S07.EP03 - B2B Branding: The Unsexy Truth with Martin Zarian

28:16And number two is your career level, your personal level, your relationship level, your networking level, whether you are a CEO that wants to get into the next Fortune 500 company, whether you are a middle level manager that wants to be promoted, or whether you're a solo entrepreneur that needs to find the right clients. We need to build an image. We need to build a positioning in order to be able to attract the right opportunity and the right people. How valuable is that? And the point number three is that your personal brand will only die the day that you are six feet underground. So it's a story that keeps evolving and keeps growing.

28:55Where does your company want to be in 20 years as your vision? Where do you want to be in 20 years as your personal brand vision? And how can you build an authentic personal brand that will help you get in there? I cannot stress this enough. Everything that happened positively in my life the last seven years is because I started to build my brand.

29:17Martin Zarian:Yeah, that's really interesting that you should say it like that. What I find as well, so people say like, do you win business off of some of the work that you do on LinkedIn? And the answer is yes. But that isn't actually where I see the real value of, for my platform, it's mainly on LinkedIn, similar to yours, Martin. That's not the real value. Like, there's a thing that I think that you need to aim towards called trust, right? I need to trust that Martin is the guy for me, right? In an AI-driven world where anyone can put anything out there, you can write anything on your website, how do I trust that Martin is the person?

29:52Martin Zarian:And there's some things that cannot be manufactured digitally. And one of those things is consistently showing up. There's Martin with a post again. There he is again. Over years, like you said, you've been investing. I think it's similar to me, like seven, eight years in the space. People know that you're not faking. right that you are real like you are doing this work this is really you you know and and that is currency which you will have against say somebody who has just started up and just trying to massage a few ai videos about brands do you know what i mean it's like who do you want you want the fake one who's just popped up in my feed today or do i want martin who i've been with for eight years who have seen his posts commented discussed things with him over time nice guy he can solve my problem and that's what people don't see like you are investing in personal brand in your future and yeah you don't know it's like what we were saying at the start right from a business b2b perspective you don't know the exact tiny roi but you know principally that longer term it's going to pay off like you were saying so i think that's something that everybody really 100 in in my case it's much easier to track because factor 39 does no advertisement Sure.

31:08We do zero lead generation. We do not have sales. Our social media post, probably the last one was probably three years ago. Our website was not updated in the last six years. So we are the classic example of the cobbler shoes are always broken. We are that cobbler. Something else worth mentioning here is that by constantly posting and having your website and being seen and constantly visible, this also serves AI and LLMs and search to actually bubble you up higher in results so i'm getting found through chat gbt and co-pilot these days because of the the history and the consistency of of posting and you mentioned personal brand i literally had a client uh this week dig up a proposal from 2014 and found me in the archives to give me a call and landed a deal so that's like 12 years ago that's mad because you during those 12 years managed to be consistent and be on top of mind.

32:05I have a really good client of mine that I worked a couple of years ago. And then at some point he wanted to update their branding. They were in a need to reposition outside of Cyprus into the UK market. And they were talking with their board and the investor circle. And I said, you know, we really need to do this strategy. We really need to do this positioning, but I need to find someone that can really help me. For some reason, my content was not getting directed to him anymore. And he was already a client of mine. So he forgot about me. Someone else in the room said, but why don't you ask Martin?

32:39And he said, oh, yeah, how did I forget about Martin? And this goes back to the very first points that we were saying about managing short and long term, right? Unfortunately, we see 10 ,000 brands every day. We make 7 ,000 decisions every day. Should I brush my teeth at nine? Should I brush my teeth on 903? Should I take the dog out? These shoes, those shoes. Like our lives are increasingly complicated. And also we are increasingly bombarded by brand and stimuli. We are over-destructed, over-stimulated, which means that we have to try even harder to just give these people a memory shortcut to get into their memory availability by being continuously out there and reminding them about us.

33:22because this person might be needing a project today, but most of the chances they might need it in seven years. So from now to the seven years, we have to be in their lives somehow.

