Most Businesses Get Branding Wrong. Here's What Actually Works.

What Branding Really Means (And Why Most Businesses Get It Wrong) | Jamie Schwartzman

What is a brand, really?

If your answer involves logos, colours, fonts, or websites, this episode may completely change the way you think about branding.

On this episode of The Tarryn Reeves Show, I sit down with branding expert Jamie Schwartzman, founder of Flux Branding, to unpack what branding actually means, why so many entrepreneurs misunderstand it, and how a strong brand can increase perceived value, customer loyalty, and long-term business growth.

With more than 25 years of experience helping organisations redefine their market position, Jamie shares the proven branding principles behind successful rebrands, premium pricing strategies, and his proprietary IDEA Method.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, author, consultant, coach, or business leader, this conversation will help you understand why branding is far more than marketing and why it may be one of your most valuable business assets.

In This Episode

00:00 – Introduction

01:35 – How Jamie went from artist to brand strategist

05:47 – The biggest misconceptions about branding

07:20 – Why branding is more than a logo

07:58 – Understanding brand archetypes

13:06 – When a business should consider rebranding

15:27 – How branding impacts business value

18:08 – The IDEA Method explained

21:10 – Distill: Brand strategy, positioning and messaging

25:56 – Activate: Bringing the brand to life

27:18 – Why brand immersion matters

33:54 – How to know if your business is ready for branding

34:56 – Using AI to clarify your brand strategy

35:56 – Authenticity, branding and consumer trust

39:10 – Branding trends and what to watch out for

40:35 – Real-world rebranding success stories

45:18 – Industries where branding creates surprising results

47:31 – The Book Drop

🎧 Subscribe to The Tarryn Reeves Show for conversations with entrepreneurs, authors, founders, and thought leaders who are shaping how we build businesses, write books, and share messages that matter.

Connect with Jamie Schwartzman

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#BrandStrategy #Branding #Rebranding #BrandIdentity #BrandPositioning #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #ThoughtLeadership #MarketingStrategy #TheTarrynReevesShow

