In this episode of the Pipelineology podcast, Gary is joined by Stacy Thal, founder of Brand Brands Better. Stacy shares her career path from screenwriting (including working with Francis Ford Coppola, who taught her “build it up, tear it down” and that writing is in the editing) into marketing and brand strategy. She explains how she helps startups, investors, founders, and CMOs connect founder and investor ambitions with what customers actually want, drawing on experience with companies like Google, Walmart, Yahoo, and agency work for brands including LinkedIn and Samsung. Stacy emphasizes storytelling through “intensive experienced acute listening” rather than being “shouty,” citing Google Store learning that customers cared more about connection than specs, and a connected-fitness brand discovering weight loss mattered most to the market. She discusses brand blunders like Lululemon’s Great Wall stunt, her pivot to startups after repeated layoffs, her day-one process of auditing and building foundational brand strategy, and how to contact her via brandbrandsbetter.com or LinkedIn.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:27 Stacy’s Brand Mission

02:25 Coppola Screenwriting Roots

06:16 Storytelling Through Listening

08:48 Google Store Human Story

11:14 Company Values vs Market

13:28 Brand Blunders

16:23 Why Startups Over Big Brands

19:09 Day One Brand Audit

21:42 Huddle Pivot Case Study

24:07 When to Reach Out

25:43 Wrap Up and Thanks

brandbrandsbetter.com

linkedin.com/in/stacythal

[00:00:20] Stacy Thal: Thank you so much. So happy to be here with you, and happy to have a chat.

[00:00:41] Stacy Thal: Yeah, I, you know, have a, had a long and twists and turns in my career path over the years. but what I do today is I try to work with investors and founders and CMOs, mainly in the startup world, trying to connect the dots between founder and investor goals, ambitions, visions, and. What their customers, end users clients really want, which is not always the same thing.

So I try to harness all the great experience I've had over the years, the hard one experience at household names like Google and Walmart and Yahoo, and, you know, a handful of years at a proper agency where I worked with LinkedIn and Samsung and Facebook and whatever, all those name drop names. And

bring that to bear, all the tips and tricks, hard won tips and tricks that I learned there and bring that to bear for startups that are looking to beat the odds. Odds are tough out there, especially today. You know, there's just a, a sea of eye wash and so many choices, these days that you really need to be authentic and stand out.

And I try to bridge that gap.

[00:02:20] Stacy Thal: Yeah. Thank you. That's a deep cut. Yeah. Thanks for digging into my background there. Well, my ambition originally was to be a film director. My dad was a photographer in the Hollywood film industry. He was also a Playboy photographer, but that's for a different podcast.

Imagine the therapy bills from that. But, he was a Hollywood photographer and so that was kind of in my blood.

He gave that up to be an artist after a time. But, but had a, you know, a, a wonderful career in that world. And my, my family were, you know, like big huge movie buffs and sort of like always going out to the latest movies and things like that. And, but I started out in my life with my dad in that career in Los Angeles because that's the, was the hub of everything.

But we moved up to Northern California, to Marin County when I was young. And you know, Francis and George Lucas were the guys that were here, you know, and through youthful bravado and a lot of good luck and kismet, I ended up meeting him and he saw some of the writing that I did, and he ended up hiring me when he was looking to create a sort of studio system, like the old, like Orson Wells studio system where you would have like a stable of writers and directors and actors.

And so I got hired and under contract to write scripts for him and with him. And I did that for a number of years, but it was, you know, tough going. It was a long time ago where there were not a lot of content outlets. I don't think we talked about content at all. There was movie theaters and then, you know, HBO or whatever, and nobody was talking about diversity of voices back then.

So it was a tough, place for a woman to crack into the business then. But Francis, you know, a lot of people of course are focused on him as a director of the Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now, but he is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. So he taught me how to write and, you know, one of the greatest bits of advice that he gave me then was in writing, because that was my way of getting into the film industry was through screenwriting, is to build it up, tear it down, build it up, tear it down. The writing is in the editing, and I started out when, you know, beating my head against the wall of Hollywood and couldn't get in I pivoted to marketing work because I discovered that people didn't know how to write about themselves.

That they had great ideas for some kind of business, entrepreneurs, but didn't have marketing sense and didn't know how to, you know, bridge that gap between what they were offering and what the public was looking for. So that was my foundation of copywriting. That's where I started in this business of marketing and advertising.

And gratefully, over the years blossomed from there into creative direction and where I got to do some script writing and shooting of commercials and things like that. So, so I got to get that, you know, my want for that stuff out. But, but I also, you know, pivoted into and fell in love with this brand work that I do, where again, it's about getting into the shoes of the customer or end user and really putting yourself in their place in order to understand better what they want, who they are, and how you can serve them.

[00:06:14] Stacy Thal: Yeah. Yeah. It's all about storytelling, right? Whether I'm working on creating a brand for launch or a website to pivot, or campaigns to help a brand grow, or investors, you know, to help them vet their potential investees. It's all about storytelling, right?

