“The purpose is the soul of the brand and needs to be understood in going through a rebranding exercise.”

Most companies want their brand to be what customers want, and rivals envy. And that calls for a strong, purpose-driven brand strategy. This week on Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos, we had a fantastic conversation with Bill Kenney, CEO, and partner of Focus Lab, about aligning the customer experience with the company’s brand. Bill’s company, Focus Lab, is an established brand agency that assists B2B firms in connecting with their consumers and distinguishing themselves as market leaders. 

[01:08] Bill’s Background – Sharing his journey so far, Bill describes how he and his business partner established their company, Focus Lab, and how they serve their clients. 

[07:15] BX, CX, and PX - Bill outlines the distinctions between brand experience, customer experience, and product experience. 

[10:30] Purpose and Brand – Bill addresses the intrinsic relationship between purpose and brand. 

[14:11] Brand Strategy - Bill discusses the core tenets of brand strategy development.

[19:00] Connecting the Experience – Bill mentions how businesses should consider tying their brand to the experience they intend to give. In addition, he explores how change management and employee experience influence above said connection formation. 

[27:50] Simplicity – Bill emphasizes the importance of simplicity in delivering a comprehensive brand experience.

[30:07] Inspiration - Bill describes the personalities he admires from a business and mindset perspective and the sources of his inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Bill:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/billskenney/

Website: focuslab.agency

Mentioned in the episode:

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues: goodreads.com/book/show/28930640-the-ideal-team-player?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=0n991sancI&rank=1

Zero to One, Start Now Get Perfect Later, Shoe Dog A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, [Hardcover] Crushing It 4 Books Collection Set: goodreads.com/book/show/52373483-zero-to-one-start-now-get-perfect-later-shoe-dog-a-memoir-by-the-creat?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=w5oMqQMvmb&rank=1

The Importance of Brand & Impact on the Experience

Hey

bill Kenny is a CEO, and partner at focus lab, and it's a, it's a global B2B brand agency. And they're working with some of the world's fastest growing B2B brands to lead and inspire. And Bill's got a really great perspective. And we're talking about today, folks, how to bring brand and experience together.

And there's probably no better person to talk about this than bill bill. Thanks so much for coming to show really excited for the conversation.

[00:01:13] Bill Staikos: All right. So bill, you've got an really interesting story and background, we start off every show with. Just listen, hearing from our guests, their journey, what differentiated their career path and, some of those twists and turns.

And can you just take a couple minutes and just walk us through that?

I almost cringe saying that. What I mean by that is I was really terrible in school all the way into college until I became an art major. And then I was like, Hey, now this is a thing I can get behind. And I, I mean, I immediately went from like a C student to a pure, straight, a getting four point OHS every semester and enjoying it.

Right. That was a dynamic shift for me. Yeah. So there was a light bulb moment. There for me, like just in my life, like, okay, there's this is gonna be around me. I don't know what, to what degree. I don't know how this is gonna become a, a career per se, but that was a pretty big shift for me. And, and ultimately what has landed me kind of in this position that I'm in now.

how you're working with clients, the work that you guys

I'll just get my master's degree at another art school. And, that will give me time to like, figure out what the hell I'm gonna do. So I, I did that. But ultimately, my financial aid fell through and I did not go to that school. So that landed me in Savannah, Georgia, which is where that school was.

And I just decided I was gonna stay there and figure life out and through a series of, of years and kind of like non design non-specific jobs. I ended up meeting my business partner at Applebee's. We have a lot of fun with that internally in our company. our, the magic date at Applebee's. I met my business partner, Eric.

and he's a developer I'm, I'm now calling myself a designer at that point. Right. I still don't really know what that means. I've never worked at an agency. I'm not really designing anywhere, but just on my own for like friends and family, but that was the spawning of the business. So we meet and say, wow, we can be powerful together from a design and development perspective.

