Ep 40 - Uplevel your Brand Identity with Ted Vaughn of Historic Agency

0:00Today I speak with Ted Vaughan. He's the author of Culture Built my Brand and co-founder of the agency, the branding agency, the historic agency. We have a really great discussion today on company culture, brand identity, rebranding, and how when you get all of this stuff right, when it's aligned, you get more sales and better results. So everyone wins. You're going to really like this episode if you're focused on this topic. And there's some very good tips on how to improve sales and recurring revenue in any space, although the example he gives is non-profit and video.

0:38Welcome to the High EQ Marketer. I'm John Busby. This show is about learning from the best and most interesting marketers in the world, which are, not a coincidence, highly emotionally intelligent. If you'd like inspiration, lessons, war stories from startups or Fortune 500 companies, that's why we're here. So let's go.

0:58Hi, Ted. How are you today? Doing well. I'm happy that it's Friday. Yeah, I was just going to say, warming up for the weekend, no matter what you're doing. I know you'll be cooking. I'll be watching NCAA basketball. So excited to unwind for sure. I want to talk about the book that you wrote. It's titled Culture Built My Brand. But if you look at the cover, there's another word there that has red strikethroughs through it. And it's eight, A-T-E, not the number eight. So it's not culture ate my brand. It's culture built my brand. Why did you make that conscious choice when coming up with the title of the book?

1:40So what drove us to write the book was as an agency, you know, my business partner and I have been in this agency world for about 11 years. It's historic agency, which is makehistoric.com. And we would find time and time and time again that the points of failure that our clients would have wasn't around the identity or the messaging structure or the product design, but it was a culture failure. And it was either a culture failure in the process leading up to the rebrand or the adoption and integration of the rebrand, or they made a promise in the identity and website messaging work that their culture, frankly, wasn't able to design or to not design to deliver on.

2:27And it was in that awareness that we thought, man, we need to rethink our own approach. We need to integrate culture into brand strategy. And we had so much success with that thinking and with that approach that we decided to write a book and try and get the ideas out there. But again, what we find time and time again is that if you, especially in moments of rebrand, I mean, it's true all the time. Culture matters. Culture always matters. Organizational culture is the soil in which everything grows, right? We all know that. But in moments of rebrand, culture has a unique ability to accelerate you or be huge headwind or maybe even sink the ship because a rebrand is a fragile moment.

3:20So for us, the intersection of brand and culture became obvious and critical to get right. Why do you think rebrand is such a fragile moment? Let's unpack that a little bit. Is it because I have an identity for what the brand means to me? And if you're going to change its attitude, change everything about it, then I have to change? Is it that? Or is it, I can think about past examples of past companies where we're going through kind of an exercise. We're all holding hands and saying the word that we think embodies whatever. And it was like too touchy-feely for people. or is it something else? Is it all of those?

4:05Let's unpack that a little bit. Yeah. I mean, our philosophy of brand is that you don't have one, you are one. So we're all about brand alignment more than we're about brand positioning. We've seen brands spend lots of money to position themselves in a way that actually creates a gap between who they are or what they're best able to do. And that gap ultimately hurts them more than it helps them. So we find that moments of rebrand are fragile because you're taking an aspect of your brand. We talk about brand as being five pillars. Pillar number one is your culture, who you are. Number two, your product or service, what you do.

4:52Pillar number three is your experience, which is how you feel, digital or physical. Pillar number four is your story, what you say, your messaging. And the number five is your identity, which is what you look like. Now, ironically, most people assume brand starts with identity, right? And then it works its way up. We think a brand really begins with culture and it cascades down. And the identity should make a promise that aligns perfectly with the other four pillars. And if it doesn't, you're creating brand gaps and you're setting yourself up for failure. So a rebrand is typically addressing one or more of those five pillars.

