[Podcast] Blands VS Brands with Ariadna Navarro

As brand builders, we used to build brands that would last.

Campaigns would extend for years, and visual identity systems—once created—wouldn’t become obsolete for decades.

Today, the speed of change is so aggressive, brand builders must consider that what they build now could be irrelevant in a few months.

Brands face a choice. First, they can commit to brand positioning and stay true to their visual appearance and social stances regardless of where the wind blows.

Or, they can create a flexible, and ever—A/B testing brand that can evolve as the world does. This second option has contributed to the rise of the blands—brands from the past five years that look, sound, and show up as simultaneously trendy and generic.

In this podcast episode with Ariadna Navarro, the Chief Strategy Officer at VSA partners, a hybrid strategy & design consultancy, we discuss the differences between blands and brands, how we got here and where we need to go next.

 

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Show Notes

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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.

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding. Today we have Ariadna Navarro with us, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at VSA Partners, a hybrid strategy and design consultancy. The amount of times I practice these names for every guest, but I got there, kind of.

Anyway, at VSA, she oversees a team of 18 strategists and uses analytics, experience design, innovation, brand, and business strategy to find unique opportunities for clients such as IBM and AT&T. Ari helps clients identify growth potential by identifying the intersection between brand and business strategy. Human needs and customer experience.

While solving problems is what drives her, she’s particularly passionate about portfolio strategy, brand strategy, and unearthing powerful human insights. With all that experience and on the pulse knowledge of the industry, we’re privileged to have her here today to discuss brands versus lands and what sets them apart. But before we dive into that hot topic, let’s welcome to this show Ari.

Thanks for having me. We’ve tried three or four times and now we’ve got names.

It’s just a running gag here, just me and names. Thank you for joining us. Just so we have a little bit of context, what is a chief strategy opposite?

What do you do and how did you get into a role like that?

Well, I’ll start with how I got into it. I’m Venezuelan from South America and I went to college. When I was in college, I had a friend who worked in production.

She was doing TV spots through college. So she introduced me to those guys and I ended up being a PA for like probably three out of my five years in college. And one of the last commercials I did was for Crest Toothpaste.

And that client was, or the agency at the time, was Leo Burnett. And I ended up really liking the team and they ended up offering me a job. So literally right out of college, maybe even like towards the end of my life, last year in college, I started working at Leo Burnett as a planner.

So I started literally when I was 20 years old, I started working on all the P&G proctor and gamble accounts and then Coca-Cola. So that was when I was a baby. And then fast forward to today, I guess, a chief strategy officer basically helps clients make decisions.

I mean, strategy is picking a lane, or as I say, picking from the pool of right. There’s always more than one way to go. So it’s helping clients figure out who do they want to be, how they want to behave, what they want to say, and what they want that experience to be.

So it’s helping as empirically as you possibly can make those business and strategy choices.

So how did you actually get into becoming a chief strategy officer? Like, was it like a natural thing? Did you have intentions to do that?

That’s really interesting. Not really. I went from advertising to direct marketing, to digital, to a.com.

And then the bulk of my career is actually an innovation. So it was less brand. It was more kind of figuring out the future, five, seven, eight, 10 years out, and then figuring out where businesses needed to go.

And then through that journey, I ended up being global head of innovation at this Australian company called The Leading Edge. And then my boss there ended up becoming the CEO of Intrabrand, which is a really big consultancy. And he brought me in there.

So I ended up heading up the strategy group there. And then from that job to this job. So it’s just been, I guess it’s been a natural progression, but it’s not something I necessarily dreamed of.

I think from my first job at LeoBernand, I fell in love with ideas. And that has been the common thread of my entire career. I think when I look back, I have just chased that in just varying degrees and varying jobs.

It’s much easier to look backwards and see where you’ve come from to get where you are.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, today we’re going to talk about brands versus blends. That’s what I said in the intro before I lost my voice.

So I’d love to hear what that actually means to you. What is a brand versus a bland? And then we can get into the differences and how we can actually create better brands versus stronger brands.

