Stay on Brand Using The 3 C’s with Kelly Bedrossian

Foreign. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Volley Rally. I'm guest hosting again today for Jake. For those of you that don't remember, I'm Summer from marketing. And today we're joined by a very special member of our team. She's kind of hidden behind the scenes, but if you think about it, is really the face behind all of everything that you see here at Volley. We're joined by Kelly Bedrosian, brand designer and creative consultant. Kelly, welcome to Volley Rally.

Hi, Summer. I'm so excited to be on Bali Rally. Very unexpected. I'm usually, like you said, behind the scenes, so it's exciting to be able to talk about what I'm passionate about and how I work with you all. So I'm excited.

We're so excited to get started today on the topic that we've prepared. But just to give everybody a little bit more context and background of what Kelly does for us, Everything you see, from website to images posted on socials, to the intro to this video, all of the little details, if you've ever received any of our marketing materials, like our case studies, if you've seen any of our pamphlets, Kelly designs and creates all of that, and she is really just like the backbone of how Volley is able to carry ourselves the way that we do. And we're just so lucky to have somebody that's so talented and. And just gets us, really. Because, you know, if she didn't have an understanding of. Of who we are and. And what we're trying to do, then this just wouldn't work. But Kelly is just phenomenal. She. She even designed the logo on the shirt I'm wearing. I did wear your. Your ignite.

Yeah.

That was our theme from our summer meeting. But we're gonna get into. You know, I'm gonna stop blowing up Kelly's head here for a second, and we're gonna get into the keys to brand integrity, at which Kelly likes to call the three C's. So why don't you go ahead and get. Get us started, Kelly? Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much.

I just want to, like, put you in my pocket. I know I've told you this before. Whenever I'm having a bad day, I just want to put Summer in my pocket and be like, I need a little encouragement today.

So I love that. Just. Just text me or email me when you. When you need a little pick me up. I promise.

So thank you so much for that. Volley has really been an awesome brand to work with. Just because you are doing the three Cs that I'm going to walk you through today in a really unique way that you're supposed to. And every brand does the three Cs differently and that's what makes branding so special. So when we talk about staying on brand, what does that really mean? And how does everybody in the organization have a role to play? That's really what I wanted to talk about with you all today. So I talk about three Cs. Every brand strategist has their little way that they talk about branding and how to stay on brand. So I like to talk about the three Cs of clarity, consistency and creativity. And when a brand really has all of these three things, think of it like the legs on a table. If one of these legs is out of balance, the table is going to fall. So the same thing with a brand, they have to have all of these three Cs in perfect harmony and that might look different for every brand. So for Volley, they're highly innovative, so their third C might be a little bit different than somebody who isn't such an innovative technology company. So it's really exciting to talk about this and how it applies to Volley specifically.

Yeah. Awesome. We're so excited. It's really a great topic and it's enlightening. And like you just touched on, this isn't just something for your marketing team. This isn't just something for the people designing the website. This is something that is relevant to every person within your company. And Kelly's going to talk about how it relates to Volley. But if you're customers of ours watching this, this relates to you and how you brand and run your dealerships as well. Whether you are in a customer facing position, you're in management, anything internally, externally, it should all reflect the brand and who you are as a brand identity and maintaining that integrity. So let's go ahead and talk about your first C. Kelly.

