IAM1802 – Branding Specialist Creates Customized Approach to Brand Development

Robyn Young Teaser 00:00

So essentially branding in thought of that larger landscape is what sets the efficiency for your marketing. So a lot of times where people think their marketing isn't performing, it's actually a branding problem.

Intro 00:13

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs, without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:38

Hello, this is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit over 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call a CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on the visibility game, a.k.a. Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Sales. I would just say the name of the game is being found and these tools will help you to do that. We have heard the philosophical question, if the tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If there's a really, really great product or service and no one knows about it, how great is it really? What impact does it ultimately make? This is where we will go into this month looking at visibility, branding, marketing, public relations, sales being the lifeblood of businesses building, meeting companies and so much more.

This is probably one of the most exciting and probably the most excruciating topics, but we hope this month to demystify, or maybe even vanquish the fear and help and arm you with the tools to be able to increase your visibility. So buckle up and sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Robyn Young of robynyoung.co and that's Robyn with a Y. Robyn, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Robyn Young 02:08

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 02:10

No problem. Super excited to have you on. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Robyn. So you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Robyn Young is a brand specialist for startups and small businesses with a vision to make branding and marketing more effective, efficient, and lean. Through her namesake agency, Robyn hand-selects her creative team from a pipeline of freelancers and creates a customized approach to brand development. Her intention with each brand is to create a sustainable relationship between the brand and customer by meticulously curating every touch point and testing at each phase of development.

Armed with a full-service team of graphic designers, copywriters, photographers, videographers, event designers, illustrators, and the like, her team can expand and contract depending on the needs of each and every client.

Robyn, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Robyn Young 02:49

Yeah, I sure am.

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Gresham Harkless 02:51

Awesome. Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to get started with your business.

Robyn Young 02:56

Sure. Oh, it's a long story. So I'm going to try and keep it kind of reader's digest version here. So I've been working in branding and marketing for the better part of 20 years. So I don't look that good for my age. I just started when I was 15. So, I started out working for this market research company called Dalton Robinson and at the time it wasn't like a career move. It was a great way for me to make a little side cash while I was going to school. So, I was one of those, interviewers, which was back in the 90s before internet was really taken off. I was one of those interviewers that would stand outside of the Nike store, Target or whatever and I would ask questions about the in-store experience and essentially the brand.

So I learned and got a really good foundational understanding of what a customer does, and what resonates with the customer. Why are they appealed to one brand and not the other? Why do they appeal to a certain visual language or even a story or tagline more than another. So I took that, I had a fine arts background, I studied visual arts at UCSD. Then from there I had mostly creative positions and every facet of branding and marketing you could possibly imagine. So, everything from working on set, creative direction and styling, putting a story together through imagery to brand managing for influencers. So I worked with Tracy Ellis Rose and Harry Shum Jr. from Glee also worked a bit on Lauren Conrad's channel.

So, I understood how to brand even like an influencer and how to build personal brands through content and through, partnerships and whatnot. Then I worked on the client side. I worked for UCLA and its branding marketing department. So now we're talking about a hundred-year-old company that's got a very great reputation and that was more like, how do we bring this into the 21st century? How do we appeal to these newer students coming in? How do we speak their language? How do we make this feel like it's still cool and relevant? Because as much as UCLA doesn't really have a problem bringing in students, they're all vying for these positions. But how do we keep the university feeling cool, relevant, optimistic? Optimism is deep into their brand story.

Then I capped my professional experience off at General Assembly, which is a tech school. They actually have campuses worldwide and for them, I was overseeing their digital marketing, user experience design, and product management courses in the Los Angeles area. That's really where I learned about tech and the lean startup methodology and just power. How are people that are in a very saturated market? How do they stand out? How do they create a really lean product and test it and make sure it's viable before they enter this market and potentially lose money if they're wrong? So that was the last piece I feel that I needed before I recognized the space within the market to take that same methodology and apply it to branding.

So we target our bread and butter customers, small businesses and startups. So we've virtually created a service that specifically speaks to them and has additional value that a bigger agency doesn't, right? Because they're working with bigger brands and completely different landscape. They have bigger budgets. They have more opportunity to make mistakes and be wrong about things. A startup in a small business doesn't really have the luxury of spending a ton of money on their marketing and being wrong about it, right?