5:30The challenge is that typically what you're doing in a rebrand is aligning and you're either moving one pillar and you need the others to align with it, or you're naming aspects of your brand, pillars of your brand that aren't functioning very effectively. And you want to fix those by aligning them to the aspects of your brand that are functioning effectively. That's fragile work. There's change. There's a reality that you're naming things that are broken. You're doing things that may or may not risk your current customer loyalty. Um, so anytime we work with an organization going through any type of rebrand, there tends to be a fragility or a delicate moment taking place, especially if you're wanting to address culture, uh, because now you're getting into aspects of employee performance, alignment, behavior, accountability, things like that, which frankly, we really encourage and coach on because those things matter.

6:30That's going to be a huge driver of success for any moment of rebrand, your people. Yeah, there's a real clear correlation in my head of times when my colleagues and I are all working in lockstep. We all have the same mission. We all believe in the same things. And the results are significantly better than that. I can absolutely feel that. And I was going to ask you later, like what you think, or if you have any hard data, that's like the link between a good company culture, a good branding exercise, rebrand and sales. But I was typing down, as you were saying, the five pillars. And I want to go through those, go through each of those.

7:15Maybe we could do it. You could describe, because I can think about what culture is, but it's not always easy for me to put into words what my company culture is. So maybe we can start with your historic agencies. What's your company culture as a way of describing to others how to think about theirs? Boy, it's a great question. It's the right question. And I think most organizations, including ours, have a culture that really can't be summarized by three or four words, like the personality of a human. So what we recommend and what we strive for is having a set of values that really become drivers of culture, become values that are actionable, that are sticky.

8:08So they're not just broad, abstract permission to play values that you feel like you have to say, because if you don't say honesty or authenticity, you're bad. But they're values that actually make a difference in how your people show up and behave. They become riverbanks for how you operate as an organization, because they speak to how your people show up. And then you measure those, you integrate those in. So I would say the best answer to that question would be going to the values that your organization uses to shape behavior, to measure success, and by going public with those values in a way that make a promise to the people that you're working with, whether it's a nonprofit and donors or it's a for-profit company, and then taking those values and building everything around it.

8:58The way that you address HR, performance, compensation, the way that you address employee meetings, the ways that you, I mean, in the book, we talk about all sorts of layers of culture. The layers of culture ultimately tether back to things that you value and that matter to you. And if you don't have that, then I think you ultimately don't have a culture that you can articulate. And we often see that. We work with brands that have founders who intuitively know what the culture should be. Maybe they reflect it, they embody it, they show up, but they've done a really bad job articulating it in a way that can scale.

9:35And if you don't create articulated systems of culture that can scale, if you grow, you're going to grow in a way that I think begins to move further and further and further away from true north. And we see this a lot where one day founders or CEOs wake up and go, the culture of this place is not what I wanted or what I started. And then they swoop and poop and they lean in, right? So a big part of the journey of culture is articulating it in a way that can scale through the systems and structures of hiring, onboarding, reviewing, incentivizing, compensating, even meetings and swag. And there's all sorts of layers of culture.

10:18We just need to be intentional about it. That was a long answer to your short question. I love that answer. And I love swoop and poop. I'm going to use that from now on. That's really funny. So yeah, I can think about at my company, at our company, Centerfield. And we've got a bit of a baseball theme going on with the name Centerfield. And so we have nine traits of a center fielder. you know leave your uniform at home you can tell i'm dressed very casually we dress casually at centerfield get up to the bat and swing which is about um experiment you know you're not you're not there's no shame in trying and failing get up and do it high five our wins you know that's how in company meetings we refer to employee recognition and then and then we realized during COVID that despite these nine traits, there were these leadership values that maybe weren't coming through.

11:19And so we asked our colleagues, our employee population for what is really great about our leaders. And it was things like flexibility, being great on and off the field. We had sort of a baseball reference for everything. It was really, really, really helpful. So let me segue that into what you're saying the second pillar is of product because there's a way of there's a way of behaving internally and there's also a way where it actually links and makes sense to the people buying your product like like there's not some some disconnect so with what you do at at historic and you're very intentional about about this how do you translate it into how you describe what you do to prospects or clients Yeah.

