Episode 94: Build your brand by unlocking the creative genius of teams – with Jeremy Miller

The full episode transcript is below.

Today on Beyond 6 Seconds,

What I have discovered is that in size, every organization has immense creative potential. The way we deal with disruption, the way we deal with this changing landscape isn’t by looking for ideas externally. It’s about how do we harness that genius of our employees? And how do we get people to participate in the change ahead?

Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast that goes beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories and achievements of everyday people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel.

On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Jeremy Miller. Jeremy is a brand strategist, best selling author, keynote speaker and the founder of Sticky Branding, a brand building agency. Jeremy’s first book, which is also called “Sticky Branding,” is a branding playbook for how small and mid-sized companies challenge the giants of their industry to grow their brands. His latest book, “Brand New Name,” launched in October 2019. It provides a proven step by step process to create an unforgettable name for anything, a brand, company, product, service or idea by unlocking the creative genius of teams. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Carolyn. It is such a delight to be here with you.

I’m so happy to have you here today. So branding is just such a fascinating topic. How did you get the inspiration to get into branding?

Well, I think necessity is the mother of all invention. I didn’t have a traditional path into branding. I didn’t do go to school for it or start out in an advertising agency. My path to it was actually, I had joined my family’s business and I came on as the Director of Sales and Marketing. And within the first year, we had a sales crisis, our sales started to collapse, our revenue was collapsing. And at first I thought I had a sales problem. I did everything in my power to fix that. We did sales training, and CRM systems, all these good things, and nothing worked. At the end of that first year, I remember sitting down with both my parents and saying, This is what it’s like to be in a family business? I can’t do this. And my dad said to me, he gave me the best advice ever which was, it’s not about the business you’ve built. It’s about the business you’re building. What are we going to build next? And that gave me permission to take a step back, look at the business, look at myself. And what we realized after doing some analysis is we didn’t have a sales problem. We had a branding problem, our customers couldn’t distinguish us from anyone else. And so it was in that moment that I discovered branding and I had to study my customers and study everything about them to see how we change. I also read every single book I could get my hands on, and I applied it. there was something about it. I love the journey. I loved what I was creating, and it sparked what has been a career wide obsession about how you grow a remarkable brand.

Oh, that’s amazing. And the family business that you were in, that was, I think it says in your book, it was IT staffing, is that correct?

That’s correct. We work with large corporations for their IT departments, we’d find everyone from programmers to systems engineers and everything in between. We were a traditional recruiting and staffing firm.

I see, reading in your book, you do talk a bit in the beginning about the origin of branding. And you talk about your family business. It’s so interesting and I think really relevant to a lot of my listeners who may be running their own small businesses themselves. Is that your family’s company was very successful in IT staffing for a long while; and then came the days of LinkedIn and online resumes. Recruiters have this amazing reach and the whole landscape changed. I imagined that happened around the same time that you were experiencing this crisis in what you initially thought was sales, and turned out to be brand. So I’m curious, how did you determine that it wasn’t so, or maybe it was sort of related to the way the competitive landscape was changing? Was that related to the confusion around your brand? Or was it a completely separate issue that you had to tweak?

No, they were totally interlinked, but at the time, we couldn’t see the disruption for what it was. So when we, then timing-wise, so I joined my family business in January 2004. I’m now just completing my 15th year as an entrepreneur. I came in in January 2004. In context, Google was only five years old at that point. Facebook was just founded, we hadn’t even heard of it. LinkedIn was two years old. And then we were facing job boards like Monster and Workopolis and a little bit of Craigslist. It was this very interesting environment where we could feel the internet. Where the brand challenge came out is, our core market is recruiters, is dealing with young professionals. The first thing people were doing when they were looking for a job was going online. So where we noticed the brand problem was, we would go online, we could see it ourselves, that we would start to evaluate companies based on their website. In our case, our website look like everybody else in our industry. But it’s actually worse than that. We had created an organization that looked; it was called Miller and Associates, it looked like an accounting firm or a law firm. It looked like any other kind of professional services firm. So from a website perspective, in this very new era of how do you do digital marketing and digital branding, we were making serious mistakes. In a time when things got very competitive, that’s when you notice the disruption. The first thing that disruption actually does is, it levels the playing field and it sucks the profitability out of an industry. We didn’t know this until around 2007 what it actually happened; but at the time, all we could see was everything’s breaking, how do we fix it and Oh, wait, we need to get better at differentiating ourselves.

