Build Better Brands

Danielle spoke with Stephen Houraghan, brand strategist, consultant, CEO and Founder of Brand Master Academy and BrandBuildr.ai. He hosts The Brand Master Podcast, featuring guests like Seth Godin and Marty Neumeier.With a background in business and finance, he later gained qualifications in design and marketing, founding the Iconic Fox Agency, and offering brand strategy and creative services globally. Stephen has contributed to publications such as Hubspot, Marketo, Creative Bloq and has appeared as a guest on countless industry podcasts and summits.KEY TAKEAWAYSStephen talks about his early career in finance and stockbroking, moving into creating design and how he pivoted into branding. All of this experience has given him a great understanding of business and how to speak the right language to business owners.Artificial intelligence is already a big part of life and Stephen speaks about his AI-powered platform, BrandBuildr and how it streamlines the brand development process and enhances strategy outcomes.Stephen explains how the last four to five years have been spent on building the corporate brand of Brand Master Academy and how he became obsessed with the idea of being consumer driven and consumer led.BEST MOMENTS‘I didn't want to go back to a job, I wanted to work for myself. That led me down the road to asking, if there are all these other designers in this space, how can I convince my prospects to choose me over them? It's a fundamental question at the centre point of first positioning and then broader brand strategy that I didn't even know existed.’‘I knew I needed to get my ideas on my concepts out there and I struggled with the idea of, why would I put all of this in an article if people are just going to take it? It was a real struggle to overcome that mental challenge of look, this is how the industry works now, this is how the world works.’‘As we venture into the world of AI, that human connection and that ability to connect with your audience and to provide them that human guidance and that arm around their shoulder, that's going to become increasingly important in the coming years and it's a big part of what we do beyond the steps and the processes.’‘When we sit down with our clients, what ingredients we get is dependent on the questions we ask. The better the question, the better the ingredient. The better the ingredients, the better the outcome.’ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Danielle spoke with Adam Housley the founder and coach at T3 Functional Fitness. Adam’s mission is to help you discover an active, healthy lifestyle that you love making it possible to regain your energy & reduce your stress in a way that is easy & enjoyable to sustain.KEY TAKEAWAYSAdam talks through his journey into the fitness industry and how he ended up creating a training method that was very different from his competitors.Danielle and Adam discuss how running a business is hard, the key skills you need to make it work and how help and support are invaluable.Adam explains how he had a belief that he needed to target a certain type of person to make money, or do a certain type of thing from a content perspective. When in actual fact he needed to do it in a way that sits well with him because that will attract the audience he wants.You’ll also hear about the challenges Adam went through when moving from an in person training business to an online coaching one.BEST MOMENTS‘One of the biggest shifts that I've made recently is instead of focusing on necessarily just time efficient strategies, it's wanting to really emphasise the enjoyment because my journey with health was a long one.’‘I've maybe kind of stuck with a message that didn't quite resonate because I was like, maybe if I give it enough time and people start coming in, it'll sit with me better. That kind of stuff, it takes a lot of experience, knowing the difference between this is right, but I need to give it time versus it just doesn't feel right and I need to change it early.’‘It just got to this point where I was like, why is this so hard? It came so easy beforehand and it was just over that time, trying something and thinking, okay, it's not quite working, and just kind of building that resilience. Every time I got knocked back to be like, no, there is a way that I can make this work.’‘When it comes to health and fitness, I believe the key is changing the beliefs because when you're stressed and tired, you think doing exercise is going to make you feel worse, whereas weirdly, kind of doing that physical exercise makes you feel more energised and helps relieve the stress.’ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Danielle spoke with Mike Kirby, Founder of Find & Finance. Their focus is not on selling cars, but on guiding people through the various stages of buying a used vehicle and making it simple, safe and special. KEY TAKEAWAYSMike takes us through every element of Find & Finance from the challenges of launching, the customer journey, recruitment, growth and scaling. At the centre of everything they do is - Simple, Safe, Special.Find & Finance have an exciting year coming up in terms of growth but Mike explains they’ve had challenges along the way and he’s very open about how he faced them.Danielle and Mike discuss what success looks like and how, as a business owner, you don’t always have time to step back and assess what success would be.Mike finishes the episode by sharing advice for anyone who wants to start a business, has an idea and wants to build a brand.BEST MOMENTS‘There were a few key factors why I decided to start the business and what I identified quite early in my motor career was a few, I don't want to say negatives to the industry, but some challenges within the industry.’‘We're trying to create a relationship with our clients. We're not selling the car to them, we're selling a service to help them to effectively find a car. Right from the first communication, we're trying to find out exactly what's important to the clients.’