Ep 152 Tough Topics: Your Brand Isn't the Logo. It's the Standard Behind It.

0:00So the whole conversation around what is the value of design has clearly entered a new era. I was looking the other day and it's interesting because there's this very large gas station chain. I'm sure if you live in the South, you are very well versed in it of other parts of the world. Maybe you've heard of it called Bucky's. And it's interesting because they've been very much in the news lately that they are suing pretty much anybody else that has a cartoon animal on their gas station into the ground. small mom and pops, all sorts of different things. But the interesting thing that I find is that whenever you actually go into one of their stores, when you look at their brand that they are fighting and suing to defend, you see the mascot that's on their own walls is AI slop.

0:47There's extra fingers, melted paws, writing that doesn't make any sense, right? Like two gas station hoses that don't connect to anything, right? These sort of, it's off-brand in places. Honestly, I think a kid would catch. But they're not alone. And that's what I want to talk about in this episode, is I see so many companies that are so vocal, even suing to protect their brand, well, they're not protecting it themselves. It's not irony. That's what this episode is going to be about. So welcome to episode 152 of The Crazy One. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. This is a show where we talk about leadership, creativity, design, all sorts of stuff that matter to creative people.

1:30Now, as always, do me a favor, leave a review, subscribe here on YouTube, or you've got some work to do. Hit me up for my agency, Crazy, to come in and help you with it. But this is what I want to talk about, right? Because I've spent, what, 20 years talking to CEOs, talking to leadership, talking to boards and companies from the Fortune 1 all the way down the line. What is the value of design? And on some level, they get it, right? And so I think Bucky's is just sort of the latest poster child. These massive kind of, I don't know what, they've been built to be an oasis where you can get clothes and barbecue.

2:09And it's just, it's turned into this sort of like roadside attraction or the revival of what used to be that kind of like Route 66 spirit where people will seek these out. But again, in recent weeks and months, they've been garnering a lot of backlash because they're a big company. They have expensive lawyers. And there's been time after time where they are now suing, candidly, probably bullying much smaller independent mom and pop gas stations because they have a cartoon animal as their mascot. And Buc-ee's has a beaver. There's statues of it out front. There's illustrations of it all over the place.

2:46There is merch that you maybe have seen, but didn't know what it was of its head kind of in a yellow circle that's on stickers and bumper stickers and all sorts of things. And that's the thing is that, you know, brands have value. It's what it's why we are here. It is what we are, what we build. But that's the thing that I find interesting is that Buc-ee's is spending all this money to do lawsuits that John Oliver tried to pick a fight with them on Last Week Tonight to get them to sue him and HBO. They wouldn't engage. But they're doing all this effort, spending all this money to defend their brand.

3:21Yet any simple search on social media or anything like that will show you person after person pointing out that this brand that they're spending so much to defend is one that they don't actually even take care of. I saw one this morning of a designer that I know who'd taken a photo of one of the illustrations was above one of the gas pumps. And it's clearly AI that Bucky is holding a whatever it is, like holding the gas hose and it kind of goes behind him, but it doesn't connect to the pump. The pump actually has one in it. The writing on the side of the pump is clearly that sort of AI Sanskrit gibberish, right?

3:58Like it's filled with these little flaws and mistakes where it kind of got it right. There's enough things where it's close. But if you've been on a brand team, if you've been a designer, it just screams at you. And I think that that's the damage that's coming. And it's the one where I think that right now every brand for a while has been optimizing for one thing, and that's speed. Not speed to get it right, speed to get it out the door. and maybe this is an episode for you maybe this is an episode you need to send for somebody on your team because there's a lot of content right now that's going out there from big brands small brands all sort of brands where you can tell nobody even spent two seconds to lean in because if you lean in the logo isn't quite right or it's just completely off altogether it's made up slightly different colors, different typefaces, different, right?

4:59It's that sort of like good enough, close enough mentality that is pervasive. And I think a lot of this is where the culture of so many people who've been working to keep their job, not to do their job is going to come home to roost because people just don't care if it's close enough. If it gets past the boss, then it goes out the door. And I think that's where AI is going to play a really interesting role in this because AI has made the speed free. Or maybe not free, depending on your token allocation, but at least close to it. So everybody's taking it. The problem is, and I think this is the big point that everybody's missing, is that at the end of the day, speed was never the thing your customer was buying.

