[Podcast] Brand Mastery with Tobias Dahlberg

Get to know the super sleek brand educator that is Tobias Dahlberg all the way from Helsinki, Finland.

In this episode, we discuss the value of brand strategy for businesses and how it can be applied to multiple business units and not just marketing, plus exactly how to approach this and embed it in businesses. Tobias discusses brand theories such as “becoming the only choice”, “radical differentiation” and how he gets people on board when making “brand choices”. He also explains his background and the super work he is doing at The Future Academy. This episode is not to be missed!

Tobias Dahlberg is an Entrepreneur & Strategist. He is the Founder of Wonder, a strategic brand and design consultancy in Helsinki, Finland. He is also the Founder of The Future Academy – a learning platform for entrepreneurs and companies who want to build game-changing brands and businesses. He has consulted, advised and created hundreds of strategies and innovative concepts for brands such as: Nike, The Coca-Cola Company, Fiskars, Fazer, Iittala, Hartwall, Nissan, Paulig, Telia, Marimekko, Halti, Neste Oil, Altia, Mandatum Life, and many more, from start-ups to multi-national corporations.

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Show Notes

• Wonder Design Lab
• The Future Academy

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Well, hello folks, and welcome to JUST Branding. We’re really excited. Again, we’re always excited, but we’re even more excited this week because we have the wonderful Tobias Dahlberg with us from Helsinki, Finland.

If you don’t know Tobias, he’s awesome. He’s a consultant. He’s an entrepreneur and strategist.

He’s done some amazing work in the past. He’s worked with some massive companies like Coca-Cola and Nike and Nissan, but also startups right the way through, so he’s got a broad sweep of experience. He’s the founder of Wonder, Inc.

a strategic brand and design consultancy, and also The Future Academy, where he basically uses that as a learning platform to help entrepreneurs and companies who want to build game-changing brands and businesses. And just one final thing, if he needs any more, he also runs the extraordinary podcast, which I’m a huge fan of. I was a victim on that a few, maybe about a year and a half ago, so it’s great now to have Tobias to be a victim on Jacob and mine’s podcast.

Welcome Tobias to the show.

Thank you very much. Thank you for that wonderful intro. And it’s great to be here.

It’s a privilege. And like you said, yes, it’s my time to be a victim on your show. I’m looking forward to it.

Careful what you wish for. Careful what you wish for. So Tobias, it’s great to have you on the show.

I think you’re going to have, there’s going to be a lot of value in your story and where you’ve come from over the course of your career to end up here today on our show. So why don’t you tell us a bit about that? Who is Tobias?

Where has he come from? And what’s your background that’s led you to this point?

Yeah, thanks for asking. So I’m from, well, I’m obviously from Helsinki, Finland. So that’s the Nordics, for those of you who might not know.

And so I started out actually first as an athlete, an amateur and professional athlete, actually as a golfer. Some people don’t think of that as an expectable form of athleteism, but I do anyway. So the reason I share that is because that’s really shaped a lot of how I think and how I work and so forth.

So when I was, you know, the ages between 14 and 21, my world was golf and thinking about how can I become better at what I do when I’m very competitive. And so I then entered business school. I left for the US.

I studied there for a year. I played in the NCAA there. So golf was my life.

And as I then graduated, I made this very difficult decision to whether I should pursue, I had to actually turn professional and I was thinking, should I pursue this or should I do the business thing? And this was like 1999, 2000. So I was super excited about all the opportunities.

This was before the crash. And so I started in media. I started in working for a large digital advertising agency.

I went to work for both Coca-Cola and Nike. And I joined a marketing agency where I became partner. I ran a team of 30 people there.

And then I set out to become an entrepreneur, which really kind of linked back to who I think I was all the time. And so I’ve been really big into personal growth. I’ve been really big into trying to always create progress, both for myself and for my clients.

So that’s sort of really my story in a nutshell. So I came out of sports and a lot of what I do and how I think is really affected by sports. And then that led me to set up Wunder, which was my brand consultancy, grew into a couple of other agencies, design agencies, which I’ve been running for 13 years.

But then I just made this big shift like 18 months ago, which was actually kind of weird and a lot of people didn’t understand why. But I had 15 employees, I was making, you know, some pretty good business. I’ve been privileged to work with pretty much all the respectable brands in my region.

And then suddenly I decided that I want to go solo. And so I made a huge shift. I started developing this, The Future Academy, which was an idea I had already back in 2013.

I registered the name, I had these big plans, but I couldn’t really do it before I was sort of free to pursue this different form of entrepreneurship, which I call brand entrepreneurship, where essentially you are the center of your business. Basically, your reputation, your brand is really, you know, what you use to build your business and your influence.