12:10So one of the easy jobs for a young company and harder jobs for a legacy company is getting to the heart of what matters ultimately. And then seeing how that idea of what matters gets articulated and how we can cascade that down all the other pillars of brand. A great example of a company that I think gets that right currently and it's really easy to see is the water or the beverage company Liquid Death. So I'm sure you're familiar with, your listeners are familiar with Liquid Death. Maybe not. No? Yeah. It's a great company. It's a great beverage company. You know, at the heart of the founders is this idea to do unbelievable human good through selling products in a wacky, wild, entertaining type way.

13:06And they would say, doing human good doesn't have to be serious, heavy, intense. And consumer branding doesn't have to be devoid of human good. They can all integrate together. But in a way that's true to who they are as a brand, which is wacky, wild, provocative, entertaining, shocking. So they've built a brand that from the founders and the culture they build, who they are, how they've articulated that, that cascades right down into their marketing, into the consumer promise they make. it translates right into how they show up philanthropically and how they engage with nonprofits, which cascades, of course, into their identity and their messaging, which is kind of provocative and wild and fun and shocking.

13:54I think Liquid Death is a great example of a perfectly aligned company that is making a huge difference in the world and finding incredible success. Is that answering your question? Am I kind of driving at the question that you were asking? I love that example. They won the Super Bowl for sure with their ad, which was hilarious. I actually don't remember if it was this year or last year, but that was a great ad. But you could sort of tell what it was all about. And even though I don't know the specific story, I didn't know their philanthropic angle, you could kind of guess and imagine what their office looks like and how they operate in their identity.

14:36That's a really, really great, great example. And, you know, you mentioned nonprofits or philanthropic work. I know you work in the nonprofit space quite a bit. And so I want to dig into that because for nonprofits to achieve what they're trying to solve for is just so much easier when you interact with that nonprofit and you just get it. You feel the love. You feel the devotion. And probably, you know, because we got to nonprofits have to have to get donors to contribute. Like how, how, what anyway, I'm having a tough time articulating this, but you use a term called a brand first donor experience.

15:33Maybe you can talk about that and why it's so important. Yeah, well, there's a lot, a lot behind your question. let me start by saying a couple of things. First, as somebody who spent a lot of time in the nonprofit space from arts to hospitals, faith-based, just education, I've been in a lot of nonprofits. And here's what I have found time and time and time again. The nonprofit is the hardest organization on earth to lead effectively and to sustain a healthy culture. Why? Because everybody is sacrificing and missionally driven. And because of that reason, leadership often presume that their culture is healthy.

16:24We have all these people showing up shoulder to shoulder for a cause, doing good work. So we don't really have to take care of the culture because everybody cares. And we think that caring to the point of sacrifice makes a healthy culture. If anything, it makes it even more complex. When you've got professional, personal, missional, all these things in a faith-based organization, spiritual, all these things pulling on you, it makes showing up professionally unbelievably complex. So getting leadership in the nonprofit space right is actually much more difficult than getting leadership and culture in the for-profit space right.

17:04When we talk about brand, the reason we're so heavy on brand first owner experiences in the nonprofit space is because unfortunately, the bulk of wisdom when it comes to brand strategy has been in the for-profit space. The example of Liquid Death, right? A lot of the brands that I'm sure your audience are familiar with do an amazing job building a brand, marketing that brand, delivering on that brand, aligning their physical space, their products, their right. Brand strategy is an unbelievably important priority in the consumer marketplace space. It has not been in the nonprofit space. So you find huge brand gaps in the nonprofit space that are going to erode donor confidence, especially as more and more donors begin to get involved in philanthropic capitalism.

17:52Like, why should I give money to a nonprofit when I can buy Patagonia and change the world. My consumer visions can be fulfilled and I can make the world a better place. Why give money to a nonprofit, especially if it feels antiquated and odd and awkward and old school? So we're really big on brands that are nonprofit brands, championing their brand in a way that adds value and builds emotional connection with their donors. Because if they don't do that, they're going to see an exodus of donors. A lot of nonprofits we work with, the average age of their reoccurring donor, reoccurring gift is 70, right?