I loved designing things. He loved developing things. It was our natural kind of itch. And we went off on that journey together. And now there's a third partner and a team of 30 and you. 13 years behind us. That's such a

We gotta go do this. Like, I'm just curious cuz I'm, I've never, I'll put it this way. I've never been maybe courageous enough to go do my own thing, but I actually enjoy working for companies, but. What was that spark that you guys were like, Hey, this is it. We gotta go do this. I'm just curious.

Right. You're kind of like young and dumb. You're like, Hey, this will be awesome. I'm certainly the like ultimate optimist. And at that point I'll just, I'll speak for myself. And then I'll kind of like clarify Eric's position at, at that time. But like, I was a young single guy, no kids, no nothing.

Just kind of like. Cool. Like did the downside risk seemed very minimal to me. Yeah. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Who cares? Eric? On the other hand, although younger than me was already married and had his first child. Right. So now you're talking about, I need health benefits. Like, yeah. I can't eat ramen every day.

Like you man. So it took him a little bit longer and there became like that kind of like leap of faith, that courage moment. So we did this kind of like freelancing thing. Maybe a year or more at this, at this point, it's kind of hard to remember quite honestly. Yeah. But, it, it was stable enough that he's like, I think there really is a thing here.

Let's go for it, but because of my, I was completely unleashed and riskier nature. I just started earlier. Right. I just said like, okay, well I'll just start, you keep your real job. You'll do this on the side and then we'll make it your real job too. And yeah, it's a fun journey to think back on, actually.

[00:06:28] Bill Kenney: awesome. Yeah. Like people say like, oh, you were a freelancer. And I'm like, yeah, but I never used that word actually. Cuz I didn't even know what that meant. I was just, I was doing things on the side to make money I'd, call it whatever you wanna call it.

I didn't call it anything other than. Can I get paid yeah, no, that's awesome.

CX has been around for a long time product experience or PX. Now a lot of folks call it, which is still relatively. I wanna just hear from you. What do you think the difference is between brand experience or CX and PX?

Right. So like Disney's brand experience would be broken down into parts and yeah, sure. You could break it down into what's the actual interaction and the experience in the stores. What is it like to experience, their products, their digital products? Like you can label the hell out all those things if you want.

But ultimately it is like the, the larger brand experience. Mm-hmm what is it like to walk into a Starbucks? That's a full brand experience from the smells, the sites, the interactions with the people. So what's interesting to me is quite honestly, I had never even heard the word brand experience until prep for this interview.

Really? I seriously, no kidding. and again, that means like I'm either in a bubble or like, Again, it doesn't, maybe I'm so in a bubble that it doesn't matter. Like I've not even heard that term. I hear UX a lot. Right. Like user experience. That's closer to kind of like, even some of the work that we do.

Yeah. Brand experience is kind of like, it's like, yeah, like I breathe there. Like, yeah. It's like, of course I love it. Does it need a label?

And I'm just speaking from purely CX perspective, we do like to confuse ourselves with new jargon. And that's why I was like, I love your answer. Like it's so spot I'm in, but like, just everyone's talking about brand experience now. Like what that means. I'm like, I, I think that we're just conflating stuff and just, just to like, I don't know, maybe sell better.

I don't know what it is, but it's definitely happening out there in the marketplace. I love that. You've never heard that term before. I think that's awesome. And you're not living in a bubble. It doesn't mean that it just means that. You're not listening to all the BS that's out there in the world going

Yeah. It might be that I'm just separated from that more like enterprise jargon that's happening by the time that maybe clients come to us, we just know, and they know they need to work on brand. And they're not saying we need to up our brand experience. Yeah. They're not using that terminology yet. Maybe it'll trickle around, trickle around in a couple years and I'm like, oh my God, everyone's using that word.

For our non-marketing listeners out there, maybe I think even like the CX folks, and ex folks understand purpose, but tell us a little bit about interconnectivity between purpose and

I don't think everybody knew it as clearly as they know now. So for us. Purpose is the, that is the soul of the brand and needs to be understood in going through a rebrand exercise. Mm-hmm so we can't do our work effectively. I focus on, but if we don't know the ultimate, like purpose and soul of the business and the way you see this play out in the market, which it would be easier for people to kind of relate to is like Tesla is an easy example, right?

