ROI: Return On Identity with Paul Campillo, Former Principle Brand Storyteller at Typeform
This episode covers:
- About Paul and his background
- Paul’s role at Typeform
- Why Paul was drawn to Typeform
- How company missions play an important role in a brand
- Tips on how to measure brand
- Why B2B tech companies have less of a brand identity
- The three pillars that lead to a meaningful brand
- Emotional resonance and building a brand
- How brand identity works
Listen to the full episode here:
And check out more of the FINITE B2B marketing podcast here!
Full transcript
Alex (00:06):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the FINITE Podcast, where today we are talking with Paul Campillo, Principle Brand Storyteller at Typeform, the platform that turns boring questionnaires into beautiful survey experiences that people enjoy using.
And we’re talking all about brand. I’m excited to hear Paul’s views on this concept of return on identity instead of return on investment in marketing, how to use marketing to strengthen a brand showcase benefits, and stand out in a way that any of you familiar with Typeform, I’m sure will have seen. I’m super excited to have Paul on the podcast and I hope you enjoy this episode.
FINITE (00:42):
The FINITE Community is kindly supported by The Marketing Practice, a global integrated B2B marketing agency that brings together all the skills you need to design and run account-based marketing demand, generation channel, and customer marketing programs. Head to themarketingpractice.com to learn more.
Alex (01:02):
Hello, Paul and welcome to the FINITE Podcast.
Paul (01:04):
It’s good to be here, Alex.
Alex (01:06):
Thank you for taking the time to talk. I am on a mission to talk all things brand much more regularly than we have done on the FINITE Podcast up until now. We’ve done a few episodes, but the more we can focus on the subject the better, and I guess who better to have than yourself when it comes to this kind of topic. I won’t introduce you for you. I’ll let you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do both kind of currently and a bit of your brief history.
About Paul and his background
Paul (01:32):
Okay. Well, brief history. So my background is in social working counseling, and I guess you could say coaching. And I was working with people who were coming out of California’s state prisons and helping them find jobs. So I guess you could say I was taking formally America’s most wanted and who became America’s most unwanted and trying to get the most wanted to get in the job space.
And then one day the CEO of my organisation came to the office and she said: “Oh, I just met with Zinga and Pandora. And they said, we should be using Typeform for our workshop service.” We used to do these workshops where we would teach people financial literacy and how to hunt for jobs and things like that. And I said: “Oh, okay. I’ll take a look at it.” And I went to the website and I was like, okay, this seems pretty cool.
Paul (02:18):
And then there was like a little animated GIF or JIF. I don’t know what you say, but and I clicked on it. It said: “Come work in the sun.” And I was like, oh, what is this? And it actually took me to a Typeform, which was a job application. And I started filling it out just so I could get used to the tool. I wasn’t really being serious. And then things got serious because it started asking me questions like, write a blog post, like 300 words long and put it in this Typeform. I was like, what?
So I put a 300 words blog post and put it in there and it said go to this webpage and rewrite all the copy and take screenshots and then upload all the screenshots. And I did all that. And it took me quite a while and I realised I was challenged by their challenge.
Paul (02:58):
Anyway, I completed the Typeform job application and I was like, okay, yeah, we should definitely use this for our workshops. Then about a week later, I get an email from the head of HR and she’s like: “Oh, the CEO wants to talk to you.” I was like, what?
So I jumped on a Skype call and he’s like: “Yeah, man, that was the best submission we’ve gotten so far.” And I was like: “Oh seriously?” “Yeah, and we’re trying to figure out, how you did it because we go to your LinkedIn and all your background, like social work stuff. So anyway, we started that conversation and we went back and forth over the course of, I would say three months at one point they were like: “Oh, we’re going to hire this person from Kissmetrics. Why should we hire you?”
