2X eCommerce Podcast

How to Build a Clear and Compelling Brand Identity → Kathy Guzman
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Kathy Guzman: [00:00:00] one of the biggest challenges with owning a brand is that you've got a long list of attributes, benefits, features, stories that you want to get across to the consumer.

And. The challenge is that the consumer only wants to hear certain things at certain times. When I'm sitting at my computer shopping for shampoo on Amazon, I don't necessarily want to hear all the details about your founder's story.

What happened with Millennials is that they taught the rest of us.

How to be who we are today. Millennials showed up and said, wait a minute. I want my food to be healthier. Wait a minute. I don't want to work this much. Wait a minute. I think experiences are more important than stuff. Wait a minute. I think travel is really cool. The rest of us started saying, Hey, actually you're right.

A brand positioning template. This is a template that's very specific to brand positioning. It's not the entire framework we talked about before. This is the tool that can help you clarify.

There are [00:01:00] four, five pieces in this template. The first one is

so on today's episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast. We dive into the art or brand positioning with Kathy Guzman who shares her expert insights on craft in a brand. That resonates really deeply with the audience. It's a great episode. You don't want to miss, or do you stay tuned

This is the 2x e commerce podcast hosted by Kunle Campbell.

Welcome to the t2 eCommercepodcast. In today's episode, we're joined by branding and positioning expert, Kathy Guzman. Kathy brings in a wealth of experience from working with fortune 500 companies to thrive in direct to consumer brands. She'll be breaking down high, unique brand fundamentals framework designed to help you. Clarify your brand's message.

Connect with your audience, a right audience and automate the drive in. More revenue for your business. So whether you're looking to scale your [00:02:00] brand or refine your markets and position. Kathy's insights are shorter. Bright provides you actionable takeaways. At the end of this episode, coffee has a small gift for you.

It's totally free. I don't even think you need to sign up for anything. It's the entire framework with discourse in, in this, in this podcast. For free to download from our website. So be sure to, to, to, to listen to the end. And don't forget to follow us on your preferred podcasting platform because your support essentially helps us bring incredible guests like coffee to the show.

So without further ado, enjoy this episode.

Mhm.

Kunle Campbell: Hey, Kathy, welcome to the 2x e commerce podcast.

Kathy Guzman: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you today.

Kunle Campbell: Brilliant brilliant. You are a branding expert, brand positioning expert. You've worked with a plethora [00:03:00] of fortune 500 brands, as well as. DTC, commerce brands. But I will like to ask you about your back story. How did you get to here? What were your beginnings like?

Kathy Guzman: Yes. I was born on a Wednesday around four o'clock in the afternoon. I'm teasing. We don't need to go that far back, do we?

Kunle Campbell: No

Kathy Guzman: so I started my marketing career officially coming out of business school. I'm originally from the East coast was born and raised in, in New Jersey. My family's from the Dominican Republic and made my way to Texas and got my MBA at the university of Texas at Austin and coming out of business school.

I went. To PepsiCo to work is where I really, I started my career where I have all of my foundation in what is classic brand management and really understanding how to prioritize the consumer after. Eight [00:04:00] years at PepsiCo, I went off and worked at a small independent company that was in the beauty space.

I then went to work in the dairy industry with a large company called Dean Foods. And then eventually decided I wanted to start consulting. And that was really because what was the driver at the time was that I wanted a little more flexibility in my schedule. I have two teenage daughters. They were in elementary school, young in elementary school at the time.

And that was really the driver for starting a consulting business. And little did I know that I was going to wind up 12 years later, 11, 12 years later with a consultancy and work that is, Much more aligned to the kind of person I am and what is ultimately my zone of genius that I discovered through the process.

And I should say others helped me discover. And so today I run the Clarity Wizard. I'm the CEO and head wizard at the Clarity Wizard, and we are a brand positioning We are experts in brand positioning, and that's really [00:05:00] all we do. We help our clients maximize revenue and make minimize risk by being very clear about who they talk to, what they talk to them about and why that person should care.

And I absolutely love the work I do.

Kunle Campbell: Why is that other superlatives of the framework? Okay.

Kathy Guzman: it actually, yes, there's a framework that I have created and designed in the last few years called the Brand Fundamentals Framework. And it is really a framework that is designed to help brands Say all of the things that they want to say. I think the, one of the biggest challenges with owning a brand is that you've got a long list of attributes, benefits, features, stories that you want to get across to the consumer.

And. The challenge is that the consumer only wants to hear certain things at certain times. When I'm sitting at my computer shopping for shampoo [00:06:00] on Amazon, I don't necessarily want to hear all the details about your founder's story. As an example that's just not the time and the place I really don't care.

I just, I want a shampoo that's gonna both cleanse and moisturize. That's my priority. That doesn't mean that your founder story isn't important. It just means that it has a time and place. And that's really what the framework was about. And the first step in doing that is to separate all the pieces and organize them.

So a place for everything and everything in its place. Brand purpose is about why you're waking up every day to do the work that you do. Why have you even bothered investing so much of your time and energy into this business? Mission is the literal what you're going to do. What is it that you're going to do in the world?

We're on a mission to help people feel more confident about the way they look by creating products that help them look more like themselves. Then that leads to the brand positioning, which is telling us again, [00:07:00] who is the audience specifically? What is it that you're offering them? And that is very much connected to the product experience.