5:43It wasn't the logo. It wasn't the color palette. It wasn't. And again, I have to have so many conversations around like your logo and your brand are not the same thing. Your brand is a feeling. Your brand is trust. Your brand is why you come back to that brand time and time again. The logo, the colors, the typeface, the guidelines, that's your visual language. And that's different. That's the visual embodiment of that. And I think a lot of people will just sort of dismiss it as being close enough, right? Like it's, you know, if the visual language isn't quite right, well, it's close enough. But what they're missing is the underlying problem.

6:23It's what I will argue all along that a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. A brand is a feeling. A brand is whenever you say, oh, I buy that because what is the end of that? And it's because I like it. I trust it. I trust there's consistency. I trust there's thought, innovation, whatever that reason is. But whenever I start seeing the slop, when I start seeing the miss details, when I see things that are off, whenever I can see that they're just going for speed, then the trust erodes. Slowly at first, but very steadily and very consistently, it erodes. And I think this is true of brands.

7:02It's true of all the content you see on LinkedIn, the people that clearly are just, again, having it create, they're putting in a prompt, having it create an image and taking the first output. They don't look at it. They don't look at the details. They don't look at any of those sort of things. And I think that that's the thing, right? Like speed was never the thing that your customers were buying. They were buying trust. And I think that in this case, like Bucky's is an easy thing to point to because I think that they got both halves out in public right now, right? Like, and I think that they're aggressively protecting their brand and their brand's sort of legal armor and shell and what that is while they're careless about the brand's actual substance.

7:45And they're not alone. This isn't just a problem with them. I'm not just going after them. I see it day after day and time after time and post after post and ad after ad where that's the part that people are missing. And I think we haven't helped this problem as creatives, right? As we've reduced ourselves to just the execution around what this is, that's the problem is that we've reduced you know brands down to just visuals down to these simple things and we've missed the bigger part of it and that i think that this is the part that's becoming pervasive that's going to come home to roost is that i don't think cheap is just a price i think at too many places cheap has become the standard and i think that in a lot of cases right Right.

8:32Like cutting corners is often framed as a cost decision that we're doing it because we need to ship faster. We need to save time. We need to save money. Right. Like there's a cost to what we do in time and money and people in whatever it is. And I've never I understand that on its surface. But I think in the same way that there's a lot you can do that's very process driven and very kind of literal, it tends to usually miss the bigger point. And again, I think for me, cost cutting, when you're cutting those corners, it's not just a cost cutting decision. It's a standards decision. That once you accept good enough internally, then it's very difficult to then start to credibly demand to get it right, either internally or externally.

9:17From your customers, from your vendors, even from your own team. And I think that that's the thing. What I've often found is that usually standards don't erode gradually. they erode the first time nobody says anything. Because I think for a lot of, I mean, in my experience, from a lot of leadership, from a lot of teams, from a lot of executives, and it's weird. I know that a lot of people look at me strangely when I say this. I think there's a lot that I've learned about leading teams and working with people that I learned from training dogs. Because a lot in these cases, they're acting like a puppy.

9:55A puppy is going to see what can it get away with? How far can I run until the leash snaps back? What can I do until I get put in timeout or get yelled at, right? Like who's watching? What can I get away with? And I think in the same way, whenever I walk into a pet store and I see a horribly behaved dog, I don't get mad at the dog. I get mad at the owner. They're the ones that didn't socialize them. They're the ones that didn't train them. They're the ones that didn't set a standard and that they then allowed the dog to act out or to have emotional problems or whatever that is, that somewhere along the way, nobody set a standard.

10:31And I think that's the thing is that it's everybody sort of testing to see how little can I get away with? Who's noticing? Can I do whatever I want to do? Can I do it fast and get my job done sooner and just sort of, again, go through the motions, which again, is often the underlying issue why for so many companies I will sort of rage against the fact that they are, they don't set a standard, they set an acceptable level of compliance. And I think that, you know, look, AI didn't invent corner cutting. I think what it did is it removed the friction that slowed it down. Because, you know, the old way of doing it was like it took time and money to produce something sloppy, right?