33:33Martin Zarian:100 % agree with everything you guys have said there. I think you've got it, you've got it. But what I wanted to do is shift your gear back into the B2B space. Yes. Because you just talked there about a client that you heard of that was branching out globally. And I think that's really important. Like we started this podcast by referencing your global heritage there, Martin. And I just kind of, we are in this global world. So I wanted to sort of touch on that because a lot of B2B brands can see opportunities globally. So how should they approach brand strategy in new markets, you know, regionally, across regions, across different parts of the world?

34:10Martin Zarian:What are your thoughts there, Martin? What they need to be focusing on is managing their original strategy, right? Every organization in the world has an original strategy, which is usually connected to the founder story, right? So the founder had an idea. He created a business out of it. He became successful. So that is the origin strategy. Now, what will it be based on that, the strategy to expand out of the markets, right? So how can we translate that into specific markets? And I think translating is really the key word here. We know that we have a core. We know that we have our positioning.

34:47and we know that we have our strategy and our vision, we know that works in, let's say, Cyprus, we need to go into Greece, we need to go into Abu Dhabi, we need to go into UK. How can we solve the problem of being consistent to our strategy by translating it in a way that is activated into that specific location? Because as soon as you go out of your comfort zone, you start tapping into other cultural connotation, you start tapping into other competitors, You start tapping into other language shortcuts. So it's really important that you are able to maintain your core, but then also be honest with yourself.

35:23If you do not know anything about going into the Abu Dhabi from a brand perspective, from an operational perspective, you're going to have to figure it out and find someone that live and breathe into that location to help you translate the brand to those scenarios. Like we did some work in the past where we were helping one of our organization going from the UK to Japan. And can you imagine like Japan is one of the furthest away type of culture and business and just modus operandi to the UK. They're two completely different worlds. So what is still true to our brand and what will not be true because X, Y, Z into the Japanese culture, let's say.

36:04So it's really important that you find really good partners that understand the local market and are able to translate those things. because there are things that you don't want to compromise in your brand, but there are things that they need to be different and activated differently wherever you go in the organization. And you can understand that if you don't have a strategy internally that is ubiquitously understood by everyone in your organization, that is such a big problem, will become a catastrophic problem expanding it from there. Like I would never add an extra fraud to my family house if my foundations are shaky, right?

36:41And it's the same concept for that. If you don't have that strategy, if you don't have that positioning, if you don't have the short and the long term in the market you currently are, you cannot expand because as soon as you're going to expand, then the problems will become absolutely gigantic because the real power of a brand is enabling everyone in the organization to act independently, but always on brand.

37:06Martin Zarian:Yeah, 100%.

37:16Martin Zarian:I've seen so many businesses who splinter, right? And what happens is, is that people, the people have this kind of internally have this, you could call it ego, but they have like a, it's kind of like, this is, well, I want to do this. This is right for my market, right? And I don't care what everybody else says. And that is very short term. of its very sort of small mindedness. And I find like constantly I'm wheeled into organizations that are global where there's, you know, multiple different international teams. They're all fighting like against each other. And it's like, no, no, no, we should be together, right?

37:54Martin Zarian:We're fighting the enemy. We're fighting the strategic enemy out there. We are wanting to create customers. Why do we have to fight each other? And by diluting the brand, we're actually cannibalizing ourselves, right? You know, and I see this in multiple things from strategic point right down to execution where you've got like teams in Africa who, you know, are creating content that is so different to the team in Europe. And you're like, guys, like, why would you do that? Like, what's the thinking? And as time goes on, it drifts further and further and further apart until someone like me has to be wheeled in to try and pick up the pieces.

38:26Martin Zarian:You're absolutely right. So when you're starting off, get that foundation right. And how would that look, Martin, like from your perspective, What would you suggest to a board, a CEO, to have in place before then they go to different regions? They need to have their brand strategy on a page. I think we need to move away from 65 PowerPoint pages full of images, bullet points, and paragraphs, and manifesto, and story, and concept, and purpose, and positioning, and mission, and visual, USP, customer journey. none of that will help you. None of that will help you. There is not one single C-suite in the world that will read carefully a 65 pages document.