Yeah. I’m very passionate about this subject because again, it’s so much innovation. I can look back and see how we got here and you can see like every single step and every logical step to how we got here.

So let me first answer your question. So blends are basically a group of brands mostly coming out of Silicon Valley. So startups that all look, feel and sound the same.

And when you look at these, whether it’s a new toothbrush like Quip or whether it’s even a trading app like a Robin Hood or whether it’s a mattress like Casper, they all present themselves in the same exact way. So I understand how this happened. You had all the innovation that started to happen maybe 10 years ago was sort of a reaction to the corporate world, a reaction to how yes, the P&G’s and the Colgate’s of the world were kind of pushing these very corporate entities and these very big portfolios that consumers didn’t even know they wanted or they needed.

So these brands that were sort of coming up or these startups were really sort of solving human needs. They were business model innovation. It was like, how do you order a better car?

Here’s Uber. How do you buy a mattress without all the BS? Can you curse here on the show?

Let’s say BS without all the BS and like the jargon of it. Who knows? I mean, have you bought a mattress?

It’s impossible, right? It’s an impossible purchase. So Outcomes Casper simplifies the process.

So in this doing, in this trying to simplify the human experience and trying to simplify the product offering and trying to simplify how they were coming across, they ended up creating templates and they ended up creating sort of this lookalike of a brand that didn’t really have to do the hard work of figuring out who they were. You guys are in this business, right? Branding is hard.

You have to do a lot of soul searching as an organization to understand who you are and what meaning you’re really bringing. And they didn’t have to do that because they were winning already just by solving all the crap that all these legacy brands had created. So now here we are and all these brands look the same.

So how do you choose?

Yeah, I think as well. Hi, Ari. I was just going to come in and say, yeah, I completely agree with that.

And the thing for me is, don’t you think that in that space, there was a lot of like copying, right? So it’s like, hey, Apple’s popular. They’re doing some cool stuff.

Let’s just like borrow some stuff from them and just, you know, and put our own little spin on it. Or borrow from the market leader. And then of course you get back in that same situation where everybody looks similar in a space and nobody stands out.

Well, and that’s a good point. The other thing I think too that’s happened, Matt, is because a lot of these were Silicon Valley startups, they were winning on technology. They were just kind of providing a better way to do something.

Whether it was a way to buy a shop or a better way to choose or an easier way to, you know, but it was a lot of it was based on the user experience. And for better or worse, technology is an equalizer. It’s not a differentiator.

And I’ve gotten in trouble saying this to CMOs. It’s like, it is and it’s our features. I’m like, it is not your features.

I mean, it ultimately, everyone’s in a catch up. And when they do, what reason are you giving people to choose you? I mean, emotional, well, they’re not all emotional, but brand choices are emotional most of the time.

So if you’re not creating that relationship, you’re just telling on like one, two, three, which is what all these brands look like, then how are you creating that stickiness?

Brutal, brutal. So technology is an enabler, not a differentiator. I’m taking that one right now because that was brilliant.

I completely agree, you know, just because, and when you look at a lot of, I don’t know what you think about this, but I think there’s a lot of, and I’m probably going to upset some of our audience here, but you know, hey, this is what we do. But you know, when you think about user experience, right? UX, a lot of that was about getting stuff done, at least in the early days, was about getting stuff done quicker and more intuitively and easier, which, as you say, gave some brands the edge, you know, e-commerce websites and so on and so forth, became, you know, market leaders because they got that right.

But as you’ve rightly pointed out, that’s everybody else is now getting that right. So we get into this bland situation once again. So what’s next?

How do we shift that?

I mean, listen, we do, by the way, I love startups because there’s all, I mean, there’s only potential ahead of you. So I’m not, you know, I’m not putting them down. Again, I completely understand how we got to this point, but you have to do the work and you have to find out what makes you you beyond your features or beyond your UX or beyond your collab or beyond, yes, even if you’re revolutionizing a category.

So even if you’ve already disrupting the way that things were done, take healthcare, you know, or take health insurance. Like even if by just existing, you’re revolutionizing the experience, you still have to create a brand and you still have to build a relationship. I mean, what’s a brand?

