Unveiling Brand Brilliance: Mastering Rebranding, Trust, and Collaboration with Branding Visionary, Shachar Meron

Welcome to another enlightening episode of "The Real Life Buyer podcast. 

Today, we're diving deep into the world of branding, marketing, and strategic storytelling. Joining us is the remarkable Shachar Meron, a true luminary in the industry with over two decades of experience crafting brands that stand out amidst the chaos. 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Shachar Meron, is a branding savant with over 20 year’s experience of shaping over 100 brands; a business owner, university lecturer, entrepreneur, published cartoonist, political consultant and chess champion, to name but a few of his accolades. 

 As a Partner and Creative Strategist at Blue Green Branding, Shachar empowers tech and finance leaders to craft standout brands. 

Today, I’d like to delve into rebranding's intricacies, challenges and opportunities and discover strategies to weave compelling brand narratives, especially in the fintech and communications realms. Through thought-provoking rebranding tales, secret sauce revelations, and impactful collaborations, get ready to receive unparalleled brand wisdom.

To learn more from and about Shachar see below:

Website:    https://bluegreenbranding.com/
LinkedIn:    https://www.linkedin.com/in/shacharmeron/

ABOUT THE HOST

My name is Dave Barr and am the Founder and Owner of RLB Purchasing Consultancy Limited.

I have been working in Procurement for over 25 years and have had the joy of working in a number of global manufacturing and service industries throughout this time.

I am passionate about self development, business improvement, saving money, buying quality goods and services, developing positive and effective working relationships with suppliers and colleagues, and driving improvement through out the supply chain.

Now I wish to share this knowledge and that of highly skilled and competent people with you, the listener, in order that you may hopefully benefit from this information.

CONTACT DETAILS

@The Real Life Buyer
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Email: contact@rlbpurchasingconsultancy.co.uk

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Transcript

Intro  00:00

Welcome to The Real Life Buyer podcast. In this podcast, you will hear interviews with business owners, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, authors and technical specialists in their field. These professionals will hasten your development accelerate your career and broaden your business know how now introducing your host Dave Barr interviewing with a purchasing twist. 

Dave Barr  00:21

Hello and welcome to The Real Life Buyer. I have a question for you. Would you like to learn and master brand fluence joining us is Shachar Meron, a branding savant with over 20 years experience of shaping over 100 brands, a business owner, university lecturer, entrepreneur, published cartoonist, political consultant and chess champion to name but a few of his accolades as a partner and creative strategist at Blue Green branding. Shachar empowers, tech and finance leaders to craft outstanding brands. Today, I'd like to delve into rebranding intricacies the challenges and opportunities and discover strategies to weave compelling brand narratives, especially in the FinTech and communications realms. So without further ado, I welcome Shachar onto the podcast. Hi, Shachar.

Shachar Meron  01:18

Hi, thanks for having me.

Dave Barr  01:19

Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us today. Branding is always an interesting subject. So I've been in businesses where they have rebranded; you question, what's the point sometimes with a change of color, a slight change in the font used in the lettering? So I sometimes wonder, what's the benefit? So hopefully, today, you'll be able to share some of that with us. Yeah. So before we kind of dive in, though, like the audience to get to know you a little bit better. So if you could kind of cast your mind back and and paint us a picture of the kind of key events that have either guided or perhaps driven you to become a leading branding and advertising expert. That'd be great.

Shachar Meron  02:01

Yeah, sure thing. So my background comes from the creative side, you mentioned in that brief bio, a little bit of cartooning. So. Growing up, I wanted to create cartoons, which involves both art and writing. When I started college, I didn't know what I wanted, and came upon advertising, I knew that I wanted to be creative in my profession. And I did not want to be a starving artists. So advertising kind of brought those worlds together of creativity, but also a business elements where you can use that to, you know, earn a salary for yourself, and also drive some growth. And so coming off of that, I got my undergraduate in advertising, and even stuck around my alma mater, University of Illinois, to get my Master's in advertising. And there's a variety of reasons why people might want to stick around to get a master's mine, I had some good reasons and some not so good reasons. But it did open a lot of doors for me so that when I started my career in the ad world, I began as a creative actually as a copywriter. But over the years working at various agencies, I sort of tried a bunch of different things and found that I enjoyed swimming upstream into the strategy world, by which I mean getting involved earlier in the process, being in the room where it happens when people make big decisions about what's this brand going to be I love the creative side of it as well, you know, being a writer and later a creative director. But sometimes it felt like a lot of the big decisions were already made, by the time I got involved. And through that work, I also mentioned, been a serial entrepreneur, I had done freelance and consulting work, I had started a different agency, a little creative boutique with a partner, and more and more started to get into a world of businesses that are starting up or businesses that exist and need some sort of a transformation. And the world of branding. And rebranding really opened up to me. So, you know, that's sort of the short version of it. I mean, since then, I've also gone on to actually teach at my alma mater as an advertising and brand professor. I've been doing that for the past nine plus years. And my current consultancy blue green branding is something I do in parallel to that to try to get that real world application. And also, you know, bringing the learnings from the teaching side.

