2347 - Why Your Brand Might Be the Only Thing Standing Between You and World Domination with Visible Logic, Inc.'s Emily Brackett

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Emily Brackett. Emily, you are the founder and CEO of Visible Logic and Branding Compass. Those websites are visiblelogic.com and brandingcompass.com, each of which are linked in the show notes. Emily, it's great to have you. Thanks, Josh. It's great to be here. Well, listen, before we talk about your superpowers and we get to have a conversation about branding, which I always love, But, you know, I always love kind of hearing what our leaders are kind of into at the moment or any hobbies on the outside. So what have you been geeking out on lately? Yeah. Well, I live in Portland, Maine, and I moved to Maine for the quality of life.

1:41You'll hear that a lot. People say Maine the way life should be. And for me, it's all about the natural environment. So I do pretty much any activities year round that I can do outside. So coming out of summer, it's all about open water swimming and paddle boarding. So I can do both of those in right on the ocean or in lakes or in rivers right here. So love that all. And now this episode is publishing and we are in December. And so probably not that. What does one do in December in Maine other than enjoy the beautiful picturesque vistas? Per the Hallmark Channel, a lot of engaged women go to Maine and apparently don't come back to their fiancés.

2:37Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, it's definitely, I mean, we got winter here. So last year I got really into what's called wild skating. that's skating on rivers and frozen lakes and that kind of thing. So really fun. Again, you're just getting out there in the natural world just based on the conditions. Living down in Orlando, it has been a long time since I've been ice skating. I miss it as a native Michigander boy. Oh, yeah. Well, Emily, let's talk about the work that you do, Visible Logic and Branding Compass. Where should we start? Yeah. So, well, I started Brand and Compass based on work I did at Visible Logic.

3:23So it all started with Visible Logic 24 years ago. And it's a pretty typical branding firm with, you know, we do brand strategy, naming, visual identity, and websites. And our focus is for, on companies who have tech-enabled products. So a lot of very innovative software and hardware. and um but for branding compass we the we work with it's much more based to any sort of small business and it's a web-based application and it helps small business owners discover the best visuals and words for their branding and marketing they answer questions about their business and then it gives automated expert advice to them well anytime i have a branding guru on the conversation I love to ask this question just to make sure that we're on the same page in terms of vocabulary.

4:21Emily, I think you know the question, what is branding? I think that, well, I should say, I think branding is a verb. And I think your brand is something that represents your company. And it could represent it in a very tangible way, like a logo. it could represent it in a very abstract way, like what comes to mind when somebody thinks of you, your reputation, a promise, that kind of thing. So anything that sort of is a stand-in for your company or product, I call a brand. And I think branding is the active development of your brand. Some things about brand are out of your control, what people think of you, but you have so much you can control on that.

5:07And that's, you know, building your brand is branding. Yeah. So here we are getting, boy, we are looking ahead to 2026. What have you been seeing? Are there any major trends? Or if you were to advise a client on the road ahead, are there any notable things that you would say, listen, more important than ever before is X? Anything come to mind? Yeah. So, I mean, everybody's talking about AI. For us, it's creating a lot of kind of mediocre brand related stuff. Like, you know, mediocre copy, mediocre visuals. and that's always been the case with so much brand work that never you know was never well thought out whether it's because you went to fiverr and use somebody who didn't know what they're doing whether you were out on like you know using some like desktop publishing tool yourself or now with ai it's like you're still just doing the same thing if you haven't gone through the motions of like these this is a step-by-step process and you're kind of jumping ahead to step five without doing the other four steps.

6:22It's just doing it faster with AI, but it's kind of creating those same mediocre results. Yeah. I cannot tell you in our own work with AI how often the advice we get, as we've been making marketing decisions a lot of times, the advice is just, it's very average. Very average. Yeah. And, you know, for standout brands, I don't think that that's enough. And again, I'm sure, again, we can continue to work with AI in smarter and smarter ways. But I absolutely love getting the wisdom of someone who has been there, done that, and has, you know, knowledge of the latest trends of what's working right now.

7:08Do you mind sharing a little bit about the client work that you do? And I don't know if you have any examples that you can kind of share the before and after what the problem was, what you were able to identify more so than just a website refresh. I'm sure it's a little much deeper than that, I would imagine. But what were some of those discoveries and what were the outcomes? Yeah, yeah. So at Visible Logic, there's two main groups of people that we work with. One is startups and the other is more, you know, larger, more established companies, but they're going through some sort of change or pivot in their business.

7:47So startups, you know, we have launched so many startups and, you know, given them names, given them visual identities, given them websites, as you said, really launched them into the world. And it's exciting because we have some of these, like we have a client we started when there were just two co-founders, they grew and grew and grew, got a lot of outside investment, eventually got acquired to the founders, you know, much, they, nice payoff for the founders. We've had same thing, some of these startups go and they get bought by private equity. So a lot of really great growth and financial rewards.

8:26And a lot, you know, when you have that strong brand, it's such a part of it. It's, it's really part of their success. And that's been really great to see. So those are all the startups. They had nothing. And so to bring it to life is so exciting. But then we also work with more established companies. Maybe they're launching a new product line. Maybe they're entering a new segment, a sector. And what was working with their brand is now confused, right? We call that, we do a lot of things are called like brand hierarchy working. It's like, well, you have a company now and you have several different product lines.