A brand is the shortest possible articulation of your business strategy in a way that’s compelling to hopefully someone that needs it. And then you tell that story and you build that relationship over time. That requires consistency and discipline.

And that’s something that especially startups have to learn because they haven’t had to do it.

How could you actually identify a brand?

I mean, at first glance, they look the same.

Yeah, so what is that look?

Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I think, I mean, I think they use the same color palette. And unfortunately there’s a lot of millennial pink and pastels and sort of softening.

Again, I think as a response to some of the more corporate kind of boring brands of the past, they use sort of a cheeky tone. So there’s kind of like a common tone of voice, which is fascinating to me, because that should be one of the most personal things, but they all kind of, because they’re trying to be human, they all have, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, they all have one, two, three, they all have three reasons to buy, and the little icons have, you know, sort of almost the same iconography at the bottom. A lot of them are sort of one or two product portfolio, which is again, I think part of simplifying the process.

So they look the same and it’s really difficult to pick between one or the other. Like if you’re gonna go buy a mattress, you know, and I’m using this because I think everyone can relate, but you know, do you know the difference between a Casper and a purple and whatever the other one, you know, they all have human names. I mean, it’s like, you could probably write a checklist.

I mean, I haven’t done it, I’m doing as I talk to you, but like, if you write a checklist, you could probably go and look across any category and they’re all gonna check, check, you know, they all have sort of the same commonality.

When you write that blog post, can you just credit me and put me and Jacob in there?

I will, of course.

And we’ll definitely share it on our networks. You know, 10 ways to spot a bland. There we go.

That’s coming up, folks, keep an eye out.

So let’s, if you’re a startup, you see all these brands and they’re like, we can do it like that, it’s easy, it works, right? So to counter that argument of like, it’s easy, it works, what are some benefits of creating a, or building a brand with more substance?

Yeah, I mean, easy, it works for how long? I think is, I guess would be my question. You know, it’s easy and it works if you’re the first in a category, and if you’re truly disrupting a category, it’s not gonna work when that category gets busy and you have one, two, three, four, five, six other players and they’re all doing the same and saying the same thing and they look the same, then how do you make, you know, how do you make a difference and how do you come across in a way that’s unique?

So that’s, I think, again, you have to, strategies about making choices. So you have to make choices. It doesn’t mean you have to redesign everything.

It just means that you really have to sit down and figure out what makes you you, what’s truthful about your offering and your company and your people and your culture, and then how can you use that to create, again, some sort of connective tissue with that audience. But again, I mean, we’ve all, I don’t know about you guys, I’ve been in this business a long time. It requires hard work.

It’s tough though. It is tough. And I don’t know what you think, but I think the number one challenge of, and by the way, completely agree with everything you said, but the number one challenge I think that people have is, is that I think a lot of people know they need this ultimately, but they kind of don’t know how to go about it.

And also the other issue that they’ve got is that in these companies, and I work with lots of fantastic clients and none of my clients are like this, but you know, there’s different people aren’t they? And they’re pulling in different directions, there’s different egos involved. And there’s obviously business as usual.

And this kind of stuff is kind of like, oh, do we really need to confront this now? And so there’s all this kind of messiness, generally around personalities I’ve found that needs to kind of be put to one side in order to focus on this beautiful work. What do you find gets in the way of folks actually doing that work?

Why don’t they do it at the start?

Oh, that’s a great question. I think at the start, it’s hard because most people don’t set out to create a brand. They set out to create a product or a company or they have a business idea.

So that’s number one. Two, I don’t think they know. It’s like they, well, why don’t you, I don’t know, make great running shoes?

Well, I mean, I don’t know how to make shoes. So it’s just, I don’t think you have the people that know how to package it up and what are the pieces that you need to bring together and how do you need, what is the work that you need to do to understand your customers? And then ultimately, who do you want to be?

I mean, so much of the brands I think we admire and love, and again, I’m speaking for myself, but is about conviction. It’s brands that believe who they are. They stand by what they are.

They have spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years pounding the pavement with that story. And you ultimately say, I love them, but it’s not because they were created overnight. It’s they spent decades doing the work.

