The Future Of Branding & Brand Strategy (w/ Marty Neumeier)

What's up brand builders Stephen Houraghan here on the Brand Master Podcast and in this episode we're speaking with branning legend the one the only mr marty newmar now marty newmar is an absolute pioneer in the branding industry and he's the best-selling author of industry classics such as the brand gap zag and the brand flip to name a few and in our chat today marty shares his wisdom on how to master brand strategy and ask bigger questions to connect your brand with your audience so if you want to learn what brand strategy is how this discipline

is evolving and the skills that you can develop and the steps that you can take to become a brand strategist then stick around for this episode of the brand master podcast welcome to the brand master podcast shows specialized in helping branding professionals and entrepreneurs to build brands using strategy psychology and creative thinking [Music] hello everyone and welcome to the brand master podcast i am absolutely delighted and privileged to have the one and only marty newmar on our show with us today marty thank you so much for taking the time out to join us today oh

my pleasure stephen this is going to be great thanks for inviting me now i i you know i am i'm a fan of of yours and when i say it's a it's a privilege and an honor to have you on the show i absolutely mean that when i got into design and branding i quickly realized that branding was what i was happiest doing and where i wanted to be so that's when i started to kind of dive down that rabbit hole and and learn a bit more and started to to dig deeper and that's when

i came across the brand gap and that is what completely opened my mind to you know what branding was all about did you ever expect that that book would be so popular and put you on this trajectory to to be a pioneer in the space um well i hoped it would but i i when i wrote it i realized this was either going to be um a home run or i was going to strike out it was you know because i i i wrote the book and designed the book in such a counter-intuitive way or

at least a you know a way that well you know in a style that was not typical of business books you know it's it's short it's succinct it's designed even though the writing is designed in the sense of being very succinct um and memorable and quotable and all that kind of stuff which wasn't the style of well it still isn't the style of business book books that you find now so i either thought you know people are going to love it or they're going to hate it and um when i saw it finished you know

look look through it after all all the work that went into it i kind of just thought i hate it i just don't i don't think it's good um and i think i was just probably sick of it but when you know when it went out there and um people got to look at and start to buy it it just shot up the charts and at one point i think probably after six weeks of being on the market it was number 15 on amazon so that's pretty incredible for a business book especially a different one

or maybe it's because it was different i'm sure it was but it definitely caught people's attention and um got you know um passed around silicon valley where i was working at the time and started to change people's idea of what a brand brand is so it was great for me and and then what happened is um um someone took a bunch of slides that i had created of the whole book really the whole book and they put it on a new a new website called slideshare brand new at the time and i didn't know about

it and it probably took me two years to figure out that people were getting it there for free so i was shocked to see how many views there were of it thousands and thousands of views which you know that's books i could have sold yeah but um but i was grateful for it because it actually was probably part of the success of the book is that it got got the word out there got people reading it and talking about it and i think by now if you go to slideshare it's there's like um 25 million

views or something so that's going to be one of the most read business books of all time so absolutely that worked out beautifully for me yeah well i i posted uh i posted a question in our group uh just last week about you know what has been the most influential branding book for you and hundreds of of respondents and by far the brand gap and gap was sitting on the top so it's been so so influential to to so many people yeah it's great to hear um it's it's it's been gone a long time i

mean it's you know people are still buying it at the same rate they were back then um i've written seven other books on branding and design um but that one uh still still the one everyone talks about so it's funny um yeah you can't can't get away from your first success it'll haunt you forever but don't haunt you or or or drive more and i've i've read every single one of of the others and yeah the the brand gap is is the one that kind of changed it all for me it changed the way i

think and about what branding really was and you know there's so many quotes from you out there there are so many quotes from different people about what branding is because it's such it's such a fluffy thing because it means different things to different people and it but instead of instead of focusing on branding and getting another quote from you about branding talk to us about brand strategy in a bit more detail so what is brand strategy to you it's a long term plan to out-maneuver competitors through radical differentiation and when i say radical i mean