Interesting. You also mentioned in the book that the name of the company, Miller and Associates, which sounds like an accounting firm or a law firm. But that was actually your competitive advantage when you first named it because it sounded like a law firm. And at the time, it was the brand and the benefit of what made you different as a recruiting firm when the firm was first started; and sounds like as the times changed that you also had to obviously change and shift with those times and ultimately change the name of your company.

Exactly. So when my dad founded the business in 1989, recruiting had a bit of a dirty industry with people called headhunters and other pejorative terms. And so he wanted to create a very professional practice and very relationship oriented, and so the original branding made a ton of sense. But one of the things, and I find this fascinating from just a marketing and a branding perspective today is, we live in a world of rapid change. What I went through 15 years ago, most entrepreneurs are going through this every three to five years now, if you think of it, each and every one of us, our brands have a shelf life. And you can see it first and foremost in your website. An out-of-date website is usually the canary in the coal mine. You’ve got other problems in terms of potentially your core messaging, your value proposition. And out-of-date website usually indicates an out-of-date brand, but a website only has a shelf life of two to four years. And so if you’re having to reinvent yourself every few years now, this is the real challenge that we are all facing. That was generational 15 years ago. Now it’s commonplace.

Change happens more and more quickly now these days. So now from your early experiences with your family company, that sounds like it inspired you to really follow and become interested in how companies develop their brands, and name themselves. I know that’s now led to your brand new book that just came out a few months ago, A” Brand New Name,” and you obviously work with brands to help them pick their names. What do you feel like are the biggest pitfalls companies face when they’re trying to build a really strong brand for themselves?

They face a couple of major pitfalls that affect most organizations from a branding context and especially small and medium sized businesses. The first one is really time. People underestimate how much time it takes to create a really strong brand in terms of just the foundational elements; like I need a good name, or we need to build a great website and we need to just put our best foot forward. Well, that’s actually hard work. It can be expensive at times. But that representation of you, those choices that you’re making, they really do make a lot of difference in terms of how people understand you, how they interact with you. And the expectations they have of your business and your products and services. So we often underestimate how much time it takes. We need a website, it’ll be done in 60 days. We need a name, it’ll be done in a one day workshop. It never works out that way. We always are behind the eight ball in terms of our timing.

I think the other pitfall that we face is that we compare ourselves to potentially the wrong brands, we look up to very admirable companies like Apple and Nike and Starbucks. But what made them successful isn’t necessarily what’s going to make you successful. The real truth of what’s going to make your organization or your brand, something that your customers love, and they come back to again, again, isn’t going to be how pretty your website is, it’s going to be how great an experience that they have. Do you have the right products and services, are they well priced, do you have great customer service? It’s that chain link system of all those moving parts that go together to create a truly great customer experience. And that again, it’s a question of time, it’s a question of resources, it’s a question of care. As entrepreneurs, we are making a choice to grow a brand, and it is a deliberate choice of how much we actually care about the customer experience.

There’s just so much that goes into building that brand. And you talk about in your new book, “Brand New Name,” something that’s really fascinating to me is, say if you’re building a new name or renaming or naming for the first time your company, you advocate unlocking the creative genius of teams. So I know a lot of times, companies, if they’re trying to rebrand, they’ll hire out external consultants to kind of do it and present back some choices and make a choice. But what I really was interested in, in your book is that you provide a really good structure and format for people within a company to come together and use their collective knowledge, and draw on history and all these other sources to come up with a long list of names. Then they work together to pick an ideal name. How did you discover that leveraging those internal employees as a team was a really valuable resource as opposed to just ordering out or or getting an external party to name your brand?

