ourselves, what we align to, what we, our sense of what we value, and what does that mean then for the relationships with brands? So it’s quite, I guess it’s a bit of a sort of murky, amorphous point at the moment, and it’s when maybe not yet there at a sort of critical juncture of it. But as I sort of see us outsourcing more of that and us sort of losing the ability to perhaps introspect and build that sense of self, I think it’s going to raise some pretty big questions for brands and how they understand the consumer and how the consumer understands themselves and the brands that mean something to them. There’s this idea of AI being a bit of a co-author to the self, right? Tell me if I’m going off on too much of a tangent here. But if we think even aside from LLMs, we use predictive text every day. We’ve got algorithms telling us how to speak. We’re using wearable data telling us how we should feel. Oh, you might be pretty tired today. Take it easy, right? It’s impacting the way that we see ourselves, think about ourselves and how we live. And so when you think about that on the one hand, and then the sort of structural piece around it, I read a report yesterday called Liquid Adulthood, which was super, super interesting. It’s like we no longer have in society today, we no longer have the traditional scaffolding that previous generations relied on to make sense of our identity. We don’t have sort of stable employment in the same way. Home ownership is out of reach for a lot of people. These kind of traditional markers aren’t really sort of consistently there for us. So the sort of burden of building a coherent sense of self falls squarely on us. Okay, but now we’re outsourcing a lot of that. So it suddenly becomes quite murky. And when we think that these models, how these models are trained, the data that they’re trained on, it’s not unbiased data, right? It’s sort of Western, democratic, rich, the weird sort of demographic that the data is largely built on. As we’re sort of co-authoring the sense of self, what does that mean for questions of power, representation, fairness, and ultimately, what does that mean for?

And ethics and morals, right?

Totally.

You mentioned the scaffolding of the past, like religion is now something that is, well, bizarrely, at least in the UK, it’s kind of coming back around because I think we’ve gone down a path and realized, actually, we’re kind of lost, we need some scaffold to use your term. So that’s super interesting. Ethics and morals are really interesting. If the LLM and the AI is there to serve my interests, and I say, hey, Asha is getting in my way, what does it advise me to do? I’m just talking broadly. That’s just an interesting thought. These are really big questions that I think we need to get to grips with. I don’t know if we’re going to get to grips with them on this episode. But I think they’re worth brands thinking about. Like if a brand, for example, stands for something, by definition, it stands against something else. You take that to the extreme. That can be quite serious. We do need to balance these things up ethically and think through. That’s why I’m a big fan of like, what is it that Rory Sutherland talks about? It’s like, I’ve forgotten the name of it, but it’s like reverse benchmarking is what he talks about. The idea is that a brand can own a part of the market that makes a lot of sense and is like stands for a high value thing that would appeal to a particular audience. But when you reverse benchmark that against the opposite, that should also be of value to a particular type of audience. Not wrong, not right, just like a different option. Then you’re in a healthy situation where there’s not right and wrong. It’s like you might like red, but someone else likes blue. Fine, if you want blue, go over there. You’re not for us. If you want red, you’re for us. That’s a good way of thinking about it if folks are thinking on the podcast. That’s how I’ve started thinking about it. But rather than thinking in absolutes, so think about consumer value, that’s maybe one thought. But yeah, wow. I think we should probably bring it back round to starting to think about closing out, because I think you’ve blown my mind a few times. Was there anything that you wanted to touch on before I bring it back round? I know you were going down a particular route there with the agents and then threw into like these LLM models and then ethics and stuff. Was there anything else you want to touch on before I ask my next question?

Yeah. Go for your next question. We’ll see what we get to with the rest.

Yeah. Okay.

Well, I was going to talk about, because we were talking about the opportunity, weren’t we? I think it would probably be worth just touching on your advice to folks who are navigating this space. I know we are still in its infancy and trying to grapple with these things, as this podcast has explained. But someone who’s like yourself is on the cutting edge, who’s being approached by top brands to figure things out. What do you advise brand builders who are trying to get their arms around this?

I think a really important part of it is understanding the, it is running research to understand, how are the mechanics playing out for a specific category, or even product category within a category, because if we think about a consumer using AI to look at luxury handbags versus toothpaste, we’re not dealing with the same kettle of fish. So let’s say, since I was 18, I’ve always wanted to have a Louis Vuitton handbag.

Jacob, that’s the case for Jacob, I’m sorry.

A pink one, a pink one.

I think, you know, this, and again, this is sort of a model that I’m trying to kind of work on building at the moment, right? That sort of relates to, again, it’s not finalized. So it’s something around, how does consideration level as a variable impact things, whether that’s in terms of emotions, finance, complexity, how significant is the outcome of a purchase decision if it’s a holiday versus, I don’t know, trying a new type of olive, right? And how significant is the experience of that purchase process? So again, to take it back to the handbag example, if I’ve had this aspirational Louis Vuitton handbag dream since I was 18, I probably know that that’s the brand that I want to go for. I might be using AI at that point, not to try and figure out, is that the brand I want? I probably know that because it’s been aspirational for a long time. It’s got all the emotional components of social signaling that I want. But maybe I’m using AI to understand, well, where should I buy it from? Is it worth doing it, weighing up the cost of, well, it’s not going to be a brilliant experience buying it at duty free versus if I go in store, maybe I have this whole other experiential part or what does the resale market look like if I’m using it as an investment? Understanding how AI is part of the process within the category versus toothpaste, I might be looking for if I’ve got super specific needs, really sensitive teeth or I want extreme whitening, maybe I’m using it to understand brands, but I’m probably not going to care that much if I’m shopping and it substitutes it for another toothpaste because it’s low cost, it’s fairly low stakes. Understanding how those mechanics look within a specific category, how important are these different factors influencing these behaviors and in what parts of the journeys. Then also understanding how does that vary between different audiences, how a gen alpha might be using it or a very niche subculture, how super fans of Taylor Swift are using it in terms of their broader ticketing experience or merch or whatever. I think there’s a lot of research to be done around these different mechanics. It’s so untouched right now, a lot of that. There’s a lot to be understood in order to reap the benefits of the strategy there.

What you’re talking about is, I guess, is a multifaceted strategy based on different… Again, I guess you’d call it psychographics, wouldn’t you? What state of mind is the consumer in when they are entering the category to buy? I’d also throw another one out there, which is very Mark Rickson-esque, which is perhaps you have a target market. There’s the 95-5 rule, right? Which is like 95% of your ideal customers are not in the market to buy today. Usually only 5% are in any, roughly speaking, any given kind of segmentation. So, not only would we use AI in the 5%, right? Which is, as you were talking about, the different states of mind, different type of psychographic for them. But the 95 who don’t even know they need my product or want my product yet, how do I start to think about positioning my brand and building up awareness and salience within those markets? I mean, this is like, and using AI and thinking about that through that lens. I mean, this is going to get complicated, Asha, more complicated than the average person might care to think about. So, I think you’re in a good space as you continue this journey and focusing in on this because, as you say, this is definitely going to be the future. So, we will be keeping an eye on you and your work as time goes on. If people wanted to do that, Asha, how do we connect with you and all of your work and like, what’s the best way to kind of keep in touch with your thinking?

—

Sponsored by Superside, the world’s leading AI-first creative partner for enterprises. Superside works as an extension of in-house creative teams on ad and social creative, video and presentation design. AI-first, not AI-only. More at superside dot com.

—

On LinkedIn is probably where I post the most. I can maybe put it in the description, a link to my profile and my website, elanintelligence.com. I do a lot, post a lot of my thinking there. I’m probably going to be sub-stacking one of these days soon. So, if I do before this comes out, then I’ll drop a link to that as well.

Amazing, amazing. Final questions, because we’re running out of time, but the final question for me would, and I want to do a quick fire round in just a second, just to wrap things up. The final long-winded question would be, you’ve obviously been, as you say, brand building pre the AI revolution, and then you’re working through it. What’s the biggest shift in your own thinking that you’ve had to grapple with over the last few years? For listeners, right, you’ve sort of got like that emoji where you’re like thinking emoji. So that was what was going on there. Carry on, Asha.

Sorry for the long pause. Why the long pause? I mean, I think, again, I think it’s this obvious one that we’re now dealing with. It’s not a sort of binary, it’s not a duo, right? We’re not just talking about the brand and the consumer anymore. I think when we’ve got this third party, this third entity, that again, is a bit of a black box and not understood, that sort of throws everything out of the water, right? There’s so much of it that we don’t understand, that we won’t ever be able to understand because it’s so tightly kept under wraps. So it’s a bit of a Tetris game of understanding, well, what are the mechanics between now the three of these and how they fit within the bounds of what we actually can learn and understand about this third entity that’s part of it and how do we organize around it in the new dynamic.

Okay, let’s do the quick fire and then we’ll wrap. So I’m going to start off. AI optimist or AI realist?

AI realist.

One brand everyone should study.

Probably Nike.

One AI tool you couldn’t live without.

Claude.

Search or agents?

Well, search now, agents tomorrow.

One thing every brand leader should do in the next 12 months.

Research into what’s happening in your category. How people are interacting with you, your brand, your category and AI. What role is AI playing in that process, not just in the journey, but for your consumers in terms of their behavior and attitudes.

Love that. I’ve got one more. Ten years time. What is it all going to look like?

If I knew that, Matt, I would be a very rich lady. I think agents will be very much here. And I think the brand building, brand equity game is going to look very different even than what I’ve been talking about now. So keep watch this space. That’s all I’d say.

Absolutely awesome. Well, look, thanks so much for jumping on. It’s been amazing to open up that subject. Not an easy subject because, as you say, there’s still so much that’s unknown, but so many interesting things for us as brand builders to ponder. I want to thank you for your time and look forward to following you and your work as time goes on. Thanks, everybody, for joining us on this episode of JUST Branding. We always appreciate comments. If you have been sat there listening to this thinking, no, Matt’s got it completely wrong again, or Jacob, mainly you’ll probably be thinking about it.

I think I’ve said about five words this episode.

Shut up. Then please drop a comment because we love to hear from folks, so you can do that on any of our LinkedIn’s, or if this has been posted somewhere and you’ve been jumped on through LinkedIn or through Instagram or something, drop a comment. We’d love to know your questions. Also, I was going to say this, I haven’t checked with Asha, but I’m pretty sure, if listeners have questions that they’d like us to tap into, we may not be able to get back one-to-one or whatever, but we might be able to do something, a follow-up or something in the future. So please ask your questions. We’ll put them to Asha and other AI experts as well as we all start to navigate this space. Thanks folks. Have a great day. Cheerio. Bye.

Designed by Russell Bean in collaboration with me, Jacob Cass, for Just Creative, JUST Serif brings sculpted contrast and human warmth to branding, publishing, packaging and premium typography.

It’s refined but approachable. Expressive without becoming ornamental. Sophisticated, but never stiff.

Jump to Download Options

Why We Created JUST Serif

When we created JUST Sans®, the goal was to build a versatile geometric sans serif that could handle almost anything. It needed to feel clear and functional while retaining warmth and a distinctive personality.

But some projects call for a different voice.

They need more contrast. More rhythm. More editorial character.

JUST Serif was created to fill that role.

It gives designers an expressive serif that can lead a visual identity while working naturally alongside the clarity and versatility of JUST Sans.

The result is a contemporary serif family designed for modern brands, editorial layouts, expressive headlines and premium applications.

Editorial Elegance Without the Coldness

Many high contrast serif fonts lean heavily into the world of luxury and fashion. They can look beautiful, but they can also feel distant, delicate or overly formal.

We wanted JUST Serif to feel more human.

Its warm curves, sculpted flared serifs, confident capitals and carefully balanced proportions give the typeface an editorial presence without making it feel precious.

There’s enough contrast to create drama in a headline, but enough warmth to keep the typography approachable.

That balance makes JUST Serif suitable for a much wider range of projects, from boutique hospitality and premium packaging to publishing, brand identities and digital design.

Seven Weights and a Variable Font

JUST Serif includes seven carefully crafted weights:

• Extra Light
• Light
• Regular
• Medium
• Semi Bold
• Bold
• Extra Bold

The lighter weights bring delicacy and refinement to large editorial typography. The middle weights offer a practical balance between expression and legibility. The heavier weights add confidence and impact to logos, headlines and display applications.

The family also includes a Variable Font, giving you more precise control over the weight and allowing the typeface to adapt to the needs of each project.

Whether you’re creating a restrained magazine cover or a bold packaging system, the family gives you room to find the right voice.

Designed for Branding, Editorial and Packaging

JUST Serif was created to perform across both expressive and practical applications.

It works particularly well for:

• Logos and wordmarks
• Brand identity systems
• Editorial and magazine design
• Book covers
• Premium packaging
• Wine and spirits labels
• Beauty and fragrance branding
• Fashion
• Hospitality
• Websites
• Advertising
• Posters and campaigns
• Premium print applications

Use it as a modern serif font for a distinctive identity, an editorial serif for publishing, a high contrast serif for expressive headlines or a branding font for sophisticated design systems.

Its personality is noticeable, but it doesn’t overpower the work around it.

Pair JUST Serif With JUST Sans®

JUST Serif brings expressive editorial elegance, while JUST Sans provides clear, versatile supporting typography for a cohesive brand system.

Use JUST Serif for headlines, key messages and moments of personality. Use JUST Sans for body copy, captions, interfaces, navigation and everyday communication.

Together, they let you create contrast without losing consistency.

Pair JUST Serif With JUST Sans® Outline

JUST Serif’s sculpted forms pair naturally with JUST Sans Outline, adding graphic contrast and greater impact to headlines and display typography.

JUST Sans Outline is especially effective in posters, campaigns, packaging and layered typographic compositions.

Where JUST Serif brings editorial character, JUST Sans Outline introduces a more graphic voice.

A Complete Type System

JUST Serif, JUST Sans and JUST Sans Outline form the growing JUST Type Collection.

Each family has a distinct role:

• JUST Serif delivers editorial elegance, expressive contrast and human warmth.
• JUST Sans provides clarity, versatility and legible supporting typography.
• JUST Sans Outline introduces graphic contrast and display impact.

Used together, they create a flexible typographic system that can move across brand identities, packaging, editorial design, websites and campaigns while maintaining a consistent visual language.

Built for Print and Digital

JUST Serif includes desktop fonts for professional design applications as well as web font formats for digital use.

Depending on your licence and download package, the family may include:

• Seven static OTF fonts
• Variable Font
• WOFF web fonts
• WOFF2 web fonts
• Latin language support
• OpenType features
• Professional kerning and spacing
• Font specimen
• Welcome and installation guide

This makes it easy to carry the same typographic voice from a printed book or package to a responsive website.

Crafted With Russell Bean

JUST Serif was designed by Russell Bean in collaboration with me for Just Creative.

Russell brought his experience and technical expertise as a type designer to the development of the family, while I helped shape its creative direction, positioning and relationship with the broader JUST Type Collection.

The process involved balancing the expressive character of an editorial serif with the versatility designers need from a working type family.

Every weight was refined to feel like part of the same family while retaining its own purpose, from the delicate Extra Light to the commanding Extra Bold.

Download JUST Serif® — Your Options

JUST Serif was created for designers looking for a contemporary serif that feels refined, expressive and unmistakably modern.

It has the elegance of an editorial serif, the warmth of humanist forms and the flexibility required for modern identity systems.

I’m incredibly excited to finally share it with you.

• Download Two Free Weights on JUST Creative
• Download JUST Serif on CreativeMarket 
• Download JUST Serif on Envato (Coming Soon)
• Download JUST Serif on MyFonts (Coming Soon)

Already using JUST Serif? Tag @justcreative or use #JUSTSerif so we can see what you create.

We love featuring great work from the design community.

JUST Sans is a highly versatile typeface with endearing, modernist warmth, geometric legibility, and a distinctive friendly bite.

Designed as a professional modern geometric sans serif, JUST Sans is both serious and friendly, neutral but warmly expressive, technical but not overt, and familiar but unique enough to stand on its own. Its typography strikes the perfect balance between style and function, making it an excellent choice for a wide range of projects.

With open-airy characters and a generous width, JUST Sans has an elegant contemporary feel, with sharp angled terminals that give it grip and make it so expressively endearing. The mood of this typeface is clean, simple, and minimal, making it a functional workhorse with 7 weights, complete Latin extended language support, precise hand-adjusted kerning, and a variable version for maximum versatility.

With a clean, simple, and minimal aesthetic, JUST Sans is a functional workhorse with 7 weights, complete Latin extended language support, precise hand-adjusted kerning, and a variable version for maximum versatility.

JUST Sans includes hand-hinted web fonts optimized for clear, legible text on screens making JUST Sans perfect for the web as well as logos, branding, headlines, paragraph text, UI, signage, packaging, posters, and industries rooted in technology, new media, architecture, fashion & design.

Its appearance is universally appealing, making it an ideal choice for those seeking modern typefaces with a distinctive character.

With its universal functionality & characteristic bite, the JUST Sans family is an essential addition to your type arsenal, even if just for those beautiful stylistic numbers. For lovers of modern sans serif fonts who are looking for something a tad more warm, open, and expressive, JUST Sans is for you.

If you’ve ever found it difficult to find the perfect balance of style and function, JUST Sans may just be the typeface you’ve been searching for.

For lovers of modern sans serif fonts who are looking for something a tad more warm, open & expressive, JUST Sans is for you.

Jump to Download Options

JUST Sans® — Free Font (Clean Modern Minimal Typeface)

JUST Sans® Features

• 7 Weights: Light, Extra Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold
• 623+ Characters per font – Full Latin Extended support (219+ languages)
• 20 OpenType Features – Including:
  • Stylistic Sets (e.g., flat terminals, single-story ‘a’, tail on ‘l’)
  • Expanded numerals (tabular, fractions, superscript/subscript, etc.)
  • Case-sensitive punctuation, tabular forms, localized characters (Dutch IJ, Turkish İ)
• 7 OTF Fonts + 7 WOFF2 Web Fonts
• 1 Variable Font (TTF) — Full weight range in one file
• Hand-Hinted for Web — Clear screen rendering at all sizes

Download Full JUST Type Collection Free — JUST Sans, JUST Sans Outline, JUST Serif

Get the Regular and Extra Bold weights of JUST Sans, JUST Sans Outline and JUST Serif. That’s 6 fonts, completely free.

How to Download

1. Join the FREE JUST Creative Newsletter
Gain access to JUST Serif, JUST Sans, JUST Sans Outline and 100+ premium design and branding resources.

2. Check Your Inbox
You’ll receive a link to the Branding Briefcase, our free, ever-growing library of professional resources.

3. Download Your Fonts
The Regular and Extra Bold weights of all three JUST type families are yours to use immediately.

Licensed under CC BY-ND. Free to use with attribution, but modifications and redistribution of adapted versions are not permitted.

Download JUST Sans® – Full Font Family

Looking for the complete JUST Sans set?

The Light, Extra Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold weights are available on Envato (formerly Envato Elements).

To license the full JUST Sans font family, an Envato subscription is required.

This subscription grants you exclusive access to all 7 weights of JUST Sans, web fonts, and the variable font, plus access to 50+ million design resources, including hundreds of typefaces, all for the low price of ~$16.50/month, which can be canceled at any time.

1. Go to the JUST Sans Download Page
2. Click Download

Prefer a one-time purchase? You can download the full pack in our shop. Or at MyFonts.

Download JUST Sans® Outline – Full Font Family

JUST Sans Outline is the perfect companion to the best-selling sans-serif JUST Sans, adding depth, contrast, and dimension while retaining the clean, modernist warmth of the original.

Designed to be used alongside JUST Sans or as a standalone decorative display font, it provides a striking way to create bold, expressive typography with greater creative flexibility.

With its precisely balanced negative and positive space, JUST Sans Outline delivers crisp definition and structured elegance, making text pop off the page.

Retaining the open, geometric foundation and signature sharp terminals of JUST Sans, it introduces a refined, linear aesthetic—perfect for logos, branding, packaging, UI/UX, signage, and high-contrast headlines.

Why Use JUST Sans® Outline?

• The perfect balance of professional and expressive – Clean, minimal, yet expressive.
• Seamlessly pairs with JUST Sans – Combine solid and outline styles for striking contrast and depth.
• Designed for high-impact typography – Ideal for logos, headlines, display text, and modern brand identities.
• Eliminates manual outlining – Get flawless contour letterforms without spacing issues or tedious adjustments.
• Optimized for digital and print – Includes hand-hinted web fonts for crisp screen readability.

What’s included?

• 7 Outline Styles – Light, Extra Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold
• BONUS Variable Font – Fully adjustable weight for maximum versatility
• 7 OTF Font Files – High-quality OpenType fonts
• 7 WOFF & WOFF2 Web Font Files – Optimized for seamless web performance
• 623+ Characters Per Font – Comprehensive Latin language support
• 20 OpenType Features – Including stylistic sets, tabular numerals, and case-sensitive punctuation

How to Download:

Unlock the complete JUST Sans Outline family on Envato. Includes all 7 weights, plus a flexible variable font for full creative control.

1. Go to the JUST Sans Outline Download Page
2. Click Download

Requires an Envato subscription (~$16.50/month — cancel anytime).

JUST Sans Font Duo (Normal + Outline) – Full Font Family

Get the complete JUST Sans experience — the original and outline styles together in one powerful font bundle.

