May 13, 2024 • 56 mins
Rob Meyerson and Fabian Geyrhalter discuss brand strategy's balance of innovation and foundational rules, touching on brand creation challenges and successful launches in the evolving marketing landscape.
Today’s episode is special. It's an edited version of a LinkedIn livestream chat with Fabian Geyrhalter, founder and principal at FINIEN, "a purposefully small consultancy based in Los Angeles." Fabian is a brand strategist and creative director and host of the Hitting the Mark podcast. He's also written several best-selling books, including How to Launch a Brand and The Brand Therapy Book. Lastly, Fabian is founder of Toneoptic, which we discuss on the show.
Fabian was a guest on season two of How Brands Are Built, and I had a great time talking to him again. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
To learn more about Fabian, visit www.finien.com. From there, you'll find links to his podcast and books. For Toneoptic, visit www.toneoptic.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome to How Brands Are Built, where branding professionals get into the details
of what they do and how they do it.
I'm your host, Rob Meyerson. Thanks for listening.
Hi, everybody. I'm Rob Meyerson. For those of you who don't know me,
I'll just kick off by introducing myself, and then I'll ask Fabian to do the
same, and I'll share a little bit about what we'll be discussing today.
(00:29):
I run Heirloom. We're a brand strategy and identity firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Do a lot of brand positioning work, brand architecture work, and naming.
I wrote a book about naming called Brand Naming, which we may talk about a little bit today.
I host a podcast called How Brands Are Built, which is also a blog.
(00:51):
And then most recently, I have co-authored the latest edition of Designing Brand
Identity, which I think really is sort of the impetus for this call.
Fabian and I chat all the time.
We've talked about previous books that he's written and that I've written,
but designing brand identity was something that kind of got us wanting to have this live chat.
(01:12):
So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about brand identity in general.
We'll talk about some books and some products that Fabian has brought into the world as well.
But Fabian, why don't you talk about that a little bit and introduce yourself?
On. Sounds good. I realized we're basically a complete mirror image of each
other, not only because of the awkward promotion that my designer designed,
(01:36):
but we're like equal height and everyone knows Rob very, very tall.
That was totally a design choice. No, but there is, it's amazing how we both
do a lot of the same things.
So in fact, we're actually direct competitors and I I should actually head out of here. So bye.
Rob, this is all you now. Or I should. Well, or you should, right?
(01:57):
So basically, we both provide naming and identity services.
We both run a podcast about brand creation.
We both have books about branding on Amazon.
So it's kind of crazy and really cool. I think that makes it so interesting
to hear both of our opinions today.
So I run a brand strategy and identity consultancy.
(02:20):
We create clarity for brand
transformations um i'm also a partner
at chameleon collective which is a brand transformation consultancy um
wrote books on branding bigger than this how to launch a brand uh run a podcast
where i don't talk to marketers um because i don't like talking to people that
(02:40):
are exactly like myself besides rob so i talk to founders special exceptions very special I
talked to founders about how they actually created clarity for their own brand
so I talked to like the founder of Liquid Death and JetBlue Intelligentsia etc
etc and that's pretty much it for for intros I think because most of you know
(03:03):
either Rob or myself or both of us um.
So one more housekeeping note I should mention.
Rob named this session today about building and launching successful brands
in 2024 and what does it take.
And of course, we're going to have that as the carrot until the very end.
(03:24):
So at the very end, we will both kind of reveal right now for us what is that
big thing that we think is the biggest advice that we can give.
So just stick around to the end for that.
But with that being said, and while I have the mic, let me start interrogating
you, Rob, because I know this is going to go both ways.
(03:48):
Let's talk about that subject, though, about 2024, branding in 2024.
You wrote a book about brand identity.
Right now, it just got released. least, in your mind, like what changed,
you know, especially it's the sixth edition now of the book,
like what changed in brand identity?
(04:09):
What is the state of brand identity in 2024? Yeah.
Yeah, I think the fact, as you put it, the fact that this is the sixth edition
of a classic book, which we should mention right off the bat,
that this is Alina Wheeler's book.
Alina Wheeler wrote Designing Brand Identity in 2003.
She created five more editions of it, including this one, which I just came
(04:34):
on board to co-author with her.
Um but i think the fact that the
the state of brand identity right now is sort of encapsulated in
that fact that it's the sixth edition of a classic because
a lot of the basics still ring true um that's
the reason this book has lived as long as it has and of course it has changed
dramatically since 2003 but also many of the topics that are in it and some
(04:58):
of the just basic definitions and descriptions of those topics still hold true
but we also need to create new New editions of this book every three to five years, or Alina did,
and I've helped with this one because so much has changed also.
I mean, since the first edition, you know, back in 2003, we didn't have iPhones.
You know, social media has exploded since then.
(05:21):
You know, everything that's happened in just the world, the pandemic,
social change, cultural change, brands, you know, it may feel like,
well, what does that have to
do with brands? On one level, you can sort of separate those in your mind.
But of course, brands have to react to that, whether they like it or not.
And brands can even help drive some of that in some maybe very special cases
(05:42):
where brands kind of drive or take a front seat in cultural changes.
And so there is a whole section of this book called Brand Dynamics that has
to do with some of those trends, social justice, AI, new digital interfaces. faces.
Um, and because we all need to react to these and brands need to react to them.
(06:03):
Um, I think, you know, I think it's important to, to stay up to date. And so that's sort of.
The state of brand identity today. But I mean, you're an expert on this topic
as well. As you mentioned, we do a lot of the same thing.
So what do you think is changing? What do you feel like is the state of brand identity?
It's a crazy state right now. It's like, I feel like in the last six to 12 months
(06:28):
with AI being, you know, really introduced to the masses,
I think everything is in flux so to me
it's a really hard it's a hard question to answer
because you know first it was
adobe and photoshop and that completely changed how brand
identity was created and you know how the entire industry worked then it was
(06:51):
fiber and a fast slope downhill um and now it's ai and i i really feel like
what is happening because of all of these tools and and i can also attest to that That myself,
because now that I'm driving my own little startup hardware brand,
I'm doing things differently than I would have advised my clients,
(07:13):
which is interesting, right?
So I see that everything is more fluid.
I feel like that a brand's overall identity, so less the name and the logo,
but really the overall vibe, right? I feel like it is becoming ever more fluid.
(07:34):
It is constantly adjusting a little bit.
And I think that's kind of great. I think brands and brand identity itself will
start to take itself less seriously.
And I think that's a great thing as long as it is within some sort of guide rails.
Because if this is going out of any guardrails, it's going to be a hot mess, right?
(08:02):
But I love that idea that brands are consistently changing their look a little
bit and moving forwards,
but the foundations of how a name is crafted,
how a brand is crafted, how an identity is shaped, that very much stays the same.
(08:23):
And I think that that's the idea of why there is a sixth edition of Designing
Brand Identity because it's this age-old saying, you need to know the rules
in order to break them, right?
And I think now we are going to very quickly identify the brands that don't
know the rules and the intern in AI is running it, right? versus the brands
(08:47):
that actually know those foundational rules.
That's funny. Yeah, go ahead.
No, I was going to say, I just saw, I don't know if you saw this,
somebody posted on LinkedIn the other day.
I don't want to call people out, but I didn't read the full post.
So maybe there was more to it than I thought there was, but it said,
why have one logo when you can have 20?
(09:09):
And my immediate reaction was, because you don't want 20.
Now, to your point, 20 variations on a very distinctive, clear logo sort of idea.
Because there was also a recent post by, I'm going to forget his name,
but he's a big Instagram influencer.
(09:29):
I feel bad forgetting his name, who does a lot of Photoshop and Illustrator
kind of tips and tools. And he just showed off how Adobe Firefly can help you
create these really cool interpretations and iterations of your logo.
And it's sort of like MTV did back in the 90s. Right, right.
You know, that I think is cool, right? That's a way to kind of flex your identity
(09:50):
that I think is, and that's using AI.
And I think that's similar to what you're talking about. Whereas having 20 very
different logos, that's where you start to veer off kind of some of the fundamentals
of just like, yeah, you want to be recognizable. You know, I think this is a
super interesting conversation.
I would love everyone to jump in in the comments too, right?
Because this is pretty choosy.
I feel like brands that I really loved back when I was growing up,
(10:16):
which of course is five years ago, like Burton snowboards, right? Right.
Burton had this thing where literally every season they came out with all kinds
of new logos, like new ideas of how the logo can work.
And to me, that was kind of like the skate snowboard, you know,
kind of like attitude where you're not corporate.
And so I think that, again, it's rooted in brand strategy. There are brands
(10:39):
where that idea of, you know, Marty Neumeyer's zigzag, right?
Like that idea of like, oh, well, if corporate goes this way,
why don't we have 20 logos? Because our tribe doesn't care about that.
Because as long as the logos all have some similarity in attitude, it can be amazing.
But I think because now we have those tools, like we had the tools like Photoshop.
(11:04):
There's going to be a crazy amount of stuff happening in the next couple of
years of like, how will brands take this?
Well, that said, talking about, you know, those guardrails, let's go back to
your book for a little longer here.
Um, this is the first time I believe, um, that Alina had a coauthor for, for her book.
(11:29):
Um, why, why you, why not me?
No, no. why why like how did how did
you the joke um how did you how were
you chosen and how did you take this on and it must have
been a massive massive undertaking uh it's
a great question i think uh not you simply because alina hadn't met you and
i made sure that that didn't happen um yeah no i i kept you a secret um no i
(11:53):
mean i didn't think it would be me either uh alina and i met because i I interviewed
her for my podcast years ago and, uh,
you know, we, we hit it off, I guess you could say, and, and sort of became
fast friends and kept in touch.
But I think that has, uh, a lot to do just with Alina's personality,
which, you know, we can talk about as well, but she, she is,
(12:14):
she was just the friendliest, most down to earth person for all,
for all these sort of, um, heroes of mine that I got to interview on the podcast.
Um she is one of those people who uh is just yeah so so sort of um.
Uh, kind and generous and does not come off as kind of a, uh,
(12:36):
like a guru that's up on a, on a mountaintop somewhere that's untouchable.
She's very kind of, uh, just a real person.
And so she stayed in touch with me and we talked a lot about work, what I was doing.
Um, when I wrote my book brand naming, I asked her if she would write the forward for it.
Um, and she did that. And I think that was a big milestone in that we got to
(12:59):
write together, you know, edit at each other.
She looked at my book, I looked at her forward and we gave comments back and forth to each other.
And I think that's when she probably started to get the idea that I might be a good partner on this.
She did know years ago when I interviewed her that she was going to be stepping
away from designing brand identity.
The way she told it, her husband gave her an ultimatum that it was either him or the book.
(13:24):
As you can imagine, this book was a huge part of her life.
And I think He was ready for her to spend a little more time enjoying the golden
years and spending time with him,
which they were such a fun couple and spent a lot of time with friends and family.
(13:47):
And so she was able to take a step back a little bit just by having me as a
co-author and not being the sole person who this edition wasn't solely on her shoulders.
Um but yeah in terms of why me uh
you know the way she put it and and
this is in the introduction to the sixth edition um
she wrote a little blurb about this we each answered three kind
(14:08):
of big questions uh about the new edition and about designing brand identity
and one of hers was essentially why why me and it kind of came down to two things
um she wanted somebody who uh whose head was in this space in sort of a deeper way than just,
you know, all of us are practitioners or strategists or designers or namers,
(14:31):
but somebody who kind of thinks about it on a day-to-day basis.
And so the fact that she liked the fact that I had had a lot of different roles,
both client side and agency side that I'd done it in the U S but also Asia.
So I brought some of that kind of cultural awareness to it, which is really
important to her and to me.
