MARKETING: Understanding and Evolving Your Brand w/ Brand Advisor Jackie Bebenroth.

Ever wonder how the world of branding and positioning works? Prepare to be enlightened as we chat with Jackie Bebenroth, a principal and Brand Advisor at Muse, who's a seasoned professional with over 25 years of experience under her belt. Jackie shares her insights on the evolution of branding and the necessity of understanding a brand's purpose for creating lasting relationships with clients. She unravels how positioning has grown from competitive strategies to how a brand can solve problems for its customers.

We delve into a detailed conversation about the importance of a cohesive brand strategy and the repercussions of a misalignment between the brand and its leadership. Jackie highlights how a consistent brand presence across all customer touchpoints is crucial, and shares practical advice for entrepreneurs and executives, helping them grasp the bigger picture of their businesses. As we explore the journey of understanding and evolving your brand, you'll learn about Jackie's techniques for identifying a brand's strengths and opportunities, and tailoring customer experience to maximize their potential. This episode promises to equip you with a clearer understanding of how to evolve your brand with precision and confidence.

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Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

And now taking care of business, your hosts Craig Mohen and Shye

Craig Moen: 0:08

Welcome to Business Owner's Radio, episode 235. Our guest today is Jackie Bebenroth, principal and Brand Advisor at Muse, where they help leaders break through the limitations of perception and determine their brand's real underlying value. Having positioned over 80 brands in 20 years, jackie helps leaders identify and evolve their true purpose and mission in times of change.

Shye Gilad: 0:35

Good morning, Jackie. Welcome to Business Owner's Radio.

Jackie Beberoth: 0:38

Hi Shy, Thanks for having me.

Shye Gilad: 0:40

Yeah, we've been really excited for this conversation. It's been a while since we've taken a deep dive into the world of branding and learning how that's evolving and changing, and certainly wonderful to have someone with your expertise. But before we go all the way down that path, tell us a little bit more about your journey and what led to you founding Muse, your agency, and how you got started in this area.

Jackie Beberoth: 1:07

Absolutely so. I love branding and marketing. I've been in this business for over 25 years and I grew up as a copywriter. So the first half of my career I was really committed to understanding how to tell the stories that sold the products and services of our clients and then, as I sort of grew more tenured in that, I was really curious about brand narratives in particular, so how companies determined how to best connect with their audiences at a more strategic and broad level. So I started my business about 12 years ago, not just to think about what a brand looks like from a visual standpoint. You know a lot of people associate branding with logo development. I was really fascinated with the art of positioning and helping brands communicate at a higher level to better connect with their audiences, and that's what my firm does now.

Shye Gilad: 2:12

So let's talk about that. So, when we think about positioning, we're thinking of the marketplace, and how do we fit in against? Well, I like to think of it as not just against competitors people that do similar things to us but I like to think of it as, on a broader level, of how we fit in against the competing options that the customer has to solve the problem that they run into when they're trying to make progress in some way that would cause them to hire us in the first place. Tell us in your own words, how has your thinking on positioning evolved, and can you give us some examples of what that looks like?

Jackie Beberoth: 2:45

Sure. So your brand positioning really is, in essence, what you stand for as a company. And so a few years back I was really engaged with the idea of Simon Sinek's Golden Circle framework and I don't know if your listeners are familiar with that. It's one of the top, most watched TED Talks. It's well worth your time. It's called Start With why, and the idea is a brand narrative has three things what you do, how you do it differently and, ultimately, why you do what you do.

Jackie Beberoth: 3:20

And Simon Sinek advocated for a purpose driven brand, meaning you should really define what your purpose is, your value, in order to really create brand affinity and long term relationships with your clients. The idea is people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and if someone decides that they share your values your brand values that they're going to be a long term customer and you will not only achieve new customer acquisition but your customer lifetime value will go up. So we use the Simon Sinek framework here at Muse to help first organize the narrative in those three parts what, how and why and from there we look outside the organization to see how that particular narrative aligns or is different from competitive sets. So it's really fascinating work and it does involve a lot of discovery deep dives interviews. We require our clients to have curiosity as they engage with us.

