Brand & product building don't compete with each other! - with Laura Busche @Author of Lean Branding

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery. For the ones who listen to us more regularly, you know that usually we try to summarize the episodes at the end. This time we want to do it a little bit differently and give you a very quick summary of the main topics we're going to discuss afterwards with our guest Laura Busche before jumping in into the conversation. Laura taught us today how to get started with your branding as a product or service that you are about to establish as well as sharing some great insights on things you should consider working with your product or brand. Yeah, it was some sort of a live coaching session as well. So we analyzed a little bit the Product Bakery Podcast to really also have practical examples and give you a tool that you can use when you start looking at your branding and your company's branding. We talked about the problems you want to solve, we talked about the vision, the target audience and even more. So feel free to listen in and get the full-fledged overview. Let's go! Christian, how do we best kick it off today? I think the best way to kick it off is if we go a couple of months back in our timeline, Alex, when we were sitting in a park and decided to get started with a podcast. Because back then we asked ourselves, next to all the questions on how to design an episode and what to talk about, we asked ourselves, what kind of logo do we want to use? What will be a catchy phrase on our future website, which is, by the way, in the making? Or what kind of color do we want to use? Etc. And we realized building up a brand and building up a community, also referring to our previous episode about communities, is more than just the logo. It's more than just one sentence that you put on any kind of website or social media. We decided back then, if you remember, Alex, that we need to invite an expert to talk about this topic. And we said clearly that the person we want to interview needs to have a couple of criteria. For example, this person needs to have experience in content and brand strategy. This person needs to have at least one PhD in psychology, as well as one book published successfully, like a book like Lean Branding. So, Laura Buscher, do you have any idea to whom we could talk to? I have no clue. I don't happen to know anyone with all of those credentials. I mean, it's very specific for someone we're looking for. Well, I think you found it. Or I mean, if you'll have me. Hello. I'm happy to be here. We believe that you are the exact right person, Laura. But before we dive in all these branding topics, because I'm sure we can talk for hours about it. So, how is life of being a book publisher? You are the first person I know who has published a great book that I, by the way, read. How is it to be an author? I think that's a great question to start with, actually, because the life of a writer comes with many of the same challenges you'd have in other creative careers, right? You name it, designers. And by designers, I'm including product designers, graphic designers in every single discipline. If you're an artist, you will also experience some of the struggles that writers have to face on a daily basis. I would say it's that eternal fight between the space you need to be creative, like just the open, divergent time periods where you can dream up or imagine your next piece, and the diligence and the discipline you need to actually put that on paper and have your thoughts converge on paper or screen, whatever you use. But it's that constant balance you need to find. And how was the feedback after you've launched? Is it like that many people start bombarding you on LinkedIn, like I did, for example? I'll say I was fortunate enough, so this is a double-sided board, but I was fortunate enough to publish Lean Branding at a time when social networks were very active, social platforms, they were there, but there wasn't the level of animosity or just the verbal violence you're seeing now. I think the environment was more neutral and appreciative. People didn't react as strongly as they do now. I think the algorithms have taken us down a path of extremes, right? Polarization. You either love it with all your heart or you hate it to the point where you want to cancel it. And it's not healthy either for creators or consumers. It's just, it can lead us in very disappointing directions. So I was fortunate enough that things were a little calmer back then. And I did get feedback from readers and I did read every single comment people shared with me. They did it via email. They left reviews on Amazon or directly on my publisher's website, which back then they were still selling books online, O'Reilly Media. That's the publishing house. I think they're now selling exclusively through Amazon. So things have changed, but I am very fortunate to have had very supportive readers from the start. People who really care about the discipline and they want to see it evolve. Nice. And I do have to say the book definitely helped Alex and myself a lot to get started with our podcast as well. And with that being said, so to Alex and me, it's very important to be as close as possible to real world examples when we talk about any kind of topic in our show. We were thinking of giving you like a kind of exercise or case study for today. What do you think about the following example? Let's imagine there are two guys coming from a product management background and design who want to launch a podcast. How would you consult them to get started and build up a nice brand that gets recognized out there? Interesting. I wonder who that is. So my first question for founders, whether they're solopreneurs or in small teams, is whose life are you trying to impact through this product or service? So in your case, who are you hoping to support with this podcast? I really love the way you phrase also the question in terms of how are you trying or whose lives are you trying to impact? Because I think it just puts the question of target audience on a very different level of like also thinking of a much wider kind of aspect and like their whole life and the impact that the product might have. Christian, maybe you as someone running this podcast, how would you answer this? I think I would answer this by going very broad, first of all, saying the product community. But if we go into depth, I would say it's especially for product managers, product designers, and also people working in engineering, as well as founders and people on C-level to get a deeper understanding of how product management and processes in companies can ideally work. I see. And if I'm understanding correctly, that leads you with a wide range of target audience types. So you're talking about the big C-suite, but you're also talking about someone who has less resources. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay. So the types of strategies and tactics you recommend in the podcast, they are also wide. They're equally wide. So you'd have to think about your more lean strategies and you could also consider how those would play out for individuals that have more resources and that brought a bigger team, more time in their hands. So the reason I always start with that question is it seems very simple. It seems very essential. Like who doesn't think about the end user when they're trying to come up with a product or service, but you'd be surprised at the amount of brands out there that just launch without that basic understanding. And they jump directly into how am I going to communicate this? Which channels are we going to use? How are we going to handle retention? And what's our customer acquisition costs? And all these, granted, they're great questions, but if you haven't distilled who the person you're talking to is, or who the person you're trying to impact is, those questions are going to be harder to resolve. And I would argue that you wouldn't even be answering for the right for the right human being. How do you deal with clients or people who directly jump into how do we market this etc how do you emphasize on taking a step back and doing more groundwork? I'm glad you asked that because it's at the core of my practice it's brand storytelling I always take founders back to a drawing board with a tool that's pretty common in the video production world you may have heard of storyboards of course you have in the user experience world right? I read your book I know it. That too. But yeah so the storyboard the idea of a storyboard it's a really healthy place to start because it guides you through the process that an average human being would go through when they're exposed to your product or service so as all stories we start out with once upon a time every story starts out like that and in that scene we basically describe who this target customer is if there's a certain professional career path they're in or there's a certain type or size of company they're a part of or a certain role that they occupy normally so that scene just gives us a very granular image of who this person is once we've defined that we go ahead and do a second scene which starts out with he or she always so what if you were to look at this person's agenda their to-do list what would you find in there what are the jobs to be done if you will in user experience language where their jobs to be done what is it that they're trying to accomplish and so once you know that you can identify if there are any pain points or problem areas within those jobs things that they're just not getting done or getting done very painfully that would be your third scene but had a problem and then we get into a fourth scene in the storyboard which is he or she tried to solve it by and the key thing to understand here is that human beings we are creative we are entrepreneurial if we have a problem we have a tendency to fix it to fix it however we can with whatever is at our disposal even if it's imperfect and this is key here so if the problem is real if the pain point is real people are already solving it somehow in on could be in a less than ideal way and that's why sometimes finding your substitute products can be challenging because you tend to look for them in the traditional spaces so if you're building a web app for example and you're trying to figure out what the alternative solution is what the alternative a competitor is you would go to the product times or the beta list or the TechCrunch you would go to sites in the same space but we don't naturally tend to consider less ideal alternatives like offline tools offline solutions analog if you will so that is key just defining how they're currently trying to solve this whether it's ideal or not digital or not they're doing something about it you can trust that and then on the fifth scene there is something within that less than ideal solution that is lacking so you start out thinking you know but this person wished this tool would do X or Y this tool would be cheaper this tool would be more user-friendly this tool connected really well with this other tool I use and and that helps to identify obviously the areas of opportunity where you can go in and fill a void and then for the sixth scene and we're getting towards the end it's just a eight scenes that I work with in this brand storyboard you essentially appear like your product in your service this is where the customer meets you and it starts with until one day right this was all happening they had a problem they tried to solve it they wished it did this other thing until one day they learn about you and this first encounter that's a scene that you want to get crystal clear about because obviously that's the encounter that you want to repeat that's the first moment and you want to scale you want to make this happen a million times depending on your ambitions for the product or the podcast but you would like this scene to happen way more than once so for that to happen you just need to understand what it looks like and at this point I actually want to bring it back to the example of a post podcast you were talking about building a space for product managers to