A Deeper Problem Than Branding

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What if most companies don't have a branding problem at all, but a deeper brand problem that no logo, campaign, or clever message can fix? We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

Announcer 0:15

Change either energizes or paralyzes. The choice is yours. This is the Shift Shapers Podcast, bringing the employee benefits industry interviews with individuals and companies who are shaping the industry's shifts. And now, here's your host, David Saltzman.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

And our guest today to help us answer that question is Kurt Bartolich. Kurt is a brand positioning advisor, researcher, founder of Brand Certain, and the author of a great book called The Brand Reckoning: Why Brand is Broken and How to Fix It. Drawing on six national consumer brand studies and more than three decades of positioning work, Kurt argues that branding has hijacked brand and that companies are trying to solve strategic problems with logos, messages, and campaigns. Kurt, welcome to Shift Shapers.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Thank you, Dave. It's good to see you again.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Thank you for having me back. It's our pleasure. So let's

Brand Is Reputation Branding Is Expression

SPEAKER_01 1:12

dive right in. The central argument of the book is one that I've made to my consulting clients many times, and I just loved this book. Many organizations don't have a branding problem. They have a brand problem. Now, for some CEO out there who uses those words interchangeably, what's the difference?

SPEAKER_00 1:32

So the way that we look at brand is that your brand is, and we try to keep it simple, brand is your reputation. And branding is how you shape that reputation. Typically it's through campaigns, visual identity, maybe your website, just all the different sort of tactical layers of how you express your brand.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

So what is the simplest way to tell whether the problem is the brand itself or merely how it's being expressed?

SPEAKER_00 2:06

That's a great question. There are there's certainly a track that can get you the answers pretty quickly. Like for example, let's say you're a business or a company, an organization, and maybe you're experiencing customer churn at a rate you hadn't experienced it before. Maybe it's kind of looks like a if you looked at an EKG, the ups and downs of how your customers frequent your business or use your products or services. Doing actual market research, now I know it's a little self-servy because that's what we do, but that's not the point. That's going to be the fast track, really understanding the attitudes that drive and influence consumers' behaviors. There are instances where behavior does influence attitude, of course, but typically the way a company views your brand, views your or a person views your brand is going to have certain perceptions and beliefs, and that's going to influence whether it wants to behave with them or not. Now, that's obviously something that doesn't happen for free. So one of the things I talk about in my book is

Simple Tests To Spot Weak Positioning

SPEAKER_00 3:06

how you interrogate your brand. And it's one of the chapters that I don't hear a lot of companies saying, and I use that word in just a the best sense, not like you're putting it under and you're waterboarding it, right? But it's more about how you do a brand health checkup at least once a year, regardless of the size of your company. And that's at the minimum. The bigger companies, a lot of the bigger CPG brands, they will, I use again the term interrogate their brand more routinely. But you can do some sort of self-examinations that I write about in the book. One of them I call the, I call it the blend test. And it's really taking as an objective look as you can as a company. And let's say you've got a digital ad and you're running it. Take a step back and put a competitor's logo on that ad. Don't run it, but take a look at that. Compare them side by side. And if you read it and you say, wow, what we're saying could fit this brand or any other brand, you probably have a brand problem, not a branding problem. There's two other tests, too, that we say you can self-administer to see if you at least have a problem. We call it the is test. Now this is a little deeper. Does your brand and is in people's heads? And what I mean by that is when you think about Google, you think of what, David? What comes to mind immediately? Search. Exactly. So Google is search. When you think of Starbucks, what do you think of? Coffee. Starbucks is coffee. Exactly. When you think of Tesla, what do you think of? Automatic driving cars. Yeah. Electric vehicles, automatic driving cars. Exactly. Those are in the same family. So that's what I call the is test. Now that's not always easy to accomplish, but depending on the competitive nature of your category, you should be associated with some idea routinely and consistently. And if you're not, you probably have a brand problem. And one way to check up on that is look at your social media, look at your digital media, look at the places where people may comment about your brand. Is it Glassdoor? Is it Reddit? Any place that people will talk about your brand or write about it is going to give you some indicators, not just good and bad, but there's some clues that are going to be in there about how they view your brand. So that's one way. And then the last one's a little more complicated. It's called the stretch test. Maybe we'll have time to talk about that at some other point in this conversation. But that one's really more about understanding the latitude of your brand, the perceptive latitude that customers grant your brand to expand wider.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Interesting.

