Deb Gabor, Keynote Speaker, Author, CEO, Sol Marketing
Deb Gabor is the founder of Sol Marketing, a consultancy that has led successful strategy engagements since 2003 for global brands like Dell, Microsoft, and NBCUniversal, and for numerous digital brands, including Allrecipes, Cheezburger, HomeAway, and many more.
A leading expert on brand disasters, she is the author of Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customers Laid and Sell the Hell out of Anything, and she has been featured in USA Today and other major publications. A displaced Midwesterner, Deb currently lives in Austin, Texas, but travels frequently to help her clients build bulletproof brands.
https://debgabor.com/
https://www.solmarketing.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgabor/
https://www.facebook.com/deb.gabor
https://twitter.com/deb_sol
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive.
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services, I’m Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host and our guest today is Deb Gábor and she is founder of Sol Marketing. She's also author of Branding is Sex Get Your Customers Laid and Sell the Hell Out of Anything, which I Love. She's also author of Irrational Loyalty. And we're going to talk a little bit about branding, about loyalty, about how we can drive customer engagement, customer loyalty through branding, through strategy. I'm excited about this. A lot of great content, lot of great ideas. I've had a chance to hear Deb speak a couple of different times. And so I'm excited for her to have this conversation with me. So with that, Deb, welcome to the program.
[00:01:30] Thank you. I'm so excited. So why don't we start with. Well, we start with a little bit your background. How did you get into branding? How did you get into loyalty? What was the background that got you into this space?
[00:01:41] I've been doing this in some form or fashion for my entire adult life. I like to tell people that I was an accidental entrepreneur, and that's because I'm a really crappy employee unemployable, as he like to say.
[00:01:52] Yes, exactly.
[00:01:54] It was like sort of manifest destiny. It's not that I have problems with authority. I just have problems with authority when it isn't me.
[00:02:01] So other people know everything.
[00:02:04] So everything was pointing towards, you know, me kind of having my own thing. So there's my career as bifurcates. By the half that I spent working for other people than the half that I spent working for other people, but working for myself and my own services business. So I grew up in the technology industry, mostly working on marketing and brand and product management, product marketing, communications. You know, that kind of stuff for a very, very, very high tech organization. So my very first job out of college, I worked in Bell Labs and this is germane to the conversation because this is where this whole branding methodology really originated. So if you can imagine, I worked at a place that was so high tech that the people who were working next to me, some of them were actually Nobel Prize winning scientists and the nuances of making emotional connections with people, especially in a world where you're selling like super, super high tech telecommunications and data communications products, mostly to other providers of telecommunications and data communications services. So like the carriers, et cetera, the nuance of making deep emotional connections and creating meaning that moves people hearts, minds and wallets was something that was largely lost on a high tech audience. And so, you know, through the process of of working, you know, working at Bell Labs and I was there through, you know, some really interesting business things that were happening to three new companies. And then I went to work for a number of technology startups, mostly on the hardware side of the business. But I worked in the services part of the hardware sides of the business. So I've always had kind of a passion for for business. But these were these were companies that were household name brands in the technology industry, both on the consumer and the B2B side of it. And so I enjoyed that. And then I had an opportunity to work for an agency that went to the agency side of the business.
[00:03:54] I did that for a very short period of time, running research and consulting brand research and consulting for companies in the technology industry. And that's where I discovered I was a really, really crappy employee. And then in 2003, I thought, you know what, there's so much value in what I do. No company out there that can constrain me. So I hung a shingle with the idea that I was just gonna be an independent consultant. And then the next thing I knew, I had like all these incredible clients that were coming to me who needed the voodoo that I do. And I had to start hiring helpers. And then I woke up one day and I had a company. So that's that's kind of the that's kind of the journey I never set out to do this, but I sure am glad that I did not.