(14:52):
And the fact that I have a podcast and was writing a book about naming just
gave her this sense that I like talking about this stuff. I like thinking about this stuff.
And to do a book like this, you have to have that mindset or you're going to burn out on it quickly.
So I think those two things combined that I was sort of,
in the space and in more than just a superficial way and
(15:14):
that um she felt I would commit to creating
the best possible version of this book just having seen my
work and and seen um uh the amount of work that I put into things like the podcast
and the book uh yeah I think that was it but I should know one thing um it also
wasn't just me she was fond of saying no one does it alone you'll see that in
(15:37):
the book you'll see that in pretty much every edition in the book.
This is a huge team of collaborators, most significantly Robin Goffman,
who's the creative director on the book. I'm not a designer.
She helped lay out every page. She was a real partner in this as well.
And then of course, the publishing team, the editor, and everybody else,
lots of people contributed content.
(15:58):
So it's not a solo effort.
It's not even an effort of just Just me and Alina, but a team.
So a lot of people to thank, and we do thank them in the book.
And Rob, sorry, one thing.
Some listeners might not know, but sadly, Alina passed away.
(16:21):
And so it is pretty hard for Rob to talk about this. I noticed this right now, right?
It's not the easiest of things, but it is joyful because it's in remembrance.
So, I just want to make sure that people are aware of that.
And you were the perfect person to do this for so many reasons.
(16:42):
As you know, I'm really busy these days with running two companies,
which one was already enough.
But I did get enough chance to go through the book to very quickly understand
why this was the perfect pair.
And I think everyone should be very excited diving into it.
Thank you for saying that and and you know when
(17:04):
she asked me um and also i didn't
immediately say yes believe it or not uh which feels kind of crazy now uh because
it's been such a huge honor and such an amazing uh experience and opportunity
but um but when she first came to me i sort of like you just said i felt like
uh man i you know i've written a book before i know how much work that
(17:24):
takes um i have young kids i have i'm running a business um i just wasn't sure
i could get on board for something that felt so overwhelming and it was overwhelming in a lot of ways but um,
but we talked about it a lot she was very transparent about kind of the pros
and cons of doing something like this um having robin involved both as a point
(17:47):
of continuity but also as just someone who i could really lean on to help with
it um was a huge a huge mid-age difference And so, yeah,
in the end, I was just too excited to have that opportunity to learn from Alina,
to work closely with her, to talk to branding professionals all over the world,
find out what they're doing and just kind of, you know, look at their work and
(18:08):
get their work into the book.
Yeah, so it's an honor and very bittersweet launching this book.
We really had hoped that Alina would be here to promote it with me.
Um the the happy news on that front is that she was able to see this through
to completion she uh saw the digital you know the pdf copies of the final pages
(18:31):
as they went to the publisher.
Uh the only change we made after she passed away was adding a
tribute to her at the front of the book as quickly
as we could you know i mean it was like already on the way to
the printer um when she passed away so
sad that she never got to hold it in her hands but i take some solace in just
the fact that uh she knew it was done and uh she loved you know everything in
(18:56):
this edition she she contributed everything in this edition um she's the kind
of person who has you know.
It's almost like maybe she shouldn't have been but she was down to the last
you know few months like giving feedback on on pages in this book so it has
it has her fingerprints all over it and And it's such a better product and book
(19:21):
as a result of that. It was a true collaboration.
And she got to see that it was done and got to know that it was done and that
there would be a sixth edition.
And that there was a team, not just me, but a team of people that were committed
to carrying this legacy forward.
And I mean, the book, for those of you who don't know about the book,
(19:42):
I mean, it is really a brand classic.
I mean, for me, it was such a staple for when we started writing how to launch a brand.
And back in the beginning, it was really we, because it was more of like,
hey, this is how brands should be launched.
And so really going, not trying to innovate how brands are launched,
but for our way, like these are the steps that we really think are important.
(20:05):
We leaned heavily on, I don't know what edition it was, of Alina's book, right?
I quote, you know, in How to Launch a Brand, the naming section,
the different types of brand names came straight from Designing Brand Identity,
of course, with credits.
And we mentioned that we take it right from that book, right?
(20:27):
Right. So it really like the influence that she had on not just me,
you know, like in the practice, but everyone in the design world is is is is unbelievable.
And it is wonderful that you were able to to kind of carry not the full torch.
Right. But you carry this you carry it over right now with being able to have
(20:48):
that book out there. So bravo. Bravo.
And I know that in the book, in the very back, you say, Alina warned me that
this will be much, much more work than you could ever imagine.
And it was even more than that. So I know it was a lot of you that put into it.
(21:11):
It was more work than I imagined, but also more rewarding than I could have
imagined. So, yeah, so I underestimated on both counts.
Let's talk a little bit more about that process.
Right um like like how was it creating a new edition like how did you kind of
like read through the last edition and and adding to it where do you start what are the hardest parts,
(21:33):
yeah well you you've written you know multiple great books i'm looking at them
up on my on my shelf here um and how to launch a brand i imagine like my naming
book it it's to some degree it's It's sort of a dump of your own brain onto the page,
right? And it's mostly words.
(21:54):
So it's a lot of just kind of prose and writing and editing your own writing
and getting feedback on your writing.
This book was very different. And maybe I wonder if any of your books were like this,
but this was kind of going outside of myself and collecting a bunch of good
content from other people, whether those are case studies or just there are
(22:16):
topics in this book that frankly, I don't know.
I'm not, I either don't know anything about or I'm not an expert on.
And so we really wanted to get experts. If I'm writing about typography,
I want someone who knows typography.
Even if I'm editing a page about typography, I want an expert.
And so for that, we went to James Edmondson of OhNoTypeCo and just said,
hey, look at these two pages about typography.
(22:39):
Is there anything on here that you would change? Is there anything that you
would add? Any newer, fresher examples that you would add?
And that was a lot of the process was kind of getting in touch with experts,
getting in touch with the agencies, getting their work into the book,
getting better examples of things into the book.
Um and that made it really different
from from sort of writing a
book yeah yeah it's in and you know i mean
(23:02):
i would get such panic attacks and anxiety over the idea of having you know
thousands of logos and other people's work and photography and everything in
this book i mean this book is like filled with case studies and examples which
makes it so amazing and so rich right Right.
But how do you not wake up in the middle of a night and you're like,
(23:22):
wait, did I get the right person credit or did we forget about this?
So this happened last minute or we miscredited someone like this must be very stressful.
Yeah. No, thanks, Fabian. I'll probably not be able to sleep tonight because
of because of this question.
The answer is I probably did. I probably did, you know, have a lot of that.
I think, well, I'm going to pull this down here because I think,
(23:44):
is this the one holding Fabian's book bigger than this?
Is this the one where you go, it's like, I think it's like five or six case
studies about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
With that great fish fishing company. Right. I love this books.
Great. By the way, for anyone who has not checked it out and wants like really
sort of in depth case studies and explanations of how, um.
(24:06):
Businesses build great brands um yeah so you had to do a little of that i assume right um,
kind of not really no no no
i mean seriously like because because really all that all i did is i is i just
talked about what these companies do um in the way that i see it right so so
(24:28):
i didn't include images i didn't include quotes from their ceos and if so i
credited them to Forbes or wherever I saw the quote.
So in a way, it was kind of like a cop-out situation because I have so much
anxiety about that. I'm like, oh my God, they're going to come after me.
I mean, I learned so much about this and I'm not a lawyer, so don't anyone take
(24:50):
away from this that I'm giving you sort of the final word on it.
But yeah, we could quote people, especially if we're pulling it from an article,
we could do that without permission.
Although although Alina really liked to ask permission anyway, just as a courtesy.
We could put logos in the book, I learned, without really asking for permission, just to show a logo.
(25:11):
Maybe not on the cover, but inside the book. If it's for educational purposes, we could do that.
But for images, diagrams, anything like that, we needed written permission.
Luckily, I had Alina who had done this many times the publisher uh had been
involved in this many times they had a form that you know we asked people to
(25:32):
sign um but still from a process standpoint it was really hard um we had you
know i can't remember what it's called but one of those like boards where you have um.
Sticky notes or cards on it for each case study for
example and really for each page of the book where we remove them
from left to right from like having even looked at this
(25:53):
one yet all the way over to we have a signature and we
got them to send us a high-res image that you know we confirmed
is the right resolution for printing wow and in between
all these steps of like we're waiting for them to reply to our latest email
and was that a physical a physical board or was
it uh was it digital no because it was digital i
figured yeah we use trello yeah we use trello because um
(26:14):
we're spread all over the place right um robin's based
in new jersey i'm out here in california um we had other people involved in
other places alina was in philadelphia most of the time um and alina had these
boards like back you know like back back in the day i see the pictures in there
that's why i asked because she literally i mean that book was a room of her
(26:34):
life it was pretty amazing yes Yes. Yeah.
Well, we did do that on our own. You may have seen a picture of me online with
these printed spreads all over the floor of my office.
Alina also was doing things like that, as was Robin.
And then we did get together in Philadelphia and filled a coffee table in her
(26:55):
home with these spreads and marked them up and things like that.
So we did a little of it physically.
Alina liked to do that. I'll show again, if you're listening to this,
you won't be able to see it.
But on the fifth edition, she sent me this really close to when we started.
It's her fifth edition with just Sharpie all over it, throughout it.
(27:16):
Get rid of this. Get a new example here. Keep this. I love it.
Or what do you think of this? And just throughout the whole book.
And so that was kind of the starting point of like, okay, well,
I guess I have to find a new example here.
Or, you know, do I agree with her that this needs to stay or go?
And let's talk about that.
That was one of the jumping off points for this project.
(27:39):
Cool. I see that Mark is getting antsy in the comments here.
He's like, how to publish a branded entity book or building and launching successful
brands. Get on topic, guys.
Way to go, Mark.
Well, I'm sure there are plenty of you out there that are interested in how
a book like this actually comes about.
(28:03):
But to Mark's point, maybe we zoom out a little bit overarchingly into the idea
of writing books and then slowly move into more brand identity talk.
And please put your questions in here, just like Mark's.
Shall we chat a little bit more about writing books to his point?
(28:26):
You know, like how to publish a brand identity book.
I think there are different ways of doing that. Obviously, what Rob just did
is a massive undertaking.
Which is very different from how you would usually go about writing a brand
identity book because it's a sixth edition.
It's like the Bible, basically.
Rob, you wrote a book about naming not too long ago, which is part of brand identity.
(28:54):
Do you want to take the question for a second? I know it's a big question.
Well, I'm reading Mark's comment as stop talking about how to publish a book.
But but i will answer how to publish your book
oh or building and launching okay let's get on okay
let's let's move over no more writing books talk um
even though you and i have so much so much to talk yes and we could and we can
(29:18):
come back to that if anyone does questions about it because yeah both of us
have done that so please do add questions about that or anything else that you're
that you want us to speak to cool um but yeah why don't we uh why don't we jump to launching a brand.
So we don't want to give away our ending because we have some thoughts there that we'll share.
(29:41):
But I want to ask you, Fandine, your book, How to Launch a Brand,
how long ago now did that come out?
That's a mighty long time ago. I have no idea.
Nine years, 10 years. I thought about 10 years. Yeah. About 10 years. Well, let's do this.
I wanted to ask you about that and then also this brand ToneOptic that you've launched.
(30:03):
So maybe you can tell us and tell everyone about launching a brand,
but in the context of now you've actually done it with a real physical product that you've created.
So I guess just for the listeners, ToneOptic is, correct me if I'm wrong here,
it's a rotating way of displaying and storing your vinyl records in your home.
(30:27):
So correct me on that. How would you describe Tone Optic? No,
that's good. I want to know why. I don't know.
Yeah, what was the process of creating that brand and launching it?
