Your Visuals Aren’t Broken, Your Strategy Is

Attention is cheap BUT trust is expensive. In this episode I'm breaking open the “vibe tax”, which is the hidden cost brands pay when they look great but say nothing. We'll tap into how strategy, positioning and proof now beat a glossy feed every day of the week. I specifically mentioning the danger of design-first branding to the mechanics of systems thinking, by laying out how to build an identity that communicates a clear position and holds up under research.

If your visuals aren’t landing, chances are it's likely the strategy beneath them. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Vibe Tax
• 1:15 Strategy Before Design, Always
• 3:40 Lost Trust When Brands Look Empty
• 7:50 Systems Over Aesthetics
• 12:20 Rebrands, Risk And Long Games
• 18:10 Design-First Branding Is Broken
• 23:45 Authenticity, AI And Sameness
• 28:50 Enterprise Vs Solo: Different Plays
• 33:40 The Trust Economy Arrives

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

You're listening to Brandon Butler, straight talking, occasionally in your face, no BS, branding podcasts, 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 brand and design agency, your one and only. Hey hey, how are you all going this week? It's been heavy this past month, a little bit heavier than normal from my art from my perspective, anyway. So I just want to sense check to make sure that uh everyone is okay. But today, you know, because business as usual, we I want to kick off to talk about, I guess, the vibe tax, this is what I call it, but it's pretty much how starting with visuals, which a lot of people do still, unfortunately, is essentially a red flag if you don't have a strategy. Now, a lot of people see strategy as different things, and a lot of people throw it around because it's kind of like the buzzword, but essentially strategy is a plan, kind of. It's the way you get to the plan. But without a strategy, and this is for everything, you need a creative strategy, you need a verbal strategy, you need a content strategy, you need a marketing strategy, but it's essentially like what you're intending to do as you move forward. The plan is putting that into action. So the strategy is the thinking, and then the plan is how you're going to do it. So essentially, when we're talking to people, they want to update their visual identity because it's the thing that people see, right? But the thing is there's a tax that nobody talks about. Like I said, I call it the vibe tax. I have a lot of taxes, I have a bullshit tax as well. So if someone's a bit more problematic, they're slapped with a bullshit tax. But basically, what I consider a vibe tax is you, I guess it's what you pay in lost trust. So when your brand looks good but says absolutely nothing, which is what we're seeing at the moment. And so when your brand looks amazing, which there are some killer brands out there that look great, if it doesn't have any substance, then that is all it is. And people don't remember the visual identity. They might go, oh, you look great, and it's great for recognition purposes, but if there's nothing underneath it, they're getting wiped now. Because we're seeing designs just come and go and trends come and go, and that's what people are looking at. You're going to miss the substance underneath. So what I want to do is really drum home the importance of getting to that depth because we're now in a consumer market where aesthetics are kind of disappearing. Even as me as a designer, like I'm designing more for I guess it comes from it's not about designing visuals, it's about designing the system. It's about designing the plan because design is more than just visuals. Design is how things work. It's architecture, it's engineering, it's, you know, all of the things that make things work. So you want to make sure that that is in, that is in place. And for us, it's like designing the brand identity system. We're all about system development. Because pretty brands are people are just scrolling past them. They don't even, they're not even resonating anymore. And I think I know why. So in 2026, what I can say, I've actually said this way sooner, but for this year specifically, I would say that aesthetics without, I guess, the guts underneath is just like rolling a shit and glitter. I always say that, but it's like, you know, something looks amazing, but you haven't fixed the core of what you need to fix. It's just making something look nice, but still, it's still broken. You know, it's with like a person without going to therapy. It's essentially the same thing. You can look as nice as you want in a brand new outfit and some new hairstyle. But unless you're going to fix you, nothing's going to change. And so that's what we really need to look at because we're seeing people going through all of these rebrands, but they're not actually fixing what needs to be fixed. And I'm going to tell you straight, so many people say, it's a transformation, you know, go from here to here. That's not a transformation, it's just a movement, right? Like, and I'm not talking about movement, movement. I'm talking like a shift. You know, you go from here to here. Great, you've ticked a box. That's not transformation. Transformation is really in deep, in deep, in depth strategy work. Like it is hard. Like you should feel like it's a gamble. It when you when you make a change, it's putting something on the line. So everyone talks about the uh mental blank coming to me. Um, oh my gosh, I've forgotten the name of the bloody brand. Oh, come back to it. It'll come back to me. The bloody car brand. Mental oh Jag, you are. Oh my god, that just slipped my mind. Anyway, so