2261 - How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Tactical Marketing and Focus on Strategic Branding with Hummingbird Creative Group's Wendy Coulter

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1:05With us right now, Wendy Coulter. Wendy, you are the CEO and founder of Hummingbird Creative Group. You're found on the web at hummingbird-creative.com. Wendy, it's great to have you. Thank you so much, Josh. It's fabulous to be here. I really appreciate you having me on the show, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I just want to point this out before we get going. Thank you for being a military spouse. I understand. So your husband was in the, in the army. So thank you so much. You know, it's, it's, it's always important to, to, to, you know, to our friends, you know, our mill spouses also always deserve that.

1:47In my opinion that, Hey, thank you for your service because it's, it's amazing, especially, I don't know if you were, were you together and like he was deployed or? Well, yeah, I actually met him after he came back from the first Gulf War. Yeah. So I was not with him while he was deployed, thankfully. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's hard. That would have been difficult. But, you know, all of our friends, his friends are friends from the military. And it's great to have those long term relationships. Those guys really had a bond. It really is. Yeah. It's I was in at that exact same time. I was in 1990 to 95 during the first Desert Storm.

2:29It was over and done pretty quickly, that part of it anyway, at least for those of us who were in school at the time, journalism school at the time. And then, yeah, my my COO for, you know, for all my influence, she was an ombudsman. So she would, you know, kind of help with all the families while, you know, everyone was deployed for six months at a time. And so that's why, again, thank a mill spouse if you get the opportunity. Thanks for her, for sure. Yeah. Well, Wendy, before we kind of get going, talking about your superpowers with Hummingbird, what have you been doing for fun lately? Oh, so you're asking me that right after a family vacation.

3:10So, so much fun. I've got a 16 year old daughter and we go down to Carolina Beach here in North Carolina every year for a family vacation with me and my daughter and my husband and my parents. And we do all kinds of fun things. So many trips we kayak. We didn't get to do that this time because of weather and those kinds of things. but we make it to breweries and we just have a great time on the beach. We did make it to the aquarium this time in North Carolina down at Fort Fisher. So that was a lot of fun, but I've got, I've got a 16 year old driving right now, Josh. Oh yeah. Every turn. That's right.

3:59Yeah. I don't necessarily can i wouldn't consider that fun but it's an activity nonetheless no i cannot i could i could all three of my kids i could not do any driver's training i was just i was too panicked i'm like i'm gonna die i'm gonna die so that's that's one area i kind of chickened out and had my wife take care of that one well you also you mentioned music earlier and um my daughter's a drummer and so that's fun um what kind of drumming uh what kind of any kind of drumming like rock drumming or like band marching band she plays um she plays at home she's been playing since she was four and so she loves rock our our favorite joint artist um is elton john not that you know a big drumming thing with elton john but um we share a lot of taste in music because she loves classics and she loves rock and she loves 80s music and um and some big hair bands that i as a kid.

4:59And so music is definitely in the household. I tell you, a house filled with music is a house filled with love, in my opinion. So Wendy, let's talk about Hummingbird and Hummingbird Creative Group. Your website is hummingbird-creative.com for a friend to follow along. But tell us about the work you do with Hummingbird. Absolutely. So Hummingbird builds business value through better branding. I have run Hummingbird for 30 years now. And I think like a big aha moment for me that I share with my clients is that for a very long time, I was always being asked what the ROI on sales is from the activities that we would do.

5:44And as I became more interested and educated myself more on branding, I think it's so important that I came to understand that marketing that is led by strong branding has an impact on more than just sales ROI. It can build a great culture. It can help improve the delivery of services and help improve reputation. We can use insight to find and express true differentiation in the marketplace. And we can also uncover needs that lead to developing new services or new products for your customers. So oftentimes branding has a lot of impact on the entire business model from operations and human resources to customer service, finance, and then, of course, sales, which does need to be the focus of marketing most of the time.

6:34But there's so many more impacts of that. I think that that's fascinating that branding can drive culture. Do you mind maybe sharing a bit more about that? Oh, absolutely. So we get involved a lot of times when we do core values work and work around vision, which is very culture driven, oftentimes in the world we're in today, where we're helping clients create an interior environment for their office or an environment for their employees or maybe send gifts and things that help express that culture. And it's so important to do that regularly with a team because the team is really the extension of the sales team.