Dave Barr  03:58

Brilliant. So it sounds like you only have a few hours sleep per day, then.

Shachar Meron  04:02

That's right. I also have four kids. So sleep is not.

Dave Barr  04:08

Fine, I've got one and that's enough. Thank you. Brilliant. Okay, so we've established an incredible career to date. And obviously, you're very busy guy. Now, you've got a background, obviously, both in branding and teaching, which perhaps is quite unique. You've got a perhaps a an unusual vantage point, to observe the evolving landscape of branding over the years. How have you seen the priorities and the challenges shift for companies in creating brands that resonate? I think that's the right word to use that resonate a mist this ever increasing noise and turmoil that's going on around us. How do you do that?

Shachar Meron  04:47

Yeah, I mean, to your point, there's more brand communications than ever before both advertising and you know, unpaid. There's so much volume that it is the real challenge of companies. How do we stand out and you don't want To do that by creating more noise. By the same token, you have people entering this profession. That's my vantage point as a teacher, not entirely sure what this profession looks like, it's less clear cut than it had been in the past, there used to be more, you know, hey, here's 10 different roles, you're going to fit in one of these or your clients are going to come to you with a budget and an ask now, it's much more open ended, which is both exciting, but also a little bit nerve racking people that aren't sure how to navigate this, sometimes feel uncomfortable. So a lot of it just comes down to, you know, making sure people are strategic in the choices that they make. Because we live in a world of limited resources, you don't want to waste time and energy and money, throwing it at an audience that doesn't care or, you know, focusing on a message that is not something you can own. So a lot of my work as a brand strategist is helping clients figure out what they're selling their special sauces, right, what's their sweet spot, the place that they can compete, the place that they can own in the mind of their customers. And once we've really honed what that message is, what's the way that we can bring that to life in an interesting way. So that it doesn't read like a PowerPoint slide, but rather has that emotional resonance that you just talked about with audiences, then by the point that companies are actually you know, doing paid advertising or creating communications, they're not just throwing it out into the wind, it's very targeted, it's very focused. And hopefully, it will make some sort of an impact, then when it comes to, you know, the students that eventually become the young professionals of the world, they need to do the same thing. In fact, a topic I talk about them a lot is personal branding. And the idea that you yourself are a brand. And when you apply for a job, you are one of 50 resumes, they're gonna see that day. So what is a way that you are going to stand out? What is that special sauce that you bring to the table? How do you stack up against competitors? And how do we position you in the best possible way?

Dave Barr  06:41

You know, I've certainly noticed a lot more talk about your profile on LinkedIn, that's something I've been focused on quite recently, how important is to have the right photograph, how you describe yourself, don't put yourself almost like on LinkedIn as a CV, as was always the case, perhaps previously. So I kind of get things are changing quite a bit and the sort of LinkedIn landscape, the expectations that you know what people are looking for appears to be changing quite radically as well. So I've been quite fascinated by what's going on, you know, what this says is that everything's changing at a very fast pace. Certainly business is changing. The, if we just look at what's going on the world at the moment is incredible, with the pace of change, the unexpected things that are happening. And so for brands to get the attention, I guess, that they'd always hoped for, perhaps is quite difficult. people's attention spans are very short now changes all around us. So you mentioned a number of things in your your last answer, and are curious, how do you go about guiding your clients to craft a compelling brand narrative, something that people will resonate with? Or stand with them for perhaps some time, not just fractional, seconds these days? So how do you capture them? As you dig into the fact that you know, people want or would expect to see x, y? Or Zed? I wouldn't know where to start with those sorts of things. Can you give us some some guidance on how you take your clients through that journey? Absolutely.