Well, it's a strange kind of niche, niche, niche brand, right?
But it is fascinating for me to see how I rethink how brands are launched and
(30:49):
how the process goes when I'm in the first person experiencing it, right?
So ToneOptic is a niche product. It's basically records, vinyl records are back.
People love them. I have over 2,000 of them. I always like them, right?
So you basically store them on the wall just like books, right?
(31:09):
So you've got your library and you've got your record collection.
The problem is you can't find anything because all you see is these tiny spines.
So not like book spines that you can read, record spines.
Most of them are tiny. They're worn out, especially the older ones.
And so during the pandemic, I had more time to listen to music.
And I realized I listened to the same 10 records over and over because they
(31:32):
have big, fat spines and they're like in color and whatever.
Right. And so it brought back an idea that I sketched down a long time ago. Like we all do.
We sketch down like tons of ideas of like, wouldn't that be cool?
And wouldn't that be cool? And we never do anything about it.
And the idea was that I could just pull out these records from the shelf,
you know, from the nice library, pull them out.
(31:53):
It rotates towards me. I can flip through them like in a record shop
and then push them back in and they're still library style so
that was the idea and then the silly thing is
I actually asked someone how difficult would that be to create and that was
my biggest problem because from there on you know it's it was a slippery road
because the next thing I know is I pay money for someone to start thinking about
(32:14):
it you know and one thing leads to another and here we are you know like three
years later and I'm producing them and selling them.
But it was really an exercise of form and function and bringing this together.
And I know, Rob, you mentioned on LinkedIn that it was in Design Milk.
It was actually the number one post in home furnishing in Design Milk in 2022.
(32:35):
Which is insane because the product didn't really exist yet.
And I was competing with all the big furnishing companies. So it was really, really cool.
But launch- I'm so jealous. Design Milk is such a cool blog.
Huge for your design and yeah so that
was that's awesome it was amazing for me for
for someone who's not a product designer to to get that
(32:56):
because you know it was just absolutely amazing um but
thinking about from a branding perspective launching this brand the branding
part was so so easy because obviously i do it day in day out right like i mean
that's what i do so the The brand strategy I did on a flight to Europe, I remember that.
(33:18):
I used my own Kool-Aid and did my Resonate workshop and went through that.
The name came very easily to everything kind of fell in place.
What was really hard was everything else.
And it was really, it was the hardest, not even the implementation of the brand.
It was just running a hardware startup, producing a product,
(33:38):
mass producing, shipping a product.
You know, like that part, the manufacturing and the design and the going through
all these hoops was so stressful.
I tell you, it was the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life.
And I thought it would be easy because, hey, it's D2C.
Just get a product and put it online, Shopify. It's all easy.
But it was extremely extremely stressful i
(34:01):
want to i definitely want to hear about that and why what what
the maybe unexpected stressors were but
but going back just to the strategy that you did on a
plane and everything did it you said you
drank your own kool-aid but like my experience is
hard it's actually hard to do that because you're the
client all of a sudden and you realize it you
(34:21):
how tough it is to make some of these decisions and um
you know it's going to to reflect on you whether you get the
strategy right and the identity right so was there
anything from that that you took away
that you might do differently with clients
going forward even if it's just kind of the empathy of like i
know i know this is a tough decision for you well
(34:43):
all of all of the above i mean first of all yes i i
felt i felt extremely vulnerable and exposed creating
my own brand that i'm i'm the guy who wrote the
book how to launch a brand and i'm telling people how to do it
and here i am like kind of like either feeling
or making it in front of everyone right and we
had a kickstarter campaign and the kickstarter and
(35:04):
when we it's really me but it's like i obviously i have.
A team of people that helps me too like florian and jesse and you know tons
of other people um but we had a kickstarter campaign and it totally didn't make
it like it totally didn't get to that goal and it was so stressful because i'm
like exposed right But a lot of that is ego and you just get over it.
(35:24):
But from a brand perspective, now that we are flourishing and things are great
and things are looking very, very positive, it definitely goes back to what
I said in the very beginning of this.
I used to be, here's the style guide, here's the rules, and here's how we are
(35:45):
going to be for like the first couple of years to make sure people know how
this brand behaves online, what the colors are, what the fonts are, etc.
But sure enough, you know, like six months in, Jessie, my creative director
is like putting a different font in there. And I'm like, Jessie, what's up?
Why is the font different? And why is the color slightly different?
And she's like, yeah, it's more the vibe right now.
(36:06):
And I'm like, oh my God, this is so good. it's more the vibe right
now because it's so true right then i'm like oh my
god you're so right it's more the vibe right now this is more
us now and so what i learned with all
these crazy founders that are constantly like oh
let's change this let's change this and it drives us brand people crazy yeah
to a certain extent probably yes but i mean we didn't pivot we weren't like
(36:30):
we're gold and then we're we're hot green right it wasn't like that but it was
just kind of like hey let's Let's go sans serif and let's go a little bit more
like darker on the color or lighter.
But it's that kind of stuff where as you put content out and as you get feedback
from people and as you start seeing your audience slightly skew younger or this
way or that way, you start changing things, right?
(36:52):
And I think it's a healthy thing. And I think brands should be doing that more.
And so I think that these like style guides, they should constantly start evolving
and they should have wiggle room and playfulness to it where it's like,
hey, these are the things we're never going to change, at least for the next couple of years.
But here, go and play, go have fun. Don't be stale.
(37:14):
And so that's something that I learned. And so when I work with founders now
and with companies, it is definitely more like here are the suggestions.
Now fly. Now make it to be organic and let's touch base in two months. See where you're going.
Right. So that, that was hugely different for me.
Yeah, I think I absolutely agree. That's been my experience.
(37:36):
I haven't launched a product brand, but just in sort of trying to build my own
brands around my agency or the podcast, you start experimenting a little bit.
And I think the experimentation is something that healthy brands do and you
need to allow a little bit of room for.
That's how you figure out what the vibe is sometimes. times you know you you
try something a little different and it sort of blows up on social media or
(37:58):
something like that and you realize oh maybe we need to be doing a little more
of that or it just feels right um and so i yeah i completely agree that there's
got to be this balance between.
That's kind of classic rigidity of the brand guidelines that you know will be
like this for 10 years until we hire pentagram to redesign the logo um no i
(38:20):
think it needs to be a lot more flexible, allow for some experimentation.
And some of the best brands out there, some of the biggest brands out there,
and this goes back to something you said at the very beginning,
Fabian, is there's kind of this increase, I think, in everything being in a
little bit of a state of flux, the fluidity of a brand.
And it's like, it's got this core that stays true. It never feels like it's
(38:40):
a completely different brand if you're doing it right. But it does feel like it's alive.
Like it's, you know, it's not just showing up identically every single time.
And that is easy when you're when you're a
small company like like tone optic where it's really more solopreneur
stuff in the beginning right then you can kind of like fly by the seat of your
pants and you can do that because it still feels right and it feels on brand
(39:02):
but it gets interesting of what happens when you have a team and what happens
when you're a couple hundred people company how do you keep this kind of intrinsic
fluidity going um and that's when
things like the book, you know, come back into, come back into the game.
Yeah. I should mention, we have these ideals in the book, sort of the, the.
(39:23):
The principles that we think every strong brand should strive for things like
authenticity and, and, and two of them are, uh, coherence and flexibility and
they're, they're right next to each other and they seem like contradictions,
but I think it's exactly what we're talking about.
It's this tension between having some recognizability over time across countries,
(39:46):
across different people, across co-branding partnerships.
Your brand is hopefully growing and doing lots of different things in lots of
different places, but it has to be similar enough that people recognize it everywhere they see it.
And so, yeah, there's that flexibility as well that's really critical,
and that's why they're both in there.
(40:07):
I want to ask now let's get back to the the uh the unexpected difficulty of
running a product company what what was what were some of the things that you
didn't expect that were like tougher than you thought they would be and you
know are there any like what are some stories of things that went wrong and
how did you course correct,
I mean, everything went wrong, Rob. I mean, this could take two hours.
(40:31):
And then I know Mark is going to jump in and say, Fabian, you're talking about
an optic too much. And I don't want no trouble with Mark.
No, I mean, everything is difficult when you run a hardware startup.
They say in the industry, now that I'm in it, right, hardware is hard,
right? There's a reason for it.
So, you know, I mean, just the production, every single detail can go wrong,
(40:55):
and it will go wrong, right?
Um, so, you know, but it's also, it's also, you know, things that you,
good things that, that, that, that completely change your day. Right.
I remember I was about to, to, to go on vacation to Portugal.
And then, um, right before I shut down my computer and say, I'm going to go
offline for a little bit.
Um, someone, someone sent me a tweet.
(41:17):
What do they call them now? An ex, whatever silly stuff, but like a tweet, a formerly known tweet.
It was a tweet at the time. it was a tweet at the time
i like that that's almost romantic right it was a tweet
at the time um of of my of my storage unit
doing its thing because it's kind of sexy the way that it does that
and it's perfect for for for social um and within within him posting it and
(41:42):
i didn't know that person and he just knew that i'm not aware of it with within
like 12 hours it had a million views um and it's insane right and so this this
thing started blowing up like crazy the only
problem was that they didn't mention my product name.
So I basically spent the entire night before I went on vacation with my wife
(42:05):
online replying to every one of the thousands of comments, you know,
with ToneOptic to make sure that they know what that is, right?
But it's things like that you don't think about, right?
Or shipping, you know, you put something in a box and you protect it well,
and then you don't realize that there's a mechanism within your a product that
when it gets shipped at a certain level.
(42:29):
That it actually starts, you know.
Being off one millimeter and it's stuff like that but it goes but
there's there's tons of cool stories i'm actually writing a book now
about it because i figured you know if anything
i get a book about book out of it right so that's what
i'm doing that's what i'm doing now with with all kinds
of how i launched a brand i love that
(42:50):
i love that yeah exactly and i'm gonna have it co-authored uh
by rob myerson to have a different viewpoint point um tone
optic you've mentioned the name a few times and i should say
go to toneoptic.com if you're watching this uh because
you do have to see this product to kind of get what it is
and the way that it moves is really sexy um so
(43:11):
go take a look at it um but let's talk
about the name we've talked about naming a little bit um and
i have a couple things i want to mention just about naming in general but before we
do that tell me about that name was that what was
the process of coming up with it was it difficult why why
was that i'm so glad someone finally asks me literally no one asks about it
(43:31):
because it is the namer is gonna ask about it no i love it because because it's
so normal right the name feels almost uninspired because it's so normal and
and i was so i was so amazed that in the last two three years no one actually
picked on it right Right.
So you have to know your audience.
Right. And with with me, you know, vinyl collectors, serious vinyl collectors
(43:54):
who also have the funds to buy something like my product, they're usually 60 year old man.
Right. I mean, that's kind of like what it is. That's my audience.
They have their hi-fi rooms.
They have the money to spend the time to enjoy. Right.
I'm a startup with no background at all in hi-fi or tech, you know,
like product or audio or vinyl in that sense, right?
(44:17):
I wanted to come on and not sound like the cool, hip, fun, young company,
but I wanted to sound like something that's basically like a boombox or like
something that's been around forever.
Like it almost sounds like an audio tape, right? Tone optic.
Like it sounds like something that could have been around in the 70s or 80s.
And tone is what is
(44:38):
what is always um what what is sound
right that's music that's what it's always about and then
optic is the vision right so so so it's basically like david bowie who i i very
much um uh appreciate um uh it's it's it's sound and vision right so it's like
his song name music and design those are the two things for anyone launching
(45:00):
a brand right you have to think about okay,
right now you have this rotating record storage unit,
but in the future, what else will you do with it, right?
Like, where could the brand go? How can it have legs?