Connect with Tarryn

Transcript

0:39

Okay, on the show today we have Jamie Schwartzman who is the chief creative strategist and founder of Flux Branding, a premier branding agency with over 25 years experience of transforming businesses. He is an expert in corporate rebranding and has developed the idea method, which is a proprietary four-step branding process that reduces risk, reveals a brand's true identity and guides it to success. Jamie, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Tarryn It is an absolute pleasure. Now you and I have discussed branding at length before, so I know that you are full of expertise on this topic and I can't wait for our audience to dive into this. So like we said, you have been building brands for over 25 years. Why branding? What drew you to this world of branding in the first place? Well, it's interesting. I began as an artist. So I have a master's in fine arts and an undergrad in design. And towards the end of my artistic academic training, I really started moving away from the object and just into pure perception, light and space art. uh performance art, all these things were really starting to trend heavily. This is sort of the nineties. And I really kind of moved into the field of perception and how can we influence perception through the visual arts? How can we influence perception through the object? How can we influence perception through experiences? And that kind of led me into getting into branding because with brands, we really are telling stories that are affecting people. and affecting their perception and ultimately their experiences. So it was sort of a natural pivot for me, you know, out of the art world and into a business arena that I was really comfortable with where I could apply my artistic expertise. And where did you first start out learning all of this branding stuff? Well, coming out of uh the school at UCLA, I started designing product. And bringing that product to market, these were architectural products. I was not only designing the product, but I was also creating the brand around them. And that brand was an essential part of its success. I think I sort of learned in the school of hard knocks, actually by doing the work and by doing it for my own company. I sold that company successfully. And then kind of worked for a couple of other startups at that time. The internet was beginning to kind of take off. And with those startups, I was able to refine communications and refine how I would position these companies, not just as products, but really as experiences. And then eventually that led into starting my own Studio Flux branding a little over 25 years ago. So what inspired you to start Flux Branding? Because you were working with startups, you'd sold your company, why not just continue working for something else? Well, I just think that for me, my style is I may be unemployable. uh I'm a very independent and somewhat impulsive kind of person. And so for me, it was important that I could create the lifestyle that I really wanted around having my own company. And I do have a partner in my company. My wife is my partner. And so that's been an interesting process of learning how to live together and own a business together. But I think we've been able to figure it out at this point in time. So lifestyle was really the driver for us. It wasn't, you know, how to make as much money as possible. It wasn't really how to, you know, create something that we could sell. We wanted something that we could operate working with people that we love to work with, working with clients that we like to work with. And we just wanted to enjoy every week. And I will say the result of taking that and making that a priority in our strategy is that Monday rolls around and I do not resent my Mondays. Mm. anything, the Friday's come along too quick. It's Friday today, and I'm like, wait, where did this week go? So I'm actually, if anything, I may resent my Fridays a little bit more, because I kind of like, man, I want to keep going. Hmm, I think it's beautiful when an entrepreneur gets to that stage and I do have to have a giggle because so many of us entrepreneurs are unemployable. It's true. All right, so let's get into the nitty-gritty of branding because every entrepreneur every business every product needs to nail this if they really want to stand out in what is now just a crazy marketplace. So in your opinion, what is the biggest myth or misconception that people have about what a brand actually is? So I would say literacy around brand is better today than it was 25 years ago when I started our studio. And when people thought, "Oh, you're a marketing company." No, we're brand. And I think the biggest confusion right now is that branding is marketing or that branding is design. In a lot of ways, I refer to branding as pre-marketing. We're all the stuff that gets you ready for marketing. helping figure out what your real purpose is, what your core values are, how are you different? We name a lot of companies, we develop the visual identity around them. So design is part of it, but the real core of what we're doing is defining meaning and getting that ready. And so that is a big difference. a lot of companies and business leaders still don't have the proper understanding of what brand is really all about. Mm. confuse brand with their logo. Logo is an important element. I think it is an important signifier of what brand is. But it's not the brand. The brand starts long before the logo. It's what does that mark stand for? What does it mean? How do we create culture? How do we create, "I pledge allegiance to the brand"? Yeah. is really what's going on with brands. It's very deep and psychological and exploratory, much more than design. So design is something that we do and it's an important thing. Visuals are important, but it's not really the core of what a brand is. So if we were to humanize this a little bit, tell me if I'm wrong, Branding is the process of creating a brand and it comes before all of the other stuff. It is essentially turning the brand or understanding the brand and creating it into a persona as such. If it were a human, it would feel this way. It would speak this way. It would act this way. It would leave you feeling and thinking about x. Is that right? Yeah, certainly we do focus on character. And I would say what we rely on a lot is archetypes. So archetypes are another sort of psychological construct. And actually, if you look at the history of archetypes, it comes back to the work of Carl Jung. And Carl Jung was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, as we know, was dealing with the subconscious mind. What's going on when we sleep? What are we unaware of and how those things influence us? Carl Jung, on the other hand, suggested that there's a collective consciousness, that these are based on stories and characters that we know and understand. because of how we were raised. The fairy tales and the bedtime stories and the classic tales. And it turns out, when you begin to study this, there is actually a science behind it and there are 12 core characters. So we rely on those 12 core characters to set the tone for a brand and how it will be different. For instance, you could have one brand which is a ruler brand. Rulers are all about control. And sometimes you need law. You need control. Certainly, it creates a lot of safety. In other cases, a brand might be more of a transformer or a magician that's going to create things or maybe an explorer brand. And they have very different tones and ways of speaking and ways of appearing. And that's a really good way for us to change the way a brand feels by associating it with a brand archetype or with an archetype. So it's one of the core things we do. We don't always actually reveal the archetype to the client. Sometimes it will get them a little confused and they'll get stuck on it. In some cases we do, but it's certainly something that we do in our work when we're beginning to humanize a brand and develop the tone and feel. So does that make sense? 12 archetypes? Good question. You can certainly go and find them on my website. And if you do intro to brand archetypes, you'll see where Flex Branding's link is probably the number one. But just safe to say there are 12 of them. And then quite frankly, there's another five that list below. So we deal with uh a universe of 60 archetypes. They're more than we're going to talk about today. But just they deal with uh the core characters, and if I were to explain any of them, you would be familiar with them. The citizen who needs to conform and work well together. The lover who is about uh emotion and feeling. The sage who is the wise one. So these are the types, and they're very simple at the end of the day. And that's one of the reasons that we rely upon them. Because ultimately, when we're developing a brand and we're assigning a brand concept, those brand concepts are extremely simple. They may be two or three words. They need to be really understandable, memorable because we're going to have to communicate these to a lot of people. Mm-hmm. I'm curious just to have a bit of fun. If we were to talk about Apple, what archetype would Apple be? Well, typically they're associated as the artist, right? As the artist in there. And what's interesting is for anybody who's interested in brand archetypes, in addition, we have a cool little tool on our website, which is the brand decoder. And I've taken the 12 classic archetypes and defined them into four. The protector, the lover, the explorer, and the dreamer. Mm. you go onto our website, fluxbranding.com and click the little yellow button, you can answer six questions and it will run an algorithm that we've developed to determine which of those four you fall into. So it's a good way to start. But I think the whole area of archetypes is a deep well. It's an important uh area. It is not an exact science. I would say it's part art and part science. and it is not always straightforward. And in many cases, when we're assigning a brand archetype, it's not just one. It may be a combination of the two, like the companion maverick or the visionary architect. So there's a lot of different ways to look at this. But these characters are important for us at the core and foundation. They're not really how the brand is going to express itself. But I would say when we're doing the deep-level strategy, archetypes are one of the things that we rely on. Yeah. So when you are working with a brand and we understand that branding is so critical for business today to stand out in that fast-paced marketplace, when you first start working with someone, what might you be looking at? Well, I mean, let's talk about why you'd want to rebrand. So I've been doing this for almost three decades. I get a lot of inquiries. And I have lot of conversations with business leaders who want to do branding. And there's sort of three things, or maybe four things that I listen for that are really the cues. Because the work that we do can be pretty invasive and represents some risk associated with it. Typically, my recommendation is if you don't need to mess with your brand, don't do it. Right. Stick with what you got and just make it better. But um the process really involves like exploring and getting to know who they are and finding out why are certain things happening. Typically, there's something that has changed. when we're being engaged, which is the reason that our studio is called Flux. Because typically when things are going smooth, a rebrand isn't top of mind. In many cases, it'll be, we've lost market share. There's been a competitive attack. New entrant has entered our category, and now they're taking our customers. That signifies a brand problem. We're launching a new product or service. Maybe we need to rebalance the portfolio. Maybe there's now a channel conflict because we're entering a product into another area that may compete with what we already have. Sometimes there's been a corporate crisis of some sort. Maybe some catastrophe has occurred and we're trying to distance ourselves from the past and we need a rebrand. Sometimes it's just spirit. The team isn't motivated. They're not. um you know, their engagement level or what we call spirit is low. So brand can work in those areas. We do a lot of work also after mergers and acquisitions. In many cases, equity