Why Companies Build Brands Backwards

SPEAKER_01 5:46

So I know one of the things that you talk about in the book is that businesses have been taught to build brands backwards, starting with expression before establishing direction. How in the name of Nimitz did that become acceptable practice?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Wow. How long do we have? You said I only have 30 minutes. Aaron Powell. That's actually the foundational premise in the book that I'm making. I think it it goes back decades ago in the days of sort of the legacy agencies, the big shops. They really had a ton of influence, not just on what the companies did, but how they looked at brand. And even if they I don't think there's some big conspiracy going around around brand that we've gotten to at all. But what I think has happened is some of that legacy agency thinking to this day, even though agencies have evolved, I think many of the big agencies, and particularly the agencies that have sprung up around the turn of a century, right around the 2000s when digital platforms and the digital age really started to take off and agencies realized, hey, there's a lot of data here. There's a lot of platforms we're on digitally where people we need to understand how they're engaging with it. So research became, I think, more commonplace in agencies over time. What I think has happened, though, is that legacy agency thinking, as I call it from decades ago, still persists inside many companies. I think the other thing, too, is if you have a choice between looking at a new marketing campaign from your agency partner, a new advertising campaign, a new website, or a 40-page strategy document, something that you read, but it's not as tangible as the things you can see or hear, or maybe even feel, like new packaging. What are you going to default to? So I think that's part of the issue as well. It's just more easy to wrap your arms around that. So I think that companies have really conflated brand and branding over time. They're used interchangeably. They're not the same thing, right? Just like marketing communications and marketing strategy aren't the same thing. PR and publicity aren't the same thing. IT infrastructure and IT solutions aren't the same thing. They may come from the same linguistic DNA or the same linguistic family, but they are different. Yet brand and branding continues to get used interchangeably. And so I think that there's just more there's more factors in that. I think AI is a factor in this now. I think it really amplifies it. I'm not an AI expert, David, but what I understand about it and what I've learned is that AI is basically it's feeding off of the inputs of humans, the things that we believe. And so that's where it's getting its cues from. So it's really more of a mirror at this point, a reflection of how people think about brand and branding. And the last thing I'll say about it, if I and I don't mean to drone on, I wondered when I started thinking about writing a book about this. This has been something that's been bouncing around in my head for much longer than the last couple of years. But I wanted to find out, do I really have something here or am I just an outlier? Am I thinking? So before I even start down to do an outline, I went into Google and I searched, is there a difference between brand and branding? There were 340 million results for that. Now I'm not saying it's 340 million people, unique results, but David, even if it's 10 million people or 25 million people generating most of those, that told me right there, I'm not alone. You and I talked before this podcast started, and you even teed it up that way. You're not alone in this thinking. So I knew that there was something here, and I just hadn't really seen anybody take this on in a public way.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Which one do you think causes the most damage?

The Purpose Myth In Consumer Research

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Oh good question. I I phrase these as branding fallacies. And it's not opinion why I think those things are misconstrued. It's definitely grounded in those six national studies we've conducted over ten years. And sidebar, we're working on the seventh one. We do them every two years. And I want to say that purpose is probably the biggest branding fallacy out there. I kept seeing for, and you probably saw it too, for so many years, that was a big push. You'd hear it from consultants, you'd see article after article on the social sites like LinkedIn, Early Days of Substack, you would see these articles about every brand needs a purpose. You've got to start with why, which I know was a book that Simon Sinek wrote. And it's an excellent book. And I do, I'm a big fan of his, so it's not an indictment of him. But we would ask about what characteristics and attributes every year in this research that we did that consumers wanted most from brands. And we gave him a really big long list, 20 different attributes. And by the way, they weren't derivative. So we went across the entire brand spectrum. Not only things that we wanted in there, but what are other people saying about brands, other experts, what are consumers saying about brands? And we put, that's how we create our content. And we put them all in this list. And purpose, every time we've tested it since 2016, has been near the bottom of the list in terms of a top attribute or characteristic they want in brands. And yet I kept seeing this public discourse that was saying every brand needs this. And it I initially is questioning my research, but I'm like, no, your samples are huge. You're statistically relevant, you match the census population. The more I saw it, I just came to realize, and I certainly have always believed in our research. I have an excellent quantitative analyst that I've used for years. He's part of a team. He's like, no, this is accurate. Our margin of error is under 4%. So it's nothing's ever completely bulletproof, but it's pretty darn close. So it's not my opinion, it's facts. So I started to realize this is more of a marketing narrative than it is a customer imperative. And then I saw an article last year in some trade that said, is the purpose era over? And I commented, did it ever really start? Now look, I think some brands do need purpose. I think certainly brands in the nonprofit world could benefit from having a purpose in particular. I think there's probably some brands in the for-profit world that having a purpose helps. But in general, purpose became performative and isn't really necessary for brands.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

