Latest / Straight To Voicemail / Are you chasing short-term trends or actually building a brand? | Mishar Briones, Tala Brand Advisory
Transcript
- Adam (00:09): Mishar Briones believes in brand. She believes in brand so deeply that she founded her own advisory company specifically promoting the importance of brand. Tala Brand Advisory is all about conducting in-depth market and consumer research so brands have a deeper understanding of who they are and who they're trying to reach. She believes in developing and building strong foundations of that brand. And strategy, specifically around brand messaging, positioning, differentiation. so everyone is always on the same page, but it's tough. We are living in an age when everything moves so quickly, not just every week, but every day there's a new trend. There's a new thing that we all need to be paying attention to. Something breaks the internet seemingly every hour. And with AI, everyone is able to do those things. If they only know how to prompt. But the more you shift and the more you change and the more you chase a trend, the harder it is for you to define who you are. I want to know her thoughts on how to understand who you are so that the people that you serve know who you are. So I asked her one question. In the age of AI, things are shifting faster than ever in the brand world. So how do you keep organizations focused on a long-term vision? Mishar (01:35): Even before AI, this was a really challenging thing to get people to focus on because we are essentially renting people's attention, you know? And it can be really hard to stay focused on long-term when everybody is so focused on just getting attention of someone today, tomorrow, you know, a week from now. Look at long-term vision and how that connects to brand as being able to reduce how much money you're going to spend in the future. So I don't think of long-term vision as this of like esoteric, ethereal, of ephemeral sort of thing that happens in the future. These things are connected to the stuff you do today. It's not a this or that, it's a this and that conversation. When we talk about, okay, well, I want to get the attention of somebody tomorrow. That should still be linking to your vision. Everything should be kind of trickling down. So the only way that I've been able to do that is to continually bring it up every week, every time we're having a conversation. know, the conversation always has to link back to does this make sense for the brand long-term? And that can also be a really big challenge because even though you have experience in this domain or maybe even in the industry, maybe you've been doing this a long time, you know that even if you have strong convictions, people don't always want to hear the truth of what you're doing, because it can be really scary to double down on long term if you can't see the results in the short or medium term. It can be very, very scary. But I think about all of the brands that have created some kind of longevity whatever space that they're in and a lot of them have always balanced out their brand building with growth, performance marketing, whatever you want to call it, whatever the new terms are for marketing, whatever. All of these things are connected together. They're all underpinned by brand. They're all underpinned by brand strategy and brand strategy is just... What are your foundations and where do you want to go? Why is it important? If we break it down into like simplistic terms... Who are you? Who are you for? Why does it matter? What direction are you heading in? And then all of the things kind of linked together, there is like a direction that going I don't think it's easy now. I think it's even harder now just because AI makes it very easy for people to come up with really eloquent answers to questions because they'll pop it into Claude or they'll pop it into ChatGPT you'll think, gave you this idea? Like there's no concept of like timing often, you know, they'll come up with an idea and they'll tell you this is the idea that I have because Claude told me this is what we need to be doing. But I'm Where are you in the journey of your business? Where are you right now? What are your plans for growth and expansion? you always want to be something small and artisanal? you want to open up to new international markets and then decide, is this an idea that is for today or is this an idea for 12 months from now? And again, it's all just underpinned by where do you want to go? I think if you ask the right questions and if you ask enough of the right questions, will allow you the in those right moments. Which is like a very long winded way of saying like, I don't think there is a good way of being able to get people to focus on their long term vision when people are struggling to find their budget, they're looking for investment. The only way is to continually keep questioning and asking and poking and prodding, the holes and gaps in people's thinking and strategy. And that is not to say that I'm not also a person who is susceptible to having holes in the work that I do, because we can be very tunnel vision, you know, it's very easy for us to be like, well, this is the path because I know this is the path and it's what's worked and whatever. If you take a step back and you ask the right questions, I think it always ends up coming back to what is your long term the brand. And if you can answer that question in a way that is clear, then I think it makes the decisions, your marketing decisions, your operational decisions, your sales decisions, your product decisions, much easier. also understand where to spend your resources. And I mean that financially. Do you need a marketing person right now? Maybe not. Maybe what you need is an account manager or maybe you need a salesperson or maybe you need to double down on your product or whatever. can comfortably say that sometimes marketing is not the right choice in it's only through asking what's the long-term plan here.