radical i think what happens is companies believe they're being different because they know that differentiation is strategically very helpful you know you don't want to be competing head-to-head with anybody but they underestimate how much difference you really need to make it clear to customers that you really are different so that takes constant work and companies usually find that even if they start out really different they kind of collapse to the center after a while they they um they they become normal they become like everybody else because i just think humans are like that we like

to be we like to fit in and fitting in is not the best way to stand out right so it's just it's just counterintuitive for people so you really have to always think about how can we be more radically differentiated knowing that that's going to appear it's just a little bit differentiated to the world outside since they don't they don't care what you're doing they don't know everything you're doing so you know you're not paying that much attention you have to exaggerate that difference so when when we we speak about branding and especially for creatives

and professional brand builders we speak to a lot of people who misunderstand what branding is and they believe that when you have this visual asset and you have you know this this website and this this presence that you have a brand but in in what you're saying without that difference you really don't have anything that's going to really be a draw card for those people to look towards your brand as opposed to everybody else out there in the market when you say when you say radically different how because of course we see disruption all the

time we're seeing disruption but with so many businesses it's it's so hard for businesses to to go in there and disrupt all the time how how can brands be so radically different what is the process for for defining that radical difference oh well there's no easy way i mean this takes a lot of judgment and imagination courage a lot of things that are difficult to come by sometimes in business but that's what you need i mean it's not going to work otherwise some companies are born that way right they have an idea that's just dramatically

different from the beginning yeah um and lo and behold it works right but if they didn't if they didn't create that brand um with knowledge of how to do it you know with with solid theory behind it what usually happens is when they try to repeat that performance they fall short because they don't know how they did it the first time it was an accident so they have an accidental brand they came up with something that was different that they believed in and sure enough they found an audience for it they found a tribe of

people willing to buy it and then when they went to do it again they didn't realize that they really didn't know how to do it so what what this the discipline of branding does is teach you how to do it um over and over at will so that's what good brand people can do that they've done it many times and they've seen a lot and they've worked on different kinds of businesses and they can come in and take a get a pretty good aim on what you know has to happen and help these companies um

because often the founders [Music] don't have the background or the the framework for creating something new that has the success factor of the original thing that brought him to the dance and when we when we so zagg is obviously another another absolutely outstanding book that that you wrote a few years after the brand gap and obviously the premise of that book is when everybody else zigs you zag and i think a a great way for professionals for branding professionals to be able to zag is to find an area of specialization what what would you say

are the advantages of being specialized in a certain area being versus being more generalized than and kind of a jack of all trades well i guess the first thing is you reduce the thr the threat of competition so um what you don't want to do is just be the same as everybody else because then the only way to win in that competition is by lowering your price and and then that cuts off a lot of options right if you're not your profit margins are low it's just difficult to go anywhere from there so you end

up just working harder and making less money so you want to reduce competition preferably um you want to become number one in a in a growing category either by starting the category yourself which is what disruption is about or by battling your way to the top and that's the hard way because usually you know brands are perceptions that customers have you know that that's my definition of a brand it's a person's gut feeling about a product service or company it exists in customer minds customers minds it doesn't exist somewhere in the company it's it's an

effect of the things that you're doing right so um to to get a customer to change his or her mind about who's number one in the category is really difficult right you have to do a lot so it's often easier to um just start out as different you know start your own category by by stretching it in a way that only that you're number one in it to begin with so that's that's the idea of disruption um specialization allows you to not compete on price um and to really get more of the right kind of

customers the kind of customers that are going to take you someplace so you know the the first thing that people say if you suggest that maybe they should specialize they should narrow uh their their offering to a smaller group of people even though that group might be more passionate about what they're doing so the first reaction is no no we want to widen it we want the most number of customers possible but the world doesn't work that way because when you broaden your um your offering to to appeal to more people then you're also broadening