39:11That is not what they do. You need to have it into one page, right? So what is your positioning? Where are you playing? How can you win mental availability versus the competitors? And what is the emotional hook that you will deliver? What are your distinctive assets? and how are you going to bring that to life? So those elements, you know, they need to be in one single page so everyone understands it. Once we have that, then we can ask the question, okay, how does that translate into an effective, emotional, consistent activation in Japan? How does that translate into Canada? How does it translate into Cyprus?

39:53All of those different activations, they have the same emotional hook to the same positioning. So you see how much easier it is now to go and brief a creative agency in Japan because this is our positioning. This is our emotional hook. This is the mental availability that we can win against our competitor. Now go activate it, but on this. And that is super powerful because not every company in the world can be the Amazon and can be Coca-Cola and own every single entry point in our category. We have to be really, really, really strategic. And again, that is a guiding tool internally, but also you take this single beautiful page of strategy, you gave it to a Japanese creative agency and they know what they need to be done based on their skills.

40:39That is not negotiable.

40:42Martin Zarian:100%. I love that. Sometimes I like to boil it down to, you know, the big idea, right? Like, which sums up everything that you've just said, the positioning, the value to the customer, where we're focused, where we're going to put our resource. that if you can get it down to one page you've you've done well but what i think is funny right if you said to a ceo right i'm gonna hire you martin i want you to do six months worth of work and you go to them and i say well what am i gonna get the back end of it and you're like well you're gonna get one slide and they're like what what the heck but like that what you just described and for folks out there that think oh that sounds like dead easy like that is hard what martin has said there dissolving it down into one slide that is the work of a strategist that is the that is where the graft comes in the the the the stakeholder engagement the thinking the research against competitors the customer research that all of that work you know is so much effort and you know i've been on i've been on projects that are like 12 months right for really complex projects and you're sifting through shed loads of stuff but your job as a brand strategist is to bring that down make it easy yeah make it communicate make it so that everybody can understand and communicate it and and there's that big word that you just said there martin align around it i absolutely and matt i want to i want to build on that a bit a bit even further so to give a practical example to to the audience as well let's talk about kitkat right so it's a positioning and activation strategy that is being powerfully consistent for the last probably 30 36 years how does their one-pager look?

42:21Their one-pager look says, the insight is, breaks are good for you. Okay. Their positioning is, have a break, have a KitKat.

42:33Martin Zarian:That's it. That's it. They don't have anything else. Now, is it unique? It's not. Is it different? Arguable. because every chocolate brand in the world has something similar. We have sneakers that is similar. We have Mars, I think, that was saying that you're not you when you're hungry, right? So have a Mars. So there are many other brands they tap into that space. But this is where relative differentiation comes into place. Relative differentiation is not about owning something 100 % unique. It's about implementing it in a different way, in a more emotional way for the longest period of time in a more consistent time.

43:23There are numbers of studies that say how brands are starting to be less and less consistent into the activation, probably because of sugar rush, probably because of a new CMO comes into the organization and wants to change things, probably because a new CEO comes in organization and the daughter likes pink. So we have to paint everything into pink. I don't know. Shiny object syndrome. I don't know. There might be many, many different scenarios, but it's proven that simple, consistent emotional activation throughout the year generates results, generates mental availability. So that's why it's really important that we get that down into one page.

44:01We have it signed off. And that's it, guys. This is us for the next 36 years. Let's go out there and activate it exactly as KickCut did it.

44:09Martin Zarian:Yeah, so good. And to the point about the global reality of these things like what does a break look like in in japan right what does a break look like in europe what does a break look like in the us it's a human it's a it's a cultural phenomena that they've they've dominated and owned for many years and and you can see mars as you say trying to break into that like you know this idea of being hangry and hungry and you know trying to look at it in a different angle but nonetheless you know it's um kitkat is a phenomenal example i think of a brand that's culturally relevant and uh and owning it and and yeah so in terms of operationally let's just kind of shift gears a little bit into operations let's say we've got our brand on a page right we've decided what you know we stand for our positioning we've done all the research we're confident everybody's aligned and we're going to go for it like how do how do brands bring that alive you mentioned activation like what are you what are your kind of um sort of advice to anybody in that stage of the process what would your There is a beautiful quote from a person, again, I don't remember.

