Make People Care About Your Brand

One of the most important things that you can do as you grow your business, as you grow your brand, is to make people actually care about what it is that you're doing and the work that you're putting out into the world. However, that can be more difficult than it seems. And so that's why we've brought Tom Geary in today. He is the founder and creative director of School of Thought, which is a San Francisco-based creative agency. And Tom, it's so great to have you on today to talk about this topic, because this is really all what you do at School of Thought. But why is it so important to make people actually care about the brand?

Well, it's great to be here, Cheryl. Thank you. I think the big issue is that, you know, we're all busy and distracted and 90% of communications get ignored. You know, when you're inside the bubble in your office, in your boardroom, wherever it is, surrounded by, you know, the groupthink. Everybody's like excited, the stock options are coming, whatever it is. But out in the real world, it's a different, it's a different game. And, and so we always try to presume disinterest and then work to overcome it. And if you can basically channel the skeptical consumer that we all are at home, you know, DVRing past all the, all the lame ads, if you can kind of adopt that mindset for whatever it is you're trying to do, you're going to be in a better better place.

So how do people penetrate that skepticism? Because there is so much of it out there. And I think now we're dealing with, you know, a lot of people who are frankly pretty savvy to the fact that they're being advertised to. So there is a lot of skepticism. How can we overcome that?

Great question. I mean, hey, I do this for a living. I hate ads. Everybody hates Everybody hates advertising, and that's, that's fine, but we all like stories. We all like to smile or laugh or cry. So, you know, connecting authentically using emotion is, is just, is just the way to go. We, we did a, uh, we did a call yesterday with a, with a prospective client, and, and she was talking about how You know, she's working on sustainability and she's just like, everybody does things that are so stocky, you know, it's just stock photography, a picture of the sun for the obvious solar ad. And she's exactly right. And so, you know, we sent her some of the work we've done that used humor to get people to try to recycling and composting. And, you know, we're making all these ridiculous jokes about, You know, San Francisco, if, you know, either you start recycling or we're going to add more hills. You know, and we did lots of things that were like that, just ridiculous esoteric local stuff. There are no cemeteries in San Francisco, which is just a peculiarity of the geography. It's a small little peninsula. So we had a headline. It was like, if we can't bury grandma here, we can't handle your extra coffee cups. You know, so what's effective about it, we're not doing it just because I'm sort of a wannabe stand-up comedian, although my son would probably roll his eyes and disagree. Humor is disarming, you know, it's a way of— you were talking about the skepticism, it neutralizes it. You know, if you're laughing at something, you're going to quit forgetting that it's a marketing message, in this case an educational message. And you're going to pay attention. But it doesn't have to be humor. I mean, any kind of emotion is good. All decisions are basically grounded in emotion. We're doing a lot of work in equity and sustainability and things that are really important. And people are all exhausted and jaded. So it's about connecting somehow emotionally so that we get people's attention. And then once you have their attention, you can communicate effectively.

Yeah, I think that's the key is how do you get that attention? How do you get them to actually invest their precious time into learning more about you or consuming more of your content or coming back to your website? And I think that there's a fine line between humor and then going maybe too far or trying too hard. You know, like where sometimes I see maybe copy or ads that are almost too— they're trying too hard. They seem like they've really— they're trying to be clever, but they've kind of missed the mark. I think that's one of the fears that people have about using humor, especially humor in their marketing, is that, well, I'm not— I don't consider myself to be a funny or clever person, therefore I should not attempt this. What say you to that?

Yeah, that's a great point. I worked at a pretty well-known shop called Butler, Shine Stern, and one of the co-founders said to me, this is a little edgy, hopefully okay, but he said, "There's a fine line between brilliance and shit." And it's exactly right. I mean, you don't want to, if somebody is not, you know, if you don't have a sort of a humorous bone in your body, there's just no way you're going to, to pull off Robin Williams or channel Robin Williams. But is there a way that you can kind of tap into a universal truth? You know, exhaustion about the pandemic, working from home, Zoom calls that freeze, Labradoodles that go nuts in the middle of a Zoom call, the next door the fact that with certainty the leaf blower is going to start up in the middle of our conversation.

I'm expecting it. I'm waiting. I'm waiting to hear it just fire up.

No, it's about sort of tapping into the emotional truths that we have. And, you know, so it doesn't have to be, you know, make you cry humor. It doesn't have to be make you cry emotion, but it's better If you can, if you can do something that kind of strikes a chord. And also, incidentally, it shouldn't be about yourself, right? It's like Dale Carnegie. Communications is— effective communications, there's a difference— should be about the target, right? Be empathetic. What, you know, what does Cheryl need? You start from that place, you know, thinking about your target audience and trying to think about their pain points. What they're dealing with, how many hundreds of emails they've gotten today, and that they're looking at yours, number 106. Whatever it is, if you think, you know, think hard about the target, think about the kind of the universal truths that are at play, and you'll have a lot more success. What sort of— what I was talking about, the emotion thing. A long time ago, I interviewed the CMO, the chief marketing officer, of Volvo in in Sweden. And we were talking about people being nervous on camera, Cheryl. We actually put him in a Volvo and had him drive around because he was so apprehensive. But he had a great line. He said, you know, there's a difference between information and communication. He goes, if you want to get to the head, you have to go through the heart. And so I think It's just sort of something that has sort of guided all of our work ever since.