This has been just an absolute watershed experience for me, Carolyn, because what I have discovered is that inside, every organization has immense creative potential. The way we deal with disruption, the way we deal with this changing landscape isn’t by looking for ideas externally, it’s about how do we harness that genius of our employees? How do we get people to participate in the change ahead. The way I came to this experience has been this through a series of steps. The first step came out of my own need, again, so much of the work that I get involved at this problem solving challenges that I face within my own business or my own clients. And then we go around codifying and documenting it so others can recreate that. So Brand New Name, originally started as an agency where I was doing the work to create names for my clients. But the problem was, I was having so much demand coming in the door, we would have anywhere from four to five inquiries a day. We’re a small business, we just couldn’t handle all these inquiries. So what happened was a fund development organization approached me and said, we would like to build an agency with you, Jeremy. We will fund it, we will help you build it, and you provide the leadership and the marketing engine to support that. Like, wow, dream come true. And long story short, we ultimately didn’t make it work because they couldn’t get their costing down for a naming project. They wanted to charge something like $75,000 or $80,000, a naming gig and I knew my clients in the market at a whole wasn’t going to bear that.

So, in a brainstorming session, we started asked the question, how else could we get this naming problem solved? Everybody has to name something. Every marketer, every entrepreneur has to name something, at least once, whether it’s for their company, a product name, a system, a campaign, you name it, we’re going to be creating a name at some point. So, in a brainstorming session, I wrote down on a whiteboard: unlock the genius of employees and that turned on a light bulb. And it was a series of things that happened at the same time. I read Jake Knapp’s book Sprint, which I think is just simply brilliant. It talks around how to prototype and create ideas in just five days. And we started to experiment with it. We went to our clients and said, Would you like to try to use a crowdsourcing exercise using your staff to name something? And they said, Yes, so we tried an experiment with a couple clients, and it worked incredibly well. And as we did that, it evolved into what is the book now, which is “Brand New Name,” which is a three stage naming sprint, that in stage one, you build a strategy. Stage two, you generate lots of ideas using your own employees. And then stage three, it’s a set of tools and exercises to test and select all those ideas so that you can come up with one name.

And the net result of this has been every time I use employee co-creation. I’m always surprised by two things. Number one, just the quality of the ideas, your staff can come up with ideas that are often better than an agency, and two, the culture shifts it creates. So often our employees are never asked to do major projects like branding or naming or being involved in strategic decisions. But if you give them a voice, and you’ve let them be a part of something that’s greater than themselves, it actually starts to shift your culture and creates ownership. And so the benefits of using your team to solve complex problems, we can spend all day talking about it. It’s unending benefit with really powerful results.

Yeah, I was thinking as I was reading your book, and I was reading about the sprint days and how employees were getting involved that, by the end I was thinking, yeah, this really is more than a brand shift. It’s truly a culture shift within a company. I could certainly see it really taking that brand, and I don’t know if it the brand becomes part of the culture, or the brand is already wound into the culture.

Your brand is built from the inside out, like you think of, we’re trained from a classic advertising perspective that your brand is your advertising. Like De Beers, a diamond is forever. M&M’s, melts in your mouth, not in your hands. We have these classic taglines that were created 80 plus years ago. But today, brands are really the sum of their parts. And so the best way to grow it is through the energy of your team. Like you can feel energy in an organization. When people love their jobs, they’re connected with purpose and they are coming to work, not because it’s just a paycheck, but because they actually get meaning and fulfillment from that work. That’s the best brand building you could ever ask for. But from a leadership perspective, you got to ask for it.

Definitely. And you have to be open to listen to the answers and the input that you get from your people.

A hundred percent. That’s the most humbling part of this right?

Yeah, absolutely. And you also advocate as part of the sprint day and the whole design process that you have one person who’s tasked as the decider, and that could be the CEO or head of marketing or whoever it is, but you have that person be involved throughout so that, you know, they’re not just coming in at the end and have to pick from a list of five choices. They’re not there the whole time, but they’re part of the process. So that, you know, they don’t stifle innovation, but at the same time, they’re kept in the loop so that they’re not totally caught off guard at the end when they have to make the decision.