when Jag came out and did their rebrand, everyone was like, it's horrible, blah, blah, blah. And I mean, obviously, first reactions mattered. But do you know what? I really respected their game there. Because we're still talking about it now. So, whatever that was, the work did its job. But I genuinely believe that that wasn't in long enough to make good traction. I'm gonna say that because I remember when the Kia brand first rebranded, and Kia rebranded and I thought it looked rubbish. I hated it. I mean, it's you know, clever, you know, symbolic stuff and it's it's design subjective, but I did not like it at all. I was wrong because where the brand is now, that logo is perfect. So, this is what I mean by we can all give our opinions on things, but unless you know the strategy that sits underneath, you are jumping to conclusions because you don't know what the long-term plan is. Now the brand logo, the brand itself and the logo is awesome. Like we see that they've moved into that futuristic kind of next era of car styling and design and the electric kind of vibes of the just the shape of the logo is synonymous with the shape of the brand and even the it's kind of like a chrome, like it's just it just really works. And I'm like, damn. So it's I'm very cautious before I judge uh a brand identity. Everyone always comes in with like, this looks shit, this looks, and I'm like, hang on, you don't know what the conversation is behind the scenes, you're only seeing the first iteration. Like, there is a lot here we need to look at. So, this is what I try to be a little bit more nuanced in the way that I would break down, I guess, criticism or opinions on a rebrand without actually knowing what's going on behind the scenes because they wowed me real good. And I don't think Jag had a chance to wow anyone. That was a whole conversation. There's issues with that, but you know, that's a story for another day. But what I will say is that it's what's broken is design first branding. And I think that we used to be able to get away with that really well, but not today, because more and more people are coming online. It's it's we've gone from the day where people have migrating online, whereas just like you just live online. And that's just the way we are now. So the assumption that if it looks professional, it is professional. Um, that works. It's important that you still need to obviously look the part, but it's so much deeper than that now. And we're watching as people aren't putting aesthetic first. I mean, you still have to attract the audience. It's really there's a strategy, there's a strategy, there's a strategy involved here, I should say. It's not just about here, we're gonna, we're gonna just make it look crap. It doesn't work like that. There is a strategy involved in making it look authentic. Authentic content, so it just works. So there still needs to be some kind of consistency and some cohesion that happens with the brand, but we're definitely not looking at like spending hours curating an Instagram aesthetic so it looks amazing. It's almost, it almost feels unreal now. And not unreal in a good sense, like inauthentic, real, unreal kind of vibe. So I guess that elevated aesthetics has now become, I guess, a substitute for good thinking. And now we bring in the evolution of AI and the exporting of thinking. Like you people aren't writing now, they're just going, here are my thoughts execute for me. And you're like, and so I guess that endless scroll of um, well, I guess, good-looking brands, they all look the same because there's nothing there that's got any substance. And so this is where people are struggling now because you actually have to know what your differentiation is. How do you differ? Why should people choose you? Who the hell are you as a brand? This is an organizational thing too. So when, especially as I've we rebrand and work with brands with big companies, right? I mean, big employee amount, like you know, there's they've got big uh headcount within the business. Um, one that we're working with recently has 5,000. So you need to look at what that company culture is and what that represents. And you have to actually attack each brand very differently, or each business essentially, based on, I guess, the teams that will be working with it, the people that work there, you need to be very calculated versus a single solopreneur to a 5,000 employee business is a very different execution strategy. So you have to understand how that's going to work. But we've confused looking trustworthy with being trustworthy. And that's an issue. And this is why we're in a bit of a trust economy as I've been pushing through for the last, I don't know how long, like it's been a couple of years now. This isn't an I told you, so it's just I'm sick of talking about it kind of vibe. But you go back through any of the last two years and you'll see that it's all there. But really, it's like when you're bringing in things that that look fake and sound fake, of course, people aren't going to believe you when it feels overly polished. You may have actually written that by hand, but people just want natural conversation. It's almost like steering anti-professional now. And that's why we're seeing the the TikTok style videos where people are just walking in the street. And, you know, it's it's you have to have a style and an approach. And that's what's kind of working now because it feels authentic. And that's what you need to figure out for how you would approach a strategy like that and what type of strategy would work for a huge or huge, you know, style business versus a solo printer style business. And that's when amazing content marketers and