This video is an excerpt from a workshop I hosted for the Yarmouth, MA Chamber of Commerce on how to develop an authentic brand. I was asked to speak about the importance of branding in the midst of the changing tides of pandemic-era marketing. Of course, I also took the opportunity to talk about how I discovered my own authentic brand and merged my pirate side with my designer side.

If you’d like to see the entire workshop recording, including the Q&A, you can find it here on YouTube.

Video Transcript

Good morning, everyone.

So thank you for inviting me to speak and thank you for that introduction. So I'll start here by sharing my screen. But at any point, if you have a question, feel free to ask, and I do want to make this as conversational as possible, and not just blather on for 20 minutes. So feel free to ask your question if you have one along the way. And I'm going to share my screen and... there we go.

So as Jen said, I am Justin Kerr, Justin Kerr Design. And what I do is I help people, specifically entrepreneurs and small business owners discover their true brand. So this is the homepage of my website. So if you go there, you'll see this. And as I said, I develop authentic brands for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

And the reason I do that is because I believe that every business, every entrepreneur deserves to have a clear, consistent and compelling message for their business. So today we're going to talk about branding and you might be wondering, well, what is a brand? Some people, when they think of a brand, they immediately think of a logo.

And it's definitely part of your brand, but it's not the whole story. So if I show you this, everybody immediately knows what this is, and which company it represents. And you're probably also thinking about the last time you were here and what your experience was like.

And maybe you're thinking, "Oh, I really love this company." Or you might be thinking, "I can't stand this company. I'm much more a devotee of a different company, one of their competitors." But when I put this up, if your thoughts go to the last time you were there and the experience you had, maybe the coffee was good, maybe it wasn't so good.

Maybe the person that served you was polite, or maybe they weren't. Maybe there was a long line, right? Maybe while you were there, you bought something else in addition to your coffee, maybe a food item or one of their products, one of their merchandise products.

So brand is really the entire experience that you have with a company or an organization. And the logo is certainly part of it because it triggers in you that response. If you've had an experience with that company, good, bad or otherwise. Another way to think about a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.

Okay, it's your reputation. It's the experience they've had with your service or your product. So I just wanted to give us some ground level understanding of a brand. It's more than just a logo. It really is the total experience that someone has with your product or service. Now, why is that important? Well, if you're putting your service or product out there, it's important for people to know why you exist, okay?

And it's important for you to be authentic and to present the most authentic version of yourself, your company, and your organization. And put your best brand out there so that the people that can connect with you, that resonate with your message will seek you out and will want to be part of your customer base. They'll want to be one of your clients, they'll want to be part of your tribe so to speak. Much the same way people are loyal to this particular brand.

Now, a little trivia about Starbucks here. How many people know that their logo is a mermaid? No? Okay.

I mean, the reason this comes up is because I use this example in a lot of different presentations and I usually just show the logo and everybody knows it's Starbucks. But if I verbally describe it, if I say to you, it's the company that uses the green mermaid logo on their products, nobody knows it's Starbucks. Now, when they see it, they know instantly. But if I describe it, they don't because a lot of people don't know that this is a mermaid.

So if you're interested, you can look up the history of the Starbucks logo and you can see what it looked like in 1971, when they first started. Definitely a mermaid and it's morphed and it's been refined over the years, but that's a little piece of trivia for you.

So back to authentic branding, the reason it's important to be authentic with your brand and your brand message is so that the people that are connecting with that message are going to be your best clients and your best customers.

Now, the reason that I know it's important to be authentic in your brand is because I had that experience. I rebranded myself about two years ago. And part of my brand now is of course being a pirate. I've been a re-enactor, historical re-enactor for 12 years. I've been a brand strategist and a graphic designer for about 30. But I had never put those two things together.

So I was part of a workshop several years back as part of a business development program. And there were 11 of us in the program, all design-based businesses. And one evening we'd gotten together for a workshop and the person who was supposed to run the workshop didn't show up because they got the dates mixed up on their calendar. So there we were the 11 of us in a room like, "Well, we're all here now, what do you want to do?"

So we decided we would critique each other's businesses. We've gotten to know each other pretty well. And we wanted to review what we saw and experienced from each other's brand. So when it got around to me, I got some tough love. The people that were there said, "We love the work that you do. We think it's very professional. We think it's very creative, but you really don't have a brand and your website sucks."

And that was tough to hear, but they were right. The way I was branding myself prior was I looked like every other graphic designer. I looked like every other brand strategist out there. Because I thought that was the way to attract customers. And the people in the group had also found out that I was a historical reenactor and they had seen this photo.