will see the opportunity of combining a couple of companies to get economies of scale, but then the people themselves are sort of left disintegrated. A lot of the brand work that we'll do is to create common language so that everybody can contribute to it and feel like you're a part. of a unified whole. Yep, amazing. So a strong brand can affect the bottom line, yes? Well, I like to encourage business leaders to think about brand in terms of balance sheet thinking. So let's go back to our our basic two fundamental business reports, right? The financial reports, you've got your profit and loss statement, you've got your balance sheet. The balance sheet is what are our assets? What are our liabilities? Right? I believe that brand is an asset. Mm-hmm. that's going to be a durable investment. It's going to generate opportunity over multiple years. So it is something that should be capitalized. This is a brand asset. That's why we call it brand equity. Equity is on the balance sheet. As opposed to the P&L, the P&L is what did I spend and what did I make? So some business leaders will ask me, well, how do I know if there's an ROI on this brand? I don't think it's really the right way to approach brand. I think it is the right way to approach marketing. How much do I spend on my marketing? What kind of revenues did it generate? But with equity, equity has to do with valuation. So I would say, you know if you got good ROI on your branding efforts, depending on what your company is worth. And if you look at major brands, maybe a brand like Coca-Cola, the value of the brand exceeds the value of all of their book assets. all of their factories, all their trucks, everything. Is it? Is it? It's interesting. My daughter's partner works for a really great company called Dr. Squatch. Dr. Squatch is a men's soaps line. They've done very well. They were just acquired by Unilever for $1.5 billion. Now, that acquisition was not because of the value of their sales. It was because of the brand. And their marketing, too. They've done some very uh innovative marketing approaches using celebrities. I think the Sydney Sweeney bathwater soap is a brilliant uh approach on how to engage the target demo. So this is where brand really pays off, is by having that value and equity in your company. It's a durable asset. Yeah, well, when you explain it like that, it makes complete sense. So thank you for sharing that. Now I want to talk about the idea method because you've developed this to help guide the branding process. Can you walk us through what idea stands for and how it works? Sure, so I mean, I wish I would be able to take credit for actually developing this. What we've done is we've developed a branded methodology that really is best practices. So, and I do think that if anybody is thinking about engaging a studio in doing branding work, you know, it's really important to find out what their methodology is and how they're going to approach it because this can be very unstructured. And quite frankly for us, this is more of a framework than a prescription, if that makes sense. Because really the needs of every different brand are slightly different. We kind of don't know what we don't know. It does make it difficult to develop a scope of work in this area. So I would say, again, developing scope of work when we're doing this is a blend of art and science. I know what to look for. I've been doing it for enough years to figure it out, but it's always a little bit different. But I do follow these four steps as a framework when I'm trying to define what the project is going to look like. And it's idea, I-D-E-A, ignite, distill, energize, activate. These are the four steps and and again this follows best practices Ignite is the discovery phase. You might think of this as market research, but it's not so much always market research. A lot of the times we're doing just internal investigation. We're meeting with teams. We're talking to the sales team. Let's talk to the product team. We need to talk to accounting. I want to talk to, you know, the executive team. What does the marketing team think? You know, really this helps us understand how much unity is there? How much common understanding? What are we starting with here? So we do a lot of workshops, uh interviews, just really getting to know the company. That's one dimension of Ignite. The next dimension of Ignite is sort of looking at the competitors, or what I call the peers. So who else is out there? What are they doing? We try to look then at the customer in some way, shape, or form. It can be expensive and time-consuming to execute that research. We don't always have the ability to do it. But in some cases, maybe the sales team can give us some insights in those areas. The fourth place we like to look is just sort of general trends. What are the trends that are impacting this industry? How's technology affecting it? Those sorts of things. And based on that, we can get a pretty good sense of what's going on there. If we have the budget, we'll write an insights report. The insights report or this is what we saw. And it's pretty easy to gain consensus around that because we're not really making any recommendations at that point. We're just documenting what we saw. That leads us to D, Distill, which is the next piece, which is brand strategy. brand strategy is where we're essentially doing the positioning work. This is where we name companies or rename companies. We do a lot of company naming. And just so you know, if you have to rename your company, it is not always easy. Finding a name that has clear IP and trademark, that also has a good URL, that also is meaningful, that everybody can agree on can sometimes be very, very challenging. And there's legal involved here too, to make sure. So if you are planning on renaming your company, get legal involved early to check it out. We have some tools to do that. But ultimately, legals is the final law. Eventually we write the bible, the brand bible. We call it the brand platform, is a poetic document. that describes who we are, what we are. We typically start with core values. The core values are what do we believe? What is our own code of conduct? And these become