Episode 85: Karley Cunningham of Big Bold Brand

Creative Strategist & Growth Accelerator Karley Cunningham develops brand leaders by taking businesses from overcrowded, competitive spaces into blue ocean territory, where they can confidently stand out and thrive.

Her international client base benefits from accelerated growth, profit and stability as her innovative Surefire Method™ provides them with an infallible business strategy and brand toolkit to stand out in the sea of sameness, attract the people their business needs to thrive, and become a brand leader in their industry. Karley’s entrepreneurial success story is featured in the awarded book The Widest Net by Pam Slim. Believing deeply in the practice of ‘givers gain,’ she’s developed a global network and rarely goes a day without making a referral or connection. When not focusing on the business or expanding her network, she can be found somewhere in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest with her wife and dog in their 4x4.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

Trends in the branding space, what business owners, marketers, and others should be thinking about
Why branding is not marketing, and the implications this has for how you build your brand
Karley’s Surefire Strategy that she uses to help companies refine their strategic direction and craft winning brands
How to evaluate a branding firm if you’re about to start a branding effort
Why it’s essential to have the C-Suite involved in any branding process
How to use your values to create a truly differentiated organization

Additional resources:

Transcript

Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to a Brave New podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing, but more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands’ success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in.

Hello and welcome to the show. So happy to have you on today. Today, I have Karley Cunningham from Big Bold Brand up in Vancouver, British Columbia, joining me. We're going to have a conversation diving into all things brand, what brand is, what it isn't, how you can build an authentic brand for your organization. And so without further ado, I'd love to welcome her into the show. Awesome. Well, Karley, it's great to have you on the show today.

Karley Cunningham:
It is so fun to be here with you, Josh. I know we've got a ton to talk about based on what we were talking about in the green room.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, absolutely. So before we dive into stuff, I know we're going to talk about all things brand today and dive into a bunch of topics pretty deeply, but I'd love to give you a chance to share your story with my audience, tell a little bit about your career path and where it's taking you.

Karley Cunningham:
The career path: I've been in this industry for, I think coming up on 25 years now. There's the confessional. Well, it's interesting. Today, I was presenting as I was sharing with you to a group of 65 or so women at a women's organization here in British Columbia. So that tells your audience a little bit about where I'm from. I live in North Vancouver and I had an epiphany prepping for that talk, and it was one of those pivotal moments in my career path. So I'll jump back to that. But I started out in graphic design and advertising. I had dreams and aspirations of hitting the tail end of the Madmen days, but quite honestly, I was a small town girl. I was so afraid of being the cliche that they would tell you about that, "If you don't make it, if you're not willing to work eighty hours a week, they're just going to chew you up and spit you out and throw you out the back door."

And that genuinely scared me. So I stayed on the outsides about, we talk about geographically, I was near Toronto, that's where I grew up, and I lived about an hour and a half away, so it was like being on the outskirts of New York City, if you will. So I hopped into it. I came in as a graphic designer, helping with campaign design. I got hired in my co-op from my graphic design school, and I absolutely loved what I did. I got involved in web pretty early back in the day when how do you even deal with 256 colors when your client's brand is one shade away from Coca-Cola red? So all those little technical details that we would just fawn over and feign over and paper styles and what texture is it going to go on? I was all in on that.

And then switching over to web, and that's where one of the pivotal points was not the one I was talking about, but really changed for me is, well, how do you take something that people are used to holding and interacting with? Because if you think about the campaigns back in the day, they were magazines. Everything was in print or some sort of physical communication and touch point, and all of a sudden we are on the screen. So how do you translate that when you're on a limited palette on a one-dimensional thing? And so that was my foray without realizing it into brand communication, brand strategy, brand expression.

And then this next pivotal moment I'm thinking of was long after I moved to Vancouver, BC, I had thrown all my stuff in the back of my V-dub and strapped three bikes to the back of it, because I was racing elite at the time, and came west. That's a whole other career that I had. I don't even know, was it a side hustle? I don't know. But I drove across the country, came here to improve my Canadian ranking in hopes of someday making it to international competition.