‘If you don't have that clearly defined set of values and you don't have a clear direction with your value statement, when you start growing your business and you bring staff on, you bring people in that might not have lived and breathed these values before. They're highly likely not going to work within your business even if they have the experience that you're looking for.’‘This year is very exciting for us from a recruitment perspective, growing the team and also some key accounts, and then the launch of our three key brands, ensuring that we stick to our core values.’ABOUT THE GUEST - MIKE KIRBYMike Kirby is Owner & Director of Find & Finance Limited CONNECT WITH MIKE ON LINKEDINFIND & FINANCE ON INSTAGRAMABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Danielle spoke with Caroline McQueen, Founder and Chief designer at Impulsiv®, a digital consultancy specialising in branding and custom Shopify Themes. Impulsiv® helps independent companies in fashion, beauty and lifestyle connect with customers through engaging brand experiences. They blend neuroscience, brand psychology, and cutting-edge design to craft engaging customer interactions.KEY TAKEAWAYSCaroline delves into how she decided to pivot during the pandemic from focussing on tech and, thanks to a grant from Baroness Karren Brady, founded Impulsiv®, an ecommerce consultancy specialising in interaction design. Danielle and Caroline discussed how brands can enhance their online presence and make meaningful connections with their audience. Caroline suggested a good starting point is to do a website audit. Making sure the brand is communicating its values in a way that customers can really understand.Caroline shared a case study of working with a client and how Impulsiv® helped reduce the bounce rate from the clients website from 70% to 40% by making one change.BEST MOMENTS‘If you can get your customers to engage in the brand building process with you, especially if they're early adopters, then they are very open to giving you their feedback on what they think of your website or what they think of your products and how you can actually use that.’On working with clients - ‘I take it all the way back to the beginning and start looking at the strategic approach. What their goals are, what their visions or intentions are, and then also who their customer is and also what research they've done on their competition and how they're different’‘It was a lifeline because it came during the pandemic. If you're running a tech company, you are burning cash. She (Baroness Karen Brady) awarded us the grant money and I was chuffed to bits when that came through because it was just enough for me to just kind of go, okay, this is what we're going to do’‘Depending on what conversation you're having on social media will depend on whether or not someone will sign up to your list. If you've taken the time to understand what their needs and wants are, that would determine whether or not they're actually going to click through onto your website and buy something.’ABOUT THE GUEST - CAROLINE MCQUEENImpulsiv®: https://impulsiv.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinemcqueen/ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTHWORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROWCONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDINSUPPORT THE SHOWThis show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Danielle spoke with Andy Starr, Managing partner of Level C, an education program teaching principles of modern brand to business professionals, which he co-founded with international brand expert and author Marty Neumeier. Andy helps clients outmanoeuvre competition and conditions in their markets, and make marketing, advertising & PR content work better, land stronger, and drive real results.KEY TAKEAWAYSDisruption is something that Andy is really passionate about so he and Danielle talked about what this really means and why it’s so important.Andy explained to Danielle how his collaboration with Marty Neumeier began and how Level C originated from his personal circumstances at the time.Branding hasn’t always been Andy’s thing. He’s a trained musician, majored in English Literature, worked in finance and studied law before coming to the world of brand.Andy spoke about how his branding classes with Marty work, why they are different from traditional teaching and how they teach you how to think about brand.BEST MOMENTS‘These days, if you're a brand, if you're a business and you're trying to stand out and you think that just being different will get you there, we make an argument that it won't, that it's not enough’.‘Creative thinking, strategic thinking, design thinking - more and more so called experts and coaches and mentors out there, they've been doing the whole how to do thing - how to do this, how to use this template. More and more of them have been trying to copy us now and it's kind of weird because they end up almost completely contradicting what they were doing just a couple of years ago’‘I won't work with anyone now who won't acknowledge that this is what I'm doing, who won't allow me to have the opportunity to teach them how to be a great client, teach them where I'm coming from right now’.‘We believe that creativity is more valuable in problem solving than just being more productive, but it needs more people who are able to think about what they do before they do it, while they do it, and after they do it’.ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Danielle spoke with Simon Dixon, co-founder of DixonBaxi, which is a global agency that's worked with clients like AC Milan, Warner brothers, Google and Samsung to name a few.KEY TAKEAWAYSSimon spoke about how and why he started DixonBaxi, what brand is and what is important to him as a business owner.Danielle and Simon discussed DixonBaxi’s Essentials book, the practical thinking that drives them. How they run the company on principles and an ethos rather than technologies or what people say they should do and how diversity is so important for DixonBaxi.How the business survived Covid was a big talking point and Simon’s view on remote working. People will still want to interact in some way, but there's now space for people to have time to themselves and privacy.Simon and Danielle discussed how to take your first steps into the industry and the attitude you need to succeed. Simon feels there is tension between education and the industry, where education is teaching people great creativity, but also there is a perception that everybody should have everything and should have it easily.BEST MOMENTS‘People get a little caught up or confused between identity and the design aspect of branding and branding conceptually, in terms of what it means as a whole. Basic branding is people's relationship with the company, the benefits of the service or the product or the business's relationship with them’.‘When we started the agency, we wanted to go back to something simpler, a bit more selfish and a bit more kind of refined how we wanted to create, because it was a kind of pivotal stage of our career and it obviously was something new, so we could build it in a different way’.‘You have to literally invest in training people, because if they haven't had the ability to go to St Martin's and you have to train those basic skills to get them into the industry, you might have to get visas and bring them from different countries and help them get into the industry’.‘The eternal thing is doing work that makes us excited. We'd rather be better than bigger, or we'd rather be the size that allows us to do the work we want, rather than it being about a certain size of company. So it's how it feels to make the work and make the work we want to’.ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Danielle spoke with Matt Clutterham who is a transformational brand strategist and founding partner of Q Branch Consulting. He's also a speaker, board member and knows a lot about branding. KEY TAKEAWAYSMatt talked about his background in creativity, passion for graphic design and how his career in theatre lighting led him to the world of brandingDanielle and Matt discussed their love for branding and how storytelling and creating a feeling in the customer is key to a successful brand. Brand building is getting the customer to recall the business at every possible opportunity. The aim is to link the business and brand with a deeply emotional experience.Matt explained how his business has changed since he started working with his partner, Jenny. Working together has allowed him to deal with the emotions and the audience psychology of building a brand that connects to people outside while Jenny deals with the people inside the brand and helping them control and build the right emotions that are going to accelerate what they are doing.BEST MOMENTS‘In psychology, they call it anchoring. That for me is the whole purpose of what we're trying to do when we build brands is to anchor our business and what we're doing with people because they're the people who are buying and they're also the people who are going to come and work for you and invest in you’‘Overnight a team of people with diggers and machinery dug up all of the grass outside of City Hall in London and planted a fake UFO in a huge crater with smoke machines pouring smoke out of it. The press came down and are taking photos and we're like a UFO crashed in central London. We built the story up over a couple of days’‘I think it comes down really to one question, which is a powerful question and it's hard to answer. What do we want people to feel?’‘We want to help as many people with great ideas as possible, with the strategies and the confidence to take the action that will make all our lives better’ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

This episode is a recording of a live webinar Danielle did with Katie Brown, who is a social media marketing consultant. Katie helps small businesses, or SME's, refine and create a social media strategy that really speaks to their target market. KEY TAKEAWAYSDanielle and Katie discussed why brand consistency is important for building trust, why consistent branding on social media is really important, and how to translate branding onto social media effectivelySocial media strategy and branding overlap. Often clients aren't really sure who they're trying to communicate with, what they're trying to say, how they want to come across. The starting point for branding and social media is to focus on thisIf you want to actually make some progress and you want results and you want to know that what you're doing is actually moving you further towards your goal, then at some point you need to move away from reactive decision and become more strategicBEST MOMENTS‘I talk a lot about the social media funnel. You've got the top of the funnel which might be that first time that you see something or maybe I'll just give them a follow. Visibility, repetition, consistency is where we get to the middle of the funnel. You're building that relationship, you're building that trust which hopefully ends up with that person then reaching out or whatever it is you want them to do’‘When I do strategy with clients we'll look at competitors and we'll look at who else is out there that's doing similar things. And the difference could be in price, the difference could be in terms of location and the difference could be in terms of efficiency or the quality of the product or how quickly they can turn things around. There's lots of different areas that you can look into to go or how are we different?’‘It's about moving away from that idea of branding being a logo and a colour, and actually brand is more of a living, breathing thing. Your business, however many people are in, it doesn't matter if it's one or if it's 3000 it should still be this living, breathing thing that's made-up of human beings’ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKEDanielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders