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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento.
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I feel like in the world of entrepreneurship and business, we throw so many buzzwords around, like resonating with your audience, building connections, all of these things but we very rarely go deep enough to uncover what actually makes this stuff happen.
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How can we implement it in our own businesses?
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And that's why I'm so very excited about today's guest, because this is someone who you'll immediately see that creating connection and building brands that resonate are truly things that he so deeply cares about, and he's got really interesting insights.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Gard Gibson.
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Gard is a transformative marketing leader with over 30 years of experience driving global brand success through innovative strategies and consumer insights.
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As the founder of Brand Heart Strategies, gard helps businesses forge authentic connections with their audiences by blending creativity with cutting edge technology and data.
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I know how many of you listeners love talking tech in the realm of all of these other things we need to focus on in our businesses.
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With a legacy of shaping iconic efforts for brands like Ford, gatorade and Wendy's, and as a recognized thought leader in customer experience in digital strategy.
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Guard brings unparalleled experience and a passion for making brands truly resonate with our audiences, something that all of us need in our own businesses, so I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Gard Gibson.
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All right, gard, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, brian.
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I'm excited to be here too.
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Heck, yes, you and I choked off the air.
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Listeners will very much enjoy you being here on the show today, because you've got that silky smooth audio coming at us, which makes me very happy as a podcaster.
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Use that sweet mic of yours to take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Gard?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things, gardner?
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00, 00, 00.
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Yeah, so I actually have spent pushing 40 years in the industry.
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I kind of had a different path there.
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I didn't go to college and get a journalism or an advertising degree or marketing degree.
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I actually have a political science degree.
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But all along I wanted to do marketing and what really drove that was the idea of understanding people.
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So political science actually has worked out well in my career because you're trying to understand the motivations for groups of people, which fundamentally that's kind of what marketing is, and I've been doing it long enough that I got involved in account planning, which was basically in the 90s how you talked about like insights and strategy around consumers and proceeded to move forward with that in my career it.
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Let me get into digital really early because I loved the idea of being able to see the response to the effort you put in the strategy you had quickly and at the time it was like lightning fast for digital.
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Continue that on and then ended up at an agency here based out of Kansas City called VML Now the world's largest agency.
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I think was there for nearly 20 years before I decided that I wanted to do something different.
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Wasn't 100% sure what that was going to be Actually started Brandheart kind of as an idea of while I think about what I want to do, I can kind of share my thoughts through writing, through the site and then started to kind of gain a little momentum with that and have been trying to take a lot of those lessons that you get from those major global corporations and help small, medium businesses more with.
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How do you leverage that?
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What does that mean for you?
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You don't have to have a hundred million dollars to have impact.
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You can learn a lot from how they approach things and how that can help you in your business.
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Yeah, I love that overview.
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And now I'm here today freezing Kansas City.
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Honestly, I love that for so many reasons.
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I'm going to call this out right here because I know this as a podcaster who hears from our global audience how much people love talking about tactics.
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And so what I love about your overview is you started with people first.
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And when we talk about marketing, everyone wants to talk about funnels and traffic and advertising and all of those things, but the fact that you started political science, I mean you hit the nail on the head there about the understanding of people.
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Talk to us about that strategic people first approach, because anyone who's wanting to us about that strategic people first approach, because anyone who's wanting to talk about marketing tactics, I believe and you clearly believe it very much that we have to start there.
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So let's talk people first.
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Yeah, I assume that most of your audience and you are familiar with Simon Sinek and his why theory, which is brilliant.
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The reality is that same thing happens for people.
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So when you're trying to market to people, if you don't understand their motivation or their why so I'll give you an example I would hear a lot of times things like oh well, our issue is affordability.
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And I would go okay, why?
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And the answer was always because we're too expensive.
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And I'm like no, I don't mean that.
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Why I mean why do they feel like it's not affordable?
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And try to get past the whole price point issue into probably value could be past.
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Experience could be the category you're in.
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But get to the core element of what people are trying to do, and I think throughout my career in marketing, I've seen what can be the heavy hand at times of advertisers, especially with a lot of money, where they basically just pound their customers and they play the numbers game.
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The problem with that is, yeah, you'll get some short-term results, but it does nothing to build your brand over time.