But back to what we're talking about is that I got asked to write an article about, and I think the question was, what is brand or how do you build a great brand, by a business publication, a really reputable one here. And I just, "Yay, you asked me to do this. Oh, my freaking gosh, who am I to define what this is? There are people way more qualified." I would've categorized myself as an intermediate in the industry at that time. And I was like, "What?" So that was a big freak-out, got the job done in 500 words or less, which, as you can imagine, would be difficult without having tools like ChatGPT.

Josh Dougherty:
It's a true branding person, but you can distill down the essence to a small amount of words.

Karley Cunningham:
And hope that you don't get torn to shreds by the other branding people. And that's what I was seeing, all the people that I looked up to reading it and going, "She doesn't know what she's talking about." And that really opened up this black hole of what brand is and threw me right into the ambiguity of it. And I just got obsessed about brand. Why don't people understand it? Why does everybody define it differently? Why don't business owners understand what it is? Is it actually a part of marketing? Is it its own thing? And so over the course of many years in geeking out on it and serving clients in this horizontal niche of learning how to develop brand strategy, learning how to help a client launch a new brand, I just fell in love with it and formed some pretty strong opinions. And I'm now confident enough to be like, "You want me to write about that? Yeah, I'll tell you what I think." So it's been a journey for sure. So that's the 30-second, maybe 2-minute version.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I think that's the sign of someone who's actually doing the work too. I think many of us, as I talk to a lot of people around the industry, my journey as well, you have that imposter feel for a long time and then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, I actually know a few things." It's like a switch in a moment.

Karley Cunningham:
And I think that the infinite challenges, as creatives, we go, "Yay, there's no governing body." In chiropractic here in Canada, you have to practice one or two ways and be certified in continuing CPUs, CEUs, continuing education credits. That's why I hate acronyms because I always get them wrong, but we don't have that, which is the double-edged sword because without it, we all get to do what we want to do and what we think is best, but is it really best? And how do you test brand? And that's a whole other rabbit hole that I'm sure we'll venture down at some point.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, for sure.

Karley Cunningham:
How do you measure it?

Josh Dougherty:
And everyone wants to measure it differently too, is the other thing. It comes down to lack of standards across the board. Before we dive into the brand's story, or obviously your day-to-day thing now is Big Bold Brand. I'd love to hear what you're working on there today, what's giving you energy, what you're excited about?

Karley Cunningham:
Well, I'm working on finalizing all of the physical touch points with a client that we've been working on this, again, terminology rebrand. I'll circle back to that in a minute, but for two years. And I am excited that I happen to be able to attend the conference that they're going to, that they're launching at. How often do we get to do that? Almost never.

Josh Dougherty:
And how often does someone push all the way through to fulfilling that?

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, so this client is pushing all the way through so far because they're so excited about everything that's come together. They have had us design custom sneakers that they're printing for their team that will be worn at the conference.

Josh Dougherty:
That's amazing.

Karley Cunningham:
Again, back in the day, this is the stuff your big tech companies would do, where I started. They got to have the cool things, but people don't do that anymore, so this is really special.

Josh Dougherty:
I think this is also very cool to see the full circle because we did have this time, you talked about working in print originally, which is where I started my career as well. And then it was all screens all the time. And now we're having people realize that integrated, full three-dimensional experience is really true, which I think has always been true for the bigger brands that had millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of budget, but now it's become something that finally smaller brands can actually live out and do on a budget that makes sense for them.

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, small print runs, such a gift.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, it is. Awesome. Well, I'm so excited for you to be able to have that, well, both for your client to be able to do this, but also for you to have that feeling of finishing a project well, because it doesn't always happen that way.

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, because so often we hand it off at a certain point. Often we hand off to the web team because they aren't doing that. Oh, we remember that humans like to touch things. We should probably make some physical access.

Josh Dougherty:
Exactly. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit about what your thoughts are on trends in the branding space. You're obviously staying up to date on this. What do you think are some of the things that maybe business owners, marketers, others should be thinking about right now when it comes to brand?