That can mean the death of their business, right? So, the idea was how can I take this and apply it to branding? And so that's what I did. I now have this business for three years and we've worked with almost 50 brands.

Gresham Harkless 06:08

Nice. I definitely appreciate that. And definitely, from hearing your story, I hear sometimes startups or smaller businesses say, I don't have a brand or brand is not important.

But hearing your background and how you worked with brands of so many different aspects, whether it be like a large university or influencers and everybody in between and all around, it seems like everybody has that brand that they can develop and speak to their clients through that.

Robyn Young 06:27

Yes, I think the really important part is to explain what a brand actually is. So for people who have not grown up in the marketing and branding world, there's still this perception that your brand is a logo, right? And that is low-hanging fruit. It's like a smaller piece of the pie. Like your name, your logo, that's like saying, all that there is to this person is their name. It's not. That's not your brand. That's part of your brand. It's a representation of your brand, but your brand is everything.

It's what you say in a sales call. It's who you're marketing to. It's how you explain what you do, how you explain the value, knowing your value, knowing the vision how you treat your customers, how you manage internal culture, the look and feel, the vibe you put out, how you're differentiating yourself, what kind of content you put out. All of that is branding, right? So essentially branding in thought of that larger landscape is what sets the efficiency for your marketing. So a lot of times where people think their marketing isn't performing, it's actually a branding problem.

They haven't done a good enough job differentiating or getting very clear as to what their value prop is or who their audience is and they're getting lost in the white noise. So it's never been more important than it is right now to have a really strong brand, regardless of what you're selling.

Gresham Harkless 07:53

That makes perfect sense. A lot of that kind of speaks to what's happening, although it's in a different way when somebody maybe sees something that represents your company and what you were doing or not doing. So a lot of times they'll make that split-second decision based on certain things that they see, or your branding folks or certain messaging that you have.

But definitely correct if I'm wrong about that.

Robyn Young 08:10

It's right. But that's like saying, it's not that those tangible pieces aren't important. But they're led by the intangible, right? So if you think about what I work on to a large degree, where we start with clients is brand strategy. That's the understanding, you know, who your audience is getting very clear on who that person is. This is another problem that I see a lot of startups make is that they're trying to pander. They think that they're going to make themselves more applicable to more people by trying to market a wide of an audience.

Casting too wide of a net is never going to serve you especially at this place in your entrepreneurial journey. You need to find your niche, pick a lane, and then, answer the problem, the questions, that really tail yourself to that audience first, that market first. Then you can start thinking about, okay, now how can I make myself, how can I look a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right? You want to start with this audience.

So in answer to your question, it's not that those things aren't important, but they should be led by strategy. Think of it as like a primer, right? You may not see it. It may not feel tangible when it goes on, but by the time you put the paint on, you can tell when it's not there. All of a sudden the paint looks really uneven. It's a little all over the place. You can tell the quality is not good. That's what strategy is. Strategy is the primer. It makes everything smooth, and clear, rounds out those edges, makes everything really consistent before you start getting to the tangible stuff.

The tangible stuff is like your logo, your visual identity, the content, all the sexy stuff that we like doing. It's important. It's part of your brand, but it's a sliver of the brand. It's not the whole pie.

Gresham Harkless 09:42

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I'm glad you broke that down because a lot of times, like the sexy stuff as you talked about, might be a Facebook ad and somebody sees a Facebook ad and they see your company and they're like, I didn't even know you did that because there's some type of misalignment with what that primer that you didn't put in place or maybe it wasn't put in place correctly. So I appreciate you for breaking that down.

So, I know you touched a little bit upon like how you're working with clients. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? And I wanted to hear also about what I call your secret sauce and what you feel sets you and your organization apart.

Robyn Young 10:09

Yeah. Yeah. So part of our process is our secret sauce. So the way that we go about branding is we work with clients in over the course of a six-month period. So we're never just taking a piece of the pie. We work on a full 360 brands because designing a logo once again is not designing a brand, right? That's one piece of the pie. So we don't even do that. We don't even offer it. When we work with clients, it's on the full brand development, which means copy, messaging, strategy, a visual identity, photography, a website, and packaging. Obviously this changes depending on what the product is and we're industry agnostic.

So we work with with lots of CTG and lots of health, wellness, fashion, some CBD companies, a lot of service-based companies. Whatever your product is, that's not the problem. We know how to do the research needed to create a strong position in the brand. But the value prop is that because we know how to work with startups and small businesses, we know their specific problems, and their specific needs, and that's how we've positioned ourselves. The value that we bring is that we tackle brand development in a really lean and efficient way.

So this is where my part of the story kind of comes back in because I came from that tech world. I understand the concept of agile and lean methodology, and I took that and applied it to branding. So now we tackle branding in phases, and in each phase, we'll create some kind of lo-fi testable piece, and we'll actually brand with your key customer group to make sure that it's resonating. So it's an extra little element that we do that I've never seen another agency doing. You're certainly not going to find that one of these bigger agencies. So it's both our process and how we like to work with people as well as part of our secret.

Gresham Harkless 11:49

Nice. I definitely appreciate that. I appreciate how everything, comes back to the methodology that you were introduced to, then you brought it to the branding world because somebody might be listening to this and Oh, I have to change my logo. I have to learn what I want to do. Then I have to talk about my logo, my pictures, my content, and all that stuff can be very overwhelming. But I definitely appreciate how you talked about it's broken down according to phases so that for one, it's not overwhelming. But for two, it's also tried, tested, and true as you continue on to each phase. It sounds like.

I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Robyn Young 12:21

Yeah. So because I'm something of a team of one, I grew my own business really lean, meaning that all of the creative team that I work with are freelance. So they signed on to a project and they're there for the length of the project, but I'm running a lot of the day-to-day on the business side. So time management is one of the key things for me.

Gresham Harkless 12:42

Absolutely. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business?

Robyn Young 12:51

You know, I've put a lot of emphasis and work and invested myself into mindset. I'll be honest that I was really skeptical at the beginning with how important and how much I should value my mindset and knowing my value and working regularly on gratitude.

Gresham Harkless 13:08

Exactly. Yeah, it makes sense. So that brings me to my next question, which is my favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on this show.

So Robin, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Robyn Young 13:21

What does it mean to me? I think a large part of my own story and some of some of the kernels that I'm using for this upcoming podcast are the shifts that you have to make from being an employee to an entrepreneur. I think a lot of times we were up high in the sky about it. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of great aspects about being at freedom, financially and time, where I could go, where it could be working, like nobody tells me what to do. On the flip side of things, nobody tells me what to do. I don't necessarily always know the right answer.

So a lot of times its trial and error and it's prioritization and it's learning and evolving and being really agile and keeping things afloat and knowing when to take time off and to really prioritize your mental health and whatnot. So I think to me, CEOs are innovators. They're optimists. They're people who see something and think I can do this better. I know that I'm also somebody who's a champion about using business for good and recognizing an audience and constantly asking yourself, how can I better serve this audience?

I'm never not innovating. I'm never not thinking about how can I take this to that next level. How can I create a better service a better experience a better product for this audience? I think that's something you have to do as a CEO.

Gresham Harkless 14:39

I like that and I definitely appreciate that perspective. You touched on it before too, just having a really strong why for why you're doing everything, I think a lot of times things will fall into alignment.

So I definitely appreciate that perspective and I appreciate your time even more Robyn what I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get ahold of you, find out about all the awesome things you're doing, and find out about your podcast that you're launching and all those great things.

Robyn Young 15:04

Yeah, absolutely. So probably one of the best ways to keep in touch with me is through Instagram. I'm pretty active. I post almost every day and I do a lot more on the personal side. So I really speak to the behind-the-scenes of what running my company looks like and also doing this while trying to be alone. So there's a lot of my personal side of the story. So I'm at robynyoung.co on Instagram. Also I have a brand planning worksheet and a series of resources that I can give to folks through my email newsletter and have a really easy way to enter that.

So you're just going to text to the number 345 345 you'll text Robyn young and it's all one word and it's Robyn with a y and then you'll get a text back asking for your email address. Just put your email address in and then you'll be added to my email funnel and through that, you'll receive both brand planning worksheet as well as some resources that will help you to build a stronger brand positioning.

So it'll go through how to position your mission statement, you know how to create an audience profile things like that.

Gresham Harkless 16:01

Awesome. Thank you so much again, Robyn. We will make sure to have the links and that information in the show notes so that everybody can follow you on Instagram. And of course, sign up for all the awesome brand information you're providing. But again, I appreciate you appreciate your time and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:13

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered By Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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