Braver B2B Branding | An Interview with Rick Julian

 Full Transcript: Braver B2B Workshop

Guest: Rick Julian, CCO, QV Brands
Host: Andrew Dietz, CEO, Creative Influence

Welcome, everyone, to our braver B2B workshop. This is the first in a series of small think tank discussion groups that we're hosting. Today, we're going to dive into what it takes to stand out in a world where the lines between brands often blur into a sea of sameness. And our goal is to explore how we can push the envelope without tearing it.

Take bolder stands, create branding that it's not only distinctive but positively memorable, branding that resonates with, as Rick says, heart, humor, and humanity, and which opens the door to more of the right kinds of conversations. So the business development link behind this bolder branding, not just the awareness benefits of it.

I'm Andrew Deetz, for those, there are some that I have not met before in person or even online. I'm a partner in creative influence. We're a marketing strategy communications firm, content firm, PR firm. I'll help facilitate today. And with me is my partner, Natalie Springfield. And helping co-facilitate the conversation today is our alliance partner, Rick Julian. I know some like Sarah have worked with Rick before, but others may not know him. Rick is the founder of QV brands where he's built a reputation for crafting really world-class brands through creativity, innovation, and collaboration. He's worked with a range of major clients from Coca-Cola, Delta, the Olympics to B-to-B brands like IBM and SAP.

And Rick brings perspective today on how we can push the boundaries of B2B branding. And I consider myself lucky to call Rick not just a colleague, but a good friend. And I'm really thrilled to have him here to share his expertise. Thanks, Rick. Let's go ahead and jump in. And Rick, I'll let you start it off. Tell us about the sea of sameness, as you call it.

Rick: Yeah, Well, first of all, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Andrew, and so I'm pleased to be sharing this time and virtual stage with such a qualified group of marketers and communicators. So, I look at this. I try to simplify this. I think often in branding and marketing, we can get very abstracted and very complicated. We have enormous tool sets that allow us to drill down very deep.

That says look at me rather than these, this brand is going to have an advantage. It's going to gather more attention. It will probably produce more curiosity, which leads to more clicks, which leads to more opportunities, which in the fullness of time, we hope, leads to more awareness and revenue growth. But it all starts with this awareness that humans tend to herd together and tend to do kind of sheep-like behavior. We tend to want to look and walk and talk the same. 

So we looked at a number of very profitable, high-end professional services kinds of industries, and one of the ones that we looked at were global consulting firms. And so I just took a couple of... In this case, law firms and law firms, I'm sorry. And Kristen, by the way, we're not picking on you. It just so happens. You know, you've been in the industry. You know it is ripe before a little poking.

Well, and this is true of any, almost any industry. B to B, B to C, this is the human condition. We seek shelter and uniformity. It's just our human nature. We think it's a safer place. But that safety comes at a cost. That safety and that lack of risk taking comes at the opportunity cost of the things that happen when we take some chances and the payoffs for those.

But let's zoom out and just look at this from a basic human perception standpoint. When I look at these global law firms and we cover the logos on them, has anyone established enough of a brand so that I go, oh, that's that brand? I know their work. That's that brand. What I see through this branding, you know, through an experience branding lens is a lot of very kind of generic, very safe, very undifferentiated branding here. And that means that there's a big upside. There's a big opportunity to break through the sea of sameness and become that brand that sticks out and garners more attention.

So let's go ahead and look at who we're looking at, some of the best law firms in the world. Skadden, Kirkland Ellis,  it's a little bit blurry, but all these are top shelf law firms, easily in the $100 million range globally, where a single new client could increase market share in a meaningful way.

So although these are very well established and entrenched brands that does not mean you can relax, I can remember early in my career just being utterly puzzled at the yellow pages if you got And I have the sense that a lot of very big, mature brands like these tend to kind of want to rest on their laurels and the authority that they have accumulated over time. I just think that's a very, very risky place to be. Always be selling. Always be branding. And when you're branding, we recommend that you always be bold and working your way toward that singular kind of placement in the brand scape.

So we took a very, knowing. I mean, there's a lot we could pick on here. You know, we're not going into a lot of detail, but, you know, just take Kirkland analysis as an example. Basically, the statement on the page is about how, you know, their leader in private equity or the leader in private equity. But, you know, that's a nice chest pounding, but what does that do for me? Why do I care?

I've worked with clients like Nelson Mullins, you know, which takes. me, right? This thing that Andrew talked about. What's in it for me as the prospective client of Kirkland Ellis? Well, since they're in private equity, what is in it for me may be some financing. And the narrative, the subtext of this narrative is that these women who grew some local coffee beans that were now able to expand their brand globally got a $2 billion infusion of private equity.

Those are the cornerstones. Those are the roots of a narrative. Those are the roots of a story that can really amplify the purpose, the mission, the value of this brand. But even at face value, when we just kind of compare where they were to where they are now, the humanity that we've added into this immediately starts to get the wheels turning in the human mind in the way that colored leaves don't. There's something about human faces that just draws you in and gets your wheels turning in ways that more abstracted, generic kind of imagery like the leaves, as pretty as they are. Those are very pretty leaves, but I would suggest that putting faces and language on this page is going to give you that separation.

Andrew: Very quickly. If I can add, Rick, it also tease up storytelling. And again, linking branding to business development, the value is not just, make it look pretty and, communicate one simple brand message. But how are you equipping your professionals, your sales force, your executives, et cetera, to have more of the right conversations, you know, distinctive point of view and stories that allow them to, to have those conversations is what does it.

Rick: Yeah. So our job as marketers, including what's on the homepage, should, should tee that up.

Yeah. Branding is all very contextual, right? And so what we want to do, our overall goal is to create separation between your brand and these competitor brands. So the first thing that you do is just say, let's look what everyone else is doing and then say, don't do that. Right. Just don't do that. If everyone else is going generic, don't go generic. Everyone else is doing these disembodied, abstracted images, do faces. If everyone on the other hand is doing faces, then do something different. Okay. And you'll see some further examples of how to do difference as we move through.

Just be conceptually sensitive and don't be over here. Be over here. So,  just a few ideas and welcome yours as well. But what makes something unboring in B2B, or any marketing? It's  obvious when you step away, did you remember what that was? Just think about consumer market. There's so many ads on television. 

My wife and I are watching and I'll look at her and go what what that was really fun and interesting who was that for I have no idea um equally difficult or more difficult in B2B  visually distinctive  definitely I don't know Rick if you want to say more about that I know you were talking about faces but beyond 

Rick: Yeah it's it's just the neuroscience neuroscience of being different. If I show you a bunch of red apples, if I show you five red apples and then I show you a green apple, right, in context, your eyes are going to be more attracted to the thing that is different. We are always, humans are always scanning, looking for opportunity or threat. And part of that pattern seeking that we do is what is different, what is standing out? So we're kind of wired.

So, yeah, Lenny, I think it's what I thought about in this conversation so far is that specific brand for Mount Will. But, , it's interesting because now the other business unit leaders,  we've talked a little bit, sometimes just jokingly, , what if they had a mascot? Are we, Louie the Launderer or whatever? Anyway, the laundry market is one of their 

Andrew: And Rick, say more about heart humor and humanity, and then we'll move on, but I really like that.

Rick: Yeah, I just,  it feels like we frame B2B branding as though we're no longer talking to humans, that, , this is a purely rational, , exercise for B2B decision makers. And so they don't want to be,  don't show me anything interesting. Don't make me laugh. Don't make me, you know, have warm fuzzies. I'm in a business mode. I'm wearing a suit. And I just, I just don't think people will like that. I think that person who you think is, you know, purely rational and only making, you know, making those choices is also the guy that jumps in his truck at the end of the day and pops in the red hot chili peppers or whatever he feels like rocking out onto and he's going to go home and tear off his suit and jump on the trampoline with his kid.

He's a human. And so what we like to do is kind of get beyond this kind of very narrow sense of B2B,  this kind of mythical sense of, oh, they're just machines making machine rational. No, this is a human. Let's talk to the human. And humans in every context like to be entertained. They like to be engaged. So if no one is using heart and emotion in B2B, there's an opportunity. If Very few people are using humor in B2B, and you're going to see some examples of humor that's successfully deployed, consider humor because no one else is doing it. It happens to be hard. You do need to have a good creative partner who understands how to do humor well. And humanity just make me feel something about the human condition.

My ability to improve it, my ability to enjoy it, connect with me it. Connect with me under the suit instead of just trying to connect with the suit. Connect with the human that's under the suit or under the hard hat, okay? Instead of just these mythical kinds of B2B personas that we make up.

Andrew: So one of the things that, as we get deeper into conversation, unless they're just Rick and I, we'll talk about some tenets and or pillars of braver, B2B or Boulder. And one of those is being famous for something specific. So this is really about positioning. And so what is positioning, you know, what underpins positioning for main things? You know, who we're talking to or our audience, right, and a specific audience. It's not everybody and everything. It's really hard for our executives that we work with to feel like they're giving something up. And that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about excluding any audience. We're talking about emphasizing an audience, emphasizing what we do for that audience, what problem we solve. 

And really quickly, Andrew, on that point, I think there's often, you You and I have discussed this many times, even as we were setting up this deck. There's often the temptation in B2B to try to throw the kitchen sink into our messaging. And what it does is when we try to activate all of these different benefits simultaneously, it blunts the effectiveness. We need a spear tip that penetrates. We need focus. That's this difference. That's this distinctiveness. We need something that cuts through the clutter.

Into, but the individuals, not just the titles, but what moves these professionals, these executives personally. So, taking a stand for something different, a point of view, that doesn't mean outrageous. When we talk about braver and bolder, we're not necessarily talking about outrageous. It doesn't even take outrageous in a sea of sameness to stand out, but you got to owned some 

And then it's not just talking about it. It's demonstrating your difference. That is a way. And so a number of the examples we'll show you in a minute are about demonstrating that difference. You know, we already talked about it's not just business. It is personal. And, linking, and it's not just about branding, it's about linking brand to business to business and sales.

The last two points kind of go together. We'll talk a little bit later about objections we get internally, inside ourselves, why we shouldn't be bolder and inside our organizations or industries. But if we want to step up to leadership in our market, we can't wait for permission to be bold. Leaders are expected to be bolder. Challenger's must be bolder. If being bolder and your marketing braver, unboring feels risky there are unrisky ways to be riskier, trying, right? 

What I say especially to our engineering-driven clients, our accounting, , accountant-driven client, , the real analytical types who,, are very prominent in B-to-B. Okay, you think analytically like a scientist. What does scientists do? They have hypotheses, and they test them out. We've got to try before we deny and stand in our own way, put blocks up and test. And I know, Rick, you've got some ways you've done that.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, just very quickly. Some of these ideas, , that I have personally presented, to clients, and you're going to see one of them that,  I, it had to have a bold visionary client in order to sell some of this through. But some of these riskier, bolder things when you're in a B2B space,can make people nervous. And so I think one of the ways through this lens of being scientific about it and data driven is to small amounts of money, like five cents, 10 cents to do this thing. 

So, for example, if we were going to test out one of these bold ideas, maybe you had your agency come up with five ideas, okay? And one of them was one of these really bold ones that made you nervous. But you believed in it, but you needed some data. Go on to Mechanical Turk. Find a bunch of people that meet your basic demographic criteria and then put up those five images in front of them and give them a persona say you are a decision maker at a such and such looking for such and such service or product and you were presented with these five different home pages which one are you most likely to click on first and you could get responses from a statistically meaningful sample of over a hundred easily several thousand for a very, very low amount of money. And then you walk into the president's office or the whomever  the power of the pen person is and you go, all right, I know this is kind of a bold idea, but here are the preliminary, here's the preliminary research on how appealing it is to people. So, you know, there are ways to build your case for bolder branding that makes it an easier and more logical decision.

Andrew: So let's talk about some examples real quick, just to spark further dialogue. And, the first couple are older and maybe well known, really well known, actually. If you remember the when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. So,FedEx stands stood for and stands for something specific. There are a lot of things that FedEx did when they first came out and still do. But the idea of getting that important smaller package to where it needs to go with certainty and speed worked for them in 1984. And frankly, they've had, you know, while they're not using the same tagline, their branding, their positioning is not far off. In fact, it's maybe evolved better.

So they've shortened their name from Federal Express to FedEx, which in my view is really a tangible expression of the brand. Shortened faster. Speed is our priority. So be famous for something. Stick with it. It worked for FedEX and can work for you too. . .

Watch the complete interview here: https://www.qvbrands.com/post/braver-b2b-interview-with-rick-julian-cco-qv-brands