Perfect. Well, you said that beautifully. And one little touch off of what you talked about, how everybody has a role. It's really about being a personal gatekeeper of the brand and it's important to have maybe one person per department that can be the brand trainers, really be what we like to call the brand gatekeepers. But everybody does have a role like you talked about and learning as much as possible in training on the brand so that we all look consistent and clear. So, so that brings us to the first C. Let's talk about clarity. Clarity. If there's one thing that I want brands to remember when it comes to clarity, it's clear equals connection. Clarity is really, what drives and strengthens the emotional connection for your brand? I was working with a new brand last week and took them through what I call my brand discovery session. And this is where we talk about the clarity of the brand. And afterwards they thought they were like, oh, I felt like I just went through therapy. Because talking about and clarifying a brand is really a vulnerable experience because it talks about really, what are the reasons to believe in you as a business, as a service provider, as a product, as a collective people, what is that going to look like? And how can you define that in the most clear way possible? And Volley. Ever since I came in working with Volley, they were clear from the very beginning this was not something that I needed to really work on too much for them. It was really harnessing the second two Cs that I came in and helped them with. But they said, look, Kelly, we know exactly what we are, we know what we're going to do, and we are going to deliver software that people love to use that makes it easy to communicate with their customers. And so once we have that clear and we have that mission established and that positioning statement in the market, we can run with that and. And interpret that visually how that's going to look. But if you don't have that clear path, you really need to start with that first. My advice for Volley moving forward and how you're innovating and growing is to keep it clear with leaving out the jargon. You have so many brilliant, brilliant minds and developers working on your products, but you have to put on that filter. And I think, Summer, that's what your role is in the marketing department is you're that filter. You take that technical product and that technical words and jargon, if you will, you put it through the filter of your audience and interpret how to make this as clear as possible. Back to our mission statement. And I think that's really the challenge that brands have in the first C. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, you talked about it being a vulnerable experience and how that kind of came a little bit easier for Volley. And I really do think that goes back to. And if people have heard me talk about Volley once and they've heard me say this a thousand times, but Volley, the people behind it, whether it's, you know, our higher ups or just anybody at the low, you know, I'm at the bottom of the totem pole for marketing, but everybody within the company takes so much pride in what we do, and they really believe in Volley. And I think that's probably why the clarity Part comes so easily is because getting involved with the brand, we knew exactly what it was that we were trying to do here. You know, our mission statement was so clear and it was so obvious to everybody and it makes it easy to get behind as employees and then it makes the translation to customers that much easier.

Yeah. And volley, like I said, from the beginning, they were always very clear. They knew exactly what their position was going to be. They just needed help in the next two Cs. So let's talk about the second C.

This one, to me, in my opinion, is the hardest one to do, to be consistent is in, in your brand, all throughout all departments, everything you do. This one, to me is the hardest one.

Yes, but, but I want to also say that every single brand struggles with the second C, single brand, and if they didn't, I wouldn't have a job. So I'm, I'm really thankful that brands do struggle with this because I can come in and reset that consistency and help train brands on making sure that they understand how important it is to be consistent and what does that look like for each brand. But let's really talk about why it's important to be consistent. So if there's one thing I want brands to remember about consistency, it's familiar equals confidence. Familiar equals confidence. So we see a lot of repetition in branding, and that's on purpose, because the more that people see something, the more that they recognize it, the more credible and the more emotional attachment that they feel to a brand. This just popped in my head, this metaphor, so I'm just going to say it off the cuff, but I found that feeding my toddler, if I feed him something new, he, you know, he won't touch it.

He's very weary of it.

He doesn't know what it is. But if I put the same food in front of him multiple times over weeks, he's going to start to love it and think of that same connection with branding. The more that you are consistent and the more that you allow people to be familiar with your brand in a consistent way, the more that they're going to recognize it and be like, oh, I've seen volley or yes, I saw you guys on. You were in my social, you were in my email, you were like, you know, what are you all about? Let's have a chat. But if you're not present and you're not showing up consistently, and if you look differently every time that you show up, they're not going to know that it's the same brand.

Yeah, absolutely. People should be able to look at any aspect of what we do, whether that's email outreach or physical mailings with goodies in it, or looking at our socials or looking at our website and get the same feeling from everything we do. You know, if you're exposed to it in the one platform and then you see it again somewhere else, you can tell it's the same company and the same brand with the same mission.