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, I don't usually like shoulds and I don't shoulding all over people, but definitely if you're not on it, AI. I jumped on the bandwagon. I think we both know Cary Weston really well from the East Coast. He's got this great ChatGPT podcast out. I started following him and down the rabbit hole I went, and what a powerful and terrifying set of tools for humanity, but also for our industry. There's so much of that ... Again, I've been in the industry so long, I'm like, "Well, back in the day when we went through this, when web came out, everybody's either embracing it, ignoring it, terrified of it, worried that it was going to take their jobs, worried that it was going to shut down all the libraries." So we're going through that all over again.

And I think my lesson with 20/20 vision on that is figuring out and learning what you can do with it and then figuring out how can you leverage it to do better for your company, for your clients, for your team, for yourself. There are so many aspects of it from productivity tools to things that can produce content in many different forms for you. And then I think the should is, what's ethical? How are we protecting our client's IP? How are we protecting our own IP? What are we doing to make sure that we're doing a sound job of doing the best that we can without breaking the system and protecting all the things that need to be protected?

Josh Dougherty:
We've been struggling through this, I don't know, struggling. We've been dipping our toes into it, we're enjoying it. But as an agency, we have built out ... I don't know if you're familiar with the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute as well, if you've heard of them?

Karley Cunningham:
Yes.

Josh Dougherty:
So we took their tool and we've been instituting, we want to pilot two new tools a quarter, and we've been thinking through the use cases that we should be piloting as an agency. And it's just interesting as you start diving in, you're like, "How far down this automation world do we want to go in?" I think the very important or interesting thing for people working in brands specifically is where is the line that the magic of the creativity that you do as a brand person starts or stops and the machine can take over, which is fascinating.

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, where is the magic of the human aspect? Where is the magic of the human creativity?

Josh Dougherty:
Kind of terrifying to think about.

Karley Cunningham:
It is. And at the same time, I think taking actions to get familiar with it and putting the structures in place, it's not going to take all of our jobs. It's going to change them. And the only reason it will take your job is because you become redundant.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, and I think I was speaking to another person in another recording I was doing earlier today, and he does pipeline account-based marketing stuff, and he was talking about everyone's freaking out about this, but there are these intricate connections that lead to building true empathetic relationships with people, and machines can't do that. He's like, "You've got to think about how I can slip in." But I thought it was a really good piece of wisdom to say, "How do we use the machine to make ourselves more efficient?" But that ability and understanding of how to build a real human connection is still, at least for now, beyond the grasp of machines.

Karley Cunningham:
And you just gave me the idea of, as you were saying, where do we insert ourselves or where is that empathetic human perspective is using, for those of us who do customer journeys, is mapping that journey of the production and going, "Okay, where are those intentional points that we know we can and will make a difference? And where are some others that maybe we can uncover?"

Josh Dougherty:
And something we've been using as a bit of a rubric is just remembering that yes, we can use machines for many things, but there are still humans on the other side of what we're producing and who are interacting with the stuff we make so that anything that a machine does needs to really connect with a true need from a person that's going to see our work, but it's interesting. I think it's fun.

Karley Cunningham:
You know what really made me smile there?

Josh Dougherty:
What?

Karley Cunningham:
You said the word rubric. Now I know how much of a nerd you are.

Josh Dougherty:
I'm a very big nerd. I won't show you my library at home, lots of books. Well, let's dive into the brand world. I'd love to talk about the difference between branding and marketing. You referred to it earlier in your intro, but I love it when people actually come out and say, "Yeah, brand is not marketing. It's often confined like the sub-discipline of marketing." Whereas I would think, if anything, it should be flipped totally on its head, marketing is an expression of brand.

Karley Cunningham:
Yay, you're my people.

Josh Dougherty:
Can you expand on this? Tell me your thoughts. I'm sure you have a strong opinion about this.

Karley Cunningham:
Excuse me while I go grab my soap box, which is a milk crate and drag it out here. Yeah, so this is perfect timing. Again, they asked me to speak on marketing this morning and I said, "Well, so I'm a branding expert and are you okay with me sharing why branding and marketing are not the same thing?" And they were like, "Yes." So that was great because otherwise, I would've been going, "Well, you want me to talk about marketing? Okay." To be fair, yes, I do understand marketing. My clients do pull me into it with them. But I really, as I said, fell in love with brand. And the reason for that is ... So you know me and to let the audience in, I love to be challenged. I'm an ultra distance athlete, mountain bike and trail running. So the bigger, the scarier the challenge, it has to have a view. That's one of my criteria. I'm in, bring it on.

And so I couldn't have made my career more difficult by saying, "Well, let's just pick the two most difficult things to describe, which are strategy and branding." So that's the realm I plan in. And the reason I like them is because it's really about getting up out of the weeds and understanding the bigger picture of what's going on, which is true of both. But the way I describe the difference between branding and marketing is that one is yin and one is yang. And if I wish to describe the visual that I use when I present is if marketing is the yang, in the curve would be zeros and ones. Marketing is meant to execute an action and get a response.

So, "Hey, we have a sale on, hey, we've launched this new project, product, project, service, hey, we're hosting this event this weekend." And what you're looking for is that zero or one response. Did what we design and put out there and the way we put it out there land zero or one or no? It can be very binary. And it is very much about communicating to people what you have to offer. The visual on the brand side, I would put little hearts as the repeating pattern. You could also put little brains with those hearts, but folks say that—

Josh Dougherty:
It's about hearts, let's be honest.

Karley Cunningham:
How much do I love it? And for me, it's that visceral reaction. I don't know about you and I'm guessing the answer, but when you see that brand that you love or you're introduced to a new brand, that visceral reaction that you get, for us, that's the biggest hit of dopamine ever. But it's that visceral response that I want. It's that human connection and depth of understanding of someone gets me, someone's going to solve my problem, someone is going to do it in a way I like because they've taken the time to get to know me and they're like me, because if they weren't, they couldn't possibly solve my problem. So brand is very much all the things that people talk about, which gets confusing. And I do this every time I present. I say to folks: "Okay, folks in the chat or throw your hands up, I'm curious to hear if I'm in a live room, tell me how you would define brand to a fellow entrepreneur or business owner."

You know what? Rarely do I get more than two of the same answer. And it's because brand is everything you do. It is every touch point that creates a reaction across the course of your customer journey, which could be they saw a billboard or an ad or something, they forgot about it, they saw you again, they saw it repeatedly, they finally paid attention because it captured their interest. And now they're engaged in learning who you are. And that customer journey goes all the way out to hopefully becoming a part of your community because why put in all that effort in marketing and building your brand if you're not going to keep those people in your camp?

Josh Dougherty:
100%.

Karley Cunningham:
So brand is really so much more. And if we go back to the heart where it started in the 1800s, it was really often the last names of the people producing the soap or the common commissary product that was being delivered because they needed a way to differentiate it. And then in the Madmen days, we're looking at the '50s, '60s, '70s, it was really about how do we get people to buy more stuff and how do we get people to buy this stuff? Well, we have to get them to like it and that means a human interaction. So I always make fun of Mr. Clean, who better to help the helpless house wife than a big strong man on a bottle? But it worked. And so it was really then about product marketing. But then we started branding people, then we started branding products and services, then we started branding companies. And it's gone so far that pharmaceuticals now use the word brand as, "Hey, that's an off-brand use for that product." What the what? So it's really just outgrown marketing in a way.

Josh Dougherty:
I 100% agree. I think when I talk about branding, I talk about it as being branding as the discipline, being about a memory curation and about a brand as this memory, because it's about the heart. We think about the things we're most nostalgic for and it brings up emotions 20 years, 30 years after that. And so it's the same thing, we're trying to tell a compelling enough story, have a compelling enough connection moment that someone can remember it. And then you were talking about going through the customer journey and each step of that journey, create a connection point with that memory so that over time people are like, "Oh yeah, that's the brand that makes me feel this way because of the memory I have every time I think about them."

So I love that explanation. I also love raising and elevating it above marketing because I think there are applications across the entire organization. And once people realize that, that's when they truly can differentiate their organization from the rest of those that they're competing with because when they think about how do we change our HR processes, how do we change our service delivery, how do we change how we're billing people? All these things around a brand, that's when the magic happens. And you get these brands that you actually truly love because the whole thing is authentic through and through.

Karley Cunningham:
And consistent.

Josh Dougherty:
Yes.

Karley Cunningham:
And one of the things that I love is the way that memory curation over time, and it could be they've ended their relationship, so to speak, or they're finished using product service, whatever, and five years goes by and they still get that reaction. And, to me, then that reaction prompts the referrals, how they talk about your brand, et cetera, et cetera. And so everyone always says to me, "How do you measure the success of a brand?" Out of that, you measure the success of your brand by: Are those people sharing with the people they're referring the right things about you? Do they believe what you believe? Do they understand what you do? Can they describe for that person what it's like to work with you? And I've had a client, and I love this story, accountants, and they'll say it, you can't get much more boring than accountants, right?

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Karley Cunningham:
I worked with this young pair of accountants. I called him the Wonder Twins, even though they couldn't be more opposite. She was Scandinavian and he was South Asian and he was about 6'2" and she was about 5'2". But the connection and continuity between the two of them and their differentiation was really the heart of what we built out for them. And they achieved their five-year goals in two and a half years by implementing the brand strategy and tools we developed for them. And here's the kicker, they hit their growth goals, they doubled their firm without doing paid marketing. It was all invested in brand.

Josh Dougherty:
Amazing.

Karley Cunningham:
And so they would take their materials and hand them to strategic partners who would then share that with prospects and referrals or their clients would refer them, and people would come in the door saying, "We know all about you, so we don't need you to do the introduction. We know how you work. We're really excited. How do we work together?" That just eliminated 80% of the sales process. So cool.

Josh Dougherty:
And it's so easy then. Then they just have to fill in the things that are part of their DNA regardless, right?

Karley Cunningham:
Yep.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love hearing that story, and I love it when people can actually tap into that thing that gives them energy because, also, people ask, "How do you get on that growth train and actually survive?" It's by doing something that actually fits who you are, especially for those smaller organizations. Can you dive a little bit into your strategy development process and your approach? I like your approach because it is about branding, but it's also about asking the bigger questions in the organization. You said you talk about strategy and brand, the two hardest things to define. So I'm going to now ask you to share about how you approach that. How is it typical, and then where are the unique points in that process that you've found to be powerful with people?

Karley Cunningham:
Oh, wow. Okay, you'll have to repeat that question, but I'll start with our method, which is called the surefire method. And the way I've come to describe it is if brand strategy and business strategy got together and then had a child, it would be the surefire method because part of what we do is the business strategy. It is getting clear on the fundamental beliefs and truths of the organization. And I've had clients argue with me. It's usually the board members. I don't work with a lot of those anymore, but one smart board member who was all steeped in their MBA would be like, "But those are business strategy elements." I'd be like, "Great, are you clear on them? Because if you're not, you have a big problem." And so we'd get them clear on their purpose, their vision, their values. We call them guiding principles and then character persona, whatever you call it.

And again, we're coming back to that problem of none of us call the things the same things, which is confusing for folks. So we get clear on those fundamental beliefs and truths because it becomes really difficult to attract all the people that your business needs to survive and make it through those hard knocks barriers of 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, but also to thrive because we can't work with everybody. So we might as well be clear about communicating who we are, why we're here, so we can attract the right people and the right talent. And by people, I mean staff, customers or clients, the right vendors, the right strategic partners, all those folks who help our business thrive.

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Karley Cunningham:
That's the business strategy aspect part. And that's internal. We work with a lot of small to mid-sized businesses, so where we're playing is in the heart space. You can tell me all day what it is that you do, but I want to know why you do it. I want to know why you care so much. I want to know what values drive you and what those deal breakers are for you. Then it gets really crystal clear about how you're different. We just bake differentiation in. We don't have to force it from the outside by looking at marketing stats and research, so that was annoyance point for me. But then we move into the brand strategy elements and we get them clear on who their target audiences are and that is business brand strategy. Those two fit right together. So many of our clients don't show up at our doorstep with a clear idea of the problems they solve for their ideal clients and how to best serve them and what they want from them.