18:32That nonprofit isn't going to be around very long if they don't begin to think in new ways and begin to engage a millennial and Gen Z audience who look at brands and brand engagement in a very different way than their parents and grandparents did. That's interesting what you're saying about how a donor feels. You use the Patagonia example. I bought an electric car last year, the first one for our family. And I'm buying it from a giant car company, but I'm feeling really, really good about that decision. And then I also think about an experience that I'm going through and my parents are going through with respect to donating.

19:22So I have a daughter with T1D. If you don't know what it is, audience, look it up. And, you know, a lot of the emphasis of nonprofits is research to, you know, prevent that from happening or to mitigate its impact or to potentially cure it. And a particular nonprofit that's research focused provides very detailed personal responses around what their research is doing and who it's impacting and even stuff at the risk of scientific results I can't understand. But I feel very engaged that I'm helping one specific person or dozens of specific people. And it makes me want to donate more than I might even feel comfortable with, which I think is the goal.

20:19yeah well one of the things that we found in our research and work with nonprofits is that when you say thank you to a first-time gift through a personal video message that names that donor and connects their gift to meaningful work that clearly that donor cares about there's a 40 likelihood that that person will give a second gift immediately following that video I mean, there's a lot to be said about emotional connection and not just presuming on it because you have a cause that people care about, but going out of your way to build an emotional connection with your audience by telling them what you're doing, by championing the values that differentiate you, by telling the success story that their donations have helped fuel.

21:12And again, you go to the for-profit space, man, they're getting that right on a regular basis. I mean, just to use the connection with Liquid Death versus Patagonia, two radically different approaches to emotional connection. Liquid Death's emotional connection is dark humor, entertainment, over the top in a way that makes some people cringe, but their audience lean in. They make an emotional connection in quite the opposite way that Patagonia does. What does Patagonia do? On their brand anniversary, they put out a huge catalog that's very, very, very expensive that doesn't offer one opportunity to purchase anything.

21:52It's all about the impact that Patagonia is making in the world and why you should care. That's an unbelievable emotional connection that each brand's making, but totally different. But the point is they're building a bond, a connection. They're connecting emotionally. And the brands that do that will win. The brands that fail at that will lose, especially with millennials and Gen Zs shifting more and more and more into positions of financial decision making. And there's so much more choice now. There's so much. Exactly. You know, I try to think when I when I tried to buy T-shirts 20 years ago, what what my choices were versus now, you know.

22:37Yeah. Yeah, I think that's our that's a really, really important point. So I want to go back to your five pillars. We talked about culture. We talked about product. We talked a little bit about experience. When you say story, what do you what do you mean? Where where does the story show up? is it the origin story? Is it the story of where you are now? And how is it used? Great question. Yeah. You can imagine that these pillars of brand, if you think of them as circles, they all kind of touch, right? It's a bit of a Venn diagram versus a perfectly linear segmented stack. In some ways, story is, really there's two dimensions to story.

23:17There's your internal messaging, which is the language that you use to shape culture, to compel your employees to understand what it means to be a part of the brand. Call that brand mantra, mission, values. Most of the time, organizations have way too much internal story and it becomes white noise and then none of it means anything. Then there's external messaging or external story, right? Which is classically marketing, right? So marketing versus mission. So we look at story through those two dimensions to make sure that you've got the meta-narrative that you want to shape culture that helps your people show up.

23:55Brand mantra is a fantastic exercise for brands to go through. Nike's brand mantra is authentic athletic performance. Almost forgot it. Any employee at Nike knows that we're about one thing, authentic athletic performance. There will never be a Nike toaster oven because it doesn't fuel authentic athletic performance. Federal Express is peace of mind. We're all about peace of mind. There's multiple others, right? That mantra is an amazing internal messaging or internal story device helping keep the main thing the main thing. Marketing is all the external stuff that compels engagement, drives people to want to click, brings them deeper in, cultivates the relationship, builds the emotional connection.