And they said, "Why isn't the pirate part of your brand?" And I said well, because what I do professionally is I'm a graphic designer, brand strategist. And this is what I do on the side. This is just a passion thing. And they said, “Well, it's all part of who you are. So why isn't the pirate part of your brand?” And I thought about that for a long time. And I was a little bit concerned because I thought, "Are people going to understand, are people going to take me seriously?"

So I finally decided to bring the pirate and the designer together and include the pirate as part of my brand. And I have to tell you that it's produced a lot of interesting conversations. Now, it's not just some persona that I slapped on the surface. It's actually part of who I am. I've been a historical reenactor for 12 years. I love doing it. I love talking about pirates and pirate history and their involvement in colonial America.

So it's something that I'm passionate about and I've been able to successfully weave that into my brand. And it's an amazing conversation starter prior to COVID when we were all going to networking events and you had to put on that little paper name tag on your chest. I stopped putting graphic designer on there. I stopped putting brand strategist on there because it's like telling somebody that you're a dentist and they're like, "Oh, that's interesting." And then they move on. I just started putting “pirate” on there. And I got more conversations started that way because people wanted to know about the pirate. And yes, we eventually got around to talking about what I do. But it allowed them to start a conversation and connect with me in a way that was authentic. And so the pirate became part of my brand it has been ever since. And it's been a real asset to my business.

So that's the story of how the pirate and the designer came together. In order to find your authentic brand, your true brand, the most important thing that you can do is to ask, why? What is your why? Why do you do what you do? Why are you in business? Why does your business or organization exist? Now, a lot of people when they meet, they'll ask one of the first questions, "What do you do for a living or what's your business?" Right?

So you tell them what you do. Maybe you even tell them a little bit about who you do it for. Who's your ideal client, who's your ideal customer. But at the heart of your brand is the question, why. Not, what you do, not who you do it for and not even really how you do it, but why do you do it?

And when I'm working with clients and walking them through the branding process and helping them develop an authentic brand, we spend a lot of time on this question of, why. And the reason this is important is if you understand why you do what you do, then you can do several things. One, you can communicate that clearly to the right audience. And you can also differentiate yourself from other people that are doing the same thing you do, right?

Now everybody knows Apple, right? One of the most successful companies on the planet. And the reason that they're successful is because they understand their why. They realize they're not in the computer business, they're not in the phone business. That's not what they do. They're a cultural touchpoint, right?

They have a very loyal tribe that follows them. They're a lifestyle brand, okay? Now they just happen to produce phones and tablets and computers, but it's not what they're about. And they understand that they know why they exist.

And they're very good at marketing that and communicating that message. Now, the reason that Kodak is out of business is because they didn't understand their why. See Kodak, although they existed for over a hundred years, when the digital revolution occurred, they didn't move with it because Kodak misunderstood their why. They thought they were in the film business. So when film went away, so did Kodak.

If they had understood that the business that they were really in, was helping people preserve their memories. Then they would still be in existence today. But they thought they were in the film business and now they're out of business. So really important question to ask yourself in developing an authentic brand is what is your why?

And I have to be honest with you, it takes a little time to do that. It's not something you're going to sit down and bang out in 10 minutes. It's a process and it takes some time. But if you're able to discover and communicate your why, your brand is going to be that much more authentic, and you're really going to connect with the audience that you're in front of. Now, just to give you a couple of examples of some people that I've worked with to help flush this out a little bit.

There's this travel organization called Connecting Hearts Travel. It's this mother and daughter team. They're wonderful mother and daughter team really passionate about helping people book their travel. But their why, isn't about getting you from A to B and their why, isn't about getting you from A to B for the lowest fares possible. That's not what they're about.

What they're about is helping people travel and experience- travel in a way that they're able to reconnect with themselves. And they're re able to connect with other people that they come in contact with when they travel. So when we develop their brand, one of the themes that came up was reconnecting with your smile. Now all this went through 2020, and I'm sure a lot of us are thinking about some place we'd like to be other than where we are right now. Maybe a vacation spot, maybe someplace you visited before.

But the why, for Connecting Hearts Travel is helping people reconnect with their smile. Their about the experience and the way that they do it really does help people reconnect, recharge and connect with the world at large, right? And Connecting Hearts Travel, the mother and daughter team. They're really helping people understand that we are part of a large world community and they're all about connecting.

So that is their why, and once we were able to discover that and formalize it, then marketing came easy. They knew exactly what they had to say. And it was just a matter of figuring out the best way to say it, to connect with that audience that they were aiming for. Now, people that are all about, "Hey, I want the cheapest fares to get from A to B."

That's not their clients. That's not their customers. And they'll go somewhere else. They'll go to Expedia, they'll go to Kayak and that's fine. But the people that really want to have that experience and reconnect, they'll go to Connecting Hearts Travel.