digital marketers and people in that space come in alongside us. So we need to look at, I guess, uh, why it's broken and why audience have learned to well, I guess they pattern match. There's pattern recognition going on. And people have seen too many brands under deliver, like a lot under deliver. And I think the visual aesthetic now is really just it kind of, like I said before, it makes people feel like it's it's not real. And I think that that's you still need to take pride. Obviously, we are still getting, we still do really great work, and people really want that, and it's you need it, but also there's an element of inauthenticity that you kind of need in in unison with it, like bringing in stories and behind the scenes and depending on the business, I should say. That's an approach that the the business depends on. But that that's a strategy, right? What works best for your type of business? How are you going to execute it? And what's the best way to do it? And it's not always visuals. Actually, I can hand on heart say that, which is why we are a brand studio, because sometimes we won't be visual first, and that's an important thing that we need to mention. So when you look at it like it looks too good, which sometimes people can say, it can also become like an objection. And so I guess your audience isn't it's not unsophistication, like that's not, that's not what it is. They're not unsophisticated in the slightest. Zero. Oh, actually, the polar opposite. They've just people are just over being burnt. They're over the looking good and not delivering kind of vibe. We had a big era happen during COVID where a lot of people sold their soul online and well, not necessarily sold their soul, but sold these frameworks and people like I call it almost like a get rich quick scheme. We saw people saying, you know, earn a million dollars in with this a$9 friggin' PDF. And we've seen people really get done for that. And so what happened then is that those people that were selling you that PDF were actually profiteering off you buying that PDF, whether or not their frameworks actually worked or not. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not lumping everyone into that. There were some good people in that space, but unfortunately, it's like the brush has been tainted across that whole space. So people are very cautious on what they want to buy. And if there's nothing else there to back it up, people are doing more research now to find you. So visuals are great, but they're not going to sell it. There needs to be way more information for people to search and gouge you. So by the time gouge you, like pretty much just like you go through everything and understand who it is that who you are, what you do, what you're about who here for. And if they can't get that from your vibe, then they are not buying from you. And so that's where I think the reframe really is now. It's what people think versus what you actually are. And so that's where people are really needing to tackle. So I've been trying to say it's positioning because it is an audience, because it is all of these things are part of a brand identity, by the way. So your audience positioning, psychographics, so you know, not just the ASL, you know, age, sex, location, the demos. It's really like, what are their fears? What are their desires? You know, we're looking at really deep emotional drivers and I guess detractions from what they need. And with that comes skill set. A lot of people are like, you know, what are the pain points? What keeps them up at night? And it's like, that's such no, they don't even know. That's the problem. A lot of the time, these people don't know, and it's up to you to kind of sense check. And that in itself requires a lot of work. So the vibe as well. So looking good, the vibe doesn't always equal to trust. And I think that people need to know that it's that's trust is so much deeper than that. It's like you wouldn't just walk up to someone in the street that has a really good outfit on and be like, hey, let's be friends. Here's$10,000. Well, you know what I mean? It's just it's wild that people would assume that. And so we need to think, I guess, if we look premium, we'll attract premium clients. I mean, yes, but also premium clients are probably the most skeptical of all, and they are diving into what they spend their money on. So when we look at, for an example, I'm just trying to scan through my head then. I've done a past email on this before. Um, Chanel. We look at Chanel and we look at all their visuals, and we see obviously high-level models. We see them with celebrities a lot of the time. It's very luxury-driven visuals in terms of what they're wearing, the environment that they're in, and how they place that ad. All of it has been design specific. This is the design aspect, right? And not just the design of the actual creation that you see, the design of the environment that they're trying to depict in what you see. So if they're showing you a woman lying on a lounge with jewelry, diamonds all over her, you're instantaneous. There are so many things going through your head here. You're saying luxe, rich, you know, luscious, uh high quality, you know, all of these things are coming into your mind. And they these are the associations that are coming from this curated space. But not only from a visual point, you go into an actual Chanel store, they've got a dorman at the door. So you know you need to be of certain style to be able to walk in that door. They are showing you that they are expensive. Even the way that they price their things. For example, if they're going to put their prices online, they don't put the decimal point. It's just