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Marketing Powerups is a show for marketers looking to boost their marketing and career to the next level. Ramli John interviews world-class marketers to uncover the secrets, strategies, and frameworks behind their wins. In each episode, guests reveal three things: (1) a marketing power-up, (2) a real-world example of that in action, and (3) a power-up that’s helped them take their career to the next level. Marketing Powerups will help marketers step up their game, level up their careers, and become the best they can be.
What makes a $100 bill worth more than another hundred dollar bill?
Well, it's a story. If you can prove that this one, one of them is
actually owned by Abraham Lincoln and you can prove it, one of them
will be worth more than another. The same can be said about marketing.
Stories matter. The brands that tell the most compelling stories
will win. Whether that's in B to C or B, two B, it doesn't
matter. Our job as marketers are to bring the stories to life.
That's where Kevan Lee and Shannon Deep comes in.
They've worked with fast growing companies like Oyster and Rattle to
bring those stories to life. And now they both co founded Bonfire,
where they help companies do the same and ignite their brands
using the power of storytelling. In this Marketing Powerups episode,
you learn first, the three steps to the brand storytelling framework.
Second, how to craft a brand purpose. And third, the importance
of brand archetypes and brand voice. And finally, number four,
a career Power Up that's helped Kevin Lee and Shannon Deep with
their careers. Before I started, I created a free Power Up cheat sheet
that you can download for free to apply the brand storytelling framework
that Kevin and Shannon talks about in this episode. You can go Marketing Powerups.com
right now or find the link in the show notes and description of this
episode. Anyways, are you ready? Let's go.
Marketing Powerups.
Ready? Go.
Here's your host, Rambly John.
Thank you both for joining Marketing power ups. We're excited
to be talking about the brand storytelling framework that
you both have applied to Oyster. Now, before we get
into the deep end, shannon, you've been in brand
marketing leadership for quite a while at Rattle. At Oyster,
you were at a few agencies. I'm curious,
first of all, how you would define brand marketing, because it's one of those things
where you ask 20 people and you get like, 30 responses
as to what brand marketing is. Yeah,
that's a great question. So I'll probably give something that's maybe
a little woo woo, and then maybe Kevan can bring it down
and make it a little more practical. But I would say that
brand marketing is the curation and
evolution of the entire
customer experience that somebody has with
your or not even customer experience, the entire experience that someone has
with your brand. And that can be everything
from news stories about your brand
all the way down to the smallest touch points like error
states and things. So I think it can
be a lot of different things, but globally, it is
the experience of your company to any external audience.
Yeah, it's a great question to ask in an interview also, because you get
so many different perspectives from brand marketing. So did
you ask Shannon that question? Oh, yeah. It's like boilerplate
for any brand marketing role because some brand marketers will say, oh, brand marketing is
social media, or oh, brand marketing is voice and tone or
probably like the answer that almost like the biggest flag for me is
like brand marketing is the visuals, like the logo and stuff. And I think
brand marketing, the way that Shannon and I think about it is so much deeper
than that. And if you almost think of brand as the sum
of all the experiences with your company, brand marketing
can almost be like the shepherd of those experiences or the person kind of
guiding and maintaining and quality,
controlling what that looks like and feels like.
That's the right answer. If you're ever interviewing with me,
people heard it. If you're looking to interview in brand marketing, here is
the right answer and you mentioned
it so much more expensive. I think
when I think about brand, I think about the feeling somebody has
and that comes shannon, you mentioned about the airstate, like something
that could bring a lot of
ill that's not on brand or whatever,
but it is part of that experience or feeling that somebody has
when they're interacting with a brand. Really?
Yeah. You have to think about corporations
are not people, despite what US. Law says.
But you have to think about your
brand and your brand's identity almost as a person.
And people aren't perfect. And so whenever
you're thinking through your brand and how you want to show
up, you can't just imagine your brand with
everything going right all the time. Like no
gaps, no notes, things will go
wrong. You will sometimes have to disappoint
customers either purposely or accidentally
say you're discontinuing a feature for a strategic reason and you need
to communicate that and meet them where they are. And so
just like dealing with every person in your life,
your brand also needs to show up in a multifaceted
and complicated way in that same respect.
I love that. I think that totally makes sense, how you put it
there, that sometimes you do have to disappoint them or it's
not on purpose, but it is part of that experience that you have there.
I want to talk about tying brand into storytelling.
Storytelling is such a great part to
really amplify that feeling somebody has or
that marketing that you have. I'm curious why
it's such a powerful device that marketers need to be tapping more. I know.
Kevan, you had this anecdote in this newsletter that you have
that I'm a subscriber by the way. I should be a paid subscriber,
so I'm going to link that in the show notes and everybody listening should subscribe.
