Graphos Project

Episode transcript:

Laurier:  Hey, product makers and product marketers. If you’ve been searching for how to brand products from your heart, listen up to this episode.

Welcome to Product: Knowledge, the podcast about creating and marketing products people truly need.

I’m Laurier Mandin founder and principal of Graphos Product.  Justin Foster has gone from branding cattle on a ranch to helping innovators brand their products in a uniquely truthful and sincere way.

And Emily Soccorsy comes from the world of corporate marketing and journalism. She’s a strategist, storyteller, and an artist. Together, Emily and Justin created Root + River, not just a branding agency, but a uniquely intrinsic branding practice.

Emily and Justin help business leaders to identify the driving forces behind their passion, and to wrap their company and product brands around a culture of truth. The result is better staff retention, happier customers, and genuine joy for everyone the brand touches.  You’ve heard so much talk about authenticity, we’ve pretty much exhausted the word. But that came out of a great need.

In the 20th century, a lot of entirely phony brands were created and the public embraced them. Think Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, the Marlboro Man.

Completely made-up people that had nothing to do with the company, it’s people, or even the products.

Even George Foreman was just a paid spokesman for a previously unsuccessful grill that was rebranded around him. And we as consumers rewarded these phony old-world brands with massive commercial success. And we made them into household words.

I started our conversation by asking Emily and Justin what is so different now and why mission-based brands are the way of the future.

Emily: I think today, the audience doesn’t really want to buy fake. They don’t want to buy falseness. The information age ushered in a peeling back or a pulling back of the curtain. And we got to see product reviews. We got to go onto YouTube and figure out how to do everything. And we got to share the photo we took of the hamburger that looked nothing like the ad.

And so what people want is something that is true. That is real. And particularly within the last year, people want something that is not just a product. But it is tied to a larger ethic. It’s tied to a larger movement. So they’re not really just buying the product. Nowadays, consumers are purchasing the brand and they associate, they identify with the brand.

I think the starkest example of this, Laurier, is Apple. And when you have an Apple user and I’m sure you might’ve run into a conversation where “Oh, you’re not an Apple user,” right? There’s this judgment, but that. That also reflects the passion with which they have connected to the brand as a whole.

So it’s yes, they’re believing in the product, but more than that, they believe in the brand. Another great example is Nike. They took a lot of heat for their support of Colin Kaepernick, but it actually increased their sales across the board and particularly in the global market.

And then you have the opposite reaction, right? To a lot of people boycotting that because they were not just buying sneakers or athletic wear, they were buying a brand and they chose either to continue to do so in a very vocal way or to stop doing so. And I think people want that veracity in the products they buy and they want the connection to the actual company, to the actual leadership.

They want to know where their leaders, who they are supporting with their dollars, stand.

Laurier: And that’s another thing you preach, I know is that branding is at least as much about repulsion than it is about attraction. And to me, that really resonates, especially in a world where the people who buy a product and don’t love it, are going to go out and blast it and harm it.

So attracting those right people is not just useful for creating positive experiences, but it’s right for building the brand. How else can repelling people make a product more successful?

Justin: I think it depends on something that’s often overlooked in traditional branding and marketing mindsets, which is an understanding of the level of consciousness that your audience is at. Which includes some level of emotional mapping. So one of the big areas is that when you are disconnected from your core self, you’re just going through the motions of life as a marketer, you’re going to see your audience as some sort of abstract that you have to convince to buy your stuff.

The counter to that, and the reason brands Aunt Jemima and the George Foreman Grill, which is an excellent example, wouldn’t work today isn’t just because the market has shifted and there’s saturation, internet, and social and all that. It’s because the level of consciousness has shifted. And you see this with brands that would never, in all their history, make any sort of political stand are doing it. Brands like Marriott and Coke and Home Depot, or the biggest, maybe the biggest example of this as all is NASCAR banning the use of the Confederate flag.

Those were all indicators of an awareness that, you can’t just lump people into demographic buckets and then market to them. You have to understand where they’re at, what level of consciousness they’re at, what their emotional needs are. And then in order to do that, you got to know that stuff for yourself and your team if you’re a corporate marketer.