Like what is their true purpose? What is that purpose of the it's not to build like awesome new cars. They are doing that as a result. That's like the output, but the purpose is a more sustainable planet. Right? So they're gonna do that in a variety of ways. They're gonna do that power sales for your house, solar panels, cars, but they have like a driving purpose.

And when you have that, It makes you more relatable and it actually gives people something to sink their teeth into both externally customer side and internally team side. Right. People want to join SpaceX, cuz they're up for that purpose. They're up for that mission. We wanna go to Mars and I'll work here my whole life and maybe we'll never get there, but I will have started to propel that mission.

they're it's easy to think about sustainability purpose driven companies. Even if you think about like the Patagonias of the world. But they're proving that purpose is paramount, right? It's like you need that. If you really want to succeed or else you start to slip backwards into a commodity, racing to the bottom on pricing, like, what else are you building your brand around?

[00:12:12] Bill Staikos: Are you finding that the conversations you're having. With clients or prospects, whatever that is, or just people out there in industry. Do you find that they are clear on their purpose or is that still something that a lot of folks are coming around to and

Really because of, we're generally working in B2B tech, but of kind of like all sizes, meaning some are like seed stage. Some are all the way to like a series D they're already targeting IPO mm-hmm . So depending on where they are in their life cycle of their business, they have, or have not figured out that purpose.

What we do regardless though, is to help them clarify that maybe they know it, but they haven't captured it and verbalized it well yet. Maybe they didn't know how important that purpose was. So they've not even like shown it to the world yet. Mm-hmm or they don't know at all. And we help them kind of find that mm-hmm so, yeah.

It's I there's nobody that says this is not important. So we, thankfully we don't have to kind of like cross that bridge, sell them on that.

[00:13:20] Bill Kenney: something you were going down, right? Yeah. Yeah. They might be in a different spot.

They mean like, listen, I know purpose is important, but. I just need to get to the 10 yard line. What can you do? It's like, well, we're just not the right company for that, but that doesn't mean you're bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's

So for you, what are some of the core tenants when you're working with clients developing that, that strategy, perhaps, and what questions, equally as importantly, like what questions should leader be asking at that stage when they're like trying to create.

So I'll speak broadly in some of the strategists. I focus lab will cringe when they hear my answers, but that's cool. Cause I've disqualified myself. So when we think about strategy at focus lab, we are clear to say. We do not approach strategy by, well, let's go out and ask a hundred customers what they think this company should be.

Mm-hmm and let's test. that, that whole thing is, is further down the line and is different. That's more of a marketing testing, polling type of approach. We would argue coming back to that, like soul of the business. Elon doesn't need to go out to the market and say, Hey everybody, do you believe in a more sustainable world?

He's like, that's what I believe in. I don't need to pull you for that. You either can join my, my mission or not, but that is truly what I believe in. So we try to pull our, our, our customers back to say, no, we're not gonna go out to the market and run all these polls and interviews and stuff. We're just gonna figure out, Hey founder, or Hey, Hey business now 10 years.

Like literally, why do you get out of bed? Yes. You might have a sales product. Mm-hmm, a platform for, to help people sell a CRM, but like that's still the, that's still like the, what? Like what's the why to come back to that assignments. The next stuff start with why? Why do you exist? So that would definitely be a core tenant of strategies.

First, figuring out why do you exist? Okay. Then we would want to say. In your market. We, we would wanna look at the market, right? We're not blind to it. We don't just put on blinders. We would, we wanna see who else in the market aligns to that same why and how can we make sure that we are different from that?

Why mm-hmm to some degree there has to be to, to plug another book. I guess there has to be some sort of a blue ocean for you to kind of sit in if you really kind of want to lead that category. So for focus lab, for example, we could have just. Well, we're a brand and web shop, which is kind of like what we did for a long time.