Shye Gilad: 4:29

You know, it's easy to see how often we have this experience and entrepreneurship of being the accidental entrepreneur, where we develop an expertise doing something and then an opportunity presented itself and we started out on our own. You know, we made that change for different reasons. Maybe we want to be our own boss, maybe we always had this vision of owning our own business. And I wonder how many times you run into that where you see a business owner who's definitely had some success the business is making good progress. When you ask them that first question about why, about that purpose, if they struggle initially to define it because maybe they haven't even taken time to think about it.

Jackie Beberoth: 5:13

Yes, I see two different types of entrepreneurial clients. One is the client that built their entire business around their why and they struggle to scale because they're so committed to that why it's hard for them to really kind of get beyond it and read between the lines. So I see that in certain circumstances. And then I also see entrepreneurs that have built a business that has grown organically over time, that their why has shifted and so they're kind of in this process of seeking out their true identity. You know they're in an identity crisis and in fact we used to call our service brand therapy for that reason.

Craig Moen: 5:55

Jackie, stepping back for a second and looking at brand evolution over the years and what really meant to people decades ago and what it means today and how we've evolved. Obviously, brand is come forth as a major spotlight for businesses and perceptions. Not so much in the past we're dealing with thousands of brands today, in decades ago, we're dealing with maybe hundreds. What have you seen evolve over last decade that business leaders should be aware of?

Jackie Beberoth: 6:29

Well, that's a big question from a branding perspective. I can speak in depth from a marketing perspective because we've seen marketing tactics grow Over the years. You know that's what makes marketing such an exciting industry to work in there's always something new, there's always a new way to market, versus back in the Don Draper madman days, where there was like TV, radio and billboards. And so now that you have all of these touch points in so many ways to reach your customer, it's even more important to present a cohesive position and a powerful brand presence. Because if there is disconnect among those different marketing tactics across that landscape, it's going to incite confusion, skepticism. You're going to lose trust, right. So brand strategy has become more important in that regard, in that you have a strategy and you flow it through all your different channels so that you're showing up in the world as a confidence, clear and really consistent brand presence.

Craig Moen: 7:38

There's some great examples where that brand has been developed and it flows consistently into the marketplace and into the public. And then we have some of those leaders of those brands having their own brand that they're managing, which may be in conflict and that provides great entertainment For all of the industries. To see the leadership not being aligned with the brand must drive the brand managers crazy and that have you seen this happening in some of your clientele?

Jackie Beberoth: 8:13

Oh yeah, and this is especially common and perhaps some members of your audience can relate with entrepreneurs who aren't growing with their brands. So maybe the business has taken on its own life and it has sort of grown and evolved what it stands for and what's important to that team and that culture and the entrepreneur is still stuck in like what was true for them five or ten years ago, and so we see this misalignment happen and that is very troublesome. It's not a top down, but it is a requirement for the leadership to really buy into the brand and demonstrate it on a regular basis.

Craig Moen: 8:56

And I know that you've got a focus area in productive distancing techniques. Tell us more about that and what it means and how is it implemented.

Jackie Beberoth: 9:07

Sure. So I've branded over 80 businesses and this could be a combination of building new brands and evolving established brands. So I've worked with over 80 brands and last year I just took a step back and I thought, you know, thinking through this collection of strategic work, what are some common things that have come out of this? What are some common obstacles that I see my clients running into? And I would say the one thing that bubbled to the top was the phrase I'm too close to it, and it's really interesting you know that phrase. I'm too close to it.

Jackie Beberoth: 9:46

If an entrepreneur believes that about their business because they're in it and they can't get out of it. Enough to say, read the label on the outside of the jar, so to speak. That creates a sense of anxiety for change. It also creates almost like a commitment to the status quo Right. So I looked at that and I said you know what? What we do as an agency is help brands evolve with clarity and confidence, but the techniques that we use to do that are actually the art of helping an entrepreneur or an executive pull back from their businesses enough to see it with a new big picture perspective. And so, from there, once I realized that I thought, oh well, what are these techniques? So we have three main techniques that we use at news to help our clients see their businesses more clearly with a more big picture view.

Shye Gilad: 10:48

So I'm fascinated about this idea of creating some distance between your identity as a business owner and the identity of the brand itself. Right, so it can scale beyond you. I love that concept, so can you give us an example of what are these three ways that you think about it and how do you put it into practice?

