Episode 98: Creating a Visual Roadmap for Your Brand with Jay Busselle

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

People don't buy the best products and services, they buy the ones they can understand the fastest.

Today our guest is Jay Bussell, marketing director at Equipment Zone and passionate educator. Many of you may know Jay as the lovable and hilarious host of Promo Chat on Twitter, where weekly industry thinkers gather together to shape trends, explore new ideas, and and discuss current issues. Jay and I sit down and discuss his passion, helping companies understand and convey the visual literacy of their brand. We chat about how the 80/20 rule is a myth, but the 20/60/20 rule is closer to the truth for most companies, the difference between the tone and voice of your brand, and mapping the customer's emotional journey through every touchpoint. This episode is brought to you by Commenscue, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to start your free trial, visit commonscue.com. And registration is now open for our brand new multi-city event called Common Skew Sessions, the promotional product industry's one-day conference for distributors dedicated to thriving in sales. From top-line growth to bottom-line profitability, all aspects of the sales process will be explored. It's led by notable industry leaders and featuring some of the most successful sales pros in each market. Common Skew Sessions will be visiting Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. You can learn more at commonsquesessions.com. And now to my conversation with Jay Bussell.

And through your work with PromoChat, you've had a really good ear on the ground in terms of progressive development in the industry, kind of hot topics, and what's going on. What is Jay most passionate about?

Oh, besides tacos, as everyone knows. Most passionate right now, I'm really focused in on concepts of, I would say, that fall under the umbrella or in the umbrella, or however you say that, as it relates to branding and branding not just from the design side, although that's a really important piece of it, but figuring out who you are as a company and creating a roadmap for your brand. If you and I were trying to create an instruction manual for how to engage with our audience, we would need this roadmap. We would need this tool that would help bring order it would help bring some clarity both for us, right, as well as the message that we want to share to our audience. Because, you know, if they're not going to listen to our message, we could spend crazy amounts of time and money and just totally miss the mark.

Yeah.

So I really had this like purpose lately of figuring out for our industry specifically, because I mean, I've grown up in this industry, it's what I know, right? Being involved in promo chats let me see from kind of a distance and kind of connect with people and say, I really like what this person's doing, you know, I'm not here to fix people because I got my own bag of you-know-what that I'm dragging around trying to—

I think we all do.

Yeah, but it's like, I just— I'm like, oh, you're so close, I just want to give you this one little tip, right? And it would just change the perspective of your business, right? So from a visual side, you know, I think of this roadmap as the graphics, you know, how to present them, but also from the language side, the written side, the copy. And how do I, how do I speak, my tone, my, you know, my mood, my style. Does it come through in the written as well as the graphic?

Yeah. I want to stress, I think most people get this, but I think it's a strong reminder to everyone that our branding, our digital branding is our number one sales rep. I mean, we think, we think we have a top sales rep that has a certain amount of revenue. And but the number one rep in all of our businesses is our— I think most people get that now and they're willing to invest the energy, although there may be folks that um, that don't still— that don't quite understand that your digital presence is—

there are a lot of folks, sadly, looking at the landscape and seeing that, you know, it's like I have a, uh, in my mind, a 20-60-20. I've recreated the 80-20 rule and decided that, that, that played in the '80s, but now it's a 20-60-20.

What do you mean?

Well, I think that you have this 20% of your business that is inactive and not profitable. You need to get rid of it as fast as you can. Then you have this middle ground, the 60%, that is mostly active and for the most part profitable. And then you have your top 20%, which is very active and engaged with you. They've fallen in love with you for who you are and your brand, your promise, and they pay you on time and they pay you well. I love that. It's good. We want to focus with them and give them this— the most amount of attention. And the bottom 20% are just like time killers, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I get, I get stuck in that from the perspective of Thinking, is what you've put out there in your digital landscape attracting the bottom 20%?

Right.

Wow, think about that for a second.

Yeah, that's a great point.

You know, and a lot of people, I don't believe, take that into consideration, and they're just trying to be all things to all people and hope that they get found.

So is this a matter of first segmenting who that tribe is that's passionate about you and your brand, and then that work begins there first?

I do think, yeah, you're right, you nailed it. Thinking about the values that you have as a person and as a company and how that leads into the summary of your story.

Your story—

by the way, I love what you're saying about starting to wrap up this 20-60-20, because in this particular industry where you can sell to anybody, that's such a big deal to segment that tribe or audience that loves you.