Included in the Font Duo Package:

• JUST Sans – 7 Weights: Light, Extra Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold
• JUST Sans Outline – 7 Outline Styles: Matching styles for perfect pairing
• 2x BONUS Variable Fonts – Fully adjustable weight for ultimate flexibility
• 14 OTF Font Files – High-quality OpenType fonts
• 14 WOFF & WOFF2 Web Font Files – Optimized for seamless web performance
• 623+ Characters Per Font – Extensive Latin language support
• 20 OpenType Features – Including stylistic sets, tabular numerals, and case-sensitive punctuation

1. Go to the JUST Sans Font Duo Download Page
2. Click Download

Bring modern, versatile typography to your next project — all in one bundle.

Requires an Envato subscription (~$16.50/month — cancel anytime).

Download JUST Serif® — Full Font Family

JUST Serif is a contemporary editorial serif combining expressive elegance, sculpted contrast and human warmth.

Designed by Russell Bean in collaboration with Jacob Cass for JUST Creative, it brings a more refined and expressive voice to the JUST Type Collection.

JUST Serif feels polished but not precious, sophisticated without becoming cold and distinctive without sacrificing versatility. Its sculpted letterforms make it an excellent choice for logos, brand identities, editorial layouts, magazines, book covers, packaging, websites, hospitality, beauty, fashion and premium print applications.

Why Use JUST Serif®?

Editorial elegance with human warmth
A high contrast serif that feels refined, expressive and approachable.

Sculpted flared serifs
Subtle details add character and a distinctive typographic voice.

Warm humanist curves
Friendly forms soften the typeface’s more formal editorial qualities.

Confident capitals
Strong, composed letterforms designed for logos, headlines and display typography.

Built for branding and publishing
Use it across identity systems, editorial design, packaging, websites and premium campaigns.

Pairs with JUST Sans
JUST Serif brings expressive editorial elegance, while JUST Sans provides clear, versatile supporting typography for a cohesive brand system.

Pairs with JUST Sans Outline
JUST Serif’s sculpted forms pair naturally with JUST Sans Outline, adding graphic contrast and greater impact to headlines and display typography.

What’s Included?

• 7 Weights — Extra Light, Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold and Extra Bold
• BONUS Variable Font — Adjust the weight with greater precision
• 7 OTF Font Files — Professional OpenType desktop fonts
• WOFF & WOFF2 Web Fonts — Optimised for modern websites
• OpenType Features
• Professional Kerning and Spacing
• Font Specimen and Welcome Guide

Try Two Weights Free

The Regular and Extra Bold weights of JUST Serif are available free through the JUST Creative Branding Briefcase.

Get the Complete JUST Serif Family

The full JUST Serif family includes all seven weights, the Variable Font and web font formats.

Go to the JUST Serif download page and select the licence that suits your project.

The Complete JUST Type Collection

One family. Three distinct voices.

• JUST Sans delivers clarity, warmth and versatility for everyday communication.
• JUST Sans Outline introduces graphic contrast, rhythm and display impact.
• JUST Serif completes the system with expressive detail, editorial elegance and human warmth.

Use them independently or together to create cohesive typographic systems across branding, editorial design, packaging, websites and campaigns.

Licensing

The Extra Bold and Regular weights of JUST Sans, JUST Serif and JUST Sans Outline are licensed under a CC BY-ND license.

This allows you to reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to JUST Creative. For any typefaces used or modified, a link to JUSTCreative.com is preferred to acknowledge the source.

You can:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

• Attribution —  You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. This applies to all typefaces used or modified. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
• No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

The Light, Extra Light, Medium, Semi Bold, and Bold weights are licensed under Envato’s easy licensing terms.

Web Licensing 

Please license web fonts via MyFonts.

Credits

JUST Sans typeface co-produced by Eugene Tantsurin and Jacob Cass. Graphics by Alena Linnask.
JUST Serif typeface co-produced by Russell Bean and Jacob Cass. Graphics by Alena Linnask.

Now JUST get creative!

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The Signal Awards celebrate excellence across podcasting, from complete shows and limited series to individual episodes and brand storytelling. As someone who has spent years hosting the JUST Branding Podcast, I’m excited to listen to the work being created across the industry and help recognise the people moving the medium forward.

My Signal Awards Judge Spotlight

To welcome me to the Judging Academy, the Signal Awards recently published a Judge Spotlight on finding your distinctive voice.

In the feature, I share more about my work across brand strategy, design, education, community and podcasting, along with what drew me to the Judging Academy.

Podcasting has become one of the most valuable ways to share ideas, tell stories and build trust. That is what excites me most about being involved. I get to help recognise creators who are pushing the medium forward through thoughtful storytelling, originality and meaningful audience impact.

What makes audio storytelling stand out?

One of the questions in my Spotlight was what separates good audio storytelling from great audio storytelling. (See our podcast on audio branding here)

My answer was simple:

Great audio storytelling makes the listener forget they’re listening.

We have a saying in the design industry that “good design is invisible”. I think there is some truth to that in audio storytelling too.

When the pacing, conversation, sound and structure work together, you stop noticing the production and become absorbed in the idea or story. That takes more than technical polish. It takes clarity, judgement and a strong understanding of the listener.

These are qualities I’ll be listening for throughout the judging process.

Distinctive voices matter more than ever

AI is making podcast production faster and more accessible, but I believe that also raises the value of authentic conversations and original thinking.

As more content is created, polished production alone will not be enough. The podcasts that stand out will be the ones with a clear point of view, strong hosts and ideas worth sharing.

My advice to emerging creators is to focus less on growing an audience and more on creating something genuinely useful or memorable.

Consistency matters, but clarity of purpose matters even more.

Why are you here? What do you have to say that could not come from anyone else?

The creators who stand out are the ones who develop a distinctive voice instead of trying to sound like everyone else.

How the Signal Awards judging works

Members of the Signal Awards Judging Academy independently listen to and evaluate entries using the criteria for each category.

Entries are considered across several areas:

• Quality of craft
• Content
• Creativity and innovation
• The overall listening experience
• Brand integration, where relevant

Each entry is reviewed by multiple judges and receives a cumulative score. Work can be recognised with Gold, Silver or Bronze honours, while finalists also become eligible for the Listener’s Choice public voting campaign.

Judges cannot participate in categories where they have a conflict of interest.

Read my full Signal Awards Judge Spotlight. 

Judging creative work across the industry

Joining the Signal Awards Judging Academy builds on my wider involvement in recognising strong creative work across branding, design and digital media.

I’ve also served as a judge for:

• Designity Awards
• LogoLounge Awards
• Horizon Interactive Awards
• Indigo Design Award
• LogoWave
• International Visual Identity Awards

Each programme celebrates a different form of creative excellence, but the responsibility is much the same: look beyond surface polish and recognise work with a strong idea, clear purpose and memorable execution.

Whether I’m assessing a visual identity, digital experience, logo or podcast, I’m always interested in the thinking behind the work. Craft matters, but the strongest work also has something distinctive to say.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to support creators across these disciplines and help bring deserving work to a wider audience.

Over the years, I’ve printed them for all sorts of occasions. Brand launches, conferences, events, personal projects and probably a few ideas that simply seemed funny at the time.

Many of those stickers were printed through Sticker Mule, which has been my go-to for its straightforward ordering process, reliable quality and ability to turn almost any design into something tangible.

The problem is that stickers have a habit of accumulating.

You order a batch for a particular occasion, hand out most of them, then discover the remaining stack months later. They are too good to throw away, but mailing individual stickers to people is more effort than the sticker itself should require.

Sticker Mule’s new giveaway tool, officially called Give, offers a clever solution.

What is Sticker Mule Give?

Give lets you create a giveaway using a product you have already ordered from Sticker Mule. You can also choose an item from its marketplace.

You select the product, decide how many people can win and choose how they enter. Entries can be collected through email or engagement on X.

Once the giveaway is live, you share the link with your audience. Sticker Mule then selects the winners and ships the prizes directly to them.

You can run a traditional giveaway with randomly selected winners or create a raffle where everyone wins.

That final part is what makes the tool interesting to me.

Sticker Mule is not just helping you collect entries. It is handling the fulfilment, which is usually the annoying part of running a physical giveaway.

No collecting postal addresses in a spreadsheet. No envelopes. No international postage calculations.

No standing in line at the post office wondering why you decided to give away stickers in the first place.

A useful tool for designers and brands

Stickers are one of the simplest ways to make a brand feel physical.

They are affordable, easy to share and far more likely to end up on someone’s laptop, notebook or water bottle than another promotional flyer.

Give turns those stickers into a practical audience building tool.

You could use it to:

• Celebrate a launch or business milestone
• Reward newsletter subscribers
• Promote a new identity or packaging project
• Give away leftover stickers from an event
• Encourage engagement around a campaign
• Send a small thank you to your community

Email entrants can become Sticker Mule referrals, while winners who enter through X can also be attributed as referrals. Sticker Mule currently states that creators can earn 10% for one year on eligible purchases from those referrals.

So, depending on how you structure the giveaway, it can help you grow your email list or social following while potentially generating referral income.

What I like about it

I appreciate tools that remove friction from a good idea.

Giving away stickers sounds simple until you have to collect everyone’s details, select winners, package the prizes and ship them around the world.

Give handles that operational layer for you.

For independent designers and smaller brands, that matters. We do not always have a fulfilment team waiting to send out merchandise. More often, there is a box of stickers sitting beside the desk and a good intention to “do something with those eventually”.

This makes that something much easier.

I can already see myself digging through the various Sticker Mule designs I’ve printed over the years and turning a few of them into small giveaways.

Some are tied to past events. Some are from different stages of my own brands. Others are simply designs I still enjoy and would rather see out in the world than sitting in storage.

A simple idea with real potential

Give is not a complicated tool, and that is probably the point.

Choose something worth giving away, set the entry method and share the link. Sticker Mule takes care of selecting the winners and shipping the products.

For designers, creators and brands with an audience, it is an easy way to make existing merchandise work harder.

And if, like me, you have stacks of stickers from numerous occasions quietly taking over a drawer, this might finally be their moment.

You can explore Sticker Mule Give here.

In this episode, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies speak with Park Howell, Emmy Award winning brand strategist, founder of The Business of Story and one of the world’s leading voices on business storytelling. Park explains why story remains one of the most powerful tools in brand building, what separates a memorable narrative from an interesting one and how brands can shift from simply telling stories to becoming truly story driven.

The conversation explores Park’s StoryCycle framework, the commercial value of storytelling and why moving from pitching to proving can create a genuine competitive advantage. They also examine storytelling in the age of AI, including where technology can amplify the creative process, where humans must continue to lead and what new opportunities AI creates for brand strategists. If you want to build a brand people understand, remember and choose to become part of, this episode is for you.

Plus, see Park’s own article breaking this episode down further.

Listen Here

Love the show? Please review us on Apple.

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Watch on YouTube

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Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of JUST Branding. We’re going to be tucking into storytelling and particularly thinking about why story still wins in brand building. We’re going to ask this question basically at the outset, why does story still win? As brandbuilders, we spend a huge amount of time talking about positioning, competitors, messaging, visual identities, etc. But we know behind every great brand is a story and a narrative that consumers can choose to be part of and manage well.

That is where the meaning and the value of a brand truly lies. So story is so important for us to wrap our arms around and get to grips with as we manage brands. And today we have the perfect gentleman to tuck into this beautiful subject with us. We’re joined by the one and only Park Howell to help us explore this. For those of you that don’t know Park, he is known mysteriously as the world’s most industrious storyteller. He’s the founder of an amazing podcast where I first came across Park, The Business of Story, an Emmy award-winning brand strategist and host of one of the world’s leading podcasts on storytelling, which I think is also called The Business of Story. Park has shared the stage apparently with Robert Redford, coached leaders on NECA Island, trained with the US Air Force for many years, and so we’re in very good hands. Throughout his 40-plus year career, you don’t look like you’ve had a 40-plus year career, Park just putting it out there.

Glad to hear that.

But throughout that career, he’s helped organizations harness the power of story to build stronger brands, win more business and create deeper connections with their audiences. He has also been exploring, and hopefully we’ll tuck into this, how AI can amplify rather than replace the strategic role of storytelling. Park, welcome to our show.

Matt, thank you so much. Jacob, great to see you. I appreciate being on your program.

I wonder if for those that perhaps haven’t come across you, Park, you could just give us a little sense of, why don’t we start with the story of how you got into storytelling?

Oh, gosh. I got in the advertising branding marketing world, yes, well over 40 years ago, and I ran my own ad agency in Phoenix, Arizona called Park & Co. I ran that for 20 years. One of the things we were always really good at was taking complex messages and making them simple and interesting and compelling to consumers. I think probably my core strength, I come at it from a writer’s strategist standpoint, but I’m really a brander. I mean, people would always come to me and say, look, I got this big idea and I got this company, but nobody knows what we do and how can we do it. Then I say, okay, pump the brakes, take a breath, give me your intel, let’s figure out what is that core brand narrative. That’s really what I’ve done for the 40 years of my advertising career. About 10 years ago now, I weaved away from being an ad agency owner and totally into the business of story, where I now consult, teach, coach and speak on the power of story to leaders around the world. It could be, like you said, one star to four star generals and their staff at the US Air Force to help them be able to communicate their complex messages. To Walmart Canada, I do a whole ton of internal training with them, to still building brand stories for major companies. And yeah, that’s kind of how my life has evolved.

So, Paul, like you’ve obviously had a great career, except why do you keep doing what you’re doing? Like what gets you out of bed in the morning?

Everybody asks me that. Are you retired yet? And I’m like, well, define retirement for me because I’ve not worked for anybody else but myself for 35 years. So if I was to retire, I’d be retiring from myself. And what? I can only play so much golf and build so many birdhouses. Now, I’m still really fascinated by the world of communication and storytelling and how we homo sapiens, we storytelling apes make meaning out of the madness of being human beings. And then how folks like you and the clients that you work with and your listeners and viewers here, how when you become an intentional storyteller, the impact you can have on a person, on a team, on a society is really quite remarkable. And so that’s what keeps me going. I’m just, I still love dabbling in the storytelling world.

Nice. So question, let’s tuck into this subject a little bit more. You mentioned there obviously like stories help to create meaning, etc. So why is it, why is that the case? Like why does a story, for example, move another homo sapien, right? Beyond say like, I don’t know, some facts and some figures or some data.

Well, let’s go way back. Let’s go like 70,000 years back. And let’s go find a cave on the savanna somewhere. And let’s picture a cave mate there. We got to, let’s call him Larry. He’s fairly retarded, he’s hanging out, looking kind of lazy by the fire, warming his hands. And he looks up and in walks his other cave mate, Thog. Thog has got a broken fishing pole and he looks pretty disheveled. And Larry sits there. Just for less. No, yeah, it’s the picture that’s- You gotta defend yourself on that, Jacob.

Not of me hanging out in the savanna.

So Larry, we’ll call him Jacob, actually looks up at Matt, who’s just walked in the door. And Jacob says, Matt, where have you been? And Matt says, well, I was down at river fishing for a cyber tooth tiger for dinner. Jacob goes, uh-huh.

Do you know what, it sounds exactly like Jacob.

I was just thinking the same thing, Matt. The first couple of minutes here, I picked it up. You know?

Keep going, keep going.

So Jacob goes, uh-huh. And then, you know, Matt says, but saber-toothed tigers show up. Jacob goes, oh, what do you do? And Matt finally says, well, I give salmon to tiger. It likes salmon better than Matt. Therefore, I’m back here at fire safe with you. And Jacob goes, aha. So now let’s look at the three grunts that Jacob gave to that little story. Uh-huh. Uh-oh. Uh-huh. Three act story structure, set up, problem resolution. Now stories serve the same purpose today that they did 70,000 years ago between Jacob and Matt in that cave as a learning tool, a meaning making tool. So now that Jacob knows if he ever finds himself out at the river and he’s got himself a salmon and that saber-toothed tiger shows up, he knows what to do for survival. Now, that’s just kind of a fun way to say storytelling is so powerful, even a caveman or woman can do it and they really did to evolve as the most invasive species we’ve ever known. Well, it’s the same thing that we use today in branding and advertising to make sense. Let me ask you this, what’s the first syllable on the word numbers? Num. Num. Numbers mean nothing to our brain unless they’re put in the context of a story so that our brain can picture it, can feel it, can understand it and then it uses those logic driven numbers to be able to support the story that we’re trying to tell. So it hasn’t changed. I like to say that stories are important to our survival as oxygen is to our lungs. It’s where we make meaning out of the madness of being human beings.

So, Park, I’ve got a follow up question on that because storytelling has been used incredibly much more in the past decade than all the previous years. So why all of a sudden in the past decade has storytelling become this big buzzword?

You know, Jacob, that’s a hell of a good question. I first started hearing about story when I was running my agency in 2003. And why I remember that date or that year, I have no idea other than people started really talking about story in our line of work, in advertising, marketing, branding, whatever. And I was talking to our creative director at the time, Luis Medina, and he and I were talking about it. I go, well, duh, I mean, don’t we all do story? And we just had never talked about it. And then I looked at a campaign that we had run that year, this TV campaign. There were two 32nd commercials. The first one polled unbelievably well. I mean, it was, it increased same store sales by 42% the very next month. The second spot in that campaign did not pull at all. I mean nothing, even so much so that the client made us pull it, said, just run the first one all the time. And I’m sorry, we had to spend all that money on the second one. And I looked at it and I did not know why that second one didn’t pull until I started studying story and story structure. I realized that first one was intuitively a very well-structured story. The second one was not, there’s no story structure at all. It was just us being these creative, wonderful brand guys and we loved it, we were going to win awards with it, but it meant nothing to the people that watched it. After I started studying and learning about story, I realized, oh, we all fall into this trap of being intuitive storytellers, as we all homo sapiens storytelling apes are, we’re intuitive. But if we leave it to our intuition, we end up winging it more than winning with it if we become an intentional storyteller, and you do that by truly understanding story frameworks. I’ve got three that I work with, the and but therefore, this three word structure that will blow your mind how powerful it is. The five primal elements of a short story, a story you can tell in under one minute, an anecdotal story that shows or makes your business point for you. And then finally, my larger ten step story cycle system that we use for brand story development, strategy development and long form communication.

Amazing.

Right.

Let’s tuck into those. Let’s tuck into those three things. Come on now. You can’t just drop those. You can’t just drop that and then just move on. We’re going to pause there and put a foot forward.

Where do you want to start?

Well, let’s start with that three step one that you mentioned.

I was hoping you’d say that.

Give us a flavor. Give us a flavor.

Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s show it in action. All right. I’m going to work with you guys creating an ad, but therefore I’ll first explain what it is and then we are going to build an ad, but therefore live for your audience on your, and it’ll be about your JUST Branding Podcast.

All right.

Let’s go. So, and but therefore, real quick, let me give you the real quick theory. It uses the three forces of story of agreement, contradiction, and consequence that are pattern-seeking, problem-solving, decision-making, buying limbic brain loves because it hand-delivers meaning to it without it having to work for it. Set up problem resolution and but therefore agreement, contradiction, consequence. So, for branders out there, here’s how you start. And I’m looking for a piece of paper because I’m going to write on the back of this as we go through it. Here’s the first question. Story truth number one, you are not the center of your story. Your audience always is. So I want you guys, Matt and Jacob, tell me as specifically as possible who is the audience for this show?

I would say brand builders seeking to get more strategic.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. I was going to go with brand builders as well, but you have to unpack that sometimes. Like what is a brand builder? But depends how deep you want to go, Park.

All right. Well, let’s just start with that for right now. Then we can come back to it. So I wrote down brand builders seeking to get more strategic, to be more strategic. All right. Now I’m going to ask you, and why is that important to them? What’s in it for them to become more strategic as a brand builder?

To become more valuable and move up the value chain.

To who?

To them. It’s more valuable to them, yeah.

But whose value chain will they be moving up? If they become more valuable, if they’re more strategic, then whose value chain?

Whoever they’re working with, their clients. Yeah.

If they work for a company, it could be internal clients, it could be if they’re freelance or they’re working in agency, it could be external clients. So yeah, so I would always say that they’re seeking to be valuable for people. They’re seeking to be of service basically.

Yeah.

Okay, great. And I just wrote down then become more valuable to their clients and colleagues.

Perfect.

Just clients and or colleagues. We’re just going to go high level at this point. That’s our end statement of agreement. We’ve introduced our audience. You are a brand builder who seeks to become more strategic. And if you do, then you will become way more valuable to the clients and the customers, or the clients and the colleagues that you serve.

Yes.

Is that fair enough?

Everybody listening in is nodding along and applauding with excitement.

That’s why we call it a statement of agreement. You don’t start off with the problem, you start off with what the shared vision is for the future. And in doing so, you are hopefully demonstrating to your audience that you understand them and you appreciate what they want and why it’s important to them. All right? Now, let’s pull the rug out from underneath them. But what problem do they currently have and how does that problem make them feel that is keeping them from becoming more strategic?

They don’t have clarity on how to do that. Well, their approach?