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As a matter of fact, you become really transactional to people.
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The brands that are extremely successful recognize that idea of I've got to build a relationship, and a relationship is a two-way street, so I need to try to use whatever I can to understand you as much as you're trying to research and understand me as a business, and I really do believe that is one of the central keys to being effective and successful.
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And I've got some of that based on just in my experience seeing that pay off and seeing when you don't do that it not paying off.
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Yeah, gard, I'll tell you what.
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This is.
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Something that stands out to me about your brand itself.
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Obviously, your company is called Brand Heart, so it's right there in your name the heart part of it, and I love your logo.
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By the way, listeners, we're obviously dropping the link to Guard's website down in the show notes.
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If you want to see his logo, I can talk about it, but seeing it is so cool.
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The heart, the actual heart, not the cartoony heart that we're all used to drawing the actual organ, the heart is right there in his logo.
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But, gar, the reason why I call that out is because a headline on your website it says at Brandheart, we simplify branding to its core.
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And then there's only one word after that connection.
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As a podcaster, I always ask when we have people who do branding, when we have them on the show.
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I always ask when we have people who do branding when we have them on the show.
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I always ask what is branding?
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It's such a big term that we throw out there that it encompasses everything.
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Of course, it's our emails that we send, it's our logo, it's our aesthetics, but it's also the user experience.
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It's all of those things.
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You boil it down even simpler of just that connection.
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What does that mean to you?
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Why?
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Why is that the lens through which you view branding so?
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if you think about it, especially in a world now where everybody's trying to figure out loyalty and they'll use.
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I love the idea of CRM, which is customer relationship management.
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Yet if you talk to almost any client about that, they just go, oh, that's our email, and it's like, well, that's not a relationship, that's just publishing things.
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Um, if you want to have long-term loyalty, you need to create some sort of a connection.
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But you're a corporate entity, so you're not.
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It's not like you're a person they can connect to.
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But you can use some of the basic human needs when it comes to interaction to make your business more welcoming, more connected, listen, and when you do that, it's wildly successful.
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Um, a great example of this is chewy.
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Now, for the record, I've never worked with chewy.
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I've worked with some other um pet brands, but what I love about them is at the base of their business.
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They are just an e-commerce store for pets, but their brand is one that actually is based on the idea of truly understanding pet owners and their connection to their pets, and not only knowing that but acting on that, and I've you know this anecdote's been around for a while, but I've seen things where people have been customers of Chewy and like they'll put food on subscription.
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They'll go in and cancel the subscription and, like anything else with subscription, they'll ask why you canceled and they'll say no longer have the pet or pet deceased.
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Chewy will send a card, flowers and tell you how sorry they are for your loss.
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Most other companies just okay.
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Well, we'll hit them back in our cycle which says if you've lapsed, we'll hit you in 60 days with a new message to try to prompt you again.
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Chewy recognizes fundamentally you're buying this for something else.
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If you've lost that, you have an emotional connection.
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I'm going to address your emotional connection.
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I'm not going to worry about can I sell you more food in six months?
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That creates a tremendous amount of connection and loyalty because people appreciate that side of a business.
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Yeah, gard, I'm going to go here with you because I don't typically go here in the context of branding, but that example that you just gave it hits home so deeply for so many people because that's a tangible emotional connection.
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We're not just talking connection in the broad sense of the word that we use in business, but that's a real human level connection from what we view.
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I mean, chewy is a massive brand that so many have heard of, it's a household name, but it retains that human connection.
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So, gard, I can already imagine the business academics or some people saying well, gard, that doesn't scale.
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How does scalability fit into all of these things?
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Well, one of the benefits is technology, honestly, and AI, even though I think a lot of people hear AI and they get kind of nervous and, yes, ai will get misused, especially in marketing it.
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It already has anybody who's touting their AI based television spot okay, thanks, like I don't.
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I don't know what the point of that was.
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It doesn't connect anything.
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It's like okay, so you that.
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But if you can use AI as a means to take the data that you have and begin to use it to understand what that means as a whole and you start to actually develop groups within your audience and you understand based on the data you actually have, you can start to understand more about them at a personal level.
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You aren't literally doing one-to-one marketing, but you're touching enough of a connective point for them that they understand and it resonates that it's almost like it's one-to-one.