it so that you come in competition with more companies so what you want to do is narrow it to a place where nobody is right you want to find that area where nobody's working there's no business happening there but there's an audience and and that's hard to find sometimes you have to really think about that but it's it's almost better to find a small passionate audience that isn't being served and then grow that audience rather than say hey there's a large audience maybe we can do something like that and go in there and compete with

them then you just you're just you and your competitors are just um competing away the profits you just have to keep lowering your price to win and and that's not really what branding is about branding the goal of branding for many companies is to get more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price not a lower price so you want more people you want to grow the grow the business you want to buy more of what you're selling for a longer period of time because you really your profit margins go way

up if you have repeat business and then you know you want to get a higher price so if you're constantly lowering your price or feeling a lot of price pressure it's probably because you're not differentiated enough yeah and you know when you when you think about it as you said before again it's counter-intuitive and a lot of people have this pushback because they feel if they narrow their field they have less potential business but in reality they're making themselves more relevant to that specific group of people so that they'll see them a lot clearer than

they would if they were broader based and had broader messaging so i know that this is a struggle that a lot of a lot of creatives have out there when when you know they go into the market as a freelancer looking for business they they are afraid to narrow that that field because they're afraid of missing out on all of this business with with all the changes that are going on and obviously it's a different environment today than when you know you were doing packaging design with with apple it was a there's a lot more

people out there offering these kinds of services what can modern creatives do to prepare for the change that's going on so that they can steady stay ahead of the curve in the coming years well creativity no matter what branch of it you're in whether you're a graphic designer or a web designer programmer you know even strategists um those skills can be very powerful but not by themselves not as a general offering of skills you know hey i'm a strategist you need any strategy no that's not going to help you have to apply it to something

and where you apply it means everything so if you can find a place to apply those skills where there's nobody else fishing in that spot um and it's something you really really want to do because you're passionate about it then you've found it right you may have to kind of change that over over the years well you know because if once you get successful at something things happen you know people crowd into your space the biggest thing that happens or the worst thing that happens is is that the world moves on to something else right

and so you have to move with the world and you also have to consider uh your changing uh interests you know you want to be able to stretch yourself and and do new things so it's it's a moving target and that's that's you know how how things work in the in the in the consulting business so when i you know when i was um i started as a graphic designer and then i became a writer because i wanted to control my graphic design i didn't want people messing it up with you know bad copywriting so

i had to learn that and um and then then i realized that another thing that was messing up my work is bad strategy i mean companies with dumb ideas that were forcing me to do something that that i knew wouldn't work for them so i had to learn strategy just in self-defense but it it was a great thing to to great a freeing thing because once i understood the idea of strategy i could actually apply it to my own business and become more specialized in a way that would make me happier but also look at

my clients business in a new light in a more strategic light and it wasn't long before they were saying well you know you're doing this package for us can you do some strategy around that like you know so we know that we're doing the right thing and so i thought okay um i thought you guys were the strategist you know you're running the company so obviously strategy isn't as well understood as i had thought and that that was the problem right companies would come with these briefs that you know that didn't make any sense to

me having done this for a while so i started um learning strategy and bringing that to to the design work i was doing and then eventually started just selling the strategy um you know and the ability to connect strategy and creativity in ways that would add up to something important so yeah um anyway so i um i kept i kept specializing yeah until i finally realized you really have to be different and so i picked a niche that was super narrow which was to to be the guy whose company um designed the physical packaging uh

well and the graphic design of a package that sold software in a store and it was it turned out to be mostly business software so business software in a package in a retail store was that and you know my other design friends said you're just going to do that how can there be enough money in that well turns out if you get you know that was a growing category for 10 years if you get a lot of that you know let's say 25 of that business because you're the only one that's specializing in it that

can be a huge amount of money very profitable kind of thing so um and it was it was amazing so that sold me on on strategy so you know this this idea of narrowing your focus uh as a powerful tool um to get more of the business that you want and i i i think that's it's important to kind of recall what you said before about you know it's not just about putting your flag on the ground and saying i do brand strategy it's about applying that to something and in your case you applied it

