Be The Default Choice In A Trust Economy

When markets shake, people don’t chase the lowest price... they chase the lowest risk. That single shift explains why discounts fall flat, why 'more features' can backfire, and why clear, consistent branding wins even in a downturn. We dig into safety bias, show how price sends meaning beyond dollars, and map a path to become the default choice without racing to the bottom.

Resources:
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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Safety Bias
• 2:38 Price Myths And Brand Value
• 5:10 Turquoise Necklace Lesson On Pricing
• 7:00 Risk Aversion And Choice Overload
• 10:20 Brand Architecture And Focus
• 13:05 Clarity Beats Cheap Every Time
• 16:10 Social Proof, Pipelines, And Fit
• 19:10 Positioning Before Ads
• 22:00 Voice, Consistency, And Trust
• 25:10 Become The Default In Their Mind
• 28:00 Specialisation, Gyms, And Buying Paths
• 31:00 Narrowing Services To Stand Out
• 34:00 Premium Pricing Needs Positioning
• 37:00 Memory, Senses, And Recall

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:03

You're listening to Brandon Butler for straight talking, occasionally in your face, no BS branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners. For those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and health caring associations, consumer behaviour and design thinking can impact what people say, think and feel. I'm your host, our line is sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable, and often unapologetically blunt. Founder and creative director of Brandon Design Agency, your one and only.

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

Hey hey, welcome to this week's episode of Brandon Butter. I um seen a lot happen in the world in the past couple of weeks. I keep saying this every week, and I feel like you're just waiting. It's like our bodies are trying to make sense of what's going on. I don't know if you're in a safety bubble or not, but I am just consuming everything at the moment, which isn't always good. But I'd like as a neurodivergent person, I like to be in the know. And I think that's why I've always been quite ahead in the cultural game, in terms of like knowing what's going on, and not just in terms of trends, but like general conversations that affect us as people. Which brings me to the very essence of this podcast episode today, the safety bias. And what I want to talk about with this is why I guess the safest choice isn't always the cheapest. I think in a market that we're in right now, we're seeing a lot of people trying to pr play the price game, but as always, true value will outshine. But it's actually more than that. It's it's well, I guess if you look at I'm trying to like compartmentalize if that's the right word, you know, get my thoughts out in a in a clear way without it sounding too sporadic. Because I just go off cuff, right? I've got a little guide here, but I randomly it's the best way to do it, right? You get my true thought process. But generally, people assume, most people assume that they want the cheapest option. Even when someone says, but we aren't the cheapest, but everyone wants the cheapest, it's like, well, the people that obviously you're currently attracting want the cheapest. But it's not always the case. So I guess when we're looking in uncertain markets, buyers will always default to what they consider to be their safest choice, and it's not always the best deal or the best offer or the cheapest price. So I guess in terms of if you feel like you've been losing out to competitors or they went to another supplier or they bought another product, this is probably why. And so we need to look at when people feel uncertain, because there's a whole bunch of uncertain uncertainty at the moment, they will find that safety. And okay, so what does safety mean, right? Like, so we're looking at let's go to the price, like what people think about with like assuming price, and it's basically like people believe that being competitive genuinely means being cheaper, but that's just an attribute on the list of things. This is why brand is so important. I think people think brand is just a tick off the box, but brand is like the brain of your business, it is the reason people choose you, it's the values, it's the personality, it's literally the thing that people are buying. It's the associations, it's all of that. It's like going to a really shitty workplace, but they have amazing logo and they have great messaging, but the teams suck, or it's really toxic, and you hate working there. It doesn't matter how amazing all the external stuff is, if it suffers on the inside, which I talk about often, people won't go there. That comes through, right? And this isn't just about internal culture. I guess the belief is that people think that, like I just said, that that being cheaper is competitive, but it's how discounting signals desperation and scarcity, and why affordability isn't really reassuring anyone right now. Because it's, I mean, it may have a couple of years ago, but I think we've gotten to that point where we went through the dip, everyone was uncertain, and then you know, they just got used to being uncomfortable, and our people are in that stage where they're really looking at who they trust as a brand. So lowering lowering your price doesn't lower their risk, it raises it. There was a really good study done. I can't remember what book I was reading. I feel like it was Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The point is, the premise of the the message was this woman owned a tourist jewelry shop. Well, she owned a jewelry shop and heaps of tourists came in. I think she was in Greece. And she was going on holidays and she couldn't sell this turquoise necklace. So she told her staff member to half price it as she was going away, right? So she went on a holiday, they were trying to get rid of this necklace. The staff member half-priced it, but misread it. I put net voted comments, misread what they said and doubled the price. And the necklace sold like instantly. And so people were assimilating a higher