important elements for recruiting. If you're going to come and work for Flux Branding, you're going to have the core values chat with Jamie. So we have five core values. They're not universal. That's what we believe. And it's important to communicate what we believe to others because it's not always obvious. So the core values of what we believe, the other side of that is our brand promises. And what do we, you know, what's our commitment to the customer and what can we say that we're going to be delivering? A lot of times these are called universal selling principles, USPs. We call them promises. We do tone of voice. We do uh like a story, almost a poetic bedtime story of what the brand is. And then we do something called the creative territory. We used to call them mood boards, but mood boards got people confused. So creative territories, what point of the compass are we going on? Are we doing something that's heavily geometric and bright? Are we doing something that's more sophisticated and maybe traditional? It just depends on where we're going. So we'll set a tone for the creative language at that point in time. That is our brand platform. After that, we do another document often called the messaging toolkit. The messaging toolkit really defines in detail who the audiences are, who we're trying to engage with. We're not big on demographics. Let the marketing team do the demos. We're more on psychographics of what kind of people are we looking for? What's going on in their life? What's happening right now? What are their fears? What are their hopes? What are their dreams? And we try to sort of draw a picture of Maya, a 28-year-old, design professional who lives in Los Angeles and is planning on going on a trip for wines, you know, to really try to humanize that person. Then with that, we'll create a sort of a kit of parts. These are the target statements that we think are right for these demos. These are the brand pillars. These are the messaging. And we'll put that all together with a series of examples of how this might work. And this really helps your social media teams, helps your... marketing teams. So they've got a guide to go back to of approved messages that can be combined and recombined in thousands of different ways, and you have a limitless supply of content creation. So this now is Distill. Now we go to E-Energize. So now design. We're 50 % into the project. We haven't even started design at all. So now at this point in time, now we begin to do identity, and identity can be meaningful. I mean, Tarryn, think about your identity. If we were going to try to figure out who you are and do your identity, this is not a simple, like, "Well, we'll make you a logo." It's a big, meaningful thing. So now we're creating the visual language that is a reflection of the brand strategy and the positioning. So this is heavily coded work that is meaningful, because we've created the meaning, and everybody's agreed to it. So now we'll create a visual identity system that will usually include mock-ups or visualizations. Well, here's what a building would look like with your sign on it. Here's what a billboard would look like. Here's what a web page might look like. These are not intended to be produced, but they are intended to prove. Does this system have legs? Are we going to like it? Because if you've ever done any painting and you've tried to select a paint chip, I did this. I selected a paint chip. I painted it was a really nice gray. I painted the room. It was actually a light purple when I did it. sometimes you just can't really get it from a chip. You've got to see some samples of it. You need to see it done. Anybody who is going through visual design, it's critical that you look at this stuff in some form other than just a tile of color. We'll do brand standards at that point in time too so that teams can understand and communicate on it and then finally that takes us to A which is Activate activate. We call them campaigns, but they're not really campaigns in terms of marketing. We're not leads gen. We're not doing social media. We typically are doing core collateral and identity application. So web is a big one. We do a lot of web design and in my 25 years. I've watched web go from a novel, nice-to-have to the most essential component of your communications library. And I will tell you, Tarryn, nobody I work with is happy with their website. So if you're not happy with your website, join the crowd. It's really hard. There's a lot going on in a website, and it can always be better. Come and look at fluxbranding.com. I'm not happy with it, okay? But it looks great and it's always evolving. We're always spending time with it. Websites are little monsters. They are hungry, demanding little monsters, and they will suck as much effort and energy as you can throw at them, and then they need more. That kind of is what we do. I think another thing that I'll add that we're finding is more and more important is training and getting the brand immersed. It's one thing for me to hand you a deck and you can read it. It's another thing for us to get together and spend a day together, talking about it, experiencing it, really having a time to do what I call synaptic programming and really get it in so that you get it. And that is really an important part of the equation. We just finished a big rebrand for a major haircare brand, 100-year-old haircare brand. They were bought by a big German conglomerate. They sort of lost their way. They forgot who they were. Their product team had one idea. The sales team had a different idea. The influencer team, they were going in one direction. Their materials were all over the place. And it was sort of time to hit the pause button and come back to uh some common language, which we did. This is Kenra Professional, really amazing hair care company. uh It was all about great hair. Really, if you want to know what the brand is, it was the power of great hair. Because you know what happens when you have a good hair day, and you feel good about your hair. when you have curly hair to have a good hair day, but yes, you feel amazing. It's a superpower. People feel a certain way about themselves when they