Your Brand Isn't Connecting: Why Brand Consistency Pays

Like you get a feeling when something is good. It's staring at a menu and just not really caring what you choose. You're going to go with the cheapest price potentially. So the cost of that connection that you can make, you have the ability to do it. And how you represent yourself no matter what vertical you're in, right? You've got the ability to create that connection and if there isn't one, again I'll say, it is just purely transactional and you're competing on price forever.

You know, you may have a great product as well but if there's no connection then they really can choose to go anywhere they want for that product. So I mean imagine a company with a really super modern website and it looks great, but then a Word doc proposal and then there's a pitch deck that you review and there's three different styles of slides, there's an invoice from the 2000s, they've got four different shape logos, three or four different colors all out there in the wild. I mean that is not one company, it's not cohesive, it's five nervous companies rather than one continuous vision that's set up across that company. So it speaks of amateur kind of setup, no matter how big the businesses, it doesn't reflect well on who you are professionally as a business.

So the cost kind of hides in lower close rates, weaker pricing, no repeat business, limited referrals, no brand loyalty, right? So that's a real financial impact from what we're saying from a lack of connection. Whereas if you get a consistent brand, like even the smallest company, and we see these all the time, right? I mean, we're now so web-based that, and thanks to COVID, everybody pushed themselves online.

Small companies can look super established. They can look much larger, much more professional than they are. Whereas an established company without good branding can look very, very small. So yeah, that cost is a lot of impact on the financial and income side. And you know, you can pay for these things. You can pay for the design. You can pay for all of this, but you're not really paying for the doubt, the connection that you never made with your customer.

So it seems like you audited all my marketing material for this episode. This is top of mind with us, right? We are discussing a rebrand. Our marketing material, I mean, this is a great example. It's kind of grown organically over the last two to three years. And we've got great material and a great brand and a lot of value. You just need to take stock sometimes and push it forward and say, well, where are we going to be in five years?

And what does it look like in five years? Well, let's set it up now for that success. So, yep. So you hit me a little bit on what the disconnect costs. Can you dig a little bit deeper into that, what the actual cost is like wearing my financial hat? Yeah, for sure. Let's imagine a potential customer deciding who to go with for a job. And we've got lots of trades and services, right?

So you're looking at a trade's job, and there's, you know, these guys are notorious for putting RFPs out there. And you respond to your RFP, you send them a deck, you know, your email as a logo in it, you send them a deck to kind of present the offering, you jump on a call with them, they've got to start making decisions about honing it down to a few vendors to choose from.

So depending on how you present yourself with your language and with your visual identity through all of that, they're going to get a feel of how professional you are or are not. Your close rates affected there, right there. You present yourself better, but you're not because it's not contiguous. Somebody's saying, I kind of like the look and feel of these guys because again, they're getting a feeling from what they're reviewing.

There's a close rate impact. If you're going out there and again putting bids out in a marketplace and you don't have that brand connection and people don't feel you're the company capable of delivering the services you are, you've got to drop price to be competitive. Back to our previous episodes, right? So right there, conversion rate and the amount you charge for a job, those are real financial numbers that we're looking at on a regular basis. They're right in your wheelhouse, Ryan, for deciding how good or bad something is.

So are you telling me that people lose jobs because of bad fonts? Yeah, absolutely they do. I mean obviously some industries are affected more than others. Like personal relationship comes into a lot of different industries, but if you're just faced with picking from one website versus another, which sometimes a lot of it comes down to that, and if one website looks just super neat and polished, with great fonts, and one website has nine different fonts with italics and bold and junk all over the place. I know what I'm going with. Like if everything's the same price, same product, I'll go with the more professional looking site. That reminds me of when the Higgs boson results came out from CERN and they presented in the slides but it was set in Comic Sans and so the internet talked about the font instead of the physics. Well look at you, Mr. Educated Higgs boson. You know, I do a lot more preparation than you do

for sure. Yeah. Not for this episode. I changed my underwear. You didn't. That's true. Time for your fun fact now. Yeah, hey, well, yeah. Time for Ryan's fun fact. So fun fact, and it actually backs Jon up. He's not making this stuff up. Psychologists have a thing called the mere exposure effect. The more often people see something familiar, the more they like it and trust it. I mean that explains politicians right there. No new information, just repetition. Familiarity itself builds affection. So just being consistently recognizable makes people like you more.

