[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: The time is near. You've given it hard, now get it in gear.
[00:00:08] Speaker A: It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I just opened my podcast studio.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with business owners and celebrities about their business stories. And now it's time to get to our featured guest, Jed Morley, and he's going to answer the question for us. If your brand were a person, would it get invited to the barbecue or reported to hr?
So he is a branding expert and he's going to tell us all about branding. Welcome to the show, Jed. Tell us about branding for entrepreneurs. What is your advice there?
[00:00:57] Speaker D: Most important question you can ask yourself when you're starting out is what does my brand want to be when it grows up? If you can anticipate how big your brand will be when it's mature, how broad the portfolio of offerings will be that comprise your offerings, your opportunity, your business, it can save you a lot of time, energy and investment because you won't have to make adjustments to your brand long term. So asking that question, what does my brand want to be when it grows up? Can help to make the most of your investment all along the way.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Can I just agree with that for a second? Because I remember when we were starting Gearhart Law, I hired a branding guy. He said that your logo should just be Gearhart Law.
And I wanted to put in patents, trademarks and copyrights in there because that's our specialty. Well, as the firm has grown over the years, we do other types of legal work and if we had pigeonholed ourselves, it really wouldn't have worked from a branding standpoint. So he had the foresight to help me think long term.
I agreed with him, even though at the time I wasn't really sure. I thought maybe more specific brand would help with marketing, but he turned out to be right in the long term.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: Yeah, well, and I think that kind of your business becomes yourself like your whole life if you're an entrepreneur. So your brand has to be something that you're proud of. That's yourself. And it was funny because I went to a personal stylist to figure out what I should wear as a podcast owner and it turned out I'm wearing the same stuff I always wore because.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: It'S Just a big relief for me because we didn't need to get a lot of new clothes.
[00:02:30] Speaker C: But it's just my personal brand is what I am and that's what I carry over into my business.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Let me ask you though, how do you build trust in a brand?
[00:02:39] Speaker D: I love what Stephen Mr. Covey says about speed to trust. He says it comes down to two contributing factors. One is competence. You've got to be good at what you do. And the other is character. You've got to be dependable and reliable to do it as promised. And the essence of branding is making a meaningful promise and keeping it and enrolling and aligning everyone on your team to partner with you to build a brand that scales by keeping that promise consistently across customer relationships over time.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: So the trust comes more from reliability and keeping the brand promise, maybe more than some sort of sentiment or emotion. So trust is just that, reliability. You could position a company to be, have, you know, service companies say, be very aggressive, right? And as long as they keep being aggressive, that's the kind of trust that somebody would want that, that would be keeping their brand promise. Right?
[00:03:36] Speaker D: Brand promises are words, and words are important. It's important to get the words right, words that resonate. More important is making sure that you fulfill the promises that those words communicate. We worked with a company called Haven park, and Haven park owns and operates manufactured home communities. That's a nice way of saying mobile home parks or trailer parks. They were acquiring these properties from owners who were getting older and ready to retire. They didn't have anyone to gift the business to. Their kids weren't interested in picking up where they had left off. And these owners were concerned about selling to a partner that cared. So we had that idea in mind of differentiating Haven park as a partner that would care for the people who lived in these communities. But we didn't really know what would resonate with them in terms of making a meaningful brand promise. So we went out into the field and tested our assumptions. We took action, and as Rick said, we got insights into what resonated with the community managers and residents of these properties across the country. In the course of doing that insight discovery work, we uncovered an opportunity to communicate a sense of respect. I remember I was talking to one resident and she was complaining about the fact that her neighbor would have friends over on the weekend and park in front of her driveway. When she complained about not being able to back her car out of the driveway to go to the grocery store to run errands, the community manager didn't do anything about it. Why? Because the community manager was good friends with her neighbor. So the community manager was playing favorites. When I probed further to ask what was the problem with this situation, the woman said, I just want people to treat me with respect. I asked a clarifying question, what does respect mean to you? She said, it means treating people the way you want to be treated. And because we had done a series of conversations, we'd heard the same sort of narrative. I was ready to recognize that she had illuminated a truth. And that is that everybody, especially people who live in mobile home parks, want to feel respected. And when I further clarified with her, she said, oh, it's like the golden rule. And that golden rule became the strategic insight that drove Haven park communities entire brand strategy. Their logo is gold and their purpose is to build caring communities across America. So that one conversation opened up an opportunity and an insight to communicate a compelling brand. Purpose and promise belong to a caring community. The only challenge is the company's operations initially weren't ready to live up to the promise. To their credit, the founders asked me, could we wait for a few months while we get some of these operational infrastructure systems in place to be able to live up to our promise? And I said, that's no problem. In fact, I really respect that you're taking the time to get your operations to where you can live up to what you're conveying and your value proposition. So they took six months to get their operational house in order. And when they did reveal and unveil belonging to a caring community, they were able to live up to that promise. They attracted better talent from across the industry. They were able to attract better employees from nearby universities, and they were able to retain more of their community managers and residents than prior owners had been able to, because now there was a promise that resonated with their residents that they could actually live up to.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: Yeah, that's important. I remember this is a little off topic, but still kind of about brand. When we lived in Atlanta, we had this neighbor and they were so happy that we had bought this house and their old neighbors were moving out. Well, it turned out the old neighbor had gotten on the HOA board because this was an HOA and just ding them for every tiny little thing. Oh, your mailbox is a half an inch too low. And just went after her and after her. And I'm telling you, that really hurt the HOA brand because nobody wants to live there. Right?
[00:07:17] Speaker B: I really like what you're saying about waiting until you're ready to take the next steps. And so sometimes when you're in the entrepreneurial world, you have to kind of take a little bit of a risk in terms of moving your business forward. But also making sure that your business is ready to take on that risk is also extremely important.
[00:07:37] Speaker C: I have a question for you, Jed. You have here services that you give, which are really deep branding services. Like people think of the visual brand, like they think of what do you look like on Instagram. But you go way deeper than that. You do the whole thing. But here you have brand messaging. How do you get everybody on your team if you're growing, to have the same brand message?
[00:07:57] Speaker D: To get everybody on your team to have the same brand message, you've got to have a compelling reason for them to buy in and believe that the messages are right. And to do that, you have to have something to back up your recommendations and the rationale to support a new story, a new narrative, new marketing messages. We found it really helpful to do in depth interviews like the one I referenced a moment ago for Haven Park Communities because it not only adds insight to the brand strategy and messaging development process, it also gives confidence to teams that may have had differences in opinions as to what would resonate. Because you now have data to support the direction you're taking the company. We were just talking to the CEO and founder of a cybersecurity company called Security Metrics, Brad Caldwell. He mentioned that when we worked with them three years ago, they were growing at something like 6%. Today, three years later, they're growing at 22%. This is a 25 year old company, they're tens of millions of company revenue generator and they'd been flat for the previous five years before we started working with them. So what was the difference? He attributed it to the alignment that resulted from our work together. And he said it was because you had done the work to dive deep, to understand the perspectives of different customer segments and partners and employees, to do a 360 degree review of how the brand is currently perceived. Let's call that P1 and how we wanted it to be perceived. P2. And when we developed the brand strategy and the messaging framework to close the gap between P1 and P2, the team was willing to adopt the new direction because they knew it was based and backed by data and that resulted in alignment. And that alignment created momentum so that they could start growing again.
[00:09:34] Speaker C: Well, that's interesting. So we just finished this podcast studio and we designed it to be more upscale for businesses rather than diy. Although we welcomed diy And I'm kind of having a hard time communicating that brand vision to the general public. What kind of tools would you use to do that?
[00:09:50] Speaker D: To communicate the right image to your audiences, you need to, first of all, understand their mental map of how they see the market landscape. To do that, you've got to find out what their current perceptions are of your category. So it's important that they give feedback on your brand, but to do it in context of competitors and comparisons. And when you have that competitive context, you can see how your brand is perceived and make moves that are consistent with how you want it to relate to existing alternatives in the marketplace and position yourself to be perceived in a way that will reinforce the desired image and ultimately relationship that you want to cultivate with your customers. And I love what you were saying, Elizabeth, about it being more than just the way your brand looks. A lot of people say, I love your brand. And what they mean is, I like your logo.
[00:10:35] Speaker C: Right?
[00:10:36] Speaker D: And a brand's a lot more than just the visual identity or a corporate identity. It delves deeply into the words and even the culture of a company and its ability to fulfill on its promises across the team and across customer touch points.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Jeb, what experience did you have as a young person, maybe even as a child, that pointed you in the direction of being a branding person?
[00:11:01] Speaker D: It's such a great question. The experiences that were formative for me and following the path I'm on now as a brand strategist and someone who helps companies build brands. That scale started when my parents would take us around the holidays. We would take Christmas gifts to people who were shut ins and who were lonely. My father was a doctor, he was a podiatrist, and he had people from, no pun intended, all walks of life. He loved his patients and they loved him. And he knew the people who were lonely around the holiday season. And so we would take time to take. My mom would make homemade bread and jam, and we would go with my parents to visit these people. And in the course of doing these visits, I realized that they had an interesting backstory, they had an interesting life, and they had insights and gifts to give and share. We once visited Jacob Boss. He was from Holland, and he was a symphony conductor. And he chose an instrument for each of us based on our personalities. And that was a fun, metaphorical way for us to learn something about music and to appreciate him as a person.