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And, quite frankly, if you think about even bigger brands Southwest Airlines that is a past client of mine and if you've flown Southwest and we'll take what's in the news right now about losing open seating and some of the other things but historically, if you take Southwest, when you fly on their flights, it's it's a little different, it's a little more laid back, a little more friendly, a little more fun.
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You don't have a class system in the aircraft.
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All the seats are basically the same.
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You're able to.
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It's a little bit more space and just feels kind of more laid back and friendly and welcoming.
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So they always do really well with their customers and loyalty.
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The first time I went to their offices, walk in, they've got their front desk.
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The woman who was there literally had the same personality as anybody on a flight crew and as I worked with those clients you understood that was the way they operated.
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The entire company behind the scenes was very much in that same sort of experience and feel and belief and they were bought in and that's why it manifested all the way to the customer.
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So part of the scaling is recognizing.
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It's not just a logo, it's not just a commercial, it's not just your colors or the music bed you use.
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Your brand is every interaction that a customer has with it and that's either direct or indirect.
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So that's a way for scaling is actually recognizing.
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If I look along the entire customer journey, I can create an impression with every touch point and when I do that it actually helps define that brand which is primarily defined by your customers, but you can try to live into that and drive it the direction you want.
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So technology allowing for that kind of scaling is what really can give more power to it today.
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It was harder in the past, but now with AI, you have a lot of opportunity to try to do that to it.
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Today it was harder in the past, but now, with AI, you have a lot of opportunity to try to do that.
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Yeah, so well said.
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Bring in the heat with some real life case studies and examples here today.
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I'm so appreciative of that Hearing you talk about these, though.
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One thing that I really appreciate is nothing happens by mistake, and so we could talk about Chewy, we could talk about Southwest, we could talk about your brand, we could talk about any single company on the planet, and nothing happens by mistake when it comes to the good stuff.
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A lot of stuff can happen by mistake if we don't give it attention, and there's probably bad outcomes attached there.
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But with regards to that level of intentionality and an intentional thought and strategies to support that, obviously there's someone somewhere, people like you sitting there giving it that level of attention and giving it that level of practice.
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What does that look like?
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Does it look like on a weekly basis, checking in and saying are we staying to the values that we planned when we launched our brand?
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Does it look like quarterly reviews?
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Does it look like certain actions or workflows?
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I'd love to hear how we can put this stuff into practice.
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Well, I definitely think the first thing you want to be able to do is almost script it.
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So think about your business and think about the customer that you're trying to attract.
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Script out, from the moment they're exposed to you, what your ideal pathway would be for them to become a customer, and then take a look at that and figure out what are the things that you can do to try to put it on that path.
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It won't always stay on that path, it's never perfect, but if you do that and you consider what you're trying to achieve.
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And then the other thing is you have to have metrics on everything.
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You should always have a number assigned to something or a goal that you can measure, because one thing I can tell you is very few people or companies or anything just out of the box it's perfect.
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There's a lot of learning that goes in there and a lot of trial, and especially when you're starting a business, you want to use that new period of time and any kind of dollars you can use towards marketing or effort, because it isn't always dollars and try to validate is this going to pay off?
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Is this a good approach?
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Am I getting what I need out of this?
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And as you're able to start to validate that, you'll start to build a better overall program For really big companies.
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They will have departments focused on this About.
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I guess now it's been about 15 years ago.
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I was working with Gatorade and it was when you started to have more user-generated content, so this is before Twitter.
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Have more user generated content.
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So this is before Twitter Actually at this point you kind of.
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I don't think my space was fully dead.
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Facebook was starting to grow and part of what we looked at with Gatorade was there's so much opportunity for us to see how people talk about the brand, engage with the brand.
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So we built something for them called Mission Control and it was literally a room within their offices in Chicago with a big glass wall and we staffed it.
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I think total staff in there was probably four and it was using social listening software.
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It was using an analytics off the web software, the analytics from their digital advertising, and you would start to be able to see the whole thing in front and be able to understand when opportunities rose, when there were issues that had to be addressed really fast and you could kind of see, before they took off, things that you needed to try to address quickly.
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So in those larger companies they could do that.
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But that practice can be for a smaller company.
