We all know that communication channels have evolved radically over the last 10 years – but how has that changed what a brand can be and do?

On this, episode 244 of Digital Marketing Radio we look at what it takes to create a super-successful brand in 2021.

Joining me to discuss that is a man who’s a brand ambassador, a strategic advisor - and founder of The Brand Bucket Company – welcome to DMR, Barnaby Wynter.

David Bain 0:00

Digital Marketing Radio Episode 244 what are the foundation stones required to create a successful modern brand, Digital Marketing Radio with David Bain.

I am David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio. The show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top that leads us to is tactics and trends shared by today's modern marketing masters.

Barnaby Wynter 0:48

Hello, David, lovely to be with you, too. today.

David Bain 0:50

Barnaby Wynter 1:15

I think it's great question. And I think it's one that I often come across business owners haven't quite grasped yet. Well, I think the first first thing that's worth doing, David is to is to define what a brand is. Because often people muddled up the difference between a brand and branding.

brand is every experience that affects the relationship between a product or service and its buyer. And essentially what that means is a brand is now a relationship, it's a relationship with your business, your products, your services, from the moment people find out about you discover you right through to they've been a long term buyer of your your particular products and services. So brand is that almost everything you do in your business. So of course, when you're building a brand today, what you've got to make sure you do is you're applying marketing, thinking to every aspect of your business systems, your business processes, your communication, your staff need to understand it and it needs to be embedded in your, your product, or your service. And that's a fundamental difference between what the role of brand is today to completely marketing lead your business should be marketing led to the way it was 30 years ago, where operations was important. And HR was important. And finance was important. That's now there now we'll threshold things. And actually what you should be really focusing on is

every aspect of your business from a marketing perspective. And that's the difference now understood. So brand is every experience everything you you're doing your business or your communication. So does that mean that rebranding, changing your identity, your your your logo, your visual identity is less valuable than it used to be? I think that's absolutely right. If that's all you do, and if you don't take the right route to rebranding, I think there is absolutely a misnomer that rebranding will give you a

new new look and feel. But it's like painting a room again, it's still the same room, it still has the same furniture, and you still go in it through the same doorway. And actually, that often then doesn't have the impact for a business that businesses looking for. Often businesses that go through a rebrand and I've done over over 300 in my career is

trying to set out a new story, a new vision for the marketplace so that people come at you in a slightly different way and you bring in new target markets, sell new products, sell new services. And to do that you've got to go to a much deeper level in a rebrand than just simply what can often happen is putting lipstick on a piece and you don't want to do that. That's very expensive.

If why not have not really changing the prospect perspective of your product or your service. So there's some real foundations those you have to put in place first before you do that. So I'm sure we've all experienced different brands that are memorable for not the right reasons and other brands, which are memorable for the right reasons. And how do you actually make a brand memorable for the right reasons? How would you encourage people that haven't even done business with you yet, and actually remember who you are, the first thing you really got to do is you really got to nail what story you want to tell the marketplace. We call that in our industry a value proposition. But actually, as an agency, we've, we've moved to a values proposition where it covers effectively four sets of values, your behavioural style, you have to define the values that sit behind that because actually, that's the way you're going to differentiate yourself in, in a marketplace where you're probably not the only one providing the product or service. The next thing you need to do is define your, your benefit values. So rather than focusing on your features, which a lot of businesses tend to do, they tend to populate their website with lots of features, you need to you need to define what the benefits are of owning your products, or working with you as a service. And then the final set of values or third set of values is you've got to you've got to build beliefs around your business, what you want people to believe about you, it's kind of inspired by Stephen R, Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People begin within the mind, you've got to put that in place. So you understand that the effect the impact you're going to have on the marketplace is known before you start doing that. And then finally, what you probably want to define is what you're be famous for. And that's the thing where all the creative initiatives should go into a rebrand is really trying to make so famous for your benefit benefits they give and the behavioural style that you're going to offer the market, how you do things in a different way to everybody else. And that's an that's the way you put a modern day brand into the marketplace. Now there's ways of doing that, which are really, really critical, as well. So, Brian, okay, well, maybe we can go into the ways in a little bit. But I'd also like to touch upon personal or business brand, because I think many listeners will actually be running their own business as a personal brand. What are your general thoughts on the pros and cons between running a business brand versus a personal brand? So I such a great question, I think it's worth pointing out that 99.6% of all business in the UK, are run by a person.

