Developing a Winning Brand Strategy

Key Takeaways

how do you help a brand be true to a character or a spirit that they themselves have yet to be able to articulate to you and you're an outsider here presumably you know it's not that often that I get an opportunity to speak to people who are actively still working in the space that we left behind a few years back so it's always kind of nice it's like a trip down memory lane so make it you're one of those people so you're working over at trollback and you have a really interesting title you're the director of creative strategy that's a big lofty kind of title director of creative strategy sounds wonderful I think I know what it is but for people who don't know who you are can you introduce yourself and tell us what it is that you do and a little bit of your story please definitely my name is Mika salitis as you said I'm the director of creative strategy at a branding and Design Studio throwback and Company um it's a I'd say it's a fairly new title within the industry trovac started in the Motion Graphics world back in the late 90s I think in 99 but recently you know we've grown into a studio that handles we still do design and animation and Motion Graphics but we're doing a lot more brand strategy content strategy those kinds of things so for me specifically a lot of my work is kind of what consumers and audiences don't see it's a lot of brand strategy work positioning building brand voice guides conducting workshops kind of the foundations that designers or writers can kind of consistently and cohesively bring to life so that's kind of half of the job that's the I'd say the strategy part of creative strategy and then the creative side is uh the more consumer-facing manifestation of that strategic element so that's campaigns spots advertising marketing um partly leading teams of writers and then I'm partly on the box or whatever the writing uh version of being on the boxes but coming up with Concepts taglines script writing that sort of thing so there's kind of two sides of house wonderful okay a lot of things for me to unpack there and what makes it really interesting for me is looking into your background you graduated from USC as a Communications major okay these these are like lofty like what a Communications major what is a community Communications major prepared to do once they're done with school yeah I was prepared to do pretty much anything I I chose to be perfectly honest I didn't know what I wanted to do out of school so I chose the major that seemed like it had the most possible Pathways so I actually started at Ithaca College in Upstate New York for a year I was in the film program there and then I transferred to UFC for the film program and I spent about a semester in the film program and saw how crazy passionate the students were there staying up till four or five in the morning making these student films and and I realized pretty quickly that wasn't me I didn't really have that passion for the film industry so I was kind of back to ground zero so I ended up choosing communication just to get a good solid foundation I knew I was interested in in writing and and maybe marketing but not really sure how or how that might come to life so communication felt like it would give me a foundation to do a lot of different things with how old were you when you realized that maybe film isn't your thing relative to who is doing it I was I was probably about two months into my sophomore year of college or two months into uh my first year at USC I I just saw this passion that people had and I thought I had that and and I just I didn't and I I also think I realized I'm much better at when it comes to creative writing doing that in the short form so I I think my my talents lie more in tagline writing or 30 second promo writing but whenever I see someone writing a feature-length film and the complexities and the story arcs and these sub arcs within them my mind just doesn't work like that and I luckily by being thrown into the fire in that film School you kind of realize that so that's kind of how that came to be I see so you're either in your late teens or early 20s when you realize hey this is not the right thing for me is that about right yep okay the reason why I ask you this is you know I don't want to presume somebody's like going from high school to college because sometimes he will take a little detour that's high level self-awareness for someone I just want to point that out like you're like wait I thought I love this this is what I thought I was gonna do and you look around like oh these are animals next to me and if I'm gonna go somewhere in life I'm like this is not my jam uh so what is it about you that you're you're you have that sense of self and that you have the confidence to say you know what it was a good plan going in I gotta change the plan yeah I I'm I guess I've never really been afraid to to take a leap because in in that case it's not like I found a different passion and I just started pursuing something else and jumping right into it I just knew this is what I didn't want to do but I didn't have an answer for what I did want to do so something in me there's this intuition knowing this probably isn't the path and I I kind of tried to follow that intuition even though I'm not sure where that's going to eventually lead me um it led me to a place I'm very happy with now so I'm glad I did it but but I guess it's you know being okay with taking a chance even though I'm not sure where I'm gonna land is there anything that happened in your childhood that started to build confidence in that ability to to go somewhere where you're not quite sure it's a great question you know I I think it probably started when I went to college um there wasn't really any you know I was I had a dream always of of going to USC and uh I wanted I wanted a school that was in a big city with palm trees and my first semester I ended up at Ithaca College because I ended up getting a scholarship there um so it kind of seemed like well there's a scholarship this is a safe thing to do and I realized that it just it wasn't the school for me I didn't really like it and that was probably the first big leap