Shachar Meron  08:17

Absolutely and you know, it's not the same for every company. In fact, when it comes to your own brand narrative, I wrote a piece once about, do you start with yourself? Or do you start with your customer, you know, there's different schools of thought, who's the hero of the story. And you know, for, for most of history, most of you know, modern economic history where advertising was a major thing. The idea is you start with a customer, you have to research your target audience, you have to first separate out your target audience from the rest of your audience, understanding you can't be everything to everyone. This itself is sometimes a challenging concept for clients who think of target audience as limiting they, they sometimes interpret it as like, Well, I kind of would accept money from everyone. And we're like, No, we get that. The question is, who's that low hanging fruit who's that limit, you know, more targeted audience that you want to pay special attention to shape messages for them, allocate resources towards reaching them. And once you understand who those people are not just their basic demographics, like age or income, but you know, those psychographics the understanding of what makes them tick and their priorities in life, your job is to them intersect with them where they are in their life, your job is to not change the way they feel about certain things. It's just too hard. It's too much of an uphill battle. Unless you are the industry leader in your particular market. It's just not worth it for that. So you learn what they care about. And then you take what you bring to the table and meet them where they are. Show them listen, that pain point that you have, we have that solution that solves your problem or that thing that you really want. We have that thing that will make you happy. So you mentioned the word resonate earlier. We're trying to resonate by getting you know their little hum to line up with our home and make sure that it all syncs up. Now that also involves an honest look at your own brand. And this is where for some companies it may depend on if it's a new brand and we're talking to say the founder who had a vision one day or For an existing brand, where we're trying to transform it, so their brand can catch up to the realities of their business. But we look at the same types of things. In both cases, we tend to look at things like their mission and values. Many companies have these but many don't, or at least have not articulated them yet. So we help them uncover that make a point, if you don't manufacture things like mission and values, you uncover them, otherwise, it would come off as inauthentic. You also look at things like just the actual services and products that you offer, what are features and benefits that they do for people, you know, don't look past that. There are some who say, you know, like Simon Sinek is one that I use as an example, start with why I like to put a little asterisk on that and say, sometimes, sometimes you start with why, but sometimes you actually start with what you do, because in your market, that might be how people shop for you or think of you. So trying to really be honest about what you bring to the table in terms of your products and services, that is strong or unique, that you stack up well against the competition, you should also be aware of where you are kind of par for the course and also where you have weaknesses. And when I say be honest, it's so that you can accurately decide what am I going to focus on. Focus is probably in a nutshell, what this brand strategy is all about, again, that idea of there's so much noise out there, and we have limited resources. So if you imagine you've got one best shot at connecting with somebody, let's get down to our strongest strength that connects with the biggest need that our audience have, and see if we can make a connection there. However, there's again, lots of different ways to do it. Some companies are entirely mission driven. And it's not about you know, the customer and their needs right now, but rather, what we believe in the hope is that ultimately, all those pieces fit together.

Dave Barr  11:33

Yeah, it's interesting, some of the things you said there, because I've been doing a lot of networking with small to medium sized enterprises. And so the business owners, and you ought to always ask the question, well, what are they therefore? What's their purpose? Who are their target clients? And, you know, perhaps some people will be surprised that many struggle with the answer to that, who is my target client, and you mentioned the call was the fear of alienating some customers by niching. Down. And that's something many of them are, I'd say, 80% of those that I've interacted with recently, really do struggle with, and they are fearful of niching. Exactly, as you said, you know, I don't want to alienate a customer, or take anybody's monies is quite important in importance, and particularly in the early years.

Shachar Meron  12:24

That's right. And sometimes there's pressure, like when you pick that one thing, that's all you are, and you can never change it, which is not the case. For starters, it's not all that you are, you know, the front when I deal with messaging, and this comes with my background, as a writer, I tell people, you can say everything you want, just not all at the same time. But what gets said first is disproportionately powerful. It's that headline that nine times as many people read as the rest of the text, it's that first five seconds of a video before we you know, skip it as soon as we possibly can. It's that first impression. So it does matter quite a bit. And you don't want to change it every week, if it's not working out. But the biggest mistake you can make is not choosing anything at all, because there's no guarantee you're going to pick the quote unquote, right thing. But if you don't pick anything at all, kind of hedge your bets, list out, you know, a tagline that has, you know, three different words separated by periods, then you've made no choice at all, and then you've probably maximized your chance of failure. So best is to actually go take a swing at some point.

Dave Barr  13:22

Now, one of the things I noticed there was a recent post you did, which caught my attention. And basically, it was a single line. And it said, a good brand purpose has heart, a great purpose also has legs. Now, there was an article to go with that. I wonder if you could explain to the audience what you meant by that statement, and how they could learn from that.