But go ahead. No, yeah, so that's the point, and you hit it, which was your actions and your printed collateral, your digital collateral, all of these things, this consistency of marketing, this, your style, it begins to attract an audience, a tribe. Is it the right one? And so if you see that you're attracting unqualified buyers or people with no budget or people who call you up and say, hey Bobby, can I just get like 10 pencils with my— right, and I want each one to have my student's name on it. You can do that, right?

Right.

Well, even if you could, yeah, that, that's not a— that's not a good fit for your business, right? So thinking through all of those parts, it's like I've come to this conclusion that it's like each of our businesses needs to have this book, and each book has a, has a chapter in it. And when you put this book together, it becomes that roadmap. And I want to call it a style guide, but a lot of people in the industry a lot smarter than me that are in design, that are in advertising, that are in marketing. You know, they've, they've kind of coined this as a, as a branding guide. A lot of big businesses have them. Some of us in the promo and apparel industries have seen them. It's kind of the dos and the don'ts of what you can do.

But you're thinking broader than style.

I'm thinking bigger. Yeah. So that design side and that logo is a piece of the puzzle, but I think there are a couple of pieces before that. The reality is You're figuring out your values and what makes you and your staff uniquely qualified is different for you and your team as it would be for me and my team. So there's something you stand for and there's that single most important idea that you want to convey to that tribe.

Yeah.

But if you're not doing it, then they're doing it for you. They're filling in the blanks. Because they don't know what you stand for. So they're gonna jump to all kinds of crazy conclusions. And, and you're building this—

this way you get commoditized.

Totally agree with that. So you're just now one of, you know, 10,000 companies that sells pens or shirts or mugs, right? You become the mug guy or you become the mousepad lady because you got defined as such.

That's right.

Yeah, if you don't define yourself well, the market will define define you.

Exactly right. And that's why that, that first piece or that first chapter in that book is, you know, it— in my mind I keep calling it a book, but a roadmap, a style guide, however you want to pull this piece together so your customers in your community really do get you. So I've heard some other professionals refer to it as a brand manifesto, right? I kind of, I kind of dig that too, because it's just the whole idea of, you know, I got my manifesto and here's what we stand for and this is my story. And now keep in mind it's going to change, it's going to evolve.

Sure, it should.

Your business. Absolutely, absolutely. But at least start with that.

Yeah.

And I think that's a piece that we, we gloss over. We move too far into logos and design and color and— right, I want my logo to be, you know, this kick-ass amazing piece of work. And it's like, that's an important—

you know, I think one of the, one of the interesting parts about a brand manifesto is that it's not just that you're codifying this for like future employees or future or clients or whatever you are. That's the end result. But actually what's happening is you are converting and convincing yourself and all of those that are working on this at the same time. It's a very important work. Yeah, because you're probably more so codifying those intrinsically.

Like, well, yeah, clearly. And as a leader in your company, you would, you would probably be setting the stage for, you know, here are the characteristics that I probably am already. These are the— this is my style, right? In a working environment. So I might be more playful and lighthearted, and you might be more serious and sober, right? And that's okay, right? That's what, you know, when we started talking about UVP—

that's exactly the way we are.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. So you're the more playful one and I'm more serious.

So yeah, see how this works?

Yeah, I need more of what you got, Jay. Go ahead, go ahead.

But it leads us to this place where, you know, here are my qualities These are the 3 that are strongest, and these are— this is what I want to project out to my, to my potential tribe. And hopefully that vibe, as I send it out, then attracts that tribe, right? And, and it— and I'm, I'm pulling in those people that are naturally going to connect with me rather than convincing people that aren't going to be naturally connecting with me, because that's a short-term relationship.

Yeah.

And then, then I think that that again emphasizes the commodity, again leads itself to price.

Yeah.

And we end up losing— it's It's so fleeting, it's so temporary.

I may be getting ahead of you then. Every time I hit a digital presence then of that brand, I should be able to determine in a very quick amount of time whether or not this is someone I align with.

Yes. No, you're not getting ahead of it. That's exactly right. So the first interaction on any platform digitally, you're going to— color comes into play. It's where you will see some of the messaging. That's where the logo is visible. That's where that impact is, is the connection starts. And if it isn't consistent, then that's also going to leave clues for you. Like, you know, you may not be judging it, but you are. You're right. And that's a piece I think that we fail to remember is we don't like to think of ourselves as judgmental people, but somewhere hardwired in our brain is this lizard trying to solve a puzzle.