76% of all business that 4.2 million businesses have no employees whatsoever, I'm proud to be a business that's running into its 11th year as a limited company, there's only me, because I built an outsourced model 10 years ago, which allows me to outsource every element of my system and process for helping brands grow and develop. So I think every brand is a personal brand. So there's no distinction between what a personal brand is and what a what a business brand is for the majority of business. And even if you look at the big ones, whether it's your Gucci, or Chanel, or Sainsbury's or, or Cadbury's, they're all started by families or founders who may carry their name. So they've all done the same. So the trick here is to somehow D can't your own personal value set into the value set of the business. So you kind of be separated from the business. So there's kind of you working for yourself. And it's kind of us, so your business

exhibits all of the values that you hold as a person. So when when I talk about defining your behavioural style, your the benefits that you give people, what you want people to believe, from a from a business point of view, whether the owner operator is there, or the founders, the dominant partner, actually, those are the same values as you have as a person, but then what you need to do is transfer those into the business systems and processes. So effectively, when people are dealing with your business. It's kind of like dealing with you, but you don't have to be there. So it gives you the option later on to either scale, or just just enjoy being away from the business because it's kind of carries all your values. So I think I think David To be honest, they're they're one in the same a personal brand and a business brand is probably one in the same for for most

businesses in the UK. Certainly, what if you are running a personal brand, but you're changing entirely the nature of your business. So if you go from selling ice cream on the beach to being an SEO expert,

David Bain 9:48

can you still just change what your business does online but keep the personal brand or is it advisable in that kind of situation to change the brand entirely. So I call this out

Really great question. The, I think you're alluding to this concept of pivoting, which which has become a very popular phrase in the last few years during the, during the pandemic. And so I think it's important to understand that what will not change is your behavioural style. So that will remain the same. So your opportunity for moving into an entirely different business space and doing something entirely different is you take your style into a different marketplace, a different sector, but it's your style that people buy, first, they buy from you emotionally, they buy the way you do things, what would clearly changes how you benefit the buyers, because clearly how you benefit somebody from selling them an ice cream to how you benefit somebody selling them, SEO is entirely different. So what you would have to do to work is really understand what it is you're going to give people what really drives the benefits. So that clearly is going to be very different. What you might want people to believe about you as a business person as a business might be the same. So you might actually argue that

the pleasure that you derive from an ice cream, and it's easy to get, and it's really good on a hot day, you can also apply that possibly to having great SEO, which will bring you pleasure, because it'll bring you more inquiries to your business, which means you can sell more, and you know what you can make more profit and go away on holiday and enjoy hot days and eat more ice creams. So you know, there's a way of linking those two together. So you don't have to deviate away from that. And clearly what you want to be famous for if you're a personal brand, or you're you're an individual, if you want to be you're famous for your lens on the world, your your experience, your style, your views. And that's going to be broadly the same whether you apply that to a an SEO product or an ice cream product. So I think people buy you in that sense. And often people talk about that. But that's your that's the value set that will dominate and remain consistent. Clearly the benefits are going to be different.

It's it's a great answer. I just plucked those two examples off the top of my head, actually, but it made me think of a gentleman called Jason Barnard. And he's a musician, but he's also an SEO expert. And he's an expert in knowledge panels, and those put in the right hand side of search results.

