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Summary
In this episode, Adam and Phill are joined by Roland Gurney from Treacle for a live critique of the Cult Products proposition and initial website. They discuss their new proposition and the target audience for their program with Roland. They talk about the importance of understanding the target customer and narrowing down the focus. They also discuss the challenges of repositioning a business and the need for a clear and concise message. The guest suggests a three-step approach to the program and emphasises the importance of simplicity and structure. They also discuss the different options and calls to action for potential customers. In this conversation, Roland Gurney provides valuable insights and suggestions for the Cult Products program. They discuss the value of offering a sequential three-step program, the balance between talking about customer problems and product details, and the importance of being the face of the brand. They also explore the concept of being Marmite, or polarising, in order to stand out in a crowded market. Overall, the conversation emphasises the need for clarity, differentiation, and authenticity in building a successful business.
Takeaways
- Understanding the target customer is fundamental to creating a specific and effective brand.
- Narrowing down the focus and choosing a niche market can make marketing and sales conversations easier.
- When repositioning a business, it's important to have a clear and concise message that clearly communicates the value proposition.
- A three-step approach can provide structure and simplicity to a program or offering.
- Offering different options and calls to action can cater to different customer needs and preferences. Offering a sequential three-step program can provide a clear and effective solution to customer problems.
- Balancing the discussion of customer problems and product details is crucial in marketing and communication.
- Being the face of the brand can create a human connection and build trust with customers.
- Being Marmite, or polarising, can help a business stand out in a crowded market and attract the right audience.
- Clarity, differentiation, and authenticity are key elements in building a successful business.
Creators & Guests
What is Cult Products?
Dive into the essentials of start-up success with Cult Products, hosted by Yaya's co-founders, Adam Yaya-Durrant and Phill Keaney-Bolland. This podcast delivers sharp insights on creating revolutionary products, radical branding, and attracting a loyal following of early adopters. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, each episode is packed with actionable advice and stories from those who've built successful businesses. Join Adam and Phill as they help you transform bold ideas into start-up success.
Welcome to another episode of our Cult Products podcast.
And this week we're joined by a very special guest.
So we've got Roland from
treacle with us, brand experts.
He's helped us over the years with our proposition.
Yaya does a whole load of stuff in that space, mainly for agencies.
And in today's episode, we are going to be talking a bit about our new proposition and the
stuff that we've been working on.
Slightly anxious about getting some feedback live.
which we don't know what we're getting basically.
So that's always going to be fun.
And we'll talk a little bit about brand, but welcome to the podcast, Roland.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited.
It's all right.
It's all right.
Before we get into things, do you want to give us a sense of your background and how you
came to be sat on a podcast with us talking about branding?
Yeah, I run a small agency called Treacle and we specialize in positioning and proposition
and messaging work for other agencies, which is a bit inception, but that's what we do.
Not the career I thought I was going to have when I was 11 or 12, but here we are.
And yeah, we work with, you know, people like yourselves, cool agency people that we get
on with.
just helping them differentiate, stand out, find the words to communicate their genius to
clients.
And that's it.
And I know we met, Adam and I were sort of trying to work out how long ago, I think, was
it before COVID even, back in that other life?
that other world.
Yeah, a while ago.
million miles ago.
So yeah, I remember doing some, we did some work together at the time.
And then we've both been on different trajectories and roller coasters and the journey and
the ups and downs of it all independently since.
So it's nice to come full circle.
It's great to have you on.
Imagine if you had been 12 years old and your dream career had been to be doing branded
positioning for agencies.
All the other kids going, I want to be a pilot, I want to be a rock star.
I'd like to be doing positioning.
I would have asked them to bully me.
That's actually, that should do.
That would be an awful child.
Precocious brand wanker.
All black, big black thick rimmed glasses.
Yeah, mac air.
Mac air under one arm.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, I made it eventually.
will change.
Yeah.
your dream.
Yes, look at me, mom.
dream.
if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll notice that there's a web page up on screen,
which is the new homepage for our cult products program.
which we've spoken about a bit on this podcast and is designed at helping B2B tech startup
founders get off the ground, attract early adopter customers and create the first versions
of their brand, their product prototype and their website.
So Adam and I spent a bit of time thinking about how we best communicate this to the
world.
