MARKETING: Understanding and Evolving Your Brand w/ Brand Advisor Jackie Bebenroth.

0:00And now, Taking Care of Business, your hosts, Craig Moen and Shai Gilad. Welcome to Business Owners Radio, episode 235. Our guest today is Jackie Bebenroth, Principal and Brand Advisor at Muse, where they help leaders break through the limitations of perception and determine their brand's real underlying value. Having positioned over 80 brands in 20 years, Jackie helps leaders identify and evolve their true purpose and mission in times of change. Good morning, Jackie. Welcome to Business Owners Radio. Hi, Shai. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we've been really excited for this conversation. It's been a while since we've taken a deep dive into the world of branding and learning how that's evolving and changing.

0:51And certainly wonderful to have someone with your expertise. But before we go all the way down that path, tell us a little bit more about your journey and what led to you founding Muse, your agency, and how you got started in this area? Absolutely. So I love branding and marketing. I've been in this business for over 25 years, and I grew up as a copywriter. So the first half of my career, I was really committed to understanding how to tell the stories that sold the products and services of our clients. And then as I sort of grew more tenured in that, I was really curious about brand narratives in particular.

1:37So how companies determined how to best connect with their audiences at a more strategic and broad level. So I started my business about 12 years ago, not just to think about what a brand looks like from a visual standpoint. You know, a lot of people associate branding with logo development. I was really fascinated with the art of positioning and helping brands communicate at a higher level to better connect with their audiences. And that's what my firm does now. So let's talk about that. So when we think about positioning, we're thinking of the marketplace and how do we fit in against, well, I like to think of it as not just against competitors, people that do similar things to us, but I like to think of it as on a broader level of how we fit in against the competing options that the customer has to solve the problem that they run into when they're trying to make progress in some way that would cause them to hire us in the first place.

2:37Tell us in your own words, how has your thinking on positioning evolved? And can you give us some examples of what that looks like? Sure. So your brand positioning really is, in essence, what you stand for as a company. And so a few years back, I was really engaged with the idea of Simon Sinek's Golden Circle Framework. And I don't know if your listeners are familiar with that. It's one of the top most watched TED Talks. It's well worth your time. It's called Start With Why. And the idea is a brand narrative has three things, what you do, how you do it differently, and ultimately why you do what you do.

3:19And Simon Sinek advocated for a purpose-driven brand, meaning you should really define what your purpose is, your value, in order to really create brand affinity and long-term relationships with your clients. The idea is people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And if someone decides that they share your values, your brand values, that they're going to be a long-term customer, and you will not only achieve new customer acquisition, but your customer lifetime value will go up. So we use the Simon Sinek framework here at Muse to help first organize the narrative in those three parts, what, how, and why.

4:04And from there, we look outside the organization to see how that particular narrative aligns or is different from competitive sets. So it's really fascinating work. And it does involve a lot of discovery, deep dives, interviews. You know, we require our clients to have curiosity as they engage with us. You know, and it's easy to see how often we have this experience in entrepreneurship of being the accidental entrepreneur where we developed an expertise doing something and then an opportunity presented itself and we started out on our own. We made that change for different reasons. Maybe we wanted to be our own boss, or maybe we always had this vision of owning our own business.

4:54And I wonder how many times you run into that where you see a business owner who's definitely had some success, the business is making good progress. But when you ask them that first question about why, about that purpose, if they struggle initially to define it, because maybe they haven't even taken time to think about it. Yes, I see two different types of entrepreneurial clients. One is the client that built their entire business around their why. And they struggle to scale because they're so committed to that why it's hard for them to really kind of get beyond it and read between the lines.

5:32So I see that in certain circumstances. And then I also see entrepreneurs that have built a business that has grown organically over time, that their why has shifted. And so they're kind of in this process of seeking out their true identity. You know, they're in an identity crisis. And in fact, we used to call our service brand therapy for that reason. Jackie, stepping back for a second and looking at brand evolution over the years and what it really meant to people decades ago and what it means today and how we've evolved. Obviously, brand has come forth as a major spotlight for businesses and perceptions.

6:15Not so much in the past. We're dealing with thousands of brands today. And decades ago, we were dealing with maybe hundreds. what have you seen evolve over the last decade that business leaders should be aware of? Well, that's a big question. From a branding perspective, I can speak in depth from a marketing perspective because we've seen marketing tactics grow over the years. That's what makes marketing such an exciting industry to work in. There's always something new. There's always a new way to market versus back in the Don Draper Mad Men days where there was TV, radio, and billboards. And so now that you have all of these touch points and so many ways to reach your customer, it's even more important to present a cohesive position and a powerful brand presence.

7:08Because if there is disconnect among those different marketing tactics across that landscape, it's going to incite confusion, skepticism, you're going to lose trust, right? So brand strategy has become more important in that regard in that you have a strategy and you flow it through all your different channels so that you're showing up in the world as a confident, clear, and really consistent brand presence. There's some great examples where that brand has been developed and it flows consistently into the marketplace and into the public. And then we have some of those leaders of those brands having their own brand that they're managing, which may be in conflict.