Exactly. So if you go from being a musician to an SEO expert, then obviously Google has a challenge of defining who you are, if it wants to actually define you pigeonhole you as a certain type of endeavour individually does certain type of things. So it's, but I love your idea of, of, I guess,

not changing your principles as a person. And you know, if you believe in certain things, that doesn't necessarily mean that

you're, you're different in any way as a person when you're doing different things as a business. And I can relate on to my next question as well, which is, how do you ensure that your brand identity is as cohesive as possible in the modern world? So there are so many different platforms nowadays, of the social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn,

what are the mistakes that brands do in terms of cohesiveness and not, I guess, providing that joined up thinking to ensure that ensuring that prospects and customers have that same feeling about the brand no matter where they see them.

So there's a couple of real key factors that affect that. So we want to stay with the firt. The first thing is, rather weirdly, in the United Kingdom, the marketing services industry is divided up into these little pockets of people. So if you want your own SEO, you go to an SEO expert, if you go to a website, want a website, go to web expert, if you want exhibitions, you go to a live experience expert, if you want design, you go to a design or a graphic designer, if you want. And actually, that's the first fundamental flaw because each of those creative expressions are run by creative people. And they try and put their own kind of interpretation of what you are asking them to do on their bit. And of course, they deal with different parts of the journey. So what you can end up with very quickly, is instead of having an agency that's fully integrated, that has integrated thinking, so a lot of people use digital agencies, digital agencies have no concept of what it's like to be in a shop or offline or be an exhibition and actually started, often people go to PR agencies and ask them to do their exhibitions. It's nonsense. I mean, this, they have no expertise in that field. And they're just using their own common sense, which is invariably limited. So that's the first mistake. second mistake is not having a value proposition. What you must do is you must define the story, and then give that if you're going to work with multiple people, you've got to give the same story to the same people and do that and what you should always be doing as a brand new business owner or brand owner is mapping the journey that your prospects will take into your business, literally line by line, and then making sure that as they move from one step to the next step, that they're going through the same, the same process, they've got the same look and feel around them, they've got the same story, they've got the same benefit promises, they've got same spelling of startup, all of that holds all that together. So you got to make sure that everybody working on your business, but staff wise, cross your departments. And particularly from a marketing services point of view, everybody gets that there's one core value proposition they brought to bring to life for those people. And then think about where people are, you know, in the journey, you know, often, often people, website designers always think the website is the first thing that people see. So they kind of design them. So it's kind of all the information on the front page and how long they've been going and stuff. And, well, here's the thing, the websites probably something like the fifth or the sixth step on the journey into your business. So therefore, they already know they want to buy from you. So you don't have to tell them how long you've been going. And what it's nonsense. Ask us web designers are completely isolated from the customer journey, the prospect journey. So the way you link them all together is map the journey, create a value proposition that holds everything together, and have go to an organisation that will look after everything in your marketing mix, put pressure on a marketing director, as I, I work as that effective as a de facto marketing director in an organisation and I outsource and implement the whole journey using a bucket of course, which is, which is my methodology, but and that will map then the journey. But there's lots of other other methodologies that you can use, find one person is going to read look after that, that that relationship,

brilliant advice. And it was actually reminded me of a book that I'm reading at the moment called story brand by Donald Miller. Have you read that one?

I haven't read it. But somebody told me about it. And I said, and then I thought to it, I buy it and add it to the other 20. I haven't started yet. So

I'm actually listening to be honest with you on on Audible. Books. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and what First of all, let's take me to do a second part of our discussions. It's a time of Barnaby, his thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET

SOFTWARE, so

Barnaby Shira lesser-known martech tool, it's bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tools important for you. Yeah, so