to this very very narrow field you identified this this very narrow field and you went in there and went all in on this particular area so that's you applying that rule you have to go all in you have to prove that you are the expert in that and when you start you may not be the expert but you probably more expert than anybody else if if you've you know identified it right there that this is something you could really do probably you're already in the lead but you need to prove that and so you know

i needed to learn everything about uh what a software package needed to be since no one knew i mean they were just making up stuff so um what does the front have to do what does the side have to do what is the top what's the job of the top what is the back for um how big should it be this should they all be the same or should they vary um can there be creativity in the shape of the box or is that a dumb thing to do um you know how do you symbolize

software how do you show software all it is is you know it's ones and zeros so you know those kinds of issues became important and so through testing and theorizing and trial and error we learned how to do this and then then i could offer that to clients and say you know you're probably going to talk to some other firms ask them if they know about this stuff ask them what they know about what goes on each panel of the package um how to increase sales using the package you know and so just set it

up in a way that they can never win against you right yes they won't they won't have the depth that you've got and you can't really do that if you're doing a million things if you're spreading your knowledge all over the place you really need to like bear down and work on that thing now eventually you may get tired of doing that i did after about 10 years i just said i this this is good money but i need to move on and um so i used just applied the same principles to something new that

i'm going to be a specialist in this other area and um every time you do that you get there more quickly because you know what you have to learn and how you're going to present yourself um and how you're going to change over time and who the competitors you know you just learn how to do it you get a feel for it yeah you know something something that i that i find that's you know it's it's quite entertaining and and funny in our industry you have so many different perspectives and because you know there's a

lot of creatives in there we've you know we we tend to to put our foot in each camp and and a few camps that i've seen come up time and again will be the marty newmeier camp versus the mark ritzen camp versus the byron shire camp and all of these disciplines with you know branding with being the the mardi side of things you know the the byron sharp being you know really heavily detailed on you know the science behind why we buy etc what what do you see is the the main difference between brand strategy

versus marketing strategy oh well marketing and brand really exist in on different planes in a way um not that one's more important than the other they're both super important um but marketing tends to be um um more tactical um there are shorter time frames for a lot of it not all of it but you know it's your job to keep revenues coming in like clockwork right and and to increase those revenues and that's uh that's a big job right and brand strategy doesn't worry about short-term sales as much as as as marketing it's more concerned

about a larger i would say larger strategic issues um larger in the sense that the time horizon is longer like you're you're really planning for a long-term success you're making you're preparing the ground for long-term success marketing needs that ground to be prepared and certainly people in marketing can do branding but in a large company the head of marketing the cmo is not going to be able to do branding for the company too it's just too they're they're just they require different sort of energy levels and different ways of thinking so i think you need

both uh i think they're complementary uh so there's to me there's no war between marketing and branding yeah yeah and i think you know practically people who are in marketing have have a better shot of understanding branding than other people designers actually can understand branding quite well because they're working with it but they do have to open their mind to um to the sort of practicalities of business and marketing so he you know all of this stuff is good um but but i would say in large companies there needs to be somebody um whose sole

responsibility is the brand if you if you define the brand as something that unifies the customer community which is kind of the way i look at it you need somebody to manage those customers right um you're not your goal isn't to as extract as many transactions as possible from your customers if you're a brand person it's about creating this uh loyalty in a group of people so they'll just keep buying stuff from you because they love you right and it's it's it's not tactical it's strategic and and so i i see branding is more on

a level with business strategy in fact i don't even see the difference anymore business strategy and brand strategy have to be swimming in the same pool i mean you know um at the same time marketing people have to be brilliant in in different ways and really on top of it i mean branding is like playing sports or something you know you're watching the scoreboard every minute um and uh branding is a little more um say philosophical than that um and it's more like sort of the bigger moves of a business and it's all about customers

it's all about who they are and who they want to become you know how do you help your customers become what they want to become that's the whole thing not how can you extract as many you know dollars out of their wallet as possible that's that's more marketing's concern and that's important too you don't have a company without revenues yeah um you don't you also don't have a company without customers customers who believe in you and will stick with you even when you make a mistake right so um anyway that's that's how i think about