You just brush over things like, I have 30 employees and then we have 15. These are huge milestones and big achievements. And just to like, cover out all of these things, I was reading your website and on there you have a quote from Marty Newmayer, who we had on the podcast a few episodes ago.

And this is what he said about you. Tobias Dahlberg is one of the brightest minds in brand strategy today. He’s a natural teacher who can simplify a concept like nobody else.

Anyone who follows Tobias will end up smarter, richer, and probably more beautiful. I love that.

That’s Marty.

That’s why I’m following you, Tobias. I’m just hoping a little bit of that beauty will rub off on me.

No, but just going into your story on that, it’s fascinating because in a similar way to you, I freed myself of an agency. I had 12 employees and I’ve gone solo and consultant. And it does free you up quite a bit.

I’d be really interested to know, I know you said people didn’t really understand it. I think it would be great if the audience could hear from you. Why would you suddenly change direction?

What made you think, maybe this agency thing is not for me?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m going to try to keep it fairly short. There are a number of reasons.

One is, I mentioned that I was a sportsman as an individual athlete, and I kind of had a tendency of being very ambitious about what I do. I don’t mean that always just in a healthy way. I mean obsessively, wanting to progress.

I realized when you’re running an agency, you’re actually running an HR business. It’s all about the other people. As the owner, as the founder, I learned that you can’t really compare yourself to everyone else, not in terms of you’re better than them by any means, just in terms of it’s your life, it’s your baby, it’s everything, your passion.

You try to make your vision come through, through other people, who might not just be as obsessive as you are, in my case. I think I probably wasn’t the best leader and manager, and I actually didn’t even want to be that. So of the 21 years that I was in working life, for 20 years I was always the manager of a team.

And so I had this dream of what if I would just be able to not have meetings about people’s holiday plans and all the bureaucracy and the stuff that comes with it. I just wanted to be a brand consultant and work with clients and be able to turn my ideas into something as quickly as possible. So that’s kind of a little bit the selfish side of it.

The other thing is I saw along all these years that, you know, you probably all know this really well, running a consultancy or an agency can be really, really stressful because you know, it’s when you have 15 people on your payroll and especially in a climate like now, you know, the thing that’s on your mind constantly is cash flow. Where am I going to get that next $100,000 just to cover your salaries and overheads? You think about that, you know, every day and every night.

And that’s really stressful. So for me became, I was the person who brought in all the business, all through my contacts. And I did all the strategy work, really, besides all the project management and all the design work.

And again, it could be that it’s bad leadership. But anyway, I realized, wow, this is super stressful. At the same time, you know, the world is going completely digital.

There’s all these opportunities to reach out and do what we’re doing right now to connect with other like-minded people. And my passion is really for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs to, you know, help people go from where they are to where they want to go. And so I thought for many years, I thought this would be great to connect with like-minded people and just do it in a different way.

Because the consulting model is not scalable, whereas, you know, the digital model, or you can build your business in a completely different way, as you guys know and as you’re doing. So, yeah, those are the main reasons.

I fully sympathize with that. I was going to say, yeah, that people management thing, I have massive sympathy with. And I think, you know, perhaps for some of our younger…

Younger? That sounds really patronizing. But, you know, what I mean is…

You can call me older if that helps. Well, I’m older as well, right? I used to be one of the young ones, but I’m not anymore.

But, I mean, for people early in their career, I should say, I think, you know, sometimes you can have these aspirations of, you know, running big teams, running big companies. And like you say, like I had that when I was young. I was driven and I wanted to do that.

But the truth is, is that when I ended up running a creative department in a corporate, right? And similar to you, like there was a lot of people management. And, you know, I’d spend at least one whole day of my week sitting down doing one-to-ones with my team, which was lovely.

And, you know, I loved my team. Don’t get me wrong. And I tried to do the best I could.

But when I compared what I was doing to have some of the career managers that I came across, I realized I was rubbish at people management, like really rubbish. Like they had development plans and goals and all this stuff. And I realized my passion wasn’t, although I think I was okay, an okay manager, my passion wasn’t that.

My passion was doing great work. And so I think when you’re early in your career, sometimes you go down different paths, don’t you? And then I think it’s totally right, like what you’ve done, to look at it and go, do you know what, this isn’t working.

Like I can do better, more meaningful work in another way. But then you’ve done something which I think a lot of people struggle to do, which is to then actually do something about that. Once you’ve had some of those thoughts for a while, to think, I’m going to change this.

So it’s quite a brave thing to do. So kudos to you. Jacob, did you have anything you wanted to say?