And so by calling it ToneOptic, I know that it will always have to do with music,
which is tone, and optic, which is design.
So that's how the name came about.
(45:22):
I love the name, actually. It totally sounds like something that Don Draper
would, you know, would have been one of his clients, right? Right.
It's like got a mid-century modern feel to it that I think works perfectly,
especially now that you've explained the audience, which, you know,
I'm not I'm not old enough, I guess. Maybe I'm not I'm not in your audience.
I'm not a vinyl collector, but you will be. I will be 10 years.
(45:47):
Yeah. No. Thinking about Mark is and Mark, by the way, I appreciate your nice
comments about it. Yes. By the product. Yeah.
That's cool. So and by the way, you mentioned David Bowie. just such a funny
coincidence anyone who knows Alina Wheeler will know that she was a huge David Bowie fan,
one of her heroes she gave an entire talk that you can still find on YouTube
(46:09):
all about David Bowie it was about branding.
I'm going to watch that which I am not surprised I'm not surprised that she
was a big fan of his and from a branding perspective when you look at him and what he pulled off Yeah,
it's exactly what we've it's like way before Prince.
Yeah. And it's kind of what we've been talking about. He was always David Bowie,
(46:33):
but he reinvented himself so many times throughout his career. So it's really that.
Uh, it's that dichotomy again. Um, I was going to say just on naming,
uh, it's something given my background, uh, that I looked at pretty closely in this book.
You mentioned the name types, uh, that were mentioned in designing brand identity
when you looked at it, uh, for your book, how to launch a brand that it may
(46:57):
have, we may have updated it or added to it a little bit.
Um, because that was one of, yeah, just one of the first things for me to go
in and say, well, how would I take everything from my book and take the best
parts and get it onto these two pages?
And so I definitely have that. And you only, see, that's the thing.
I looked at this, Rob. Two pages. Like every, it's one spread for each part
(47:18):
of the branding process in the book, right?
And looking at, here's Rob, Mr.
Naming, and he gets a spread, which of course has lots of white space.
So you can't really fill it with info.
So that's really interesting. thing um and and
how what what changed so i know that the
brand the types of brand names changed even even when
(47:40):
when when when we wrote how to launch a brand and
i say we because it really was a was it was an effort in the beginning um
it we actually we actually pulled a new name a new type of name back then i
think it was the numeric name right like 409 formula 409 right we added that
to the mix i know now when we work with clients we added another one or two
(48:01):
into the mix. So things are always fluid.
How did you update the naming section? Because I know that this is on topic
and a lot of people are interested. Yeah.
So there's a chart that I like to use that talks about the different types of
names on sort of two axes.
So anyone that's familiar with my work will be familiar with this.
Or even if you're not familiar with my work.
(48:23):
It talks about names in terms of how descriptive or abstract they are.
This range from names like the container store, which is a store that sells
containers, or Whole Foods, which sells food.
So it's pretty descriptive, all the way out there to things like Virgin and
Apple, where this has nothing to do with the products directly.
(48:45):
And then the other axis on it is the type of word.
So this is where you would get into numbers, for example, is one type.
Type, but much more common are real English words or completely invented words
like ultria, and then the compounds where they take two words like tone and
optic and smush them together.
(49:05):
Those are kind of the three main types. Smushed? They were neatly placed together
to form humans. You're right. Exactly.
Good point. Seamlessly connected.
There are others as well, and maybe some of the things you're talking about
are, there There are founders' names.
There are brands that are named after their place of origin.
(49:27):
I would just call those descriptive real-word names. They're just sort of a subtype of that.
And there are lots of other ways of thinking about names. But I think that breakdown
really helps kind of orient you
in the space of all the different types of names you could come up with.
But for anyone who hasn't seen that chart,
(49:47):
and I'm sure, Rob, you also had it in your naming book, but that is a chart
that if you don't mind sharing it afterwards, maybe in the comment section or
a link to where people can find it,
it's really great because that way it's not here are the seven or eight or 12
different types, but it's kind of like more where do you get it? Exactly. Yeah.
If you Google one of the different types of names, you will find a lot of those posts.
(50:09):
Unfortunately, my SEO is not good enough to take over all of those posts.
That claim that there are exactly X types of names.
And I just, that kind of thinking, not only for naming, but anything really
in marketing that claims to be that sort of precise and absolute about,
you know, there are three ways to position your brand, or there are exactly
(50:31):
this many archetypes or whatever it is.
I'm always kind of like, eh, I think it's probably more nuanced than that.
And naming definitely is.
It goes back to the fluidity, right? Okay, so five minutes left.
You titled the live stream, Building and Launching Successful Brands. Yes.
What is your current answer? Because I know it changes every week,
(50:51):
every month, every year for us, at least for me it would, right?
Because there's so many things that can go wrong.
Yeah, well, I want to talk... What makes it? Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways
I could answer this. And I do want to mention, I mean, some of the updates we
made to this book were to get some of that thinking into the book.
Some of the things that have changed are not necessarily things,
(51:14):
but we have new experts and new points of view.
And so in this edition, for the first time, we have a spread on evidence-based marketing,
which many of you may know as sort of how brands grow or the Aaron Berg Bass
Institute way of thinking about building strong brands,
which you can either adopt wholeheartedly or just, you know,
(51:36):
even if you don't, you can, I think, acknowledge that it has impacted the way we think about brands.
And if you're not familiar with those books or that way of thinking,
then I encourage you to look into it, which you can do by buying Designing Brand
Identity and looking at that two-page script.
Well played, Rob. Yeah. Well played. Here's the marketer.
(51:57):
You know, we have Mark Ritson quoted in this book for the first time about brand strategy.
We have David Ocker's model, his brand vision framework in the book.
It wasn't in there before, although he, of course, was quoted in the book before.
So there is some, well, that's not new, but there is some new and developing
and for different perspectives on how to build strong brands that we try to cover in the book.
(52:21):
The thing that I want to talk about, though, to answer your question,
that's kind of top of mind.
Oh, I should say that James Barnard is the influencer that I mentioned earlier
who shares these incredible tips.
He's got like half a million followers on Instagram. So shame on me for forgetting the name.
There's a different James, also very influential.
On social media. Another designer, James Martin, made by James.
(52:46):
He has a great book out now about logo design.
He posted something the other day that got me thinking. He posted this idea
that you can't sell what you don't do.
And his point was that a lot of brand strategists seem to not have their own strategy.
Logo designers don't even have a logo. You know, that,
(53:07):
And to use his words, he said, the internet is like the wild,
wild west when it comes to creative services. And it amazes me how many people
talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.
So I think that's a really good point. All of us, and Fabian,
it's so refreshing and great to hear that you used your own process to build the Tone Optic brand.
And it worked. You weren't like, oh, God, I need to completely change how I
(53:29):
do this now. Now, it's been proven by all of your clients, but of course,
I think it's different when you experience it yourself.
But I replied with a joke, which wasn't a joke, half joking,
that I've been, and maybe many of our listeners have been at agencies where, unfortunately,
it's more like try to sell whatever you can and then figure out how to do it after the fact.
(53:52):
I mean, I've literally had bosses
who I'd be in the pitch and the client would say, can you do X, Y, Z?
And they would say, sure. And then after the meeting, they'd say,
they'd turn to me and say, go figure out how to do it. It's the worst. It's unethical. Yeah.
But it got us into this kind of debate about, and I think this is really relevant,
(54:13):
especially because a lot of us who are building our own brands,
you know, are thinking about branding from the perspective of professional services,
and maybe we're solopreneurs or small agencies,
I do think there's a balance to strike between sort of trying to what people
call niche down and say, like, I am a specialist in just this one thing.
(54:34):
It's great if you can have a real depth of expertise in something.
But I do want to, there's a counterbalance to that, which is to not over, be overly narrow.
You know, I think there, I've seen people out there who say,
like, we only do branding for this one very specific niche industry.
(54:55):
And I mean, more power to them if that's working, but I feel like that's probably
overly limiting and you want to be able to provide your services to a lot of different industries.
And I think it's okay to have kind of a periphery on what you offer and say,
this gets a little bit out, like what are the edges of what you offer?
And are those places where you could collaborate with people to provide more
(55:19):
value for your clients? So I don't do web design.
I don't do web development through Heirloom, but if we're designing a visual
identity and we want to show what that's going to look like on a website,
of course, we're going to be able to help you find a developer and we can work
with that developer to create that website and make it real.
And so that's kind of my most recent thinking is this debate between niche down
(55:42):
versus go as broad as you can is to kind of think really carefully.
And two takeaways from that are build your network.
I think especially for us small guys in the agency space, it's so important to build,
get on live streams like this and listen and meet people and go to in-person events,
(56:04):
stay active online, and just know people who do the things that you can't do
and figure out ways to collaborate with them potentially.
And then I think it's just about honesty and transparency.
I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift in work culture since the pandemic.
And I feel I feel like now more than ever, I'm just talking to clients really
(56:25):
directly about like, that's not something I do. I've never done that before.
If you want me to try to do that for you, you know, maybe we can figure out a way to do it.
But, you know, I'll be bringing in this partner that I've worked with before,
and they're going to kind of lead this, you know, just just have that super
candid conversation with the client.
(56:46):
And yeah, be honest and provide value where you can.
And Rob, this is exactly why I joined the Chameleon Collective,
because we're 110 specialists, right?
And we work in teams, right? So if they need a brand strategist or a namer,
they put me into the team and vice versa, right?
(57:06):
So I think that whole idea of how the agency model is broken can be a whole different live stream.
I know we're past the hour too.
I'm going to finish it off real quick with my thoughts and just go a couple minutes over.
I do have a call right now, but I texted that person.
(57:27):
So basically, for me, what I learned, this is more about launching a brand rather
than building a brand, which I think is great. Rob, you went into building, I go into launching.
So yes, branding is key, of course, right?
But But you have to know what you don't know, right? So if you're launching
(57:48):
a brand, if you're there actually and it's your company, if you don't know branding,
right, you need a specialist.
Exactly what you said. For me at ToneOptic, I didn't know the audio industry
at all. I went into a complete new industry.
I didn't know anything about manufacturing at all. And I was not manufacturing a product, right?
So what I did very early on is I started a board of advisors and an advisory
(58:12):
board sounds so fancy, but it's really a couple of highly capable people helping you, right?
So I actually have the founder of Hydroflask on it, who I have an advisory call
starting a minute ago, and I just texted him.
But so, you know, it's like the founder of Hydroflask who knows manufacturing in and out, right?
I have the founder of Cambridge Audio who knows the audio world in and out, right?
(58:34):
And I have these people on my advisory board.
I have like, with some of them, like Travis, I have a weekly call with some of them.
I have a monthly call and they just help me navigate. And I feel supported by that.
And an advisory board doesn't need to cost money. It doesn't even need to cost stock options.
Neither of the two I have with ToneOptic right now. So with them.
(58:56):
It's basically like colleagues, right? Like I advise on brand,
I advise on that strategy, you know, and they advise on manufacturing or advise on the industry.
So I think that idea that when you launch a brand, that you have the people
that know what you don't know along the ride,
made it be experts you hire or made it be a board of advisors,
that is my biggest, biggest thing that I did right with Tone Optic.
(59:22):
That's huge. So I leave it right there because I know we all have to jam.
But we didn't get many questions.
If there are any questions that we didn't see, I'm sure, Rob,
you and I can jump in to... Is this going to be on LinkedIn too?
Yeah, this will be on LinkedIn.
Well, I'm not the technical expert on the questions, but I'll stick around if you have to jump.
(59:45):
I'll try to answer some now and make sure we collect everything here.