have great hair. And so that's what it is that we really picked up on the brand. And that was something that everybody could agree on and everybody could understand. So great hair, ruler. This is a ruler, which is like, we know the way. We have the power. We can share with you the rules and the laws for great hair. Mm-hmm. There was a five-day training session where each of the different teams came into this massive conference room and we had the opportunity for them to really learn it, for them to say, "I don't think so," disagree, do exercises, really internalize the brand. I can tell you now, six months later, they got it. They have the brand. They're working with it. I'm seeing the stuff. I'm seeing what they're putting in at retail like Ulta right now. I'm seeing the before and afters and like they got the brand. This doesn't always happen. Sometimes we deliver the brand and it erodes really fast because the marketing folks, they're the ones that hired us. They didn't really engage the other folks. And I think this training piece of immersion, we'll call it brand immersion, critically important for your team. And it's an insurance policy to protect the investment. Yeah, that makes sense. I've received branding documents before and I've gone, "Okay, that's nice." And I've done a few things and then I've forgotten about it, you know, so that training piece really is critical. I love that you are so thorough with this idea, methodology and I can see how it reduces the risk when you are in a branding process for a business. I'm curious, you've already said that you've done a training piece and sometimes the brands get it. Sometimes you don't do the training piece because maybe a brand doesn't want it and then it erodes over time or quite fast. Are there any other unexpected outcomes that clients have kind of experienced after going through this process with you? Yes, I would say that in some cases, this begins the process of a total overhaul, big overhaul. We've seen big changes to the executive team. We've seen sometimes people are not okay with that change. They're holding on to the past. They wanna go back. And I'm a firm believer that we're all in this process or journey of evolution and it goes in one direction. And if we try to swim upstream, eventually the force of the flow is going to take us back downstream. So I've seen a lot of times executive leadership teams begin to change after brand. I've seen a product approach begin to change, the twilighting out of certain items. Because once we get through the brand and we find out who we really are, it's very possible that some of our business lines no longer make sense. So they could fold off or they could just be twilighted. So yeah, it's interesting. Brand, I think, it's part business consulting. So the impacts of those can be pretty major. yeah. I bet people get a bit of a surprise when they start working with you there at Flux Branding that it was way deeper than what they ever thought it was going to be. Yeah, partly, but I would say really truly there is a growing uh interest in what we do that people are seeking exactly what I'm talking about. And really what I've tried to do is develop my identity and our website so that we attract people who are ready. It's interesting, I used to have another... tool on our website we called the brand calculator and the brand calculator was uh you would answer 15 questions and it would then plot a four quadrant analysis of you know it was a magic quadrant and the two scales were how urgent is it for you to do something in brand right so urgency or elective and the other was like how ready are you or how reluctant are you Mmm. Typically, we're looking for organizations that are where it's urgent and they're ready because those are different things. The market might be saying you better act. But from a readiness standpoint, you haven't defined a budget. The CEO doesn't agree. The lower folks are trying to convince the management that the brand is important. That is an indication to me that you are not ready. When I ask a new prospect, "What's your budget and timeline?" Well, we don't really know. We're trying to figure it out. I know that you're not ready. These are such massive fundamental issues. I know that I will help them get ready. That will be what we'll do. We'll use our time to help you develop readiness. So I think it is complicated, and we just never know where it's going to go until we get into it. So that's why, in many cases, when we start on a project, typically it begins with a 30-minute discovery session that I call a brand blueprint. And I would say for anybody who's listening to this podcast that would like to do one, if you reach out to me, you can put my uh contact info in the show notes. We do a brand blueprint, and I'll walk you through a series of questions and intakes to sort of get a sense of things and based on that, I can generate a summary report that talks about okay, what are the challenges? What are we trying to accomplish? What's the gap right now that we're trying to cross? What are the objectives? What's a possible recommendation of directions to go? But I think having something written when you go into this is really important. Mm. it's easy to talk about it, but sometimes it can be hard to write it. So I think writing it out is a good thing. I would really advocate for the use of AI in this process. Anybody who's trying to figure it out, getting your ideas into AI, trying to have AI compile for you a brief of your brand. And don't take the first result out of AI. It's going to take a lot of prompting. It's going to take a lot of refinement to get to that point. But I can do a really good job of taking disparate juxtaposed information, kind of synthesizing it into a brief. And then you can see it in one place and correct it, and correct it over and over again. I would expect you're going to do 15 to 25 passes on it. So know that this is where AI is great for the stuff provided. You don't put garbage in. So really put in thought and attention into it. You can actually get some pretty good thought and attention out of it. And I'm curious to know, do you believe that that people's interest is growing