90% of them don't show up. I'm like, "How do you even have a business? And congratulations, you've got a successful business, awesome. Now let's make it so much more successful." And then from there, we move into your typicals of core differentiations, benefits, differentiators, core points of value, build the UVP, create the brand story, create the brand promise, and then get into the pitch and brief intro. So not unexpected elements, but how it came to be was it hearkens back to that difference between branding and marketing, "Oh, so you're in branding?" "Yes." "Great, so you can help us with our marketing problem." "Okay." "So we need help with keeping and attracting more of the right people." My brain would go, "Hold on a minute, that's an HR problem." And then they would say, "Well, nobody on our team is telling the same story. We've gone through this major event, things have changed." I'm like, "But hold on a minute." That's a leadership story. "We need to develop a new product or we've got all these products, we don't know how they fit together." "Well, great. Isn't that a product R&D and delivery problem?"

And so they started mapping all over the place, and I realized that the two needed to come together to solve a lot of the problems. They weren't coming to me saying, "We need a new visual brand identity. We need to rebrand." That's not what they were asking for.

Josh Dougherty:
And I love this because whenever I can remember so many times when you get into a branding process and someone starts asking about, we have mission, vision, values, and now you're looking at working on, we call them core attributes, the core differentiators, and they're like, "These feel like they might supersede our mission, vision, values. What do we do?" And I'm like, "Well, let's figure out which ones are true and then we can use that. I don't really care as much about the definition. Let's just understand what actually represents who you are as an organization and then be willing to go with it."

Karley Cunningham:
And the other piece of that is what is truth and what is relevant to the other side, which are the people that are outside of your organization?

Josh Dougherty:
And that's why I like to talk about branding as curating memories as well, because it's the fact that you don't own those memories. Just like in a museum, a museum curator can come and try to create as much of an experience, getting the nerd again, but they can try to create as much of an experience as they want, but the person takes it away at the end of the day and they're the ones who tell the story. That's awesome. So going back to your story, you told me about the process. I'd love to hear what you think is unique to your process and how that's helped you get breakthroughs for people. Do you think there are any unique perks?

Karley Cunningham:
That's such a loaded question when I know part of your audience is other creative directors and creatives. One, our process is designed for small to mid-sized businesses. I've worked with the big brands, but I fell in love with working with the entrepreneurs. What is different about our process is I'm really seeking to connect that business leader or possibly reconnect that business leader to what matters to them and how they're driving the company forward, which is why we're getting back into what is your purpose? Why did you start this organization? Sometimes that evolves, but it evolves and refines over time because it just gets clearer to them or it gets muddier because they never got clear on it and they lost sight of it. So I'm really, again, working at that human aspect of I'm not just wanting to get clear on the words. We need to get the business owner clear on their emotions and their drivers.

What else is different about our process? I don't do the let's do it in a two-day session and slam it all together exercise. It's going to probably piss some folks off, but I don't think it works. I think it's too easy. I liken it to driving on the Autobahn. We're in the cars, we go, "Okay, we're ready to go. We're going to get it done. Everybody's hyped up." The facilitator is go, go, go. And it's easy for someone to go, "Oh, let's go check out that statue," or, "I have a great idea." And you take off before you've ever had a chance to consider, should we even be taking the cut off? And you can get sidetracked pretty darn quickly.

Josh Dougherty:
I think also on top of that, I would add to that because we do multiple two days in our process, if it's over three or four months, it's really easy to get in a group think in a two-day session where an idea seems really good and then you look back at it six months later and you're like, "Huh, that didn't resonate like we thought it would."