7:19It's not just about one person or just your sales team doing sales. Sales goes across the culture of a business. And so when we get into the strategic activities of branding, culture is oftentimes where we start. And we always want to make sure that we're touching on culture. Yeah. Well, so if I would, I'd really love you when you've been doing this for decades, you have a lot, you are a legacy company. You've served a lot of clients over many, many, many, many, many, many, many clients over the years. You've seen it all. So I'm curious what you are seeing in your world. So like, again, if you're the kind of the advocate for the branding world, what should those of us who don't swim in that world every single day know about what's going on in branding today?

8:14So I think I want to talk about what's going on in marketing because there's so much change in the world that I'm in. And the biggest thing right now is that digital marketing tactics are what everyone is working on. A lot of tactical work, a lot of teams who are spending hours and hours on social content. And what we see a lot of times is that getting the tactics done is getting in the way of remembering what the strategy to meet the business goals needs to be. And so we have to take that step back into strategy and differentiation before we're jumping into all of these digital marketing tactics.

9:00And the reason that's important to the clients that we talk to is because the leaders that we're engaged with really are looking to achieve a high EBITDA multiplier at the time that they're selling their business, merging with other companies, or trying to find investment capital. And so that's where the strategy piece is so important and differentiation is so important because you can gain more monopoly control when you find differentiation of your business. And that leads to like three really important things that you need to know. One is at the time of the sale of a company, a strongly differentiated brand can command 25 to 100 percent more on the open market.

9:41it. Secondly, companies with really strong brand orientation can generate almost double the profits of other companies. And that's a key to attracting investors. And then finally, determining true competitive advantages and showing your defensible leadership position can increase your EBITDA multiplier up to 20%. So when we're talking about millions of dollars, that's significant. and those three things are a real reason to take a step back and think about brand and and kind of get away from this idea of oh we've got to do this many posts a week and we've got to create this many videos but what really are your goals and that's what hummingbird does is we step back with the leaders to define their goals and then figure out what the tactics need to be from the brand activities that we do.

10:37So obviously, AI is a very powerful, everything AI that we have access to now, it just really speeds up and I think can improve a lot of our systems process. Certainly marketing can be impacted in a great way. But, you know, obviously there's a right way and maybe a less effective way. And I would say maybe even a harmful way to use AI. What's your general guidance around AI enabled tools for marketing and branding? I love this question. We love AI in our office. We're using AI to create plans and frameworks. So that's a great use of AI. also from a content standpoint if you can if you can explain to your chat bot what your differentiation is what your tone of voice needs to be and really start to train it some really great content outlines and content pieces can come out of ai it just needs to be overseen by a person and thought about.

11:53And I think that is another trend that we're seeing is so many people pushing out this content using AI, and they're not using the brand strategy to guide it. So you just get a dump of things that you see everywhere. And there's no differentiation in that. We also, what I would say is, I think it's very important from what I'm hearing in the marketplace to pay for an AI tool that becomes a part of your daily work within your offices. Not try to use every free tool and piecemeal that together. You know, when you're paying for a tool, you have more ownership to what you are putting into it and what is coming out of it.

12:40And then, you know, realize AI is built into every tool that you use. You just might not realize it yet. And so, you know, we're continuing to learn about how AI is being incorporated into Adobe products, which is Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator, what tools can plug into that that are driven by AI and be great tools for us to achieve filters or backgrounds really quickly. and using those kinds of tools. What I say about that is using AI as a tool helps us be able to be more creative because we have the time to be creative because we're not creating the frameworks and the outlines and the simple things.

13:27We're able to actually think, do strategy and be more creative as a result. And I'd like for people to think about it that way. Free up your time to do the creative activities. Yeah, yeah. Wendy, for someone who's wondering, hey, listen, we need to go to market. Obviously, we want to have a successful launch. We have a fixed budget. We have so much that we can work with. you know, how much is kind of maybe an unfair hypothetical question because everything is unique and different. But I'm wondering in terms of like, how vital is it to make sure that we are making investments into the branding side of things?

14:18If we're thinking about a product launch versus, hey, we're just going to dump it all into paid ads. Why, I would imagine you probably have an argument for, make sure you're advertising the right thing, but I don't want to take the wind out of your sales. I'll let you answer that. Yeah, so paid ads are extremely important to every media that you want to gain traffic on because if you don't invite them, they won't come. And you don't want to continue to speak to the same people that you've spoken to forever if you want to grow your engagement. So we have to do things like paid ads. But the way to do paid ads that is most effective is through expressing differentiation.