cost to a better service. It's how we do things. It's why you may have two cars that are made in the same factory, Hello Toyota and Hello Lexus. And the brand is actually what makes the I guess the luxury messaging, the type of cars that they sell, all of it has a very different vibe. So if you look at Lexus, they can charge more for that because they've positioned them as a luxury, a luxurious brand, or more so than Toyota. Toyota's like the family-friendly, you know, great on fuel, fits the prem, whatever. And when we're looking at it like that, very different audiences, very different values, but it's what people will spend based on the associations that they say. And over and over and over and over again, if you're constantly switching up what you're saying, you're building mistrust with your audience. So, which brings me to my next point, which is risk aversion. And that is running the show. So before anyone will buy anything, you're basically trying to answer their objections. That's why a fax page is really good on a website, by the way. Preempt the questions they're going to ask you, and you know, you will be five steps ahead of someone else that hasn't done that. What I think is really important. I'm just clicking around here because I don't want to go off track. That we understand that in cautious markets, every purchase is like a it's like a gamble. People aren't well, they're not necessarily looking for savings, right? They're they're they just don't want to get it wrong. And so there is this overwhelming cognitive load of choosing, which has increased. So if you go back to like the 1950s, we're looking at God, I don't know. When they used to do maybe two or three products per category, and so you had a choice of three. It's like going into a paint swatch, you know, the paint aisle. Everyone's met with so much choice that it actually becomes much harder to make a choice. More isn't always great. That's why they say to be really specific on what you offer. We actually culled down what we offered and got really specific in the things that we do. And that doesn't necessarily mean you can't sell heaps of product, especially if you're an e-commerce, but it might be that you categorize yourself into a specific place and stay with, you know, within the realms. The moment that you start to extend is the moment that you can dilute, and we've watched this happen multiple times. What brands genuinely do here is they build branded architecture. And so if you stay with me here and you mentally haven't, let's mentally track this, at the very top you'll have the mother brand, and then you will tear off like a flowchart where you start to then categorize different subsets of that brand. Coca-Cola do this, and they have multiple versions of that brand. They have Mount Franklin and Fanta and Sprite and all of like they have heaps. There's so many. This is Unilever and Kellogg's and what's the other one? Nestle have heaps. I mean, that's questionable with a lot of the things that a lot of those brands are doing at the moment. But yeah, it is it is really important that you understand how these people from a well not people but brands and the people behind them from a much larger scale are able to communicate these messages in a really clear way, is that usually if they want to extend their product line, is that they create a subset or a different category brand. They use their logo as a signifier, and that depends on how you do it. So FedEx do House of Brands, like where you have the logo on everything. There are so many different ways you can do this. This is a whole different conversation, by the way. I will not detract. So I digress. Basically, you need to be really clear. So, not so much to think about is always the easy way. It it's always, always less is more. That is the whole premise of design. Less is more. If you have too many things on a page and you have people trying to look at what the hierarchy is and it is not clear, they get overwhelmed and they don't look. It that comes down into things like formatting, the way you would write an email, you know, your headers and your subheaders, and the way that you format your text so that people can skim read. All of this stuff is really important. And so this is just in design purposes, but design is everything. Design isn't just visuals, design is systems, and design is architecture, and design is process. So it's really understanding what you're wanting your customers to do because your buyer isn't asking what the best deal is, they're asking for what the safest bet is. So, what's safer from here and here? I may have to spend a bit more here, but for longevity purposes, I'm going to get more bang for my buck. And these are the things that people are thinking about these days. So when you look at, I guess, safe doesn't always equal cheap. Safe does, however, equal clear direction or clarity or reduction of mental load. And people think safe means low cost, low commitment when actually safe means I understand exactly what I'm getting from exactly who I know they are and they align to what it is that I want them to do, right? They tick all the boxes and it might be something really mundane. It doesn't have to be this big elaborate purchase, but that's why decisions take longer to make when the decision requires a much bigger spend. But when we're looking at the brand with the clearest, I guess, brain is what I would say, like the the brain or the the cis the identity, it will always win. Because it's not the brand with the lowest price. It's the one that's given them all the things that they need. And that's the thing that you need to take into consideration. If there is a hesitancy as to why someone won't buy, chances are it's because there's something missing and you haven't given them what they've needed from you. Sales aren't always about doing things for the money, right? It it really does align with knowing what your customer wants. If you are a business that is like an affordable, like this is where JB Hi-Fi used to go off. If you're an American brand, JB Hi-Fi is like music and they do a whole bunch of other stuff now because music