I took where I realized you know this doesn't feel right to me this doesn't feel like a fit I've always had this dream of being in LA and USC was my dream school mostly because of the film school um so I I reapplied I I got in again and it would have been a lot easier to just go back to the college I was at the next year but I decided to to pack everything up about three or four weeks before the semester started move out to LA and try something new can you tell me a little bit about what the inner voice sounded like because I think a lot of people feel what you feel but they never act on it because they don't recognize the voice or they talk themselves out of it so in your mind like when you're going to Ithaca like what are you thinking about and what is it that you're saying to yourself and how do you find it that you can say okay you know what I'm gonna move from one side of the country to the other in a place where I don't know much about and I'm just gonna go for it like what does that voice sound like I think uh I always try to think of how I'm going to feel at the end and I still have that voice if there's you know this big presentation that I'm just getting really nervous about and not dreading but you know there's there's a lot going into it and I'm thinking you know this is a big hill that I have to climb but I I think of what that feeling is once it's done and how happy I was that that I went through that and I did it I think that's kind of what happened when I was transferring to it it would have been a lot more comfortable like I said just to stay where I was and ride it out for a few years and then figure it out but in my head I was thinking you know imagine where you could be if you just took this one step it's you know one step that could impact years and it did it I lived in La for 17 or 18 years so it was a big scary step but it was just one step that impacted so much more in my life I just want to clarify one thing if I remember correctly you were born and raised in Minneapolis Minneapolis right yep and then you said 17 18 years after you made this decision to you know what I'm gonna pack my bags I'm gonna go to USC and see what happens and that one decision lasted 17 or 18 years right yeah I moved out to LA in 2004 and I made the move back to Minneapolis uh in 2020 so yeah 16 years I ended up out there wow okay so I I want to clarify something here and and I do this as well so it's kind of interesting for me just to hear someone else say it is that you looked forward into the future about where this could lead and instead of going to a dark place you focus your energy on the positive outcome and that excited you a lot and sometimes that's enough for you to make that big bold and courageous decision did I hear that right absolutely yeah and I still do that today you know last week there was a big presentation to a few different presidents at a company and you know that I've been doing this for over a decade now but it's still um you know still nerve-wracking and still get anxiety when there's a crowd like that that you're presenting to but again you know I just think okay I know how good this feels once I'm done with something like that and I just try to put myself in that mindset that you're going to get to this place once you once you just go ahead and make this leap um so I just want to relate to experience and a realization I had recently in that I often I am asked to speak and in my schedule such that I don't have a lot of time to prepare and oftentimes I'm writing a new talk and so I go through that stage which I think a lot of creative people can relate to the dreading part the getting started getting all your ducks in a row the procrastination like I'm gonna read a couple more books I'm gonna watch a few more videos instead of just doing the work and I started to feel that weight but then I thought about something something that I heard um Eric and Meads talk about he he does the talk for mind Valley and public speaking he says you have your primary strategic objective and then you have your secondary strategic objective and the second secondary strategic objective is where you envision like if this goes really well what might happen in the world of possibilities what else might happen and so I thought wow okay on the one hand is a lot of work and I want to make the producer book me really happy that's my primary objective but the secondary objective is if I do really really well the people who attend will invite me to speak in their country and when I started to think about that it got me really excited and all of a sudden I can feel the pressure lift off me slowly until I was just so amped even though physically I was tired I was up to two three four in the morning and then I would go to sleep and go right back at it I was super pumped up and I want to capture that feeling I'm trying to share not just with you but with our audience it sounds to me like you went through a very similar thing leaving one University for another and just thinking wow I want to be in those next to those palm trees and be outside in shorts and a t-shirt during winter and you start looking forward and things sounded really good so it got you excited for that future for yourself yeah I think thinking like that kind of turns that anxiety into excitement and I should say I also totally get that that dreading feeling um I think when I'm in that place I always equate it to cleaning your room or cleaning a house where everything gets way Messier earlier early in the process for me before it finally gets cleaner and you can make sense of what it is you're presenting or or what this how this manifests so yeah I I can totally relate on that level too because I see the mess that's gonna happen but then eventually it uh it clears up for me okay so let's jump forward in time a little bit you go to USC you graduate as a Communications major and you wind up in a couple different places and I kind of see this movement uh where'd you land what did you do and tell me about the experience of getting your first professional work opportunity yeah so right after I graduated I decided to sign a lease without a job because I knew I wanted to be in LA and then