Paul (03:40):
And I was like: “Well, if you wanna hire that guy from Kissmetrics go ahead. I got a job, so I’m not worried about it. But you know, I’m gonna think very differently than everybody else.” So anyway, we’re on the call that first call and he’s like: “Yeah, we’re trying to figure this out.” I applied for this content manager role. And so they said: “Okay, so how would you approach content?”
And you see this whiteboard behind me, I know the listeners can’t see it, but I have this whiteboard. So I had a whiteboard in my home. And on the whiteboard, I had this whole plan mapped out for their content and I grabbed my laptop and I started like showing them like detailed detail. And they were just like: “Well this guy’s weird.”
Paul’s role at Typeform
Paul (04:25):
So anyway, finally made an offer. And then my journey through Typeform was basically starting as a copywriter. And I was writing copy for the product for the marketing. I was writing articles and then eventually I moved to head of copy and story. And this whole time, I’ve been working on the brand, brand guidelines, voice and tone, things like that. And then eventually I got into marketing ops.
So I guess you could say, I was like all over the place. I was like our storyteller. So we would work on things like, what are growth loops. And, you know, since we’re very much a product-led growth company. And then eventually I got into director of brand and I’m director of brand. I oversaw a brand strategy. How are we approaching the market?
Paul (05:13):
What’s our differentiation, what are the things that our audience wants? I even started looking at other ways that would separate us from our competition, looking at questions like who do we want our customer to become? So I guess you could say customer design beyond product design, start thinking about aspirationally, how do we wanna think about customers? And then this whole media arm idea got into my head like, how do we become a media company? So I became the principal brand storyteller and started focusing on that.
And that’s kind of where things left off. So start a show, host of a show called Meaningful, where I go around interviewing business leaders around what it takes to become a meaningful brand. So I interviewed people like Rand Fishkin, Chris Walker, Vincent Stanley from Patagonia, Seth Goldman from Honest Tea and Beyond Meat. And, you know, just all these different people, getting all these different perspectives. And it’s been quite a learning experience so far.
Alex (06:08):
So America’s most wanted to loss is Typeform’s game, you’ve been a Typeform for how many years now?
Paul (06:16):
Six and a half years.
Alex (06:17):
Six and a half years. I mean, I think that’s kind of the coolest like way into a job. I’ve heard. I mean, I get the pleasure of talking to lots of marketers and to be fair, they come from many different backgrounds. I’ve had people that have studied nuclear physics and like very rarely actually, do I get someone that’s just like done a very linear marketing education. So, which is great. I think that brings a lot of diversity to the marketing field generally.
But do you think you feel like this was kind of like within you and Typeform was the environment that brought it out, you feel like you kind of unlocked something that was meant to be? It sounds, it all came pretty naturally.
Why Paul was drawn to Typeform
Paul (06:59):
Well, the only reason why it came naturally is because the founder sold me on the idea that: “Hey, we’re trying to make the web a little more human.” And I was like, what? And you know, my experience, I put together websites before and it’s like, I didn’t have no experience. I guess you could say, I don’t know how familiar you are with old school copywriter, but Gary Halburt, I was a subscriber to his newsletter, I think back in the eighties, nineties.
So I’m kind of dating myself now. And I kind of got into understanding copy through Jay Abraham and some of these old school, old school marketers. Gary Bencivenga, people like that. And the reason why I had to do that is because I work for nonprofits and they suck at marketing and they suck at brand.
Paul (07:45):
So anyway, when I was talking to David and Robert, they were like: “Hey, we are trying to make the web more human. You know, you can tell through our products, this is like, we really wanna change how people interact online.” And I was like, okay, I can get down with that. That’s something I can think about.
And I think we can create some thought leadership around that. So that was the thing that attracted me. If it’s not somehow making a difference, then I probably would’ve just walked away. But it’s weird because people say: “It’s just forms, man.” And I said: “No, you don’t understand what we’re trying to do.”