is almost non-existent in that space, but they used to have like cheaper versions and they they made their brand like that. That's what you knew. So it was really clever the way they did this because they had scene kids behind the counter. So those that don't want a scene kid. It's like, you know, people that would be the type of people that would listen to their music or young um Musos or people that looked at the part of the scene that was at the time. So, you know, alternative emo, piercings, tatts, like very much the vibe. I don't know what it is now, but that was very much the vibe at the time. And so you felt like you were talking to a professional when you went in to ask about music. Like these guys and girls listened to the same things that you listened to. And so you felt like you were having a conversation with a mate. However, their brand identity was very budget-heavy, black and yellow, big sales signs, starbursts everywhere. But it was intended to be like that. And so you knew what you were getting when you went into that store. They weren't luxurious, they weren't above the line heavy. You were more like more, right? So you need to understand this is positioning. You need to understand where you want to value yourself in the market. However, they were safe because they were consistent and they never changed their direction. And to this day, they still remain the same way. So if you were to look at, for instance, if we put this into, I guess, a better term, if you had two service providers where one was cheaper and one was 40% more expensive. The expensive one has that clear positioning, really specific outcomes. It's an obvious process, like end-to-end. This is how we're going to do things, this is how it works, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the cheaper one is super vague. They aren't consistent with their promises. They say that we do everything, and they're not really specific in the way that they do things. It's not going to get you the response that you want. Offering more isn't always the answer. And so who gets the yes? It's always going to be the one that gives the most clarity because there is an answer to how their money is going to be invested, or there's a clear process on how they're going to work together. And people just need that reassurance, is essentially what they're looking for. So they're not paying more because they had more money, but they're paying more because it felt less risky. I know that sounds so weird, but for instance, if you're going to spend more money with someone that's a professional and they're experienced in what they do, you're probably gonna get what you need. Versus if you were to spend money with, say, someone that's been in the industry for only a couple of years, but there's going to spend more time on that because they don't know what they're doing. Now that's not shitting on anyone that is in that space, but that's the difference in comparison comparison when you're looking at like someone that's been in the game for a really long time and someone that's only entered the field. With that comes experience and knowledge, and the same thing with a product. If a product's been on the market for a long time, it's all about that testing and reassurance and accountability, right? It's the same thing when you see the reviews. So that clear direction is doing the selling, right? That's the reputation aspect. It's the guidance and the step-by-step, and I know exactly what I'm getting myself into. I know exactly what my money is paying for, and I know what it is that I need to buy. And so if people aren't choosing you, it might not be your price. In fact, it almost isn't your price in most cases. And what I would say, if it is the price, is that they haven't bothered to get a flag for me, right? A flag for me is that when someone inquires to work with us and they never click on the subscribe to email, and I know that sounds so weird, but that's a behavior to me. If you're really interested in giving your money to someone, especially for a service, you want to know what they're saying. And I can guarantee that that has worked for me like almost nine out of ten times. The ones that click yes are the ones we end up working with, and the ones that click no, ghost us or just go off. And because they haven't built that reputation with you, or they haven't built that, not reputation, that relationship with you. And so they're giving themselves an easy out to say no. So that's usually you can tell the people that are price hunters. So that's when you really need to know the types of buyers, but also how you promote your business and how you promote your brand messaging and the way you rock up and the way that you are will naturally go through that process before having to get there. So we know that when people come and work with us, they already know what they want. And the last I don't think we've actually had a lead that's come through. So we've got one in one pending, but every single lead that's come through since November has been a sure thing. And that's because our website is super clear on the type of client that we work for. We rock up and we speak to what we believe in. The work is there that we do. Should probably put more up to be completely fair, because there's some stuff missing. But everything that we say that we do, we are. So what you see is what you get, and then our action is showing up every day, living by the very things that we say that we're doing. And that's the difference. And you know what? That's where social media comes in. And it's not to sell, it's to reassure. So it's the conversations that you're having, it's the big picture thinking. And over the last couple of years, I've really shifted the messaging for you one and only to be more big picture. So we've moved into more of the space that I've always had experience in, which were those medium enterprise space, you know, small to medium enterprise space of working with multiple people within a team, you know, being the person that helps direct, and then they take that and run with it. So we're at the moment we're working with people that