Not about all the extra. Fun things that we offer and then why should they care what makes me better than the competitor works like product better than the competitor's product and why this is the right solution for that problem that consumer is facing that then leads to brand values is the fourth piece of the puzzle brand values is about how we behave and how we talk what are the rules that guide how we live in the world as a brand, as an organization that are always going to be representative of that brand.

And then that finally leads to identity, which is how we actually look in the world and that look is reflective of all of the other components. And that framework ensures that all of those fundamental pieces are. in place so that you are more effective at communicating to your target audience in a way that is [00:08:00] compelling and motivating.

At the end of the day, we're asking people to make some sort of behavior change by us instead of them. Buy more instead of less, go to this place to find me instead of going to this other place. You are asking people to do something. And so the most important job is to be compelling and motivating and having that clarity around what we're saying is the first step to being effective at that motivation.

Kunle Campbell: very thorough and that's very interesting. So the, what is the mission from what I understand the positioning is the how the identity is the look and sound values are more the behavior, how you behave, and then your purpose is your why.

Kathy Guzman: Exactly.

Kunle Campbell: Yeah, there's a lot to unpick from that, but I want to track back to my first Question, which is more around your experience in PepsiCo and essentially what pivotal experiences in PepsiCo.

I'm looking at your your LinkedIn page. Now [00:09:00] you've worked in so many, organizations in, in, in all the other organizations you've worked. What has been essentially, what was your, what's a pivotal experience there to get you to understanding like brand positioning?

Kathy Guzman: Yeah, that's a great question. I think the starting at PepsiCo, the first. Experience or series of experiences that really pushed me in this direction was exposure to traditional consumer research. I think in business school, even an undergraduate, you hear about that, even as just an everyday consumer, these things occur.

People are researching. You don't know what that means. What does it look like? Who are researching and in what way, and having that firsthand experience to peek under the tent in a really high performance way that showed me and educated me the value of asking a [00:10:00] question the right way in order to get an unbiased response.

I think learning how to understand others, understand human behavior is one of the most fundamental things you can do as a marketer. Not only because you need to do research, but even in your day to day. There, there are learnings that are happening around us at any moment in time, even in your own home with you opening the refrigerator door and making a choice about what to drink in that moment.

is an opportunity for learning and understanding of consumer behavior. And having that initial experience at PepsiCo then led to what were many other experiences in understanding consumer behavior. And over 20 plus years now that I've done, countless pieces of research, I've heard from literally thousands upon thousands of consumers over.

Any number of studies that has remained and has evolved into an [00:11:00] appreciation for what our job really is. And our job is to make people happy. You want to be successful. You want to have a successful brand. You got to make people happy. That's literally our only job. And in understanding what they need to be happy, what their other options are, how they evaluate you, how they talk about you and your category.

Is what makes really all of the difference. And I'm grateful that it started at PepsiCo with such a strong foundation, but it has continued to be reinforced. Even today, even now that is still something that I continue to experience and continue to see.

Kunle Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I can imagine at PepsiCo, you had resources to, to, to so many consumer insights. The point you made in regards to, hold on, I am echoing. I just want to see if I'm, why I'm echoing. One, one second. [00:12:00] I'm going to reduce this. Okay. I think it might be your mic. Okay. All right. Much better. Much better. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to record from it from here on. Okay. So it's really good point in regards to what you mentioned in, in PepsiCo in terms of trying to answer questions without bias, really gets into the nitty gritty of Of answering questions about the consumer.

Do you want to shed a bit more light into Techniques you used to just be not biased

Kathy Guzman: just being thought by us. Avoid bias in doing research and I'll be very clear that there are 2 ways in which bias shows up [00:13:00] in quantitative work, which is quantitative is research that is based on a large number of a sample size. These are going to be more like surveys that you would do the bias.

And that is in the way we ask a question and the responses that we provide. In those questions, and the consumer is going to answer specifically what you've asked of them. And that creation of that question then becomes so important. So that we're not saying how much do you love this brand? But instead, evaluate this brand on these particular metrics so that you are eliminating that, the language that subconsciously may lead them to one way or to the other.

It's a little bit easier in quantitative to eliminate the bias, but it's still a big learning curve to understand how to write questions well. A lot of the solve for that [00:14:00] today is obviously working with someone like me or professional would help you craft questions, but also there are a lot of online DIY survey tools today that highly recommend it brings the cost down of research significantly, and they have a bank of questions that you can work from.

And so that's one of the easier ways to solve that bias on the qualitative side. And qualitative, if quantitative is about a large sample size that's really about understanding what consumers are doing. How many people are buying low sugar beverages? How many people clean their house twice a week or more?

It's giving you hard, big numbers. The qualitative is telling us why people are doing, why are they cleaning it more than twice a week? Is it because they're afraid of illness? Is it because they just like to be clean? Are they OCD? It's telling us the why. On the qualitative side, it's a lot more about an interpersonal relationship with a consumer.

And so you are having a dialogue with them. That's a lot harder to [00:15:00] manage the bias. And the rules that I would provide there to help manage those biases is. To not ask questions that you think you want to answer, but instead follow the consumer through their logic and their thinking and use why as a tool to get you to the next layer.

So you've said that you clean your home twice a week. Why do you think you do that? You're not saying, are you cleaning your house because you're OCD? Are you cleaning your house because you're afraid of illness? You're saying, tell me more about why you do that. You said that when you clean, you tend to use the same.