I was scrambling for a job so I honestly would have taken the first job I was offered and I did take the first job I was offered which happened to be a receptionist role at a um branding I think a brand consultancy they call themselves called Troika which was based in Hollywood and so I was a receptionist for a year I was I knew nothing about the industry um they also did at the time a lot of Motion Graphics and branding mostly for entertainment clients um I didn't know that industry even existed so for a year I was taking lunch orders answering phones taking out the trash just kind of getting my hands dirty and learning what this industry was um and I was lucky enough to land at an agency like that where they had a pipeline where each receptionist had moved up through the company and now there's five or six of us who um one was an executive producer at Jeopardy one's a creative director at another agency called we are Royale um one was a producer at a TV network so we all kind of ended up working our way through the industry um but the typical path was going from a receptionist to a producer that was kind of the pathway for a receptionist at Troika and I kind of realized again that that didn't seem like something that was super interesting to me I had this kind of creative itch inside of me and I I didn't quite know how to scratch it yet I didn't know what I was good at or I knew I liked writing I didn't know if I was good at writing um so I ended up on this pathway that was more kind of an in-house PR person for Troika so I worked on the business development side I was writing press releases and you know trying to pick up some Publications and some press for these projects that these creative directors were leading and um after a couple years I realized you know I think I can do this creative work I it's it's fine writing about this amazing work that's coming out of this agency but I'd like to actually be a part of doing that so I started I started Moonlighting at nights I was still doing my you know the pr job during the day um but a couple executive producers at the agency knew that I was interested in in more creative writing so I throw my ideas into that hat when some pitches came in and uh kind of got my feet wet that way okay there's a couple of Parts here I'm trying to figure out so you go to USC presumably a very expensive school to go to um scholarships or anything any grants aside it's an expensive school to go to you get out of school you're going to take any viable job of all the different jobs I can think of where you apply to because you said you didn't know anything about the industry that you're going into how did Troika even get on your radar as an opening did somebody tell you about it did you read about it what happened there if my memory serves me correctly I think there was a website called entertainmentcareers.net or it was something like that and I think I was scrolling through there mostly just looking for if TV networks were gonna hire because I I interned at a TV network um in college between my Junior and Senior year and I was a PA I'm The Biggest Loser one summer so I was kind of interested in that space so I honestly didn't really know of any agencies other than the the Leo burnetts and the ogilvies of the world they didn't know there were like these brand consultancies um until I saw that posting so I honestly was was looking more for for TV network gigs and kind of stumbled upon that wow it's quite interesting because like your decision to move to USC or to transfer to USC or get into USC that your first job takes you on a whole another adventure that I mean your life would be totally different now if it was like a like a uh software company like a startup or something you'd be doing something totally differently right yeah and I could have easily landed there like I said I needed to I needed to make rent so yeah they offered me the job it was the only job offer I had so I took it well this is where I think your USC pedigree pays off because if it were me sorting through resumes I'm like here's a young person USC Communications major great answer the phones right like use that that education and use that uh that pedigree to your advantage and there you are okay so you said you you stayed in that position as the receptionist for about a year and then you moved into doing PR how did that happen uh because if people were listening like they could be four years into receptionist gig I'm like wait how come I wasn't offered that like what happened there how did you create that opportunity for yourself or how did it materialize yeah so typically uh the receptionists were in that role for about a year and then they move on to a I think it was production coordinator was where they would go on the production side of the house um but for me this will date me I think it must have been 2008 it was the holiday season and the agency really wanted to get a Wii for the studio and it was impossible to get and I don't remember how I got my hands on one but they tasked me with if would you be able to find a Wii for the studio and I got one in there and the sales and marketing team decided that they thought I might be good on their team um because I was I guess able to get things done and they liked that Moxie so um again I didn't know exactly that PR or Business Development was the path for me but they saw something in me that they thought you know it could be a fit so I ended up going in that direction rather than production just because that side of the house kind of wanted to use my skill set um okay so it sounds to me like in in Troika they seem to say you're going to make a one-year commitment and as positions open up we move receptionists out into being a production coordinator Junior producer or something like that right yeah and then your your ability to solve problems you're I'll figure it out at all costs kind of thing earned you the respect of a whole different team and they're like we'd like to draft you for our team and so you're like okay that seemed more interesting because I didn't want to become a producer that's how that happened yep that's that's exactly how it happened yeah that's so awesome okay so some