a whole figure. There's these tiny little nuances that they do in order to make themselves a lot more luxurious in terms of being, you know, a high caliber, elegant kind of brand. And it's these micro details that matter. And it's not just in the visual identity. All of the things that I just explained then are environment, like in terms of, well, it's not environmental. Well, it is, it's environmental design, but it's also curated specifically. So the model choice, it's the clothing that they wear, it's the, I guess, the positioning of the of the place and the environment that they're actually shooting in. So where was the photo shoot done? Photographers are so important in this space as well. Having a good photographer, the type of photography that it is, the colours that they're wearing, the mood that it's setting, like all of these things are so much more than visuals. They've they're part of the visual aspect, but it's not just a design. And that's what I'm trying to get people to understand as well. So if we're looking, I guess it's you will get the attention from the visuals, but it's clarity in what you talk to and the commitment that will get your people in. And this is what we're seeing at the moment. So I think when we look at brands like Chanel, they also have a huge amount of followers that probably will never buy from them, but they respect the brand or the brand has this status that they want to buy. Now, this is where brand matters, because they have managed to make themselves look and be so superior as a brand that they've become a whole part of pop culture. You know, if you're walking around with those two C's on a handbag, people know exactly what it stands for, which is why people buy knockoffs, because they want to be associated with what that brand stands for. That doesn't come from a visual identity, that comes from everything else that's baked under the visual identity. So the visual identity is answering the brief to all of those things and associations of what that brand stands for. That means the way that they speak, where they place their ad. And where the placement is really important too. If you're a really high-caliber brand, where you position yourself, what locations that you have are hugely important. You know, you will see that there's like a designer area in every city, in a specific part of the city. And once you're there, it's almost like design, you know, the Madison Avenue, for instance. You know that that's where those high luck stores are. So if you're someone that positions yourself in a completely different area with a different demographic, it may not skew the same. And that's why placement is hugely important. This is where marketing comes in, you know, your five Ps or 4Ps or 7P's or whatever they want to bloody call it these days, price promotion people, all of those things. It's so much deeper. And I talk to people who have never done this work before, and they'll go, I've done this work, and here is my, and no shame, by the way. They may be a really good hairdresser and they've built a business and the business is really great, but all of this brand work, that stuff a lot of the time comes later on down the track. And like I said, each different type of brand work will be different depending on the business that you're working with and the type of direction that that business wants to go in. Whether they want to be high luxe, you know, like Chanel and appeal to those same clientele that they do, positioning matters. How you price yourself matters. What you look like matters, who comes there matters. And all of those things are baked into a strategy. The same thing is if you don't want to be one of them, you maybe want to be, you maybe want to be, you may want to be like trendy and urban. And so you may position yourself more like the inner west or something where all of those people go more vibey, more culture, more street kind of vibe. And how you design will depend on that. And this is with the problem. People build the business and then the brand is done, then the business shifts, but then you need to marry up the visual identity to move with wherever it is that you're going. That's when people have rebrands or refreshes. And so when people are starting with the design, so sometimes I'll always say, just kind of start the business. If you're at the very early stages, it's like just start the business, see how you're kind of gravitating, build the bit the build, the business is still being built. God, I can't even speak today. The business is still being built, the brand is still being built, regardless of if you have this big, flashy eye. Identity. Sometimes the most simplest identity is the easiest thing because you can then change it and morph it into whatever way you want to go. And sometimes, a lot of the time, a visual identity could be the thing that's cracking people as well. So if they've got an amazing business and they've created this really cool visual identity, but it actually doesn't answer where they want to be and what they stand for, or someone's done the strategy wrong because they don't know how to do strategy and they've created this, they've created an urban, beautiful kind of street vibe for their hairdresser and it looks amazing, but they're actually trying to target these people over here that Chanel targets. And you're not going to attract them because the branding is off, the visual identity is off. And so that's where people need to understand the depth of the strategy itself and what the intentions of the strategy are is personality. Kind of brand personality you have. That's so important. A lot of people can't answer it. How do you differentiate? A