Cover Brand

How do you keep a century-old institution meaningful to a generation that's stopped joining things altogether? Lee-Sean Huang, Chief Community Officer of AIGA, joins Ethan Decker to talk candidly about AIGA's membership decline, the tension between community patronage and pay-for-service value, and what it actually takes to serve everyone from the casual event-goer to the die-hard super-user. Along the way, they trade real-world examples from Dove, Tiffany, and Prada, wrestle with the "old but innovative" heritage-brand tightrope, and confront a truth a lot of legacy organizations avoid: plenty of people have simply never heard of you. Ideal for association leaders, community builders, and anyone managing a brand with more history than headlines.Main Topics:The decline of membership-based associations — and why AIGA isn't alone in feeling it"Bowling Alone" and the broader erosion of civic and social participation in AmericaThe tension between patronage-style value ("you're supporting the mission") and transactional ROIThe Banana Curve: why most organizations have tons of light users and vanishingly few heavy onesWhy you can't force light users into heavy users — and why that's not even the goalBuilding an offer ladder — cheap entry points, mid-tier products, and premium experiencesPositioning a heritage brand as both credible and innovative, without leaning on nostalgia aloneThe hidden problem underneath every other problem: awareness. A lot of your market has simply never heard of you.Links to Additional Resources:AIGA — aiga.orgAIGA on Instagram and LinkedIn — @AIGAdesignThe AIGA Design Podcast, hosted by Lee-Sean HuangBowling Alone by Robert Putnam — referenced for the broader decline in group participationappliedbrandscience.com — for more on brand science frameworks like the Banana CurveIf you're running a legacy brand or membership organization and wondering how to grow without losing what makes you trusted, this episode is a must-listen. Subscribe to Cover Brand for more, and visit appliedbrandscience.com to dig deeper into the science behind the strategy.Produced by BiCurean.com

When do you build a house of brands, and when do you keep everything under one roof? In this episode, Bob Jordan, the longest-running name in interim and fractional executive leadership, brings Ethan Decker his own brand architecture puzzles to solve live. From the unintended consequences of launching a separate site for his book, to the decision of whether InterimCIO and InterimCEO deserve their own standalone brands or should function as landing pages pointing back to InterimExecs, this episode is a working masterclass in brand architecture for anyone managing more than one offering under a growing company. Bob also shares the FABS leadership framework from his book Right Leader, Right Time, and the multivariate research effort behind proving it holds up. Ideal for founders, brand strategists, and anyone staring down a "should this be its own website" decision.Main Topics: ● House of brands vs. single-brand strategy, using Coca-Cola as the working example ● Why splitting a book brand off from the core business can quietly cost you SEO ● Deciding when a new offering is distinct enough to earn its own brand ● Landing pages vs. standalone sites: how to handle domains like InterimCIO and InterimCEO ● Building "sibling" brands that borrow equity without diluting it ● The FABS leadership typology — Fixer, Artist, Builder, Strategist ● Using statistical research to validate a leadership framework ● Lessons from writing (and maybe rewriting) a business bookAdditional Resources:Right Leader, Right Time – Bob Jordan's book on leadership stylesInterimExecs.com – Bob's company siteRightLeader.com – The leadership assessment site discussed in the episodeSubscribe to Cover Brand for more insights into the world of branding and marketing. Share this episode with a friend who could benefit from these strategies, and head over to appliedbrandscience.com to dive deeper into the principles of brand science. Your success starts here!Castmagic and Descript used to create drafts and then edited with human eyes, ears and hands. Produced by BiCurean.com

Cat How joined Ethan for a shop talk episode. She's founder and executive creative director of How Studio, six years in now, teams running in both London and LA, with a stack of award show judging credits and a spot on more than one influential-women-in-marketing list behind her.  She and Ethan dug into three of her recent launches together, and each one carries a different lesson about how branding actually works.The first is Ideogram, a generative AI company that came to How Studio needing a brand, which is its own small irony. They dug into some lessons and the complexity of taking on a project for Gen Ai company.The second is Bristol Dockyards, a museum built around the historic ship SS Great Britain, sitting on a genuinely complicated history the city has struggled to reckon with. The rebrand leans on an unexpected color choice, and the conversation gets into what makes a bold creative swing actually work.The third is How Studio itself, mid rebrand for the fourth time in six years. Kat ran an audit of competing branding agencies and found ninety percent had no house color at all, black and white, despite color being the exact thing they sell clients. This week's cover song: Sinead O'Connor's 1990 rendition of Nothing Compares 2 U, written by Prince for his side project The Family in 1984, and turned into something entirely her own.How Studio: https://how.studioSubscribe to Cover Brand, explore the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com, and come back next week for more of this.Produced by BiCurean.com