Mop over and over you don't really empty out the bin and put new water in tell me why you do that and so leaning into the why as opposed to What might be a more pointed question that you would ask if you were talking to a friend if you and I are talking and Saying well, that's interesting. I've never heard of [00:16:00] someone cleaning their house more than twice a week.

Tell me why you're doing that. Are you nervous about something? You would not say that to a consumer in order to avoid that bias. Both in that they're going to want to tell you what they think you want to hear, but they're also protecting themselves. I don't want you to think that I'm a dirty person.

So I'm going to tell you that I clean more often maybe than I do. And so eliminating that bias and that Subjectivity just ensures that you're getting a more qualitative or rather, I'm sorry, more a more valid response, a more authentic response from that participant, but in both cases experience is the master.

If you're just getting started and trying to learn from your consumers, do more of it. The more you do, the more you realize where you might have had bias in the past, and you'll start to improve on that. Everyone should be talking to consumers all of the time. Really?

Kunle Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. And it's another point I want to make. So a segment of this audience will likely have never asked their their [00:17:00] cost of a base, price Questions, surveys that the man have one to one, via emails. What is the best approach? I know you mentioned some some tools to essentially help you get that bias out for surveys.

And the other question I have is, are interviews better than surveys were like self serve surveys? If

Kathy Guzman: Yeah. So the first part of your question, which is what is the range of what research might look like? What does it cost? How in depth is it is? How long does it take? And the answer is all of it. There, there is a. There is a tool and an opportunity to do research that is zero dollars and five minutes all the way up to a million dollars and 12 months, right?

And the question is actually more about what is the size of your business? What are the questions that you are asking? And what kind of accuracy [00:18:00] level or fidelity do we need in that data? So I believe heavily in something called right sizing for research, especially for research, where it's a place that can very easily become too expensive.

Sizing means not every brand needs to spend a hundred thousand dollars on research but for some brands. You do need to spend more to get the right piece of information. If we were to say, give two examples, there's one. Brand owner listening who has a fairly new brand. They're under a million dollars in revenue.

They've been out just a year, a couple of years. And they're just fairly new into the scene. That is the kind of brand that would benefit from a DIY solution online where you're doing surveys online. They would benefit from what was more low cost or free research, for example. Surveying customers you already have doing research by doing social listening.

So one of the [00:19:00] best research tools that is a thousand percent free. That math doesn't math, but that is extremely free is Amazon reviews or reviews anywhere, really. But Amazon has a great database of that. You want to know what people have to say about your product or a competitor's product.

Go spend two hours reading Amazon reviews and jotting down notes about what are you seeing? Are those consistent themes? And then the final thing on for a brand of that size, under a million dollars would be working with someone like me or someone who is an expert in qualitative focus groups and interviews as you described them are one of the best and.

Lower expense ways to get a lot of information very quickly about the why There's actually a lot of free research on online So mining Google for some facts and statistics is very easy and cheap, but then you're left with But why are they doing that? And how does that relate to me and my [00:20:00] brand?

This is where a focus group can be extremely helpful in giving you some guidance on the other side of that would be a brand that's a little bit larger. Let's say there's a 25 million in up in revenue. And especially if you're much larger than that, if you are part of an organization and not that you are a brand owner, but you're an employee of a brand that's a hundred million plus.

In those cases. You're going to want to spend money in order to make sure that the data is factual. You want less error. And by what I mean by that is not that a young brand is going to get false information, but that the work that you would do as a brand under a million dollars is more about building hypotheses.

I just want to get enough information to point me into the right direction. You are very much in a test and learn mode. As a young brand, once you get into the tens of millions of dollars, now you have a lot more to [00:21:00] risk. Now making changes to my business can literally mean thousands, if not millions of dollars to my bottom line.

I need to be sure that those fractions of facts are as accurate as possible. And this is where we want to then invest in doing more robust, quantitative or robust qualitative. And so pricing in those two scenarios for the young brand under a million dollars to spend around $10,000 over the course of a year in research is probably appropriate up upwards to even 20, $25,000.

Once you get past the 10 million, 15, $20 million mark. That budget will really just depend on, again, how big your brand is, but can go anywhere from 30, 40, 000 in the course of a year to 100, 150, 200, 000 in the course of a year. And that is really dependent on your learning plan. And I actually have a learning plan [00:22:00] template that I'll make available to your audience.

I know at the end, we'll talk about where they can reach me, but there is a learning plan template that can be really helpful for this type of exercise, which says, Let's first outline the key questions we need to answer. So I own a brand, a beauty brand of makeup, and there's so much competition in the world.

I really want to understand at the end of the day, when someone is buying mascara, what is the most important thing to them? And then what are the next three most important things so that I can prioritize appropriately? That is a question that I have. I need to figure out what is the right methodology to answer that question.

How would I go about answering that specific question? And so the learning plan, what it does is help you identify all those key questions and then work through coming up with what is actually a plan for addressing each one of those. Methodology by methodology, you lay out the cost, you lay out the timing so that you can figure [00:23:00] out exactly what that plan would look like over the course of the year.

And that's really the best way to manage answering those strategic questions that'll help you push your business forward.

Kunle Campbell: Interesting. I want to ask if pricing ever comes to play when you're planning a brand.

Kathy Guzman: Yes, absolutely. Pricing is a huge piece. I would actually refer to it as value, is how do you determine what is the right value. And, It plays a role. It really in every part of the discussion with a consumer about the product. And so there are ways that you would learn about price the specific price.

