S07.EP12 - Creative Leadership & The Future of Branding with Ekaterina Solomeina

0:00No 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 a one-person team, you have a lot of influence. So how do you influence people? All these things stop creatives and designers from growing further and actually achieving more.

0:30Hello and welcome to Just Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies.

0:48Before we jump in, if you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the waitlist. That's joinbba.com.

1:22Hello 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 Solomina. And Ekaterina is a creative director, a TEDx speaker and co-founder of Future London Academy, an executive school for creatives.

2:11And 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.

2:48And 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 Wolff, the founder of Wofolins, 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 in 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's just a marvelous and genius person. and yeah I've been working across variety of design and creative fields from shooting commercials to digital product design or back then multimedia design whatever we called it back 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 one 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 establish 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, and you feel like you lack this language to communicate with them.

4:30And 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. And that was basically my personal pain that started Future Learn Academy. I wanted the place for myself to learn. I wanted to progress.

5:06I didn't think that my career stops after I've done the biggest campaign or whatever, achieved tick the boxes that I needed to take as a creative director and I wanted to learn I wanted to be better and again speaking of Michael Wolff 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 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.

5:50So I was thinking, how can I continue being inspired, continue learning, continue being the best I could be? And yes, that's what started Future Learn 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 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.

6:43All top companies trust us as the best place to learn about branding, leadership, strategy, business and all these topics that creatives and designers are 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.

7:05Matt Davies: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. And 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 sort of 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, PhD or whatever.

7:48And if you do it back to back, which is what a lot of people do, you finish at the age 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 do 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 set up 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.

8:42And 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 that 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?

9:26Let'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 so 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 what am I supposed to do next like I've 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

10:41Matt Davies: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 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?

11:14Matt Davies: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?

11:50Sure. 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 model 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.

12:32And 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 like 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, what even bad looks like you haven't seen anything at all uh 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 and on top of that for any neural unit practice one is to know what good looks like and then actually going 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.

13:38So there are lots of micro things that are just much harder now than ever before. And 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.

13:59Matt Davies: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 think it'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 on 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.

14:48I think one just very random tip that I remembered from talking to actually Sir John Haggerty, 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 and 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 the 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?

15:52What kind of feedback should I provide in this meeting that will move the project further? And then as you progress throughout the career ladder, yes, 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. is compelling that people can follow understanding where 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 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 your role as a leader to we know that people don't quit jobs they quit managers so your job becomes about retention about creating the culture that forces creativity how you create conditions for creative work to be done and then how do you not micromanage like how do you maintain the quality of work that you set that you know this is what good look 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 meeting everything to the end point and sending it to print or publishing or whatever was 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 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 good looks like.

18:36So it's a tough one. But then the most exciting one is when you go even 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 organization 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 and that's the hardest part and this is where as future land 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 the United States, former Airbnb co-founder, Microsoft hired chief design officer two weeks ago.

20:29It'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's happening in the industry. And 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're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it.

21:11If you're 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 the audience.

21:53And 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 a 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 that anyone working in branding might enjoy so for example I love this new trend of that traditional way of thinking about audiences segmentation or anything else is going away towards being creating something for one weird person so we used to think of demographics then they're kind of got cancelled 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.

23:22And 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 whatever it is about this finding this very deep quirky inside 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 as a most commoditized and bland because we 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 that 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 but then when i suppose we started all in branding and advertising that was a risky strategy because the distribution wasn't there.

24:52You 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 miss 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.

25:57Design 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 with to creative problem solving and that's what 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 is creative problems whether it's marketing and branding problems and that becomes the main value now to make sure that the rest of organizations sees this as the 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 and this rebrand 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.

27:14Now, 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 teabag is made from and what goes into each tea leaf.

27:57And we can actually have that very clear in the packaging and the brand and communication and everything. And that opens us total addressable market of an extra, let's say, 1 billion people globally. And within our current market of the UK or Australia or wherever you are, that's 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.

28:45And maybe I already ran an experiment and saw the ad that talks more about health benefit. Customer acquisition cost goes down. The landing 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 and 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 their all the efforts they're doing and then you'll become their best friend you'll become the go-to person for any advice any conversation and 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

29:32Matt Davies: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 such a challenge and and so needed so it sounds like you're doing some some really awesome work I had a question for you obviously future London Academy we wouldn't be uh you know doing our job if we didn't ask you about the rise of AI into the future and uh and what your kind of take on on on where that's going to kind of push the industry in the future so ai go ekaterina great question i was wondering if we can you knew it was coming right but it was it's actually quite interesting we were having this conversation yesterday so obviously as future land can we teach about the future and everything 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 like some of the top CEOs and CFOs as part of our final judging panel for our Executive MBA program.

30:44And we were just discussing what they're seeing in the industry and kind of what shifts. And they were comparing, I suppose, our wonderful alumni who were graduating and presenting their final project, again, kind of trying to sense what is the feeling in the market. And what they said is, it's 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.

31:29There 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 has limitations. 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 uh obviously back back then it was photoshop that we used to to draw and to create branding and i remember i had an art director who said you 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.

32:58And 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, but 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, huh, 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.

33:38And 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.

34:30And 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're experiencing is in other parts like 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 chat 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.

35:17So 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 as creatives and humans is not be scared and just trying things out playing around and seeing where where we want to go as as professionals all right from here i'd love to just loop back i love that there is no one wants to go deeper into conversation about and 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 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's about but i do want to go back to the the creative leadership uh thing we're talking about because you know that's the theme of this and getting creative leaders into boardrooms you know like going upstream a little bit more so how do we actually go about that like what what what are creatives 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 effort as 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 the 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.

37:35And 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're involved in it, the planet that is involved in it, and all All these other things that very naturally as humans, we are drawn to.