INBOUND 2016 Tiffany Sauder: "Brand: The Last Remaining Currency in Marketing"

All right, let's do this. So I'm supposed to stay on this little, like, jail cell up here. I was sort of hoping we could become friends, but that is not within the rules. So we're going to talk about brand today and why I believe it's the last remaining currency. I believe the companies that decide to tell bold stories to the marketplace to be very clear and descriptive about the thing that they have to offer the world are going to be the companies that win. And we heard a lot about that from Gary Vee yesterday of are we going to be willing to step out and are we going to be noticeable and are we going to be discernible? I believe in the day where the speed of innovation is faster than ever, the barriers to entry are lower than ever, the speed of communication is faster than ever, that the thing that we can create, that creates a real moat around our companies that makes it impenetrable, tough to copy, you cannot be me. There is only one I believe in today's age that that thing is brand. So I'm hopeful at the end of these 45 minutes together that you will join me in this belief and that you will make a commitment to investing in what I think is the most important asset in your business. So real quick about. So suddenly I'm feeling very self conscious about this huge picture of myself up here. I had envisioned a much smaller room and I clearly was missing my family when I put this together. And for the second time in my life, I followed instructions and I submitted this deck like 3 1/2 weeks ago. So not missing my kids as much today, tried to see if they'd delete that slide, and they said no. So there you go. Okay, so I am a mom and I am a wife, but we're not really here to talk about that. So I run an agency called Element 3. And I thought it important to do a little bit of setup about what I spend my days doing so that you could understand the perspective of the rest of what we're going to talk about today. So I run an advertising agency, brand agency, in Indianapolis. We have about 50 employees, and we work with brands like Airstream, Boston Whaler, Premium Hallmark, brands that have amazing products with amazing stories wrapped around them. And we also work with companies that wish they were those companies, and we work with companies that are stuck in sort of the sea mucky sameness, and they're trying to figure out, how do I be spectacular. I estimate over the 1112 years that I've been running the agency, I've probably worked on about 75 different brand projects ranging from companies that are like a million dollars in revenue to right one. Now we have one in the agency that's about 4 billion dollar company. So huge, huge, huge span. And what I thought 10 years ago I would be standing up here telling you is, holy cow, they're all different, but they're not. They're actually all exactly the same. So I first want to Talk about element 03 from the perspective of I hope that you see us living the message. I'm going to tell you today our noble why. Our reason for being is that we exist to write bold stories. And. And very quickly, that has three dimensions to it. One is, I believe element 03 is my first bold story. I'm a very unlikely success story. Not going to go in that today. The second one is, I believe it is my duty as a business owner to make sure that I'm creating an environment where my employees can write their bold story on the world through the things that they learn through my business. And the third dimension of writing bold stories is that in our best day as an agency, we, we help our clients write their unique bold story in the marketplace. So this is what I spend almost 100% of my time thinking about, is how do I write bold stories that are interesting and noble and distinctive in the marketplace? Because it is so flipping hard to do. We also have values that create a framework with how we behave and the way that we really live out those bold stories. And I think it is most important because, first of all, I'm a business owner. Second of all, I'm a storyteller. But I don't get a chance to keep writing bold stories if it doesn't create a real economic engine. So this logo board up here is not to say, look at what we've done, but it's to say it works. There is positive economic value that comes out of being distinctive and discernible and choosing to create a brand. So we're going to talk about this kind of like two sections to this presentation. The first one is I'm going to talk about what I see going on from a generational perspective. We're going to focus mostly on boomers and we're going to focus on millennials about some of the generational dynamics that I think are influencing the way that we have to think about the stories we tell as businesses. And then the second are like five. I don't know, I don't want to call them like tips or whatever. Five trends, key themes that I see that if you're serious about making a move into this, these are some things that you really need to think about. So first. So I feel like, first I felt a little self conscious about why do I feel so, like, instinctively that knowing about what the generations believe and are expecting is so important to be able to be a good brand builder? It's like, because we as marketers get super, super obsessed about Personas, right? And dossiers and all this. And you can't write the word Persona without first spelling the word person. And so it's first understanding who are we as people. I have a lot of labels. I have a baby. So I've got, like, all of these consumer goods products that want to sell me, like, wipes and creams and, like, all kinds of jazz. So I have a mom Persona, I have a business owner Persona, I have a fitness