Yeah, I was going to jump into that. And the idea of going to agency life and then solo, I think is, well, I personally haven’t done that. I’ve always just loved the solo life and I haven’t gone into agency life.

So I was just curious to see the other side of the fence of how people go to agency and then solo. And like they do get, like it is so stressful and that’s often the cause of it. You just get over it.

So did you want to go into the reasons why that you went solo apart from?

Yeah, I think, well, I mean, like I mentioned, there are many different things, but another thing that comes to mind is just as, you know, the personal fulfillment. Like I’ve come to the age now where I was, you know, perhaps in the beginning, it was a bit more, I have to confess, it was a bit more ego, like build a building, you know, the biggest building in town and I want to have best brand consultancy. It’s going to be world class.

And I kept talking about all these things and people just looking at me like, he needs to calm down. And so we got to that point within my home market. But then again, you know, I come from a small country.

And so in a way, if you think of, you know, Brand Strategy 101, like Providence, like a brand strategy firm from Finland, you know, it’s going to be pretty tough. And so I think that’s one thing. And I, you know, as you start putting your own ego aside and thinking about like having the biggest teams or whatever, I’m thinking, you know, what is it that I really, really value?

And I think, you know, it comes down, like I said, it’s like that empathy and that human connection to other like-minded people who actually want the change. I love working with people who are ambitious, who are kind of mavericks, who want to create the change. And typically those people are found, you know, either inside agencies or they’re solopreneurs or they’re entrepreneurs, you know.

And, you know, at the same time, I’d say I love doing a lot of the work I did for my large clients. I love my teams and so forth. So I’m not like hating on any of that.

It’s just that it didn’t sort of give me that level of satisfaction that I now have in this new role that I call a brand entrepreneur, where, you know, you really get a chance to see firsthand the change that you’re, well, you’re enabling people to go through a transformation. You know that probably really well yourselves. Like when you work with large organization, you’re really happy if you can move the needle just a little bit.

Even if you do, like, a billion-dollar company’s strategy and the mission and sort of big stuff that I dreamt about for years. But at the end of the day, you know, it’s like, you know, group think, compromise, compromise, compromise, and it kind of gets watered down and you see something, and it’s like, oh, that’s not really what we had in mind. But so it doesn’t really move the needle as much as it does with individuals and smaller companies.

So that just makes me happy. It just makes me happy to see people change.

Can you talk about that vision a little bit? Where you’re taking this Future Academy?

Yeah, so I mean, the idea behind that was just like, actually, I think it even started when I drew this. I’m big on frameworks and I was drawing this, trying to explain to my teams, like this pyramid, like, you know, I was thinking about different levels of clients. If you’re hearing some screaming, that’s my kids, by the way.

Or my wife.

I thought it was a weird lisp that you might have, you know, like some speaking impediment that, no.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding.

Don’t worry.

Yeah, so I drew this pyramid and I was like talking about like first class customers and economy class customers and economy, sorry, economy, first class, business class and economy class. And I said how we’re not serving, you know, the economy class and they don’t have the money and, you know, so forth. And then I was thinking, what if we turn that model upside down and they said how can we serve, so you’re asking yourself, how can you serve that, the segment that is maybe not so attractive for agencies, but actually do need the help, the tools that I’ve developed and the experience and the knowledge from working with the large organizations who would typically pay, you know, the high tens of thousands or hundred thousands for projects.

And then thinking, okay, how can we give those tools to people and package them in new ways? And so The Future Academy was born out of the idea to take my learning, my experience from 15 years doing consulting, like probably put in like 20 years into those 15 years, and package that in ways that are easy to consume and to reach more people, to have more impact. And I just, like I said, I just like that, love to see that personal transformation.

Like I said, I come from, I’ve been doing personal growth, I’ve been big into that for 30 years. And so I believe, I genuinely believe that there’s like unlimited potential in everyone. And I love just like helping people bring that out and reach that next level.

So that’s really what, you know, gets me going.

That’s awesome.

And I remember you saying that you actually found that it wasn’t just entrepreneurs that you’re attracting, you’re also attracting consultants or people wanting to become consultants. So, what’s your perspective on that?

Yeah, I mean, I did not set out to do this for them per se, but I realized a lot of people out there who, for example, take my online course, I have an online course, my signature strategic brand building course is called Brand Mastery. And a lot of the people who take it are actually people who want to brush up on their own skills, perhaps want the tools and the frameworks to do the work. And so I realized, well, that’s pretty cool.

And so we’ll be doing more courses just for people who want to be brand consultants because yeah, it’s a cool thing to do. I mean, as you guys know, I mean, it’s a great profession. It can be a really lucrative, it can be a great lifestyle, it can give you everything you want if you’re the type of person who loves that.