You know, it was like, oh, I love Nike. I love Apple. You know, the brands that usually come up when you ask them one.

Those brands have worked on it for decades.

There’s a consistency, consistency to them. They’ve sort of defined it, aligned around it, rallied around it. And then as you say, they’ve told that story over and over and over again.

It works and we love it. And then they somehow, as well as told the story over and over again, continue to innovate and create products that are relevant to that story, to the consumer, to make us buy and to make us love them, right?

Well, and that ecosystem, that vicious loop that should never end is the second key to branding. So it’s one is that definition and like you said, being truthful, having conviction and consistency. Once you’ve had that, right, you start your brand process, then what?

Sometimes brands get lazy. It’s like, I’m gonna say the same thing for, okay, well, that’s not what consistency means. You have to keep sort of evolving.

And we say, you know, I don’t look at the customer journey as a linear. I don’t think anyone does these days because nothing is linear. So look at it sort of as a circle.

And we say, you have to create lusts. Again, think of a relationship when you meet someone that’s sort of exciting or attractive, or there’s a feeling, there’s an emotion. There’s a wanting that comes out of it.

So it’s like, how do you create lust? Then you eventually get to potentially a love situation and that’s from lust to love. And then after love, you go into commitment and that’s when you’re loyal and that’s when you stick.

I’m glad you went to commitment there. I was a bit nervous.

However, to commit it, you have to go back to creating lust because otherwise you’re bored and you drop that brand in a heartbeat when the new fun one comes in.

All right, well, let’s dive deeper into that. Creating lust or that process, let’s give, rather than give all the examples like Nike and Apple, perhaps there’s some smaller brands that you could give some insight to, some practical examples where you’ve seen this done really well.

Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know why the minute you asked that I was thinking of Chobani, but Chobani, a decade ago when it started, not Chobani today, which is massive. So when Chobani started, you can imagine the yogurt shelf was completely, there was really basically no room to add another yogurt.

In addition to that, it’s like how do you differentiate a yogurt? Like it’s a yogurt. I mean, it’s milk with some fruit, like who’s gonna win over, I don’t know, Danan or whoever, whatever the category, whoever was the leader at the time.

And I vividly remember, I don’t know if you guys do, the CEO who had sort of come out and he gets, everyone’s an owner and whether you’re an admin for it or an executive, you have shares in the company. So everyone has kind of an interest in how that company grows. To me, that became the brand.

And so basically, there’s many ways to build a brand, not just through advertising. You can build that soul in a lot of different ways. And that became who they were.

And that’s for me in particular, the reason we probably still buy Chavani and not because we care about the taste or not, but we believe in the values that that brand or that company put out there. So that’s, I think, an interesting example for me, because it doesn’t get more boring than yogurt and there’s nothing less sexy than talking about yogurt.

I can relate to Chavani, but it definitely wasn’t around the values for me. I didn’t even, I wasn’t even aware of that. It was literally the beautiful packaging that was on the shelf and it stood out.

It stood out. Also the taste and the fact it had more protein and things like that. So bought for different reasons and we go through tubs of yogurt a week because of that and Chavani it is.

So it’s interesting you brought that up. So apart from that particular reason, the values, perhaps there’s another brand that doesn’t rely on values or maybe it’s not as big, maybe it’s a smaller business you’ve worked on or perhaps a case study from VSA. Is there something else that we can explore that shows the difference between a brand that’s more meaningful, has more substance and perhaps how we got there as well?

Yeah, I mean, I’m ready to bring up Robin Hood and we did a little bit of work with them, I don’t know if it was this year or last year. But when Robin Hood started, and I remember, do you guys know Robin Hood? Yeah.

Now listeners may not, so you could give them some context.

Yeah, so Robin Hood is basically a trading app on your phone that requires $3 or $1,000 or whatever you wanna use to invest and buy stock. And when Robin Hood came out, I’m never gonna forget, I remember I was in the office and a creative director actually sitting next to me was like, oh, I just don’t know this app. And it started talking about trading.

