The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
Unlocking the Secrets of Branding - 145
In this episode of The D2Z Podcast, host Brandon Amoroso speaks with Jamie Schwartzman, Chief Creative Strategist of Flux Branding, about the importance of branding in entrepreneurship, the evolution of marketing, and the role of AI in creative processes. Jamie shares insights from his extensive experience in branding, emphasizing the need for authenticity and passion in work. They discuss the challenges of balancing business ownership with personal interests, the shift to remote work, and the future of AI in branding and creativity.
Here's What You'll Learn:
❗Jamie Schwartzman emphasizes the importance of authenticity in branding.
❗Branding is about discovering identity, not just graphic design.
❗The journey of entrepreneurship requires passion and love for the work.
❗AI can serve as a powerful writing assistant in branding.
❗Finding your expertise is crucial for long-term success.
❗10,000 hours is needed to become an expert in any field.
❗Remote work requires conscious team-building efforts.
❗The future of branding will heavily involve AI technologies.
❗Passion projects can lead to greater satisfaction in work.
❗Generosity in business can lead to unexpected rewards.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Branding
01:54 - Lessons from 25 Years in Branding
04:46 - The Importance of Brand in Business
08:21 - Finding Passion in Work
11:18 - Navigating the Entrepreneurial Journey
14:54 - Balancing Business Ownership and Passion
18:13 - The Shift to Remote Work
22:31 - Leveraging AI in Branding
26:49 - The Future of AI and Creativity
28:05 - Conclusion and Resources
Jamie Schwartzman:
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamieschwartzman/
Flux Branding:
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/flux-branding/
Website - https://fluxbranding.com/
Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, the podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, former founder of Electric and now the co-founder of Scaleless, and today I'm talking with Jamie Swartzman, who's the chief creative strategy of Flux Branding. Thanks for coming on the show, hey Brandon. Thanks for having me. So, before we dive into the world of entrepreneurship and branding best practices, can you give everybody a quick background on sort of your own entrepreneurial journey and path?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So you know I represent a little bit of an older generation, but I've been an entrepreneur for my entire life. You know, I just kind of found that. You know I wasn't really cut out to work for other people. I'd say the two toughest words for me are my boss. So having my own studio, having my own thing, has really afforded me a really great kind of lifestyle where I'm in control of my own destiny. Maybe I could have made some more money if I'd have worked at a big company, but I think for me, having the right kind of life and owning my future has really been the priority.
Speaker 2:So I started as a designer, got a degree in fine arts, master's in fine arts at UCLA in Los Angeles and started designing product and showed product to somebody and they said hey, we think we want to buy this. Before you know it, I've got a factory and I've got 25 people working for me and we're making product and selling product. And really I think I got into branding by being a product designer right, realizing that the product alone wasn't enough. There had to be a story behind it, there had to be a brand behind it. And so I sold that company at a profit which was kind of nice. Bought my first house and worked for a couple other people, got into digital and then started the agency around year 2000.
Speaker 1:What have been the biggest lessons or learnings that you've taken from the agency over the past 25 years? Especially how has that evolved? Because you've gone through quite a few cycles, so what does that look like?
Speaker 2:Well, totally so. I would say the best advice that I was given was by an architect who I really respect. This was Ted Tanaka, and I was probably in my late 30s at the time and he said, jamie, just make sure that by the time you're 50, you're an expert in something. And so I think, really, the advice there was to you know, find your expertise, find a place where you can really call yourself an expert and become knowledgeable in it and become known for that. And so for me, at that time, I decided it was going to be brand and go into branding. And you know, branding, I would say at the time I got into it, was not well understood.
Speaker 2:A lot of people confused branding with graphic design. People confused branding with the logo, right. But branding is a much greater discipline of discovering identity. And if you or I were to go and go into therapy and try to figure out who we are and what our identity is, it's a deep dive, right. It's a spiritual journey to figure out who we are. And we do the same things with companies.
Speaker 1:What does you know? You mentioned that it's not graphic design, it's not a logo. What are some of the tangible things that would come out of brand in your opinion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think what happened is that marketing became really analytic, and particularly with the advent of digital technologies, performance and driving sort of managing investment around marketing drove it to be much more analytical and the creative aspect of it really needed a different center, a different place to live, and I believe that that's what's become branding. So I look at any kind of transaction of going from an idea to revenues follows into three different buckets. It goes from branding to marketing, to sales, and so I think about this chain of branding, marketing, sales right In branding we're getting people to understand or feel something right and try to get the right kind of people engaged, so then marketing can generate a lead around that, so then marketing can generate a lead around that and that sales then can close that lead that you know is more relevant or more likely to actually generate a transaction.