Karley Cunningham:
Yep. So much for that bright idea. And so with that, and playing on what you're saying is iteration. I love the iteration of it, like a painter. If you imagine the classics, just going back and you see painters often have multiple on the go, and then they capture it. They hear something, see something, experience something, they go, "Oh, I know what's missing," or, "If I just add a highlight here." And those are the magic moments that bring it, that create the magic, the magic moments that create the magic, shocking, right? But I think iteration is such an important piece and having everybody participating in that iteration and giving everybody time to digest. One of the things I know from being married to and glossing over introverts because of my own raging extroversion, I've had to learn that giving them time to think and breathe and absorb and ponder is key and critical to them having confidence in what you're building. There are so many reasons for iteration.

So we iterate over time and we take time to get that strategy in, it's four to six months. The differentiation is that we don't wait until the end to say, "Great, here it is, use it." We're encouraging our clients to test it and to play with it and to put their own right words down on paper as we're iterating and it creates such a richer experience. We don't have to control it. I just need to guide it and then add those highlights where the client doesn't quite know what does a shadow or a highlight look like on this angle with that light.

And the other big piece that we do is we teach our clients those words off the page and use them as a powerful set of tools. That is the change management aspect of the work we do that so many run away from. And that was the breaking point when I was talking to business owners of our work getting broken because you hand over the guide and you say, "Congratulations, all of our hard work is done. Here is your guide and all the elements that go with it." And you hand it to them and they're excited. And then they look at this book or binder or whatever physical piece of artifact you create for them, and they get this look on their face and they're like, "What do I do with it?" And now it's time to put the money ... That's where the rubber hits the road.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, that's the starting point, honestly.

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, and so I, being someone driven by results as an athlete, I wasn't satisfied with just handing over good work. I wanted to figure out how are you tracking results? I got really tired of having business owners at the front end of the sales process going, "Does this fluffy stuff really work?" And those are usually your left brain CEOs and rightly asked. It's a big investment. And so I wanted to figure out, well, okay, one, how do we track it? Which is something that I do on the back end. I follow up with quarterly calls with our clients forever more if they'll let me, because what I'm trying to do is figure out are they using those tools because we've started to teach them how to use those tools, other than just copying and pasting and putting them somewhere.

The easiest one to pick on is values, is how are you using your values in the hiring process? How are you using your values to evaluate whether someone's a right fit for annual or every six month evaluation? How are you using your values to choose your clients, to choose your vendors? That's just one example. And we work with our clients to break down and list all of the ways they can use them in their business and encourage them, "Okay, now pick three that are going to make the biggest impact in your business and with your team or with the team that should be in charge of it, if they're a bit larger, go put it into action. Go develop the SOP." That's, I think, what our biggest differentiator has been because we teach them how to drive the car.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love that. I love the follow-through of it, honestly. So nice. So if we get down to the nitty-gritty, we've talked about the importance of brand, how to do it, what to think about, what wisdom do you have for maybe a CMO or director of marketing who's like, "Yes, I know I need to think about brand. I'm thinking about it above and beyond just my function," what questions should they be asking as they're looking for a partner to maybe help them with the branding process?

Karley Cunningham:
Well, the first thought before you finish the question was, don't focus so much on the data. Don't let the data be the primary driver because the data is often old. It's in the past. It gives you a 20/20 view, but what's going on up front and also brand is so much about the ... And this is so embarrassing, I've completely lost the scientific study. Well, my nerd friend, it's the study of observation. What's that line of science? I can see the book I read, I could see it's cover, and I can't remember. Oh, anthropological science. There we go. Pulled that one out. But brand is as much about scientific data and numbers and opportunity, I think the opportunity aspect of that data is really huge, but the anthropological piece of how people interact with it and what they want and what they need and how they feel is equal to, if not more, important than.

So I would suggest if you're looking for a brand partner who really knows how to plug that in, then you're looking for someone who isn't doing this the way of the past as a market. You're looking for someone who's looking at this as this is an activity that belongs in the leadership house of the company that you're building that brand for and understands that consistent action that happens in the consistency that's developed, needs to be carried out through actions over a course of time. As the marketing, as a CMO, it's your job to take all of that strategy and that information and ensure that in your marketing, the company shows up how it's supposed to.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, it's so important. We work with slightly larger organizations than you do, but I still won't take on a branding process if I'm not going to have direct access to the CEO.