9:01How do they all mesh together and make sense as a brand system? So we, that's another big part of what we do is just get those systems better, you know, clarify, and that can be through words and through visuals are the two biggest things that we provide to our clients. Emily, I'd love to share some tasks or some action items or assignments that our founders who are listening to our conversation right now might be able to, I don't know, run some self-diagnosis, run some tests? What would be something that an audience of founders could do this week that might be really helpful to either become more aware or move the football forward a little bit when it comes to how we're representing ourselves through our brands?

9:55Yeah. So as I alluded to earlier, people tend to jump ahead in what they should have done. So I started a new business and I need a logo and they're like off starting to create a logo. And what they should have done is made sure, okay, what are the things that really make me unique? Are products unique? The way we serve people? What is those unique things? and try to like really brainstorm what does that feel like emotionally? What does that connect with others? Are there metaphors that have a similar kind of feel to them? That's what we kind of call the core brand traits. Then you want to think about your differentiators.

10:43That's taking some time to look at the marketplace and be like, how are we different? Like, even if you're like, hey, we do this really fast, but if all your competitors are saying they do it fast as well, that's really not a great differentiator. So it needs to resonate with what you do well, but then it needs to be different as well. And then making sure that it is attractive to your ideal client. What is the value you're going to bring to them? So once you have those things done, then you have benchmarks to measure anything against that you develop creatively. Like, oh, would this social post be of interest to our ideal client?

11:24Would this, you know, does this part of our website really represent what's different about our product or service? Have we made that clear? Does it match it graphically? So doing those steps, those are things that, you know, anybody can do at any time. It's definitely challenging, you know, deep thinking kind of work. But those are the things that if you haven't done it, you just are going to have trouble with your marketing programs. You're going to have trouble building your website. You're going to have trouble with so many of the things that come after because you didn't do the foundational work.

11:58Excellent. Your websites are VisibleLogic and BrandingCompass.com. Do you have, it looks as though you have some resources. So if someone isn't necessarily, maybe they're not ready yet for a conversation, or maybe there's just some tools that are free that you recommend that everybody goof around with. Anything come to mind there? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, like, yeah, Visible Logic, that's a pretty big commitment, but, you know, I'd love to talk with any listeners who want to, you know, take on a big project. Branding Compass was built to be super affordable, you know, DIY platform. So, you know,$49, you're going to go through that system and it's going to be probably very insightful for you.

12:49If you're not even ready for that on Branding Compass, we have like a seven day brand building. It's like a little, it's a virtual educational thing. So you do need to give your email because it's going to be dripped out to you and you're going to receive the email. It tells you about what needs to be done to build a brand and give you some exercises to follow. So in the seven-day course, you'll be well on your way. And are there AI tools or other tools out there that you just love? I mean, again, not necessarily for your clients, but just tools that you think are really helpful that are either pretty low cost, free, just great resources that maybe aren't under your umbrella?

13:37Yeah, I mean, I still feel like we should be using AI to help generate creative ideas. So, you know, whether it's ChatGPT, that's the easiest one to do any of those LLMs. I do think you can feed it like, hey, for example, this is the feeling I want to get. What would be some other things that are related to that? You can use it to help you brainstorm and do that really quickly. So I think those are worth doing. It's just the prompt has to be based on, you know, what really aligns with your brand and then take that and do something really quality with it. All right. And to our friends that are listening and they're like, oh, no, I know, I know, I know We are, you know, brand, you know, maybe the business has evolved.

14:28That happens quite a bit. And it might be time for a refresher of sorts. Or maybe it was designed a while back. And, you know, it was based on your available budget at the time. But that brand may be holding you back because, well, we know how fickle consumers are. And they give you how many seconds, by the way? What's the second test? Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think it's less than one second people are making real smack decisions, you know, on a website. It's, you know, one point something these days. Oh, yeah. I mean, instantly, you know, and it's really interesting. I have an opinion on this. I think that, you know, people form opinions of people, of things, of ideas.

15:13And then we spend a little bit of time, I think, initially trying to validate our initial impression because we want to feel like we're really good judges of characters. So we just, until we are taught or learn otherwise. I think it was Carl Jung said, you know, thinking is hard, which is why most people just judge, you know, something like that. But Josh, what you were saying is so true that like emotionally, a lot of people, especially if you're the founder of a company and you know, your brand is just not really there and it's almost like embarrassing or shameful. Right. And then you can imagine that's probably holding you back from being like, do you really want to scream to the world?

15:57Like, go to my website. No, right? But if you feel like really confident, you love your brand, you love your messaging, you love your website, you're going to be much more confident in any of the marketing that you do. So if you're feeling that, whether you're the founder or maybe you're the head of marketing, it's probably wise to listen to that because there's probably some truth there. You know, and I'm of the opinion, Emily, that that's not fair. You know, if someone's listening and they are remarkable at what they do, I feel like it's unfair that they're too harshly judged just simply because of what their available marketing budget was at the time.

16:38So for someone who's in that position and now is ready to take a second look at what they're projecting to the world, what are those next steps? Yeah. So I think that if they're looking to do it on their own. No, no. Meaning they want to talk with you. Okay, good. So Brand & Compass is still a great place to start. We use Brand & Compass with our agency clients. So go through that. I think it'll be really eye-opening. and then just I would love to hear what their challenges are. We do obviously a discovery call with anyone before we provide an estimate. And I'm really active on LinkedIn talking about all things brand related.

17:24So those are the ways I can help people. I love it. Brandingcompass.com and VisibleLogic.com. Emily Brackett, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. This is great.

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