Yeah, they might feel a bit lost and confused. Perhaps they’re not sure who or what to listen to, and there’s a lot of noise out there. One other thing to throw into the mix, I think people are a little worried that AI is going to come and eat their breakfast, so that’s what I hear a lot of anyway, they’re worried that that’s a thing. So I don’t know if that is helpful, Park, for where we’re going?

Yeah. No, I can’t, this is like, you guys know this because you work with clients all the time. It’s just downloading, just throwing it out there, and I’m just taking it in. Okay. All right, and I’m just-

This is what live storytelling looks like, folks.

Yes, but you know what?

They tuned in, they didn’t realize this was going to happen. Now they’re on the edge of their seats.

We’re going to do this in under five minutes. All right, so here we go. So we’ve got the end, we’ve got the end statement of agreement, we’ve got the but statement of contradiction. That’s like act two. That’s the problem. If there’s no conflict, you have no story. There you have just identified what the conflict. Now let’s talk about the therefore. What’s the way forward? So therefore, what is your solution? Which I believe your solution is listen to JUST Branding.

Yeah. 100 percent.

Okay. Why listen to JUST Branding?

You’re going to hear from awesome people like Park Howell, basically. That’s where we’re going with that. But no, you’re going to hear insights from knowledgeable experts from across the world.

Well, I can’t even write that fast. All right. How is that going to make them feel?

Jacob, what do you reckon? Ecstatic?

Clearly, clearly.

Do we make people feel ecstatic, Jacob? I think we’d like to think they would. I think I genuinely listening to having what reading some of the feedback, I think people feel that we equip them with interesting insights, access to-

New perspectives.

Yeah, new perspectives. I like that. Tools and practical examples as well, I think for them to use in their work.

All right. So, I got everything I need here. Now, a couple of things there. I asked you first what the problem was and then how it made them feel. When you write these, I want you to flip it. I want you to make them communicate how they feel first and then the problem. So, but you feel confused, frustrated, anxious, whatever it might be. You use the conjunction word because to set up the problem that’s making you feel that way. And Harvard did this amazing study back in 1978 about the power of the word because to get people to do things and the belief is it uses this cause and effect meaning making apparatus in our survival limbic brain. Remember Jacob and Matt at the door, you know, well, I’m back here because I gave Salmon to Tiger and therefore, and anyways, it’s a way to speak to that meaning making machine. So I want a negative emotion right after the but because of this problem. Now you’re really raising the stakes. It’s called find the hurts, you know, because you’re frustrated, amplify the pain because of this problem, therefore heal the wound. And so then after the therefore, I want you to lead with the positive emotion because in storytelling, you want to you want to have as much conflict or contradiction and contrast as the word I’m looking for throughout this ABT. So that and statement of agreement is here’s the perfect world. This is what I really want. The but statement is the exact contrast to that, but you don’t have it because of this problem. And then the therefore is imagine how you’re going to feel when you get it. So with all that in mind, let’s just read through real quick what I have. And you’re going to speak directly to your audience. So you’re going to do the pronoun shift. You’re not going to just generally say brand builders. You’re going to say you are a committed brand builder seeking to get more strategic in all you do. And if you could find the insights and the people that have been there before, then you can grow and become more valuable in your brand building with the clients and the colleagues that you serve, which also leads to even more respect for your profession and you. But you feel lost, you’re confused because you don’t have the clarity on how to build your strategic skills. And you know what? AI is making it even worse. Raise the stakes, right? Therefore, become ecstatic over the insights and the expertise and the tools you are going to learn when you listen to JUST, The JUST Branding Podcast. The only podcast over the past nine years that have brought you brand story leaders from around the world who generously share their insights so that you can have the same success that they do. Welcome to the show. Wowzers, I want to listen to the show.

We’re going to use that as a new intro, Park.

That’s it. That’s it. We need, that is, that’s it. We’re made now. Thank you.

Wow.

That was so impressive.

I want everybody. Well, thank you. And I’ve been doing that a long time, but everybody can do it. It just takes practice. And here’s the thing. People are going to go, well, geez, Park, it’s only and but therefore. How hard can it be? And I’ve got an and but therefore for you. ABT is short and sweet, but tricky. Therefore, practice, practice, practice. But when you do it in that order, audience or they want relative to your offering and why is that important to them? But negative emotion, because of what problem? Why don’t they currently have what they want that you’re going to fix for them? Therefore, positive emotion, picture when you get all this by doing this with us, your call to action does not come in until the second clause of the third statement, that therefore statement of agreement. That way you keep it all about your audience and what’s in it for them.

I love that. I love that.

Let’s take a little break from today’s conversation. If you are enjoying this episode, I think you’re going to love the Brand Builders Summit. You can join me, Jacob Cass, Matt Davies and more than 40 leading brand experts from September 8th to 11th for four days of free talks, live Q&A’s, workshops and panels. You can reserve your free ticket at brandbuilderssummit.com. Now back to the episode.

I particularly agree. I think brand narrative, the hero is always the customer of the brand. Oh, yeah, yeah. People get that so wrong. I guess you always probably come across this, but I do as well, where people talk about brand narrative or brand story and it’s all about the history of the company. And you’re like, you’re like, no, no one cares. When you were founded, it’s called JUST Pounding.

Listen to me. I’ve got all the answers by now.

Put the customer at the heart of everything. That’s like the number one rule. So it was great to hear you kind of set that out at the start as well as a kind of an overlying, overlying foundational principle.

Well, the other thing I’d add to that, Matt, is you’re exactly right. Customers are the center of the story. And number two, your story is not about what you make, but what you make happen for your customers because they don’t really give a crap about your SaaS product or whatever you’ve made. I just want to know what does it actually make happen for me?

I love that. Right. We’re going to go way over time on this podcast. Perhaps not in such detail, but maybe just give us a sense of the other two frameworks that you use, because I know one of them is, well, I think both of them are.

All right. So the second one is the five primal elements of a short story for big impact. And I learned this framework from a company out of Melbourne, actually, called Anecdote, and they teach leaders how to tell an anecdote. And there’s five beats to that anecdote. And in fact, I used it on you when I was telling you the facetious story, Larry and Thog, that became Jacob and Matt. I started with a location stamp, the Savannah. I gave you a time stamp. I said, 70,000 years ago, I introduced Larry to you. He’s the central character in this story. Thog just plays a bit role, actually. A story is always about one individual and something happening to them, even with other people in their supporting cast. Then action and surprise. The action is, oh my God, what are you doing here in this doorway with a crumpled up fishing pole? You look terrible, Thog. Well, and then now it goes deeper to the action. I’m fishing, the Cybertooth Tiger shows up, and the surprise learning moment is, I give salmon to Tiger. It likes salmon better than Thog, Matt, and therefore I’m safely back here with you. Aha, the aha moment, the learning, the moral of the story. So let me just try this on you guys, and either one of you here or both of you, but one at a time. I want you, so we just wrote an ABT for your show about why people should listen. So now it’s one thing for us to say that. Jacob, I’m going to start with you, and then I’m going to let Matt tell a story. Jacob, take me to a moment in time that you may be heard from a listener or a viewer, or maybe one of your customers really learned something from the show, or maybe you learned something from the show as a co-host, that then you apply to a customer. But I need you to take me to a moment in time that illustrates that you are a go-to podcast for branding.

Oh, one thing came to mind, it was like a negative that turned into a positive. Can we do that?

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So I got an Instagram DM. Someone said that I put the wrong cover graphic on one of our podcast episodes. So that was a couple of weeks ago on Instagram. Idiot. Yes. Who it was, it was someone I had never met before. They just sent me a DM. They loved the show. They just wanted to let us know about it. The name was Jude. And the action I took was quickly fixed up the podcast cover graphic. And then I said, can I be a little bit cheeky here and ask for a review? You sound like you’ve been enjoying the pod. And he said, yeah, sure, no worries. And he sent the review in. So that was the five primal elements, if I got it correct.

Awesome. OK, so let me add one more thing to that. I love it. So I want you to set that up. What is the moral of that story? Tell me what is the moral? What did you learn from that little interaction?

The moral is that you can tap into your big fans to, I don’t know if that’s the moral, but it’s like I’m not sure what the moral is there.

What I read into the moral, Jacob, was in branding, some of your most powerful moments come at the worst times. And so you might say that, one thing I’ve learned in JUST Branding is some of the most powerful moments for brand building comes at the brand’s worst times. Let me give you an example. Two weeks ago, I’m on Instagram and this guy by the name of Jude, who I don’t know, did tell me that they were active listeners and loved the show, but that we had blown it. Notice the word blow or butt in there to get to you, but we had blown it and we put up the wrong graphic for that current particular episode. And I was very appreciative that Jude would actually take the time to do that. I said, thank you very much, Jude. Obviously, you are a committed listener. Could I mind maybe be a little cheeky and ask for a review from you? And Jude says, sure, of course. And that’s what happened. That’s where not a great moment in the JUST Branding Podcast life, because we all make mistakes. You’ve probably been there yourself, but instead of apologizing and being embarrassed about it, I said, thank you very much. You must be a committed listener. And now I probably have an even stronger listener who gave us a review.

There you go. Yeah, well said. Very well said.

Well done, Jacob. Great work. Great work.

Yeah.

Loving your work, Jacob. Loving it.

Anybody can listen in and say, I’ve had that happen to me. And yeah, I know that Jacob’s right about that. That must be a good show that that guy would actually take time to comment on it to Jacob. So now you’re making a business point through a story, a true story that nobody can argue with. They can argue with your opinions and your assertions and your expertise. They’ll argue with that all day long, but they can’t argue with a true story well told that makes that business point for you.

Thank you. Well said.

Matt, how about you? Do you have one?

This is hard. So what do you need? What do we want? What do we need?

I need a moment in your life recent. It could be whatever, actually. It could be 10 years ago. Something that was an aha moment for you, and we’re talking about JUST Branding Podcast because sharing that ABT is not enough. It set you up what the podcast is. Now you got to prove that premise of what you made in the ABT, that this is one of the go-to podcasts in the world on branding. And just a little anecdote like Jacob just shared says, oh man, this thing must be legit if he’s got people taking the time to reach out to him. Do you have something similar? It could be a negative, a positive, something in between.

Oh, I don’t know. Okay. I’m going to throw one out there and see how it lands. So we had a gentleman on called Rory Sutherland.

Oh, famous, famous UK marketer.

Right. And I think he’s, yeah, oh, he’s fantastic. And he shared some ideas around problem framing with us and how like the immediate problem that you’re presented with may not actually be the problem that you need to solve. In fact, sometimes it’s helpful to rethink the way that we’re thinking about a problem, if that makes sense. So reframing the problem. So I had a client and I’m working with this client and they are trying to work through a problem. So I had a client, so let’s give it a time stamp. It was about, I don’t know, three weeks ago, something like that. And they’re trying to work through a problem as a strategy team around the way that they were positioning a solution. This is in a building industry for fire doors, right? And the way that they were thinking about it was, I’m not going to get all into the technical thing, but they were thinking about the actual door frame. And it turns out that when we reframed the problem, the issue actually was the level of the floor, right? So that’s kind of where we went with it. I don’t know if that’s getting into too much detail. No, that’s okay. The point was, if I hadn’t had Rory’s thinking around problem framing, then, excuse the pun, we may not have been thinking about the frame. We may have been continuing to think about the frame rather than the floor, right? So, that was, and then that kind of put us in a completely new strategy in terms of how that we would sell their solution that they were offering the market. So, I don’t know if that makes any sense whatsoever, but the point here is, is Rory’s ideas from the JUST Branding Podcast helped me put a workshop exercise together for them that helped them rethink the problem that they were taking to market and solving for, and they then have done that, and they’re now working through that solution. So, there we are.

That is awesome. So, what is the moral of that story? What’s the aha moment for you, or for your listeners, really, I want you to be thinking about, because you’re going to be sharing this with potential prospective viewers and listeners.

OK, so the aha moment would be that we don’t always have to take what is presented to us as the initial challenge. We can interrogate that. The moral of the story is not to accept things on face value.

Yeah. All right. So I’m going to take it even deeper. Don’t accept things on face value is a generalized moral, which is fine. It’s a good moral. But I want it to be very specific to your viewers and your listeners as to why should I spend any time on JUST Branding Podcast? Why should I invest? What am I going to learn? I would follow something along the lines of you said you’ve been doing the show about nine years. One of the great things about doing the JUST Branding Podcast for nine years is all the stuff that Jacob and I get to learn. For instance, don’t take things that face value. We had Roy Sutherland on and it was about reframing of a problem. They did it in a way that I had never considered before. Three weeks ago, I found myself in a situation where I could use that reframing immediately in my job. We did this, this, this, this, and this was the happy outcome. That’s why I love and this is why we do this show tirelessly for nine years because we get to speak and bring you experts like Rory Sutherland that we can all learn from. So thanks for listening.

It sounds amazing.

This is one small correction. I do get pretty tired of Jacob. So putting that to one side. That’s phenomenal. That’s absolutely phenomenal. So they’re the five, how did you, what did you sort of frame that as the five?

Yeah, so the five primal elements of a short story and here’s how and why they work. I like to start with the timestamp because the timestamp triggers the limbic brain and it says, oh, something must have happened to these guys or to the storyteller that I, because they’re giving me a point in time when things start, stories are always temporal. I better pay attention so I know what to do if whatever happened to the storyteller happens to me. That’s a long way of saying that’s how you hook them. Give them a timestamp. Then I like to give a location stamp because it fires up the theater of the mind. Were you in London? Was it downtown London? Was it in a high rise? Was it a beat up old fire station somewhere? Where were you? You can even say, it was a hot day in downtown London, blah, blah, blah. You don’t have to go into great detail. But all you’re doing now is trying to fire up the theater of the mind. So they start picturing it. They go, I’ve been in London. I’ve been in a place like that. I know what he’s talking about. Then you introduce the single character in this. In this case is really you are the character in it. And I know a lot of people will go, well, this sort of belies what you were saying earlier about, you are never the center of your story. Well, a lot of your stories are about you, about ourselves, but in the telling, you make it about your audience. So they live vicariously through you. They can picture themselves and what happened to you. So that the aha moment, the moral of the story is as powerful for them as it is, as it was for you of what you experienced in that. So then that central character, then the surprise, the aha, what went down? How did you reframe it? And everyone goes, oh, wow, that’s amazing. It’s like you magically came up with a new way to look at this problem, and that’s way better than what we had before. Therefore, it leads to the final solution is don’t take things at face value. If you really want to understand how to reframe problems, listen to our conversation with Rory Sutherland.

Nice. Nice. Love it.

So, Park, the framework there is like all children’s books. I read a lot of children’s books. I’ve got four kids at home. So at the start…

He wants to read them because he really enjoys them. Just put it out there.

Yes, that too. But the framework that you said there is like once upon a time. So it’s like setting the location. What did you say, Matt? I totally didn’t hear that.

I was just saying you quite like the level of age six. That’s kind of your standard.

Yes, yes.

Anyway, just ignore me.

As usual, as usual. All right. But books, they start like once upon a time in a land far away.

They really gave you a static, don’t they?

Yeah. So this is literally that order. So it’s a, I never really considered that, but it sounds logical to set that time, location. Here’s the character and let’s get into who they are.

It’s the tripartite structure to story. You’ve got to know where is the story based, who is this story about that you would care about, and what is it that they really wanted in life once upon a time. But all this horrible stuff happens and it goes on for hours and hours and hours. Therefore, at the end, they bring it in and all, they live happily ever after. I heard one guy once saying, I love these three words. Once upon a time, suddenly, luckily, is the same sort of three-part structure. It’s the same three-part structure of the ABT or brand building.

Yeah.

When I looked at it a while back, Aristotle had like a three-part structure, didn’t he? I think in the ancient Greeks, he sort of talked about that sort of side, at least that frame thing.

You know, his was as simple as a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And everyone goes, well, duh. You say that though, right?

But like, I think, is it Japanese culture? They kind of don’t end stuff. And then like everyone’s just like, it goes wild because like no one knows what’s going to happen. It’s so unsatisfying, you know, because they don’t close the loop. But maybe that’s wrong, so you know, forgive me, well, Japanese.

Well, we want to close the loop because in the closing of that book is where our call to action is.

Right. And that’s where we want to get emotion and get kind of motion going.

So I’ve been right in a children’s book, Park, and I’ve had to go through this whole scenario of like the story and the ups and downs and even the page turns to make sure the flow works with the illustrations and everything. So it’s really fascinating to hear how you approach it, but in the context of brand. It really does apply to like the story of a children’s book as well.

Oh, yeah. Well, it all leads up to the biggest story structure of them all, and that’s The Hero’s Journey from Joseph Campbell.

Right.

The 12 steps of the or the 17, depending on how nuanced you want to get with it. I learned about that first back in early 2000s, when our son was going to film school at Chapman University in Orange, California. Time stamp, early 2000s, Chapman University, Orange, California. Very prominent. I mean, it’s now ranked among the top five film schools in the world. And while he was going to school there, I said, I was trying to still figure out the story thing. I said, you know, send me your books and your recorded lectures when you have them. Since I’m paying for them, because I want to know what is Hollywood know. And then the first thing he said is dad read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And here are some videos to watch too, of which I did. And I go, oh my God, this is a customer journey. This is an agency owner’s journey. This is every journey that we’re all on. Why don’t they teach this stuff in advertising and marketing schools? Because this, to me, seems like the roadmap, the blueprint for every communication you ever want to build. And The Hero’s Journey is simply a very large expanded and but therefore the first part of it is the and section. You’re setting the stage. The big long middle part where the audience or the protagonist goes into that weird world to figure out life and they got all these trials and tribulations. That’s the but. And then the therefore is that very short third act that is the closing that brings it all together and we learn something in the process. And it was when I saw that that I said, well, this would be amazing in brand building, but I’m afraid that a lot of business people might think it’s too Hollywood woo woo. So I took it and I mapped it to my 10-step story cycle system. It totally inspired the system, which is all about the very first step is, what’s your position in the marketplace? Setting the stage, right? Second step, who’s your hero? Who’s the number one audience that makes up 80 percent of your sales? Then step three, what do they want? Why is it important to them? And you move on to all the antagonistic forces that are against them and even against you as the brand. How to leverage those using storytelling to be kind of a Jiu Jitsu master to use those negative forces and positive ways for your brand, because again, nobody’s going to buy a solution unless they have a frigging problem. So you want to really highlight that problem, make it hurt as much as you can possibly make it hurt. And then introduce the mentor or the guide, which is the brand. And then the journey begins on how you are going to help them do that. So that became the whole basis for our 10-step story cycle system that is the overarching story framework that I use then, the ABT and the Five Primal Elements story within.

Amazing, amazing.

I had a question about the woo woo thing, because the storytelling does have that vibe when you say storytelling. It’s like, well, you know, how does that work? It’s from Hollywood. And like, how do you get over that in like a boardroom or with clients? How do you get over?

Well, number one, you never say the word story. You never say, let me tell you a story, because their defense shields will immediately go up. I don’t have time for a story. Story’s bullsh**, you know, but they know how manipulative in a positive and or negative way a story is. So you never, ever, ever use the S word. You just simply hook them with a story. They don’t even know what’s going on. You just tell them a quick little story. So here’s what I do. If I’m in a room and I really got to understand who my audience is, I try to think like I’m Spielberg and this audience is sitting in a theater. I’m going to start my presentation with an ad, but therefore, I’m going to say it in under 15 seconds to hook them on that singular problem solution dynamic that we’re going to be solving in that meeting or you’re selling against in that meeting, and then I’m going to immediately follow it up with a little anecdotal story using my five primal elements of story to show them that problem solution dynamic in action right now. So, in under 90 seconds, I’ve used two story frameworks, the ABT and the five primal elements, to wormhole my way into their limbic subconscious brain that says, oh, dang, he might be on to something here and he just showed me the impact of what’s going on, then you start leveling up into the logic reason driven brain and go, let me now show you the numbers by why this, you know, why this is so important, that is supporting the context of my stories that I’ve shared with you. So don’t even tell them the magic you’re doing on them, but they’re homo sapiens, just like you are. It doesn’t matter how smart they are, their limbic brain runs the exact same way. Help it make meaning first and then bring the numbers in to create the context and support around that meaning.

Makes sense.

You know, we said at the outset, you’re exploring AI, etc. And we’ve already hinted at there’s a general sort of fear factor of AI around the place. And I know you’re dabbling. So tell us a little bit about that and how you’re sort of using that alongside storytelling and all of the thinking that you have been working on over the last few years.

Yeah. Well, let me tell you, it goes way beyond dabbling. I mean, we have now almost three years been in the process, and we’ve brought to market the StoryCycle Genie, which has taken our 10-step StoryCycle system process from my book and the work that I’ve done with it over 20 years. We’ve been able to use artificial intelligence and leveled it up to becoming artful intelligence. Because with Inside the Genie, yeah, we’ve got API calls going out to Chad, GPT and Claude. But the way we have programmed and built it and prompt it, it’s more like you are just simply sitting down with a brand consultant next to you or a colleague next to you, or yourself, I mean, with the Genie, and you collaborate with it to create. What used to take is three or four months and $100,000 to do, you can literally now do in a couple of hours and have the same, not even greater impact because you are using the power of AI in a very artful way with RIP, the StoryCycle system to be able to create, refine and define your brand stories.