Shachar Meron  13:44

Yeah, for sure. The this is the practical side of me, a purpose should have heart we're talking about brand, purpose, mission, things like that. And that part I think people understand right, it shouldn't have heart meaning it should be authentic, it should really come from somewhere, your company should actually back it up, then with real action. It shouldn't just be that you know, poster that hangs on the wall when you walk in the building, or that one line on the website, and then everyone ignores it. So in the best of cases, a brand a company that have a strong purpose, you can actually see it infuse in all areas of the business even to help you know drive business decisions or attract the right employees and reward them accordingly. The idea of it also having legs as you know, just basically, the idea that it should be able to go somewhere we should be able to do something with this, we should actually have some aspects creatively to bring it to life in an emotional way. That gives us a little bit of flavor to stand out a little bit from others that are out there. Also the idea that like there's something special enough about it that you can use this to help differentiate from other organizations. There's nothing saying that a brain purpose has to be the thing that you differentiate on. There's plenty that say, you know, our brand purpose is to improve the lives of our customers are things like that, but is there something a little bit further that you can do with that that can now work its way to inform things like marketing and communications on one end, or internal culture are on the hiring practices on the other end. So having legs just meaning can it go further? Can we do more with this, I've many times the, as a creative been dealt a hand of like, well, here's the the brand elements we have to work with. And there's just not that much there. You know, it's like, I believe that this is true, but there's nothing here that's unique or original. And in those cases, you know, I've been asked sometimes to, to bring the uniqueness with the creative with the language and the visuals that we choose. And we can do that. But it's much better to have special creative built on special strategy than have the strategy come out somewhat generic. And now it's all up to creative to do something different. Again, the problem with that is that you end up with just surface level flash at best. And at worst, worst, people actually dig below the surface, and they find there's nothing there. And this company is not for real. 

Dave Barr  15:47

Okay, that is interesting. Now, we opened up the discussion, we mentioned rebranding. And we've all seen examples of rebounding out there. And I said, sometimes I don't quite get it, or wonder if you could share a real world scenario. And it could be a tech finance company communications wherever you like, where they successfully managed a, what you perhaps call a complex rebranding process, trying to understand what the strategies they've employed to navigate the risks of doing that, because the guests that could be some serious downsides. You know, we all remember the chocolate bars that have changed names over the years and people say you mad, you know, every no is this is whatever. So how do they navigate those risks? But on the flip side, seize the opportunities.

Shachar Meron  16:31

Yeah, you know, it goes back to something you mentioned at the beginning of this recording, which was, brands have to if they're going to undergo a rebrand that has to be for the right reasons. That's right out the gate, the biggest stumble that people make is they are rebranding for the wrong reasons. Now, right and wrong. It's not always that clear cut. But I have over the years seen many reasons that could fit into one category or the other. A good example of a bad reason to rebrand is like, hey, our company has a new chief marketing officer, and they kind of want to shake things up, or even a new CEO. And it's just like, they want to put their fingerprint on this brand. Regardless of its if it's in trouble or not. We just wanted to, for their own selfish reasons do that it's a human instinct to want to make an impact on your organization. But that by itself is not a good reason. There's, there's very good reasons for wanting to rebrand if it's a matter of you know, what our customers have changed what they care about. And what we do for them is no longer clicking. And we have more or different competitors in place. And we've had before or even we've improved, but our brain doesn't reflect it. It's kind of behind where we're not causing problems, but we're missing opportunities when you when you rebrand for the right reasons, and I'm oversimplifying it, but you look at all sorts of things. Well, then right off the bat, you've way maximized your ability to to make the most of this opportunity. Now, once you're actually in the process, it's funny because I use the word rebrand a lot. And it's actually one of the things I do the most, but my most recent article has been about don't use the word, don't call it a rebrand. That word itself is fraught with peril. When people hear the word rebrand, they have certain assumptions with what that means. And I was actually talking with a few strategists friends of so what constitutes a rebrand, and the three of us had three completely different answers. For one of them. They said, You know what, it's gotta have at least a name change. And I was like, I did not expect that, you know, a name change is in some very extreme examples, part of a rebrand, but in my opinion, it's fairly rare for someone else it was more about, listen, the design is it doesn't have to be the main thing that changed. It should be connected to strategic things that changed. But if the design doesn't change, if there's not a new logo, it won't connect, people will not take it seriously that there's actually been a rebrand. And then there's the idea that like, you know, is it surface level versus how deep does it go? Things like positioning persona, all the different jargony terms? At what point do you cross the line and say, This is a rebrand? Ultimately, there is no one line. But for the sake of argument, if you want to talk about brands that did not successfully rebrands, you know, I think of consumer brands, like say, the gap, for example, this was one of those very surface level fails, where company rolls out a new logo, they are in a very image driven industry. So logo does matter. The new logo is instantly shut down by the public so quickly, that the company can is like just kidding. And they go back on it. You know, it's an embarrassing moment for them, but they can eventually move on with their lives and pretend like it never happened. And occasionally they make a punch line. That's a rare example. That's a rare case where a brand tries something the the public rejects it, and they move on. The far most common cases of brands that mismanaged a rebrand are the ones you never hear of the ones that did it in the hopes of standing out in a crowded market. And it just didn't work. Nobody paid attention, nobody noticed. And they did not have any more success afterwards than before. The ones that did have success with it. This is where it's tricky, because a lot of brands I work with, I can't really talk too much about the specifics of what we did. But you know, working with companies, a lot of you know, small businesses, medium sized businesses, companies, like say, a software developer that had their roots in website developments, but have long since moved past that, you know, web development now is not the same business that it was in the year 2000. And so companies that just do web development are not seen in the same way and don't get the same types of projects as the ones that say, maybe do software development. And, you know, creating games and apps and things like that. So a company that we had worked with had long since moved past their web development days. But they were like, we need some help. And getting people to understand that we're a software developers, we don't want these types of projects, we want these types of projects, we don't want these types of employees, we want those types of employees. And that sort of a rebrand doesn't necessarily come with a name change. In fact, in that case, it didn't even come with a logo change. But it did come with a lot of change in the culture of the organization, the way that they presented themselves to the market and their communications. And then ultimately, the people they hire and the customers that they get.