45:12I'm very bad with this. Like names and numbers, they just don't stick in my brain. But it said, maybe it's Dixon Baxi. It says that how well a brand is understood externally depends from how well it's understood internally. So do you want to build a successful brand externally? Well, it starts internally, right? Even if we have a one pager, we need to start the external brand campaign by the internal brand campaign. Every single person in the organization, no matter of their position into the organizational hierarchy, needs to understand where we're going and what we're doing and how we're going to be doing it.

45:45And the other beautiful quote that I always use, which was supposedly attributed to Kennedy, that he went to visit the NASA Space Center back in the 60s. He saw the caretaker of the building, you know, mopping the floor. And Kennedy being Kennedy, supposedly went to this person and said, hello, I'm Kennedy, the president. and who are you? What do you do at NASA? And this person stops mopping the floor, looks Kennedy in the eyes and says, well, Mr. President, I'm here to put a man on the moon, right? So even the apparently lowest piece of the organizational structure knows what the vision organization is.

46:27And that's very important. Once we have that, then we have five people or 5 ,000 people acting independently, but always moving on brand. So that is the first thing to solve. And we're talking about months of work, guys, here. We're talking about years of change management, right? We're talking about telling Sophie from HR that she's been doing the same thing in the same way from 15 years, that now we're starting to do things slightly differently. So how do we translate that into the context of HR? Then we need to go to the CTO, building the technology. How do we translate that brand into the language of a CTO?

47:04So it's an incredible, hard, but extremely powerful change management and brand onboarding that needs to be happening internally first. If you don't have that internally, I can guarantee you there is no external campaign that will fix that. Because if the operations are not able to support the promise that we're delivering to our customer, we don't have a business, right? And this might mean taking some hard decision, firing people, hiring people, killing products, killing brands. You know, we do not talk about enough about that strategy is about saying no. It's about taking hard decisions for the greater good.

47:45There is a story that I heard from Mark Ritson. He was talking about how there is a very specific type of bush rats, which they kill their babies or family members in their nest in order to protect the strongest one into their litter. And that similarly goes to brands as well, right? And we're going to go into brand architecture and portfolio management. So I don't want to go there because that is a huge, huge topic. A whole other topic is a whole other podcast and probably 15 different books. But it goes back to the ability to align everyone in the organization into the same direction, but being able to also take hard decisions that are based on brand.

48:26Now, let's say that we fix that internal alignment. Then it's all about creativity and emotionality. The rules did not change. It's scientifically proven that humans respond with production of endorphin, production of dopamine, production of a series of neurological chemical component when they are interacting with an emotion. And if brands are able to create that emotional connection with the consumer, they're able to buy into mental availability, which ultimately means they're opening wallet. So how might we activate this campaign and how do we, sorry, how might we activate this brand with a series of activation, with a series of campaign that will generate that right emotional connection with our users?

49:10And how do we translate that across touchpoints? Website, applications, how we pick up the phone, how we write our messaging, how we do our campaign, the TV, social media, you know, whether internally is aligning all people, externally is aligning all the different touchpoints. and that is another fundamental mistake that people do, right? They consider some of the touchpoint insignificance but I want to tell you a story. A couple of years ago, I wanted to go to a fish taverna, to a fish restaurant here in Cyprus to take my family to have a Sunday treat, to spend some time with the people that I love the most and because in Cyprus, some of the businesses, they're not really good in updating their working hours on Google, I Googled the place and I said, you know, it's Sunday, maybe they're closed.

49:55Let me give them a call just to be sure. I called the restaurateur, the host picks up the phone. And I said, hey, it's a party of six. We would like to come for lunch. I'm just calling to see if you guys are open. And the gentleman on the other line said, I pick up the phone. What do you think? And I was like, wow, like this person really, really doesn't want my money and really, really did not understand that even how you pick up the phone is a touch point to activate your brand and to create that positive customer experience and positive emotion. Needless to say, I didn't go to the restaurant.

50:30I actually was empowered to speak about this negative experience with all the people that I knew. And here we go, broken brand.

