Find What Matters To You and Your Audience | Andy Grayson

The second thing that I wanted to talk about was your audience. I'm not going to go into great detail about this because it's very simple. And I actually think you should— if you don't know how to do this yourself, you should hire someone eventually who's really good at this that complements you. Or you should hire an agency, a small firm who endeavors to go out and find out about your audience and bring that information back to you. But it's critical for you to understand your audience. And what I wanna leave you with, you wanna understand what your audience cares about. And that does not come from demographics. That is the old way to do marketing and branding. To say, okay, we're in this business, therefore we need to go for 18 to 34-year-olds with this much household income that live on the coasts. That's gonna be our target audience. Because if you're really talking about why you're in business and you're trying to tell that story, you need to find people that have a certain mindset that you're gonna speak to. And that allows you to speak to a much larger audience potentially than just a demographic audience. And also allows you to be much sharper and have a much more sharpened, defined emotional story that's gonna speak to those people and speak to that mindset about people. So that's what you're looking to do. Don't use segmentations which are just crude averages of people based on demographics and some psychographic information, as we call it. You're looking for a mindset. You're looking for something that describes people's beliefs, their values, insights into them as people, into their humanity, what they really care about. And also added on to that is the cultural context that they're living in, that we're living in. You know, honest and company we just talked about. We're living in a cultural moment where people are caring more and more about the products they're buying for their children, about the products they're buying for themselves. Yeah? Yeah, I think so. gentleman just made the point about, is that like a buyer persona? And I think yes, but you wanna make sure— personas can be written very badly. They can be written with vague information that doesn't really describe the humanity of the people that you're trying to reach. So when you're looking at a great persona, you're not only like, I know that guy or that girl, but you get them as a human and you get what they care about. You get kinda what drives them.

Mm-hmm.

And remember, just remember that word mindset. If you can't read that persona that's been created or you're creating one or someone on your team's creating one and you can't say, yeah, this is that person's mindset, then it's probably not good enough. It's not sharp enough. And that's what you need to go out in the world and look for is what's someone's mindset. Not complicated, but really important for you to remember. Okay. So if I'm boiling all this down into a super simple chart, it's this chart. You need to understand what you care about and what the people you're trying to reach care about. And the intersection of those 2 creates your brand point of view. What is the thing that you stand for and advocate for that kind of sits at the center of those 2 things? We believe this, we care about this, and there are people out there that care about this, and therefore they're going to really be receptive to our message and want to buy our product. So therefore we're going to say this to them, or we're going to behave in this way. That is branding at its simplest and most powerful.

Yes. Can you give an example of this model to like Apple? So like, what does Apple care about? What do you think they're going to care about? Or just the company that you—

That's a great question. I was actually just about to do that because I'm going to use Nest, which is one of our clients, as an example. I thought it was a particularly relevant example for you all. But I was going to say, You're probably asking, like, how do we do this? And you can take this chart. I brought a copy of it that we can have photocopied, or we can give it to you digitally. But this is a tool that we use in the agency. We don't— every time we do this, it always looks different. But sometimes you need a bit of a structural tool to kind of help you distill your thinking. And we call this a bunch of different things— our brand structure, Our brand bow tie. Hopefully not our brand vortex or something like that. But it's a really simple tool that we use to kind of get to that intersection and that distillation. Yeah, there's a question. Yeah, most of the videos are on YouTube. And yes. And slides, yes. Except for I'm going to show you the next one, but I can't give you the next one.

And then also, you're talking about getting your why and pushing it through all of the process in terms of your brand message. But there are some industries where they overwhelm you with information and the transaction cost is very high in terms of the person making the decision, like telecommunications industry, lots of contracts, constantly got new plans, and then also content and distance once you make a decision.

So apart from talking about the why, is there a balancing act You know, the way I'd respond to that is, is Simon Sinek's chart.

Yeah.

Because he doesn't say you don't need to talk about the how and the what. It's just the order in which you talk about it and the prioritization. So you shouldn't talk about the things people need to help make a decision about why you're better at all. What you should do is tell people why they should care about you and then add that information on as support and proof for why they should make that decision.

And if you have someone watching the tour, I understand that it's against the rules, but it's still gonna affect the experience.

It can be a stated message because it becomes the proof of— so, you know, for instance, I'm trying to think of a good example. But I don't know. Maybe let's use CVS, for example. If they're going to tell you that they're a health and wellness company, and then they're going to tell you how they do that is they've reorganized their stores to better service you when you most need to take care of something from health, where we've eliminated lines at the pharmacy, we've brought in more nurse practitioners, and what we do is we sell—

Great.

great drugstore products at a great price. But that doesn't— if you just said, we're a well-priced drugstore, it wouldn't connect with you. But everything else kind of in that order does. Does that kind of answer your question?

Yes.

OK.

So yeah.

So just to explain this. I think it's kind of hard to read. And I'm gonna give you this to take away. In a sense, it's really just 2 streams of thought that come together at the center, which is essentially what the Venn diagram was on the page previous. And it's basically what about your company or your brand distills into a very emotional place? And then what about the people you're trying to talk to and the culture that they live in distills down into a very emotional place? And the intersection of those 2 things creates this brand point of view.

Yeah.

That's probably the one thing you can read. What valuable idea do we stand and advocate for based on why we created our product and what we created? And also the people we're trying to talk to and what they care about right now in the world they're living in right now. So the example, as I mentioned, that I was gonna use is Nest. And when Nest and Tony Fadell came to us to talk about this new thing he'd created, which is the learning thermostat. You know, it really was about, look how old all the other thermostats in the house are, and look at this beautiful, amazing thing. And we started to talk about, okay, that— it's amazing, Tony, but like, why did you create this? And obviously, his inspiration came from a story where he was building a house and, you know, obsessing over every minute detail and got down to choosing the thermostats and was just disgusted with— The old ones. What they look like, and had this idea to kind of create something new. But as we talked more and more about it, it was because Tony had this vision that the home was the place we spend most of our time. It's an amazing place. We have an emotional connection. And the home seemed like it could hold so much more potential. Like, what if the home was smarter? What if homes were connected to each other? How much waste could that reduce? How much more safe could we be? And this was kind of why he started to think about creating things in the home that would be smarter and more connected and actually be more aware of what is actually going on in the home and more adaptive to the people that are living in the house. And that started to get really exciting as we started to pull that out of Tony. And again, we're talking about an amazing designer, an amazing inventor. But just like you guys, you're trying to get an idea and a business product off the ground and you're obsessing over that. And sometimes it's hard to step back and go back to the beginning and think about what is the bigger reason this would be great? What is the bigger reason other people would care about this? And as we started talking to Tony about that and started to think about who we'd want to talk to— this is going to be hard to read, but I'll read it to you. And when we started talking to people, what we came to was this idea that people are excited by the power of technology to solve these big problems in our lives right now. Everybody loves that about technology. And the benefit of that is that people really want to live these sustainable, thriving, and connected lives. find it hard to do so. So that's why technology steps in and kind of saves the day in a lot of ways, and why we're in love with our smartphone as this magic wand. And what Nest does is use that kind of technology to kind of unlock the power and the potential of the home to help people live these lives that they find hard to live, especially when it comes to being environmentally thoughtful. And we all want to be environmentally thoughtful, but sometimes it's hard to match our behaviors with our kind of ambitions. And that's where Nest kind of stepped in and made that activity basically effortless. And we kind of arrived at this idea for their point of view that, um, basically this is— I would argue that this isn't as great articulated as a point of view. In fact, it should be something you could argue for or against. But this idea that, like, every— if I were to restate it, it would be like, every home should be a conscious home. Which would mean that every home becomes more aware of you. Every home becomes more conscious. Every home becomes more thoughtful. And the things within it, Nest is trying to awaken and become, you know, more thoughtful pieces of technology in your home to allow you to live that sort of effortlessly sustainable lifestyle. And that basic idea led to how they articulated it. Which was this video, which was basically the story, their brand story, where these 2 things came together, you know, that ultimately became that compelling piece for Google, for Google to buy them for $3 billion.

Those little things clinging to walls, clickety-clacking in corners, switches that don't switch. Timers from another era. Things that go— in the night. Kinda ugly. Kinda dumb. Unnoticed and unchanged year after year. But we noticed them and thought maybe they could notice us. Notice when the house is quiet. And when it isn't. Notice how we like it cool in the morning and cozy at night. Notice the difference between a summer breeze and a winter chill, between a steamy shower and an overeager toaster. Notice when the rain is falling, when the sun is shining. What if we gave a little thought to making those little things more thoughtful? They could save us energy, effort, effortlessly and keep us all safer and be beautiful enough to never go unnoticed again.

Nest.

Thoughtful things.

Cool. So like I said, I'll hand out the brand structure sheets. If you have 2 takeaways, just it's about your story combined with what people would Why people would care about that based on what they care about. And how do you get to a sharp articulation of that that sounds like a compelling point of view? To rewind all the way back to the beginning, it sounds like you could explain it to someone in an elevator. You could explain it to a child and they would get it and they would be compelled by that.