[Podcast] Behavioural Marketing & The Strategic Branding Process

Rudy Fernandez, joins Jacob Cass & Matt Davies to walk through the strategic branding process of his creative marketing agency, Creative Outhouse, giving case studies & insights on how to better work with clients through problem solving, plus how you can use strategic thinking to help brands properly connect with their customers, through research and testing.

Rudy also reveals his proudest projects in the realm of Behavioral Change, proving that “information is not motivation” when it comes to making users change their behaviour, and how you can can actually make others create change.

 

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Show Notes

• Creative Outhouse 
• Marketing Upheaval Podcast 
• Case Studies
• Corona Parody Video
• Sapiens Book 
• Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference by David Halpern
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H Thaler

 

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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. This is episode 12. I am super excited to introduce Rudy Fernandez, who is the founder of Atlanta-based creative marketing agency, Creative Outhouse, as well as the podcast Marketing Our People.

His background is in transport and healthcare, but he’s been doing this for 25 plus years, so he’s got a ton of value to give. We have him talking on this show about branding, brand process, and behavioral change. So welcome to the show.

As I said, super excited, Rudy.

Well, thanks for having me, and thanks for the plus that helps give more nebulous to my age.

You’re very welcome. So how we start this show usually is about definitions. Like what does branding mean to you?

How do you define branding? Then we’ll ask you about marketing too.

I know you do that at the beginning of your show, and I thought to myself, I don’t really have a boilerplate for that, but I do know that a lot of times when you go to a meeting, people think, and you guys are from a design background, so you think it’s, a lot of people say it’s a logo or a color scheme or whatever, and we all know it’s not or a tagline. It has to be something deeper than that. It has to come, it has to make a connection with the audience.

It has to fulfill a purpose. So every company, I would hope, is in business for some reason other than making money. There’s gotta be some service you offer.

That all that is part of your brand. The reason you’re in business, the reason you want to serve people and how you connect with them, that’s part of your brand. And it has to be true to who you are.

So solid definition for sure. And how does that differ to marketing?

Well, marketing is, how you market that is an extension of your brand. You know, your marketing is, these days, it’s every piece of communication. So going back, let’s say not 25 plus years, but not too long ago, it was very one to many.

It was very much, this is who we are and hey, everybody else, this is who we are and hope you like it kind of thing. But now everybody has a say in your brand. And so your marketing is no longer just one department that pushes out a message.

Your marketing is now every department, your R&D, your internal, everything. It has to constantly communicate who you are and what your story is. So I would say marketing is how you take a brand and spread it out to all your audiences, your internal audiences, your stakeholders, your customers, your shareholders, if you have those.

And it has to be consistent within that core brand, but it has to speak to that specific audience.

Okay, so if a client came to you and you’re, they said, I need branding, what is your process of getting them from A to B after you’ve talked to them for a little bit?

You know, it’s funny, very few, Creative Outhouse has been around since 2001, so we’ve had, you know, it’s been a lot of different journeys. We’ve been on different clients. They don’t ever say we need branding, although that is a search that people do look for.

Usually it’s, we’re launching a new something, or this is not working, or we’re extending that. So it doesn’t usually come out with the words branding. It just comes out as we need branding.

And I was actually telling Matt earlier that we just launched a new brand that came from nowhere. We’ve done everything from this brand has never existed before, to we’re changing the name, to gosh, this category has never existed before. So it ranges in how we launch brands from like for the brand we just went through, we take, they were wise enough to go, we’re going into a crowded field.

So we need to differentiate ourselves. How can we do that? So they didn’t say we needed branding.

They just said, we need to differentiate ourselves in a very crowded field. How do we do that? And that starts with, okay, let’s figure out who you are and what your brand is and how that fits within the competitive set.

I think that’s exactly what happens to a lot of designers. They have clients come to us saying, we want a logo or we want this, and that’s actually not what they need. And that’s what we need to do as facilitators is get that information out of them.