Dave Barr  20:40

Okay, you mentioned about, in some ways, for me, you mentioned about trust. So I associate some times certain brands with when they come out with a perhaps a new product, or they've developed a product, you instinctively believe that it will be a good product, you trust that name, you trust that brand. Now, how do you establish and maintain a trust in a brand per se? What sort of things do you have to do? What's the process? What's the execution that has to take place, so people associate you with, with the trust element, so they always go back to you time and time again, irrespective of what you produce? 

Shachar Meron  21:21

Yeah, trust is one of those root things that are essential to the world of brands. You know when I define what a brand is, to my students, for example, there's so many definitions out there. And the one of the most common ones I see out there is a promise, a brand is a promise of some sort of expectation, of quality experience, what have you. So a promise means that if I walk into McDonald's, I have a sense for what I'm going to get what it's going to taste like, what's going to cost, what the service will be like. And if I go to buy a car, I am doing a similar thing, I have all the different messages in my head that have a cue and experiences that have accumulated over the years plus, say reviews that I might read or test drives, I might do to summarize, like, I trust that a car that comes from this carmaker is going to deliver on X, Y and Z. So trust is important, regardless of whether your consumer or business to business, or small or big or whatever it might be. Now, how do you build trust, trust has to be earned. It's never just given, companies that now are trusted for quality or ethical behavior. They didn't just start that way, they had to actually just gradually build that over years and years. Also, trust can be lost much faster than it's earned. So but the idea that trust should never just be communicated. Trust should first be demonstrated by what you do and who you are, then only once you've already been demonstrating for some time, that this is what we're all about. And again, trust is a matter of it could be about your character, like can we trust you to do the right thing and behave ethically, it could also have to do with capability, can we trust you to you know, deliver the fastest this, like you said that you would or you deliver the only that like you promised. So trust has to be baked in all those. But it first begins with actually delivering on that sometimes for years. And then gradually, you can draw attention to that in your marketing, advertising, other communications type things, but if you communicate it before you actually demonstrate it, again, it's just going to backfire. You know, people, you might convince a few people in the short term, but in the long term, it would only cause damage. And we've seen cases of brands that you know, tried to tout something from the mountaintop. And then it turns out that there was nothing there. You know, there's famous examples of that. I believe the BP oil spill happened right around the time that they had their beyond petroleum sustainability message, you don't want things like that to happen. But that takes a lot of discipline. By the way, there's a lot of companies that wants to start by promoting you can trust us to do this. And we always say anybody who says trust me, you should just run in the opposite direction, they should not be trusted.  

Dave Barr  23:47

Okay. There's, for me, there's a scenario where there's a risk. And what I mean by that is when brands decide to collaborate, they could be both trusted brands. But there's a reason for collaboration. Now, if one of those parties, for whatever reason, has a problem, we just mentioned one just now that can taint the relationship. So if brands are going to get together and collaborate, and hopefully get impressive results, what has to happen to contribute to that success? What's the synergies that have to be aligned to make sure that any collaboration ends up benefiting both parties and the public of course, in liking it.