Laurier: That’s sometimes the hardest part. Brands see it as being easy to just go and let’s create something totally fictional because we don’t know who the heck we are and what we stand for. Or we’re scared to talk about what we stand for too much, because that might drive away too many people.

Cause when I talk to people about what I stand for, it creates arguments. So let’s go safe and come up with something. That’s just, this homogenous thing that doesn’t please anybody and doesn’t create negative feelings either. And brands are really starting to recognize that isn’t acceptable anymore.

It’s not just about not putting people off, it’s about talking about what you aren’t, and creating a culture around the brand and the product so that people can enjoy it and be excited about whatever it is you have next.  At Root & River, you work on bringing product makers in and helping them to flush out and identify who it is that they really are so that they can build a truthful brand.

Where do you start with doing that? How do you help these product makers who may not know what their truthful brand is, what they can build a culture around, get people excited about it and then deploy on it, so it becomes the heart of their messaging?

Emily: We are deep believers and practitioners of contemplative practices. And so our work really counteracts the human tendency to separate and product-makers are just like every other human being where we separate, “well, no, no, I’m making this product. It’s not about me. It’s about the product.”

And let me put up a wall between those two things. When an actuality. Who you are, what you believe, what are your standards and how you create a product, how you see the vision for the future of this market. All of that goes into the blood, sweat, and tears that creates a product, but rarely do we pause to go deep.

To uncover those things, articulate them in very clear, succinct language that is not part of a campaign, but as part of a soulful uncovering of what makes you tick and then build a bridge between that mission, those standards, a message, the category. Build a bridge between that and actually what you’re going to go talk about in the market.

So a lot of times, if people get to that place where they’re doing deep work on mission or vision, they might stop there and go, “okay, great. Let’s make a poster and put it on the wall,” but they don’t actually bring it into product marketing. They don’t actually create content around those internal ideas.

And that’s a big gap. That’s the big failure point.  And so we bring our clients together with us, and this is a collaborative kind of guided journey where we will map all of those things, articulate all of those things, and then help bridge that gap, create rollout plans and help them understand how to use the words of mouth that we’ve uncovered together in the practice of branding every day.

We spend time together. Before the pandemic, it was mostly face to face. Now is through Zoom, and we immerse them in this journey to really find that foundation and articulate it together.

Justin: One of the more heretical things that we often do, especially with the head of marketing or product marketer, is strongly suggest they stop marketing for a little bit. Because to your point earlier, if you don’t know who you are, the marketplace isn’t going to tell you who you are.

They’ll just ignore you or never even see you.

Laurier: Yeah, that’s a big ask to make of a head of marketing, is to stop doing what you’re paid and judged on.

Justin: But here’s the thing about that though. And this is where we challenge them, is you’re not actually paid to do marketing. You’re paid to grow a brand and generate leads, and move product. It’s like someone that goes to the gym and works out really hard, but has terrible form and then wonders why they don’t see results and why they get injured.

And a lot of marketers are using kind of an older playbook. That’s where the pause comes in. And we’re not saying pause for a month. We’re saying pause for a day. One of our goals is that we want to create an immersive experience, where the time is totally dedicated to the brand and what they want to get out of it, that emotional connection to the work itself.

To pause from the chop wood, carry water, and see the bigger horizon of possibilities. And the other thing that happens here, and this is why we have an immersive experience, what we call a Root Session, is because most marketers have really overdeveloped left brain problem-solver brains, are good at execution and strategy, but their creative brain, which is maybe the thing that got them into marketing in the first place, is often quite atrophied. It’s worn down by ROI conversations and metrics and hiring and all of the pieces.

And so that pause that stopping marketing for a bit and focus on imagination and creativity and play to some extent. Is not only cathartic and reenergizing, it gives you a very different lens about how you’re going to go out to the marketplace.

Laurier: When you talk about how branding has changed from an external practice where we’re shooting out messages and it’s all about what we can send out and how many people we can reach to an internal practice, I think that’s what you mean. Where you’re looking inward learning who we are, and at the same time learning who those right fit customers are, who are going to love the brand and then deciding how to communicate on that level.