I think it’s even bigger than that. I do really believe they should be involved in the whole process, as much as possible. Because if you delegate and if you take yourself speaking as a business owner myself, and if I look at delegating something, yeah, it frees up time. But when you’re in something like this, being part of that team and putting in your ideas and contributing, not only are you demonstrating that you are part of the team, you’re also experiencing what everybody else’s experience. It’s so easy as a leader to watch a group of people do a creative project and then reject everything, or say, well then show me another. And that is so defeating for everybody involved. But at least if you’re rolling up your sleeves and you’re in there, you’re creating ideas, you’re submitting and participating, just like everybody else, well now you have a much higher stake in the outcome. And there’s no blame to be thrown around or shooting down ideas. You are truly being a participatory leader. And I think that’s how you actually get the better results. And so, when I facilitate a naming sprint, the first thing I say to the business owner is, will you be involved? We may have to justify it a little, but we need that agreement, they need to be contributing and participating start to finish and if they’re not, I think the project is at risk from the very beginning.

Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense. It’s not something that you can just delegate and come back to later on. Absolutely. And you use a lot of structures around that, that feel like, or sometimes overly are, like brainstorming sessions. But a lot of us have an image of what a brainstorming session is like. And sometimes we go and we may or may not have good inputs and outputs coming out of that. But what I really liked about your sprint day design, is that there are brainstorming sessions, but there’s almost like a different theme for each one. So they’re structured, in a way, and you really encourage people to come up with, in some ways, quantity over quality, understanding that you really have to get a lot of names and a lot of ideas out in order to get those gems and really build on different ideas.

100%. Go back to the brainstorming thing. Isn’t brainstorming the worst? Like someone brings you into a boardroom and says “All right, guys, be creative!” And it’s like deer in the headlights. You go to groupthink very quickly, the ideas are weak, everyone gets creative constipation, nothing comes out. It’s a horrible experience and it’s a horrible contrived environment to throw someone in a boardroom and ask them to be creative. There’s two parts to why we want volume in this process. But the reality is, in creativity, the best results happen actually when you get people to be creative on their own. And so what I advocate in the book is this idea called working alone together. And the exercises are designed for individuals. So right now I’m doing a naming project with a manufacturer here in Canada that is looking to change its company name. And today was day one of the sprint. We had 54 people involved and it’s 7:30 at night. And so far we’ve had 113 names submitted today. And, that’s remarkable, we’re generating three to one return on everyone contributing names, and people are doing on their own time. So I believe working alone together means you know, when you have a creative moment, you’re in the shower, you’re driving your car. And an idea just pops in your mind. That’s actually usually how ideas percolate. And so we need to give people space to do that versus stuffing them into a boardroom. And so that’s the big part of the structure elements that are going on in the book. But it’s also to a bigger purpose. In the biggest challenge in naming is not coming up with a great idea, it’s finding an available name. We’re running out of names. And so finding available dot coms and trademarks is truly the issue. So what an organization needs to do if they want to name something is generate a whole ton of ideas, as quickly as possible so that they can narrow it down to a few ideas that might stand up to a trademark search. And that is really the hardest part of naming and really why “Brand New Name”, is structured the way it is.

I say, Yeah, that’s a good point. And you also make the point to not get too upset or hung up on the domain name. If the exact domain name is taken, there might be other ways to change the name or alter it, and you gave some examples of companies who have names that may relatively be common words, but have slightly different URLs and web addresses. So I thought that was an interesting point, too.

Yeah, well, that’s very fair point. So if you go to buy a domain name that right now you have to go and expect that all the dot coms are taken. So if you put down in your criteria, I want a dot com name, well budget a minimum of $10,000. But it could be closer to 100, 200, $300,000. I was offered recently to buy Brand Builder.com, and I said, well, what’s that gonna cost? And they said, $250,000. I went, no thanks. I don’t need that. Pass. And so if you’re a small business, spending that kind of money on a domain name, I don’t advocate for that. There’s probably a lot better things you can spend your marketing or even your business dollars on.