Absolutely. That's perfect. And really the second seat is the tactical part of brand integrity and how to just really best practices are to establish those gatekeepers, brand gatekeepers in your brand and have a department wide brand audit. I recommend quarterly to start. This might look different for every brand. If you're a smaller company, you're innovating fast, it might be fewer brand audits. If you're a bigger company, you have lots of people, which volley is growing very fast. The more audits. Audit is a scary word in the brand word world. I like to transition brand audits to brand studies because it's really about studying the brand and then seeing where other people need to maybe have a new training if there's something new or added to the brand or a new product, anything like that. From an educational standpoint, these are opportunities to harness consistency.

Yeah, absolutely. And having those gatekeepers has got to be essential. But I mean it was kind of eye opening to a lot of the people at Volley. Jake actually even said, he said, you know, I never even realized what things weren't supposed to look like because it always looks good. And it's really because between you and Wendy, our CMO there, you guys do such a great job of protecting our consistency of what our brand is and just making sure. And now we have even more pieces to the puzzle of that you were talking about translating from that jargon of the dev department. And we have people on the business side of dev now, people like Sadie Davis and a couple of other members who take what's going on dev and then help us and the other departments understand what exactly is going on. So that's really going to be an essential part of our brand and our business moving forward like you said, as we continue to grow at such a rapid pace.

Yeah, that's so important is having that consistency and really like you said, putting the practices in place where each department can be their own gatekeeper. And that's really important, you know, if you are innovating and moving really fast like you said with all the product innovations. So I do want to talk about the third C because it's obviously my favorite.

Yeah, the most fun.

It's the most fun. And it's really, I see brands struggling with this because they are so focused on their products and their people and their customers that creativity is always at the bottom of the barrel. And they're like, maybe we'll get to it, but we just don't have time. But creativity is a muscle and you have to exercise it. And when it comes to your brand, you have to, I call, create a culture of creatives. It doesn't matter if you're a developer in the developer department. Right. You can still be creative in the way that you're innovating and you're thinking for the brand. So I advise to stop, drop and think and schedule time in your calendar to just have some brain ideation time. And what that looks like is you'll silence your phone, you'll silence your to dos. Maybe it starts with five minutes, maybe it's 15 minutes, whatever that is. And you just let your brand explore on one topic. So you'll give yourself a prompt. Maybe it's a project you're working on and you feel a little stuck. Give yourself a prompt and let your mind just wander without boundaries. And that's really a great best practice to explore creativity and work your own muscle on a regular basis. I also have this metaphor that I think really speaks well to the importance of creativity. If there's one thing that I want people to remember about creativity, it's innovation equals relevance. You have to keep innovating to stay relevant in the market, to stay relevant with your customers and to keep your brand at the forefront. I took my son to see sharks for the first time and we learned that the hammerhead shark and the great white shark, they have to keep swimming to survive. And that is exactly, exactly how creativity and branding works. You have to keep swimming, you have to keep exercising it. You have to keep innovating for your brand to survive.

Yeah, I love that. And I mean, you kind of touched on it a little bit. You know, where creativity is at the bottom of the barrel. And it probably doesn't seem as important as clarity and consistency, but it's just equally as important, if not needs a little bit more attention than the others because it doesn't come as naturally. It is something like you said, that you do have to carve out time in your calendar for, you know, to be creative. And we're lucky in the industry that we're in where we're always innovating and so in ways we are always getting creative that's my favorite part of the job, is coming up with creative ways to, you know, engage on social media or to pull new people in on our website or, you know, creating campaigns and that kind of thing. But it does, you know, in a role maybe more like our customer success department, where things kind of feel a little bit more rigid, It's a lot harder to incorporate that creativity into there. But like you said, I mean, these apply to every department, all the time, everywhere, no matter what industry you're in and no matter what role you play. So. And I love the shark metaphor. I don't know if you knew that sharks were my favorite animal, but it's like, come on, could Kelly get any better? Anyway, I do now.

That's funny. Yeah.

And.