lessons to learn here if you're going to be a receptionist at a company make sure that they have a path forward and that you've spoken to people who were in that position how long you're making that commitment for because look I'm not trying to judge anybody if you're the receptionist for the rest of your life and that's what makes you happy and that works for you more power to you but if that's not where you want to be that's not your final station in life you need to make sure you're smart and you're looking forward the company needs to be be big enough this is critical that there's room for you to grow into and departments and nooks and crannies that you can show your value to so this is a critical skill and obviously here Mega you found that and you're able to grow and you keep growing you keep moving now moving further along the timeline here you spend seven years at Troika what gets you to make the next move the next move was um I want it to be on the creative side so you know I was the communications manager at that point I wanted to kind of start a totally different path so the um the the Director of Business Development at Troika he moved over to another agency who was similar in what they did called Loyal Casper and um knew that I was trying to kind of make this career shift and said you know I'll take a flyer on you we'll bring you over here if you want to come so um it was thanks to you know someone knowing that I wanted to kind of shift career paths they knew kind of the work I was capable of doing and took a chance at me and brought me over there and was it hard for you to leave how was what was the departure like because that's a thing that a lot of people struggle with like there's an opportunity there's some security here and I go to work somewhere else new new job new title but if it doesn't work out I'm just kind of screwed how did that go for you there is nothing worse or scarier for me than quitting a job I absolutely dread it and I get that Feeling Again of I really don't want to do this but I'm picturing where I'm going to be if I just have one difficult conversation it could change my trajectory for years to come and and it did um so yeah you know I was I was definitely dreading it I hate those conversations but I'm glad I did because it gave me an opportunity to get more on the the brand strategy and the Creative Marketing side of the industry now for people who are listening that feel that deep in their heart like oh yeah and some some people can't make that decision can you tell us how you had that conversation and how it went to so see if we can learn something from it I don't remember the intricacies of how it went down I do remember that I was sweating and my heart was beating out of my chest um and they were very they were very nice about it which which I am very grateful for um but I I cannot remember the specifics of what I said other than you know I think I've carved a really clear path at this agency I think I could kind of turn over a new leaf and try something else at this other agency so I didn't feel pigeonholed necessarily but I was really good at doing this certain thing or I don't know if I was really good I was I was doing this certain thing for one agency and they knew me for doing that thing um and so I just said you know there's this other opportunity they're gonna try me out in a different capacity and I'm gonna take that chance okay so it's a little bit of a blur for you just remember elevated heart rate maybe a little sweaty here and there and something happened but then ultimately you did the hard thing and then you could move on to the next thing okay so I'm gonna just let everybody who's listening know that so make a graduates from graduates from USC and then he goes to Troika and he works there for seven years then eventually he becomes a writer senior creative strategist at another company called Loyal Casper and he stays there for four years then he moves on to becoming the director of creative strategy now we're starting to see that title at a company called Compadre and he's there for at for three years so you moved around a little bit now you're at trollback and Company and with the same type of director of creative strategy so now we get a sense of the evolution of who you are and do you just out of curiosity you keep in touch with people who graduated with you in in Communications to see what that they're doing today yeah there's there's a handful of people in the communications school that I still keep in touch with a lot of my friends weren't in the Communications Department they were business and engineering students um but there's a handful of people I I studied abroad in London for a semester through the communications school so there were about 28 of us who who ended up really close and I still keep in touch with a few of them is anybody working in the same industry not in the specific branding creative marketing industry um there's some people in the kind of social media marketing space um one person's kind of doing crazy things with uh with Alexa and Amazon and kind of audio branding but nobody specifically in in this industry I see I'm trying to ascertain as to how many of these communication major people wind up in the same industry it sounds like you're fairly unique in your Pursuit and by luck by chance by faith or by Design you you get this job and it takes you on a journey and you're still in this uh this space so it's it's kind of cool to hear that and and the the message I'm trying to send out to people here is some sometimes the things you do is just very through intentional action and sometimes it's it's luck and and just to be able to recognize the opportunity when you see it and and go on an adventure and you might wind up being where you're at Micah which is director of creative strategy in a firm somewhere that's so cool okay I'd like to like shift gears here and I want to talk to you a little bit about authenticity you have a very strong perspective on this and it is a term that's used a lot and I remember a conversation with Debbie Millman and she's like you know why are we talking about authenticity because it would infer that you're being inauthentic when