And I think it's fair to say
Adam that we've taken a quite different approach in terms of how we're positioning and
marketing this to anything that we've done before with Yaya and taken that done some
things that maybe feel slightly uncomfortable to us and untested that I'm quite excited
about but I'm slightly
terrified, just about to get kind of ripped to shreds.
Yeah, so, you know, this is...
very different proposition to the one that Ronan you've worked with us before or kind of
known us for.
So it's definitely kind of a new, all new for us.
And especially doing the videos, which I don't, if you've had a chance to watch, but
they're also, that is definitely new territory for us.
I think Phil is a natural, could, but yeah.
So it'd be cool just to see you think about something like the content, obviously you're
the wordsmith around this stuff and just get your view on things.
Like this is very kind of work in progress.
Like we haven't got, we've got lots of kind of stock imagery and stuff in there at the
moment.
So it's just more around the content, but yeah, it'd be great to kind of get your view on
it really.
Cool.
Well, it looks really good.
So I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not here to shred it.
I suppose there's some questions that are always worth just covering off at the beginning.
So talk to me a little bit about the person that you're aiming this at.
So B2B tech startup founders, tell me just a little bit more about them.
who they are, what they're like, what they want to do, where they're at in their journey,
what their fears and dreams are a little bit.
I'm glad you started there because that's generally generally where we start thinking
about these things as well.
The kind of person that we are trying to talk to is somebody who has had a lot of
experience in an industry is probably you know kind of late 30s up and hasn't
got a lot of experience in this in the startup space hasn't got a lot of experience with
things like marketing brand and product, but really knows their space really, really well.
And as a result of that has seen an opportunity to do something quite radically different
and, and change the way that their industry operates through an innovative new technology
solution.
So I guess
the sort of dreams are.
Being a sort of recognized thought leader in their industry would be one of them.
An opportunity to get to kind of financial independence and all that kind of stuff.
The experience of running their own business and having that freedom, not having a boss
anymore, being able to kind of make decisions, probably slightly frustrated with the
status quo and not being able to make the changes that they want to in their role and to
their industry.
you know, I guess that sense that things could be better and they're the person to change
it, making that a reality for them without having to sacrifice a lot of the sort of equity
or any of those kinds of things.
I think the other thing that's probably important is getting them confident to potentially
quit their job and place all their bets on doing this business and
understanding, I suppose, whether the idea they've had is any good, really, and whether
it's the one that is going to change the industry, change their lives, and, you know,
getting some validation and some data back that it's a thing people will buy.
that's a big one, isn't it?
I think, when I talk about this, and even, you know, the people we've spoken to so far who
we're kind of bringing into the community, there are so many people who are in these,
like, who are in their roles and they're sitting on just great ideas, but they just don't
know, like they just can't validate whether it's worth kind of taking the punt and making
that leap.
And we really want to be the kind of organization that can help people support them and
give them the confidence that they can actually do it.
You know, we have, we all have to do it.
You had to do it, Roland, I'm sure.
Like, you know, it was a big, it's a big jump making that first kind of initial dive into
doing your own thing, but it's so rewarding and it's so beneficial that I really want
other people who've got better ideas than we had in starting an agency to, and can really
make a difference.
to give them the confidence that, yes, we can kind of validate that idea and it can be a
success without kind of, again, what Phil said, like giving away a load of equity or just
taking a huge financial and, yeah, just a big risk really.
That makes sense.
That's really it's really good.
You've obviously got a really clear understanding of them And I'm all right in saying that
there it's all it's a tech startup, right?
It's built around the
The customers or our product.
Yes.
Yeah.
audience is, right.
And it has always in the B2B space.
Yes, yeah, we were basically looking for a real niche that we could kind of get specific
on and the one that we have had the most experience in is probably that space.
But it sounds like you've got a really very clear understanding of them, which is, you
know, you can see it from the from this copy you've got.
There's, you've done a really good job of understanding, not just their sort of commercial
ambitions, but also their emotional, personal, you know, technical, all of those you've
dug into some different pains and gains, which is great.
So I think I think
you've honed in, which is, which is half the battle basically.
And always the first step in the process that we take anybody through is who's it for.
If you don't know that, you know, you've seen, I'm sure you've seen it.
That sort of horrible generic messaging of like, you know, grow or scale or something, but
without, you know, have solutions that drive results, you know, the kind of meaningless
things that because they're not, they're not aimed at anybody in particular.
They're just.
generic bake statement so you've done a really good job of honing in so that's really good
then
you think that's why people end up with really generic communications and branding?