24:30

That's a really timely question, because brands have partnered up so many times in the past, but now with the emergence of things like social media influencers, the quantity of partnerships and the visibility of partnerships are so much bigger than they used to be, and a lot of brands. They like to partner with individuals or companies that already have some brand equity because it's sort of like borrowed attention. It's like, Listen, if I'm partnered with this celebrity who's beloved for this, and they're associated with us, then we can borrow some of that for ourselves. But like you said, it's also risky and there are plenty You have cases of a company getting into bed with a celebrity or another company who then misbehaves, and then now you're just trying to distance yourself, right. That's when the crisis management folks come in, I would say the best way to vet if the synergies are there is through things like mission and values, if you share the same mission and values, and you can do some digging to see Do they actually demonstrate this over time, as opposed to just say it, that's probably your single best chance to connect with somebody. In fact, at that point, it almost doesn't even matter. If the nature of their business overlaps with yours, they can very often we can find a way to help each other out if our mission and values align. There are other ways to align as well. It could be something like I'm just making this up. But if your brand is known for being the fastest in its category, and you say, Listen, this one so you know, this one person just won gold at the Olympics, they're the fastest human being on Earth, let's partner up. There's plenty of times that that makes sense. It's just again, now you have to really vet them to make sure you understand what are the risks that we are taking on, what's really tricky is when it's not even an outside partner. But it's even like a CEO or the founder of your own company. There are some brands that have benefited from having a outspoken or larger than life CEO, they get more attention sometimes or maybe more attention to more investment dollars as a result, but then sometimes that that prominent CEO then shoots off their their mouth at the wrong moment. And then now the question is, do we need to distance ourselves? So definitely, life is always set up with risk and reward. These are things where you can mitigate the risks quite a bit. I think that a lot of the times that there's been some misbehavior, people kind of saw it coming.

Dave Barr  26:34

Okay. Some people thrive on the misbehavior and get a lot of following because of it to be honest, yeah. Quite quite measured, particularly in politics or notice these days. But there we go.

Shachar Meron  26:44

Yeah, politics and pop culture, which the line has been blurring between those for some time now.

Dave Barr  26:49

Absolutely. Now, what's quite interesting is, I'm sure that as a lecturer, you have some kind of curriculum to follow. So there's given ways of doing things we say that have been tried and tested over a period of time. But on the converse side, we have things rapidly changing at the moment, a lot of the rule books are being rewritten. As you say, there's a lot more, I would say, a lot more creativity now than ever. So how do you where you're trying to teach your students about the theory, the practice and everything else that has been adopted over many years and decades? align that with the rapid changes that are going on today? Because what you could teach today could be quite different tomorrow. How do you cover that for your students? 

Shachar Meron  27:35

Yeah, absolutely. Especially in this field, you know, I have I teach advertising and branding. If I taught in, say chemistry, or philosophy or history, I may not, I still see change in my field, but not quite to the same extent. So we are a field that thrives on change. However, universities are not always built to move quickly and adapt. But what's nice is the way at least in our program, you know, we have some flexibility to evolve our program. Over time, there's always a core set of courses. For example, one of the classes I teach is, I think, the the second or third out of a series of eight required classes. So it's early. And it's focused on brand and advertising and brand strategy. Most of what I teach is very fundamental things like we talked about here, the idea of understanding your target audience, being focused with a message research methods, things like brand architecture, or positioning, these are things that even as the world changes, and the tools you have at your disposal, change, the fundamentals are the same, I don't believe we're going to get to a place where you no longer have to understand your target audience, I certainly don't believe we're going to get to a place where you don't have to focus. In fact, focus is more important than ever. Then there's other other aspects, though, that are changing quite a bit and you'd be a fool not to roll with it. So a good example of this is I taught a copywriting class and elective for years, right, I got my start as a copywriter, I share a lot of my industry examples and tips and things like that. But you know, in the past year, especially we've seen AI really transform this industry. I know, I have to transform my course. And I'm teaching a rebooted version of it in the spring that incorporates AI. And it's not an incorporation in terms of like, here, there's something in the syllabus about how now you can't use AI to cheat. All professors and all teachers are getting nervous about that all the time, right? Students find a way to cheat. This is one of those latest things that help you do it. That is not enough. That is not what this is about. This is not fighting change and protecting ourselves. This is about how do we use change that has happened anyway, and make sure that our students are prepared for the future world. So in that regard, just to illustrate the change, I had, in my first job as a copywriter. I had a boss that would tell me, give me 50 headlines by lunch, you know, in the period of a morning, here's your creative brief, I want you to give me 50 headlines because this is how we're going to explore the process, making sure we're understanding the main message we're trying a variety of things. She didn't expect brilliance in a couple of hours, but she wanted to kind of test my creative muscles and make sure I was getting the quantity and variety that I needed. It was me learning as a copywriter how to do this field. And I had that as my first assignment for my copy. writing students for years give me 50 headlines by Sunday right now, they could give me 50 headlines in 10 minutes, if that was the prompt, because I've done this, I use AI as a tool myself, which we can talk about that later if you like. But I can't use a prompt that now somebody can can do this in 10 minutes and move on. So now I have to change the assignments. And the assignments may be something more like a multi step process, which is give me 50 headlines, you can do this on your own, or you can use this tool. But if you use this tool called Chat, you now have to also show me your work of what you prompted. And then you have to take it to a next step. We don't just use tools, and the latest innovations to do our work faster, we have to do it to make our work better and to go further. Because as I tell students, if you're if AI can do your homework, then AI can do your job once you graduate, and we all as human beings have to ask ourselves, what do we bring to the table?  