Which is the whole game. A connected, consistent brand gets seen as the same thing over and over so it compounds trust for free. An inconsistent one resets the meter every time and never gets familiar. You're backing me up, Ryan. You know, I probably had too much cough medicine. I'm really not thinking straight. I'm not sure what came over me. It's really high altitude here. Feeling dizzy. Yeah, well I appreciate it. It's a strange feeling but I appreciate it.

I'm thinking I'm going to have to go see somebody after this. Yeah. Alright, time for a word from our sponsor this week. A quick break. Brought to you aptly by Suricata Studio, a brand agency and design studio out of Toronto. And Ryan, this is the most on topic sponsor we've ever had. A brand studio sponsoring the brand episode. Makes sense. Yes, indeed. Suricata is a small award-winning studio led by Nico and Diana, a couple who are experts in product design and branding, 10 plus years, clients from tiny startups all the way to unicorn companies.

So this is exactly the build, the one connected identity work we spent the last 20 minutes on. The people who take five nervous companies and turn them into one. Yes indeed, and they are excellent at it as well as brand identity, also UI, UX, design, all done as a white glove service. Their whole philosophy is that great design comes from strategy, not just making things pretty. Which is the episode. Connection is everything. It's a strategy decision. It's just not a decoration. That is right, Suricata Studio. Their web address is, and I will spell it, Suricata, S-U-R-I-C-A-T-A-E-S-T-U-D-I-O.com, or email them at hola, H-O-L-A, at S-U-R-I-C-A-T-A-E-S-T-U-D-I-O.com.

If your brand looks like five companies, they'll make it one. Gracias, Suricata. Yes, indeed. And they are from Colombia. So, I know they are. They are from Colombia. I know, you told me once and I remembered. That's the only thing I've remembered that you've told me in the 20 some odd episodes. You're gonna remember about connection today. I am and I'm gonna find a thesaurus and never use that word again after this episode.

What's Spanish for connection? Conexión? It is. Okay. There's also false cognates. So be careful. There's what? False cognates. Like conexión is connection. Sometimes when like embarrassed is not embarazada. Embarazada means pregnant. But you think it's completely different things. If you're like, hey I'm you know very embarazada with you. They're like whoa let's slow down there, seller. Buy me a mojito or something. Yeah or two. Let's see if we can, yeah, we'll not impregnate for the rest of the episode. Oh, it's a type of connection. I guess so. That's not, that's not what this episode expounds though. Let's keep rolling. How do you actually build that one connected identity? You know, if I hired a brand agency like Suricata, for example, to do it, what exactly would I get?

I think it's a great question and I think people don't really understand and that it's really a process. So there's a few things here. One, it does start with a process and that's where brand agencies should begin. And that's, I know that I've worked with Suricata a lot. So that's where they begin. And the process is really about the method of making sure that you dig in and research the right elements to be able to then come up with some moments of real value.

So like the first step is spending some time digging deep into the identity of the organization. Who's the owner? Where did it come from? What's its purpose? What are you really focused on? What's the values? What's the messaging to the customer base currently? Step two in the process, understanding who the customer is and really digging deep, researching who they are in detail. What are they like? Where do they shop?

Where do they hang out? What are their buying factors? What do they identify as and with? Most importantly, think about how you can represent more than just a transaction when you're appealing to that customer. You've got to smash those things together. And then you make a set of decisions. You have to go through this and define who you want to be. And sometimes you've got to give up on those old identities. It's not about the owner and the fact that he would spend 12 hours working on something. That's not who the company is and that's not how you can scale that company. So your brand identity really needs to be able to be evolved over the next three, five, seven, 10 years, and you've got to make some decisions about who you want to be.

You make those once, you write them down, so nobody is guessing about who you intend to be and how you communicate who you are. So that's kind of the process in a nutshell. People who carry out that process on a regular basis get really, really, really good at it. And there's some cultural and historical relevance in being able to connect a brand to things, it creates a lot of depth.

And so you want somebody who can do that very well. They then come up with a few different things. And to be clear, a good brand agency will not fire this into GPT or Claude Design or whatever the heck else and spit something out. Any of us can do that. And what you get when you do that is a very transactional computational output of what you could or should be.