you talk about authenticity like who here is not being authentic at this moment in time so why are we championing that as a term to be authentic are we saying that everyone is fake what's going on so I'd love to get your perspective on this yeah so in in my role specifically building brand strategy and positioning that word gets thrown out maybe more than any other word when a Brand's trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for and it sounds really nice who doesn't want to be authentic and you know on the surface that seems great but it's you know the definition of it is is of being authentic is being true to a character or a spirit and a lot of times Brands aren't really they haven't figured out what that character or spirit is yet authentic's kind of a word that's used as a workaround um when you're not quite sure a lot of times you hear you know well we know it in our gut or our brand is an attitude and we're we're being authentic but there's this extra layer of figuring out what that attitude is what is that spirit that you're being true to I think um that the word authentic kind of is used in place of a lot of the times how do you help a brand be true to a character or a spirit that they themselves have yet to be able to articulate to you and you're an outsider here presumably yeah it's it's workshops it's a lot of interviews it's writing down a lot of different ideas and seeing what feels right to them what doesn't um but yeah that that's really the hard work if you can crack that then I think you have something a lot more ownable um and I think something a lot more actionable you know the I think the best brand strategies are any teams are able to use if you're a designer if you're a writer there's this Foundation that you can build from but as a designer if you know you're giving the word authentic it's really hard to bring that to life if there's no other context around it are we you know being authentic to being youthful or rebellious or whatever you know the characteristics are it's you kind of need that Foundation before you can say that you're being authentic to something oftentimes when we're trying to figure out the voice and the character of a brand we trace it back to the Founder's story and it's easier for us because there are certain companies there is a Founder it's not like a corporation imagining a new thing because the market requires it do you find parallels in what you're what you do and trying to help them discover their true their true voice their character and their spirit yeah a lot of times it comes from that um it can also be a blend of you know where a brand has been and where they want to go and sometimes that character or Spirit doesn't exist yet or they're looking to reinvent it so it can be a mix of the two so in that case they're designing the the brand their authenticity is is one that's intentional and designed right it's not coming from a place that has a natural origin yeah exactly and usually that comes through you know what we try to look at when building a brand strategy or um you know what what's true to the company um we look at the competition how are you differentiating from your competitors what is your customer you know how are you going to resonate with your audience and then what's happening in culture you know taking into account what's happening with the world around us so if we are building something from scratch that's kind of the different areas we try to hit to make sure that sure we're building this new spirit or character of a brand we want to be authentic to that but we have to make sure that that's going to resonate with who we're trying to communicate with how do you resolve the conflict that inevitably comes up where we we pick words and characteristics that feel right to us but they don't truly reflect uh the culture that's behind it or that it winds up becoming a composite of many different positive attributes but don't truly sound or act like anybody that we know yeah I think that is a a great point I think you know I'm I'm kind of picking on the word authentic here but I think there's a lot of words that are easy to use in a strategy like I I think we could probably build a strategy right now that would sound good to a whole bunch of Brands if it was about being authentic and relatable and inclusive and bold who doesn't want to be those things you know but it's it's really hard to stand apart or to really create a brand that people love if if you're using these words that are maybe a little watered down or could mean 100 different things to 100 different people so yeah I always try to use words that are really um actionable for people so again if you're a designer or writer you know what that means um and I also like to an exercise I do is I'm not sure if you do this Chris but a lot of times in a brand strategy document you'll see we're blank not blank right so we're authentic not fake or something like that I think the not words are almost just as important in defining what a brand is um but what I try to do is for those not words don't use something that no one would ever try to be right so we're authentic not fake who who would ever build a brand around being fake so you know maybe it's we're you know rebellious but not Brash you're kind of splitting hairs about what it is about this characteristic that we are and that we aren't without just going to the complete binary of what that word is because oftentimes a brand would never want to stand for that anyways I like that explanation it is in alignment with the concept when we talk about focus and finding your Market uh Seth God and I was reading about this he describes as splitting the market so you take a group of people and you keep splitting it until you are really clear about who it is that you stand for and so it's easy to grab a word and that word to mean lots of things there are lots of different people and then use the exclusion like where rebellious but we're not uh Brash and that starts to find oh oh okay it's a certain kind of rebellious spirit I guess to the point of which you're saying don't choose a word that nobody wants to be because everyone will claim the same thing but also don't choose