[00:04:34] Not an uncommon story. I think, you know, a lot of lot of people end up becoming business owners, business founders, kind of accidentally or sideways. As I like to say. They can wake up one morning, realize they've got a they've got a business going.
[00:04:45] Well, the common thread is that like me, my entire career has been, you know, in some kind of services. Right. Like, I love the human aspect of the delivery of a brand promise that's always like really, really ignited me. And I personally like me as a human being. I'm on a mission to create a billion dollars worth of business value for other people's businesses. Like other people's entrepreneurial ventures and things by helping them create that condition of irrational loyalty. So it suits me very well. So I love that you have your content is focused specifically on services businesses.
[00:05:15] Yeah. Well, you know, and I think it's a it's a sector that it's generally monetarily easy to start.
[00:05:20] You know, it doesn't require a whole lot of capital. Oftentimes you get businesses up and running in services fairly easily. They tend to be very difficult to scale. I mean, both in terms of, you know, figuring out the service model and really kind of process, you know, making that a process and how to scale. But also people. Right. Because if you're service based business, you're delivering value through your people. And, you know, unfortunately, people are you know, people are people. They're very dynamic. They're you know, they they're material. They have lots of differences. It's hard to make cookie hunters out of your employees. You know, and it creates all these challenges. So that's that's really why we focus on that here. So let's talk a little bit about branding, about loyalty. Give us some grounding definitions on some of these things. When we talk about building a brand, we talked about creating loyalty. What do we really speaking about? What is what is the topic?
[00:06:07] So when I talk about brands, I talk about brand with A capital B. There's there's big B branding, which is like the underlying brand foundation, the strategic foundation of your business. The core DNA of your business. It intertwines really well with like the scaling up methodology because it relies a little bit on your core values, your core purpose, your mission, your vision. You know, the relationship that you have with customers. So that's the internally facing piece of that. But then you take that. It's a construct that's made up of the part that you own, which is the brand identity that I just talked about.
[00:06:38] But then the part that customers own, which is the brand image, and ideally you want something where the brand identity, the brand image are completely aligned. A brand is the sum total of like all of those various touchpoints that your brand has with your entire ecosystem.
[00:06:52] So it's your employees, it's your partners, it's your it's your vendors, it's your customers, it's your investors, it's your advisors. It's like the families of your employees, et cetera. It goes on and on and on.
[00:07:03] But the brand is basically how you show up. And I always tell people your brand is about them and it's not about you. And so I encourage people who are listening to this, like if you want to really know if you're doing this right. Go to your Web site. And if the first word on your Web site is we or your company name, I can tell you this for free, you're doing it wrong. So your brand is about other people. And, you know, ultimately the promise that you make to them about how their lives and their world is gonna be elevated through the use of your brand makes sense.
[00:07:32] Yeah, it does. I think it's the important part for me. And that is this. It's what the customer or the employee or the stakeholder or the person feels. It's not what you want. You know, you want all sorts of things. But, you know, at the end of the day, the brand is defined by by your customers about the person receiving and not your strategy.
[00:07:50] And when where do people typically get that wrong and or what are the mistakes or kind of the mistake of thinking or approach to this that most companies missed up on when it comes to branding?
[00:08:00] Most companies misstep on branding when they spend all of their top all of their time and energy talking, talking about, you know, their bells and whistles and what they think differentiates the brands don't compete to be different. They compete to be unique and they compete to be meaningful. Right.
[00:08:17] And when brands spend all of their time talking about their speeds and feeds and bells and whistles and the lipstick that they put on on the pig, basically, that's like selling an ice cream by saying it's cold and it's sweet. Right. Or selling a car and saying it has wheels and a steering wheel. And it sounds funny, but like I work with a lot of brands that when we first walk in the door, that's how they're marketing themselves.