Justin: Yes. And that goes to what Em said about being contemplative is that the point of contemplative isn’t that you’re going to navel gaze in perpetuity, and nothing ever gets done. The purpose of a contemplative practice at all levels, whether it’s a leadership role or spiritual or whatever is to change your actions.

That’s what we’re trying to do. We want to change the actions, the habits. That’s what we call branding a practice. Branding is not a department. It’s a cultural practice in an organization. And to do that requires what you just said that, that element of what you just talked about.

Laurier: And I think you also refer to it as, “branding from the heart.” I’d love to hear from you what you’ve seen happen when a brand makes the change. When an organization that’s creating products and selling products to the public makes the change from branding for a show and branding for loudness to branding from their heart.

Emily: Yeah, that’s what keeps me in this work. So three things tend to happen. The first is a huge sense of relief. And Justin alluded to this. The CMO, that role is the highest turnover role of anyone in the C-suite. They turn over at the highest rate because they do get burned out and they are typically coming with a very creative spirit, but they also pair that with a strategic mind.

And so when we come in, either working with the entrepreneur or the head of marketing and we say, okay, we’re going to take a step back. We’re going to see how all of, what you’ve been putting out there and all of your effort and your energy, how it connects to your soul. And then we make that leap.

They’re a little dubious at first, but when we make that leap and make that connection, there’s a huge sense of relief. And they’re like, “Oh, okay.” The light bulb goes on. They realize that they don’t have to follow the formula of falseness that the 20th century imposed on them and their work and their industry.

And so they’re relieved. The second thing that happens is that their marketing becomes much easier; no longer do they wonder, “what are we going to say on social media? What is this campaign going to be about? What’s our angle on this, quick! We need to come up with something.” They have this beautiful treasure trove of language rooted in the beliefs of the brand that they can go to again and again. And it’s a wellspring of information and inspiration that they can offer to the market. And so they have that ease. And then finally, the third thing is they started having fun. Again, they start seeing and hearing from their audience.

They see the audience respond in a whole new way, which gives them enjoyment and fulfillment in the work. And that works interior too. They’re also able to give the teams that they work with opportunities to shine, to share their story, to tell why they’re involved in the brand.

And that builds the whole engagement of the culture at the same time as it builds the market and the audience as well. So those are the three things that I see.

Laurier: Yeah. And you talked about, the average tenure of a CMO, I believe is around two years, which when you think about that, there’s a reason why it’s that short is because these people aren’t enjoying their jobs and they’re not creating the results that they’re brought into create so they go out the other end of the revolving door. But obviously you can’t do something from your heart for just two years because that’s about how much time it takes to get momentum and get things working properly. So I think that’s a big part of the problem is just what marketers are often evaluated based on, and it’s so much just the performance metrics as opposed to creating love, creating this culture of people who are going to buy your product, even if it’s more expensive than competing products, because it resonates with them.

And like Apple products, nobody buys Apple products for price. They don’t discount. And that’s what works.  That’s why everybody wants to be like Apple. It’s because, they sell based on love—and who cares about the haters who don’t get it and say, “Steve jobs just mashed together a bunch of other ideas.”

He did it in a way that resonated with millions of people.

Emily: But… yes. And part of that, that people talk about when we reference Apple, is that it took them decades to get to that point. And the company almost went bankrupt. So Steve Jobs left and had to come back. This is a long game.

Laurier: Yeah, it was not an easy game and it’s still not won. They’re still fighting hard.

Emily: And to your point about heart, I think you’re right. Marketing and CMOs really set a high standard around metrics and analytics and that’s fine. Those are realities, but marketing is really not only a numbers game, it’s also a game of heart and soul and truth.

Both sides need to be tended to, but in our culture, we tend to prioritize the more linear and that will hurt your brand long-term, if that’s the only thing you’re looking at, and I would also say it will erode your market. You can’t look to the numbers alone and be successful in branding and marketing.

Laurier: No, and it’s like sports, right? If you have a hockey team, if you think all that matters, because all that shows at the end of the game is what’s on the scoreboard, and that’s all you care about is getting people who can score goals, you’re going to neglect defense and team spirit and every other important thing.

