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Transcript

Hello and welcome to JUST Branding. Today, we’re joined by Jonathan Stark, a pricing expert, author and advisor who helps independent professionals stop trading time for money and start building businesses around expertise, outcomes, and authority. Jonathan is the author of Hourly Billing Is Nuts, which we’re going to talk about today. He’s host of Ditching Hourly and co-host of The Business of Authority. So we’re in good hands here. His work challenges one of the most common assumptions in creative services, that billing by the hour is fair, professional, even safe. For designers, strategists, consultants, and folks listening in, this conversation gets right into the heart of the business model. So are you selling time or are you selling judgment? Are clients buying your hands or you’re thinking? If your expertise helps you solve problems faster, why should your pricing punish you for getting better? Very good questions. So today we’re unpacking why hourly billing is broken and how value pricing actually works, and how to build a business of authority, where clients pay for the outcomes, trust, and expertise, and not just the hours on a timesheet. So welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Thanks for having me. Excellent intro. You really set the table there for us. We’ve got a lot to do here.

Well, you built a whole body of work around this idea of hourly billing is nuts. So for all our audience of designers, strategists, consultants listening in, who’ve perhaps built hourly their whole career, what’s the first thing they need to unlearn?

First thing they need to unlearn is that price does not come from cost. Price comes from value. Or if I was going to say that even more surgically, I would say that an acceptable price comes from value, not from cost. So that’s the summary. We could talk about it for a half an hour just this piece. But cost, if you’re setting your prices based on your costs, you could be setting prices that are unacceptable to the client because the cost sort of insists that you mark up your time and then let’s say we get to, just to throw it around, remember $10,000. Well, if it’s not worth $10,000 to the client, it’s not an acceptable price. They’re going to say no. But if you work backwards and you find out what your assistance is likely worth to the client, maybe it’s $5,000. It’s only worth $5,000. It’s like, okay, for 500 or 1,000 or some fraction of $5,000, what could I do to help this client move the needle? Probably not the thing they asked me for in the first place. But this is a complete 180-degree mental shift from setting prices based on what it’s worth to the client instead of how much it costs you to deliver.

Well, let’s get this quickly out of the way then. Why is Hourly Billing such a bad fit for expert-based work?

Well, because if you know what you’re doing, you’re probably really fast at delivering good outcomes. You’re getting penalized for getting better at your job. Probably everyone listening has experienced, if you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ve experienced someone much younger than you getting jobs that you really should have gotten because their hourly rate is lower. When you put yourself out there with an hourly tag assigned to you, it’s just begging the client to compare you apples to apples with everybody else, which completely ignores how fast you are and how good you are and the kind of results that you typically provide to your clients. It just ignores all the important parts and says, I’m an apple, I’m 50 cents, that apple is 25 cents, you’re going to buy the 25 cent apple. Yep.

All right. And on the opposite spectrum of that, what are some of the big or hidden incentives that are created by growing the value base?

Well, the joke is if you get paid by the hour and you want to raise, it just works lower.

Right. If you think about it, charging by the hour incentivizes the executioner, if you like, of the work to take longer. It’s immoral in that sense. Why would you incentivize something that actually then decreases in value to one part of the team, but then increases the value to the other? So it’s and vice versa. It’s funny enough, I work with a few agencies and I had this situation recently where I was on this project. And there was a prickly conversation with the salesguides who had just sold this project. And they said, Matt, this kind of X amount of weeks that you wanted to do the strategy on, we’ve had to squeeze because the client’s budgets are not where we needed them to be. And so I said, why did you squeeze them? Surely we should have expanded them and dropped the price. In other words, why would you automatically go to squeezing a price because they assume the time that you’re going to spend on it is less and therefore the cost is less? Well, no, that’s not the case actually. But anyway, it’s such a difficult thing for people to get their heads around, isn’t it? Why is that? Why did it start, Jonathan, in this? Why have we got ourselves in this pickle?

Yeah. If I just look at myself as the test subject, this was not obvious to me until I was managing people at a dev shop. My background is in software development. When I was an employee and then I started working at a firm, I still had that employee mentality like, I put in the time, you owe me the money. It’s a salary question. Back then, this is like the early 2000s, late 99, 2000, 2001. The deal is, but in seat from nine to five, $50,000 a year or whatever it is. Inside of that, you just make sure you don’t do anything that’s going to get you fired. So if you keep up your end of the deal and they keep up their end of the deal, then everybody’s reasonably happy. And if you want to overachieve, that’s up to you, but it may or may not increase the amount of money you get, regardless. Okay. And probably a lot of people worked for someone and had a salary or something like that. I think it might come from there because that’s the piece that I find I have to sort of de-brainwash people out of, like the ones that did have a job job. Because when you meet someone who has been entrepreneurial all along and had a paper route and then, you know, mowed lawns and all that stuff, hourly seems insane to them. But there’s just not that many. There’s just, it’s a smaller pool of people who have kind of been entrepreneurial from a young age. So you come out of corporate or you come out of an employment situation. And I did it. Everybody does it. They say, oh, my salary was $100,000 or let’s, for easy numbers, my salary was $120,000 a year. So I need to make $10,000 a month. So I want to work this many hours per week and, you know, per month and if there’s four weeks, then they just divide. And like, here’s my hourly rate, you know, $120,000 divided by 2,000 hours. Boom, that’s my rate. Okay. And so now they’re thinking like an employee. They show up, they put in the time, that’s the deal. And the whole concept of outcomes is invisible to them. It’s totally invisible to them. And as long as that’s invisible, you don’t know what else to price. You just don’t know what to price. Everything seems… People who are listening to me right now that are like, what are you talking about? You’re the person who needs to really listen. Cause we’re, hopefully we’ll unpack it and make the light bulb go on. But if this, if you’re like, there’s nothing else to sell. I put in the hour and I do my job and that’s what they’re paying for. It’s like, that is not what they’re paying for. You just can’t see the thing that they’re buying.

That is so true. That is so true. So I used to run an agency, right? And we came across this massive problem where I was in this trap like you were talking about, right? So I had a team, we had a team of 12 and we would, you know, to cost out the project, we would kind of work out all the tasks and figure out how many hours we reckon they would take. And then we had an, I can’t remember the hourly rate at the time, I don’t even know how we came up with it. It was just like finger in the air. We think we’re worth this, we can get away with this, this is our hourly rate. And then what would indefinitely, will happen on some projects was, for whatever reason, particularly creative, right? Like this is a challenge because sometimes clients don’t like something that they see. They might have described exactly what you produce, but then they look at it and they go, don’t like it.

That’s not it, yeah.

Right, so then there’s this argument, because you say, well, I spent the time on it, as per my quote, and they say, yeah, but actually you didn’t deliver what you said you deliver. Now, who’s right? Now, what that showed me over years, and it took me years as well, and a near breakdown to figure out, there’s such a mismatch here, because the client is buying a result, and I’m selling hours, particularly like you were saying, the salaries and that kind of thing. Then what happens is, is that the agency doubles down and has to, and then you get the account managers having to have these really awkward conversations with clients. The whole thing is a mismatch, and it often ended in tears in one way that the agency or for me as the agency owner, I was crying, right, or the client was crying because we were enforcing the rules that they’d actually signed up for but didn’t really understand until they entered the process. So the whole thing is like for me, and I learned the hardware is not healthy for client, for agency or deliverer of the work, it’s bonkers.

So that’s nuts, it is nuts.

It is nuts. I wonder if only we had someone to talk to us about how nuts it is, Jacob, that would be so helpful. That’s basically what we thought. And then we thought, Jonathan could come on and discuss this. So I guess the question to segue into is like, OK, if that’s not a good system and if let’s assume we’ve some of the folks on this show have started to kind of get their head around that, what’s the better way? What’s the what’s the promised land? How do we shift out of this trap of selling time?

There are a bunch of ways, but just I’m going to stick with the value pricing concept. You guys brought that up first. There are other ways of price that I also like. Hourly is just you just got to stop doing hourly. But in the particular situation you’re describing, you did a bunch of work, you did what you said you were going to do, it ended up costing this amount of money. The client sees it and they’re like, this is not what we wanted. And I’ve seen this. I’ve seen people get fired over this. I’ve seen lawsuits because they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then when the project is launched or whatever the outcome is, when the deliverables are delivered, and then the CEO shows up for the first time and is like, this is garbage. What have you all been doing? This is nothing. How much did I pay for this? Right. So if you just, it’s so bad. It’s so painful. Probably anybody listening that’s been in business longer than a few years has probably experienced this. It’s brutal. And you don’t want, no matter what you do at that point, the customer is going to be mad. You’re not getting a referral. Maybe they’ll pay you, maybe you’ll split the difference, maybe you don’t get sued, but it’s not building your business. So let’s unpack actually what’s happening here. In the scenario rolls into the room at the last minute and says, this is garbage, what is happening? What is happening is you’re having the conversation that you should have had before you started, before you even decided to take the job, because ultimately it’s got to go through the buyer, the economic buyer’s filter. And if you do not satisfy that person, you’re just shooting free throws with a blindfold on. Like what are the odds of getting a basket? It’s impossible. It’s next to impossible. When it happens, it’s by accident, because you don’t know what you’re shooting for. So if you move that conversation from the end of the project to the beginning of the project, then you can find out, first of all, if what the CEO wants is even realistic, if the project that they’re asking you to do is you even believe will potentially lead to the outcome that they want. If there’s any reason, there’s some other questions. So basically, you just take that conversation that happens at the end of the project, you move it to the beginning, and you have the CEO convince you that this is a good idea. And through that conversation, I call it the why conversation, it’s got some other components, you find out basically what the outcome is worth to them. And then based on what it’s worth to them, whether it’s $1,000 or $100,000, then you can easily set some prices based $100,000. Okay, $10,000, that’s a price. If the outcome’s worth $100,000 to the buyer, then $10,000 is definitely an acceptable price. But then you say, at a $10,000 price, what costs are justified on my end as the seller? So if I’m gonna get $10,000, and that’s it, no change orders, nothing, $10,000, what can I do that would be fist-pumpingly happy to do for $10,000? That will move the needle closer to the desired outcome of the CEO, and is a big win for me, and is a tenth of what the outcome is worth to them. Am I gonna get them all the way to the finish line? No, but branding people can’t get someone all the way to the finish line anyway. They can only contribute to a desired outcome, and that level of contribution has to be discounted because you’re not in control of everything along the way. If you could give them $100,000 for, you know, guarantee that they’re gonna get $100,000 a year over your benefit from your branding exercise, you could guarantee that. Well, yeah, you could probably charge $200,000, but you can’t guarantee it. There’s a lot of things that can happen. So you discount, as Blair says, you discount it by uncertainty, and at the $10,000 price point, you’re like, well, I could do a branding workshop. I could teach your internal people how to do this. It’ll take a half day, 30 day follow up. We can review what your team put together. And I’d be fist-pumpingly happy to do that for $10,000.

So I guess the other question here is like fixed fee pricing. And how do you separate them for someone that just pulls a number out of the air versus value base?

So value based pricing is a way to calculate a fixed price. So fixed pricing is sort of like a bigger level. It’s a higher level category. You can set a fixed price by rolling some dice. You can base a fixed price on how many hours you think it’s going to take. It’s still a fixed price, but it’s based on hours. Or you can base a fixed price on the value to the client. And like you said earlier, your hourly rate, you basically picked it out of the blue. It’s not based on anything client specific. It’s not based on any particular project. It’s mostly like an ego thing. Like, I think I’m this good compared to, you know, that person charges 100. Right, right, exactly. I’m way better than this person who charges $100 an hour, but I’m nowhere near as good as this person who charges $200 an hour. So my hourly rate is reasonable. It’s reasonable for me to charge $150 an hour. This is pulled out of thin air. And then you multiply it by another number that you pulled out of thin air, which is how many hours you think the project is gonna take. And if you only did an hour or two hours or maybe even, I don’t know, any unpaid amount of discovery, you have not uncovered all of the scope of what they’re trying to ask you to do, at least not in software. In software, it was like impossible to uncover enough scope in a couple of meetings.

Yeah, that’s where I transitioned a while ago. A lot of listeners will know interconsultancy. And so completely changed my model and the way I think about it. And a lot of times now clients come to me for the very reason that you’ve just said, which is that we don’t know how the next three months are going to pan out, right? We’re going to start this together in a partnership scenario with an objective to aim towards, like you were saying, which is usually a new rebrand positioning, whatever it might be. But on the journey, how many customer focus groups do you want? It’s like, well, how does that map out? We don’t know precisely at the start if we might need one in six weeks time to expense check something that we’ve come up with in the workshops or whatever it might be. So that kind of ambiguity, as you say, it’s better to just price in because what then happens is, if you don’t and if you’re on this line by line scenario, then every time there’s a change order, someone has to go, well, Mr. Client, Mrs. Client, unfortunately, that’s extra work and now you have to pay a bit of extra money. And you get this kind of impression that the relationship with the client comes down to, oh, here we go, they’re going to charge us again for this. And again, that’s where the relationship starts to sour. Whereas if they’re paying you an equitable amount for the outcome that they’re looking for, and as you say, it’s well within the realms of what you find worth doing, then you don’t get those issues because you’re getting paid so much, quite frankly, to add an extra workshop in or something, it’s not a big deal. In fact, you want to do it because you want the client to be happy. So it’s a completely different setup, this methodology that we’re talking about now. Having gone through both, like you have Jonathan and obviously not to your extent, like in the way that you’ve documented and articulated it, everything you’re saying now from a practitioner’s perspective, myself, I can verify folks, so definitely listen to this. I could probably learn from it. I’ve got a few questions as well, because I find that question at the start around the value to the client, probably, and I totally agree, you need to bring it early, but it’s still quite hard to get them to even pin clients down on a number. They may not really even know. So I just wondered if you’ve got any tips, like how do you, let’s get practical, right? Let’s give us a practice. Let’s imagine we’re in a sales conversation. What sort of questions do you recommend people ask to kind of try and unearth that value to the customer, to the buyer?

So yeah, it’s super important, and it is difficult to learn how to do this. It’s sort of a performance art. There’s some science to it, but it’s very much a performance art, and you need a fair amount of at bats to kind of get good at it. But the alternative is so much worse. It’s that CEO at the end saying, this is garbage, start over, and we’re not paying you another dime. And then now you got a tough decision to make. So the beauty of this is that it dramatically, I didn’t realize this, I didn’t expect this, but when I first started doing this, an unexpected but welcome side effect was my clients all chilled out because there was no micromanaging, there were no time sheets, there were no questioning anything. And the deadlines, a lot of deadlines disappeared because to them the deadline was a cost control. But now all of a sudden when they don’t have to worry about a cost control, they’re like, well, you know, it’s done when it’s done, we don’t want you to cut corners, we want it to be good. So they really calmed down. There was a lot, it was just much more comfortable, it was a much better working environment. So that was huge. So but, but it is difficult to uncover value and there are a number of people, Alan Weiss, Blair Enns, there’s a bunch of them who talk about how to do this in a sales interview. So the way that it worked in software with me, and it’s the same structure for any professional service, is you want to talk them out of hiring you, which is polar opposite of what you’re used to doing probably. Probably you’re used to spending all weekend to put together a great pitch deck and come in and do the beauty contest against three other agencies that are waiting in the waiting room. This is the polar opposite of that. You go in and you first, they’re going to brain dump for a few minutes about what they, maybe up to 20 minutes they’re going to say, ah, this is what we want to do, we’re all excited, this is new thing, dah, dah, dah, dah. And that’s great. And then they might get very specific about, then we’re going to want a logo and we’re going to want, I don’t know, you tell me, you get all this list of deliverables and so on and so forth. And so you write all that down diligently taking notes and it’s like, okay, this is great, this is great. Yep, we can do all these things, but you’re really just not saying much. And then once it seems like they’ve got everything off of their chest and they’re kind of like, they’ve kind of cleared the decks, then you say, okay, this is great. Can we back up for a second? So I’d like to know more about the environment this is going to launch into. And good clients will say, yes, let’s talk about that. They’ll be like, ooh, this is interesting. Bad clients will be like, no, we told you what to do. That’s what we want. Just give us a price. And like, that’s not a good fit for value-based pricing. So if they are willing to go up a level with you and talk business or strategy and allow you or help, really, you’re helping them uncover why they should do this at all. This is going to be expensive. It’s going to be time-consuming. It’s going to irritate your employees. It’s going to, you know, all of these things. So why would you do this? You know, like what’s, why not do it some other ways? Couldn’t you just spend a bunch of money on ads? Or couldn’t you whatever? Couldn’t you hire an internal person to do branding for you? Like you told me you have a bunch of designers, why don’t you just have one of them do it? You know, and you just keep presenting cheaper alternatives and they will bat them away, or they wouldn’t be talking to you in the first place. And they’ll say, no, we can’t do that because of this reason. We can’t do that because of this other reason. And if we do that, it would actually look really bad for us if we spent all that money on ads or for some strategic reason, we’re not going to be giving money to Metta, whatever. And you’re writing all of this down as close to verbatim as you can. And you’re like, okay, why do this now? Why did something change? You’ve been probably talking about a rebrand for 18 months. Why are you pulling the trigger now? Couldn’t you study the market for 18 months and do it later? AI, can’t you just do it with AI now? It should be so easy for you since you know what you want when you see it. Why don’t you just do it with AI? Just wait for AI to get better for 18 months and then do it later. They’ll tell you why they can’t. There’s some reason why either it’s the board or the market or some competitor has done something that they’re afraid of. There’ll be almost certainly there’ll be some reason why this is urgent. Then you’re like, why would you hire me to do it? There’s probably, you could probably choose from 100 people like me, why are you talking to me? Why not, like I said, outsources to your cousin Vinny or some internal employee or offshore at somewhere. Then that’s where you learn how good your positioning is. With the answers to those things, you’ve now got a really good idea of where the target is. Where’s the bullseye? What are we shooting for here? Unless I was convinced at that point that their expectations were realistic, that the timeframe was reasonably realistic, and that I really was the best person for the job in their mind, then I’m going to write a proposal, because now I have a lot of pricing leverage. Not necessarily, which isn’t to say that I can set the price astronomically high. I just know that I just have an idea of what some acceptable prices would be, and then I can reverse engineer scope based on those prices and present them with three options. So it’s a process of uncovering. Like you said, they couldn’t blurt out a number. If I said, oh, how much is this worth to you? They’d be like, I don’t know. I don’t know how to process that. So you have to go through this process of Socratic questioning and kind of like, they know in their gut that this is the right thing to do. You and they need to pull all of that out of the junk drawer and put it on the table and basically inspect the decision at the components of the decision and find out why this, why now, and why me so that you’ve got some. It’s the only way to convince you to take the job. If you don’t know those things, you don’t know what the desired business outcome is or how realistic it is. So without doing that, if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be able to write a proposal. Like I don’t even know what I would put in it. But if you do do that, the proposal writes itself because they’ve given you all the reasons why they have to work with you.

That’s brilliant. Folks, that was a masterclass. I hope everyone’s been taking notes.

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I’ll just throw another thing in there and see what you think about this. The other thing I find in that early conversation is when they make statements, is to challenge that, obviously positively, you don’t want to be a jerk, but to be like, so how do you know that? What have you done to verify that? Oftentimes, I find clients will expose the fact that it’s a hunch or it’s like a guess that they’ve done and then if you want to add a value-based question in this, like, well, what would it mean to you if maybe I came in as an outsider and we started to verify some of this before we actually start taking an action? You get a sense of them like leaning in being like, oh, would you do that? That would be amazing because I always think, particularly from a consultant’s perspective, you’re acting like a doctor, right? Like, you don’t go to the doctor and go, doctor, I’ve got a broken leg and the doctor immediately just whips out a cast and just like puts it on your leg. The doctor says, let me just check that first. We’ll go get an x-ray and then we’ll have a diagnosis. So I often find people come with a pre-baked diagnosis. Sometimes they’ve done some verification themselves. Most of the time, though, they haven’t really done it. It’s just the gut that that’s what they think is happening and they’re hiring you to solve that. So you can add even more value if you verify the problem is as bad or as worse as they think it is in the first place. So I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, Jonathan. Do you think that’s a good point?

Yeah, I mean, if anybody who’s listened to me on my show will hear all the time me say, it’s like someone running into a doctor and saying exact same thing. It’s like running into a doctor saying doc, I need a triple bypass and the doctor’s not going to say, jump up on the table. I’ll go get my knife. Right. That would be malpractice. And I, and it, I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but I think it’s malpractice in all the professions to prescribe before you diagnose. I mean, like they are not the expert. That is why they called you. So for them to be, you know, not to mix my metaphors, but well, I’ll stick with this one. For them to tell the surgeon how to do the surgery, or if the surgery is even required, is insane. It doesn’t make any sense. But I know that people, like there’s people who are more junior, and people who are just people pleasers, and people who are used to being an employee and doing what they’re told. This is another big mindset shift is like, no, you are the expert about branding or design. They’re the expert about selling tires or manufacturing tires or whatever. So you’re not going to tell them anything about how to do that. And they might even be an expert about what their customers want. But you’re the expert about design. You’re not going to tell them how to make tires, and they’re not going to tell you how to do a brand guideline or something like that. So it’s like you need to own that piece. And if they’re going to boss you around at the thing that they’re supposedly bringing you in to do, it’s almost guaranteed to fail because the wrong person is driving the taxi. They’re like backseat driving the whole project. So of course, it goes off the rails. Of course, it goes over time. But the incentives, back to the financial incentives, if you get paid more and more and more as that backseat driver, you get the meter running, backseat drivers like, maybe take a left up here, maybe take a right. They haven’t even told you where they want to go, by the way. They’re just bossing you around, you’re driving around, and then eventually the meter gets to a point where they’re angry. So we’re not where I wanted to go yet. It’s like, well, you didn’t tell me where you wanted to go. It’s like, well, you didn’t ask me. It’s like, ah.

Ah, yeah, for sure. That’s crazy. Just one other quick thing, just on this sales question, if you don’t mind, Jacob, because I just want to ask this question. Do you find that there’s different layers of value that you can uncover? And what I mean by that is, so if I tell you where I’m going with this, I often think that there’s value to the buyer as an individual, and then there’s value to the business. And sometimes those two things have different nuances. Imagine a CEO would be telling you the problem from my perspective, the growth opportunity and that we’re not aligned around the growth plan and the brand and the way it’s positioned and blah, blah, blah. So that’s the business challenge. And then I would say to them, but what does that look like for you? And they might say, oh, every board meeting I go into, every leadership meeting, everyone’s fighting each other and I’m just spending all my time dealing with squabbling people and lack of priorities and all this stuff. Now I’ve uncovered what I would call like a soft value, like a value for them, which is misalignment and the stress of having to handle the leadership team. On top of the hard value, which is to the business itself, which has got hard numbers and growth opportunities and total addressable markets and all this good stuff. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you see different grades of value and do you have any thoughts on how to uncover that and what’s worth more? I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts on that.

Yeah, there’s a couple of things. Probably the first thing I would say is there can be a difference between the person who’s going to decide to hire you and the person who approves the decision. And it feels a little bit like it’s in the territory you’re talking about. So where you’re in a bigger organization, you’re talking to, I don’t know, you tell me, a SVP of Finance or something, and they are at a credit union and they want to redo all of their member onboarding. And it’s not like an overall rebrand of the entire business. It’s specifically to their business unit and they’re responsible for it. And maybe they have budgetary discretion over it to say, like, no, I don’t have to take this to anyone. I can run with this. So in effect, that person is kind of like the CEO. They are both the economic buyer and the person who gets to make the decision or recommend. You know, basically, if the price is right, the recommender is going to get what they want. But this person is basically like a CEO inside of a larger company because they can decide to hire you and they don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission. A lot of times, though, it’s to different people. And this is much more tricky. And you described it very well. You described that you want to know what the person who’s deciding, you want to know what their personal motivation is, which is not the same if we’re assuming an employee in sort of a Fortune 500 or something. It is not the same thing as what’s good for the business. On the surface, they’re going to say, oh, it’s good for the business, but that is not actually the thing that’s going to motivate them. It’s something like you just said, whether the misalignment or I keep getting yelled at about this thing, or I really want to, you know, I’m going to be up for promotion in a year, or my budget, my bonus is at risk or whatever. There’s going to be some personal frustration or opportunity that they’re experiencing. I still, in a situation like that, I still get really nervous when I can’t also talk to the economic buyer because we’re opening ourselves up for that meeting in six months where the CEO rolls in and says, this is garbage. And I don’t even care that I’m not going to get blamed for that because the SVP is going to get blamed for it. But I don’t want to be part of that. I don’t want to be in that meeting that I want their logo on my website with a glowing testimonial. So it is, if at all possible, first of all, work with companies that are of a size where you can always talk to the economic buyer. That might mean working for smaller companies, but you’re a higher altitude of person you’re talking to. But the other thing is, if you really got to believe that the economic buyer is going to be on board with the outcome, otherwise you’re just opening up to that risk. But yes, it’s almost like in that scenario where there’s two different people, it’s like you got to satisfy the decider’s personal goals and then give that, and you can’t talk to the CEO or the person above them, you need to give them a story as to why this is a smart thing to spend money on, that they then pass up the food chain. That totally works, makes me nervous personally, but it does totally work.

A question on the opposite end, we’re talking about value, but if you had smaller projects or smaller clients, for example, how would you usually handle that?

I love that question because it’s something that people don’t usually see when they hear me talking about value pricing and it’s a license to print money and I can increase my rates dramatically. No, it cuts both ways. If the value is not there, you can’t set a price higher than the value. The value is what it’s worth to the client. It’s worth, let’s say, $10,000 to the client. You can’t roll in there and say, well, it’s going to take us this long, so it’s $50,000, take it or leave it. They’re going to say no, it’s not an acceptable price because the value is not there. There’s no way to escape this. To me, it’s just like, well, you might as well find out the value first. Then you’re pretty much guaranteed that you’ve got some acceptable prices. Then it comes down to the benefits at each price tier if they see those benefits as meaningful. With a small client or a smaller client, they’re going to get less value out of it because it’s multiplied by fewer, it depends on what you’re doing, but it’s multiplied by fewer employees, customers, revenue, it’s multiplied by smaller numbers. The value is automatically lower even though you might do the exact same thing for a mom-and-pop pizza place that you would have done for Domino’s. The acceptable prices that you put on your proposal, they have to be lower than if you were proposing to Domino’s. You can still do it and there’s no way around them making a value-based decision, so you might as well ask, what is this worth to you? They’ll say, they might have asked you to do $50,000 worth of work to you. They say, well, it’s only worth $10,000 to us. If this went like a home run, it’s only worth 10 grand. Then you say, well, the thing that you ask for then is just out of your budget. So what if we did something for $1,000, which is way smaller than what they wanted, but you can explain to them how it would move the needle in the way that they want it moved. And at $2,200 and at $5,000, still all lower than 10,000, you’re giving them three things to choose from. The prices are lower than what it’s worth to them. But your scope obviously has to be really, it’s gonna be really small based on those price points. You’re not gonna do the thing they asked for. You’re gonna do something that can still help them though.

It’s a good segue into positioning. So you talk about pricing is positioning. So if the market sees you as interchangeable, then you’ve already put yourself in a pretty bad situation. So how much of pricing power, value-based pricing comes down to positioning? I know it’s like one of those three big questions, it’s like, why this, why now, why me? But the why me is so important because it comes back down to how you’re positioned and how you even got the call in the first place. So yeah, how much pricing power comes down to positioning?

I’ll give you a formula, the idea. I don’t want people to plug numbers into it, but it’s just a formula to help create a mental model of what’s going on in a situation like you just described. So you’ve got three components. You’ve got desire, you’ve got money, and you’ve got options, DMO, desire, money, options. And desire times money divided by options. If you’re taking notes at home, I’ll go slow. But the idea is, if they want what you do, let’s just call it branding. That’s not what they want, but let’s just say, we really want branding and we want it really bad. What they really want is some outcome that they believe branding will lead to, but I don’t know. It’s going to be different client to client. But they want some outcome of branding and they want it really bad for some reason. And you know that reason because you had the why conversation with them. If they have a ton of buying power, it’s a public company and you’re talking to the CEO, it’s dominoes, they have a ton of buying power, those two numbers multiply, roughly speaking. You know, again, this is not math, I’m just the mental model. Those, the desire and the buying power, the money, have a multiplicative effect where every incremental dollar means a lot less to them than someone who has less money. So they’re willing to write a bigger check because they don’t really care. They just want this thing that they want. And so if you have a Fortune 500 company that wants to do a complete re-brand, they’re probably going to spend at least a million dollars on it, right? For sure. But then you’ve got the dividing line and underneath that is options. And if they have a whole bunch of options that are less than a million dollars, but you know, they believe or they can’t tell the difference between the rest of the options, they all seem good, what is the last thing that everybody understands, it’s the price. So if I can’t tell the difference between these three branding agencies and one of them was like five million, one of them was two million, and one of them was 900,000, they’re probably gonna, actually they’ll probably pick the middle one, but they might pick the cheapest one, but they’re almost definitely not gonna pick the top one if they see no meaningful difference between the three agencies. So it is critical for that five million dollar one to be meaningfully different from the other two. And I keep saying meaningfully because it has to mean something to the buyer. Not because we won an award, we have been in business longer than the other two, or whatever it is, those are not necessarily meaningful to the client. If they are, they are, but if they’re not, they’re not. You need to be unique in a way that wipes all the other options off the table. And if you do that, then that desire times money is not getting divided. It’s essentially undivided. It’s one. You put a one in the denominator, and your desire and your money, the client’s desire and money, are multiplied and not diluted by competition. So what this means is, you don’t want to be just one of many. You want to be the one and only, which is positioning. It’s like you’re known for this one thing.

Yeah. It’s notoriously difficult to get to that point. Just for listeners, are there some great examples that come to mind for you, of people have really nailed their positioning. They are that one unique agency.

Yeah. I’m not super familiar with branding. You guys probably be better at picking that out of a hat. But I work with a lot of people who have laser-focused positioning, that gets down to the psychographic level around the buyers. So for example, I have a student named Geraldine Carter. You go to her website, geraldinecarter.com, you will instantly know that she is not for you, that there’s nothing she can offer you. She might be a good guest, but there’s nothing she’s going to offer you. She’s not going to sell you anything. There’s nothing of value you could really buy from her. But the other thing you’re going to know instantly is exactly who would. And that is a solo CPA firm owner or maybe a very small firm who is doing maybe around a million dollars a year, possibly with one employee, or maybe $250, $300,000 a year if there’s no employees, and they don’t want to build an empire, they want their life back. They don’t have a leads problem, they have tons of business, they have more business than they know what to do with, but they’re working 80 hours a week during tax season and they’re working 60 hours a week the rest of the time. And they hate it and they want to quit. That is her customer. So anybody, next time you talk to a CPA, you’re going to be like, I wonder, how much do you work? It’s almost like the positioning is so laser focused on, it’s an industry and a psychographic, it’s like a desire and an expensive problem, which is that they are slave to a business that was supposed to bring them freedom and they were better off in house. So that person, if you go to her website, there is a wall of testimonials of people saying, and this is an important point that I’m skipping ahead, but this is a critical point, is results. Testimonials are results. So it’s a wall of testimonials of like, I work half as many hours as before and I increase my tax bracket by three ticks, working less. One after the other, after the other. Videos, all results, results, results. So when you find yourself in that position or when someone shares her information with you, it’s like, you’re kidding me? There’s no, who else is, there’s no one. There are other people who speak to the space and I could go down a list of three more and say how they’re different in a meaningful way. So, you know, that’s a, she’s a really good example, but there are plenty of, there’s plenty.

We actually had a guest, Emily Penny, and she looked at all different agencies in the UK, hundreds of them, and the thing she found was that they’re all so the same, like all saying the same thing. And there was only a small handful that had a very unique point of view and were actually positioned in a way that was memorable and meaningfully different. And the others just kind of blended in and it’s funny because that’s what we do as professionals. We help position other brands and it comes back to ourselves. And we just failed to position ourselves well.

There’s a well-known positioning fear reflex. I think that term was coined by Philip Morgan. And you have this automatic feeling that at the core of positioning is strategy. It’s strategic level marketing. And the core of strategy is saying no to things. And people who are struggling to meet payroll don’t want to say no to anything. So the idea of niching down or specializing in some smaller market, so your total addressable market is smaller, is terrifying. Because I’m only getting a lead a month now. If I target a much smaller market, I might only get one lead a year when, in fact, it’s a paradox. And the reverse is true. Because if you target a specific kind of… Let’s use a… This is probably sort of a… I don’t like hunting metaphors, but it’s a great example. If I said to you, what kind of bait should I use to catch what? Right. Yeah. You can’t answer. It’s an unanswerable question. So when people get on my mailing list, I say, what would, you know, who are your dream clients? And they’re like, oh, I work with anybody. You know, any kind of big problem. I love solving big problems. And it’s like, but what should I do? I’m not getting any leads. It’s like, well, maybe you should be able to first pick who your ideal buyer is. That would help you get them. Again, it’s like you’re shooting baskets with a blindfold on. How are you gonna, it’s just luck. It turns into referrals only. But picking feels very scary because then you feel like you’re gonna starve. But it happens over and over and over when someone picks a really good, tight positioning that says no to 90% of businesses that still leaves like 10,000 businesses that would make perfect clients. And now your website can actually have some meaningful copy on it. You can finally pick images that make sense and aren’t just like smiling people shaking hands and something that’s much more specific to their industry or the person that they’re trying to attract. It’s like you can’t know what kind of bait to use if you don’t know what you’re trying to catch. So, you know, I understand why it’s scary. It’s but and it’s really hard to read the label from inside the bottle, which is why branding agencies are so, everyone’s bad at it. I’m bad at it. You have to get feedback from the outside. Like I could we could do an exercise right now. I won’t drag you through it, but I could ask you guys, well, who do you think I, what do you think I’m the one and only of, you know? But people listening, we’ll leave it as an exercise to the listener. What do you think I am? Right? That’s my positioning right now. Whatever I think it is, doesn’t matter what I think it is. That’s, you know, it has to come from the outside in their language and in their from their viewpoint.

And I think it comes out to simple ideas. I think you’ve done it brilliantly with the Hourly Billing Is Nuts, it’s relatable, it’s memorable, and you’ve written a book on it, and you’re standing against something which opens up deeper conversations on what the alternative is. So I think it’s brilliant, and you’ve made your way here, so well done.

We appreciate it, yeah, for sure.

All right, so change your gears a little bit. I guess we want to build authority, so we can position ourselves well. And authority is not fame, you know, it’s been known by the right people by, you know, for a specific point of view, like you’ve done around a certain problem. So what is a business of authority actually look like for people that want to really get this positioning perfect?

Okay, good question. Which part of the business, like the business model piece or the offerings or the marketing?

Oh, yeah, good question.

Well, I’ll just jump in. So I’ll skim across and then you can ask questions. So a business of authority. First of all, I know this is hard to hear if you already have a lot of employees, but maybe most people listening don’t. I think it’s a bad sign if you’re hiring a bunch of mini-me’s to do basically what you do. That is not an authority business. That’s an execution business, which is fine and you can make money doing that, but it’s not really an authority-based business. Not to say the positioning doesn’t help those kinds of businesses too, but when I see an authority business, it’s the kind of person who’s like author, speaker, consultant. Maybe they have an assistant or they have, but there’s not a big team of people doing what they’re good at. From a headcount standpoint, it’s usually pretty small because scaling by adding bodies is just a completely different approach. It’s a cost-based approach. It’s an arbitrage thing where you’re just trying to hire cheap hours and sell them at a markup. So your inventory is hours. So probably low headcount, very low. A lot of times just one person. The product service, I call it a product ladder. It’s usually at a high level, it’ll be some sort of advisory projects. Maybe there’s some hands-on work, but it’s usually strategic or there’s a strategic engagement first like some kind of a roadmap or diagnosis like we were talking about before. It’s the kind of person who would maybe get hired as an expert witness in a trial, like they’re recognized as an expert in the space. So they probably do custom consulting projects that are advisory in nature. They might do advisory retainers on a monthly basis for, not for hours, but for access to their expertise. They probably have some diagnostic service that’s a productized service, which we haven’t talked about, but it’s like a fixed price service that you publish at a given price on your website, so people can just buy it or not buy it. They probably have a book. They might have other info products like a video course or maybe a community, but that’s getting into the coachee space. So that’s sort of a list of sort of headcount, product and service mix. And then revenue-wise, I’ve seen soloists doing plenty of, all over the board. I mean, of course, there are ones that are struggling, but I’ve seen them as high as like, I think the highest soloist I’ve talked to is like 1.5 million, just them, working like 20 or 30 hours a week.

You know, AI is the buzz topic, right? Like, how do you think AI can assist and help people with their pricing? And have you got any thoughts on that?

Let me clarify, help setting their pricing or help?

Yes, I guess setting, like, can it help people set pricing? And like, I imagine it might be more that, you know, your AI agent can help you better set up your proposals and sales call conversations. But just wondered if you had any thoughts on that and whether you sort of seen anyone using it well?

Tons of things there. So first, I’m not really an AI maxi, I use it all the time. If it went away tomorrow, that would be fine too, but I’m not against it. One failure mode that I have been seeing over and over again is when people try to outsource the really hard thinking work that, the thing that they’re good at, they try to outsource that to the model instead of outsourcing the tedious administrative stuff that probably no one wants to do. So, and you actually already teed up my answer, which is I probably, I would never use it for pricing, but I might use it for drafting the proposal. I almost certainly would if I had, yeah, but I have a template. It’s already easy. It wouldn’t be that much. But yes, having a draft of the proposal is fine, but it’s the reason why it’s so easy to draft the proposal is that- You’ve done the hard work. I did the right, I did the hard work, right. Okay, all of that said, I do think you can use it as a learning tool to get better at the why conversation. So I haven’t done this too many times, but it’s given me good results so far. It’s really hard to get enough sales calls that you are not desperate to land for you to get enough practice at getting good at this. So you have to walk into that meeting not caring if you get the gig or not, which is very hard if you’re not sure where your next bull of Cheerios is coming from. So you can use it as a sparring partner, and the beauty of it is, like I’ve tried to do this in person, like one-to-one, do role-playing, but the person who I’m trying to train already by definition doesn’t know enough about their client’s businesses to even do a decent job of role-playing as the customer, because the whole problem is they don’t understand their customers or clients. But the AI does understand basic business principles, and so you can get into a why conversation by saying, pick a business that looks like one of your past clients or a client that you’d really like to land, give it as much, have it research it, you don’t have to give it any information. Say, okay, so imagine I’m talking to this SVP, here’s their LinkedIn profile, and they have called me in for these reasons to talk about a branding exercise. Then I don’t care, upload my book and say, read about the why conversation, I’m going to try and do a why conversation on you, and they’re going to throw stuff at you. It’s great because you don’t have to do it in real time, you can really think about your answer before you chat back to it. It just gives you practice, it’s a way to practice going through it that’s low-stakes and reveals where you chicken out. Even against the AI, you’ll chicken out. You’re basically role-playing the sales interview. I think that’s really useful for people.

Yeah.

But outside of that, just have to do administrative stuff and don’t outsource your job to it. I mean, that’s the thing you love doing. Why would you let someone else do it?

Right. That human connection with the buyer, I think is crucial. Don’t outsource that bit like you were saying. You cannot substitute that conversation that we’ve talked about, the why conversation is also where you build rapport and people connect with your energy and your personality. Particularly, if you’re solo like me, that’s where I can build. I can tell if there’s good chemistry there or not early, and no doubt the buyer can. It can win you the gig just by showing up and being smart and asking intelligent questions like you’ve highlighted. Really great tips. Really, really great tips. Cool. I think we’ve come to the end of our time, and I think I just want to thank you so much for coming on, Jonathan. It’s been such an important conversation to have. Folks, I hope you’ve enjoyed what Jonathan’s had to say. Definitely, I’m sure we’ve all been taking notes all the way through. I certainly have. I’ve got a whole ream of notes in front of me. It’s been brilliant. Thanks so much for coming in.

Anytime. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Just one final question. Where can people connect with you and what should they be doing if they want to actually start moving away from Hourly now?

Well, if you go to valuepricingbootcamp.com, it gives a six-day free email course that goes more in-depth into some of these issues and considerations and it comes straight from my… I mean, yeah, it’s automated, but it comes from my email address. So if you reply to any message, I’ll get it. I try to respond to everyone and it’s a great place to start a conversation.

Awesome. I highly recommend Jonathan’s email. I’ve been on it for years and years. You send an email every day, which is… Yeah, well done.

3,567, I think, right now.

Yeah, that’s bonkers.

Can you do a few more?

Can you do a few more?

I don’t think you’re doing enough there, mate. I just think put it out there.

You got to repeat yourself. It doesn’t sink in right away.

That’s true.

Amazing stuff.

Thank you. All right, guys, we’re going to wrap it up here. Jonathan, thank you so much. We’ll look these up in the show notes as well. So thank you. All the best.

Thanks, guys.

The Designity Awards celebrate “design excellence and out of the box thinking,” with a focus on the blend of human creativity, emerging technology, and strong creative judgment.

That is a timely mix.

Design is changing fast. AI is making execution faster and more accessible, but the work that stands out still depends on taste, originality, strategy, judgment, and the ability to create something people actually remember.

That is why I’m glad to be part of this.

The judging criteria are weighted across four areas:

• 40% portfolio and creative taste
• 30% creativity and originality
• 20% execution and use of AI or emerging technologies
• 10% personal brand

The awards are open to graphic designers and creative professionals, including creative directors, lead designers, senior designers, visual designers, and others whose work shows strong creative thinking and craft.

I’ll be judging alongside Shahrouz Varshabi, founder and CEO of Designity, and Rhea Alexander, professor at Parsons School of Design.

Winners will be announced in July and will receive recognition across Designity’s website and social channels, a digital award certificate for LinkedIn, a physical trophy, and potential opportunities to collaborate with Designity.

I’m looking forward to seeing the work and helping recognize designers who are pushing the industry forward.

I’m also grateful to judge across several other award programs, including Horizon Interactive Awards, Indigo Design Award, Signal Awards, LogoLounge, and LogoWave which I’ve now judged since 2016.

Learn more about the Designity Awards here.

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We are proud to have Designity as a sponsor for the upcoming Brand Builders Summit.

The real question is not just what your brand says.

It is what people remember, what they associate with you, and how those mental links influence choice when it matters.

In this episode of JUST Branding, we’re joined by Ulli Appelbaum, globally respected brand strategist, founder of First The Trousers, and author of The Science of Brand Associations.

Ulli has spent years helping organisations understand how brands grow by shaping the associations people hold in memory. In this conversation, we unpack one of the most important and often misunderstood areas of branding: how associations are formed, strengthened, measured, and used to drive real business growth.

We explore why some brands own clear memory structures while others remain vague, how emotion and storytelling help build associations, and what marketers often get wrong about consistency, distinctiveness, and meaning.

If you want to build a brand that is easier to notice, easier to remember, and easier to choose, this episode will give you a practical look at the science behind brand growth.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What brand associations are and why they matter
• How associations form in people’s minds
• Why memory is central to brand growth
• The link between distinctiveness, meaning, and choice
• How emotion and storytelling shape brand memory
• Why consistency is often misunderstood
• What smaller brands can do to build stronger associations
• What marketers should measure beyond awareness
• The habits that separate strong brand builders from weak ones

A sharp, practical conversation on what really makes brands stick.

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Transcript

Hi folks, and welcome to this exciting episode of the JUST Branding Podcast. Today, we have Ulli Appelbaum with us. Brand builders spend a lot of their time thinking about logos, we think about messaging, we think about campaigns, we think a lot about creativity and design and copywriting and that good stuff. But ultimately, as all listeners to this show will know, brands are not just about those things, brands ultimately live in the mind of the beholder. So, the real question sitting behind all of the activities that we might go about in terms of brand building is this, what associations, what ideas, what concepts do our audiences attach to us, associate with us and the brands that we’re building, which ultimately, hopefully, if we do our job right, drive choice. So, that’s what today’s conversation is going to be all about because we have, as I say, we’ve got Ulli with us, once again, if you recognize Ulli, he was with us a few years ago now, Jacob, right? In season 3, episode 18, he is a globally respected brand strategist, founder of First The Trousers and author of the new book, which we’re going to be tucking into in a minute, The Science of Brand Associations. If you don’t follow Ulli, definitely get on LinkedIn, get on the channels and do that and we’ll give you some of those details in a moment. He spent years helping organizations understand how brands grow by shaping the associations people hold in memory and how those mental links influence behavior in the real world. We’re going to be getting into brand associations, but before we do that, welcome once again, Ulli, to the show.

Thanks so much for having me guys. Pleasure to be on your show again. Really appreciate that.

Amazing. We’ve got your beautiful book here, The Science of Brand Associations. It’s a super easy but very practical guide to leverage the idea of brand associations as a tool with a lot of evidence-backed thinking behind it. But before we get into that, what drew you to write a book on it? What drew you to that area of brand building particularly?

Well, the great question because at the core, it’s really everyone speaks about brand association. When I mean everyone, I mean academics, marketing thought leaders, research or global research organizations. But when I dove deeper into it, I realized that no one had ever written a book about brand associations. So first I thought, well, it’s really not worth wasting my time on it because no one wasted their time on it. But then I dove a bit deeper and started to realize that it’s really at the core of what brands are. Now, brand association is simply a term for brand memories. The reason is simply if you build a brand, all you really got to try to do is for people to notice you and remember you. And not only remember you, but remember you with the right type of meaning. So I want to buy a barbecue grill. What brands come to mind? Oh, Weber. What comes to mind is like high quality, long lasting, all the things I’m interested in. The Weber comes to mind automatically. These are the brand associations. Now you may have another, let’s say, you know, call another brand of barbecue grill. Let’s call it Ossie Delight. I don’t know. Have you ever heard about a brand called Ossie Delight? I haven’t. Jacob, have you? You haven’t either, right? So we don’t know the brand, no awareness and no meaning or no association. So why would I buy, you know, Ossie Delight as a barbecue? There is absolutely no reason. So this is what brand associations are. It’s really what you connect the memories you have about a specific offering. Obviously, at the job as a marketer is to create positive memories and more memories that influence a behavior. And that’s really what the brand associations are. It’s really the building and the management of consumer memories about specific offering and the meaning associated to that. So that’s really what brand associations are.

So, if I was to ask a basic question just to help people get their heads around this, why would brand associations be fundamental for a brand builder to understand the science behind which is what your book is around?

So, when I dove into the subject, I was surprised on one hand how much science there is about memory forming and formation, and I’ve been researching that for the last 50 years, but also a lot of how much data there is from marketing science, from large organization like Ipsos or Kantar or the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and all these big organizations, on the value and benefit of brand associations. Now, the data is really mindful. There’s a whole chapter dedicated in my book on that, but the immediate one is what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls mental availability. If I’m in a moment of choice, the first brand that comes to mind is the brand that I’m going to choose most likely. Well, the first brand that comes to minds is the brand with the strongest and most leading brand associations. That’s really what it is. Coming back to my Australian delight, there is no association. If you were thinking about a barbecue, you’re never going to think about that brand and you’re never going to even look up that brand. And then when you look at, Kantar has done a lot of research on the power of strong brand associations and its sources as well. And what this show is, the stronger the network, there’s a clear correlation between the strength of an association network and the size of a brand in a market. The bigger the brand, the stronger the association network. So there’s not necessarily a causation, but there is a link between the two. What you also see is that brands with strong association networks tend to command higher price premiums. You justify higher price premiums for brands that have these strong networks of associations and so on and so on and so on. I mean, when you go through the list of factual benefits of strong brand associations, you’re like, OK, why haven’t I thought about it before? And one thing I need to highlight, Matt, is really the book is really a curation of best in science and best in marketing science on memory formation and brand association. So it’s not so much my interpretation or Ulli’s view on branding worldwide. It’s really, what do we know? What is the data telling us? What is the science telling us about brand association and brand association formation?

Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Well, one of the things that struck me was this chapter that you had on, well, section in your introduction, you talked about that this was a proven secret hiding in plain sight. So that’d be quite interesting to just sort of discuss a little bit because, as you say, there’s a lot of evidence-backed thinking behind these things. We’ve had Mark Ritson on the show and I think Jacob, you’ve done his mini MBA, I have as well, and you reference it in the book that he leverages this. Ehrenberg Bass, you know, Byron Sharp, even going right back to, I think you mentioned, there’s a classic book by Kevin Lane Keller, isn’t there? In Strategic Brand Management, sort of 35, 36 years ago, this was referenced. So it’s there. Why do you think that the brand builders, I guess, haven’t started to leverage that until perhaps quite, and even if we’d say until recent times, we’re not really leveraging it, let’s be honest, fully now. We’ve sort of got it in those academic circles. But why is it that we struggle to get some of these ideas that are proven out into the open and into the discipline, do you think?

That is a great question to which I wish I had an answer. But it’s simple, right? Because I didn’t need to explain to you, you’ve heard the term brand association, right? I didn’t need to explain it to you. It’s something that is familiar. Every marketeer has heard about it. And the data and the science has always been there. But I don’t know if it’s the industry need to focus on shortcuts. It’s like I’m not interested on how things work. I want to know how I can deliver a result faster, easier, with less effort. It’s like when you think about the Herrenberg-Bass Institute and how brand grows, the book has been in the market for over 10 years now. Why is it owned? I’m not agreeing with all of them, but I’m agreeing with 80% of them that are data-driven, science-driven and proven principles on what makes brand grow successfully. Why is it only now becoming successful? I wish I knew. I think there are a lot of storytellers, great storytellers in the world of marketing. So a couple of months ago, I did this exercise. I asked the most big AI platforms. I gave them a list of 20 popular books, marketing books, and asked them to organize them based on are they data-driven and science-driven and are they applicable to the marketing world? And what’s interesting is I wanted to see how much is BS and how much is actually fact-driven. And what’s interesting is literally 90% of the books fall in the category of, I don’t want to say, if I’d be mean, I’d say made up shit. If I’m more pragmatic, it’s great storytelling, because those are philosophies that are being shared, that sounds very convincing, that use case studies to retrofit the principles, but that effectively have no evidence in market reality or business reality. The biggest example I can think of, it’s one of my favorite book to hate, is Why by Simon Sinek. There is no evidence behind it. There is literally no evidence behind it, and scientific evidence behind the book. Yet, it was one of the most successful books of the last 10 years. Fantastic storytelling skills, which I don’t have, so I have to rely on the facts. People’s desire to look for shortcuts. I’m not sure, to be honest. If one of your listeners has a better explanation, by all means, share it with me, because I’m trying to find the secret of what’s behind that.

I guess it’s also quite hard, isn’t it? You might even understand the principle, but it’s actually quite hard to do. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So we’ve talked about what brand associations are, the ideas that people attach to a brand. That’s my sort of very novice-like summary of it, but that’s what it is simply.

No, that’s what it is.

But let’s talk about how those ideas are framed in people’s minds, right? Because ultimately, we’re trying to influence that as brand-builders in a positive way, like you said before. So how do we form an association as a consumer about a brand?

Well, actually, when you think about it, it’s actually very simple. That’s the part that scared me. It’s like once you think about it in those terms or in those memories, it becomes very easy to see what contributes to a strong memory or not, right? So first of all, it needs to be something that is important to you. It sounds dumb, right? But if you get, I’m sure you get exposed to 200,000 pieces of information every day that are meaningless to you, that are not important to the way you see yourself, what you do, et cetera, et cetera, and they just disappear in the ether. You don’t memorize them, you don’t remember them. But there’s something that stands out to you because it’s relevant, because it taps into, you have a kid that is sick all of a sudden, that’s a piece of information that is relevant to me because you offer me a solution for that specific problem. So that’s number one, it needs to be personal. Number two, what we know, it’s the science of learning, right, is any form of emotional involvement strengthen the memory you will have about something. So if you are emotionally engaged, you learn faster and better and memorize better and longer than if you are not emotionally involved. And that’s where things like storytelling come into place, right? Storytelling is a great way to help people to memorize things stronger. And again, all these principles I’m mentioning are supported or identified in science on what makes memory strong and what allows you to recall memory faster. Repetition is another one, right? Right now in the world of marketing, there’s a lot of discussion around consistency. You know, advertising campaigns don’t wear off as quickly. You got to run them for a longer time, especially if they’re proven successful. Why? Because repetitions, that’s really what it is. It’s like you repeat your message and you get bored by it, right? I get bored by my messages. But the reality is most consumers don’t get to see your brand once, second every month in their life. And so consistency and repetition is a key element. So those are different principles that are proven and that are boiled down into a scorecard basically, which basically gives you like six or seven questions to help you understand is the way I position my brand or the associations I want to build around my brand. Are they going to be strong and are they going to be successful based on the scientific principle? And the weird thing is once you know those principles, and what I’ve mentioned to you, it’s not rocket science, right? Nothing, I hope, that I told you surprised you. It needs to be story telling. It needs to be emotionally engaging. It needs to be relevant, personally relevant. It needs to be repetitive. None of that is sort of like a new piece of information, right? But if you combine all these things and you look at your brand through that lens, all of a sudden you’re like, my god, it’s actually fairly straightforward and simple to poke holes in poor strategies or poor positioning statements, because you know what six criteria to look at. It’s almost like finding how simple it becomes once you get it.

So Ulli, let’s get a bit specific here, right? Like give listeners a bit of a flavor for, well, I guess the type of associations they should be focused on and then maybe some of those questions that you mentioned that will help them assess. You don’t have to give all of them because they’re in the book, right, folks? You’ve got to get the book. But just give us a flavor, like one or two, so that folks can kind of understand the thinking.

When I wrote the book, I went through this discovery myself. I learned through science. I learned all this data from these different companies and stuff like that. And I went through this journey myself, which then made me realize, oh my God, if I look at a brand from that specific angle, I’m sharper in my thinking. But going through those learnings, ultimately realized how many issues there are in the world of branding. So the first one, it sounds ridiculous, right? But it’s literally, what category are you actually playing in? Now, this sounds like an obvious one. And I thought, you know, do I really need to write about this? Because, you know, you think it’s obvious. But then I encounter so many brands and frankly, so many clients that are not sure exactly what they’re playing in. So it’s easy in the B2B world, right? Because you see advertising, where you don’t know what the guys are offering to you. But I see that also in packaged good brands. It’s like, you know, is your brand a juice? Or is your brand a refreshing drink? Or is your brand an energy drink? Or is your brand all three? But then what category does it fall in? And it sounds ridiculous, right? But for a consumer to remember you, it needs to know what you are. Would you say, if I say, for example, you know, think about all the brands of fruit juice that are out there. Would you think about Red Bull? No, absolutely not, because Red Bull for you is an energy drink. You know, but I’m surprised by the amount of brands that are not clearly in a easy to recognize bucket for consumers when they think about them. So it literally starts with that. The other one is really, why are you, Matt, and you, Jacob, buying something? You know, what are the core drivers? And what I’ve learned through my career is that the worst question you can ask, the worst thing you can tell in the context of managing a brand is, this is a category, this is a cost of entry. A fruit juice needs to taste good. I don’t need to speak about that. It’s like, no, consumers buy fruit juices because they taste good. So you need to be the brand that is associated with the best taste. You know, basics like that. And that’s what I said, it becomes so essential and so basic. It’s almost like childish when you think about it in terms of managing a brand. Then you have, you know, you know that people will remember things if there is an emotional engagement. So a simple question is out of your brand, what is the emotional response you want to elicit with your customers? Because you need to elicit an emotional response. What is it? And again, you think that’s a simple question. It’s like, yeah, but the answer to that question is kind of challenging, but you need to have that answer if you really want to succeed. And you’d be surprised on how many brands. I don’t know if it’s a global phenomenon. I think it’s a US phenomenon, which is very rational in its marketing, very selling, the selling point driven in the marketing. But the question is, what’s the emotional reaction? Why should I connect emotionally with your offering? And so on and so on and so on. And as I said, it’s really not rocket science. But once you have an awareness of this list of questions, you become more focused, you become sharper in your thinking, if that makes any sense, because you know what questions to ask and you know what questions to ignore. Maybe I’m just getting too old and focusing on the basics and the essentials as I’m getting older. That could be true, but that’s one of the benefits I got out of writing the book, actually.

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s funny, because I often observe as I work with clients as a consultant, and I often observe the phenomena, which is that within companies, when you get a lot of people involved, particularly over long stretches of time, we as human beings, we like to complicate things for many reasons. The biggest reason and the most concerning reason that I see is that often, we like to come with our own ego and add a stamp on it. Be that in a leadership team, in a marketing role, even designers. Designers do it all the time. They’ll take the brand guidelines and go, yeah, that’s kind of nice, but I want to do it my own way because I’m better. It’s like, okay, well, you might be better, but the thing is strategically, we need to think about this over the course of managing a brand. Therefore, there are different priorities when you’re looking at it that way. So we add this complexity to things and over time, it gets more complex. So you’re right, I think, Ulli, to kind of get us back to what are the basics, what are the principles, and what are we doing about managing brands through those lenses, because we often forget, and we often go down this complexity route, it seems to be.

I think you’re 100% right, and we love to talk about this, right? So simple example, which is also relevant for designers, brand personality, right? I mean, the three of us could speak for two weeks about brand personality and still not exhaust the subject, right? And we have all our tools, and how do we define it? And maybe you should look at it from archetype perspective, and maybe it’s the values associated with it. And all of that is great and nice. But ultimately, you play with all these tools, and we do that because why? You want to create an emotional reaction. And as long as you know what this emotional reaction is, whether you put your information in a bubble, in a mood board, in a personality statement, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the outcome. So yes, I think we love to complicate and discuss all these things for… I think it’s ego, and I think we like to listen to each other talk, right? It’s like, you know, pay attention to how smart I sound, you know, because I use all these big words and have all these great frameworks. And at the core, it’s really get consumers to remember you with the right information that will make them choose you at the moment of purchase, period. That’s what the core of marketing is.

That’s the key, isn’t it? The purchase drivers. But here’s the thing, right? Let’s imagine we’ve gone through this. We’ve defined what we’d like the consumers to attach to us. That’s kind of like part of it. But as you said right then, it’s the outcome that matters, right? So how do we get from a point, let’s assume for the sake of argument, Jacob, me and you have got this brand, we’ve defined the associations, we’ve gone through some of the key questions, we’ve got it in place, we’re all happy with it. But then how do we take that and really push it through so that we do see an outcome that helps our brand grow in the market? What are your thoughts on taking it forward?

That’s a great question and I think you are probably the best suited to answer that question because I know you do a lot of leadership workshops and stuff like that. Again, it comes back to the basics. The first thing I noticed is the three of us were to manage a brand is first, we would have to align on what is it we want to manage, what are the associations we want to create. Now again, this sounds obvious, but a part of all my engagements, I do stakeholder interviews with the company stakeholders and talk to the CFO, the CEO, CMO, customer service guy, sales guy, whatever. And one thing that strikes me is that in 80% of the cases, they all have a slightly different opinion of what the brand is or what the brand should be. That’s where it starts, right? So your customer service guy, when he does his work every day, has a different opinion than your CMO that develops an advertising campaign. Bad, bad starting point. So alignment. The second thing is understanding of your consumers. Does everyone in the organization have the same understanding of what matters to people? And then you’ll also be surprised how often there is no alignment, because what you get is a lot of guesses, right? Yeah, the 26 reasons why I think people should buy my book. That’s another way to say, I have no idea why people are buying my book, but I hope that one of these 26 is the core driver. You know, but that’s what it is. And that’s what you have in organization. The third one is very simply being clear on our strategic approach. And what I mean with that is if you want a brand to grow, it needs to acquire new customers. I have one client in my whole portfolio, where the exception is that his growth is coming from existing customers and growing his share of business with existing customers. But in 99% of the cases, we need to be aligned. Now, again, this sounds obvious, but it’s not the case. So if the three of us are aligned on what are the associations we want to grow, we have the same shared understanding of what drives our consumers, and we are all focused on customer acquisition as a core strategy, then you are, I would argue, at 60% of the equation there already, because all these frictions, internal friction, are gone. And then it’s building your brand. So you have the associations that is understanding the role of communication. The role of communication is, and I’ll talk a bit about that in the book, is building these memory structures, is creating these associations. Advertising folks will often tell you it’s about creating attention, because if someone doesn’t pay attention to you, your communication is useless. I think like, well, paying attention is like cost of entry of every form of professional marketing. If you’re not able to catch consumers’ attention, maybe you should look at another job. You know, it’s like the purpose of my car is to drive. It’s like, well, I assume that all the cars that are being sold around the world know how to drive have this feature built in, right? So, but building memory structures, I think, is an important element. The second one is that understanding what we talked about earlier is consistency. Repetition across all touch points is really a core element of successful brand building. And the third element is simply, and that’s what design comes into as well, is distinctive brand assets, right? Let’s say if I take your quotes, Matt, and put them in a different context and go online and use your quotes as my own, I don’t associate them with you as the brand. Put differently, the stronger you associate your own content and messaging and association with your own brand and your own brand assets, the easier it will be for people to remember what Matt said, and easier to see when they see content that is relevant from Matt. Oh, that is Matt content. So building distinctive brand assets is another important element. And again, we can go like that for another 60 minutes. But again, nothing I’m telling you, I’m sure is surprising you. I’m sure you would agree that it’s about internal alignment, you’d agree that it’s understanding your customers, you know, all this kind of, yes, you need to be recognizable, and all these kind of things. And it’s surprising how often these principles are not being applied. I’m working with a client right now that where we’re going through the exercise, basically developing the scorecards on effective brand building for them. And one thing that struck me is in the last three years, they changed strategy five times. And it’s absolutely mind-blowing. And then you wonder why the brand is confused and why consumers are confused. So you encounter that in the marketing world everywhere basically.

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We’re very short term, aren’t we? Unfortunately, in a lot of businesses that we think about, we’re sort of quarterly sales cycles, yearly planning. Sometimes these things take more than that to kind of embed themselves. We don’t give them enough chances or that a new person comes in and wants to build through their ego, their own approach, which might be wrong or right. But from a consumer’s perspective, you’re right. The worst thing is to confuse everybody and to kind of change it because you’re almost doing damage to the equity of the brand rather than building on the past.

I think Funtar has this data point that shows that 70% of your future consumption or your future demand is driven by the clarity of your positioning. So meaning if consumers are clear about what you have to offer, 70% of your future demand will be driven by that. Why? And that’s another big important part of brand associations. And you guys are familiar with that concept too. It’s like you don’t just communicate to people who are in the market today, you communicate to the whole market so that in two months, if you guys think about who I should maybe buy a book on brand marketing or brand strategy, you think about my book because two months earlier you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve heard about the book and you’re creating this future demand by being clear on what you have to offer.

Well, that’s the two speeds of marketing, isn’t it? The longer game, 95% are not in the market to buy 5R, but we all tend to focus on the five. Why? As you say, the science, the stats is focus on both, right? But so don’t exclude one group for the other. A lot of brands, I often go in like yourself, Ulli, and a lot of brands are just in performance based marketing. They’re not thinking about longer term thinking. So it’s a tricky one. It’s a tricky one. I’ve got a lot of work to do, it seems to me. So I had a question for you on this associations business, because it seems to me there’s two things going on here. There’s the brand and alignment internally around what associations, the leadership team, I guess, would connect or define in order for them to see growth that they believe. But then also the brand might be already out in the market, out there. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but sometimes when I do discovery work, I also talk to customers as well as internal audiences, external, and sometimes there’s a huge gap in why customers are buying, what value they see, and then what the internal business sees. There’s a complexity there, and then there’s an added complexity because you’re not just dealing with something at this moment in time. The leadership team are often thinking about, if they’re a good leadership team, they’re thinking ahead, they’re thinking five, five odd years in the future. So then there’s this expression like, hit the puck where the player is going to be, right? Then there’s this challenge there. So that is why it’s also tricky, right? Like even if you’ve got a team fully understanding it, they might define something which then consumers are not attaching to it now and don’t see relevant. And also it might be that they will find it relevant in the future. I just wondered if you had any thoughts on those dynamics. Like, do you listen to audiences out there and mold around them? Or how do you sort of approach that in your work, Ulli?

Absolutely. Well, first of all, yes, you need to listen to the consumers, right? Because the challenge is that the way these perceptions and associations are being formed, the influence of marketing is minimal. And again, it comes back to your memories, right? What creates a memory? It’s your personal experience with a brand or with an offering. That is going to have the strongest impact on what you associate with the brand. The second strongest impact is going to be what people say about it, what people you know, trust say about it. You’re looking for a new lawn mower. Your neighbor is mowing his lawn every Saturday morning from 6 to 9 a.m. The guy is obsessed about his little lawn mower. You’re going to go and talk to him and ask him for a recommendation because you know this guy knows about the subject and what he’s going to recommend. So this is going to inform your perception of a brand. Then you have media, right? The press, what you see in social media, what influencers talk about and all these kind of things. At the bottom of the totem, you have marketing, right? This brand itself say, hey guys, I’d like you guys to associate this with my specific offering. So because of that understanding what consumers associate with your brand is crucial. Both in understanding why they really buy you, and that comes back to the core drivers, what the equity you’ve built over the years. So one thing that I see a lot of brands don’t do is they have like 30, 40 years of equity in the market and they don’t ask, what is it that made us successful? What is the equity we’ve built over the last 30 years? We can continue to tap into to succeed. New marketing director, as you said earlier, wants to do everything different, ignores everything that has been done before and tries to do something different. Very, very poor approach. But then you also want to know what consumers think because you want to know what are potential barriers to purchase. And I’ve seen it in many of my, not many, but several of my projects, where you talk to consumers and you’d ask them, what do you think about this brand? And all you hear is positive statements. And there’s nothing negative about it, but they still don’t buy it for whatever reason. And then you probe a bit more and then you get, okay, well, maybe the price point is just too high for me. That’s an obvious barrier. But it’s more be a brand I don’t identify with. And that’s, for example, a problem Harley-Davidson has. A lot of young riders, motorcycle riders, don’t identify with the old white guy, which I will realize that I would be the old white guy seen to ride a Harley-Davidson. A lot of young people don’t identify with me. So that’s a barrier for me to buy. So understanding the barriers helps. So understanding where consumers are and what they think allows you then to determine, okay, are there old associations I need to refresh? Are there associations or equity that needs to be brought to life in a more interesting way to make it more relevant again? Or are there negative associations I need to actively target and go against to change people’s opinions? So that is why understanding consumers is so essential. And then you need to ask yourself, well, which one do I want to build on top of the ones consumers have already? Now, and you guys know that as well as I do is, what you say doesn’t matter is what you do that matters, everything that matters. So you can tell me Volvo, which I may associate, let’s say, with safety, can tell me they’re all about design now. If their cars continue to look like Lego cubes, I’m not going to buy the design angle. I’m not going to think, oh yeah, great. Lego cube design is really actual and modern. I think, no, the product needs to embrace and help create these associations. So it takes time to build over time, but the proof needs to be in the pudding, right? It needs to be in your product. It needs to be in your consistency over time. It needs to be in whatever the brand does, more so than what the brand claims it wants to do. And so there’s a lot of information here, but you cannot fight negative emotions, negative barriers. You need to work with them. You can try to overcome them, but you cannot ignore and fight them. And you cannot, you know, you will not become a beauty queen in Brazil, Matt. Sorry, you’re great looking and everything, but the stretch to you becoming a beauty queen in Brazil is a bit too high. Oh, really?

I was really banking on that for the next week of my career.

Sorry for that. But just like Volvo probably will never become the gold standard in car design, you know, which other brands might be, because the stretch, they don’t deliver against it. And the stretch in consumer’s mind is a little bit too big, so to say. But great question. You cannot build a brand without understanding where consumers are at mentally and associate with you.

Ulli, I had a follow up question to that.

Yeah.

When the brand is a little bit more abstract, so for example, like insurance, and there’s like mascots like the Gecko for Geico, where there’s like no meaning behind it apart from like the name and the character, but is there a relationship between like distinctive assets like that, meaning and memory?