You talked about this book Alchemy and how brand can
storytelling can really make a difference there.
Yeah, I think it's such a differentiator for companies today.
And yeah, that story from the book Alchemy,
which is written by I think he is like a senior vice president or
something at the Ogilvy agency. So he knows this
stuff about brand. And the anecdote is that
this advertising agency used to ask this test for aspiring copywriters,
and one of the questions was, here are two identical 25
cent coins quarters. Sell me the one on the right. And one
candidate thought it through the problem and was like, okay, I'll take
the right hand coin and I'll dip it in Marilyn Monroe's bag, and I
will sell you a genuine quarter as previously owned by
Marilyn Monroe. And I just love that anecdote because ultimately we're selling the
same thing at the end of the day. But the way that you talk about
it, the universe of story that you build around a thing
can totally impact the value and the perception of that thing.
I think that is what brand can do, especially in today's
culture and markets where there's so much saturation of things.
Yeah, I think that's such a it's such an important point to
remember that there are eight different ways you
could sell the same thing.
You could tell the story of The Three
Little Pigs as a tragedy. You could tell
the story of The Three Little Pigs as a comedy, or you could
tell the story of the Three Little Pigs from the Wolf's point of view.
And these pigs are in his neighborhood gentrifying it, and he needs to get them
out. And the angle that you take,
really, and that is your brand.
Is your brand? The wolf. Is your brand the comedy, or is your
brand the tragedy? And it's all part of the
but the base story or the base thing that you're
selling doesn't change. And I think another really great example of that is
the Significant Objects Project. I think,
Kevin, you and I have talked about this before, but you can look it up.
It's still, like, extant. And they have a book and everything.
And yeah, it was a group of it
was kind of half art project, half sociological experiment,
where they bought a bunch of crap, like, just like cheap things
from dollar stores or from thrift stores that cost
them maybe a total of, like $20 or something. And then they took
each thing and they worked with an artist. They worked with a writer
to give it a backstory, a fictional, obviously backstory,
and they put it on ebay, and they weren't,
like, deceiving people. It was like, this is the art story that
goes with this object. And they saw how much money they could sell the objects
for, and it was like something like a 900%
increase in what they I don't know the exact number. Don't quote me
on that. But it was an exponential increase
in what people were willing to pay because it made them
feel something. It wasn't just a little plastic toy horse that cost
fifty cents. It was a story. Yeah. I think
one of the ways I've experienced this and Shannon, you and I have talked about
my love of water, which is kind of silly,
but if you think of water as one of the biggest commodities there
could ever be. There are still so many water brands if you go into the
store and how do you sell water in a unique
and differentiated way and you can do it so much to branding. There's water that
is all about being in an aluminum can and water that's all about
being sourced from Fiji. There's water that is like think of like liquid death,
which is I don't even know how to describe liquid death brand,
but it's all at the end of the day, it's water. And for most people,
if I'm being honest, probably like it all tastes the same, but the brand is
different. And that brand is what differentiates and tells the story, even for huge commodities
like water. And that brand can
also affect I think I forgot what it was,
these two guys, Penitenteller, where they gave water to people
and then they gave them the expensive water
and it's like, this tastes so much better, it's so
sweet and it's like it's all tap water.
So your experience of the product can really
affect by the story you tell of it, even though it's
all essentially the same, that story
with water. I think one thing that I've experienced
with brand over the years, so I worked at Buffer, which is social media management
software, and so much of social media management software is the same no matter
what tool you use. But we would have people at Buffer who would pay for
Buffer regardless of what the product features were. They just wanted to
support the brand, to be part of the brand experience. That is like
the Nirvana state of brand, I think, is if someone's willing to pay just to
be part of your ecosystem, that is
wonderful. And I think that's going to be like the future of
tech and marketing in my mind. It's like brands that can do that are going
to be the biggest brands. Wants to win.
Yeah. Never underestimate the power of the cool factor when
a buyer is trying to please
a grouchy bunch of end users. At the end of the day.
I was just talking about this with someone. Even if you
are aiming brand initiatives at not necessarily your buyer,
but your fans, you are able to kind of up that
cool factor. And if it comes down to the choice between
this kind of unexciting piece
of software or the piece of software that every couple of weeks there's
some cool thing they did in the news,
even if they're functionally the same, you're probably going to go for the one that
did the cool thing. Yeah, the other thing
around that I'm thinking we're talking a lot about more on
the top of the formula acquisition. This is also potentially a
great retention play where I
don't want to leave this brand, this company, because I don't
want to leave the cool, know, Apple has done
such a good job. I mean, they do have that tech ecosystem,
but people get their identity so associated with
that feeling that they're like churning away
is almost like pulling a piece of yourself of themselves.
Apart from that,
would you agree or. What you think is totally true? I think
you see a lot of those examples in the B to C space. Like you
mentioned, Apple, even direct to consumer brands. I think there's a lot of that
cool factor in feeling like that loyalty for things to a
brand. I believe it's very true in the B to B space.
Also, I know someone once told me that going through an
RFP process is simply justification for an emotional
decision that you've already made about the thing you're going to go with. I totally
believe that 100%. I think it's true both in the top of funnel
stage, but also in the bottom of funnel retention stage too. You want to
stick with the brand. You want to stick with cool brands.
And if the brand is cool enough, you will find rationale in order to
stick with them in like a B, two B context too.
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I actually want to get into
the steps to the storytelling framework that you both
worked at Oyster. Now, the very first step here is really
to know your brand purpose. I know brand purpose.
I'm thinking like going back to high school, I'm not
sure what is your life purpose, but you provide a
very specific definition and visual
of what a brand purpose is. Kevin, I'm curious what you mean
by brand purpose and what exactly is
that? Yeah, and there's lots of different ways to define brand purpose.
So the way that I've done it in the past is not by any stretch
the right way or the single way. I stole mine from the Ogilvy agency
again, I promise I read other things than Ogilvy. It just happened to be
another one that caught my eye. And this is one that companies like Wistia have
used. Ogilvy uses it for all the brands they work with.
And what you're trying to find is this intersection between
a tension out in the culture and the best version of
your brand self. And I think that is that sweet spot where those
things overlap. That is your brand's purpose. And essentially brand purpose
is like the why you exist in a way. And so as long as your
why connects to something outside of yourself, something that is true
in the culture today, that's going to be it's almost like your product market
fit arena is like there has to be something external to
you that resonates and then there has to be a
reason why you made the thing that you made. And what is your best version?
So that intersection is where you want to operate as a brand purpose and
the way that you would express that is we believe the world would be a
better place if and then you kind of fill in the blank there. And so
relative to the cultural tension and what you think your brand can bring, how do
you make the world a better place? And that purpose becomes like
the foundation for everything else you would do from a brand strategy perspective.
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notes and description. Well, let's get back to this episode. Super cool.
I'm curious what that looks or I'm
guessing you're early stage of working at Raddle as well.
But Shannon, I'm curious, what does that look
like at a.
Going to I'm going to read it directly so I don't mangle,
like like Kevin said, it's stated as something that
you believe about the world. And the thing that
you believe about the world could either be said directly
or it could be sort of implied. You'll see what I mean in a second
when I read Oysters. So this
is Oyster's brand purpose. Oyster believes the world would be a better
place if access to great talent and opportunity
for great jobs was not limited by geographic location.
So Oyster is a global employment platform and they
help companies everywhere hire people anywhere
so borders don't matter. And they automate all
of the tricky processes from legal and
finance and payroll that would otherwise complicate international
hiring. And so what is inherent
in this brand purpose? Like the thing that we believe about
the world is that right now, access to talent
and great jobs are limited by geographic location.
And the kind of truth that we're driving at
there is that Oyster believes that
by eliminating that, we can reduce inequality. So those
two things that opportunity is limited
by location is a driver of inequality. And so that's
what the brand is aiming at fixing. So it kind of elongates
the distance between the initial belief and what
your company is doing. But through that lens,
you're able to not just say something very,
I don't know, pat or rote like we want to
reduce inequality. The mission of the company is to reduce
inequality. Okay, but how
and why specifically? And so you have to kind of connect those two things
through that process. What I
really love about this idea is specifically
seeing the problem in the world and how we're fixing that is it
becomes really a mission call, almost like a
roll call to get people excited. Not just like people
outside, but people internally as well. We're making the
world a better place. But how? And then you describe it specifically
by how. And that becomes more exciting to
not just buy that product, but work at a company that
has something, that has a rally call to
do something, to fix something. Is that something you?
Yeah, I guess I just want to caveat.
I don't want to be a killjoy here, but I don't think
that every company needs to save the world. I will say that that's true.
I don't think that every company needs to save the world. But what I think
is valuable about this exercise is that by tying your
purpose to something you believe is true about the
world, then you are still getting that kind of, as you said,
like rallying call of people who think the way we think.
Like this brand is for you, this company is for you. And so I guess
I just want to take the pressure off, maybe founders or anybody. You don't
have to save the world. It's okay. But I think
doing this exercise, even if you think, oh yeah,
our product just does this one kind of limited thing.
Yes, but it's tied to something you believe to be true about the
world. And what is that thing? And that's the thing that's going to really get
to the heart of it. Yeah. And I think that is very motivating for
everyone in the company too. Like, if we just woke up every day and we're
pushing pixels around, I don't know that we'd be doing
our best work and feeling most fulfilled. And so I think there is something innately
within brand purpose that is tied to obviously your brand strategy, but also the overall
company's vision and mission and values and these bigger concepts.
And so making sure that that is obvious,
that it is communicated as such, that people are on board with this
and can almost recite this kind of thing to you. I think that cohesion
is really important from a company perspective too, to get everyone feeling like there's
more that's bigger than themselves. It's bigger than just the transactional
state of pushing pixels around.
That's such a good point that you made there.
Often sometimes we get so like, I don't know, maybe it's me. I get so
deep in the work that I don't pull out enough high to
see what is the impact of the work that
we're doing. And this kind of is a reminder like, hey,
there's a bigger world out there. It sounds like we're getting into very
philosophical kind of discussion now, but I think that does apply here
where you're seeing the impact, you're hearing what
exactly is the impact of our work here? Yeah, I think that's
kind of what brand is intended to
do. I don't know if you disagree with that or not, Shannon, but you almost
start philosophical and from that base, then you're
able to make it more tactical and break it down. But you need that
bigger story, that bigger starting point before you can decide what routes
to take off of that. I don't mind the philosophical at all, and I
think it's intended to be philosophical at a certain point.
Same. Oh, I was hoping you would disagree, Shannon, so we can have
a bad well, I am just joking.
The second step here is once you have this brand purpose, is to build
out three to five stories around this brand purpose.
I love the example you brought up earlier, Shannon, with the Three
Little Pigs, because I guess you get to select
the stories, but depending on who the characters are,
the story might be different. I feel like this is where this is going,
kevin, is that what that's about? How do you select those stories and what did
it look like at.
I mean, to the Little Pig's example is maybe a little different than that or
that there's different people telling different pig stories.
I may be exhausting that metaphor, but I'll explain how it worked at Oyster.
So if you think of Oyster's brand purpose as
being about inequality, being about access globally to great
jobs, there's a handful of stories that we have access to within that
overall brand purpose. And so there's probably 50
hundreds of stories like you can make there. And so we want to be deliberate
about which stories we are choosing to have a point of view on and to
create conversation around within the market. So, as an example,
we had a category story. So there was no software
category that existed to solve a problem like this before. And so we chose
a storyline of how software is solving
this problem that used to exist and was done in
a very manual way before. But we've kind of updated it. So there's a category
story, there was a persona
story. And so understanding the main people working on this challenge are
people ops professionals and what is their life like today?
This is in peak COVID times and things
their life was hard. It was not a fun job to be
in. Most of our jobs are not super fun to be in at the time.
But theirs was rough. Everyone was wanting to go remote. They had
to figure out all these different policies and things. So championing
them as this underserved undervalued role within
a business was really a critical story for us to tell. It played into the
larger narrative and then we had a really high
impact focus arm of our business
too. We were going to be a B corp and we were going to do
all these other things. And so having that impact piece, it's so closely
tied to the inequality aspect of the brand purpose too. But we wanted to
be really specific about well, what does that mean for us? So what stories do
we show up in? A lot of that ended up being some of
the remote work policies that would come out. Some of these the news stories around
countries, around the world would have changes to their rules
and regulations around remote work. A lot of narratives at the time was
about oh, you can save money by hiring internationally.
And that was a really interesting one because it became almost this concept
of offshoring talent which I
kind of bristle at that idea. I don't kind
of bristle, I a lot bristle at that idea. And for us it's more about
no, the intention is not to offshore talent. The intention
is that there are great people worldwide
that you have access to now to hire and bring to your team. And so
that was our perspective on that story. And so being deliberate about those stories was
something that was really important to us and I think being deliberate choosing that these
are the stories we're going to show up for. Yes, we can opportunistically jump into
other conversations too, but we are building strategies and pillars around
these stories in particular from channel strategies spokespeople
like the whole nine yards.
I think what Kevin just did a great job of illustrating is that the
brand stories and your brand strategy in general isn't
in a vacuum or in a silo. We are expressing
the priorities of the company from a product perspective, from a
customer perspective, from all of these different perspectives through
each of the stories. So it's not like we went away, came up
with them and then came back. It was oh wait, what are we actually
trying to accomplish as a company? And how do all of our business
priorities flow through the brand strategy?
That's interesting. I was going to ask how do you select those stories?
And Shannon, you just answered it's around what is the overall business
strategy and the product strategy? Is that how you would advise companies
if they were trying to pick their stories? Look at
what your company strategy and strategy is all about.
I think that sounds right. I think there needs to be a connection.
Brand is not in a silo, just as like
our purpose is not a silo. The brand team should not be in a silo
within a company either. And so the brand teams need to be
connected to product marketing, to growth marketing, to product
strategy, to company strategy and all these things. So typically when you're choosing those stories,
yes, it'd be great if there is a product story to tell within those stories.
Yes, it would be great if there is a story oriented toward a persona.
For instance, Shannon and I are both at Rattle today, which is a revenue tech
platform that helps sales teams be more productive. One of our primary personas there
is revenue operations. So what stories exist for us to tell around revenue
operations? Let's pick one of those stories as well, and then the mission
impact more the philosophical touchy feely
stories like those ones, you can totally grab some of those, too, making sure that
you're at least having a mix of all those things. Like if it's all philosophical
stories that may not move the needle as much on the business side, if it's
all product stories, that may not build as
much brand affinity for you because it's very transactional and
pixel oriented. So making sure you have a mix, then developing and
evolving that mix as time goes on based on where you're. At as a business
makes sense. The other interesting thing you mentioned around each
of those stories are not weighted the same. I think I saw
in the thing that you sent me, Kevin, the content weight.
There was a percentage, and then one of them was 40% and 20%,
something like that. I'm guessing that's super interesting for me
because now you're thinking about how much content should we create for
this? And really that's, I guess, tied up all to what
we're just talking about now that your strategy as a
company and a product could be also defining how much content
and where you create more and less often.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds a lot more scientific than it might have been in
practice. But the idea is that we have a limited number of resources,
and if we have five stories that we're going to tell, how do we divvy
up our resources to go and tell those stories? Yes, you can split them equally,
but perhaps there is more urgency or
prioritization around category creation today. And so we tell 40%
of our time goes to telling that story. I think, Shannon, you were
kind of in the weeds of actually bringing those percentages to life,
so I don't know how helpful those were in practice. But in theory, that was
the idea behind it's. Kind of like a prioritization resource exercise.
In terms of those stories. I know it's important to have characters
for them and each of those stories would have different voices.
Shannon, I know this is like, probably I'm assuming
it's your bread and butter. I read some articles about this.
I'm curious, how does that fit in here?
This brand voice and archetype. I know, I saw the creator is the
archetype for.
I. I love talking about this stuff, so you might have to cut me off
at some point. My first
agency job, I was working on the Brand communication
strategy team at Seagull and Gail, a global
branding firm. And this was like, really what
we did. Like brand voice exploration and
definition for dozens of clients, mostly B. Two b clients.
And you're right when you say that you're thinking about it
as a character. So it's like, who is actually telling that story?
And that's where not that we're belaboring this,
but that's where the Three Little Pigs kind of difference comes in, is like,
who is telling that story and what is their perspective on
the story that you're trying to tell? And I
found my way to marketing through theater and
the storytelling, brand marketing. And so
I think about developing a brand personality.
And brand voice is kind of like a subset of that as creating
a literal character who has motivations, who has things they care
about.
Whenever you are writing plays or whenever you are directing
plays or you're part of a
play creation process, you're looking
for your actors and the writing to have
a specific arc so that you feel like the
character that you're watching in Act One is the same character
at the end of the play. Right? It would be weird if the character
did something totally to break their moral compass
or the thing that they said that they've cared about this whole time or like
the goal that they've had. And I mean, we all saw season
eight of Game of Thrones and we all hated it. So you know what it's
like when the character breaks
in a way that feels like unexpected and unnatural and
unsatisfying. And so when you think about developing
your brand personality and your brand voice, what you're looking for is
that consistency. And please note that I
don't mean monotony and I don't mean like,
homogeneity. I mean consistency. And consistency
is a function of well, actually, trust is a function of consistency.
So being consistent in how you go to market
and the ways that you express yourself and the tone and all of
that, giving people a clear expectation and
meeting that expectation every time is a huge way to
build trust with your customers and with your audiences. And so
thinking about brand personality and
having attributes that can guide people
who are the kind of the mouthpieces for the brand. So specifically,
writers and designers are going to be the people who are most using
these tools. When you're thinking about these attributes, you want them
to feel like the metaphor I like is like
spices in a particular cuisine. So if you think
about and I live in France, I love living
in France, but the Mexican food here is trash.
It's absolutely terrible. And I love Mexican food.
And so when I go to a Mexican restaurant here and
there are peanuts in my Mexican
food, I'm like, this is not
right, this is not consistent. This does not align with my understanding
and experience of Mexican food. Because cumin,
garlic, chili, paprika,
onion, those are the spices I associate with Mexican
food, right? Not peanuts. And so some
dishes might have more or less of some of
the spice, but it's all going to still taste like Mexican
food. And so whenever you're talking about modulating your brand
voice across audiences, across touch points, across channels,
you're still using that same set of spices. But maybe this one's really garlicky
and this one has a lot of chili, but it should all feel
like it's Mexican food. I'm hungry now.
That was so good.
How did you land on the creator archetype
for Oyster?
I assume it's through reviewing everything and interviews
through customer. I'm not entirely sure, but I'm curious how that came
about.
Yeah, I don't remember the
process super well. So Kevin, you might have to jump in and save me here,
but I'll talk a little bit about just like archetyping processes
in general. And so there are
a lot of tools out there that will help marketers
choose archetypes. There are generally twelve.
Most of the archetype wheels I've seen have
twelve different personalities or sort of stock
characters that you might see in a
movie or a book or something like that.
And they're generally broken down into four different
categories. And anyway, you can look up these archetype
wheels, they're very interesting and they're very helpful because you can look
at them. And the way I usually like to start is
by plotting your most direct competition
on the archetype wheel. So each archetype will
have certain characteristics associated with it. And if you think about
your competition, you can, and this isn't going to be
exact, because it's you assigning things to your competition,
not their self conception. If you are looking
at how they go to market and how they
express themselves, you can kind of maybe see like, oh,
everybody in our category kind of clusters around these
certain archetypes. So do we
want to ride the draft
of all of the people who are doing this? Do we want to sound the
same? Do we want to be consistent? Do we want to play in the same
space? Or do we want to take advantage of the white space that we've
identified and try to define ourselves in
that way? At Oyster, I think it really was about
just kind of matching our mission vision and values
with the values and point of view that
aligned with, as you said, the creator for Oyster.
And so it kind of was like we already had who
we were. We just needed to find the
right description to sort of crystallize that and then make it more actionable.
Yeah, and I think our process is very similar to what you described, Shannon.
There was the competitor piece first and then we did sit down
with I think the exercise was led by a brand agency we
were working with, but it could have been done in house just as easily.
And we brought together people from throughout the marketing organization. There were 50
of us in marketing at the time and so there were maybe ten of those
50 who were on the call together, along with product representatives,
sales representatives, and some senior leadership just so we
have perspectives from other parts of the business. And then it was an exercise in
bringing our perspectives together, kind of voting on which archetypes most resonated.
And then I think it was a relatively easy process for us
because everything kind of started pointing us toward the. Creator one
that makes sense. I think that's just that exercise all
is something that I do
see. I want to move on to the step three now about
building your structures around this story. I'm curious
what that means. Kevin, what does that mean to add
in the structure to the story?
Yeah, so if you think through, you have your brand purpose,
there's a handful of other brand pieces that you'll have within
your strategy. But the stories in particular, if you end up with three to five
of those stories, then the actual structures is like, how do
you get those stories out to market? And so that becomes touch points, it becomes
channels and it becomes people. And so for us at
Oyster, it was about listing out, well, what are all the different channels that we
own, what are the different channels we have access to from like an earned media
perspective? How do we want to orient these
stories into those channels? I want to place them there. And so for instance,
a lot of the product stories were about like lifecycle communication,
they were about webinars, they were about events. A lot
of the impact and mission stuff was about PR
and earned media and podcasts and places that we could put our spokespeople.
And then we also had the opportunity, we had a really big ambassador
push within the company. And so like, our CEO was a really vocal presence
on LinkedIn. A lot of our senior leadership team was vocal and we would build
their personas up as a marketing strategy that gave us
then additional outlets
to talk about these stories. And so we ended up assigning the
CEO was the category story and our co founder was the
mission impact story. And our chief workplace officer was the persona
story. And so they're just like those naturally fit anyway. But making that
extra deliberate about when we spend time crafting our CEO's
LinkedIn posts or crafting his speech at
conferences, it's going to be oriented toward this story in particular. Rather than
we could tell any and every story that we want to in this instance,
which can make it really hard and can lead to I
know it kind of waters down the overall message, but if you really focus it
and say, well, no, our CEO is talking about this thing everywhere. That he's talking
about this. Let's be deliberate about that. It adds some structure to it.
So that's kind of the structure pieces you think of channels, touch points and people,
and you'd be deliberate about focusing in those areas.
That makes sense, I think. Now you're putting it's interesting. You mentioned
that you wrote your father's story when he's talking to
other places, he would tell that specific story
to people is what I'm hearing. Is that right?
Yeah, he would tell a lot of stories that he
would want to tell also. So it wasn't all just like you have to tell
this one story. But I
guess the touchstone of the stories was this particular narrative.
It was great for him because he created Oyster
because of a pain and need that he felt innately within
this gap in software for previous companies that he had built. And so it was
a very personal story for him to tell anyway. And it tied very closely
to the category piece, which is great. I think it's hard to go the other
way where if your founder doesn't have a clear perspective on the why
other than maybe there was a market opportunity or something, you kind of have
to retrofit that in a way that can be a bit tougher. But in
Oyster's case, it was a very natural fit. And so that's like the starting point
for sure. And maybe 70% of the stories that
he tells are related to the category piece, and 30% can be how
he does work remotely or how he thinks about leadership or whatever comes to
mind in more of an opportunistic way. But the core is based
around the story, and that's where the structures come into, where the percentages come in.
Like, majority of it should be this, but there's plenty of room to be
flexible within that.
I'm curious, we've talked about the three steps.
Now, how did you roll it out
to the I mean, maybe this is more a question
for Shannon. I'm curious,
did you all present this to the team and be like, this is what we're
doing, content team, this is what you're talking about now 40%
this and then, okay, make sure that archetype.
Make sure you're talking to the creator. I'm curious how the rollout of
this storytelling framework happened at Oyster
once you kind of finalized all the pieces and all the steps together.
Yeah, it definitely was something that we explicitly
rolled out and people had access to.
And it was like, this is our strategy. And we
had a fabulous team at Oyster who all
of our contributors are strategists in their own right. And so saying,
you are building your individual pieces
and the things that you're working on on the back of this overall
strategy. And so the content and editorial strategy
was coming directly off of what is the
brand strategy and et cetera for the other
disciplines that we have in the marketing team.
Everyone isn't going to be supporting the stories
quite so explicitly as the content and editorial team,
but everybody is in service of getting these things
out into the world because we've decided to prioritize them.
Yeah, and I think we had a couple of advantages with that too, just given
how we organized the team. Like content editorial were very close to brand
like Shannon came into Oyster from an editorial perspective and
was the people manager for a lot of content people at first. And so there
was that natural connection there. And then I think there
was also work to do on the company perspective too. So I remember I put
together a little presentation in all hands and had this
dumb slide that people could download and save to their desktop or something just as
a reminder. But I think that broader communication piece is
really critical because then it allows brand marketing
to play more of that role of shepherd and to have something to point back
to and be like, oh, remember when we said this this thing that you're doing
out in the world is not quite in the right space yet this is
how we might tweak it or think about it differently. And you have that thing
to refer to. And so I think there is that piece of it from like
company perspective too. I wouldn't expect our CX team or our
product team to have memorized all of our brand strategy and voice and tone and
things, but as long as they know where to find it, as long as they
know we'll help you stay on track with what we want
that to sound feel like that's the most important piece.
Yeah, it becomes like the most important,
it becomes armor for your marketing team
to be able to say no, look at this thing.
We all agreed this is the standard,
this is what we're trying to get to. And yeah,
like Kevin said, I would never expect that people outside of
even the brand team are memorizing all of
this stuff. And at a certain point for people
who are not just creatives but who are generative on behalf
of the marketing department, you kind of internalize it,
it kind of becomes second nature and what I
think a huge strength is or something to aim for at
an organizational level. So even across product and engineering is not
to train everybody to be able to write a tweet
that sounds like your company, but is to acculturate
everyone to see if something isn't right.
So to have the negative reaction of,
like, that doesn't seem like us is a much lower bar
and still very valuable to have the
company have an instinct for, even if they're not
executing and writing or designing on behalf of the brand.
Where it gets really fun for me is when it comes into those decisions.
We're having to make real decisions on this. Like, for example, at,
like, the Ukraine war started when we were there, and that is a very
globally impactful thing that we wanted to have a
brand reaction to and having a brand strategy and having this brand purpose made it
very easy for us to look at this decision. Like, do we say
something? What do we say? How do we act? Hold it up against our brand
purpose and say, yes, obviously we need to do something.
Maybe that's more of an obvious one, but I think one that was a bit
more subtle is that at Oyster, we are kind of in
this interesting, almost like it's
an interesting conversation around the difference between global employment and
remote work. And so when a lot of conversations were coming up about,
oh, remote work has allowed me to go and travel
the world and still keep my same. Like, do we
as Oyster want to be part of that narrative and you hold it up to
our brand purpose? And no, our brand purpose is about creating access to
jobs for people around the world. It is not about me, Kevin in
Idaho now being able to travel the world with all my privilege because I get
to be remote working remotely. And that is the story we want to tell.
That's different than what our brand purpose is. That was a really clarifying
moment because it could have been very easy for us to get sidetracked and go
down different rabbit holes there. That totally
makes sense. I mean, I love how you're calling out that people
in the company should be able to say what's
not on brand and something that our brand would say.
But I'm hearing that there is no specific
editorial process where every content has to go through brand and be like,
that's on brand, that's not on brand. Come on,
fix that. Or was there a process where, like, a review.
Or should there be? Yeah, so I've been
on it's funny. When I was at
Siegel and Gail, I literally was the brand
police for one of our clients. Like, every piece,
every piece of advertising came
to my desk for a brand voice
check. And I was evaluating and giving feedback,
and it was wild. Do not recommend. I do not recommend.
Yeah, it took a lot of time. So there's like, that extreme where you're
putting we'd like to call them the brand cuffs on everybody and
you're saying absolutely everything has to come through us.
But what I really think it is, is about empowering and
enabling the teams that really need it. So like your
customer success team, anyone who's building or writing
in your help center, sales teams,
people outside the marketing team who are communicating on behalf of the company.
This also applies to spokespeople too. Getting proper
media training and working really closely with a PR agency
if you don't have it in house, who knows how to internalize
and digest a brand voice and a point of view and can
coach your thought leaders on that?
I think a lot of things went through the
content and brand team because I have
pretty high editorial style standards and I wanted everything proofread
before it went out. Makes sense. My general rule
of thumb is two people
should see everything. So no single
set of eyeballs something goes out in the world, I think that's a dangerous
place to be in. And so I think even if you don't
have a dedicated editor or proofreader on the team, even if
you don't have brand marketing, who have the time to review absolutely
everything? As long as you're checking in with at least one other person, I think
it helps up the quality and consistency.
Yeah, I think the two eyeballs rule is great. And I think even the difference
between talking about it as brand police versus talking about it as
a brand shepherd, I think those are very
different feelings. Right. I don't know if you ramble in your role,
felt like you had brand police on your team, how would that make you feel
as a creator or as a marketer versus if you had a brand shepherd to
guide you and watch over you and things like those give different vibes.
And I think that is I think of that very intentionally when
I think of how we communicate what brand marketing's role is within a company,
that's great. I like that paradigm shift or
that mindset shift that it's more a brand shepherd.
I want to start wrapping up and ask you both this question first with Shannon.
You've held several brand communication marketing roles
and leadership positions at companies like Dashlane Oyster and
now Rattle. Curious what's a power up that's helped you
in your career, something that's helped you get a leg up
and accelerate your career itself?
Yeah, I love this question and I'm
going to answer from a sort of philosophical mindset
kind of side of things. So as I mentioned,
I come to marketing from a creative and like a theater background
and in know
I think I was in grad school still and Paula Wagner,
who is a very well known and successful
film producer TV and film producer. She's an alumna of the
school that I went to and she came back to address the student
body in the school of drama. And somebody asked
her something along the lines of how
do you know how to attach yourself to the right projects?
How do you know what will be successful and
what she said. And I apply this to my
daily life and career all the time. She said
the secret is nobody knows anything.
And I think about that every day.
Nobody really knows anything. And marketing
is not a science, actually, and especially
brand marketing and creative, it is not a science.
And so to think that there is a right
way, even there are only
three things you can do that will work is like a really
limiting and anxiety inducing kind of mindset to
have. And so I
think thinking that if nobody knows anything really
about marketing, then I
think things. So why don't I have a voice?
Why don't I have a perspective? I do actually. And my perspective
is just as valuable, interesting,
creative as anybody else in the room because this isn't a science
with right answers. It's people coming together with
thoughtful, considered hypotheses and creative ideas
and imagination and. Collaborating so
good nobody knows anything. It's easy for you to
share something. I love that. Yeah. How about you,
Kevin? I'm curious know you have more than a decade of marketing leadership roles.
Vox Media, Buffer, Oyster, now Rado curious,
what's a career apart for you that's helped accelerate your career?
Yeah, it's funny, I resonate a lot with what Shannon said because I may
have that experience, but I feel like I don't know anything most every day too.
So I think what's been key for me is curiosity.
I think that's maybe one of the biggest power ups that has helped me because
I came into marketing through journalism and came into tech
totally blind and cold to everything. I had no idea what I was doing and
I credit any of the successes I've had to just being really curious
and also being very lucky to have landed in places that allowed me
to be curious and allowed me to go and research things
and to learn things. I think one of the most helpful pieces of advice
I got is that it's okay to answer a question by saying I don't know
the answer to that, but I will find out. I think that phrasing
was so helpful for me because it gave me permission to not know and it
gave everyone was asking me the question confidence that I would go and figure out
how I would do the thing that I don't know how to do. I'm not
100% successful in always figuring out how to do the thing, but I'm at least
curious to understand how do I get one step closer to understanding
this thing. And I think that has helped me go from content to
brand. Like all the stuff we just shared about brand I had no idea about
a few years ago and have had the chance to learn it all and just
have stayed curious about it. So that's something that I
hold pretty dear. Is that curiosity mindset for
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