So how do we get around this? Well, I don’t think domain names are worth what they were a few years ago to do. The only place we see our URL is on a business card or marketing collateral print material. If you’re on an app, if you’re on your website, you’re dealing with the Google browser or the Chrome browser or the Safari browser, and you’re typing proper words in and it’s giving you a result. Or even more likely, you’re talking to Siri or Alexa, and you don’t even know what the dot com name is. So my view of this is, keep your dollars and focus on trademarks. Because you can find very creative domain names. Think of Zoom, Zoom.us, which makes their name a verb, Zoom us, or Tesla, Tesla went under Teslamotors.com for a very long time until they were able to acquire Tesla.com. So lots of large companies are not using traditional comms because either can’t get it, or they don’t want to spend the money for it. And I think the same is true for you too.

Yeah, and that’s a good point that the technology is really changing. That domain name is becoming slightly less important than it was even just five years ago. Oh, absolutely. And another really interesting point that’s throughout your book, and again, relates to working with employees and teams is that you really emphasize the importance of consistent and meaningful recognition, not just at the end of the process for the person with the winning idea, but throughout the process, which I think is something that sometimes gets left out in big projects like this. Or maybe there’s only one end reward for people. But I really liked the idea of incenting and recognizing the importance of all of the contributions of the team, and not just the winning name, but you know, even the other really popular names and really treating that very seriously. And again, I think that ties back to culture as well, in terms of really valuing and appreciating what people are working on. So how did you discover the importance of recognition and incentivizing in the brand creation process?

Well, this came out to some of the research. As we started looking into employee co creation, one of the things we recognize or that I saw I was just in dealing with organizations was, people are actually afraid of being creative. And it’s actually a real shame. We can see this in the data, there’s been two long term studies that have compared IQ scores and creativity scores. So the Flynn effect of IQ has been measuring IQ score since the 1800s. And what it has demonstrated is that, over the last hundred years, IQ scores have been going up by about 10 points per generation. But as we look at the creativity scores, it’s been doing the opposite. Since 1990, creativity scores have been in decline. And there’s a variety of reasons for that. There’s the rise of the Internet. It’s the industrialization of our school systems. It’s the focus on skill based learning, like math and science over the arts and humanities. And, so all of these conditions are coming together. So we have an entire generation in the workforce actually, all the generations of the workforce, Gen Y to baby boomers, everybody who we’re working with right now, have been growing up in an environment that has not rewarded creativity since they were in school. And this creates a problem because when you ask your team to be creative, in many cases, those skills, those muscles may have atrophied. And they may or may not know how to do it. The marketing team might be good at it. Maybe the engineering team has some skills on it. But other people like accounting will go, I’m an accountant. I’m not a creative person. And so how do you start to demonstrate to people that their ideas are valued?

And so one of the ways that I’ve been going around that is not to judge an idea, not to criticize it, not to comment on it, but just to celebrate it. And so if somebody contributes a name and a naming sprint, I think they should get something. It could be as simple as a $5 Starbucks gift card or an Amazon card, and just say thank you for participating. And it’s like being in school and getting the gold sticker on the board. What that does is create the psychological conditions to try it again. And if they get another reinforcement and positive energy, they’ll do it again. The thing that kills creativity more than anything is somebody takes an idea and shares it maybe for the very first time, they put themselves out there and they give an idea to the group, and then somebody steps all over it. What are they going to do the second time? Are they going to contribute? No. So rather than allowing that to happen, we need to be building people up and demonstrating that they were born creative. They are inherently creative, and that when they put forward idea, it should be rewarded. And as leaders, if we can make those small little steps where people every time they put forward an idea even in small kudos and thank you or a handwritten note or an email, just saying, I really appreciate that. The quality of the idea doesn’t really matter. It’s the act of creating, and if you encourage people to do that again and again, now you’ve got a renewable resource, because people get better at their ideas. The more they use this muscle, the better they get, the more you foster this culture, the better the ideas you get, that just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. You just, you really create a creative culture by nurturing creative culture.

