In this episode, Rachel Baker helps us all understand what it takes to build a brand that lasts.
You'll learn:
...and so much more.
Need a Branding Buddy?
Check out some of our favorite projects!
https://www.wierstewart.com/work
In this episode, Rachel Baker helps us all understand what it takes to build a brand that lasts.
You'll learn:
...and so much more.
Need a Branding Buddy?
Check out some of our favorite projects!
https://www.wierstewart.com/work
[00:00:01.110] - Jackie
Hi and welcome to another episode of the Weird, Smart podcast. This is a show about how to tap into your brand's individuality to help your business distinguish itself from the competition. I'm your host, Jackie Rogers, and I'm the social media strategist here at Wier/Stewart.
My guest today is Rachel Baker, an extremely talented designer here on the team. And I've invited her here today to talk to us about saving yourself from time wasting mistakes when developing your business's brand.
[00:00:28.960] - Jackie
Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:00:31.110] - Rachel
Hi, Jackie. I'm so excited to be here. This is my first ever podcast.
[00:00:35.850] - Jackie
This is your first ever podcast.
[00:00:36.930] - Rachel
Yes. I've never been on a podcast, and you've made me feel very comfortable and excited to do this. I just want everyone to know that we are actually sitting on the floor right now just so it feels like a casual conversation, which is helping my nerves.
[00:00:52.360] - Jackie
So I'm so glad. Yeah, it's supposed to be fun. And I actually enjoy sitting on the floor for that same reason. It does just it's very cozy and it's very casual. Yeah.
[00:01:03.580] - Rachel
Is it unprofessional to say we're sitting on the floor, do you think.
[00:01:06.870] - Jackie
I only think it gets weird when we start mentioning, like, the the liquor we're hiding behind us.
[00:01:12.270] - Rachel
There is some in here. Don't tell them we're not drinking it. No, but it is here maybe later. Yeah, afterward.
[00:01:21.630] - Jackie
Rachel, I have to tell you, when I was telling people that I wanted to do this podcast, I had several people approach me, like you need to get Rachel on here to talk about design, several people. And it's been weeks of me asking you like gently on the floor with me and talk about design, because I've seen your stuff. You're very talented and you obviously know what you're doing.
[00:01:45.840] - Rachel
So thank you. I did not pay Jackie to say that. Maybe I did not yet.
[00:01:55.410] - Jackie
Yeah, I will demand royalties. No, but so I figured you'd be a really good person to talk to. Like, give our audience some advice about, like, you know, we get people who who want to create a brand new brand or rebrand or just think that like, you know, help or want to help people see beyond, like, the colors and the logos and what a brand can actually do for their business. Right. Yeah.
[00:02:21.750] - Rachel
So I'm going to be because. Yes, you just ask me, you quiz me. Hopefully I'm prepared.
[00:02:29.820] - Jackie
I think you will be. So really, one of the first questions I wanted to ask you is how do you know that if a brand is going to be successful or not? Like what? Like where does that conversation happen with a client?
[00:02:45.930] - Rachel
Yeah, I think some of the key metrics that you can look at to know if your brand is successful is is your audience engaging with you? Do you have the target audience that you're wanting? Are you consistent?
[00:03:06.150] - Rachel
Is your brand look and feel consistent across touch points? And as a business, we know we always want to be gaining market share. And so just looking at metrics like that, are we are we gaining market share? Do we feel like we're losing our customer base? That might point to the fact that we have a messaging problem or a branding problem that we need to solve. So just things like that. How does your are you creating brand loyalty?
[00:03:36.120] - Rachel
How do your customers talk about you when you're not listening? Are people, you know, super engaged on social media with you, things like that? There's a lot of different things you can look at to gauge that.
[00:03:48.750] - Jackie
Yeah.
[00:03:49.500] - Jackie
And, and you said something interesting about understanding where your marketing chair is and if it's spreading, what are some like, especially for like let's say like a local business. How do they know if they are gaining market share or is it just people using that? I don't know, like grabbing their stickers and posting them around town?
[00:04:10.250] - Rachel
Mm hmm. Yeah. I think, you know, is just something as simple as is your business doing well. But I think one of the great things to look at is are we creating repeat customers? You know, are people coming back time and time again because you've created a unique product or experience for them that is available nowhere else. So, you know, anybody can come and engage with a brand one time. And, you know, that's not necessarily a great metric for measuring success because you want people to come back again and again.