15:04So, you know, if I've got two AC companies doing paid ads on Google, and both those ads basically say the same thing because they dumped it into AI and they've got the same message. How does a consumer make a decision? So it's the same thing with any of your sales enablement tools that you're creating, whether it's paid ads, whether it's a presentation that's being made during the sales cycle, whether it's what your trade show booth looks like, you need to differentiate. And so it could be the way the person answers the phone. If you still answer the phone, there's a differentiation in tone of voice.

15:44There's a differentiation in product delivery. A lot of companies have a problem finding that differentiation. And once they do, it's like magic. And that's what branding is all about. Going through those strategic activities so you can uncover what makes you different. Because that helps you hone in on a target customer so much easier and niche down if you really understand what it is that you do different. And your targets will niche themselves down because they'll realize you're a good match for them or not. And you won't waste the sales cycle talking to someone who's not a good match for you.

16:21So the branding activities help to clarify all of that up front so that you're not doing all this A-B testing. You're not doing this, you know, continuously changing things over and over again because you haven't found the right solution. when you find differentiation and you stick to it and it does take time it's not an overnight thing and it's not inexpensive but when you look at the long-term cost of not doing strong differentiation work you could be churning your wills forever and so there is there is a cost I think conversation to have about the long-term versus the short-term. It may seem like that number to do branding activities is very high, but when you think about the fact that you're setting yourself up for long-term success and not having to reinvent the wheel, then that's more like a capital investment, right?

17:22Wendy, tell me about how you work with your clients. Your website, by the way, is hummingbird-creative. We just have a couple of minutes left, so I want to make sure that we've got some great calls to action for someone that could really value from a conversation around their brand and marketing. Sure. Well, I'll give you an example of a client because I think telling stories is always the best way to explain how we work and the results of that. And so we work with a life science consulting company here in the Triangle area and their business goals. They were realizing that they were on an upward trajectory of that hockey stick.

18:04Leadership wanted to capitalize on the timing of growth of the industry and they were seeking investment. And so they hired us to do branding work. We did some insight work with customers, finding voice of the customer, positioning with the leadership team and finding their differentiation. And this enhanced their reputation and their EBITDA multiplier, which I've already talked about. Part of the work we did was helping to execute the corporate vision and why. So they did, we worked with them on a why statement and then rolling that out to the entire team. So that's that culture piece, right?

18:41Like making sure that everyone understands the why and that everyone knows how to communicate that well. We helped this company. They grew revenues three times in three years. They say it was in a responsible, sustainable, and profitable manner. And that enabled them to attract private equity investment, which was really exciting to be a part of that. And they then bought three other companies. We were able to do post-close integration communication with them to create the tactics to make sure that the differentiation and the culture flowed to the full entity after these other three companies were acquired.

19:23And so that was kind of neat to be a part of seeing how to bring that culture together for an even bigger team when they're going through a whole lot of change all at one time and what types of activities and communication pieces are needed for that. The other thing we did for that company is create a lot of standards. So as you can imagine, as we're going through branding activities, we're learning tone of voice. We're figuring out what the graphic standards need to be. We're figuring out what the messaging needs to be. So as this company grew, they hired team members and created a marketing team.

20:00And we were able to hand that marketing team a lot of standards and a lot of materials that they can go forth with that continued, they continue to really communicate their brand differentiation in a great way because we set them up for that success. So that's just one example of being able to, yes, we impacted growth and profitability of sales, but we also impacted a lot of different areas of that business. Wendy, your website, hummingbird-creative.com is, listen, thank you so much for this conversation. I'm sorry. I'm like looking at the clock. I'm like, oh, no, we have really run out of time.

20:39Great conversation. Thank you so much for this. Anything else that people need to click on or go to? I just want to make sure I didn't miss anything. So on the website, we've got free white papers, blogs, video content, a ton of free resources because we want to help every company create the most valuable brand that they can achieve. So as you said, that's hummingbird-creative.com. You can also subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter. We're really easy to find on LinkedIn. And that gives you great marketing tips and ideas. Again, all free to help you optimize your brand value. And then finally, we have a podcast too.

21:14You do? I just saw this. Yes. And the Hummingbird Effect brings leaders on to explore the fascinating interplay between small changes in branding and marketing that have significant outcomes in other areas of the business, like what we've been talking about. And so we would love to have your listeners listen to our podcast as well. And we also bring guests on all the time. So that's an open invitation. Wendy Coulter, founder, CEO, Hummingbird Creative Group, found on the web at hummingbird-creative.com. Thanks, Wendy. Thank you, Josh.

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