I think a lot of times we read in leadership literature and things about making it a safe place to fail. But even on the opposite of that is not just being a safe place to fail, but also, it’s encouraged that we want you to come up with different ideas, because we have to get through a lot of names or ideas or concepts that maybe aren’t on point or aren’t quite there, because they’re used as stepping stones and ways to build on other ideas to actually find that big idea that you’re looking for. And you have to make people feel comfortable and safe enough, and heard enough in order to get that input so you can get to your end destination with your brand.

For sure. And it’s incredibly difficult. While doing say a naming sprint or a structured exercise where there is clear rules and guidelines that will foster and create those conditions that support the creativity of a culture and get to those outcomes, that the process that I’ve designed by its design is to foster and nurture creativity. But the challenging part that we face as leaders is, the moments outside of those constructs, that we have to create the self awareness and ourselves to how do we maintain that generosity and that engagement, when it’s not simply a naming sprint or a creative exercise? We’re dealing with people’s ideas every single day. And it’s the moments when you are busiest and when you’re most stressed, and you’re just not paying attention that someone brings forward something and you shoot it down, you knock it away, whatever it is, you didn’t do it maliciously. But it was just that moment that you were not present. And those are the most insidious ones. Because that damage adds up. And so I think my hope, at least for people that go through the brand new name process or become aware of employee co creation is, it creates that self awareness so that you can continue to evolve. You’re never going to be perfect, but at least if you’re self-aware of it, you can manage and get better at it day by day. It’s like creativity, if you can help your team get better as a creative, you’re also working on yourself to be a better creative leader.

Well, that’s so true. And it comes with practice. It’s like building a muscle. So you described in the book, again, talking a lot about unlocking the creative genius of teams with small businesses and companies, to come up with names and branding ideas. And we have a lot of people who listen to the podcast here who are maybe solopreneurs, or it’s them and maybe a couple of other part time people so they have very small teams, or maybe they’re just starting out and it’s just them. So at that critical time when people are thinking, I’m starting a business for myself, how do I pick a name for myself, I don’t have a team to run a brainstorming sprint with, what advice would you have for them on branding?

Well, everything in the book you can do on your own. It’s better with a team but the process still works the same. So as you go through the three stages, you’re going to create a strategy, you’re going to generate lots of ideas, and then you’re going to test them, select them. Now, if you can, everyone can do this. Try to create a sprint team if you can. So that could be part time staff. It could be some partners, it could be friends, family, people that believe in you and your business, and just ask them to put 20 to 60 minutes a day for five days into this process, to contribute their ideas, and maybe reward them a little bit. You buy them dinner afterwards. You could pay them if you need to. I’ve seen some people pay some freelance people a few hours per week to do the project with so you can get creative to create your own team. But if you don’t want to do that, the only thing I would suggest then is, set yourself a quota. Maybe it’s 100 names or 200 names and over the course of, say, a week or two, take the time to try to generate even more ideas than you would on your own. Just do what a team would do, but just on your own, just raise the stakes. Because in order to overcome the naming drought, you’re going to need a lot of ideas. And so that’s probably the most important piece of this whole process is, how do you get to say, 200 names, so that you have enough good options to choose when it comes time to evaluating trademarks or looking for those ones that are brilliant versus obvious?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Oh, that’s great advice. Yeah. To pull in people and create your own teams from family, friends, colleagues, other sources of information. Oh, that’s great. Wow.

I can give you a very specific example. One of the people that read my book was Maggie Langrick, and she is the CEO of LifeTree Publishing. They’re a hybrid publishing company out of Los Angeles. And the problem was that they were having challenges with their name and they wanted to come up with a new name. So she has a very small team that is exactly how you described it. So she got that small team involved, and they had four people involved in it. And they generated a whole lot of names, they set the quota for them, and they pushed, they got over 100 names, and they shortlisted that down to four names that they loved, and they worked on it, and they evaluate it and they let it sit. And eventually they chose Wonder Well, and so they are going through the process now. But in the new year, they will be changing the company name from LifeTree to Wonder Well, and they love the name. That’s a fabulous, experiential name that gives a suggestion of what kind of books they are striving to publish.