in this area of branding due to the buzz around authenticity? I don't know that it's necessarily due to the buzz around authenticity. Although I do think authenticity is really an important point because consumers and people are really smart. And I wouldn't underestimate the intelligence of your market. And fake brands, I like to say fake brands stink, people smell them a mile away. So authenticity is really uh part of that Ignite process. In many ways, I don't think we actually craft brands. I think of it as more revealing the brand that's already there, almost where the sculptor will reveal or release the form from the stone. I really think that what we do in branding is we're going to take what's already there and showcase it. That said, I believe that the real interest in brand right now is largely driven by revenue Mm-hmm. because brand can help distinguish your offering from a commodity offering. And if you're trying to drive a premium price point, developing a brand that people can believe in and be loyal to is an essential component of that. This is not for everybody. Some people just want to be the cheap competitor, which is cool. Market needs that. There would be no branded offerings if there weren't challenger brands that are just, you know, purely operating on price. They're alternative. They serve the needs of a really important need that the market has. But for the rest of the market that's looking for something where the way they equate value is different than just using price, brand is an essential element of it. It's not the whole story. You still got to have a product that works. You still got to have great service. The experience of getting from inquiry to receiving whatever the product or service is, has to be really good. So it's part of the puzzle. But I think it's an essential part of the puzzle. And it will spell out a lot of the rules of engagement if you have a clear brand. One other thing I'll say, Tarryn, is I think that what the stuff we're talking about here is not really so much of a startup kind of mentality. uh In many cases, my advice for startups is just get out there. Like, get out there. Your prototype beats my business plan. So just get out there. Start to explore the market. You won't really know what you don't know. So I think for startups, more importantly, you just get in the market. Typically for us, we work more on rebranding or large corporate brands where there is a known problem. There is a team involved. The team has lost its way. They need a knowledgeable outsider that is not drinking the Kool-Aid, that can look at things from a, you know, objective standpoint. And we kind of love to have that perspective of being new. So that's kind of my thoughts there. Brilliant. And is there anything trending in the world of branding right now that that people should be wary of? What's going on out there? I think that, you know, it can be tempting to offer branding services as an additional element of an offering. And this is an area that marketing companies, particularly digital marketing companies, are offering, saying that they can do brand. I just think that it's a wholly different core competency. So I would be careful. And my opinion you're better off getting smart specialists and assembling a team than trying to get a generalist who's going to try to do it all for you. So that's part of it. The other thing I would say for anybody who's listening out there who's still into this and is listening to brand, right? Get literate. Understand what brand's really all about. Learn about brand. Understand it. And that will help you make better decisions. It will help you engage the right people. And don't rely on making calls to potential vendors to help you get educated. Like get educated, read some stuff, there's great stuff out there. Brilliant. And I know that we already spoke about the hair care brand and it was an amazing story. Let's dive into your portfolio a little bit if you can. Do you have another success story for us of a brand transformation that you're super proud of? Well, we love them all. Yeah, we just did a big one. They're a really great company up in Oakland, California. And they are, we do a lot of real estate housing, Walter Family Housing. This is a group that was developing workforce housing. So not premium, but also not Section 8 low-end housing. The company had a name, but they hadn't really implemented. The name was ArtHaus, A-R-T-H-A-U-S. And they had a good idea behind it. The CEO, brilliant individual, very creative guy, a little bit so brilliant and creative. He's a little frustrated that his team hadn't been able to figure it out for him. So they engaged us to do a pretty, integrated marketing development of an entire portfolio around it, of not only their housing offerings, but different collections of housing, their operations, their property management, and their investments group. And so now ArtHaus is really transformed. And I think it's a much more powerful brand than where they were previously, which was a great brand. Riaz Capital is a great name, but moving from Riaz Capital to ArtHaus really transformed everything. Along the way, we developed a visual language that's simple and clean and modern. Their prior materials were extremely, like, very detailed. There's a lot of information there. And I feel like it's a little bit too much information to provide at the opening. So for websites, I'd encourage people to keep your websites shorter. Keep them more brief. A little copy goes a long way on the web. Mm. it was a process of refining, reducing, getting it together. And now they have launched arthaus.mov which is great. Their whole portfolio is onto it. ArtHaus Partners is about ready to launch now. Really incredible. And we did brand training, met with all of their different teams over there, and they really did a thoughtful job. And these are the kinds of projects that we love when they really get it. They really get it. They really embrace it. They really run with it. Amazing. I can see the total difference just even in the name. It's got a total different feeling and a vibe. I mean, I know really nothing about it other than what you've just told me