It's 399 versus the value. It's a good value, or it's not good enough value in comparison to competitors very early on in developing the concept. You would get that read. But then. There are also times where you need to have very specific and dedicated pricing research, where you are going out to figure out what is the elasticity of this category?

What is the right value to price [00:24:00] equation? What are people willing to pay more for? And even when you're thinking about product exclusivity, How do those new product lines or product extensions increase or decrease the price point in my portfolio, which is a strategic question, right? I may have a product that is really high priced and I'm losing a good percentage of the population.

Cause it, it's too pricey for them, even if they want it. And so I might determine that there is an opportunity for me to, to launch something that's maybe smaller in size. It has less product in it, or it's available for a shorter period of time, and reduce the price in order to get people into the brand.

On the other side, you might discover, hey, I really am struggling with my margin, and I got to figure out a way to increase the margin by identifying a solution that a consumer is in need of that perhaps has a higher price for it, whether it's price per ounce, price per unit, or total net price. How do I increase [00:25:00] The overall margin of my business.

And so research is critical when it comes to pricing, because it's one of those things that consumers look at and immediately can make a decision on a brand based on that price point. So yeah, there's a lot of room for research and pricing.

Kunle Campbell: There is indeed. I thought regards to the steps, or actually the cadence, brand, I'll give you something anecdotal. We acquired a business about two years ago. And the, one of the first things we did is we got someone like you, the nature's boutique agency to Essentially give us a map for, like what is roadmap to, to, to what's essentially scaling this brand out.

And so we did, the we did surveys, we did focus groups and we got to the heart of it. And then there was an output. That came off the back of it. It was like a strategy doc that came out. So it was not too extensive because we didn't have too much money to, to really dash [00:26:00] out.

And so it was a 1 million pound brand. And then you talk about the fact that for 25 million, 100 million, brand, you need to do it again. So what is the cadence? When do you realize that? Wow. Okay. This has run its course. This plan has essentially run its course and we need to refresh or is it an ongoing investment you take on every year to, to just read to adjust to, to, to market dynamics.

Kathy Guzman: It's yes. And yes, it is both of those things in that. So the. The benefit of the learning plan and by the way, the learning plan really as an input into optimizing brand positioning, right? It to make sure that we're always talking to the consumer about the right thing at the right time. The learning plan is twofold is 1 is there are questions that I need to answer right now.

I need to understand this because I've already identified it as a problem in my brand or in my business. But then there is also room in the [00:27:00] learning plan for ongoing learnings. So the world that we live in today is a world in which every 30 days there's some new thing that is trending. 10 years ago, 20 years ago actually, when I started at PepsiCo, more than 20 years ago now, I started at PepsiCo.

I was working on the at the time we were looking to reposition it because everyone was coming off of the low fat craze and moving into the low carb craze. And that period of time, Where low fat existed and then it started to pivot into low carb was literally years and years. And then we pivoted into this low carb, which has continued to exist in one form of another.

And it was a little bit more slow moving at the time, whereas today, Things move so much faster. Consumers are educated so much more than they were before. [00:28:00] Even if they don't understand why things work the way they do, they understand what they should and shouldn't. Be taking into their bodies or what they do and don't want or what the options are in the world.

And so keeping a pulse on what is happening in the world on a day to day basis, particularly with your target audience, has to occur in a continuous, never ending loop. And that looks like a lot of things. It can look like actual research. There's one client, for example, where we worked on developing a cadence for twice a year consumer immersions.

That's twice a year, we spend two or three days in a particular market and we do all the things that our consumer does. We spend the time eating where they eat, working where they work. We visit The types of schools that their kids are in. We go where their grocery shopping. We look at the kinds of homes they live in.

We're really just trying to understand them as an individual. But there are other ways to do that. That can be as simple as, Calling your customers once a month. I'm going to [00:29:00] get on the phone. I'm going to call somebody who's recently bought my product and just figure out what they're up to and what they're learning, right?

So that's that continuous part that you add as a layer to these specific questions I need to answer for the problems I am solving for today. Both of those things need to occur and should be reflected in your learning plan.

Kunle Campbell: Interesting. And how do you feed all of this to critical functions in a business? So to give you some context, it, a lot of listeners in this podcast are super interested in performance marketing, whether it's search or social, advertising. To be honest with what I've seen in a lot of accounts, it's just, some media buyer just guessing, that it's all about the game is about testing, but a lot of the time the media buys and given parameters as to, okay, this is, these are your limitations.

So you find situations in which they're completely off [00:30:00] brand. But some of those off brand creatives are driving a lot of conversions. So they just double, so they're now essentially guiding the path, for, to, for the company. And it gets to a point where, you know those creatives no longer work and then they're stuck.

They're not able to acquire customers. They just play too. And that's it. So what is the efficient way to strategically pass on without making things stiff and fixed insights from. From a brand plan to, to other key revenue generating functions in a quite agile company. Most people listening to this, a part of very agile, young companies.

[00:31:00] Yeah.

Kathy Guzman: Or if brick and mortar is just a very small piece of your business. It happens a lot that, What is occurring in the digital marketing world can very easily drive strategy in the opposite direction, right?

Rather than the brand driving the strategy, the marketplace is driving the strategy. And the reason that this happens is because I hypothesize is because there's a real big conflict between the strategic approach to digital marketing and the strategic approach to brand development and business development.