are that are very much team oriented, or they're building something great because they've moved on from where they were and they know what they want. And so they're coming to us because they know exactly what it is that they need and we're the people for them. And usually, this is whistled, sorry, usually these people have been following us for a really long time. So if you have something that, you know, people are really interested in buying, you've got to know what that lifetime cycle is, or or you know, how long they're in the pipeline for in terms of when they enter to when they leave. Is there something you can sell them later on? But it really is about understanding that, I guess, that initial onboarding phase and what it is that you do and how quickly you can get them on. And everyone's going to be different here. So I want to talk about the mind and and how people think because it's about what needs to change. And so before you touch design and before you run an ad, God, I don't know how many times people say, I really need to put an ad out. And I'm like, you can't put a ad out because even I don't know what you do. Like, you have to be really clear with what you do. Otherwise, you're just going to say that the ad didn't work when really your messaging's not right, your personality isn't down pat, you don't know what your positioning is, you have no idea about your audience, even though you think you do. I know so many people at the moment that think they've nailed their audiences, and they really have not. Because we are in a very shifty moment at the at the time, and I feel like these need to be updated so consistently because emotion is driving so much behavior at the moment. I mean, it's a whole subject, behavioral economics, which means that emotions guide our choices. I always use the example of um, would you ever spend$500 on a bottle of water? And everyone says, absolutely not. I'll say, what if they've got a family member, um, family member ransom? And they'll go, well, of course. It's like, exactly. So emotions will drive your behavior, your buying, your buying behavior. You don't actually know what behaviors are being driven behind the scenes, and that's when it gets really complex, and how you can dive right into your psychographics to figure that out. But before you touch all that stuff, and before you get ads, like I said, you need to be really clear. Your positioning needs to answer why you, why now, why not them? It has to be all of those immediate. Tell me why I should buy from you. Tell me what it is that you do, who it is, who you're about, what you're here for, all of those things need to be cemented in. Because this is the brand part that most people skip. They think you need a logo, they think you need, you know, a couple of messages that to bring people in. But my God, it is an Energy. Your brand is an essence. Like people should be able to step into a room and go, oh, this is blah blah blah. Oh, this is so on brand. And if people can't do that, you haven't hit it yet. It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It just means you haven't done it yet. What a really good compliment for me is, is when people meet me in person and they say, Oh, you're exactly how you are online. I'm like, well, obviously. But a lot of people don't do that. They have a persona where they show up online and a different one when they meet people in person. And that creates inconsistency. So it's really important that you understand how you need to show up. That is the tone, right? And the tone can differ by different conversations. The voice, however, is who you are and you know what you believe in. It's your values. When they say brand voice, I think a lot of people assume that that's that that's just, I guess, some core messages, which it is, but the brand voice is like the internal identity. It's it's cementing the narrative of what you speak to and what you believe in. And that's the depth that we need to be in right now because it's a trust economy. And exactly what I'm saying here, if they don't trust you, they are not buying from you. And so the work that they skip comes back down to people thinking that they need to do a rebrand next time. Or you need a reason to be chosen. You don't understand your differentiation. Very, very often, very often, does that make sense? Often when I'm talking to people, I say, why did you start your business? There is the gem in there that people need to know. Now, obviously, you're going to evolve as a brand, but the very premise of why the brand started to begin with always has an answer. And a lot of times people detract from that. And then they become a shell of who they are because they've moved away from it so far that they've just been parading. And then you ask, what is it that you stand for now? And you go, I don't know. Well, how are you different? I don't know. Well, why did you start your business in the first place? Ah, are you doing that? Are you talking about that? No. Okay. Go back. And that's when the mission, vision, values stuff come in. What is your intention? It's like an it's like an overarching objective. I mean, some people don't have them, but essentially it's like it to me, it's like a guiding light. And it should be so much higher. A lot of people put a mission as like this is I want to make people happy. Like, snore needs to be like purpose-driven. Like, what is it that you're trying to do? Why are you in business? Because you could just go get a nine to five and you know, or if you're an organization, how is everyone on the same page? Like, what's the intention and buy-in from every employee that you work with? And what are they what are they there for? Because that's what you find as as businesses get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, that the culture starts to be lost. And if you don't have a really core center that people know why they're there, then you're gonna get diluted messages from all different aspects of the business, communications that are going out from all these different people that aren't in alignment, and then you have a problem. And that's when you start