We're talking about humans here and human connections. So you really gotta be careful that AI is not capable of producing a brand connection and at depth that we've been talking about. So they need to go away and then write things like, or three main document. One is visual identity, what the brand looks like, color codes, what color blue, what fonts do you use, what imagery style do you use, what shading, is it bright, is it kind of dark and mysterious.

The look and feel of the photos and the overlays you put on those, the text you put on top of all your imagery. All those things get defined very well from a scientific way of how to deliver it over and over again so that it always looks the same. So that's visual identity. The second thing, your brand voice. Adjectives based around what you are, what you stand for, the way you represent yourself, and those need to flow down through your entire team.

There also needs to be do's and don'ts within that brand voice. Don't say this. Don't say cheap. Say inexpensive, right? So there's a big difference in how you create, how you sound. And then all of these things get spilled down into a brand guidelines. And this is a document with rules. It doesn't need to be an overwhelming document, but it keeps the company connected through all of the different voice and visual elements so that there's consistency.

So that when you get a new hire, when you get a new vendor, everybody knows exactly who you stand for. So these things need to be usable as well. So we don't want a 40-page document that nobody reads and sits in a corner. That's not useful. A one-page visual identity, one-page brand voice with guidelines of how to use it. And that will fix the majority of the assets that you need to create.

Then, these need to be rolled out. And I mean, that's what a brand agency would provide. But what you've got to do on your side is then roll it out through the organization. Make sure that these documents drive every single piece of communication. And I do mean communication forevermore, right? The look and feel of every asset that people see. How you pick up the phone. How you send out your invoices.

And what it says on the invoices, all of these things need to jive with the brand guides that have been created. Because this is what creates connection. It's all these ingredients, that internal connection and the external connection. Now, I've seen this happen multiple times with a good brand agency, because what you're looking for, the sum of all of these things creates an aha moment. Oh wow, this brand is now deeper than just the sum of its parts.

And there's some magic in that. And I think people who do this for a living can create that magic. Again, it's that aha moment when you look at a brand and you go, oh, I really get it. That makes a lot of sense. And it may be something clever with the imagery or the logo, right? But there is something that then somebody goes, oh, wow, it's like the Ralph Lauren monogram logo, right?

It's, you know, that's a big brand, of course. It's the excitement that you get when you hold this, you know, a rectangular boxes with an embossed apple on it. Again, another big brand. But for small business, there are things that are just as important like a monogrammed leather handle if you're opening a drawer or have a suitcase or something. It's the familiarity of seeing a truck roll up with a familiar face that you know is going to fix your problem. It creates things where people will call the company back. It sold you a great product, after they emailed you to follow up, follow them on social media, sent you a card on your birthday, called you to check on your installation, you know, all with the same imagery and same voice, and then you pick up the phone, you call that company back because it's the only company you're going to call when you have the same problem. That's really how a company can help create

great branding and it makes a difference. So for our listeners in trades or manufacturing, like their small business version of the unboxing moment is the technician wiping their feet. Yeah. Or, yeah, putting on those shoe covers. Vacuum, vacuum, a little hand vacuum. They vacuum it up, right? Now, I mean, those are small steps within a process. You don't necessarily need great branding for that. But that is your, who you stand for as an organization, trickling down to the little things that a technician does when he's wearing the polo that's nice and fresh and clean and crisp that matches the logo on the truck, the nice shiny truck out there with the verbiage that speaks the tone of the organization.

Yeah, it's the little thank you card that perhaps he puts in the mailbox, right, as he walks out the door or a referral card where somebody gets 25 bucks or 50, but you get 25 bucks and a new customer gets 25 bucks off the next time somebody signs up. So I'm talking about how all the elements of the interaction relay who the company wants to be in a contiguous brand voice.

You know that tampering with someone's mail is a federal offense. Oh yeah, you're not allowed to do that in the US, right? That's right. You got to pay more for your medicine and don't put anything inside the mailbox. Tuck it in where the flag is, right? Right. Well, I'm going to have to call that one back, but yeah, that's right. I'm not advocating to break federal law here, folks.

Jon is. Yeah, come after me. I'm across the border, I'm fine. Door hangers, there we go, door hangers. That's how we'll solve it. All right, so that makes sense, Jon. We don't have the 40-page Old Testament of the thou shall not copy your logo off the website, right? We've got a one-page doc, we've got an image that gives us the wow moment, the connection all the way through.

So let's give some more detail, like walk me through how that one identity flows through everything and why that makes each piece connect better. Yeah, and I'm going to speak from experience here, recent experience, where there was an existing brand which was just kind of dated and there's lofty expectations to be able to grow that brand and increase the product set and also speak out to a different, slightly different type of audience to be able to meet some growth objectives, right?

And a rebrand in that instance, it started with the documents that I already described. I don't need to, you know, repeat myself and do the process to death. But when you do go through that process and you say, this is exactly how we're going to represent ourselves, and this is exactly the language we're going to define and use every time we communicate, then you can reach out to those new audiences.

And what that means is the initial experience that somebody gets is generally, you know, they're googling something and they're looking at somebody's website. And so all that language, if it's consistent in front of them on a website, is the first port of call. Then they want to find a little bit more information and they fill out a lead form. And then you get an email that's branded, has exactly the same tone about who they are as an organization and how they speak to that market.

Let's say it's a local family-run business and it flows through everything. You want to support that family-run business and from the moment you go onto the website and in this instance it's not family-run business but the moment you go onto the website it says that, the email you get reinforces that. And then you got to do a little bit of thinking before you're ready to purchase and they might run some ads.

And the ads look exactly like the website with exactly the same tone and they follow them around because there's remarketing technologies that allow you to put ads in front of them wherever they go. And so you see exactly the same messaging continuous through your whole experience with them. Then you might want a little bit more information. They send you a catalog or a deck and that looks exactly the same as well, speaks the same language.

You go in to take a look and there's a tear sheet that you take away the product that you're looking at. Again on voice, on brand, it just your whole experience there just kind of flows from the moment you've touched one item all the way through to the point you're making a purchase, a transaction. So yeah, each, it's compounding, right? Every single asset pays interest on all the other ones that you've, they've had an opportunity to touch with and then I mean, I mean that really reinforces it.

That's the whole connection working well in your favor. But just imagine if you didn't have that. It works backwards. You lose credibility if the website doesn't match the email and it's a crappy email and a weird font. And then you get followed around by some ads and they look completely different and you don't even notice them because they look so different. The logo looks different. Paying dollars to be able to put those in front of the customer and you know you just, you don't see those things. So I mean it can be compounding the negative or compounding the positive, there's no real neutral here. So for me, yeah, that's how it all kind of ties together. That's the guidelines and the consistent application that makes it all happen. So you said something there that really sparked my interest here is, you know, each assets, yeah, right. I was paying attention for some of it. Each asset pays itself on the others. So that's finally a

marketing metaphor that I can get behind because it has yield in it. So walk me through maybe typically a van that's sitting in the driveway with the right image, with the connection. What is a neighbor looking at and saying, well, I want to call those people? Yeah, I mean bear in mind that a van is one component of everything that we're talking about here, but what the van looks like has been thought through, how it represents the business.

It'll be on point because you've already looked at the fonts, you've looked at the messaging, you've got a website on there that people want to go to, you've got a phone number where people know exactly how to answer the phone. You might have a QR code because people don't have time to write down the number or whatever or sitting behind them at a traffic light. So all of those things in and of itself are just good marketing principles, but when you thought through them and you brand them well, then they're aligned with the opening up of the website and it looks exactly like the van itself.

Clear breakdown of services. Yeah, so that's where it's not just the van itself and the drive, it's every experience that you touch when people want to interact with it that really kind of drives the frictionless purchase cycle when somebody wants to give you a call and sign up for service. Excellent. I think you wrapped it up well. Awesome. Good stuff. Okay. I think it's time for my two cents.

That's right. And we'll all be lucky if it's worth that amount. All right. Two cents on point for today's episode as well. Real photos beat stock photos every single time. It's another connection thing, which is perfect for this episode. A real photo of your actual team, your actual work, your space, connects. A stock photo does the opposite. It turns people off. People can smell stock instantly. The stock photo whispers.

This company has nothing real to show, and that's a disconnect. A real, even slightly imperfect photo says, these are actual humans who actually do this, and that's where trust starts. So one tip this week, find the three most important stock photos on your site. It's probably your hero, your about page, your main service page, and replace them with real photos of your actual work or team. Phone photos in a decent light, you know, from iPhones or whatever, are fine, just make them real and try and get some good composition with them.