I’m like, well, what do you mean you’re trading directly? You had to go to a, you have to go to a bank, you have to go to an investment banking firm to buy a stock, you have to, and which created a huge barrier, right? So, cause you had to have certain amount of income and certain amount of money to invest and certain amount of understanding of how the category worked.

So, I remember sitting there going like, well, what do you mean you can trade on your phone? What do you mean you could put $5? Like my brain exploded with this idea of like, God damn it, how do we not think of that?

Like they were able to pinpoint a barrier, a need, a problem, an audience, like a user experience job all at the same time and put it into this one platform that allowed even an experienced people to trade and to experiment and to learn and to do it over time. It was probably too gamified at the time and they got into trouble with people investing. You remember that, yeah, some horrible stories, but still like the fact that they were able to sort of look at that opportunity and create a product that has quite a challenging entry barrier, because you have to meet obviously financial regulations.

It’s not like, again, getting into the mattress business, I mean, the mattress people are going to hate me. I have nothing against you people, I swear. It’s just an easy example.

So I remember that. And then, you know, when I got into sort of Robin Hood per se, and then the brand, it’s like, oh, I truly understood like the whole democratizing finances, and I just thought it was sort of a spectacular, and again, I’m not promoting it or selling it or not selling, I just really remember it at the time as a, what are the best technology examples that were also sort of really human, and that were talking to you as a human and sort of tacking a human need and not just a user interface challenge.

Yeah, I love that you’re talking about the human need there, and the fact that this is a, you know, a finance doc kind of company, not necessarily the most sexy topic, but it’s something that you can still add your human element to and that you’ve brought the best brand building practices and applied it to, you know, a company like that. So you could easily have done something entirely corporate and new standard and, you know, just blend it in. So I think it’s a great, great example, so.

And they have a great voice like that, you know, they, again, super hard to balance because they have to create trust because it’s a financial product. So in a way, it’s not that it has to be serious, but you kind of have to trust them. I mean, you’re giving them your money and you’re going to trade, you know, you’re going to risk your money on a platform.

So it can’t be like some, you know, crazy person off the street. So you sort of have to implicitly create trust, but they did it in a way that was just so fresh and so real. I mean, honestly, I have nothing but respect for what they did and they’re not necessarily brand people, I don’t think, or I don’t think it started as a brand.

So I give it tremendous credit for sort of having that soul from the beginning.

Yeah, that soul is so important. And we were talking about work before, like the companies or brands doing the work. So what was the work involved to get to the root of, or the soul of a company like Robinhood?

Like, how did you get there?

We didn’t do that. We did, that was them eight years ago, nine years ago, when they started. We did strategy this year.

Yeah, no, I’m not taking credit for that. I would have liked to, but I’m not. I mean, I would have liked to do it.

Well, still the question remains, like, how do you get to the soul? How do you do the work? Like, what’s the process you guys follow to get to that?

Yeah, and it’s an interesting question because it’s very different depending on the kind of company. So when you have old companies, legacy companies, in a way it’s easier and harder. It’s easier because you have a founder story and then you could potentially go back to the vault and at least understand how the company got to today, what mattered for the company at the time, how has it grown?

How has it evolved? What does it care about? What’s the culture?

Like there’s a lot of things you can look at that then you can marry with customer or audience research to really understand the needs of the audience and then you pair those two. So how can you deliver meaning based on what’s true to you and based on what people need? So that’s sort of the process for legacy.

The process for startups is slightly interesting because they’re slightly different because it’s more definitional if they haven’t done it before. It’s more like, great, I get how you operate. I get how you disrupted this category.

Let’s say it’s healthcare. I get how you position this and what your features are. We now need to find the emotional hook and to figure out how to build that relationship over time because guess what?

All of your competitors are saying the same thing. I mean, we’ve done, you know, we do semiotics analysis and we do competitive analysis. It is mind blowing when you look at, you know, words, like words, signs, symbols.

It’s like the same vocabulary, the same tone, the same colors, the same shapes. So that’s the part that it’s more about, like how do you pull yourself out? And then, then you start to tease out the founder story and try to find, you have to build the soul versus recover the soul, it’s different.