Well, I got to tell you folks, before we came on the show, Park a couple of days ago sent us through, kindly, like a review. I guess it was like we weren’t working with the StoryCycle Genie. You said, look, I’ll feed it to your website, and it kind of gives you a full comprehensive report of where we’re at right now. I was super happy with mine because it was said all sorts of very nice things. I’ll just give everybody a flavor. I said, so overall brand strength, eight out of 10. I suppose I’ve got some improvement to do to get up to scratch, but it did say some stuff like, Matt Davies occupies a well-defined niche at the intersection of brand strategy, leadership alignment, and organizational energy, meaningfully differentiated from the typical brand consultant. So I thought, oh, that sounds nice. There’s a ton of great stuff in here around my positioning, all sorts of things around audience confidence. What I found really, really insightful is it had a load of stuff around my core differentiation, and particularly, it came up with some stuff around competitive positioning. I just thought I’d mention this part because I think it kind of almost went deeper than just stories. So for example, it said, for example, MyServices versus a big four McKinsey type firm, Matt wins on speed, leadership proximity, and direct access that clients get to Matt. Not a junior team, no partner bait and switch, and there’s a few other things. Now, that is so insightful. I don’t think I’ve written that specifically that I can think of. In my website or on my social media specifically, I’ve not compared myself to a big four McKinsey type firm, but it kind of picked that up. And then there’s loads of stuff around opportunities for my brand’s story kind of telling, stuff that’s high priority, medium, and lower. And it just goes on and on. And I mean, there’s 14 pages of real deep, good, gorgeous stuff with suggestions on brand narrative and all sorts. So it absolutely blew me away, Park. And I just want to kind of encourage folks to kind of have a look at it. What can people do? Like I assume they can jump on. Can they access it themselves? Or is it a paid for service? Like, how does it work?

Yeah. So what I sent you was the beginning of the building of the brand brain as if you were a user of it. People watching this and listening to this right now can do, is you can get a free brand story grade. Just go over to storycyclegenie.ai, click on the red button. It’s going to ask for your name, your email address and the URL, whatever brand it is that you want to run through. It could be yours. It could be a competitor’s. It could be a prospect’s or whatever. And in about two minutes, it’s going to run a complete assessment for you. And it’s going to give you a grade from A plus to F minus on how well you’re showing up in the world. It will validate what you’re doing well. It will reveal the gaps that you could quickly fix and even inspire you with new ways to think about telling your brand’s story. And that is all delivered to you through a 14-point storytelling assessment. Totally free. No credit cards. No nothing. Just go check it out. What I sent to Matt is I took it to the next step. So I just asked the genie, and I didn’t know anything about Matt’s brand at all. So I didn’t iterate or do anything. I just went into the genie. I said, here’s the URL. I want you to now create a deep dive assessment. It goes deeper than what premium does. Give me an assessment and then write up a complete narrative strategy of how he is currently appearing in the market. So what I like to have you think of it, Matt, is like mirror, mirror on the wall. How was my brand showing up for all? And that’s what that document is doing for you. So you said you were pleased, you know, eight out of 10 is not too bad. You have probably some room for improvement, but you’re doing pretty good. It is parroting back to you some of the things that you wrote in there, but it’s also revealing some other gaps in there and how you could fix it. And then when I ran the brand narrative strategy, it made the assumption that its assessment was at least 90% accurate. And it said, all right, here’s my recommendation on how you are showing up in the market and maybe some different things that you could do. As a user, then you would just be sitting and working with it. Say, oh, I like that. I don’t like that. I want to change this audience to that. I’m not sure where you got that. You know, if it gave you some bad information, it means there’s Intel on your website that’s not serving you because it’s pulling it right from your website. So that’s when the beginning of building your brand brain. And over the course of a couple of hours, it builds your foundational brand narrative. It then writes the version of it for your three audiences that it identified. You can even add more audiences to it. But we start with default to three because we don’t want you to get too far flung with your audiences and then it brings it all together in a content playbook. Once that’s done, you use it for all of your strategy, building your campaign creation, your blog post writing, all your content creation, and it’s always going to be on brand because that’s what the genie was designed to do. No generic AI, not out there flattening your brand story. It’s learning with every iteration you make with the genie about you, your brand story, and how to precisely tell that in the market. We call it story sovereignty, finding the story that only your brand can tell and then owning it.

Now, it’s truly mind-blowing. Jacob, I know Park sent you one as well.

Yes, I got 8.4, just to rub that in a little bit.

That’s got to be wrong.

But yeah, just to expand on what you guys have already mentioned, there’s other things in there as well. Like I was reading, there’s some ABT statements as well that come through as well. Unpacking the audience in greater detail. UVP gets into brand personality traits. I’m looking at, and it actually picked up quite a few of them. Like Flair, I used the Flamingo and the Promise there. Also things like the emotional promise, the brand archetype it gets into.

What archetype were you, Jacob?

It was three, actually. It was creator, surprise, surprise.

That’s number one, right? So that’s your primary archetype, 65% is the creator.

100%.

Yep. Bit rebellious and a bit magical, so 22% rebel, 13% magician. Brand purpose statement, brand narrative it gets into.

Why don’t you read your purpose statement to us, Jacob? What does it say your purpose is? And this is what you stand for beyond making money.

Yes. Okay, so the brand purpose statement declares what JUST Creative does beyond making money that elevates the lives of everyone it touches. Focus on people and human transformation, not organizational achievement. So that’s the premise here. JUST Creative exists to enthrall people by enabling them to live into and prosper from their most powerful brand stories. So it then has a whole other larger paragraph, but it goes into our key tagline, a standard flock out, which combines with our flamingo.

Yeah.

And it breaks that down even further. But there’s quite a lot of text there.

Yeah. Yeah. And the idea is this is what builds out the brand brain. And then the one part in there that you didn’t mention that I like to talk about real quick, because people don’t know of it, the OO exercise, O-O-O. And those are nine one-word descriptors in three categories. O-O-O, organization, offering and outcome. So three one-word descriptors for your organization, they are what, Jacob?

Courageous, authentic, meticulous.

And you use these as story prompts. So for instance, Jacob, I would say, it’s one thing to say you’re courageous, show me you’re courageous, and then tell me a quick little anecdote about how courage shows up with your customers, or your clients, or in a campaign you did and so forth.

Yeah, it pulls out me being a digital nomad, traveling across 88 countries, and the brand exists as proof of that courage, not conformity. And then for an authenticity, it talks about the organizing principle of standing the flock out as a methodology, and that insists that genuine distinction requires excavating what is genuinely true about a brand before ever designing its expression, which absolutely. Yeah. And then meticulous, it goes into logo design awards, industry coverage, and clients like Disney, Nike, San Francisco, and years of experience.

Yeah. So then for the offering, this is what people actually experience when working with you, Jacob. What are the three it came up with for you there?

It’s come up with transformative, distinctive, and strategic. Transformative, sorry. Transformative.

And then outcome. What do they get?

The outcome is freedom, authority, and flair.

All right. So, and of course, if you were working inside the Genie, you could change any one of those. You’re like, yeah, you could say, I like transformative, but I’m looking for a different word that’s more like this or whatever. And you would work in it to find those nine one word descriptors there. Think of them as character traits, but more importantly, they are story themes that you are going to now go out and tell true stories about each one of those themes, and that becomes your story marketing. And they go in your website, in your content, in your social posts or whatever, but they are now triggers to have you go and find stories so that you’re not just selling features and benefits, you’re selling impact. Here is how you have actually touched the people in the world that you worked with.

So good, so good. Brilliant. Well, Park, I just want to be… I think we had a plan, folks, to go through, and it’s just completely been blown out of the water because we’ve been storying. We’ve been storying. What can I say? I was just going to kind of say, just kind of circle back and almost close the loop, and then I want to do a quick fire round with you, and then we’ll finish. But I just want to close the loop on our sort of discussions that we started the episode with. That was mainly around the relevance of storytelling today, particularly in today’s world of AI and all this stuff. You’ve shown how it can kind of help frame things, but where do you see the real value? Do you see storytelling and the way that we see the world changing ever? Give us a sense of why storytelling is so powerful and so needed in today’s world.

Well, storytelling hasn’t changed, the storyteller is going through an immense evolution with AI. And I think the biggest challenge and opportunity for agencies out there right now is this concept around operationalizing a brand story. So this is why it goes back to meaning. We’ve got AI that is taking all the stuff you’ve got out there in the world, and it’s probably somewhat fragmented because everybody’s telling your story a little bit differently. And what is it doing? It’s making your story more impotent. It’s flattening it. You’re starting to sound like everybody else out there. So we are looking at this thing called story ops. You know, big, large enterprises, companies have marketing ops. They have sales ops, HR ops, FinOps, supply chain ops. But nobody has story ops. Someone whose full position is to make sure that not only is that story defined, but it is automatically implemented across the enterprise through tools your audience or your colleagues are already using. So why is that so important? Because we are completely being bombarded with AI slop, which is unbelievable amounts of information that our brain was never built to equip, or equipped to be able to make sense of. So what does it do? It bats all that stuff away. And if you are the signal in that noise, starting with things like The Ant But Therefore, a crystal clear brand story that’s been completely operationalized through the enterprise, you are not going to get drowned out. We call it narrative entropy. When you don’t control it, AI bots are going to control it, and they’re going to destroy that story. It’s going to go into complete narrative entropy. The only way to stop that is through story ops, because storytelling is not going to change. From Thog and Larry, Jacob and Matt back in the Savannah to where we are today, it’s still the fundamental tool that we, Homo sapiens storytelling apes, use to make meaning out of the madness of being human beings.

Boom.

Boom.

Right. Final quick fire round. I’m going to start, then I’m going to go to Jacob. Are you ready for this, Park?

Yes, sir.

I’m just going to wrap things up. Right. So number one, best brand story ever told.

Patagonias. Just go and look at the fact I’m coming out with an article on that very thing. They do a brilliant job in storytelling.

Amazing. One brand that understands storytelling better than anyone else.

Virgin. Sir Richard Branson. His whole life is one big, unbelievable narrative. Very well told. He plays that over into everything he does at Virgin.

Slight aside, did you get to meet him when you went to Necker Island? Yeah, I worked with them.

Yeah, I got to spend a week on Necker Island, and they had a whole bunch of automotive dealers in from around the country, and I did a whole storytelling program with them on how to use stories for their industry. So a great guy.

So jealous. If he ever wants to get on a podcast, just mention us. All right. One storytelling myth you’d love to kill.

That you think you’re telling a story and you never get out of and, and, and, and, and you are and, and, and in your world to death, you get one and insert the buts and then resolve the pain with the therefore.

All right. And a book every brand better should read besides your own, of course.

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. Now it’s written for screenwriters. It’s in its fifth edition, but it is one of the most marvelous explorations of the hero’s journey and how it works in our life, and how you and that he doesn’t talk specifically to branders, but it doesn’t, it’s not a leap for you as a brander to be able to take everything Hollywood knows and start applying it in your world.

All right. So next one, AI, friend or foe to storytellers?

Friend. Don’t approach it as artificial intelligence. Approach it as artful intelligence. And it is going to scale your storytelling abilities way beyond where you currently are. It’s not going to do it for you. It’s going to do it with you.

Amazing. One word that defines a great brand story.

That’s great. You know, enthralment. Enthral was used in your own brand positioning right there. You know, the word, the term enthralment, which I use a lot with the story cycle Genie means capturing the fascinated attention on something. That’s the term. That’s the, for, you know, the, the, what am I trying to say? The definition of enthralment. Well, isn’t that what every brand wants to do is capture the fascinated attention of their core audience on what they can do in their life?

That’s the word of today. Enthralment. Just etch that in your brains, folks. Learn it, digest it. Right, I’m going to move us on. We’re going to have two more. So if every brand did one thing differently tomorrow, what would it be in you? If you want, you know, if you could make them all do something different tomorrow, what would it be?

Assemble all of your leaders in the room. That could be two. It could be 20. Ask them each to write an and, but therefore about your brand’s story. Compare the notes. You’re going to find one in five actually know your brand’s story and then start fixing that.

Nice. Jacob, do you want to end the quick fire?

Yes. Last piece of advice for brand builders who want to become better storytellers.

Oh, man. Study what Hollywood knows. I mean, read that book. Go get Chris for Vogler’s book, Writers Journey. That’s the first place to start. Really understand that story is all about setup, problem resolution, just like Aristotle said, a beginning, a middle, and an end, and don’t be fearful of including that middle, because that’s where all the grimy, disgusting conflict is. If you don’t have a conflict, you don’t have a story. If you don’t have a problem, they don’t need your solution. Find out how to communicate that problem. I had a customer once tell me, he said, Park, sales is nothing more than find the hurt, amplify the pain, heal the wound. That is storytelling in a nutshell. Amazing.

Final thing as we wrap them, Park, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing all your knowledge and being so generous. But if folks want to follow up with you, how do they follow you? I know you’ve got a great podcast. Do you want to just give folks a sense of things?

Yeah, sure. You hit my contact form at businessofstory.com and let me know that you heard me on Jacob and Matt’s excellent show. Or jump over to LinkedIn. I’m there a lot too. I think I’m the only Park Howell on LinkedIn. Reach out through there and connect. And again, let me know that you heard me here. And then I will give you all kinds of content. And I just started the new newsletter on LinkedIn, Brand StoryOps for Agencies. And it’s only three weeks in, I’ve already got over 1200 subscribers. So I think I’ve hit a nerve.

Well, good for you. Good for you. I’m sure you have. Thanks so much, Park. That was Park Howell, everybody. What an awesome episode that was. I’m looking forward to seeing everybody’s comments and hopefully feedback and reviews, just to tap into what Jacob said earlier. We are always keen on good reviews. So please do that. It helps us kind of keep the show humming along nicely. And finally, if you do find this particular episode useful, and you use anything that Parker has sort of shared, please do tag me, Jacob or Park, in anything that you use. We always love to hear how we’re having an impact in the real world. So thanks for tuning in, folks. It’s been a pleasure. Take care. See you next time. Bye bye.

Thanks, guys

Every year I seem to forget how much work goes into it.

Partly because I tend to go overboard.

But also because an event of this size involves an extraordinary number of moving parts, from speaker logistics and global scheduling to registration systems and hundreds of custom graphics.

Today, I want to give you a small glimpse behind the scenes, using the 2025 Summit as an example.

There’s nothing polished here. This is the real work.

Behind the 2025 Summit

For context, planning a virtual summit typically takes three to six months, sometimes longer.

The major stages include:

1. Summit Foundations: 1–2 weeks
2. Planning & Organisation: 1–2 weeks
3. Core Decisions: 1–2 weeks
4. Website & Registration: 2–4 weeks
5. Speaker Outreach: 4–8 weeks
6. Speaker Onboarding: 2–4 weeks
7. Sponsors & Affiliates: 4–10 weeks
8. Presentation Management: 4–8 weeks
9. Ticketing Setup: 1–2 weeks
10. Promotion & Advertising: 6–10 weeks
11. Attendee Engagement: 3–6 weeks
12. Testing & Optimisation: 1–2 weeks
13. Registration Management: 4–8 weeks
14. Event Week: 1 week
15. Post-Summit Wrap-Up: 1–2 weeks

Many of these stages overlap, but the complete Summit plan still contains more than 250 top level tasks, as seen below.

Step 1. The Foundations

Every successful summit starts with the big picture thinking.

• Who is the summit for?
• What transformation will attendees receive?
• What is the central theme and position?
• What does success look like?

These decisions shape everything that follows, from the speakers and sessions to the visual identity and attendee experience.

For the 2025 Summit, the central idea was “Become a Star Brand Builder”, and the programme was built around four core pillars:

• Strategy
• Design
• Marketing
• Business

Once those foundations were clear, I could begin identifying the speakers, topics and experiences needed to deliver that promise.

Step 2. Identity & Website

Next comes my favourite part: designing the identity and website.

This is where I tend to spend days, sometimes weeks, exploring visual directions and finding a concept that can carry the entire event.

The 2025 Summit had a space theme, which allowed me to have fun exploring futuristic typography, cosmic graphics and the idea of helping attendees become star brand builders.

After designing the website and identity, I ensure that it works across the complete brand system, including website pages, speaker graphics, community graphics, emails, ads and event materials.

The type system was created using Hyperspace Race, a superfamily from Swell Type, shown below.

I pushed the family as far as I could, combining its vast range of weights, widths, alternate characters and italics to create a flexible and distinctive system for the Summit.

Like I said, I tend to go a little overboard.

Step 3. The Speakers

While the identity is taking shape, speaker planning is already underway.

My goal is to create a balanced programme across strategy, design, marketing and business, with every session contributing to the transformation promised by the Summit.

I begin with a long list of potential speakers, review dozens of submissions and eventually create the first shortlist.

Then the outreach begins.

Cue hundreds of emails.

The truth about running a summit is that much of the work involves managing speaker communication, databases and spreadsheets.

Rows and rows of information covering topics, biographies, headshots, presentations, promotional assets, deadlines and more.

Once speakers begin confirming, the programme starts to take shape.

Every day needs the right balance of topics and formats.

Then comes the granular scheduling, including the small matter of coordinating speakers and attendees across global time zones.

Astronaut hard at work. Who said logistics couldn’t be fun?

Step 4. Promotion & Advertising

Once the speaker presentations arrive, the promotional machine kicks into gear.

I create hundreds of custom graphics to help each speaker promote their session across social media, email and their own communities.

For the 2025 space theme, I had a little fun by turning every speaker into an astronaut.

Because if you’re asking someone to become a star brand builder, you may as well commit to the concept.

Step 5. The Payoff

After months of planning, thousands of brand builders from around the world tuned in to learn from people such as Debbie Millman, David Aaker and Marty Neumeier.

Seeing the community connect, learn and become better brand builders makes all the spreadsheets worthwhile.

Across the 2024 and 2025 Summits, more than 25,000 brand builders registered. Of the 300+ attendees surveyed, 100% said they would recommend the Summit to a friend, giving the experience an average rating of 9.7 out of 10.

Truly out of this world.

The website also received an Awwwards nomination, following the Typography Honors recognition received by the 2024 Summit.

A nice bonus after all that creative exploration.

What’s Coming in 2026?

I’m glad you asked.

This year, we have a stronger focus on live workshops, panels and interactive sessions, all built around one mission:

Helping you become the brand builder AI can’t replace.

Here’s a look at what’s planned, including part of the 2026 speaker line-up.

You may recognise a few familiar faces in the image below, along with some brilliant new voices joining us.

What to Expect

• 40+ global experts
• 24 Keynotes
• 14 Live Q&As (2 speakers per session)
• 5 Live Panels
• 2 Live Fireside Chats
• 8 Live Workshops
• Live Design Battle
• 2 Networking & Co-Working Sessions
• Live Hot Seat Coaching
• Live Demos
• After Party
• $10,000+ in giveaways

And one shared mission:

Become the brand builder AI can’t replace.

Reserve your free ticket

Related Posts

• Brand Builders Summit 2026
• Crafting Unforgettable X-periences: The Art of Event Branding with Armin Vit

What does the future of branding look like, and why do creative leaders need a stronger voice in the boardroom?

In this episode, Jacob Cass & Matt Davies sit down with Ekaterina Solomeina, creative director, TEDx speaker, co-founder of Future London Academy, and host of Creative Capes, to explore how branding, design, and creative leadership are evolving.

As AI accelerates execution and businesses face more complex cultural, technological, and commercial challenges, the value of creativity is shifting. It is no longer enough for designers and brand leaders to simply make things look good. The real opportunity is to connect creativity to business value, strategic decisions, customer trust, innovation, culture, and growth.

Ekaterina shares her perspective on what separates talented creatives from true creative leaders, why many businesses still underestimate design, and how creatives can better communicate their value in language executives understand.

Together, Jacob and Ekaterina discuss the future of branding, the business value of design, the skills creative leaders need beyond the portfolio, and why more companies would benefit from having creative representation at the highest level.

If you want to become a more strategic, commercially valuable, and future ready creative leader, this conversation is packed with insight.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding. Branding has always been about more than just logos, campaigns, or clever taglines. But right now, the role of branding is changing fast. As businesses face AI disruption, cultural shifts, talent challenges, and more complex markets, the creative leaders who thrive won’t just make things look good. They’ll connect creativity to business value. So what does the future of branding look like? And what role should creative leaders play in shaping it? That’s what today’s conversation is all about. And today we’re joined by Ekaterina Solomeina. And Ekaterina is a creative director, a TEDx speaker, and co-founder of Future London Academy, an executive school for creatives. And over the past 20 years, she’s worked as a creative director. And in 2013, she co-founded that Academy to help creatives connect, learn and lead at a higher level. So today we’re talking about the future of branding, the business value of design, and what creative leaders can bring to the boardroom. It would be great to hear a little bit of your backstory and how you started Future London Academy and anything else you’d like to share.