Alex (08:18):
Yeah, it’s a cool mission. I think it’s such a great product. We actually , you’ll be pleased to hear, upgraded our Typeform account recently on Black Friday. I think we actually got a Black Friday deal whenever it was, but all of our FINITE surveys were running through Typeform, so it’s a brilliant product, but I think that frames, this conversation really nicely, right.
In terms of, I guess the power of a strong brand, like maybe the business wouldn’t be as successful with that super strong kind of mission, but I guess you wouldn’t even have applied for the job. Right. Or even entertain the idea of working there. If that mission hadn’t existed and been so strong, which I guess is maybe a whole other podcast in itself, but the power of brand in terms of attracting talent is something that’s often overlooked.
How company missions play an important role in a brand
Paul (09:05):
Yeah. And it’s something that I think that’s the best way to put it is because when I think a brand, I think brands need to attract talent and brands need to attract customers and also brand needs to somehow serve your partners and vendors. And, you know, whoever is out there that you’re working with. So a brand should serve all those people, all those functions, and all those groups. And, we tend to lump brand as a marketing thing. And it’s really not.
It’s really the feelings and associations you could almost say intangible and irrational associations that you have for a particular company or product. And so, yeah, that definitely pulled me in, but I did not know what their mission was. Me filling out that Typeform was simply a fluke. And I didn’t discover that until later. And then they pitched it to me and I was like: “Oh, this is actually interesting.” So yeah, that’s kind of how the relationship started.
Alex (09:59):
So you are running this series now, Meaningful, which it’s a video series, but it’s also, I guess it’s kind of the umbrella for a media brand that you’re building within Typeform. Is that a fair summary?
Paul (10:09):
Absolutely. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to this space as it evolved. Obviously Joe Pulizzi and Kevin Rose wrote the book, Killing Marketing, whatever talking about: “Hey, you should actually build a media brand for your company.” And you’ve seen this with Salesforce creating Salesforce+, you know, my first interview with Rand Fishkin, this guy was like: “I think people need to start Netflixing their content.” I was like, what? This is so meta because this is exactly what we’re doing.
And recently we just saw a WebFlow launch WebFlow TV. So it’s amazing, like all the developments, but we’re also seeing according to Patrick Campbell, a decline in content marketing metrics. So the ebook doesn’t have the shelf life that it’s once had. And you know, some of those other metrics are declining.
Paul (10:58):
So how else are you gonna build a relationship with people? And I think when you think of a media brand, that’s essentially what it’s trying to do. And you know, this is something that I learned very quickly. I talked to Mark DiChristina from MailChimp and he’s was like one day the founders were like: “Hey, we wanna have more than a transactional relationship with our customers. How do we do that?” And so they created MailChimp presents.
And when they first launched MailChimp presents, according to him, they didn’t run ads around it. You know, people kind of discovered it organically. And then what they found is that people signed up faster and they paid more after, you know, touching MailChimp presents content. So I guess they were buying annual plans and they were signing up much faster because the relationship had changed.
Paul (11:47):
And when I asked them: “What do you say if you’re trying to pitch the ROI of something like this?” He says: “Dude.” He just kind of laughed at me. He’s like, we don’t care about that. And it’s funny, I got the same kind of response when I talked to Vincent Stanley, he was my last interview with Patagonia.
He’s like, this is about the relationship that we’re building. And we want to make sure that we build those strong relationships and too many people focus on “Hey, what’s the profit?” And don’t keep their eye on what’s the value.
Alex (12:16):
But at the same time, the example you gave at MailChimp, being able to demonstrate that sales cycles get shorter and people sign up for longer amounts or higher deals, values, whatever. If they have some kind of interaction with the content they were putting out. Sounds like they were able to attribute some of what they were doing or kind of measure the success. Because I think this is the big debate, right?
It’s like how much do we even try to measure brand? And if we are like, how are we doing it? And I’ve had brand leaders from IBM on a podcast before, where when you are in IBM, you’ve kind of got a number of different ways of measuring brand in kind of air quotes. When you’re a hundred person startup scale up like measuring brand is like a particularly B2B one is pretty much impossible.