Jackie Beberoth: 11:07

So the first thing we require from our clients is we want them to buy into the idea that Great brands start from the inside out. This may or may not be true with startup companies, but for established brands that are at sort of a growth stage in their life cycle, we start inside. A lot of brand companies will actually look outside the business first, like, ok, what is the market demand right now? Let's go after that. Or where is the gap in the competitive set? Let's land there. And what that does is it creates this sort of like constant pivoting where you never really stand for anything because you're like chasing shiny things in your environment. You're just showing up to meet what your environment needs from you, right?

Jackie Beberoth: 11:56

So the first technique is really to start inside the business, and we interview all the key executives, we interview the employees and we ask them perception based questions about the company To gauge the common themes and discrepancies among those audience groups. So, for example, one question that we love to ask is when thinking of our company, what are the first three words to come to mind? And it's so interesting to hear the answers of that. If a brand has a solid culture and a solid position, we'll hear similar themes. If the brand is sort of lost in space and having this identity crisis will hear completely different things. So that is a good gauge of where you stand inside the company with your internal brand perception. So that is technique number one ask perception based questions to identify the strengths and opportunities of your brand inside the company.

Shye Gilad: 12:56

First, so do you mean this is to your employees and your coworkers?

Jackie Beberoth: 13:01

This is entirely internal. So we will do qualitative interviews with your executive team and then we will take some assumptions from those interviews, put them in a survey and survey the employee base.

Shye Gilad: 13:16

You've done this in some pretty large firms, so are you kind of working within a specific division typically, or how does that work for you?

Jackie Beberoth: 13:24

For our corporate clients. We typically do division-based and department-based or product-based branding. So, yes, we will take the same approach we use with entrepreneurial companies and we will apply it to a department. And so the question of when, thinking of our company, what three words come to mind? That's the number one question to ask. The number two question to ask is actually not a trick question. It's very simple. You have to ask the question what does our company do?

Shye Gilad: 13:55

It's funny because it sounds so straightforward, you know, but I can think of a lot of examples where it might not be what some of the people think it is.

Jackie Beberoth: 14:02

No, it really creates a lot of fumbling and the core discrepancy there is the category that the business lives in, and when I say category, I mean like, for example, muse is a marketing firm. We're not an advertising agency, we're not a digital marketing company, we're a marketing firm. That phrase, marketing firm we selected that category specifically because we operate in a strategic realm. I'm a principal, not a CEO, so I work in the business so that we help the business define the category. And that clears up all kinds of issues. Because, say, you're at a barbecue and you just meet somebody and they're like oh, what do you do? Tell me about your company? And you can say, oh, abc Company is a manufacturer that makes widgets right. So that, to me, is like such a simple thing that has so much power when expressed in consistent execution.

Shye Gilad: 15:04

I really love that. So I guess in that first discovery you're looking for some congruency there between what people think they do and what the company actually does, and then there's the opportunity to define or redefine that right. So can you give me some examples of how that goes?

Jackie Beberoth: 15:19

Yeah. So this is where we bring Simon Sinek's Golden Circle into play. And our next technique is really understanding. This is technique number two and it has to do with specialization. So you understand what category you do business in. Now we have to determine what it is you sell. And again, this is another fairly straightforward question that should have a straightforward answer. But quite often, especially in e-commerce or product-based businesses, there's just dozens of different products. Even in professional services, in agencies, we see this a lot because there's so many different marketing tactics. You can sell everything under the sun, right. So what we try to do is get our clients to slim down what they sell into five categories or less, or five buckets of services. Sometimes there's one, sometimes there's two, but the goal is the more you niche, the higher your specialty. The higher your specialty, the more you can charge for your service. So that is the goal of niching in. It's a specialization technique that we help clients to ultimately work smarter, not harder, by increasing the value perception of what it is they sell through perceived specialization.

Craig Moen: 16:44

I can imagine, as you're going through this process with your client and there's a lot of light bulbs that probably go off in the audience in the aha moments when someone can come from the outside and add clarity. You mentioned before being too close to your business to really see what's going on. Do you have some examples of when that's happened and how that evolved?

Jackie Beberoth: 17:09

Yes. So organizing information is just such a light bulb moment for people, and I compare this process to we call it the California classes process. So, to use this analogy, it's like if you open your closet and you have a bunch of stuff just stuffed in there, you have everything you need, but when you're getting dressed in the morning, it takes you maybe 15 minutes longer than it should because you can't find it, because everything is just cluttered. So imagine that that's your customer. If they go to your website or if they're talking to your salesperson and all they're seeing, reading and hearing is clutter, they're going to walk away because they're not going to put the effort into it.