And nobody’s going to want to play on your team.

Justin: Yeah, I think that’s a great, sports here is kind of an allegory of this is. Certainly you want to collect information, you want good data and all that, but we discourage the ROI-ing of humans. We have this performance metrics culture, but you look at even the NCAA men’s championship. It wasn’t the better physical team, the one with the better statistics that won, it was the team that was more prepared and in better shape mentally and physically. And you see that a lot where ROI or performance metrics influence unhealthy and often unethical behavior in brands.

If the point is to win then the point is to win again. It’s about building a championship type brand so you can show up every year and own your category. But if you do that short-term thinking… this is where like the whole steroid scandal in sports came from; it’s this short-term thinking that certain behavior was okay because of the pressure to produce specific performance-based results.

And we’re not saying don’t measure things; we’re saying don’t measure humans that way. It’s dehumanizing to overemphasize ROI. Especially considering that neuroscience shows that all decisions are made in the emotional part of the brain and the heart, that’s where they’re made. And if you dehumanize people by applying too many performance metrics to them, it’s just a matter of over-saturation and dumb luck to some extent.

Laurier: Yeah. And you’ve killed every reason that they had for being there in the first place.

Justin: Exactly. Yeah, it’s a passion killer. This is a real relationship between the brand and the audience, which includes the team, the culture.

Emily: Drawing through that analogy, the highest performing teams that have won championships are those that play for each other. They play because they have this strong culture. They play because they love one another, and that’s what leads to performance. So if you strip that away, and within a brand, if the people are disconnected, because the CMO is only focused on the numbers, because that’s the ethic of the leadership, then how is that individual going to engage their team in the meaning behind it?

That’s the real motivator that brings people to work every day with their best ideas and their passion and their tenacity. So as that erodes, we get a cultural effect from this decision to focus strategically on the numbers alone.

Laurier: Again, back to branding, being an internal practice, where it doesn’t really matter what you’re saying externally because people internally can see right through it, but if it is true and it holds true inside of the business, then it becomes part the brand organically.

The brand comes to exist and be stronger and resonate because it’s internal practice that throughout the company from the inside outward.

Justin: Yeah, I think that’s why we point out a lot that in order to do this kind of heart-based branding, there’s a few, must haves. You have to have a good product, first of all. So I think a lot of the attrition for CMOs is that there’s so much pressure on them to produce results for products that just aren’t that good.

That’s one, and the second thing is you have to have a good culture because everything is based off one or two degrees of separation now, and how you treat your employees is how your customers will treat you often. That used to be a wide gap and it’s not so much anymore. But the other aspect of this is tapping in to the idea that you have to have something to say. Something to invite people to. Simon Sinek got into this with “Start with Why,” but we feel like in a lot of ways we’ve picked up his work and taken it to the next level of evolution of thought, which is You’re not really looking for customers.

You’re looking for people who believe what you believe. So you’re looking for believers, you’re looking for people to join. This goes back to what you said earlier about repulsion.  And all of that requires a level of an intrinsic root system that doesn’t happen naturally. Like we talked about earlier, you have to pause and figure that stuff out in order for it to be sustainable.

Laurier: Yeah, I think it was Jeff Bezos who’s credited with saying, “your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room,” but you guys have an even better definition, I think. Tell me what that is.

Emily: We do. Our definition is brand is how other people experience, what you believe. So referencing again, that experience of what you believe. And again, that separation comes up we’re like, “What? That has nothing to do with it’s about this product or this offering.” And we would just say, Baloney. You dedicate yourself to something based on a set of beliefs and that informs everything that you do.

And so it begins inside internally and then it extends out into the experience. And so if you’re not being thoughtful about how those beliefs extend into the customer experience, then you’re missing a huge opportunity to really touch someone at a irrevocable level. Seth Godin talks about this extensively, is that you create what your goal is.