Great point on on finding people to support
you and i just want to thank you fabian for joining me here
today for supporting me on uh this book uh
and everybody else who's dialed in and is watching and supporting us so thanks
thanks everybody for making the time absolutely it was awesome rob i appreciate
(01:00:07):
it see everyone bye thanks again for listening to how brands are built if you
like this episode please leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts podcasts.
How Brands Are Built is a production of Heirloom Agency, Inc.
Our theme music is by Isha Erskine Project.
I'm Rob Meyerson, and I'll talk to you next time.
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome to How Brands Are Built, where branding professionals get into the details
of what they do and how they do it.
I'm your host, Rob Meyerson. Thanks for listening.
Hi, everybody. I'm Rob Meyerson. For those of you who don't know me,
I'll just kick off by introducing myself, and then I'll ask Fabian to do the
same, and I'll share a little bit about what we'll be discussing today.
(00:29):
I run Heirloom. We're a brand strategy and identity firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Do a lot of brand positioning work, brand architecture work, and naming.
I wrote a book about naming called Brand Naming, which we may talk about a little bit today.
I host a podcast called How Brands Are Built, which is also a blog.
(00:51):
And then most recently, I have co-authored the latest edition of Designing Brand
Identity, which I think really is sort of the impetus for this call.
Fabian and I chat all the time.
We've talked about previous books that he's written and that I've written,
but designing brand identity was something that kind of got us wanting to have this live chat.
(01:12):
So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about brand identity in general.
We'll talk about some books and some products that Fabian has brought into the world as well.
But Fabian, why don't you talk about that a little bit and introduce yourself?
On. Sounds good. I realized we're basically a complete mirror image of each
other, not only because of the awkward promotion that my designer designed,
(01:36):
but we're like equal height and everyone knows Rob very, very tall.
That was totally a design choice. No, but there is, it's amazing how we both
do a lot of the same things.
So in fact, we're actually direct competitors and I I should actually head out of here. So bye.
Rob, this is all you now. Or I should. Well, or you should, right?
(01:57):
So basically, we both provide naming and identity services.
We both run a podcast about brand creation.
We both have books about branding on Amazon.
So it's kind of crazy and really cool. I think that makes it so interesting
to hear both of our opinions today.
So I run a brand strategy and identity consultancy.
(02:20):
We create clarity for brand
transformations um i'm also a partner
at chameleon collective which is a brand transformation consultancy um
wrote books on branding bigger than this how to launch a brand uh run a podcast
where i don't talk to marketers um because i don't like talking to people that
(02:40):
are exactly like myself besides rob so i talk to founders special exceptions very special I
talked to founders about how they actually created clarity for their own brand
so I talked to like the founder of Liquid Death and JetBlue Intelligentsia etc
etc and that's pretty much it for for intros I think because most of you know
(03:03):
either Rob or myself or both of us um.
So one more housekeeping note I should mention.
Rob named this session today about building and launching successful brands
in 2024 and what does it take.
And of course, we're going to have that as the carrot until the very end.
(03:24):
So at the very end, we will both kind of reveal right now for us what is that
big thing that we think is the biggest advice that we can give.
So just stick around to the end for that.
But with that being said, and while I have the mic, let me start interrogating
you, Rob, because I know this is going to go both ways.
(03:48):
Let's talk about that subject, though, about 2024, branding in 2024.
You wrote a book about brand identity.
Right now, it just got released. least, in your mind, like what changed,
you know, especially it's the sixth edition now of the book,
like what changed in brand identity?
(04:09):
What is the state of brand identity in 2024? Yeah.
Yeah, I think the fact, as you put it, the fact that this is the sixth edition
of a classic book, which we should mention right off the bat,
that this is Alina Wheeler's book.
Alina Wheeler wrote Designing Brand Identity in 2003.
She created five more editions of it, including this one, which I just came
(04:34):
on board to co-author with her.
Um but i think the fact that the
the state of brand identity right now is sort of encapsulated in
that fact that it's the sixth edition of a classic because
a lot of the basics still ring true um that's
the reason this book has lived as long as it has and of course it has changed
dramatically since 2003 but also many of the topics that are in it and some
(04:58):
of the just basic definitions and descriptions of those topics still hold true
but we also need to create new New editions of this book every three to five years, or Alina did,
and I've helped with this one because so much has changed also.
I mean, since the first edition, you know, back in 2003, we didn't have iPhones.
You know, social media has exploded since then.
(05:21):
You know, everything that's happened in just the world, the pandemic,
social change, cultural change, brands, you know, it may feel like,
well, what does that have to
do with brands? On one level, you can sort of separate those in your mind.
But of course, brands have to react to that, whether they like it or not.
And brands can even help drive some of that in some maybe very special cases
(05:42):
where brands kind of drive or take a front seat in cultural changes.
And so there is a whole section of this book called Brand Dynamics that has
to do with some of those trends, social justice, AI, new digital interfaces. faces.
Um, and because we all need to react to these and brands need to react to them.
(06:03):
Um, I think, you know, I think it's important to, to stay up to date. And so that's sort of.
The state of brand identity today. But I mean, you're an expert on this topic
as well. As you mentioned, we do a lot of the same thing.
So what do you think is changing? What do you feel like is the state of brand identity?
It's a crazy state right now. It's like, I feel like in the last six to 12 months
(06:28):
with AI being, you know, really introduced to the masses,
I think everything is in flux so to me
it's a really hard it's a hard question to answer
because you know first it was
adobe and photoshop and that completely changed how brand
identity was created and you know how the entire industry worked then it was
(06:51):
fiber and a fast slope downhill um and now it's ai and i i really feel like
what is happening because of all of these tools and and i can also attest to that That myself,
because now that I'm driving my own little startup hardware brand,
I'm doing things differently than I would have advised my clients,
(07:13):
which is interesting, right?
So I see that everything is more fluid.
I feel like that a brand's overall identity, so less the name and the logo,
but really the overall vibe, right? I feel like it is becoming ever more fluid.
(07:34):
It is constantly adjusting a little bit.
And I think that's kind of great. I think brands and brand identity itself will
start to take itself less seriously.
And I think that's a great thing as long as it is within some sort of guide rails.
Because if this is going out of any guardrails, it's going to be a hot mess, right?
(08:02):
But I love that idea that brands are consistently changing their look a little
bit and moving forwards,
but the foundations of how a name is crafted,
how a brand is crafted, how an identity is shaped, that very much stays the same.
(08:23):
And I think that that's the idea of why there is a sixth edition of Designing
Brand Identity because it's this age-old saying, you need to know the rules
in order to break them, right?
And I think now we are going to very quickly identify the brands that don't
know the rules and the intern in AI is running it, right? versus the brands
(08:47):
that actually know those foundational rules.
That's funny. Yeah, go ahead.
No, I was going to say, I just saw, I don't know if you saw this,
somebody posted on LinkedIn the other day.
I don't want to call people out, but I didn't read the full post.
So maybe there was more to it than I thought there was, but it said,
why have one logo when you can have 20?
(09:09):
And my immediate reaction was, because you don't want 20.
Now, to your point, 20 variations on a very distinctive, clear logo sort of idea.
Because there was also a recent post by, I'm going to forget his name,
but he's a big Instagram influencer.
(09:29):
I feel bad forgetting his name, who does a lot of Photoshop and Illustrator
kind of tips and tools. And he just showed off how Adobe Firefly can help you
create these really cool interpretations and iterations of your logo.
And it's sort of like MTV did back in the 90s. Right, right.
You know, that I think is cool, right? That's a way to kind of flex your identity
(09:50):
that I think is, and that's using AI.
And I think that's similar to what you're talking about. Whereas having 20 very
different logos, that's where you start to veer off kind of some of the fundamentals
of just like, yeah, you want to be recognizable. You know, I think this is a
super interesting conversation.
I would love everyone to jump in in the comments too, right?
Because this is pretty choosy.
I feel like brands that I really loved back when I was growing up,
(10:16):
which of course is five years ago, like Burton snowboards, right? Right.
Burton had this thing where literally every season they came out with all kinds
of new logos, like new ideas of how the logo can work.
And to me, that was kind of like the skate snowboard, you know,
kind of like attitude where you're not corporate.
And so I think that, again, it's rooted in brand strategy. There are brands
(10:39):
where that idea of, you know, Marty Neumeyer's zigzag, right?
Like that idea of like, oh, well, if corporate goes this way,
why don't we have 20 logos? Because our tribe doesn't care about that.
Because as long as the logos all have some similarity in attitude, it can be amazing.
But I think because now we have those tools, like we had the tools like Photoshop.
(11:04):
There's going to be a crazy amount of stuff happening in the next couple of
years of like, how will brands take this?
Well, that said, talking about, you know, those guardrails, let's go back to
your book for a little longer here.
Um, this is the first time I believe, um, that Alina had a coauthor for, for her book.
(11:29):
Um, why, why you, why not me?
No, no. why why like how did how did
you the joke um how did you how were
you chosen and how did you take this on and it must have
been a massive massive undertaking uh it's
a great question i think uh not you simply because alina hadn't met you and
i made sure that that didn't happen um yeah no i i kept you a secret um no i
(11:53):
mean i didn't think it would be me either uh alina and i met because i I interviewed
her for my podcast years ago and, uh,
you know, we, we hit it off, I guess you could say, and, and sort of became
fast friends and kept in touch.
But I think that has, uh, a lot to do just with Alina's personality,
which, you know, we can talk about as well, but she, she is,
(12:14):
she was just the friendliest, most down to earth person for all,
for all these sort of, um, heroes of mine that I got to interview on the podcast.
Um she is one of those people who uh is just yeah so so sort of um.
Uh, kind and generous and does not come off as kind of a, uh,
(12:36):
like a guru that's up on a, on a mountaintop somewhere that's untouchable.
She's very kind of, uh, just a real person.
And so she stayed in touch with me and we talked a lot about work, what I was doing.
Um, when I wrote my book brand naming, I asked her if she would write the forward for it.
Um, and she did that. And I think that was a big milestone in that we got to
(12:59):
write together, you know, edit at each other.
She looked at my book, I looked at her forward and we gave comments back and forth to each other.
And I think that's when she probably started to get the idea that I might be a good partner on this.
She did know years ago when I interviewed her that she was going to be stepping
away from designing brand identity.
The way she told it, her husband gave her an ultimatum that it was either him or the book.
(13:24):
As you can imagine, this book was a huge part of her life.
And I think He was ready for her to spend a little more time enjoying the golden
years and spending time with him,
which they were such a fun couple and spent a lot of time with friends and family.
(13:47):
And so she was able to take a step back a little bit just by having me as a
co-author and not being the sole person who this edition wasn't solely on her shoulders.
Um but yeah in terms of why me uh
you know the way she put it and and
this is in the introduction to the sixth edition um
she wrote a little blurb about this we each answered three kind
(14:08):
of big questions uh about the new edition and about designing brand identity
and one of hers was essentially why why me and it kind of came down to two things
um she wanted somebody who uh whose head was in this space in sort of a deeper way than just,
you know, all of us are practitioners or strategists or designers or namers,
(14:31):
but somebody who kind of thinks about it on a day-to-day basis.
And so the fact that she liked the fact that I had had a lot of different roles,
both client side and agency side that I'd done it in the U S but also Asia.
So I brought some of that kind of cultural awareness to it, which is really
important to her and to me.
(14:52):
And the fact that I have a podcast and was writing a book about naming just
gave her this sense that I like talking about this stuff. I like thinking about this stuff.
And to do a book like this, you have to have that mindset or you're going to burn out on it quickly.
So I think those two things combined that I was sort of,
in the space and in more than just a superficial way and
(15:14):
that um she felt I would commit to creating
the best possible version of this book just having seen my
work and and seen um uh the amount of work that I put into things like the podcast
and the book uh yeah I think that was it but I should know one thing um it also
wasn't just me she was fond of saying no one does it alone you'll see that in
(15:37):
the book you'll see that in pretty much every edition in the book.