So let’s dive a little deeper into that process because I think that’s a common problem for all of us going through this process is how do we get what they actually need out of them? So perhaps you could talk about some examples that you could tap into so that our listeners can actually use that process to build upon.

Yeah, first I want to speak to that thing that I think every creative has that problem. And if you own a creative shop in, and that is, I needed this, a client comes to you and doesn’t say, hey, here’s our business problem, help us solve that. Usually they’ll come to you and say, I need a logo, I need a video, I need a something.

And then we step back and go, well, why? Like a logo, well, you can’t just, okay, let me press the logo button on my computer.

And so those are the most challenging types of clients because oftentimes it’s somebody in marketing, let’s say a marketing director who has a budget set and said, okay, I have this much to do this list of items. And among those things is not, I need a branding program. So I think in terms of a process, that’s the most challenging thing with that situation where someone says, I need a logo.

And to get them to transition in the mindset from you’re someone who delivers a thing to you’re someone who helps me solve a business problem. And so that’s the first step in the process and we could probably talk an hour about that.

Well, let’s do, let’s do.

Sorry about that.

Okay, so you define the problem. You define the problem. What is the next thing that you do to them?

Like how are you educating them on what you do and how do you put this into proposal and how do you go through that process?

Okay, so a lot of times, I really start with asking a ton of questions. And I actually have, I’ve actually listed a bunch of them. And I have a list of them, depending on whether they’re a star up or not.

But that helps two things. Helps me understand more about them and understand whether they’re willing to invest in a longer branding process. But also lets them know that I’m not just a creative guy, that guy that sits in the back room that you don’t really want to talk to, but here, slide the thing under the door and make something beautiful.

It’s, oh wait, this guy has creative ways of thinking about my business, you know. That’s the thing that’s going to make a difference. Not just he can make things look pretty or write really nice words.

It’s, oh, he’s going to solve bigger things to bring in more business or make me look better than my boss or whatever the problem is. So assuming you get to that part and you get someone to say, okay, what is the branding process? I think that there are, you have to narrow it into two big chunks, let’s say.

And there is, and let’s say we have two consent, two circles that intersect. The one side is who you are as a company or let’s just say company. And notice I didn’t say what you do.

So many people think that what they do is who they are. And that’s simply, and the best example, I know it’s an old one, but forgive me. In 2007, Apple said, hey, we’re launching a phone.

And people stood in line for that phone, not because Apple, and Apple never made a phone ever. So there was no guarantee they knew how to make phones, but people stood in line for it because of what Apple stood for, who they were. And it came to the second part of the second circle, which is what your audience needs or what your deep needs.

In other words, who your audience thinks they are.

My definition of identity is the story you tell yourself about yourself. So who you are as a company and who your customer thinks they are, that connection is where you’re going to hit a very strong brand. So if you separate in those two things, the who you are, you’re going to have to go through a process to find that out.

And it really depends on your client and how much of a process they want to go through. You can do an abridged version or a more version where you’re talking to senior leadership. What we do is we’ll do like when we’ve done it full blown, we’ve done one-on-one conversations and phone calls with leadership and salespeople.

We also do a half-day brand workshop where we go through a whole process. We do a competitive set and we offer, we create different fundamentals that help them understand who they are, like a brand positioning. There’s a whole process we go through to find the value proposition and the higher-order benefit, which I can walk through as well.

It’s a whole other conversation. So we do all these things to help them understand who they are. And then there’s the other side of that, and that is who is your audience and what do they think about themselves?

And that can get real expensive and take a lot of time or not. It really depends on, again, your client. And really the best way to do it is to do some qualitative research to understand more about them, get any kind of input they already have, any kind of behavioral input they already have of people.

And then from there, you take all that data, turn it into information and insights, and then that’s where the science and art blend, where you go, this is the statement that, this is the thing about you that connects with them. Does that make sense? I’m trying to be respectful of time here.

I was picturing the two circles. And what you said in the middle there, the key word was connection. That’s really what branding is all about, is connecting.

That is it.