Thank you for having me. And yes, it has been quite a journey. I’ve been in branding and creative industry for quite a while. As my official profile mentions 20 years, that’s probably about right, might be a bit longer. And I worked as a creative director and I worked across branding, advertising, anything from traditional branding, rebrands. I was very lucky to work with Michael Wolfe, the founder of Wafolins, absolutely legendary person within the creative industry, who is turning I think 93 this year. So he is the one who one of the, I suppose, legends and figures and branding who inspired me when I was starting within the industry. And now he has his own book as well that I would recommend to everyone because he is just a marvellous and genius person. And yeah, I’ve been working across a variety of design and creative fields from shooting commercials to digital product design or back then multimedia design, whatever we called back then. And I had quite a fun career. I worked with the Nutella Versace, I worked with really cool brands, big campaigns, whatever anyone dreams about. I’ve done it, won awards. But I think one thing that kind of started feeling throughout reaching probably 15 years or something like that, is that you get to this point where you’re already very good at what you do, you won your awards, you established yourself as a brilliant creative person, brilliant branding person, and you’re invited into these boardrooms with CEOs and CFOs and people who make bigger decisions, talk about strategic values of business. You feel like you lack this language to communicate with them. In general, there are less and less places for yourself to learn. I think that’s across any industry, but specifically in the creative industry, the further you go in your career, the less new information you can find that is actually helpful and practical. I think when you’re very junior, you can go on YouTube and literally learn anything from scratch, the more senior you get, the less useful information you can find, but also the less time you have to find it. That was basically my personal pain that started Future London Academy. I wanted the place for myself to learn, I wanted to progress, I didn’t think that my career stops after I’ve done the biggest campaign or whatever, take the boxes that I needed to take as a creative director. I wanted to learn, I wanted to be better. Again, speaking of Michael Wolfe, who still works and was working his whole life, he never retired from doing branding. I saw him as who I want to be, I didn’t want to stop doing my creative work, I wanted to continue to be inspired and also to feel fulfilled by the work I’m doing because if you do the same project, the same type of thing every day and you kind of, you know the recipe, you know how to do a good campaign, you know how to do a good brand, it becomes very repetitive and boring. So I was thinking, how can I continue being inspired, continue learning, continue be the best I could be? And yes, that’s what started Future London Academy. And it has been quite a ride since then. We obviously won awards. Actually, just last year we won the Norman Award for impact on education industry, which is especially important because I feel like we wanted to change not just what we do, but the industry overall. And the Norman, obviously another legend and father of modern design, who wrote Design of Everyday Things. So specifically getting an award from him meant a lot for us. And now all the top creative directors, heads of design come to study on our courses and programs, whether it is from Apple or Netflix. All top companies trust us as the best place to learn about branding, leadership, strategy, business, and all these topics that creatives and designers rarely taught. So I feel very grateful, very privileged, and also excited about what the future is, because there is so much more that will be happening in the industry in the next 10 years, that it excites me to wake up every day.

Awesome. Ekaterina, kudos to you for setting up. I mean, it’s not easy to set anything up, but to do it with such success is incredible. I just wanted to ask you about something you just said. So you mentioned you wanted to change the industry or have that impact. What was it like before? And then what’s the change that you’re making and looking to make in the sector?

Great question. So one thing, there are a few structural things. We as a society, as a, I don’t know, educational industry are set up in a certain way. We go to school, we go kindergarten school, then university, then maybe someone will do a MA or PhD or whatever. And if you do it back to back, which is what a lot of people do, you finish at the end of 25 with your degrees and everything. And then the rest of the life, you’re supposed to figure everything out on your own. So on one hand, you need to make these big decisions of who you want to be, when you grow up, what you want to do at the age of 18. And then for the rest of your life, you have to stick whatever you chose, and not learn in any shape or form, which is ridiculous considering how fast the industry changes, how much exciting innovation going on, and also how cool creativity is, and how much there is to learn from each other. So I always found that setup ridiculous in the first place. So we believe in never stop learning, and this is as Future London Academy our motto, never stop learning because it is true, and especially as a creative, you literally can never stop learning. The second thing that personally was confusing to me is what do you need to learn? Okay, you’ve learned the design, you’re good at design, you practice design, branding, whatever it is, creative skills. You kind of feel confident, I nailed it. I know what I’m doing. What do you learn next? How do you pick the subjects that you need to learn? What would be helpful to help you with your career? And that’s not a linear and easy question. And I personally, and we as a team, spend a lot of time trying to understand, okay, what do you need to learn at this stage in your career? Let’s say you have 10 or 15 years of experience to get to the next level. What are the skills you are missing? Or what skills that have been missing through your education, whether it was formal education through university, or whether you are self-taught designer and creative, who kind of learned everything by doing, what are the things they’re missing? And the answer is business. No one teaches designers business. No one teaches designers strategy in a broader sense. No one teaches designers leadership. And all creatives and designers at some point become leaders, whether it is leaders who manage big teams, or whether it is leaders, meaning people who influence them, even if you’re still one person team, you have a lot of influence. Or how do you influence people? All these things stop creatives and designers from growing further and actually achieving more, which is very sad to see when kind of everyone has this incredible journey until the age of 30, 40, 45, and then kind of gets this confusion point and midlife crisis because what am I supposed to do next? Like I ticked all my boxes. So, yes, that’s what we are trying to change and have been successfully changing for the past 13 years. So it’s a lot of fun.

That question of creative leadership is amazing. Like I do a lot of work with creatives and I do a lot of consulting with creative agencies. And I’ve seen this in my career. I ran a business, creative business for nearly 10 years. And then I went in house at a corporate and ran a creative team. And one of the things that I observed and have continually observed throughout my whole career is that what happens is you get a great designer who’s got a great personality, they’re brilliant, they do great work, and then they get promoted, right? So they go up the ranks and eventually they’re given a team, right? So here’s your team. Now, they’re a great designer or a great marketeer, but they’re not necessarily a great leader. And I see this a lot where that can either people can say, oh, actually I kind of like leading a team or they see it as a real drag because they don’t get to do the work that made them great. So courses on leadership, I think, are really, really kind of key. I wonder if you could share anything like any kind of key tips to anyone perhaps who is just taking on a new team or been promoted into an area that allows them to kind of hire into their team. What sort of tips might you point to to help them?

Sure. And I just first of all want to echo what you just said. This is exactly what happens to the majority of creators. But on top of that, I feel like right now it’s even harder because of the remote work and a lot of people not being in the office. That learning curve of you used to step up as a leader after observing your manager or your boss or whatever, your creative director managing other people for the past five years. So you roll a bottle on it or against it depending on how good your leader was. But you at least know what leadership could look like. Now with a lot of people having flexible and remote work, you might not see what this leadership looks like. And by leadership, I mean this in between conversations, how someone gave feedback, how another person reacted to feedback, what happened next. All these tiny micro-interactions that you see how someone deals with stress, how do you deal with difficult clients? All these things are now hidden behind zooms and homes and conversations that are private. And therefore, you’re right, when a new person steps up as a manager, as a leader, it is a very confusing place to be because you don’t really know what good looks like or what even bad looks like. You haven’t seen anything at all. You might have seen versions of it on maybe TV or maybe worse, TikTok, which do not learn anything from TikTok or rather definitely check your sources when you’re learning anything from TikTok. But it is a confusing place. On top of that, for any new role, you need practice. The one is to know what good looks like and then actually go in and practicing it and making your own mistakes and falling flat on your face. That’s part of it and also being okay with that and knowing that it’s okay. There are lots of micro things that just much harder now than ever before. This is why it’s even more important for learning to provide that support where someone doesn’t burn out when they become a leader. Someone doesn’t quit and feel like, I can’t do it, this is not my thing, like I’m really bad at it.

Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Yes, exactly because you haven’t seen other managers and leaders struggling with the same thing. It’s not easy. No one said it will be easy. But if you haven’t seen that struggle, you’re seeing there’s something wrong with me. I’m not supposed to do this. I’m not built for this. I don’t have skills for that. So equipping people with skills and confidence that they can do it and then support if they need to learn something new, how do you go about it? It’s very important. Now, practical tips. What new managers and new leaders can do? I suppose there are plenty of things and depending of what level of leadership we are talking about, because being a first-time manager leader, there is a lot that you need to understand about yourself as a leader, as a person, your leadership style, and how you can give the best value to your team. I think one just very random tip that I remembered from talking to actually Sir John Huggerty, another legendary person in design and advertising. He was saying, when you give feedback to your team or to any team member, you need to make sure they live with less work rather than with more work. I think it’s such a simple tip, but it’s actually quite profound if you think about it. And finding this balance where what you say, we have lots of ideas, I think. And as a leader, you have many opinions of someone else’s work. But what you say really defines what this other person will do. So how do you plan what you say and how do you provide feedback in a way that will be the most helpful? And one way to go about it is they need to do less work than more work. And it is a really good mind game that you can play before any meeting. Like what is the most helpful in this meeting? What kind of feedback should I provide in this meeting that will move the project further? And then as you progress throughout the career ladder, it’s about your personal skills as a leader, then it becomes about team dynamics. When you become manager of managers, you can’t really see every single person. So it becomes more about influencing people through other people, creating the vision that is compelling, that people can follow, understanding when to step in and where to step out. Again, the bigger the team grows, you can’t be in every meeting. So really understanding the process. We actually have a course on creative leadership that is taught by brilliant person, Matt, who was creative director and head of design of HUGE, which is an iconic creative agency. And he had the highest retention rate in his team. So way above industry average, way above, I forgot the exact number, it was something over 10 years or something. So people who worked for him, stayed with him for a very long time. And again, this is your role as a leader. We know that people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers. So your job becomes about retention, about creating the culture, the fosters, creativity, how you create conditions for creative work to be done. And then how do you know micro-manage? Like, how do you maintain the quality of work that you set, that you know this is what good looks like, but also not be in every single meeting. And Matt actually has this wonderful way where he describes it, kind of looking at the full process of creative work end to end from first initial briefing, getting everything to the end point and sending it to print or publishing or whatever, or is it digital then going live. Which points are the most crucial for you as a creative leader to be in and which ones you don’t need to be? And really being very strategic about that, because we all know the situation when we are too late to give feedback. It’s already going to print. You giving 10 pages of feedback about everything needs to be changed is not going to make anyone happy, not going to make a difference. It actually will create tension in the team and actually probably will produce worse work because now people will start changing things. There will be more mistakes. The final product will be even worse. So how do you think strategically about this overall journey of the project and where you can be in and out of it and where you can be the most helpful to the team, where they do need your opinion, where they do need your support, versus when you step out and let them fail, let them experiment, let them figure things out, but you gave them the criteria of what it looks like. So it’s a tough one. But then the most exciting one is when you go over and beyond that. So now you’re not just managing creative work, you’re managing business. And that I’ve seen the hardest. If the ones that I’ve described, I think there is nothing new, they have been happening throughout generations of creatives. You can read old books on that and there is wisdom in every single one of them and it’s the matter of practice and actually looking at it through the frameworks that someone can provide you. The last step is the hardest because when you get to Chief Design Officer, Chief Creative Officer, or whatever is the highest title, creative title within your organisation, your work stops being about just design, creativity and branding. It becomes, it starts being about business. And leaders within your business expect that you understand that. But a lot of creatives unfortunately don’t make this shift. It’s not natural to us. I don’t think that is natural to anyone to do creative work their entire life, join the industry because we love creativity, because we love doing branding. And then suddenly one day someone says, you know what, it’s not your job anymore. Stop doing this. You cannot be doing creative work. You need to actually think about the business. That’s the hardest part. This is where as Future London Academy, we also try to help leaders navigate this. We have our executive MBA program specifically about that, but also we try to publish content about this because I think this is quite a new shift. It wasn’t like this 10, 20 years ago. It’s definitely even the job title of Chief Design Officer is very new. We have the first Chief Design Officer of United States, former Airbnb co-founder, Microsoft High Chief Design Officer two weeks ago. It’s the first Chief Design Officer at Microsoft, literally two weeks ago through the entire history of the company. It is new. It’s a new shift that is happening in the industry. Anyone who is creative, whether it’s branding, creative design, product design, whatever that is, if you want to prepare for your next 10 years of career, you need to start thinking what you need to pick up now to be ready for that shift.

If you are serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside you will get live master classes, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you are done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That’s joinbba.com. Wow, tons of practical tips in there. I think you just hinted on the next section, which is the future of branding and like looking ahead and the skills that we need to look at and I guess study. So what do you see as the future in the industry, in the brand industry? Like what feels exciting? Anything feel outdated or broken that you want to share?

I suppose I can approach it from two sides. One is pure creative branding, which is again probably relevant for a big part of your audience and one is more of the strategic and kind of leadership part, which is very much connected. So from the branding side, obviously branding and brands do evolve and change with culture. I think brands reflect culture and society. So therefore, as we evolve as a society, brands and branding changes, that’s normal. So there I wouldn’t be able to predict long term future because literally this is how our society changes. But there are a few interesting things that excite me right now that I can see as, I would call them maybe micro trends, things that are exciting in this moment, anyone working in branding might enjoy. So for example, I love this new trend of that traditional way of thinking about audiences, segmentation, anything else is going away towards being, creating something for one weird person. So we used to think of demographics, and that kind of got canceled in terms of like, there is no such thing as 40 year old, whatever professional working. Then we started talking about psychographics and just kind of behaviors. And now it went into this weird, wonderful world, which I absolutely love, when there are content creators, there are brands who are just going full on weird, literally talking to one weird person out there, whether it is someone who’s super obsessed with some strange trend and let’s go very deep, nerdy about it. And that’s what my brand is all about. You can see a lot of this on TikTok, on social media, on any sort of platform. This is the content that goes viral, not your generic trying to cater to kind of every single person who likes sports and is an athlete or whatever. It is about this finding this very deep, quirky insight about one particular person and literally doubling down on it and making it as weird as possible and that’s what works. And I find it personally more fun because then there is more variety in brands and branding because it’s not, I suppose, commoditized and bland because we’re essentially talking to very similar audiences out there. Everyone wants to target people who have spending budgets in their prime time of buying and being interested in brands and culture and all of this. And a lot of brands define their audience as this influential and affluent people. Their love, quality and love, I can appreciate good brands. But with all honesty, it’s all about the one weird person they can find out there that you’re talking to. And turns out that if you talk to one, there are many other weird people who resonate with what you’re saying, so you don’t need to be afraid of that. And I suppose distribution helps with that. I think back then, when I suppose we started all in branding and advertising, that was a risky strategy because the distribution wasn’t there. You can be talking to this one person on one billboard, and this one person doesn’t live in this one city, so you kind of missed the whole opportunity of talking to your audience. But now with, again, social media, giving access to global audiences, you can have millions of people who feed this one quirky profile across the world and really, really resonating what you have to say. So that’s, I suppose, one example, but there are so many other things that, again, all about cultural relevance and all about brands, moving along with culture, not being stuck in what branding used to be, balancing consistency, balancing strong vision, strong point of view and all the other things. The second shift that excites me is obviously about branding as an industry and brand professionals, creative directors, branding strategists are moving now into the business conversations, which is, again, something that I already mentioned is happening across all design and creative industries. Design is being seen as a strategic tool more and more because with technology being commoditized, anyone can vibe code an app in a day, anyone can copy anything. Again, the actual visual skills, visualization skills are being commoditized. It comes back to imagination, it comes back to vision, it comes back to creative problem-solving. That’s what’s unique about any creative professional. We are trained in that way, we literally practice this every day, we can solve problems in unconventional ways whether it’s business problem, whether it’s creative problems, whether it’s marketing and branding problems. And that becomes the main value. Now to make sure that the rest of the organization sees this as a value, the creative and branding professionals need to understand the business side. So if you just come to your boardroom and say, in the age of AI, branding is the only thing that can differentiate us. We need to really invest more money in branding. Branding is amazing. Look, this latest campaign they have done is really cool. This re-brand, look how great typography is and this special effects and everything. And we can like, they will shut down immediately and they wouldn’t be interested in hearing what you have to say. Now, if as a creative or branding professional, come to the board, CEO, founder, whatever, the business person and say, I can help you increase your market share. I noticed that your tea brand or whatever is currently only consumed by mainly people who are kind of just looking for a cheapest brand to buy and whatever is on the shelf. But I can see how we can shift it to the demographic that cares about health, because we actually use these great ingredients that are higher quality. So we can appeal to this new wave of people who are very conscious about what the tea bag is made from and what goes into each tea leaf. And we can actually have that very clear in the packaging, in the brand and communication and everything. And that opens us total addressable market of an extra, let’s say, one billion people globally and within our current market of the UK or Australia, wherever you are, that even if we take a market share of 2%, this will increase sales by this amount of money. On top of that, our customer acquisition cost will go down because currently we are running ads very inefficiently because we are competing with all brands on the generic messaging of just buy tea and this is good tea. If we start talking about our ingredients and health and everything else, then we can run an experiment and see, and maybe I already ran an experiment and saw the ad that talks more about health benefit, customer acquisition cost goes down, the lending page will be optimized for that. Again, you can start talking about business metric and how you can save company money or make company more money. Any CEO, CMO or business leader will love you because you just came to them telling them how their company can make more money, grow their audience or save money on all the efforts they’re doing. Then you’ll become their best friend, you’ll become the go-to person for any advice, any conversation. Yes, you’re doing it through creative work and branding, but you have this unique insight how to make business grow and that’s what matters.

Yeah, that’s about the strategy question, isn’t it? Growing the brand from a business perspective, as you say, like you’ve got to have both sides, haven’t you? You’ve got to have that creative brand edge, understanding consumers, understanding the problem that’s being solved, understanding how to communicate. But then you have to plug that into an organization that can deliver on that. So it’s about harmonizing both sides. Such a challenge and so needed. So it sounds like you’re doing some really awesome work. I had a question for you. Obviously, Future London Academy, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t ask you about the rise of AI into the future and what your take on where that’s going to push the industry in the future. So, AI, go, Ekaterina.

Great question. I was wondering if we can-

You knew it was coming. No, I took.

But it’s actually quite interesting. We were having this conversation yesterday. So obviously, as Future London Academy, we teach about the future and everything that is going. So naturally, we are in the industry with top leaders constantly having this conversation, what they’re seeing, what they’re feeling. Yesterday, we actually were sitting with some of top CEOs and CFOs as part of our final judging panel for our Executive MBA program. We were just discussing what they’re seeing in the industry and what shifts. They were comparing, I suppose, our wonderful alumni who were graduating and presenting their final projects. Again, trying to sense what is the feeling in the market. What they said is quite interesting. I think this year became less about AI overall in general. I don’t know if you see that in your conversations. I think last year was definitely very AI focused, very AI heavy about how we can use AI for this, how we can use AI for that, how it will change. This year, it’s becoming a bit of more of an underlying conversation out there, that AI is there, it’s not going away. There is a bit of a fear and uncertainty regarding the industry, the job market. There are so many uncertainties about who we are, what our jobs and professions will look like. But there is no urge to suddenly plug AI in everything that we do. I think everyone played enough with it to understand where it can be used, where it can have limitation. It obviously evolves very fast, so we’ll see more new use cases. There is a big shift on obviously using AI for operationalizing companies, and that’s where there is a massive impact that is being seen on making companies more effective and kind of going operational side companies or people in general, making people more effective. Now within the creative world, as any tool, I think it has so many great things that it has to offer. And we’ve been through many shifts throughout our careers, from Internet and Photoshop appearing to many more tools like Figma appearing. I actually remember when I was in one of the agencies, and obviously back then it was Photoshop that we used to draw and to create branding. And I remember I had an art director who said, you can’t really say that you created a good branding if you haven’t drawn it by hand, because he was trained to draw everything by hand with all those curvy rulers. And I think there is some beauty in doing everything by hand. It definitely helps your thinking process. But it’s not how I was trained. And I might sketch something about I wouldn’t do the final version of the logo using this all special rulers and circles and things to create the shape. And I remember at that point thinking how interesting, like clearly I grew up in a completely different era that doesn’t even come across my mind. And I think that’s what the future generation will feel like. Whatever we are using as tools now to do creative work, to do branding will be very different 10 years in the future. And we have to adapt, we have not to be stuck to our way of thinking, but also we need to understand what we can offer as humans, as creative, which is unique. And it probably won’t be the very good visualization skills, but it probably will be something around thinking about understanding humans, because at the end of the day, these brands will be consumed by humans. And we’re closer to humans than AI, so we understand better. It will be a lot about communication as well. And I think that’s where AI lacks a lot. I think there is a difference between writing or summarizing versus good copywriting. And I think we all know the difference. I read somewhere, I think one of the copywriters saying, now you know how we all felt the entire time when everyone said they could write, but copywriting is not writing. And I feel like this is exactly what we are experiencing in other parts. The fact that you can write doesn’t mean you’re good at writing. The fact that you can create an image doesn’t mean it’s a good image or brand strategy. Even if Chad GPT or Claude wrote you a go-to-market or brand strategy, it doesn’t mean it’s a good one. And it requires understanding in the context and connecting many pieces to actually decide what good looks like. So I am excited about where the industry is going, because I don’t think it would be fun to work in an industry that is just stuck and it’s the same and nothing changes. It’s great to see changes. I don’t know where it will push us. I can appreciate and empathize with an anxiety that is out there, that is tough. But the only thing we all can do as creatives, as humans is not be scared and just trying things out, playing around and seeing where we want to go as professionals.

All right. From here, I’d love to just loop back to it.