This is a huge team of collaborators, most significantly Robin Goffman,
who's the creative director on the book. I'm not a designer.
She helped lay out every page. She was a real partner in this as well.
And then of course, the publishing team, the editor, and everybody else,
lots of people contributed content.
(15:58):
So it's not a solo effort.
It's not even an effort of just Just me and Alina, but a team.
So a lot of people to thank, and we do thank them in the book.
And Rob, sorry, one thing.
Some listeners might not know, but sadly, Alina passed away.
(16:21):
And so it is pretty hard for Rob to talk about this. I noticed this right now, right?
It's not the easiest of things, but it is joyful because it's in remembrance.
So, I just want to make sure that people are aware of that.
And you were the perfect person to do this for so many reasons.
(16:42):
As you know, I'm really busy these days with running two companies,
which one was already enough.
But I did get enough chance to go through the book to very quickly understand
why this was the perfect pair.
And I think everyone should be very excited diving into it.
Thank you for saying that and and you know when
(17:04):
she asked me um and also i didn't
immediately say yes believe it or not uh which feels kind of crazy now uh because
it's been such a huge honor and such an amazing uh experience and opportunity
but um but when she first came to me i sort of like you just said i felt like
uh man i you know i've written a book before i know how much work that
(17:24):
takes um i have young kids i have i'm running a business um i just wasn't sure
i could get on board for something that felt so overwhelming and it was overwhelming in a lot of ways but um,
but we talked about it a lot she was very transparent about kind of the pros
and cons of doing something like this um having robin involved both as a point
(17:47):
of continuity but also as just someone who i could really lean on to help with
it um was a huge a huge mid-age difference And so, yeah,
in the end, I was just too excited to have that opportunity to learn from Alina,
to work closely with her, to talk to branding professionals all over the world,
find out what they're doing and just kind of, you know, look at their work and
(18:08):
get their work into the book.
Yeah, so it's an honor and very bittersweet launching this book.
We really had hoped that Alina would be here to promote it with me.
Um the the happy news on that front is that she was able to see this through
to completion she uh saw the digital you know the pdf copies of the final pages
(18:31):
as they went to the publisher.
Uh the only change we made after she passed away was adding a
tribute to her at the front of the book as quickly
as we could you know i mean it was like already on the way to
the printer um when she passed away so
sad that she never got to hold it in her hands but i take some solace in just
the fact that uh she knew it was done and uh she loved you know everything in
(18:56):
this edition she she contributed everything in this edition um she's the kind
of person who has you know.
It's almost like maybe she shouldn't have been but she was down to the last
you know few months like giving feedback on on pages in this book so it has
it has her fingerprints all over it and And it's such a better product and book
(19:21):
as a result of that. It was a true collaboration.
And she got to see that it was done and got to know that it was done and that
there would be a sixth edition.
And that there was a team, not just me, but a team of people that were committed
to carrying this legacy forward.
And I mean, the book, for those of you who don't know about the book,
(19:42):
I mean, it is really a brand classic.
I mean, for me, it was such a staple for when we started writing how to launch a brand.
And back in the beginning, it was really we, because it was more of like,
hey, this is how brands should be launched.
And so really going, not trying to innovate how brands are launched,
but for our way, like these are the steps that we really think are important.
(20:05):
We leaned heavily on, I don't know what edition it was, of Alina's book, right?
I quote, you know, in How to Launch a Brand, the naming section,
the different types of brand names came straight from Designing Brand Identity,
of course, with credits.
And we mentioned that we take it right from that book, right?
(20:27):
Right. So it really like the influence that she had on not just me,
you know, like in the practice, but everyone in the design world is is is is unbelievable.
And it is wonderful that you were able to to kind of carry not the full torch.
Right. But you carry this you carry it over right now with being able to have
(20:48):
that book out there. So bravo. Bravo.
And I know that in the book, in the very back, you say, Alina warned me that
this will be much, much more work than you could ever imagine.
And it was even more than that. So I know it was a lot of you that put into it.
(21:11):
It was more work than I imagined, but also more rewarding than I could have
imagined. So, yeah, so I underestimated on both counts.
Let's talk a little bit more about that process.
Right um like like how was it creating a new edition like how did you kind of
like read through the last edition and and adding to it where do you start what are the hardest parts,
(21:33):
yeah well you you've written you know multiple great books i'm looking at them
up on my on my shelf here um and how to launch a brand i imagine like my naming
book it it's to some degree it's It's sort of a dump of your own brain onto the page,
right? And it's mostly words.
(21:54):
So it's a lot of just kind of prose and writing and editing your own writing
and getting feedback on your writing.
This book was very different. And maybe I wonder if any of your books were like this,
but this was kind of going outside of myself and collecting a bunch of good
content from other people, whether those are case studies or just there are
(22:16):
topics in this book that frankly, I don't know.
I'm not, I either don't know anything about or I'm not an expert on.
And so we really wanted to get experts. If I'm writing about typography,
I want someone who knows typography.
Even if I'm editing a page about typography, I want an expert.
And so for that, we went to James Edmondson of OhNoTypeCo and just said,
hey, look at these two pages about typography.
(22:39):
Is there anything on here that you would change? Is there anything that you
would add? Any newer, fresher examples that you would add?
And that was a lot of the process was kind of getting in touch with experts,
getting in touch with the agencies, getting their work into the book,
getting better examples of things into the book.
Um and that made it really different
from from sort of writing a
book yeah yeah it's in and you know i mean
(23:02):
i would get such panic attacks and anxiety over the idea of having you know
thousands of logos and other people's work and photography and everything in
this book i mean this book is like filled with case studies and examples which
makes it so amazing and so rich right Right.
But how do you not wake up in the middle of a night and you're like,
(23:22):
wait, did I get the right person credit or did we forget about this?
So this happened last minute or we miscredited someone like this must be very stressful.
Yeah. No, thanks, Fabian. I'll probably not be able to sleep tonight because
of because of this question.
The answer is I probably did. I probably did, you know, have a lot of that.
I think, well, I'm going to pull this down here because I think,
(23:44):
is this the one holding Fabian's book bigger than this?
Is this the one where you go, it's like, I think it's like five or six case
studies about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
With that great fish fishing company. Right. I love this books.
Great. By the way, for anyone who has not checked it out and wants like really
sort of in depth case studies and explanations of how, um.
(24:06):
Businesses build great brands um yeah so you had to do a little of that i assume right um,
kind of not really no no no
i mean seriously like because because really all that all i did is i is i just
talked about what these companies do um in the way that i see it right so so
(24:28):
i didn't include images i didn't include quotes from their ceos and if so i
credited them to Forbes or wherever I saw the quote.
So in a way, it was kind of like a cop-out situation because I have so much
anxiety about that. I'm like, oh my God, they're going to come after me.
I mean, I learned so much about this and I'm not a lawyer, so don't anyone take
(24:50):
away from this that I'm giving you sort of the final word on it.
But yeah, we could quote people, especially if we're pulling it from an article,
we could do that without permission.
Although although Alina really liked to ask permission anyway, just as a courtesy.
We could put logos in the book, I learned, without really asking for permission, just to show a logo.
(25:11):
Maybe not on the cover, but inside the book. If it's for educational purposes, we could do that.
But for images, diagrams, anything like that, we needed written permission.
Luckily, I had Alina who had done this many times the publisher uh had been
involved in this many times they had a form that you know we asked people to
(25:32):
sign um but still from a process standpoint it was really hard um we had you
know i can't remember what it's called but one of those like boards where you have um.
Sticky notes or cards on it for each case study for
example and really for each page of the book where we remove them
from left to right from like having even looked at this
(25:53):
one yet all the way over to we have a signature and we
got them to send us a high-res image that you know we confirmed
is the right resolution for printing wow and in between
all these steps of like we're waiting for them to reply to our latest email
and was that a physical a physical board or was
it uh was it digital no because it was digital i
figured yeah we use trello yeah we use trello because um
(26:14):
we're spread all over the place right um robin's based
in new jersey i'm out here in california um we had other people involved in
other places alina was in philadelphia most of the time um and alina had these
boards like back you know like back back in the day i see the pictures in there
that's why i asked because she literally i mean that book was a room of her
(26:34):
life it was pretty amazing yes Yes. Yeah.
Well, we did do that on our own. You may have seen a picture of me online with
these printed spreads all over the floor of my office.
Alina also was doing things like that, as was Robin.
And then we did get together in Philadelphia and filled a coffee table in her
(26:55):
home with these spreads and marked them up and things like that.
So we did a little of it physically.
Alina liked to do that. I'll show again, if you're listening to this,
you won't be able to see it.
But on the fifth edition, she sent me this really close to when we started.
It's her fifth edition with just Sharpie all over it, throughout it.
(27:16):
Get rid of this. Get a new example here. Keep this. I love it.
Or what do you think of this? And just throughout the whole book.
And so that was kind of the starting point of like, okay, well,
I guess I have to find a new example here.
Or, you know, do I agree with her that this needs to stay or go?
And let's talk about that.
That was one of the jumping off points for this project.
(27:39):
Cool. I see that Mark is getting antsy in the comments here.
He's like, how to publish a branded entity book or building and launching successful
brands. Get on topic, guys.
Way to go, Mark.
Well, I'm sure there are plenty of you out there that are interested in how
a book like this actually comes about.
(28:03):
But to Mark's point, maybe we zoom out a little bit overarchingly into the idea
of writing books and then slowly move into more brand identity talk.
And please put your questions in here, just like Mark's.
Shall we chat a little bit more about writing books to his point?
(28:26):
You know, like how to publish a brand identity book.
I think there are different ways of doing that. Obviously, what Rob just did
is a massive undertaking.
Which is very different from how you would usually go about writing a brand
identity book because it's a sixth edition.
It's like the Bible, basically.
Rob, you wrote a book about naming not too long ago, which is part of brand identity.
(28:54):
Do you want to take the question for a second? I know it's a big question.
Well, I'm reading Mark's comment as stop talking about how to publish a book.
But but i will answer how to publish your book
oh or building and launching okay let's get on okay
let's let's move over no more writing books talk um
even though you and i have so much so much to talk yes and we could and we can
(29:18):
come back to that if anyone does questions about it because yeah both of us
have done that so please do add questions about that or anything else that you're
that you want us to speak to cool um but yeah why don't we uh why don't we jump to launching a brand.
So we don't want to give away our ending because we have some thoughts there that we'll share.
(29:41):
But I want to ask you, Fandine, your book, How to Launch a Brand,
how long ago now did that come out?
That's a mighty long time ago. I have no idea.
Nine years, 10 years. I thought about 10 years. Yeah. About 10 years. Well, let's do this.
I wanted to ask you about that and then also this brand ToneOptic that you've launched.
(30:03):
So maybe you can tell us and tell everyone about launching a brand,
but in the context of now you've actually done it with a real physical product that you've created.
So I guess just for the listeners, ToneOptic is, correct me if I'm wrong here,
it's a rotating way of displaying and storing your vinyl records in your home.
(30:27):
So correct me on that. How would you describe Tone Optic? No,
that's good. I want to know why. I don't know.
Yeah, what was the process of creating that brand and launching it?
Well, it's a strange kind of niche, niche, niche brand, right?
But it is fascinating for me to see how I rethink how brands are launched and
(30:49):
how the process goes when I'm in the first person experiencing it, right?
So ToneOptic is a niche product. It's basically records, vinyl records are back.
People love them. I have over 2,000 of them. I always like them, right?
So you basically store them on the wall just like books, right?
(31:09):
So you've got your library and you've got your record collection.