And I also want to say that it's about balance, too, because I've also come in and worked with companies that went too far down the creative. They got lost in their creativity and we had to reel them back in. So I think, you know, if you go too far down the path of being creative, you lose that clarity and consistency. And so it's. It's really all about balance. But I do see that the third C is the one that does get left behind the most. So that is just something to be aware of. And if you are a company or someone who just goes for it and is super innovative and creative, always go back to the first two Cs because that's what you need to work on. It's all about balance. I will say, though, that sharing originality is the most powerful tool that you have in your toolbox as a brand, and that can be just an easy practice, is to generate brand original quotes. It can be from your people, it can be from your departments, it can be from your leaders, it can be from your customers. All of that is just a really great idea to create originality in a simple way.

Yeah, I love that. How do we ensure that we are maintaining our brand integrity in every piece of documentation and, you know, information piece that we put together? What. What do you suggest brands do to make sure that they're maintaining that?

Yeah, that's a. That's a great question. So actually, my next project with Volley is we're going to be reviewing and updating the brand guidelines as we're incorporating these new products. I really want to go back and see. Okay, so how has the evolved in the past four years? How are we going to make those little tweaks and changes and how we want to train the team? So it's all all about if you, if you innovate, you have to take one step back and make sure that you put in those brand processes for the clarity and consistency and then you can move forward. So it's almost like, okay, so we're going to create. Let's go back. We're going to create. Let's go back. So it's kind of like you're doing these small increments where the brand isn't completely changing overnight, but it's a smooth process that's growing with the company.

Yeah, absolutely. And with everything we're doing, whether it's, you know, internal training, documentation or something, definitely something that customers see outside. But it's just as important to make sure that we're maintaining it amongst ourselves as well. Should we be asking ourselves, you know, do these things follow the three Cs?

Oh, absolutely. And the three Cs is just something that I came up with to make it easy to remember. It's really. There are three checkpoints. Right. And maybe the other departments aren't going to be focusing on the third C. That might be, you know, the marketing department would be highly the third C, but they're going to be asking, am I clear and am I consistent in my brand messaging to my customers? Am I clear and am I consistent in the way that I interact with other employees in my department? You know, all of these things make up the brand as a whole. Every interaction with the brand is important and the marketing department is really going to take the result of those first two Cs and translate that into the creativity for the marketing and the external vision of the brand moving forward.

How do we allow Volley customers to extend this as well? You know, to make sure that they are also helping us maintain our brand integrity?

Yeah, so I love that question because I also think it extends to customers working on their brand as well. And I think Volley is a great example. You know, in working together, you guys are working on the three Cs. And so you are just, if anything, you know, being a great example in the industry of how that balanced approach can look externally to your customers. But I do have three little activities that work with the three C's that I wanted to talk about today, if that's ok. Ok. So the first activity that I have around the first C, Clarity. This is for any business, any personal brand, any, you know, even just Volley. If you wanted to practice this as best practice going back to clarity, define the boundaries of your brand. We exhaust so much energy in marketing or in innovation talking about what we want to be? What do we want to be? Who are we? But we often neglect talking about what we don't want to be. And I think exploring the boundaries will just help you ultimately clarify exactly where your positioning is going to be, because you know what those boundaries are and you know how you're going to. How you're going to stay within the limits of your. Your clarity and your mission. The second exercise I have around the second C Consistency is about going back to your brand Standards guide. I always recommend, at least annually, giving it a review. I guarantee you there will be something that needs to be updated. Whether it's something that we've added into the brand, it's a tweak to the typography, something silly as small as that can make such a huge difference in the brand overall. So don't neglect your brand Standards Guide. Go back to that. Invest in training with the guide overall on a department and a regular basis. Creativity. So the last circle. This is going to be the hardest challenge that I have, and it is defining and finding your X Factor. And every brand has an X factor. And what that is is your special recipe of how you express yourself in the market for Volley. It's really a couple of things. It's. Your visuals are very. They're trendy, they're powerful and they're also very cool. They have a cool essence to them. And, and I just love working on the Volley brand because it is so different than what you see normally in the industry. It's very clean as well. So that is a special X factor is the visuals. The second X factor is your product. So combining the visual, combining the visuals with your amazing innovation in your product and adding an AI for BDC technology that has never been done before is just, it's so cool. And be able to combine that messaging with the visuals is another X factor. And the third one, of course, is the people. And meeting your people for the first time in person the other week was so awesome because I could see, I knew all of you were hard workers, but I had no idea until I saw how hard you all worked and how passionate you are about the products that you're building. And so all of those three things combine into Volley's X factor. So if you just sit and think about what those special unique things are about your brand, that's going to go a long way in the creativity.