differentiation, for example, would be that one of those hairdressers would be street vibes and you know, cool urban, I'm in in a west versus high luxury, you know, luxurious, elegant, high market, very different aesthetic, very different vibes. How you would then brief that in completely changes the game. Too many people starting with the design, because the design's fun. I get it. I'm in it, I do it, but the design is also answering something. And if you haven't got those things down pat, you're not answering the question. Another thing to take into consideration is the consistency of it. So while I did say authenticity, um, of creating things that are a bit more, I guess, relaxed, you still need to have a foundational source. You still need to be using the same branded assets. You still need to, like if you're doing a reel, for instance, where you're face to camera, you still want to be using your brand colors and you still want to be using your fonts and things. You still want people to assimilate those assets of your brand. And I like to say that some people are always going on about the logo, but I sometimes think that your brand font and that your colors are probably more important a lot of the times these days because people are going to social media to engage with brands in real time. Logo sits up in the top left. I mean, obviously an identifier, still important. It's like a name to a person. But it's like when you go and you talk about a friend, you're not really referring to them as just being someone, you know, you're explaining who they are as a person. You're saying who they, what they like, what they're about, you know, what their interests are. You're not going, oh, that's, you know, that's Tara. That's her name. That's obviously how you identify her. But then everything that you explain them by is everything that they do. It's the substance underneath. That's brand. The name, logo, if you're talking about, you know, your brand name and logo is the identifier, like my name. That's how you identify me. And all of those other things are who I am underneath. How you explain people to other people is the brand depth, right? So rocking up with a really good identity or just a few funny things doesn't give depth. Like people want to know what you stand for. People want to know what your values are. People are putting their money behind things that they believe in. Like, I cannot stress this enough. On the weekend, I just pulled my money out of three different subscriptions because of what they stood for. So that's just me as a consumer, but you go and look at the stock market, and a lot of these things are correlating with boycotts. And that's just some side. Obviously, you know, it depends on where you sit and in terms of where you put your money. But I can tell you now, there will be a time where it will move and it will shift. And just like the tipping point, the main you'll have your early adopters, mainstream, and then boom, whole society will move over. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, I spoke about the generational wealth gap. Um, or the generational, what is it, the great wealth transfer? Sorry, where in the next decade we're going to see a huge mass of money move hands from boomers into millennials and Gen Gen Z. And it's something like$62 to$84 trillion. With that comes a value alignment and a value purchase. And if you haven't shifted or shown any substance as to who you are as a person, you're going to miss out on that next stage of business when people are spending money with those that they trust. And if you haven't built that trust, you're just not going to get, you're going to start when everyone else is starting, essentially. So I think uh COVID really did a number on a lot of people. It really shifted the way that people consumed things and the way that they uh, I guess, engaged with brands and what they expected to hear from brands. At the moment, we're seeing big shifts happen yet again. We're watching people politically align with brands that are standing true to what they believe in. And that's something that people need to take into consideration as well. Do you always have to do that? No, I would say it depends on the brand that you have. However, I think if you're uh standing on people, will always do their research. So if there's any shifty stuff going on in the background, people are gonna find out. Um, but I guess you want to make sure that where am I looking at? I don't want to, I'm trying to go, I've totally gone off script, by the way. Do it every week. But I want to make sure I'm not uh confusing you. But yeah, you want to make sure, okay, I completely jumped over about five things and I'll go back up. You want to make sure that your design expresses a clear position. So, like I said before, with the two different hairdressers, they would definitely scream a certain message, whether you wanted them to or not. And that's what I mean by if you did not want to target, say inner west, but you looked like the inner west, you're going to target the inner west. And then people go, I don't know why I keep attracting the wrong clients. Gonna say it's either what you're saying or it's what you look like. And unfortunately, you need to fix it. And with that comes going in, and that's where the real transformation happens. What is it that I need to do? What am I trying to achieve from this business? This stuff's hard. Really finding what it is that you do and what you want to align with is hard because with that comes a loss of income at some stage. Because, like we did a massive brand, you know, re-maneuver repositioning. I am so in alignment with what we're doing now and I feel