The Brand Category Paradox

The Brand Category Paradox

An engineer-artist who builds soft skills training like a video game — and the brand problem that comes with it: how do you look trustworthy to the suits who sign the checks while staying genuinely weird for the Gen Z workforce who actually uses the thing? Sayre Blake is a systems engineer, concept artist, and founder of SkillSage (that's S-K-I-L-L-S-A-I-G-E — the AI is in the name) — a soft skills training platform built to replace the three-ring binder and the soul-sucking compliance video with something that actually works: character-driven, game-style training that lets your AI coach get ticked off at you for saying "I'll try" in an interview simulation. The brand problem at the center of this episode is one Ethan calls the brand category paradox: how do you fit in enough to be trusted and stand out enough to be noticed? For SkillSage, it's layered. The people who use the product want a video game with style and teeth. The people who pay for it want beige with rounded corners. MAIN TOPICS COVERED * The brand category paradox — the tension between fitting in to signal credibility and standing out to signal difference, and why it's especially sharp in B2B SaaS where your user and your buyer aren't the same person * Big B vs. little b brand — your reputation, offering, and story on one side; your logo, color, and font on the other; and why you need both even though people treat them like they're separate religions * The blandification curve — why small brands start scrappy and distinctive and end up beige, and the few that manage to stay sharp or get sharper again as they grow (KFC, Salesforce, Aflac — yes, Aflac) * The user/buyer split in corporate SaaS — dress for the banker when you're pitching; dress for the shop floor when you're deploying; SkillSaige already does this with two distinct UX environments, one for individuals and one for the corporate dashboard * Raymond Loewy's MAYA principle — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable — and why your buyers want plus three percent, even when they're absolutely convinced they want plus thirty ADDITIONAL RESOURCES * Sayre Blake / SkillSage: skillsaige.com * I Prevail — "Blank Space" (hard metal cover of Taylor Swift): worth the whiplash * How I Built This (NPR) — Ben Chestnut episode on MailChimp * Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify: Cover Brand Covers Playlist Your buyers and your users are two different people with two different wardrobes. Build for both. If this one gave you something to chew on — share it with someone navigating the same tightrope. Subscribe to Cover Brand, dig into the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com, and we'll see you next week.  Produced by BiCurean.com [https://www.bicurean.com/] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Oldsmobile Problem

John Tayer [https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-tayer-6a5738/] has run the Boulder Chamber for thirteen years. He knows the joke — the Chamber is your father's Oldsmobile — and he's not here to argue with it. This episode works through what you actually do when your brand has been aging with its customer instead of recruiting new ones, and the honest answer is more interesting than a rebrand. Ethan and John pull the Oldsmobile metaphor apart live: product vs. packaging, the fractionalization of the business community into sexier-but-narrower alternatives, and why the cross-sector connective tissue chambers actually provide doesn’t have a direct competitor — it just has an image problem. The most counterintuitive move on the table is the Buckley's cough syrup play: stop hiding the elephant and introduce it yourself. Tastes awful and that's why it works. The tie might be uncomfortable, but growth looks good on you. MAIN TOPICS COVERED * The Oldsmobile Problem — why "your father's brand" is one of the oldest running jokes in chamber circles, and why the punchline isn't as funny when it's your membership numbers * Product vs. packaging — are the services out of sync with what modern businesses need, or is it the haircut? And what's the actual difference between those two diagnoses * The fractionalization of the business community — clean tech associations, startup weeks, quantum industry networks — none of them do what a chamber does, they just feel more like a Tesla * The Nike model vs. the Oldsmobile model — two strategies for how a legacy brand relates to time: stay anchored to a generation or stay anchored to a moment in someone's life * Jaguar's full-stop rebrand — a year with no cars produced, a complete reinvention for the electric era, and what that extreme version tells you about the decision in front of every legacy institution * Refreshing honesty as a brand strategy — Buckley's cough syrup, "you'll swear by it and you'll swear at it," and why naming the elephant yourself is usually more disarming than trying to hide it * The research prescription — three practical moves: qualitative conversations with the prospects who aren't joining, competitive diagnosis of what competing organizations are giving people that you aren't, and the case for owning your history rather than polishing over it ADDITIONAL RESOURCES John Tayer / Boulder Chamber: boulderchamber.com Buckley's Cough Syrup — https://www.buckleys.ca/about-buckleys/award-winning-advertising/ Jaguar rebrand coverage — https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/01/claws-are-out-as-jaguar-heads-down-ev-rebrand-road Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6h4QzTqrtn9DIAPvdn1iCI?si=MR0mZB_4T9S7O-qM8w9h1Q The real R&D isn't in a lab — it's coffee with the people who said no to you. Go find out why. If this one made you look at your own brand's age lines differently, share it with someone carrying the same kind of legacy weight. Subscribe to Cover Brand, go deeper at appliedbrandscience.com, and we'll see you next week. Produced by BiCurean.com [https://www.bicurean.com/] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Pain in the Neck Marketing