Jackie Beberoth: 17:58

And so what we do, through productive distancing and, ultimately, brand positioning, is we pull out everything from the closet. We understand to use a Marie Kwan-Do phrase what brings them joy and what's of value to their customers. We organize it and put it back in the closet in a very refined and easy to access way so that you know the sales team can pull out you know this messaging when they need it, or the website team can understand how to build an appropriate hierarchy for the user experience based on the buyer journey. And so it's organizing this communication. If you do that upfront, in advance of applying it to any sales or marketing application, you're going to be so much better off and your team is going to be really excited. But I will tell you that process just like cleaning out a closet and all of the decisions that go into that can be exhausting and it can be uncomfortable.

Craig Moen: 19:08

I can imagine there's some aha moments and revelations and pain level that goes through this process and from a perspective of you have companies with very strong leadership, you have large opinions and so forth. What was the tiebreaker as far as the direction of the company and what's number one during these processes, do you run into any collisions on personal preferences, leadership challenges and so forth? How does that evolve?

Jackie Beberoth: 19:39

Yeah, that's a great question. So our most challenging entrepreneurial clients are family owned businesses, because all of the family is involved in the decisions.

Craig Moen: 19:51

It's like a real family, huh.

Jackie Beberoth: 19:54

Yeah, and there's a lot of emotion and passion associated with that. So we're very sensitive when we're working specifically with succession based stage companies, where we want to be very respectful of the older generation and the equity that's been built in the brand while advocating on behalf of the younger generation and their vision. So family owned businesses are a particular challenge I very much enjoy. Other than that, my recommendation is really, as an owner, to build yourself a brand committee and if you run EOS traction, that would be, you know whoever leads your marketing seat and is responsible for that and your sales seat, and it maybe should be no more than four to five people who are actively involved in the process and the decision making and that, in my experience, has led to a very productive and efficient decision making process.

Shye Gilad: 20:55

Well, jackie, we want to thank you again for giving us so much time today, certainly given me a lot to think about, and I'm wondering for our other entrepreneurs listening that are struggling with some of these ideas or maybe starting to feel a little uncomfortable just realizing what they might not know about their own firm. What's a good place for them to start?

Jackie Beberoth: 21:14

I think it's important to, every so often, go to your website. You know, as owners, we don't go to our website as often as we should, but maybe once a season. Just go and look at it with fresh eyes and if you're feeling like it's not truly reflective of what it is you're selling and the quality of the work that you're putting out into the world, it's probably time to evolve your brand in a way that reflects your aspirations. So take a fresh look at it and then maybe think about what needs to be changed.

Shye Gilad: 21:52

Yeah, that's such good advice, and I think sometimes we forget how dynamic our websites can be and how static they can quickly become if we're not paying enough attention, and that really is such a place to make a first impression.

Jackie Beberoth: 22:05

You bet.

Shye Gilad: 22:06

Is there anything else you'd like to leave with our listeners today?

Jackie Beberoth: 22:09

I think brand evolution is a necessary part of doing business if you want to grow and if you want to scale, and so my suggestion would be to perhaps find a consultant, find an agency that can help you do that. When you are feeling as though I always compare the feeling to like, maybe your pants feel a little too tight, you know you just need to maybe refresh the wardrobe a bit right, because you're outgrowing your brands and you know that's just a natural part of scaling, just like change is a natural part of life. So my business would certainly be happy to provide some free consultation on the matter, whether it's a 15-minute conversation, a quick assessment of where your current brand stands, or a referral to someone who might be able to help you, whether that's a freelancer or another consultant or happy to help. You can reach me at MuseHeadquarterscom.

Craig Moen: 23:11

Joining us in the studio today has been Jackie Bebenroth, principal and brand advisor at Muse. You can learn more about Jackie, as well as find links to her background and business, at BusinessOwnersRadiocom.

Announcer: 23:28

Thank you for joining us on BusinessOwners Radio. We hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, you can read more about each episode, along with links and offers, in the show notes on our website, businessownersradiocom. We want to hear your feedback. Please leave comments on this show or suggestions for upcoming episodes. Tell your fellow business owners about the show and, of course, you would love the stars and comments on iTunes. Till next time, keep taking care of business.