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Brand Vision: Brand and Culture with Ken Meyers

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

If you want to build a brand vision that really lasts, having a message that lives with one person is a dangerous thing. Ken Meyers, founder of the Smartfood brand, which he sold to Frito Lay, discussed why getting other viewpoints is critical to creating an impactful message that resonates with a wider and more enduring audience.

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Hosts & Guests

Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Connecting Messaging to Customers

Control The Focus

The Power of Co-Creation

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As an owner or founder, it can be difficult to let others into the vision for a brand. This brand vision is often something that is highly personal, and therefore it becomes protected and guarded against any outside influence. We have this tendency to project and overvalue our own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

That, however, limits the potential of a brand strategy, and can even set it up for failure. As Meyers notes, we live in a world that has such transparency and interconnectivity, it makes it almost impossible to build a brand in a vacuum anymore.

Instead, there is an opportunity to feed the creative process in a positive way when we proactively gather feedback and contributions from all the other stakeholders who either are, or are going to be in the mix. This allows us to get contradictory ideas, challenge our assumptions, and think more broadly about the possibilities that exist. By shutting out any kind of challenge to our brand vision, we run the risk of falling victim to confirmation bias. We lose the creative tension that identifying multiple ways to solve problems provides.

Meyers reminds us, “That’s what the creative process in many respects is all about. And building a brand at the outset requires a tremendous amount of creativity, but it also requires insight and a willingness to believe that your idea may not be the only, or the best, or the most effective path to get where you’re trying to go.”

Connect With Customers, Brand and Culture

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

There is no way to create a brand to connect with customers if you don’t let other people collaborate on the vision. Doing so takes courage and vulnerability, but as Ken Meyers, founder of the Smartfood brand, and Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative, discussed, it leads to much stronger results.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Building a Sustainable Brand

Control The Focus

The Power of Co-Creation

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Leaders should think of their brand like a flag or a badge. A brand is a way to deliver a message that they want other people to absorb and embrace. And a big leadership lesson is that just because a message that you personally created resonates with you, it does not mean that it will resonate with others.

If the vast majority of the people a company is trying to reach don’t share a particular view because a founder or CEO stubbornly stuck to certain elements or features or messages, it can quickly become impossible to succeed, especially as you grow and scale. It may work for a short period, but it won’t be sustainable in the long term. Understanding this is especially critical for early-stage entrepreneurs (those who are young, not by age, but on the timeline of a company’s development or a brand development). It’s difficult for them to let go and engage the people who they are trying to influence. But if leaders don’t do that, then they are standing on the railroad tracks with your back to the headlight. Sooner or later, they’re going to get run over.

It takes a certain amount of vulnerability to do that too. There was a study in Helsinki, Finland in which the researchers performed brain scans of business owners and they showed them a picture of their child and they showed them a picture of their company or their logo, and the same parts of their brain lit up. So engaging other people to collaborate on your brand is literally like putting your child in the hands of somebody else and saying, “What do you think?” It’s incredibly difficult and emotional, but it’s necessary to connect with customers in order to get the insight you need to build a strong, sustainable brand.

Company Focus: Brand and Culture

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

When brands engage employees and customers in co-creation, how do you still maintain your company focus and keep your integrity and vision intact? Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative, and Ken Meyers, president of Panorama Foods, discuss the benefits and pitfalls of the human element of brand building.

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Hosts & Guests

Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Building a Sustainable Brand

Connecting Messaging to Customers

The Power of Co-Creation

ABOUT THIS VIDEO

For decades, brands were pushed down to customers. The company had all the control, and customers were, for the most part, passive. That’s not the case anymore. Companies no longer have that amount of control. Company leadership can’t decide unilaterally what a brand is going to look like, what it’s going to stand for, what that message is going to be. Now any number of people, both internally and externally, most of whom the company doesn’t control, are going to be contributing to that process along the way.

So what can you control? This is where company focus can be an extremely helpful tool. When companies can identify who their target is in a very laser-like way, they can create relationships with people who are very symbiotic to the relationships and values and promises that that brand wants to be.

In this way, the brands are not trying to spread themselves too thin, especially early on before it’s been established. Once they begin to scale and grow, this can help to cut down on the number of people coming in and commenting on, or co-opting a brand who are not really the target audience. If people are talking about the brand but it’s not for them, then it can be easy to quickly lose control of a brand and lose control of the story that’s being told about it.