I did a project recently and we did a similar thing. And one thing, it was in the data space. And then this particular corner of the market, like everybody used abstract pictures of data, like streaming lines and stuff, like literally like 12 competitors, everyone’s looked precisely the same.

And yeah, it’s just, it’s unbelievable how little sort of sectors get like that. And you think, oh, come on now, you know? And so it makes your job easier in a way, right?

When you come across that, because you’re like, guys, like this is the same, everyone looks the same, right? So that’s a very simple strategic tweak that we can make. But then people start to feel super uncomfortable, don’t they?

Because you’re like, hang on, but like, what do you mean we should change? Like everybody else looks like this, we feel safe looking like this. And you’re telling us we’ve got to push it out there, you know, and I come across that all the time.

So I guess it’s the job of the strategist, I don’t know what your thoughts are, to help that happen in a way that people can feel comfortable with. And also, as you pointed out earlier, to base that in empirical evidence. So talking to customers, getting feedback along the way.

Would you agree with that? Like, how do you persuade people who are a little bit hesitant to do something bold?

Honestly, it’s the easiest way to have an argument that you can go in front of the CEO of a company and they can’t refute it because you’ve really covered your tracks. You know, you’ve really done the work. And we do a ton of research, whether it’s qual, co-creation, online panels.

We do a ton of quant. We do a ton of modeling, predictive modeling, and like to really try to understand not just what matters, but where’s the growth coming from. And that’s that leap that you’re talking about.

That’s really hard because it’s scary. Because it could be like, hey, the bulk of the market, like you can say, the bulk of the market likes red. Like 70% of the people we talked to, they like red.

But hey, there’s this 30% that likes blue. Let’s look at the profile of that 30%. Those are people that are making this up, but like more brand loyal.

I don’t know, travel more, are more into tech, or have bigger purchase patterns. Like the things that you’ll tell me, let’s say you want in a customer. So can you want to start moving towards that 30%?

Oh no, but my market is, everyone likes red, it’s 70%. So that’s the conversation when it’s not all science. That really is the empirical with the learning and experience over time and how you build it.

But the data just helps your story. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. I guess that is then a strategic decision. It’s not just a wishful thinking.

It’s grounded in some thought. And it’s kind of like people, as you say, I mean, you’re into innovation, right? So people always have to step into the unknown.

And the future is a murky world, right? It’s unknown. But I love how you sort of talked about them, you know, making that as easy as possible through that data and having those strategic conversations with CEOs around the data.

I definitely agree makes life a lot easier when you’ve got that. Persuading them to invest in that in the first place is interesting. I wouldn’t mind touching on that with you.

Like, how do you…

I just want to put it like this because it sounds to me like you’re sort of co-creating and building a potential future that doesn’t exist right now. And then you’re trying to get, you know, I guess to a point where you can make, you know, an informed decision or advise on an informed decision. But that’s a big investment to build something that doesn’t yet exist yet, at least even if it’s prototype.

How do you find that? How do you get people, persuade people to…

Yeah, I mean, we don’t do as much, we don’t do a ton of innovation at VSA, but my innovation years, we had so many risk assessment mechanisms in place through the journey. That by the time you got your decision, you’re able to tell with some certainty whether this product was gonna cannibalize yogurt and grow from there or whether it was not. So then your market was smaller, like there’s a lot of companies that were starting to do some of that sort of predictive modeling that you’re at.

Again, it’s sort of a false choice because you can only get to say like, well, would you eat this or drink this instead of eating yogurt? And if the answer is yes, then you could start to do the math. But you would really honestly, like it’s a journey.

I remember my innovation days, people would say, what are you doing? I would say, well, I’m in the fear management business. And they’re like, what do you mean?

Are you in the mafia? Like, what do you mean you’re in management? I work in consulting.

And that was just like, because of exactly what you said, Matt, because you had to really work with clients to eventually by the time you got to that recommendation to be able to say, okay, I trust that I should no longer sell yogurts. I should now sell drinks. And then that means I have to close all my factories that make yogurts and invest half a million dollars in factories that make drinks.