Yeah.

And if they don't, if we don't find order and consistency, then what do we find? I think we find friction. And I think that slows everything down.

Yeah, sure.

It's that fear and it's that uncertainty, and I don't think our brains like that much, so we move to the next one, right? Quickly. Yeah, very quickly. Yeah. In fact, I, I was in preparation for this trying to figure out, you know, both how to impress you and then be, you know, somewhat sound like I know what I'm talking about. I, I came across a quote that I love, and it's this guy that's totally into stories and branding. His name's Donald Miller. He's the CEO of StoryBrand. I give him credit for, for credit is due. And he said, people don't buy the best products and services, they buy the ones they can understand the fastest.

Mm, yeah, that's good.

So when we create friction, when we are uncertain in our digital landscape, when our brand isn't clear, it's going to slow that process down and somebody moves on.

Read that last statement of his again, that they connect.

They buy the ones they can understand the fastest.

And what I would— and he probably extrapolates this, but what I would stress too then are those that we have an emotional connection with immediately.

Definitely, definitely. And part of that becomes the, the, the lead-in of our logo, our— that design side. You know, we make an impact, and when our story and our values and our personality all align, we can start to play with color, we can start to play with, you know, the design. We can, we can decide, hey, do I want to have abstract symbols like Apple, or do I want to have kind of the logotypes, you know, that stylized rendition like maybe Home Depot's logo?? And then the third, do I want to have kind of a combination of those two, like Mercedes-Benz? You know, they have a symbol, they have the stylized text. So where do I want to play? And those are hard questions because you're like, I just want to make payroll Friday, or I just want an order. Somebody please call me, buy something from me.

But that brand— Mark talks about this a lot— that brand personality, that we're a walking, speaking brand personality, what would that be? And then also, once you get that brand personality right, you again have a living, speaking, vibrant representation for you and your brand that's working for you all the time.

All the time, 24/7. And that's the world we are today. When you think about all the platforms that people can find you, they're like on-ramps to your, you know, your website, all the social media platforms, right? If you're blogging, you have this amazing potential to draw people to you. Yeah. When you coordinate all of those pieces correctly. In my mind, in my opinion.

What are the critical chapters or components or stakes in the ground?

We touched on a couple of them briefly, but if I were kind of making a list, I would say number one, first and foremost, you've got to have your message and your values. You would start from that. That would be the first chapter. Second chapter would be something I call your style or your mood. That's when we were talking about being playful and lighthearted versus being serious and sober. You're trying to build the identity or the character of the company. So that's that, you know, what are you naturally?

Are you As an example, then we've talked about this before, and in the Right Sleeve website, for example, they might work with a lot of tech companies, or they might work with camps. And when you go there, you can feel that in their branding. Whereas when I was with Robin, then we tried to build, even with the colors in black and blue, a very corporate-looking site because we did company stores and we did— we dealt with a lot of corporations that wanted stability or speed, right? And we tried to convey that even when we built the logo. A lot of people don't know this, we built a box in the shape of the logo, in a shape of a moving box because speed, confidence, even the logo color choices were all around that emotion that we were trying to do. So two totally different brands in somewhat the same industry.

Yeah, no, those are great exact examples, and a lot of businesses miss that. They get stuck in creating their logo first, or they don't think about the things that you just thought of, which are how to identify and how will this visually appeal to that audience?

Will it?

I got ahead of you. No, it's cool. It's perfect. It's perfect because, you know, certain logos will evoke positive emotions. They almost create those anchor points that say, you know, it's like you had said, stake in the ground. This is what we want to be known for. This is visually what we're portraying to the world. So it becomes an extension of that promise or that value or that your story. And that's the piece of the puzzle that I think most people miss in our industry is they're too eager to just be in business, and it's easy to get into this industry, whether from the apparel side or the promo side. So not a lot of thought is put into this, and typically you're just like, you know, Jay's Promos and More.

Which is a little shocking because of the business that we're in. We're in a highly visual business, and there's a lot of folks that sell to, for example, the marcom community. And one of the things that I learned is when you're a small business in this industry and you're selling to VPs or director levels of marketing communications, departments in these large companies, you're not competing for mindshare with other distributors. You're competing for mindshare, period. Correct. So, and you're, you're communicating on a level that should be that they are at, which is all about investing in that marketing brand.