A lot of listeners on this show are designers going into strategies, so I can see why there’s such a strong need for it or pull to your courses. So did you want to talk about the process of what they would go through in that side of the course?

Yeah, brand mastery. So brand mastery is basically, so where I come from when it comes to brand strategies, I come very much from this idea that, that I guess is quite commonplace now, but it wasn’t really 15 years ago. It’s like, I was a first-day client myself, and I, you know, sorry, it’s gonna be a longer answer now, but so people were typically thinking that branding and brand building is the domain of marketing or graphic designers and so forth.

And of course that’s true to a large degree, but also there’s the other side, like think about what is a brand, and if a brand is basically how you think about the product, service or your feelings, the meanings you attach to them, well then obviously everything is going to impact that. And so brand, if you want to build a strong brand today, where you don’t compete only with messages and how you look, then of course you have to make the brand, the organizing principle of everything you do. And that means you have to work with embedding it into the whole culture and get people to really adopt a similar mindset before you do anything else.

And so when I actually locked myself in a room for three months, and I’m a big reader, I know you guys are big readers as well, I pulled out all my books, I started thinking like, what is that framework? Because I had so many different tools and I needed to put that into a structure. And I realized this is exactly how I’ve been doing it, but I had never really clarified it for myself to the degree that I do in the course.

So the course just briefly, it consists of a top level strategy, which I call the only strategy, which is a form of radical differentiation. I built it, actually, if you’re familiar with Marty Neumar’s work, he has this onliness statement, which is a positioning drill. And I’m good friends with Marty now.

And I actually, I took that idea of the word onliness and asked myself, what is the bigger system for how do you build an only choice brand? And so I then researched the US market together with the University of Delft. And I was curious to know, are there these only choice brands and what are they and so forth?

And we found a lot of interesting, we found out a lot of the interesting things. One was that, yes, they exist in almost every category. You know, in some categories, like Apple is a cliche example, but people are willing to pay over 100% more to get their only choice brand for brands like Apple.

But on average across every category, including like pasta, you know, Barilla or like everyday households, people are willing to pay on average 69% more to get their only choice brand versus a brand that is just like one of a few, or, you know, not to even speak about a brand that kind of has no clear position. So there’s like an overall philosophy about how to build an only choice brand, and I teach how to do that through the six modules. And so, unless I’m rambling on for too long, I can just briefly walk you through.

So, the foundation is all about, the first module is called foundation, and that’s really about the mindset, because something I learned over the years is you walk into a leadership team or different parts of an organization, and unless you can get people to agree on a definition and understanding of the role of brand, you’re going to keep running into problems. Like I see that today, every day, I’m working with a few large brands at the moment. You know, if you haven’t done that job, that enrolling people, you know, getting them to believe in the whole brand gospel and so forth, clarifying things, you’re always going to suffer.

And so that’s one part, just going to very briefly. The second one is about your customer. I’m a big fan of deep, qualitative research to understand, you know, you have to understand more about your customers than competition.

Otherwise, how can you create something that connects better with them? Strategy, your own in a strategy, a bunch of other stuff, brand story and so forth. Then you translate that.

And that’s a very important part of strategic brand building is taking that vision and that idea and translating it into a total brand offering, not just a product, not just communication, but a combination of product, service, communication, people and behavior and your choice of environments. And I call that the five brand dimensions. And so there’s so many different ways we can create value.

And a lot of people are missing out because they don’t think about it. Like the meaning, the transformational level, it’s not just about the product, the value that is inherent. For example, this $45 Lululemon water bottle, which I have here, like, why did I buy it?

It’s solid material, but it’s a lot of other things that make you make a decision like that. So that’s offering. Then I talk about engagement, how to engage and build relationships, because that’s part of brand building.

And then I give you sort of a brand operating system, how to make everything work. Because at the end of the day, making a brand work is all about building systems. I don’t believe in fixing one thing, even doing brand strategies, like you ask a plumber to come in and fix one part of your system, it’s just going to have a leakage somewhere else, unless you look at it as a system, connecting everything inside the business to the customer and the ecosystem around it.

So that’s my religion. Sorry for that very long answer to a simple question.

That sounds phenomenal. There’s so much stuff I want to dive into, just because I’m excited, because you’ve touched on so many things that I also believe. And it’s interesting, because at the start of this conversation, you talked about being free from the agency.

I used words to that expression, like you’ve freed up your time, right? One of the observations that I have when I talk with designers, when I talk with agencies, is that they kind of tag brand strategy into their processes in order that they can still sell their graphic design, their website, or whatever it might be. They kind of go, well, we just need to be briefed a little bit better, so we’re going to do brand strategy.