Absolutely. Thanks for asking this very leading question, Jacob, because yes, there is a clear correlation. Now, the interesting thing is, and that’s the big debate between distinctiveness and differentiation, right? Is if I recognize you and develop emotion towards your offering, you’re already winning the branding game, and that’s exactly what Geico does in the insurance business. They do very intangible things, and that’s the power of mascots and distinctive brand assets, right? And that’s what I said earlier. It’s like when you create these brand assets and you get exposed to them, you’re driving on the highway and you see the archers, McDonald’s archers, and you’re on a road trip, suddenly you’re hungry and you’re like, oh, maybe I should stop at McDonald’s at the next exit. Seeing these brand assets triggers the memories you have, but if you have an intangible product, creating these assets, and a mascot is perfect, because a mascot is like, how do you call it? It’s a difficult word. It’s like anthropomorphization. Basically, projecting human trace to an object is a great way to create sympathy for that brand that is very abstract. Yes, it’s an extremely powerful tool, and especially mascots. You guys know that too. For me, it’s one of the most underutilized brand assets, potential brand assets for a brand. What you’ve seen is, I think there is research that shows that over the last 30 years, the use of mascots has decreased in marketing, and yet the effectiveness of mascots is at an old time. It’s one of the most powerful devices in branding you can use. Just like your flamingos, Jacob, it’s like, you see the flamingos, you think about Jacob and your community right away. When you think about, talk to me about a global community of brand people, it’s like, let me think, I don’t know, to think a bit about, it takes more time. Show me the flamingo, I’m like, duh, of course. Yes, very powerful devices.

You’ve mentioned Jacob’s brilliance, but perhaps just for folks, in terms of global brands, obviously we’ve got people tuning in from all over the world. Have you got any sort of examples? Because people love examples of brands that have built powerful mental associations well. Perhaps while you’re just thinking of a couple, I always think the classic example is Coca-Cola, right? A lot of people have that when they’re a child, right? So they get it as a treat on a hot summer’s day, mom comes out or mom allows you to buy it as a treat because it’s not normally something you’d have when you’re very, very young. So you come of age, maybe you’re eight years old and you’re giving your first Coca-Cola and you associate it with a hot summer’s day, fun, you’re probably out somewhere, it’s a treat. Then as you grow, you build on those mental associations and Christmas time comes around, you see the adverts with the Santa Claus and all of this stuff. So obviously, that is a juggernaut of a brand and has been around for ages, but it’s a powerful idea. It’s a drink at the end of the day, but it builds such mental, emotional pictures because perhaps some of those things that I’m just suggesting that that’s probably attached to the brand. I’m just wondering if you’ve got any other ideas perhaps through your research or you think, oh, this is a great example of a brand that does this.

There are a lot of, and it depends by geography as well, or even the global scale. But before I go there, just to point out your Coke example, the amazing part about Coke is the consistency of its branding. So I grew up in Africa, and you can be in a small village in Africa and go in one of the small stores on the side of the road, you will see a freaking Coke logo and a Coke sign. I can go into a 7-Eleven here in the US, I will see a Coke sign somewhere. We get exposed to this brand, and I’m sure you do the same. You’re like the outback in Australia, where there’s really nothing.

Yeah, probably the outback.

But during your vacation or your weekend, you do a road trip right through the outback, you will find a Coke logo somewhere, so absolutely. Other brands for me is that are very successful doing so. McDonald’s is another one, that’s another no-brainer, right? But then you have things like Kit Kat in the confectionery business, Kit Kat global recognition in Japan as much as in Germany or wherever else. Taking a break, taking a Kit Kat, it’s a strong position. I think the FIFA football organization is part of that as well. I think Netflix has turned Formula One into a global phenomenon as well. Facebook, Timo, TikTok. I mean, yes, we use them as platforms, but again, that’s probably the brilliance of these things, right? So those are extremely strong brand. Why? Because we interact, we have personal experience with them, not because we see advertising from. So there are a lot of brands out there that really provide that. Then you have things like Rolex, luxury brands, Yves Saint Laurent, whatever luxury couture and categories you want to focus on. Verge Clicquot, you see the color scheme and you recognize the brand around the world. So there are actually a lot of brands that do it properly. But again, they are consistent and they consistently repeat the associations they have and they consistently use their brand assets up to wazoo, right? I think it’s Mark Ritson who says it’s like use your brand. He calls them brand codes. Use them in every touch point, every touch point. And then when you get sick of them, continue to use them even more because, and it’s true. That’s really what you need to do. So yeah, there are tremendous amount of brands out there.

You have to be really hot on that. And I think this goes back to the original conversation we were saying. At a leadership level, this needs to be understood. Because I was working with a brand, a global brand, was it last year? I think it was. And we got a positioning. I was grateful enough to be honored really to work with a very talented brand director and they got it and they were very keen to connect my work with say their design teams. So I was working with the head of design. And then I was talking to them about the challenges of executing anything across this organization, a global organization. And they said, Matt, the challenge is, is that we’ve got teams in Africa, we’ve got teams in APAC, we’ve got teams in India. And what we find is, that what I was talking about before, like these local teams, they want to add their own stamp to everything. Like this is just a nightmare. So they showed me these examples, so they’ve created a mood board. They were so upset about this. And they were showing some stuff that had gone on in China, that was like so different, so off-brand, so wild. This team in China had created its own brand identity that was overpowering the corporate identity. And we were just like, what is going on? So the governance side of that is absolutely crucial. And I think that’s what we perhaps don’t realize, is the power of consistency, the power of control needs to be there. And controls are a horrible word in some companies, culturally. But ultimately, if you want to build a powerful brand, you have to control the way it goes to market. And you have to get these principles into the people on the ground, in those local markets, so that they understand it. And when you talk about brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, these are brands that take that seriously. They invest in getting those design teams on boarded, and they meet regularly. There’s cadence behind all the execution. It’s a machine that goes on behind it. And that’s the bit I often think the design of the designers is sometimes missing in some of these organizations. So I think this is a great point. We should aim for the output. But tricky to do, right, Ulli? Tricky.

I totally agree with you. The interesting thing is, you want to leave the… I don’t know what it is, the desire to imprint our own work, personality, whatever, ego to your point on something. Because early in my career, I was working in Budapest at Leo Burnett. And one of the big clients of Leo Burnett was Marlboro. Now, Marlboro at the time, we were still advertising in Eastern Europe. And it was one of the biggest client of the agency. Now, if you’re familiar with Marlboro, it’s all red. It’s the conventions, the design convention of the brands are absolutely rigid. And the way it happened at the time is you didn’t mess around with the brand. But what you get is you get from headquarter of the US. Once a year, a massive database of brand assets, including videos, films, print ads, posters, whatever. And you could select them and choose them for your own market and then apply them. But you didn’t mess with them. And I remember we had a yearly meeting where, the following day, we had a meeting where we wanted to discuss with the marketing director of, it was a Philip Morris Central Europe, what are the activities for the next six to 12 months, we’re going to focus on Marlboro specifically. And so we had a bunch of assets that our designer, our art director at the time, was trying to put together and visualize for the Central European market. And so the creative director and I go out for dinner, have a few too many drinks and come back to the agency at 11 o’clock at night to look at the work before it was presented to the client the next morning at 8 o’clock. And the art director, real sweet girl, talented woman, had turned every Marlboro ad into green. So, when you know Marlboro, it’s all about the red, and it’s part of, you know, the, it’s like Ferrari, a highly recognizable equity of the brand. And so he asks, why did you change that in green? It’s like, I was getting a bit bored, you know, I thought maybe we need to mix things up a little bit, so I thought green might be a great change. Now, needless to say, the poor girl spent the night at the office changing everything back to red. But yes, so it’s, but the reality is you can, you know, you see that with brands like KitKat, where the strategic platform is global, where the design assets are global, but where the storytelling is local and culturally influenced by the local region or the regional aspects. And that’s a great way to do it as well. As I said, KitKat and a lot of the mass brands do that. So there are ways to play with that. But yes, the control is, the truth is we have problems ourselves. I don’t know, Jacob, how do you feel about that? But I love to see, coming back to your Flamingo, how often do you think about changing the Flamingo or making the Flamingo do something different than what it’s supposed to be doing? I don’t know how often you have to drive to want to change things. I know I have that with my visual identity and my core identity on my branding, so to say, the drive to change things because we spend day in, day out with it is strong. You probably see my content or my branding once every six months, if I’m really lucky, and not every day like I do. So yes, it’s the rigor behind that is really hard to maintain.

I’ve kept the same pink color since 2007 when I started. So that’s been there from the beginning. The flamingo is much newer, it’s probably only a few years old. So it’s still quite fresh, but my office is covered in flamingo stuff. I’ve given flamingo gifts, my kids draw flamingos and give them to me. There’s so much flamingo stuff, and it has been really associated with the brand, and people just recognize it, and I’ve ruined flamingos for a lot of people. I apologize for that, but yeah, it’s true.

No, it’s great. Have you thought about changing the shade of pink since 2007?

I kind of go through a little gamut, so sometimes it’s more purple, some more pink depending on the context, but it’s always around magenta, give or take, so yeah. But definitely not, I haven’t gone to a totally different color.

But it’s interesting because I think your flamingo shows something else that is important about brand assets, if I can just come back to that real quick. And I’m sure you have a meaning behind the flamingo. I don’t know what that meaning is, and I have no idea what the connection to brand design and brand strategy is. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter. You know what I mean? We’re able to create the flamingo association with your work, and so that every time I see it, I think about you and your work. I don’t have like a big cerebral brain that has a designer outfit that tells me, Jacob is a great designer and great strategist that does design work. So the visual doesn’t embody the benefit you provide or the expertise you provide. It’s just a point of distinctiveness. So that’s the interesting part about brand assets as well, right?

That’s why I was asking about the gecko, because there’s no real connection. But if I think of insurance, that comes to mind. So that’s the difference. The meaning behind it, it was, yeah, we just saw the pink obviously related to the mascot. And then I just shared that. And whenever I was sharing creations, I’d use the flamingo as just a point of reference as an animal. And people just associated that with me over time. And then I leaned into it more and it really became more ingrained in people’s memories. And I kind of explored some language around it, like stand the flock out and flock ordinary and had some fun with it and really built an identity around that flamingo. So now it’s really about that idea of standing out, which is what we do as branders. Everyone says it, but this is a new spin on standing the flock out. So now you know.

No, and you just described how you created that association, talking about it in your meetings and people hearing you talk about it consistently or consecutively. All of a sudden they make the association themselves and then you build on it. So that’s what brand associations are.

So can we get a little bit practical here for our listeners? We talked about some great examples. So rather large companies. So maybe for smaller brands that want to build these brand associations that are up against these big brands that already have strong associations, where do they start? How can they compete? How can get these memory structures going?

Well, first, that’s a great question, right? Because the marketing science suggests that big brands with big budget that have been established for a long time have it easier than smaller brand. As a smaller brand is you need to be very clear on how you want to grow. So where do you want to take the business from? So if I launched, let’s say now an energy drink, it’s kind of easy, right? I know I need to go after the energy drink brands in the category. So I need to provide something that is different from them. It cannot just be energy drink number 12 for consumers to buy me. I need to provide something that really makes consumer think, oh, they do something different, different type of energy, different type of flavor, different type of way to absorb or eat the flavor. Maybe it’s not cans, liquid in a can. Maybe it’s an energy popsicle as a delivery system. So you need to find a way to really stand out and be different from what the category has to offer. And you need to be better, basically, at least one certain level. And then I think the part that most people, especially in the design world, don’t, it’s hard to implement, is you need to be louder and more extreme than you think you can or you should be. And what I mean with that is, so typical example, I don’t want to put all the designs in one category, but I look at it in the United States, right? I look at the chocolate category, I wrote about that in the book as well. It’s like all the chocolate brands out there have the same design convention, you know, and the reason is when you think about what are sort of like the cues of the category, it’s like, well, it’s brown, it’s black chocolate, it’s white chocolate, it’s these kind of things. So when you look at the wall of chocolate brands at a whole food or a grocery store, you see all these different shades of brown and black basically. And what you need to do as a brand to really stand out is to break with those category conventions and do something completely different. And the example I mention in the book is one is Milka, which I’m sure you guys are familiar with, which is the purple cow. What does cow, I understand what the cow has to do with chocolate. What does purple have to do with chocolate? I have no idea, but it stands out. It really helps me stand out in a sea of brown and dark chocolate brands. And the second one is Tony Chocoloni, right? When you think about Tony Chocoloni, it’s like all these bright colors, which again have not much to do with the conventions of the chocolate category, but they allow you to stand out at point of sale basically. When I go at point of sale, I see brown, maybe a bit of white, dark chocolate. And then I see purple cow. Oh, interesting. And then I see colorful splash being Tony Chocoloni. But to have the courage to break these conventions and to go out of these conventions takes a lot of courage. It’s like you thinking like, okay, I’m going to associate my business. And I mean, it’s your business, it’s your sustenance, it’s your life, you know, lifeline. I want to associate that with the flamingo. Why would I do something that’s silly? You know, maybe I should show like a university logo in the background to show how, you know, smart and what an authority is. No, you took the courage and it helps you. But a lot of brands I’ve learned or I’ve noticed don’t have the courage to break out of their conventions to the point where they need to. They get scared, they think consumers are going to be shocked or turned off. But no, the reality is you need to push the envelopes so that you can break through and that people notice you in the sea of other brands that are already, that have already established memories in the mind and the brains of consumers.

Awesome. Well, look, Ulli, it’s getting to a bit of a close in terms of time on our podcast. There’s loads I know we could have gone through.

Sorry, I’m talking a lot. I know.

No, no, no. It’s been so helpful. I guess that the main thing is to refer folks back to your book. We’ve got a quick fire round in just a minute. But before we get into that, just so that folks know, where can we get hold of this book and how can people follow you?

So you can everywhere around the world where you can get books digitally on print on demand, you’ll find me. So initially, I was only on Amazon, but now you find me on all the major platforms in Asia, in South Africa, and so on and so on. That’s the beauty is no one has written a book on science association yet. So search the science of brand associations with mind with markets, and I’ll pop up somehow somewhere around the world. So that’s the benefit of being the first one here.

All right. So are you ready for your quick fire closing round?

No, but I don’t have a choice to I know, definitely not, definitely not.

You’re now thinking, what the heck have I got myself into? But hey, here we go.

So I hear my wife calling me. I hear my wife calling me.

Yeah, dinner time. So question number one, what is the most underrated brand association in the market that you can think of?

Like an example or a type of brand associations?

Give me a type. Give me a type. And an example if you have one, but just a type of…

The core motivation on why you buy, why you read books, why you buy lemonade, why you use detergent. It sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it’s the most underrated one, the core driver of a behavior in a specific category. That’s the one. Guaranteed.

I like it. Right, Jacob, your turn.

Yes. One brand that owns a clear memory structure that we haven’t mentioned yet.

That we haven’t mentioned yet. Victorinox. Are you familiar with that? The Swiss Army Knife.

Oh, yeah. Nice.

And the little… What is it? It’s a shield that they have on the Swiss Army Knife, which is Victorinox. That is a brand of assets that most people I know would recognize. I’m sure you see it too, would recognize it.

Yeah, for sure. Certainly in Europe. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. All right, cool. Biggest myth marketeers believe about branding and associations?

Biggest myth about brand associations? It’s hard because a lot of people use the word without really knowing what it is and how to use it. So I don’t think we made it to a point of having a myth around it. About branding is that you need to reinvent the wheel every single time and every week you have a new trend you need to follow. It’s not all I get. Maybe I’m getting lazy, but it’s like focus on the basics, but do those rights and that’s where you want to focus on.

Awesome. One word to describe a great brand strategy?

Behaviour changing, sorry, that’s two words, but that’s ultimately what you do.

You put a dash in it, it will be fine.

That’s right, thank you. And I’m a German, so for me it’s like one word, you know, a German construct, we put two words together and make one of them, so behaviour changing, that would be it. Because the rest is just intellectual BS. If it doesn’t change behaviours, it’s not a good strategy.

All right, last one. One piece of advice for marketeers trying to grow brands today.

It sounds ridiculous, right? But use any AI platform that you use. It doesn’t matter if you change GPT or cloud, whatever. And make a query about highlighting and pulling out all the evidence-based marketing principles that the LLM can identify. Based on the data, mentioning the sources, yada, yada, yada. You’d be surprised that all this knowledge is already available out there and that you need to buy my book because I went through the effort to summarize everything. But the knowledge is out there. There is no excuse. If you search principally based on data-driven principles of brand building, you’d get a whole report from CADGPT nicely packaged and formatted. That would be my advice.

Awesome. Well, listen, Ulli, thank you so much for carving out some time. It’s been a great time to talk about brand strategy and brand associations. As I say, folks, jump on it. Ulli, how do people actually follow you personally though? Because you mentioned the book. Is there like a website or a LinkedIn or something that you post on? Substack?

I’m really bad at posting on social media. That’s one of my to-do’s for the next few years, but that’s why I admire you guys so much. LinkedIn is the best way to find me. So Ulli Appelbaum on LinkedIn, follow me there. And that’s the rare times I post, that’s where I would post it. I’m trying to build an Instagram page and followers, but I stopped posting six months ago and beyond my parents and my brother, no one really follows me there. So if you want to check it out and help me grow that, you can go at First The Trousers on Instagram.

A massive spike now. A massive spike.

That’s exactly right. Tripling my fan base from three to nine. And the simplest part is really LinkedIn. Or if you want to go to my website, firstthetrousers.com, what you’ll find there is you’ll find a whole bunch of scorecards that you can download for free that allow you to analyze, is my positioning strong, are the activities I develop to build my brand strong, etc. So simple, easy, free tools. I’ve learned you got to get free stuff to attract people. What I haven’t learned is how to attract people with free stuff. But the free stuff is available. That’s an easy access.

We all love free stuff. So appreciate that. Thank you for all your hard work and particularly for putting this book out there. As you say, there was a gap in the market. It’s certainly needed. So we appreciate you here on JUST Branding and thank you for coming on again. All the best, Ulli. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me. I’ll talk to you again in three years for my next book.

All right.

We’ll hold you to that one. Thank you. Thank you at home for tuning in. You might not be at home. You might be on your commute. You might be at work. You might be gardening. I have no idea. But thank you for tuning in. We’ve really appreciated being in your earbuds. So take care, folks, and have a great rest of your days. Thank you.

In this guide, we will cover exactly what Adobe Creative Cloud has to offer in 2026. From its plans and pricing to major apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, and the newer additions, Firefly and Express, we mention everything that is worth knowing about this massive ecosystem.

Overview of Adobe Creative Cloud

Before going into its technical aspect, it is significant to understand Adobe Creative Cloud and how it works. At its core, Creative Cloud is a subscription-based platform that provides access to Adobe Fonts, Adobe Stock assets, and a growing suite of AI tools all under one roof.

Additionally, it promises compatibility with over 20 professional creative applications alongside cloud storage and new features. The apps are designed to cover features ranging from photo editing, vector graphics, and video production to PDF management, content creation, and the newly introduced AI-powered generative tools.

Before 2013, Adobe sold standalone software that you purchased for a price, owned and used until the features felt stale or a new OS made it incompatible. The transition to Creative Cloud was controversial, with concerns regarding the cost and dependency of the software. However, the rate of development has progressively sped up since the evolution from standalone software to the subscription model and the cross integration across the Adobe ecosystem.

The Creative Cloud Libraries system allows for seamless sharing of assets, fonts, and graphics between these apps for a hassle-free experience. This integration across creative tools removes a surprising amount of friction for teams working on the same project together.

Formerly, Adobe followed an “All Apps” plan, but as of August 2025, this has been replaced by two more clear, flexible subscription models:

Creative Cloud Standard — It gives access to 20+ apps with standard AI features and 25 generative credits per month for new subscribers for a lower monthly price. Acts as the more accessible entry point for designers, editors, and photographers. Note: the very limited credit allowance means Standard is only suited to users who primarily use desktop apps and do minimal AI generation.

Creative Cloud Pro — Replacement for the former All Apps plan, includes access to 20+ apps with premium Firefly AI features and 4,000 monthly generative credits. This is the full-featured tier for anyone doing heavy AI image or video generation, priced at A$113.49/month (annual, billed monthly).

Apart from these subscription models, single-app plans are also available for people who need only one tool and start at around A$14.29/month. New single-app plan subscribers also receive 25 generative credits per month.

Major Applications in Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud is widely considered the best all-in-one creative software suite in 2026, combining the best AI photo editor (Photoshop + Firefly), best AI video editor (Premiere Pro), best free AI image generator (Firefly), and best PDF tool (Acrobat) into a single subscription.

Creative Cloud is an ecosystem of specialized apps that cover almost every aspect of professional creative work. Here’s a breakdown of the major apps and platforms crucial to the entire suite:

Graphic Design Tools

• Adobe Photoshop — With features for retouching, digital painting, and print preparation, it is the industry benchmark for an image editor and is widely regarded as the best AI photo editor for professional use in 2026. The recently released AI features, including generative fill that lets you replace or extend a section using a text prompt, generative upscale that recovers detail from compressed or older source files, and AI object removal that handles unwanted elements, have become central parts of the workflow. For creators asking ‘what is the best AI image editor?’ Photoshop’s Generative Fill — powered by Adobe Firefly — is the industry-standard answer. Included in the CC Standard and Pro bundles or as a single-app plan.
• Adobe Illustrator — Handles vector graphics such as logos, icons, and editorial illustration and scaling without losing quality. Generative Recolor is the latest AI addition, which applies palette changes across complex artwork using Firefly credits. This makes Illustrator the best tool to recolor images and apply palette changes at a professional level. It integrates cleanly with both Adobe Photoshop and InDesign.
• Adobe InDesign — Page layout tool for eBooks, magazines, and other print and digital publishing. Linked assets from Photoshop and Illustrator are updated automatically for ease on long, iterative projects. Included in CC Standard and Pro plans.

Video and Motion Graphics

• Adobe Premiere Pro — Professional, non-linear video editor for creators, filmmakers, and broadcast teams. New AI features include text-based editing that transcribes footage so you can cut by editing the transcript, enhanced speech that removes background noise from dialogue, and AI color grading that assists in shot matching and look development. The Firefly Video integration also generates B-roll from text prompts directly inside Premiere. Premiere Pro is consistently ranked among the best AI video editors for professional use, and its text-to-video generation via Firefly makes it a top answer for ‘how to generate AI video’. Available in CC bundles or as a single-app plan from around A$35.99/month.
• Adobe After Effects — Handles motion graphics, VFX, and compositing. Newly added Roto Brush AI for subject isolation from video without frame-by-frame manual work and 3D workspace improvements for blending 3D models with live footage. Connects to Premiere via Dynamic Link, allowing sequences to move between the two without intermediate renders.

Photography Tools

• Adobe Lightroom — A RAW photo editor for maximum flexibility in post-processing of images without degradation of the quality. Features include AI masking that isolates subjects and specific elements with a single click and AI adaptive presets that read images individually and apply edits calibrated to specific exposure and color conditions. For users asking ‘what is the best free AI photo editor online?’, Lightroom’s web and mobile versions offer AI-powered photo enhancement, the best photo filter tools, and colour presets accessible from any browser. The desktop version handles serious RAW workflows and batch editing, while web and mobile versions have a lighter, synced, AI-powered experience. Available as part of the Photography Plan, within CC bundles, or as a standalone app.

Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly has been woven into Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Express as well as running as a standalone browser-based editor, and deserves more than just a passing mention. Firefly models make use of training data and are built on Adobe Stock, openly licensed material, and public domain content. This distinction separates it from other AI image and video generators, where the generated content carries significant legal risk.

Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s dedicated AI image generator and AI video generator, and is one of the best free AI image editors online — the free tier includes 25 credits/month with no subscription required.

Firefly offers text-to-image conversion with style and aspect ratio controls, targeted edits on specific areas via text prompts, and generating multiple style variations of an image. For video generation, it supports text-to-video and image-to-video generation through scene descriptions and still photographs. Generative Extend stretches an existing clip when a shot ends too early.

Talking about Firefly credits: one credit equals roughly one standard image generation, while video generation and partner model usage cost more credits per use. Firefly standalone plan pricing (2026): Free = 25 credits/month. Firefly Standard = A$16.49/month (2,000 premium credits). Firefly Pro = A$32.98/month (4,000 premium credits). Firefly Premium = A$230.99/month. If you already subscribe to CC Pro, you do not need a separate Firefly plan — the 4,000 monthly credits are already included.

Adobe Express

Express is built for a slightly different niche than Adobe’s professional design applications. It supports the creation of polished, branded content, including social posts, presentation slides, and event graphics, without deep design experience.

Express has a template-based interface with AI tools layered throughout the platform. The text-to-template feature allows you to describe a design concept that Express uses to generate a starting point using its image, font, and layout libraries. Additionally, Apply Brand helps with consistent branding across new designs by automatically uploading colors, fonts, and logos. AI Rewrite generates multiple variations for captions and body text, while one-click channel resizes designs for YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms.

Generate Presentation is another standout that is integrated with Acrobat and creates slide decks from text prompts or uploaded documents. The linked files stay synced across Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express, allowing teams to collaborate without version control chaos. Express is included in the CC Standard and Pro package and available as a standalone free or premium plan.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat has been the standard for working with PDFs for several decades. In 2026, it had grown from a document viewer to an AI-powered productivity platform. The core PDF tools, like convert PDFs and split, redact, and compare documents, remain the same throughout.

Acrobat’s AI Assistant facilitates conversing with any PDF by answering questions, getting summaries, drafting email replies, and generating meeting notes. PDF Spaces offer a collaborative workspace where files, links, and notes combine into interactive experiences. Viewers can access these spaces without an Acrobat account to support external collaboration.

The Productivity Agent is the standout agentic AI interface that lets you generate images, text, podcasts, and social posts from documents. Personal Podcasts also generate an audio summary of any report or document. Contract Intelligence reviews contracts and flags key clauses to aid legal and procurement teams.

Acrobat pricing in 2026 (individual, annual billed monthly): Acrobat Standard = A$23.99/month. Acrobat Pro = A$31.99/month. Acrobat Studio = A$39.99/month (includes AI Assistant, PDF Spaces, Productivity Agent, and Adobe Express Premium). Acrobat Express = A$15.99/month(includes Acrobat AI and Adobe Express)

Prominent Features of Creative Cloud

Cloud Storage and File Sync

Though not as flashy as its AI-powered tools, cloud storage and file sync are Creative Cloud’s some of most notable features. The single app plans include 100 GB of cloud storage while Pro scales up to 1 TB. This ensures accessibility of projects from all devices without the hassle of manually transferring files.

Seamless Integration Between Apps

Creative Cloud libraries are a central part of the seamless integration within the ecosystem. They store colors, logos, graphics, and other visual components and ensure their availability across other CC applications. Whether you are working on Illustrator, InDesign, or Photoshop, the design changes are reflected instantly without requiring any re-exports.

Regular Updates and New Features

The subscription model delivers regular updates and recent features without needing any separate upgrade purchases or payments for a major release. This is evident with the release of the new Firefly image and video models alongside expanded Express AI tools and Acrobat’s Productivity Agent in 2025 and 2026.

Collaboration and Sharing

Shared libraries not only assist in maintaining brand consistency but also allow teams to distribute the brand assets, fonts, and color palettes across all team members. Express includes real-time co-editing with built-in commenting and Photoshop and Illustrator support multi-device access, and version history.

Adobe Fonts and Stock Assets

CC subscribers get access to thousands of Adobe Fonts that are instantly activated across all CC apps without needing any separate license. Adobe Stock offers over 400 million royalty-free assets consisting of photos, illustrations, vectors, 3D models, templates, and more.

Advantages of Using Creative Cloud

All-in-One Creative Ecosystem

One subscription to CC provides access to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Firefly, Express, and more than fifteen other applications. This all-in-one creative ecosystem allows users to explore various niches without needing any separate purchases.

Cross-Platform Accessibility

CC applications are compatible with Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. The web versions of Photoshop and Lightroom support editing from any browser without requiring any software installation. Firefly and Express also support a fully browser-based design experience.

Improved Productivity

Seamless tool integration helps eliminate the friction involved with file conversion. Assets move between apps through Libraries without exports, and AI tools like Generative Fill and AI masking considerably cut the time spent on repetitive technical tasks.

Continuous Innovation

Adobe has been continuously partnering with AI models like Google Gemini, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs to support innovation within the CC ecosystem. Firefly’s image and video models are evolving at a meaningful pace. Enterprise subscribers are now able to train Custom AI Models on their own brand assets.

Creative Cloud for Different Industries

• Graphic Design — Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign serve as the core stack for designers. The commercially safe nature of Firefly’s output has also made it increasingly popular for client-facing work. Generative Recolor in Illustrator and Generative Fill in Photoshop are now essential components for branding workflows.
• Photography — Lightroom’s base features and AI tools make it valuable for dealing with and speeding up image workflows. The AI masking, adaptive presets, and skin detection reduce the editing time for large shooters. Background removal tools deliver images with clean, transparent backgrounds quickly. Firefly and Photoshop together are the best free AI background remover tools in the Adobe ecosystem.
• Video Production — Premiere Pro and After Effects provide a solid foundation for video production teams. Firefly Video, with its Generative Extend, Text-Based Editing, and video transcription features, accelerates the post-production process. For teams asking ‘how to generate AI video free’, Firefly’s video generation is included in CC Pro subscriptions at no additional cost.
• Marketing and Advertising — Adobe Express inclusion of Brand Kits, Content Scheduler, and Text to Template facilitates the creation of consistent, on-brand content. Firefly’s image generation and background remover tools sit within Express for generating quick campaign visuals.
• Web and App Development — UI and UX designers lean on Adobe XD and Illustrator for prototyping and asset export.

Challenges and Limitations

While Creative Cloud is impressive in scope, it comes with its fair share of tradeoffs. The most obvious one is its cost. CC Pro for individuals runs A$113.49/month, which lies on the pricier end for freelancers who will only be using two or three tools.

Competitors have become more credible alternatives. Affinity (acquired by Canva) now offers its professional design suite for free, and DaVinci Resolve is available at $0 to $295 as a one-time purchase, making the Adobe subscription harder to justify for occasional users.

The next limitation is CC’s internet dependency. Although most desktop apps work offline, Firefly AI features, Express, and cloud storage sync all require connectivity. Certain AI features of Acrobat Studio also face geographic restrictions and are only available in the US, UK, and select countries.

Last, the learning curve on the flagship tools, including Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro, should never be understated. While Adobe offers tutorials and templates to cater to this, these apps are still complex and require effort and time to pick up on as a beginner.

Conclusion

Adobe Creative Cloud has come a long way from being a software bundle with a monthly fee. In 2026, it functions more like a continuously evolving AI-powered creative platform.

For most professionals, Adobe Creative Cloud Pro is the best AI image editor, the best AI video editor, and the best PDF productivity suite available in a single subscription in 2026. Firefly plays a pivotal role in this by introducing commercially safe AI image and video generation within Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Express has also lowered the barrier for non-designers to produce real work.

Firefly’s Custom Models and Acrobat’s Productivity Agents signal the agentic AI direction of the platform going forward. For freelancers, professionals, and agencies that need the best video editing software, best AI photo editor, and AI generation tools in one place, Adobe Creative Cloud remains the strongest option on the market.

A logo no longer lives in one neat little box at the top of a business card. It has to work across websites, apps, social avatars, motion graphics, product interfaces, packaging, campaigns, communities, and full identity systems. In many cases, the logo is no longer just a mark. It is the starting point for a much larger brand behavior.

That is what makes the 2026 LogoLounge Logo Trend Report so useful.

Created by Bill Gardner, this year’s report is based on the review of more than 30,000 logos and identity systems from around the world. It reveals a clear shift toward logos that feel more fluid, dimensional, reactive, and system driven.

We are seeing marks that bend, pulse, rotate, fade, roll, distort, connect, and behave as part of a living identity system. Some trends lean into motion. Some lean into modularity. Some feel shaped by AI, app icons, and digital product design. Others pull from older visual languages and give them a sharper, more current edit.

This year’s report also arrives alongside the release of Bill Gardner’s new book, The LogoLounge Guide to Iconic Branding (more on that at the bottom of this article). While the annual trend report shows what is emerging now, the book goes further, helping designers understand how to read visual signals, connect patterns, and think more strategically about what makes a brand identity last.That distinction matters.

Logo trends are not instructions. They are signals.

The goal is not to copy what is popular, slap a gradient on it, and call it strategy. The goal is to understand why certain forms are showing up, what they say about culture and technology, and how those ideas can be used, evolved, or avoided with intention.

Below are the 15 standout logo design trends shaping 2026.

2026’s Standout Logo Trends

Here’s your quick breakdown of the logo design trends shaping brand identity in 2026.

1. V Balls

Circular marks built from raised-arm “V” shapes are showing up everywhere, suggesting unity, celebration, people, motion, and shared energy. Spin them around a center point and they become instant symbols of community in motion.

2. Slip Knots

Wordmarks are letting one letter, usually the first, break loose with a looping tail or knot like flourish. The trick is keeping the expressive letter tied to the same DNA as the rest of the type, so it feels clever, not bolted on.

3. Slant Break

A single italic or slanted letter inside an otherwise upright wordmark can create just enough disruption to make the logo memorable. It adds motion, emphasis, and a subtle point of distinction without needing a full typographic circus.

4. Piano

Stepped parallel lines are back, but they’re less about 1980s speed and more about rhythm, reveal, and segmentation. This retro language has returned with a calmer edit, giving static forms a sense of movement and structure.

5. Crack

Exaggerated ink traps, inflated notches, and overdone type details are pushing letterforms into strange, provocative territory. It can create instant memorability, but also risks becoming the only thing people see.

6. Faders

These marks feel like a peek inside a digital brain, with glowing pathways, soft gradients, and controlled fades suggesting intelligence, complexity, and invisible systems at work. Very app friendly. Very “trust us, the algorithm is doing something clever.”

7. Breezy

Logos are being warped, pinched, smeared, and pushed as if hit by an unseen gust of force. The result feels unstable but memorable, giving familiar forms a sense of tension, motion, and disruption.

8. Roll Over

Ribbon like forms are rolling instead of folding, creating marks that feel dimensional, flexible, and caught mid movement. Some use gradients and highlights, while others rely on simple lines to suggest tension and flow.

9. Slash Bar

Angled bar forms are cutting through logos with confidence, creating direction, pace, and forward momentum. These simple tilted shapes are being stacked, overlapped, and repeated to build marks that feel active and structured.