In that, in the world of the, in the digital world, broadly speaking. We operate in the context of specificity to the 100th degree and the way that we [00:32:00] execute marketing plans. And certainly at the very last leg, even if, at the beginning, we are talking in broader strategic terms, it eventually moves to a place where we're saying a woman.

who is 47 and has three kids and she has a higher education degree and shops for tied pens is my target. Along with 10 other of these versions of people, there's also a woman who doesn't have kids, but she's highly motivated to work and she buys champagne, right? There are these personas that we leverage.

Necessarily for the efficiency and effectiveness of that digital marketing work. The business and the strategy side, the business and the brand side, it actually operates a little bit differently in that you need to start with a view of the total market and then move into a synthesized [00:33:00] and summarized version of who your core consumer audience is.

So while yes, I, as let's take a brand like Gatorade actually use a lot as an example, Gatorade brand markets to a lot of people, a lot of different diverse people. What they have identified as their core consumer are People, these are my words, not theirs, but people who are thirsty, people who are active in some way that causes them to be thirsty and therefore need to replenish the liquids in their bodies.

That is a gigantic audience of people. That's basically everyone in the country. Now, for most brands, your audience is not that large, but the synthesis of a consumer target is that broad. It should be that broad because. You need enough of an audience in order to actually have a scalable business, right?

That's a conflict. So what has to happen, regardless of the size of the brand, the industry, even where you [00:34:00] are distributed D to C versus brick and mortar, it doesn't matter. If you're doing it outside of the trunk of your car, all of the brands need to have a. Strategic ownership of the brand position, which includes the brand's promise.

That's the key message that the consumer is going to take away. I'll give you a good example of that is if it's got to be clean, it's got to be tied brand promises. The thing is always going to be clean. No matter what you need to know what that brand promises and you need to know what are the key messages that resonate with that audience that has to be the standard by which we begin.

And the way that a brand owner can manage that through execution is to start every conversation there and then finish every conversation there. So we're all agreeing here that this is who we're talking to. This is what we're saying to them. This is what we want them to hear from us. What does that look like in digital marketing?

Great. It's a huge, long detailed [00:35:00] plan. It has all these personas as all these placements, these variants of creative executions. Perfect. Love all of that. Does it loop back to the brand positioning? Are all of these things we've just described consistent and authentic representation of the brand positioning that we have aligned on?

If no, then we need to stop. That doesn't mean that we eliminate the test and learn process, which is incredibly important for us. When you have an e com brand, but what it does mean is that it gives you guardrails for what we know to be true and what we can test and learn. You might discover that the agency says, look, we have a hypothesis that right now you're prioritizing message A, but actually we think it needs to be prioritized to message B.

Fantastic. Let's test it. That means a small piece of our budget is validating that I would include that in a learning [00:36:00] plan. That is part of research. That's part of you learning what works and what doesn't, but it doesn't change the course that we're on. Until we've proven that is a better and more effective way of talking about our business, in which case then we can pivot.

But until we've proved it and we know we have the validation behind it, we don't just throw things at the wall. We have a perspective, we have a strategy, and the brand owner owns it. I actually talk a lot about this idea that as an owner of a brand, of a business, You need to be the one in the driver's seat.

What happens a lot in this, you just described one of those scenarios, is that when a brand owner does not have a strong point of view or a strong vision or a strong strategy for what the business is doing, You hire someone to do work for you. Their job is to to shine. Their job is to over deliver work for you.

They want to show you results. And so if you're not controlling how they show the results, they're going to do what is [00:37:00] necessary in order to get you the results. Cause that's their job. That doesn't always mean that the results you get are the best results for your business. And so it has to come back to you.

It is not their fault to solve. It is that you have not provided the right kind of guardrails and guidelines. And so I encourage anyone listening who owns a brand to figure out how do you document and have what I call a brand manual that says, these are our strategic. Points. This is what our brand positioning looks like.

This is exactly who our consumer is. And these are the things we are not doing. We are not talking this way. We are not going after this. We're not competing with these people. We are doing this. And then allow anyone who's involved in your business to challenge that and offer you hypotheses. If you feel confident.

That one of those hypotheses has value, then go test it, but start from a position of power of strength of having a perspective and then allow others to help you optimize that and get it better. Instead of allowing others to drive that it's [00:38:00] really important. Yeah.

Kunle Campbell: I, yeah, that that's a very detailed answer and I resonates with a lot of the points you made, particularly the final points around you taking ownership as a leader, as a proprietor, as a founder of a business to to really guide essentially. I'll say the words, how you describe things which ties into what's your brand promise what you talked about with regards to, to, to a brand promise.

It's so powerful because if I tell you that this adjust the light, my studio lights, this device here, and the promise here is to always be in control there, at least that's a wedge that people can take on. That doesn't change. It's persistent with the expectation of when we ship this to customers.

That's exactly what this particular device is going to do. And then people can experiment. Another anecdotal another anecdotal. Example is we're in the process of scaling a beauty device brand at the [00:39:00] moment and our hypothesis was a certain demographic, so we thought a certain demographic, women age 25 to, to, to 39 will be, the core base.

And we just made some adjustments to to, to some of the influencers we work with, and it turns out that the over 40, the 42 to 59 demographic are much more effective. And you look at Metta, Metta is always telling you to don't be specific, let, we know what we're doing, our AI.

We'll tell you. So I think that conversation between performance, and you mentioned it, which is using performance as a research, hypothesis generation center to answer questions, to just, Directly inform the brand planning is so important.