Company focus, therefore, becomes critical to building a strong brand. Many founders think of focus as losing opportunity. Instead, focus becomes a way to attract the right opportunity and get access to the right audiences who will support the vision for a brand instead of fighting against it or undermining it.

Brand Culture: The Power of Co-Creation with Ken Meyers

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

How do you make getting your employees to live out your brand culture a “want-to-do” instead of a “supposed-to-do” for your team? Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative, and Ken Meyers, founder of the Smartfood brand, discuss how to successfully develop a culture of advocacy instead of a culture of compliance.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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The Human Element

Action, Not Ideas

Culture Is Credibility

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Ken points out that if something is pushing down to a group of internal stakeholders, employees, partners, vendors, it is less likely to be absorbed and embraced than if it’s something that everybody has had a hand in developing.

“If people can feel even a shred of ownership in something that is meant for them to follow, it becomes a want-to-do, as opposed to a supposed-to-do. Supposed-to-do things are rarely a hundred percent right. Want-to-do things are much more likely to get to universal application,” Meyers explains.

This engagement and ownership is extremely valuable when you are trying to create a brand that is nurtured and sustained by a culture that is aligned with the messaging a company is trying to get the rest of the world to embrace.

Often visionaries create companies with a mission that is so important and so meaningful to them that sometimes they forget that the process of buy-in means letting other people into that vision.

This doesn’t mean that the company turns into a democracy where everyone has a say in what the vision of the company should be. That would undermine the clarity and consistency needed for effective brand and culture building. Instead, it means allowing other people to take the vision and look at it from their perspective or their role in the company or as a customer. When companies and brands can achieve that kind of co-creation and co-ownership, the relationship becomes much stronger.

Company Mission Statement: Action, Not Ideas

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

When companies are trying to set the tone for both team culture and their brand positioning, there is often a lot of time spent wordsmithing their company mission statement. Ruth Lund, President of the LEGAY Center, and Ken Meyers, President of Panorama Foods, discuss how Ken’s early experience pitching the Smartfood brand relates to crafting a mission statement that really matters.

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Hosts & Guests

Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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The Human Element

Culture Is Credibility

The Power of Co-Creation

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Ken told the story of when he and his partner were in the throes of developing the business plan for Smartfood popcorn. The business plan said that they were going to generate a million dollars in revenues in the first year. Then Ken would go out and talk to people and try to get them to buy into our vision and support it and write checks. Investors would ask, “How do you know you’re going to do a million dollars?” His response would be “because it says so right here in the business plan!”

Ken’s point with this story is that there are altogether too many people who think the same way when they develop a company mission statement or create documentation around what their culture is or is going to be. They spend a lot of time wordsmithing it, and then put it in a binder or on a website, and they think that their job is done. But the reality is that all of that thinking is really only as good as the actions taken behind it.

As Ken said, “You can write anything down, you can think anything up, but if it is not followed through on, if it is not really injected into the blood of the organization, such that it becomes a living, breathing mission, a living, breathing set of mile markers and guard rails, that everyone has absorbed internalized and cleaved to then it’s up no real value.”

Employee Branding Strategy: The Human Element

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

In a transparent and interconnected world, the people in your organization are critical contributors to (or potential detractors of) your brand messaging. What brands are getting it right? Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative and Ken Meyers, president of Panorama Foods, discusses an employee branding strategy and the benefits and pitfalls of the human element of brand building.

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Hosts & Guests

Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Culture Is Credibility

Action, Not Ideas

The Power of Co-Creation

ABOUT THIS VIDEO

Brands work hard to develop messaging that captures how they want to be known, but the actual customer experience often falls short of the promises. Meghan cited REI as an example of a strong external brand that is also backed up with the actual experience with their employees in their retail stores. Their employees are outdoor enthusiasts who can speak to the products from their personal experience, and they stand behind their products. They truly live out the promise that REI puts out into the world. In many ways, the experience of shopping at REI is even better than some of the messaging or promises that they put into the world.

This is incredibly important because any one of the representatives of a brand, from the CEO to the people who come in and clean the building at night can have an impact on the brand. Everyone now has a say in the reputation of the brand. Comments and reviews can either be a fantastic asset support bed for what a company is trying to build, or it can be a fire in the building.

The quest to try to manage a brand reputation through an employee branding strategy really has to be distributed out to all of the human points of contact in an organization and beyond, including those who you can recruit as supporters and advocates for your brand. Everyone will see how a brand’s representatives behave and how closely that aligns with the message that you are trying to build and support in the marketplace.