and it just feels worlds apart. Yeah, we were lucky in that one. They already had the name. So now I'll give you another one. We just did another one. This is a uh fishery down in Mexico. They are growing fish for the market. Their uh entry to market is fine dining. So they're in Ensenada, Mexico. It's a seaside culinary destination, lot of Michelin restaurants there, a lot of really inventive chefs. So, you know, they're growing the steelhead down there. It's raised on land and it's hatched on land and it's finished in saltwater. So it's kind of an interesting species. The local market's doing really well with it, but they didn't have a good name for it. The name was Baja trout. And trout, we thought, has a specific perception of a small river fish. It wasn't gonna be well understood, particularly in American markets. Hmm. not really a good representation of what this stuff is. So the name that we came up with it was Azero. Azero plays on the Spanish word acero, which is steel, but using a Z instead of a C for it. And Azero Steelhead really came out as an amazing-looking brand. And not only did we go and do new photography of their whole production facility, took the boats and went out to the ocean pens, watch them feed the fish, watch them harvest the fish. We also went and visited several Michelin restaurants. I got to work with the chefs. um Let them cook with the fish, get their recipes, and develop really a whole lifestyle around it. So it's not just about a commodity product. It's about something that diners would really dig and they would really get into. So these are just two, and I would say every brand that comes along our way, it's always something different. It's what I really love about doing the work I do is that we're not pigeonholed into a specific industry. Although we do a lot of real estate, we do a lot of automotive, we do a lot of those areas, but I approach every project as if it was a fresh new beginning. Yeah, it sounds like you've worked with some amazing brands and transformed them beautifully. And I'm surprised at the diversity—fisheries, haircare brands, and housing. Are there any other surprising markets that you've been playing in? Well, look, you know, almost three decades, we've played in a lot of different markets. It's always something different. And I think one of the areas that has been a big surprise to me is in the sort of architecture and design community. We've done a lot of construction companies. We've done uh building products, right? Concrete. We've done really interesting areas that really do make a difference because in B2B, we approach B2B just like we approach B2C. If you're thinking B2B and you're trying to market to other businesses, really look at those businesses as if they were consumers. They want cool stuff. They want stuff that's interesting, that's novel, that's different, that has a story to it. Stuff that is brilliant. Really, we are wired. Our neuroscience has wired us to recognize things that are brilliant and remember them. And that's ultimately what we're doing in brand is trying to program in something memorable, cut through the noise very quickly. This all has to happen in fraction of a second. Just like it happens when you smell peanut butter. You smell peanut butter, it just takes a fraction of a second and bam, you're keyed into it. So we're trying to create that same type of response in individuals when they think about your company as they do when you smell peanut butter. I had peanut butter for breakfast. So I hear you. Jamie, I've loved learning about the idea methodology and I'm sure the people listening and watching have as well. For those of you who want to get a brand audit, go and check out Flux. They've got so many cool things on their website. I've done them myself personally. I'm to put all of Jamie's contact information in the show notes. But before we love and leave you, Jamie, we have a tradition on the podcast called The Book Drop and we want to know what book has impacted you either personally or professionally. Well, I mean, there's so many of them, but I'll just give you the one that the last one that I read, and it's right here. This is Laura Bush's book, Brand Psychology. And I would say brand psychology is a great academic resource that talks about what is brand all about and what's the psychology behind brand. I wouldn't look at this as a primer to brand. This is a master's course onto it. But for those of you that are interested in the really the detailed breakdowns of historically how has brand evolved and where it's at all coming from, I think Laura's book is a really exceptional, well-researched, you know, the chapters are relatively short and each one has three or four pages of bibliography notes. So it's very academic, very well-researched. And if you really have a deep dive interest in brand, I would say go here. If you want an intro to brand, I still think that Marty Neumeier's Brand Gap is a great book. It's a short little pamphlet designed to be read on an airplane flight. It's a little dated in some of the companies that it refers to. I think it might talk about Kodak, quite frankly. But I think the principles of what he talks about uh are still really relevant. Yep. Yep. I'm curious. Did Kodak rebrand or did it go under? Good question. And the fact that we're still talking about it means that their brand is lost. I mean, it's one of those great brands like Polaroid. Polaroid started to come back and do some interesting things right now. But Kodak is one of those incredible stories that you just almost can't imagine. They weren't able to adapt. I put them into the same bucket as I would put Sears into. Right? Or Sears, you know, Amazon ate their lunch. Yeah, Amazon really did come along and dominate, didn't they? Yeah, you gotta love him, gotta hate him. That's right. Jamie, thank you so much for being such a brilliant guest on the show today. Thank you for having me, Tarryn. Thank you for doing this podcast too. I really appreciate it. And I love to talk brand. And so thanks for, you know, engaging me today. My pleasure. I love doing this podcast. I get to meet the most interesting people. So I'm the lucky one. Thanks, Tarryn.