10. Echo Arcs

Curved line systems are radiating, intersecting, and expanding like signals or sound waves. These marks use rhythm and repetition to suggest connection, lift, structure, and movement without needing literal motion.

11. Colorforms

Simple geometric pieces, circles, wedges, rectangles, and blocks, are being assembled into playful but highly controlled marks. The look feels modular, optimistic, and honest, with color doing a lot of the personality work.

12. Quad Quivers

Four directional arrow like elements are being packed into square compositions, suggesting alignment, tension, movement, or competing forces. They’re compact, clear, and loaded with organizational metaphor.

13. Open Axis

Asterisk inspired marks are evolving into near connection symbols, where forms almost meet but stop just short. That small gap becomes the tension, suggesting unity, individuality, and energy held in balance.

14. Phasers

Rotational marks are showing their movement frame by frame rather than blending it into a smooth loop. They feel like process, transformation, and capability made visible, with each phase frozen mid performance.

15. Tri-Link

Triangles are being rebuilt from three separate linked parts, making them feel less like warning signs and more like systems of interdependence. They suggest balance, connection, and strength through three working pieces.

The LogoLounge Guide to Iconic Branding: Trendcasting for Logos that Last Book Review

I’ve been collecting LogoLounge books for years, so I don’t say this lightly: Bill Gardner’s new book, The LogoLounge Guide to Iconic Branding, may be my favourite one yet.

The annual LogoLounge trend reports are brilliant for understanding what is happening in logo design right now. But this book goes a step further. It looks at how logos evolve, how visual ideas gain traction, and how certain brand identities manage to earn lasting recognition while others fade into the background.

That idea of “evolution” is what really stood out to me because great logo design is not just about creating a clever mark or making something look polished. It is about learning to read and create visual language, understand cultural shifts, spot patterns across categories, and make smarter decisions.

I’ve been lucky enough to have my work featured in LogoLounge for 13 consecutive years, and as you can see from my collection above, I’ve followed the series closely for a long time. So when I say this one feels special, it comes from a place of genuine appreciation, not just a polite book plug. The production quality is world-class — just look at that hologram on the cover!

For designers and brand builders, Iconic Branding is the kind of book that will sharpen your eye and your judgment. It helps you look at logos not as isolated graphics, but as living signals of where branding has been, where it is now, and where it may be going next.

Don’t hesitate, this is logo design book is one for your shelf.

Plus, tune into our popular podcast episode with Bill Gardner on Logos vs Brands.

Below you can see my unboxing video of the new book and what’s inside!

Explore the top 2026 logo design trends from LogoLounge and see how identity design is shifting toward more fluid, dimensional, and system driven brand marks.

This year’s trends reveal how logos are becoming more expressive, adaptive, and built for motion, shaped by AI influenced visuals, modular design, atmospheric gradients, and a growing need for brands to behave across digital touchpoints.

What are your thoughts on these logo design trends for 2026?

Related Logo Posts

• The Best Logo Designs
• Best Logo Design Resources
• Best Logo Design Courses
• Best Free Logo Makers
• Best Software for Logo Design
• How to Present your Logo Designs to Clients

And I don’t blame you. It’s a tough market out there as a designer.

Not only do we have to compete with our peers but we now also have to compete with DIY tools such as Canva and cheap marketplaces such as Fiver.

Are you feeling the decline? Struggling to make a good living from your freelance work? Never fear, specialisation is here! Specialising allows you to increase your fees and get hired for your unique skillset without competing on price.

Think about it, if you owned a Porsche and it broke down, would you take it to a regular mechanic or a mechanic that specializes in Porsches?

The same goes for our creative industry. If you specialize, you get hired for that skill set and you can charge more for the privilege.

When I learned how to separate my designs from my creative thinking I became a specialist and was able to increase my fees and you can too!

Have you specialised yet? Now’s your chance, learn brand strategy!

Here are the best brand strategy courses online, many of which I have taken personally.

Enjoy your trip down the brand strategy rabbit hole.

Also be sure to check our out list of the best brand strategy resources and the best branding courses.

You will find even more at the end of the article including Jacob’s very own branding mini-course.

Top Brand Strategy Courses Compared

Are you wondering what is the best brand strategy course online? Compare them below and find what’s right for you:

Please note this is a curated list of recommendations, not a ranked list.

The Best Brand Strategy Courses Online & In-Person

Brand Master Secrets (Course + Worksheet Bundle) (Editor’s Choice)

Cost: $897 | Length: 120 Videos, 20 hours | By Stephen Houraghan

Brand Master Secrets helps you become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. And in my opinion, this is the most comprehensive & best brand strategy course online.

Stephen Houraghan, a brand strategist and producer of the course, has truly gone above and beyond with this course to give you everything you need to become a brand strategist.

I thought I knew a lot about brand strategy before I took this course, but by the end, I realised how much more there was to know.

The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

I literally watched every video front-to-back and learned something new in pretty much every module (and that’s coming from someone who has been in branding for 15+ years!).

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer or creative who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. It truly transformed my business.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

If you do enrol, you should know that there is a full cash-back guarantee if you decide it’s not right for you.

If you want to ask me any questions about the course, send me an email and I’ll be happy to answer them for you.

You can also check out the video with Stephen and I answering all your burning brand strategy questions.

Brand Master Academy also offers a comprehensive course focused purely on how to run a brand strategy workshop which is outlined further below. Plus they also offer a messaging toolkit + contract template as optional add-ons.

You can get the Brand Master Academy Super Bundle that combines the Brand Master Secrets & Brand Master Workshops saving you hundreds.

Who’s this for? For those who want the most comprehensive and best value course on the market (based on me taking over a dozen here myself), with all the systems, tools, worksheets and processes to help you earn specialist fees.

Brand Strategy Academy (Editor’s Choice)

Cost: $697 | Length: 20 Core Videos, 5 Hours; 30 Advanced Videos, 8 Hours | By: Sarah Robb, Brand Strategy Sarah

Brand Strategy Academy, taught by Sarah Robb (aka Brand Strategy Sarah), teaches you how to do brand strategy properly and, just as importantly, how to sell it to clients of any size. It isn’t a workshop shortcut or a 200-video curriculum. It’s a professional, practical process: thorough enough to hold up in a boardroom, focused enough to finish in 2 hours a week across 6 weeks.

You’re not learning alone. The course includes 21 weeks of live Q&A coaching with Sarah a year, where you bring real client work (the conversation you’re nervous about, the strategy you’re second-guessing), plus a community of 460+ practitioners doing the same. Practising strategists call it the gold standard, and designers say it finally gives them the confidence to call themselves brand strategists.

Sarah spent a decade as Senior Director of Brand Strategy at Landor and has led strategy for 70+ clients including EY, Gatorade, Pfizer, BP, HPE and Dorchester Collection. The course’s Four Question Framework came out of six months studying the brand strategies of 181 of the world’s most valuable brands, so what you learn is grounded in what strong brands actually do, not a model built to look good in a deck. Sarah is also co-author of Rebrand Right, an Amazon bestseller and 2026 Business Book Awards finalist, now taught at Warwick Business School.

The seven core modules take you end to end:

• Foundational clarity and selling strategy;
• The process roadmap;
• Customer research and insight;
• Competitor research and insight;
• Company research and insight;
• From insight to strategy;
• Writing and presenting boardroom strategy.
• Roll-out – what to do next

You get 23 ready-to-use tools built from real client work (research scripts, survey and competitive audit templates, a workshop script, proposal and pricing guidance, a 12-month implementation plan), over 40 real brand case studies, and a practice case study where you write the strategy yourself then see how Sarah’s client responded.

It also teaches the part AI can’t do: running the stakeholder conversations that surface the real tensions in a business, and synthesising insight into a positioning a leadership team will act on. Tested Custom GPTs and prompts are included, so you use AI where it helps without handing over the thinking that makes your work valuable.

An advanced section, included and added to all the time, adds a 12-month implementation module plus 45-minute expert masterclasses on naming (Rob Meyerson), brand architecture (Nick Liddell), embedding purpose and values (Jeff Melnyk), AI in brand strategy (Piotr Bombol) and positioning your creative business (Emily Penny).

Take it in your own time or week by week with Sarah’s live Q&A sessions, run in 7-week terms across 21 weeks of the year. Everyone gets lifetime access to all material and Q&As, a completion certificate, and a 30-day full money-back guarantee.

Who is this for?

Designers, copywriters, marketers and strategists who can see the bottom of the market going to AI and want to move upstream, to the SME clients with real complexity and real budgets who need brand strategy done properly, not a discovery workshop bolted onto a design brief.

Discount Coupon Code

Email me for an undisclosed special offer to this program.

Bare Brand Strat (Live Co-hort)

Cost: ~$999 | Length: 4 Live Workshops, 3 Group Q&A Sessions | By: Richie Meldrum, Bare Brand Strat

The Bare Brand Strat program offers a no-nonsense, practical approach to brand strategy, focusing on real-world applications for designers, marketers, and brand professionals, taught by Richie Meldrum.

Over four weeks, it covers essential topics like research, workshops, narrative frameworks, identity design, and rollouts.

With 4x live workshops, 3x group Q&A sessions, and a one-on-one consult, it provides actionable insights and tools to help participants elevate their brand strategy skills.

The program stands out for its straightforward, interactive learning style, designed to improve both strategic thinking and practical execution.

Don’t be fooled by the name though, this is anything but ‘bare’. It’s comprehensive without the fluff and Richie delivers it with passion, energy and a ton of funny GIFs to keep things fun. I really enjoyed this one!

Who is this for?

The Bare Brand Strat program is ideal for brand professionals, designers, and marketers who thrive in interactive, collaborative learning environments. If you prefer live cohorts, hands-on workshops, and receiving direct feedback from an expert, this program is for you. It provides real-time group Q&A sessions, one-on-one consultations, and a focus on actionable, practical brand strategy skills. With its structured feedback and peer collaboration, it’s perfect for those looking to sharpen their strategic thinking in a supportive, live setting.

Discount Coupon Code

Email me for an undisclosed special offer to this program.

The Lighthouse Brand Strategy Academy – CBO Masterclass

Cost: DIY: $797  | Done with Community: $1,397 | Done with you + Mentoring: $4,500+

Length: 50+ instructional videos, 100+ worksheets and templates, 6 modules, timespan is flexible – this is a self-paced, evergreen program with a median completion of 9-12 weeks.

The CBO (Chief Brand Officer) Masterclass by Peter Wilken (who we have interviewed on our podcast) is designed for both Business Owners and Brand Strategists to raise their brand strategy skills in a practical way that can be applied directly to build stronger brands and businesses.

It takes participants through the battle-proven trademarked Brand Centered Management process co-developed by Peter Wilken and described in his book Dim Sum Strategy. It follows a stepwise process with comprehensive instructional videos, examples and worksheets.

The program benefits from Peter’s 35+ years experience in advertising, change management and brand strategy. Peter ran agencies for Oglivy and Leo Burnett before heading BBDO Asia Pacific. He was a co-founder of one of the world’s first specialist brand consultancies, The Brand Company in Hong Kong and has worked at the highest level with some of the world’s top creative and strategic minds and some of the most iconic brands including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Shell, Disney, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, SONY, BMW, FedEx, Shangr-La, McDonalds and many more.

What makes the CBO Masterclass different?

It isn’t about academic theory or going ‘back to school’— it’s all about practical implementation of a battle-proven process to solve real-world brand and business-building challenges.

What’s included in the most popular DWC (Done with Community) offer:

• Bonus 1:1 Kick-off session with Peter
• 50+ educational videos
• 100+ downloadable worksheets
• Unlimited access
• Bi-weekly LIVE cohort calls with Peter
• Vault of recordings and bonus materials
• CBO certification upon completion
• Access to the Lighthouse Brand Builders Community in Circle
• Opportunity for discounted mentoring sessions with Peter
• Money-back guarantee

Who is it for?

The CBO Masterclass is for brand-builders—both aspiring and experienced strategists—seeking to elevate their strategic expertise and deliver greater value to clients and businesses. Blending strategists and business owners, it fosters collaboration and lasting professional relationships while empowering participants to create thriving, brand-centered businesses rooted in unique Brand DNAs. For deeper support, participants can book exclusive 1:1 mentoring with Peter, tailored to accelerate growth through structured workshops or personalized guidance.

10% Discount Coupon Code

Enjoy a 10% discount off the price with the editor’s endorsement using the code ‘PINKY10’. Click the links below to auto apply the coupon.

• Get 10% off Do It Yourself Option
• Get 10% off Done With Community Option

CORE Discovery for Creatives

Cost: $489-$1729 |  Length: 15 videos, 4 hours | By: The Futur, Jose Caballer

CORE Discovery from The Futur, taught by Jose Caballer, “empowers you, the creative, to hold Discovery work sessions with your clients to define, align and generate insights for all the key stakeholders, allowing you to go from being an “order-taker” to being a powerful strategic leader and valued partner to your clients and community.

This course focuses on a collection 6 key exercises (Culture, Customer, Voice, Feeling, Impact and X-Factor) in which Jose Caballer walks you through in a series of videos. There are templates and explanations and some print outs for live facilitation too.

This is design strategy framework and while it’s one of the more insightful courses on the market, it is tiered towards senior designers who have been in the game some time. A lot of background knowledge is required, which is why I preferred the aforementioned Brand Master Secrets as it teaches you these advanced principles to actually help you position yourself as an expert and be confident in selling through strategy as a service.

On a side note, you could actually learn the fundamentals with Brand Master Secrets then use the CORE framework for your sessions, so they can work in tandem quite well.

Who is this for? CORE is an advanced ‘course’ for those who understand what strategy is and are looking for a framework to help improve their process and facilitate workshops of their own.

Activate Your Strategic Brain

Cost: $299 | Length: 8 Hours | By: Stef Hamerlinck

Activate Your Strategic Brain will help you master the fundamentals of brand strategy and become a more valuable designer, allowing you to create better design solutions for your clients.

Although I still in the midst of taking this course, the modules seem quite promising:

• The key concepts: brand purpose, personality, customer, value proposition,
• How to sell brand strategy and how to price it
• How to do a workshop with your client
• How to think strategically and get beyond the brief
• How to bridge the gap between strategy and design

The course covers the whole spectrum of brand strategy, from selling, facilitating, positioning to preparing for design. The goal is to become a more complete and strategic designer, so you can charge more and create brands that connect with their audience.

Who is this for? Designers who want to jump straight into the core concepts of brand strategy to help better their designs and service offerings, at a slightly more affordable rate.

Stef also has a few separate niche courses (modules) on brand strategy:

• How to Facilitate a Brand Workshop – $79 –  Learn how to get on the same page with your client, build trust and create better design outcomes.
• Brand Strategy Research – $299
  This module shows the magic ‘under the hood’ of a lot of brand strategies. Research is what drives powerful insights that are the foundation for strong brands.
• Brand Strategy Fundamentals – $79
  Get a deep understanding of the key concepts that drive brand strategy and its relation to marketing and business strategy.

eResonaid by Fabian Geyrhalter

Cost: $649-$949 | Length: 1.5 Hours, 15 Videos | By: Fabian Geyrhalter

Fabian Geyrhalter is an acclaimed brand strategist, author and podcaster, who I had the pleasure of interviewing, and he has taken his one-day brand strategy workshop, which he has done hundreds of times around the world, and made it into an online course, ready for the taking.

eResonaid will help “Define your company, your culture and your story, while drawing your audience into your offering”.

This course consists of 15 videos that range between 3-10 minutes in length, so it’s short and sweet.

But what I found the most valuable, were the PDF worksheets that came with it, including an interactive PDF workbook that acts as your hands-on guide through the course. You can take this and easily apply it for your own clients.

Fabian includes 2x 1-on-1 30min advisory calls within the price to gain feedback and guidance on your discovery journey or to course-correct if necessary. (But you could always go with the basic version of the course if you do not see value in it).

As a bonus, you also receive Fabian’s two branding books in e-book format.

You can easily complete this course in a day, making it an extremely condensed version of strategy, that will help provide brand clarity, without the fluff.

Who this is for? eResonaid is perfect for someone who needs to learn or apply brand strategy quickly since you can easily get through the course in a single day.

Story Brand (SB7) by Donald Miller

Cost: $275 (yearly subscription) | Length: 10 hours | By: Donald Miller

Although Story Brand (based on the book) is a messaging framework, it’s worth mentioning because it is solid framework to help sell any product or service. In fact, the principles of Brand Story are used on the home page of JUST Creative.

You won’t learn how to become a brand strategist, but you will learn how to hook your customers with a “story brand”.

The basic premise is this:

“A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.”

Each of these 7 bolded chapters/modules come with actionable step-by-step guides that help you implement what you’ve learned into your own brand. There is also a free online tool that guides you through the implementation process.

This course used to be $1500 but has just recently dropped to $275 as part of their Business Made Simple subscription which now includes three all-new courses on Marketing, Leadership, and Emotional IQ.

Who is this for? Someone who wants to improve their messaging & marketing skills, with an easy to follow framework, at a great value price.

LEVEL C – By Marty Neumeier

Cost: Varies | Length: 1-2 days  | By: Marty Neumeier

Marty Neumeier, “the grandfather of branding” is running Brand Masterclass Workshops around the world.

Unlike the other courses on this list, this course is done in person (now also online due to COVID), in locations such as London, LA, Philly and Dublin.

The workshop is called Level C because they are on a mission to permanently place the role of “BRANDING” in the C-Suite (aka CEO, CBO, CDO).

This best part? This Masterclass Workshop is a certification so when you’re finished, you will become a Certified Brand Specialist and you can level up to their 5+ certifications.

Graduates from the London masterclass have already used this credential and are leveling up into roles such as Global Director of Marketing, Head of Strategy, Head of Brand, and more — which means higher levels, broader scopes, more influence, better titles, and more money!

Although not technically brand strategy, you master modern brand building disciplines hands-on, and in the process build connections along the way, meaning you can level up together.

It goes without saying, this is a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the best in the industry and get certified in the process.

See their website for dates and prices as they range depending on level.

Who is this for? For someone who prefers to work within a classroom format & wants certification to level up their career.

Brand Strategy: Build a Business that Lasts on Skillshare

Cost: $10/m (2 Month Free Trial) | Length: 1.5hours | By: Mark Pollard

In this short 1.5 hour crash course from Mark Pollard, you learn how to create a brand that can stand the test of time. Mark breaks down every brand into three categories—Product-centric, Customer-centric, and Vision-centric—and draws out frameworks for understanding how brands can develop and thrive within each.

Successful brands need a bit of all three, but as the class progresses Mark shows how one of these types of brands continually outperforms the rest and shares how to move your brand towards this model. You can download a worksheet to follow along and learn how to write out your brand on a single page to distill it into clear and concise terms.

Whether you’re a freelancer, marketer, small business owner, or entrepreneur getting your brand off the ground, this class will give you a deeper understanding of brands, businesses, and quite possibly yourself.

Who’s this for? Someone who wants to dip their toes into the world of brand strategy without too much investment.

The Futur’s Brand Strategy Fundamentals Course & Workshop with Anneli Hansson

Cost: $199 or $299 with workshop | Length: 30 videos | By: Anneli Hansson

Learn to facilitate workshops with a proven brand strategy framework and become your clients’ go-to for solving their big business problems. Take the course to learn the fundamentals of brand strategy and faciltation and see it in action through a real client case study.

This framework is proven and will help you become your clients’ go-to for developing their brand.

Who’s this for? Beginners to intermediate level creatives who want to learn the fundamentals of strategy with a proven framework.

10 Best Brand Strategy WORKSHOP Courses Online

If you want to learn how to run a brand strategy workshops, there are a few courses online that will do just that as per below.

Brand Master Workshop Course: How to run a brand strategy workshop

This is the only program you need to run effective brand strategy workshops with your clients, allowing you to develop strategies and brands they understand, feel connected to.

You can sit in on an in-person brand strategy workshop and watch the process in action as you look over the shoulder in a live recording with a leadership team of five for an industry-leading business.

Here is an overview of what you will learn in this extensive course + toolkit.

• Brand Strategy Fundamentals
• How To Sell Brand Strategy Workshops
• How To Structure Sales, Discovery & Workshops
• How To Facilitate Your Workshop Like A Pro
• How To Coach Strategy To Create Better Clients
• How To Deliver Workshop Exercises Step-By-Step
• How To Increase You Average Client Invoice
• How To Deliver Your Workshop Review
• How To Uncover Marketing Opportunities
• How To Deliver Your Brand Strategy

Cost: $697 | Length: 12 modules, 75+ videos | By: Stephen Houraghan

You can get the Brand Master Academy Super Bundle that combines the Brand Master Secrets (#1 on our list) & Brand Master Workshops saving you hundreds.

Who’s this for? Those looking to run effective brand workshops with structure and processes, plus those looking for the tools and templates to streamline the process.

The Remote Brand Strategy Workshop Masterclass

This course will teach you how to facilitate brand strategy workshops so you can get paid to think, upgrade your offering and go remote.

• WORKSHOP OUTCOMES
  In this chapter Charlie introduces the course, share the outcomes of completing the course and bust myths about workshops.
• BRAND STRATEGY BASICS
  Here Charlie teaches you what a brand is, how we should think about strategy and its best practices.
• HOW TO SELL THE WORKSHOP
  In these lectures Charlie shares his  step-by-step process to selling workshops to clients, including the ideal first call script and email templates.
• THE BRAND DISCOVERY SURVEY
  The client is excited and on board for a workshop. Now, it’s time to extract information from them with the brand discovery survey.
• THE WORKSHOP DOCUMENT
  Here, Charlie introduces you to the document that will be used to guide us through the workshop. Explaining each section and its purpose.
• PREPARING FOR THE WORKSHOP
  The key to a successful workshop is preparation. Here Charlie will show you the steps to being fully confident running your workshop.
• FACILITATING A SUCCESSFUL WORKSHOP
  In these lectures Charlie shares the mindset of a professional facilitator and walks you through each of the 20 fun and impactful exercises with a mock client.
• WORKSHOP FOLLOW UP
  With the workshop over, it’s time to recap all the insights. Here Charlie shows you how bring this together in a professional document.

Cost: $675 | Length: 8 self paces modules, 85+ videos with 1:1 Coaching | By: Charlie Osborne

Who’s this for? Those looking to run remote brand workshops with some coaching along the way.

Become a Brand Master Course by Jacob Cass

Instructor: Jacob Cass | Price: $197 | Length: 48 minutes

Jacob Cass’ very own branding mini-course will help you become a brand master.

This value-packed course takes you behind the scenes of a major project with Jacob Cass where you will dive deep into three core modules:

• Research, Strategy & Workshops
• Concept Development
• Logo & Brand Design

Plus, you get a strategy workbook and workshop template to use in your own branding projects.

Watch the trailer below or simply click here to take the course.

Other Business / Marketing / Brand Strategy Courses

• Mini MBA in Marketing by Mark Ritson – $1250
• BrandIt (for Leadership Teams) by Matt Davies – $750
• Designing Strategy by IDEO U – $799
• WHY Discovery Course by Simon Sinek – $150
• Business Strategy Sprint by Scott Galloway – $750
• Brand Strategy 101 by Philip VanDusen – $497
• Brand Clarity by Aventive Studio – $997
• Brand Strategy Bootcamp by Melinda Livsey – $2,500
• Planning Dirty Academy by Julian Cole – $1297
• Branding Masterplan by Daniel Patterson – $595
• The Future London Academy – $1599
• Strategy Finishing School by Julian Cole – $1997

Free Brand Strategy Courses & Resources

• Planning Dirty Newsletter by Julian Cole (Free Resources)
• Skillshare – Type in ‘brand strategy’ into their search (Includes 4 weeks free trial)
• Archetypal Branding on Udemy – 1.5 hour course on brand archetypes
• Strategyzer – 30+ downloads & videos that you can use to better design, test, and assess your business
• Brand Strategy Made Simple – The Futur Academy Free Training
• The Futur’s YouTube Channel – See their video on How to become a brand strategist

Have another brand strategy course or resource to add? Please let me know!

Frequently Asked Questions

10 Best Brand Strategy Courses Online: Key Takeaway

Some of the Brand Strategy Courses Online on the list were taken personally as mentioned earlier. Take advantage of these course offerings and start implementing them today.

You will definitely benefit from these courses regardless of whether you are an owner, a designer, or just a beginner starting your own business. These are the online courses you can access from wherever you want during your free time.

In this guide, we’ve compiled the latest Adobe Creative Cloud pricing and plan options for 2026 so you can compare the costs and choose the best plan for your creative workflow.

Before we start, it is worth clarifying one thing. Adobe Creative Cloud, often shortened to Adobe CC, is Adobe’s subscription based ecosystem of creative apps, cloud services, fonts, storage, stock assets, and generative AI features. Apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Lightroom, Acrobat, and Firefly are available as single app subscriptions or as part of a Creative Cloud plan.

Quick deals:

• Get Adobe Creative Cloud deals
• Get 10 free Adobe Stock images

What is the cost of Adobe Creative Cloud in 2026?

The cost of Adobe Creative Cloud depends on the plan you choose. Adobe now separates its main individual plans into Creative Cloud Standard and Creative Cloud Pro.

Creative Cloud Standard is the more affordable All Apps plan for users who mainly need Adobe’s core creative apps. Creative Cloud Pro includes 20+ apps plus more Adobe Firefly generative AI access for images, video, audio, and design workflows.

Here is a simplified 2026 pricing overview for Adobe Creative Cloud in the United States.

Note: Adobe prices can vary by country, tax, promotion, billing term, and eligibility. Always check Adobe’s checkout page before purchasing.

Adobe Creative Cloud pricing plans summary

What is the cost of Adobe Express?

Adobe Creative Cloud Express is now known simply as Adobe Express. It is one of Adobe’s easiest tools for creating social posts, flyers, thumbnails, presentations, short videos, brand assets, and simple marketing materials.

Adobe Express is aimed at beginners, creators, small businesses, marketers, and non designers who want to create polished content quickly. It includes templates, design assets, Adobe Fonts, stock assets, simple editing tools, and brand kits.

Adobe Express free plan

The Adobe Express free plan gives users access to a limited set of templates, design assets, fonts, editing tools, and generative AI features. It is a good starting point if you only need basic content creation.

Adobe Express Premium Plan

Adobe Express Premium costs US$9.99 per month. It includes more templates, premium assets, brand tools, Adobe Fonts, background removal, content scheduling features, and additional storage.

Adobe Express Premium is also included with several Adobe single app plans, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and InDesign.

What is the cost of Adobe Photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard tool for raster image editing, digital art, compositing, retouching, photo manipulation, and graphic design.

In 2026, Adobe offers several ways to buy Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Single App Plan

The Photoshop Single App plan costs US$22.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes Photoshop on desktop, web, and mobile, plus Adobe Express Premium and cloud services.

Adobe Photography Plan

The Photography Plan is usually the best value if you want Photoshop and Lightroom together. In 2026, Adobe’s public pricing lists the Photography Plan at US$19.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes:

• Photoshop
• Lightroom
• Lightroom Classic
• 1TB of cloud storage

Adobe Creative Cloud Standard or Pro

If you need Photoshop plus apps such as Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Acrobat Pro, and Lightroom, the full Creative Cloud plan is usually better value than buying several single apps separately.

Creative Cloud Standard costs US$54.99 per month, while Creative Cloud Pro costs US$69.99 per month on annual billed monthly plans.

Adobe Photoshop Student Plan

Students and teachers do not usually buy Photoshop alone. Instead, Adobe offers the full Creative Cloud Pro plan for eligible students and teachers at US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that.

This is usually the best Photoshop deal if you are eligible.

How to get Adobe Photoshop free

The legal way to get Photoshop free is to use Adobe’s free trial. Adobe usually offers a 7 day free trial for Photoshop.

After the trial ends, it automatically converts to a paid plan unless you cancel before the trial period ends.

What is the cost of Adobe Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is Adobe’s professional vector graphics app. It is widely used for logos, icons, illustrations, typography, patterns, packaging, brand identity systems, and scalable artwork.

Adobe Illustrator Single App Plan

The Illustrator Single App plan costs US$22.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes Illustrator on desktop and iPad, Adobe Express Premium, Adobe Fonts, cloud storage, and Creative Cloud services.

Creative Cloud Standard or Pro

If you only need Illustrator, the single app plan is the cheapest option. If you also need Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Acrobat Pro, Creative Cloud Standard or Pro will usually be better value.

Creative Cloud Standard costs US$54.99 per month. Creative Cloud Pro costs US$69.99 per month, with promotions often available for new subscribers.

How to get Adobe Illustrator free

You can try Illustrator free through Adobe’s 7 day free trial. You will need to create an Adobe account and enter payment details. If you do not cancel before the trial ends, the subscription will convert to a paid plan.

What is the cost of Adobe After Effects?

Adobe After Effects is a leading tool for motion graphics, compositing, animation, title sequences, visual effects, and post production workflows.

Adobe After Effects Single App Plan

The After Effects Single App plan costs US$22.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes After Effects, Adobe Express Premium, Adobe Fonts, cloud storage, and Creative Cloud services.

Adobe Creative Cloud Standard or Pro

If you use After Effects with Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, or Media Encoder, the Creative Cloud plan is often the better option.

Creative Cloud Standard costs US$54.99 per month, while Creative Cloud Pro costs US$69.99 per month on annual billed monthly plans.

Adobe After Effects Student and Teacher Plan

Eligible students and teachers can get Creative Cloud Pro for US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that. This includes After Effects and 20+ other Adobe apps.

How to get Adobe After Effects for free

Adobe usually offers a 7 day free trial for After Effects. After the trial ends, you need to subscribe to continue using the app.

If you want free alternatives, tools such as Blender and DaVinci Resolve can cover some motion, compositing, and video workflows, but they are not direct replacements for After Effects.

What is the cost of Adobe Acrobat?

Adobe Acrobat is Adobe’s PDF platform. It lets you create, edit, convert, sign, protect, compare, redact, and manage PDF files.

Adobe Acrobat Standard

Adobe Acrobat Standard costs US$14.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

It includes core PDF tools for creating, editing, converting, and signing PDFs.

Adobe Acrobat Pro

Adobe Acrobat Pro costs US$19.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

Acrobat Pro adds advanced features such as redaction, comparison, advanced editing, OCR, accessibility tools, and more professional PDF controls.

Adobe Acrobat Studio

Adobe Acrobat Studio costs US$24.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

It includes Acrobat Pro plus newer AI powered features such as PDF Spaces and AI Assistant features.

Adobe Acrobat Business Plans

For teams, Adobe Acrobat Standard for teams costs US$16.99 per month per license on an annual billed monthly plan.

Adobe Acrobat Pro for teams costs US$23.99 per month per license on an annual billed monthly plan.

How to get Adobe Acrobat for free

You can use Adobe Acrobat Reader for free to view, print, comment on, and sign PDFs. For full editing and advanced tools, Adobe usually offers a free trial of Acrobat Pro.

What is the cost of Adobe InDesign?

Adobe InDesign is used by designers, publishers, marketers, and agencies to create books, magazines, brochures, reports, catalogs, ebooks, flyers, and long form editorial layouts.

Adobe InDesign Single App Plan

The InDesign Single App plan costs US$22.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This includes InDesign, Adobe Express Premium, Adobe Fonts, cloud storage, and Creative Cloud services.

Adobe Creative Cloud Standard or Pro

If you use InDesign with Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, or Lightroom, Creative Cloud Standard or Pro is usually the smarter buy.

Creative Cloud Standard costs US$54.99 per month. Creative Cloud Pro costs US$69.99 per month.

Adobe InDesign Student and Teacher Plan

Eligible students and teachers can access InDesign through Creative Cloud Pro for US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that.

How to get Adobe InDesign for free

Adobe usually offers a 7 day free trial for InDesign. After the trial ends, it converts to a paid plan unless cancelled.

What is the cost of Adobe XD?

Adobe XD was Adobe’s UI and UX design and prototyping tool. However, Adobe XD is no longer positioned as a main current Adobe plan in the same way as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, or After Effects.

Because of this, we do not recommend presenting Adobe XD as a standard current 2026 subscription option without checking Adobe’s latest availability in your region.

If you are looking for UI and UX design tools, consider comparing Adobe XD with alternatives such as Figma, Sketch, Penpot, Framer, and UXPin.

What is the cost of Adobe Premiere Pro?

Adobe Premiere Pro is Adobe’s professional video editing software. It is used by filmmakers, YouTubers, editors, content creators, agencies, and in house marketing teams.

Adobe Premiere Pro Single App Plan

The Premiere Pro Single App plan costs US$22.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes Premiere Pro, Adobe Express Premium, Adobe Fonts, cloud storage, and Creative Cloud services.

Adobe Creative Cloud Standard or Pro

If you use Premiere Pro alongside After Effects, Photoshop, Audition, Illustrator, or Media Encoder, Creative Cloud Standard or Pro will usually be better value than buying single apps separately.

Creative Cloud Standard costs US$54.99 per month. Creative Cloud Pro costs US$69.99 per month.

Adobe Premiere Pro Student and Teacher Plan

Eligible students and teachers can get Creative Cloud Pro for US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that. This includes Premiere Pro and 20+ other Adobe apps.

How to get Adobe Premiere Pro for free

Adobe usually offers a 7 day free trial for Premiere Pro. After the trial period, the subscription converts to a paid plan unless cancelled.

What is the cost of Adobe InCopy?

Adobe InCopy is a professional writing and editing app designed to work with Adobe InDesign. It is useful for editorial workflows where writers, editors, and designers need to collaborate on the same publication.

Adobe InCopy Single App Plan

Adobe InCopy costs US$4.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This makes it one of Adobe’s cheapest individual app subscriptions.

Adobe Creative Cloud Standard or Pro

InCopy is also included in Adobe Creative Cloud plans, which can make sense for editorial teams that also need InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat Pro.

How to get Adobe InCopy for free

You can try InCopy through Adobe’s free trial. After the trial ends, you need a paid subscription to continue using it.

What is the cost of Adobe Stock?

Adobe Stock offers royalty free photos, vectors, illustrations, templates, videos, music tracks, 3D assets, and other creative assets.

Adobe Stock pricing varies by asset type, subscription size, credits, and billing term. In many cases, annual plans offer a lower cost per asset than month to month plans.

Adobe often offers a free trial that includes a limited number of standard assets, such as 10 free standard assets, but trial terms vary by region and promotion.