learn more about what it takes and for product management enthusiasts to actually get a grasp of what this discipline entails and so the until one day for a podcast like this could actually be a colleague sharing this episode or another episode with someone else they think might find it helpful have you seen a lot of referral behavior in product makery we see increasing referral behavior at the moment yes we do okay and you would say it's one of your key drivers of listeners or is there anything else that's I think I like to correct me if I'm wrong for now that's definitely the main driver for our traffic yeah I think it's definitely very organic and obviously like when also talking about content you reach specific people and some episodes are referred to a different target audience and it also comes a little bit from where we are coming from where we're trying to definitely like also have more different themes being covered over the time so maybe not every episode is interesting for everyone but in a sense it should give you a good perspective on on the product one thing that I've seen also at work people can relate to it and they're like oh but at the moment we are exactly looking at for example today we launch pricing pricing I listened to to the podcast on the real XYZ and that's something that we could take in so I think yeah it's probably the main source for growth at the moment as we are also not doing anything let's say besides their organic growth okay so in that case I think you have enough clarity around what that scene looks like for you at least now that you haven't invested in paid yet as you said so for those organic drivers what you want to do is you want to amplify them you want to repeat them you want to make sure they're not a product of circumstance they're not initially of course there's some spontaneity to them but you can encourage them you can incentivize them and that's precisely why this scene is so key now we're going back to our storyboard to the last two scenes this is where the story comes full circle and what you want to understand is unlike their old solution so unlike the way they used to be fixing this issue your product or service your podcast does this very well or teaches this subject area in this way that is very innovative and I'll get back to this just to ask what you two think is the product bakery different so think about that and I was going to the last scene which is their wish came true so their desire was fulfilled their pain point was resolved which was to accomplish X or Y so going back to the the difference you're trying to establish here what are some thoughts what do you think the end Christian correct me if I'm wrong because this is also a little bit like couple therapy so we can see where we are but I guess that's what consulting is a lot of the time isn't it oh yeah cool no I think generally one of the things that we discussed a couple of times also coming like from different roles it's a little bit like my current solution at the moment would usually be I get my information from within my professional circle so I would talk to other designers I would talk to our design managers and we go to conferences in that field subscribe to specific like also design medium publishers and so on and so forth and the interesting part or what should be different to this approach of getting my information what product bakery should solve is connecting these functions and I want a designer to be able to listen to product management stories and actually learn from them and directly like change or it should positively impact also the way he works with both disorder function as well as the way he broadens also the view on product development as a general topic and from a broader also business aspect that I unfortunately see often being a little bit missed when being stuck like in like a professional silo For example, the main part to make product management work effectively and efficient is in bringing in all different departments. Product management doesn't work if you're not communicating with, for example, marketing or engineering or design, etc. And this is where we want to go in. And this is the problem that we have observed by ourselves by saying, hey, now it's time to bring all these people together in different episodes, but still always trying to connect to the big picture and relating to the holistic point of view in product management. You touched on a keyword, which is holistic, and a lot of people run away from it. I've been in meetings where certainly it's found upon, I'm just mentioning that something is holistic. But, you know, think about it. Reality in itself is not a matter of black or white. There are lots of grays, there are nuances everywhere you look. So it's just a matter of being open to the idea that your business or your company's success does not hinge on a single department or a single team, or even a single process. It has to be a combination of all of these different pieces working together. And it's something I've also faced on the brand front. When I come in and do brand consulting, in the traditional understanding of what a brand is, it's almost as if a lot of people perceived brand as competing with product. And that is insane. Because there is just no, there's just no world in which improving your product is going to hurt your brand. And I touched on this. I actually mentioned this in Lean Branding. I say, product and brand don't compete. Product is brand. So everything you can do in the way of increasing satisfaction, making the user experience more seamless, more enjoyable, more delightful, this is brand building. There's just no line. It's not even a gray line. There's no line. You are effectively investing in your brand whenever you invest in your product. So it's that kind of mindset of organizational boundaries. Users don't care about that. Oftentimes, they don't even know how your company is organized. True. Absolutely. How should they? Externally, it's just a single performance. It's just an experience. They don't compartmentalize it. They don't see what marketing had to do