a word that also doesn't have any power because what's the point of that too so it's finding that balance and I guess that must be the role of the the strategist right yeah absolutely so I have a question for you just a real like two people talking about brand strategy her which is when you encounter a client and typically when I say client it's plural there's more than one person in the room and they're picking or making decisions that seem to water down the clarity of what it is that the brand stands for how do you navigate that yeah I think that is a great question and I've definitely been uh in those situations um I think that's being completely transparent with with the client and you know clients typically don't hire an agency just to be a yes person I think they value the opinion of a third party and I think it's my job to give that opinion if I do feel like we're going down a pathway that's maybe not gonna resonate with their target audience or not going to differentiate them in the landscape as you said that's usually when multiple people come together and there's maybe there's group think and they can't agree on a word or a phrase so it kind of gets watered down and watered down into something that everyone can accept and doesn't really stand apart at all but yeah I've definitely been in those situations and I think it's you know on the agency on the third party to kind of speak up when it feels like that's happening how do you typically raise this what's your style are you the Don Draper where you like sign here pick one word I'll be ready to work when you start or are you more diplomatic or strategic like how do you handle these things where it feels like the it's dissipating and versus being concentrated in terms of the Direction and The Voice how do you do that I am so not cool like Don Draper I could not do that I uh it's not my personality um I in my personal life I just hate conflict and so I think that carries over into work too so I I try to go at it the most diplomatic way possible where I can completely empathize and understand with how we're getting to where we're getting to but maybe we can take a couple step back steps back see maybe why this isn't going to be as powerful or as resonant an option that's going to move the needle as much as we like um and just try to have an honest conversation I certainly don't have all the answers so I don't come in there saying that I do but I can give my opinion on why I think we might need to course correct a bit and do it from a place of you know empathy understanding and and yeah being diplomatic about it I I should have known the answer was coming this is the person whose most difficult thing in life to do is to quit so getting clients to agree or choosing different words or something like that you're going to be very diplomatic about it totally in keeping with your character um I'm just sitting here thinking this and I'm wondering as a person who studied Communications and now doing brand strategy creative strategy how did you learn how to do this was this on the job did you figure this out like somebody mentored you how did you learn how to do this yeah this was a lot of working uh on the job um I I never encountered you know how to build a brand strategy what those different you know strategic pyramids are those different levels all all those different models I never encountered that in school I think if anything School helped me with public speaking and giving those presentations there are a few of those classes that I had to take and there was some communication Theory as well but in terms of you know how to build the foundations of a brand voice guide that was all on the job and um Beau Bishop who was the executive creative director at loyal Casper and he's actually now the executive creative director or executive director of creative strategy I should say um at trollback now so that's kind of how I came back to trollback was I reunited with Beau Bishop but he was uh he was a great mentor for me when I first landed at loyal Casper kind of showing me the ropes um showing me how he did things but still giving me the freedom to kind of you know build my own systems as I was learning along the way so you you learned on the job you you were able to put your writing skills to play here's something that a lot of people might feel in your situation where I didn't study this in school so the Imposter syndrome is going to be like yelling quite loudly right and how did you did you have issues with self-confidence like oh man I didn't train in these in this discipline and so many people here did and I always feel like I'm an outsider looking in did you have those moments and if you did how did you resolve that 100 um I still have those moments sometimes it's you know I'm much more confident now but imposter syndrome is definitely a real thing even especially when you're you know you don't have the the skill set already built in if you go to Art School you learn you learn the tricks of the trade you feel really confident coming out of school that you know how to do this and then you know you get a job as a designer and and off you go whereas you know for me yeah I was I was learning from scratch and I felt like you know the first present the first times I was tasked to give a presentation or I remember the first pitch I had to lead I was scared out of my mind because I had complete creative control which was which was awesome but also terrifying to me I definitely empathize with that and like I said you know it's it's something that doesn't ever truly go away for me I don't think um but with with each project with each presentation um you know I get more and more confident and comfortable with the work I do I want to ask you a little bit about a work experience and then I want to come back maybe to some tips that you might have for people who are in a position where they're working with clients and they want to help them with their creative strategy I I noticed that trollback has an impressive list of clients and you said before sometimes you can get anxious because these are massive multinational multi-billion dollar corporations and they're entrusting some initiative to you either