[00:08:41] And so, like I always think about it in terms of cars, because it's something that people can really relate to. So when you buy an automobile, there are baseline requirements for the category which in order to be considered, let's take luxury SUV, mid-sized luxury SUV, because I drive one of those. It has to have wheels and it has to have a steering wheel and a chassis and some mode of pre ambulation. It doesn't even have to be a combustion engine anymore because you can buy a hybrid or an all electric car right now. And it has to have, you know, the things that are required by law for you to have. But in order to be considered a mid-sized luxury SUV, you probably have to have leather seats. You definitely have to have Bluetooth. Right. These are the things that, you know, five years ago if you went to market to buy a new car. Bluetooth was like this new fangled offering that, frankly, you paid extra for. I'm old enough to have purchased a car where power door locks and power windows were an option. I paid 400 bucks for it. I paid three hundred dollars for a vanity mirror. You wouldn't even think of purchasing a car today without any of those things. So I always lecture to people if you're marketing on the basis of those things. Those are those options packages that you think make your thing better than everybody else's. Today's options packages become tomorrow's standard equipment. And if you're trying to differentiate yourself on the basis of a feature or some functionality, then you're not creating a brand that is going to be long term sustainable. The best brands in the world are the ones that become part of the person who uses them. And that's the essence of how I think about branding.
[00:10:08] Interesting. Give us an example. Can you give us example of a brand who has done a good job of, you know, in general or for you specifically and has become part of you more than just a set of features and benefits?
[00:10:19] I know. A brand here that's like a little bit of a cop out because there's a lot of people who love this, but I am irrationally loyal to this brand. And I'm going to have to say that that's got to Apple. And specifically, specifically the iPhone. I am so, so irrationally loyal to Apple that I've had like every I think they've ever made. Because, you know what? I'm about it. Technology. My irrational loyalty, meaning like this brand is so much a part of me is so strong that a couple of years ago when Samsung came out with like a really, really awesome competitive equipment, which like it looked amazing and it had better performance, better glass, more durability, it cost less. I could get it at Best Buy, store it and have to like go and wait in line at the store. And God forbid I should have to spend more than 30 seconds in an Apple store because it makes me twitchy know like all of those kinds of things. When I got in there and I held it and I looked at it and I saw the features and functionality, it seemed like it completely fit everything I needed and it was two hundred dollars less. And I you know, and I could get it. It was very, very available. Yet when I held it in my hand, as beautiful and amazing as it was, I felt dirty.
[00:11:23] And I'm like, I'm cheating on Apple. Yes, exactly.
[00:11:29] So this notion of irrational loyalty, the best brands in the world create this feeling of irrational loyalty, this idea that the brand is so indispensible to the user that the user would feel like they were cheating on it if they were to choose something else. Right. And, you know, it's the same reason why every time, like I've moved and asked, I live in Austin. I've been here for like 22 years. Like I've moved in Austin like four times. It's the same reason why every time I move, I use the same moving company like I'm irrationally loyal to them. And, you know, it's the same reason why when I when I book when I book hotels, I look for my favorite hotel chains. And I and I try all the time to stay in the same place. I feel like I'm I'm cheating, you know, and cheating if I were to choose something else. Even even if American Express gives me like four hundred and fifty two thousand points to stay in a competitive hotel, I feel gross. And so that having that irrational loyalty relationship is what separates the good brands from the worst. So just to go back to your original question, which was like where do brands where brands mess up, where do companies mess this up? They mess it up by not going far enough up. Maslow's hierarchy of needs to make the brand part of a person's self-concept like part of the person that they are. If you're selling anything you want to have like coke level loyalty. And what I mean by Coke level loyalty is like people identify as either Coke people or Pepsi people. It's the ultimate, right?
[00:12:59] Yeah. How did they do that? I mean, there's this Sprinkel like powdered oxytocin or something on the products that we touch them that you it's a chemical reaction they got. How do you create that kind of kind of thinking, that kind of bond, that kind of emotional reaction, missional connection to the brands?
[00:13:14] So there's there's a couple of things. The first thing they do is that they aim their brand at an ideal archetypal customer. We call this the ideal customer archetype. And I think in a scaling up methodology, they talk about the core customer. This goes beyond the core customer. Like I like I work with tons of companies who are, you know, who have coaches and who go through this process. And, you know, we we have a business coach and, you know, we we're working on the seven strata of strategy and the scaling up methodology as well. So I know it very, very well. But I also know like where it stops and branding begins. And so this idea of identifying a core customer is actually creating not just a demographic or firm or graphic picture of like who is a good customer for your business, but who is the singular customer for whom this business is built. Right. One hundred percent lock, stock and barrel like this is who this brand is for. And creating an actual like a like a picture that's that goes into, you know, hopes, fears, dreams, desires, wants, needs. What do they look like? What did they drive? What kind of shoes do they wear? Where do they live? Where do they go on vacation? What's most important to them? What makes them feel sexy like getting inside their head and taking a walk in their shoes to understand, you know, ultimately who is this person and what what are they trying to create for their lives, not just through the use of your brand, but just in life in general. So that's the first piece to figure out who is your ideal archetypal Northstar customer? Because I'm not really sure who said this, but they always say if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it with amazing accuracy hundred percent of the time.
[00:14:47] Right.
[00:14:48] And so my clients actually draw this. Like I make them put pen to paper and do it as a group and I make them draw a picture of their crazy ideal customer. And, you know, the very, very creatively advanced ones actually make infographics out of them or make life size cardboard cutouts that they bring to their meetings. But it humanizes the brand. Right. And then the second piece really is, is kind of the core of the whole thinking about strategic brand branding methodology. And that is once you know who that person is, answer these three questions. If you do nothing else in branding, do this. The first question is what does it say about that person that they use this brand? What does it say about them that they hire this plumber? What does it say about them that they fly this airline? What does it say about them that they hire this CPA for their business or they use this software or whatever? What does it say about that? That's where you take the brand and turn it away from you and turn it on to customers. And that's really the self-expressive benefits. What does it say about me that I'm an iPhone enthusiast versus like I feel like I'm cheating on Apple if I were to use a Samsung? I can tell you, you know, one of my coworkers who uses an Android phone, and every time he texts me and I see that green bubbles come up, it gives me a weird feeling. Right.
[00:15:59] You're you're you're cool fraternizing with the enemy.
[00:16:04] Yeah, exactly. It's irrational, isn't it? It's crazy. The second question that we want you to answer about that ideal customer is what is the singular thing that your customer gets from you that they can't get from anyone else? This is the hardest question to answer. And it's the most important.
[00:16:21] It's the one where I make all my money, because this is the one where you actually have to go out and you have to do some digging and you have to do some asking and you have to do some discovery and you have to be willing to hear some things that maybe, maybe don't make you feel good. But, you know, figure out what is the one thing they get from you that they can't get from anyone else. And here's a hint. It's never a feature. It's never a feature. It's always in essence. And I and I know that this community really likes the Clayton CHRISTIANSEN jobs to be done and stuff. The idea here is like figure out what's the milkshake job that people are hiring your brand specifically to do for them. Like, what is the one thing, the singular thing? And then the third question.
[00:16:59] This is the hero question. This is also the sex question is how do you make your customer the hero in their own story? It requires you to understand what is their story and what's your promise to them. So they get to get a sidekick in this process of life. And your brand is that sidekick for that particular category. How do you make them the hero? They get to be the protagonist. They get to win. They get the guy. They get the girl at the end. You know, they get the big onscreen kiss and get to walk away into the sunset. Like, how do you enable that for them? If you do nothing else in branding, if all you do is like focus on that ideal archetypal customer and then answer those three questions, you basically have your brand strategy done.
[00:17:42] And examples. Anything you can kind of use to illustrate, you know, answering these three questions well or kind or a brand that has done answered these questions.
[00:17:49] Well, let's see. You know, let's let's do let's do an exercise. Let's pick a brand that you like. And we can we can kind of pick it apart a little bit here.
[00:17:59] Let's choose Patagonia. I'm a big outdoors guy. You know, I've I've always felt like I pay way too much for Patagonia Patagonia gear, but yet I still do it.
[00:18:06] Yeah, the goal of branding is to make price irrelevant. Exactly.
[00:18:10] Right. Right. OK. So who do you think is the ideal customer for Patagonia? If you could put your if you could put your finger on it. Who who is that brand specifically built for? Is it a man or woman? Something else?
[00:18:23] You think it's fairly gender neutral? I think.
[00:18:25] I think there is this kind of combination of outdoors, but also sort of socially socially enlightened. I don't think it's really consciously. I don't think of it as like, you know, super activist, but, you know, very kind of practical. You know, look at the look at the environment. How do our practices and processes kind of impact, impact the world we live in? I mean, that's kind of my my kind of connection to it. I think it's also there's a there's a performance element to it. You know, there's people that that want high performance gear. You know, that's not super flashy and tacky. But, you know, tested by people that are in the community like real climbers, real adventures, ventures. You know, these these products have been to the tops of mountains, to the you know, in the most remote parts of the world. You like that kind of feeling. That's what it was.
[00:19:18] Yeah. So you're not necessarily climbing Mount Everest tomorrow, but you could. Right. You know, if you're in your Patagonia gear. And so I think that you're 100 percent right there. You know, one of the things I notice about your description, you are you're like a straight a student of this. And also, you know, I know you've heard that before. For me. And, you know, you've worked in and around this a lot, but it's very astute of you to observe. Like these are some of the human characteristics of the person who uses this. This is what they're like. And it's interesting. You talked a lot about beliefs and values, didn't you? You know, like this is somebody who you know, who who values the environment. These are also people because Patagonia also really values like sustainable business practices. The circular economy, they also value, you know, rights for workers. They don't want to devalue their brand by selling it on Amazon. There's a lot of things here. People who align with that brand are the ideal customer. So it's it's very principled outdoor person. Maybe they're not like I don't think that their ideal customer. It's like a hard core, outdoors, high performance person. It really is the normal people like you and me who like to get outside, right, and who have all these values. So that's that's the ideal customer. So then let's ask the question. You like the brand a lot. What does it say about you, Bruce, that that you that you like Patagonia. What is it? What does it say to other people about you?
[00:20:41] I said you're saying so I would I would say that it's that I'm someone who appreciates kind of quality and performance, but also in a non sort of garish, flashy way. I think there is there's a certain element of kind of practicality and like being on the world. This isn't it's not about fashion per say. It's about having good quality. That gets me where I need to go. It allows me to kind of do do what I want to do, you know, whether it's, you know, be able to get around New York City or whether it's, you know, climbing in the mountains, you know, it has that kind of practicality and functionality around it or.
[00:21:17] Yeah.
[00:21:19] Right. And it also says to me that you're down to earth, that you're it. It says that you're both reliable and adventurous, like you're a guy. That is going to help me go on a little journey of self-discovery, right wing medicine.
[00:21:35] That's really what it's about.
[00:21:38] And I always say, like people in Patagonia, that's all my Seattle friend. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:43] I mean, and and the brand image is like very, very different than, say, like Chanel. Right. If we were working on this for Chanel, it'd be a completely different story. So those are the self-expressive benefits. The second question, what's the one thing you get from Patagonia that you can't get from anyone else? So like you've chosen Patagonia as a favorite brand. Why is it your favorite?
[00:22:00] That's the one thing interesting. What is the one thing that I get from Patagonia? You know what? I think there's there's like this history element to Patagonia that I don't think I can get anywhere else. Like there's there's a connection to, you know, historical climbing community. I mean, the founders were, you know, some of the first real climbers. There's there's history. There is a tradition, legacy that I think I feel with the brand that I you know, it's just not you know, if I go to Hurley or Black Diamond or any of these other ones that, you know, they're big. They have qualities, but they don't have the history.
[00:22:32] Ok. So, you know, the one thing that you get is this connection to, you know, hundred plus year legacy, you know, exploration. Right. It's it's your it's your way to be able to pay that off. And then the third question, how does it make you a hero in your own story, in the Bruce story? How are you a hero?
[00:22:48] Well, let's me go out and do those things. You know, it reminds me it reminds me that those are important to me, reminds me that that's an important part of of the activities that I do when I go meet clients. I'm often, you know, tacking on various adventures before and after these things. You know, and I think it's a it's it's a little gentle reminder about what's important to me.
[00:23:08] And then do you. Do you ever wear your Patagonia fleece or or your your puffy jacket or anything like that with clients?
[00:23:16] Sometimes, you know, even if you're not going to go climb a mountain. I'll I'll put it on or I'll I'll use it to get around the get around the city or to travel with it. There's a certain that there's there's adventure of being out in the wilderness.
[00:23:27] Then there's adventures of trying to navigate, you know, three connections on flights. Modern society. Yeah. Yeah. Author.
[00:23:36] So that's the essence of it. And I like this conversation that we just had right here. Like, you know, working on a brand that's familiar to a lot of people. You can basically take the answers to all those questions, that description of who the ideal customer is to aim the brand directly at them. So you can say like, hey, you can draw those people in. Right. So, you know, you're you're not an adventurer, but you're adventurous. And what's important to you is that, you know, like when you want to get outside, you can and you can you know, you can pay a much to, you know, 100 plus year legacy of of adventuring history right here in your own backyard down the street or at a national park or whatever. Right. And then you you you use that to actually create the messaging for the brand. I mean, it's really it's a really I always laugh at myself about how simplistic the formula is because I'm like it's just this is just to answer these questions. Just do this. It's that easy. The framework is easy. The work of figuring all that stuff out is a little bit more difficult, especially, you know, if you're a if you're a scaling company, sometimes you don't have the resources, mostly you don't have the time, sometimes you don't have the expertise. And then the final reason why it's hard for companies to do this on their own is ugly baby syndrome were too close to it. I always tell people like nobody loves your brand as much as you do. Don't expect that anyone else is going to love it as much as you do. And by the way, if you're a founder, like it's even worse 10 times.
[00:25:08] Ten times. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So let's talk about services, because I think that, you know, I've I've always felt that, you know, one of the challenges of service based businesses is, you know, you don't have a widget. You don't have. Software product. You don't have a thing that you're giving to the person to actually deliver the value, everything is through people.
[00:25:26] Everything is, you know, somewhat ephemeral, as is abstract. How? Why? Why is branding so important for service based businesses? And to the extent that, you know, it's nuanced differently? What are some of the differences when you go to do branding for services?
[00:25:40] Yeah, well, branding is so much more important for services than it is for any other kind of business. I guess the only other kind of business is going to be like a not for profit or even not for profit, but or a product business. Right. You can't see it. Touch it, feel it. It doesn't have heft. It's not something that you can hold in your hand. And it relies upon the most unreliable aspects of our world to deliver the experience. And that's people. Exactly right. Which, you know, it seems like it's counterintuitive.
[00:26:13] It's much, much harder to brand a service than it is to brand a product, because you have to worry about consistency and delivery. You have to worry about buying. You have to worry about compliance. You have to worry about like your product. It is delivered like your entire value proposition and your promise. And essentially your product is delivered through human beings, which like at last check. Human beings are the most irrational and ill behaved creatures on earth.
[00:26:39] Why do we always said that his business would be much easier without employees or customers? Unfortunately, yes. Yeah.
[00:26:46] Right. We need both. And and so like in the services business, I think it's doubly difficult. And when a brand does like having that solid foundation of the brand strategy that everyone is bought in on and aligned with and understands exactly what their specific role going all the way from the receptionist at the front desk to the person who who, you know, is walking around after hours like emptying our trash bins up through the CEO. Every single person in the company needs to be empowered to deliver on that brand experience. They need to understand what it is they need to understand, like how do they deliver it specifically and they need to understand the consequences of not doing it. I always point out this is becoming an old story now, but it's still my favorite. I always point out the story of United Airlines of the last couple of years, which if you remember back in twenty seventeen, they pulled that poor Dr. David Dow off an airplane at like seven o'clock at night on a Friday. I don't know about you. I travel for a living and I know you travel a lot, too. I'm sitting if my ass is in a plane seat at 7:30 on it on a Friday night, a two hundred dollar voucher is not going to get me out of it. And United Airlines, their stated brand promise like that is like printed on their annual report. And in all their materials, their stated bank brand promise is to be the most caring airline in the world.
[00:28:06] So it's ridiculous.
[00:28:09] We're the most caring airline in the world like you. You are empowered as that gate agent who caused this entire disaster. You're empowered to do not just the best you can, but whatever it takes to make sure that everybody who wants to be on that plane can be on that plane. And anybody who can be enticed to get off the plane and fly tomorrow or on a later flight is able to do that. She should have been. She should have been empowered to offer a voucher of up to ten thousand dollars to roundtrip first class side-to-side place in the world. Right. And so when you have a brand promise, when you have a strong brand promise and you want to have your company, everybody marching in the same direction to deliver on that brand promise, specifically at a services business, you have to have your brand infiltrate your culture. But also like your behavioral guidelines, your job instructions, you basically have to operationalize brand. And I think that that's the that's the best example. The other example I give is I have a client. Here's here's where you can use people and the brand experience to your advantage, where you can zig where everybody else is dying. So a quick story. I have a client services business there, about a 30 million dollar travel services company that serves like the rich and famous like the one percent of the world. These are their customers. And we did a brand exercise with them. And one of the things we do, we do this exercise on brand archetype, where we anchor the brand to a well-known storytelling motif, which is a character archetype.
[00:29:43] And they determined everybody in the travel industry is the explorer archetype. Right. Like that's the whole industry is taking you on a journey. And one of the things that we learned through our research was that their customers, the reasons that their customers travel and the reasons that their customers use a service like theirs and pay several thousand dollars a year is highly, highly customized. High touch travel planning service is because they are very well aware of and value highly the transformative power of travel that once you travel to a new place and you have a journey and you experience new things, you are never. Same again, which any kind of brand that transforms things needs to be the magician archetype. Right. And how this how this brand showed up, the magician archetype is like we make things happen. Everything should feel magical. Disneys The magician type. Right. And the way that they were showing up as a brand was actually as a stage. They were like they were just bomb farting customers with information. And the way they were handling travel medicine was very sage like. So have you ever traveled to a place where you had to get shots before you went like that or something?
[00:30:51] South Africa. Yeah, OK.
[00:30:54] And so when you go to do travel medicine, the way this company was doing it, I asked them, I said, how are you?
[00:30:58] How are you letting people know, like what they need to do for trauma medicine before they go on their safari? And they said, oh, well, we take a bunch of pages out of the medical encyclopedia about dengue fever and yellow fever and malaria. And we send it to them and then we tell them, go get these shots. And so the way that they were showing up was very much a stage which the answer to this age is, you know, find the truth that will set you free. But these are people who want to be transformed by their experience. And so this is a services company. And I said, I challenge you. How can you create a magician like experience for these folks since you're about the transformative power of travel? And they came up with it immediately. They said, oh, we send a concierge doctor to where they are any place on earth. And I was like, okay, great. And so recently they purchased a concierge medicine service. So this idea of the brand and the brand experience and having it delivered by people, it permeates every aspect of delivering on your brand promise. Like, I don't think that a services business can exist without a brand, truly.
[00:31:59] So let's talk about one other thing important.
[00:32:02] From a leadership point of view, how do leaders end up kind of impacting or conveying brand and and where does this fall down and what can leaders do to be more cognizant of how their behaviors, actions or are impacting or communicating brand to customers and stakeholders?
[00:32:19] Well, I can tell you this, that it's become increasingly important that brand is driven from the highest place in the organization.
[00:32:28] As the founder, CEO, the leader of the organization, as the leadership team of the organization, you own it like it is absolutely your responsibility. You own it, you drive it because you are the living, breathing embodiment like the walking billboard for this brand, not just to employees, but to customers, to investors, to the general public. We have seen increasingly and like rapid succession. This year there was a record number of CEOs that have been dismissed from their jobs.
[00:32:56] As of the end of September, I saw it was close to eleven hundred CEOs had either been invited to pursue excellence elsewhere by their boards or by their investors, or they stepped back or were strongly encouraged to do so. Right. And mostly because they either were behaving in a way that wasn't in accordance with the values and beliefs and performance and experience of the brand, or they were not valuing or honoring like what the brand values are, what the brand assets are, and what the brand really is about. So, you know, I will only like my company will only work with with organizations where we have a relationship with people on the leadership team. I prefer it to be the CEO, not even the CMO. So not even the chief marketing officer or chief revenue officer, like I want to get as high in an organization as I possibly can because the best brands in the world take root at the top and are delivered throughout the entire organization where where the entire experience is 100 percent consistent. I mean, think about it this way, like Uber, for instance, like this is a brand that the brand itself has faced so much controversy, both because of bad behavior on the part of the founder and the leadership team in this like ugly sort of like bro culture that ignited there.
[00:34:20] But also, if you have one bad egg in the in the dozen, like the one guy, the one Uber driver who opens fire on his passenger in the back seat, like it's it spoils like the entire the entire take and it only takes one negative action from anybody at any level in the organization to take an entire business down. That day after United Airlines made their like little 140 character Twitter apology for pulling David Dow off an airplane stock lost in one afternoon. Three hundred and fifty five million dollars worth of value. Yeah. Yeah. So and that was like I can trace all of that back. I mean, I'm sure that there are reasons why that that employee, the gate agent, wasn't trained and she security and all that kind of stuff and whatever. And she was a contractor. But the real reason was, was that one person was not truly empowered to deliver on the promise of the brand.
[00:35:19] Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think for the leadership, it just it magnifies everything by a hundredfold thousandfold. You know, if they're behaving in ways that are contrary to Theos, you own it. Yes. He's highly radical personal accountability. That's my that's my mom drama about this, too.
[00:35:35] If people wanna find out more about you, about the books, about your speaking, about the work that you do. What's the best place to get that information?
[00:35:41] I think the best place to get that information. Just go to DebGabor.com and iYou can go there. You can see information about the books. You can also like if you click on the various things that are book related on that site, you can download free chapters from both branding, sex and irrational loyalty. Braining of sex is like the How to book. And Then Irrational Loyalty is the book that wrote itself about the brand disasters of the last couple of years. And then like there's videos up there, and then you can also ask to be added to a list and find out, you know, where I'm speaking. You can follow me on social media, have a public profile on Facebook. Just search on Deb Gábor or I'm on Twitter. Deb, underscore Sol like the sun in Spanish. You can find me on LinkedIn. I love connections. I love when people write to me.
[00:36:29] I love when people, like, want to just, you know, shoot the breeze about branding. I'm literally obsessed with us. Like I can't do anything else with my life. So, like, bring it.
[00:36:38] I love it. I highly encourage people to check him out. I'll put the links in and the handles and stuff in the show notes people and glittering that. Deb, this has been great. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great insight and always fun conversation with you. Thanks for taking the time. Awesome. Thank you.
[00:36:53] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.