Richard Byrd runs Bluebyrd, a Houston shop that markets to rocket scientists and oil engineers, and his new book names the thing that quietly wrecks technical companies: the curse of knowledge. Smart people forget what it's like not to know the answer — and it shows up everywhere in how they sell.Byrd's workshop trick, the "so what" game, gets clients from 684 product specs down to the one thing that actually matters. Ethan and Richard get into why that's so hard for engineers to do on their own.Then there's the B2B buying committee — eight to ten people deep, per Gartner, all reading the same pitch differently depending on what's at stake for them personally. Byrd's toilet paper story makes the point better than any case study could.Ethan debuts a new metaphor for brand awareness involving asteroids, planets, and why your buyer only knows three or four names in your category. Apple's keyboard box makes an appearance. So does a very specific question Byrd asks skeptical engineers about what car they drive — and why the answer usually proves his point for him.Cover song this week: Any Major Dude Will Tell You, Steely Dan covered by Wilco.Find Richard Byrd at thebluebyrd.com and on LinkedIn. Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify. Subscribe to Cover Brand, explore the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com, and come back next week for more of this.Produced by BiCurean.com

Nobody wants your logo on their stuff, and why that should change how you think about every piece of branded merch you order. Swire Ho runs Garuda Promo in LA, printing and producing promotional product for companies. The episode suggests you ditch the logo-first instinct, find the unsexy market nobody else wants, and let the product itself do the talking.Swire's been quietly building a niche in construction, while every other promo shop in LA chases entertainment and Hollywood clients. Construction companies are flush with infrastructure money right now, thanks to the World Cup and the incoming LA Olympics, and almost nobody markets to them. Ethan compares it to Melanie Perkins building Canva on the back of Australian high school yearbooks before she ever touched Photoshop's turf — pick the boring pond nobody's fishing in, and you get to be the only boat on it.The conversation keeps coming back to one idea: people don't want your logo, they want something fun. Swire's Hollywood event clients order color-coded party cups that say I'm available, I'm taken, it's complicated instead of a brand mark, and the cups end up all over Instagram and TikTok, which is free reach no logo ever earned on its own. Ethan's response is to push the same logic onto Swire's least glamorous accounts — construction recruiters handing out neck fans at job fairs, hard hats, tumblers, vests. Slap a tagline on the fan instead of just a logo, and suddenly the guy on the job site filming a selfie video becomes an unpaid brand ambassador.Ethan brings in his Lazy Boy story, socks that said Go away, I'm lazying, as a case for mocking up the fun version of merch before a client can even imagine wanting it. People don't buy from inspiration boards. They buy from a giggle. Show them the funny shirt, the cool tagline running down a sleeve, and they stop thinking of you as a vendor and start thinking of you as the guy who gets it.The episode closes on retention, not acquisition. Branded merch that makes employees feel good, on a job site, at a company barbecue, in a recruitment photo, becomes a quiet recruiting tool in industries where turnover is expensive and training takes months. Garuda's job isn't selling promotional product. It's making boring industries feel like they have a personality worth showing up for.This week's cover song: Sandy Lam's 1996 Cantonese cover of All-4-One's I Swear, a karaoke staple across Asia that, in Hong Kong, eclipsed the original entirely.Garuda Promo: garudapromo.com Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify Subscribe to Cover Brand, explore the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com, and come back next week for more of this.Produced by BiCurean.com

Two brands, one founder, and one of the most interesting brand architecture problems you'll hear on this show — how do you launch something brand new when your most valuable asset is the reputation you built doing something else? Rachel Lederman has spent eighteen years running Sweet Sadie Productions, a creative studio behind commercial, experiential, and live work for clients ranging from Kraft to Broadway. Now she's launched Fawn, a white-glove concierge service for film industry players descending on Boulder, Colorado for Sundance's first-ever non-Utah run in forty years. The puzzle she brings to the table: how do you build Fawn into its own thing when the best door-opener you have is Sweet Sadie's name?Ethan and Rachel work through this live — figuring out when to invoke a parent brand, when to let the new one stand on its own, and what it actually looks like to use an existing relationship network to launch something new without just folding it back into what you already are.MAIN TOPICS COVEREDFawn, powered by Sweet Sadie — the brand architecture question underneath it all: when does a spinoff benefit from naming its parent, and when does that connection become a ceiling instead of a credential?The relationship business reality — in an industry where people hire people, not logos, your network is your distribution channel; the question is whether you're using it intentionally or just hoping it trickles overWhy your two hardest launch questions are usually the same question — Rachel came in with "how do I get customers" and "how do I separate the brands" and it turns out the answer to both lives in the same placeThe new-venture credibility gap — Fawn has never run a Sundance, so there are no testimonials, no case studies, no proof; Ethan and Rachel work through what you do when you don't have receipts yet but you do have eighteen years of them next doorSundance in Boulder — why the festival's move from Park City to Boulder for January 2027 is the window, and how insider local knowledge plus production expertise is the actual product Fawn is sellingThe merch moment — Rachel shows off Fawn's laser-cut metal keychains with a skeleton key and room number 27, and Ethan makes the case that good merch is a brand statement and bad merch is just money on fireThe Prince-Sinead-cover-of-his-own-song rabbit hole — because of courseADDITIONAL RESOURCESRachel Lederman / Sweet Sadie Productions: sweetsadie.comFawn: hello@thefawn.coCover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify: Cover Brand Covers PlaylistCover song this episode: Prince's live cover of Nothing Compares to You — his own song, given to Sinead O'Connor, then reclaimed live with Rosie Gaines. Very meta. Very Prince.Explore more on brand architecture and how brands grow at appliedbrandscience.com. If this episode made you think about a launch you're sitting on or a spinoff you've been afraid to name — share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to Cover Brand and we'll see you next week. Produced by BiCurean.com