Yeah.

Point to any successful brand, and there is some connection. There is some promise that they’ve made that people feel like that’s important to me. And that’s why a lot of times you’ll see brands who sometimes actually just behave badly, but people are still loyal to it.

And it’s because of something that’s deeper than just that thing they did bad. It’s a connection.

Hi, everyone. It’s Matt here. I’m just going to elbow my way in, as I do.

Rudy, lovely to have you on. I love the two circles and the sort of example of activity that you do to go through with your clients to get them to answer those questions of who they are and what their audience needs or the story their audience tells about themselves. So in regards to this, how do you know when you come up with an answer to those questions that it’s right?

Do you have any ways of testing that or how do you approach selling that into the client so that they’re comfortable with going with it?

Again, we’ve had a range of clients. We have some smaller clients who just just, that feels right, let’s go with it. And of course, we’ve had larger clients.

We work with the CDC here in the United States, we work with state or Toa authority, bigger organizations that can’t just go to their bosses and say, this feels right. So we do test, we test a lot of different messages and this is always tricky because we’ve been very fortunate that we have been worked with clients who creative is part of the lead. So a lot of times that’s not the case.

So you’ll have people that test things before it launches. And so when we test the creative, we don’t test whether they like blue or not or whether they like that picture or anything. We try to get what does this mean to you?

We ask the deeper questions. What did you get out of this? What does this mean to you?

So we do a lot of qualitative research like that. And there’s a lot of just A-B testing to small audiences digitally that you can do as well. You can also test various different landing pages.

Just again, with small audiences and see what the behavior is in that regard. We’ve done a good bit of testing. Like I’ve mentioned, we do a good bit of healthcare and sometimes behavioral change healthcare.

And some of that can get really tricky because you’re talking about people’s health and that’s very personal. So you have to make sure that you word things exactly right and still being creative obviously and affecting people’s hearts and minds, but also making sure you’re not completely off the mark. And you do test those messages, usually qualitatively, never quantitatively.

That’s my opinion.

Interesting. So these are small focus groups, this kind of thing where you’d float a few ideas out into, I guess, kind of participants that would fit within the segment of audience that you think, right, this is who we’re going for. Let’s test it in front of them and see what they think.

Is that how it works?

We’ve done focus groups. We’ve also done it online where people you ask just a series of questions, one or three to four questions or maybe a little bit more, and see what their experience is seeing something. And again, we’ve also tested behaviorally.

If you look at something, if you look at a page, where’s the first thing you go to? How many people are clicking on this thing rather than that thing? So we do that as well.

That’s really fantastic. And I guess the benefit of that is that then there is some justification for the strategic direction that we’re taking the brand in, right? So you can sell that in, because I use that all the time in my work, because I find it’s so helpful, particularly when you’re challenged, to say, well, when we tested this, yeah, with the small sample, but when we tested it, this concept came out on top, and this direction kind of resonated the most.

That’s so helpful going forwards. Do you ever get it, though, that the client doesn’t go with the customer research and just goes with their gut and says, no, stuff it, we’re going to be brave and we’re going to try something new?

The only time that happens is when the person making the decision is the CEO. There’s never a situation that I’ve seen where, let’s say, director of marketing who has a boss or two, and I don’t know about where you guys are, but here it’s not the most secure job in the world, is going to make that decision. Usually, that’s why you test.

I mean, there is, unfortunately, a lot of fear of, you know, I’ve got to make sure that I’m justified with everything I do, which I think it does not… I mean, I’m not going to say… I think it sometimes affects the quality of the creative.

Maybe not so much on our end, because, again, creative is the lead in every time we’ve tested something. But a lot of times, I’ve seen things… I wrote a blog about this where, you know, I went to a digital summit, and some guy showed two ads that looked equally boring.

But they’re like, guess which ad performed better? And people were shouting, well, that ad shows diversity. Well, that ad has, I don’t know what, different headline, whatever.