But the truth is brand strategy, and this is what I think you’ve touched on there, it solves the big problems if you do it right. If you’re just doing it to tag in a bit of design stuff, yeah, it will add some value, and don’t get me wrong, there is value in that. But if you want to really get paid the big money and you want to kind of solve the big problems, you need to start zooming way out of creating a brochure, way out of creating a website.

That’s what you’ve touched on there. I love the way you sort of said that it is about, brand is the organizing principle of everything you do. So there’ll be a few tweets, and no doubt being pinged off at this moment, because if you’re going to tweet anything from this show, folks, that is the quote, organizing principle of everything you do.

Love that. And then you embed it, I think you said, internally. There’s huge amounts of stuff that you do culturally to do that.

And also express it then externally. But my question for you is, can you talk to us about some of those sort of ways that you look to embed things in a business? Because I think that’s the bit that a lot of people miss.

And it’s also the messy bit and the scary bit, particularly if you’re a designer, and then you think, whoa, this is now way out of my comfort zone. So what are your thoughts on that? How did you embrace that?

How did you kind of discover ways of helping companies really live into the brand strategy that you put with them?

How many hours do we have? That’s an excellent question. I think, well, first of all, let’s get into the discussion.

I’d love to talk about how designers can become more strategic. And I know there’s a trend toward that. And I have some words of caution and encouragement when it comes to that.

Remember this part that first. And to answer your question, I think, like I said, I come from the more the world of business strategy when I approach it. For me, there has to be a watertight link between brand and business strategy.

They’re two sides of the same, the different sides of the same coin. When you have established a brand strategy, positioning, and all the things you might want to define around that, the identity and story and so forth, I think there are two different things you have to start asking yourself. This is where 99% get it wrong.

They think, how should we communicate and express our idea, a whole different idea? Where you should ask yourself is, how can we embed this idea and align people behind this throughout the whole organization or large organization? What must change about pretty much everything?

If things don’t change, I mean, innovation, product development, how we do things, how we serve people, the brand experience, then it’s not really a bold brand strategy. I’ve been part of this and also not guilty, but in a say, I’ve let my clients off the hook sometimes because they weren’t really. That’s why I mentioned this thing about mindset in the beginning.

It’s so important to enroll people as a strategist to the client, to tell them that, you know what, once we have the brand strategy, that’s where it begins. And that means we have to use different tools to embed it inside culture. So to answer your question more specifically, how do you do that?

I think you have to do training and you have to do, you have to give people guides. So I created, to solve this, I created a product I call the brand playbook. The brand playbook is slightly different from a conventional brand book or visual guideline.

When you put that visual guideline in the brand book, you kind of reinforce the idea, well, the brand is just like a bunch of visual definitions. No, that’s for professionals. Leave that outside.

The brand playbook is basically a decision-making manual. So once you have the brand strategy, you sit with the different teams inside the organization and you define what are going to be the principles and kind of the decisions that we will start making from going forward. You have to do that with product development as much as you have to do with marketing and any other relevant silos or departments inside the organization.

So for example, I’ve seen this so many times and that’s why I said this could take hours. You sit with someone and say, we want to be the healthy food, whatever, and we story tell, and marketing goes off and they do the content stuff. And then people in product development, they kind of interpret it just the way they want, like we’ll put 27% sugar for 100 grams or whatever.

And they’re like, no, these are brand decisions. So everything comes down to a brand decision. I think you have to first make the call.

How are we going to make decisions going forward? And secondly, we need to train people. It’s like you can’t ask people to play, you know, a Beethoven symphony, just giving them like, look, here’s the notes, just play it.

No, you have to train, train, empower. And those are the ways that you can do the cultural part. And then, you know, the rest is also then the innovation part.

But let’s just leave it at that. It’s another long answer.

I love how you described it as decision making manual. That was great.

Yeah, I think that’s what it is more than just like, you know, mood, like a coffee table, mood book. It’s like, no, what does it mean? That’s what people want to know.

Yeah.

And one of the things I’ve found is when you say you have the strategy and you do those sessions, you know, it’s really important as well that you get ownership from those parts of the business in some way without diluting the core strategy. So one of the things I love to do is even with things like brand values and stuff like that, is talk to, say, people managers within departments and do big sessions. I’ve done sessions with like 300 leaders before.

And, you know, like, how do you get them to all get buy into it? What you say is, is like, here’s our core, this is brand, this is what it’s about. Here’s our core principles.