11:14That, that friction was sort of accidentally a quality gate that, you know, it had to go through a couple of different meetings or it had to take some time or write like a few different people had to look at it. So at some point, somebody would probably give a shit and go, wait, that looks like crap. So it was these sort of like unintentional accidental quality gates that were there. And I think that what AI has done is it removed the friction, so it removed the gate. And now sloppy scales just as fast as good. And I think this is the issue where brands are treating AI like a speed multiplier with also, and they aren't raising the bar on the review at the same time.

11:56I've talked about this is why sort of your status meetings need to get replaced with decision logs. You need to do pre-mortems instead of post-mortems because, and again, I think that they're shipping at their own decline, at their own peril, at their own compromise faster than ever. And whenever you push back on it, when you're one that says, stands up and says, Hey, wait, you know, we're compromising our brand, our value, things like that. Everybody's response is, Oh, you're a problem, right? You're a gatekeeper. You're, you're trying to slow me down as if somehow right has become a dirty word, which I don't understand.

12:33I don't understand it on any level. I don't understand it with my clients. I don't understand it with the kind of revolving door of designers that I've had recently who keep telling me that my standards are too high. And I keep arguing with them that theirs are too low and their careers are going to be too short. That, you know, for me, the standard is not negotiable. That, you know, if the stakes are what they are, for me and my agency, it's me making a living. For you and your brand, it's continuing to grow at the rate that you want to grow. That what's often dismissed as these sort of little things is often reduced to individual individual decisions and you kind of look at the headline, not the trend line.

13:10And this was why I wanted to call out a few episodes ago, why I felt like plausible noise was such a massive threat. Because I think, and we're talking about plausible, plausible noise as an, as sort of like an individual output problem. And I think that, you know, a lot of cases, that's what, whenever I talk to people, that's what they do is they cite it as a person problem or they aren't necessarily looking at it at the larger scale, that this is going to be a systemic issue and that the companies that have standards and hold the line and again, like are able to train their systems, but also train the people to actually still care about the work that it puts out.

13:52Then again, I think that if not, then that's where you're going to start to see. And you're already starting to see the building resentment against AI slop, against like the things that are clearly AI. Now, look, I think, and we do it with a number of our clients, I think you can do it and do it well if you invest the time and pay attention to the details and come into it with a strategy and still understand what are the parts it does well and what are the parts that you need to lean into. But if you're just handing everything over with no standard, then your packaging, your signage, your marketing, your customer-facing assets, and ultimately your trust, right, is what's going to cut the corner.

14:29It's the thing that's going to fail, that it's not just the person that's cutting the corner, it's the organization. But this is often the difficult part of this conversation because couching this to an individual person, that's an easier conversation. That's an easier thing to face, especially as I talk to CEOs and leadership, where it becomes more difficult is whenever you have to look in the mirror and admit that there is a systemic problem, that there is a systemic cultural problem, that sometimes it's the culture, sometimes it's the leadership, sometimes it's coming down from the CEO. Like it can start from a lot of places, but it's easier and more comfortable to think about if we say, oh, this is just a person, not that this is an organizational problem.

15:11And I think that this is the thing that everybody needs to hold on to, is that in my experience and building brands and doing everything else, right? Like authority doesn't survive contradiction. That as we talk about that in two different ways, there's internal authority and external authority. On internal authority, I think the second your team sees leadership either ship or accept subpar work to hit a date, the quality and doing it right stops having any real value, right? It becomes a poster on a wall. And I think that a lot of leadership then sort of just becomes an empty shirt. Because at the end of the day, if I'm there to do something that really matters, and I know that leadership doesn't care, that's why the number of people I am constantly shocked at who said, I don't care about my job, right?

16:01Like they have quiet quit, they are in place, but they don't actually care. They don't, they're just like, look, I'm going through the motions until my next stock vest, and then I'm going to go find something I love. And so again, these organizations are rotting from the inside out. But then there's also the external authority. And you just look at the headlines and you know this is true, that even if customers don't consciously notice AI slop, they feel it. It has a look. You recognize the fonts. You recognize the details that are off. You recognize that all of a sudden you can tell that a brand doesn't care the way that they used to.

16:41And you start to wonder, what else does this permeate? This is why I've argued for 20 or 30 years, right? Like the work is the truth. It is the truth of the organization and the culture that produces it. If the I's are dotted, the T's are crossed, the details are paid attention to, then even before I ever talk to the organization, I know the leaders give a shit. I know there's a strong culture. I know that they are paying attention to the things that are going on. They're not just going through the motions. But if I look at a different company and their org chart matches their website, there's typos, there's AI slop, there's stuff where it's just clearly they're just shipping for the sake of shipping.

17:21Then again, even without a conversation, I know the state the culture is in. I know people are just going through the motions. There's probably rampant, quiet quitting. No one is there because they feel like they have a future. They're there because they have a paycheck. And that transactional sort of commoditized relationship is, again, whenever you're in that space, that's only going to be a bullhorn for what's going on here. Because there was a time not long ago when anyone could produce work that was good enough, right? That thing used to sort of separate a real brand from a knockoff, right?

17:58That care and craft and standard. But again, I think that that's becoming less visible, or maybe it's just becoming less cared about. That plausible noise is now this problem. That if the fake looks close enough, why pay for the real? If I can have AI do the job of a designer and it looks close enough, why should I pay for that marketing department? Why should I pay for that designer? Because it's close enough? If I can cut the headcount to save, you know, my bottom line for the next quarter, why should I care about the bigger picture? And that it's this sort of myopic thing that is really going to, like I continue to say, is going to destroy so many brands of so many companies from the inside out.

18:44You're already seeing it happening. But I think that that's the thing is that no one's going to see this coming as like a single event. There's not usually, unless you really do something big, right? There's usually not some headline moment where your brand loses trust. It's an erosion. It's quiet. It's cumulative. And by the time it shows up in the numbers, it's too late. And I think the way you're going to see when companies start to realize is just watch when the rebrands start. Watch when they start getting celebrity creative directors, watch when they start changing their logos, watch whenever.

19:25That's going to be the moment where you know that they've realized it. And I think, you know, the people making these sort of speed over quality calls right now are almost never the ones who be in the room when this bill comes due. They're going to move on. They're going to go do it for somebody else and for all the companies. And they're going to keep finding jobs. I am shocked at the number of absolute idiots I've worked with who keep getting great jobs because nobody checks references. Right? I've never even understood references. Like you get a list of three names, you know, are going to say nothing but good things about you.

20:01Why? Like, why does that have value? That's a different episode. But this is the thing, right? So I think this idea of kind of these short wins, the ship faster, cheaper, AI powered efficiency, we're seeing all these quarterly decks are being financed by long-term brand debt that nobody's tracking on a balance sheet. So what do we do? How do we start to fight this? Well, I think there's a few different ways to do it. I think one is just sort of, you know, audit your own brand assets this week. The ones that the customers actually touch, go get in a fight, go die on that hill, right? Like would, you know, would this survive the scrutiny you're applying to your competitors or to other things like that.

20:45Would that survive like a legal review if you're going to go sue somebody? But give a shit, right? If you're the one that's been mailing it in, start to give a shit. Now, what does give a shit mean? I think part of that is like, what are your non-negotiables? What are the, like I said, what are the hills you're going to die on? Because a lot of people I talk to these days don't have any non-negotiables anymore. They're only non-negotiables to keep getting a paycheck. Again, and I think that sacrifices the longer term vision. What's the work you're going to show in your next interview? What's the work you're going to get in the future?

21:20Because I know there's a lot of people right now that whenever they're being pressed on their case studies and things like that in interviews, it's pretty clear that they've just been kind of mailing it in for the last couple months or the last couple years. And why is that somebody I I want to hire again. But, you know, what is that non-negotiable? Is it that nothing customer facing ships without somebody looking at it, who we know has taste and authority to review it? Not a rule, but an actual role. That if you're using AI to generate anything brand facing, that you are continuing to raise the bar up, not down.

21:55Because that failure mode, that good enough mode, that going through the motions mode, it's invisible until the customer finds it for you. Until the cumulative damage is enough that they do just start to realize that they don't really trust you anymore. Maybe they can put it in words, maybe they can't, but they're going to start looking at other brands and spending their money elsewhere. Because if it's happening there, it's probably pervasive other places. But I think also like, Just start asking the uncomfortable questions.

22:28And again, I think this is that part of just like, give a shit. Where are you already doing the things that Bucky's doing? Where are you shipping the stuff that people are noticing? Because people are starting to notice. Again, you see all over the country now, right? People are putting graffiti up on clearly AI-generated billboards. And there is a pushback against what this is. I don't see that slowing down. But also, if you go through that, if you ask uncomfortable questions, if you have your non-negotiables and it's clear that there is nothing you can do that is going to change anything there, then your job is to spend as few hours there as you need to until you can get a job and get someplace that does care.

23:08Because those are going to be the places that are going to have the long-term success. Those are the places where you're going to find stability. Those are the enlightened places where, again, the careers are still going to exist. While everybody else needs to go through the rebrands and getting rid of that team and bringing in a new team and closing their innovation lab and opening a different one, thinking any of that was the problem. Like this is why candidly, like most leadership will continue to hire consultants until the world ends because most consultants will not tell that leadership the one thing they should, that would actually make a difference, which is either they, that leadership needs to be different.

23:46The culture needs to be different or the people that should be fired are the people that hired them because they are the ones that are mailing it in and it just rolls downhill. And you can keep changing the org out and keep doing all that stuff and keep getting the same results until the board or somebody else realizes that, hey, maybe we got rid of a lot of really good, smart people and we're not looking at getting rid of the right people. But again, that's the thing we need to remember. cheap always feels free in the moment you make the decision but it never is it cheap easy cutting that corner doing the thing that's good enough and this is where we all have to want to do better we have to raise the bar not lower it where we have to lean in and stop making the excuse about cost or time or whatever it is Because at some point, all those little excuses fade away and you're left with a team or a brand that doesn't produce.

24:45And then you're out on the street trying to figure out what happened. You have to protect what you actually stand for. Not just the trademark, but the thing behind the trademark. Protect the feeling. Protect the brand. And to pick your head up and have a longer view outside of, and I think this is where most creatives, I've said it before on the show and I'll say it again. Again, this is where most of us fall down because we only will go, we'll only think, we'll only care as far as the scope we've been given. That if it is outside of that scope, if it's a bigger decision, we tend to just sort of shrug our shoulders and go, there's, you know, hey, that's somebody else's problem.

25:22While simultaneously sitting around wondering why we aren't taken more seriously. But that's the thing, right? And I argue this with a lot of my clients lately where I was like, man, if you think it's expensive to do it right, let's try doing it this way and let's try doing it wrong for a while. Because that little project is going to turn into a rebrand. That little tweak is going to turn into a complete repositioning. That group of teams that you're just sort of babying along are going to all need to go and you're going to incur a huge cost in hiring new people. And then the leadership position you've got, you're going to give up to Chase.

26:00and that's the thing is that you know nobody wants to think about that and that's what i said is that those are the bills that are gonna come due it's easier not to think about it but guaranteeing i and again i'm sure that at some point this will probably be an i told you so episode on my part for a bunch of different people but bill's gonna come due so like i said go out think about that stuff, push back, give a shit, send this to other people, make them listen to it, make them understand what the cost of what this is of kind of what's really going on. And then again, like the people that are going to rise and are going to be great and are going to do good things are going to think about more than just the next two feet in front of them.

26:41But like I said, that's something I've covered before and it's sure something I'm going to cover again. But hey, I say it every time because I mean it every time, but thank you for your time. I know time is truly the only luxury of us really have. I was incredibly grateful you want to spend and any of it listening to me. So remember, cheap is too expensive. And the best way to fight that, and as always, stay crazy.