in this versus what products did or whether the CEO was involved. It's a single experience. And so we need more of that in the tech world, for sure. Something I'm a strong advocate for. Amazing. Lana, this actually brings me to one question. I'm thinking a little bit like about what you just said also about the storyboard. I'm curious, who should actually be in charge of this exercise? Who should be the one driving it? Great question. Because I've used this tool with people in every team in organizations. So I've done this with the founders. I've done this with product designers in the same room with support team members. We've brought in a couple of times. We've even brought in customers to give us that kind of other side of the coin perspective. They are the ones we are supposedly, they're the main character in this story. They're the ones we're supposedly understanding and following and policing. So bringing them in has been fascinating in the times we've done it. So there isn't a single team that has to conduct this. It's more of an interdisciplinary tool to get everyone on the same page. It's an alignment tool. The more the merrier. I definitely love that. And now just thinking it a little bit like further, one thing that I see is there are different frameworks also used by different other roles. Just recently, I think it's like the radical product tool. I don't even remember who made it, but I can definitely also follow up on that. But they have a similar framework where they talk about today, when X wants to, and then fill in, they have to fill in. So it's a similar way also of storytelling, but with more of a focus on shaping the vision for the product and less like the focus on capturing also this first time experience and the emotion that you have connected to a brand. But how do you think could this realistically tie more together? And do you see a company like doing this, as you say, as an exercise cross-functionally with everyone to make sure that you don't do the same exercise over and over again with different roles to maybe have some misaligned output in between the teams again in the company? Because I think this is one of the biggest challenges I see, or I also had the thinking back, for example, at SumUp where even on a separate team level, everyone had a little bit of their own kind of vision-ish that builds on similar input. Interesting. Though I have found that different teams bring different elements to the table when we're working on this, ultimately, I think there's incredible value in building the shared narrative, in having the shared language. And it's undeniable that every team's tasks and activities and processes and the mere fact that some of your team members will be engineers, some of them will be designers, some of them will be marketers, that just places them in different environments. And again, they come with different languages to speak about the same things. But when you put them together in a room, so to your question, yes, I do think that's absolutely what should happen. In putting them together in a room, what you're also building is this shared vocabulary. How do we talk about the person that we're trying to build for? How do we define them? How do we describe the problem they're experiencing or the pain point they're experiencing? And do we all recognize how it is that they get to learn about us? So going back to that pivotal scene where they learn about you, the until one day scene, we all need to be on the same page when it comes to that. Because if your main traffic driver, your main, not traffic, but your main lead driver is, for example, organic, the team should be aligned around a strategy to make sure that your potential customer's experience in search is rich and effective, right? Like we all understand that this is where they're learning about us. So we all want to contribute to that part of the experience to make it scale. But I think where the dissonance is when we just don't understand how customers even enter our conversion funnel and that's where we misalign and where some teams feel like their vision is not represented by other teams and we can get into conflict, which is totally unnecessary. Ultimately, everyone has the same north star, which is having this business succeed, this brand succeed. Another thing you talked about in your book was this topic of value and value proposition. And there is usually a gap between the value that the brand tries to send or message that the brand tries to send to the audience versus how the audience, the users, the community is experiencing the brand. What are usually the reasons why there is a huge gap? A huge gap between what we build and what is perceived. Exactly. I've seen all kinds of issues when it comes to translating the vision for the brand into reality. But I will say that one of the most common sources of disappointment and dissatisfaction and non-delivery of the brand's promise, truly, because that is what it is. You're breaking a promise. I've seen like the largest source of that is when the frontline brain representatives, so the people who actually talk to the end customer, your support agents, your sales people, if you have a sales team, when they are not in the room for the more strategic brand vision conversation, it shows. When they are not in on the narrative, on the story that we just talked about, that's where it breaks the most. As I said, there are multiple areas that could be malfunctioning there, but the sheer importance of your relationship with that frontline brain representative, it can make your entire experience with the brand or break it. That's another key definition that we have in lean branding is the fact that a brand is the story your buyer remembers when they think about you. It's not about the logo strictly. It's not always about 99 percent. uptime, you know, we've all forgiven brands that have had issues and bugs and scandals, and we've moved along with them and we've been there and they've communicated openly and we've still remained loyal customers. So it's not always about that, but it's always about the story, right? It's always about what you remember at the end of the day. And yes, it is holistic. But that brings us also to what you just said, right? Make sure that all the people, all the right people are in one room to make sure everyone has the same vocabulary. And this is also connected to what Alex and I are doing with the podcast, making sure to bring all people together and share this common understanding of, for example, product management and processes around that. But we talked now a lot about, or you asked us many questions on why we're doing things and what we're doing and what kind of problems do we want to solve? What would you recommend us to bring this now out to the world? What are good strategies that we can use to share our brand message to the rest of the world? Interesting. This brand consulting is fascinating. So, Basel would have heard, because I will admit this is a new podcast, right? This is episode number what? This will be 18, I think. Yeah. 17 or 18. It's a relatively new space and you're still validating a lot of your initial hypothesis around who you're talking to, what they need. But based on what I know right now, I would recommend inviting your current listeners. And that's something I'll do right now. If you're listening to this episode, please share this with a colleague from your team or other teams that might find this content helpful. Share it with individuals beyond the product management space. Make sure that you are consistently inviting your listeners to share the value they've obtained. Because ultimately, this is a very intimate channel. We have spent a lot of time in this digital world of ours, we've spent a lot of time talking. People who are listening, I bet you're doing other things. Maybe you're having your morning coffee, maybe you are working out, maybe you're walking. We are in this very safe, intimate space. It's normal, it's natural for you as podcast hosts to just ask if you've gotten any value from listening to this, spread the word. I would highly urge you to rely on that kind of incentive and to encourage referral. I would also recommend joining other podcasts. You can be guests for other podcasts in your space and beyond. That's how I've learned a lot about a lot of podcasts that I currently subscribe to, for example. Not sure if that resonates with you, or you've seen something similar. But people don't normally listen to a single podcast in their everyday. They normally have quite a few, especially because not every podcast is daily. Monday, you can be interested in product management. Tuesday, you're listening about brand strategy. The next day, you're into crime. I don't know what people hear. People don't have a wide range of podcasts they like to listen to. There's that. Finally, I invite listeners to rate the podcast if you can and leave reviews so that when the next person comes by and they perceive what the experience of listening is like, they get a real first-hand recommendation from someone who's gotten some value out of these episodes. Review and comment if you can, please. It's great. That's really great. It's even better when you say that people should share this episode instead of us saying, please share the episode. I think this is the start of going viral. This is the first real brand ambassador that we have. Happy to be your ambassador. Actually, as soon as this is live, you'll also see this in my channel. Oh, yeah. Amazing. One thing that I'm curious about is, with all this understanding also around branding, you're giving us tips on how we can improve our positioning of our podcast. I think there's always this notion also of personal branding. How did this actually affect also your approach in writing your book, publishing your book, and then also marketing your book? What was your strategy there? What I'm curious about is, you have a lot of understanding of building brands. You obviously also gave us some tips, but I'm curious, how did you apply these theories and this knowledge of branding also in the way you approached writing the book of Lean Branding and the way you approach also the branding of the book, the launch and publishing of the whole book? That's really interesting. With books, there are more constraints than you think, especially when you're working with a publishing house that's established and especially when you're joining a series. Just to give you guys some backstory, Lean Branding is not a one-off title. It's part of the Lean series that's edited by Eric Ries, who's the author of Lean Startup. That in and of itself meant that the series was branded. There are other titles like Lean UX, maybe you've heard of that one, Running Lean. I have read all of them. Okay, perfect. Literally, Lean Branding, Lean UX, Lean Enterprise, everything is on my shelf behind me. Amazing. It is on your shelf. You'll notice that the brand symbols aspect has been controlled. There's a uniform aesthetic for all of these titles. Similarly, there were also editorial considerations to make sure that the series was cohesive. Unlike titles that are not part of a series, the branding just needs to be consistent across the board. It needs to, again, feel uniform. That was the main constraint. We had to work within that framework, that structure. It's just another example of if you're not launching a single product, but a series of products, or you're working on a group of services that must make sense together, what you really need to think about is a brand system that can accommodate for all of that. Going back to your question, Lean Branding specifically was part of a brand system. Its brand story, symbols, and strategy had to be consistent with that. I think that really sums it up. We are the green book within what is a rainbow of books that all maintain the same type scheme, same typography scheme, roughly the same layout, the editorial layout, and the same spirit, truly. It's a series of books for entrepreneurs and innovators, how it's branded. In another sense, the storyline was also set for the titles in the series. That's how I would summarize it. Yes. I think it also nicely ties in with what you said earlier about the whole story and the different touch points. Also, you obviously have to think about the whole series when you tackle the series and need to build the experience also around that one. One thing that comes to my mind, speaking about series, and it's more of a less theoretical question, but more something that I'm personally interested in because it's something that I've seen a lot now in social media, speaking about series and big brands. Google just recently redesigned all of their app icons. I think you can see that they have a very strong brand system that they apply to all the different icons. At the same time, you could also almost say, and that's why it's criticized a lot on social media and so on, that it's almost uniform. They all look the same, and it makes it hard to really find the right icon on your home screen and so on. What's your personal view on their redesign and their system for the brand? My take on it, which you may or may not agree with, is yes, they went a little overboard with trying to make everything look as part of a collection, but I think the key pain point here is that the user can no longer distinguish what app it is they're using, they're interacting with. The general sense, and correct me if I'm wrong or if your experience is different, but the general sense is that what made these apps unique and valuable has been diluted into these shapes. How have you felt as users? Go ahead, sorry. No, go ahead. I was just going to say the experience of using an app like Gmail, there are users that are very passionate about Gmail, not necessarily as passionate about, I don't know, Hangouts or they rely like their lives depend on calendar, but maybe they're Dropbox users when it comes to cloud storage. So despite understanding what Google wants to do here, which is convey a specific brand aesthetic and potentially help users understand that these are all part of the same family, it does seem like there was, they were a bit excessive in the, at least in the execution of this, where just the eye, there's just so much overwhelmed. I don't know if this is just me, but it quickly becomes overwhelming. Absolutely the same. Yeah. The thing I, or the thing we obviously don't know sitting here is what their strategy was, but I'm totally with you. I think they brought in this informity, uniformity, and they made everything like look the same while I'm not entirely sure if it shouldn't be like the app specifically that in this case should have a unique branding, obviously it can tie into their system, but at the moment it looks like they're all the same. And I think like Gmail is Gmail because it's Gmail. I'm also, usually people are referring to it as Gmail and not like the Google mail app, which the new icon tells me personally. So I think, yeah, without knowing the strategy, it's obviously hard to talk about it. And to some extent I can probably like, yeah, I can somehow relate to maybe why did it, but I'm totally also with you that it loses a little bit like the personality when it comes to the specific app level and not everyone uses the whole G suite. This is true. I think our successful examples to look at when thinking about visual cohesion and how to tie together a family of products. One of them for me is Apple. I think they've done a good job of preserving each app personality, if you will, and making their icon collection still pretty timeless, pretty aesthetically pleasing, but also highly differentiated. I have personally never confused my Safari icon with my iTunes icon. As a user, I've just always felt that level of clarity, even in a subconscious level, because I don't think you make all of these decisions consciously. Sometimes you're just quickly jumping from one app to the next. And the other example is actually Adobe. I think for the creative cloud, the way they've managed to treat color as their sole differentiator for the different apps, but maintain typography consistent over time, because Illustrator has been yellow for as far as I can remember. Photoshop has been blue for as far as I can remember. It's truly worth highlighting. It's a good example. The difference though, between Adobe and Apple is that Adobe has definitely a better pricing and no MacBooks that are regularly breaking. Well, but it sounds like someone is upset. I am. Sounds like someone's computer is broken. I needed to go many times to the app store to get a new fucking keyboard because it's breaking all the time. Yeah. And my, my AirPods just broke as well. Oh, the butterfly keyboard is just the worst. It's definitely. So if someone at Apple is listening to this, please, you can sponsor us by sending a question on the keyboard. And if anyone from Google is listening in and it's consulting, I think Laura, you would be the right go-to person here. But apart from advertisement, Laura, maybe you can to slowly come to an end, share maybe three key things that you would recommend anybody working in a very brand heavy product service area to look at when they are either launching or already working with an existing product. Okay. Maybe something. I'll refer again to that issue where some of the individuals that interact with the end customer are not in on the brand narrative. I'll just highlight that one again, because it's by far the most recurring brand perception issue I find. There's just a disconnect between the person you talk to on the phone or via chat or in your help ticket versus the intention for the brand's vision that you've designed in some boardroom. If that makes sense. So that would be number one. Number two is in this new world of ours, 2020, and this wasn't necessarily as real back when you published the first edition of the book. Lean branding is even more important. You just need to react in real time to a lot of different events happening. You name it, social chaos, political issues, environmental concern, public events that affect your end customer, issues of discrimination. There's just a lot happening. It can be overwhelming, but as a brand, you just need to have a wide radar and capturing