And I was just like, they’re both just invisible, boring crap. But, you know, they were testing it. Like, well, this one clicked 20% more.

Well, but so? If it was actually… If it actually had a point of view and made a statement, would it have done better?

Maybe, I hope.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Does it stand out enough? And sometimes that scary side is where you do need to be brave, I find sometimes. But it all depends, of course, on what you’re trying to do and who you are, I guess, which is the other circle that you’ve conjured up for us in terms of your description of how you approach it.

So, yeah, interesting.

Jacob, where were you with all this? In terms of testing and stuff like that, what are your thoughts on testing stuff out?

I was going to comment on Rudy’s work first because he has a lot of work on his portfolio or his website, Creative Outhouse, and it was super creative in terms of the messaging and actually solving business problems. And you go through, you have some very strong case studies where you actually walk behind the scenes of how you got from A to B. So I just wanted to say kudos to you, and for anyone listening, it’s worth checking out because there’s not so many agencies that share so much information these days that I’ve found.

So it’s definitely worth checking out. In terms of testing, in terms of testing, I work with small, small, mid-sized businesses. So they’re generally working straight with the CEO or the owner or a small team.

So I don’t have to deal with so much or healthcare or transport, thankfully. So I don’t have that burden. But in terms of testing, for me, it’s a gut feel.

We don’t have the opportunity so much these days to go out and apply it too much and then have to revert back. So I don’t think small businesses have that opportunity so much. What’s your opinion on that?

Well, I’ll tell you, no, we do both. So when we work with the larger organizations, we’ll partner with a bigger company because we’re not a very big company. So when we’ve done, like funny enough, you say that, we recently did a brand launch, renaming for a real estate company.

And there we were working with the CEO and it was heaven. You know, it was, we were presenting some logos and we sort of, between the team, we had narrowed it down to three and he talked to his senior team and they talked about it. And he points to one, he said, this one, let’s do that one.

And they’re like, what? That’s it? So that was just wonderful.

And yeah, I agree. Some of our most successful case studies were someone just saying, let’s go, let’s do that. Let’s just go with it.

And because, because I think the best ideas connect to a deeper human truth and that’s why it connects to people. And where we allow ourselves to be people and not just stare only at the data, we go, yeah, that speaks to exactly who we’re talking to. And that’s why I think a lot of times those things are right.

Yeah, the gut feeling for sure is something that is just in you and that’s why it’s called a gut feeling. And that’s why you gravitate to stronger creative or something that connects better. And these days you, why I find personally that you can dwindle down your concepts to much smaller numbers because of that gut feeling.

In the beginning, we just fired a bunch of different creatives and hoped for the best and get them to pick one. But as you evolve, it’s dwindling it down.

I think that’s why you’re creative though, because you have taste and a certain taste. And it’s a good taste usually, why you do this for a living eventually.

Jacob’s taste is very, very good. But what I would just say is that, from my perspective, if I might just sort of give a sort of an opinion on this. My view is, yes, there are instances where you’d say, look, this is who we are.

And this thing needs to represent something that’s never been brought to market before. So, we’re gonna claim that and we’re gonna be brave. And we’re gonna say, this is us.

And we’re gonna really stamp on that and make sure that’s great. But I personally would always say as a strategist, like, we must gut check that with our audience. Not necessarily do you like it or not like it, but I quite like what you said earlier, Rudy, which was to ask some more intelligent questions.

Like, what does this mean to you? Like, are you attracted to this? Does this stand out to you?

Would you notice this? Those sorts of questions, which can be a little bit more insightful than do you like it or not, you know?

Goodness, no. We have, and it’s usually open-ended questions, you know, to get their opinions. But no, I belong to different, in my nerdy history, I belong to different writers’ groups.

And inevitably, there’s always one rule, and that is you are not allowed to say, I don’t like it, because that’s, sorry, I know you don’t like bad words on your show. Let’s BS, let’s just say that. Yeah, you know, because what am I gonna do if you don’t like it?

I don’t care if you like it. It’s not, you know, so you have to have a reason why it works or it doesn’t work.