Now I want you to go away and think about how you would like to see evidence of this in your department, in your context, in your world. And you’d be amazed how positive that is. It gives people a framework and lets them actually play and start thinking strategically.

And it begins the process of embedding like you’ve talked about. You almost have to give people permission, you know, people need permission for some of this stuff. And it can be so high level and sort of fluffy, they don’t really see how it applies.

So you’re going to bring it down to earth. You’re going to help them use it as an actual tool as opposed to, you know, you know, reinforce. I love what you said before about reinforcing that brand is just the logo, you know, it’s really not guys.

It’s the essence of everything.

You have to get over that, you know, it’s like, yeah. But you know, if I may say one more thing, I one of the most important tools, you know, surprisingly, I think it’s like simplicity, like, if I look back at the greatest work that I was part of doing, not did, but was part of doing once was actually just over a year ago, a large beverage company in the Nordics here. And, you know, they had a pretty good mission statement and so forth.

But we just I just simplified it, I gave them one sentence, and then I gave them together with their teams, actually, we created different meanings for different for the word for different target groups, for you know, what it means culturally, what it means for customers, what it means for the, you know, society at large, and so forth. And that became this kind of mantra, it’s worked so well, just because it’s simple. And like you said, and which is very important, which is get people to play with it and to get ownership.

Because once people adopted this idea, they did all the work, they came up with this beautiful, fun ideas. How do we greet each other when people show up at a meeting, you know, every everything about the company started changing. There’s like this playful, fun, vibrant culture now.

And it all started with just like a simplification, giving people clarity and direction, and also answering because there are all these people who don’t get to play the brand game, who kind of also might feel that, you know, we’re not entitled, it’s just the marketing people. And so we’re doing the serious stuff, we’re bringing in the business, we’re creating the products. I would say no, include all of them and co-create it, but step clear guidelines and ask them to be part of it and say, okay, if we’re going to be a healthy food company, it means we have to hold ourselves accountable to certain ideas.

But we’re also going to use this idea to inspire innovation. And that I think for me, you know, to summarize in a way, I guess, brand building is more about innovation than communication today. I mean, obviously both, but just to provoke a little bit.

Yeah.

No, no, I absolutely agree. I’ve got sessions coming up this week, actually, for me personally, where I’m doing a very similar thing, sitting down with different, basically sales and marketing teams, and who are very much ingrained in looking at their business from selling boxes, basically, or products, and saying, guys, look, how can we widen that? What’s the real problem that our customer has?

And what might it look like if we actually try and make their lives completely different? How could we change their lives so that they were so happy they didn’t have any major problems? And the way that we can do that is, we’ve got to stop thinking about shifting boxes, and we’ve got to stop thinking about customer solutions.

So solution-focused outcome, and all of that comes down to brand, brand thinking and brand strategy, and the permission from the leaders, like you say, to set that role of brand from the top, so that you can then get down into the teams and start helping them think wider and innovate. I love it. That’s why I love this idea of the brand game.

It is a game, but it’s not a game. Like it is a game, but it’s also survival, and it’s also the future. But yeah, I think I totally sympathize with that expression.

Jacob, did you want to add?

Sorry, go on, go on Tobias.

No, you go on. I was just thinking if we address the designer side of things, but you, it’s your show. I’m just…

Yeah, I was going to go into… So we’re talking about big clients now. So if we bring it back down for smaller business, how would you apply this brand mastery to smaller business?

So for smaller businesses, I mean, a lot of people are taking it just for educational purposes, but it was designed in a way so that, you know, like 95% of the stuff I teach there is applicable to all sizes of companies. Like, yes, I do talk about culture. I talk about this kind of stuff we just talked about, which, you know, if you’re a solopreneur, it’s not going to be as relevant.

But then again, you might work with networks of people if you’re trying to scale. So, yeah, I mean, 5% of that maybe will not be relevant. But the rest of it, the rules are exactly the same.

And so it’s actually quite timeless, because when you think about how the biggest brands and the most respected brands actually grew, let’s say, let’s take, okay, Patagonia or Nike or Whole Foods or, you know, if we go back and study their history, they started out extremely niche. Like Nike was a brand for geeky runners before jogging was really even a thing. Or Patagonia was just like doing like metal hooks and stuff or flying birds.

Like it was like completely non-mass, non-existent categories almost. And so what I teach is essentially a strategy for scaling and building a brand even without a budget. So in that sense, it’s extremely well suited for small entrepreneurs.

And so again, going back to how those brands were built, I mean, they became super relevant to a highly, very narrowly defined market. And so that’s what I’ve, you know, I talked about being the only choice. And so I teach how you become the only choice.