Or you know the ways in which you can measure brand are much more limited. It sounds like the leadership, but Typeform is really quite creative, open-minded, supportive, and understand the value of brand. But I think other CEOs, founders, maybe not so much is often the challenge. Yeah. What do you think are there any tips on how to tackle that kind of, how do we measure this conversation?
Tips on how to measure brands
Paul (13:25):
Well, if you’re a 10 person startup then absolutely. I think you need to kind of take a look at where you’re putting your money. I think it was Les Binet and Peter Fields created a report called The Long and Short of it. They were basically talking about the short term thinking and long term brand building. And, they basically said: “Look, it’s a 60, 40 split. You need to invest 60% into your brand.
And 40% into, I guess you could call the performance side, but they said only after, you’ve gained some traction. In the beginning. Yeah. You might need to start with that performance and get that message out there quickly and get some feedback on that before you start doing more of this high level stuff. But in a sense, we kind of started with the high level stuff.
Paul (14:10):
I can tell you that the most viral article that I wrote was called “In search of the ultimate user experience” and where I introduced the concept of HX instead of UX. And it was a good moment for Typeform because it kind of established: ” Hey, this is our point of view to the world.” Anyone can do that, right? And this comes back to again, knowing who you are and what you’re about, you don’t necessarily need to roll out the big bucks and do a big production, kind of what we’re doing with Meaningful.
You can start where you are and kind of put your point of view out in the world and share that perspective and then see if it gains traction. But again, there’s a point where the market where your ideas meet with the market and the market wants what it wants, but you also want what you want.
Paul (14:54):
And you need to find that Venn diagram of sweetness of that sweet spot. And I don’t think founders or the thought leaders within a company should steer away from who they are. They should be proud of who they are. And I think you and I were talking before about this concept of return on identity, right?
The real ROI to me is really understanding who you are. And I know this from working with individuals, also working with companies that if people really understand who they are, what their strengths are. I guess it’s okay to understand where your weakness is are, but I would say really what your strengths are, what you’re really good at, what your differentiation points are. And you really like enhancing that, put that out there and get behind that and have the confidence to be yourself.
Paul (15:43):
You’re going to see a lot of great returns. And you know, me going around the United States and talking to, you know, brands like Honest Tea, Patagonia and you know, some of the less known brands, but the brands that are known to us like Chris Walker and Rand Fishkin and you know, all these people, it really becomes about: “Hey, this is who we are. This is how we’re amplifying ourselves.”
And I don’t know if it’s like take it or leave it because they do have this sense of generosity and they have the sense of: “Hey, I want to deliver value no matter what, but this is what I’m about. This is what I’m about. This is the value I want to deliver to you.”
FINITE (16:21):
The FINITE community and podcast are kindly supported by Clarity Performance, the digital marketing agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies visit clarityperformance.global to find out how they partner with marketing teams in B2B technology companies to drive growth.
Alex (16:41):
And why do you think, I mean, I guess we see it more in these consumer brands, like Honest Tea, Patagonia, like some of the ones that you’ve mentioned, but less so in B2B, particularly B2B tech where most companies are so fast just to talk about features and what their product does and how it works.
And often they barely even have an about page with a human face on it. Like there’s like, there is no identity. It’s just like what the product is and how it works. Why do you think and why is that such a common B2B tech software trap?
Why B2B tech companies have less of a brand identity
Paul (17:13):
Well, it’s hard to say for each B2B tech, because when you talk to the founders, you realise that they’ve done it for different reasons. Right? And so some founders would be like: “Well, I saw an opportunity to do it better.” Another founder would be like: “Well, I wanted to scratch my own niche. I just felt like this is what the world needed.”