24:42And, you know, story matters. In fact, I think one of the challenges we run into with legacy brands, because so many of their leaders are deeply invested in the culture, they love the product, they know the story, they don't see gaps or barriers in the identity or experience. They just look right past it. Like, it just doesn't matter to them. The irony, though, is a new customer or a new donor or a new person, they don't know your culture. They probably haven't gotten the product or service yet. All they have is that identity and then that experience digitally that's either going to groom them and cultivate them in, or they're going to make a judgment about you early and not engage.

25:25So a lot of the nonprofits that we work with are guilty of just having an antiquated identity, a horrible user experience digitally, and then they wonder why they're not getting new customers or new donors.

25:40Yeah, that makes so much sense. I've been thinking back to the beginning of our conversation when you're talking about a leader who can sense something is misaligned or maybe doesn't know if something's aligned or misaligned. And like the leader of a legacy brand that you were just talking about, who has been somewhere for a long time, they know intuitively what they think the culture is or what they want it to be, but it's not being translated. And they hear your warning not to swoop and poop, and they want to do something different. What would you suggest? What would you suggest to a leader who's saying, I sense something's misaligned.

26:27I want to get to the right place. I want to get to it the right way. What's my one, two, three thing that I should do? I love the question. It's the right question. I'm going to try and give you three helpful, simple things. First, I think most senior leaders are so close to the thing that they love, they have to hold their guts in check or the anecdotal evidence they have from the two people they talk to in check. The way a great tool to do that, and you can email me and I'll give it to you for free. Take the five pillars of brand, map each pillar on a scale of zero to five, get people in a room, do it multiple times, different groups of people, depends on how big your organization is, but get people in the room and either you do it or hire me or somebody else to facilitate conversation that says, how's our brand performing based on these five pillars on a scale of zero to five and why?

27:32And rochambeau it. And what I mean by that is don't wait for people to answer after they hear what the CEO says. Throw a hand up. Okay. How's our culture doing? And when we think about our culture, let's divide it into two categories. Are we as leaders clear? And are we as leaders, healthy. Clarity means we know what we're about, how we measure success, what we want to achieve. Health means there's trust, goodwill. We enjoy our jobs and feel safe. There are two different metrics, but both critical to culture. Okay. Scale of one to five, clear. How clear are we as leaders? Go. Five, whatever it is, right?

28:13And then make people hold their hands up and then just assess and then look around the room. Are there ones? Are there fives? Why? And you talk about it. Then do the same thing for health. Then do the same thing for the quality of your products. Do the same thing for every pillar, one to five, and just facilitate discussion. And it's amazing what you walk away with seeing and understanding. It probably will affirm things you've already known and then give you insight into other gaps that maybe you didn't realize. Then, of course, the question becomes, Should we close those gaps? And if so, when?

28:45Because that's a whole other question. No brand operates without gaps. The question is, do we know them? How bad are they hurting us? And when is the right time to close those gaps? And do we know what it will take to do that? Don't rush into brand alignment or brand positioning or rebranding. Naive to what it takes to do well. Uh, the second thing I would say is if you're a senior leader and you have a good gut on this and you want to get some evidence, you have to build a bridge over your power in order to get true feedback. What I mean by that is how you show up in a room will shape the level of honesty that you get, how you ask a question.

29:29You're building culture just by how you as a senior leader show up. So if you're not intentionally, cognitively building a bridge over your power, I can guarantee you you're one of the most self-deluded leaders in the organization because people aren't telling you the truth. So if you're going to have that meeting, you need to go out of your way to make it a safe environment for people to tell the truth. I guess the third thing I would say is it's really easy to think we know what's up from talking to leaders or our own anecdotal experience, but there is an unbelievable well of digital data that can tell you a ton.