[00:07:06] Stacy Thal: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I've been thinking about that a lot, you know, in, in this, volatile world, in this volatile marketplace with the disruptor of all disruptors, hashtag AI. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think that, you know what my. Maybe superpower value is, is intensive

experienced acute listening. So a lot less yelling and a lot more listening, to, you know, my clients and their customers to understand how to tease out that story and what it really is, you know? If you have something that somebody wants, you should be able to use your inside voice about it rather than be too shouty.

You know, it depends a bit on the brand, right? But if people want it, they're searching for it, right? And so you don't need to, I mean, I think that, you know, all the time, Gary, I, I always relate this back to my dating days, right? Is that you should be able to just go present yourself authentically as yourself.

You know, the customer, the date knows what they want, hopefully, and you either make it or you don't, right? You either, make the cut or you don't. Same with, all this marketing and advertising stuff.

[00:08:48] Stacy Thal: Yeah, I think that, you know, interestingly when I was at Google, so I was embedded at Google through an agency. I was there for about three years, and I was the creative director for in, in tandem with another creative director for Google Store, which is, you know, where the Pixel phone and eventually Nest came in.

So it's like the Apple store, but for Google products. And the story that Google wanted to tell was, you know, better camera, better this, better that. But what people were really looking for was connection, right? Is that less seeing the phone as a technical computer in your pocket. And when we would go out and talk to people, like focus group type things, what we heard time and time and time again in all the different ways was that the phone, the, this pocket computer,

they didn't want to know about all the specs. They didn't want to know why the camera was better than the Apple, you know, phone, except that it is the iPhone. They wanted to know how it worked in order to connect them, whether it was, you know, professionally, or personally mostly. And so a lot of our campaigns had to change.

You know, we went out of the gate with the assumptions from Google that they were gonna win on the specs. And what we really found there was a human story about the, the want and need to connect.

of, nothing to do with how fast the processor was or, or, or any, or how much memory it ran. None of that stuff mattered. It was how smooth and fluid and just, just immediately like, I love it. It is great.

And when we went out of the gate with that, always we're like nipping at the heels of Peloton and wanting to serve the 99%, right? Like Peloton was very exclusive, velvet rope, you know, like ripped people, sweaty, shirts off, whatever, like exclusive club. And we're like, we just want to serve the 99%. We're not all about, you know, body stuff.

We're not all about, you know, trying to have the perfect, you know, like ripped eight pack or whatever it is. We want to serve like people that are just trying to do 10 minutes in their basement before they're homeschooling their kids. And we want to show these like diversity of bodies. And not buy into like be part of the shame game of connected fitness where it's about losing weight.

And then when we went out to market, that was that, that ambition of the founder, when we went out to market, all anybody cared about was losing weight. So you had to completely, you know, pivot everything that we had the ambition to be something else that was sort of life affirming and staying away from the politics and the sociology of, you know, that you have to be a certain size or look a certain way.

But that's all people wanted. So, so again, you know, it was another pivot in storytelling, right? So how do we ride that line between not compromising what our values were as a brand, as a company, and also catering to something that, you know, was very delicate to play into.

[00:13:46] Stacy Thal: Yeah. Gosh. I feel like that happens all the time. I would have to think about that. Something just happened. I mean, we see bland, a brand blunders all the time, just today in the news. Keep it timely that Lululemon is being castigated around the globe for this stunt that they did of a yoga session

using Japanese drums and things at the Great Wall in China. And the Chinese people are like super offended by that. And I just know from working in, you know, big, huge public household name companies, what it takes to get through the approvals process. You know, it's not just one person rubber stamping something.

It's, you know, whatever this event was, this stunt, this activation that they did to garner eyes, I'm sure that that wasn't the intention was to offend the Chinese population. But they must have been working on this for months and months and months and months. And this is salespeople, you know, all the people in their marketing and their advertising departments, you know, their CMO, their CEO, all of it.

Everybody had to sign off on this thing for sure. And how it gets there is baffling to me, except for I think sometimes, you know, why gratefully I have been successful in my consultancy is that an outside pair of eyes can be really helpful. Like where you can have, you can bring in the experience and the objectivity where folks can flag stuff like that.

Because you know, I think we often drink our own Kool-Aid, right? That, that there must have been something where there's an echo chamber happening in Lululemon. They keep, Lululemon is a good one where they keep making these kinds of blunders and maybe they're sitting around and it's really Machiavellian and they're like, you know, all press is good press.

People are still buying our leggings, you know, let's, let's, let's keep messing up in public like this because we get great, you know, traction out of it. I don't think so. You know, they've been in hot water and have lost a lot of business because of it. So yeah, it's baffling how people can go through those intricate months and months and months and sometimes years of approvals process and, and come to that end point.

You know, where it's such a big public blunder.