I agree. And I think that— but let's be real, let's be honest, there's probably 80% of our industry that isn't even playing at that level. Yeah, they're just not, right? They're just happy to take orders. They're order takers. They're just just sure grateful that the phone rang or that they got that email or that somebody at some bank said, hey, I have a friend and they sell t-shirts or they make, right, widgets, you know. So, and, and the truth is we all started there. I did. Oh sure, absolutely. I mean, you know, you're just grateful for the— oh my God, thank you for thinking of me when you thought of t-shirts. Yes, yes. So obviously as you and I evolve, as we, as we pretend to be adults and, and, and grow up This is why this has become my passion, is because I can see all these connections. I can see how these things link together like, like, like chapters in a book. And, you know, that roadmap becomes clear. So I love the fact when I can see people that are in, you know, any of those top industries or marcom, or they, they've already done this. They kind of, right, learned this somewhere. It was, it was either ingrained in them earlier, or it's, you know, that, that on-ramp to, um, advertising and marketing, they get it. So, you know, we talked about logos, but there's this supporting thing that I like to think of in terms of the logo. It's beyond that. It's the themes and even sometimes the use of iconography. So themes and icons can help tell that story. Yeah. And it takes it to another place. So if through the repetition of a theme, it's more than the logo, it kind of carries that story because the logo in and of itself is basically just a visual cue. To me, it doesn't really tell the whole story. Sure. And I, I want to make that an emphasis because then you think about these symbols, every— they're everywhere you look. Thousands and thousands of possible themes. And I'm not just talking about like if you were to look at a website or website templates or WordPress, but, but that's not a bad place to look to see the potential themes and how color works with graphic and how copy works with color and how all of these things start to reinforce themselves. Yeah, it becomes almost— I mean, if you're, if you're a nerd like me, it's almost inspirational because you see all of the work that somebody pulled together and all of the thought that goes into it so that in a click, somehow it either connects with you or it doesn't, right? And that's impressive, all that time, and just to say, got it. Right. This is who we are. Yeah. This is my tribe. This is who I want to attract. Yeah. So that's a big piece of the puzzle for me is trying to pull that together so that whether it's you sending out an email or whether it's somebody landing on your Facebook page, either way they're going to feel that connection.

The creative consistency across those platforms, right, that's translated across—

Is paramount. And it's important. A lot of people spread themselves too thin on this. They think they have to be all places all the time. And be, you know, visible to everybody 24/7. I, I understand the need.

I understand the, the, the—

I don't want to miss out, you know, the fear of missing out. So I better be on Facebook, I better be on Instagram, I better be on, you know, whatever the flavor of the day is, right? But let's at least start with your website. Let's, let's start there first, because all roads should be leading back to that anyways. Yeah, for sure. And I think that there's a place where you can kind of build your home. There's a place where you want that vibe to really attract the right tribe.

What are the other few anchors that a brand should be aware of?

I want to make sure that we include this concept of our tone, our tone, like our actual voice, the language that we use and choose. There is a difference between voice and tone. You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes. Here's the example. If you go to dinner with your closest friends, versus if you go to dinner with your boss, right? It's a great point. So it's, it's that communication style. And a lot of people think of it, uh, if you want to put it into these everyday touch points, you know, the feelings. Um, it's how you speak to your employees, it's how your employees answer the phone, it's how you answer emails. It's, um, are you, are you the type of person that's constantly hyping and selling, or are you the type of person that's often educating? And training, right? Because that's a piece of this. That's, that's your tone, that's your language, that's your voice. So I, I think that that's one of these chapters is you have to stop and pause and say, okay, how do I do this? How should I help customers feel better after talking and meeting with me and my team?

And tone is intimately tied to your values.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think of a company that can be quirky cool, and that's reflected in the tone of everything they do, from their branding and messaging No, you're 100% right.

That's the piece. So like when we were at SkewCon— sorry for the plug. Yeah, not sorry. People said that at the same time. You have a confidence and a trust the tribe that you've attracted is going to be thrilled with your communication style, and it showed everywhere, right? At the venue you chose, the signage that you chose, the swag and all of the merch that you had.

Marcus Graham is the the maestro of that.

He is the maestro. He is the definite— and Kate. Kate, they did a fabulous job, and it was very, it was very prevalent, and it was awesome. So not that they need my good point though, consistency on the tone was clear, and that's really it. So there are a few things to avoid. So one of the things, before I forget, we need this more in our industry for promo and apparel peeps. We need this— is the shipping and the delivery. That's kind of the— towards the end of the book How do I actually deliver? Yeah. How do we actually ship this out? How is our packaging? Is it on point?