Mm-hmm doesn't really work all that great. Or you could say we're actually a brand agency. Okay. Now you're getting a little bit carved down and strategy will help you kind of carve that down and then you get a more specific and you say we're B2B brand agency, and now you start to find your clear ocean.

So to come all the way back to your question, like strategy is meant to kind of illuminate those opportunities and you can do it in a variety of ways, sort of. There are things that we run in our strategy portion of our project. we look at archetypes, right? Mm-hmm like what's the archetype of the business.

Mm-hmm that helps us tell a narrative. Mm-hmm we look at what we call, like three core words. We have this deck of cards with a bunch of descriptive words on a bunch of adjectives, and we wanna boil call it a hundred cards down to three. Say like, okay. Your company's essence should feel magical, joyful, and, enlightening or something, that's the three words of the business.

That's again, another piece of the strategic foundation that we can build off of, to close this point so that when we go to design in communications, we're not just making things that look cool. Following trends in the market, chasing subjective, kind of. I like it. It's very much rooted in all that strategic work, which is just like really, it's a lot of like introspective thinking about the business, what it stands for, what it wants to be,

Or when do you think

Are they helpful for you when you, if you back away from that, you get back to the brand. I don't need to go ask the market. Do you think we should be B2B or B2C? That's my decision to make at that point, right? That's foundational. Yeah.

Right? Cause then it could be a little bit more feature functionality driven. Cause if here's my, why. Here's what we stand for and what we promise we will do every day for you. Then how do you start to connect? Or how do you work with clients? Start connecting the experience end of it. Back to that brand and make sure that there's no daylight between the two.

So it really, it comes back to the brand. No surprise that I'll keep pulling us back there. Yeah. Cause that's the type of company I run. Yeah. Yeah. But like you started that brand and you make sure that everybody in the entire organization is clear top to bottom all the way through, why are we here? What are we trying to achieve?

So that then when you are rolling out new features or thinking about new divisions in the company, whatever, like you have to be able to north star back to that thing. Yep. Say like, Hey, does it align to that? If it doesn't, you should be saying we shouldn't do this. And again, it has to get outside of features too.

So Starbucks is, if they're, I actually don't, I don't know what their vision is, but if I was to assume it's to create a different experience of a coffee shop than other places, then whether that is in the brewing process, how the relationship of where the counter is to the people picking up the coffee, like all things need to be measured against that idea of what they're trying to build.

And,

you said something in there, bill that I want to just kind of just double click on just for a quick second. It was around sort of this concept of making everyone sort of in the company, understand and work towards that as well. How big is sort of the change management component to all this work.

We started to create some design guidelines around that. And what that, how, how does that manifest in sort of the things that we're doing. How do you then make it real for people? Are you guys doing that as well? Or where do you see the breakdown there?

Maybe it's still looked at, let's just make up some random size companies. Like if it's a 3000 person company, And founder and CEOs kind of like, yes, marketing team. I, I approve you to do that, but like, I don't think it's gonna change much. Right. So you've already got a gap existing there because that really needs to rain down from the tarp, like top hardcore.

It needs to be, we've made this cha like, you almost need this, like. As much as you can, this Steve jobs, iPhone, onstage moment to say, this is the new us. And you're speaking to the entire company about why that matters. And it like pushing it into the DNA. It's not just, oh, like here's this new style guide.

So like, we got a new logo in some colors and like a couple like, pieces of, of communications that we're just gonna start plastering all over. It has to be bigger than. So if it's not embraced as bigger than that by leadership all the way up, then I think it falls a little bit flat. It doesn't mean it fails, but it kind of just lands more as like a, a pretty marketing lift.

And we just, we really, we try to help our customers see that. It's not that, so yeah. To answer your question, do we help them? Yeah, we, we try to preach and teach the whole way from beginning to end. This is how impactful this is going to be. This is how you should be thinking about it. We do a brand rollout presentation with our clients.

Mm-hmm before they even see any work, that's how early we're prepping them mentally for the amount of energy and effort is gonna take actually to do the rollout well that you gotta audit all your stuff. Like even the tactical portions of this, I spoke before about the emotional side. Yeah. Getting everyone pumped about it, but then there's all the tactical stuff, which is like a hell of a laundry list.