[00:16:40] Stacy Thal: Yeah. Well, I mean the, the honest part of it is that I was having a fantastic time in agency life and, and working for these big brands. And because I was in the world riding the big wave, at the top of brand storytelling and the volatile world of silicon Valley marketing and advertising, like we're seeing today so much

I got laid off five times in 10 years. And each time I would get laid off, to fund my job hunt, looking for the next direct pay, you know, holiday every two weeks and having someone pay my 401k and all that stuff, I would go back to the consulting workers where I came from. Did that for a decade before I went in-house, you know, for the, for the next decade.

And, so I would go and, you know, scrape around for work and help. I, you know, fell into the world of startups in Silicon Valley and fell in love with these founders. You know, it's people that have fantastic ideas, but not expected to be marketers, right? And they, you know, grabbed my heart in that way and I could be of service in all the things that I was learning.

And I think that, you know, the honest truth is during the pandemic where we all had a chance, an opportunity for better, for worse, to assess like what am I really doing here? I had been laid off, you know, for the fifth time, and in a, you know, shorter period of in 10 years. So every couple of years, and here I was in the beginning of the pandemic finding myself out on the street again.

And I just. I was able to understand that, that that work with the startups when I had, you know, some space and time to really gut check like so many of us did, that that work that I was doing was way more fulfilling, interesting, varied, lucrative and plentiful. And that I would, take the chance to, to bet on me in a more permanent way and go out on my own so that I could harness all that great hard won experience that I had with those big names to bring it to bear for people that deserve to get their fantastic and oftentimes fun ideas into the world.

[00:19:22] Stacy Thal: Yeah. Well, I, I think it depends. People hire me in a couple different ways, right? They hire me to help them with their foundational brand strategy, oftentimes that's a calling card and they keep me on fractionally to operationalize that kind of foundational work and brand guidelines that we would create.

But day one, I think it just starts with a conversation, right? It is about what's working and what's not working, right? Oftentimes I get pulled in pre-launch to make sure that brands have a firm foundation. Right, they have all sorts of projections, but to help them up the odds of really

capturing the attention of their target audiences, there needs to be a bridge of the foundational brand strategy of their mission, vision, values, their messaging frameworks, their personality, voice, and tone. All the underpinnings that any, any whatever, like creative, any art director, designer, motion graphic designer, copywriter of any kind worth their salt will ask for those things.

So to make sure that they have those things, so first it's sort of an audit of what do you have, right? And how can I, give me everything and how, how can I plug in the holes for you of the bare minimum? Your bare minimum you need to go out to market, right? Your MVP. But oftentimes people hire me when they are,

for lack of a better term, like ready to grow up, right? I've had many, many brands come to me when they have gone out to market and it's working or it's not working, and they need to get serious about it. Either investors breathing down their neck or they have some traction and they just threw up a website that's incomplete.

The experience is incomplete. Or they've have identified other, you know, competitors. So that's, you know, again about, what, what are you doing right, and where are the gaps? And filling those gaps. So a lot of times it's like download from people's brains and then a bunch of documents so that I can put, pull that puzzle together for them to make sure that they're, again, strategic foundation is solid.

Whether they're looking to launch or pivot or grow scale.

[00:21:48] Stacy Thal: Yeah, I think, I think, you know, a recent one is that I worked for a company called Huddle last year that was pivoting from going to, from a, like a curated creative and dev agency.

Like for with curated talent, matchmaking founders with the, you know, skilled talent that they needed to pump out websites and creative campaigns and things like that.

But they were looking to, they got acquired and they were looking to pivot to a go to market agency. And I worked with their investors' portfolio of brands, you know, half a dozen of those. And these were, it was interesting, these were CEOs for hire, most of them. So we worked with a couple of founders, but these were CEOs that were hired for turnaround businesses where the founders had spun off.

And there were new CEOs there that perhaps didn't have the initial idea or passion that drove the business. So it was bridging the gap between the, what the there there was of the appeal of the product offering service, and now the CEO who had the skills, the business skills to scale, but not the

origin, you know, the origin story of what the passion was to create the business in the first place. And trying to bring the heart back into it to connect the dots with what the customers, end users, you know, clients would really want. So, so that was, you know, an interesting exercise in what hopefully perhaps I do best, is again, listening super hard to what the ambition and the vision and the pressures are, and diving deeply into who the customers are in order to be able to bring the two together, you know?

[00:24:31] Stacy Thal: Yeah, I mean there's, I think there's so many different pain points that drive people to reach out for sure. First of all, people can get ahold of me through my website brandbrandsbetter.com, brand brands better.com, or through LinkedIn, Stacy Thal at LinkedIn. Happy to have, you know, initial conversations with anybody who's looking to get a little bit of help, and hang out with them and find out what's keeping them up at night.

But I think it, you know, it just depends that people, again, hire me when they're not getting, generally when they're not getting the traction, either their ambition is to get the traction that investors need them to get, or they're not getting the traction that they're wanting themselves,

right? Or they're blowing out new offerings, if they're scaling, that they want to make sure there's good brand architecture and a strategy behind it to make sure that, you know, their fifth product, adding a fifth product doesn't break the whole machine.

So I really appreciate you coming on the show.

[00:26:03] Gary Ruplinger: Alright, take care Stacy. Thank you.