A pillow that took six years to build, a third of your life to use, and one conversation to reframe — what happens when you've got a genuinely great product but the pricing, positioning, and place are all pulling in different directions? Siri Schubert-Nicolella [https://www.linkedin.com/in/siri-schubert-nicolella-50a10344/] is a wellness expert, bodywork practitioner, and the creator of a contoured natural latex pillow she designed from scratch — hand-carved with her husband in their home before finding a manufacturer — to address the epidemic of neck pain, TMJ dysfunction, and sleep disruption she was seeing in her clinical practice every day. She's got the expertise. She's got the product. Now she needs the brand strategy to match. This episode is a live working session in the truest sense: Ethan and Siri roll up their sleeves on one of the most common and most underestimated challenges in brand-building — figuring out your offering. Not just the product. The whole thing. And why getting the four P's wrong means even the best product in the world doesn't find its people. MAIN TOPICS COVERED * The Offering Problem — why product alone isn't enough, and how Product, Price, Place, and Promotion have to work together as a system before any of them can work at all * The "energetically good price" test — Siri's honest gut check about whether she can say her price to a customer without cringing, and what that signals about brand confidence and positioning clarity * Natural latex vs. memory foam — the product story hiding in plain sight: how latex is harvested from trees, turned into a soufflé of a pillow, and why that story is the justification for the premium price point * The Goop-to-Walmart spectrum — why "online" isn't one place, and how two buyers at opposite ends of the market both shop on the internet but want completely different things * Economy, Mass, Premium, Luxury — the four market positions, and why landing in the right tier requires everything else in the mix to match (as Ethan explains from the Applied Brand Science framework: "if you're a premium brand, your merch should be Yeti, not cheap no-name stuff") * The FDA detour question — the appeal of going the medical device route, and why that steep regulatory hill might not lead to the ideal customer anyway * Two paths forward — high-end wellness retail (think spas, boutique health studios, and Boulder's own backyard of health-conscious buyers) vs. licensing the patent to a medical company with doctor relationships already built ADDITIONAL RESOURCES * Cradle Wave Pillow -https://cradlewavepillow.com [https://cradlewavepillow.com] * Florence and the Machine — Cornflake Girl (Tori Amos cover): find it on the Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6h4QzTqrtn9DIAPvdn1iCI?si=1utllF5fR-qy-DIi6uxH-A] You might not have a pricing problem; you might have an offering problem. The price is just where it shows up. If this episode made you look at your own product differently — whether you're a founder, a practitioner, or someone who's been putting all their energy into promo while the other three P's quietly undermine everything — share it with someone who needs the reality check. Subscribe to Cover Brand, dig into the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com [https://appliedbrandscience.com/], and come back next week for more of this. Produced by BiCurean.com [https://www.bicurean.com/] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Holistic Marketing