So are you telling me that nobody, nobody's team ever high fived in a glass conference room? We do it all the time. I do it every day, Brian. It's part of our company values. But I mean, you're the boss, so you're paying people to high five you.

Green beans for lunch, yeah! Yeah, let's go! Snap. Put that on the website, it's fabulous. No, no classroom high fives, no people with pens leaning over, writing weird documents. Take all that junk out, right? Yeah. Get a genuine photo in there. It doesn't have to be like perfect. I mean it has to be decent, right? If this is the main image on your website, you want it to be decent.

You don't want to look like, like doo doo. So spend some time, get the right image. It's not impossible. Decent not doo doo, folks. Why's words? Decent not... Decent not doo doo. Let me get a T-shirt with that on it. Well, the connection through a line. That's your brandy. Alright, one more from Suricata Studio out of Toronto. Yeah, and here's a bit of fun in their naming. Suricata means meerkat in Spanish and meerkats are the animal that stands up on watch and keeps the whole group connected and safe, which is exactly what a good brand does for a business.

That is a genuinely good metaphor and I'm annoyed you found it. Oh yeah, it is a couple-led studio, Nico and Diana. You feel that in their work. It's white glove, hands-on, strategic, not a template mill. They've done this for individual startups and for unicorns and the care is the same. I can feel it building up. You have a stupid thing about Toronto to say. Oh yes, Toronto. It's not Toronto. Toronto. It's Toronto.

As a Canadian, I get quietly proud when a small Toronto studio is out there doing world-class brand work for companies on four different continents. That's my one, and for once it's just pride, no weather joke. That's your one, Suricata Studio, suricataestudio.com, S-U-R-I-C-A-T-A-E, S-T-U-D-I-O.com, or hola at suricataestudio.com. Go build the one identity people can connect with. All right, Jon. So we talked about connection. Never wanna use that word again, but we're gonna use it again and I'm gonna use it in this question.

So let's bring it home for the skeptic. What does real connection actually do for my sales and my prices and outcomes? It creates, I'm gonna say it instead of connection now. It creates a compelling reason to drive an hour to your favorite store versus one just down the road. It creates the desire to connect with a family-run business and order online when it takes longer to arrive and it costs a little bit more.

Or it pays the bill for a plumber to arrive, be, you know, versus somebody who is more local and cheaper because they trust the job's going to get done right. None of that is price, all of it is connection with the brand and it comes from a trustworthy feeling that you get, it also comes from a little bit of identity that you're building for yourself, right? Like you wanna be the guy that supports the family-run business, that buys local, right?

Maybe you like your crafts and farm stuff, so go out and find these opportunities. So the brand pre-sells, they've decided to trust you, right? And they're forcing that trust before any of the marketing starts to speak. And really, it creates ad efficiency. I've talked about it before. Recognizable ads get remembered, and then they start to perform for you. So consistency here is basically free reach to your audience.

That's good stuff, Jon. People have slept on a sidewalk for a phone, but never the cheapest one, unless it was Black Friday and then watch out for being trampled to death. People die in those things. That's what trampled to death means. Yeah. Do you mean in Canada too or does that have a different meaning? Well, it depends. It's hyperbole. Somebody got boarded in the third period. Yeah, yeah, it's hyperbole sometimes, you know.

I was racing for my poutine and I got trampled to death the other day. Wow. So they serve poutine in the ice rink? Uh, they serve poutine everywhere. Nice. Yeah. Love it. You know, Canada is known for poutine. The US is known for beating Canada in hockey. Oh! Oh! Anybody who watched that game knows. If you watch that game, you know. At least we can afford our health care.

Canada lost at the end of the game. Yes. We can afford our health care up here. We played so well. But we should have won. I had to go get a hook out of my arm. Well, that's the difference between disconnection and connection, Jon. Connection brings the winners home. Brings the home the trophy. Your words not mine. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's still sore. That'll be sore about that one forever.

