Hand on heart, how would you rate the strength of your brand story?

Are you on the top of your game when it comes to positively influencing your target audiences’ perceptions of what you offer and how valuable this is, inspiring customers to buy your product again and again, encouraging customers to rave about what you do to others, and more?

Regardless of your company size, your ability to create a compelling, distinct, and memorable brand story can literally be the secret to your success.

And the good news is this task doesn’t have to be complicated. As the late advertising guru David Ogilvy said of brand creation, the key is to:

“Decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place.”

Of course, he’s right. And doesn’t that sound wonderfully simple?

But, here’s the thing. While you may have certain ideas you’d like your brand to be known for…

…If you find yourself relying on third party design professionals to help you to create brand presence (via your logos, marketing communications, packaging, websites, social media activities, etc), it can be surprisingly tough to get your branding ideas translated into the designs of your dreams.

Why? While there can be many reasons – chances are, the most likely culprit will be disconnects between what you think you asked the design professionals to do and what they believed you wanted.

And rather than have to deal with the aftermath of not getting what you thought you would/should from a creative partnerships, wouldn’t it be good to get ahead of the posse and set these relationships up for greater success before the fact?

That’s the topic for today’s expert interview, when branding expert Alec Drew (also known as the straight talker) shared his advice on how business owners and promoters can work more effectively with design experts to create better brand stories.

How to Partner With Design Professional to Create Winning Brand Stories

Listen in as we discuss:

• The single biggest challenge you must address before you even begin to design your brand
• Why too many businesses don’t get what they want when working with creative professionals to design brands, websites, and more
• What you simply must know to achieve better results from your partnerships
• The single most important question you should ask creative professionals when deciding who you should work with
• What it really takes to create a winning brand

Over to You And Your Experiences of Working With Creative Professionals

If you’ve worked with third party creative professionals to help you to share your brand stories – what observations and suggestions would you share about setting these relationships for greater success?

What challenges have you encountered and what did you do about them?

Interview Transcript

Eamonn: You’re so welcome to the Reluctant Speakers Club Expert series. Today, we’re going to talk about why it is so important to pay attention to your message when you are creating your brand and also expanding what people think about your business in general. We’re joined today by an expert in this field. We have Alec Drew. Alec, you’re known as the straight talker.

Alec: That’s correct.

Eamonn: More than that, you are an expert in Brand Management and in Corporate Communication. And as somebody who’s been involved in this space for as long as I have, and there aren’t many people who fall into that category, I’m so delighted to have you here.

Alec: Thanks very much.

Eamonn: Now, you specialize in the whole area of helping people to figure out how to work with more creative folks and how their message is brought to bear. What are the biggest challenges that you find businesses face in trying to figure out what is their message, first off, and then how to get that delivered through other professionals?

Alec: I think the challenge that most businesses have, really, stems from the fact that they actually don’t know what they do. So, a typical example would be an accountant. What do you do? We do book keeping, pensioners’ advice and, through an organization, Dublin Chamber, where I set up a subgroup called The Business Owner’s Network many years ago, we actually run a little practical exercise, which was a bit of fun, and in one of these cases, the accountant was the victim. So, we sat him at a table and said to him…

Eamonn: The victim? Yeah, I like that.

Alec: Yeah, he was. He was the victim! We said to him, “Tell us, Shawn, what do you do?” He said, “Well, I specialize in…” That’s the word everybody uses these days. It really gets on my nerves, but anyway, we specialize in accountancy, book-keeping, pensions advise. We said, “So what?” He went, “Okay, yes, and we outsource to India, so we can reduce costs and things like that.” So what? We need to hear something different. We kept pushing him and pushing him. This went on for about 10 minutes. It was fascinating as he backed and backed into a corner. Eventually, he said, “We developed a software that tracks the cost of delivering goods from one part of Ireland to another.” We went, now we have it. Now we know what makes you different from all the other accountants out there.

Eamonn: Sometimes, it’s that journey, I suppose.

Alec: Yes. If you were to take one of the big brands, McDonald’s. If you ask a lot of people what do McDonald’s do, they sell burgers and chips. If that’s all they did, they wouldn’t be the global empire that they are.