Yeah, no, for sure. And all I’d say on the smaller budgets, Jacob, is, you know, and obviously a lot of our audience will be working on that sort of startup end. Like, I always think it’s helpful, even if you’ve talked to two people or three people, you know, when you’re presenting a concept, to say, look, we’ve sampled this with a very small sample, like three people, and these were some, this is nothing to do with our team.

This is what other people were saying, you know? And kind of work on that basis, co-create, if you can almost, with people. But, you know, I’ll just throw that into the mix for…

No, for sure. And we definitely do that with our team. We definitely do that with the team.

So often CEOs will, or the owners will talk to their team, if it’s a handful of them, get their opinions. Obviously the wife will come into it and all of that. So there are definitely, definitely feedback coming from all different sides.

And then you can adapt it based on that feedback. But I think testing, if we could do that, that would be amazing to do more of it. We should be doing more of it.

And I definitely agree with you there.

I would suggest you incorporate it into some of your budget estimates and just bring in a freelancer or whatever, just incorporate it. They could always take it out if they don’t want it, but at least it should. Cause that goes back to our first problem of, how do I go from the guy who does logos to the guy who helps you solve business problems?

You show them right away, this is a business problem and I’m gonna solve it in a business way. And even if they don’t, you know, then they’ll start to look at you a little differently. You go, okay, I see, you want to test it, okay.

That’s great advice, that’s great advice.

You mentioned something Rudy, as you were going through your, you know, you were talking about process, you mentioned a kind of a couple of words, which I know have come up on your website and we talked about before we came on air and I’d really like to get into it. And those words were behavioral change. Let’s start with definitions again.

What do you mean by that? And how do you sort of think about that from a high level before we dive in?

Behavioral change is often trying to get something, someone to do more than just buy something. It’s getting them to change some facet of their life. So in our, how we’ve worked before, for example, we’ve gotten people to get tested for HIV or go back to school and earn a college degree or a carpool ride transit or take a different way to work.

Gosh, we motivated a lot of people to learn about autism. So it’s things that are not just buying bubble gum or beer or pizza, not that those things are bad. It’s just a longer process and a lot more involved, a lot more emotional to try to get people to move from don’t care about it to okay, maybe someday to, all right, let me investigate this a little bit to, okay, I did one thing one time to I do it all the time.

This is a whole continuum of behavior.

That’s really fantastic. I really wanna dig into this because I think this is a really interesting subject. When do you pull this out?

Is it when you understand the brief requires not just someone to buy, but something deeper? Is that when it kind of become, or do you get approached for behavioral change projects? And how do you frame that?

We know we need to change someone from A to do B.

Well, there is an overlap. So yes, we do, like I said, we work here in the United States with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention on different initiatives and different organizations that require people to change their behavior. But it has come up in situations where we are creating a brand and it’s not just a matter of, we want you to prefer our doohickeys to their doohickeys.

It’s more of your brand isn’t really connecting and they’re not taking the effort to switch from where they are now to where you want them to be. And we need to find out why that is and use some of the same processes and same theories to help change that mindset. So it’s a little bit of both.

There’s overlap.

So could you walk us through that? You mentioned a few examples there, which would be great to dive into. Maybe we talk about, I don’t know, one that’s closest to HIV testing or autism or whatever one that you want to talk about.

There have been, well, there have been several. We could talk about the autism one, because I’m really proud of all of those, because that’s another thing about a lot of these campaigns.

When I die, I hope that they’ll include some of these case studies in my obituary.

Lovely positive thought there, Rudy. But I know what you mean. You’re proud of it.

It’s like a legacy, but something that you’ve left behind, just stamp that you’ve made rather than just get people to depart with their money. There’s something meaningful behind it.

We’ve been really fortunate to be part of a campaign, for example, with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s been, oh gosh, 16 years running now that we helped launch. It was trying to get people to change their perception of autism.