actually, the thing that

invariably, it's gonna be very difficult if I if this is show 244 to come up with something that somebody has said before, but the thing that has made a big difference to me is a thing called stream deck. And it's a little device which gives you buttons on your on your desk, which you can just press and they immediately take you to a certain programme, actually, it's its original conception is if you're if you're a gamer, then what you could do is you can and you're presenting your game online, it allows you to get different viewpoints from different cameras very quickly. So it's just a little, a little thing that sits on your desk. For those of you on the video, here is look there is and now what I bought it because I'm a professional speaker. And of course, in the last year, I've been doing most of my gigs online. So it's quite nice to press a button and change the perspective and have the small and have the big and have the content behind me and content in front of me. I could do all that through stream deck. But where it really made a big difference is you can also programme it to take take you to particular part programmes or spreadsheets or timesheets or anything. So I have programmed in the front screen I've got, you'll be pleased to know it's got Spotify on it and has nothing. So this is music, it's got zoom on it. It's got Dropbox on it, it's got my all my client websites on it. So actually, if ever I'm working, I just have to press a button. And one of my screens that fires up with this, this amazing information on it. The Productivity impact for me has been amazing for this this device. And that was an unintended consequence of getting it. So I use it almost daily. And and it saves me maybe let's be generous five or six minutes a day. Well, that's, that's 25 minutes a week. That's two hours a month. Do you know what? That's more gin and tonics for me and not having to work at my desk, you know, it's

supposed to be a bad thing. Don't get screamed anyone could possibly be the tool that I used to press

SECRET SOFTWARE. You can you can

use stream deck in so many different ways. It's quite incredible. You can use it to switch on your lights, can you run different programmes on your computer. I'm a little bit complicated the way that I actually route my audio through my system, I've got the mix, which is the software that I'm using to produce my video. But that's where the different sound effects are loaded into. But the stream deck buttons power there so and then the audio goes from the V mix to my road caster. It's a little bit of a complicated setup, but once it's set up, it's in play, you touch the button.

It's amazing. It's amazing. So I'm particularly fond of it. I have to say so.

Yes, yeah, absolutely. So am I let's press

Again, I move on to NEXT ON THE LIST. So what's one marketing activity or tool that you haven't tried yet, but you want to test him, right. So I've I have, I have begun the journey of a thing called OBS Studio, which I guess I don't know if you're using that as well, David, but it's the thing that stream deck ostensibly is meant to link to. Yeah, but it's, I think it's easier to fly to the moon and run OBS.

I'm guessing there's gonna be a lot of online and hybrid events going forward. So that will be great fun, because you can bring in video and you can bring in all sorts of things. You can you can drop back, you can be small in the picture, big in the picture, that content behind you all that sort of thing. So I think it's again, it's was designed for gamers so they can bring in different viewpoints and things like that. So again, that's the one thing that I'm going to develop more and more. So that actually is a it's another tool, that as a small business, where there's only me, you can look much bigger and much larger than if you actually are. So it's certainly a great tool used by many people. I started using it probably about seven years ago about 2014 or so. And maybe it was quite early days in terms of the product development, but I just find it to be a little bit glitchy, that could have been to do with the quality of the processor and the computer that I was actually using at the time. But and ended up moving on to the software that I mentioned called V max. And V max is similar kind of software, but I find it easier to use, I find it less likely to crash, the V max does work only on PC as well. But if you're on PC, that's that's possibly an option worth considering. But it depends what you want to do with the software. You know, if you it's really important to create a virtual webcam that you can do anything inside, as you say you create your presentation and sides. And then then some kind of studio like like OBS or view mixes and portions. But you get some presentation studios or some I guess, webinar, or live event studios like like like like Demi or lots of other platforms like that, that you can easily share your screen and do do other interesting effects and sites. I'm not sure if it's more or less important to be able to do everything yourself than it used to be. That's more of a long meandering. Question, by the way. Yeah, no, listen, I, in the end, I think where you're absolutely right there. And I think this is true of all technology issue, you've got to you've got to try different things out and find the one that sits with you as a person because we're all wired differently. And so therefore, some things work well for certain people and not so well for others. And so you have to keep trying these things, but you're hunting, you kind of have to decide on one thing and give it a good go before you abandon it. Because like anything, it takes a while to get used to it, you've got to be under pressure of being in a live situation. And all that sort of thing. So so I'm up for at least having a go with it. And then if we speak in two years time, and I've abandoned that, well then then that that so be it or there are many. There are many cupboards here with bits of equipment in that I've abandoned over the years, because it just didn't fit with my my way of being, you know, so there's many martec software subscriptions that still exist and people use credit cards and people haven't used them for years and haven't even thought about the software. Absolutely right. Absolutely. Let's move on to this or that right. So this is the quick response round 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you're only allowed to see the word booth on one occasion. So use it wisely. Are you ready? I'm ready.

Tick Tock off Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast, podcast, traffic or leads. leads, paid search or SEO,

paid search,

ads or influencers.

Influences

Google ads or Facebook ads,

email marketing or chat marketing

shots marketing

More tech stack or all in one platform

tech stack

one to one or scale

scale

to the end there.

I think the interesting one for me is that you went for influencers rather than ads, because before that you went for a paid search instead of SEO, but then you went for influencers over ads. So why was that?

I think there are two reasons. I think if I was building a marketing plan, I would I would be exploring media that our influences I appreciate you probably main influences and as in people on online and and providing a principle, actually, content is an influencer. It may be delivered by a person. So actually, my definition of influencer is slightly different to the nature of the question was, so you asked me to respond quickly. So I had to the reason why to think slightly there is because clearly, ads are, unfortunately, to strike me down advertising God, I know, I've made my whole career out of you, I think are a complete waste of time. And what we need to be doing now is using content in a very, very clever way. And I think that was the only question in there that really alluded to, to provision of content in the form of influences. influences are a good route to it. But actually, blogs, webinars, podcasts, they're all kinds of influences. In many respects, Indeed, indeed, as this is. So you're you're seeking to to affect behaviour in a very humanistic way. Whereas I think ads tend not to be as humanistic as they, as they once were. I think when we we sat down little homes without one Telly in the corner of the lounge, you know, ads were the way that we gained humanity. I think now in a modern modern day, the digital economy has provided that much more so. So that's hence why I answer that way,

is a great point. Actually, I think content comes first before any form of digital marketing activity, whether it's paid, whether it's organic. And unless you have a good content marketing model, and know precisely why you're actually writing or recording a piece of content and what you wanted to look like, then the effectiveness of the channel that you're intending to use, probably isn't going to be there.

No, and I think that's that's very much the cornerstone of how I know you said, you might come back to how we put in place strategies for a modern day brand. It's, there's a particular strategy for content, which you must now follow. Well, let's move on to the $10,000 question,

if I was to give you $10,000, and you had to spend it over the next few days on a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success.

So very clear on this, I have recorded over 400 advisory videos in a studio, they sit on my computer, and are nowhere else. So what I would spend my $10,000 on is I would find a person who would know how to build me a great video access platform, I then offer that to my existing client base. As a reminder, I have a huge mentoring portfolios, I mentor a lot of owner operators a couple of hours every every month and using the video platform for that. And of course, the way I would measure it is I would of course, put in a subscription site onto it, and then measure the sales of subscriptions to a plethora of a lifetime worth of marketing videos about everything to do with your brand, your business, everything. So that's what I was doing my $10,000 on.

Great. Okay, well, you could certainly use a platform like teachable, you could maybe even upload it to Udemy as well. But I guess the challenge with content like that is knowing where to draw the free line knowing what to give away for free and what to charge for. How do you try and make that distinction yourself?

You,

as you get out the cargo, I really want to own that car by that's the time time to sell it. So you build in such way. But content provision, you've you can get the books you can give many, you know, many examples you can give, you know, first one of a set of six, you can you know, there are lots and lots of different ways of engaging people in a way which makes them go this is really cool, I'd like to see the rest of it. And it's, you know, it's, you've got to make it interesting, you got to make saw it and it's got to have an impact on people straightaway, can't be just sort of a flavour of it, get, get people fully immersed in your value proposition as quickly as possible. Give away as much as you possibly can. And it's the relationship they want ness, not necessarily the content. Yeah.

Yeah. It's tough to know for certain, because everyone's business is different. And everyone's cell cycle is different. So I guess the volume of content that you require to give away for free is going to be different for most businesses. Yeah,

I think it's, you do have to map the journey that people go on, and you have to, the trick is to to immerse the prospects in your value proposition to a point when you remove it, they notice. And when they notice, that's the time when you say, they say you can't take it away, I've been using it as part of my part, my x y, Zed, I've integrated it into my life, my quality of life has improved as a result. And you go, I'm really sorry, I can't get given it to you for nothing. And they go, Well, we have a problem here. And I go, Yeah, we do our problem. We're not in we're not a charity, we're not not for profit with our social enterprise, we, you know, commercial entity. I'm sorry, I can't all I do have one idea. And they go, What is it? What is it and you say, Well, if you give us money, we will carry on with this relationship. And they go, that's a great idea. And they don't even, they don't normally even ask the price because they're so immersed in the value. So the trick is immerse people as much as you possibly can, in in your style of doing things that product or service as much as you possibly can, and then remove it at a point when they're,

they'd love it.

Great advice. Well, to finish off, let's shift the focus to someone else who deserves it. So that's a MAGICAL MARKETER. So who's an up-and coming marketer that you'd like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

Yeah, so. So another fellow speaker of mine is chap called Warren Cass. I don't know if you've had him on your show. He, he spent. So he's, he's also a professional speaker. He's written a great book called a book on influence, and how you how you influence people. He's a contextual marketer. So very good. But he's been spending the last year with with another tackle, Warren knight to Warren's building a platform to help your personal brand and build your personal brand. So it's interesting, your Christina earlier, and how you can be as influential as possible. And they put this amazing programme together, which they call hive mind, which they're just launching now. So. And essentially, what it is, is, it's a mentor, mastermind lead programme that they've really been working very hard on over the last over the last year or so. And it's proving to be really, really impactful for people who sign up for that. And he's a great speaker, and has a great view on the context of the marketplace. I'm a practitioner, in helping businesses become famous brands. I've done that 557 times my career, but that he what what it does, it sets the context for what you should be operating, what's changing what's going on.

And how you as a product or service can can address that market and as a person or brand, how you build your personal brand through through his hive mind.

brand that they're creating right now. Great. Okay, well find him Warren cast on LinkedIn. I also find his website hive mind thinking.com.

Great recommendation. So that was Episode 244 of Digital Marketing Radio where Barnaby Wynter from Barnaby Wynter calm shared, a lot of great value about brand to begin with. So you're talking about defining on what you perceive your brand to be. So every experience, everything you do in your business, or your communication, is what your brand is. It's not just a corporate identity. And he also talked about, if you're changing what you do, or if you're changing your brand, keep the same values as you as you had before, and that will lead you through any changes that you want to do. The SECRET SOFTWARE that you shared was stream deck, as demonstrated on this particular show. And NEXT ON THE LIST was OBS project and your MAGICAL MARKETER was of course Warren cans from a hive mind thinking.com. I'll make sure everything Barnaby mentioned will be in today's show notes on Digital Marketing radio.com or B, what's the best social platform for someone to follow you and to say hi, LinkedIn, I was one of my one of my other roles.

So LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn on Barnaby Wynter with a why in case you haven't noticed, so it's wy NT er, I'm probably everyone on LinkedIn. There are two of us in the world. So Barnaby Wynter is a young musician. And then obviously, ww Barnaby wynter.com. If you want to have a look at some of the things I've been getting up to with my career. Okay, well, at least there's only two of you in the world. I had to wait about I think it was about 18 years before I finally got David bain.com.

Got it. It took me a while to figure out what I want to do with it. No, but that's another story.

I have children's names.

There we go. Yes, yeah, absolutely. I've got I've got I've got 101 already, but that's a sidetrack. Barnaby. Thank you again, so much for coming on. And I've been your host, David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com. And remember, wherever you're tuning in, feedback is fantabulous. Until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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