The problem is you can't find anything because all you see is these tiny spines.
So not like book spines that you can read, record spines.
Most of them are tiny. They're worn out, especially the older ones.
And so during the pandemic, I had more time to listen to music.
And I realized I listened to the same 10 records over and over because they
(31:32):
have big, fat spines and they're like in color and whatever.
Right. And so it brought back an idea that I sketched down a long time ago. Like we all do.
We sketch down like tons of ideas of like, wouldn't that be cool?
And wouldn't that be cool? And we never do anything about it.
And the idea was that I could just pull out these records from the shelf,
you know, from the nice library, pull them out.
(31:53):
It rotates towards me. I can flip through them like in a record shop
and then push them back in and they're still library style so
that was the idea and then the silly thing is
I actually asked someone how difficult would that be to create and that was
my biggest problem because from there on you know it's it was a slippery road
because the next thing I know is I pay money for someone to start thinking about
(32:14):
it you know and one thing leads to another and here we are you know like three
years later and I'm producing them and selling them.
But it was really an exercise of form and function and bringing this together.
And I know, Rob, you mentioned on LinkedIn that it was in Design Milk.
It was actually the number one post in home furnishing in Design Milk in 2022.
(32:35):
Which is insane because the product didn't really exist yet.
And I was competing with all the big furnishing companies. So it was really, really cool.
But launch- I'm so jealous. Design Milk is such a cool blog.
Huge for your design and yeah so that
was that's awesome it was amazing for me for
for someone who's not a product designer to to get that
(32:56):
because you know it was just absolutely amazing um but
thinking about from a branding perspective launching this brand the branding
part was so so easy because obviously i do it day in day out right like i mean
that's what i do so the The brand strategy I did on a flight to Europe, I remember that.
(33:18):
I used my own Kool-Aid and did my Resonate workshop and went through that.
The name came very easily to everything kind of fell in place.
What was really hard was everything else.
And it was really, it was the hardest, not even the implementation of the brand.
It was just running a hardware startup, producing a product,
(33:38):
mass producing, shipping a product.
You know, like that part, the manufacturing and the design and the going through
all these hoops was so stressful.
I tell you, it was the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life.
And I thought it would be easy because, hey, it's D2C.
Just get a product and put it online, Shopify. It's all easy.
But it was extremely extremely stressful i
(34:01):
want to i definitely want to hear about that and why what what
the maybe unexpected stressors were but
but going back just to the strategy that you did on a
plane and everything did it you said you
drank your own kool-aid but like my experience is
hard it's actually hard to do that because you're the
client all of a sudden and you realize it you
(34:21):
how tough it is to make some of these decisions and um
you know it's going to to reflect on you whether you get the
strategy right and the identity right so was there
anything from that that you took away
that you might do differently with clients
going forward even if it's just kind of the empathy of like i
know i know this is a tough decision for you well
(34:43):
all of all of the above i mean first of all yes i i
felt i felt extremely vulnerable and exposed creating
my own brand that i'm i'm the guy who wrote the
book how to launch a brand and i'm telling people how to do it
and here i am like kind of like either feeling
or making it in front of everyone right and we
had a kickstarter campaign and the kickstarter and
(35:04):
when we it's really me but it's like i obviously i have.
A team of people that helps me too like florian and jesse and you know tons
of other people um but we had a kickstarter campaign and it totally didn't make
it like it totally didn't get to that goal and it was so stressful because i'm
like exposed right But a lot of that is ego and you just get over it.
(35:24):
But from a brand perspective, now that we are flourishing and things are great
and things are looking very, very positive, it definitely goes back to what
I said in the very beginning of this.
I used to be, here's the style guide, here's the rules, and here's how we are
(35:45):
going to be for like the first couple of years to make sure people know how
this brand behaves online, what the colors are, what the fonts are, etc.
But sure enough, you know, like six months in, Jessie, my creative director
is like putting a different font in there. And I'm like, Jessie, what's up?
Why is the font different? And why is the color slightly different?
And she's like, yeah, it's more the vibe right now.
(36:06):
And I'm like, oh my God, this is so good. it's more the vibe right
now because it's so true right then i'm like oh my
god you're so right it's more the vibe right now this is more
us now and so what i learned with all
these crazy founders that are constantly like oh
let's change this let's change this and it drives us brand people crazy yeah
to a certain extent probably yes but i mean we didn't pivot we weren't like
(36:30):
we're gold and then we're we're hot green right it wasn't like that but it was
just kind of like hey let's Let's go sans serif and let's go a little bit more
like darker on the color or lighter.
But it's that kind of stuff where as you put content out and as you get feedback
from people and as you start seeing your audience slightly skew younger or this
way or that way, you start changing things, right?
(36:52):
And I think it's a healthy thing. And I think brands should be doing that more.
And so I think that these like style guides, they should constantly start evolving
and they should have wiggle room and playfulness to it where it's like,
hey, these are the things we're never going to change, at least for the next couple of years.
But here, go and play, go have fun. Don't be stale.
(37:14):
And so that's something that I learned. And so when I work with founders now
and with companies, it is definitely more like here are the suggestions.
Now fly. Now make it to be organic and let's touch base in two months. See where you're going.
Right. So that, that was hugely different for me.
Yeah, I think I absolutely agree. That's been my experience.
(37:36):
I haven't launched a product brand, but just in sort of trying to build my own
brands around my agency or the podcast, you start experimenting a little bit.
And I think the experimentation is something that healthy brands do and you
need to allow a little bit of room for.
That's how you figure out what the vibe is sometimes. times you know you you
try something a little different and it sort of blows up on social media or
(37:58):
something like that and you realize oh maybe we need to be doing a little more
of that or it just feels right um and so i yeah i completely agree that there's
got to be this balance between.
That's kind of classic rigidity of the brand guidelines that you know will be
like this for 10 years until we hire pentagram to redesign the logo um no i
(38:20):
think it needs to be a lot more flexible, allow for some experimentation.
And some of the best brands out there, some of the biggest brands out there,
and this goes back to something you said at the very beginning,
Fabian, is there's kind of this increase, I think, in everything being in a
little bit of a state of flux, the fluidity of a brand.
And it's like, it's got this core that stays true. It never feels like it's
(38:40):
a completely different brand if you're doing it right. But it does feel like it's alive.
Like it's, you know, it's not just showing up identically every single time.
And that is easy when you're when you're a
small company like like tone optic where it's really more solopreneur
stuff in the beginning right then you can kind of like fly by the seat of your
pants and you can do that because it still feels right and it feels on brand
(39:02):
but it gets interesting of what happens when you have a team and what happens
when you're a couple hundred people company how do you keep this kind of intrinsic
fluidity going um and that's when
things like the book, you know, come back into, come back into the game.
Yeah. I should mention, we have these ideals in the book, sort of the, the.
(39:23):
The principles that we think every strong brand should strive for things like
authenticity and, and, and two of them are, uh, coherence and flexibility and
they're, they're right next to each other and they seem like contradictions,
but I think it's exactly what we're talking about.
It's this tension between having some recognizability over time across countries,
(39:46):
across different people, across co-branding partnerships.
Your brand is hopefully growing and doing lots of different things in lots of
different places, but it has to be similar enough that people recognize it everywhere they see it.
And so, yeah, there's that flexibility as well that's really critical,
and that's why they're both in there.
(40:07):
I want to ask now let's get back to the the uh the unexpected difficulty of
running a product company what what was what were some of the things that you
didn't expect that were like tougher than you thought they would be and you
know are there any like what are some stories of things that went wrong and
how did you course correct,
I mean, everything went wrong, Rob. I mean, this could take two hours.
(40:31):
And then I know Mark is going to jump in and say, Fabian, you're talking about
an optic too much. And I don't want no trouble with Mark.
No, I mean, everything is difficult when you run a hardware startup.
They say in the industry, now that I'm in it, right, hardware is hard,
right? There's a reason for it.
So, you know, I mean, just the production, every single detail can go wrong,
(40:55):
and it will go wrong, right?
Um, so, you know, but it's also, it's also, you know, things that you,
good things that, that, that, that completely change your day. Right.
I remember I was about to, to, to go on vacation to Portugal.
And then, um, right before I shut down my computer and say, I'm going to go
offline for a little bit.
Um, someone, someone sent me a tweet.
(41:17):
What do they call them now? An ex, whatever silly stuff, but like a tweet, a formerly known tweet.
It was a tweet at the time. it was a tweet at the time
i like that that's almost romantic right it was a tweet
at the time um of of my of my storage unit
doing its thing because it's kind of sexy the way that it does that
and it's perfect for for for social um and within within him posting it and
(41:42):
i didn't know that person and he just knew that i'm not aware of it with within
like 12 hours it had a million views um and it's insane right and so this this
thing started blowing up like crazy the only
problem was that they didn't mention my product name.
So I basically spent the entire night before I went on vacation with my wife
(42:05):
online replying to every one of the thousands of comments, you know,
with ToneOptic to make sure that they know what that is, right?
But it's things like that you don't think about, right?
Or shipping, you know, you put something in a box and you protect it well,
and then you don't realize that there's a mechanism within your a product that
when it gets shipped at a certain level.
(42:29):
That it actually starts, you know.
Being off one millimeter and it's stuff like that but it goes but
there's there's tons of cool stories i'm actually writing a book now
about it because i figured you know if anything
i get a book about book out of it right so that's what
i'm doing that's what i'm doing now with with all kinds
of how i launched a brand i love that
(42:50):
i love that yeah exactly and i'm gonna have it co-authored uh
by rob myerson to have a different viewpoint point um tone
optic you've mentioned the name a few times and i should say
go to toneoptic.com if you're watching this uh because
you do have to see this product to kind of get what it is
and the way that it moves is really sexy um so
(43:11):
go take a look at it um but let's talk
about the name we've talked about naming a little bit um and
i have a couple things i want to mention just about naming in general but before we
do that tell me about that name was that what was
the process of coming up with it was it difficult why why
was that i'm so glad someone finally asks me literally no one asks about it
(43:31):
because it is the namer is gonna ask about it no i love it because because it's
so normal right the name feels almost uninspired because it's so normal and
and i was so i was so amazed that in the last two three years no one actually
picked on it right Right.
So you have to know your audience.
Right. And with with me, you know, vinyl collectors, serious vinyl collectors
(43:54):
who also have the funds to buy something like my product, they're usually 60 year old man.
Right. I mean, that's kind of like what it is. That's my audience.
They have their hi-fi rooms.
They have the money to spend the time to enjoy. Right.
I'm a startup with no background at all in hi-fi or tech, you know,
like product or audio or vinyl in that sense, right?
(44:17):
I wanted to come on and not sound like the cool, hip, fun, young company,
but I wanted to sound like something that's basically like a boombox or like
something that's been around forever.
Like it almost sounds like an audio tape, right? Tone optic.
Like it sounds like something that could have been around in the 70s or 80s.
And tone is what is
(44:38):
what is always um what what is sound
right that's music that's what it's always about and then
optic is the vision right so so so it's basically like david bowie who i i very
much um uh appreciate um uh it's it's it's sound and vision right so it's like
his song name music and design those are the two things for anyone launching
(45:00):
a brand right you have to think about okay,
right now you have this rotating record storage unit,
but in the future, what else will you do with it, right?
Like, where could the brand go? How can it have legs?
And so by calling it ToneOptic, I know that it will always have to do with music,
which is tone, and optic, which is design.
So that's how the name came about.
(45:22):
I love the name, actually. It totally sounds like something that Don Draper
would, you know, would have been one of his clients, right? Right.
It's like got a mid-century modern feel to it that I think works perfectly,
especially now that you've explained the audience, which, you know,
I'm not I'm not old enough, I guess. Maybe I'm not I'm not in your audience.