Dave Barr  30:49

Absolutely, certainly, as you say, is fascinating. I was thinking as you were saying that, you know, could AI with all the knowledge it has about us as individuals, you know what we talk about what we put on social media, you know, when we go and go on to search engines and put lots of things in? It built up an enormous amount of data on us as individuals, do you ever see AI being able to, therefore target us as being certain avatars given certain parameters? And it creates? Should we say some kind of branding or posts or something that it knows would align with our personal beliefs, values and interests?  

Shachar Meron  31:30

Easily? They can it can be done right now. I mean, at this point with the right prompts, it absolutely can be done right now. Yeah, I don't think you know, AI is just the next step. But I do feel like it's a it's a pretty big quantum leap in what we've seen before. But we have been feeding the internet, all of our content for such a long time. And even off of the internet. You know, we've been giving away our data for the longest time. So at this point, we should assume that any company knows just about everything about us, including where we are right now. And what we just had for lunch. So yes, absolutely. It could be used to create that. I never want to say never. The question is just when will it get to a level of sophistication that we think it could rival what human beings do probably not that long from now, I never want to say never to these things. Because we've seen too many times over the past how many years that we said technology will never be able to do that. And then it did it. I'm somebody who enjoys playing chess. And I remember in the 90s people talking about deep blue like in no way could a computer ever match a human being with chess playing. It's just there's too much of an art to it. And it was a real blow I think the number of people in humanity when that happened. And you know, little did we know Oh, that was one of the first easier dominoes to topple. Now we're getting into things that like, can we create emotional connections? I do believe we can. At the moment, I believe human beings are the best to usher that process through to vet it to add something, but I believe that AI can already get us 80% of the way there. Yeah,

Dave Barr  32:48

I think that also the advent of digital currency, there was a lot of talk about it in the UK, that cash is gonna die, everybody, we were using digital, and therefore how we spend our money will be dictated or could be dictated by other people or other entities should we say of course, every time you spend something on your credit card, or whatever the currency is, it knows instantly what you purchase, where you purchase it when you purchase it. So even more information about you as an individual suddenly becomes available at a huge, much greater depth than even it is today. And you know, it can be quite scary. It's funny, my wife and I are only chatting last night, we're talking about holidays. And my wife jumped onto her phone. And she only put in two letters, and it come up with the country that we're thinking about going to now that's quite scary. You know, that's definitely eavesdropping. But yeah, so you know, there's so much information available. And before I jump on to the last question, and it comes back to something I touched on earlier on about new startups, where can people find out more about your company yourself? The things that you teach?

Shachar Meron  33:56

Yeah, so my consultancy is called Blue Green branding. So if you go to blue green branding.com, we have insights and resources on there that are basically, this is the educator in us coming out just free resources and information for people that are interested in these topics of branding. And we're doing it themselves. In fact, this goes to like myself and my partner, we have our roots working with a lot of small businesses and startups. And these days, we've moved, generally the larger ones, but we still feel like we have a lot of things we can give people that they can then do it themselves. So if you are in a field where you've got a start up, and you want to have templates for things like target audience research, brand, strategy, things like that, we have resources there for that, that you can just use. We like to think if you can do this on your own without hiring us, then more power to you. And then if somebody tries it on their own, and they're like this, I need a little bit more. That's where we consult or redirect them to another way. But yeah, that's probably the main place right now to find my latest writings and resources.

Dave Barr  34:50

Brilliant. I'm going to be sharing that out because I mentioned earlier and I'm talking or have been talking to quite a lot of fairly new businesses, perhaps within the within a year of their entry into the market, and I see a common concern, worry, a thread that comes through. So on their behalf, really. So from your journey as an entrepreneur, you've been a business owner, you're a branding expert, what advice would you give to someone who's recently started up in their first year or two of business? They're looking to build some kind of strong brand Foundation, what could you suggest they could do to make sure that their growth is supported, that their goals are achieved? How do they go about making sure their brand comes across in the right way? And obviously builds over time?