You probably, 16 years ago, the perception was very different than it is now. We did a lot of audience research to learn about them, about an audience who were pediatricians. Because what was happening was usually it was the mom who would find out, would assume something was wrong with her child and would go to a pediatrician.

The pediatrician wasn’t that educated on it either and would just say, he’ll grow out of it, it’ll be maybe he’s spoiled. It was a lot of different, not helpful feedback from the pediatricians. When we tested with the parents, we found out that even just saying autism completely shut them down.

Even if their child met all the symptoms, they were saying, no, that’s not my child because it was such a scary word. Our approach was to educate pediatricians and then try to find a way to reach moms, to get them to start to look for these early behaviors. Because the earlier it’s caught, the more you can do to help the child.

How do you get moms to look for these behaviors and know that they’re unusual? Without mentioning the word autism, by the way. What we did was we instead changed the conversation.

We used triggers that all parents have. I don’t know if either of you are parents, but every parent observes things about their child. Their first tooth, their first step, they’ll measure how tall they’re getting.

There are certain things that we look at in terms of the physical development of our children. Of course, if there’s something physically wrong, we would notice and immediately alert a doctor. Instead, we use those physical markers, let’s say the wall marker of how tall a child is getting, and saying, oh look, she’s getting this tall and she’s pointing at things.

We started to associate the physical development with the emotional and social development, so that the parents could start to look at, okay, that’s just like a physical development, it’s just a social and emotional development, and start to accept that, if something’s wrong, I need to bring it up to the pediatrician. And we supply pediatricians with a lot, still, in the United States, if you go to a pediatrician’s office, you’ll still see materials that we’ve helped put together, that help educate the pediatrician, the staff, and the moms about things to look for that trigger those events. But in order to create those messages, you do have to know what’s part of the identity that people have that helps block those messages.

What are the triggers to look for? What are the open doors to help talk to people?

That’s amazing. That must be so satisfying to go into a medical unit or whatever and see your work being used for something like that. Fantastic.

I just want to throw something into the mixer. There’s a book I read a few years ago called Inside the Nudge Unit. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this.

I read Nudge. Yeah, you read it. Cool.

It’s by David Halpern. Really interesting because I’m here in the UK, right? He was part of the UK government’s, what they nicknamed the Nudge Unit, right?

It’s a fascinating book because he talks about behavioral change and he talks about the benefits that it can bring to healthcare and pensions and employment and crime and energy. And basically any message the government sends out can be, you know, when you’re sending it out to a massive population, you can tweak letters, you can tweak notices, and you can see changes in populations, right? But what also I found fascinating in this book, and I’ll sort of come on to this in a question to you, is that they kind of mention, he kind of mentions in the book, there could be this dark side, right?

Because if you know you have the power to change someone’s behavior, and you have to start asking the question, I want, in a sense, we want people to make a better decision, but who says that decision A is better than decision B? And it’s quite an interesting, there’s quite a couple of interesting sort of chapters in the book that talk about the moral angle. I wonder if you had any thoughts on this.

I mean, I suppose being, you know, you could say how manipulative could this become? And do you have any thoughts on that? Is there any sort of guardrails that you would put in place in terms of your work or any thoughts like that?

Well, yes, but first, yeah, now we’re getting really macro. Oh, yeah. So, you know, I’ll throw out another book.

My book I’ve referenced a lot recently is the book Sapiens. This is A History of Our Species, and it’s a wonderful book. And it sort of should be required reading for being human.

But the basic underlying theme is that what sets our species apart is our ability to tell.

Stories. That’s why we excel beyond every other hominid. So suddenly, people who don’t know each other, millions of them, are doing the same thing because of a story.

And that’s what helped build our civilization. Most of our civilization, our economies, are based on a story. Because there’s not that much real money in the world.

It’s always a promise that things are going to get better, and that’s the story. So going back to your question is, I don’t know if you can determine whether something is completely moral. But certainly, getting people to be tested for a disease or choose a healthier behavior, stop smoking, those sorts of things are easy calls.

I don’t have a problem motivating people. I’ll use motivating instead of manipulating.

No, go with that. Let’s go with motivating.

Motivating people to choose a healthier behavior. I would have a problem motivating someone to smoke. That would be a problem.

There are certain things I’ve turned down. Gambling is one. There’s nothing wrong if you like gambling, personally.

I think it’s dumb, but gamble away if you like it. I’m not going to get somebody to do that. There are situations where we work with hospitals.

I know that for a certain service line, one hospital in an area is better than the one we’re working on. I would have a problem if that hospital wanted me to say, make it look like they were, deliver some different message that would conflict what I would know is the fact. Sometimes it’s pretty clear cut in terms of, is this the right thing to do or not?

I would never blatantly lie to someone to get them to choose a behavior, unless it was a healthy behavior, no, I’m just kidding.

It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Obviously, one that you’d have to look at if and when every situation pops up. What are we doing here?

One thing I think is quite interesting is you talked about choice. I think that is one of the main things, isn’t it? When you talk about brand, if we zoom back to the start of our conversation, and you’re looking at using your model of the two things, who you are and what your audience needs, really what you’re talking about there, we talked about connection, what you’re talking about there is becoming the right choice for the right person.

I guess from that perspective, I think that behavioral science and the behavioral change aspect could be quite good. You say, look, if you want to become this, choose us. If you don’t, that’s fine.

We’re not going to force you. I guess that’s then leaving the choice, which we would anyway, obviously, always to the customer, always to the audience. But yeah, just an interesting one.

I just thought I’d throw in a hand grenade there for you, Rudy.

Unfortunately, though, people in our society and despots throughout history have used tools to manipulate people to not so pleasant ends. The most common one is to use fear. Fear is an emotional behavior.

We have varied emotions, but there are certain ones that cause a physiological response and require action. Fear and anger and laughter are three that require some sort of action. That’s why people like to share things that are funny or that make them mad, because it requires a physiological response.

Unfortunately, the fear and anger is used too often to get us to do things that aren’t good for society itself, in my opinion.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s kind of like, does this make our audience stronger, like our tribe stronger? If we’re pushing stuff like Las Vegas, right, which is selling itself basically on gambling, ultimately, does it make your tribe stronger, right? Well, if they have a great time, and they’ve had some fun and they go away and it’s all fun, yes.

But if you completely lose all your savings, your house, your car, and you’re completely bankrupt at the end of a visit to Las Angeles, sorry, not Las Angeles, forgive me, Las Angeles, Las Vegas, then clearly that’s not going to be a good thing. People are not going to have a good experience with you, and they’re not going to buy again. So if you put that in the context of your business, I always say to my clients, how are we making our audience stronger?

And if we’re manipulating them and we’re pinching their pockets, it’s not going to work long term. You might get a few short term wins, but we really need a strategy that really helps people, not screws them over, basically.

I love that question.

This kind of leads into the purpose led brands, because a lot of brands are starting to use purpose and they’re kind of using it as a manipulative tool. So what’s your opinion on using purpose for this side of motivation?

Well, I think like anything else, when it’s done right, it works well. But when you make up, when you just try to make it sound like it’s your purpose, we’ve seen that. And we actually did a spoof COVID-19 commercial to sort of…

If you’d like to check that out.

Yeah, we want to see that.

That you have this… I think to be fair, every brand, at least in this country and in the world, was thrown into suddenly, I have to not just sell my doohickeys, I now have to deliver a public health message. How do I do that?

As someone said, it went from buy a Toyota to we care about your health, buy a Toyota. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit.

And so your purpose, every brand, I think they just do it wrong. I don’t have a problem with purpose-led brands. I think that’s wonderful.

But you have to understand, like you said, how do you make your audience stronger? In that case, Toyota doesn’t make you healthier. So don’t go there.

Maybe it fulfills other things. So go with that. I think if it’s done right, it works very well.

But when it’s false, people know it. We’ve been looking at messages since we were in the womb. We get it.