7:56And that provides great entertainment for all of the industries to see the leadership not being aligned with the brand. It must drive the brand managers crazy in that. Have you seen this happening in some of your clientele? Oh, yeah. And this is especially common, and perhaps some members of your audience can relate, with entrepreneurs who aren't growing with their brands. So maybe the business has taken on its own life and it has sort of grown and evolved what it stands for and what's important to that team and that culture. And the entrepreneur is still stuck in what was true for them five or 10 years ago.

8:42And so we see this misalignment happen, and that is very troublesome. It's not a top-down, but it is a requirement for the leadership to really buy into the brand and demonstrate it on a regular basis. And I know that you've got a focus area in productive distancing techniques. Tell us more about that and what it means and how is it implemented? Sure. So I've branded over 80 businesses. and this could be a combination of building new brands and evolving established brands. So I've worked with over 80 brands. And last year, I just took a step back and I thought, you know, thinking through this collection of strategic work, what are some common things that have come out of this?

9:30What are some common obstacles that I see my clients running into? And I would say the one thing that bubbled to the top was the phrase, I'm too close to it. And it's really interesting, that phrase, I'm too close to it. If an entrepreneur believes that about their business, because they're in it and they can't get out of it enough to say, read the label on the outside of the jar, so to speak, that creates a sense of anxiety for change. It also creates almost like a commitment to the status quo. So I looked at that and I said, you know what, what we do as an agency is help brands evolve with clarity and confidence.

10:17But the techniques that we use to do that are actually the art of helping an entrepreneur or an executive pull back from their businesses enough to see it with a new big picture perspective. And so from there, once I realized that, I thought, oh, well, what are these techniques? So we have three main techniques that we use at Muse to help our clients see their businesses more clearly with a more big picture view. So I'm fascinated about this idea of creating some distance between your identity as a business owner and the identity of the brand itself, right? So it can scale beyond you. I love that concept.

11:01So can you give us an example of what are these three ways that you think about it and how do you put it into practice? So the first thing we require from our clients is we want them to buy into the idea that great brands start from the inside out. This may or may not be true with startup companies, but for established brands that are at sort of a growth stage in their life cycle, we start inside. A lot of brand companies will actually look outside the business first. Like, okay, what is the market demand right now? Let's go after that. Or where is the gap in the competitive set? Let's land there.

11:41And what that does is it creates this sort of like constant pivoting where you never really stand for anything because you're like chasing shiny things in your environment. You're just showing up to meet what your environment needs from you, right? So the first technique is really to start inside the business. And we interview all the key executives, we interview the employees, and we ask them perception-based questions about the company to gauge the common themes and discrepancies among those audience groups. So for example, one question that we love to ask is, when thinking of our company, what are the first three words to come to mind?

12:24And it's so interesting to hear the answers of that. If a brand has a solid culture and a solid position, we'll hear similar themes. If the brand is sort of lost in space and having this identity crisis, we'll hear completely different things. So that is a good gauge of where you stand inside the company with your internal brand perception. So that is technique number one. Ask perception based questions to identify the strengths and opportunities of your brand inside the company first. So you mean this is to your employees and your co-workers? This is entirely internal. So we will do qualitative interviews with your executive team.

13:08And then we will take some assumptions from those interviews, put them in a survey and survey the employee base. You've done this in some pretty large firms. So are you kind of working within a specific division typically? Or how does that work for you? For our corporate clients, we typically do division-based and department-based or product-based branding. So yes, we will take the same approach we use with entrepreneurial companies and we will apply it to a department. And so the question of when thinking of our company, what three words come to mind? That's the number one question to ask. The number two question to ask is actually not a trick question.

13:48It's very simple. You have to ask the question, what does our company do? it's funny because it sounds so straightforward, you know, but I can think of a lot of examples where it might not be what some of the people think it is. No, it really creates a lot of fumbling. And the core discrepancy there is the category that the business lives in. And when I say category, I mean, like, for example, Muse is a marketing firm. firm. We're not an advertising agency. We're not a digital marketing company. We're a marketing firm. That phrase marketing firm, we selected that category specifically because we operate in the strategic realm.

14:30I'm a principal, not a CEO. So I work in the business. So that we help the business define the category. And that clears up all kinds of issues. Because say you're at a barbecue and you just meet somebody and they're like, oh, what do you do? Tell me about your company. And you can say, oh, ABC company is a manufacturer that makes widgets, right? So that to me is like such a simple thing that has so much power when expressed in consistent execution. I really love that. So I guess in that first discovery, you're looking for some congruency there between what people think they do and what the company actually does.

15:13And then there's the opportunity to define or redefine that, right? So can you give me some examples of how that goes? Yeah. So this is where we bring Simon Sinek's golden circle into play. And our next technique is really understanding. This is technique number two, and it has to do with specialization. So you understand what category you do business in. Now we have to determine what it is you sell. And again, this is another fairly straightforward question that should have a straightforward answer. But quite often, especially in e-commerce or product-based businesses, there's just dozens of different products.