What if the person who knows your work best got to ask the questions? That's this episode.Aicila Lewis has been producing Cover Brand since before Ethan knew it was live. She's heard every episode, watched the frameworks land in real time, and spent years telling Ethan he needed to bottle up those coffee conversations where someone walks away going, wait, that's all I had to know? For episode 69, she finally gets to ask some of the questions she's been sitting on.The conversation covers how Cover Brand found its format, what Ethan keeps hearing from callers across 68 episodes, and some of the nuance behind the brand science.MAIN TOPICS COVEREDHow Cover Brand got it’s start. The biggest recurring theme: nobody is thinking about your brand. Eleanor Roosevelt said it about people, it's even more true about toilet paper. Nobody knows the color of the packaging.The brand category paradox — you have to fit into the category before you get to stand out in it. Parchment paper and toilet paper are not interchangeable. Neither are your category and your differentiation.The Geico gecko principle — your distinctiveness doesn't have to mean anything. Nobody knows the gecko's backstory. Nobody can tell you the service differences between Geico, State Farm, and Allstate. The cockney lizard still tripled the business.Consistency as strategy — you are bored of your own marketing long before 99% of your future customers have ever seen it once. Ethan wears the orange tracksuit to business events on purpose.When the hard work isn't knowing what to do — the real challenge for a lot of callers is letting go of the thing they're good at to make room for the thing they need to do nextBrand story and brand purpose: three places where the internal stuff actually does its job — employee alignment, the 0.1% of category mavens who want to go down the rabbit hole, and the North Star effect that quietly shapes everything without anyone knowing whyThe loyalty myth — you can love Tiffany and own one charm bracelet. That love does not help Tiffany's revenue. Brand friends beat brand lovers for volume, every time. Jeff Leitner said it best: love is great, but it ain't where the money's at.ADDITIONAL RESOURCESAicila Lewis / BiCurean: bicurean.comUncensored CMO with Jon Evans: uncensoredcmo.comDerek Sivers, How to Start a Movement: ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movementSubscribe, share it with someone building something, and come find the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com. Back next week.Produced by BiCurean.com

How do you turn people who stumbled into the Farmer's Market on a nice Saturday into more engaged partcipants?Mackenzie Sehlke is the executive director of the Boulder County Farmers Markets, a 40-year-old nonprofit running seasonal markets in Boulder and Longmont, plus a food hub that's been quietly building for six years. She came in wanting to know how to convert casual visitors into lifelong fans. What she got was permission to stop wanting that — at least as a primary strategy.MAIN TOPICS COVEREDThe banana curve — most of your buyers are light buyers, for any brand, any event, any category. Most Harley riders only ever buy one Harley. For a farmers market in a tourist town, that curve skews even further. Don’t curse the climate, plan for it. Reacquaintance over retention. The ongoing reminder that you exist, that it's Saturday, that you like going to the market. Even the biggest brands have to keep tapping you on the shoulder.Behavioral loyalty vs. emotional loyalty — someone can love a brand they only visit once a year. Someone else can show up every week out of pure habit. Delight as strategy — the small, considered thing that turns a fine morning into a story someone tells. It's the detail that tells people someone was paying attention.Cover Song: Teenage Dirtbag (Wheatus), as covered by The Parcels live at Red Rocks. May only exist as shaky iPhone footage. We're working on it.Additional resources: Boulder County Farmers Markets at bcfm.org. The banana curve gets its full treatment in the Applied Brand Science book and on the podcast. Share this one with anyone who's exhausted from trying to manufacture superfans out of a crowd that just wanted a good Saturday.Produced by BiCurean.com

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 COVEREDThe 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 personBig 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 religionsThe 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 dashboardRaymond 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 thirtyADDITIONAL RESOURCESSayre Blake / SkillSage: skillsaige.comI Prevail — "Blank Space" (hard metal cover of Taylor Swift): worth the whiplashHow I Built This (NPR) — Ben Chestnut episode on MailChimpCover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify: Cover Brand Covers PlaylistYour 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