Eamonn: Exactly, yeah.

Alec: They provide an experience and they’ve got it tailored out and down to a T. Branding is a lot more than just that, and the question that you asked me is, “What are the challenges?” The challenge is to get business people to understand actually what they do.

Eamonn: Yeah. That’s the starting point and, even if somebody does have that understanding, commonly, they still have an issue where they go to a designer or developer and they say, “Make me one of those,” and they don’t get what they thought they would. Why does that happen?

Alec: Because they go along with a solution, rather than a problem. This is strange. The design industry suffers from two things and they are the plumbers with the leaky tap. They actually are very poor at communicating the value they deliver and good designers will give you a return on investment of about three times your investment in there, at a minimal. It could be a lot more, so that’s one of the key things that people don’t understand.

Eamonn: Well, how do you actually help, if you like, the designer and developers to help you, because oftentimes, they’ll expect you to know the answers or maybe, because they do not want to get things wrong, they ask you to specify something that maybe you don’t know exactly how that design should turn out.

Alec: I’ll give you an interesting story around this that I think might be relevant to help you out. We were short-listed for the brand for the national development plan back in the year 2000 when it came out. So, we were down to four companies and what the department of finance, who were running at the time, said, “We want design sketches from each of the four of you.” We said, “No, we can’t do that, because we don’t know enough about what you are doing.” Strangely enough, they picked us.

Eamonn: Oooh, probably because you were wonderfully honest.

Alec: Yes. I was fascinated by that. Then, we discovered what the real project was. They wanted a new national identity delivered in six weeks. Our first meeting was with 35 officials from five government departments, and this was about managing people. We said, “What you’ve asked us to do is to create a new national identity in six weeks. That’s not going to happen. I’ll tell you why. There’s at least six months research in the National Archives.”

Eamonn: Yes.

Alec: It’ll come under criticism from newspapers, no matter where you’re gong with this. This is going to happen. We said, however, there are three national identities as it stands. You’ve got the tri-color but it doesn’t work in black and white, so we can eliminate that. The second one is we have the shamrock, but it’s twee Irish. It’s touristy. That’s not going to work. We have a third one, which is the Harp, the symbol of government. So, when any solution comes, we’ll have The Harp involved. Once they understood that, they went, “Yeah, that’s fine. We’re happy with that.”

Eamonn: So the thing is that you actually challenged your customer, and oftentimes, of course, the person you’re dealing with may not do that. So, if you were to kind of help or nudge, if you like, a speaker on to finding the right questions to ask, what would you put top of your list?

Alec: One in particular is, “Tell me, if I gave you a project, how you would take it from the start to the finish.” It’s what I mentioned before, a methodology. I want to see how you do that, because, typically, too many people in the design industry are artists and what they do is keep throwing designs at you and you kind of go, “Well, I like that one.” “Why?” “Because it’s red and matches the United Supporter, so I’ll go with that one.”

It’s to show a methodology and if a designer can’t show you that, you should walk away straight away because you’re on a [inaudible 00:06:35] nothing, and the real sadness is, because there are so few companies that will take you on that journey properly, most companies have a very poor experience of design, spend a lot of money, get no return on it and then don’t return. That upsets me.

Eamonn: Well, I would upset almost everybody.

Alec: Yes, so there’s no winners in it.

Eamonn: No. Just to close out, maybe, with one question about what it is that, if you like, creates winners in the brand game? What would be the one critical bit of advice that you would give people about selling their brands out there and their communication, of course, with the people who helped them to create it, to succeed?

Alec: There is a lot of stuff out there about brands but to kind of simplify it, a brand starts here and here and the person who’s setting up either the product or service. That’s where it starts. They have a vision. They have a passion for something. Where the brand dies is they are not able to communicate that to their staff. That is the first place, because if your staff don’t understand what the brand is all about and the heart and mind behind it, it never goes any further.

Eamonn: I love that, because it’s all about the why. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Look, Alec I know this was going to be a great chat. Thank you so much for being here, Alec.

Alec: Thanks again.

Eamonn: Thank you for watching. This has been Eamonn O’Brien and you have been watching The Reluctant Speaker’s Club Expert Series, and, until the next time, happy speaking.

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