That’s great. Yeah, that is a really cool name. And that’s wonderful to see an example of smaller companies that can pull together resources to come up with different names. That’s great.

And I had this question down and I wanted to ask you, it’s related to brand. And I’ve always wanted to ask this to a branding expert for companies. The whole concept of personal brand, I feel like is just so super popular. It’s like a big buzzword now. And every individual now somehow is a brand and we all have to have a personal brand, and all this, very popular concept. As someone who’s truly studying branding from a corporate and company and an organizational perspective, do you believe that every individual really does need to have their own brand? And if so, what does that really even mean?

That’s a great question. I am really troubled by the idea of personal branding. Just put that on the table to begin with, because, you are a complex individual. I am a complex individual, you have multiple interests. Brand is a caricature. It’s a distillation or it’s a construct, to create a connection with an individual. And so yes, celebrities and politicians distill themselves down. And what I would describe is, it’s them, but more. So there’s a few key elements that they emphasize over others, and they architect that. But generally speaking, that’s not what most of us need to be doing. We need to be high functioning quality entrepreneurs and employees and leaders and just being happy, healthy human beings.

And so let’s pull this back down to where the question that was, so what is a personal brand? And do I have one? Well, everybody has a personal brand, whether you’ve worked on it or not, you have a brand and that is simply your reputation. So you may be known as a caring person, a generous person, an intellectual person, the person that call whenever somebody needs to be helped, whatever your reputation is, that is your personal brand. Now, the question of personal branding is, how do you amplify that? And the way I like to think of it, is how do you grow your network or your relationships so that it’s larger than the number of people you know? And so what we’re using branding or marketing tactics to do is to grow our reach and influence so that we can engage and help a larger audience. And so we see lots of people doing that, you’re doing this today, in running a brilliant podcast and reaching lots of people and consistently creating brilliant content, you are raising your awareness. And you’re also creating immense value. So that is a way for you to amplify who you are, and grow your network beyond the specific people that you have met face to face or know personally.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it makes a lot of sense to think of personal brand in that way as the reputation that you’ve built and a way to, as you said, grow your network beyond the people that you already know and that are in your immediate orbit. I spend a lot of time hanging out on LinkedIn. I think it’s what everybody there is trying to do with publishing their content, whether writing or videos or podcasting, is just trying to reach new people out there in the world, or trying to find work or business, things like that.

And I think that that kind of network, that kind of amplification, is healthy and it’s positive, and that’s why we use the tools. Where I get really troubled by this idea of personal branding is we go take it too far. The difference between a person and a business brand, well, if my business hits a crisis, say, the business model changes, we have some kind of structural change, the market changes, whatever it is, and we lose relevance, just like what happened to my family’s business. You change it, if the brand doesn’t work for you, you change it, you can change the company name, you can change the logos, the colors, the value proposition, the services, and the company is fully healthy and happy on that. But that kind of reinvention is to yourself, unless you’re doing this for very specific terms because it’s probably connected more to media, that kind of mindset is actually kind of unhealthy. Especially psychologically and just from a mental health perspective. And so where I really think we need to focus on ourselves is not how do we construct this thing of, how do we be known? It’s really, how do we connect with people? How do we create value? How do we put our best work and best content and best ideas out in the world, and focus not necessarily on yourself but on others and your connections with them. And you can have multiple interests. The thing that personal branding and business branding differ on is, business branding, you want to be really focused, how am I known? Personal branding, well, you’re a person, so you can have multiple distinct interests, and they can change over time. You can change careers, and that’s part of who you are, and I think you should really embrace that as much as you can.