looking at hiring, which is why I always say everyone's like, oh, they're the wrong hire. It's like, well, you haven't done a good enough job with the brand to know what the type of person is that you're looking for, and that's a whole different conversation as well. But you need to become the default, that's the core of this, is you need to become the default in their mind, become part of the consideration set, which is enough marketing for you to be able to be recognized and memorized when they're ready to buy whatever it is that you do. So your brand needs to feel safe to buy, or you're not even going to be on that list. And obviously, that's from years of, you know, if you're a legacy brand, for instance, that would be years of recognition. So you've got more to lose. The reputation's upheld. If you're a newer brand, it would be more about really clear, consistent stuff. You're up and coming, or something's happening, or you've done something, or you value align. And these are the things that you need to think about. This is positioning. So you need to be consistent because if you haven't been consistent in your positioning, in terms of how you like we could have two gyms in the area. I say gyms because I just had it pop up from my friend. If you had two gyms in the area, and one is a mainstream gym, and one's a specialist gym, and one's a Pilates gym, like all of them offer different things. So you position yourself accordingly to the things that you offer or the way that you differentiate, or the clientele that may come. You know, it could be a the UFC gym, for instance, or a boxing gym. And this is where people need to understand that you, when you say that you do these things, that's when people go, oh, okay. But if you say, oh, we do all of these things, then it becomes really confusing. Whereas if you want to do just one thing and someone does this one thing well and has a few other things on the side, you're probably gonna go there. Like, for instance, if I was looking for a gym, a lot of the times I'm trying to look for a pool. Because I like to swim. And especially when I was doing triathlon, so that was a lot of things to think about. It's like which gym in the area had a pool? Boom, half of them didn't. So that narrowed my search down quite a bit. And then it was like, are you gonna go to somewhere just for the pool? What if the gym sucks? And then I was looking at certain elements of what I was buying in each of those places. So if I wanted a strength training program, I was looked for looked for one that was really specific in strength training. Whereas if I was looking for something that was swimming, I'd look for the best pool in the area. And then that's when I weighed up two choices versus one. And this is the buying process. It's like, what are people thinking? What's going through their head? And you need to be able to understand that buying process so that you can be positioned when they're ready to buy the thing that they're looking for. And so you're not here for everyone, you're here for specific uh a specific area, a specific group of people. It's like I keep saying about your subsets and making sure that you're in line with those subsets. And if you don't know what a subset is, it's obviously your main one, and then you have it come off, you know, as a secondary. And the way I would explain that in terms of, and I'm talking about in terms of targeting, is we used to be, you know, brand brand agency, and then you would have graphic design and websites and packaging and social media assets and all of these things, and you know, brand identity and logo design. We're now we're just logo uh we do brand identity systems and brand campaign development. So essentially we are brand narrative and brand campaigns where we do the essential, the very premise of the of the of why the brand exists. So we start in that and from a psychological point, right? So we're not doing just logo colors font. We're also not doing just, you know, mission, vision, values. We start in a really heavy research phase and audit phase where we do a psychological analysis because I study that. So we suss out behaviors and buying intentions and motivations and drivers, and we get really specific on that stuff before we start the next phase. So we have a really clear intention on what we're building out as we go. And that's what helps us to differentiate because people are wanting that, and we've got years of experience doing this stuff. So they come to us because when you're looking in comparison, no one really stood by that. So we got rid of all the extra stuff that we didn't need to do. The websites and the social graphics, and we do them for, you know, big clients that we're working with retainer on, and we're we're basically their contracted agency. But if someone's just coming to us and saying, hey, I want a business card, or hey, I want a flyer, then we say, sorry, we don't do that, and we'll lead you to someone that does. And it's really important that everyone understands what they're getting when they work with us. And because of that reason, we now work with really great clients that want exactly what it is that we're offering. In fact, I'm doing more of the work that I love to do, which is consulting and workshops. So people are asking me to come and do workshops now for brands which I thrive in, by the way. So I've had a few of those over the last year, which has been super, super, super fun. But charge more and sell easier. So there's a nice little prompt here. But the brands that are charging, I guess, big bucks, they're not brave. But they're clear. So they know what they want, they're very clear with what they want. And discounting is actually it's a response to when you aren't positioned correctly. It's like, oh, this is what we do. Crap, we they're not gonna pick us. Here, we'll just cut some money off. So if you haven't got a really solidified positioning in the market of why they should choose you, then they're gonna go down the next step of criteria, which is price or your product or the things that they can start to cull. It's like when you have the selection process when