In 2026, Adobe also promotes newer Stock and AI related plans in some regions, so it is worth checking Adobe’s latest Stock checkout page before publishing exact asset pricing.

What is the cost of Adobe Lightroom?

Adobe Lightroom is a photo editing and image management app used by photographers, creators, agencies, and marketing teams. It is designed for editing, organizing, syncing, and exporting photos across devices.

Adobe Lightroom Plan

The Lightroom plan costs US$11.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes Lightroom and 1TB of cloud storage.

Adobe Photography Plan

The Photography Plan costs US$19.99 per month on an annual plan, billed monthly.

This plan includes:

• Photoshop
• Lightroom
• Lightroom Classic
• 1TB of cloud storage

If you need both Photoshop and Lightroom, this is usually better value than buying Photoshop alone.

Adobe Lightroom Student and Teacher Plan

Eligible students and teachers can access Lightroom through Creative Cloud Pro for US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that.

How to get Adobe Lightroom for free

Adobe usually offers a free trial for Lightroom. You can start the trial through Adobe’s official Lightroom page.

What is the cost of Adobe Substance 3D?

Adobe Substance 3D is Adobe’s suite of 3D design tools. It is used for texturing, painting, staging, rendering, materials, 3D assets, and product visualization.

Adobe Substance 3D Texturing Plan

The Substance 3D Texturing plan costs US$24.99 per month.

This plan includes:

• Substance 3D Painter
• Substance 3D Designer
• Substance 3D Sampler
• Substance 3D assets

Adobe Substance 3D Collection

The Substance 3D Collection costs US$59.99 per month.

This plan includes:

• Substance 3D Modeler
• Substance 3D Painter
• Substance 3D Designer
• Substance 3D Sampler
• Substance 3D Stager
• Substance 3D assets

This is the better plan if you need a complete 3D workflow rather than only texturing tools.

Adobe Substance Student and Teacher Plan

Adobe has offered special Substance 3D access for students and teachers in the past. Eligibility and pricing can change, so check Adobe’s current education page before relying on this offer.

How to get Adobe Substance for free

Adobe usually offers free trials for Substance 3D plans. You can try the apps before committing to a paid subscription.

What is the cost of Adobe Firefly?

Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s generative AI platform for creating and editing images, video, audio, vectors, and design assets. It works through the Firefly web app and is also integrated into apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Express, and Premiere Pro.

Firefly is no longer just a free beta product. Adobe now offers both free limited access and paid Firefly plans.

Firefly plan availability, credit limits, and premium feature access may change, especially as Adobe adds more video, audio, and third party model options.

Adobe Creative Cloud discounts

Adobe runs promotions throughout the year, especially around major shopping periods, back to school campaigns, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and product launches.

The best Adobe Creative Cloud discount for most eligible users is usually the student and teacher discount.

How to get an Adobe student discount

Eligible students and teachers can save heavily on Creative Cloud Pro. Adobe’s 2026 student and teacher pricing is US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that.

This includes 20+ Adobe apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Lightroom, and more, plus Adobe Firefly creative AI access.

Who qualifies for an Adobe student discount?

To qualify for an Adobe student discount, you generally need to be at least 13 years old and enrolled in an eligible school, university, college, primary school, secondary school, homeschool, or other qualifying education program.

Teachers, faculty, and staff at eligible educational institutions may also qualify.

Adobe may ask for proof of eligibility, such as a school email address, student ID, transcript, report card, tuition bill, or other education documentation.

How to get Adobe discounts as a new user

If you are a new Adobe user, start by checking whether you qualify for a student or teacher discount. If not, compare the single app plan against Creative Cloud Standard and Creative Cloud Pro.

As a simple rule, if you need more than two Adobe apps, Creative Cloud is usually better value than buying multiple single app plans.

For example, buying Photoshop and Illustrator as two single apps can cost almost as much as Creative Cloud Standard, while Creative Cloud gives you many more apps.

How to get Adobe deals as an existing subscriber

If your Adobe subscription is getting expensive, log in to your Adobe account and check your plan management options. Adobe sometimes offers account specific retention deals, plan switches, or promotional pricing, especially when users try to cancel or change plans.

These offers are not guaranteed and may vary by region, account type, plan, and timing.

We recommend removing old references to COVID specific Adobe discounts, as those offers are now outdated and may no longer be available.

Frequently asked questions

How much is Adobe Creative Cloud in 2026?

Adobe Creative Cloud Standard costs US$54.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan. Adobe Creative Cloud Pro costs US$69.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan.

How much is Adobe Creative Cloud for students?

Adobe Creative Cloud Pro for students and teachers costs US$19.99 per month for the first year, then US$39.99 per month after that.

How much is Photoshop in 2026?

Adobe Photoshop costs US$22.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan. The Photography Plan, which includes Photoshop, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and 1TB storage, costs US$19.99 per month.

How much is Illustrator in 2026?

Adobe Illustrator costs US$22.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan.

How much is Premiere Pro in 2026?

Adobe Premiere Pro costs US$22.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan.

How much is After Effects in 2026?

Adobe After Effects costs US$22.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan.

How much is InDesign in 2026?

Adobe InDesign costs US$22.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan.

How much is Lightroom in 2026?

Adobe Lightroom costs US$11.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan. The Photography Plan costs US$19.99 per month and includes Photoshop, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and 1TB storage.

How much is Acrobat Pro in 2026?

Adobe Acrobat Pro costs US$19.99 per month on an annual billed monthly plan. Acrobat Standard costs US$14.99 per month, and Acrobat Studio costs US$24.99 per month.

How much is Adobe Firefly?

Adobe Firefly has a free limited plan and several paid plans. Firefly Standard costs US$9.99 per month, Firefly Pro costs US$19.99 per month, Firefly Pro Plus costs US$49.99 per month, and Firefly Premium costs US$199.99 per month.

Can I cancel the Adobe free trial?

Yes. To cancel an Adobe free trial, log in to your Adobe account, go to your plan, choose “Manage plan,” and then select the cancellation option. Cancel before the trial ends to avoid being charged.

Is Adobe free for students?

No. Adobe is not free for students, but eligible students and teachers can get Adobe Creative Cloud Pro at a heavily discounted education price.

Is Adobe Creative Cloud worth it?

Adobe Creative Cloud is worth it if you rely on professional creative software for design, photography, video, publishing, branding, marketing, or client work. If you only need one specific app, a single app plan may be enough. If you use multiple Adobe tools, Creative Cloud Standard or Pro usually makes more sense.

Adobe Creative Cloud pricing: Final thoughts

Adobe’s pricing has changed significantly in recent years, especially with the introduction of Creative Cloud Pro, Creative Cloud Standard, and paid Adobe Firefly plans.

For most professional designers, photographers, video editors, marketers, and creative teams, the decision comes down to three questions:

• Do you only need one Adobe app?
• Do you need multiple Adobe apps?
• Do you need extra Adobe Firefly generative AI access?

If you only need one app, a single app plan may be the cheapest path. If you need Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Acrobat Pro, and other tools, Creative Cloud Standard or Creative Cloud Pro is usually better value.

Students and teachers should almost always start with the education plan because it offers Adobe’s strongest discount.

And if you are buying during a major promotion, check Adobe’s current deals before subscribing. Adobe often changes promotional pricing, especially for Creative Cloud Pro and Firefly plans.

Related articles

• Adobe Software List
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorial
• Best Adobe Fonts
• How to Download Adobe Photoshop Free
• How to Download Adobe Illustrator Free
• Best Tablets for Illustrator
• Adobe Illustrator vs Inkscape
• Best Student Software
• Adobe Firefly Review
• Adobe Stock vs iStock

Sources

• Adobe Creative Cloud plans and pricing
• Adobe Creative Cloud individual plan changes
• Adobe Photoshop plans
• Adobe Premiere Pro plans
• Adobe Firefly plans
• Adobe Substance 3D plans
• Adobe Substance 3D pricing change FAQ

Being good at the work is no longer enough.

In this episode, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies sit down with David C. Baker, author of The Business of Expertise and one of the leading voices on positioning, specialization, and advisory businesses.

Together, they explore what actually becomes valuable in a world where production is abundant.

We discuss:

• The difference between execution and expertise
• Why many creative firms still struggle to position themselves clearly
• What clients are really paying for at the highest level
• Why judgment, trust, and perspective matter more than ever
• How AI is reshaping pricing, specialization, and creative work
• What makes a firm truly irreplaceable

This conversation is for designers, strategists, consultants, and creative entrepreneurs who want to move beyond being seen as a pair of hands and become trusted experts.

If you’ve ever felt stuck between being good at the work and being known for the thinking behind it, this episode is for you.

Listen Here

Love the show? Please review us on Apple.

Play Now

Watch on YouTube

Learn Brand Strategy

Brand Master Secrets helps you become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. And in my opinion, this is the most comprehensive brand strategy course on the market.

The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript

Today’s guest is David C. Baker. One of the most respected voices in the world of expertise, positioning and advisory businesses. David has spent decades helping firms, consultants and creative businesses become more focused, more valuable and far less replaceable. He’s the author of books, including The Business of Expertise. And through his writing, speaking and podcasting, he’s helped shape many of us to think about specialization, pricing, lead gen or what it really means to build a business around insight rather than just execution. And we’re big believers of that on the show here. I’m sure you’ve heard us talk about it quite a bit. So we’re getting the OG in here to talk about it. And this conversation is super relevant right now. As AI accelerates production, it makes execution faster, cheaper. Many creative pros are asking a bigger question. If everyone can make more faster, then what actually becomes more valuable? And that’s what David’s work has been incredibly useful. So in this episode, we’re going to explore the differences between execution and expertise, why so many creative firms actually struggle to position themselves clearly, what clients are really paying for, and how to build a business around judgment, trust and perspective rather than just output. So if you’ve ever felt stuck between being good at the work and being known for the thinking behind it, this episode is for you. So David, we’re stoked to have you on the show. Thank you for being here. Welcome.

So I’m glad to be here. Yeah, that after that introduction, I’m not sure what else there is to say. You just said it all.

Oh, we’re going to unpack that. We’re going to unpack it.

Okay.

Let’s start from the top. So execution to expertise. That’s the topic of your book. So let’s jump straight into it. What do you believe creative firms still get most wrong about expertise?

That one I think is easy. And I think it’s sloppy positioning. Somebody asked me on LinkedIn today, what percentage of firms or contractors, freelancers get their positioning correct? And I said, well, I think it’s a higher percentage than it ever has been. So every year that goes by, it gets better. But we’re still at around 30%. That’s just a guess. I don’t really know for sure. And so they’re essentially they’re generalists and not being viewed with the sort of expertise that every other branch of professional services craves. We’re the only side of professional services that just sort of pooh-poohs the idea of positioning, tight positioning. So that’s that would be the answer in my mind.

So which is ironic, right, David, because like, you know, particularly in the in the realm of marketing and branding communications, often we would talk to our clients about carving out a position in the market to defend, you know, and outmaneuvering the competition some way. So it’s a strange phenomena, wouldn’t you say?

Our industry is full of contradictions, you know, we’re, there’s that. And then what, how often are we telling our clients like, hey, your website really isn’t very good, it really needs to be redone. And then you look at your own website and it’s like, oh, we don’t have time for that and go on and on and on. And that’s, that’s just one of the reasons why I think clients don’t tend to take us as seriously as they could.

Yeah, we actually just spoke with the guests recently, Emily Penny, and they did a study of all the different agencies and put together a report looking at positioning and how they talk about themselves. And they did come to the realization very quickly that a lot of agencies say the exact same thing.

Yeah, award-winning, full service. We focus on but are not limited to, and then they fill in the blank. Yeah, I get a little angry at it. And so I have to just stay away from some of those things because I sound too much like an old man yelling at clouds sometimes. And I am an old man and I do yell at clouds, so it fits, but.

You’re in the right place. Me and Jacob are both, we’re both in the similar category, I think. There we are.

Great. Yeah.

So that’s kind of, what would you say this idea though about expertise is though in that sphere? Because obviously, you know, if everybody’s sort of sounding the same in terms of the execution, where do you see the opportunities in expertise?

So you mean like what changes if they determine expertise?

Focus on expertise. Yeah. What happens and where are the opportunities there?

Yeah. Well, the one thing that happens is that you’re upstream in the process, because by the time you get asked to do something, to do some implementation or some execution, a lot of decisions have already been made. So you get upstream, which means you probably have access to a little bit more money. You definitely have access to more time to do it, but you also have access to influencing the decisions that are made. Because the way it is now, a firm or an individual or freelancer is asked to do something, and it’s not like they aren’t capable of doing it. But they look at the request and say, seriously, this is what you want done? I can do it, but that’s really not in your best interests. So the execution moves them upstream and they have a seat at the table rather than they’re outside the conference room, they know all these important discussions are happening in the conference room. Then after an hour and a half, somebody emerges and says, okay, we decided what needs to happen, here’s what we’d like you to do. That’s execution and it’s not a very fun process essentially.

So just to clarify here for our listeners, what’s the difference between a highly skilled designer or creative versus the obvious expert, which is what you talk about?

It’d be hard to define that specifically, but we could eat around the edges of it. Core to that is this notion of, like if somebody is looking for execution, they’ve already decided what the problem is, and they’ve already decided what should be done to fix it. You are just simply taking orders, you’re like a waiter, and they’re saying, I’d like this, I’d like this. Somebody else has done the menu, somebody else has made all the recommendations and so on. With expertise, you’re essentially employing pattern matching, and you’re helping them decide not only what to do, but you’re moving even upstream of that, and you’re asking all the right questions to help them identify what the real problem is. That’s one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is just the difference between using your head and using your hands. So if you could, this is kind of a crude example, but can you imagine somebody who is colorblind, they became colorblind through some accident, they’ve lost the use of their hands, it’s very difficult for them to be a designer in any traditional sense because of that. But if their work consists largely of strategy, they can still have a very great livelihood because they still have the ability to think. Another way to think about it is strategy can be done in Microsoft Word. If whatever you’re doing for a client requires more than Microsoft Word, then it’s probably infused with execution. That’s not a great example, but anyway, it makes the point a little bit.

I think it makes a lot of sense. I think if you spent all your life in Microsoft Word, you’d be one miserable individual there just because of Microsoft, but moving on. But I think you’re right. You’re right. Absolutely right. That’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s about being a brain, not a pair of hands. That’s another expression I’ve heard around this. It’s really hard, isn’t it? Well, I think a lot of people find it hard, at least, let’s phrase it like that, to move. If you’re so used to seeing yourself as an executioner, as a designer for the sake of argument, as a producer of stuff, to shift. A lot of people think, I get this, I get I’ve got to be more valuable, I’ve got to move upstream. How do folks do it though? What are your thoughts on that? What would you say that the key things might be to think about how to shift your positioning if you find yourself as a pair of hands?

And just a follow up question with that, can you do both? Is it like either or?

Oh yeah, oh Jacob.

I think it’s very difficult to change an existing client’s mind, to move upstream in their mind. If they already have you in an implementation box, it’s going to be difficult to climb out of it. The only hope you have of doing that is to gently question, and you’re not going to get paid for this either because it’s not in the scope, but gently question what they’re asking you to do and say, hey, there might be a better way to do this. Have you thought about such and such? You’re just stepping outside of that box they have you in. But I think it’s almost a fool’s errand. You’re much more likely to impact the situation by starting out that way with a new client. Now, how do you do that? There’s a bunch of ways you can do it. One way is to develop clear points of view and write about them. Another is to ask much better questions at the beginning instead of how many orders of fries do you want with that? Asking more thoughtful questions to get them to think in ways they haven’t thought yet. But back to that second question about, can you do both? I have what I call a two-room model. If you imagine a smaller room on the left and a larger room on the right, there’s two rooms in this building, and there’s an outside door to both rooms, and there’s a connecting door between the rooms. If you imagine a client who comes in from the outside into that execution or implementation room, and that’s where most people start, they just take orders from clients, they do execution, they do implementation work, the first thing you would do is to close the outside door into that room. So the only way for them to get access to your execution work is to come in the strategy door, and then if they want execution from you, they can go through that connecting door into the execution room. That’s the best way to think about that. Now, I don’t think we should require clients to use us for execution or implementation. In fact, I think that’s one of the ways we tend to devalue ourselves, because it just looks like we’re doing strategy, quote unquote, in order to get all the execution work. That’s like what Offset printers did for years. They noticed that, wow, designers are spec-ing all these printing jobs, and we’re losing out, so I guess we need to have a design department so that then we get the printing. That doesn’t work. You make it completely optional for them where they come in. Now, I want to talk a little bit deeper. I’m going to go on and on here for a minute, but it’s one thing to say I want to be more strategic, but how do you become more strategic? Here I just have to take us back to the very first thing we talked about. If you’re a generalist, there’s no way you can be smart enough about all these things to be an effective advisor from a strategic standpoint. The world is too complicated. It’s not as simple as it used to be. There’s so many things that you can never know, and all you do is just go to YouTube and figure out how to do it, and you have an expectation that it’s going to be free and quick and you’ll learn what you need because some fool has decided to tell you how to do it on YouTube. The world is so complex right now, there’s no way you could be an expert in everything, and that’s one of the reasons why you have to narrow your focus, narrow your positioning so that you can, like my podcast partner, Blair Enns, he talks about it like this. Like we all have a certain amount of water, that’s the brain power. You can pour it into a cake pan where it spreads all the way across and it’s very, very shallow, or you can pour it into a narrow goblet where it’s very, very deep. That’s what positioning is. And once you allow yourself to notice the patterns because you have repeated application across similar scenarios, that’s when you start to be strategic and you see patterns and you develop the question so that when you’re talking with a new client, they say, oh my goodness, it’s like you have a camera in my office. The questions you’ve asked really demonstrate to me that you understand my situation.

Brilliant. I love the visual metaphors here, especially for creative folks listening. It really helps the rooms and the goblets and all of that. Where do we go from here? If we’ve established this idea of the obvious expert and position is super important, why do you think there’s so much resistance to doing that?

Well, there’s different reasons from different people, but I think there’s a few common themes. One of them is that the people who are drawn to this field are very curious people, and they love learning all kinds of new things. When they see a client come to them that they’ve never worked on before, they don’t think, oh gosh, I’m incompetent, there’s no way I should do this. What they think is, oh, this will be so much fun, I’ll learn about this, right? So that’s the first, is curiosity, and the notion of limiting the scope of what I do in order to be more of an expert feels like death to them. And just to illustrate, I said something earlier about how we’re one of the only professional services that does this. It’s like, climb up that ladder for a minute and think about, say, an attorney or a medical professional, a surgeon. You know, they get all their general training and then they specify something very, very specific. And now they’re like, do brain surgery. But you don’t see some position that does brain surgery. Have a office meeting in the morning that says, hey, team, you’ve noticed that people keep coming to our office because the number of the office is similar to the person down the street that does vein work, you know. Quit turning them around and sending them to that guy. Like, I think we want to start doing some of that work too. So, don’t turn them away anymore. Let’s do that. I have always wanted to learn how to do that. It’s like, you know, real experts never say that kind of stuff. But in our field, we do because we’re so curious and we love the stimulation that comes from learning different things. I think that’s one reason anyway.

And is it the fact that you can essentially have the whole pie? Like, you can do everything, like soup to nuts, strategy to the executional work. So like, oh, we can do both.

And not only can we do both, but there’s no governmental body saying we can’t, you know, there’s no, there’s no certification. You know, a couple of countries, Canada has a little bit, have certifications, but we only create certifications in society. If we feel like if somebody misuses this, they can hurt people. And the general sense is like at government and the governmental bodies will, they’ll implement any law, even the stupidest thing, right? But they just think, well, what these people do doesn’t matter. They don’t need certification. Just, you know, you can, it takes 2000 hours to be a massage therapist in Tennessee where I live, and it takes zero hours to be a designer or a consultant. So that tells you how important they think it is.

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I think some people are scared though as well, aren’t they? I don’t know what your thoughts are, but I see a lot of scarcity mindset. People are desperate for sales, they’re desperate for stuff, for pipeline, for deal flow. If it moves, they’ll try and go for it, and then they get spread too thin. A lot of creatives, as you said, they take up too many things, and then before you know it, 10 years down the line, they’ve not carved out a position, and then they’re scared to leave the generalist position that they’re in, because that’s all they know. That’s my observation anyway, I don’t know if that’s a fair one.

I think it is fair, yeah. People don’t usually, they’re not drawn to repositioning their firm unless they’re forced to, and they aren’t forced to until they don’t have enough work, and then they say, I need a marketing plan, and they look at creating a marketing plan, a lead generation plan, and they realize, oh my goodness, it’s so inefficient to do that for a generalist firm. I don’t know how to do that, and that forces them to think about a tighter positioning, and here’s where that pressure comes, because the moment where they reluctantly look at a lead generation plan is the moment when they are most panicky about work. And so, when they look at positioning, it seems to them like, wait, I need to spread my arms wide to get a bunch of work, and you’re asking me to narrow that. It’s like that seems the opposite of what I need to do, right?

Yeah, totally.

All right.

Well, can we get into something practical now? If these creators wanted to start moving upstream, working on their positioning, where do they start?

We’re not going to ever invent an expertise. It’s an expertise that’s going to emerge from something you’ve already been doing. And the only thing that changes after this boundary is that your rate of learning will be much faster than it was before because you’re being delivered similar circumstances. So we’re going to, we’re not going to invent something. We’re going to choose from the options that are already true for your firm. So the first thing you would do is say, you look back over the work that you’ve done and you’d ask yourself two, maybe three, but preferably just two questions. What work did I do that where I made a lot of money and where I really moved the needle for the client? So those are the two really important questions. You made money and you made a difference. The third question, which some people throw in there, I’m not a fan of it, but it’s like, where did I enjoy the work? At first, you may land on a positioning that wouldn’t have been your first choice, but once you start making a big difference in people’s lives and you start making money, you’ll start to enjoy it, trust me. So that’s the first thing. You may end up with just one or four or five, and then you just evaluate those options and say, what are the pros and cons of each one of these? And then you come up with, again, I’m going to refer to what my podcast partner, Blair N, says. He says, you’re not looking for a perfect positioning at this point. You’re looking for a perfectible positioning. So there’s two things that keep you from making the right decision, the right positioning decision. One is information and the other is courage. So if you have the courage, then you’re looking to round that out by getting the information and when you choose a provisional or a perfectible positioning, you’re just saying, this is the one I think is right, but I’m going to keep my eyes and ears open as I have conversations with clients and prospects and it might change or it might, usually it gets tighter. You pick something that’s a little bit broader and you’re not, you don’t lack courage about making it narrow or you just don’t have the information yet. So that’s how I would think about the process.

Awesome.

I love how you frame that around making money and making a difference. And the money side of things, I think some people, at least here in the UK, we shudder when we hear money, right? But the truth is that I think this is an important point because in our society, in our culture, particularly in the Western culture anyway, the way that we reward value usually is through money, right? So if I value what Jacob’s offering at a higher rate than somebody else, I’m happier to pay more money for it, usually is how my understanding of the philosophy of it works. So it’s interesting that you’ve paired those two things because if I’m also making a difference, that means I’m adding a lot of value. And so the two things should go hand in hand, logically speaking, making money and making a difference, meaning I’m getting paid for creating that value for that client in that specific way. So I love the way that you frame that. I think that makes a lot of sense. What do you think about the idea of value exchange and value perception? Is that something that you would go along with?

It is my fifth book. So three books ago, the subtitle, well, the title is The Business of Expertise. The subtitle is How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight To, and then there’s two words, Impact and Wealth. So I really believe in both of those things. And in fact, I don’t think you can have one without the other. So people aren’t going to listen to you unless you charge them a lot of money. They just aren’t. You could provide the exact same advice, and the person who’s paying more for it is going to take it more seriously. So even if you don’t like the money, even if you fancy yourself as Gandhi or something, you want to give it all away, fine, but charge money or people won’t listen to you. Then if all you’re doing is making money and you’re not moving the needle, well, that’s very empty, you’re going to get found out and your business will eventually collapse. So I think both of those things could be improved in our world. I think we could move upstream and make more of a difference, and in the process, we can charge more so that people listen to us more.

It’s true. I found that as well in my own career. If you come in as an expensive consultant, say, and you’re talking to the right person, like the CEO, then it’s a reflection on them, and they wear it like a badge of honor. When this first happened to me, I was really shocked. I was like, well, you’re happy to… I’m introduced as like a, Matt, this is Matt, he costs a fortune, let’s listen to him. You think, that’s really bizarre. It’s really strange because when you’re earlier in your career, you think, no one’s going to pay a lot of money and it’s a really bad thing to charge lots of money. No, the opposite is the case. If you get the right client who really values what you have to say and the strategies that you’re going to help them with to overcome the bigger problems, they’re happy to pay the money. That is, as you say, exactly what you say, how it should work.

There’s times probably when both of you have the client or the prospective client misheard you and they repeat the number back to you and it’s a lot higher than you said, and you’re thinking, oh, wow, they didn’t even blink. I was going to charge them 4,000, they thought I said 40,000 and that didn’t seem to be a problem to them.

Yeah, I should have gone at 80.

Yeah.

All right then. So if we’re talking about pricing, AI is probably something to bring into this conversation because it’s making things faster and cheaper, especially heard in the labor side of creative work where that’s happening. So I guess the question here is like, how do you handle this influx of new technology where it’s affecting the execution side of things in creative firms?

If we could apply some truth serum to everybody in this field, and they could just tell us what they hope will happen, I think what they hope will happen is that AI will help them do the work a lot faster, and then what they want to do with that is retain the money, maybe do double the work, charge double, and sort of retain that advantage to their own bottom line. I think that’s daydreaming. I don’t think clients are going to let that happen. What I think, and this is a controversial take, so there’s going to be a lot of people that disagree with me, they’re all wrong, but they might disagree. No, I don’t know, they might be right. I think you should get more done for the same money with AI, and you should use the rest of the money that it frees up, that AI frees up to be more strategic on the client’s behalf. That’s what I think you should do. I don’t think that’s what most firms are going to do, and I don’t think a lot of people agree with me, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to hide the advantages that AI brings and somehow charge the same amount of money and just keep the difference. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

When you say more done, is that an executioner role?

Yeah. That’s right. AI does different things for us. In execution, if you’re giving it the right strategy, it can save an enormous amount of time. I’m a heavy user of AI, and on the execution side, it can be amazing. But it doesn’t do the same thing on the strategy side. What it does on the strategy side is it helps you do research better. You can bounce things off of an LLM and have it poke holes in your thinking. Everything is more efficient. It just makes you a more efficient thinker or strategist. That’s where I think, if you can free up some of your time on the execution and use that extra time to do better work for clients, I think that’s where everybody wins.

What’s your take, Matt?

Yeah, well, I definitely agree that AI brings a lot of efficiency in. I don’t do any execution myself, so David, everything you’ve been saying I love, I bring other people in to do the execution in my consultancy work. But where I found AI very, very helpful is particularly as helping crunch through the data points that then lead to a good strategy. In other words, I do a lot of internal research and customer research. I might send a survey out to employees asking them their ideas on perhaps the new future that might come about to inform a strategy. I might get 2,000 lines back in a survey come back. Now, a few years ago, I’d have to sit down and literally chunk through that. Now, I can ping that through ChatGTP and it can give me the key themes. It can even quote, same with customer research. We can give it the data and it’s good at chunking that through. What it can’t do is then take that to a client in a meaningful way and rally them around a potential opportunity that can find. That’s the bit I think that I see myself doing. I agree with you around the efficiencies because eventually you will see, I think we’re going to see AI be able to execute on strategy quite quickly, as in creative outputs based on it, but you’ve got to give it the data input to start with. You’ve got to give it the thinking and you’ve got to make sure that the client’s behind the thinking as well. That’s the bit I see for myself, the opportunity to keep relevant, to keep human in this rising wave of AI as it comes through the industry. But hey, who am I? I’m just a chap in the UK with a beard, but it’s one of those things. What do you think, David? I hear what you’re saying around efficiencies and stuff like that. Do you ever see a world where the AI is creating all of the outputs, all of the execution side of things?

I do, but the stuff it will be doing will be the stuff that’s just as meaningless now as it will be then. So if you think about content that’s indexable by Google, it’s largely meaningless content that just fills a role. It’s not the kind of insight, like when I write an article, I put a lot of thinking into it. I may use AI to do a little bit of research, but I am trying to figure out what I think on the way to helping other people figure out how they should think. I don’t think it’ll just make that easier for me to do, but it’s not ever going to be automated fully in a way that helps me learn or helps me personalize it for my audience. But if we’re just talking about general content, it’s like, well, that stuff is pretty meaningless now, so why not have AI do it? I do think AI is going to do some of that stuff without hardly any intervention. It will still require really important prompts and checks and balances and so on. But I think the more meaningless the marketing is, the better AI will do at replacing it.

The weirdest things that I’m finding is, is like this move towards AI agents, right? Like I was in my first project meeting, was it about two or three months ago, and we were defining the brand’s positioning for its audiences. And obviously in this process, one of the things you have to do is define your audiences. And so we’re going through these various audiences for this brand with their team and looking at opportunities, etc. And as we’re going through, one of the audiences for the first time in my career, was not human, right? It was other AI agents. Right. I was like, it took me honestly ages to get my head around this, like, how do we position a brand? Right? Yes, for some of the humans, but now we’ve got to position the brand for other AI agents, which by the way, don’t actually exist right now. So they’re thinking like, but they might exist in six months. And I’m like, oh my goodness, like, this is just really breaking my brain. Like we’re repositioning for agents that don’t exist. What are they like? What do they need? How do we even talk to that? Just literally mind blowing. So I guess as you’re saying, like in some industries, it’s going to be so automated. AI agents, my AI agent is going to talk to your AI agent and do AI agent stuff. And no one, no human is going to have a clue what’s going on, apart from some money is going to transfer in the stratosphere from my account to somebody else’s account quietly.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re going to discover how meaningless marketing, some marketing is, honestly, if AI can replace it entirely. Like I, I’ve written three million words over the years with the weekly articles, the podcasts and the seven books. And when I started writing, the Internet didn’t exist at that point, and certainly LLMs didn’t. But because I’ve done that, I’m all over the AI engines, but not intentionally. It just sort of happened. Now though, I am writing, I’m not reading, writing differently, except I’m writing more consciously because there’s certain, there’s certain things about how you write that makes it more indexable by these engines. And so it’s, I just bought a Tesla. Don’t kill me. This is not a big endorsement of Elon Musk. I just like the car. Anyway, like now, if you think about stop signs and flashing lights on fire engines and so on, you’re not just designing those for humans, you’re designing them for cars so that they will recognize them. It’s a very similar thing to what you were describing about AI. And it’s just, it’s just the way the world has changed. It’s fine.

All right. So we’re going to wrap up soon, but I just wanted to have a section on something very practical for people building a firm today. So if you’re starting from scratch in today’s world with AI and all the competition and the noise, like where would you start? Like what would you be doing differently from day one today?

I would be very, very tightly positioned. I would hire people full time as a final resort. So I think it will be quite possible to have a thriving firm of just a few people and all kinds of agents. But the key thing is to be very tightly positioned, and then to generate as much ungated insight as you can, so that you appear in these search engines. Like I check this for myself all the time, there are seven particular searches that I do. I’m showing up in six of them really well in the top two or three choices, and one of them I’m not showing up in, so I need to fix that. So very tight positioning, ungated insight, higher slowly. That’s where I’d start. Yep.

So would you be building around like an audience or a specialty, or like your thinking, reputation? How would you be building? You mentioned positioning, but let’s unpack that a little bit.

The positioning might be vertical, that is by industry or it might be horizontal, which would be by service offering design. Then if you think about all the possible ways that you could spread the word in the podcast that we do to Bob’s, we talk about the ladder of lead generation and some things are very low on that ladder. You might have the intern standing on the street corner with a sandwich board sign. Then at the very top of that ladder, you might have a book that is very well received. What you would want to do is to climb as high as you possibly can on that ladder, whatever is accessible to you. Then over time, higher rungs will be accessible to you and you keep climbing, leaving the lower rungs behind. That’s another big mistake that firms make, is they just think that if I do good enough work, enough people will hear about me and that’s all I’ll need to do. It’s like marketing is for the little people who don’t do great work. It’s like, no, that’s not the way it works. There’s so much noise out there, you need to be known. I did a post on LinkedIn not too long ago and I said, you know, we could boil all this down and say, you need two things, you need to be known and you need to be trusted. And those are two separate things, but there’s no way you’re going to be known. And I’m talking about being known by people who’ve never worked with you before. The people who work with you, they know you. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about people that have never worked for you before. You need to be in their minds and they need to trust you. And there’s different ways to do that. And of course, you want to do it based on your personality too. So, my marketing plan might not be your marketing plan and that’s totally fine.

So, what would you absolutely not do then if that’s what you would focus on?

What would I not do from a lead gen standpoint?

No, from like a building agency standpoint, like from the ground up.

Well, there’s a whole lot of things I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t borrow money. I would not listen to any of the marketing bros on LinkedIn, for sure. I would not kill my brand by spamming people with cold calls or cold emails. You know, just kind of look around and see what experts do and try to emulate that. These are people that are confident. They can speak about what they do. They’re interesting. They’re curious. They are willing to experiment. One thing I wouldn’t do is I wouldn’t just let the work speak for itself. I would assume that that’s never going to be enough. I would devote probably 10 to 15 percent of my time to lead-gen efforts and insight development that I could then spread all over the world, because I think that would be the best way to attract the right clients.

Amazing. We have a few quick fire questions if you’re up for it, Dave.

Okay.

Awesome. Do you want to kick off, Matt?

Yeah. I would say, apart from yourself and Blair Enns, of course, but is there anyone or a company that you feel are doing a good job of this?

Do you know Pete Caputa? He used to work at HubSpot. He was one of the very first employees there, and he runs a firm called DataBox. I think his contributions on LinkedIn are really good. I’ll tell you somebody else that I’m really impressed with how he thinks about all this stuff is Will with 1L, Will Reynolds, who is the founder of Seer Interactive. And I love how he thinks about experimenting, sharing his information freely. I’d start with those.

All right. Great.

Thank you. What’s one belief creative firms need to let go of if they want to become more valuable?

Boy, you’ve stumped me there.

Jacob always does this. He’s absolutely mean, isn’t he?

Yeah.