15:51Even in professional services and agencies, we see this a lot because there's so many different marketing tactics. You can sell everything under the sun, right? So what we try to do is get our clients to slim down what they sell into five categories or less, or five buckets of services. Sometimes there's one, sometimes there's two. But the goal is, the more you niche, the higher your specialty, the higher your specialty, the more you can charge for your service. so that is the goal of niching in it's a specialization technique that we help clients to ultimately work smarter not harder by increasing the value perception of what it is they sell through perceived specialization i can imagine as you're going through this process with your client and there's a lot of light bulbs that probably go off in the audience in the aha moments when And someone can come from the outside and add clarity.

16:59You mentioned before being too close to your business to really see what's going on. Do you have some examples of when that's happened and how that evolved? Yes. So organizing information is just such a light bulb moment for people. And I compare this process to, we call it the California classes process. So to use this analogy, it's like if you open your closet and you have a bunch of stuff just stuffed in there, you have everything you need. But when you're getting dressed in the morning, it takes you maybe 15 minutes longer than it should because you can't find it because everything is just cluttered.

17:43Well, imagine that that's your customer. If they go to your website or if they're talking to your salesperson and all they're seeing, reading, and hearing is clutter, they're going to walk away because they're not going to put the effort into it. And so what we do through productive distancing and ultimately brand positioning is we pull out everything from the closet. We understand, to use a Marie Kondo phrase, what brings them joy and what's of value to their customers. We organize it and put it back in the closet in a very refined and easy to access way so that the sales team can pull out this messaging when they need it, or the website team can understand how to build an appropriate hierarchy for the user experience based on the buyer journey.

18:42And so it's organizing this communication. If you do that upfront in advance of applying it to any sales or marketing application, you're going to be so much better off and your team is going to be really excited but i will tell you that process just like cleaning out a closet and all of the decisions that go into that can be exhausting and it can be uncomfortable i can imagine there's some aha moments and revelations and pain level that goes through this process and from a perspective of you have companies with very strong leadership. You have large opinions and so forth. What was the tiebreaker as far as the direction of the company and what's number one during these processes?

19:31Do you run into any collisions on personal preferences, leadership challenges, and so forth? How does that evolve? Yeah, that's a great question. So, our most challenging entrepreneurial clients are family own businesses because all of the family is involved in the decisions. It's like a real family, huh? Yeah. And there's a lot of emotion and passion associated with that. So we're very sensitive when we're working specifically with succession-based stage companies where we want to be very respectful of the older generation and the equity that's been built in the brand while advocating on behalf of the younger generation and their vision.

20:17So family-owned businesses are a particular challenge I very much enjoy. Other than that, my recommendation is really as an owner to build yourself a brand committee. And if you run EOS traction, that would be whoever leads your marketing seat and is responsible for that in your sales seat. And it maybe should be no more than four to five people who are actively involved in the process and the decision-making. And that, in my experience, has led to a very productive and efficient decision-making process. Well, Jackie, we want to thank you again for giving us so much time today. You've certainly given me a lot to think about.

21:02And I'm wondering for our other entrepreneurs listening that are struggling with some of these ideas or maybe starting to feel a little uncomfortable just realizing what they might not know about their own firm. What's a good place for them to start? I think it's important to every so often go to your website. You know, as owners, we don't go to our website as often as we should. But maybe once a season, just go and look at it with fresh eyes. And if you're feeling like it's not truly reflective of what it is you're selling and the quality of the work that you're putting out into the world, it's probably time to evolve your brand in a way that reflects your aspirations.

21:47So take a fresh look at it and then maybe think about what needs to be changed. Yeah, that's such good advice. And I think sometimes we forget how dynamic our websites can be and how static they can quickly become if we're not paying enough attention. And that really is such a place to make a first impression. You bet. Is there anything else you'd like to leave with our listeners today? I think brand evolution is a necessary part of doing business if you want to grow and if you want to scale. and so my suggestion would be to perhaps find a consultant find an agency that can help you do that when you are feeling as though i always compare the feeling to like maybe your pants feel a little too tight you know you just need to maybe refresh the wardrobe a bit right because you're outgrowing your brand.

22:42And that's just a natural part of scaling, just like change is a natural part of life. So my business would certainly be happy to provide some free consultation on the matter, whether it's a 15-minute conversation, a quick assessment of where your current brand stands, or a referral to someone who might be able to help you, whether that's a freelancer or another consultant, we're happy to help. You can reach me at MuseHeadquarters.com. Joining us in the studio today has been Jackie Biebenroth, Principal and Brand Advisor at Muse. You can learn more about Jackie, as well as find links to her background and business at BusinessOwnersRadio.com.

23:28Thank you for joining us on Business Owners Radio. We hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, you can read more about each episode along with links and offers in the show notes on our website, businessownersradio.com. We want to hear your feedback. Please leave comments on this show or suggestions for upcoming episodes. Tell your fellow business owners about the show. And, of course, we would love the stars and comments on iTunes. Till next time, keep taking care of business.

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