you're looking for, I don't know, a TV. You look for high def, you look for how big the TV is, you look for the brand, you look for the energy rating, I don't know, all these different things, and you start to chip down attributes. You don't want to get to the attributes. You want to just get to the brand. You want to make sure that the you are the chosen one because you are the brand and like the only one that they're going for, and that's actually who's contacted us the past few months have been people that know who we are and wanted to work with us. There wasn't anyone else they were really talking to. So that to me says that our work has done what it needs to, which is great, and yours can too. So it's really important that you understand the I guess the clarity I hate saying clarity, everyone uses clarity, but it is it's that clear-minded, really obvious pricing strategy. Make sure that that's that's there for you and it aligns with everything. You can't charge premium prices and have a really shitty-looking brand. Like people need to know that you value your own brand as much as you want to charge out, and that's a really important fact as well. But you need to test it too. So if you how do you explain this? There's so many variants to it, but if you were to look at your website or your proposal or a pitch or whatever it is that you're doing, if you're a service base, obviously, and you had to explain to someone why they would choose you to the business partner, what would they say? It's really important that they are able to take away the things that you're trying to put down. And if they aren't taking that away, then there's work to be done. For instance, like you could be someone that's really experienced in what you do, but you don't list down your past credentials or your experience. Like that gives them no knowledge that you have years in the game, and without that information, you you're flying. You want to stitch together the interpretation, right? I always say basic understanding. I have a whole podcast episode of this. It's like how memory works, where it talks about the way that people remember you, but it talks about information processing. And essentially, like we have multiple ways that we we remember things, like tactiles, we touch things, things that you can smell. It's like sensory visuals, obviously, the way something's said, the way the the way it's said, not just what it said, the way it's said. And that stays stuck. So there's auditory and there's visual and there's touch, and all of those things matter. If you can get multiple stacked sensory experiences in one, like ding ding ding, you're getting there. But that's why they're doing that. Like Subway actually project the smell of their bread. They used to outside the door, so you could smell it from a mile away. Lush, you can know that they're in there, you know that they're in a shopping center. You can smell that from halfway down the shopping center. And instantly it triggers a memory response. And so that's your job, right? Is to, and not obviously, you can't just push the smell of bread out if you're, you know, service-based business, but it is about creating those memorable, memorable parts of your brand that people can come back to and not just saying what everyone else is doing and doing what everyone else is doing. If I say to you, how do you differ from someone else in the market and you can't give me a response, chances are that's where you need to start. Because if you can't answer that clearly, neither can they. And that's your gap right there. So if you're sitting there thinking that, which is like most cases, that you don't know why someone would choose you, which is probably the most common thing that we know. Or people know and they don't know how to articulate it well. It's like a vibe. You it's it's okay because things change, right? Especially if you had an idea at the beginning and you knew and then it's moved, then that's when you would look at a repositioning or a refresh on ways to kind of make sure that you're staying up to date. But that's the starting point, like I said. And so that's exactly where you would come in for like a reality check, or you want to do an assessment, which is why we start there. So we have, if you are interested, a free resource called the Brand Gap Finder. Now, the Brand Gap Finder is basically a way, it's like a scorecard where you go through and you ask yourself questions. Now, they make in it, we've specifically put so that you have to ask other people what they think. Because what you think of your brand is biased, even those around you are biased. It could be that you ask customers or people that you are acquainted with and what they think of you. And these are the things that you then use as your core pillars to differentiate. Because I remember specifically asking people, like, what is it that made you choose us? And people would be like, Oh, you were funny, or I really like the copy on your site, or I like the way that you showed your photos. I'd be like, Oh shit, none of that stuff. I didn't, you know, I didn't not think anything of that. Ironically, we're designers, no one said design. I feel like that was an expectation. You should be good at design if you're coming to someone for design. So I don't think that was ever going to be their answer, but it was really cool the way that you got that information. Like, and then you open up this whole realm of ideas that you go, oh, I didn't even think about that. So I'll drop that in the show notes. I've also got a really cool paid resource, if you want, called the Market Advantage Gap, which specifically targets positioning. So I'll drop that in there too. But for now, I want you to think about writing down all the things that seem to be an issue at the moment, because I can guarantee that you could probably knock off 50 things by answering maybe one or two. And so instead of staying down here and overwhelm, we need to go two layers deeper and figure out what it is that we need to be hitting up there at the top. Until then, I'll try to next week.

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