I love that there is no one wants to go deep into conversation about AI. This is exactly what I feel like this year is all about. If last year we would have had a debate for another half an hour, what AI can and cannot do, what it’s shifting or not shifting right now, everyone’s like, oh yeah, that’s what it is. Let’s move on.

Every conversation has been about AI, but there’s always a different perspective, especially depending on what the conversation is about. But I do want to go back to the creative leadership thing we’re talking about because that’s the theme of this. And getting creative leaders into boardrooms, like going upstream a little bit more. So how do we actually go about that? Like what are creators doing wrong and what should they be doing to actually get there?

My favorite question, and literally this is where we are putting a lot of efforts for Future London Academy to make sure there are more creatives and designers at that board level. For many reasons, I personally believe that obviously creativity and design has enormous power. And as I already mentioned, first of all, it’s a very unique perspective and skill set that creative or design leader can add to the boardroom with their creative problem solving, imagination, empathy, and all of that the businesses need. Now, yes, to growth of businesses and growing their revenue, but I also feel like creatives and designers are the only ones currently who care about sustainability, ethics, humanity, other things that maybe CRO or CFO or COO might not be as obsessed about. And we need those people in those high level conversations to make sure these big companies, we as consumers, we as humans are all influenced by and affected by. We want someone speaking on our behalf there in the boardrooms and shifting this decision in the right direction. And I would dare to say not just companies, but governments and other organizations where decisions will affect all of us. I want more creatives to be there because they won’t make decisions just from the pure financial, capitalistic point of view. They will make decisions understanding the broader context, the system thinking aspect of it, the humans they involved in it, the planet they is involved in it, and all these other things that very naturally as humans we are drawn to. And in general, we come from a place of curiosity and open-mindedness that is very often lacking at that. So one is I just generally want more people to be at that level. Now, we’re not there yet. The trend is positive. And I already mentioned that there are more and more chief design offices and chief creative offices appearing in larger organizations, which is a great thing, which shows that there is a massive opportunity for anyone who is a creative designer right now to step up to those roles. But you’re right, this is not as easy as just wishing that you get the role and then getting it or just applying for it. And there are a few elements. One is understanding the business context, understanding business language, understanding how businesses are operating. And again, it’s not something as creatives as designers we are ever thought, through the design schools or self-education. These are not the conversations that come up for us throughout our careers. So if we want to make this strategic move to boardrooms and chief design offer positions, or even if you are an independent person and just want to win bigger clients because they will trust you bigger budgets, you need to understand the business side. So when the client comes to you, you don’t offer them every brand. You don’t offer them a creative campaign. You offer them a business solution. And for that, you need to understand what pain point the business has, what metrics they’re using to address it, what is the strategic metrics they are having this year as the numbers they need to hit. The CEO would not care about rebranding new packaging or whatever. The CEO cares about whether they’re hitting this financial target. Or maybe it’s not about financial target. Maybe it’s about market growth and they’re actually not trying to make profit this year. They’re trying to invest as much money as possible into securing a bigger market share. So again, that’s where you can come in and offer that strategy how to secure market share. So it’s not one-feet-all. You really need to understand what’s happening inside that business that you’re talking to or you’re part of. What are the strategic business priorities and how you can help influence them through your creative and design work. And for that, yes, you need to understand operations, finance, P&L, marketing, logistics and supply chain, all sorts of subjects that are not on designer’s agenda whatsoever. And this is the reason why we have our executive MBA that literally teaches that because there is literally no place. If you go to a traditional MBA, even though they technically cover those subjects, they cover it from perspective of non-creative business. You actually cannot apply that to your work. You will learn what an ideal P&L might look like. But when you go to your company and look at the real P&L, it’s like, I have no idea how to translate that knowledge to what I’m looking at. So P&L, by the way, Profit and Loss Statement for anyone who is not at P&L stage yet. It’s the most important document, one of the three most important documents in financial statement universe for businesses. So very important to understand how to read one and which one to read as well.

Can I just jump in there? Yes. Having that language is one thing, but one thing I’ve experienced in my career is, I’ve got a background in design, is that one thing that we as creatives are brilliant at is about stepping into, looking at all the information that’s available to us, assessing that, figuring out what’s important, and then stepping forward and proposing ways forward. That might be a little uncertain, we’ll obviously going to base it on the knowledge that we’ve got, but we’re used to stepping into the unknown. We’re used to trying stuff, designing stuff. I’ve shifted my career from doing the actual designing of, I guess, marketing materials and advertising and creative stuff like that, to actually helping business leaders designing parts of their business, like exactly what you were saying. I just think there’s so much that we as creatives have to offer modern business in a way that, because we think in a completely different way to people who are, they like surety, they like the data, they like the numbers. But if you want to progress, if you want to innovate, if you want to change things up, you can’t just look back at the safety of yesterday. You have to step forward into the unknown of tomorrow. So I just wanted to clap you on that one. We’ve got to give people the vocabulary, we’ve got to give people the knowledge and the information. But then don’t lose sight of what makes us great as creatives. I think that’s such an important point to make.

I’m glad you mentioned that. This is exactly, I 100 percent agree with you. And I suppose these are the two sides of the coin. So as with any game, you need to learn the rules, how to play it, but then you need to have the skills and the tricks. So yes, the finance and the business is literally the rules of the game. You cannot be influential within the business if you don’t understand how business works. It’s just no one going to listen to you, no matter how many tricks you have up your sleeve. Now, when you do get to those conversations, when people trust you, they understand you’re a decent person, you understand, you have the intention to grow this business together with all of us. Now, exactly to your point, what unique do you bring as a creative person? Because there is no point in all of us turning into CFOs. We don’t want anyone who goes through Future London Academy programs to become a CFO or just be a business person. That would be a very boring wall to live in. There are enough of people who are just obsessed about business, and it’s fantastic. And I think it’s great. There are people who love numbers, who love looking at spreadsheets. Creatives should understand spreadsheets, should tolerate them to a certain extent. They don’t need necessarily to obsess about them, and maybe they can spend their time actually doing exactly what you said, creative problems or imagination division. That’s, I suppose, what creatives most well-known for is setting up this vision for the company, and Steve Jobses of the world who are setting up where we are going, and we might not see what it is, but these creative leaders can visualize it for us, visualize in the verbal way, visualize in a very practical visual way, so they can help visualize the future. This is what creativity is. It helps in the world of uncertainty, in a world where no one knows in general what the future looks like, but also where even every day changes so much, creatives can provide that tactile, that visualized prototype version of the future and align people around it, so we can all move forward in the same direction. Previously, throughout the, suppose, the history of creativity has been done through, again, creating a prototype that everyone can believe in or creating a visual deck or whatever this is, for people to believe in the future, because if we all sit in the room and we just talk, we all have different picture of what the future looks like, so a creative coming in and using the facilitation tools of what it is all drawing together, what it is us creating one sentence that we believe in, that what the future is and just really aligning all the people with different opinions in the room around the vision we all believe in, that’s one of the skills. Another brilliant skill is obviously the different point of view and creative problem-solving, seeing the system, seeing the connection between the user and the business and the market and kind of all the different elements. Again, that’s another very important point of view. And I think that’s what creatives want to bring anyway, so I don’t think they necessarily need to be taught that, but I think the rules of the game is what stops them from bringing this vision across and communicate it in the way that other leaders will appear. And actually, communication, like speaking of AI and everything else, that’s probably one of the most important skills that we all will have to learn and relearn in the next 10 years. And communication has always been difficult. And the more senior you get, the more important communication becomes because potentially you only have 10 minutes or one minute with a senior person to get your idea across or ask a question or get the information you need to make the next step. So you really need to be super clear about what are you communicating, how you’re communicating that. And I think being able to be concise, being able to be clear, being able to ask the right questions, it is some of the most important skill for any leader, not just creative, but anyone who is moving up that ladder, who wants to be in those conversations. We actually, one of the, our faculty members who teach in our executive program, our executive MBA for design leaders, is executive recruiter for Google. So he basically hires C-level for Google. So it’s fascinating to hear what he had to say, what he looks for when he hires for C-level versus top management or lead, mid-management, and what skills you actually need to have at that level. And a lot of it comes down to communication, because hopefully by that time, if you’re already at that top VP position, you’re probably good at your job. I think you proved yourself. That’s a note. Now, can you communicate with a lot of people in a clear way where your message is not lost? Because again, you might be at Google. There are thousands of people who work in the organization. How can you make sure that at that level, whatever you communicate is cascaded down across all departments and not gets lost because you don’t have the luxury of talking to every single person. You don’t have a luxury to be in many meetings. So how can you learn these communication skills that actually will make you influential, trustworthy, and visionary leader? That’s a massive skill to learn. And again, this is all this big package of skills that creatives and designers are never learned, never taught. And that’s, yeah, that’s we at Future London Academy believe that a massive gap is. And I hope there are more creatives who do that, because I think if creatives don’t step up, unfortunately, someone will take that position of chief design and chief creative officers who may be been in a short course about design and speaks business very well and maybe can dress up and look like a designer. And for the rest of the business, it would be creative enough to make creative decisions, maybe not as grounded in the broader system thinking as traditional creatives and designers.

All right, I do have a follow up question to make it a little bit more practical, because there is such a huge gap and there’s so much to learn to climb that ladder to get to that spot. So, for someone listening to this, what would be some practical first steps to get started? They may not have the means for a huge course or MBA or anything like that, but how do they get going?

If you’re working in a company, first of all, befriend people from other departments. So, go for a coffee with your finance person, your marketing person, your salesperson, your legal person. Just befriend them. You don’t need to have too deep of a conversation. Just try to understand what they worry about, what they care about, what’s on their mind. Have you ever had a coffee with a legal person? Have you ever had a coffee with a finance person? If you haven’t, literally invite them tomorrow. They’re also humans. They also have their lives and families and interests. Trust me, you’ll learn so much from just talking to them in a friendly matter. So ask what are their priorities? You might be trying to approve your budget for the new rebrand or for hiring more people in your design team for the past six months and hitting the wall. If you take for a coffee a few people from finance and understand what pressures they are on, what costs they’re trying to cut, but where are they giving budget? Where CEO said, you know what this line on the P&L or this area of our business, spend as much as you need, this is a priority right now. We’re expanding to Brazil and whatever we need to do to expand to Brazil, that’s what you spend money on. Now, that is a massive insight. So now if you say, I want to grow my design team because I actually want to start hiring more people in Brazil, we can have the local insight into the culture and the what’s happening within consumers, within that market and we will have team on the ground that can make our brand more relevant in those markets. Look at that, you already sign off yourself a budget for a new hire. So if you don’t know these things, you don’t know why you’re hearing no, whether it’s for your personal promotion, whether it is for some decisions that you’re trying to make within your creative or branding or design world. So take anyone for a coffee, have a chat, that’s step number one. If you are a consultant, if you are an individual freelancer or someone who tries to win bigger clients, I would say the same, ask clients more questions. Ask them what are they really trying to achieve. Yes, they come to you with a new branding or new website they need or app or whatever they came to you for or packaging, poster. I don’t know what they ask you to create. Why are they asking you to create that? What is this video that you’re shooting? What is it for? Is it to create brand awareness? And the only thing they care about is that their brand is out there and more people can see it and they just try to be more visible in the UK market. Fantastic. Then what do you need to make it happen, to make it more visible in the UK market? Is it a video that you need to show to be more visible in the UK market? If YouTube doesn’t have any followers, and this video will be dropped to five lovely people who will watch it, is that really where the budget should be spent? Or should it be maybe more social collabs with influences? Yes, you will use your lovely strategic thinking as a cinematographer and videographer to curate this content, because you know all the influences within the industry. You will co-create Instagram content with them, and that will give them visibility within the UK market using the skills that you have. But maybe it’s not this beautiful, glamorous video that you were asked to create, because what happens then? You take this project and you deliver it to the perfection. Now it didn’t make any impact. The client hopes that this massive video, they’ve seen these videos do well, they go viral and then the fame comes, and then it didn’t. And then you’ll never be hired again by this company because they spent money on you, you didn’t bring any money back, why would they hire you? Now, if you dug deeper and really understood what they’re trying to do and really tried to help them achieve that through the tools that you have, through the network that you have, through the skills that you have, even if you don’t succeed to the highest point, nothing is guaranteed in this life. But if the client sees that you really try to understand what problem they’re trying to solve, you genuinely try to help them solve this problem and grow. They will write signs here and there. There is a bit of mention here, influencer reshared it there, and maybe this real got at least some views compared to this video that would have set on their website, maybe, I don’t know where. Then you can already say, look, this is what we learned from this, this is what we done right. If you want to do it again, I think this is how I can help you again. But it all starts with conversation and all starts with question. Ask what are you as a client, as a business trying to achieve? And is that what you ask me to do? Are we 100% sure we’re going to achieve it? And how are we going to measure that we achieve that? Is it views on the video or is it even the new packaging? Are we expecting the increase of sales, increase of sales in which market, of which audience, new audience, existing audience? What are we trying to do? Let’s set the targets up. So we’ll set up each other for success and then we’ll continue this relationship for the future.

Love that. It’s about, I think that’s such a great tip to give people like around asking the right questions, right? Don’t just take a brief, do the brief. Like if you don’t understand what’s behind it, then you’ve got a problem. I always like to think you’re there to improve the client’s condition. You know, and when I say client, it’s like your client could be internal or external, right? It could be someone’s hiring you. So you’ve got to understand what improvement means to them, what problems they’ve got and what they’re looking for you to help them to solve. And there’s loads around that, isn’t there? There’s the root issue, but then there’s probably also a little bit periphery kind of challenges. You know, I often get asked to help with communication of a strategy, for example. That’s not normally why I’m hired. I’m hired to help craft the strategy, but then I find that there’s a need within the leadership team or wherever it might be that they could do with a hand, someone stepping up at the town hall and sharing it in a high-energy, exciting and hopefully bearded way. And that kind of works. So you’re right. It’s about what’s the challenge? What’s the problem? How can I add value? And really picking that apart. So I think that’s a great tip.

Thank you. And also having a coffee chat, I think what you’re doing there is trying to get some leverage or insight, as you mentioned, because everyone in an organization has their own agenda. And if you can tap into that to understand how can you help them and they help you, that’s going to help you get a little bit of leverage for whatever.

And it’s also about building relationships, right? People don’t ever, as you were saying, Ekaterina, no one sort of trains you in this. It’s like relationships are everything, like influences everything. And just building empathy and understanding, and just kind of being seen around as somebody who’s connected and thoughtful, and just a nice person to be around, rather than this kind of grumpy creative who sits in the corner, kind of demanding that everybody looks at Kerning and Pantone swatches. You need to be connected. You need to understand the reality of what happens outside of your bubble. And I think that’s such another great thing. Relationships are underplayed. We talked about AI a moment ago. That’s one thing AI can never do. It can’t build those human-to-human connections and build those relationships around a business to help then influence it going forward. So usually mine is with beer rather than coffee. But I definitely think I’d definitely recommend the same thing because you would learn so much from other people and building those relationships. And it’s free. And it’s free, right? And then if you do want to kind of push an idea forward or you need them to back you at a moment, if you’ve already got a relationship in place, a working relationship, that could be so helpful because even if you’re in a competitive environment, if somebody’s had a coffee with yourself, but then the other person that’s sort of countering you, they haven’t had a coffee with, they can’t help it. Humans will instinctively connect with the people and back the people that they feel that they understand. So I think that’s so crucial. More coffee is needed and beers. Jacob, drink the pasta.

I’ll write that one down. Awesome. All right. There’s one final segment I’d love to just go a little bit into is your podcast. You wrote a podcast too, Creative Capes, and you’ve interviewed some really top-tier guests. Is there any insights you’d like to share from some of your episodes or anything else you just want to unpack?

So many, and yes, I’ve been very lucky to sit together with some of the most inspiring guests including Michael Wolfe. We actually visited his house. Everyone wants to see how Michael Wolfe’s house looks like. Go to our YouTube, check out the episode with him, and all the paintings he has. It’s actually, I think maybe the biggest learning for me is going inside people’s minds. I think practical tips and tricks, I can list many and there are many that they share. But I feel like what is very unique that I try to do without podcast, and I’m very lucky that people who come to our podcast, majority of them are my very good friends and my former colleagues, or people who I worked with, so they trust me and our team that we will do a good job. They invite us to their houses, so we just filmed an interview with James Hilton, who is the co-founder of AKQA, one of the iconic digital creative agencies that I think he sold majority of the stake for half a billion dollars to WPP in a few years back. So he did very well. They have offices, I think, in 13 different countries, something like that. So they’re a massive company, and he is reflecting on obviously his years in the industry and what he has been doing to grow the company, but also what he has done since and kind of what he reflects on. He may be done wrong while growing his business. And that’s valuable insight into his life. But what’s even more exciting, we went to his house. So he invited, he’s a very reserved person. He’s very introverted person. He doesn’t invite people around. But he trusts us and he loves, he also teaches in our executive MBA program. So he’s seen what we try to bring to the industry. So he believes that this is something that is needed and this is why he keeps collaborating with us. And he showed us around his house, his vinyls that he has, the books that he reads, how his work desk looks like, the first thing that he bought when he earned his big money. Like it’s a fascinating insight into someone else’s life. And I think that’s where creativity comes from. Speaking again about remote or in-person, we miss out on all these in-betweens right now. We have very strategic and well-planned conversations over Zoom. We have an agenda. We know what needs to be discussed. We finish on time. We’ve done everything. But we miss out on the in-betweens of the water cooler conversations, of the things that are currently on your mind. And they’re not really about anything, but it’s just something I thought about, I want to mention. But I watched these episodes or something on Netflix or Apple TV or who knows, or I actually went to this museum. Random things or something about my dog or my cat, who knows, this in-between conversations, this is what gives us inspirations as creatives. And we don’t have enough of them right now in our lives. So that’s what we try to provide with Creative Capes Podcast and really get into the insides of these minds. And we just launched the latest episode with Ivy Ross, Chief Design Officer for Hardware Devices at Google. So she’s the, again, Chief Design Officer got to this C-level. But she’s, she worked at Mattel, she partied with Calvin Klein, she was at Studio 54. She had just such an incredible life. They just like, I could listen to her for hours. And yes, I learned a lot from her about Chief Design Officer and the value of business, how to bring it to the boardroom. But I also learned so much about her as how to be inhuman, how to live this life so you stay inspired, you feel happy, you feel fulfilled, and you actually enjoy this journey that you have. So if you want to have a broader conversation about what creativity and design is, but also understand what business impact it can have, definitely check it out.

Yeah, it’s amazing. And that’s how I feel about interviewing folks like yourself. You interview passionate people that have so much energy that they bring to the table and they share it and you just learn from those different perspectives. So thank you for coming in today and sharing your wisdom. And thank you so much. Is there any closing remarks you want to share and where can people connect with you and learn more?

Thank you. And I’m a very friendly person. So anyone listening, please connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s Ekaterina Solomeina. It’s a very long name, so I’m sure it’s in the title of this podcast, in the show notes somewhere. Find it. I love meeting new people. So Ekaterina Solomeina on LinkedIn. Do find me. Obviously, follow Future London Academy. We are on all social networks. You can find us. We constantly provide insights from the industry in a very short and very easy form. Our podcast, Creative Capes, obviously listen to that. And if you are the person who feel like, okay, now is the time when I’m ready to become Chief Design Officer or Chief Creative Officer, obviously check out our Executive Program for Design Leaders, our executive MBA program essentially that teaches all these things in London and Silicon Valley. So it’s an immersive year experience. So definitely changed so many lives and it just keeps inspiring me seeing what our alumni do from their career perspective and from business perspective. Yeah, and I think keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re listening to this podcast, you must be a very curious, creative person. So first of all, you must be curious to listen to some new information. So well done to you. Don’t never stop being curious. That’s what makes creativity. And also never stop creating. I think it’s so important in the world that we live right now. Never stop that creative process. And as you said, Matt, like even when you get to this strategic conversation, still be creative, be that person who comes up with those ideas. Yes, learn business, learn how to translate your ideas, but yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. And our life will be better with more creatives at all sorts of leadership and influential positions.

Nice. I think we should close with the slogan from Future London Academy, right? Like, would you agree, Ekaterina, do you want to remind us of the slogan?

Oh, you mean our manifesto?

Yeah.

Well, no, you said it earlier.

I’ll never stop learning. Actually, can I read our manifesto because I think…

Let’s do it. So never stop learning. This is the manifesto. Go on.

Manifesto from Future London Academy. You’re brave and conventional, weird, fun, intelligent, passionate, positive, sarcastic, hardworking, imaginative, introverted, extroverted, ingenious, innovative, wise, original, always young, resourceful. You’re here to erase borders, question everything, inspire others, ignite ideas, make friends, challenge the impossible, start a movement, invent solutions, think different, change the world and never, never stop learning.

Boom.

There we are.

Thanks so much for coming on.

We’ve really enjoyed this conversation and best of luck to you and everybody in your team for all the great work you’re doing over there. So appreciate you and kudos to you. So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

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5 five practical ways to get started with value based pricing

1. Look beyond the deliverable

When a client asks for a logo, website or brand strategy, ask what they hope it will change.

Are they trying to attract better customers?
Increase trust?
Launch a new offer?
Compete at a higher price point?