50:38Martin Zarian:Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Can I just pick up on one quick point? Because I just think it's so important, this idea of aligning everybody and how that looks. Because I recently had a client, well, I'm working with a client, a big client in the construction company in this construction industry in the UK they're massive right hundreds I would say of employees okay you imagine like they're building sites builders surveyors all that good stuff anyway I'm working with their senior exec team we come up with a strategy and I was like we were starting to talk about this phase of activation okay now usually that's a really big uphill struggle but this company I was so amazed because they have invested for years in internal communications and culture to the point where there is a cadence in the company for this kind of thing for change management to happen swiftly so regularly they invest in all of their people getting in a room like a big theater and they're in the north of the uk they're in manchester now i was actually quite amazed by this right so because it was dead easy so right we're going to communicate the strategy to the team right what are you doing like next month we need you in manchester you're going to help us communicate it we're going to you know this is a normal thing for us it's not an unusual thing we're going to all the people come they go we got a three four hundred stadium theater in manchester they're all going to come we're going to only have a skeleton staff on the sites and then we can actually film it and we can actually you know live stream it across all the the projects that we've got on around the uk and the CEO is on board.

52:16Martin Zarian:It's dead easy. He's briefing is already scheduled here, here and here. Here's the comms team. Matt, we need you to speak here. We need you to help. Bam. Now I was just like, whoa, I'm not used to such, I guess, investment in internal communications. And when I asked the CEO about it, he said, yeah, like that is how we've become so successful just generally. And they're working with, you know, no disrespect to builders, but people that basically are bricklayers and people like that that don't care about corporate strategy. They just want to build great. New collar, yeah. Yeah, and there's no disrespect to them whatsoever.

52:49Martin Zarian:But the challenge businesses have is to connect what goes on in the boardroom to everyone. And this company had nailed it, and it was a regular cadence in the year, regularly getting together, regularly discussing it. Everybody understood it, so much so that the CEO told me a story of they had some market research done, and somebody had gone to one of their sites and asked like one of the people putting up the boards the boardings outside about the company values and what the strategy of the company was and that person putting up boarding was able to tell them and they were absolutely shocked so the point i'm trying to make here is is that you are right martin like that is absolutely correct inside out and particularly if you uh my advice would be to company owners to put cadence in so that you know no doubt things are going to have to change over the course of those five, 10 year plus in terms of the nuts and bolts, but have a mechanism by which you can communicate, you can connect, and you can engage with your people.

53:52It's super important. You know how I like to explain to my team, it's like having a party balloon, but it has normal air inside, not helium. So you hit the balloon, it will go up a bit, and then eventually it will start to going down. So our job internally, as brand change management, is to keep hitting the balloon at regular cadence so it stays up in the air, you know? And that's really the game because people want to go back to status quo. People absolutely despise and hate change. So if we have to make a change internally, it's what you said, Matt, which is beautiful. It's about building regular rituals, regular cadence to keep that believer alive, to keep the people excited and keep going.

54:36Otherwise, it's back to business. is is is monday to friday nine to five people don't care they they and it's going to be really really hard to to have that brand alive internally right okay well look we're we're running fast out

54:50Martin Zarian:of time i'm just wondering jacob is there anything you wanted to pick up with martin to sort of start closing us out it was kind of it's kind of like a master class of um britson actually i was like picking up on so many things from his his courses and i was like yeah and even the kitkat and everything it's you've so eloquently repeated it all back so it's great to hear hear that and you actually acting on it as well which is which is awesome but yeah i've thoroughly enjoyed this so martin where can people connect with you online yeah i'm i'm i'm on linkedin every day uh maybe even too much of uh of too much time uh but but you can find me there yeah just just uh find me on Martin Zarian in LinkedIn, send me a message and happy to chat with everyone.

55:35And if you guys want to check my work and the things that we do, although the website, it needs a big uplift and new case studies. We have about six, seven case studies that we didn't manage to put inside yet. There it's factory39.io. But yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to reach out to me.

55:52Martin Zarian:Amazing. Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your energy and all the best of luck and thank you. I know that we'll be in touch again in the future. So thanks very much Martin. Thank you guys.