Speaker 1:So you know, I would say that branding is about getting qualified prospects in so that you don't have to do quite as much sorting, and it makes it easier for sales to focus on leads that can close. Where do you see companies typically trip up when it comes to brand or branding, or do you think that half the time they think they have it but they don't actually have it?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it depends a lot on the life cycle and where you are in the state of the company. Right In early stages, when you're just starting out, I really think the focus has to be on sales and revenues, just to get out the door right but pretty quickly. What can happen, I think, is companies start to invest too much money in sales and not enough in brand, and so that marketing starts to generate a lot of opportunities and prospects that aren't really within the core capabilities and might not be the right kind of business. So I think that's a big place there. The second is, if we're going into a competitive market and we're trying to differentiate the product across other things, that might be more commodity. Brand is a great way to elevate perception and develop a real loyal fan base of people that recognize what they're selling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean my new business is pretty early and so I think for us, brand is something that we will grow into. But to your point, know it really is. At this point, you know just sales and revenue, that really is what matters. But I think you need some aspect of brand. I mean, like we've had internal exercises around how we want to do, like messaging, or what we want our identity to be. But I mean it's by no means in any way, like you know, done by an expert or perfect, but that has to happen. Because I remember you heard the book Building a Brand Story.
Speaker 2:Sure Brand Story is a great. I love that book.
Speaker 1:So I read that book in 2020, beginning of 2020. I'd had my Shopify Plus agency for about a year and a half. I was just graduating from USC. Actually, so, right down the road from you, just a little bit of a rivalry there. You're tragic, yep, and you know that completely transformed everything that we did as a as a business. Not just the website, which was changed significantly, cause I just was like, well, let me put myself in the shoes of somebody else coming here for the first time, like this doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1:Like. This is completely confusing and I don't even understand how I let this go up on the website to begin with. So that got completely overhauled, but also our service offers or service offering completely changed, as well as a by-product of the work that we did like from from reading that book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think brand has to be authentic and it has to really come from within and be just a way to reveal the authentic brilliance that's really within every different organization. And I think the big mistake that some companies make is by trying to engineer a brand that they think people are gonna like. Right, I think brand, I think a brand. Again, when you come back to identity, you know I'm the best Jamie when I come off as Jamie and I don't try to be somebody I'm not, and you know I can try. I can try to fake it, I can try to put on a false front, but in the end it's exhausting. It's so energy intensive to do that. I'll eventually revert back to who I am. It's so energy intensive to do that I'll eventually revert back to who I am. So what we do when we're doing branding is really work with our clients to help them figure out who they are, what's brilliant about what they're doing, and then just reveal that to the world. It's pretty simple.
Speaker 1:What would you say? What's your favorite project ever?
Speaker 2:The one that really sticks out to you. Well, I mean, for me my favorite project is the one that I'm working on right now. So it's always that way. And you know, we just got a really interesting new client. They are in the aquaculture business, so they're growing fish business, so they're growing fish.
Speaker 2:So I just got back from Ensenada, mexico, yesterday, going on a boat with 10 chefs out to the aquaculture farms, pulling out the steelhead, bringing it into a restaurant, 10 chefs who are working on the fish, slicing it, making sashimi, making great flavors, talking to chefs about food and flavor. I mean there's no better possible place to be. I love food, I love flavor, and getting to work with brands who are trying to make a difference in the world doing sustainable farming, trying to do something that's great flavor and doing something new, I mean that's just a total kick. But I would say it's not always that and this is another thing too for anybody who's thinking about being an entrepreneur in this business is it's all about getting into what the client's doing, and sometimes it is as uninteresting as insurance services right, and finding some way to understand the passion and motivation that's driving somebody to do insurance products right. So I would say try to bring that same spirit.