[00:04:46.140] - Rachel
You know, we see things like apple where we're apples just created in just an insane fan base that just, you know, it's almost like has a cult like following. And so, you know, that's always the goal is keeping customers that are. Your own basically fan base and having them become brand ambassadors is really a key to gauging your success.
[00:05:09.090] - Jackie
That's fantastic. Yeah, and I'm just thinking about the things that, like, I stick with like, for instance, I switched to Apple because of the fan base, because I had a very distinct line between, like my the friends I could hang out with and the friends I you know, it's polarizing, isn't. And Android people are the same way as Apple people, you know, just equally as devoted to their own brand as as Apple people.
[00:05:36.720] - Jackie
Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Like, I don't know if you know the Clubhouse app yet, but when that rolled out, it only rolled out to Apple users and there was like a little tiff on social media for the Android users who could not get on to it, but now they can. So good for them. Yeah, that was really cool. So my next question for you is I want to kind of dove into the grander vision of a brand.
[00:06:03.480] - Jackie
So when thinking about that bigger vision for a business and their brand, what are some things that are helpful to understand before developing it starts?
[00:06:13.800] - Rachel
Mm hmm. Yeah. On both like our side and then the client side. We always want to start with why? Why do we need to talk about if you're doing a new brand? That's obvious. But if we're doing something like a rebrand, usually it's because something is not working. Something's broken. We need to be better in certain areas. And so we always want to assess the problems first. What's not working? Is our audience changing?
[00:06:47.250] - Rachel
Are we trying to shift with them? Is our company internally changing? Are we going in a different direction? And we need our brand to reflect that and evolve to be more representative of who we are now. So that's something to look out for sure. On the other side of that, you also want to look at your audience. And so that's things like demographics, you know, age, location, gender and things like that. And then the psychographics, which are a little bit more of the soft side of, you know, who are these people?
[00:07:22.590] - Rachel
What are their dreams and goals? What's the lifestyle they're looking to achieve? Kind of like what's going on in their head, like what kind of brands do they want in their life and want to engage with? And then also the media that they engage with so that we can be sure with the new brand to meet them in those channels that they're on.
[00:07:42.450] - Jackie
That's awesome. I love that. So and I don't know, I feel like when I got into marketing, like I was always on the on the strategy side. So developing a brand, it's not it's not my strong suit. I'm not a designer. I'm not like that creative. But I always find that so interesting to be able to dig into these strategic aspects of the business to help it grow. And that's what fires up the design and the creativity that goes into like, you know, the brand look and feel.
[00:08:14.910] - Rachel
Yeah, absolutely. That you're right. The design is always flowing out of the strategy. So we never just want to make something that's beautiful for the sake of being beautiful, because if you do something that that looks great but the message is off, then you're not going to be able to engage with your audience. At the end of the day, the message and the creative have to marry together in a way that makes it relevant for your audience.
[00:08:43.530] - Jackie
That's awesome. Beautiful. But I want to switch gears a little bit because I feel like business is sometimes depending on like if they're a local business or if they're trying to be more of a national brand or whatever it is, they have to decide really. It's like a decision they have to make if they want to be like, am I trying to say like a radical differentiator in their niche? Yeah. When does it behooves someone to be that kind of like radical idea or that radical brand versus I don't know, like if you're a donut shop calling yourself a donut shop.
[00:09:25.300] - Rachel
Uh huh, uh huh, yeah. I think in my opinion, in order to thrive and really stand out in today's market, you pretty much every time do need to be radically different. You need to have at least one key component of your business that nobody else is doing just foundationally. And then we can also work on expressing that visually. So I think the you know, the standard kind of metric everyone always points to is that we are bombarded with about 5000 messages a.
[00:10:00.770] - Rachel
But that is probably before social media came into the picture, and if you can just imagine how much social media has and just being on our smartphones constantly has amplified the number of messages we see every day, then we are competing not just on our local community, playing field business wise, not even just in the U.S., but it's a global competition now. And so in order to stand out, if you are that donut shop, you know, there's a hundred donut shops in our town.