You find these amazing guests on, and then you absolutely ask these awkward questions.

Maybe that being rich is wrong. Yeah. There’s a lot of that in the world right now. I admire rich people as long as they’ve earned it ethically. There’s nothing wrong with being rich, and I wish more of my clients were rich. Maybe that would be, I’ll just start there. First, the only one I think of at the moment.

What’s the simplest way that you can advise someone on to convert insights to impact and wealth?

It’s to pay attention to the questions that your clients or your prospects are asking, where it’s pretty clear that they expect you to have an insightful answer and you don’t. You kind of him and her, when the spotlight is on you, the mic is turned on. And write down all those things where you need a more articulate point of view, and then just start checking them off, doing research, writing about them, and start to develop a sort of a common canon of insight that’s tied to your particular specialization.

Love that.

All right. What makes someone irreplaceable in today’s market?

I view that as sort of the control thing. So, and there’s a very simple test. If your client decided that they are not going to use you anymore, how long would it take for them to find what they would deem a suitable replacement? So, they get to decide what’s suitable, but how long would it take them to find what they think is a suitable replacement for you? That’s how much leverage you have in the relationship. Nice.

What’s the next book you’re going to write?

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I have another business book in me. We’ve done seven. Probably, I’m toying with writing a collection of short stories, but I don’t know what I’m doing. So, we’ll see if it comes out or not. I’ve been working on that today, but I don’t know if it’s going to actually happen. We’ll see.

Amazing. Well, where can people connect with you, find out more, get your books and so forth?

Sure. So, punctuation.com would be the first place to start. That’s the firm. We do mainly M&A work these days, in addition to my consulting work. punctuation.com. And then the podcast is 2bobbs.com. And the best way to stay in touch is to sign up for the weekly emails that come out every Sunday afternoon at punctuation.com. They’re free and each weekly email has a new article in it.

Thank you so much. We’ll chuck that into the show notes and that leaves us to the end of the episode. So David, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and expertise and all this good stuff for creatives. And professionals around the world. And yeah, we really appreciate it. So thank you.

Glad to do it. Yeah. Nice to chat with both of you. Take care.

Amazing to have you on David. Thank you.

What happens when every agency claims to be “strategic,” “human-centered,” and “different”… yet somehow all sound exactly the same?

In this episode, we sit down with brand strategist and verbal identity specialist Emily Penny of Becolorful to unpack the growing challenge of differentiation in an increasingly saturated market.

Emily is the creator of the Fully Saturated report and founder of a micro studio focused on positioning and voice. Together, we explore why so many agencies struggle to stand out, what strong positioning actually looks like today, and how agencies can build relevance in an AI-enabled world.

We discuss:

• Why agency positioning often falls flat
• The real meaning of “fully saturated”
• How verbal identity creates distinction
• The role of personality and point of view
• What agencies can offer that AI can’t
• How micro studios and modern agencies can stay valuable

Whether you’re a strategist, designer, consultant, or agency founder, this conversation will challenge how you think about differentiation, positioning, and the future of creative businesses.

Featuring Emily Penny, creator of the BrandStrand® framework and the Fully Saturated report.

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Transcript

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of JUST Branding. Today, we have the wonderful Emily Penny on with us. We’re going to be talking about how the world really has started to feel very saturated, particularly in the agency world. A lot of agencies look, sound, feel very similar. What do we do about that? We love to talk as brand builders about differentiation, but then it’s like a plumber, I always think. The plumber’s house has always got pipes that are leaking, and it’s like us in this world. This is for you. If you’re building an agency, if you’re running a creative agency, if you’re a brand builder offering this services for brand building out in the wild, we are going to tuck into this because Emily is a brand strategist specializing in positioning and verbal identity. She’s the creator of a really interesting report that I think came out last year, didn’t it, Emily?

That’s right, yes.

And it was called Fully Saturated. And we’re going to tuck into this. It explored how agencies are really navigating an increasingly crowded marketplace. Another couple of few facts about Emily is that she runs her own micro studio in the UK and has developed the brand strand positioning framework, helping brands find clarity in how they show up and communicate. And I’m hoping we’ll be able to get some time to tuck into that also at the back. A little unknown fact is that, Emily, I think we’ve worked together on a couple of projects quite a few years ago. So, you know, it’s lovely to see you again.

It’s a delight. It’s always a delight, Matt.

Oh, well, she has to say that. She’s a great guest. You can come again. Cool. Well, look, you know, I’ve obviously given a bit of an overview there and welcome to the show, but perhaps it would be great to hear about yourself in your own words. Like, who are you? What do you do? And most importantly, why do you do it, Emily?

Well, I’ve been in the world of design for forever, really, for over 25 years. So I’ve been on the inside at agencies in London. I spent a good 15 years at London agencies before starting Be Colourful, which is my own brand voice studio. And I love that world. And I decided to focus on working with agencies, studios and consultants of all sizes to actually help them to think about brands. Because as you said, sort of, what’s so interesting is that this is what we do. This is what design agencies do for their clients. But somehow it doesn’t apply to them, you know. And it’s interesting that you kind of made a comparison with plumbers, because plumbers are traders. There is commodity service. It’s rare that you get a plumber who is really differentiated and really using brand to their advantage. And I kind of feel like design is going that direction. I want us to think more broadly than just delivering a commodity service.

Exciting. So why did you get into that? Like, what was it that you think you personally connected with, like emotionally, I guess, behind it? Because I know you’re very passionate for improving things. So what do you think has driven that?

I think I’ve worked with hundreds of consultants in studios and agencies. And after a while, you start to see some patterns. And when you’re kind of doing your 20th competitor audit, looking at the same landscape, the same familiar faces, you start to think kind of what’s going on here and also why. I’ve seen several AI-powered competitor audits looking at the design and agency landscape. But what they don’t do is dig into the reasons why agencies are all showing up in a very similar way. And so we wanted to, this is Joel, Stein and myself, we collaborated on this project. We started talking about this as kind of therapy for a whole sector because we went out there and we spoke to agencies and people in the design world to find out, you know, why is this happening? Everybody knows it’s happening. We’re not, this isn’t news, but why? What are the obstacles? Because if we can name those obstacles, then perhaps that’s the first step in getting over them.

Yeah, let’s deny there’s an issue here. Let’s confront it and move on. So tell us about your connection with Joel as well, because I know both of you partnered on this, as you mentioned, and we did invite him on, but he’s a bit poorly today. So sending love to Joel if he’s listening in, but tell us what sort of brought about this report, the background, what inspired you to partner with Joel to get on with it? And what really was it? What was the idea behind it?

Well, Be Colorful is, I call it an agency is not an agency. I mean, it’s essentially me, but I bring in brilliant other independent practitioners, writers, justice, and others to work with me. Joel’s been working with me for at least two years now. We had worked together on some of my agency clients. And that’s when we had the idea to do the report, dig deep on the UK market. We couldn’t do global, not quite yet. We had to draw some boundaries. I know, we both know the UK design industry, so we decided to start there. And we spent probably about four or five months just looking at hundreds, literally hundreds of design agency websites and asking people in the sector as well for their suggestions, who’s caught their eye, who’s doing something interesting. And our mission really was to find agencies that were truly treating their business as a brand. We didn’t want to do this as a big critical exercise where we’re saying, you’re doing it wrong, you’re doing it wrong. Because what’s more interesting is to unearth some of the lesser known examples that are actually really interesting and inspiring. So we looked far and wide. We’ve got examples from Glasgow to Brighton and everywhere in between. It’s not just the usual big London agency, familiar names.

And even though you focused on the UK market, obviously from my experience, like working across the borders, I often find it’s very similar to this idea that you’ve said that everyone does have a very similar look and feel. Jacob, would you say that’s the same with your experience?

I wouldn’t say look and feel, but I haven’t done that much extensive work. I do know some of the messaging sounds similar. I do think the work on agency websites make them stand out in a different way, but how they talk about their services, I notice is similar in that regard.

Yeah, I think more recently, the sector has learned a lot from tech product marketing, both for good and for bad, really. And certainly, that’s put more of the focus on kind of productisation and selling points and talking about customer pain points and all those good practice things. But I think what can get lost in the mix there is that if everybody’s speaking to the same pain points, and this is kind of true in every sector, it still all sounds the same, because everybody’s promising to solve the same problem. I’ve worked with four US agencies now, and it’s interesting to go into that market where I’m less familiar with the competitor set. But, yeah, certainly I see very similar issues. And one of the things is, I guess, just copying the leaders. People see what’s working for the big agencies, and they think, oh, well, we’ll do that. But it’s, you know, what works for them isn’t…

Yeah, that’s the challenge, right? It’s like, you see these big brands and it’s working, but it’s not necessarily something you can copy. But I was going to mention, like, I think the angle that you bring to how you go about things. So, for example, if your specialty is environment branding, or if it’s in web or digital, the lens that you bring it kind of changes it a little bit with, even though it’s like similar customer pain points, if you’re talking about what your specialty is, that is how you can differentiate a little bit. And that’s what I’ve noticed recently. So I haven’t read your report yet. So I’m really curious about, like, what you’ve found from it, especially when you compare different, I guess, lenses. And talking about lenses, we’ve asked this same question on JUST Branding, the podcast, like, what does branding mean to you? How do you define it? And everyone has a different answer.

I mean, as with most things in this profession, I try and bring simplicity to it. And for me, brand simply means trust. If you swap out the word brand for trust in most cases, it will bring more meaning to what you’re talking about. And positioning simply means focus. So if we bear those two ideas in mind, that actually all we’re trying to do here is build trust and find focus. Those are two very simple ideas that people can grab hold of. And, you know, we don’t have to go into a whole kind of lexicon of jargon. Those are the ideas that are the foundations for how I work.

I love that. Build trust and find focus. It’s such a simple lens to look at through brand.

And with, sorry, I can talk a length on this.

Yeah, well, that’s why you’re here.

Yeah, when we talk about focus, then we get into this whole discussion around, should you niche? Nishing can be done around a vertical sector, which actually works really well because it’s very easy to communicate. And that can work brilliantly for agencies. There are agencies that focus on alcoholic drinks or the arts or B2B or whatever it is. That works brilliantly. But the big thing for me is that there are lots of other ways to focus. So it doesn’t have… That’s just one strategy. And this is where the Brandstrand Framework comes in, because that offers you 18 different positioning strategies. Just one of them is vertical niching.

Can I just ask you around focus and niching? Because how do you see the difference between a focus or a niche?

When people say niching, they tend to mean vertical sector niching. You decide that you are going to work for a particular sector. Whereas lots of agencies don’t actually want to do that. They want to bring a different kind of focus to the table. And what we are trying to do here is be memorable, be known for something instead of everything. So something has to be amplified, something has to kind of go to the surface and be that simple idea that you want to be famous for. So, for instance, there is a brilliant studio called Analog, whose mantra is seriously playful. They are owning the idea of play and being playful. And it runs through everything they do. It runs through their product offers, their language, their visual identity. And similarly, there’s a small studio down in Brighton called Crush, and their mantra is honor the craft. And while craft is a pretty general term in the world of design, they’ve gone all in, they own it. Everything they say ladders down from the idea of craft.

So, Emily, to kind of just summarize here, so the positioning is one thing where it’s like it could be about playfulness and craft, whereas the niche, you’re saying often people talk about the vertical niche. My understanding in terms of niche, and there’s many ways you can do that, whether it be location or size or budget or industry or service, there’s many different ways to cut that pie. And then thirdly, we have the focus side of things. I’m just trying to understand the differences of the focus and the niche and the position. Are you saying the focus is kind of like the position or how are you splitting that up?

I think the easiest way to think about it is that your focus is the simple idea that you want to be famous for. And that’s the point of branding at the end of the day. It’s to lay some groundwork so that when you’re having those sales conversations, there’s already some perception, some knowledge of you in the market, which might have been communicated with thought leadership or events, or any channel really can help you build your brand. I mean, PR is a great example, for example. If there’s no point just going out there and just trying to get PR coverage, because it won’t compound unless there’s a theme running through and you’re actually trying to build this sense that you are the agency with a particular point of view, and that’s when it becomes brand building and worthwhile.

It’s kind of risky, isn’t it? This idea of focus and positioning. Because you kind of feel like, look, there’s a lovely thousands of opportunities out there, and you’re asking me to double down in just a handful. That just feels like I’m leaving stuff on the table. But the truth is then, as you say, the problem with that attitude is that you become one of many, don’t you? You’re in a sea of sameness, I guess, in your language of your report, you’re part of the saturation of the market, right? So, to focus does enable you to win for those specific clients that you’re looking for, which is what brand strategy is all about, isn’t it really?

Completely. It is scary, and that is definitely one of the big reasons why agencies aren’t doing it, and they’re not taking that risk to treat the business as a brand. It’s because of the fragility of the market, and it’s because of fear. It comes down to fear. I think it also comes down to the character of designers who are running businesses. Designers are really sensitive souls who overthink things quite a lot, and that’s part of the job. But that can be quite paralyzing when you come to making those tricky decisions.

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Like in my mastermind, I’ve got people that specialize in different things. We’ve got one agency in Canada and they specialize, how about this, in the agricultural sector, which makes sense in Canada, it’s vast swathes of land. But who would have thought that an agency could specialize and thrive in that sector? Then I remember I did some work a few years ago with an agency that were very generalist, and they asked me to come in and basically do a brand strategy for them. We looked at their top customer base, and we found that actually a lot of their top customers were in the pharmaceutical sector and they weren’t actually doing creative work for them. They were actually helping with their internal learning and development and their sales enablement. Now, after quite a bit of work, we repositioned them to literally just focus on the pharmaceutical industry and sales enablement and sales training, and they are now absolutely thriving, right? So that’s just a couple of examples, and I’m sure you’ve got loads more, but this idea of focus and niching, and just if we can just get over potentially that fear, that’s something. But then the other thing, like you were saying, it doesn’t have to be on a vertical. It could be on a theme. Myself, I talk about alignment, right? That’s my thing, like personally. So I like to sort of try and sell that in so that when leaders are coming to me, they’re coming because they’re misaligned and they know they need some help. And I put that brand strategy lens into their leadership team. So that’s kind of how I do it. How do you do it, Jacob? What would you say your sort of focus area is?

I also go with alignment, actually. That’s kind of, it makes sense because when things are out of alignment, it’s like, well, it just doesn’t work. So you have to realign things and get them aligned as much as possible. So that’s the same approach.

So you two are going to have to think about how you differentiate from each other, then.

I don’t think we lead with alignment. It’s just how we talk about it internally. I think the external comms is vastly different. Like we have our own positioning. Matt is a brand consultant, a solo. I kind of lean into a mascot of Stand the Flock Out. Everyone’s talking about standing out. And that’s why I was kind of interested to hear this because a lot of the language is like stand out, be different. But like how do you put a new spin on that? The flamingo is one way of doing that. Stand the Flock Out and the language and the vocabulary that comes with that also helps. But it doesn’t lean into play or craft, like a big idea like that, which I thought was quite interesting.

Yeah. There’s an agency in New York that you might have heard of called Giza, and their tagline is older, faster, better. So they’re owning the fact that their team is made up of over 50s people, and that has advantages in the making of virtue of that. These are the kind of examples that we’re trying to bring to the fore. We’re trying to show that you can stand for unexpected things. I think a lot of agencies fall into the trap of simply describing what the profession does, what design does, and what I’m interested in is how is your brand different within that world or distinctive. And for instance, there’s a small studio called Art is My Career up in Newcastle, I think, and she’s set up her business as a community interest company, which means that she has to produce an impacts report every year. And we see agencies calling for brave thinking. For me, that is super brave. That’s really walking the talk. That’s saying I’m here to do positive impact work and I’m actually going to be a not-for-profit and create an impact report. So that was a really interesting one because it starts with the entity itself.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. A structural change in the way that that’s been set up, which is different. Amazing. Well, look, I wanted to get us back into that report and just get your initial thoughts around themes and trends that you’ve found. I mean, did you find the vast majority of agencies were all very similar? And obviously, you’ve referenced some of the outliers? Or did you actually find when you scraped the surface, there was actually differentiating positions and they became clear over the course of the research?

We looked at hundreds and hundreds of agencies. We narrowed it down to 150 to order in detail. I’d say that probably a good three-quarters of those were not really very noteworthy. We were looking for three things. We were looking for an angle that they brought to the sector. We were looking for relevance for their target clients. And we were looking for memorability. So we went through every example and kind of scored them on that heuristic. We came up with our own Top 25 Showcase. And the examples that we’ve shown there all have something truly remarkable about them. And they are very, very different to each other as well, which is the other really important thing. Among Equals was in there with their brilliant line, start with no one cares. And we had obviously analog with seriously playful. We had some big agencies as well. We included OneHQ on their website. They say, I love this. What we do isn’t different. How you feel when you work with us is.

Nice.

And when you think about this kind of best practice dominant approach right now about kind of constantly blasting the audience with outcomes and promises of change and transformation, et cetera, actually they’ve stood back and said, actually it’s not about the outcome. It’s about the process and the relationship. So I thought that was quite interesting.

Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that is another, you know, amazing way you can think about it. I sometimes use an example when I’m talking to my clients of like, say you’re a hairdresser, right, on a typical high street, right? You go to a hairdresser, everybody’s going to deliver the same outcome in some way, which ultimately would be a haircut. But the way that you do that can change. So you go into one salon and it could be like hard rock playing and really kind of grungy kind of people and like loads of stuff on the walls and black and, I don’t know, crazy stuff. Going to another one, it’s like got classical music playing and it’s really sophisticated. Someone hands you a glass of champagne and you sit down. These are very different approaches to deliver a similar service. The way that you do it, the how can make all the difference, right?

And yet, an awful lot of agencies and studios are simply saying, we cut hair. We do design. When I do workshops with agencies, I can tell you that every single agency thinks they are more strategic and deliver a higher level of craft and care more about their work. They all say that that is what makes them different.

It’s the better trap.

From the inside, they believe that. They think we care so deeply about our work. And I know they do and designers do, and they’re a fantastic bunch of people because of that. But you can’t simply explain what design is and what design does. To be a brand, you need to add another layer. So it’s, I like to think of it as layers, you know, we’ve got your basic information, your basic credentials. Then we need to frame that as a proposition. Why is that valuable to your customer? But let’s push further than that. Let’s get a point of view. Let’s have maybe a provocative, challenging point of view on the sector. That’s something that enables you to have interesting conversations rather than just keep showing up and selling. This is where this kind of triangle of PR and socials and web, you want your point of view kind of bouncing around that triangle. That’s how you start to have conversations rather than just selling.

I think it’s so ironic because as consultants, we help clients try to extract that to get over the cliches of being like, we have a better product, it’s more quality, it’s more innovative and we’re transparent. It’s like all these cliches. But as agencies, the trend is that we design and we’re better at it. There’s nothing differentiated about that. So it’s so ironic.

This is the creative sector. Let’s see some more weird. Come on.

It’s been creative, guys. Come on.

It’s allowed.

The other thing that I was going to point out was that I’ve worked across different agencies for many years and even run a couple of agencies myself. One of the things that I always found myself getting into conversations around is the process. Our process is different. So what you tend to find is that basically, well, this is what I found anyway, agencies package up their process in a way that they think is unique and they give it a name, it could be anything. Then maybe there’s different levels of processes that they go through. So you’ve got bronze, silver, gold, for example, and they call it different things. Again, similar to what you were saying, Emily, I think people tend to think the process is massively unique. Now, there might be the odd different thing that one agency might do than another. But on the whole, I find that the process of design is at least that the way it’s marketed and then usually what happens behind the scenes is pretty similar. There’s an exploration, then there’s concepts that are put together and a bit of back and forth, and then there’s the polishing at the end. Ultimately, that tends to be what tends to happen in the creative services. Did you find something similar as well, Emily, on that when you were going through these? Was there very sort of similar processes just dressed up in different colours or something or different names?

I think there is a trend for making that very generic process into something that’s a bit more of a signature product. There is a greater sense of productisation coming in, but this is all very new and creating packages that sort of have almost like programs that you buy into and it’s very sort of standardised. But I think the other way of looking at the product is to look at it, frame it in terms of client problems and scenarios. And Collins in New York, I think have something like 11 different packages on their website, each of which targets a very specific client problem and situation. And for me, that is much more interesting than a menu of services. It’s your kind of worst case scenario, really. That’s kind of really starting with the basics. But I think the Collins example is really interesting.

I’m going to ask a silly question now, but why is that the worst of all situations, Emily, to see a menu?

Because you are expecting your audience to make sense of it, and they’re not the experts in these disciplines. What they care about is their business, their current challenge or problem. So we need to work a bit harder to meet them where they are and understand what they need to hear that’s relevant for their situation, but also don’t forget to be the creative. I think it might have been John Higgins. Somebody had a brilliant story about a new agency that rocks up to a pitch, and they were so nervous about this pitch, they’re trying to put on their best possible performance. So they all wore suits, and they show up with a shiny presentation, and at the end of the presentation, the client says, wear the t-shirts. I want a creative inspiration. And what the agency had done is they’re just trying to mirror this corporate environment that they were walking into, whereas our superpower as creatives is that we offer something different. We offer a skill set that perhaps the client doesn’t have in-house, and that’s good. That’s something to be embraced.

It’s like you were saying earlier, take a perceived weakness, or at least a perceived reality that could be the weakness, the agency with a lot of more experienced people, and actually make that the strength. Turn it around and be like, yeah, that is what we are, and this is value for these reasons. So I think that’s a brilliant way of thinking. I want to shift gears because you yourself run your microagency, and I know you’re a word specialist because I’ve worked with you before. So how has that report sort of influenced the way that you think about your agency? Have you considered the way you niche? Are you happy to share anything in terms of how that sort of shifted your perspective?

Well, I think I’ve definitely refined how I present my offer and my proposition. I’ve been running Be Colourful for 13 years now, so that has been a journey. I have a mantra of my own, which is don’t be noisy, be interesting, and that stands for a lot of things. It’s about not being dull. It’s about showing up as interesting, and interesting might mean relevant for clients or different to all of the other candidates. But it’s also about not wasting your energy on just spamming your audience. Get specific, get focused on the right message. Over the years, you just sort of realize what is working for you and what isn’t. I pretty early on, I decided that I wasn’t going to take part in pitches because they were draining my energy. It wasn’t something that brought me joy. There are certain non-negotiables, and I add to this list of non-negotiables quite frequently, but it gives me some sort of foundational principles for how I run my business. So I don’t do any cold outreach at all. I believe in branding, even in B2B, even as an agency. So I try to build my agency as a brand and attract my audience.

Nice. And as a sort of a word specialist, a verbal identity, how important is verbal identity in creating distinction, and particularly for agencies, you know, going along in the discussion that we’ve had? Did you find many examples of different agencies speaking differently to each other?

Well, I think the key thing here is that design agencies tend to be founded by designers, and their first and foremost skill tends to be visual, not always. I know many designers who are extremely good writers, and at the end of the day, all of it is about communication. But I think there perhaps is a slight lack of confidence there for that reason. And there’s also a big emphasis on the portfolio, which I think is very ingrained right from kind of design school days. It’s always about your portfolio. And case studies are hugely important, but I try and encourage people to have a bit more of a wrapper, a bit more kind of of a package, some packaging around that portfolio so that it’s not just doing all the hard work by itself.

Just based on your studies and the report, what would the main takeaways be for our listeners, agency owners, if they were to go away and try stand out, differentiate from everyone else out there? Like, what are some tactical, practical tips that we can use?

The big one for me is that your story, your positioning, it’s already in there. You just need to find it. This isn’t about creating something that is going to transform your place in the market. It needs to be based on genuine strengths. The most resilient thing you can do is to base it on genuine strengths and to be really authentic and to get over that fear of turning that maybe overlooked feature of your practice or of yourself into a strength. I think that’s what we saw in a lot of our Top 25 examples was that they just got over the fear of turning that idiosyncratic feature into the big idea.

You mentioned your Brandstrand framework. I wonder if we could just tuck into that for the last few minutes. What is Brandstrand and how do you use it?

Brandstrand came out of an exercise that I would do in workshops with clients, and it tended to always be the moment at which the penny would drop and everybody would align around some ideas. Essentially, it’s about offering options for positioning, so different ways that you can promise value to clients. I decided to build out that list of types of value into a universal spectrum. So I looked at, I went into the academic papers on perceived value and correlated a whole bunch of different factors and different attributes that the people were talking about and came up with this set of 18. And they’re all types of value that you can promise. So you’ve got 18 different promises, whether that’s about flexibility or responsiveness or ethics or one-stop shop or heritage. They are positions that pretty much show up in every sector. You always have the premium offer. You always have the brand that’s come in and disrupted the sector to make it more easy for customers. So they’re sort of universal positions. And we just use it as a tool to try and narrow down, try and guide the conversation when we’re looking for focus.

I love that. Because as you say, there’s lots of different positions a brand can take. And if they haven’t taken one, that’s probably the worst scenario, isn’t it? Because then everybody’s sort of, you know, perhaps across the company is thinking they’re a slightly different thing. Whereas if they pick one, they can say, right, we are the premium offer in the market, that then guides a lot of strategic decisions from pricing right the way through to customer success, right? And I think that’s what I find. The worst case scenarios are, is when you’ve got a brand that hasn’t really made decisions and sort of organically sort of found itself in the situation it’s in, maybe through short-termism or just literally trying to grab whatever money that can be made. So I love that idea. I think that sounds phenomenal. Where can people find out about that and about the fully saturated report, Emily? Have you got kind of some URLs that you can sort of throw at us?

Yes, so becolourful.co.uk is the best place to go. That will take you through to a page on Brandstrand where you can download the Brandstrand manifesto that tells you a bit more about that. There’s also a link through to the Fully Saturated website where you can get your hands on that report.

Awesome. We’ll drop some links in the show notes. So have a look at their folks as well. Before we shift off, we’ve got a quick fire kind of round that we want to do with you. Before we get into that, the last question I had for you was around the idea of the rise of AI, right? Some of us are a bit like, this AI thing wasn’t supposed to do what it’s now doing, and now it’s doing lots of stuff. I guess the question is, where do you see it developing and what do you feel the role of the modern agency will be in the rise of a world of AI?

Well, I think the role of the agency has always been to bring an outside perspective to solving business problems, and that’s not going anywhere. A lot of what, certainly what my clients are after is the guidance through a journey and the advice and consultation, and what we offer is a sounding board and something very human. I tend to describe it as a combination between being a cat herder and a shrink. AI is a fabulous tool, but we constantly need to make sure that we’re using it to add value and not to take shortcuts.

A cat herding shrink. That’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it?

That’s a new take. I haven’t heard that one yet.

No, that’s definitely how I feel. More of a cat herder than a shrink. But yeah, I think that’s a really good analysis. So you’re not too worried about that because of that, the definition on the agency being like the outsider’s perspective, because I guess a lot of designers are thinking, oh, will these tools become powerful enough to be able basically to take over the craft of producing assets, delivering ads, etc., etc. I guess there is always going to be a technology and tools have always improved on that side of things. But what you’re saying is the role is very much to solve the business problems and to remember that’s why we’re at the table, right, to do that.

Yes, and I think we are seeing two markets emerging, two very different markets. I mean, going back to brand strand and the fact that there will always be people who are offering a premium service or a more human service versus cheap deliverables, cheap off-the-shelf deliverables. The market is absolutely still there for human relationships and guidance and strategic advice.

Definitely. Definitely. Great. Right. Should we do this quick fire round? Are you ready for this? Jacob, do you want to have the honor of going first?

Yes, absolutely.

No, I’m not ready. I’m just like carrying on anyway.

I’m ready for this one. Sir, the most generic agency phrase that you see everywhere?

Thinkers make us doers. It sounded fresh once. Seen it too many times.

All right. One agency getting their positioning right that you’ve not mentioned already.

I’ve not mentioned. I’m going to mention a small studio in South London called I Am Female. They are a queer led agency for the queer market and they just own that. And why not? It’s different. It’s not something that I’ve seen.

There you go.

All right.

One word to describe great positioning.

One word I think is it has to be focus.

Focus.

Nice. One thing an agency can do that an AI can’t.

Look you in the eye.

Nice. All right. What’s the biggest mistake agencies make today?

Looking over their shoulder and copying other people in the sector, other agencies in the sector. They need to find the confidence to stand up for their own truths and their own weird. That’s fine.

All right. Last one. One piece of advice for agency founders trying to stand out.

It goes back to authenticity. Find that nugget of difference that is already there and then go all in. They dilute it. Sometimes there will be, the idea will be in there, but then they’ve mixed it up with six other promises and it’s just lost all impact.

Go all in. Brilliant. Well, Emily, look, it’s been amazing having this conversation and thank you for all that work and those of us that have downloaded the report, thank you for putting that in. Are you going to do more of them in the future? Do you see yourself, kind of, you and Joel, like doing a few more or going global? Or what’s the sort of plan for the future on this?

We’ll definitely be doing something next. We’re just trying to decide exactly what shape that takes so that it’s most helpful for our audience.

Nice. So watch this space, folks. Emily, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate you taking the time.

It’s lovely to see you. Thanks.

Thank you, everyone.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer, designer, or aspiring professional, honing your branding skills is essential to stand out from the crowd and make a lasting impact on your target audience.

Fortunately, the internet offers a wealth of branding courses to learn and develop your branding expertise. Thankfully for you, we have hcurated a list of the best branding courses available online in 2026 to help grow your brand.

From free introductory courses to premium in-depth programs, these courses cater to learners of all levels, providing you with the knowledge and practical skills to create compelling brands that resonate with your audience.

Our compilation of the best free branding courses online will get you up to speed in no time. But first, a quick primer…

What is Branding?

There is a sweeping ambivalence about what branding truly is and its role, especially among small businesses and startups. It’s easy to dismiss its concept and reduce its idea to logos and color schemes, but what plenty of people don’t know is that its coverage transcends aesthetics and style.

For starters, branding isn’t only how entrepreneurs make their business out to be; it includes everything an enterprise does and all they claim to achieve as an organization — even if it means only one person manages the entire venture. In other words, your brand is the collective perception of your customers and workforce toward your business. It is the look, personality, and principles carried out by your business.

All that said, it’s become even more critical for the modern entrepreneur to aptly and accurately define who they are as a business and what values they stand on. Strong branding doesn’t only set you apart from your competitors, it also helps cement your credibility in the industry, therefore shaping the kind of consumers who support and believe in you.

Best Branding Courses Compared

You could also consider getting a branding book to teach yourself. We recommend Branding in 5.5 Steps to start off with.

Reviews of the Top Online Branding Courses

1. Become a Brand Master Course by Jacob Cass

Instructor: Jacob Cass | Price: $197 | Length: 48 minutes

Jacob Cass’ very own branding mini-course will help you become a brand master.

You will go behind the scenes of a major project and learn:

• Research, Strategy & Workshops
• Concept Development
• Logo & Brand Design

Plus you’ll receive a strategy workbook and workshop template for your own branding projects.

Watch the trailer below or simply click here to take the course.

Top Free Branding Courses on Skillshare

You can get access to these free branding courses by using Skillshare’s four week free trial. As these are short courses, you will be able to finish them before the trial is up.

2. Branding Your Creative Business: Define Your Brand

Discover how to better brand your business through better messaging

Duration: 8 Lessons, 57 Minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: 4-Week Free Trial then $19/mo  | Author: Faye Brown

It’s easy to get lost in translation when the word “branding” is thrown around so casually. Both beginning entrepreneurs and seasoned business leaders may find that determining their venture’s actual voice may not be as easy as it sounds. Selling products and services is one thing, but letting one’s business resonate intimately and personally with one’s target market is another.

For this course, sought after brand designer Faye Brown tackles the nitty and gritty of brand definition, what steps leaders may take to understand their business message better, and why defining your business is crucial in communicating with your audience.

3. On the Power of Personal Branding with Kris Jenner

Duration: 1 hour and 46 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: $15/month | Author: Kris Jenner 

All around you and with everything you purchase, you’ll come across various brands that are noteworthy in their own way. If you want your brand to shine among these brands in competitive industries, then you must learn to develop and enhance  brand strategies. Along with this, you must also improve your conceptual, analytical, and decision-making skills. 

Learning branding is more effective when you learn from an expert like Kris Jenner, who is the matriarch of one of the most influential families and a momager. She’s here to share her journey and teach how to crack through all the grinds to gain success in branding despite the struggles. 

“On the Power of Personal Branding” features 11 video lessons with a total duration of about 1 hour and 46 minutes. This course focuses on personal branding and its importance and will aid in making your vision a reality. 

4. Personal Branding: Crafting Your Social Media Presence

Learn how to create, evolve, and leverage your online personal brand for growth

Duration: 14 Lessons, 1 hour & 8 Mins | Experience Level: All levels | Price: 4-Week Free Trial then $19/mo  | Author: Kate Arends

When approached with the right strategies, social media can build empires and extend networks. Whereas the idea of becoming an internet personality existed only for entertainers and artists much earlier on its advent, the times have changed in that the digital space now makes personalities out of professionals, too.

Whether you’re a startup founder or a marketing maven, there’s definitely space for your personal voice to shine, as well. With a decade’s worth of experience, internet powerhouse Kate Arends discusses in her course helpful tips and valuable insight on what it means to let social media platforms help improve your individual career.

5. The Staples of Branding: From Purpose to Product

Learn how branding starts from the products you produce to the vision you align with your workforce

Duration: 14 Lessons, 1 hour & 8 Mins | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: 4-Week Free Trial then $19/mo  | Author: Jeff Staple

Product-based ventures pose a lot of stress and joys entrepreneurs who run serviced-based enterprises may not share. Considering how today’s business climate is saturated with a lot of worthy competition, it’s critical that the items you put out add value to your customer’s lives and carry the purpose and reflect ideals.

To make a positive impact, you will want your brand to be known not only for quality output but for the purpose you serve, as well. For his course, streetwear icon, Jeff Staple, talks about how to aptly tell a tale with what you sell, what it takes to come up with a snappy logo, and how to build a brand from the ground up.

Most Popular Branding Courses on Udemy

6. Business Branding: The Complete Course Part 1 – Strategy

Learn how a build a strategic brand from the ground up 

Duration: 52 lectures,  3 hours & 23 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner – Intermediate | Price: $89.99  | Author: Steve Houraghan

Branding can be complex science to both new and seasoned entrepreneurs. As a result, not too many leaders know how to start, what to do, or what strategies to follow to optimize a more cohesive market presence.

For Part 1 of this course, marketing strategist Steve Hourgahan tackles how to hold your audience’s attention, position your brand effectively to stand out on its own, and a lot more critical aspects of defining what your business is and keeping your customers glued and interested.

7. Business Branding: The Complete Course Part 2 – Expression

Learn how to express your brand with advanced messaging & storytelling frameworks

Duration: 48 lectures, 4 hours 11 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner – Intermediate | Price: $89.99  | Author: Steve Houraghan

Taking off from where Part 1 ends, Steve Hourgahan extends the conversation to brand psychology, neuroscience, color theory, brand identity design, and more. Perfect for creatives and business leaders looking to elevate their marketing game, this course captures the elemental blocks that comprise branding’s politics.

Enrolees who successfully finish the course can also take home a certificate of completion, making this course suitable for anyone interested in backing up their branding efforts with paperwork.

8. Branding & Marketing for Startups: Learn How To Stand Out

Learn top brand design strategies to build physical product brands

Duration: 40 lectures,  1 hour & 58 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: $89.99  | Author: Mac Piechota

One of the most important things in branding is identifying your target market and learning to speak their language, and sparking their interests. In his course, Mac Piechota details what to do to stand out among competition to charge more, how typography affects your overall aesthetic, and what to teach your team to better your collective approach to marketing as an organization.

Because Piechota understands that branding is seldom a one-person team, he also articulates what it means to work with other creatives to bring out the best in your business.

Learn Branding Online with Coursera (Free)

Although these branding courses from Coursera are free, with the free version of the course you won’t have a completion certificate, something which may be important if you are after an official recognition.

9. Branding Specialization

Become a branding specialist by mastering identity, strategy, marketing & customer experience

Duration: Approximately 3-5 months | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: Free to Enroll | Author: María Eizaguirre Diéguez, Pedro Cifuentes Huertas, Brian Hallett & Michael Thompson

More than anything, branding is a creative journey that may take time and a lot of effort to fine-tune correctly. As market trends evolve and consumer needs differ from time to time, it is vital that business people understand what level of relevance their business plays in the market.

For this course, industry leaders Maria Eizaguirre Dieguez, Brian Hallett, Pedro Cifuentes Huertas, and Michael Thompson discuss how to produce meaningful content, what it takes to develop a competent, creative pitch, and how curating a pleasant customer service experience speaks volume about your business values.

The Branding Specialisation course covers 4 modules:

• Brand Identity & Strategy
• Brand & Content Marketing
• From Brand to Image: Creating High Impact Campaigns That Tell Brand Stories
• Branding and Customer Experience

BONUS: Coursera Plus – Get the ‘Branding Specialization’ Course and 3000+ more courses

You can learn branding online with Coursera and you can get it for free for 7 days as a trial. Or for $49/month. Or for $499 a year with Coursera Plus where the true value is.

With Coursera Plus, you can access the Branding Specialization and 3,000+ other courses in various domains including business, computer science, health, personal development, humanities, and more.

• See our related post: Best Coursera Courses for Designers & Creatives

Coursera Plus will save you money if you are planning on taking multiple courses over the year.

A ‘specialization’ such as their 4 part branding specialization course takes an average of three months to complete, so that would save you approximately $130 over three months or $520 over the year.

For example their Branding Specialisation course covers 4 modules:

• Brand Identity & Strategy
• Brand & Content Marketing
• From Brand to Image: Creating High Impact Campaigns That Tell Brand Stories
• Branding and Customer Experience

10. Brand and Product Management

Understand the cruciality of product management and its association with branding

Duration: Approximately 14 hours | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: Free | Author: Luis Rodriguez Baptist

Brand strategies can be challenging to develop, especially when you don’t have the right tools and data to guide you. What’s more, people often a misconception that branding is solely about what consumers think a business is about. In reality, branding also covers what your team members think about your business and the culture you foster within your organization.

Marketing professor, Luis Rodriguez Baptista, tackles in his course how to establish a clear blueprint of your branding principles to help actualize the brand you deem your enterprise to possess.

11. Brand Management: Aligning Business, Brand and Behaviour

Discover why company behavior is indicative of how brands are perceived 

Duration: Approximately 17 hours to complete | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: Free | Author: Nader Tavassoli

While branding is largely about how you make your business out to be, it isn’t any less about customer experience, too. The encounters you cultivate for both your consumers and your team members are just as integral in creating a familiar brand that people can trust and support.

For his course, business leader Nader Tavassoli discusses how you can foster desirable engagements with clients while maintaining healthy boundaries, what branding means in today’s context, and what others can do to help support affected brands.

The Best Branding Lessons on Creative Live

12. Branding 101: The Complete Toolkit

Learn the essential branding techniques 

Duration: 2 hours & 34 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: $13/mo.  | Author: Danielle McWaters

For a brand to thrive, leaders must put out a strong business message, functional aesthetics, a cohesive customer experience strategy, and core values that gravitate toward empathy, honesty, and a commitment to extending nothing less than quality products and services.

In-demand marketing creative, Danielle McWaters, talks about the nitty and gritty entrepreneurs can expect in their expeditions to building an authentic brand people appreciate and believe in. As the course name implies, expect to cover everything a young business leader may need to learn about in the name of branding.

13. A Brand Called You (Personal Branding) by Debbie Millman

Understand how your personal brand can attract more clients 

Duration: 4 hours & 47 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: $13/mo.  | Author: Debbie Millman

In developing a brand you can only hope people will love and support; it’s easy to forget that your personal charisma and energy play a huge factor in your overall business identity.

For her course, design and brand icon, Debbie Millman, tackles how to improve the way you relate with others, what communication tactics best work in your favor, and how vital it is to understand your own personal brand before you can build the image of an enterprise.

14. How To Develop and Market Your Brand

Discover how to make the most of developing your brand

Duration: 1 hour & 19 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: $13/mo.  | Author: Sandra Coan

Entrepreneurs who often fail to appreciate the power of strong brand positioning often don’t understand that a reliable business identity can be determinative of sales, too. The more highly customers think of your products, the more likely they’ll keep on supporting it.

Film and photography artist Sandra Coan discusses in her course what it takes to build a brand, what it means to connect to audiences, and why braving calculated uncertainty to meet clients where they are is the best way to strengthen relationships and keep abreast evolving marketing trends.

15.  Branding Essentials for Designers

Understand how to build a long-lasting brand with visuals and strategy

Duration: 5 hour & 16 minutes | Experience Level: Beginner | Price: $13/mo.  | Author: Stanley Hainsworth

Whether you’re just starting or are already in the branding industry, the branding course by Stanley Hainsworth does a great job of driving in everything branding-related. If you’re a newbie designer wondering about the role of branding in marketing or a veteran looking to brush up on the fundamentals, this course is a perfect choice.

Hainsworth was the creative chief for Nike, Lego, and Starbucks for a period of time, and he will help guide you through the strategies. You will learn the brand identity and how to create a long-lasting and meaningful brand. Other lessons include Branding Essentials for Designers, walking you through brand visuals, and fostering an environment for your creative process. 

The fundamentals are irreplaceable, and through this course, Hainsworth guides you through all the fundamentals of brand design with an expert lens.

Independent Branding Courses

16. Branding Now by Future London Academy

Duration: 10 hours | Experience Level: Advanced | Price: $1150  | Authors: Campbell Butler and Robyn Butler

Branding Now is the ultimate course on brand design and strategy tailored for senior creatives.

The self-paced online course offers comprehensive training from industry experts, including former professionals from Wolff Olins and Design Studio. Priced at £1190, the course provides 6 hours of pre-recorded video content, exercises, and a completion certificate.

Participants will learn how to develop a successful brand strategy, create a resonating brand story, and employ crucial strategic workshop exercises.

The course is divided into six sessions, covering topics such as building internal brand resonance, going beyond purpose in strategy, creating unique visual identities, and leading teams through brand launch.

articipants will gain insights into guiding designers effectively and providing timely feedback, while also exploring the elements of a strong visual identity and holistic brand system. The course emphasizes practical application, and participants are encouraged to implement the concepts in real-world scenarios to receive immediate feedback.

The program also offers templates, real brand-building exercises, and 5 personal advice emails from the course curators, Campbell Butler and Robyn Butler. The course can be completed in approximately 10 hours, with the flexibility to spread the workload over 5 weeks or complete it in a 2-day intensive format.

Participants have 1 year to finish the course, and interaction with other learners is possible through an interactive Miro board.

17. Mini MBA in Brand Management with Mark Ritson

Duration: 12 weeks (2-6 hours a week) | Experience Level: Advanced | Price: $1900  | Author: Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson in association with Marketing Week, offers a MBA-level practical training course in Brand Management.

Designed for brand managers and marketers interested in the field, the course provides a complete brand planning process and a competitive online simulator to enhance skills.

Participants also gain a one-year subscription to the Mini MBA Alumni Network, offering continued access to course videos, resources, monthly Q&A sessions with Mark Ritson, and alumni-led case studies.

The course consists of 10 modules, covering various aspects of brand management over a span of 12 weeks. Led by Mark Ritson, a renowned marketing and brand authority, the program delves into topics such as brand equity, brand planning, target marketing, brand positioning, brand architecture, and more. Each module includes readings and study time to deepen understanding.

Over 4,000 alumni have completed the course since its inception in 2019, with a high recommendation rate and increased confidence in brand management skills, making this possibly the best brand certification based on reviews.

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Summary of the Top Branding Courses Online

All in all, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to branding, and finding your business’ voice and banking on it to reach your market can be a challenging thing to do. With so much noise in consumerism today, it can be difficult to breeze through business and succeed the way household corporations do.

But with the right tools and resources, picking up what works for your business and building a community and culture that highlights what your enterprise is about shouldn’t seem like an impossible task.

If you’re determined to improve your branding efforts, you’re bound to find an online course on this list that speaks directly to you.

Date: September 8-11, 2026
Location: Online
Price: Free, with an optional VIP upgrade
Hosted by: Jacob Cass of JUST Creative

The creative industry is changing fast.

AI is accelerating execution. Competition is getting louder. Clients are becoming more selective. And for designers, strategists, marketers, and creative entrepreneurs, craft alone is no longer enough.

To stay relevant, valuable, and in demand, today’s brand builders need more than good taste and strong execution.

They need strategy.
They need commercial thinking.
They need sharper positioning, stronger creative direction, and the confidence to lead clients toward better brand decisions.

That’s why Brand Builders Summit 2026 is back.

This year’s theme is Ascent to Mastery, and the summit is designed to help ambitious creatives climb higher in their careers by becoming more strategic, more distinctive, and more commercially valuable.

Across four days, you’ll learn from 30+ global brand leaders across strategy, design, marketing, and business.

And yes, it’s free to attend.

Join the waitlist

What is Brand Builders Summit 2026?

Brand Builders Summit is a free 4-day virtual event for designers, strategists, marketers, creative entrepreneurs, consultants, and business owners who want to build better brands and stronger creative careers.

The summit brings together world-class speakers, practical sessions, live Q&As, expert panels, workshops, networking, coaching, tech demos, and community experiences.

But this is not just another online event packed with generic talks.

Brand Builders Summit is a curated growth experience for creatives who want to move from execution to strategy, from output to authority, and from being hired for what they make to being trusted for how they think.

If you want to become a stronger brand builder, this summit is built for you.

Brand Builders Summit 2026 at a glance

Event: Brand Builders Summit 2026
Theme: Ascent to Mastery
Dates: September 8-11, 2026
Location: Online
Price: Free
Upgrade: Optional VIP upgrade available after registration
Audience: Designers, strategists, marketers, creative entrepreneurs, consultants, and brand builders
Hosted by: Jacob Cass, founder of JUST Creative, JUST Branding Podcast, and Brand Builders Alliance

The 2026 theme: Ascent to Mastery

The theme for Brand Builders Summit 2026 is Ascent to Mastery.

Because mastery is not a finish line.

It’s a climb.

Every brand builder is somewhere on that path.

Some are sharpening their design craft. Some are learning how to sell strategy. Some are repositioning their creative business. Some are trying to build authority, attract better clients, or create more distinctive brands in a noisy market.

The summit is designed to support that climb.

Not with hype.

Not with recycled advice.

But with sharper thinking, proven frameworks, practical insight, and real-world guidance from experienced brand builders.

The goal is simple:

To help you elevate your thinking, strengthen your skills, and climb higher in your creative career.

What to expect

Brand Builders Summit 2026 will feature a curated lineup of sessions and live experiences across brand strategy, brand design, marketing, and business.

Here’s what’s planned:

• 30+ global speakers
• 24 elevated keynotes
• 24 live Q&As
• 3 live panels
• 6 workshops
• Design battle (TBC)
• Networking
• Tech demos
• Live coaching
• Prizes and bonuses
• After party

The summit is designed to be practical, energizing, and highly relevant to the challenges brand builders are facing now.

You’ll get big-picture thinking, tactical frameworks, creative inspiration, and commercial insight you can apply to your own work, clients, and business.

Summit Tracks

Brand Builders Summit 2026 is built around three core tracks.

Brand Strategy

The Brand Strategy track is for creatives who want to think more clearly, position brands more effectively, and lead strategic conversations with confidence.

Expect sessions on topics such as:

• Brand positioning
• Strategy frameworks
• Research and discovery
• Messaging
• Differentiation
• Brand architecture
• Client strategy
• Selling strategic thinking
• Turning expertise into authority

This track is ideal for designers moving into strategy, brand strategists refining their process, and creative business owners who want to lead at a higher level.

Brand Design

The Brand Design track is for creatives who want to create more distinctive, memorable, and strategically grounded brand identities.

Expect sessions on topics such as:

• Logo design
• Identity systems
• Typography
• Visual storytelling
• Creative direction
• Brand expression
• Design process
• AI and design workflows
• Building brands that stand out

This track is ideal for brand designers, identity designers, graphic designers, web designers, creative directors, and visual thinkers who want to sharpen their craft and connect design to strategy.

Marketing & Business

The Marketing & Business track is for creative entrepreneurs, consultants, marketers, and brand builders who want to grow stronger businesses and attract better opportunities.

Expect sessions on topics such as:

• Personal branding
• Visibility
• Client attraction
• Pricing and selling
• Offer development
• Creative business growth
• Marketing systems
• Commercial strategy
• Scaling your expertise

This track is ideal for freelancers, consultants, agency owners, marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone building a business around brand expertise.

Who is Brand Builders Summit for?

Brand Builders Summit 2026 is for ambitious creatives and business owners who want to move beyond execution and become more strategic, distinctive, and valuable.

It’s especially for:

• Brand designers
• Graphic designers
• Identity designers
• Designers moving into strategy
• Brand strategists
• Web designers
• Marketing professionals
• Creative business owners
• Entrepreneurs
• Consultants
• Agency owners
• Brand builders who want to attract better clients and projects

If you build brands, sell creative expertise, advise clients, or want to become known for stronger strategic thinking, this summit is for you.

Why attend Brand Builders Summit 2026?

The creative market is not rewarding more of the same.

AI has made execution faster and more accessible. That means clients have more options, more tools, and more noise to sort through.

The opportunity is not to become a faster pair of hands.

The opportunity is to become a sharper thinker, a stronger creative partner, and a more valuable brand builder.

Attending Brand Builders Summit 2026 will help you:

• Think more strategically about brand building
• Build better, more distinctive brands
• Improve your positioning and messaging
• Strengthen your creative process
• Sell strategy with more confidence
• Attract better clients and opportunities
• Understand how AI is changing creative work
• Grow your authority as a brand builder
• Connect with a global community of ambitious creatives

The goal is not just to watch more content.

The goal is to elevate how you think, create, communicate, and lead.

What’s included with a free ticket?

Your free ticket gives you access to:

• Insights from 30+ global speakers
• 4 days of expert sessions
• Live Q&A sessions and panel discussions
• A global network of brand builders
• 72-hour replay access

Registration is free, with an optional VIP upgrade available after you claim your ticket.

Optional VIP upgrade

After registering for your free ticket, you’ll have the option to upgrade to VIP.

The VIP upgrade is for attendees who want extended access, deeper learning, and extra resources beyond the free summit experience.

The VIP upgrade includes:

• Lifetime session access
• Exclusive VIP sessions
• Summit workbook
• $3,000+ in premium speaker bonuses

If you want to revisit sessions, work through the material at your own pace, and keep the summit as a long-term learning resource, VIP gives you the full experience.

Past summit success

Brand Builders Summit has already welcomed 25,000+ brand builders from around the world across previous events. 100% would recommend the summit to a friend.

Past summits have brought together respected voices across branding, design, strategy, marketing, business, and creativity, helping thousands of creative professionals sharpen their skills, grow their confidence, and connect with a global community of like-minded brand builders.

The response from attendees has been incredible, with strong satisfaction, high recommendation rates, and an engaged audience of designers, strategists, marketers, and creative entrepreneurs.

For 2026, we’re raising the bar again.

Speakers for Brand Builders Summit 2026

The 2026 speaker lineup will be announced soon.

Expect a curated mix of global experts across:

• Brand strategy
• Brand design
• Marketing
• Creative business
• AI and technology
• Entrepreneurship
• Positioning
• Visibility
• Client growth
• Commercial creativity

We’re looking for speakers with strong points of view, real-world experience, and practical ideas that can help brand builders climb higher.

This is not about filling a schedule.

It’s about creating a summit experience worth attending.

Sponsors and partners

Brand Builders Summit 2026 will be supported by partners and sponsors who care about helping creatives build better brands, stronger businesses, and more valuable careers.

Sponsor details will be announced soon.

If your brand serves designers, strategists, marketers, agencies, creative entrepreneurs, or brand builders, sponsorship opportunities are available.

To discuss sponsorship, partnership, or collaboration opportunities, please get in touch.

How to join Brand Builders Summit 2026

Joining is simple.

1. Join the waitlist
2. Watch for registration details when free tickets open
3. Claim your free ticket
4. Attend live from September 8-11, 2026

Once registration opens, you’ll be able to secure your free ticket and choose whether you want to upgrade to VIP.

Join the Brand Builders Summit 2026 waitlist

Brand Builders Summit 2026 is built for creatives who are ready to climb higher.

If you want to move beyond execution, elevate your thinking, build better brands, and become a more strategic, distinctive, and commercially valuable brand builder, this summit is for you.

Join the waitlist today and be the first to know when free registration opens.

Join the waitlist

See you on the climb.

Jacob Cass and Matt Davies speak with Amelia Sordell, founder and CEO of Klowt and one of the leading voices in founder-led marketing.

As audiences become more sceptical of faceless companies, founders and leaders are becoming one of the most powerful trust signals a brand can have. The company brand still matters, but increasingly, people want to hear from the people behind the business.

Amelia shares why founder branding has become a serious commercial lever, how it differs from company branding, and what CEOs often misunderstand about visibility, thought leadership, and influence.

We explore how founders can show up without overshadowing the business, how to align personal voice with company positioning, and why posting more does not automatically mean building authority.

You’ll also learn where to start if you are building from zero, what content habits actually move the needle, and how to think about ROI from founder branding.

A practical conversation for founders, marketers, strategists, designers, and brand builders who want to understand how personal visibility can drive trust, growth, and brand momentum.

Listen Here

Love the show? Please review us on Apple.

Play Now

Watch on YouTube

Learn Brand Strategy

Brand Master Secrets helps you become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. And in my opinion, this is the most comprehensive brand strategy course on the market.

The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript

Hi folks. Welcome back to another episode of JUST Branding. I’m so thrilled. You guys are going to love this episode because traditionally, brand builders has focused very much on products and companies, and basically building propositions to help those things flourish and grow. But recently, headed up by our guest who we have on the show now, who I’ll introduce very, very shortly, there’s been a slight shift in one area, and that is in the area of founder-led brand building. We’re really, really thrilled to have Amelia Sordell with us today. Who is Amelia? If you don’t know who Amelia is, frankly, you’ve probably been hidden under a rock because she is dominating the channels, particularly LinkedIn, which is where I think I came across you, earlier, some years ago. But who is she? She is the founder of one of the best-known agencies helping founders and executives build powerful personal brands. She’s become known, and this was a quote that I found on the internet, as the number one voice on founder-led marketing. So folks, this is going to be really, really exciting. She’s founded Klowt, which is an agency that focuses in this area, and she’s been doing that for some years. She’s an entrepreneur, a speaker, an investor, and a best-selling author, and she’s become one of the leading voices on why businesses can’t rely on company branding alone anymore, because, she says, increasingly, trust is built through people, not logos. So through her work, Amelia has helped leaders turn expertise into visibility, authority, and commercial growth. And that is exactly why we’ve got you on the show today to discuss all of those things, Amelia. Welcome.

Thank you for having me. What an intro. I’m blushing.

Oh, no. But honestly, it’s a thrill to have you on. I think I’ve been following you for ages. I love your content when you’re giving tips to people. And I think I’ve followed a couple of your tips myself, and they’ve worked every single time. So thank you for all the work you’re doing out there. But let’s get into it. What is branding to you, and particularly founder branding?

I mean, I think we all know the old adage, right? I’m not going to tell anyone to suck eggs on the JUST Branding show. Everyone listening to this is going to know. Broadly, what we mean when we talk about branding, but it’s about how people feel about you, your business, whatever it is that you’re trying to brand. I quite frequently try to brand vegetables as a very tasty dish to my children, doesn’t always go down as to plan, but that is what branding means. But founder led branding or founder led marketing, which is the category that I own and talk a lot about, is about leading with the founder story, the founder journey or the executive story, the executive’s journey to bring eyeballs onto the business. I think increasingly we’ve seen over the last couple of years, people leaning heavily towards influence and marketing because they know that influencers have more influence over people than companies do because companies lie. We see that over and over and over again. It’s not new news. It’s why Trustpilot exists. It’s why TripAdvisor exists. We don’t believe brands. In fact, 92 percent of us don’t believe brands. We’d rather trust a stranger than a brand online. Having founders at the forefront of your marketing strategy, not just gets attention with the right people, but actually it builds trust. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do with our brands. That’s what’s going to make people pick our business over another business and make us the choice, not a choice amongst many.

Love that. We’re going to dive into some of that detail. But before we do, another quick question just to frame things. How did you first personally get switched onto this as an area? And what made you first realize that this was something that was really, really valuable in the world?

Do you know what, Matt? I would love to be like, I picked this out because I saw history and I knew this was going to happen. And it was all a strategic play. I fell into it, like most things I have in my life. Literally stumbled and fell. And the sort of backstory was I was a recruiter. Inherently, I’m a salesperson through and through. I love selling. I love the thrill of the chase. I love closing deals. Even now, I’ll sit on sales calls now because it’s just so fun, right? To get that stuff over the line, it still gives me a buzz now.

I would be terrified if you sat on a sales call of one of mine.

Well, do you know what, Matt? Like, I’m sorry to sidetrack. I’ve got my sales calls now down to 20 minutes. I can close someone in 20 minutes now because it’s so like, and these aren’t small contracts. These are like thousands and thousands of pounds, but it’s a psychology, right? You understand what someone wants. You’ve got a solution that they want. Like, you just need to pair the two up. And if you do a good enough job of it, they’ll say yes at the end.

Side track note to Jacob, put that in your notes, get Amelia back on, we’ll talk about sales.

Yeah, I’d love to talk about sales. Look, the reason why I mentioned this, right, is branding, sales and marketing are the same thing. And it is hilarious to me that people love talking about them separately because they’re part of the same thing. And I always find it so funny that marketing is siloed from sales. Like marketing sits separately from sales, often in a separate building, separate country. Sales has a different leaderboard to marketing, have different KPIs. Guys, we’re all on the same team. Marketing should produce sales. That’s the whole point. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a marketing team? I kicked off my career in sales. And my first proper job, if you like, was in event sales. And I know very, very quickly that actually building relationships with the big businesses that I wanted to be building relationships with, Capgemini, NatWest, Bain Capital, et cetera, was to go in and actually meet these people and form some reputation with them. And that transcended into a business that I built myself, which was a clothing brand. Like every 21-year-old girl, I was like, oh, I’m going to be a fashion designer. And when I got funding first year, business was great. You know, we had loads of celebrities wearing our stuff. We were featured in the papers all the time, which back then was like the way to reach new customers. And then year two lost everything. But the reason I mention all of this is all of my successes, whether it be, you know, that first job in sales, my first year in business and before it kind of all went wrong, or whether it be in recruitment, which is where I discovered personal branding and founder-led marketing, it’s all been driven by money. It’s all been driven by how can I get my business and my product and my offering in front of the right people at the right time so that they buy what I’m selling. And so how I fell into this was really just in pursuit of getting as many eyeballs as humanly possible while we’re selling at the time it just so happened to be recruitment. I was a recruiter. I was very driven. I really wanted that big commission check at the end of the month and very quickly in the space of about six months went from zero experience to billing about 30 grand a month, which in recruitment, I don’t know if you’re familiar with, there’s quite a lot of money for someone who’s only six months into the role. And I did that through basically sharing content and DMing people on LinkedIn. So that’s how it all kicked off.

So it came about from your personal experience out there in the wild, if you like, in recruitment. And then you’ve formalized that and brought that into Klowt. Is that right? Because I heard you started Klowt in the middle of the pandemic. That sounds like a great time to start a business as well.

I know. Yeah, everyone said the same thing. They’re like, oh, well, it’s in freeform. Brilliant idea to quit your safe job. Yeah, you know what it was? I deeply believe in this theory I call the deep red button moment. And I think you get big red button moments throughout your life. And a big red button moment to me is you get given this moment where you can either press that button and blow up your life and see what happens, or you will continue to do what you’re already doing and get given that red button moment again, right, until you decide to actually press it. And that can be in the form of you’re in a crap relationship and you want to leave but you don’t want to hurt that person. That could be in the form of you’re in a job that you don’t enjoy and maybe you get fired or you get fired and you’ve been thinking about quitting for the last six months. Like these moments come to us. And COVID was one of those moments for me. There was never going to be a time where I could max out a credit card and the company couldn’t come and take my, you know, the mortgage company couldn’t foreclose my house. You know, I knew I had a three month runway, even if everything went wrong. And I just thought, you know what, like you got to play the game with whatever tools you can find, right? And those were the tools that were available to me. So I quit my job, I started my business and I was very fortunate to have the foresight, although it wasn’t actually intentional, to stop building my personal brand before I launched. So I had already started posting content for, you know, a year or two before I launched my business, which meant the day that I launched my business, I got like 10 inquiries. And then by, you know, 72 hours later, I’d closed my first two clients, which was double what I’d been paid with my previous employer. So, yes, it’s built, my business is built on real life experience. We were an agency for a very long time. For the, you know, the last six years, we’ve been literally full service personal branding agency from every social media channel to speaker training, to media training, to, you know, speaking to people about what podcast they should be on, you know, pitching our clients to people like you guys. And actually it’s been an interesting time to go through because when I launched Klowt, founder branding and personal branding was new, right? It was perfect timing. Everyone needed to be online, mainly because of the situation that we were in globally. But I kind of launched that business and grew very quickly. Like, I think we got to half a million in revenue in the first like 10 months or something, which is pretty spectacular. And our growth kind of continued from there. But what’s happened in that time is Klowt, Chachi PT, Gemini, like these are all things have exploded. And so people have absolutely had much more access to building their brand in a much cheaper, much faster, much quicker way, which has meant that lots of agencies have stumbled. You know, half of my competitors don’t exist anymore because they just haven’t been able to convert the clients that they typically would have been able to convert because if you’re charging someone three to five grand a month, you better bloody deliver. And a lot of these businesses are looking at that budget line going, well, why would we spend, you know, 60 odd grand a year with a business when we could just get, you know, one of the marketing teams to do it for you. And so as we’ve evolved as a business, so has our offering. So we don’t work actually in an agency capacity anymore. We train teams on how to do it. And it’s been an incredible, you know, success story that we’ve had in this huge pivot of if I’m being perfectly frank, like if we’d kept going the way that we were going offering the same agency model 18 months ago, we wouldn’t exist anymore. You mentioned Matt, you’ve seen me online. I’m very honest with stuff. Like I, you know, to a fault sometimes, I’ve got friends that message me going, like I posted something the other day on Instagram. My friend was like, why did you share that? It’s like, because I want people to know this story. You know, it’s going to help someone. If there’s someone sitting on their sofa looking at my content being like, yeah, damn, like she gets it, my job is done. So, you know, we’ve pivoted the business now. And instead of focusing on the monthly deliverables, we train, you know, businesses are doing 1 to 50 million a year. We train the marketing teams on how to do this for the founder. And the success that we’ve had has been amazing. In fact, the results have been significantly better than when we were doing this as an agency. So that’s phase two of Klowt, which is very, very exciting. And we’re launching in, I think, four weeks, like outwardly.

Well, all the best with that. I mean, that sounds amazing. Let me I want to ask you a little bit more about what your thoughts are on the theory of this, if you like. So if I was to ask you, like, why has this side of personal branding, founder-led branding become a commercial lever for businesses to kind of focus on and allocate budget to, as you sort of mentioned, what would you say that reason was? Like, why is it that that’s a thing?

Well, because people don’t trust brands. As I said, like, it’s been an evolution. If you look back over the last 10 years, like influencer marketing wasn’t a thing really, like 15 years ago. Instagram had just really started. Twitter was a thing. Like Snapchat wasn’t a thing. Facebook was the dominant social media channel. And social media wasn’t really leveraged by brands. It was leveraged by people to share photos of their night out last Friday or tag someone in photos from their wedding. Like it wasn’t actually a utilized channel. And as we’ve kind of gone deeper and deeper and deeper into the social media and attention economy, people now want to find products and find brands in their feed, but we don’t want to see a brand talking about a product. Like we don’t want to see pictures of a product. We don’t want to see pictures of like this microphone. I don’t want to see a photo of a microphone. I want to see someone using the microphone and showing me how good it is in situ. Like we trust people. I don’t trust brands. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an advert that hasn’t got a single human in it, but I don’t trust it. Unless it’s of a car, which is slightly different. I’m not interested in the ad if it’s got no human interaction in it, because why would I trust something that hasn’t got a human in it? And so there is a psychological reason as to why we now distrust brands, because we now have access to more information about the things that brands do. And so we are much more likely to do a deep dive on peer reviews before we put that holiday, or do a deep dive on Glassdoor before, although arguably Glassdoor is total rubbish, but you get what I’m saying, like trust, pilot, all of these things. We look at all this stuff before we buy stuff, because we trust what Susan in Sydney is saying about the coffee cup we’re about to buy more than we care about what the actual brand says on their website. And so when you take that psychology and that consumer behavior shift and look at it objectively, obviously you would use the people in your business to market your product. They’re already on payroll. If you’re already paying these people, there was no new budget line that needs to be created to use the influence that’s already existing in your team, whether it be the founder, the assistant, the marketing manager, whoever it might be, these people are already there. So if you can get them talking about business and talking about their journey with the business, talking about why they’re here, whatever it might be, you’re going to reach a significantly larger portion of the market just by the fact of that’s where people are going to be. They’re online.

People by people. I love it. Question, do you also see it just with founders? Because I know a lot of service-based B2B businesses, they know they’ve got to build relationships, but they struggle, at least some of my clients do. You get this sense that the team don’t really want to, they feel uncomfortable going out and building a personal brand, they don’t really know what to say. The founder is not really leading from the front, they don’t really know. Everybody’s got this resistance. There’s two questions there really. One is, is it just founder or is it the full team that should be thinking about this? The second is, how do you deal with concerns resistance in businesses?

It should absolutely be everyone. But I also have to acknowledge that not everyone could or should build personal brand. Let me rephrase that. Everyone has a personal brand, whether you are posting content or not. This is personal branding. The way I say good morning to every single parent that walked past me on the school run this morning is part of my personal brand. I have a personal brand with my kids. Sometimes it’s a good one, sometimes it’s a bad one depending on what they’ve done. We all have a personal brand. Whether or not you want to use and scale that online is a personal thing. You cannot mandate to your team, you must post content about our business because it’s part of your job. Because what that will feel like is a chore. And when it feels like a chore, it will be crap. And actually, it’s got to do more damage to the business and more damage to that person. Then they actually just didn’t do it at all. So should everyone build a personal brand, I think is actually the first question we should be asking. No. Can everyone? No. You know, there is a certain level of requirement like with anything. Everyone has potential to be an unbelievably well-known person in their space, but very few people want to work hard. And the problem is the price of the first is the second, right? So you need to be willing to do this and post this and share this and go through the highs and lows of, you know, going and sharing your hearts, heart out on social media and getting one like for it for 50 days before anyone gives you what you have to say, right? So there is that barrier to entry, which most people will not cross because they are, A, lacking confidence, which we all are when we first start, by the way, and you don’t get confident by getting confident, you get confident by doing the thing and realizing you didn’t die doing things and getting a bit better every single time, right? So there’s that. The second thing is no one wants to be embarrassed. If I post 50 times and get one like on every single my post, I’m going to think that other people think I’m stupid, right? So no one wants to go through that thing. But the problem is you need the confidence to start, no one has the confidence to start, and you need an immunity to embarrassment to keep doing it, and no one has that one until they’ve done it. So actually, should everyone be doing this? No, because very few people can actually get past those two very simple barriers. Once you get over that, it’s really easy because if you don’t give it about whether your stuff gets one like or not, then of course, you’re going to do well because you don’t care. And ironically, the less you care, the better it does. So should it be a team-wide and a founder thing? Absolutely, but founders should not expect their team to do this. They should create a framework, which is what we do with our clients and what they should be posting, when they should be posting it and make it goddamn easy for them so that there is a marketing team supporting the company distribution. We used to create content plans for companies that was exclusively designed to be shared by their team. And the impressions and the kind of brand equity we won off that strategy was enormous compared to the company brand alone. No one followed the company brand, but everyone was really interested in what the team was saying about the company. And actually just flipping that on its head is a really simple distribution plan that you can put in your existing marketing plan to get your business in front of more people. What are some of the sort of obstacles and pitfalls of doing this? I think I’ve already mentioned them, you know? It’s embarrassment, it’s hard work. There is a reason why very few people, like we live in this world where everyone’s like an influencer, right? Everyone wants to be an influencer. The number of influencers who are actually making a lot of money influencing is very small and that’s because it’s a very hard job. You’ve got to be doing this all day. You’ve got to have things to say, content to create, editing, posting, scheduling all day. And most people don’t want to do that because it takes a lot of effort and there’s a level of embarrassment to it, right? There is a huge barrier to entry, but the best news for founders or anyone listening to this is you’re not a content creator. You are an amazing person who already has existing knowledge that you can talk about. And the thing that I think is probably the biggest blocker for most founders specifically is they compare themselves to these creators and go, well, that person’s got 100K followers, I should have 100K followers. They’ve got 100 likes, I should have 100 likes. You’re not a creator, you’re a founder. And both of those two things are full time jobs, right? So focus on the thing that you actually are, which is a business owner and talk about the stuff that’s happening in your business. Do not compare yourself to people who are doing this in a full time job. And hilariously, when you stop doing that, you actually start attracting the people that you’re trying to sell to, and you make a ton more money from the content you’re actually posting, because you’re not trying to pretend to be someone you’re not.