building a new brand or rebranding something that has a lot of equity in it can you share a story or two about um I don't know one that you can share about a client interaction that you found like a breakthrough moment or something worth sharing one moment where where I had kind of a professional breakthrough I'd say was when I was I was leading this pitch for the global brand positioning of Marvel and this was where I I kind of had the reins and and I could do the pitch my way and it's Marvel it's the brand I love I didn't want to mess it up I went all in on this pitch WonderCon was in Anaheim so I went to WonderCon the weekend before the pitch I just completely lived this lifestyle that these fans were living um and put together the deck mostly after I went to that convention because there were a few light bulb moments for me and you know I'd say 40 of of winning that pitch was probably the the creative that was pitched but 60 of it was showing that we got it and we get why you're doing this and we got the lifestyle that these people are living um so you know that kind of helped where yes of course the creative the strategy matters a lot but I think showing clients that you understand their challenges you can help them through it these are the solutions we got to because we understand all that was really important to me professionally and it's kind of influenced a lot of how I approach giving presentations and and presenting strategies to clients now so you you credit being immersed in the culture and experiencing it firsthand is helping to create those light bulb moments these observations that you had yeah I think you know for that specific one there's there's not a Wonder con for every project but I think if anything it it helped me learn that in a presentation especially a strategy you know the strategy itself might just be a couple pages but it's taken the client on that Journey leading up to how we got to where we got to because I think that that story of why we believe this is the right solution for you is just as important as the solution itself can you expand on that because a lot of creatives don't think this way they think this is the solution this is what it looks like and I'll reduce it down to its its Bare Essence here which is I make a logo I'm going to present the logo apps in any context and you should pick this logo and sign the check and we should be done yeah I would say I spend as much if not more time building brand strategy deck on the setup for what that brand strategy is as I do on the positioning statement or the brand attributes or pillars or whatever goes into that because I do think it's really important if you just show up in a room and show a positioning statement to a client and they don't know why you got there how you got there it's really hard for them to buy in but if you take them down this path and leave these breadcrumbs of okay we noticed this about your audience we noticed this about what's happening in culture we noticed this about your competition and this is what you're really good at as a company and together we created this statement it might just be a sentence but they understand okay this makes sense to me this is accomplishing my goals for these reasons so that's what I always try to do is is tell the story behind how we got to a solution so you take them through a some kind of narrative I take it right some kind of narrative some observation some insights uh based on on customer interviews or or social listening some people will call it and and building a composite and and making connections where perhaps they knew instinctively but they couldn't articulate and you kind of hold a mirror up to them does that sound about right yeah definitely um a lot of what we do is you know making the intangible tangible I'd say when it comes to Brand strategy or or putting intuition onto paper so yeah it's you know a lot of times people might have a gut feeling about what they want their brand to stand for and it's kind of codifying that giving them some tools but yeah also giving them a a reason to understand why that's correct or maybe it's sometimes maybe why we don't feel that's correct but this other solution is correct um so yeah it's you know it's a lot of digging a lot of um a lot of these insights are the stories that we we've telled before we get to a an actual positioning statement comes from stakeholder interviews too sometimes for a company it might be interviewing the core two or three people but I've been in rebrands where we've interviewed I think 47 people before we even put any sort of strategic document together when people like you strategists say we do the research this is what research sounds like everybody research isn't getting on Pinterest or behance and looking at things that you like and saying I've researched this is really kind of combing through the data and trying to look in spot patterns and and I love that expression it's intuition on paper which is like that's a nice juxtaposition of two words there because you don't think intuition is not something we feel and act upon but you're saying it's on paper so that's really cool and if you if this idea intrigues you and you're let's say a logo designer I'm gonna just make a reference point here to Paul rand's beautifully written and Illustrated process books where when he goes to present a logo to a large corporation he takes them through the ideational phases and he writes about it and it's a very logical process of how you start and where you end because his he's he's famous for I'm going to make you one logo there are no revisions you can use it you can't you don't have to use it but either way you have to pay me and it's quite wonderful just to to look at that and so it's a very logical narrative and you can understand the decisions that are made and why he wound up where he wound up yeah absolutely I completely agree and just last week I I gave a presentation and 70 of it was what we decided not to do it wasn't the actual solution it was these are all the paths we tried these aren't working for whatever reason because of these insights we found and now here's finally the solution we're arriving to but but again it's