Well, I mean, you've worked with big brands, right? You've worked with Cisco Webex, eBay, Red Bull. But a lot of the Cashing on Camera audience, you know, they're not, you know, they're not, you know, Fortune 500 companies like they're entrepreneurs who are looking to build their brand. And so maybe they don't have avail to a creative agency such as yours to be able to help them with this work. So I wonder what advice you would give them and how they could inject emotion or humor into their own marketing if again, they don't feel like they're really humorous. But like you said, universal truth. How do you get to that universal truth? I think you were kind of alluding to it there when you said you have to get through the heart before you get to the head. But there's some work that needs to be done to drill down into who this person is you're trying to reach.

Right, exactly right. I mean, you know, the more you can think about who the recipient is in great detail, you know, what are their pain points? What are they going through? You know, we— are they overworked? What are their stressors? What, what are their goals? What do they really need? And then you basically try and reverse engineer in a way that will get people's attention. So, you know, the fact that the email box is just too full, you know, a lot of the time, you know, we write cold emails to prospects and so forth as well, just like, just like smaller entrepreneurs, and, and, uh, it's hard, you know. But you, you've got— you've got to presume disinterest. You've got to, you know, think about the person on the other side. They're literally a river of emails, you know. I've got clients who get 200, 300, 400 emails a day. Good luck. So, you know, you've got to have an awesome subject line. You've got to have a killer first line. I mean, we basically presume that 90% of communications get ignored. What are you going to do that's going to be the 10%? Well, you better have an awesome opening. You know, we did, we did some work locally for pro bono for a vaccination effort to get people in the Black community in Oakland vaccinated. And the headline was, Black Lives Matter, starting with yours. And we, you know, so we had a really strong hook and we needed that because people were skeptical and jaded, understandably, based on what's taken place here in the US with healthcare in the Black community. And, but we, so we had to hook them hard and then we pivoted to our communication once we had their attention. You have to basically adopt that framework with whatever you're doing. You know, it can be a poster, it can be an email. Presume disinterest and then work hard to overcome it.

And I've never heard of it put that way before. Presume disinterest. I really like that because if we think about it that way, that will change the way that we approach, like you said, copywriting or any type, any form of communication that we approach. Presume that they're disinterested. They're not waiting. They're not sitting there waiting for your email to arrive. Exactly right. They're not waiting for your rebrand.

That's another—

a lot of people suck in rebrand.

And they're not waiting for your rebrand. We get clients who are— it's kind of funny, you know, in the boardroom, everything looks great. It's the one ad, you know, is sitting there in your office that you have commissioned and you're already passionate about whatever it is we're talking about. You know, the new laptop with, you know, 7 GHz processor speed or whatever. Nobody else cares, but in that room you do. We get clients who are like looking at the body copy— not the body copy, they're looking at the legal— and they're like, oh yeah, this is great. And I stop them and I say, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether they will stop and look at this ad in the first place, which means the headline and the image better be strong, strong, strong. You know, I'd love to have people get to the copy. I'd love to have people get to the body, to the legal copy. But, you know, most people— so the point is, don't presume people are going to read your stuff. Don't presume they're going to get to the legal copy. Yeah, you know, go the other direction. And I wonder— go ahead.

I was just going to say about curiosity, how important is it to inject some level of curiosity into, you know, headlines or copy.

There's a kind of a famous San Francisco ad guy who used to say, people don't read advertising, they read what interests them, you know. So, so make it interesting and, and you'll get there. That, that's the trick. Again, you know, we don't try to come up with With ads, we try to come up with things that are kind of emotionally resonant that will get people's attention.

I'd love to know more about the process. Let's say you're working with someone and you're— the actual creative process of getting to that finite thing that's going to be the headline, per se.

It's really hard.

It's a very curious thing, right?

Yeah, I mean, every— a lot of people like our name, School of Thought, although they frequently walk in and say the School of Rock place is really impressive. And we also have people who walk in and ask us what our class schedule is. But 300th name, you know, bankers have the worst credit. It's hard to have perspective about your own wares, you know, which is the challenge. I'm pretty great with somebody else's brand. It's pretty hard for our own, which is the inherent challenge that your audience is faced with. You know, you lack perspective. You're on the team, you're pretty excited about the new offering. So it takes a lot of work. We come up with, you know, literally hundreds of ideas, you know, and then we kind of run it through the Will anybody care filter? And then we kind of shoot it around. It's kind of a circular firing squad on the team, and we all shoot down each other's work, mostly politely. And then eventually we present some very low percentage of the ideas that we come up with. But we have to run it through lots of different filters. Is it on strategy? Is it going to the right audience? Do we think it's got the right tone for the brand and so forth? So I wish I could say that I hit, you know, F7 on the keyboard and the ideas popped out, but we haven't.

That's not how it works.