Persona. I have different aspects of me that are Personas to marketers. But first and foremost, I'm a human being that has a set of instincts, a set of values, a set of ways that I make decisions in purchasing. That does not change as I'm looking at those different channels. And I think a lot of the work that we do in our agency is in the B2B space. And I think B2B marketers tend to sometimes, sometimes think, ooh, all the people in the B2B world are just very rational in the way that they make decisions. That's bullshit. Because in the same way that they make B2C decisions, they make B2B decisions. The difference is that they often have somebody they have to tell about that decision in the B2B world, where they don't in the B2C. So they have to have a set of rational information to be able to describe it to purchasing or. Or to the executive team or to their colleagues or to their team that reports them about, why did I make this decision? I have no idea why I bought these pants, except that I like them. None of you asked me why I bought these pants. My husband didn't ask me why I bought these pants. So we don't have to rationalize it in the B2C world quite as much as we do in the B2B. But we make decisions in the exact same way. So a lot of millennials, a lot of boomers, big trends are changing in our economy. You guys know this stuff. So let's talk about what do boomers want? So 70% of boomers are very affluent. They've got a bunch of cash, and they're going to inherit $13 trillion in the next 20 years, and they make up 70% of the nation's disposable income. We need to care about boomers. How do we reach them? Mostly Facebook. Gary Vee talked about this again last night. Facebook is very much still an under tapped channel. They are still very much engaged. We have found in email marketing that you use smartphones, but are less inclined to purchase on mobile. And they still read things. Really, really, really still read things. They spend more time online than any other generation. I thought this was very interesting too. As boomers enter retirement, they're faced with more free time. And so this idea of creating sincere relationships with customers who used to be busy CEOs, busy parents, busy people who are working 75, 80 hours a week, suddenly they're faced with semi retirement. The 1099 economy starting to slow down a little bit. And so the way that boomers are beginning to consume, it's much more patient than other generations and places. What do they care about? And I'm going to show you some examples. Boomers care about nostalgia. We're starting to see a lot of old school brands be bought by venture capital and private equity firms, and they're wrapping new products underneath that brand. Because brands connect to boomers. They remember their childhood. They remember what it felt like. They remember. They remember their youth. It conjures up all kinds of amazing stories in their memories. And marketers know that. So boomers care about nostalgia. Boomers care about showing status in a way that millennials don't give a shit about. And I believe boomers are going to continue caring about status, and I'll show you that too. Boomers care about being countercultural. And boomers care about consistency. So think chain restaurants, suburban developments, shopping malls. All of that came to be over the last 30 years while the boomers were having a really, really big impact on our economy. So let's look at some brands that boomers love. They love Levi's Strauss, big nostalgia brand. They love showing status. If you think about Coach Purses and Mercury, Mercedes Benz, there's nothing hidden or discreet about the way those logos are displayed in the products about being countercultural. I doubt there are any millennial brands that have a sexy woman seated right beside it. That does not sell to that generation. Harley Davidson is all about sort of sticking it to the man, about not being compliant, about being defiant. And millennials are saying, what? I don't even see any rules, actually. They don't feel the same sense of obedience in the 9 to 5. Boomers care about being countercultural and McDonald's consistency. I talked about that just recently. So boomers want familiarity, they want safety, they want comfort, and millennials want authenticity, and they want local. And what's really starting to happen in some ways because of the wave of the millennials and the wave of technology and the wave of access, is that we're starting to get a little bit blurred, is that some boomers want what millennials want, and some millennials want what boomers want. So this is not really about creating a great divide between the two, but to create a picture in our mind's eye of these two generations that are smashing together before us. What are the things and the narratives that they have sort of brought to our present day that will inform the way that we need to think about the brands that we create? And we'll get back into that here in a minute. So let's talk about Millennials and what they want. There's a lot of them. There's 80 million. They've got about 200 billion in annual buying power, and there's a lot of sort of different dates. This generational line is not as clean as you might expect, but for the most part, Millennials, the first one was born in 1980. So that makes them like 35, 36 years old down to 1996. So they're, I don't know, 15, 17, something in there. Millennials want to participate in the creation of products and services instead of passively accepting them. Millennials want product specialists. They do not want to be sold to. So there's a bunch of different sessions about customer journeys and about how dynamic that is and about how we need to customize and personalize our content, making sure that inbound is connecting in a very one to one way. And we've got to be really careful that we don't turn into weird, smarmy salespeople. Millennials, I think all of us ultimately want product specialists, and Millennials want to know the story. They want to know the heritage. They want to know the history behind the products that they purchase. It seems like every chip bag that I buy now has some story behind it about how there was this big thing that happened in my life, and so then I decided to start this product, and this is what happened. We have the narrative to almost every brand, and that makes things meaningful to us. We can picture the story of them. We can expose and tell the journey and invite people to be part of it. Millennials love brands that make a difference. You see a lot of this taking place. Toms is Certainly front and center in this movement. The one to one, I see them as not so fashionable, fairly uncomfortable, overpriced shoes that I have like four or pairs of. Because this one to one movement really brought it mainstream in a way that I'm not sure the product alone would have. Millennials want it all. They just don't want it all right now. They're willing to wait, they're willing to be patient. I've seen several different studies that said, I think originally it was thought that millennials didn't want to buy houses, they didn't want to get married, they didn't want to have kids. But really what's happening is they're delaying those major decisions about seven to nine years because of this great big thing called student debt. But that also is a very different discussion. And 64% of the affluent millennial population is female. Also very, very interesting statistic to bring perspective to this. So brands that millennials love, Chipotle customization, one for one, Toms Giving Back Dollar Shave Club, disruption of the status quo. And if we look at these things, what boomers want and millennials want, nowhere in here is it the trite things that we say about our process, quality high tech, established, 30 years of experience. That's all the bullshit that we try to bundle up and put lipstick on to get people's attention and pay attention, to get people's attention, to get them to see our companies, their platitudes. It's boring, it's horrible, and yet we do it over and over and over again because we cannot figure out how we make what we do every single day super special. So we're going to go into my five brand principles here. So the first one is don't get greedy. You have to be something before you can be everything. So a couple examples here. The number one, when I look at the brand work that we do, the number one thing that I see us tell companies to do, is to stop doing some of what they're doing. They have too many product names, they have too many brand names, they have too many service offerings, there's too many jagged edges to the brand that it is indistinguishable as a story and as a unit. One of the most powerful things, particularly as a small to mid sized business owner that you can do, is to say no to things. A couple of examples come to mind. Even if we look at HubSpot, my guess is this afternoon at the keynote with Dharmesh and Brian, they are not going to tell us what are the things that they're doing less of, but they're probably going to announce some new products and new integration partners, some new pieces of the software. But when it started, it was just one thing. And they made it very easy for us to wrap our heads around what that one thing was, because it was inbound and it was marketing software. The second example, I don't know if you guys have read what Brian Fishkin has written about some of the evolution of Moz, but he talks about how one of the major reasons they had to take a big step back is because they tried to do too many things. And we create so much confusion inside our companies, inside our cultures, inside the vision and line of sight into what we have to do to be distinctive, that we get greedy and we don't say no. So my advice to you is don't get greedy. Be very clear about your vision, be very clear about what's distinctive and discerning for you. Because you cannot be everything to everyone. You have to be something before you can be everything. The second here is that story amplifies strategy. I love this quote from Ben Horowitz. I don't know if you're familiar with Andreessen Horowitz, but it's a venture capital fund that's in Menlo park in California. And the Andreessen part of this wrote one of my very favorite books. It's called the Hard Thing About Hard Things. In this quote, it says, the mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. But know the story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make the strategy better. And what this says to me is that it's not enough as business owners, as marketers, as people who are coming alongside executive teams, to just know where we're going. We. We have to tell an impassioned story around it that gets people to move their feet, that gets people to put their energy behind the belief system that we've set out, and it gets people to paint the vivid picture that we can see in our mind's eye. The story is the strategy. The story gives the strategy legs. The story is what makes things vivid to us. So I have a video here that we're going to see if it works. But I also think a big piece of this is thinking about your brand like a person. And authenticity is a part of us. I think often we overlook. And if you think about people in our world that are most magnetic to us, they're vulnerable, they're authentic, and they show us perspective. So they're not afraid to fail. They lead with strength and authenticity is what saves the day. So let's, let's pull up this video here.