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You can use any number of solutions to be able to try to set triggers so you know something's changed.
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When you're first starting out, it might be a lot of reading.
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You might go out and search.
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I will tell you that one of the benefits of AI out and search I will tell you that one of the benefits of AI is it's almost like a search engine, kind of on steroids.
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You can ask a question and you don't get a traditional search response.
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You get what feels like an answer.
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Now, to be fair.
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I mean the accuracy can be hit and miss sometimes, but if you always ask for sourcing, then it'll come back with why it said that and you can quickly take a look and figure out was that poorly interpreted or accurately, is it relevant or was it pulling something because of some weird connection, and pretty quickly you can have a view of your customer and kind of how they're appealing, as much as like Gatorade, and ultimately PepsiCo took that mission control over to be able to see their overall audience.
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So that's definitely one of the things I think you really want to try to do.
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Yeah, that mission control, real life glimpse into how these bigger brands get to manage their brands and guide their brands.
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That's super powerful and, listeners, if you're hearing Gar talk about this and you're thinking, well, how the heck am I going to do that?
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One very basic and free tool is something as simple as Google Alerts, where you can set up a Google Alert on your personal name, on your company name.
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You could set up a bunch of Google Alerts and anytime it's mentioned anywhere on the web, you get an email from Google saying hey, here's the link of where you're being talked about, and it's a really cool way to tune into the conversations that may be happening.
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With regards to that, some listeners might be thinking well, no one's talking about me.
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I'm a brand new brand.
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I'm a brand new business owner.
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Guard, what I really love about your business is you talked about it that you just started writing and you just started putting these things into the world, even when you still had a full time job.
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I know how easy it is to look at brands like yours.
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I'm staring at your logo.
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Honestly, I love your branding so much, but it always feels like these brands look like the final product.
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Of course, you and I both know that they're evolutionary.
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We rarely get it right right out of the gates.
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Talk to us about those building blocks and how we can evolve and iterate along the way when it comes to our branding.
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Yeah, you're right, when you first start out, if you do Google alerts unless your name's John Smith or something it can be and then it's even worse because then you're getting a bunch of stuff you don't want.
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What I did was I tried to look in the space around the topic that I was interested in.
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So, at the core level this idea of modern branding, which encompasses way more than what it has level, this idea of modern branding, which encompasses way more than what it has traditionally and trying to figure out okay, so what's important to me you know a little bit of the Simon Sinek why and honestly, my why is really I want to help companies actually build a relationship and not abuse their customers.
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Because I feel like when we got to the point where you could go to my email inbox and dump whatever you want, I mean, just think about how much of that you get.
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So this idea of you can be a successful business and still be conscientious and respectful of your customers and actually become a partner to them.
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That's what kind of excited me.
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So looking for that, I think, in trying to do the website, because the website for me is the equivalent of me putting up a storefront and a brick and mortar space, basically.
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So there were a few iterations and thoughts and, with the logo, all credit goes to a partner that I've worked with in the past and still do, mark Eimer.
00:20:50.345 --> 00:20:58.626
He is a great designer and a great creative and he pushed me on the no, we need a real heart, not the fake heart.
00:20:58.626 --> 00:21:09.328
And then, so as we started to do that, you start to be able to see how many people are coming, what they're interacting with, and then you can start to use things like google alerts.
00:21:09.328 --> 00:21:14.326
Um, when you start to get to where you can afford to spend a little bit on it.
00:21:15.230 --> 00:21:18.662
Um, there's a company called infigy and they have something called starscape.
00:21:18.662 --> 00:21:20.263
It's a.
00:21:20.263 --> 00:21:24.411
It originally was a social listening tool, but it's broadened out.
00:21:24.411 --> 00:21:28.442
It can now pull YouTube, the comments from YouTube, lexisnexis.
00:21:28.442 --> 00:21:32.390
It can get to a lot of content and it can do it fast.
00:21:32.390 --> 00:21:41.252
And what they've been able to do is they'll give you the traditional capabilities of being able to see like is our people positive about me, negative about me?
00:21:41.252 --> 00:21:42.861
If they're negative, what are they negative about?
00:21:42.861 --> 00:21:43.761
Some of that kind of stuff?