Yeah, that’s an important distinction. So thank you for your thoughts on that. Something about the term always kind of, in one way, I think understood the value, but in other ways I was like, Well, I don’t know, it’s not quite branding, so that distinction really helps. So thank you for that. So for your own brand, Sticky Branding, what big goals do you have in the near future for your brand?

So, as an entrepreneur, this business for the last 10 years has revolved around me, I’ve been a one man herd, so to speak, where I am the consultant, the speaker, the author, and I’m really working now to transition from being a consultant to a business. Sticky Branding’s mission was really inspired out of the work that we’ve been doing in Brand New Name, and just our approach to employee co-creation. As I said, getting into employee co creation, it’s been a total watershed in terms of the way I’ve approached clients in my own work. As a traditional consultant, it was very prescriptive, do analysis, develop strategy, present back to client. But in co-creation, it’s around a process that others can use to solve problems. And this is really struck to me what sticky branding is all about today.

There’s a classic meme on the internet that went around a few years ago called,” How to Draw an Owl, a Fun and Creative Guide for Beginners.” Have you ever seen this?

I don’t know if I’ve seen that one. No.

So it’s two steps. So step one, draw two circles, one for the head and one for the body. Okay, I can do that. Step to draw the rest of the damn owl. And it’s a full picture of the owl, like everything, shading. It’s, it’s a spectacular owl. But that’s been my experience. And as an entrepreneur, as I would go and read a book and I get a big idea, I’d be told what is a great brand, or this is why Apple and Caterpillar are great brand names. And I’d be shown all of the why and the what and I’d be told, essentially, this is what you need to do, now go draw your damn owl. And this frustrates me to no end.

So what we’re really trying to do in marketing is provide proven step by step processes to solve complex problems like core messaging, naming, positioning, strategy, all the things that we wrestle with, that a simple guide isn’t going to solve. But the key is creating those experiences and the process and the content to support that. So we are doing a ton of research just breaking apart how do you solve complex business and branding challenges, so that employees can put it back together and solve on their own.

That’s fantastic! Organizations sometimes get so complex, those high levels of complexity. I think any attempt at simplifying and codifying and just giving guidance to people as far as how to achieve those big goals and really build their cultures and their brands definitely has such value. Absolutely. So how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about your book or potentially work with you and with Sticky Branding?

Sure, well, easiest way to find me is just search Sticky Branding. We’re at StickyBranding.com. I’m on all the social networks at Sticky Branding. Both my books are available online or in all bookstores, but Amazon’s always the easiest for a book, so you can look up” Sticky Branding.” And the new book that we’ve been talking about this afternoon is “Brand New Name”. But yes, if anyone wants to connect or chat, reach out to me anytime. I’d love to hear from them.

Fantastic. And I’ll put some Amazon links to your books and a link to your website in the show notes as well so people can find it there too.

Thank you.

Awesome. Well, Jeremy, it’s been so great talking with you about your brand new book and branding and culture and all these really fascinating issues and empowering and recognizing employees and the power of teams. Is there anything else as we close out that you’d like our listeners to know or anything else that they can help or support you with?

Well, if anyone wants to pick up the books I would be eternally grateful for that. But let me leave just a final thought on some of the things that we’ve talked about. And I think it goes back to the beginning. What I have discovered in all my work and working with organizations around the world and doing my research is that all great brands are built by people. Smart, ambitious, creative people, people like you and I that care deeply about the work we do. But the key to it all starts with a choice. It’s the companies and the leaders that make a choice to grow a brand. So if you believe in your work that much that you want to grow something that will create legacy, that will last beyond you, that will grow beyond you and your team. That’s the first step of growing a really, truly remarkable brand. And I think you have the power to that, everyone has the power to that. But it’s those few leaders that truly commit to growing something that they can be proud of are the ones that are growing the truly remarkable brands that we ultimately admire.

Great words of wisdom. Thank you so much, Jeremy for being a guest on my podcast today,

My pleasure, Carolyn, thank you for all the work that you’re doing. It’s, it’s fascinating, and I think it’s brilliant. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

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