Speaker 2:It's certainly easy when I'm working on Steelhead, right, and you know, going into the Valle de Guadalupe and having, you know, dinners at Michelin star restaurants but I try to bring that same sort of energy and passion when I'm working with anybody. Maybe they're building a multifamily residence project, maybe they're doing construction there's so many different places that we play in but I would say the same energy should come to it and for everybody who's in it love your work, right, love your work. I wake up Mondays and I'm not resenting Monday, right. I wake up Monday. I'm like cool, this is going to be a great week. And if anything, I would say I was starting to resent my Fridays. I'm like man, we didn't get enough done and like really, I can have a weekend now. So I think you know really loving what you do. That's the key and that's what will make it sustainable.
Speaker 1:So you know riffing off of that. How do you get to that point? You know you've obviously were fortunate to have that path and you know you've obviously been successful for a very long time. And what is your passion? There's definitely a lot of people who are still trying to figure that out. So you know what was that journey like for you and for those that are listening. How can they sort of navigate that and get to the ideal, which is oh wow, it's Friday. This sucks versus thank God, it's Friday. I need to get the hell out of here.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's, first of all, it's having balance across all disciplines of life. I don't think there's any one answer right. And for me, look, I'm 62. Okay, so this is what 62 looks like, you know, in 2025. And I have a lot of different things that I do. There's no one answer right. It's multimodal, a lot of different things.
Speaker 2:So I would say, have multiple inputs. Be not trying to find the answer just in work, just in career, right, you know, do creative things, get inspired, go outside, you know, see art, listen to music, hang out with friends, learn to cook, have passions right, and so it all works together. And then, along that, just realize where is your gift? I mean, the classic book here is what Colors your Parachute, right, and I think, for anybody who is and this is probably, I don't know, it's in its 25th edition Branding. We're not a full service agency. We don't want to do that.
Speaker 2:And I think about it in terms of almost like you know, if I was a tennis player and I had a wrist injury, I wouldn't go to a general practitioner, I would go to a specialist. In fact, I might even jump on a plane and take a drive. You know, take a ride 3,000 miles to go see that specialist. So how can you be that specialist, right? How can you learn to be an expert in what you're doing and be that specialist? And that's going to be the differentiator. The benefit today, with the internet and matching, is that it's easier and easier for smart people to act as quarterbacks. Pull together a team of players that are experts in different areas, right, you know, the linebacker doesn't have to be the same as the receiver. Different kinds of talents. So find out where's your talent, what do you enjoy doing? And and and stick with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the sticking with a component is really important to highlight. In today's age of instant gratification and you know, if you you went on social, you'd expect to be able to snap your fingers and become a billionaire entrepreneur it seems like yeah, it's 10,000 hours, right.
Speaker 2:So 10,000 hours, and that's also part of why it's so important to enjoy the work right. To enjoy the work and stick with it and listen. It can be tough. Times change. I think we're in a time of great change right now. Our agency is called Flux for a reason. Typically when people need what we do, something's changing, and we're in a tremendous time of change right now. I believe that the change that we're seeing is all fueled by technology, in specific communications technology, and this is a time where communications can be highly effective and coming up with the right strategies for communicating is difficult. There's a lot of different things that can be done, but if you can figure out that recipe and you can start testing with it, the opportunity for resonating has never been greater.
Speaker 1:How do you balance being a business owner while also still getting to do what you love? Because one of the things that I found out pretty early on is that it really is not that glamorous. There's a whole bunch of shit that you have to deal with that has nothing to do with what it is that you actually like to do. But then I kind of actually sort of fell in love more with the process of business than necessarily the business itself. And so then that's when I was like you know, clearly I'm not going to be a marketing agency guy forever and then ended up selling that company. So for me it's more about, you know, I love business. It doesn't necessarily matter so much what it is that the business is. It's the process of creating and, you know, being around the team and all of that. But it definitely wasn't that way and it still isn't that way in certain instances. So how do you manage that and deal with that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think having a team helps, right, Having a team helps and not trying to do it all myself really is a big difference. So I don't operate as a solopreneur, I have a small team. I would say that I've been able to make my team smaller since the pandemic. We used to be a studio-based organization. I had a cool loft in downtown LA, a room full of Macs, some dogs, coffee drinks, all that kind of stuff. It was amazing, it was great.