Does it—

is it consistent with the other touch points of our brand, or is it just going to show up in this nondescript brown box, right, with a UPS label on it? Right. I think, I think that's a piece that we should have in, in terms of our style. We need to take that into consideration.

Well, I think you too, you're stressing this one area, but you're really— every touch point. That's it. Every touch point. And it's because of the speed business that has become more important than ever before to focus on these touchpoints. You don't have the time to convince or convert anymore. It has to be done through these multiple touchpoints that happen in like a second or a nanosecond.

It's true. I think you really hit the nail on the head there. So that effective— that's what I would consider effective marketing. That's what I would consider an effective brand or branding. Or, you know, you pull all of this together and you say, what does this look like? That's what the style guide looks like. It's all of those touchpoints. Everything's evaluated, everything's written out. So it's a, it's a work in progress. It's a living document that says, until further notice, boom, this is who we are.

That's great. You know, sometimes some people think this way intuitively. Some people think this way intuitively. Some of us do not. But it would be a good exercise for you to think through every single touchpoint that your customer has with your brand and your experience. We call it the customer journey, but I think it's more than that. It's almost like mapping the emotional journey of the customer's response to you and all the stimuli that you create, from the digital presences to the physical things that you drop off, to the interactions from phone voices and tone. To actually just map that out, it'd be a tremendous exercise, but it would be so worthwhile.

Agreed.

Because you could spot the weak spots. Even the most advanced brands could do this exercise and walk away with tons that they can improve.

I agree. I think it would be a fabulous concept. And, and, you know, thinking through those things is critical because you become self-aware, you become more invested in that brand, right? You recognize that each one of those little touch points is a victory. It's like a tie-down. It's like if we were in a submarine, you'd be like closing off this door so the water doesn't come in.

And the more you codify this, the— as you grow, then you can scale that brand and messaging and tone and everything that's important to the brand because you've done this exercise of imagining every touchpoint through the customer's eyes.

And I don't think it's possible to scale it until you do. Yeah, I agree. Because you create that friction. You create so many little— it's like drag. You're literally dragging these anchors around.

Too many messages, too many voices, too many opinions, and not—

it's not clear. There's no clarity there. Clarity. And so that singular clarity, that focus point on these are the solutions, these are the problems, that we solve, and it's visible. It's almost tactile. Yeah. When people connect with it, they're like, I know Bobby and he's going to help me in this area.

I love your word clarity because that's really what we're talking about. Cutting through the clutter. It's a $24 billion industry. We're not only competing with each other, we're competing for the commoditized version of what the buyer has of the industry in their head and in their mind. So we actually have to dislodge those perceptions, remove those so that we can speak clearly enough. And if that clarity comes through quick enough, then you can cut through and grab a customer's emotional attention.

I wanted to bring this up because this— I read this about 20 years ago, and luckily I wrote it down, I saved it. It was a quote from Marty Sklar. Marty Sklar was connected with the Disney Brothers. And he was the, um, he, he became the ambassador for all of this, this transition away from amusement parks to theme parks. And he was also a speechwriter for, for Walt and his brother. He would literally, if they were going to go out into the public, he was the guy that was going to say, here, you need to touch these points, you need to say it in this way. So I read his book. He has a book, you can check it out, and it's called, uh, Dream It, Do It by Marty Sklar. S-K-L-A-R. Marty Sklar, as I said, scriptwriter. He was, he was the ambassador on an international level for Walt Disney's— and I love this word— Imagineering division. So here's what he said, and, and I maybe can— we can end on this, or if you have any other questions, but time permitting, he said, know your audience, wear your guests' shoes, meaning don't forget the human factor. Yeah. And then he said this: create a weenie. And I was like, what? He said later, that's Walt Disney's somewhat inelegant term for what you and I might call a visual magnet. So this branding and all of these pieces and all these touch points become a magnet that draw people in. Yeah. And think about what Disney did. Think about it. As a kid, you were drawn to it, right? You know, nobody had to push you to go to Disneyland.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that we can learn something from that in our communication style and the concept of visual literacy. And we could do a whole nother session on that. But just simplified that down, you get it the second you see it and you're emotionally connected to it. Yeah, that's what it means to me anyway.

I love it. Jay, Bobby, thanks for being on.

Yes, man.

Wow.

It's a pleasure. Love it.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast.

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