your surroundings and capturing your target audience of surroundings and reposition your brand as needed. Don't be afraid to make things a little different than you were doing them a few months ago. Because, and I think this is how the book starts, if I recall correctly, we can no longer afford to be dinosaur brands. We can no longer afford inertia. We all have to become chameleon brands that can incorporate learning as quickly as possible. And yes, stay true to a vision, but understand that the methods and the channels and even the messages might shift and that's okay, and we just learn and move on and validate whether our new approaches are working and are resonating well with the audience we're talking to. The ultimate message is if your consumer is changing, why wouldn't you? So that would be another common challenge and issue to identify and correct for. All right. Amazing. Thank you very much for this nice support today. Yeah, I was about to say it's, it's, it was not only interesting podcast with you, but it was also very helpful consulting session, so. Agreed. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it. It found some value in it. Empty invoice, please, to Alex Tapunt. Well, um, I do accept coffee and peanuts. It's something I've done in the past. You're based in Columbia, right? I am. I am. So coffee is my life. Do you want to do a business trip to come over? Oh, that's amazing. Do let me know. I, we will. We definitely will. All right. So thanks again very much and wish you all the best for the next time. Thank you for having me and branded. Alex, I think that was one of the best consulting sessions. I've had. How do you think about that? New format, live consulting on the podcast. Who do we invite next? I think people would soon realize what our secret mission is like to get free coaching on this podcast. But the good thing is people will benefit from it. I do hope so. What are your key takeaways from today's consulting? I have different key takeaways from the consulting and from the whole conversation in general, focusing probably more on the conversation in general, I think. The one thing that is like super interesting to me is exactly also what the mission of this podcast is of like connecting all the different functions and it's super nice to see the framework she uses for branding. That this is something that I also see within different other groups in an organization. And this was what I mentioned. I think it's something that you often see, like when people think of a product vision, when they think about the company vision, when it discuss user experience, even down to personas. And this can be like user experience personas and marketing personas. And I think one thing that's not like entirely clear to me yet is like who should be sitting in the driving seat for this whole topic, but branding definitely is one of the broader topics. And it includes the user experience, the products, the overall company, the way you talk as a company, the way you communicate, the way you market and so on and approaching it like from the storyline that she shared with, especially like the focus of the first interaction. I think this is something that's super interesting. in the storyline and in the storyboard framework that she had. Yeah, thinking of this first experience is probably my main key takeaway here. What about you? My key takeaway is definitely the Nokia slogan, if you remember back then, which was connecting people. And I really like that she was highlighting so much. And she just did it a couple of seconds before saying she can't emphasize enough on, I also cannot emphasize enough on having the relevant people, especially the ones who are responsible for your sales and marketing, in this whole branding conversations involved, ideally from day one. I think that's super important. And also, the whole approach of defining a branding, I'm not sure if you necessarily need someone particularly who's driving it. If you remember when we were talking to Alex recently in the gaming industry, there are so many teams doing things in parallel working on the same thing. So I think being aware of the fact that it needs to be done and sitting down as a team, whether it's a product manager or a designer, doesn't matter. The most important thing is that people take ownership and responsibility to work on that, in my opinion. Yeah, but they need to do it holistically. It's something that needs to happen on a company level and not on a chapter or functional level. Because if the designers do it for their own and they think of the brand, or if the product managers do it, you still lack this part of, you need the whole organization to buy in. And the way Laura phrased it with talking to both the founders down to the support agents and even including the customers, I think that's the circle that you need to have. I think the bigger the organization, the more complex and the harder it gets. Fully agree. Nevertheless, this whole topic should somehow be driven or at least initiated on a higher level. You don't come up from a bottom by saying, or to not be misunderstood. For sure, everyone in a company should drive. And in a healthy organization, you can drive these things. But it must be on a high level strategic roadmap somewhere to work on a branding, to change maybe certain icons like Google did, maybe a bad example. But you need to have this clear direction coming from the upper level, in my opinion. Yeah. I think it can be initiated bottom up, but you need to have the overall buy-in even from the C level if you want to push this forward. Fully agree. So Alex, talking about branding and all these things that are related to this, I just want to emphasize that people can follow us on LinkedIn at productbakery or also now on Instagram at productbakery. So feel free to drop us a comment, like and reshare, as Laura said. And other than that, you can also contact us directly by writing us an email to hello at product-bakery.com. Yeah, I guess that's it. So. Exactly. Thanks a lot. Spread some love, spread the voice, and see you in our next episode. Bye-bye.