You think having a 37 year old on to Cincinnati, it's nothing about the past, nothing about the future. Right now we're preparing for Cincinnati.

Okay.

Do you feel like the talent you have here is good? We're getting ready for Cincinnati.

What is your response?

Well, I mean, I'm just asking, do you think you've done enough to help Tom Brady? We're getting ready for Cincinnati.

So how many of us think that's what our brands sound like when people go to our websites? Right. We're moving on to Cincinnati. Take a look at our process. Take a look at our process. Have you seen our people? Have you seen our people? Have you seen our people? Do you know about our leading edge technology? Do you know about it? Do you know about it? I think we say we're moving on to Cincinnati in all kinds of other ways that just don't allow people into our world. Now Bill Belichick can get away with a whole lot of stuff that we can't as companies because people are following him around, sort of dying to know what he has to say about things. But we're so afraid to show who we are. We're so afraid to lift the lid off the top of our companies and to let people in to the best parts and to the worst parts and to live our story in a really, really bold and authentic way. I think about leaders that I love to follow on social media. We think about Gary Vee last night and how he's so comfortable saying fuck in front of all of us. There's authenticity to that and it's magnetic in ways that very, very stale things cannot. So the brand is the product. I can't see people very well in here, but if you've heard of Lee Clow, he's kind of. Yeah, awesome. Who's Lee Clow? Best copywriter ever. All right. Best copy ever. Yep. The ad agency. So he, what major campaign was he part of? That's right. Apple 1984. So Lee Clow worked with Steve Jobs on the Think different campaign. And it was the first, I think, million dollar budget. Is that correct? Yeah. Seeing some nods on a commercial that had no product in it. And it was for the first time we stepped out and said, you know what? The brand is the product. Steve Jobs understood. If I can get people to give me their attention and I can get people to fall in love with what Apple is about, which is about think different, then I can sell them all kinds of stuff. It's elasticity. So let's think about the opposite of this. The opposite of this is the product is the brand. So let's think of an example of that. A can of Coca Cola. The product is the brand. It's nothing more than cola in a can. And there's not a lot more that they can sell us because the brand is the product. No shit. The product is the brand. So as companies, we have to think about, if all that you're known for is one thing, like just one product, then the challenge that you're going to have is to create elasticity to that brand. On the other side, if you can create a movement HubSpot, and what they've done with Inbound is certainly Exhibit A, then you can get our attention and sell us a lot of different things. Another example I used to use a lot was Beats by Dre. It was all about headphones and sound, and now it's so much more than that. It continues to have elasticity because it has distribution. So when you think about how companies have huge engineering departments, they have great big, like, product roadmaps, and the amount of energy that we put into making sure that our stuff works and that our product is good, and yet how lazy we are about the way that we think about our brands and the story and the message and every single impression and the way that we engage and make sure that people are paying attention. It's tragic. And we don't put the same amount of energy into the brand. And what would happen if we did? I keep referencing Garrett Vaynerchuk because he always is very impressionable when he presents, but he made himself a brand before he had any idea what he was going to sell. His media company is simply an extension of the distribution that he was able to get. So how do we think about that with our own companies? How do we create movements and how do we create brands? The last one here is that the brand cannot achieve more than the vision of its leader. Steve Jobs was not surprised at what Apple became. He saw it the whole time. Richard Branson is not surprised at what Virgin is today. These visionary leaders always knew what was going to happen because they saw it. And so when you look at around you, if your company or the company that you're working for, the brand that you're managing as a marketer, if it's not where it needs to be, it's likely because the person holding the vision does not exist. And if that's supposed to be you, then you better wake yourself the heck up. Because your employees, your people, the industry that you play in, the marketers that are helping you take this message to market are never going to be able to see it if you can't hold the vision out in front of them. A brand cannot achieve more than the vision of its leader. So I'm done super early because I flew through this. So if you guys have questions, great. I'd love to hear them. Or you guys can move on. Thank you.