so good about it. But that took two years of repositioning. You had to unlearn, relearn, figure out which audience you wanted to target, change the messaging, lose the audience that you'd built, build build another one, and re-educate the audio, the audience again and try new ways of doing things. You will get people that bridge, there'll be bridges. But if you are completely moving into a new space or you want to target someone, you need to really double down on what it is you do. And you will always lose people from that because you will move away from something that someone wanted to do. If you're okay with that, that's fine. But if that detracts from the original mission of why you were in business. So some people really lose themselves when they try to go more, I guess, income-driven and make more money, fine if you want to do that. However, with that can come a loss of integrity and a loss of values for some people that have stood by for other reasons and they may drop off. The same thing is if you've shifted and you want to target higher caliber clients or someone in a, you know, as you grow and you get more experienced, you want to be talking to different kinds of audiences. You will lose those folks that may be there at the beginning. It's just the natural progression of things. Just make sure I would say that that everything that you do is with integrity because people understand growth. They understand scaling. They know that. However, if you're completely dropping off like Witchery did, should I wrote, I did a thing on that. But yeah, Witchery really just kind of like ended and were like, we're not doing this anymore. We now target these guys. And they had like a whole, it was a whole pushback. I think it may have simmered down now, but it was not great for them. They should have, they did a really bad brand launch. So the brand launch also matters. So I guess with us specifically, it's that, you know, we want to make sure that the design is always expressing that clear position. You want to look at it and go, yep, that's cool. You also want to make sure that when you are promoting things, that it's amplifying trust. It is speaking to the things that you do. And you could naturally get behind a camera like this and be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, talk about what you do without reading from a script. And if you can do that, then that also builds trust because people know that you're not scripted. I find talking in reels quite difficult. Uh, not because I don't know what to say, because I say too much. So I don't find short form fitted fit suits. We're gonna change the whole word completely. I don't find short form suits me for meaty, deeper, nuanced subjects. So I need to find a way that can get me into longer form because I am a big longer form person, and that's where our clients come from, obviously. And you should never use, I guess, from a from a content marketer perspective. Um, you can go and listen to Kim James, who did uh podcast, who I did a podcast with last year. She's amazing. Uh, she talks about this a lot, but it really is just like, you know, it's like a funnel. You kind of want to take people, the perception set online, you're kind of building that rapport. This is who we are, this is what we do, this is what we about. And when people are ready, you kind of move them into that next category. That's when they'll start to look at the deeper stuff, you know, what you've done, what the process is, you know, and you should always have that stuff going out as well. But like that's when we move from social media to the website and they start reading the blogs or they start listening to podcasts or they start reading emails, and then naturally it's a progression into moving into um, you know, to a sale. But it's it's a proper, you know, avenue and that can take longer these days. So that's that's something there that is talked about with building trust and what that what that looks like for you specifically. But I guess we always have a look at the uh I'm looking at this, I'm like, this doesn't even make sense, but it does. The nine post test and Cherie from Digital Picnic talks about this a lot, but it's like, could someone tell who you are and what you do based on the nine post, like the nine tiles on your Instagram page? All of those things should summarize exactly what you do within the first two seconds, especially those three pinned posts. What do they say? You know, if if people are coming and they have to figure you out, like that's too hard. I'm not doing that. Tell me who you are, bang. And that's why people will view your profile, they'll suss it all out. If they don't like it, they'll leave. So it really needs to tell a story. Think of it like a bookshelf. You know, you've got individual books on that bookshelf, but you know, my bookshelf right over sitting over here tells you things about me. It's got design books, it's got anthropology books, it's got consumer psych books, neuroscience books, you know, things that are about me, you know, understanding mindset. Like you can get you can gauge the type of person that I am based on my bookshelf. And it's a similar thing with your Instagram. You need to do something quite similar. And so you want to make sure that that vibe is coming through there as well. You look good, but also it's clear based on the type of personality that you have, and not just you as a person, the business has, because the businesses always have a personality, it should if it doesn't. But if people aren't on board there, that chances are they're not going to be. So you will have to try harder and also to see your stuff. I know that we try and we do a