We know when we’re being lied to. So, you know, well, hopefully we do.

I was just thinking about that ad. I’m not sure if it was your agency, but it was the one where it’s like Cue Piano Music and it has like all the ads compiled together. Is that your ad?

No, that was not ours. We did one where it was an announcer, female announcer, soft music. And it used all the cliches.

Now’s the time to do the things that matter most. Family, love, crap like that.

We’re going to post that in the show notes for sure. So if you get that over to us, we’ll get that in the notes. I was going to just wade back in on the behavioral change because we talked about it from the perspective of the customer or the patient in the case of the healthcare sort of example that you gave of autism.

But interestingly, in your example, you also mentioned that there’s a… I think I got the right end of the stick, so to speak, when you said that some of your work was also helping to educate, as it were, the doctors, the practitioners, in providing them with materials which would help prompt the right thinking in the parents. So I guess I just wanted to sort of pose this question.

I know it’s quite broad, but do you ever find that there’s also a requirement internally with a culture within an organization to help shift behavior internally before then you go to shift it externally? And what are your thoughts on how to approach a project like that?

My opinion is that any brand’s most important audience is their internal audience because it doesn’t matter what you say to the outside world. If your people don’t believe in it, it’s going to die. So you really have to get people to buy into what you’re saying and believe in it.

And usually with any new brand launch, we always strongly recommend an internal launch and a whole series of tactics that help get people excited about this new thing that they’re part of. Because you don’t want people to feel like you did that without consulting me, without letting me know. You certainly don’t want them to see the new logo on an external piece.

That’s just death right there. So I think that’s really important. And in terms of behavior change, I was going to say, with the physicians themselves, you do have to find the things that speak to their identities.

Because one of the things, our motto, when we try to talk to people, because especially working with physicians, they always think you just give people the information, which a lot of clients do, just tell people and they’ll change. No, information is not motivation. Otherwise, no one would smoke.

I would obey the speed limit. It’s not enough. You have to find a way to motivate people to want to change their behavior.

And I could go on about that too.

That is awesome. I think everyone listening right now needs to jump on Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever social media platform you’ve got. And the quote there was, information is not motivation.

And tag Rudy in your tweet. What a great quote from you, Rudy. Thanks for that.

I love that. That’s a gem right there. So highlight that one, everyone.

One of my closest friends is an endocrinologist and we’ve done a lot of work with diabetes patients. And he even says, I will tell people, if you don’t start monitoring your blood sugar, if you don’t lose weight, you’re going to lose your feet. You’re going to become impotent.

Your body is going to shut down and people still don’t change their behavior. Because the information is not enough. You have to find the reasons, the barriers to changing their behavior and address those instead of just saying, here’s the info.

I tell my kids that all the time. Your feet will fall off if you don’t put your socks on.

Does it work?

Information is not motivation.

We might need to figure out some triggers and look at some barriers there, Jacob, to get that behavior to change. Maybe you need Rudy. We should hire Rudy for this problem.

I think this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion. What I was going to say, Rudy, is where can people find you? If any of the subjects that we’ve touched on over the course of this episode have peaked people’s interest and they want to find out more and maybe engage with you, where do we find you?

Well, you can go to creativeouthouse.com. You could find our links to our blog, our Contact Us page. There’s our podcast on there as well.

This is creativeouthouse.com. You can also find Creative Outhouse on Facebook, Instagram. You could find me on LinkedIn, Rudy Fernandez.

You can come to my house, but don’t do that.

I can’t believe you just pitched your own podcast on our podcast.

Epic.

But it is a great podcast, everyone, so check it out.

Yeah, I was kind of having an inside joke because we were talking, Rudy and I, earlier about every episode guest is super exciting. We’re super excited to have you on.

We are super.

Super excited. Well, it was a super episode. Thank you for coming on.

We will let you know. Well, we’ll let everyone know your details in the show notes and it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.

It’s been great. Thank you, Rudy. Take care.

Thank you. See you.