And I guess, you know, Typeform falls into that camp because the more I talked to David and Robert, the more I realised their philosophy was really: “Hey, you know, everyone is making sure that the experience is great for the creator, but no one’s making sure that the experience is great for the respondent.” We want to make sure that the experience is like first world-class for the respondent. And that was a different point of view.
Paul (17:55):
And so it’s really about getting into those motivations and why they created the company. When I think about building a brand, it really comes down to three things. It’s like, you got the product, which is the first touchpoint, right? You got to have a quality product. Even when I talked to Patagonia, they said the same thing when they talked to their customers, they said: “Quality of product was number one.” I forgot what was number two, but I know number three was environmentalism, right? So you would think that would be higher, but it wasn’t, you know, it was still, Hey, what’s the quality of this product? It needs to be very high.
So once you have the product in place, then you got to be able to understand who your market is. Okay. So I would say somewhere in between, when I was talking about my career journey at Typeform, I did all the jobs to be done in research.
Paul (18:42):
So I interviewed along with the team, all the customers and was trying to figure out what are you accomplishing with this job? We found there’s like seven different jobs to be done, which creates seven different contexts. Which creates seven different potential markets and seven different potential products in how people look at the Typeform.
So you understand all, understand your market, you have this product and then you need to understand the founder and their motivations. And when you have those three things, you have the founders story, you got the product story, and then you got the market and what they’re trying to do. And then somewhere in between there, that’s where your brand lies. Right? And so it’s just bringing all those things together and telling a cohesive story.
And again, when you’re positioning your stuff, your company or your product, you realise it’s not just one position because everyone’s seeing it in different ways. And what we found is like seven different positioning statements potentially with Typeform. But that helps in like telling there’s this universal brand story. And then there’s like, I guess you could say these many stories that kind of where people plug in and fit.
Alex (19:51):
Yeah. And we talked a bit previously about these kinds of, I guess, the different benefits that brands can offer. And does this tie back into this kind of, because I love the jobs to be done framework, but when you’ve kind of figured out those seven or so kind of jobs or pain points or challenges or use cases, how do you then go to that next step in terms of how the brand offers benefit to each of them?
The three pillars that lead to a meaningful brand
Paul (20:15):
Well, I mean the more I thought about this stuff, the more I realised that everyone is trying to build a meaningful brand. And in order to do that, you need to understand what a meaningful brand is. And I never heard the term before. And I realised that Havas and Havas media and Vivendi had collaborated on a study called meaningful brands.
And what they found was that a meaningful brand outperforms the stock market by 134%, their KPIs are pretty much double whatever a non-meaningful brand produces. They’re just profitable all across the board. And once I discovered what those reasons were and you know the three pillars or three benefits, as you said, that lead to a meaningful brand, the first one is functional benefits, right? So your product has to work has to be good. And I would say even great.
Paul (21:07):
And then, so functional benefits, the second one is personal benefits. So how do you help the person be better within the context that your product rests? So if you buy a digital camera, you’re probably buying it for one or two reasons, right. It’s probably for video or it’s for photography, or maybe it’s for both who knows, but probably there’s a primary job to be done there. Right. So the personal benefits beyond the product would be, how do you help this person shoot better video?
Well, how do you teach them about lighting? How do you teach them about the camera settings, right? How do you get them to adopt more features so that they can get more out of it basically? How do you take them from novice to badass as fast as possible? So that’s personal benefits. And then you could even think a little bit beyond that.
Paul (21:53):
And I could talk about how Typeform does that and then the final one is collective benefits. Now you’re starting to see brands have a voice on societal and even political issues, right? Patagonia is known for this. And, you know, I would say they were way ahead of the game when it came to thinking about the community and the collective benefits beyond the company.
So Patagonia had a viral moment. They’ve had many viral moments, don’t buy this jacket in 2011, that was a big one. And recently someone discovered a tag in a shirt and it said vote the assholes out and that picture spread like wildfire on the internet. And when they asked the founder who are the assholes, he basically said: “Anyone that’s against climate.” You know initiatives, which is an interesting take.