It's not unthinkable in nonprofits because they're driven by mission. And so if you're driven by mission, telling people what your mission is, i.e., a mission statement, probably makes sense. But I just had a client call me yesterday. Interesting that we're talking about this today, and they were redoing their website, and the whole H1, the whole hero section, the top piece of the website was all about their purpose. And I said, the only people who care about that are the people in your organization. That's not outward facing. That's inward-facing. And you know, I'll add one more piece. What's interesting about the why and the Simon Sinek thing is that I've probably now interviewed on this podcast close to 600 entrepreneurs and people who are changing and taking shifts in the industry and shaping them in different ways. Not a one of them ever started with why. They all start with why not. Yeah, that's a great point. And with all due respect, it's great to know your why, but sometimes I don't think you figure out your why until you get into the why nots.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

But absolutely No, I think that's actually really well said. I think you're exactly right.

Using AI Without Losing Judgment

SPEAKER_01 13:38

You take part of the book and you talk about agency amplification and AI acceleration. I tell clients that AI only helps you be wrong faster. What happens when every company can instantly generate those professional-looking messages that all actually at the end of the day sound alike? And how should leaders use AI without allowing it to substitute for strategic judgment, which is what we're talking about?

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Yeah, I think you just said it. That's probably not its best application. It's a tool. I think that the whole thing about the AI amplification is that again, it's more of a mirror than it is, I think, a strategic interface at this point. Will it ever become sentient? I don't know. Who knows? But the thing with it is if it's built upon our inputs, it's also built upon our flawed inputs, and that's what it's going to pair it back. What I find fascinating, and I think this is the challenge and the problem with AI and it conflating brand and branding, is I'm seeing many things repeated on places like LinkedIn and Substack. I'm seeing a lot of the same terms and expressions, and I'm not talking industry jargon. That's a whole other podcast. But I'm seeing things about defining brand that look like it's it's generated by generative AI. It's coming from AI. I think you can tell the signs. And by the way, we deal with a lot of AI issues in our research we do. So we're pretty familiar with how AI talks, the expressions it uses. Again, we're not experts, but we have to deal with it. And we also use AI to our benefit as well. But I do think it's probably the biggest contributor because of the speed at which it can amplify things, the speed at which companies are adopting it. And I th I'm the kind of person I think that if you're going to use AI, I really don't believe in using AI to create your strategy. I don't believe you want to use AI to create your marketing messages or even amplify campaigns. I think it still should, that part should still come from humans. If you want to use AI to help you refine it and make sure it's on tone with you and as it checks and balances, I think that's perfectly acceptable. I still think humans need to be at the front of that. AI maybe comes in next, and then humans are the last check on things. Because you've seen what's happened to brands that haven't checked what AI has done. And that's reputational damage. It's hard to get back.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

It is. And it's a great tool, but that's exactly what it is. It's a tool. It's not a substitute for judgment or being consumer savvy, et cetera. And that kind of leads to the next part of the book I want to talk about.

The Honest Gap And What Honesty Means

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Whether the content comes from an agency or an algorithm, it's hard to conceal the difference between what a company claims and what people actually experience. You call that the honest gap. What is that and how do you recognize it in your organization?

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Well, it's a great question. You're always good with good questions here. Keep me on my toes here.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Do my best.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

