IAM460- Branding Specialist Creates Customized Approach to Brand Development

Robyn Young is a branding specialist for startups and small businesses with a vision to make branding and marketing more efficient, effective, 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 client.

• CEO Hack: Time management
• CEO Nugget: Gratitude and working regularly on your mindset
• CEO Defined: Innovative, optimist, and using business for good

Website: http://robynyoung.co/

Instagram: @robynyoung.co
Facebook: @robynyoung.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/robyn-young-co-branding-design
Twitter: @robyncyoung

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

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 0:29

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

Robyn Young 0:39

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem. Super excited to have you on and what I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Robyn so you 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 Young 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 brand and customer by meticulously curating every touchpoint and testing at each phase of development 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 IAMCEO Community?

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Robyn Young 1:20

Yeah, sure I am.

Gresham Harkless 1:21

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. What led you to get started in your business?

Robyn Young 1:27

Sure, oh, it's a long story. So I'm going to keep you 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'm not not I don't like that good for my age. I just started when I was 15. I started out working for a market research company called Gallup and Robinson. And at the time, it wasn't like a career move, I just it was a great way for me to make a little side cash while I was in school.

So I was one of those interviewers, this was back in the 90s. Before we had, you know, before the internet was really taken off, I was one of those interviewers that would stand outside of the Nike store or Target or whatever. 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 the customer knows, what resonates with the customer, why they appeal to one brand and not the other why 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. And then from there, I had mostly creative positions and every face of branding and marketing you could possibly imagine. So everything from working on set, creative direction and styling, putting, you know story together through imagery to brand managing for influencers. So I worked with Tracee Ellis and Harry Shum Jr. from Glee and also worked a bit on 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 then I worked on the client side, I worked for UCLA and their branding marketing department. So now we're talking about a 100-year-old company that's got a very great reputation. And that was more like, how do we bring this into, the 21st century? Can we appeal to these newer, you know, these newer students coming in?

Like, how do we speak their language? How do we make this feel like it's still cool and relevant because as much as you know, UCLA doesn't really have a problem, bringing in students another role vying for these positions? But how do we keep the university feeling cool, relevant, optimistic, and deep into its brand story? Then I kept my professional experience at General Assembly, which is a tech school, that has campuses worldwide.

And for them, I was overseeing their digital marketing, user experience design, and product management courses in the Los Angeles area. And that's really where I learned about tech and, the lean startup methodology and just power, you know, our people that have that are in a very saturated market, how do they stand out? How do they create a really lean product test it and make sure it's viable before they enter this market and potentially lose money if they're wrong, right?

So that was the last piece I felt 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, our small businesses and startups, we virtually created a service that specifically speaks to that and creates and has additional value.

So the 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, you know, mistakes and, be wrong about things like a startup, a small business doesn't really have the, 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 have a business for three years and we've worked with almost 50 brands.

Gresham Harkless 5:01

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that. And definitely, from hearing your story you kind of hear, like I hear sometimes startups or smaller businesses say, I don't have a brand or brands not important, but hearing you know, your background and how you worked with brands with so many different aspects, whether it be like a large university, or influencers, and everybody in between and all around, it seems like everybody kind of has that brand that they can develop and kind of speak to their clients through that.

Robyn Young 5:22

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 like that is low hanging fruit, I mean, it's like a smaller piece of the pie, like, your name, your logo, that's like saying, Oh, this, like all that there is to this person is their name.

It'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 on a sales call, it's who you're marketing to. It's, you know, 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.

So essentially, branding and thought of in that larger landscape is, what sets the efficiency for your marketing. So a lot of times where people think they're not, their marketing isn't performing. It's actually a branding problem. They haven't done a strong enough or a good enough job differentiating or getting very clear as to what their value prop is or who their audiences are, 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 6:51

That makes perfect sense. And it kind of makes sense. Definitely correct me if I'm wrong, but I kind of visualize why you were explaining that, talking to those people who were outside about what kind of experience they have and didn't have and why they like one brand over another. But a lot of that kind of speaks to what's happening.

Although it's kind of in a different way, when somebody maybe sees you know, something that represents your company and what you were doing or not doing, a lot of times they will make that split-second decision based off of certain things that they see or your branding folks or certain messaging that you have, definitely correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Robyn Young 7:21

No, 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. So if you think about what I work on to a large degree, or where we start with clients is brand strategy. And that's understanding what you know who your audience is getting very, very clear on who that person so that 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 of more applicable to more people by trying to try to market to a wider audience.

Yeah, 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, you know, answer the problem with questions that you know, really pale yourself to that audience first, that market first, and then you can start thinking about okay, now, how can I make myself you know, how can I look a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, right? You have 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 a data strategy 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 page on, you can tell when it's not there. Like really uneven, it's a little all over the place, and you can tell the quality is not good.

That's what 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. And the tangible stuff is like your logos, or your visual identity, the content, all this sexy stuff that we like to eat. 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 9:03

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, like Why be a Facebook ad is somebody sees a Facebook ad and they see your company. And they're like, I don't even know you did that. Because there's some type of misalignment with what you're that primary 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 want to hear I know you've touched a little bit upon like how you're working with clients. Can 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 kind of sets you and your organization apart.

Robyn Young 9:31

Yeah. So I mean, our process part of our process is our secret sauce. So the way that we go about branding is we work with clients over the course of a six-month period, so we're never just taking a piece of the pie as we work on a full 360 brand. Because designing a logo once again, is not designing a branch, 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 whole brand development that means copy, messaging, strategy, visual identity, photography or website, packaging, you know, obviously, this changes depending on what the product is. And we're industry agnostic, we work with, we work with what's a CPG, and lots of health, wellness fashion, some CBD companies, you know, like Georgia state companies like I don't, whatever it is your product is like, that's not the problem, we know how to do the research needed to create a strong positioning and brands.

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. And 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 my tech world, and 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. In each phase, we'll create some kind of loci testable piece, and we'll actually test the brands with your 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 that's our I mean, it's both our process and how we like to work with people as well as part of our secret.

Gresham Harkless 11:18

Nice, I definitely appreciate that and appreciate how everything you know, comes back to that, that methodology that you were introduced to, and then you brought it to the branding world, because I think, you know, somebody might be listening to this and like, oh, I have to change my logo, I have to learn what I want to do then is talking about my logo, my pictures, my content, and all that stuff can be very, very overwhelming.

But I definitely appreciate how you talked about it being broken down according to phases. So that one is not overwhelming. Number two is also tried, tested, and true. As you continue on to each phase. 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 or book or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Robyn Young 11:52

Yeah, so because I'm a something of a team of one. So I grew my own business really lean, meaning that all of the creative team that I work with, are freelance. So they they sign 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 things for me.

Gresham Harkless 12:16

Absolutely. Now that definitely makes perfect sense. So 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 happen to a time machine. What would you tell your younger business self?

Robyn Young 12:28

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

Gresham Harkless 12:49

Exactly. Yeah, it makes sense. And success is definitely a team sport. 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. And we're hoping to have different quotes and quotes from CEOs on the show. So Robyn, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Robyn Young 13:02

What does it mean to me? I think a large part of my own story, and 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. And I think a lot of times we were pie in the sky about it, and don't get me wrong, there's a lot of great aspects about being a CEO. The freedom, you know, financially is your time where I could go where can be working, like, nobody tells me what to do, right?

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 it's trial and error. And it's and it's prioritization. And it's, learning and evolving, and, being really agile and keeping things afloat. And, you know, and knowing when to take time off and, to really prioritize your mental health and whatnot.

So I think, for me, CEOs are innovators. They're optimists, they're people who see something and think I can do this better. I know that I can, I think I'm also somebody who's a champion of 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 not, I'm not thinking about how can I take this to the next level. How can I create a better service, a better experience a better product for this audience? And I think that that's something you have to do as a CEO.

Gresham Harkless 14:33

I like that. And I definitely appreciate that perspective. And especially, you kind of touched on it before to just having a really strong why for why you're doing everything. And I think a lot of times things will fall into alignment like we talked about definitely your brand or it wouldn't act as your personal brand. But why your businesses and why you started a business and why you started an organization is incredibly important and those things will definitely help you.

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 else just know you want to let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get ahold of you to find out about all the awesome things you're doing and find out about, your podcasts that you're launching and all those great things.

Robyn Young 15:08

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 kind of the behind-the-scenes of what running my company looks like. And also doing this while trying to be a mom. And so there's a lot of my like, personal side of the story.

So I'm @Robinyoung.co, on Instagram. And then also, I have a brand planning worksheet and a series of resources that I can give to folks through my email newsletter, they have a really easy way to enter that. So you're just going to text to the number 345345 You'll text Robin Young, and it's all one word.

And then you will 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 a brand planning worksheet as well as some resources that will help you to build a stronger brand positioning. So it'll go through you know how to position your mission statement. You know how to create an audience profile and things like that.

Gresham Harkless 16:09

Awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Robin, we will make sure to have the links and that information in the show notes so 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 16:21

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. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating 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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