Every few years, someone slaps a new name on the same old thing — and suddenly there's a conference, a certification, and software to go with it. Is account-based marketing actually a discipline, or is it just marketing with a better LinkedIn bio? And if you can't describe what you do without a subgenre, is the subgenre helping you — or just hiding the ball? Laura Dodds [https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurakdodds/] is a digital marketing and demand generation leader and problem-solver-for-hire. She's back on Cover Brand after her breakout run on the On Brand with Jimmy Fallon series for a proper shop talk: the practitioner-level debate about what actually moves the needle in marketing versus what's just posturing dressed up in a framework. The episode covers the proliferation of marketing subgenres, when a new name is genuinely useful versus just tree-peeing, and why starting with the goal and the customer will always beat starting with the system. MAIN TOPICS COVERED * Cover song: "Happier Than Ever" (Loveless cover of Billie Eilish) — Laura's thesis: every song is better as a pop punk cover. Ethan is skeptical. The jury remains out. * What Laura actually does — why she resists a tidy job description, and what "marketing problem solver" looks like in practice * The case against marketing subgenres — ABM, growth hacking, lifecycle marketing, demand gen: are these real disciplines or just old ideas in new clothes? * When a new name is actually worth it — shopper marketing, digital marketing, and the cases where the label earns its keep * Why marketers keep inventing subgenres — vendors, academics, analysts, and the very human need to pee on a tree * Laws vs. Levers at Applied Brand Science — how to separate what's always true from what depends on your situation * Holistic marketing, TM — Laura coins a term live on mic, immediately regrets it, and Ethan leans right in ADDITIONAL RESOURCES * Laura Dodds — LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurakdodds/] (search Laura Dodds, Houston TX) * Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify — Listen here [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6h4QzTqrtn9DIAPvdn1iCI?si=a8GqPlxYQXm_L9Am1OXCvQ] * Cover Brand: On Brand with Jimmy Fallon series — search the Cover Brand feed The framework isn't the strategy — it's just someone else's tree. Start with the goal. Start with the customer. Everything else is a lever. Subscribe to Cover Brand wherever you get your podcasts, share it with the colleague who just forwarded you a deck full of ABM jargon, and go deeper at appliedbrandscience.com [https://appliedbrandscience.com/]. Produced by BiCurean.com [https://bicurean.com/] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Say-Do- Gap

This week Ethan chats with John Pabon [https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpabon/]. John is a sustainability strategist, former McKinsey and UN consultant, and author of three books including The Great Greenwashing and the just-released Strategic Sustainability: A Pragmatic Blueprint for Responsible Business. This episode digs into one of the most stubborn gaps in brand communication: the chasm between what companies say about their values and what consumers actually do at the shelf. Ethan and John work through the tension live — from a Walmart factory program in China that used sex ed to boost productivity, to Patagonia's window display that leads with "everything we make pollutes," to why the 10% of survey respondents who say they don't care about the polar bears might be the most honest people in the room. Main Topics Covered * Speak their language or don't speak — the fundamental rule of sustainability consulting: if you can't frame it as a business problem, nobody's listening. "Save the polar bears" doesn't open doors. Lost productivity does. * Radical transparency as brand strategy — Patagonia's "everything we make pollutes," Avis's "we try harder," and Buckley's cough syrup ("it tastes terrible and that's why it works") — the brands that lead with the bad news are the ones that earn trust * The headline is the whole game — a riff on Porsche, Rolls Royce, and Guinness and why nobody reads below the fold — your headline better say the whole thing * Atlassian, Williams F1, and the private jet problem — Mike Cannon-Brooks buys an F1 team and the sustainability world erupts, until he explains why. The lesson: getting out in front isn't enough. You have to explain the why or you've lost them anyway. * The Great Greenwashing — John's second book dissects how brands, governments, celebrities, and individuals all do it — and why the companies investing millions into how to lie to you would make more money just fixing the problem * The say-do gap, live — why the survey that says your customers care about sustainability is the survey that will get you delisted in six months. Clorox Greenworks. End caps. Zero velocity. * The 10% who don't care about the polar bears — why they're the most honest respondents in any focus group, and why converting them might be the smarter campaign target than preaching to the choir * Nike Considered and the long game — Ethan's firsthand account of a glue-free sneaker that screamed eco, the first Prius, and Nike's 20-year bet that sustainability would eventually just be baked into every Pegasus at Dick's Sporting Goods — invisible, assumed, default * Where this all lands in 15 years — John's prediction: sustainable products become the baseline, the companies that aren't playing ball are already dinosaurs, and the consumer won't have to think about it at all Additional Resources * Keep up with John at his website johnpabon.com [https://johnpabon.com/] * Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6h4QzTqrtn9DIAPvdn1iCI?si=1utllF5fR-qy-DIi6uxH-A] You can't sell products on a dead planet — and you can't build a brand on a lie that people can already see through. The smarter play has always been honesty. It just takes more guts than most brand teams are willing to bring to the brief. If this one made you rethink how your brand talks about the stuff it's not proud of, share it with the person in your org who needs to hear it most. Subscribe to Cover Brand, go deeper at appliedbrandscience.com [https://appliedbrandscience.com/], and come back next week. Produced by BiCurean.com [https://bicurean.com/] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.