Speaker 2:And in the pandemic we pivoted to being virtual and with virtual now we have a much smaller, more lean organization where we use a lot more outsiders, and so that's really been liberating, I would say, because we do need to have multiple people and contributors coming in, but they're also, when those people are employees, there's a lot of administrative load and overhead required for that. So, you know, we've been able, I would say, to shift away from that kind of administrative load, right of dealing with HR related things, and instead now we've sort of put that same energy towards project management, organization and how do we work as a team still, when we're not in the same room? Look, it was a lot easier when I could walk out of my office, go into the studio, sit down with the designers, chat about stuff, go into the conference room. Right now we're much more scheduled about things and if I were to show you my schedule, you know it's pretty much every 30 minutes Boom boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 2:So I spend most of my day now, you know, on virtual meetings. It's kind of nice. You don't have to spend two hours in the car driving around. I can work kind of from anywhere. And I would say now for our team members, they really appreciate that too. Now, at the same time, I'm glad that I did have that time of working with other people, of being in a social environment, because I think there's a lot of things that occur and people grow in different ways when they have to deal with other people, deal with other personalities, learn to get along. So it'll be interesting to see how things develop and evolve in this new paradigm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's very like vertical and industry specific. You know, whether it's staying remote, going hybrid, even going back to full-time altogether. The one thing I do see pretty consistently, though, is if you just graduated school this is just my opinion, but I would avoid remote like the plague You're 22, 23, maybe you're still living at home. We've tried to bring some of those team members into the previous business, because the business that acquired us was fully remote. We weren't, we were all based in San Diego. You don't get the social camaraderie, you don't get to do the networking, you don't get to have that friendship outlet too. That's a huge component of your early career, is an identity. For more experienced people or for people with families, you know it's a huge time savings and a huge benefit to be able to work remotely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I would say that we have to do things consciously, to do team building, and even though that we're remote and we've got people all over the world, we have a three times a week touch base. So we meet three times a week what we call our hot sheet meeting, and during hot sheet, that's when we talk about what's going on. You know, look at, look at what needs to get done in the next couple of days, and we kind of need to do that round. Robin, sure, you could log into the system and you could see your actions. Right, they're all in there, they're all marked, but there's still something about having that dialogue and communicating. Definitely, for creative and for what we do in branding, there's a lot of just what we call workshopping, where we get together, we talk about things and it's done virtual right, which works pretty well, surprisingly well. Okay, I love being in the same room, but when we're virtual like this, everybody has a front row seat. Also, when we're virtual like this, in many cases we can do transcription, and we always typically do transcription, and that allows us then to use a number of new tools.
Speaker 2:Ai is an important tool for us. We use it extensively, but not in the way that I think people would imagine you use AI. Ai is not something you press a button. It gives you an answer. What AI does is it helps us synthesize a lot of content and bring it down, and boil it down and at least get us to a good, solid draft. The draft then is, you know, always manicured by hand, but allowing that to come in is important.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example. So we have a large insurance services client I mentioned to you. They're in Boca Raton and we were brought aboard by the CEO who was installed by Equity to fix this company. And when he first got in this is a CEO I've worked with extensively One of his first calls was to me I need to get a lay of the land. We organized a two-day off-site retreat session with 14 of their top executives.
Speaker 2:I use markers and whiteboards to marker up things and sort of figure it out. But prior to that I did in-depth interviews with 14 executives, used the transcriptions into AI to synthesize and it was a common discussion guide that I used for all 14 of the different executives. Then I was able to use AI to sort of pull together common themes and common threads across these different elements and use that to generate a 60 page report that gave a state of what's going on, where are the challenges, and the AI was also able to weight the responses differently depending on the role and title of that individual. So the C-suite guys were weighted more heavily than the manager guys and that really provided a very interesting viewpoint that you know. I could have done it by hand, but it saved me a lot of time to do it and use the AI to synthesize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the ability to like just intake all that data is extremely valuable. You know, it saves me a tremendous amount of time when it comes to things like that and that's a really cool use case. I love the weighting component. My new business does a lot of that with recruiting and candidate placement and management, and there's a whole system of various weights and the weights change based off the company, et cetera. So that's really cool.
Speaker 2:So that's really cool divisions of the company to try to keep the brand somehow consistent. I think that these are moving now into digital platforms. We use a platform called Aurora and Aurora provides different workspaces for each of our clients. Each of those workspaces have its own private knowledge base. So as we're developing things, we're adding it to this knowledge base and the knowledge base then informs each of the chats moving forward. Plus, we can develop what are these smart flows? And to do detailed descriptions of products, a short description of the product, a three-word description, a one-sentence description, a short paragraph, the reasons why you should have the product, what are the features of the product, what are the benefits of the product, and all of that stuff can be generated based on, you know, the assembly of prior materials going into the knowledge base, and this is really like a huge time saver for us and, I would say, also provides the opportunity to hand off those systems to the client in the future so that they have the ability to keep the brand consistent and generate more stuff. That's on brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that and you know you. Your expertise and value can be amplified because you can spend more time on the tinkering and the refinement than necessarily like just getting the basics out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think learning to be a great prompter is, you know, going to be highly valued. I look at the AI as a writing assistant right, and I've had, I always have writing assistants. The thing about this one is it just works really fast. It works really fast and I can get a new draft going in you know minute or seconds it's not always on.