And marketing is to create a connection to the audience that is remarkable and that they will go remark to other people, whether that’s online or in person, about how you need to have this product. And that’s what we’re wanting to create. And the only real effective way to do that is to create it through emotion and through emotion that we feel first as the product makers. So we often tell our clients that if you want to create an emotion in your audience, you have to first feel it. And so you have to be to Justin’s point, you have to be a person who’s willing to feel and process emotion in order to convey that to someone that you want to get excited about it. If you’re not excited about your product or you’re not intrigued by your product, you’re not eager to have other people use it. Then your audience will not feel that way either.

Laurier: Yes, great points. And marketers are so challenged and tasked all the time with finding what we call product- market fit. And I think the problem is often that we’re so busy trying to find it rather than trying to create product-market fit, than create that fit with our ideal buyer. It’s finding ways to resonate, from our heart to the heart of those buyers.

I think if you can do that organically, then you have a fit that is very hard for others to break.

Justin: Yeah, in that area too, is we often, we like to distill things down to almost like mantras and there’s a couple here that come to mind based upon what you just said, and one is “Preach, Don’t Pitch.” And so by preach, what we mean is that back to that spiritual component, which is invite people to your mission. Present a grander vision for the future.

It’s not about product pitches, it’s about preaching ideas and philosophies. And the second one is “Express, Don’t Explain.” Verbosity in marketing as a sign of insecurity, it’s this idea that I have to give you all of the speeds and feeds so that you understand what this is.

So you know that this is a logical decision for you to make, which isn’t at all, how decisions are made

Laurier: No, the rational brain doesn’t get to play in that game until after the decision’s made.

Justin: Eventually it does, but initially, exactly. Those two mantras then inform this idea of audience. And one of the things, another heretical area is we don’t really think demographics are all that useful. At least in the United States, there’s only two reliable demographics and that’s old people and Trump supporters.

And so our definition of your audience is the people looking for you.

It’s not who you’re looking for. It really isn’t about lead gen. It’s much more about lead attraction. And relationship building and matchmaking and things like that. That goes back to what we said about knowing who you are, so that you can then go out and design that emotional map of who your ideal audience is.

Laurier: So if I have a product, and now you’ve just shook my world up in a few different ways, telling me demographics don’t apply. I’ve got to abandon all my thoughts of pitching, even if that was my entire marketing plan. Where do I go with my new product? Assuming it’s something that works really well, and there are people out there who are going to like it if I can get them to try it.

But for new businesses, especially that are just going to market for the first time and trying to find ways to resonate. It doesn’t feel like it’s enough just to go and say, “we believe in these values,” because people are looking for a product that delivers specific results and outcomes.

How do you recommend the brands reconcile that, and come up with messaging that is truthful and honest about who they are, but also conveys what the product needs to in order to reach the buyers it has to reach in order to succeed?

Emily: We would say, Laurier, actually do that. Actually, do tell them what you believe in, and say, “and we created this product based on that belief.” And I want to give an example here of one of our clients named Cozure. It is a women’s clothing line and the founder is Tan Gopal.  We worked with her to really help her uncover all of these pieces.

So she knew where her market was. So demographics do come into play when you’re thinking about where does my audience interact? And before she even launched her first piece of apparel, she began having conversations around her beliefs, around her message and sharing on the platforms where her audience tended to be.

And her root belief, as we call it, is powerful women should always feel stunning. She started talking about the idea of being a powerful woman and what that means, and the lifestyle and having to travel, back before when we could travel, move between being a mom and being a professional. She began to have those conversations, and then she launched her product, but she, in the interim, had built an audience that was resonating on a beliefs level, on an ethic level, and seeing her point of view.

And then they were ready and waiting when her clothing began to come to market. And so that’s exactly how we suggest that you should begin the conversation about the system of the brand, a little bit ahead of the product. And there can be a bridge between that root system and the product itself.

Laurier: That’s a great example: one of the most powerful things you can do is create desire and demand for the product before people can get it in their hands—you want to talk about something Apple has been really successful at. Much harder to do when you’re a brand-new product, because you don’t have the platform and you don’t have any brand recognition yet.

When you’re starting out, clearly it’s harder.