[00:10:31.790] - Rachel
And so to really stand out, you want to do something that's totally different, like maybe you make donuts out of cotton candy or whatever it is. You know, you invented the cronut, which was a big thing for a while. So as long as you have that one thing that makes your brand different and then visually, we love doing things that are when appropriate, just kind of off the wall, like really going to grab someone's attention. And rather than kind of playing it safe, you know, seeing how far that we can we can push that.
[00:11:05.180] - Rachel
And so we love when our clients come and they just trust us to do that and just create something really fun and something that's going to be really memorable. Because when you're looking at thousands of brand messages a day coming at you through social media advertising or billboards, you really do have to be radically different.
[00:11:29.270] - Jackie
That's great. And I don't mean to put you on the spot, but is there a project that you've recently worked on that particularly sticks out to you?
[00:11:38.350] - Rachel
Oh, gosh, I love all of our projects. Let me think about that. I would say. Just one, because it's recent and it's top of mind, that was a lot of fun. We did a rebrand for Augusta Office Solutions, which is an office supply company, really fun people doing really great work. And when you have something like office supplies, you know, it conjures up visions of, you know, cubicles and maybe not necessarily the most exciting thing.
[00:12:19.130] - Rachel
Our client may disagree with that, but we but we wanted to when we felt that we could do something that was fun in that space, because when you have a product that's just meat, potatoes, it's paper, it's paper clips, you really do have to find that fun visual niche to make that different because you're not competing on product at that point. You're competing on brand differentiation. And so we wanted to do something just visually exciting. So we did like their color palette is like lime green and purple.
[00:12:49.870] - Rachel
We did this crazy pattern that they can wrap all of their paper in and their boxes just really pushing for exciting packaging and just just visually really, really fun. And so we're going to see that roll out in our market really soon. But, you know, something in a company like that is always a challenge when you really are competing on service and brand rather than product, it really it does open doors of opportunity for us to do something visually exciting.
[00:13:17.950] - Jackie
That's really cool. I cannot wait to see that. But I saw a couple mockups that you were on. They looked really cool. Yeah, um, awesome. Well, I guess I've got one more question for you. Right. So for the audience listening today, what's one thing that they can do to evaluate the strength of their brand today?
[00:13:36.400] - Rachel
Mm hmm. I think there's kind of a couple of different ways to you can approach that one that I always think about practically. And this is something that we see with a lot of our clients is how does our brand work in a digital environment because so many people are engaging with your brand. First of all, in a digital space, they're on their phones. They're finding you on social media, you know, their Google mapping, you going to the website, things like that.
[00:14:05.470] - Rachel
So how does your brand stand up on a screen the size of a couple, you know, of a graham cracker, basically? So you're you know, you want to make sure your logo reduces? Well, that it's highly legible at a small size, that you have social assets that work well as small sizes and all the way up to billboard sizes. So today's brands have to be just uber flexible in the spaces they inhabit. Everything from a favor icon, which is like 40 by 40 pixels, you know, to a banner on the side of the Yankee Stadium.
[00:14:42.880] - Rachel
Your brand has to look really fabulous in all of those contacts. And there's a lot of practical ways that we can approach doing that and setting somebody up with a brand toolkit that really thrives in all of those contexts. And then a little bit more on the soft side, like me and Jackie we're talking about earlier, just are you creating brand loyalty? Do you see people coming back again and again to your brand to engage with you? And if not, then then we can look at that messaging problem.
[00:15:12.580] - Rachel
Maybe there is something we can, you know, reevaluate and rebrand and to help bring those customers in.
[00:15:19.930] - Jackie
Beautiful. Rachel, it's been such a good conversation. It has.
[00:15:24.480] - Rachel
Thank you, Jackie.
[00:15:26.050] - Jackie
It was very good. And you did great. You sound nervous at all.
[00:15:28.720] - Rachel
Thank you. I'm glad I only threw up once before, so before we recorded.
[00:15:35.140] - Jackie
Oh, gosh, no, she did not. Um, all right. Well, for everyone who's listening, thanks so much for tuning in today. If you want to see any of the case studies that Rachel has done, you can just go ahead and visit our site or I've added some links at the bottom of this episode. And that's it for today.
Tune in next time. See you later. Bye bye.