The value is not in the number of logo concepts or pages you produce. It is in what the work helps the business achieve.

2. Talk to the decision maker early

Do not wait until the final presentation to discover what the owner or director actually wanted.

Before proposing the work, ask how they define success, why the project matters now and what happens if nothing changes.

This helps you understand the real problem before committing to a solution.

3. Price the value of solving the problem

Hourly billing can punish you for becoming better at your job.

If your experience helps you solve a problem in two days rather than five, the result is not worth less. The client benefits from your judgement, experience and ability to avoid expensive mistakes.

Price the value of solving the problem, not simply the time spent at your desk.

4. Offer three ways forward

Rather than sending one quote, present three fixed price options.

For example:

• A focused brand review with clear recommendations
• A strategic refresh of the most important brand elements
• A complete strategy and identity engagement

Each option should help the client make progress, with different levels of scope, support and certainty.

5. Give clients a meaningful reason to choose you

Saying that you offer great service, creative thinking and tailored solutions will not separate you from others.

Be specific about who you help, the problem you solve and why your approach is particularly suited to that situation.

You might become the designer for professional service firms moving upmarket, the strategist for founder led businesses that have outgrown their identity, or the studio that helps hospitality brands prepare for expansion.

The aim is not to appeal to everyone. It is to become the obvious choice for the right client.

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The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to JUST Branding. Today, we’re joined by Jonathan Stark, a pricing expert, author and advisor who helps independent professionals stop trading time for money and start building businesses around expertise, outcomes, and authority. Jonathan is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, which we’re going to talk about today. He’s host of Ditching Hourly and co-host of The Business of Authority. So we’re in good hands here. His work challenges one of the most common assumptions in creative services, that billing by the hour is fair, professional, even safe. For designers, strategists, consultants, and folks listening in, this conversation gets right into the heart of the business model. So are you selling time or are you selling judgment? Are clients buying your hands or you’re thinking? If your expertise helps you solve problems faster, why should your pricing punish you for getting better? Very good questions. So today we’re unpacking why hourly billing is broken and how value pricing actually works, and how to build a business of authority, where clients pay for the outcomes, trust, and expertise, and not just the hours on a timesheet. So welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Thanks for having me. Excellent intro. You really set the table there for us. We’ve got a lot to do here.

Well, you built a whole body of work around this idea of hourly billing is nuts. So for all our audience of designers, strategists, consultants listening in, who’ve perhaps built hourly their whole career, what’s the first thing they need to unlearn?

First thing they need to unlearn is that price does not come from cost. Price comes from value. Or if I was going to say that even more surgically, I would say that an acceptable price comes from value, not from cost. So that’s the summary. We could talk about it for a half an hour just this piece. But cost, if you’re setting your prices based on your costs, you could be setting prices that are unacceptable to the client because the cost sort of insists that you mark up your time and then let’s say we get to, just to throw it around, remember $10,000. Well, if it’s not worth $10,000 to the client, it’s not an acceptable price. They’re going to say no. But if you work backwards and you find out what your assistance is likely worth to the client, maybe it’s $5,000. It’s only worth $5,000. It’s like, okay, for 500 or 1,000 or some fraction of $5,000, what could I do to help this client move the needle? Probably not the thing they asked me for in the first place. But this is a complete 180-degree mental shift from setting prices based on what it’s worth to the client instead of how much it costs you to deliver.

Well, let’s get this quickly out of the way then. Why is Hourly Billing such a bad fit for expert-based work?

Well, because if you know what you’re doing, you’re probably really fast at delivering good outcomes. You’re getting penalized for getting better at your job. Probably everyone listening has experienced, if you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ve experienced someone much younger than you getting jobs that you really should have gotten because their hourly rate is lower. When you put yourself out there with an hourly tag assigned to you, it’s just begging the client to compare you apples to apples with everybody else, which completely ignores how fast you are and how good you are and the kind of results that you typically provide to your clients. It just ignores all the important parts and says, I’m an apple, I’m 50 cents, that apple is 25 cents, you’re going to buy the 25 cent apple. Yep.

All right. And on the opposite spectrum of that, what are some of the big or hidden incentives that are created by growing the value base?

Well, the joke is if you get paid by the hour and you want to raise, it just works lower.

Right. If you think about it, charging by the hour incentivizes the executioner, if you like, of the work to take longer. It’s immoral in that sense. Why would you incentivize something that actually then decreases in value to one part of the team, but then increases the value to the other? So it’s and vice versa. It’s funny enough, I work with a few agencies and I had this situation recently where I was on this project. And there was a prickly conversation with the salesguides who had just sold this project. And they said, Matt, this kind of X amount of weeks that you wanted to do the strategy on, we’ve had to squeeze because the client’s budgets are not where we needed them to be. And so I said, why did you squeeze them? Surely we should have expanded them and dropped the price. In other words, why would you automatically go to squeezing a price because they assume the time that you’re going to spend on it is less and therefore the cost is less? Well, no, that’s not the case actually. But anyway, it’s such a difficult thing for people to get their heads around, isn’t it? Why is that? Why did it start, Jonathan, in this? Why have we got ourselves in this pickle?

Yeah. If I just look at myself as the test subject, this was not obvious to me until I was managing people at a dev shop. My background is in software development. When I was an employee and then I started working at a firm, I still had that employee mentality like, I put in the time, you owe me the money. It’s a salary question. Back then, this is like the early 2000s, late 99, 2000, 2001. The deal is, but in seat from nine to five, $50,000 a year or whatever it is. Inside of that, you just make sure you don’t do anything that’s going to get you fired. So if you keep up your end of the deal and they keep up their end of the deal, then everybody’s reasonably happy. And if you want to overachieve, that’s up to you, but it may or may not increase the amount of money you get, regardless. Okay. And probably a lot of people worked for someone and had a salary or something like that. I think it might come from there because that’s the piece that I find I have to sort of de-brainwash people out of, like the ones that did have a job job. Because when you meet someone who has been entrepreneurial all along and had a paper route and then, you know, mowed lawns and all that stuff, hourly seems insane to them. But there’s just not that many. There’s just, it’s a smaller pool of people who have kind of been entrepreneurial from a young age. So you come out of corporate or you come out of an employment situation. And I did it. Everybody does it. They say, oh, my salary was $100,000 or let’s, for easy numbers, my salary was $120,000 a year. So I need to make $10,000 a month. So I want to work this many hours per week and, you know, per month and if there’s four weeks, then they just divide. And like, here’s my hourly rate, you know, $120,000 divided by 2,000 hours. Boom, that’s my rate. Okay. And so now they’re thinking like an employee. They show up, they put in the time, that’s the deal. And the whole concept of outcomes is invisible to them. It’s totally invisible to them. And as long as that’s invisible, you don’t know what else to price. You just don’t know what to price. Everything seems… People who are listening to me right now that are like, what are you talking about? You’re the person who needs to really listen. Cause we’re, hopefully we’ll unpack it and make the light bulb go on. But if this, if you’re like, there’s nothing else to sell. I put in the hour and I do my job and that’s what they’re paying for. It’s like, that is not what they’re paying for. You just can’t see the thing that they’re buying.

That is so true. That is so true. So I used to run an agency, right? And we came across this massive problem where I was in this trap like you were talking about, right? So I had a team, we had a team of 12 and we would, you know, to cost out the project, we would kind of work out all the tasks and figure out how many hours we reckon they would take. And then we had an, I can’t remember the hourly rate at the time, I don’t even know how we came up with it. It was just like finger in the air. We think we’re worth this, we can get away with this, this is our hourly rate. And then what would indefinitely, will happen on some projects was, for whatever reason, particularly creative, right? Like this is a challenge because sometimes clients don’t like something that they see. They might have described exactly what you produce, but then they look at it and they go, don’t like it.

That’s not it, yeah.

Right, so then there’s this argument, because you say, well, I spent the time on it, as per my quote, and they say, yeah, but actually you didn’t deliver what you said you deliver. Now, who’s right? Now, what that showed me over years, and it took me years as well, and a near breakdown to figure out, there’s such a mismatch here, because the client is buying a result, and I’m selling hours, particularly like you were saying, the salaries and that kind of thing. Then what happens is, is that the agency doubles down and has to, and then you get the account managers having to have these really awkward conversations with clients. The whole thing is a mismatch, and it often ended in tears in one way that the agency or for me as the agency owner, I was crying, right, or the client was crying because we were enforcing the rules that they’d actually signed up for but didn’t really understand until they entered the process. So the whole thing is like for me, and I learned the hardware is not healthy for client, for agency or deliverer of the work, it’s bonkers.

So that’s nuts, it is nuts.

It is nuts. I wonder if only we had someone to talk to us about how nuts it is, Jacob, that would be so helpful. That’s basically what we thought. And then we thought, Jonathan could come on and discuss this. So I guess the question to segue into is like, OK, if that’s not a good system and if let’s assume we’ve some of the folks on this show have started to kind of get their head around that, what’s the better way? What’s the what’s the promised land? How do we shift out of this trap of selling time?

There are a bunch of ways, but just I’m going to stick with the value pricing concept. You guys brought that up first. There are other ways of price that I also like. Hourly is just you just got to stop doing hourly. But in the particular situation you’re describing, you did a bunch of work, you did what you said you were going to do, it ended up costing this amount of money. The client sees it and they’re like, this is not what we wanted. And I’ve seen this. I’ve seen people get fired over this. I’ve seen lawsuits because they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then when the project is launched or whatever the outcome is, when the deliverables are delivered, and then the CEO shows up for the first time and is like, this is garbage. What have you all been doing? This is nothing. How much did I pay for this? Right. So if you just, it’s so bad. It’s so painful. Probably anybody listening that’s been in business longer than a few years has probably experienced this. It’s brutal. And you don’t want, no matter what you do at that point, the customer is going to be mad. You’re not getting a referral. Maybe they’ll pay you, maybe you’ll split the difference, maybe you don’t get sued, but it’s not building your business. So let’s unpack actually what’s happening here. In the scenario rolls into the room at the last minute and says, this is garbage, what is happening? What is happening is you’re having the conversation that you should have had before you started, before you even decided to take the job, because ultimately it’s got to go through the buyer, the economic buyer’s filter. And if you do not satisfy that person, you’re just shooting free throws with a blindfold on. Like what are the odds of getting a basket? It’s impossible. It’s next to impossible. When it happens, it’s by accident, because you don’t know what you’re shooting for. So if you move that conversation from the end of the project to the beginning of the project, then you can find out, first of all, if what the CEO wants is even realistic, if the project that they’re asking you to do is you even believe will potentially lead to the outcome that they want. If there’s any reason, there’s some other questions. So basically, you just take that conversation that happens at the end of the project, you move it to the beginning, and you have the CEO convince you that this is a good idea. And through that conversation, I call it the why conversation, it’s got some other components, you find out basically what the outcome is worth to them. And then based on what it’s worth to them, whether it’s $1,000 or $100,000, then you can easily set some prices based $100,000. Okay, $10,000, that’s a price. If the outcome’s worth $100,000 to the buyer, then $10,000 is definitely an acceptable price. But then you say, at a $10,000 price, what costs are justified on my end as the seller? So if I’m gonna get $10,000, and that’s it, no change orders, nothing, $10,000, what can I do that would be fist-pumpingly happy to do for $10,000? That will move the needle closer to the desired outcome of the CEO, and is a big win for me, and is a tenth of what the outcome is worth to them. Am I gonna get them all the way to the finish line? No, but branding people can’t get someone all the way to the finish line anyway. They can only contribute to a desired outcome, and that level of contribution has to be discounted because you’re not in control of everything along the way. If you could give them $100,000 for, you know, guarantee that they’re gonna get $100,000 a year over your benefit from your branding exercise, you could guarantee that. Well, yeah, you could probably charge $200,000, but you can’t guarantee it. There’s a lot of things that can happen. So you discount, as Blair says, you discount it by uncertainty, and at the $10,000 price point, you’re like, well, I could do a branding workshop. I could teach your internal people how to do this. It’ll take a half day, 30 day follow up. We can review what your team put together. And I’d be fist-pumpingly happy to do that for $10,000.

So I guess the other question here is like fixed fee pricing. And how do you separate them for someone that just pulls a number out of the air versus value base?

So value based pricing is a way to calculate a fixed price. So fixed pricing is sort of like a bigger level. It’s a higher level category. You can set a fixed price by rolling some dice. You can base a fixed price on how many hours you think it’s going to take. It’s still a fixed price, but it’s based on hours. Or you can base a fixed price on the value to the client. And like you said earlier, your hourly rate, you basically picked it out of the blue. It’s not based on anything client specific. It’s not based on any particular project. It’s mostly like an ego thing. Like, I think I’m this good compared to, you know, that person charges 100. Right, right, exactly. I’m way better than this person who charges $100 an hour, but I’m nowhere near as good as this person who charges $200 an hour. So my hourly rate is reasonable. It’s reasonable for me to charge $150 an hour. This is pulled out of thin air. And then you multiply it by another number that you pulled out of thin air, which is how many hours you think the project is gonna take. And if you only did an hour or two hours or maybe even, I don’t know, any unpaid amount of discovery, you have not uncovered all of the scope of what they’re trying to ask you to do, at least not in software. In software, it was like impossible to uncover enough scope in a couple of meetings.

Yeah, that’s where I transitioned a while ago. A lot of listeners will know interconsultancy. And so completely changed my model and the way I think about it. And a lot of times now clients come to me for the very reason that you’ve just said, which is that we don’t know how the next three months are going to pan out, right? We’re going to start this together in a partnership scenario with an objective to aim towards, like you were saying, which is usually a new rebrand positioning, whatever it might be. But on the journey, how many customer focus groups do you want? It’s like, well, how does that map out? We don’t know precisely at the start if we might need one in six weeks time to expense check something that we’ve come up with in the workshops or whatever it might be. So that kind of ambiguity, as you say, it’s better to just price in because what then happens is, if you don’t and if you’re on this line by line scenario, then every time there’s a change order, someone has to go, well, Mr. Client, Mrs. Client, unfortunately, that’s extra work and now you have to pay a bit of extra money. And you get this kind of impression that the relationship with the client comes down to, oh, here we go, they’re going to charge us again for this. And again, that’s where the relationship starts to sour. Whereas if they’re paying you an equitable amount for the outcome that they’re looking for, and as you say, it’s well within the realms of what you find worth doing, then you don’t get those issues because you’re getting paid so much, quite frankly, to add an extra workshop in or something, it’s not a big deal. In fact, you want to do it because you want the client to be happy. So it’s a completely different setup, this methodology that we’re talking about now. Having gone through both, like you have Jonathan and obviously not to your extent, like in the way that you’ve documented and articulated it, everything you’re saying now from a practitioner’s perspective, myself, I can verify folks, so definitely listen to this. I could probably learn from it. I’ve got a few questions as well, because I find that question at the start around the value to the client, probably, and I totally agree, you need to bring it early, but it’s still quite hard to get them to even pin clients down on a number. They may not really even know. So I just wondered if you’ve got any tips, like how do you, let’s get practical, right? Let’s give us a practice. Let’s imagine we’re in a sales conversation. What sort of questions do you recommend people ask to kind of try and unearth that value to the customer, to the buyer?

So yeah, it’s super important, and it is difficult to learn how to do this. It’s sort of a performance art. There’s some science to it, but it’s very much a performance art, and you need a fair amount of at bats to kind of get good at it. But the alternative is so much worse. It’s that CEO at the end saying, this is garbage, start over, and we’re not paying you another dime. And then now you got a tough decision to make. So the beauty of this is that it dramatically, I didn’t realize this, I didn’t expect this, but when I first started doing this, an unexpected but welcome side effect was my clients all chilled out because there was no micromanaging, there were no time sheets, there were no questioning anything. And the deadlines, a lot of deadlines disappeared because to them the deadline was a cost control. But now all of a sudden when they don’t have to worry about a cost control, they’re like, well, you know, it’s done when it’s done, we don’t want you to cut corners, we want it to be good. So they really calmed down. There was a lot, it was just much more comfortable, it was a much better working environment. So that was huge. So but, but it is difficult to uncover value and there are a number of people, Alan Weiss, Blair Enns, there’s a bunch of them who talk about how to do this in a sales interview. So the way that it worked in software with me, and it’s the same structure for any professional service, is you want to talk them out of hiring you, which is polar opposite of what you’re used to doing probably. Probably you’re used to spending all weekend to put together a great pitch deck and come in and do the beauty contest against three other agencies that are waiting in the waiting room. This is the polar opposite of that. You go in and you first, they’re going to brain dump for a few minutes about what they, maybe up to 20 minutes they’re going to say, ah, this is what we want to do, we’re all excited, this is new thing, dah, dah, dah, dah. And that’s great. And then they might get very specific about, then we’re going to want a logo and we’re going to want, I don’t know, you tell me, you get all this list of deliverables and so on and so forth. And so you write all that down diligently taking notes and it’s like, okay, this is great, this is great. Yep, we can do all these things, but you’re really just not saying much. And then once it seems like they’ve got everything off of their chest and they’re kind of like, they’ve kind of cleared the decks, then you say, okay, this is great. Can we back up for a second? So I’d like to know more about the environment this is going to launch into. And good clients will say, yes, let’s talk about that. They’ll be like, ooh, this is interesting. Bad clients will be like, no, we told you what to do. That’s what we want. Just give us a price. And like, that’s not a good fit for value-based pricing. So if they are willing to go up a level with you and talk business or strategy and allow you or help, really, you’re helping them uncover why they should do this at all. This is going to be expensive. It’s going to be time-consuming. It’s going to irritate your employees. It’s going to, you know, all of these things. So why would you do this? You know, like what’s, why not do it some other ways? Couldn’t you just spend a bunch of money on ads? Or couldn’t you whatever? Couldn’t you hire an internal person to do branding for you? Like you told me you have a bunch of designers, why don’t you just have one of them do it? You know, and you just keep presenting cheaper alternatives and they will bat them away, or they wouldn’t be talking to you in the first place. And they’ll say, no, we can’t do that because of this reason. We can’t do that because of this other reason. And if we do that, it would actually look really bad for us if we spent all that money on ads or for some strategic reason, we’re not going to be giving money to Metta, whatever. And you’re writing all of this down as close to verbatim as you can. And you’re like, okay, why do this now? Why did something change? You’ve been probably talking about a rebrand for 18 months. Why are you pulling the trigger now? Couldn’t you study the market for 18 months and do it later? AI, can’t you just do it with AI now? It should be so easy for you since you know what you want when you see it. Why don’t you just do it with AI? Just wait for AI to get better for 18 months and then do it later. They’ll tell you why they can’t. There’s some reason why either it’s the board or the market or some competitor has done something that they’re afraid of. There’ll be almost certainly there’ll be some reason why this is urgent. Then you’re like, why would you hire me to do it? There’s probably, you could probably choose from 100 people like me, why are you talking to me? Why not, like I said, outsources to your cousin Vinny or some internal employee or offshore at somewhere. Then that’s where you learn how good your positioning is. With the answers to those things, you’ve now got a really good idea of where the target is. Where’s the bullseye? What are we shooting for here? Unless I was convinced at that point that their expectations were realistic, that the timeframe was reasonably realistic, and that I really was the best person for the job in their mind, then I’m going to write a proposal, because now I have a lot of pricing leverage. Not necessarily, which isn’t to say that I can set the price astronomically high. I just know that I just have an idea of what some acceptable prices would be, and then I can reverse engineer scope based on those prices and present them with three options. So it’s a process of uncovering. Like you said, they couldn’t blurt out a number. If I said, oh, how much is this worth to you? They’d be like, I don’t know. I don’t know how to process that. So you have to go through this process of Socratic questioning and kind of like, they know in their gut that this is the right thing to do. You and they need to pull all of that out of the junk drawer and put it on the table and basically inspect the decision at the components of the decision and find out why this, why now, and why me so that you’ve got some. It’s the only way to convince you to take the job. If you don’t know those things, you don’t know what the desired business outcome is or how realistic it is. So without doing that, if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be able to write a proposal. Like I don’t even know what I would put in it. But if you do do that, the proposal writes itself because they’ve given you all the reasons why they have to work with you.

That’s brilliant. Folks, that was a masterclass. I hope everyone’s been taking notes.

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I’ll just throw another thing in there and see what you think about this. The other thing I find in that early conversation is when they make statements, is to challenge that, obviously positively, you don’t want to be a jerk, but to be like, so how do you know that? What have you done to verify that? Oftentimes, I find clients will expose the fact that it’s a hunch or it’s like a guess that they’ve done and then if you want to add a value-based question in this, like, well, what would it mean to you if maybe I came in as an outsider and we started to verify some of this before we actually start taking an action? You get a sense of them like leaning in being like, oh, would you do that? That would be amazing because I always think, particularly from a consultant’s perspective, you’re acting like a doctor, right? Like, you don’t go to the doctor and go, doctor, I’ve got a broken leg and the doctor immediately just whips out a cast and just like puts it on your leg. The doctor says, let me just check that first. We’ll go get an x-ray and then we’ll have a diagnosis. So I often find people come with a pre-baked diagnosis. Sometimes they’ve done some verification themselves. Most of the time, though, they haven’t really done it. It’s just the gut that that’s what they think is happening and they’re hiring you to solve that. So you can add even more value if you verify the problem is as bad or as worse as they think it is in the first place. So I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, Jonathan. Do you think that’s a good point?