But at least, as I say, at least we can afford our health care and our drugs up here. Well, I had to go to the hospital get a fishing hook out of my arm a couple of weeks ago. Cost me nothing. Who knew that fishing was such a brutal sport? Yeah, contact, contact sport. How do you get a hook in your arm? I was fly fishing and I hit myself with a big lure. Stuck in there, was in the tendon. I, so I had to go in. They had to cut it out. Oh, wow. Yeah, I hope she leaves that in there. It's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for you to say that.

All for dinner. That's what we gotta do to eat up here, folks. That's right. You can afford a medicine in hospital. We can't afford food. That's the metaphor. What are the other folks? It's more for... No, that's because we import it and we get a tariff. Holy crap. Yeah, let's not go that way. No, that's not. Alright, so owners driving home, they suspect their brand isn't connecting.

One thing this week. Okay, do the one-table brand audit. Put every customer facing asset in place on that table. Look at them once. So print out your home page, an ad, proposal, deck, business card, invoice, signature, picture of your truck, packaging, whatever it is. Put it all on one table and look at it. Do these connect as one identity or do they feel like however many you've got on the table, you will see it instantly.

Every disconnect, pile up every single disconnect and that is the first step. Seeing it is, this will take you less than an hour, right? Now what you've got to make at this point is a decision of do we just need to fix the one or two things that we see or do we need to rebrand the organization. I would speak to your leadership team and I would say, okay, here's what I'm seeing with the assets that we've got.

Do we feel like we represent who we are now and who we want to be to our customer base? And if your leadership team comes back and says, no, I would consider bringing the professionals. I would get them to carry out a process like I described earlier. I am not advocating for $50,000, $100,000 budgets to brand agencies to come in and navel gaze. That's a bunch of BS.

I think you can get good people out there and good agencies out there that are affordable, run through the process I described earlier and they'll come up with the three assets that really help define yourself. So yeah, take those assets, talk to your leadership team, send it out to everybody who touches your marketing for feedback to pick the identity that you want to go with and build around it. So that's if you don't call in the, the, the A team for, for a rebrand, pick the one identity that everybody likes and roll with that, update your logo, your fonts and colors around that. Then I would also use AI and tell it to ask you questions to help define your brand and tell it to include the things not to say as well and that will help you build your brand voice and your brand guidelines that you can base all of your communication on. That will give you your visual identity, your brand voice and your guidelines. Now

and that'll get you through the next kind of six to 12 months. I would bring in that brand team for the next sort of five to 10 year vision at some point. Good stuff, Jon. Now we've got about a five episode streak of the takeaway being remarkable, superb, really like profound people. People writing stories, short sonnets to them, to me. Why don't you connect with our audience and not screw this up?

I'll do my best, but your memory of the recent takeaways is flawed. A brand's job is connection, and it runs two ways. Your asset's connecting to one identity and the customer connecting with that identity. Break the first and the second can't happen because nobody bonds with something that keeps changing shape. A brand that doesn't connect is, at its best, transactional, and at its worst, a turnoff. And either way, you compete on price forever.

But connection is exactly what makes the customer drive an hour to their favorite store, order from the family-run business when it takes longer to arrive, pay more for the plumber they trust to do it. None of that is price, all of it is connection. You don't need a rebrand, put every asset on the table and see whether they connect as one, pick the single identity you want people to bond with, write it on one page, make everything match it. Excellent branding creates connection, that's the whole point. And it's what is costing you when it's missing. Great stuff, Jon. For all those listeners who also have been hurt in a fishing accident, Jon is starting a support group.

Where we literally will be connected. That's right. If you have been connected to an expensive fishing rod for any length of time. Jon, I dare say great episode, it pains me that I'm getting physically ill saying that but you know great episode and I have to say that you are more decent than doo doo. Today. Today more decent than doo doo. Thank you Ryan, I appreciate it. The seat is still clean, remarkably clean for you.

You'll be back in the hot seat next week. I can't wait but how am I gonna surpass that? Just don't say connection 65 times. You got it. And embarazada. Yes. Peace out. That's it for this episode of From Burnt Out to Bought Out. If something we said today hit home, don't just nod in agreement. Pick one thing, the number you've been avoiding, the process that only lives in your head, the conversation you've been putting off for six months. Do that one thing this week. That's how it starts. And if you're not sure which one thing to pick, drop us a line. We'll happily point you in the right direction. New episodes drop every week. Until next time, stop running the treadmill and start building something you can actually sell.