00:21:43.761 --> 00:21:54.066
But one of the cool things they've done that I think is great because it allows you to go faster is they've used ai to create summaries and the summaries they create are really good.
00:21:54.066 --> 00:22:04.921
From that, ai, um and I I know the ceo and he put a lot of effort into making sure that it wasn't like robotic response back, that it really was something that was useful.
00:22:04.921 --> 00:22:18.547
And then the other thing they do do is they do use AI to create social personas so you know who's talking about you in groups, and that's really important too, because you start to understand where the conversation's happening.
00:22:18.606 --> 00:22:22.622
And should I be involved in those conversations or allow them to go and watch?
00:22:22.622 --> 00:22:26.892
So you kind of gradually ramp yourself up.
00:22:26.892 --> 00:22:36.544
As you know, you have more out there, but, like with the logo, I literally went to a bar, sat at the bar and randomly showed people and said what do you think of this?
00:22:36.544 --> 00:22:53.655
And I didn't care what their background was, I just wanted the reaction of people and there were a couple that were like that's a little too realistic, but most of them were like that is memorable, I like it, including some asking if I was going to have t-shirts.
00:22:53.655 --> 00:23:00.143
No-transcript guard.
00:23:00.222 --> 00:23:01.244
Please do t-shirts.
00:23:01.244 --> 00:23:03.410
Let me be yet another person who pushes you there.
00:23:03.410 --> 00:23:05.101
Honestly, because it is.
00:23:05.101 --> 00:23:06.846
It's perfect for a graphic tee.
00:23:06.846 --> 00:23:09.134
Give me that vintage feel with that brand.
00:23:09.134 --> 00:23:10.500
I'm loving it 100.
00:23:10.921 --> 00:23:14.750
I'm signing up to have that t-shirt and absolutely rock it because it speaks.
00:23:14.750 --> 00:23:16.961
It speaks to people who share your values.
00:23:16.961 --> 00:23:19.106
That's what I really appreciate it about.
00:23:19.106 --> 00:23:24.167
It is that you, as a businessman, you put the heart into brands that you work with.
00:23:24.167 --> 00:23:38.047
You put the heart into marketing considerations and for those of us who share that value and we appreciate that component of your work, we want to further enhance that and share that message with the world and I think it's so important and what's really fascinating to me.
00:23:38.160 --> 00:23:49.482
I kind of teased it at the top of this episode, but I love how much you focus on the people and how much you focus on the heart, but you also have that rare combination of technology which is you're preaching to the choir here.
00:23:49.482 --> 00:23:51.573
So many of our listeners are always looking for that.
00:23:51.573 --> 00:24:03.044
You've brought up some really cool use cases of real life AI and I love the fact that you shouted out your friend's company, who does some really powerful work that allows us to gain those insights from an AI perspective.
00:24:03.044 --> 00:24:06.385
Listeners love hearing how fellow business owners are using AI.
00:24:06.385 --> 00:24:10.048
Talk to us about some of those ways that you're using AI to get ahead faster.
00:24:10.789 --> 00:24:21.217
Yeah, I mean when you come from a background of agencies where there's pretty decent sized staffs, when you want to do research on something there's entire groups that do that for you.
00:24:21.217 --> 00:24:32.006
You'll do some of it yourself, but there's other groups that you can bring in when you go out on your own.
00:24:32.006 --> 00:24:32.847
Those groups aren't there.
00:24:32.847 --> 00:24:40.003
So I had taken a look at what was out there and I liked the way ChatGPT kind of worked, mostly because I could verify sourcing for it.
00:24:40.003 --> 00:24:48.915
So I use it as it's like the flash for research when I'm writing stuff.
00:24:48.915 --> 00:24:53.251
I'll turn around and be able to put in fundamentally what it is that I'm going to write.
00:24:53.251 --> 00:24:59.393
It won't be as polished or like meant to be published, but I can get the thought across.
00:24:59.393 --> 00:25:29.486
I can use chat GPT to go out and one validate that there is information to back that up and it's not just me having a random opinion and then look at those sources pretty quickly and that means when you're writing things you're able to more quickly bring in like empirical truth versus opinion and that makes a big difference because when you're starting a business there's a lot of God.
00:25:29.486 --> 00:25:30.228
I hope this works.