Does it all stem from not understanding who you're targeting enough or even not narrowing
that focus enough?
Exactly.
It's both, but before the understanding is the deciding.
And I understand that there's a, you know, naturally as an entrepreneur, certainly, you
know, as you start your business, it seems to make logical sense that the wider you cast
your net, the more opportunity there is for people to give you money, which on paper
sounds great.
You know, why wouldn't I aim this at everybody because everybody's got some money and
somebody might give it to me.
But actually that, that
of turning away any revenue is what holds them back.
So, excuse me.
So making that decision about who you can serve best and who you want to say yes to, but
then also by implication, who you're going to say no to is really scary.
So founders don't like that.
It feels uncomfortable.
You know, like you guys said at the beginning of doing this, going into this process and
this repositioning and all of this work feels a bit scary.
It should, because if it doesn't,
you're just in the same place you always were.
So you need to make that decision, which you've done a great job at and people need to
make.
But then you're right.
Then once you know them, it's much easier to understand them, meet them, speak to them,
listen to them, go on Reddit and listen to them whinging, all of those things.
But you'll start to soak up how they talk.
And then you can speak that language back to them, which is exactly when you get that
messaging that isn't.
you know, we drive impact or something meaningless, you can talk about specific problems
and specific things, which is exactly what you've got here.
You know, these are not, these are not a list of achievements and you know, things to
avoid that are just generic, they speak really specifically about your target client.
So yeah, decide on them, then understand them.
And that gives you that gives you the messaging you want.
Can I ask her?
sorry.
harder when you're repositioning a business, you're often having a conversation with
people who have lots of different types of customers, because, you know, they've probably
organically got people interested, and they're probably also doing different things for
each of those different customers.
And so it becomes difficult to say, you know, we're going to slice off
you know, one of our one of our favorite clients here, if we if we go down this, we
wouldn't get any more work like this.
And that's been that's been really good to us.
And I think that does that makes life very difficult for established businesses.
You know, one of the things we're obviously trying to communicate to people who are
starting businesses from scratch, essentially.
How do you decide
who to focus on when you haven't got any customers?
And how narrow should that should that focus be?
Because you could go to an extreme, right?
There is the very, there's a very, very small pool of people.
And we've already spoken about why you don't want to go too broad.
So how do you decide what that target customer should look like without any previous data,
I suppose?
It's a really good question.
Sorry, excuse me.
Yeah, it's a really good question.
I think if you're starting the business from scratch, you are in a great position, which
is you can afford to go, you can afford to fish in a very small pool to start with.
Making that decision is difficult.
You don't have any data.
So it is going to be a bit of a bit of guesswork, a bit of intuition.
I think
You can test, right, with an early stage startup business.
You can test some ideas out.
So you could have a landing page or a website and you could tailor it to two or three
different target clients and run them side by side and see which gets the traction.
But quite often you'll find that startup founders have an idea of the product market fit
where they see the product market fit.
So they're already
aiming towards one segment a little bit.
Now, because they're new, they can, you know, it is okay to be quite niche at the
beginning, quite a lot of big products start very, very niche with a very specialist
audience and then grow out that audience as the product grows, as the business grows.
I mean, in terms of how you, the sort of process you go through to make that decision, I
mean, you have to kind of decide if there's a viable market for it.
So there's some numbers you can run.
you know, to test whether there's enough target audience in your country or worldwide or
wherever and how many of them are realistic in the market and how many of them are going
to be looking for something like your offer.
So you can try and run some back of a napkin numbers to see if there's a viable market.
I think there's a kind of three Fs Venn diagram of like fun, fame, fortune of like who's
going to be fun to work with?
Who are you?
going to get out of bed excited to work with, who's got some money basically to spend on
this, like who's the good fit to give you some cash for it.
And then, you know, for some businesses it's who are those clients or customers that are
going to bring their reputation up a level.
So that doesn't apply to everybody, but that's a good exercise to run through.
But I mean, there is no cut and dried answer to that, unfortunately.
It's a slight...
leap of faith at the beginning but unless you...
it shouldn't be everyone that's the...
you're going to make it harder if it's everyone just anyone someone anyone but not
everyone basically to start with and you will the market will tell you if you're in the
right space or you need to adjust
I'm writing with kind of...
We've spoken about it a bit because leaving space for serendipity is really important in
these things.