it yeah and and i i know that you've been a massive advocate for us seeing somebody in the boardroom who represents the brand only so that's the chief branding officer talk to me about the chief branding officer what is a chief branding officer and how do you see that role evolving in the coming years well the chief brand officer is um [Music] the person who's speaking on behalf of customers that's sort of representing customers to the company and and vice versa and that requires um sort of uh bridging the gap between logic and magic you

know most companies are you know in the last hundred years companies have been all about logic and numbers and sort of left brain stuff but that doesn't get you into the minds and hearts of customers as much as the magic part the magic comes from um really great touch points um speaking to people in a voice that that that goes right down inside them you know i mean all this kind of stuff is more like art right and you've got to have both so who's going to be responsible for bringing the logic and the magic

together um you know whoever can do that is probably a natural cbo chief brand officer now so my poster boy for for cbos is steve jobs steve jobs his title was the ceo but everything he was doing was the role of a cdo the way i looked at it so he was all about you know which products do we produce and how do they fit together what's the what's the architecture of all these brands all these sub brands that we have how do they work together to make um to create something more than just the

individual products you know how do we make one and one become 11. he was doing that he was also all about how do we communicate it to people all right so he was very involved in that what he was not not involved in is um shareholder meetings um you know spreadsheets the finance part of it um he left that to other people uh which is a nice nice thing to happen but he was the figurehead for apple in a way but the reason that worked is because he was all about customers and you know how

do we how do we change their lives how do we make them into better people um so that's kind of the job of the cbo and there have been other cbo's like claudia kotska who was the cbo without being called that um at procter gamble and she helped create a huge change there um at intel there was susan rockrise um so you know she had to um communicate translate between the audience um out there and the engineers who were building the products right so engineers are like they don't really understand how people other people think

so she had to always be explaining that to them look here's what we need here's what the market needs and getting everybody to work together so the cbo is really it's a it's an executive job and it's about how do we get all how do we get this complex company to execute a simple idea um right who how do we get people to play together and collaborate and uh in ways that that that make us richer yeah and i and i love that because it it really is the setting the foundation for what the brand

is all about and a lot of a lot of small businesses certainly they they jump into the you know the the visual part of of the brand and then straight to marketing without really getting clear on what the brand is about what their message is who they're really trying to connect with and what they want to say what they want to you know place in the mind of of that audience about what they should mean to them so well that's you know that's how brands you know that's the roots of brand go back to identity

basically you know just identifying the uh the product which is pretty a small part of branding today so you know yeah today you need i mean those elements are important i mean you have to have an identity you have to have a tone of voice you have to communicate with people you need design you have to make products all that but that's um not really what people are buying people are buying some improvement to their lives usually and and um you gotta you've got to really have a sense of what they need from you and

you have to be able to fulfill that need in a way that nobody else can so it's difficult it's difficult work but if you don't get the big things right those those big things aren't in place all the advertising and marketing and selling in the world is not going to get you where you want to go because you're mis you don't know where you're going it'll get you someplace but but where you know so i think branding is something that um informs the whole company and its customers about what we're doing here together you know

the three big questions that branding answers are who are you who are we uh what do we do uh why does it matter and if i were going to add a fourth one i would say it's how how should we show up in the world yeah yeah and that's that's it it's really about clarity it's about asking bigger questions rather than than than just going out there and selling products really the questions that are being answered are you know why is this product a good fit for me and why is this product going to make

my life better and if you're able to get some clarity on that you know you find a bridge to really connect with them and step above the noise of of everybody else and that really takes uh a skill to be able to do that to find exactly what these people want and how to give it to them in a way that's going to be compelling to them so with with that in mind what would you say are some of the top skills that strategists need to bring to the table or that people who are in

design at the moment they want to bridge out to or expand out the strategy what skills could they develop to become a good strategist yeah i mean i think designers um can be strategists and they can certainly be strategists in terms of their own work to make sure that it's strategically sound um they have an equal chance to get there the that as do other kinds of people people who are in leadership roles or marketing roles uh have equal chance to get there you know but i would say um you know there's some meta skills

that are nice to have those are skills that allow you to learn other skills quickly so curiosity would be really important curious people do better at strategy imagination right it's not strategy isn't about checking boxes or making lists or anything although you do a lot of that it's more like can you imagine a future that that doesn't exist right now and then you need judgment uh you need critical thinking skills uh you need to be able to be objective about things and use numbers when uh when numbers make sense and and and use intuition when

intuition is is more useful you need to become an artist of the possible yeah so um then you know i mean just the practical skills that could go into it um you know are marketing and design writing leadership skills storytelling skills storytelling skills are huge in brand strategy you have to be able to tell a very simple compelling story that illustrates your difference and and how you're going to make somebody's life better storytelling is really good for that and do you ever get uh questions from from customers about what the roi of branding is because

i know that me personally i've come across this before i know that uh you know a lot of people in in our group they get talking with clients and today with so many metrics available for digital marketing you know the roi on this and it's very easy for business owners like that to to chase those metrics so that they can get some kind of guaranteed return on investment have you have you come across that question before what's the law of branding and how do you answer it well i think you should try to figure that

out i mean you know you the simplest answer is you you get a brand accountant and they'll tell you what your brand is worth you know so apple's brand is worth i don't know 65 of their uh the valuation of their total total company coca-cola is up there somewhere too i mean it can get pretty high um or you could be like microsoft was around the turn of the century they were um their brand was worth 17 of the value of their company so obviously branding wasn't the reason microsoft was successful that you know they

were losers at branding but they had a lock on the marketplace so that's kind of like brute strength this is what they had and now since their brand got sort of behind it's a struggle for them because they never invested in that and they don't have the lock on the market that they used to have so um i think branding is is going to give you more roi than just about anything um but you know companies can work around branding they don't they don't necessarily need it but i think the best companies the one that

lasts the companies that last a long time typically have strong brands yeah so i you know in my book the brand flip i've got um a way to measure brands it's very simple anybody can do it it doesn't cost a lot of money it'll give you a really good uh heuristic about how your brand is doing and it's based on the real things you need to measure you could hire a brand accountant um there are lots of little measurements you can use and new ones are coming out all the time and and the and the

the evidence for brand being very powerful is is coming out uh slowly over the years but you can even see it in its effect on on stock price you know um it's quite remarkable actually so um i would i just think if you know how to do branding and you've got the the framework in place the infrastructure in place to do it if you really grasp it you can really do a lot with branding and i think again apple great example of how to use branding um to really increase your profit margins to the max

yeah yeah and with with so many different disciplines out there within marketing and branding we can you know we could go on for days we've got designers we've got copywriters we've got social media managers you know marketing strategists seo writers and and we we seem to be developing this broader understanding now of the port the importance of strategy so a lot of them are turning around and looking internally as to how they can bring brand strategy into their world so that they can take what they do and make it more effective so for for professionals

like that designers copywriters social media managers what would your advice be to them to you know the first thing that you would do if you were in their position you know being an executioner on a certain area what would you do to to kind of step more towards strategy so that you can improve those services well i think the first thing to do is is decide and make the decision that you're not going to do what everybody else is doing that's the hardest thing because we all like to do what other people are doing especially

if they're successful we want to do something like that but that's not how how it works strategy is not about copying other people it's about being original in some way that matters yeah i mean mattering is the new marketing that's the way i always think about it is like if you matter to people that's going to be so powerful and then marketing becomes easier selling becomes easier because um you don't have to really sell they come to you they find you you know so um how do you do that in your own business um there

are many ways but and but the way you do it should be unique and so then then you start to think about well okay here's something i could do that nobody's doing is it really a good idea do i really want to do this am i going to be happy doing it for a long time so you got to ask yourself some sort of deeper questions like like that and then if everything looks good then you throw yourself into it and just realize that even if this category you're inventing doesn't exist that doesn't mean it

can't exist but you have to do the work to bring it to bring it out to the world to make it into to shape it into something um that people can see you know it's about cutting cubes out of clouds you take something that seems amorphous to people and you make it very distinctive and then you can offer you package it and you can offer it um and uh i think there's just nothing more rewarding than than bringing something new to the world instead of just competing with other people doing the same thing and then

you know getting turning bitter because you you know you don't get any respect i went through a period like that is like i know i'm better than these bigger design firms but they're getting all the big clients you know well that's because they're doing something that those big clients are attracted to and um the way you can beat those bigger companies is by doing something that maybe is too small for them to take on maybe it's just like they can't make any money doing that so they're gonna succeed by being bigger you know yeah or

having more offices or you know having a track record with working with giant companies but um i mean that's the situation i was in when i decided to design software packaging um i was up against some really big companies but i found that it was very easy to win in the in those sorts of shootouts where you know they have to choose some firm uh when i showed them you know here's how you do it and look at the success i've had look at the increases in in sales patterns uh when i do that do

these packages a certain way and then i start looking at those big companies and going well you know they're big companies but they don't seem to know anything about this specialty so since our product matters matters to us we're going to have to go with the best now part of that is the wonderful part about that is if you do have a specialty like that you can charge more for it in fact you have to charge more for it if you want to be taken seriously if you've convinced someone that you are that's the specialist

in this you need to have a price that's commensurate with that and so um you have to raise your price i'm sorry to tell you that but you have to raise your price you can always you know you can always negotiate downward if you want to give them a good deal but you have to set your price your anchor price should be pretty high and so my my price for i always kept the price for my software design at the highest if i heard someone was charging more i would you know maybe add another 20

to that price and um i never found that that discouraged um clients uh usually it attracted them but they would be the first to say oh well you know we can't afford that and then that might open a discussion and said well why why is that what kind of prices are you seeing um and maybe you could say you know if i if if we did it a different way where i could maybe get the price down 20 with that would that help and you know you're playing with a huge profit margin margin that even

if you you know cut it in half you would make more more money than anybody else uh so so that's a great feeling that that can only happen when you're differentiating really strongly right so that's why apple's profit margins are huge because no one can do products like they can with such beauty and sleekness um there's cheek products um and every everything they do is just at a higher level and this it requires that they charge more for that but also it makes sense to people that they charge more for it it's attractive yeah yeah

and look you know i'm i'm not going to keep you here all day you've got uh you're you're there on your your sunday afternoon but i do want to ask you one more thing about strategy versus execution so you know we will find you know marketing firms branding firms out there who will do you know do absolutely everything from brand strategy to identity design web development you know facebook ads execution what are your thoughts on strategy versus execution do you believe the strategist should be involved in the execution of how the brand is is expressed

in the market or do you see these things as separate where you know you get to focus on the meaning of the brand and allow somebody else to go and execute on that strategy so the assumption there is that strategy comes first and then you once you have a strategy hand that off to someone who's going to execute it some designers or creative people and then they may make it you know they they make it real so that it can go to market um that's really the wrong way to do it so i think the

way to do it is a strategy and execution have to happen at the same time they have to be intertwined so it's great if if the team of people doing it the strategists and the creative people really know each other and can and can look out for each other and make sure that you know this strategy can be executed in some really cool way and also the designers can keep the strategist from doing something that's so boring that they'll never be able to save it so i think they they each have to know something about

um uh each other's work and i would say that you know ideally there would be a strategist a head strategist and a head creative person working as equal partners that's the way to bridge the gap between the logic and magic that i was talking about so that worked really well in the advertising world back in the 50s and 60s when the when the the creative team was born where you had a copywriter and a designer working equally and where they almost finish each other's sentences i mean i think that can work the same same at