So we go through all of that with them. We tell them what to look out for. Then we do what we. What we call brand support at the back end of the project. So this is this little bridge that we've built to say, okay, now you've got your style guy. We've given you the keys to this awesome Ferrari, but you're still like, I'm very nervous to drive it.

I think I will drive it. Okay. But I'm probably gonna ding it up in a couple spots and I'd rather not do that. So we stay on with them. Cool. For a series of time, let's call it three to six months and we helped them through that whole rollout. We, we basically become an augmented kind of design brand kind of unit for them.

Mm-hmm what is great for them? , they don't have to jam it into their own team, which is, this would be all new stuff to them. Maybe they don't even have the team to do it. And we have the team not only to do it, but was actually part of that initial creation anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And at that point they have realized that focus lab is more than just design and writing and strategy.

We focus hard core on the customer experience that our clients receive as they go through this. Mm-hmm because rebranding is a hell of a journey. And if all we were doing is moving pixels and writing words, We'd be like another, the other 98%. Right. We wanna be up into that 1% to say like, wow, we have never even worked with a better company regardless of what the, the craft output is.

Is that something you guys do as well? Or how important is that part of the process?

They do not need to say, oh, I don't like those light fixtures. Oh, actually, by the way, I think it should be the green and not blue. Key parts of the project team. Key key members of the project team are there to speak for their departments if you will. Right? So you might have voice of the customer mm-hmm CMO.

So head of marketing, head of design, sometimes founder, CEO. So they're there to make sure that the companies. Kind of like collective group is spoken for, but no, I mean, you're not running it up and down the pole constantly say like, do you like this? Do you like that? Do you think we should be this ? So what you have to do then, because you haven't done that is you need to make sure when you roll it out, this is why we did this.

Mm-hmm this is why we're excited about it. This is what it's actually gonna change. This is how it will affect you. And you need to put that enthusiasm and basically all that work and thinking, et C. Into them, or what you're gonna do is you're gonna move the bus walk away and they're like, I think it's cool.

But like, I wonder why we built that, that way. Right? Like you don't wanna leave them to, to tell their own story. Yeah. Yeah. so that's where that kind of like that Steve jobs moment, if you can create it is really impactful.

Important for a long while, but maybe from a, just the importance of, and I hate to use the word channel. If you've got a different word for it, I'm all ears that is really accelerated, but customers continue to go into branches. They continue to go into dealerships. They continue to go into the store. They continue to get physical mail, right.

from the companies that they buy from mm-hmm how do you connect the dots across all of these touchpoints to ensure that there is a sort of. Omnichannel branded experience, cuz that is really tough. Well, you're working with B2B tech company, so that's a little different, right?

Web, 3.0 metaverse like, how do you now, now we're gonna go. It's not omnichannel. It's omniverse. Right. How do you think about connecting the dots across there? Is it just that upfront when you're doing the, the. Understand sort of what are the, what are the guidelines or principles that you're gonna follow and then making sure that no matter what the platform is, you're following those across or is there something

No, that's right. You're exactly. It has to be that way in a way that simplicity kind of makes it easier for everybody, cuz it can get pretty unwieldy really quick. Right? You get these big companies, you get digital team way over here, disconnected from, whatever these people are doing. So if you wanna pull it all the way back.

And you start to say, okay, our, the archetype of this company is, the Sage or the hero, or our three words are that like magical, joyful and enlightenment. If we can just continue to pin to those to say, well, is it magical and joyful to, to interact with our app? How the hell do we make it joyful? And, and, and, and enlight to.

Open up mail. Well, we better find out because if we really want this to be consistent, that's kind of like what we're going for. The companies that do that. Well, they win, right? Like apple has nailed that from both a digital and a packaging perspective. It's the same reason. I have like nine apple boxes in my closet of crap that I'm never gonna return because they have made that, that box sliding up off the thing, like their attention to detail their perfection, their craft carries across the entire board.