And there's a balance between, I think, being really strategic and having a real clear
plan and setting out to do a very specific thing.
And then
leaving, as I say, leaving room for that to kind of shift and change over time once you
start to have real experiences.
And I don't think, I don't think you can be at either end of that spectrum.
I think you kind of need to like move, move between the two as you sort of feel things out
a little bit.
Do you agree with that?
I think.
I've seen people spend a lot of time honing the strategy, but you're right, action beats
strategy.
Certainly when you're an early stage business, just get in, roll your sleeves up, learn
it.
That education is much more valuable than planning everything out in a nice snazzy
document, which will instantly go in the bin the day that you launch in the market anyway.
So yeah, I'm all for quick and dirty at the beginning and then...
sort of pulling back and having a bit more thought at some point about the direction.
Can I ask you another question?
sorry.
yeah, I was just gonna just to wrap that up as well, actually, just as a sort of nice kind
of bow to put on it.
I think what we're saying is having a real clear understanding of who it is that you're
going after and what things they care about is really, really fundamental to not having a
really generic brand that is just kind of solution, solution is for problems.
and is much more specific and that you say makes life much easier because it just it leads
into what you talk about on all those different channels and and it makes sales
conversations much easier.
Yeah.
I mean, we have a, we have a canvas that we created and it's, it's basically just eight
boxes on a page.
and the first one is, you know, who, who, the client, the customer, and until you get that
right to the other seven boxes just will never really be that valuable.
But when you get that right, it flows, everything flows from that and it just makes
everything easier, but it's hard.
It's really hard to do it.
I get, I get that that's the.
tough, a tough decision.
how much should you be talking about the problems that customers are facing versus getting
into the detail of your product and how early and I suppose, how do you find that balance
between the two?
Because I think it does obviously need to be in balance.
I think, yeah, so what the balance between problem and solution.
Yeah.
I think you definitely need, you can't have one without the other, right?
That's the thing.
So I think at the minute, my gut is you've done a really nice job of talking about
problems and sort of benefits here.
But then I'm kind of, I'm still not 100 % clear on which solution is the one that gives me
all of these.
Is it all of them?
Is it one of them?
Like if I just got coaching and peer support, would that actually help me avoid the long,
expensive, complex process of building a product?
No.
So they're not linked directly.
Whereas if you call this a program, and it was a sequential three steps through product,
brand, sales, effectively, they all then, as a program, marry to these problems.
So then it becomes the solution to the problems you've outlined.
You could, on the back end, decide whether people could
at different steps if they've already got a product maybe they could still come in and you
know join from step in just want to brand and build or sorry brand and scale or whatever
you called it but yeah I feel like at the minute it's just a slight disconnect there
that's all but
That's really interesting though because we've kind of got a load of stuff about problems,
a couple of different products which are kind of defined to varying degrees but the bridge
between the two maybe feels like
it involves them doing a lot more cognitive thinking.
to decide something, whereas you've got this problem, if this thing solves it, and it will
make you rich and not have to work in that job anymore, here's us, we're good, we're
credible, buy it or join it.
That's kind of it.
That single mindedness is very, very effective for conversion, just almost a landing page
mentality.
It's one offer, one target client, one offer, one problem, one solution, one thing, one
call to action.
That single mindedness is...
rate to stop.
As soon as you've got cognitive load, choices, options, conversion rates drop because
people have to think and nobody wants to think.
They just want to be convinced all the way through the page that this is brilliant.
Even though I don't need the first bit, it still sounds good.
I'm going to do it.
That's my gut.
I wanted to just maybe kind of
Get your thoughts on something that, you know, Adam and I have been talking about a lot
over the past couple of weeks, which is, I suppose how the kind of brand positioning
approach has changed since COVID, since things became a bit more virtual.
And one of the things that we've tried to do with this is, which we didn't do with Yaya at
all, is be the faces of it and put ourselves there so that there's a human
element to this.
We've recorded a lot of videos, we've actually put a lot of photographs of ourselves up
there.
We've put photographs of dogs up there as well.
And, you know, in kind of tandem with doing all this stuff, trying to raise our profile,
being more active on places like LinkedIn and, and YouTube and do all that kind of stuff.
Is that something that you're seeing as a trend in general?
And how do you feel about it?
Yeah, I think it's...
Yeah, I do see it more and more.
I think it's, you know.
I think it's more and more valuable the more and more digitized and the more and more
automated things have got that that human connection is really important.
It's funny, I was chatting to an agency that I worked with yesterday and we talked about
cold calling, right?
And do you remember like pre -COVID, you know, people wouldn't spit on them if they were
on fire.
Cold callers were like, nobody wanted that.
And we were saying, well,
I can see that in an era of getting sent awful AI spam messages with fake personalization,
getting a phone call from a human is going to be like actually really quite a nice
experience as somebody going, you know, because it can't be fake, right?
Maybe it can eventually, but not convincingly, but there's something about that human to
human voice that actually cold calling might well come back as a really interesting
channel for people to use for lead generation and things.
And it's the similar principle.
I think that
As everything becomes more and more automated and digitized, that anytime you can have
some human element will be a massive factor.
I think in terms of it being the whole positioning, that's where I don't think it can be.
I think you need the figurehead people to be the champions of the positioning.
But unless you've got real sort of clout or reach, it's
know, I wouldn't advise any agencies solely relying on that as being their sort of point
of difference or the thing that they're known for.
It's also difficult to maintain, but I think having it is a very good idea, especially...
Yeah, especially when you've got a product like this, which is in effect, you know, self
-serve DIY, whatever we call it.
I think people want to know that there are on demand accelerator.
There we go.
There you go.
When people want an on demand accelerator, I think they want to know that there's a, yeah,
there's a couple of smart guys, you know, behind the scenes that are behind it all.
That's
credibility and trust factor I think you wouldn't get if you took your, if you took you
out of this equation, it would feel like I'm downloading, I'm downloading some files from
Google Drive, you know, where I think you need that, that feeling that it's being very
crafted and considered through everything that you've done over the years.
So yeah, I'm all for it.
good to know because, you know, essentially we could do this all kind of very faceless and
create all the kind of assets and the brand elements being very much like, here's your
kind of, here's your guide, here's your templates, here's your tools and keep it very like
separate to having kind of any personal element to it.
You know, it's kind of, it'd been interesting putting ourselves like at the front of this.
I don't know, like.
How much, as you said, like we can keep that consistently and how much we do that is kind
of what we're trying to work out now really, I guess, with like how we present the brand
visually.
Like, do we put ourselves at the heart of that?
Like, do we kind of, you know, like just getting that balance right, I guess, because, you
know, I don't know if you've got the clout or, you know, if we haven't done this stuff
before, so people were kind of just getting to kind of know who we are.
So yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, just trying to find that right kind of balance really is
I think where we're at.
Well, I was going to say there's a movement at the minute of this idea of build it in
public, which is it's much more endearing and attractive for you guys to be the face
because people can watch you build your business as they're building theirs.
You only need to be a step or two ahead of them.
But actually,
The fact that you're not so far, you're not, you know, and I mean this in the most
respectful way, but not Stephen Bartlett, some people that feel kind of, you know, sort of
beyond the, you know, unobtainable.
The fact that you're building it in public with, you know, just a bit ahead of them is
actually quite inspiring, I think, for people rather than it feeling like it's, they've
got to be all polished and done and everything perfect.
I think it's a good, it's good for that target client to see this as you do it.
So yeah, I think it's a smart thing.
So, so I think I, I really agree with that whole building in public thing.
And I think there's that, is definitely the approach that we're doing and definitely the
approach that we're recommending and actually seeing clients come and talk to us about and
say, look, I want, I want to do this.
How do I do it?
the reason I think that's so important is because you, and again, this kind of comes back
to this point about tech innovators and early adopters.
Like they are.
interested in being part of the process of building it.
They want to be, they want to understand if you're a tech innovator, what's under the
hood, what's the technical stuff, how are you thinking about these problems?
And if you're an early adopter, you know, okay, I like the fact that it that I'm the first
to go and use this thing and that it's being built and I can see, you know, this is what
you're working on.
This is how you're thinking about it.
And you know, perhaps even kind of contribute and do this, you know, take part in that.
I think, I think with the
With the visibility thing and this kind of evangelism stuff, there's no way that we could
launch this business without me and Adam being front and center of it, because this
business is about people investing in access to our expertise.
So if it was totally faceless, it just wouldn't work.
We have to be front and center because that's what people are really.
buying is what we know and our experience.
And, you know, we're a little bit kind of further down the road than them.
And we've worked with people, you know, all over the world, so we can help them move a bit
faster down, down their path.
And I think that is also transferable to pretty much any B2B business.
So I think a lot of the way that B2B business is a branded marketing, it is, it is about
expertise.
Even if it's a tech product, it has come from somebody knowing, you know,
deep insights about the problem space and how those problems can be solved and then
creating a solution to them that nails all of those kinds of things.
And I think over time, it becomes less critical probably.
So if you are Salesforce, then you probably don't need to have somebody out kind of, you
know, front and center talking about all the interesting ideas and ways that you think
about the world differently to everybody else.
But if you're just launching something new from nowhere and you're basically trying to get
early adopter people to buy into your, you know, philosophy, your ideas, the way that you
think things should be different.
You lose a lot of authenticity if you don't put a face to that.
And you can't give a human story for why you should listen to this person's ideas, because
I don't think that a business having interesting ideas is as compelling as a human being
having interesting ideas born from experience, you know, trying to solve
specific problems for for people.
So I think all of that, plus I think there's a generational shift where people want to see
transparency and authenticity and what your values are before they work with you.
Plus the fact that, you know, five, six years ago, you could just meet up with people and
go for lunch or go for a coffee or go for a beer.
And that's harder to do now.
So there's a barrier to getting all of those things in person.
I think all of that means that if you've
founder business, it's going to be really, really hard to found a business and stay in the
cupboard and, you know, just kind of sell up, sell at arm's length.
I think, I think it's, I personally think the trend will be more and more of this stuff
and more founders as quasi -influencers and having to learn a, yet another skill set of
being the, being the face and being the voice of, of your business in a digital space.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think, you think about lots of brands, like, you know, when I was a kid, you didn't know
who ran companies, they were just sort of faceless companies.
And I know it's, you know, a lot of companies still are faceless.
But like you said, more and more, you do know who runs them.
They are personalities and they are influential people.
You know, you know, the founders or the CEOs of these companies nowadays.
people follow them.
They don't, you know, like on LinkedIn, I don't follow any massive amount of companies.
And if I do, they're not really that interesting, but I do follow the people who run those
businesses because I want to hear what they have to say.
And then, you know, through that channel, I do learn about their business, but I don't, I
don't sign up to listen to a business broadcast, you know, LinkedIn posts at me.
That's not, I've got no interest in that.
So I think you, I think you've done well to
to be the face.
It's difficult and weird at first isn't it but I'll just kind of get through the yeah, I'm
going to get through this first video.
Yeah.
but like you said, you know, there is so much more kind of connection to the founders and
the business.
And I think people do start to like, you know, they, they buy from them, don't they?
And I think, you know, as you say, we're not kind of Stephen Bartlett's, but
I hope we come across as quite genuine, quite authentic.
And I think that's hopefully what a lot of other founders share the same values.
And I think that's kind of what we're kind of hoping to create.
And I think putting ourselves out there is part of that, right?
We have to practice what we preach.
And I think this.
Absolutely, and also there's just that thing of, they call it the Prattfall effect, but
you know there was an era where everybody presented themselves on LinkedIn as absolutely
super perfect, you know, everything was glossed up.
But it just, that veneer just never felt very real, so nobody warmed to anybody, but the
Prattfall effect is that like, people who up are much more, you know, they're much more
attractive and relatable, and you warm to people who make mistakes.
than people who are just perfectly polished all the time.
So I think that whole building in public and making mistakes in public is actually really
attractive.
Tell me about the name, the Colt products name.
Where's that?
Tell me.
I'm curious about the thinking where that's come from, where it's going.
want to know the honest answer to that is that we wanted something that felt very Marmite
and it's very deliberately positioned in a way that some people will be like what that
kind of feels uncomfortable and my theory is that that kind of jarring reaction is
a better lasting reaction, then yeah, that feels that feels fine.
I don't know.
We talked we were like, what did you just called it like, accelerate?
Or, you know?
Yeah.
And it would be like, Yeah, that seems like that's an obvious name for you to have.
Whereas cult products is like, cult?
I don't know about that.
Does it sound like a beauty brand?
That's odd.
And actually the same is true of the visual identity as well that we're working on where,
you know, we've been playing around with lots of imagery that is deliberately a bit
Marmite.
I think it's a really good idea.
I think anytime there's that, because in the B2B world, not to disparage us B2Bers, but
anytime there's a pattern disrupt, like a pattern interrupt of like, yeah, you know, like,
you know, it always reminds me of, normally apprentice when they have to name their teams.
Yeah, like accelerate, Accenture, and that's just like, for sake.
So, you know, the fact that you've gone with something, synergy, yeah.
There must be about eight synergy, team synergy by now.
You know, the fact you've gone a different way with it, I think is a really good idea.
And I think I've seen some of the visuals, I think just lean into that even more because
it does.
It isn't another synergy accelerator or, you know, one of those things it does.
It does give you a bit more personality to play with and a lot of it, especially with, you
know, with the podcast, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, you can see a lot of podcasts about how to do this or marketing this and.
Yeah, I think it's a good idea.
I'd go with it.
Ramp it up.
The more people say, I'm not sure about that, the more validated I feel.
I think that's the feedback I'm really looking for.
I love it.
I just like, I don't know.
Yeah.
to come full circle, right?
You know, back to the back to even just picking a target client target customer.
It should be Marmite, right?
What you put out there should not be right for some people, and it should be right for
some.
And it's the same all the way through it.
You shouldn't be afraid to piss people off.
You don't have to be.
You should be obnoxious or rude about it.
But the whole point of positioning is a filtering system.
It should filter out the wrong ones to filter in the right ones.
And so
your analogy of Marmite is totally right.
Every decision you make should be Marmite.
Because what's the opposite?
What's like the most generic thing that everybody loves?
I can't think of what the opposite of Marmite is.
But you know, that you know, if it's yeah, you know, if you're if you're to be more
Marmite than butter all the way through the decision making process, because otherwise,
you're left with I'm not going to follow that analogy through losing that train of
thought.
but if you take one thing from this whole podcast, being more Marmite than butter, I think
is a good takeaway.
Yeah, if you're not pissing somebody off, you're not turning anybody on.
You've got to be willing to make something taste lovely to some people and disgusting for
other people.
Otherwise, it's just going to taste average to everyone and nobody wants that.
There you go.
think also selfishly, like we want to have a bit of fun with this as well and enjoy it and
put kind of a bit of our energy and personality into it.
You know, I think that's quite, that's, you know, it's something that, you know, we've
done a lot of stuff for clients in the past and this feels like different because we're
doing it for ourselves and we're not for ourselves obviously, it's for other people in the
community.
But yeah, I think
I think we want to express ourselves a little bit differently and have that enjoyment and
put stuff out there that we're like, okay, that's quite weird and different, but I think
you're right, Ronan.
The right people will want to it, and if they don't, I guess that's also quite good, I
guess.
It breeds a reaction, doesn't it?
Well, thinking of going back to your point about how things have changed since COVID,
right?
The world is, you know, there are so many people around, so many people changing jobs, you
know, the whole world of work has totally shifted.
People are exploring things, but there are also just loads and loads of fragmented,
there's just a lot of everything, right?
A, so there are a million...
so you do need to think differently and enjoy it and do something different.
But there's just a lot of fragmented niches.
There's so many niches.
There's so many specialisms.
You know, in the agency world, they used to just be about four kinds of agency, and then
it split off into becoming eight.
And then, you know, nowadays, you can find, you know, somebody who'll do you Bing ads for
left handed dentists in Bristol, right?
It's just everything's got so fragmented down to that granular level.
So
think you don't need loads of people, right?
You don't need a massive audience to have a very viable business.
You can have, because it's also gone global, right?
So all of this stuff that you're doing, you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of
people to have a very, very successful business.
You've got the whole world that you can appeal to and just really speak to your people,
you know, your cult.
And that's, that's enough to build a really very, very viable business off the back of
that.
people want to still open it out to everybody and that's the mistake.
Mm.
I think, if you can find a smaller market, as you know, if you're a big fish in a small
pool, I think that's better, to be honest, than being the reverse because you can own
something, you know, it's going to be much easier for you to become the person that people
go to for the for answers, you know, similar people, I think it's better they know you as
you know, the people who can help agencies with their with their branding.
if you'd maybe gone for just branding in general, I think it would have been much harder
to be really known for something and own it.
I want to bring all this together into just kind of one final thought maybe before we wrap
up, which is I think in terms of being different and potentially alienating some people
and kind of making other people of you.
One of the things that I think we didn't historically do particularly well
with Yaya that we're trying to do differently with this cult products program.
And that I think has become really fundamental to, you know, all of the advice that we're
giving to people is how do you actually do what you do differently in line with your
beliefs?
And I think as again, back to kind of individuals being front and center and expertise
being front and center, people have a weird energy about them and they think about
things a certain way.
So for us, me and Adam, I think I do really believe that, you know, doing a product that
is just the same as what's out there, but a bit cheaper, or, you know, works a bit faster
isn't really a thing that's worth doing.
I do really believe that when you create a brand, if you if you just start by looking at
what everyone else is doing and trying to align with that, that's really not worth doing,
and it's not going to be successful.
And, you know, when you go out and create a website, you should be thinking about who your
specific audience are and what your specific strategy are, not just kind of aping what
everyone else does.
And I feel like we have, you know, you can go out and you can just give people what they
want or what they think they want.
Or you can say actually that we have a view on this and we, you know,
that will be right for some people and some people won't want to work with us for that
reason.
In the tech space, similarly, there's a philosophy behind this technology.
It's not just a bunch of pixels, but you've got to buy into this way of working for this
technology to benefit you.
And I believe that is really, really fundamental.
In the...
agency space and in the services space, I think there are a lot of businesses that don't
really capture that in a forceful enough way and don't, or they do it, but it doesn't
appear on their website, doesn't appear in their communications, any of those kinds of
places.
I really want us to be Marmite in the sense that I want some people to kind of look at us
and go, well, that's not the way I would do that.
And some people to look at us and go, that is the perfect way to do that.
I don't want us to just be in the middle, trying to do something for everyone.
And, and so one of the things that we're trying to do as part of the brand and the part of
the product, part of the communication is actually that creative framework that we can own
and say, that's our framework for how we think about the world.
And it's an asset.
It's part of our story.
It's come from our experience.
It's different to what everyone else has.
When we talk to clients and
people going through the program, I want them to be able to say, this is our way of
thinking about the world and this is how it's different to all of the other people that
are trying to solve the same problem and help them.
You know, one of the things that we'll do as part of the program is help them to really,
really identify that really clearly.
So I think, you know, we've talked about these things today, understanding who your target
is really, really important.
Understanding and being able to communicate what their problems are really important.
understanding what your product is and actually connecting the two, I think, really,
really important, but also having actual clarity on how your product and your way of
thinking is different from everyone else.
And then communicating that effectively, and not doing the easy thing, which is which is
kind of not like, not really putting that kind of space between you and everyone else and
not being Marmite.
taking that out of the equation and saying that if you really want to try and get people
to sit up and take notice, they're going to have to do it this way.
And I'm curious what you think about that 20 minute monologue that I just delivered.
I mean, I cannot top that.
I can just agree with it.
That's exactly everything that you, yeah, that's perfect.
That's exactly everything that's in my head and everything I would say.
Yeah, it's great.
End the podcast there then, I think.
people to search for at least.
website is treacle .agency.
I have people who can just book a call with me if they've got any questions or they want
to know more, or just want me to sort of have a look at where they've got to and what I
would suggest next.
So yeah.
That's gonna be it.
Very good.
I would really highly recommend following Roland because, and also one of the very few
email newsletters that I enjoy getting because they are generally very sarcastic and funny
and very, very different from what I see other people sending out.
Here we go, Marmite not butter
That's it.
That's the end.
Yeah.
Love that.
That's it.
Yeah.
You got it.
You see he's good, isn't he?
Adam, you're gonna, we've, we've decided a lot.
We've created an on demand accelerator of Marmite Not Butter.
Two things we can take away from this.
As for us, please, if you enjoy the podcast, please like and subscribe to it and share it
with your friends.
Give it a review.
Yeah.
are interested in the Cult products program, there is a link in the show notes to get in
touch and see whether you want to become part of the beta program as we figure out what
the product shaping up to be.
Go to cultproducts .yaya .co to see the page that we've been interrogating today.
And there is a link in the show notes to the AI powered prototyping toolkit that we've
been working on and talking about week after week.
Any solo project songs or anything Adam you want to produce that you want to promote this
week?
said, no, not this week.
I think let's just hit the music and wrap it up.
But that was great.
Thanks, Roland.
That was really enjoyed it.
And we'll put your details in the bottom as well so people can find you.
But yeah, loved your input.
And yeah, really good.
Thank you so much.
Thanks very much Roland, it's been great having you on.
Maybe turn the volume down if you've got headphones in.