Another client I worked with recently is an IT company, right? And as soon as you say IT, people go. "Okay, I don't understand IT. It's this black box. I know it has something to do with computers and technology, but beyond that, I really have no clue." So the goal in working with the owner of Almeida & Associates is he really wanted to demystify IT and really put a friendly face on it.

When we were talking, he said, "I want people to understand that IT doesn't have to be scary, that it really can be a lot of fun. And I think I can bring that message to my audience." And I said, "Fine, well then that's your why."

Your why is to demystify IT, to make it less scary and to make it fun. And when we were developing his brand and coming up with some core values for his business, one of the ones that came to the surface was a sense of humor.

If you can't have fun doing your job you shouldn't be doing it, right? And you shouldn't be taking yourself too seriously, because it's all about developing relationships with your clientele. So in marketing, we wanted to make sure to bring a little bit of that sense of humor into it and bring that message of, "Hey, IT doesn't have to be scary. We've got this and we can help you understand it."

So one of the things that we came up with was, the message of sure we can solve your IT problems, but we can also do it with a sense of humor. So here we have one of their ads, we can spot IT issues coming from a mile away. And that's 1.6 kilometers in Canada, right? So just a little bit of humor there to let people know that, "Hey, this doesn't have to be so scary."

And the last example working with this solopreneur, wonderful woman. Immigrant, actually from Haiti, who's a registered nurse. And she had been working in the assisted care and palliative care side of healthcare and realized that a lot of people that are in this realm of assisted care and assisted living are stuck in these institution type of facilities.

And she really wanted to provide a home, a house where people could feel like they're coming home and they have their own room and there's not an institutional or commercial kitchen there, but it's a really homelike setting.

So her why, is providing a better form of care for people that are in the assisted living and palliative care side of life in that season of life for them. And really pushing that idea of a home setting. That you're part of a family when you're part of her organization. You're not just somebody in an institution.

So we developed her brand, her why was solid. And when we produced her website, we wanted to make sure that this message was very, very clear. That this is a better way of care, a better place to care for your loved ones and make that connection with not just the person who needs the care, but their family and reduce some of the pressure and relieve some of the pressure on the families as well.

And interesting thing about the name of this organization, Nana's House. So when the woman, Gerdine, actually came to me at first she said, “I have this idea for a name for my organization” and she told me what it was and I said, "Well, that's fine. It's sounds like a fine name." And we just set that aside because we really needed to develop her why and her brand message.

And in the course of talking to her, she told me about, growing up and being one of the people that really cared for her grandmother. When her grandmother got up in years, she was one of the children that naturally gravitated towards caring for her grandmother and being at her house every day and just helping her do basic things like cooking and getting the cleaning done and stuff like that.

Really made a strong, strong connection with her grandmother. And as she was telling me the story, I realized this was a big part of her, why. The reason that she went into nursing, the reason that she wanted to start this company came from her grandmother and having that experience of caring for a family member and realizing that, "Hey, I've got a talent here. I've got some natural ability. This is really resonates with me. And I want to do this for other people."

So I said, "What do you call your grandmother?" She says, "Everybody in the family called her Nana." I said, "That's the name of your business. It's got to be Nana's house." And as soon as I said that, it was like a light went on for her. And she said, "You're absolutely right. It has to be Nana's house."

And that really was a big pivot point for her because she knew what her why was, but naming the business Nana's house helped her make that connection between her why, and being able to communicate this through her brand. So hopefully, by now you understand why the why of what you do is so important and how that plays itself out in your brand and being authentic.

And also it plays out in your marketing. Having come through this, I'm going to stop sharing my screen now. Having come through this pandemic, and we're still in the midst of it, but 2020 was a rough year for a lot of people. And in regards to marketing, a lot of things in marketing have changed. A lot of the ways that you communicate your message for your organization has changed.

Your customers, your clients, the people that you're trying to connect to, they really want to know that you care about them as people. And the best way to do that is to be authentic with them and to communicate that authentic message. The old school marketing has shifted because people want to connect now.

Especially since we've had the socially distance and we've all been working out of our homes, or we've been working isolated, it's that much more important that we be authentic in our brand and that you communicate that in an authentic way, because that's going to connect with people.

One of my favorite sayings and it's not an original, I stole it from somebody because I'm a pirate and that's what pirates do, we steal things is, 'Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.'

Right? So you could be the best at what you do. You could be an expert in whatever it is that you do for business, but no one's going to connect with that message of you being an expert until they know that you care about them as a person and as potential clients and customers.

Once you make that connection with an authentic brand, an authentic brand message, now they're more open to, okay, tell me about what, tell me about how you do what you do.

Hopefully that makes sense to everybody. So now I've been blathering on for 15 minutes or so. I would love to hear from some of the folks here. Is this making sense to you? I mean, have you had any of these experiences yourself?