Paul (22:43):
But anyway, those three benefits. So, you can look up this study, it’s called meaningful brands and kind of get a better education than you can get in a 30-minute podcast. You can also see Edelman produce the similar research. And basically they found three things, solve my problems, solve society’s problems and enrich my life. So that’s another way that you can start looking at.
So when you start thinking about brands, you’re trying to figure out how you can differentiate yourself even more. And if you just try to differentiate yourself at the product level that’s not going to last because competition’s ridiculous right now. I mean, you look at the MarTech stack in 2011 is 150 companies. And you look at the MarTech stack in 2022, and it’s 10,000 and you’re competing. If you’re in the MarTech space against all these companies, I can’t imagine any other space.
Paul (23:31):
And so now the market is looking at products and their buying criteria has shifted because they have so much choice. And when the buying criteria shifts, then you know, they realise they have the power, then they can just look at you and say: “Well, okay, functionality wise, these products are pretty much plus or minus the same.” How do I differentiate these, oh, this one actually cares about the environment, oh, this one’s gonna donate a pair of shoes for every pair of shoes that I buy. Or a pair of glasses if you’re Warby Parker.
So you can look at it as a gimmick? Or you might look at it as, Hey, this is really what we’re about. And Patagonia would argue that it needs to be true and authentic, or it’s not gonna work or you’re gonna get found out. Right.
Alex (24:15):
And do you think, I mean, I guess that relates to my previous point around tech companies being so focused on, as you say, the product and that’s a competitive space, but typically it’s to the functional benefits using your framework rather than the personal collective benefits.
We usually as B2B tech, marketers always thinking about functional aspects rather than personal and collective ones. And I guess it’s the personal and the collective ones that feel the most emotional and meaningful just by nature of what they are.
Emotional resonance and building a brand
Paul (24:45):
And your brand should have an emotional impact. If it doesn’t, then you’re in trouble. So you have to remember that brand is really… I mean, I hate to say irrational associations around your company or product, and you want to make sure you accentuate those right there’s ways to do that. There’s ways to get people to of talk about things.
I mean, I think people just suffer from a lack of imagination really when it comes to this. But I mean, DoubleTree hotels give you cookies. It’s a minor thing. If you’re in a digital space, I remember I was writing copy in the product and you know, you complete a workflow like an integration, let’s say you’re integrating Typeform to Google sheets or something, I forgot what I wrote in a copy, but I was like: “Oh great, you did it! Now you can walk your pet lizard Kobe, and have a nice day or something.”
Paul (25:35):
And people were commenting about that. I wrote Easter eggs and on the homepage, like only a few people would get, but when they got it, they were just like oh, this is cool. It’s little things like that anyone can do, whether it’s microcopy or something in the product experience itself that could really like separate you from other people. And you wanna create as many moments as it can without overdoing it, because then it becomes like less special so to speak. But there’s many ways to leverage the emotional side. I should say. And again, when you talk about the jobs to be done framework, you are looking at those three things, functional, emotional and social benefits, right?
So jobs to be done, like I can tell you what the social benefits are when it comes to Typeform. I can tell you what the emotional benefits are and there are seven clear functional benefits and people buy and switch to Typeform for the social and emotional side. They, it’s not the functional side, the functional side. It’s pretty much, you know, Google forms or jot form or some of these other competitors. Yeah. Everyone shares that, but we offer a little something a little bit more on the emotional social side.
Alex (26:47):
I want to finish by talking about the brand identity side of things. Because when I think about it, I often think this is why brands are not as strong and motive meaningful as they can be often. Because I think particularly in the B2B tech world, the tangible bit, the deliverable from brand is like a brand guideline. It’s a brand identity, it’s a visual aspect of brands. And I think as we’ve been talking about brand begins like way before that, and is actually what you believe about the world and your perspective on things. How do you see brand identity in itself kind of working itself into that, and at kind of what point?
How brand identity works
Paul (27:25):
Well, I mean, you can say that pretty much anything that comes from your identity is gonna manifest some way in your outer world, right? You wear certain clothes, buy certain products, you’re proud of certain things and you’re not so proud of other things, right? So a brand works pretty much, same way.
You know, it should influence product. It should influence marketing. It should influence how your success and support teams interact with people. It should impact how your HR people, if you have recruiters, you know, how you recruit people. And I don’t know to give you a really good example of this. I was talking to David Aaker who’s written like, I don’t know, 17, 18 books on brand. You know, he’s like probably the leading brand expert. And I asked him, I said: “What do you think about brand marketing? “
Paul (28:16):
And he looked at me, and he was like brand marketing. What’s that? And I didn’t get it at first. And I was like, oh, he’s right. It’s like everything you do represents your brand. And so if you’re only on that performance side and you know, the Adidas CMO just recently found this out, right. Discovered, oh, we’re investing too much in performance not enough in brand. No wonder Nike’s killing us.
And so they had like a 23% split into brand and 77 into performance. Right. So, you know, they were just like, man, we really screwed up. And the wonder, like our market share is not what it should be. But again, your identity, everything that happens, all your behaviors. And, you know, I really got this from Patagonia, just drove home.
Paul (29:05):
They just really drove, Hey, it’s all about values. It’s all about how you behave and how you behave, represents what your real values are. And so you got to have those things in check, right? And he said, yes, this is how we recruit people. So we project our values, the people who share those values, join us. And then the cycle just, you know, it’s a virtuous cycle from that point.
So this is underestimated too, your identity. And you know, I was talking about those three things, your founder, your product and your market, those three things need to come together. And you know, your brand story’s in there somewhere, your DNA is in there, but it’s so critical. You want to recruit the best team. You want to have superstars on your team. You want to have even if they’re not known, right, you want to have talented people, join you in your quest to produce the best product to produce the best experiences.
Paul (29:57):
And the way you’re going to do that it’s not going to be through at ads, right? You’re gonna have to build that brand. You’re gonna have to track quality talent, because now that’s another competitive landscape that people need to deal with, right? You don’t have the same access to all the talented people that are in the world and for you to find those people and attract those people to you really need to do these very differentiated and unique point of view and all those things that we discussed before.
So, all that comes from your identity. And maybe this is just me, but when we’re talking about brand, the thing or the channel that I care most about is word of mouth. To me, it’s the most powerful channel and the goal of brand or any brand related, which is basically everything is to get people to talk, how do I get people to recommend my product service company?
Paul (30:50):
Or how do I get people to at least have a conversation about it? And so everything we do on a brand level should be about that. You probably heard that saying that advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. And I remember talking to Patagonia and everything that they do is about organic word of mouth and recommendations from friends.
So to me, that’s the ideal game for brand. And yeah, it’s not the measurable thing in the world. I mean, you can track mentions. You can see how many people type in your company’s name or your product name into a search engine and all that counts. And ultimately what matters is that people are talking, people have you on their mind and that people are checking you out, if not flat out buying your product service or whatever it is that your company sells.
Alex (31:50):
We’re pretty much out of time. I feel like I have a lot to think about, I think our listeners will have a lot to think about too of all the stuff you’ve touched on in terms of jobs to be done and that the different types of benefits. And I think there’s a lot of you bring a lot of clarity into thinking about brand, which is often missing.
And I think often why marketers find it quite a kind of intimidating, hard to approach area of what they do. So the fact you can add some clarity in the way that you have is awesome. So thank you so much for joining thank you for your time. And hopefully we’ll get to see you and something in the FINITE world in the future.
Paul (32:24):
Cool. Thanks Alex. Appreciate it.
FINITE (32:28):
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