And of course, it’s a theory that is difficult to become the only choice for everyone. But the point is you will always have your best customers. So like the theory behind that is like, there’s only three ways to create revenue.

You know, you can increase the number of customers. You can sell them more to those people. So they buy more or you can sell more often, make your customer life money.

And so if you think about, well, you could run around and try to shoot, you know, for everyone to use a military expression, which is totally inappropriate. Or you could be very, very narrow, you know, focused. And meaning that you search for only the right type of people and then you grow and scale from there.

And that’s surprising what these mass brands were doing in the beginning. They become so relevant that people think of them as like, I wouldn’t want to substitute this brand for anything else. I love them because they, and again, I studied this, they like provide the utility, you know, the thing the products and services are supposed to do.

But more than that, they provide a great experience perhaps. And more than that, they provide the meaning and the connection, the belonging. And maybe more than that, they do, they provide a whole transformation.

They change my identity. They make me a better human being or more of what I want to become. And when you hit those different layers of value, then you’re building a strong brand.

And that starts small. So yes, you can start just being a solopreneur and use the same model.

Brilliant, so deep.

I guess it is. Yeah, it is deep. But I think this is how people need to start thinking about brand.

You know, this is it’s all well and good tinkering around the edges. But for me, and this is I completely am on board with everything you’ve talked about. Like we often talk about brand not being a logo, not being the veneer, not being the sort of the whitewash.

And I think if we truly mean that as businesses, that means getting really stuck into some of the things that you’ve talked about. And I think therein lies the challenge because business just perhaps traditionally isn’t used to thinking about brand quite as all encompassing as that. Have you come across any challenges like that, Tobias?

Like how can you say like you mentioned, you mentioned it’s tricky sometimes to get that mindset. So if you go in and you sort of do a session and people are not quite on board, like how do you kind of cope with that? Like what do you do to kind of get people on board with this message, this preaching that we all believe in?

That’s a great question. The reason I laughed spontaneously was because I have that, you know, I wrestle with that pretty much in every project. And so what I learned, like I said, like I know so in brand mastery is just like the first thing you have to do is to enroll the client.

That doesn’t mean that when you think you have said the right things or show the cases or whatever, it doesn’t mean that they are actually enrolled. And so I just have now one of the most respected brands in the next week that working right now. And I got into a tricky situation just the last presentation because I got a lot of blank stares and people clearly didn’t really understand what was coming from.

And so now I’m going to go back and talk to them because they’re smart people and they know how to run their business. So of course, we just have to make our worldviews align a little bit. But yeah, I mean, you have to deal with that all the time.

One particular way that I like to do that actually with CEOs in particular, because I have developed this theory for myself, which I try to take measure of the level of brand thinking very quickly when I go into a new pitch or something like that. So I think of three levels. Like there’s brand as the viewer, brand as communication, there’s brand as marketing, there’s brand as strategy.

So brand as communication is like when the CEO says, hey, show him our brand and he means the logo. And I’m like, okay, we have a lot of work to do. Second level is where the marketing department is actually quite sophisticated.

They do the brand stuff very well, but it’s disconnected from maybe sales and the other parts of the organization. And when branding is strategic, it’s connected. Like we talked about the organized principle.

And so that’s the holy grail. Obviously, I’m a brand consultant as well. But the way I like to do it is I ask questions where I don’t use the brand word.

And I try to simplify things. For me, simplicity is a religion. Like you have to simplify things and ask, hey, Mr. CEO, do you agree that when your customers make choices, it’s really about how they spontaneously think about you that’s going to decide where they’re going to choose you or another brand, you know, something like that.

And they’re like, yeah, okay. So I get them to nod along. And then I go to the next question.

I don’t mention brand at any point. I just try to sort of get them to buy in and realize that they’ve been nodding along the brand gospel all along. And I say at some point, I’m like, that’s what they call a brand.

So every decision that the customer makes is a brand choice. Do we agree? And of course, it depends on what type of CEO you’re dealing with.

If you can play that game in an open and honest and genuine way, then good. And it can really sometimes transform how they’re thinking. One quick story.

I was in with this construction company not very long, a couple of years ago, and we were pitching. And there was like all these other competitors lined up to win the business. And so one of the things I also have a program called Pitch Like a Pro.

It’s a new program where I teach my secret for pitching. And so one of the things I teach is like very quickly you have to precision yourself. And if you’re really good, you also reframe the brief while you’re in the pitch.

And so this kind of goes a little bit outside your question, but it’s related. So I have this CEO, and in the beginning of the pitch, we start talking about their business model and their strategy. And they actually, they briefed us for branding, whatever that they thought that meant.