So that’s, you know, that takes time. That’s a different process from like sort of building a room, which there’s still risk, but there’s less risk, I guess, because you can pivot quicker.

So what would you do? What would a company, what would you recommend a brand do if they don’t have the resources to invest into such a venture? Like what are the essentials that you recommend to get those initial insights to uncover those customer needs?

Yeah, I mean, you have to understand your audience and you can do that in a lot of inexpensive ways. You know, I mean, we do it for startups all the time. You can do a survey amongst friends.

You know, you can do a little bit of research. You can do a couple of different groups and then use that to extrapolate, you know, some insight gold, insight nuggets, as we call them. But you can do desk research.

I mean, these days, honestly, it’s extraordinary how much you can learn just from doing desk research. You can, you know, sort of start to connect the dots. Like when we do trends analysis, a lot of it is desk research, you know, it’s like, and you start to look for patterns, you know, how are societal trends changing?

How are politics going to influence where people live? What are the sizes of people’s homes? Like you can start to look at all kinds of information and make sort of connections to find patterns.

So you could do that for free on your own if you’re starting a business, you know, and that’s how startups start. They look at the market, they look at the opportunity, they look at if there’s a need, they look at it at JSEC categories that they can start to cannibalize from. And then you have to understand that sometimes they forget, like, let’s look at all the external factors that you think are going to drive that business.

So you can do that literally from your bedroom, your home office, your basement, wherever you’re starting your company and then make choices. And that’s maybe the hardest part because I think that’s where some people go wrong. Well, I don’t know.

I don’t want to say this because then I’m going to leave these people out. Well, I don’t want to say this. And then you end up saying a whole lot of nothing.

So that’s honestly like work that anyone can do. Again, it takes work because you do have to be critical and analytical and you have to make choices, but anyone, anyone will want to know about anyone. We can do it for not a lot, but any brand company should be able to help you without necessarily having to do millions of dollars of research.

So the lack of research and the lack of, whether it be desk research is kind of one, I guess, I don’t want to say mistake, but some area that some brands may skip over. Are there any other areas that you see as like common pitfalls or traps that brands fall into?

Oh, something just, I was thinking about this the other day. Most brands think that their competitive set is just their category. So for example, let’s say you’re in, I don’t know, let’s say you’re a soda and let’s say you’re a dark soda, cool, right?

So they think that their only competitors are dark soda, as opposed to, no, every drink is a, you know, if you’re, do I have a Coke or do I have water or do I have a juice or do I have a lemonade or do I, you know, and that requires almost like a paradigm shift, you know, for organizations to really look outside kind of their direct two, three, four competitors to really understand, okay, well, if that’s my competitive set, then what choices do I need to make? You know, I always say, my team’s always heard me say this, but when you define yourself, you redefine the competition. So every time you make choices, everything else shifts, but that competition has, you have to look at that as a wider lens, not just a couple of different companies.

And then what we were saying earlier, then just be consistent. I mean, most people get bored of their choices before they’ve even had the time to sink into the psyche.

So I’ve got a quick question. So, you know, your role at the moment, obviously, you work for clients, but there’s obviously, I’ve got a question about the strategy of your agency and the agency model in general. I just wondered what you’re kind of thinking, and I don’t know if you get involved in that in your side of things, so forgive me if you don’t, but assuming you do, how would you see the agency landscape changing going into the future?

Curveball question from Matt here, just to answer.

It’s a great question that I think every agency thinks about every minute. Listen, I think the gist of it is agencies have to strive to create value that clients can’t create in-house. And what I mean by that is even 10 years ago, clients would outsource everything, every design, every strategy, every effort, because they couldn’t do it in-house.

They didn’t have the teams. The marketing teams were, part of their job was to hire agencies like us to do a lot of the work. That has shifted over the last seven years, six, seven years, where a lot of organizations are building teams in-house.

They’re building design teams, they’re building bigger marketing teams. Some of that work is being brought in-house. So as an agency, you have to think about, okay, cool.