Shachar Meron  35:41

Yeah, I feel like so many of the answers come from a lot of them come from a business plan that's well put together. Now I've worked with dozens of startup businesses over the years, and very few of them have a business plan that many people would say you must have, right? The reality is that sometimes people they have an opportunity and a capability and they just run with it. But a lot of those things around how do you make your money? Who is your audience? How do you you know, what are the services that you offer, and then also just an understanding of your overall competitive landscape and the trends of it, you know, these are, this is the type of information that can really help you out most of the time. I mean, I should say this, all of the time that I do strategy, it's founded in research. And most of the time, it's founded in the same three items of research, target audience research, knowing your customers, or and or employees, brand research, meaning understanding your own company, and what you do for people. And then competitive market landscape, understanding the broader context of where you are, between those three things. There's tools out there that help you triangulate, and figure out what do I say in what order normally at that point, it's just about discipline and focus. It's very often the hardest thing is, like we talked about earlier, a lot of people can do a SWOT analysis and get down to a top five strengths, do you have the courage to narrow it down to one or two, and build messaging and, and brand identity around that, that is often where people fall short. So step one, get together the kind of information that's normally found in a business plan. And if your business has changed, since you started it, then absolutely update that there are many, many times that a start up, you know, starts thinking they're going to be one thing, and then they become something else. But then if you have all that, than to start to make some choices, a lot of it comes down to, you don't want to do too much guesswork. So a lot of it comes back to research. Do you have a brain trust? Do you have a couple of people that either can speak for your target audience or understand different aspects of your business that can weigh in on it, but making the decisions? What is our positioning statement in a single sentence? Ideally, then things like your brand name and logo and identity are built around? What's that one thing that we stand for those? Those are the hardest steps and braiding once you're on the other side of that, honestly, I feel like that's the fun and exciting part now that we've decided to go all in on this, this is the way that it can manifest. 

Dave Barr  37:53

Would you say that when they project themselves to their audience, they must be obviously consistent in a number of different ways consistent in the imagery consistent in the tone of their, you know, what they're trying to convey you the coloration is that they put out as consistency there. They have two people talk about the amount of posting that you do on different social medias, they have to make sure that they're consistent on how they project themselves. And when they project themselves and how frequently they project themselves. Are all those things equally important or lesser? 

Shachar Meron  38:27

Absolutely, I have an article called "consistency isn't sexy", but it sells, so many clients that I've been brought in with have started with a cleanup, you know, the business has been humming along. And in the past 10 years, there have been some acquisitions, they've pivoted to some new geographic markets, they have different offerings. And now the brand is a mess. That causes real damage, it creates an impression of a creates confusion with your audience, it creates the impression of a kind of a sloppy brand that doesn't think things through maybe subconsciously. I mean, sometimes people roll their eyes, they say listen, I'm in the business to business, mainframe, et cetera, what do they care if I use this shade of blue on my website, and that shade of blue, you know, on my social media, it does have an impact. And especially on the messaging side, you lose your impact of messaging, if you're all over the place, you know, I sometimes compare messaging to like being like a laser, you know, a single beam of light not going to do much. If you can get 100 beams of light all aimed at the same spot, you can burn through steel, so that consistency is so important. And then they know, wherever they see you visit you hear from you. They're getting that over and over, then it starts to sink in, then they can start to form that impression. They have a view, then when you back it up with say the products and services you offer. That's where that trust comes in. Sometimes this comes in the form. This consistency comes from brand guidelines, you know, more established brands often have a document that you can look to that have not just the mission vision values type stuff, but then gets into here's how we use our logo and colors and graphics and writing. It's a good idea to have those in whatever form I've seen the one page and two page versions of them just to get started, but then it's a good idea to regularly look through things, make sure that we're being consistent, hey, we just had that acquisition. And this team that we have that's you know, over in the UK are doing their own thing because they like their old brand color better. And then this team in Mexico is having this kind of a message. Sometimes you really do have to play the brand cop and bring it back in. You want to give people the flexibility to do what they need to do. I mean, this can get into a whole thing about good brand guidelines have some flexibility built into them, so that people don't just feel constantly constrained by them. But most importantly, teaching your people the why. Why do we have these brand elements? Why do we do this consistently, because it makes all of our jobs better, and it's going to make the company more successful.

Dave Barr  40:40

Brilliant that's a great way to note to finish on that asked me quite helpful to the people I've been talking to, I'm certainly going to be posting them to this podcast to hopefully sharpen up their branding and imagery. So let's say to thank you very much for your time. today. It's been most fascinating. And obviously wish you all success with your branding going forwards.

Shachar Meron  41:01

Yeah, thanks a lot. And to everyone listening, happy to connect with you on LinkedIn as well. That's one of the channels I use the most. So happy to talk there. Thanks, guys. Take care.

Dave Barr  41:10

So there's another Real Life Buyer podcast. I do hope you enjoyed it. And it has given you some ideas and inspiration for greater action and achievement. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and a five star review would be most appreciated. If you would like to discover more about me and what I do. Take a look at www.thereallifebuyer.co.uk bye.