And so at some point, he’s looking at his colleagues, he’s leaning back, and I’m getting a feeling this is a bit awkward. He wants me to stop or something. He said, okay, so we just did 18 months of strategy work, and you’re coming in here to tell me and us, my leadership team, that we’ve done it all wrong.

And then I’m just like, this is just how we see it. And then he says, the great thing is he repositions me in front of everyone, and says, oh, so you guys are obviously not just a bunch of advertising dudes, are you? Something like this.

And I’m like, this is the best thing. It’s exactly what I want him to say. So suddenly, we reframe the whole brief.

They realize that brand building is something different. And he says something like, this is our core strategy. And I said, exactly, because brand building is differentiation, you know, isn’t it?

So it’s the same thing. And in that meeting, in the pitch, he realizes that what they actually were briefing for was something different. And he now finally understood that what a brand project is all about.

So, yeah, that’s just an example. But I mean, you can use questions. You can just get them to think.

You can never force your own thinking on other people. You can only get them to understand, have the aha moment. And then you position yourself and win the deal.

So I’m hearing education has got to come as part of what we do as strategists. And I’m also hearing positioning. You talk there about the pitch, making sure your position.

That’s one thing that we all fall down on hilariously. We talk to a lot of people about how to position themselves in the marketplace. And then we ourselves just feel like, oh, you want some graphic design?

Okay, I’ll come and do graphic design. Oh, by the way, you should, you know, no, no, no, you’ve got to reframe it upfront because otherwise you’re never going to get those clients. That will be like, we want to work with you because you’re going to completely change our strategic approach.

So we suck at it as an industry.

We’re rubbish. But now we’re all going to go and bury our heads in water. I don’t know.

No, it’s fine. It’s fine. We’ll get through it, guys.

We’ll get through it together. Now, I’m pretty much out of questions, but I don’t know, Jacob, if you’ve got any more. I mean, I say out of questions, there’s so much more we could go into.

But in terms of the broad sweep of getting a feel for you and your process, I think we’ve had a fantastic show with you. Jacob, was there anything kind of last minute that you wanted to sort of ping at Tobias?

No, I think that was great. It really was. I’ve learned a ton as well, just seeing how deep things go as well and how you approach to talking to clients and education as a whole, because we do have to constantly educate them.

That’s never-ending. Just seeing how you approach that.

Maybe I can leave you with one more, because I know that a lot of your listeners are designers who, and some of them you mentioned, want to go up the more strategic route. I mentioned earlier that my word of caution is this. I employed maybe 30, 40 designers in my life, and I never had one who would have, in my book, completely qualified as a kind of a holistic business-driven branch strategist, if that makes sense, the stuff that I just talked about.

They could have done a brilliant job had they educated themselves a little bit broader their scope. So massively talented individuals who could have done the job, but they never set out to do it. So what I’m saying is that being a branch strategist and being a graphic designer, like working in an application field is quite a different profession.

So again, you have to be prepared to have discussions about business and category and sales and culture and all these other things. So you have to just feel good about that kind of discussion. Having said that, I think there’s a lot of interesting curve between the sort of application world of design and that sort of hardcore business of brand strategy.

And so I see there’s a huge need for, let’s say, strategic design to help people, clients understand how they can leverage design and not talk about the touch point, to go a lot above and beyond that. And whether you frame that as brand strategy or design strategist, I mean, that’s up to you. But there’s a huge need because designers are typically great at seeing and connecting and telling stories.

And I think some of the skills that you guys have, if you can apply that just a little bit more on the strategic and the invisible stuff, not just the visible stuff, you can create great careers and you can really move the needle with that because like people who come from where I came from, like I consider myself a pretty much a strategic design thinker or whatever you want to call it. But a lot of people in my field have very analytical business, kind of just that kind of boring world and you guys can bring the magic. So I just want to leave you with that encouraging thought.

There’s a lot of space there, just kind of carve out that position in the space between strategy and design or strategic design and yeah, do great things.

That’s why we started the podcast.

Absolutely. This is what it’s all about folks. I love this podcast.

Yeah, well, we’re so thankful that you took the time to come on. You talk about bringing the magic and you definitely brought the magic for us all here today. Tobias, if anyone wants to get hold of you, look at your courses, whatever, do you want to just drop a URL right now so that people can tag that up?

Sure. Well, most active at thefutureacademy.com right now. I have also my other stuff.

But let’s say thefutureacademy.com is a good start. You can find a lot of free training there. So I already promoted my course there and some other stuff.

But just take some of my free trainings and if you like your thinking, if you connect, there are many different ways that we might potentially work together.

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. You take care.

Have a lovely day. Cheerio.

Thank you so much for having me.