Branding: Knowing Yourself and Building Relationships With Kyle Asperger

“Is there any time when branding isn’t important?” Your brand represents you and your promise to your customer. With creativity, skill, and a strategic approach, you can establish an identity with your brand. Great branding sells out to your customers because it’s what makes you unique and different. Here today is brand specialist Kyle Asperger, and he’ll be deep diving into how branding gives “life” to your company. He would walk us through the importance of story making and overseeing creative projects to amp up your business. --- Listen to the podcast here: Branding: Knowing Yourself and Building Relationships With Kyle Asperger Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. As you continue along your journeys and build your own things, one of the important aspects of that journey is going to be branding. Branding is something that a lot of people have some weird and interesting thoughts about which we'll cover in this episode. We all have a brand. A brand is a good way of understanding what service someone offers. You think about your favorite brands: Nike, Whole Foods, anything. There's an automatic mental image or an automatic feeling associated with that brand. Today, my guest is here to talk to us about the importance of branding and how we can go about visualizing and creating a good story for our particular brand. Today's guest is Kyle Asperger, the founder of Studio 301. --- Kyle, welcome to the program. Stephen, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. I hate talking about myself, so this is nothing but just pure torture. Sorry. Most of my guests tell me, "Oh, I love your questions. I love coming on and talking about my things." The first thing I want to dive right into is, a brand is a story. What do people generally think about their brands? Probably the wrong way. I think that's going to be my default, just because it circles back to what we were just talking about. This is the armchair expert in me. That's the psychological "I've been through therapy. I know myself now," yada-yada, "I'm always working on myself." As we all should be. That is the crumbs of it. Whether it's a brand revolving around the individual or a brand revolving around the product, the key is to do all of that footwork, the heavy lifting. Go through the painful moments of the conversations that you believe [you physically ill]. It's through those struggles in life that marks/notes. Embrace the struggle. That, I think, is so true within the world of just branding. Know yourself. Know your product. Know it thoroughly. The brand will come to life as a byproduct of that. With this "know yourself, know your brand, know your product", is there an order to this, or does this all happen in parallel? It is a bit different. If you're talking purely product, that perhaps is a bit more easy to create and cover a brand around, as opposed to an individual, which is severely more complex. If somebody is a coach or something along that line that the individual is critical and core to whatever value they bring to the table, that versus a product -- a product is pretty self-explanatory, what the uses are for; people are just more complex beings. Interesting. Do you typically work with products more or people? We don't really find ourselves working within a niche as far as the services or products that are provided. What I do on a regular basis is strictly work with people. That's what I do all the time. I just go out and try to find friends. That's it. Just being here on the podcast, the part that was fun for me is just chopping it up about the psychological, social psychology course, understanding, "Okay. Where is Stephen coming from with this podcast? What are the tools that he is employing? What makes him truly Stephen?" That's the kind of stuff that makes me excited. If I was just doing the same thing for one company, I would blunder things at one go. We wouldn't be having this conversation. Yeah, for sure. Thankfully, that did not happen. I think my parents, all four of them, would be very happy to know [it]. The honest answer is, it's strictly people. You can't even think about products, because behind the product are people. We're not at a place where AI has taken over so much that AI can now create products for us on our behalf. At the crux of every brand, you have people. Is there a variance? When I think of a brand like Nike, I don't tend to really think of people. It's such a large company with a history. The original founders are long gone, and things have transitioned. An individual art studio, on the other end of the spectrum, this art studio is this person's art. That art is usually showing, if they're good, a very, very deep integral part of who they are. I call it a personalized element. When it comes to what we can offer, that's really the only main differentiator. We're small. We're highly communicative. The larger the team, the less Johnny-on-the-spot I can be with -- how quickly the team could get back to you, or less and less meetings and rounds of revision and different people/hierarchies that things have to go through. With Nike, there's an interesting story. The former CEO was a good friend of a family friend here. This family friend ran over 100 marathons in his lifetime. For his 100th marathon, the former CEO of Nike had made a specific custom pair of shoes. There's only two pairs that exist in the world, and they were made explicitly for him. His name is Mike. On the back -- being a relative shoe layman, I'm going to call it the spine -- of the shoe leading down to the heel, where we would often see Nike and say, "Mikey's Nikes" on there, and the 100th marathon on there. It was epic. They were so cool. I thought, “What an extraordinary story.” It's just very interesting. Small studios shortly inherit vendors to think, "Okay. We're going to get this boutique service," thus, you have this expectation that customer service is going to be more intimate. You could even walk out knowing about each other's [inaudible] -- I don't know. Whatever it turns into, you're going to have that more personalized effect. Big or small, it's still those little stories that I always think are interesting. Whether it's an individual art studio or a big brand like Nike, is it a challenge for them to get that story out so that when people see Nike in a store, they should be thinking about the CEO running his 100th marathon in the same similar story for any other product that you see? I think that's the important part -- because the CEO knows these people that are running marathons in this volume. Those are the stories that I think are worth-telling. That's what is indicative of a brand. A brand is how people talk about, whatever the product, whatever the service, whoever the individuals are. You have a brand; I have a brand. Everybody has a brand whether or not they're actually aware of it. The brand is more or less just your commonly known reputation. If a brand is just a commonly known reputation, is that something that is important for every single person to think about? I can imagine a situation where someone's got a whole bunch of pictures on social media, and every one of them is then falling down drunk. It suddenly becomes a brand. What's the danger in people outside of business even not thinking about their brand? The first word that comes to mind is reckless. Tighten up, people. Come on, do better. I'm not here to crack the whip like that. That's completely unrealistic. Everybody's allowed to do exactly what they are allowed to do. Perhaps if that's their vibe and they're out in nightclubs getting slashed on, fine, sure. I've been through those days. I just got to a point where my value shifted and there's just been a greater understanding gain. The point is, through growth, what one may feature as recklessness in their younger years can, for one, and hopefully would evolve into a more learning stance of [inaudible] with me. That was the old brand. Why not take this period to really reassess? Have those conversations. Reassess -- where's my love life? Is it healthy? Am I surrounding three or 10 people that I am putting the majority of my energy into? Are these good people to keep around? You're going to be hauling trash bags out into the street if that's the case. End of day, once you've done all that clearing, whether it's just up here mentally or physically, whatever it turns into, that's where you're more or less clearing your canvas for what's next. When it comes to brands of products or established brands of groups, do you think it's easier to start from scratch, or do you think it's more interesting to turn around a brand because there are so many stories about companies that lose their way and their brand suddenly becomes associated with something different than what they want it to be and they need to actually turn that story around and establish a new one? I think that's a good question. I would see it as the before and after. You see it with breast augmentation, stuff like that. That's a very face value example of that all the time. That's how people come to gauge whether or not this is a successful endeavor. You can see the tangible differences between what this brand was versus what it is now, what it's become. There is a journey of transformation that happens regardless of how many individuals put the work in to actually initiate the change. I would then say that taking an existing item and shifting and carving out a new brand or reputation, I'm not going to say it's more interesting. However, just based on how human psychology works, the before and after aspect affords us a much more pragmatic look at -- was this even effective?...