So it doesn't have to be this big, complicated, like, oh my God, how do I connect all these channels and get everybody on the same page? It's like, keep it simple. Stupid. Yeah. Right. Like, think about what those three words are and just live and die by them. Yeah.

[00:28:45] Bill Kenney: Like, you're like,

[00:28:53] Bill Kenney: you better believe there's psychology at play. For sure. You get companies that big, they're thinking about brand really, really deeply, I don't have the size of team where I can have four psychologists on the team in a perfect world.

That would be epic. Right. Yeah. Because a lot of brand is just pure psychology. Yeah. Totally.

[00:29:20] Bill Kenney: Yeah, so I don't, I don't know why this is, but like, if someone says, what brand books should I read?

I'm like, geez, I don't seem to have read a lot of brand books. Why is that? I almost feel like a fraud or like, what, what people in your industry do you follow? And I'm like, God, I'm kind of a fraud on that front too. So I don't have a big list of industry names, but I have a couple standouts that.

That I look up to more from like a business and mindset perspective that have been shaped me more in that regard than just other people running agencies, if you will. But a name that jumps out to me industry wise is a guy named Brian Collins. he runs Collins, which is an agency in New York city. He is the type of person that resonates with me, which is really down to earth, super humble, really genuine and authentic.

And his company is wildly talented and creative. So I can't not look at that group, that company and, and that leader and be like, damn, they're like, they're doing it well, they got it going on. So that would be in industry. There's certainly a lot of really talented people in the industry, but outside of the industry where I've gotten a lot of value.

In kind of like this, they don't know they're a mentor, but they are because I'm reading their books and watching their stuff. Patrick, Lindsay's a pretty good one for me. Stand out. I'm not sure if you've, if you've heard of him. Yeah. So he does a lot of writing and speaks at conferences, but he writes on basically similar to Jim Collins, which is this.

How do you take a, a company or a team from good to great. What are the unique advantages in human beings? That if you focus on them will make you a better human. How do you hire the right people inside of your company? And he's Patrick has written all these fantastic books that, that we've like read and leveraged actually as, okay, we're gonna follow his model.

He says to find the right team. So that book is the ideal team player to find the right team members. You, you look for these three traits. So we read that and we say, okay, those are the traits we're gonna look for. And OI it works. That's awesome. It's great. And it's not rocket science, so Patrick is a standout to me.

I can't help, but be inspired by Simon. Yeah. Yeah. SEK just the way he thinks about humans and people and how that relates to business. And so, I don't know. There's a couple name drops. Very cool. Off the top. Very

You gotta get down with. Where do you go for inspiration?

That's like, that's not me. For me to get inspired, really reading really awesome autobiographies of people, either that were business owners or were not right. Like I just read the, FL like the, the base. Yeah. For red hus. Is it bass guitar, guitar. Bass. Yeah. Yeah. Like I read his story. That's a great book actually, shoe dog, which is the Phil night book, which is the guy that started Nike.

Like that's the type of stuff that gets me. Gast up. Cuz I'm this. Sucker for the underdog, the entrepreneurial spirit, the. Find your way. So that that's the type of stuff that, that gases me on.

shoe dog is a great book. I actually read, the flea BI I love biographies around from like rock stars. And for some reason, one Uhhuh, I'm a huge chili pepper fan and listen to them all the time.

[00:33:02] Bill Kenney: you wanna know, like, what was

That's why I start off every show with, just tell me about your journey, right? Yeah. Hey bill, this is an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you coming on the show, man. It's great to get to know you a little bit and love the work that you guys are doing at focus lab and, Hey, where can people find you if they wanna get in touch?

I just locked that up everywhere. I could, because I stuck my middle initial in there. I was able kind of grab a bunch of those. So yeah. Bill S Kenny at, at basically any location company named focus lab has a variety of different handles, but if you just Google search. Cool. You'll find us.

Thanks for the gift of your time today. And, another great show folks. We're out. Talk to you soon,