it's yeah taking taking clients on a journey to to the eventually the final solution why is that valuable to a client to see all the things that you tried but didn't work I think so they can feel feel good about a final solution I think a lot of times clients come to agencies because you know they they have an idea maybe they should do this maybe they shouldn't they need either validation somehow or someone to challenge those that intuition so I think part of servicing a client is is showing the process of of how we get to where we get to um I think they pay for our thinking just as much as the the solutions we arrive at and showing the thinking I think is really valuable I think what a lot of smaller shops and generally speaking freelance creatives don't realize is when they see the final execution everyone starts to argue oh that's so simple you paid 100 Grand to do that I could have done that what they don't realize is the process you just just described which is clients pay you a lot of money to do the due diligence to explore to try things to test things the Prototype what what the general public often never sees is that entire process and so they've gone through a a very controlled process of eliminating things that don't work and exploring what ultimately will be dead end so that they can ride and reassure that this is the one correct solution this is it and so you'll see something set in helvetica with a very simple modification or a very geometric icon that feels somewhat generic but they've tried all the other things and one thing that what design firms will do too bigger design firms is they'll take a more complicated logo that has more flourishes and personality and they'll put it against a lot of different things like ads on a on a busboard or billboard in a newsprint thing so you can see like oh this is competing with the central messaging it becomes more important and it doesn't allow the messaging or the tagline to work so again oftentimes we become very myopic as creative people we just focus in on the one component we don't realize it lives in a larger ecosystem and when you're bigger firm you know that that's part of the process is that has it been your experience as well yeah absolutely um usually there's some sort of an intake process in whatever project I'm working on and that might be a couple weeks that might be a couple months sometimes we go really deep depending on how big the uh the assignment is or you know how much change a client is looking for or how much research we need to do to to kind of turn over all the stones we need to turn over and I should say when I say research it's not a capital our research I'm not doing segmentation studies and focus groups um if we do that we we hire an outside firm because I'm by no mean an expert in that but it is stakeholder interviews it's workshops with companies it's desk research of kind of looking at at Trends and trades and that sort of thing have you run into an experience where you go through that process of explaining like we tried this that didn't work and you go through it and then you finish with the conclusion like this is why it looks like this today only for the client to say well well you know exploration number three where you say didn't work I don't know about that has that happened [Music] for sure and I'm trying to remember I'm trying to remember a specific example because I I can picture that conversation happening and and I can't think of a specific example right now but but usually it happens when someone is seeing a presentation for the first time who hasn't been involved from the get-go so maybe they know the whole story maybe they don't maybe they're seeing a condensed version of the overall presentation and it gets a lot more subjective because I think what we try to do is is make a solution as bulletproof as possible prove out why this works from every angle we can imagine and if my memory serves me correctly when that's happened it's usually been some Consolidated or Frankenstein presentation that that maybe doesn't have the full context so it makes a lot easier to kind of subjectively say yeah no I I don't really like that that's not to say every every strategy I build is bulletproof and perfect but it's a pretty collaborative process so ideally we're working along the way there aren't any surprises and we're kind of taking these baby steps to get to where we get to so there there usually isn't a surprise like that at the end and if it happens it's usually someone who's kind of coming in new to the process I also wanted to highlight that uh bigger firms that work with really big budget clients High high-profile clients with really big Stakes that are involved they don't go and disappear into their creative caves and re-emerge and say here it is and Tada do you love it or what that's usually the actions of much smaller firm and what you realize is the bigger the client the more that's at stake the more you have to kind of be one with the client that you're taking steps together you're having a lot of meetings around milestones and so that when you arrive at the end everybody's on board because that's probably one of the biggest challenges it's not so much that designing the mark the symbol the system the tagline is difficult it is but it's not as difficult as getting buy-in from everybody making sure that all the key stakeholders involved see what you see and arrive at this very logical conclusion to say instead of saying like ta-da or brilliant they're saying of course you've been leading down this path and that seems to be the Natural Evolution we're all still very excited about doing this together now you mentioned something a couple of times the word Workshop that might be a foreign concept to a lot of smaller design firms and and you talked about stakeholders and stakeholder workshops potentially tell us what that looks like if you can share some insight a framework or a process that you found to be very helpful so that everybody here can learn from you yeah yeah I totally use brand speak there so apologies but yes Workshops can kind of come in two forms either at the beginning of a process or at the end so at the beginning of a process usu