Karley Cunningham:
No way.

Josh Dougherty:
Because at the end of the day, I was going to ask the next question about how do you build buy-in for the rest of the organization? But I think it's honestly, until you get buy-in from those top levels, it's going to be an insular effort that is ineffectual at having an impact if you don't have the top people saying, "Yeah, we're going to get behind this and we're going to do what it takes to change." Otherwise, it gets relegated to another marketing effort.

Karley Cunningham:
Yeah, if I was in a CMO role of a large organization and leadership came and said, "We need to do a rebrand, we need to evolve it, yada yada, insert need here," that had to do with that brand strategy and they wouldn't engage, I'd be looking for another job because your head is on the line. Building a brand, if we think about it, let's look at it in the product aspect. So where brands started from, it was like, "Hey, we've got this can of soda or this new alcoholic beverage or insert thing, and we know that by sweetening it or changing it or adding kombucha to it, it will appeal to a feminine audience. So then we just need to change the wrapper on it and change its character and change the story and wrap it in a new wrapper."

When the leadership house won't participate, you are being asked to wrap them in a new wrapper. And let me tell you, it doesn't really matter, in my opinion, how great it is what you build them, when you dress them in it, it's going to become an itchy sweater in 60 seconds and you are out the door because you didn't do your job. Well, I call BS, you did do your job in the confines that you were given, but that's not the way to do the job. You had another question in there and I tangented on you, which is terrible.

Josh Dougherty:
Oh, no, it's okay. I think it's a good point because I think the minute authenticity is betrayed, which is you're talking about wrapping it in a wrapper that doesn't change the insides. I always talk to people about how your brand has to be, it's got to be at least 50% true for where you are, and it can be 50% aspirational because someone needs to be able to peel back all the layers on who you are and have it feel like, "Oh yeah, that still fits."

Karley Cunningham:
And you’ve got to be able to build that bridge between the two on the fly because there's a gap between those two. And you don't want your clients falling in that gap.

Josh Dougherty:
Yep, and otherwise, people are going to start being like, "Hmm, what else isn't true about this relationship I'm building?"

Karley Cunningham:
You just get that feeling. Animals can smell it. We are not that good, but humans can sense it.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, for sure.

Karley Cunningham:
Where your question was, I just remembered was how do you get buy-in with the rest of the organization? So as a leader in the leadership, how do you get buy-in? You live by example. You live and breathe your brand, and you turn to those tools like your values, like your brand promise, and you make sure that they're being delivered consistently to everyone you touch.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love that.

Karley Cunningham:
And then people follow suit or they don't, and you let them go for good reason.

Josh Dougherty:
Yep. My favorite culture consultant, I work with this guy, Chris Ihrig, quite a bit, and he's always like, "You know what? Half the people, it's your job to coach them out of the organization. It's fine. Find the right person."

Karley Cunningham:
I wouldn't want that job, but sure.

Josh Dougherty:
I don't want that job either. But I think that's a true point of you're not ever going to get everyone on board if you have a real opinion about how you want to show up and it's fine. It's okay. Well, this has been a really great conversation. I'd love to head towards wrapping up. I ask everyone this question and everyone hates it, but I'd love to hear what your superpower is. What do you think you do best?

Karley Cunningham:
My superpower is connecting the constellations.

Josh Dougherty:
Great. Living in the big ideas and drawing the connections between it. I love it. Karley, how can people connect with you? What's the best way to keep up with what you're doing on a day-to-day basis?

Karley Cunningham:
I'm on LinkedIn and that's the channel I choose. We're small, so it's easy for me to focus there. My name's spelled with a K and an E-Y and Cunningham, so if you happen to watch Happy Days, I'm dating myself here, you'll know how to find me. Yeah, that's where you'll find me.

Josh Dougherty:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for the conversation today. It was so great and so nice to have you on.

Karley Cunningham:
Thank you. Always great to be in the room with another nerd.

Josh Dougherty:
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand and marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a brand and marketing agency in Seattle, Washington. Our producer is Rob Gregerson of Legato Productions.