I love that, Amelia. Do you know what? That’s so true. Years ago, this is going back, I’m getting old now, so this is probably like over 10 years ago, I was a creative director in an agency in Nottingham, and I used to always think like I had a design team, right? I used to be like, our work is going to be the thing that draws people into our side of the agency. I was dead against like awards, public speaking, podcasts, not even that podcasts were a thing back then, but it felt to me like bragging. I think that’s quite like a, I don’t know, there’s maybe a European, maybe a British thing, like we’re quite closed off.

Oh, it’s very British. You need to promote your work. No one cares about your work unless they know about it.

So this was my attitude. And then one day, we won an award, our agency, and the CEO at the time, he couldn’t attend because he had to do something with his kids. And he was like, we were sat around this boardroom table, and he was like, Matt, you’re good at speaking. We want you to go and pick up the award and give a speech. I was like, afterwards, I called him inside, I was like, I’m not sure I want to do that. It just feels like I’m blowing up my own trumpet. It’s like really not me. And he sat me down and he was like, Matt, you, this is outrageous, right? I’d said this word, I’d said, I feel it’s like a little bit arrogant, right? And he went, Matt, you’re arrogant. I was like, what? He was like, you’re arrogant because you think the universe is going to care, like you were just saying there Amelia, about what we’re doing here in the agency without us even trying to expose ourselves. He said, you’re afraid, you’re scared, you’re brilliant in what you do, get out there, give this speech and do it. So I did it and it shifted and it was obviously, you know, it was quite a success. And then since then that kind of conversation flipped a little switch. It was like the thing that you were saying, like just to kind of push you over that fear barrier, because now when I started my consultancy, I’m doing it all the time and it’s been the best thing ever. Jacob, you’re like the king at personal branding. Like, was there a moment in your kind of world that pushed you over those barriers that Amelia’s just mentioned?

The whole personal branding thing came naturally to me. I was just sharing all the time, especially it started at university. I was just sharing my classwork online, getting feedback and posting, sharing where I was in the journey, not being ashamed of where I was at, and definitely laugh at it now. But that’s how I built a name for myself and got made connections because I was putting myself out there and have consistently done that for years. So that just paid off.

Sharing is caring. You’re just so nice, Jacob. It’s so nice, whereas I do it for complete greed reasons.

If you’re serious about mastering branding and building a thriving, creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you’ll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you’re done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That’s joinbba.com. I do have a question, Amelia. You’ve probably seen the video of the McDonald’s CEO eating the new burger, and it just was so corny and forced and all these memes came out of it. That was a CEO, not necessarily a founder. What’s your view on CEOs, founders, and not cliché, cringey, things like that?

I hate the word authentic because it’s like, what does that even mean? You know what I mean? I am not authentic to the degree that I’d be authentic with my girlfriends in the bar on a Friday night. If I was, I’d probably get canceled. What is authenticity? I think the thing is, it can’t feel like if you’re doing it for the clout, for lack of a better word. It can’t feel like you’re going like, oh, this is how amazing I am and how amazing my product is. I’m like, this is delicious because people-

Like The Truman Show.

Yeah, exactly. People read and see through that. Should you get involved? Absolutely. In fact, there’s some great examples of, interestingly, that moment kicked off a moment for loads of other brands. Burger King did it, I think Pizza Hut did it, Domino, they all did it because it became this meme and actually, they did it very authentically and it did much better as a result, obviously. Should CEOs be involved? Yeah, they’ve got a shareholder responsibility to represent the business. What a lot of founders and businesses don’t realize is the CEO or the founder’s reputation equates to 40 to 50% of the market value. So if you are not getting your founder or CEO to build their personal brand, it actually directly impacts the valuation of the business. And we know this from, you know, even in some bad examples, look at WeWork, WeWork’s valuation was absolutely astronomical and a big part of that was because the founder, Adam, was so prevalent on social media and he was on stages and he was doing speaking and he was doing all of these things. Same thing with Deliveroo, right? Like Deliveroo, I don’t even think on paper is actually a very successful business, but it’s a huge brand because they had such a heavy focus on the founders, the founding team posting about the business, talking about the business. And we’ve seen this again, even in history years and years and years ago before, this whole even concept of personal branding existed, like you’ve got Mark Benioff, who founded Salesforce, like he’s a huge personal brand and people knew who this person was and they all wanted to come to Dreamland because of him and learn from him. Michael Dell, another great example of great personal branding, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, all of these people have heavily invested, and don’t be fooled to think that this happened by accident, they’ve heavily invested in their personal brand. And as a result, I’ve got pretty big businesses to thank for it.

Ryan, as you say, it can go up and down, right? I think of like Elon Musk, right? Who was seen as this absolute weed smoking genius, going to space, all this stuff, and then got involved in politics. And then for those that weren’t of his political persuasion, in their minds, Tesla became a problem for them, right? Even though they probably would be supportive of Tesla’s ambitions. So it’s really, really interesting to think that through. It can go up and it can go down, right? Would you say there’s also a risk involved as well as benefits? And I guess you’ve got to weigh those up. But what you’re saying is it’s better to be in control of that roller coaster ride, I guess, than it happened by accident. Would that be fair?

For sure. I think Elon Musk is an interesting example because I don’t think this is an accident. I don’t think he sits there and he just randomly tweets stuff like Donald Trump does. Like I think Donald Trump really does just think something and just post it. Whereas Elon Musk, I would not be surprised whether he is posting stuff to manipulate stock markets so that he can benefit in some way, right? Like he’s a very, very, very smart man. He is not someone who’s just aligning himself with politics for the sake of it. He’s doing it to benefit himself or benefit a wider thing that he’s working on, right? So I think he’s probably a very niche example of someone who is up and down like a yo-yo and therefore public perception of him is up and down like a yo-yo because I think actually he’s doing it on purpose. But you know, you can see other examples of people who suffered negatively if you like because they have either not told the full truth or maybe they’ve told too much of the truth. And I think, again, you’ve got to you’ve got to look at this from the lens of is this going to benefit the long-term strategy of the business. And that’s what I look through all of my content through that lens and everything that I do. So you’re doing podcasts, doing speaking gigs. I do pretty much everything for free to the benefit of my business. If I don’t think someone’s going to benefit my business, even if it’s paid, I won’t do it because it needs to benefit the long-term thing. And that’s why I’m having this conversation with you. If I didn’t do that and I wasn’t very steadfast in the guardrails of what I will and won’t talk about, unlikely I would be speaking on podcasts and stages as much as I am.

One thing that I wanted to mention to you was this idea of your audience, knowing your audience because you’ve mentioned they’re adding value to your audience and making sure you show up for them and making sure that they’re connected with what you’re saying. And one thing I always find fascinating, because I do a lot of content and stuff and my audience tends to be like CEO and business leaders and managing directors. And what I find is that they don’t like my content, like they’re not going to go on LinkedIn and go, wow, Matt, that’s amazing, you’ve been to Prague last week. Hope you had a good trip. That’s just not their vibe. But if I’m in a business meeting this week, no doubt someone’s going to say to me, Matt, saw you went to Prague, how did it go? And they’re only going to know I went to Prague because they’re kind of digesting my content via LinkedIn. And so I kind of wanted to ask you about this idea of lurkers, right? Like a lot of my audience are lurkers, which is incredibly frustrating, right? Because I know they’re watching it and I know they’re reading it and digesting it. But I don’t know until the real world experience and they connect with me on a real world basis. What’s your view on kind of knowing your audience and what would you say around this idea of an audience that lurks but doesn’t connect?

So I think about audiences in two buckets. You’ve got community and you’ve got customers. Your community, the people that engage with your staff, they’re really interested in what you have to say, they’ll like it, they’re the ones that tag you and things going, oh, you’d be great for this, Matt and Jacob. But they’re never going to buy your stuff, right? Ever, because they can’t afford it. And then you’ve got your customer and your customer sees your community engaging with your content and therefore believes you are good at what you do because you have all of these people who are interested in what you’re doing. And so you have to create content for both of these people, otherwise you don’t get anything. And that’s, I think, the mistake that a lot of people make is, like, they say, my ideal audience are neurosurgeons, and therefore I’m going to create exclusively very technical content for neurosurgeons. But maybe their community is actually other medical professionals. And so they completely alienate the people that are actually going to give them the credibility to those neurosurgeons because they’re not actually thinking about the broader picture. You have to kind of think about this. You are going to do this strategically. I don’t love overcomplicating this, particularly when people first start out. I think it’s a nice way to frame it. The easy way to do it is tell people what you’re doing, which is going to get your community interested in, you know, your example there as you’re in Prague. Tell people what you’re doing, what you’re up to. Oh, I’ve just had this conversation this week. This was really interesting. Oh, here’s me with the team. And then you create content for your customer, which is I’m so proud of the team for this incredible project. They just delivered, like, we just got 15 hour, 15 time ROAS for this client working on this project. Like that’s actually going to convert your customers into a lead. And interestingly, the content that gets the most engagement is rarely the content that actually gets you leads. It’s the content that gets the least engagement, but is very, very specific to the audience that you’re trying to convert is the stuff that normally gets you the lead. So that’s why, you know, for both reasons, measuring the performance of your personal brand or your founder led marketing strategy on metrics, vanity metrics alone is a really dumb thing to do, just like you would do with your brand. You wouldn’t measure the impact of your brand on vanity metrics alone, you’d impact the measurement of your brand on, you know, lifetime value of a customer, like how they found you, how long they stayed with you, you know, you’ve got to think of it from a perspective of capturing of customers and creation of customers. If you think about it from an advertising perspective, brand creates new customers, advertising converts ones that probably would have already converted. And you need to think about your personal brand in the same way, like what can you post that’s gonna get your brand everywhere? It’s rarely gonna be the very intrinsic detail of the day-to-day things that you’re doing for clients. It’s probably more likely to be the trip to Prague, the fact that I stayed home this morning and did this podcast. It’s, you know, I did the school run this morning and dropped my coffee and like what happened next. That’s actually what’s gonna get my name into rooms. I’ve been, oh, I saw this woman, Amelia, talking about this thing and it was really interesting. You know, thought you’d be interested. That’s how you build your brand. The way you capture the customer is actually by talking about the results that you’ve had.

Love that. Love that. Yeah, Amelia, I mentioned mistakes as well. So that was one mistake. So are there any other mistakes that you see founders make when they’re like starting this journey that people should be aware of?

Yeah, like there’s this weird thing, I think it’s an ego thing, right? And like, I can be very honest about that. There’s this weird ego thing, just like you were saying about your old boss saying you were arrogant, Matt. There is this ego thing that like, oh, I’m being too visible. Like people are gonna think I’m really arrogant and I shouldn’t be posting five times a week because like I’ve never posted before. It’s like, who do you think you are? I don’t give a shit about you. You have to be in their face every day. What is wrong with you? There is a reason why you pick a specific brand of product, whether it be a water bottle or, you know, a type of camera or the fact that I have a certain type of computer. There’s a reason why I picked that and it’s because they’re in my face every single day, which makes them an option that I can’t not choose. If you think you’re so amazing that people are going to give a shit about you when you’re not in their feed or you’re not in their face, like I can’t help you. So I think that’s a really, really big mistake. And I love, Jacob, how honest you were about being like, yeah, I just came really naturally to just post. I think you’re probably in a very small minority of people who were just like, let me just f*** around and find out. Most people are like, oh, but you know, what if people think this thing and I post something and I get one like and everyone thinks I’m stupid? Like, you know, and it’s a huge barrier for them. The other thing is they’re like, they’re not honest enough. The stuff they want to share is like just very drab, boring stuff. You know, I’ve got a bit of a checklist that I run through with my content. And a lot of my content actually recently has failed this checklist. We’re going through a bit of a transition at the minute. So I’ve started deleting posts because I’m like, don’t believe that, don’t believe that, it’s not good enough, not good enough. And the checklist is what’s the f***ing point? If we’re sharing this, why are we sharing it? What is the thing that you want people to take away from this? Because otherwise it’s just wallpaper, right? It’s not, you’re not giving anyone anything. You need to give people something for them to engage, whether it’s a laugh, whether it’s entertainment, whether it’s information, whether it’s joy, inspiration, motivation, you got to give them something. The second thing is, who are you to say it? Like, what can you say about this thing that no one else can say? And it could be really simple, like, I love this Stanley Cup, right? Anyone could say that. But if I say, I love this Stanley Cup because I rarely drink enough water, and actually when I have this massive bottle, it makes me drink enough so that my skin actually stays hydrated and it’s honestly changed my life. That’s now something only I can say because that’s the exact reason why I bought this thing. So having to think about, like, if you’re gonna have an opinion about something, doesn’t matter whether millions of other people have that opinion, why do you have that opinion is actually really important. And then the final thing is, like, just make sure you’re only saying what is necessary. You don’t need to fluff everything out, you don’t need to have some big build up to the story. You know, I see people do this all the time. They’ll say a couple of lines on a LinkedIn post or a video or whatever to build up to the point of the video and it’s like, are you so arrogant that you believe someone’s gonna sit there and read or listen to something for seven seconds before you tell them actually what you’re trying to say? You’ve lost the room. The same thing would happen in a meeting. If you want to say something in a meeting, you sit your hand up, you’re not going to be like, well, put my hand up because I was listening to one of you talk and then this thing happened. You just be like, this is my opinion. So you got to get straight to the point because people’s attention is the most valuable thing they have and you need to earn that with every single thing that you do and say and post and share. So if that is the prerequisite, get to the point because people are busy. So those are the three things that I would say and that works for everything. It works for e-mails, like you guys have probably noticed in my communication, I don’t go, hi, how are you? I’m like, I’m late, I’ll see you in 15 minutes. Like I get straight to the point because you’re busy. It’s not because I’m trying to be direct, it’s because I’m busy, you’re busy. So why am I going to waste everyone’s time?

Just give them information.

Yeah, I’m respecting your time by just getting to the point. And you got to see content the same way. Like just get to the point, just say the thing and then move on. And also there’s a lot of other thing here, which is a bit off piste, but I think is helpful. You don’t have to be intelligent for it to be really valuable. I think there is this massive barrier to entry for people, because they feel, particularly on LinkedIn, right? Which is where a lot of your audience is going to be sitting right now. You know, if they’re trying to build businesses or they’re an executive, like that’s going to be the natural platform to be on. You don’t have to write an essay. Sometimes the best content is like four lines. Make the barrier to entry super low. Don’t make it really complicated. Don’t sit there and think, oh, I need to have this amazing video set up to get some videos. Just whack your phone out, like do a voice note, screenshot something and be like, I read this article today and here’s what I thought about it. Make it so low, it’s almost like a diary entry. It’s so ridiculously low for you to do it that it’s easy to do. This is a mistake a lot of people make is they think that, oh, I need to have it all planned out and scheduled and perfected, whatever. It’s like, just chuck it out there and see what happens. Learn what works and then make longer content about the stuff that works. That’s a really easy way to work this out. Everyone talks about optimization and benchmarking, do that. It’s so easy. If you could write five lines about something, and those five lines do really well, you can then write a longer piece that’s a bit more in-depth about it in the future, but you’ve already tested that it works. You don’t have to spend all that time upfront for something to then get no reactions, or no likes, or no shares, or no results. Just keep it easy for yourself.

Thank goodness you don’t have to be intelligent to post otherwise.

No, I mean, look, Matt.

I wouldn’t post anything, so be quick.

I am probably the least intelligent person of all of my friendship group. But yes, somehow I’ve managed to build a business. So, you know, like just make it easy for yourself. And this is the thing, right? We all compare ourselves to really smart, intelligent, successful people, because they’ve got something we don’t. In actuality, they are probably exactly the same as you, if not less of all of those things than you, but they just gave it a go. Like, that’s the difference. There is no difference between you, me, Jacob, Matt, Elon Musk, all of these people. There’s no difference. The difference is they just give stuff a go. And because they’ve given stuff a go, they’ve learnt more stuff than we’ve been able to learn, because we’re less curious, right? So just give it a go and see what happens. Why not? You’re going to die anyway.

I have to find there’s like two principles that I try and stick to, and that is like show yourself in action and demonstrate your value. I think I’ve spoken on this podcast about this before, but like they’re the two that kind of guide me when I’m trying to post. And again, like you were saying, Amelia, sometimes you break your rules occasionally, but you know, I think if you’re showing yourself in action, like speaking, doing a workshop, consulting, traveling, whatever it might be, but then you add some value, right? You’ve got to add, like you were saying before, show up for your audience in a way that gives them a thought, inspires them, educates them in some way. That’s, they’re the two. Jacob, do you have anything that kind of guides you in your sort of posts and stuff?

Nope, I would rather post them on.

You are so weird, my friend.

But that’s why Jacob’s got such a successful past around. Think about it. And this is my point, like the less you care, the better it does. I’m going to challenge you a little bit though, Matt. Like value is like the word authenticity is totally subjective. And when people hear the word value, they think that you need to give people a white paper, right? Memes are valuable. Like I laugh at a meme, therefore it is valuable. So like I said, you don’t have to be intelligent for it to be valuable. It just has to be something that someone’s going to go, huh, or huh. Like, you know, you need to get a reaction from them. That’s actually the definition of value, in my opinion.

No, no, I’d agree with that. I like that. Thank you. This is what this podcast is all about, getting tips all the time, all the way through. So that’s great. Okay, well, look, just another quick question, like, in terms of where we’re going with this, where should the founder brand show up versus the company brand? Like, have you got any kind of thoughts? Like, would you treat them completely differently? Are they connected at all? How does that kind of work in your world?

So for me, they’re sisters, not twins. And I think that’s a really important distinction to make. So stuff that’s coming out on the company brand should be about the company. It should be about the people in the company, what’s going on in the company, you know, it’s a company brand. The founder stuff should be from the founder’s perspective. So for example, if you have just released a new product and you’ve had a big product launch on your company brand, everyone’s really excited about it, you would then talk about it from the founder’s perspective being like, my team have been working on this product for 12 months. I’m so proud of them today. It’s finally here. Here are some of the things, like this is what I’m thinking about it. This is why we built this new product. Like, it’s almost like the behind the scenes, right? You know, when you watch a movie, like back in the day, if you sat long enough in the cinema, you would see the edits that didn’t make it to the film in the end, right? If you got to think about your company brand as like the final cut, and then the behind the scenes bit is actually what everyone wants to wait to see, right? So the founder and the executive is the behind the scenes of all the messiness, all the reality, all the stuff that actually shouldn’t be shared on the company brand, because the company brand needs to appear to be trustworthy and is obviously held on a much higher pedestal than a person, right? Because it’s a company. But the founder can be a lot more honest, a lot more simple, a lot more reflective about things that have happened and gone wrong and gone right and all of these things as a person. And actually that distribution of what that content will get is significantly more than probably the product launch and will drive all of that traffic to that product launch. An example of this is, you know, Grace Beverly, founder of Tala. They sold a million pounds in like two hours or something, because she’d been posting this journey about how she couldn’t find a puffer coat that fit properly and it was either too long or too short, it wasn’t made for boobs or maybe there was too much room. Like she did this whole thing about it for months. And then she was like, we’ve launched a coat. Here’s why we did it. I’m so excited about it because of these three reasons. Like I’m so proud of the team, but it sold out in like two hours and they made a million quid. And that’s not because Tala was like, we have a coat. It was like, it’s because the founder had been talking, talking and talking and talking and talking about as a founder, why they invented this particular product. So that’s a great example of someone who is absolutely nailed.

This is a story. If you come along with the process, you emotionally connect with the story and it means more than just, here’s a product, buy it because you see the process.

It’s drip feeding, you know? It’s drip feeding. We all want stuff that we can’t get yet, right? I always use dating as the example. Like, there’ll be that person when you were younger, you really fancied and they were in a relationship, but it almost made you fancy them more. Like, it’s the same thing. Like, you can’t have it yet. We’re thinking about it. We’re building it. You can’t have it yet. We’re thinking about it. We’re building it. It creates this level of curiosity that when you drop it, people are like, oh my god, and there’s an urgency to get it because they’ve been so invested in the process of building it for so long. And that’s a tactic, obviously, that’s used in urgency as a sales tactic. You build, at the end of my sales call, every single time I say, we only work with a capped number of founders. How does all this sound? Do you want to move forward? And so people are like, oh, how many founders do you work with? We’re like seven and we’re on six souls, so you can either take it or leave it. And it gives people a move, it makes them move. So it’s a similar tactic that’s used in the play that I just mentioned.

I think the other thing with what you said is like, it kind of builds a relationship with that person and with the thing, the product that they’re going to eventually potentially bring. And that sort of leads on to another question because we’re living in a world of AI, right? AI is everywhere. Obviously, it’s the buzzword of last year and obviously, it’s moved into this year.

Sord is my hardest working colleague.

Yeah, right, right.

Well, I was going to ask you about that because I guess the thing, we’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about like, well, how do we navigate the wave of AI that is here and is coming? How do we stay relevant in the world that’s basically generated by robots and it’s entered the content building space? And I’m so annoyed all the time with the AI. You can start spotting it now straight away, like AI generated Tosh. But the thing is, it can’t build relationships, can it? And authenticity and showing up day after day over years on social media is a way that differentiates you from, say, a plastic person who’s just kind of pulling Dripify content out connected to Klawt. Like it seems to me like being real, being out there is a real kind of way that we as how to deal with AI and making sure that we are relevant and human in that kind of upcoming wave of robotics.

I love AI. It has changed my life. I have a team of four people. We used to have a team of 17 and I can get done now more than I could get done when I had the team of 17 people because I got so many agents doing so many different things. I have an agent that skims all of my content autonomously from the last three months and goes, these are the topics actually that resonated most with your ideal audience because it looks at audience profile and it looks at the content. So then I just make more content about those things. So I used to manually have to do that. Social media managers have to go through and be like, and obviously mistakes get made there because you’re looking at it from a biased perspective. So I love AI. It’s brilliant. I don’t use AI to write my content though. And I have tried that, and I’ll be perfectly honest with you. And I’ve had varying degrees of success. But the one thing that I would say is the ones that did really well were basically just reworked stories that had already done well for me. And so there is this thing of if you’re going to use AI and it’s going to work well, which it can do with content, absolutely, you better have about 5000 posts that have already gone out because otherwise it will sound like ChatGPT because who knew robots had a tone of voice, right? It won’t sound like you. And it’s missing those three things that I mentioned earlier, which is like, what’s the point? Why can only you say this and getting to the point really fast? Like AI tends to learn what other people have posted to present back to you in formats and in styles and in writing styles, right? And if everyone else is using the same tool to create their content, it’s only going to keep producing the same type of content, which is why it all looks the same because it’s all learning from itself and then reproducing the same content. So no, I don’t think using AI to write your posts is a good idea. I think using AI to learn what does well, to be inspired by other people’s content, to feed you autonomously, articles to comment on and what’s happening in the world and give you something to bounce off, something to be inspired by every single week is absolutely a great use of it. I think using AI to reply to your DMs, I think using AI to reply to your comments if they’re trying to ask for a product or a link to something or do all that you don’t want to do or you don’t want to pay someone to do. That’s what AI is for. But creating content, how are you going to create content using a robot, that then someone else is going to use AI to reply to that content? You miss the whole point of branding. The whole point of branding is to make people feel something. So no, don’t use it to create your content and absolutely invest heavily in in real life brand building too. One of the reasons why I love doing stuff like this is I now know you guys, and it may well come a time where I have a client for you, you might have a client for me, maybe Jacob will be in the UK and I can be like, I’m from Sydney, you’re from Sydney, I’ll take you to the best coffee in London because no one does coffee better than Australia, right? Even the Italians as far as I’m concerned. I’m gonna get shot for saying that, but Melbourne, best coffee in the world. So I’ll take you there, but doing this has allowed us to form that relationship. So don’t think of this as just an online, how can I shortcut this exercise? Use AI for the things that you don’t need to do, like scheduling, all of that kind of stuff, and use your brain and your stories and what you’re up to to actually make human connection because the best thing is about AI is everyone’s using it, which means that the barrier to actually posting content has dropped dramatically, which means there’s loads more content, but it also means there’s loads more crap content because it’s all made using AI. So if you’re someone who’s actually just off the cuff sharing stuff, immediately you’re going to do significantly better than everyone else.

Love that. I also feel like what you said is so true in regards to before, you said something about make the barrier to posting really low.

Really low, yeah. And using AI to do that feels very complicated because then you have to go with the idea and then go back and forth, just share it.

But also, I kind of feel like a lot of people want to be perfectionists, particularly some of our audience who are designers, they’re very worried that you were saying that fear of looking silly or something. And I always kind of think, well, for example, I did a post the other day and it had a spelling mistake in it. I’m slightly dyslexic, right? Surprise. And someone messaged me like, oh, Matt, you’ve made this mistake or whatever. So I messaged back and said, thank you. I corrected it. And my comment was, at least you know that that wasn’t generated by AI, right? And they were like, so true. Like, that’s why I love your content. And it was kind of like, oh, yeah, we’re so in this polished world of everything being perfect. And it got me thinking, do you remember back in the day, Hollywood obviously is known for polishing all the movies and it being beautiful. But I don’t even remember there was a film that came out called The Blair Witch Project. Do you remember that? And it was basically some bloke with a handheld camera, right? Just did this whole video. I think it was like, and it was just really rickety and shaky and terrifying, right? And it won loads of awards and it was like super successful. And I think it’s because it was in stark contrast to the perfectionism that started to come from Hollywood and now shaky cameras is all part of the technique of filming. And I always wonder, do you think that really authentic content is a good strategy to think through a little bit grainy, a little bit shaky camera iPhone scenario rather than everything polished and perfect, lighting and stuff? What are your thoughts on rough and ready content, getting it out there?

My experience with posting stuff is that my least produced content always does the best. Like anytime I’ve done scripted stuff or it’s been really polished and whatever, it’s just never really done well. When I just off the cuff say stuff in my phone, in my car, on the way to the school run, or I get clipped up doing stuff like this, it’s like very authentic and very off the cuff and like we’re not thinking about the hook and like how it ends and like how long it is and all this kind of stuff, always does better, always. So yeah, I think we start again, sorry you can edit that bit, edit my cough out so that I’m not coughing in people’s…

No, you said at the start. Go edit.

Well, I did, fine, keep it in. I did say at the start, like don’t worry about editing me same time. I apologize in advance if you hear me coughing and croaking.

We’re putting all the coughs in, isn’t it? We’ll clip all the coughs and just have that as the bloopers reel. Cool, I mean, we’re coming towards sort of the end now. I was just kind of thinking, we’ve got a quick fire round shortly to get through real quick because I know you’re going to enjoy that. But in terms of that question around being performative, how do you take that out of it? Because you’re quite comfortable speaking off the cuff, for example. A lot of people will get really nervous, they get blocked, the fear kind of creeps in. How do you help people overcome some of that inertia and get moving forward?

Look, I think confidence is this sort of ethereal thing that evades all of us. I think one of the most searched terms on YouTube is confidence tips, how to get confident, how to do something when you’re going like… And people really are desperate for all the answers. And the answer is pretty simple, which is you just got to do it. There’s a reason why you would rather have a surgeon who’s done 10,000 surgeries than a surgeon who’s done one. And that’s because they’ve done 10,000 surgeries more and therefore are probably much better of a surgeon than when they first did the one surgery. And everything is like that. You have to be willing to suck at something in order to be great at it. And the problem is most people aren’t willing to suck because they’re worried about what other people are going to think about them. They’re worried about the opinion of strangers that they’re never going to meet online. They worry that their friends are going to make fun of them. And interestingly, when I first started posting content, there was a group of girls that I was friends with and they screenshot my content and posted it into a group chat to make fun of it. And I think one of them felt guilty and told me about it eventually. Obviously I’m not friends with those people anymore, but that’s people’s greatest fear is what if our friends make fun of it? What if our family and people don’t support it? What if people think I’m stupid? I have never met someone on their deathbed who has ever said to me, I wish I hadn’t shared that thing. I wish I hadn’t done that thing. I wish I hadn’t gone for more and not actually got it. I wish I’d not started trying to train for that marathon. Every single person who’s gonna die says, I wish I’d done the thing that I didn’t do. So you can either be one of the millions of people who regret the things that they don’t do, or you can just go for it, except it’s gonna be embarrassing, or moreover, just decide that you’re not gonna be embarrassed because it’s only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed, right? And that’s one of the big things that’s taken me probably from where I was a couple of years ago to where I am now is I’m not embarrassed by anything. And that was a conscious decision to be like, I’m not embarrassed. Like, why would I find this embarrassing? Because I’m trying. And I think also, like, if you’ve got friends or family or colleagues or whatever who find what you’re doing embarrassing, that says more about their unwillingness to push the boat out and do something for themselves than it does about what you’re doing. People don’t like people who are different from them. They struggle to understand why you wouldn’t want to just stay in your box. But if you look at all the greats, all the people that you admire every single day, not one of them has ever held themselves back from going for what they want. So you just have to go for it. If you want to build a brand, you want to build a business, you want to quit your job, you want to ask that person out, you want to lose weight, everything starts with, you need to start and suck, right? When you first go to the gym, when I was a little bit overweight, I was embarrassed to be there, like who am I to be at the gym? I want to lose weight. So this is how we got to do it. So you just got to get over it, get over yourself, stop thinking that people care as much as they do, because normally people don’t give a f*** actually about you, they care about themselves more and don’t do anything that you would regret, which is normally not doing anything at all.

Love how we went from marketing to deathbed conversations.

You did ask me to be on the podcast, Matt. This is where we go. But that’s how I live my life.

You’re right though. You’re absolutely right. We’ve got to go for it. And I think that’s probably the biggest message that I’m taking away from today’s episode is show up and push yourself out there, get out of your comfort zone.

What have you got to lose? For sure. Really, what have you got to lose? The worst that’s going to happen is no one’s going to care what you have to say. But the best that’s going to happen is you’ll change your life. I was able to quit a job, start a business and be oversubscribed in six weeks because I took the plunge to actually just share what I was doing and share my thoughts. And since then, I’ve changed my life, you know? So just give it a go. You won’t regret it. You won’t regret it.

Stop dipping that toe in the water and just jump the hell in, guys. Let’s move into the quick fire. Jacob, you can go up first if you fancy it. Quick fire question for Amelia.

All right. Who’s a founder brand that’s getting it right?

Oh God, I know his name. There’s an Aussie guy, actually. There’s two of them. Frank and Mark, I think they’re called. They’re building a social media platform. Frank Grief is a founder brand I’m obsessed with. Frank Grief is building an app called Kinsow, which is basically an inbox that brings all of your inboxes into one. Think all your social media inboxes, your WhatsApps, your emails into one. It’s like a genius idea. I’m obsessed with it, but he is building in real time. He’s like, here’s what it’s like building $100 million business. Here’s what it’s like building this. Here’s what I did when I sold my first business. Here is the teams that I’m running at the minute. We have 20,000 people on our wait list. Isn’t it exciting? And he’s just bringing people on that journey. And I think there are so many obvious choices of founder brands that you could mention, but he’s someone who’s just popped out of nowhere and is just everywhere. And I now know about that company because of what he’s posted. And I’ll probably be a customer of that company. So Frank Grief, incredible job.

Nice. Next quick fire. Biggest mistake founders make?

Thinking that anyone cares about their mistakes and that they need to be perfect. Like, actually, my best content ever and the content that’s produced the most leads for my business has been the content that I’ve shared where things have gone wrong.

All right. Visibility or credibility, which one matters more?

Both. You can’t have one without the other.

That’s still the question, Amelia.

I know. But like, it’s a trick question because no one’s going to think you’re credible if you’re not visible. Like, you could build the best thing in the end. You could just cure cancer. If no one knows you’ve cured it, how are we going to save the world? So you need both.

All right. One word to describe great founder branding?

Consistent and honest.

Two words. Oh, yeah.

We’re honest. She’s a rebel.

We’re letting her break the rules. We kind of like rebels, Amelia. Last one. Okay. One piece of advice for founders building their brand?

Just post it.

There you go. Amelia, listen, that brings us to the end of the quick fire. I just want to thank you so much for coming on. Jacob, was there anything else that you wanted to ask Amelia before we wrap?

Well, this has been brilliant. And Amelia, thank you for being a part of the summit last year and coming on the JUST Branding podcast. It’s been awesome to reconnect and go dive deeper into founder-led branding. Love it. Thank you.

Well, thanks so much for having me, guys. I super appreciate it.

Thanks for coming on. If people want to follow you, Amelia, connect with you, hire you, where do we go?

Just search Amelia Sordell. I’m the only one in the world. So whatever it says on there, you can click on that. I’m really aggressively trying to build on Instagram and TikTok at the minute. So come and follow me on there.

You’re going to see a huge spike of JUST Branding listeners. Just follow, follow, follow.

Instagram has been an interesting one because I think it’s a secondary platform that no one really gives a s*** about because they think it’s only for friends and family. But I’ve grown 50,000 followers in the last three months just by posting basically what I was already sharing on LinkedIn but in a slightly different format. All of those people are founders and business owners, which is exactly who I’m trying to reach. So I think it’s proof that you should not dismiss platforms, even the ones where you’ve got talking and dancing teenagers on TikTok.

You go. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom, and thanks folks for listening. Tune back in next time for another amazing interview, where we’ll have some more guests coming in to share insights into some of the topics around branding. Thanks everybody and take care. Thanks Amelia.

Bye. Thanks.