So honest is one of those things that it's so easy to look at and think the opposite is if your brand is honest, then if your brand the opposite is your brand is dishonest. And that's not what we talk about when we talk about an honest brand. We actually started in, I want to say edition six, so four studies ago, edition three, four studies ago. We added honest to that list of attributes I mentioned that we test, that big, wide variety of things. And that was the first year. So the first two years it wasn't there. And that was because I saw somebody write an article about it. And I go, that's interesting. And they made a good point about the difference between honest and genuine and transparent and authentic. And by the way, there are differences between all those things. They're related, right? But there's differences. So when we tossed it in the list, it immediately shot to the top when we got the results back. And it wasn't even close. We're talking 30% higher than the next one in line. And we're like, wow, okay. But we thought, okay, maybe this is one of those trends, or maybe it's somebody's agenda. So we tested it again in 22. We saw the same results. So in 24, we kept it in the list and we said, look, we need to really understand what consumers mean by honest. And so we asked them their definition. And we came at it from several angles, unaided and aided types of questions. And really what an honest brand comes down to is about the strategic things about RAM we were talking about, right? It's about, and I know this just sounds like duh, but it's really how they define it. So yes, being truthful is a part of it, but it's that's actually a secondary factor. Transparency is a secondary factor. It's all about consistency, clarity, and reliability. So consistency in everything that you do and ensuring that what the customer expects from you, that you deliver on that. The clarity, making sure that your message is crystal clear, it's specific, not vague. We see a lot of vague language. And by the way, going back to your previous question, I think that's another problem with AI outputs, is so much of it is vague, particularly when it does marketing stuff and creative stuff. And that's why I think you're seeing a lot more sameness in brands right now. I think that's a part of it. But anyway, back to the honest thing. And then the reliability is about making sure you're keeping your promises. So one's about product and experience consistency, one's about clarity, and then one about again is about that reliability piece. So we turned the lens to business leaders in 2023. We're going to do this again in 2027. We're not asking them all the same questions in the consumer brand study, but some of them. And we asked them that same question about characteristics, but not about what was important, about how effective is your organization in delivering on these. So we did have them pick their top three and then tell us how effective they were. And 28% of business leaders, and this was a national business study, 28%, only 28%, said that we are we deliver an honest brand. And basically two in five consumers said, but that's the most important thing. So therein lies the honest gap. So consumers say this is most important, but companies are not delivering on it effectively enough.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

This may be a loaded question, but who usually sees the gap first? Customers, employees, or competitors? Probably customers.

unknown 20:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

If I think if companies and leaders saw it, they may do something about it. But they may not understand the true definition from the consumers either.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

So recognizing that gap is one thing, but closing it requires leaders to confront assumptions that they may have protected for years. You talked a little bit about that. We talked about earlier interrogating the brand. But how much of it is being honest with consumers? What does it mean to be honest with consumers when you're defining a brand position, not merely communicating one?

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Well, I think defining a brand position doesn't really come from your communication. I think it comes through brand as behavior, how you show up every day as a brand. I think about, I think that I think this is a brand that most people would recognize, Aldi. I think Aldi is a terrific brand because their brand actually is built on their brand governance, the things that they don't do. And I think because they focus on that, like here's the things we're not going to do, but they created a personality with it too. It's become a very kind of trendy thing, a trendy thing to do. It's like, you know what, we're going to make you get the shopping carts. We're going to make you now check yourself out. We're going to make you bag your own groceries. All of those things that used to be customer service have now evolved into an actual position and a great position. So if they deliver that, that's they're being honest by their actions, right? They don't have to be. Exactly, said David. That's exactly right. That's the consumer.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right. That's the emotional message that resonates with a shopper who's never been in an Aldi before.

Listening Through Research Not Guesswork

SPEAKER_01 21:56

So question for you how how do you listen to customers without asking them them to decide or to design the company's strategy for you. What is that listening like? So many clients, mine, yours, other people's, they don't listen, they just forge ahead on what they think is what the customer wants to see and what will draw the customer in. And then they have these self-inflicted sales losses.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Yeah. That's a di a different question for me because we don't make any decisions on guesswork, right? We don't work with any client that won't allow us to do real brand research for them, whether it's quantitative or qualitative or both. Because when you when I'm sitting across the table, I know I'm dodging the question, but when I'm sitting across the table from a client or a prospective client, I'm like, look, if you can't if you don't want to do market research, you're not we're not going to be a good fit for you. And so we have a little bit of an advantage is that in fact I think there's maybe been one or two clients in our 17 years where, and that was very early in the early days, in the ramen noodle days of my business, where we didn't do research because they couldn't afford it. So I did secondary. And it turned out okay for them, but it could have turned out better. We look at because we have the power of those insights because we have the power of those insights, it makes it once you convince the client that this is the work, understanding their attitudes that's going to help change their behaviors or the actions you want them to take, because we have those insights, it's we're able to say, let's collaborate together and come up with ideas based on these gaps in your brand or your competitors' brands. And these gaps are things that matter, right? They have to be things that matter and we test for that as well, these studies and say, let's build a strategy around that and let's decide how we can evolve your brand to meet those customer needs. So meet them where they are. So it's a little bit of a difficult question because we always have that research to fall back on. But that's the beauty for any organization, by the way. One of the things I champion in the book is creating a culture where one of your values is about never guessing. When you're going to do some big initiative or do a brand health checkup every year, as I recommend at the very least, is that is when you have those insights, you can just make smarter decisions in line with the consumer, not what you believe. And that changes conversations in organizations too, particularly if you adopt that objectivity mindset. And it goes from conversations when you're in a conference room from I think to here's what consumers told us, remember A or remember B, and that's who we serve. So I think it actually can take strip away tensions and things like that. So I know I went down a rabbit hole here, but I think that's a little bit of an advantage that we have over a lot of companies who do brand positioning but don't do it driven by insights.

Where A Brand Reckoning Should Start

SPEAKER_01 24:58

So if a leader finishes reading the book and thinks that the company's been using branding to mask a positioning problem, where should this brand reckoning that you talk about, where should that start I think depending obviously on the size of the company, but I think the leader what I'd love them to do is buy copies for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

But that aside, I think the starting point for them is to meet with the leadership team and talk about this notion that we need to see do an audit. What have we been doing? Where's do we have any sort of document that says this is who we are as a brand, this is how we behave as a brand do we have standards in place? Are we adhering to those? Just really just doing a self-analysis with your leadership team and doing it as an honest analysis. And then letting that kind of trickle down into the organization. You do want to engage everybody, every potential employee because everybody plays a role in the brand. And I think it's part of there's a I write in one of the chapters and David I don't remember off the top of my head some of the questions that I put in there, but there's some questions I want to say it's in like in chapter six or seven how the reckoning starts with you. And there are some questions that you can pose to yourself and to your team in there. I believe one of the questions that I that that's in there that I use from time to time is particularly around research. If they make the decision at that point, hey, we need to bring in some objective perspective here is okay, if the results don't align with the way we see things or the way we think, are we just going to dismiss them or are we really going to embrace them? Are we going to do something about them? Because there's been a lot of times I've worked with clients in the past before I started challenging this way, really understanding what was in their heart before I understood what was in their head. And that's flipped the business for us in a positive way because now I know what to expect from the client. And so I think you can use those same sort of line of questioning I think there's four or five in there in chapter six or seven that can help you do that self-assessment and with your leadership team and every employer for that matter to get them on the same page of taking on a more objective mindset.

Tracking Clarity And The Cracker Barrel Lesson

SPEAKER_01 27:16

As we wrap up our conversation for today here's the million dollar question. How will leaders know when they've achieved real clarity rather than just simply agreeing on another attractive story?

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Again, I think that you're going to start to see changes in employee behavior first. I think you're going to start to see I maybe you don't see your revenue change immediately because there can be a lag time between when you start to change someone's mind in terms of a customer and they change their behavior. That lag time is dependent on many variables but it really from a company organization comes down to how consistent are you in delivering on that that that new promise or that evolved promise based on what you've learned. I think that they'll know it if you really want to know it, then you want to do annual tracking studies after you've done sort of that big initial study. In fact I've got three tracking studies going on right now with three clients who said yeah we want to understand if we're shifting attitudes but maybe not quite the behavior debt, but knowing that behavior is going to come in time. Someone doesn't just wake up in the morning and say, hey, I think I'll switch banks today. Who does that? No one does that. And so it takes multiple exposures to something that's unattractive to them or behaviors they they don't agree with for them to start changing their minds. So the same thing is on the positive side, when you're starting to build towards the thing that aligns better with your customers, you may actually be changing their minds before you're changing their behaviors. And one quick anecdote I know we got to run but Cracker Barrel we all know about that debacle or most people do. If you haven't read it then or heard about it then it's out there all over the Internet. But Cracker Barrel got in a lot of trouble for changing its logo. What a lot of people don't know is the four quarters one year leading up to that they had started making changes inside their company in terms of the operational side of it, which is where it should start. So they were improving the experience in their restaurants, improving the menu, improving the visual appeal before they launched that logo and they had four straight quarters of growth. So they were doing the right things, right? They actually never needed to update the logo because they were growing organically and when you see that improvement that's when you know you're doing the right things you're pushing the right buttons.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah as I've said to a zillion clients we talked about this a little bit before we started recording the only one who cares about your logo is your mom and even she doesn't care that much about it. So it's really all the things that you're talking about. The book is called The Brand Reckoning Why Brand is broken and how to fix it. We interview authors frequently on this channel. This is a book you have to go and buy and you have to read it if you want to straighten out what's going on with your company and how you go to market and how you face customers.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Thank you, David. It's a pleasure thank you.

Announcer 30:24

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