the strategy execution level and we may not be able we we may not be talking about two people we may be talking about two teams that have to work together yeah but i would really advise against um doing the strategy first then the execution because you've sealed off so many avenues when you've say this is what we're doing now take us there it makes execution a tactical thing instead of a an equal partner and i know from being a designer and being a lot of these collaborative sessions with people that designers come up with ideas

that strategists might never come up with um you know and so why wouldn't you avail yourself of those ideas so that strategy is informed by more possibilities yeah so so if you have the the teams or the skills at your disposal to have them involved from uh from early on so that they can have their input as to how this brand might be executed on the outside it's some some great advice listen marty i i i really uh uh thank you for for coming on the show now if anybody wants to get in touch with

mr marty newmeier how do they how do they go about doing that what's the best place to get you on where's where's your your most active platform well i've got two so one is my author um website that's just marty neumeyer.com yep and then if you're interested in learning more about branding and expanding your skills stretching your abilities a bit um i'm i have a firm called level c that's teaching branding so i think it's the only company that's teaching branding specifically from the point of view of people who have done it yeah and you

can be certified in some specialties and work your way up through that and we're adding more classes all the time so that's level c uh dot org dot org dot c yeah you can see what we're building there and i think we've got you know we just started a couple years ago but it's um doing much better than we imagined um it's very gratifying we've got you know i think in six months we'll probably have a thousand graduates of our various master classes and they're working their way up from a basic understanding of branding and

how to work together on a brand team all the way up to potentially becoming a cbo yeah yeah and and look i can i can vouch for that i've i've uh jumped through the the first level i was really hoping that because i know that you started you know doing those world tours and and you know having the the physical classes and unfortunately we uh we we all got cut off with uh with covet uh but hopefully they'll they'll return to the physical environment uh before too long is that what you're hoping is that you're

holding up the show on the road again yeah we want to uh do more live classes because we think it's just uh people need that they need to to meet each other i mean part of this part of it is um the people that you meet um can really help you you can help each other um and uh just enrich your whole experience of branding when you meet other people it's a little bit harder when you haven't ever sat with them at a table so we want to do that but we also i mean i'm

grateful for the pandemic in that way that it um taught us how to teach online um and that's bringing it to a lot of people who couldn't necessarily um get away from the office to go you know to go to london let's say and take a class for three days um so the expense of it and then the time away from the office becomes difficult so um i think we're going to do it both ways um and they both have their their advantages and disadvantages yeah yeah well i'm absolutely looking forward to uh to getting

back into the classroom wherever that may be maybe it'll be london maybe it'll be sydney i'm not too sure but uh but i'll definitely look forward we're hell-bent on getting to london to finish our master class three uh in march and then april we're gonna be in in philadelphia uh pennsylvania and so that's it for the live locations uh we we we started doing them in more far-flung locations you know try to really reach out and get to different uh cities but we couldn't get large enough classes to make it exciting so we've got to

force people to come to major hubs to do this but uh for those people that can't do that we do have the online classes and that's been great yeah we've really enjoyed teaching them so yeah it's been it yeah we've been we've been kind of thrown into to the situation but you know we've we've all learned very quickly that you know this is it's not too hard we can all do it we've all got these computers and just like you and i speaking on literally the opposite sides of the world you know you just you

just get into it and you you you roll yourselves up and get on with it and when you get to know people from your class or whatever who live in different parts of the world you can think about collaborating with them long distance over zoom or whatever and a lot of our graduates are doing that they're forming little alliances with other people so that they can accomplish things they couldn't do on their own um and so you know the nice thing is that this these uh classes give you a framework for working together so if

you understand brand and the way that i've talked about it in my books anybody else who understands it that way um can can easily collaborate and you'll be on the same page you won't be arguing about definitions yeah marty it's been an absolute pleasure uh really i really appreciate you taking the time um and i really hope to catch up with you at some stage with that next level c and uh i look forward to meeting you then thanks so much steven it's been fun thanks marty [Music] we really hope you enjoyed today's episode thanks

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