Yeah, I mean, if anybody who’s listened to me on my show will hear all the time me say, it’s like someone running into a doctor and saying exact same thing. It’s like running into a doctor saying doc, I need a triple bypass and the doctor’s not going to say, jump up on the table. I’ll go get my knife. Right. That would be malpractice. And I, and it, I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but I think it’s malpractice in all the professions to prescribe before you diagnose. I mean, like they are not the expert. That is why they called you. So for them to be, you know, not to mix my metaphors, but well, I’ll stick with this one. For them to tell the surgeon how to do the surgery, or if the surgery is even required, is insane. It doesn’t make any sense. But I know that people, like there’s people who are more junior, and people who are just people pleasers, and people who are used to being an employee and doing what they’re told. This is another big mindset shift is like, no, you are the expert about branding or design. They’re the expert about selling tires or manufacturing tires or whatever. So you’re not going to tell them anything about how to do that. And they might even be an expert about what their customers want. But you’re the expert about design. You’re not going to tell them how to make tires, and they’re not going to tell you how to do a brand guideline or something like that. So it’s like you need to own that piece. And if they’re going to boss you around at the thing that they’re supposedly bringing you in to do, it’s almost guaranteed to fail because the wrong person is driving the taxi. They’re like backseat driving the whole project. So of course, it goes off the rails. Of course, it goes over time. But the incentives, back to the financial incentives, if you get paid more and more and more as that backseat driver, you get the meter running, backseat drivers like, maybe take a left up here, maybe take a right. They haven’t even told you where they want to go, by the way. They’re just bossing you around, you’re driving around, and then eventually the meter gets to a point where they’re angry. So we’re not where I wanted to go yet. It’s like, well, you didn’t tell me where you wanted to go. It’s like, well, you didn’t ask me. It’s like, ah.

Ah, yeah, for sure. That’s crazy. Just one other quick thing, just on this sales question, if you don’t mind, Jacob, because I just want to ask this question. Do you find that there’s different layers of value that you can uncover? And what I mean by that is, so if I tell you where I’m going with this, I often think that there’s value to the buyer as an individual, and then there’s value to the business. And sometimes those two things have different nuances. Imagine a CEO would be telling you the problem from my perspective, the growth opportunity and that we’re not aligned around the growth plan and the brand and the way it’s positioned and blah, blah, blah. So that’s the business challenge. And then I would say to them, but what does that look like for you? And they might say, oh, every board meeting I go into, every leadership meeting, everyone’s fighting each other and I’m just spending all my time dealing with squabbling people and lack of priorities and all this stuff. Now I’ve uncovered what I would call like a soft value, like a value for them, which is misalignment and the stress of having to handle the leadership team. On top of the hard value, which is to the business itself, which has got hard numbers and growth opportunities and total addressable markets and all this good stuff. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you see different grades of value and do you have any thoughts on how to uncover that and what’s worth more? I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts on that.

Yeah, there’s a couple of things. Probably the first thing I would say is there can be a difference between the person who’s going to decide to hire you and the person who approves the decision. And it feels a little bit like it’s in the territory you’re talking about. So where you’re in a bigger organization, you’re talking to, I don’t know, you tell me, a SVP of Finance or something, and they are at a credit union and they want to redo all of their member onboarding. And it’s not like an overall rebrand of the entire business. It’s specifically to their business unit and they’re responsible for it. And maybe they have budgetary discretion over it to say, like, no, I don’t have to take this to anyone. I can run with this. So in effect, that person is kind of like the CEO. They are both the economic buyer and the person who gets to make the decision or recommend. You know, basically, if the price is right, the recommender is going to get what they want. But this person is basically like a CEO inside of a larger company because they can decide to hire you and they don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission. A lot of times, though, it’s to different people. And this is much more tricky. And you described it very well. You described that you want to know what the person who’s deciding, you want to know what their personal motivation is, which is not the same if we’re assuming an employee in sort of a Fortune 500 or something. It is not the same thing as what’s good for the business. On the surface, they’re going to say, oh, it’s good for the business, but that is not actually the thing that’s going to motivate them. It’s something like you just said, whether the misalignment or I keep getting yelled at about this thing, or I really want to, you know, I’m going to be up for promotion in a year, or my budget, my bonus is at risk or whatever. There’s going to be some personal frustration or opportunity that they’re experiencing. I still, in a situation like that, I still get really nervous when I can’t also talk to the economic buyer because we’re opening ourselves up for that meeting in six months where the CEO rolls in and says, this is garbage. And I don’t even care that I’m not going to get blamed for that because the SVP is going to get blamed for it. But I don’t want to be part of that. I don’t want to be in that meeting that I want their logo on my website with a glowing testimonial. So it is, if at all possible, first of all, work with companies that are of a size where you can always talk to the economic buyer. That might mean working for smaller companies, but you’re a higher altitude of person you’re talking to. But the other thing is, if you really got to believe that the economic buyer is going to be on board with the outcome, otherwise you’re just opening up to that risk. But yes, it’s almost like in that scenario where there’s two different people, it’s like you got to satisfy the decider’s personal goals and then give that, and you can’t talk to the CEO or the person above them, you need to give them a story as to why this is a smart thing to spend money on, that they then pass up the food chain. That totally works, makes me nervous personally, but it does totally work.

A question on the opposite end, we’re talking about value, but if you had smaller projects or smaller clients, for example, how would you usually handle that?

I love that question because it’s something that people don’t usually see when they hear me talking about value pricing and it’s a license to print money and I can increase my rates dramatically. No, it cuts both ways. If the value is not there, you can’t set a price higher than the value. The value is what it’s worth to the client. It’s worth, let’s say, $10,000 to the client. You can’t roll in there and say, well, it’s going to take us this long, so it’s $50,000, take it or leave it. They’re going to say no, it’s not an acceptable price because the value is not there. There’s no way to escape this. To me, it’s just like, well, you might as well find out the value first. Then you’re pretty much guaranteed that you’ve got some acceptable prices. Then it comes down to the benefits at each price tier if they see those benefits as meaningful. With a small client or a smaller client, they’re going to get less value out of it because it’s multiplied by fewer, it depends on what you’re doing, but it’s multiplied by fewer employees, customers, revenue, it’s multiplied by smaller numbers. The value is automatically lower even though you might do the exact same thing for a mom-and-pop pizza place that you would have done for Domino’s. The acceptable prices that you put on your proposal, they have to be lower than if you were proposing to Domino’s. You can still do it and there’s no way around them making a value-based decision, so you might as well ask, what is this worth to you? They’ll say, they might have asked you to do $50,000 worth of work to you. They say, well, it’s only worth $10,000 to us. If this went like a home run, it’s only worth 10 grand. Then you say, well, the thing that you ask for then is just out of your budget. So what if we did something for $1,000, which is way smaller than what they wanted, but you can explain to them how it would move the needle in the way that they want it moved. And at $2,200 and at $5,000, still all lower than 10,000, you’re giving them three things to choose from. The prices are lower than what it’s worth to them. But your scope obviously has to be really, it’s gonna be really small based on those price points. You’re not gonna do the thing they asked for. You’re gonna do something that can still help them though.

It’s a good segue into positioning. So you talk about pricing is positioning. So if the market sees you as interchangeable, then you’ve already put yourself in a pretty bad situation. So how much of pricing power, value-based pricing comes down to positioning? I know it’s like one of those three big questions, it’s like, why this, why now, why me? But the why me is so important because it comes back down to how you’re positioned and how you even got the call in the first place. So yeah, how much pricing power comes down to positioning?

I’ll give you a formula, the idea. I don’t want people to plug numbers into it, but it’s just a formula to help create a mental model of what’s going on in a situation like you just described. So you’ve got three components. You’ve got desire, you’ve got money, and you’ve got options, DMO, desire, money, options. And desire times money divided by options. If you’re taking notes at home, I’ll go slow. But the idea is, if they want what you do, let’s just call it branding. That’s not what they want, but let’s just say, we really want branding and we want it really bad. What they really want is some outcome that they believe branding will lead to, but I don’t know. It’s going to be different client to client. But they want some outcome of branding and they want it really bad for some reason. And you know that reason because you had the why conversation with them. If they have a ton of buying power, it’s a public company and you’re talking to the CEO, it’s dominoes, they have a ton of buying power, those two numbers multiply, roughly speaking. You know, again, this is not math, I’m just the mental model. Those, the desire and the buying power, the money, have a multiplicative effect where every incremental dollar means a lot less to them than someone who has less money. So they’re willing to write a bigger check because they don’t really care. They just want this thing that they want. And so if you have a Fortune 500 company that wants to do a complete re-brand, they’re probably going to spend at least a million dollars on it, right? For sure. But then you’ve got the dividing line and underneath that is options. And if they have a whole bunch of options that are less than a million dollars, but you know, they believe or they can’t tell the difference between the rest of the options, they all seem good, what is the last thing that everybody understands, it’s the price. So if I can’t tell the difference between these three branding agencies and one of them was like five million, one of them was two million, and one of them was 900,000, they’re probably gonna, actually they’ll probably pick the middle one, but they might pick the cheapest one, but they’re almost definitely not gonna pick the top one if they see no meaningful difference between the three agencies. So it is critical for that five million dollar one to be meaningfully different from the other two. And I keep saying meaningfully because it has to mean something to the buyer. Not because we won an award, we have been in business longer than the other two, or whatever it is, those are not necessarily meaningful to the client. If they are, they are, but if they’re not, they’re not. You need to be unique in a way that wipes all the other options off the table. And if you do that, then that desire times money is not getting divided. It’s essentially undivided. It’s one. You put a one in the denominator, and your desire and your money, the client’s desire and money, are multiplied and not diluted by competition. So what this means is, you don’t want to be just one of many. You want to be the one and only, which is positioning. It’s like you’re known for this one thing.

Yeah. It’s notoriously difficult to get to that point. Just for listeners, are there some great examples that come to mind for you, of people have really nailed their positioning. They are that one unique agency.

Yeah. I’m not super familiar with branding. You guys probably be better at picking that out of a hat. But I work with a lot of people who have laser-focused positioning, that gets down to the psychographic level around the buyers. So for example, I have a student named Geraldine Carter. You go to her website, geraldinecarter.com, you will instantly know that she is not for you, that there’s nothing she can offer you. She might be a good guest, but there’s nothing she’s going to offer you. She’s not going to sell you anything. There’s nothing of value you could really buy from her. But the other thing you’re going to know instantly is exactly who would. And that is a solo CPA firm owner or maybe a very small firm who is doing maybe around a million dollars a year, possibly with one employee, or maybe $250, $300,000 a year if there’s no employees, and they don’t want to build an empire, they want their life back. They don’t have a leads problem, they have tons of business, they have more business than they know what to do with, but they’re working 80 hours a week during tax season and they’re working 60 hours a week the rest of the time. And they hate it and they want to quit. That is her customer. So anybody, next time you talk to a CPA, you’re going to be like, I wonder, how much do you work? It’s almost like the positioning is so laser focused on, it’s an industry and a psychographic, it’s like a desire and an expensive problem, which is that they are slave to a business that was supposed to bring them freedom and they were better off in house. So that person, if you go to her website, there is a wall of testimonials of people saying, and this is an important point that I’m skipping ahead, but this is a critical point, is results. Testimonials are results. So it’s a wall of testimonials of like, I work half as many hours as before and I increase my tax bracket by three ticks, working less. One after the other, after the other. Videos, all results, results, results. So when you find yourself in that position or when someone shares her information with you, it’s like, you’re kidding me? There’s no, who else is, there’s no one. There are other people who speak to the space and I could go down a list of three more and say how they’re different in a meaningful way. So, you know, that’s a, she’s a really good example, but there are plenty of, there’s plenty.

We actually had a guest, Emily Penny, and she looked at all different agencies in the UK, hundreds of them, and the thing she found was that they’re all so the same, like all saying the same thing. And there was only a small handful that had a very unique point of view and were actually positioned in a way that was memorable and meaningfully different. And the others just kind of blended in and it’s funny because that’s what we do as professionals. We help position other brands and it comes back to ourselves. And we just failed to position ourselves well.

There’s a well-known positioning fear reflex. I think that term was coined by Philip Morgan. And you have this automatic feeling that at the core of positioning is strategy. It’s strategic level marketing. And the core of strategy is saying no to things. And people who are struggling to meet payroll don’t want to say no to anything. So the idea of niching down or specializing in some smaller market, so your total addressable market is smaller, is terrifying. Because I’m only getting a lead a month now. If I target a much smaller market, I might only get one lead a year when, in fact, it’s a paradox. And the reverse is true. Because if you target a specific kind of… Let’s use a… This is probably sort of a… I don’t like hunting metaphors, but it’s a great example. If I said to you, what kind of bait should I use to catch what? Right. Yeah. You can’t answer. It’s an unanswerable question. So when people get on my mailing list, I say, what would, you know, who are your dream clients? And they’re like, oh, I work with anybody. You know, any kind of big problem. I love solving big problems. And it’s like, but what should I do? I’m not getting any leads. It’s like, well, maybe you should be able to first pick who your ideal buyer is. That would help you get them. Again, it’s like you’re shooting baskets with a blindfold on. How are you gonna, it’s just luck. It turns into referrals only. But picking feels very scary because then you feel like you’re gonna starve. But it happens over and over and over when someone picks a really good, tight positioning that says no to 90% of businesses that still leaves like 10,000 businesses that would make perfect clients. And now your website can actually have some meaningful copy on it. You can finally pick images that make sense and aren’t just like smiling people shaking hands and something that’s much more specific to their industry or the person that they’re trying to attract. It’s like you can’t know what kind of bait to use if you don’t know what you’re trying to catch. So, you know, I understand why it’s scary. It’s but and it’s really hard to read the label from inside the bottle, which is why branding agencies are so, everyone’s bad at it. I’m bad at it. You have to get feedback from the outside. Like I could we could do an exercise right now. I won’t drag you through it, but I could ask you guys, well, who do you think I, what do you think I’m the one and only of, you know? But people listening, we’ll leave it as an exercise to the listener. What do you think I am? Right? That’s my positioning right now. Whatever I think it is, doesn’t matter what I think it is. That’s, you know, it has to come from the outside in their language and in their from their viewpoint.

And I think it comes out to simple ideas. I think you’ve done it brilliantly with the Hourly Billing Is Nuts, it’s relatable, it’s memorable, and you’ve written a book on it, and you’re standing against something which opens up deeper conversations on what the alternative is. So I think it’s brilliant, and you’ve made your way here, so well done.

We appreciate it, yeah, for sure.

All right, so change your gears a little bit. I guess we want to build authority, so we can position ourselves well. And authority is not fame, you know, it’s been known by the right people by, you know, for a specific point of view, like you’ve done around a certain problem. So what is a business of authority actually look like for people that want to really get this positioning perfect?

Okay, good question. Which part of the business, like the business model piece or the offerings or the marketing?

Oh, yeah, good question.

Well, I’ll just jump in. So I’ll skim across and then you can ask questions. So a business of authority. First of all, I know this is hard to hear if you already have a lot of employees, but maybe most people listening don’t. I think it’s a bad sign if you’re hiring a bunch of mini-me’s to do basically what you do. That is not an authority business. That’s an execution business, which is fine and you can make money doing that, but it’s not really an authority-based business. Not to say the positioning doesn’t help those kinds of businesses too, but when I see an authority business, it’s the kind of person who’s like author, speaker, consultant. Maybe they have an assistant or they have, but there’s not a big team of people doing what they’re good at. From a headcount standpoint, it’s usually pretty small because scaling by adding bodies is just a completely different approach. It’s a cost-based approach. It’s an arbitrage thing where you’re just trying to hire cheap hours and sell them at a markup. So your inventory is hours. So probably low headcount, very low. A lot of times just one person. The product service, I call it a product ladder. It’s usually at a high level, it’ll be some sort of advisory projects. Maybe there’s some hands-on work, but it’s usually strategic or there’s a strategic engagement first like some kind of a roadmap or diagnosis like we were talking about before. It’s the kind of person who would maybe get hired as an expert witness in a trial, like they’re recognized as an expert in the space. So they probably do custom consulting projects that are advisory in nature. They might do advisory retainers on a monthly basis for, not for hours, but for access to their expertise. They probably have some diagnostic service that’s a productized service, which we haven’t talked about, but it’s like a fixed price service that you publish at a given price on your website, so people can just buy it or not buy it. They probably have a book. They might have other info products like a video course or maybe a community, but that’s getting into the coachee space. So that’s sort of a list of sort of headcount, product and service mix. And then revenue-wise, I’ve seen soloists doing plenty of, all over the board. I mean, of course, there are ones that are struggling, but I’ve seen them as high as like, I think the highest soloist I’ve talked to is like 1.5 million, just them, working like 20 or 30 hours a week.

You know, AI is the buzz topic, right? Like, how do you think AI can assist and help people with their pricing? And have you got any thoughts on that?

Let me clarify, help setting their pricing or help?

Yes, I guess setting, like, can it help people set pricing? And like, I imagine it might be more that, you know, your AI agent can help you better set up your proposals and sales call conversations. But just wondered if you had any thoughts on that and whether you sort of seen anyone using it well?

Tons of things there. So first, I’m not really an AI maxi, I use it all the time. If it went away tomorrow, that would be fine too, but I’m not against it. One failure mode that I have been seeing over and over again is when people try to outsource the really hard thinking work that, the thing that they’re good at, they try to outsource that to the model instead of outsourcing the tedious administrative stuff that probably no one wants to do. So, and you actually already teed up my answer, which is I probably, I would never use it for pricing, but I might use it for drafting the proposal. I almost certainly would if I had, yeah, but I have a template. It’s already easy. It wouldn’t be that much. But yes, having a draft of the proposal is fine, but it’s the reason why it’s so easy to draft the proposal is that- You’ve done the hard work. I did the right, I did the hard work, right. Okay, all of that said, I do think you can use it as a learning tool to get better at the why conversation. So I haven’t done this too many times, but it’s given me good results so far. It’s really hard to get enough sales calls that you are not desperate to land for you to get enough practice at getting good at this. So you have to walk into that meeting not caring if you get the gig or not, which is very hard if you’re not sure where your next bull of Cheerios is coming from. So you can use it as a sparring partner, and the beauty of it is, like I’ve tried to do this in person, like one-to-one, do role-playing, but the person who I’m trying to train already by definition doesn’t know enough about their client’s businesses to even do a decent job of role-playing as the customer, because the whole problem is they don’t understand their customers or clients. But the AI does understand basic business principles, and so you can get into a why conversation by saying, pick a business that looks like one of your past clients or a client that you’d really like to land, give it as much, have it research it, you don’t have to give it any information. Say, okay, so imagine I’m talking to this SVP, here’s their LinkedIn profile, and they have called me in for these reasons to talk about a branding exercise. Then I don’t care, upload my book and say, read about the why conversation, I’m going to try and do a why conversation on you, and they’re going to throw stuff at you. It’s great because you don’t have to do it in real time, you can really think about your answer before you chat back to it. It just gives you practice, it’s a way to practice going through it that’s low-stakes and reveals where you chicken out. Even against the AI, you’ll chicken out. You’re basically role-playing the sales interview. I think that’s really useful for people.

Yeah.

But outside of that, just have to do administrative stuff and don’t outsource your job to it. I mean, that’s the thing you love doing. Why would you let someone else do it?

Right. That human connection with the buyer, I think is crucial. Don’t outsource that bit like you were saying. You cannot substitute that conversation that we’ve talked about, the why conversation is also where you build rapport and people connect with your energy and your personality. Particularly, if you’re solo like me, that’s where I can build. I can tell if there’s good chemistry there or not early, and no doubt the buyer can. It can win you the gig just by showing up and being smart and asking intelligent questions like you’ve highlighted. Really great tips. Really, really great tips. Cool. I think we’ve come to the end of our time, and I think I just want to thank you so much for coming on, Jonathan. It’s been such an important conversation to have. Folks, I hope you’ve enjoyed what Jonathan’s had to say. Definitely, I’m sure we’ve all been taking notes all the way through. I certainly have. I’ve got a whole ream of notes in front of me. It’s been brilliant. Thanks so much for coming in.

Anytime. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Just one final question. Where can people connect with you and what should they be doing if they want to actually start moving away from Hourly now?

Well, if you go to valuepricingbootcamp.com, it gives a six-day free email course that goes more in-depth into some of these issues and considerations and it comes straight from my… I mean, yeah, it’s automated, but it comes from my email address. So if you reply to any message, I’ll get it. I try to respond to everyone and it’s a great place to start a conversation.

Awesome. I highly recommend Jonathan’s email. I’ve been on it for years and years. You send an email every day, which is… Yeah, well done.

3,567, I think, right now.

Yeah, that’s bonkers.

Can you do a few more?

Can you do a few more?

I don’t think you’re doing enough there, mate. I just think put it out there.

You got to repeat yourself. It doesn’t sink in right away.

That’s true.

Amazing stuff.

Thank you. All right, guys, we’re going to wrap it up here. Jonathan, thank you so much. We’ll look these up in the show notes as well. So thank you. All the best.

Thanks, guys.