lot of things to make sure that people see us, but if it's not impactful and it's just a rehash trend or you know, it seems stupid, people are just not, they're just not going to engage in it. You want people to engage, so that's where the good meaty stuff comes in. So I guess if you're wondering whether your brand has that vibe problem, you need to go beyond what it looks like and understand how people would explain you to another friend. Like, what would someone say about your brand? How would they describe you to someone else that may want to work with you? These are the things you've got to lock down. So it's not really a complicated thing to figure out when you when you know. So it's the process of of going through that, which can be quite difficult because it does feel really confronting. But when you find it, oh my god, everything just goes so everything I'm doing now is just like, oh, that's easy bang, easy bang, easy bang. And I never thought I'd get there. And every time I'm like, this is it, wasn't it? This is it, wasn't it? When you know, you know. And so that process took a lot of time. And I mean, if you work with someone, obviously, it can it can be a lot quicker. So I worked with two different people on different things, and that real both those conversations just made the direction really clear. And I think you will know exactly what you need to do from that point forward. I guess instead of me sounding a bit preachy, um, it's not about bad design. So I'm not saying that everyone has a bad design, but it's about the design doing the wrong job. So if the design isn't serving its purpose of the strategy, then the design is just like I said, it's a shit rolling in glitter. But the vibe, and a lot of people go, it's not about the vibe, it totally is about the vibe. I don't care what anyone says. Like you have to kind, you have to, you have to vibe with it. And a vibe, when I say vibe, I'm not like just it looks nice and it feels like you, like it has to feel right to buy from them. Otherwise, people won't buy. That's why people do research. If the when the vibe finally goes, yep, that's it, that's when the trust has been ticked. Enough for them to say, okay, I want to talk to this person, or I want to book in at some time to chat, you know, or they buy, you know, whatever that is. But you need to also make sure that there is more substance. That is where we're going. People want more substance. In fact, I had a conversation with my sister this morning and they were talking about Taylor Swift and how my niece kept asking for more Taylor Swift things. Has Taylor Swift done anything new? And I said to my sister, Isn't it funny how the younger generation almost look at people as like a narration, like an ongoing story? It's like a sitcom. They see you as a sitcom. And every day that we open our phones, someone's life is it's almost like their own little sitcoms. So you need to look at it like that. If someone's watching your sitcom, what would that be? Many people have used that as an example, actually. It's not me who's thought of that, but I just thought that was funny and it reminded me of my niece this morning. And so the goal is about coherence. Everything needs to be working. If you have a great visual identity and the substance underneath doesn't work, it won't work. It's not gonna work. So it's all about that, you know, coming together with the strategy and the design and making it work, and not only just the strategy and the design, but the whole experience, which is why marketing matters. Brand marketing is important to maintain who the brand is, and then obviously the marketing aspect is getting people to connect with you, whether that's through a product or that's through. By the way, brand and product are different things. That's a whole different podcast episode. But your brand can essentially sell the product, or the product can sell the brand. It did you can that we'll look about that, we'll talk about that another time. But anyway, I guess this episode feels like if your visuals aren't landing, you probably aren't getting the job. Or if the visuals look amazing, then the strategy underneath didn't fit to begin with. So there's lots of different things there. A lot of the times, visual identities don't actually need to be fixed at all, and it is a fact of needing to re-maneuver the strategy that sits underneath. But anyway, you don't need to strip back and start again. That's not what I'm telling you to do at all. I think a lot of people think they do need to do that, and that's why we do audits here. That's not a sale, that's just a general, you know, saying. But we do we make sure that we go through everything and go, okay, this is working, this is this is not working, this is okay, that's the problem. And we focus solely on that part. We're not gonna go and completely revamp something that we don't need to. That's way one, way too, way too much work. But if we can do that job really well and it wins from the back of that, success. Anyway, that's today's. We're doing like a maneuver into the design week next week. But that's what I want people to think about is if you're thinking like something isn't working, trust me, it's not your Canva graphics. And if it is your Canva graphics, then you need to figure out what the strategy is saying and how you need to marry those two up. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Otherwise, I will chat to you next week. Did you like that episode? Hope so. Because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you listen on and rate and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at you want to AU on Instagram or head to www.youwananonly.com.au