Yeah. Awesome. To me, I mean, my favorite part about working here really is the people. I mean, and that's kind of funny to say, considering we work remote and I only get to see, you know, I was meeting a lot of the people for the first time too, when you did coming down for our meeting last month. And really, the, the people make this brand. They are just so incredible. They're so passionate, they're so easy to work with and it's just, it's all around such a good time. The, the people make the brand to me, for sure, to, to round it all out, you know, just main takeaways from the three Cs, how to make sure that we're following that, and just any little parting words of wisdom.

Yeah. So I think one thing that I might have missed when talking about when companies grow fast, like Volley, and when they're consistently innovating, always go back to your core and clarity. So that's like your checks and balances. If you're innovating and you're straying away from the core, you need to pivot the creativity. Right. And so if we're coming up with something creatively in the marketing, but it doesn't really express, you know, back to our clarity mission, and it doesn't really look consistent with the brand. It's too creative. Right. It's really all about being in a consistent, clear and creative balance with each other. And if it's not, you just need to pivot. And you can easily see that when you go back to the three Cs.

Yeah, no, I love that. And I, I have people quite often, you know, that I talk to from other departments tell me, you know, oh, we should, we should do this. Well, you know, how fun would it be to do that? And yes, it would be fun, and yes, it's trendy, but it doesn't really relate back to who Volley is as a brand. And so although they're like super, you know, fun creative ideas, they kind of fit into that category you're talking about where they're almost a little bit too creative to where we're losing the other pieces that are so essential to what we do.

Yeah, that's really important to have that underlining understanding and training of the brand and clarity. But I wouldn't say throw, you know, throw those ideas out. I would love to keep a, almost like a creative library. So anytime a creative idea comes, you know, keep a library, keep a list, and you never know when that's going to be the perfect secret sauce that you needed for that little marketing campaign. But it might not be it as, you know, as it came to you. It might just have to pivot a little bit and innovate a little bit to be more on brand.

If anybody needs an idea of what to get Kelly for Christmas, it should be like a leather bound creative library where she can just keep running lists of all of her creative, beautiful ideas. I think that, I don't know if anybody picks you for Secret Santa or, you know, your husband needs some ideas this year. I don't know. I think that'd be perfect. Personally, I love it.

I love it.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Kelly. This has been a blast. We enjoyed getting to hear a lot of what you talked about today at the meeting and we just thought it was a no brainer to. To have you share that with our customers and allow them to be able to understand what it is that makes us successful is what we, you know, with what we do as a brand, how they can take things away from that to apply to their own dealers. And, you know, just to give some more insight too, to any of the employees that we have that were like, gosh, I feel like Kelly gave us so much information, like I almost wanted in, in like note card form where I can, like, look back at it. You know, this is your, this is your study tool. So thank you so much for being here with us today, Kelly. We just enjoy your presence. You are such a light and we just, we love working with you.

Aw, thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time today and you know, I'm really passionate about this, so thank you for letting me talk about it.

Yes, you're welcome. Well, everybody, we hope you have a fantastic day and we'll catch you in the next one.

Bye.