Justin: Yeah. There’s history here too, is you go back, in kind of the pre-mass-media era in say, pre-World-War-II, the way that products were marketed was much more around the story they told, similar to the way the J Peterman catalog that was parodied on Seinfeld of this story that goes with it.

That takes effort. That takes a certain type of creativity and dedication to do that. I encourage people to go back and look at old Red Wing ads or Stetson Hat Company, or Winchester Firearms. Like these brands from an era before there was all of this proliferation of too much information and too many mediums.

There’s something to be learned about going back and rededicating ourselves to the work of storytelling. And that’s why one of our principles of humanistic marketing is that when you master storytelling, then you master marketing. You haven’t mastered marketing until you’ve mastered storytelling, which requires you to create some consistency and density and pop to what you’re putting out into the world.

And those are lost arts to some extent within the product marketing field.

Laurier: Yeah, and very important ones.  People learn and remember, and retain stories better than pretty much any other information that you can feed to them. We go around and looking for stories and in our spare time we read stories or watch stories unfold.

So absolutely there’s so much power in a story well told. And I agree, Justin, that very few brands do that effectively in a way that is really storytelling.

Emily: One modern brand that’s doing this very well is California Closets. Right? How interesting can that be? Last year I had someone come to my home and she worked with me and she was so personable and she was curious about my work.

We built a relationship, right. I did end up purchasing from them. And just last week I got the most beautiful magazine. It was not about their products. But it was about spaces that they had helped design, and the stories of those people, and why they needed to create those spaces. Beautifully done. I was completely absorbed in it. I set it aside. I’m like, make sure this doesn’t get put in the recycle bin. And I made an appointment to sit down with it and consume not just the story, but also the art. And it was very artful and non-promotional. That’s another current brand people can look to that’s taking storytelling, and a product that’s not that exciting, but infusing humanity into it through these stories.

Laurier: And a good example of how every need is part of someone’s story. They’re where they are at, at the point of recognizing that need, but. They have where they come from and where they hope to get in this case with the product, which is to a more organized more comfortable uncluttered life, because now they’ve organized their closet space and they can see things in a way that makes them love what they own again.

Emily: Yes.

Laurier: So a ton of value for that. For brands, for products that are just starting out, where they don’t really have much of a culture yet, you might have a founder and a few early employees, maybe a co-founder, how do you recommend they find who they are so that they can build their brand around that, when they feel they don’t have particularly strong beliefs, one direction or another.

How do you flush that out?

Justin: I wouldn’t say that they probably do. They just don’t know they’re important, this idea that it’s too woo or it’s too soft, or we have to get our pitch deck done and build our systems. And that’s all true. You do need all that infrastructure in order to be successful.

But I don’t know a single entrepreneur in my almost 20 years of doing this that did not come into their venture with a belief system. They just were unaware of its Importance. What we would invite people to do is to understand that what you believe, because as Emily said, our definition of a brand is how other people experience what you believe. Well, that you, when you’re a small firm, when you’re the founder, maybe you’ve got a small team, that you is still you. But eventually as happened with Disney and Steve Jobs and Patagonia and Southwest, the “you” stopped being a singular person and started to be the culture.

And that’s why one of my favorite titles I’ve ever heard is what Ken Blanchard, the “One Minute Manager” business consultant, after he retired from his own company, Ken Blanchard Company, he took on the title of Chief Spiritual Officer.

It’s like being a parent. Early on in life, your job is to keep them alive. And then later on, you’re more of a mentor to your children. So your job as a founder, eventually is going to be to is to be that Chief Spiritual Officer, which means going back and from the very beginning, as close as you can to the founding of your business, to codify and articulate. And write down and share your beliefs, your principles, your standards, how you see the world, how you live your life.

Laurier: That’s it for this episode of Product: Knowledge and my conversation with Emily Soccorsy and Justin Foster of Root + River. Find out more about Emily and Justin and join their Being Marketers community by going to rootandriver.com.

Be sure to also visit Graphos Product dot com, where you can listen to all the podcast episodes, read the transcripts and get insights from our blog. Reach out to us on Twitter @GraphosProduct or email us through the form at GraphosProduct.com.

Thanks for listening. I’m Laurier Mandin.