Speaker 2:You know, I have to go through a lot of different iterations and drafts to get something, but it does a pretty good job. And also, I don I have to go through a lot of different iterations and drafts to get something, but it does a pretty good job. And also, I don't have to be overly specific. I have to be specific enough. I guess it's not that I don't that I have to be specific, but I don't have to be ordered and logical. I can throw a lot of stream of consciousness at the AI and it can somehow seem to make sense of my random, juxtaposed, unusual thought process and ultimately that's what it can't do, right, it can't do that kind of creative process.
Speaker 2:Example I was doing a. It was a 10 part email series, right, a training series, and they just were starting to get really boring. It was formatting them all the same. It had three bullet points, it had a numbered list, but just everything was coming out very uniform. So I was able then to work with it and say, listen, for this particular one, let's use a Greek myth, a Greek myth that exemplifies what we're trying to do. So it brought in something. You know, I think it was Icarus or something, one of these great myths to help tell the story. And these are the different, or another one I said you know, write a bedtime fairy tale. So there's just different things that it wouldn't necessarily think about. And this is how I believe that you know, we as humans, the human creative brain, will fuse with the analytic brain of the AI to really do some interesting and exciting things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it feels like we're just at the sort of frontier of what is possible with it, so we're in for quite the ride.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, you know, I remember. You know listening to the modem and having it connect, and you know using Netscape Navigator. These are the early days of the internet, and looking at it and going this is going to change everything, I would say the way I feel about AI is even more. It's even a greater sense of wonder on what's going to happen with AI. I too share concerns about it, but ultimately I'm an optimist. I tend to look at the optimistic side of the world, but I would say it's a tool. It's any tool. You know a chainsaw right. Use a chainsaw to. You know, trim the trees. I can use it for the Texas chainsaw massacre.
Speaker 1:I like that. I'm going to steal that one. Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights. I think there's a lot of really great value here, especially from a branding perspective and how to leverage AI to help assist in that creative process in a really unique way. But before we hop, can you let everybody know where they can reach you or get connected with your business online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. So we've got some really cool things, some free stuff, on our website that I would encourage you to go over to and check out. So go to fluxbrandingcom You'll see a little yellow button up there. Answer six questions and we generate a report on your brand personality type and your brand personality type. It's a version of brand archetypes, but it's related to brand story and who you are, what your character is. If you put in your email, we'll send you the report. You get the answer right on there immediately. Also, if you're a bigger brand and you have a team, I encourage you to send me an email and you can send it to me. It's Jamie J-A-M-I-E at fluxbrandingcom. Put the name of this podcast in the subject and I'll do a 30 minute session with you and generate a brand blueprint report which will kind of help give you a roadmap. And we do that complimentary.
Speaker 2:I love learning about new businesses. I love making a contribution. One of our core values is we have a spirit of generosity. I do believe the more we give, the more we get, and I encourage everybody to have that same attitude. Right, it's like where can you make? Where can you make a contribution? I don't know. Somehow it all comes back to me. Once in a while I get taken advantage of, but that's in the minority. I get much more out of it than I lose. So if you're interested in the brand Blueprint, please send me an email and I'd love to meet you.
Speaker 1:Awesome, I really appreciate it. I might have to take you up on that myself.
Speaker 2:You're great Thanks for doing this and I think it's great that you're doing the podcast. And I would say, you know, for you know, for young people out there, it's so easy to get polarized. You know, we're really entering an era of just tremendous polarization and just there's a lot of gray out there. Right, there's a lot of gray between the blacks and the whites and uh, you know, just because things can look so horrible out there, there's also incredible great good going on right now. So we're in a, you know, just there's a lot, there's a lot of shades of color happening right now.
Speaker 1:I agree. Well, again, thank you for coming on, for For everybody listening, as always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or Scalistai. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.