I'm not a vinyl collector, but you will be. I will be 10 years.
(45:47):
Yeah. No. Thinking about Mark is and Mark, by the way, I appreciate your nice
comments about it. Yes. By the product. Yeah.
That's cool. So and by the way, you mentioned David Bowie. just such a funny
coincidence anyone who knows Alina Wheeler will know that she was a huge David Bowie fan,
one of her heroes she gave an entire talk that you can still find on YouTube
(46:09):
all about David Bowie it was about branding.
I'm going to watch that which I am not surprised I'm not surprised that she
was a big fan of his and from a branding perspective when you look at him and what he pulled off Yeah,
it's exactly what we've it's like way before Prince.
Yeah. And it's kind of what we've been talking about. He was always David Bowie,
(46:33):
but he reinvented himself so many times throughout his career. So it's really that.
Uh, it's that dichotomy again. Um, I was going to say just on naming,
uh, it's something given my background, uh, that I looked at pretty closely in this book.
You mentioned the name types, uh, that were mentioned in designing brand identity
when you looked at it, uh, for your book, how to launch a brand that it may
(46:57):
have, we may have updated it or added to it a little bit.
Um, because that was one of, yeah, just one of the first things for me to go
in and say, well, how would I take everything from my book and take the best
parts and get it onto these two pages?
And so I definitely have that. And you only, see, that's the thing.
I looked at this, Rob. Two pages. Like every, it's one spread for each part
(47:18):
of the branding process in the book, right?
And looking at, here's Rob, Mr.
Naming, and he gets a spread, which of course has lots of white space.
So you can't really fill it with info.
So that's really interesting. thing um and and
how what what changed so i know that the
brand the types of brand names changed even even when
(47:40):
when when when we wrote how to launch a brand and
i say we because it really was a was it was an effort in the beginning um
it we actually we actually pulled a new name a new type of name back then i
think it was the numeric name right like 409 formula 409 right we added that
to the mix i know now when we work with clients we added another one or two
(48:01):
into the mix. So things are always fluid.
How did you update the naming section? Because I know that this is on topic
and a lot of people are interested. Yeah.
So there's a chart that I like to use that talks about the different types of
names on sort of two axes.
So anyone that's familiar with my work will be familiar with this.
Or even if you're not familiar with my work.
(48:23):
It talks about names in terms of how descriptive or abstract they are.
This range from names like the container store, which is a store that sells
containers, or Whole Foods, which sells food.
So it's pretty descriptive, all the way out there to things like Virgin and
Apple, where this has nothing to do with the products directly.
(48:45):
And then the other axis on it is the type of word.
So this is where you would get into numbers, for example, is one type.
Type, but much more common are real English words or completely invented words
like ultria, and then the compounds where they take two words like tone and
optic and smush them together.
(49:05):
Those are kind of the three main types. Smushed? They were neatly placed together
to form humans. You're right. Exactly.
Good point. Seamlessly connected.
There are others as well, and maybe some of the things you're talking about
are, there There are founders' names.
There are brands that are named after their place of origin.
(49:27):
I would just call those descriptive real-word names. They're just sort of a subtype of that.
And there are lots of other ways of thinking about names. But I think that breakdown
really helps kind of orient you
in the space of all the different types of names you could come up with.
But for anyone who hasn't seen that chart,
(49:47):
and I'm sure, Rob, you also had it in your naming book, but that is a chart
that if you don't mind sharing it afterwards, maybe in the comment section or
a link to where people can find it,
it's really great because that way it's not here are the seven or eight or 12
different types, but it's kind of like more where do you get it? Exactly. Yeah.
If you Google one of the different types of names, you will find a lot of those posts.
(50:09):
Unfortunately, my SEO is not good enough to take over all of those posts.
That claim that there are exactly X types of names.
And I just, that kind of thinking, not only for naming, but anything really
in marketing that claims to be that sort of precise and absolute about,
you know, there are three ways to position your brand, or there are exactly
(50:31):
this many archetypes or whatever it is.
I'm always kind of like, eh, I think it's probably more nuanced than that.
And naming definitely is.
It goes back to the fluidity, right? Okay, so five minutes left.
You titled the live stream, Building and Launching Successful Brands. Yes.
What is your current answer? Because I know it changes every week,
(50:51):
every month, every year for us, at least for me it would, right?
Because there's so many things that can go wrong.
Yeah, well, I want to talk... What makes it? Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways
I could answer this. And I do want to mention, I mean, some of the updates we
made to this book were to get some of that thinking into the book.
Some of the things that have changed are not necessarily things,
(51:14):
but we have new experts and new points of view.
And so in this edition, for the first time, we have a spread on evidence-based marketing,
which many of you may know as sort of how brands grow or the Aaron Berg Bass
Institute way of thinking about building strong brands,
which you can either adopt wholeheartedly or just, you know,
(51:36):
even if you don't, you can, I think, acknowledge that it has impacted the way we think about brands.
And if you're not familiar with those books or that way of thinking,
then I encourage you to look into it, which you can do by buying Designing Brand
Identity and looking at that two-page script.
Well played, Rob. Yeah. Well played. Here's the marketer.
(51:57):
You know, we have Mark Ritson quoted in this book for the first time about brand strategy.
We have David Ocker's model, his brand vision framework in the book.
It wasn't in there before, although he, of course, was quoted in the book before.
So there is some, well, that's not new, but there is some new and developing
and for different perspectives on how to build strong brands that we try to cover in the book.
(52:21):
The thing that I want to talk about, though, to answer your question,
that's kind of top of mind.
Oh, I should say that James Barnard is the influencer that I mentioned earlier
who shares these incredible tips.
He's got like half a million followers on Instagram. So shame on me for forgetting the name.
There's a different James, also very influential.
On social media. Another designer, James Martin, made by James.
(52:46):
He has a great book out now about logo design.
He posted something the other day that got me thinking. He posted this idea
that you can't sell what you don't do.
And his point was that a lot of brand strategists seem to not have their own strategy.
Logo designers don't even have a logo. You know, that,
(53:07):
And to use his words, he said, the internet is like the wild,
wild west when it comes to creative services. And it amazes me how many people
talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.
So I think that's a really good point. All of us, and Fabian,
it's so refreshing and great to hear that you used your own process to build the Tone Optic brand.
And it worked. You weren't like, oh, God, I need to completely change how I
(53:29):
do this now. Now, it's been proven by all of your clients, but of course,
I think it's different when you experience it yourself.
But I replied with a joke, which wasn't a joke, half joking,
that I've been, and maybe many of our listeners have been at agencies where, unfortunately,
it's more like try to sell whatever you can and then figure out how to do it after the fact.
(53:52):
I mean, I've literally had bosses
who I'd be in the pitch and the client would say, can you do X, Y, Z?
And they would say, sure. And then after the meeting, they'd say,
they'd turn to me and say, go figure out how to do it. It's the worst. It's unethical. Yeah.
But it got us into this kind of debate about, and I think this is really relevant,
(54:13):
especially because a lot of us who are building our own brands,
you know, are thinking about branding from the perspective of professional services,
and maybe we're solopreneurs or small agencies,
I do think there's a balance to strike between sort of trying to what people
call niche down and say, like, I am a specialist in just this one thing.
(54:34):
It's great if you can have a real depth of expertise in something.
But I do want to, there's a counterbalance to that, which is to not over, be overly narrow.
You know, I think there, I've seen people out there who say,
like, we only do branding for this one very specific niche industry.
(54:55):
And I mean, more power to them if that's working, but I feel like that's probably
overly limiting and you want to be able to provide your services to a lot of different industries.
And I think it's okay to have kind of a periphery on what you offer and say,
this gets a little bit out, like what are the edges of what you offer?
And are those places where you could collaborate with people to provide more
(55:19):
value for your clients? So I don't do web design.
I don't do web development through Heirloom, but if we're designing a visual
identity and we want to show what that's going to look like on a website,
of course, we're going to be able to help you find a developer and we can work
with that developer to create that website and make it real.
And so that's kind of my most recent thinking is this debate between niche down
(55:42):
versus go as broad as you can is to kind of think really carefully.
And two takeaways from that are build your network.
I think especially for us small guys in the agency space, it's so important to build,
get on live streams like this and listen and meet people and go to in-person events,
(56:04):
stay active online, and just know people who do the things that you can't do
and figure out ways to collaborate with them potentially.
And then I think it's just about honesty and transparency.
I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift in work culture since the pandemic.
And I feel I feel like now more than ever, I'm just talking to clients really
(56:25):
directly about like, that's not something I do. I've never done that before.
If you want me to try to do that for you, you know, maybe we can figure out a way to do it.
But, you know, I'll be bringing in this partner that I've worked with before,
and they're going to kind of lead this, you know, just just have that super
candid conversation with the client.
(56:46):
And yeah, be honest and provide value where you can.
And Rob, this is exactly why I joined the Chameleon Collective,
because we're 110 specialists, right?
And we work in teams, right? So if they need a brand strategist or a namer,
they put me into the team and vice versa, right?
(57:06):
So I think that whole idea of how the agency model is broken can be a whole different live stream.
I know we're past the hour too.
I'm going to finish it off real quick with my thoughts and just go a couple minutes over.
I do have a call right now, but I texted that person.
(57:27):
So basically, for me, what I learned, this is more about launching a brand rather
than building a brand, which I think is great. Rob, you went into building, I go into launching.
So yes, branding is key, of course, right?
But But you have to know what you don't know, right? So if you're launching
(57:48):
a brand, if you're there actually and it's your company, if you don't know branding,
right, you need a specialist.
Exactly what you said. For me at ToneOptic, I didn't know the audio industry
at all. I went into a complete new industry.
I didn't know anything about manufacturing at all. And I was not manufacturing a product, right?
So what I did very early on is I started a board of advisors and an advisory
(58:12):
board sounds so fancy, but it's really a couple of highly capable people helping you, right?
So I actually have the founder of Hydroflask on it, who I have an advisory call
starting a minute ago, and I just texted him.
But so, you know, it's like the founder of Hydroflask who knows manufacturing in and out, right?
I have the founder of Cambridge Audio who knows the audio world in and out, right?
(58:34):
And I have these people on my advisory board.
I have like, with some of them, like Travis, I have a weekly call with some of them.
I have a monthly call and they just help me navigate. And I feel supported by that.
And an advisory board doesn't need to cost money. It doesn't even need to cost stock options.
Neither of the two I have with ToneOptic right now. So with them.
(58:56):
It's basically like colleagues, right? Like I advise on brand,
I advise on that strategy, you know, and they advise on manufacturing or advise on the industry.
So I think that idea that when you launch a brand, that you have the people
that know what you don't know along the ride,
made it be experts you hire or made it be a board of advisors,
that is my biggest, biggest thing that I did right with Tone Optic.
(59:22):
That's huge. So I leave it right there because I know we all have to jam.
But we didn't get many questions.
If there are any questions that we didn't see, I'm sure, Rob,
you and I can jump in to... Is this going to be on LinkedIn too?
Yeah, this will be on LinkedIn.
Well, I'm not the technical expert on the questions, but I'll stick around if you have to jump.
(59:45):
I'll try to answer some now and make sure we collect everything here.
Great point on on finding people to support
you and i just want to thank you fabian for joining me here
today for supporting me on uh this book uh
and everybody else who's dialed in and is watching and supporting us so thanks
thanks everybody for making the time absolutely it was awesome rob i appreciate
(01:00:07):
it see everyone bye thanks again for listening to how brands are built if you
like this episode please leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts podcasts.
How Brands Are Built is a production of Heirloom Agency, Inc.
Our theme music is by Isha Erskine Project.
I'm Rob Meyerson, and I'll talk to you next time.
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