And that ability to get behind the superficial, the shallow, and really connect with people made a lasting impression on me.
Later, I studied design and I thought designing logos was going to be the way to build brands. But then as I learned more and had more experience, I realized that there was this idea of a consumer insight. Lisa Fortini Campbell was an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, where I earned my master's degree in integrated Marketing Communications. And she was passionate about uncovering the why behind the buy. What are the underlying drivers and motives and psychology behind the products we purchase. She had built a successful insights consulting firm, and we were given the opportunity to do some actual research. We were given a bar to study in Chicago, and I was assigned to the Abbey Pub, which was an Irish pub with a team of four other people. For 10 weeks, we observed and interviewed people to understand the why behind what they buy as it relates to alcohol. The only challenge was, I don't drink. So the question was, how does a guy who's dry figure out what these people are drinking and why? And that's where I cut my teeth on this idea of being able to uncover insights into the psychology of the connections and associations people have with their brand perceptions and preferences. But it really grew out of this ability to appreciate people and to want to understand them and connect with them on a personal level. And I attribute that to my parents.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Jed Morley, he is a branding expert and founder of Backstory. We'll be back with more passage to profit. Stay tuned for intellectual property news. And then a little bit later in the show, Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. Stay tuned.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Let me tell you a story about Bill. Bill was a normal guy in his 50s. He had back surgery about two years ago. Bill was in a lot of pain. He dealt with his pain by taking the Percocets his doctor prescribed for him. Bill took more and more and more of them to help with the pain. Until one day, the prescriptions weren't enough to get rid of Bill's pain. Then one day, Bill found someone to help him get rid of the pain with illegal drugs he didn't need a prescription for. Fast forward to today. Bill lost his job and his family.
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800, 980, 1761. That's 800, 980-1761. Are you running a small business with two or more employees struggling to find affordable health insurance? Well, Help is just a call away. Whether you're a restaurant owner, retail store manager, or a gig worker with staff, we've got you covered. Get quality health insurance plans Starting as low as $120 a month, our custom comparison tool finds plans tailored specifically to your business. We know it can be tough to find the right coverage. That's why we're here, to make the process seamless and stress free. Our plans include health, vision and dental coverage, all at unbeatable rates. Call the Small Business Health Insurance Hotline now. We'll compare top providers to get you the best deal in one quick phone call. Don't wait. Secure the benefits you and your employees deserve today. Call now. Rates may vary based on location and coverage options. 8024-9120-8480-2491-2084-802491-20844. That's 802-491. 2084 now back to passage to profit once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: And our special guest, Jed Morley, a branding expert. And if you think a brand is just your logo, hold on. There's way more to it and Jed's helping us through that. But I just opened our pod. Well, Richard and I just opened our podcast studio and since we have Jed here, I wanted to pick his brain a little. So I asked him for things he would do to start a brand strategy for a podcast studio that caters more to business. So you're on the spot, Jedi, and.
[00:16:13] Speaker D: Get crystal clear about who your most important audience is. Think about the words, images, and the experiences that would reinforce the desired perception you want to impress upon them. And think first from an empathetic point of view, what problems you can solve for them. Make them the hero of your story. You're guiding them to overcome the challenges they face and deeply understand how you're in a position to be able to help them achieve their desired outcomes and then build and design a world that is aligned with that desired perception. It has to be true to you. So there's always got to be an underpinning grounding foundation that connects to what you value. And you can build on top of that an expression of your values and your brand that resonate with your desired audience.
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Great advice.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Very strategic. I think.
[00:17:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm doing some of that, but I think I need to hone what I'm doing a little bit better because it's a new business. I'm looking to see who shows up.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Jed, what's your favorite brand besides your own?
[00:17:09] Speaker D: I really love Sonos. They do a nice job of packaging a product that's well designed and easy to use. So between the time you open it and can use it, it takes about 15, 20 minutes to set up and you have professional grade sound, whether it's your tv, sound system or music throughout your house. And you can tune it and selectively turn on and off speakers. So you equip your house with music and audio content in minutes. That's a professional great experience. I think they do that better than anybody else. And I love music. So it's been a brand that I've.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: Really learned to love that goes back to customer experience.
[00:17:45] Speaker D: Takes a lot of work to do it well.
[00:17:47] Speaker C: There's a lot of steps to doing it right.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Important stuff. Jed Morley he is a branding expert and founder of Backstory Jed where do people find you?
[00:17:56] Speaker D: People can find us@backstory branding.com backstory branding.com and on Amazon. After June 3rd, the book will be available. It's called Building a Brand that Scales. They can also find me on LinkedIn.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Perfect. Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleishman and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Risa Kat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow. Anywhere you get your podcasts, our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
[00:19:06] Speaker D: Sam.