If they’re gonna design, I don’t know, they’re gonna do the seven versions of the logo in-house, then what am I gonna bring that’s different or that’s unique or that’s incremental value to what they can do in-house for a third of the price. So that’s where having sort of a holistic perspective of the human experience, not just an asset, not just an element of marketing is where, I don’t think clients are necessarily gonna do it and bring that all in-house. That’s where they’re always, I think, gonna go to agencies.

And the second thing is we have, we work across multiple industries. So I can be working with AT&T, for example, and then I can bring an example from, hey, we just did this Wayfair campaign and they’re reminding me there’s something that we learned there. And wait, with this thing we were doing for Goldman Sachs the other day, that is really interesting because there’s this shift towards X, Y and Z.

And hey, look, we’re talking to Gen Z because we’re doing this project for Google. Like there’s just a perspective that we have as a whole across multiple businesses that we bring into every project regardless of the category that someone that’s on the client side, just working on a brand can’t possibly mirror. So I think it just, it puts you on your feet and it forces us to constantly be innovative and be thinking and bringing sort of that crisp kind of perspective to clients because that’s what they’re paying you for.

And a fresh pair of eyes, right? I guess as well, like, as you say, like because you come in with different experiences, with different patterns, with different methods of doing things that, and as an outsider almost, you can prod and ask the silly questions and shift the status quo a little bit. So yeah, I love that.

Nice one. Sorry, we’ll question over. Carry on Jacob.

Well, the future you mentioned, and I noticed that VSA was getting into web three. So how are you handling working with companies like in the blockchain and web three and in the future, where those products aren’t necessarily like mapped out and just a pretty new space?

Yeah. I mean, truthfully, the way we’re working today is kind of similar as far as how we look at the creative, how we look at the experience and the choices we make. And I’ll explain that, I’ll unpack that in a second.

So one of the things that we say, and I think I said at the beginning of this call is, we bring our purpose into how we work. And that’s, we design for a better human experience. For us, that means what are the choices that we make, whether it’s in strategy or design or experience or web three, what are the choices that we make that are creating value to you?

And value could be, I want to entertain you. Value could be, I want you to brush your teeth with a better toothbrush because I’m worried about your teeth. It’s about not, it’s really sort of conscious choices about not creating noise.

So when we look at a couple of things that we’ve been working on that we can’t of course say, yet with our partners, it’s really about, how do we make sure that we are creating experiences that add value and not just sucking you in and taking more of your time and immersing you more into a world that you can’t get out. And fanatical and adamant about making sure we do this every time something comes up where it’s like, oh, let’s develop, let’s do an NFT for this client. Oh, let’s do a little collectible on this end.

Oh, let’s like, why don’t we use this as a token to access this? And I’m like, does that one want to go to a mattress club? You know, like in the metaverse, I don’t know, maybe, but like, those are the questions we ask ourselves all the time.

And there’s things that we’ve said no to because we don’t think they’re meaningful and we don’t think they’re adding value to the customer and maybe the client’s taking it to someone else and maybe they did it. But we really want to make sure that we’re helping clients think through that and not just create more, just noise, you know, noise and the ethos. It just, it’s honestly our philosophy for everything.

It’s how we do media, it’s how we do strategy, it’s how we do web three, it’s how we do expertise. It’s kind of not different than how we do the core business.

I like that approach because that value is so important. I love that. And I think we’re coming to the end of our session unless you had another question, Matt.

But Ari, where can… I have one last question. That was the question I was going to ask.

That last one.

You always ask, where can we find you? How can people connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn?

Are you on Instagram? What’s your kind of thing?

We’re only in the metaverse.

I’m not real. Yeah, we’re LinkedIn or VSA Partners on Twitter, at Ariadna Navarro on Twitter, vsapartners.com, if you want to go to our website. So yeah, ping us if you want to chat, ping us for Kindred Spirits or ping us if you need help.

Only in the metaverse. Virtual. No, I’m kidding.

We do all kinds of work, not in the metaverse.

I love it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It’s been awesome speaking to you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our conversation as much as we have. And I hope you forgive me for the curveball questions every now and again. But no, really exciting to talk to you.

And thanks so much for sharing your wisdom.

Of course. Thank you guys. It was a pleasure.