Nor are we using the AI to do the lift for us yet. Right. Google did a white paper, which is a great read for just about anybody. It's called "From Promotion to Emotion." Okay. And it basically talks about that, the fact that emotion drives every decision for consumers and for businesses. And, and so I really think about that, you know, because whether you're buying, you know, coffee or a $100,000, you know, infrastructure solution, cloud SaaS thing, or, you know, it's $1 million, you know, you've got the high stakes for both, right? Yeah. Your partner's upset with the coffee choice or you're going to lose your job, you know, on the SaaS thing. Either way, you're in trouble.

Yeah, that's right. You know, a lot of people, I think, are afraid of taking risks when it comes to— and there's a certain amount of experimentation, I think, that has to happen. How much should they be risk-taking? How many, you know, is it, is it, is it something that really needs to be in the DNA of an entrepreneur to be like, just go out there and try some stuff?

Yeah, that's a great point. Um, and it's something that we, we recommend to our clients all the time. You know, there, there are risks in business and there are capital R risks in business, right? If you're Volkswagen, you want to come up with a new car, that's a billion dollar investment, you know, the new shape, the new everything, 3 years of tooling, that's a capital R risk. If you're coming up with an ad, who cares, right? You can change it. And it's, you know, the world will not end if everybody doesn't like your ad. You know, most of the time the work that we come up with is slightly polarizing. It generally means we've come up with something that is not vanilla that will stand out. And some people like it and some people won't. And, you know, and, but it's about trying things and optimizing, as you say, because if you're too safe, it doesn't work. Here's a different, because I'm the master of bad metaphors, I sometimes think about communications as like a stock portfolio. You know, if you have everything in, you know, bonds or whatever is the safest thing on the, you know, out there these days. Of course, right now it's tough to talk about stocks, but, but, you know, big picture, you don't want to go all in on something that's going to earn, you know, a CD that's going to earn you half a percent is not, not a great way to go, right? So what everybody says is have some proportion in something safe, kind of middle of the road for another chunk, and then have some flyers. And you should basically adopt that approach too with your marketing in general. Try, you know, and so on this side of things, there's just no harm in doing some more things, pushing yourself to try some things and optimize. When I was doing some work for Microsoft, I led a chunk of Microsoft business. As a corporate culture, you know, they're pretty conservative, but they push themselves to invest 3% on total flyers every year. Experiments that just anything goes, we're not going to get in the way too much. Um, and I, I generated— I had two things that generated, I think, 100 million hits organically. Wow. Wikipedia now, uh, because somebody said, yeah, whatever, we'll get behind it, it's one of the 3% projects. And, and good for them, uh, but, but getting out of your own way is a— is really good advice, uh, to, to push yourselves because you will, just like the stock portfolio, you know, not all of them will hit, but some of them will, and you'll get— you get outsized returns that will help the whole portfolio.

I love that because it gives permission to our, our viewers and listeners to say, go out there and just try some things that you know, like you said, polarizing the audience is not a bad thing. I think a lot of times people think, 'Oh no, I don't want to alienate.' No, you do want to, I think, polarize because that's actually an indication that you're probably doing something right. So I love that. Tom, one of the things that we do on Cash In On Camera is we have a segment called Stop Marketing Like It's $19.99. So I would love to know what is a tip, a tactic, a tool, some type of technique that you're using to market at School of Thought?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think I've talked a little bit about the presumed disinterest, but I think that we've all sort of hunkered down, you know, we're in the bunkers. I'm at home now, our offices, we're gathering cobwebs at our office, which is a few miles away in Oakland. But I just think it's really important that people— I, I have found I'm a lot more successful in terms of outreach when I strive to build a relationship first versus, you know, how can you help me, how can you help me, which, you know, it's like, yeah, I'm reaching— I'm, I'm— I do have a goal in, in, you know, connecting with this person of a transaction, but If you go transactional first versus relationship, it's obvious it backfires. It's off-putting. And so I would say, you know, especially these days, you know, we're all stuck at home mostly. And, you know, make a connection authentically and everything will kind of unfold from there. It's funny. Sometimes people ask me about that painting. My dad actually painted it when I was a kid. He fulfilled his lifelong dream of sailing around the world, and so we went on that boat and we were in the South Pacific. And so I was talking to somebody, a prospect, kind of a cold lead, and he said, what was the story with that? And it turns out he's a big sailor, and then we started talking about racing and boats and, you know, the money pit in the water that they are and so forth. And, you know, we have since gone out and had numerous drinks and made a really strong connection. And I have yet to— I have yet to kind of pivot to the professional thing, but I will, and it will be authentic, and I think it will go well. But I'm in a much better place than I would have been if I just sort of started pitching this guy cold.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. If, you know, I think back on relationships and clientele, in most cases, the ones that I've really enjoyed working with have stemmed from having had a relationship first. So I agree with that. Tom, this has been so much fun. This has really been a blast to hear your perspective as As someone who is deep in the trenches of the creative process, to be able to help people with their brands and making people care about the brand, it's very insightful. And I really appreciate you coming on today. Thank you so much.

My pleasure, Cheryl. Thanks. Thanks for having me.