It just makes you agile and able to adapt in this ever-changing world because, the ai and meta is really investing in AI now. And yeah, it's, it, yeah. It's wild. Yeah.[00:40:00]

Kathy Guzman: And I'll build a little bit on that to give brand owners a sort of a past, if you will, in that. The reason this happens, the reason why you wind up and you find yourself in a place where the tail is wagging the horse is that We just don't know. There's a lot of uncertainty, particularly for folks that are coming into owning a business, owning a brand that maybe this is new to them.

They haven't done it before, or this is still fairly new. You've just still in the learning process. There I've been a brand owner myself and I've worked with a lot of particularly startup brands is there's a lot of fear in the work, right? That I can invest the money and I'm going to lose it, or I'm going to set up my brand in the wrong way.

And. The folks that I'm bringing into my ecosystem, they are experts. They know what they are doing and there's this sense that I need to rely on them to help [00:41:00] guide me in the right direction. And you absolutely should, because there are a lot of smarter people out there than me and I definitely want their input.

Where there's a slight difference that I'd like to encourage Everyone listening to consider is that you don't need to know everything there is to know about the industry to have a point of view. It doesn't mean that your point of view is right. Maybe you're wrong, but you can start from a point of view.

You can start from a place to say, I know this space. I've been evaluating this. I'm working on it. I'm looking at what's available in the world and I can have a place to begin from, and then hold myself accountable to that. strategy, that perspective, that vision. While I allow the experts to help me make it better, let them help me improve it as opposed to let them help you drive it.

The other thing I'll say to that, one more thing I will offer to your [00:42:00] audience that I'll put also in the link we'll talk about in a minute is a brand positioning template. This is a template that's very specific to brand positioning. It's not the entire framework we talked about before. This is the tool that can help you clarify.

There are four, five pieces in this template. The first one is for who is this for? And that is really a description of the kind of person. This has nothing to do with their problem or issue or what you're solving for. It's really. What kind of person is this? So we go back to the Gatorade exercise.

This is somebody who's out in the world. They're out in the world. Maybe they live somewhere where it's hot. Maybe they're exercising. The, this is someone who is, has an active life. The next piece is the need statement, the insight statement that is stating what the problem is. And so if we were to take one of Gatorade's products, they have one that's a zero sugar.

We'd say that the problem is they want to drink something that hydrates them, but everything out there has sugar in it and they're tired of, they don't want the sugar. They don't want that [00:43:00] for their body. That is the problem that we're addressing. The next piece would be the brand promise, just as you described.

Like what, ultimately, what is the thing that you are giving me that that I'm coming to your brand for the Gatorade zero example, the brand promise might read something like. Hydration with less sugar, right? Or hydration with no sugar. That's what I'm selling you, period. Then comes the reasons to believe.

And those, I force my clients to stick to three. And three are going to be the most important reasons why I think Gatorade Zero is the right thing for me. Number one, It's going to taste great because when you're in beverages or food, 99 percent of what we're selling is taste. So number one is going to taste delicious because it's Gatorade and we know how to make drinks taste great.

Number two is it literally has no sugar. That's why you're here. That's the reason you can believe because we're using whatever sweetener they're using in order to reduce the sugar [00:44:00] content, but ensure that it still tastes great. And then the third thing is you're here for hydration. So the third point is it has electrolytes.

It has water. These are the ingredients that are actually hydrating your body. And there's a lot more I could say about Gatorade, but that's not what the consumer cares about in that moment. So the brand positioning template as the minimum lowest effort exercise. To get into the right direction. This template can help you do that.

It can really focus you in on. I need to make a strategic choice about what my promise is. I need to make a strategic choice about what the problem is. I'm solving, I need to make a strategic choice about what kind of person this is. And then what are the reasons that I'm going to prioritize in order to be compelling to you?

If you can do that work, you're halfway there. Because that is the starting point to just reducing the noise and getting that clarity and focus around what this [00:45:00] brand stands for. And it is a starting point to literally everything else. Yes, advertising, but also product development and innovation. Also how you think about pricing, what channels you would be in and how you talk about your brands in those channels.

It definitely packaging and what the packaging looks like. It's actually the most important thing in packaging is that positioning statement. And so starting with that at the very least which again, I'll make the template available to your audience is the best way to, to start that process and to start to feel like you're a little bit more in control, right?

Because that's the other thing. If I asked you tell me your brand positioning. You probably start rattling off. It's this. And it'll take you a couple of minutes to describe it. This template helps you say, Oh, this is exactly what it is. Point. And you feel a lot more confidence when you have that

Kunle Campbell: absolutely. The thing about templates and frameworks is it just makes things scalable, repeatable, and system systematic which really helps in, in this world where, so just to clarify it, it starts with the who, the problem you're [00:46:00] solving the brand promise, what is it I'm given, and then three reasons to believe.

Kathy Guzman: Correct.

Kunle Campbell: That black without brown promise. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So just wrapping up because yeah it's been almost an hour that, that has passed by. It feels like it's five, five minutes. And there's been so much value you, you delivered in in in, in, in just going to, to the framework, the first framework you, you mentioned which was the values, the mission, the position and identity and purpose.

What is the most important of those components founders should essentially focus on. And then it has cascading effects, almost like a domino effect on the others. Yeah.

Kathy Guzman: Brand, the brand is new and you're still working things out and figuring out what the brand is. You got to start with brand positioning. When I teach classes on this and when I do on the entire brand fundamentals framework, actually start with positioning.

It's the thing people get the most easily. And it's the place [00:47:00] where we are most concerned because that's what we're going to tell consumers. This is what we're going to actually use to sell our product. And so that is definitely the most important thing. But what happens Often, which is how I wound up creating this framework is that we start to put things into brand positioning that don't belong there.

And so if you start writing the brand positioning document, if you use my template, you start writing and you find yourself. Putting things in that you're like I don't know if this really fits. And, in your case, you might say, this is a black founded company, a black owned company. Is that important right now?

I don't know. Like I'm selling socks. Do people care that this is a black owned company? I don't know that. You make a judgment on that and that needs to come out. If you're like, actually, I don't think that this is relevant for positioning because positioning is about getting someone to buy this product and you'll being black has nothing to do with socks.

If you are Mexican of Mexican descent [00:48:00] and you're selling tortillas, different issue right now, it doesn't matter. Now there's some authenticity story that's connected to that. So once you start to see that there are things you're trying to put into positioning that don't fit. That's when then it's time to start figuring out the rest of the puzzle and for some young brands, depending on, depending on the brand for example, I worked with one brand that was it's a cookie brand that is owned by two gay men, they're two husbands, and they have a foundation where they are raising funds to support young gay kids in the United States.

We had to solve their purpose, mission values right away because so much of their business was about that. If that's you are running a brand in which your own purpose. I'm not talking about social mission. I don't mean that you have to be giving money away. It doesn't matter what your brand is selling.

You have a purpose a hundred percent. And so sometimes that purpose has to be defined early. And you need to address it right away and you need [00:49:00] to deal with all of them. As you get bigger and more established, there does come a point in time where you start to realize, as I'm bringing external parties in to help with my business, or I'm talking to retailers or anyone that I'm trying to partner with, I'm realizing that I got to tell more of the story.

I got to tell my founding story. I need to talk about my values and why. Why I won't take your ingredient that was sourced in X, Y, Z place, because it doesn't fit the values of my brand. And certainly in identity, when you start to optimize and refresh your packaging, every brand goes through a rebrand at some point after it's been out in the marketplace, that's when you've got to start getting all those pieces pulled together.

And I'll say the last thing about all of that is. It would be my preference that everyone does all of it right at the beginning. But if you have to make a choice, you've got to get your brand positioning locked in. And then from there, pick the other pieces of the fundamentals [00:50:00] that are going to be most impactful to your type of business.

And I'm happy to chat with anyone about that. It's easy to get some time on my calendar, give you Some guidance and direction on how exactly do you think about the brand fundamentals? And then maybe one last thing I'll say is know that this is hard work. This is not the kind of thing you're going to do.

You're going to spend an hour on it. Look, I did it. It's done. You're going to spend a lot of time and you are always going to be optimizing brand positioning. I have a client, the brand is 180 years old. We're still working on brand positioning. Because the consumer is always changing, because words always change, and so it's a never ending process, but start with brand positioning.

Kunle Campbell: Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Speaking of diversity we had the e commerce performance marketing manager who was like. key to revenue for this business. They're a hundred million dollar business. They sell essentially photo frames. So for memories the brand is called mixed tiles.

[00:51:00] So a few years ago I we had him. Oren on the Israeli business. So we had him on a conference. I we organized a virtual conference and he mentioned something around diversity. So didn't, they were not very, because they're based out in Israel. They were not the, they're not very familiar with the nuance of like demographics in the USA.

And the primary market was not, was USA, not even Canada was USA. Those were the, again, majority of the funds. And the. Most of their advertising was just had Caucasian, families essentially, because you're selling memories, right? So you're sending essentially to, to women, who are going to put the memories and decorate the house, married, married, family, women, and they decided to change change it up a bit, I don't know how they discovered, but they started to put, ethnic minority families on there.

And that year. That accounted for almost a 33 percent increase [00:52:00] in, in revenue. And we're talking about, at the scale of tens of millions of dollars here, because obviously it plugged it into, meta and all of a sudden, as in, there was a lot of affinity. From from African American, families and, the ethnic minority, consumers.

So my question is really how do you authentically, strategize for diversity, particularly for CPG brands or e commerce brands. On the flip side, if you put. That you are black owned in the UK. No, no one really care in the UK. All right. So yeah. But in America it's a whole different conversation.

So I would like to, you to give us a little bit of a breakdown of how diversity, really works in the context of the market. You're more familiar with, which is the United States.

Kathy Guzman: Yeah, the U. S., we're just so tricky in so many ways. We like to be special. We like to do everything our [00:53:00] own special way. Hard to summarize how diversity plays a role or ethnicity or race or even gender sexual orientation, income levels, all these sort of levers of demographics, how they play a role in brand positioning, in messaging, even in language and how we speak to consumers.

And so what I will say about it. The short version is we like to be recognized as individuals. That the individuality in the United States is such a huge component of our culture and who we are. What is underneath that is a desire to be seen that is not unique. To Americans. We just like to showcase it on our shoulder,

That is true for everyone in the world.

We all want to be seen and understood and heard [00:54:00] and therefore reflected in the products and services that we buy into. So I will put aside in this conversation, cause it's not an area of expertise of mine, but incredibly important, the desire for organizations. To become diverse themselves or to market to a more diverse population because they feel it's the right thing to do.

That is an issue of values and it takes a completely different conversation than what I am about to talk about, right? So if that is where your business is thinking and going. There is specific work to be done around that. That really doesn't necessarily fit within business strategy. So I'll put that to the side.

And I'm happy to refer to a bunch of people who I know that actually work in that space. The other side of the coin is there's a business opportunity. I either I'm missing out on it and I don't know, or I [00:55:00] realized there's an opportunity that I'm not tapping into because I don't understand the broadness of the audience.

The very easiest way to begin this conversation is by saying that the way that we used to do marketing in the past, and I'm not talking about digital marketing here, I am talking about brand management, strategic marketing that happens at at the business strategy level. We used to talk a lot about demographics women who work from home, or rather women who don't work and who are homemakers men who travel a lot teenagers whose parents are wealthy and then also by generation.

So we're gonna target millennials. So when I. So we're starting in my career, that was the hot topic, the way we talk about Gen Z or even Gen Alpha now, we were talking about Millennials, everything was, who is your target? Millennials, who is your target? Millennials. What happened with Millennials is that they taught the rest of us.

How to [00:56:00] be who we are today. Millennials showed up and said, wait a minute. I want my food to be healthier. Wait a minute. I don't want to work this much. Wait a minute. I think experiences are more important than stuff. Wait a minute. I think travel is really cool. The rest of us started saying, Hey, actually you're right.

Now that I'm seeing these products come to life. This is something that I want as well. And that turned into what is called the millennial mindset. And the millennial mindset has nothing to do with your generation. Doesn't matter how old you are. There are 75 year olds that are more millennial than millennials are, because it's about the.

These ideas and these principles that they brought to the table that were then reinforced by the world we lived in, right? We reinforced by the iPhone and the internet and Google and so now we all share these values What that has meant in the last five years in particular is that we've moved away from a demographic focus And more to a psychographic focus.

Something I say all the time [00:57:00] is, demographics don't matter until they do. They matter if you're talking to women who just had a baby, right? Now it matters. You're not gonna talk to a man, it matters that she's a woman. If it is not about a specific demographic that literally is driving the product, then really the demographic is not as important.

What's important is what does this person care about and what do they want? So mixed tiles, if we take that as the example, what I would bet that they learned either before they decided to make the change or learned quickly after is that it doesn't matter what color you are. You want to showcase your family.

You want your home to be beautiful. You want to put stuff up on the wall. Even a minute ago, you made the comment about that they were marketing to women who care about memories and care about their house looking beautiful. That's not exclusive to women. There are actually many people who feel that way.

Across the gender spectrum across the age spectrum across regions and marketplaces and instead what we're looking for are people perhaps they may have gotten [00:58:00] to a place where they're looking for people who are interested in unique ways to show their memories. In a way that looks beautiful and professional, but it's also easy to do.

They're just, I want to be part of the process of doing that. I don't want to hire someone. And this lets me do that in a really beautiful way. That may be what they have discovered. So the takeaway here is. Focus less on the demographics and focus more on the need and the solution and how that consumer will really think about your product and you'll be way more successful at doing that.

And it allows. Diversity to naturally exist in that audience. Now you don't have to go work to see it. We'll do black people care. It doesn't matter because they're already included in the way that they're thinking. And if they're not thinking it, then they're not included because it's about the thinking and the feeling and the desire and not about the color of their skin or their age or their gender, unless it matters.

Again, unless it matters. Yeah. [00:59:00] Oh, I lost your audio. Oh, I think you muted yourself

Kunle Campbell: No, it's that's an excellent answer, to, to the question I had. And at the end of the day it's about people and their feelings and how they want to be heard. And once you are empathetic enough, it's not even a question you'd intuitively. Know how to include, even from insights will tell you this is, this goes back to one of your first points about, unbiasedly asking questions and then what are you going to do about those questions?

The answers that you get and that's where they flourished and just to make a correction, it's actually a 35 percent reduction in ad spend. As against an increase in in, in revenue, I just checked it out anyway, just to correct myself. Yeah, so it's a really good, brilliant stuff, Kathy for people who want to find out more, about what you do, I have your [01:00:00] website, it's the clarity wizard.

Dot com, but you do also have some goodies for our audience. You have your brand fundamentals document, as well as the clarity catalyst blank template, for really planning your brand for free, totally free, for free. On your website. So for people who want to find out more there, it's the clarity wizard.

com slash podcast. I will link to it on the show notes, wherever you're listening to this. Are you active on any social media platforms? If any, one wants to follow your work or anyone who's listening to it up until this point, which ones for you, what would you which ones

Kathy Guzman: absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. And and I accept all invitations. I think LinkedIn is The square of the community and we're all here to meet each other. And I accept all invitations. And by the way, on that forward slash podcast, I'll also add which are not there today, but I will add the learning plan [01:01:00] template.

As well as pull out in that Clarity Calendar List document is the brand positioning template. But I'll pull it out as its own standalone so folks can find it really easily. And make sure that they're able to get to those two tools. And of course if there's anything I can do to help help you or your audience learn how to use those or develop them happy to do just reach out and we can chat.

Kunle Campbell: Really appreciate your time here, Kathy. Thank you again.

Kathy Guzman: Thank you. .

So thank you for tuning into this episode of the two actually comers podcast.

I hope you found our conversation with Kathy Guzman as, as insightful as I did. Her expertise in brand positioning is truly invaluable for anyone looking to redefine their message and connect more deeply with their audience. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the two X e-commerce podcast on your preferred platform.

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