Latest / Straight To Voicemail / How Brand is the Soul of a Company with Ari Yablok, Head of Brand, Island
Transcript
- Amanda Smith (00:00): Amanda Smith. A question I've been asking myself a lot recently, mainly when I'm brushing my teeth or when I wake up at 2:00 AM is the question of what is brand? Is it your logo? Is it your color palette, taglines? Yeah, all of those things matter, but what actually makes up a brand? And so I tapped Ari Bl because he has such a wonderful approach to brand when it's done right, brand is the soul of your company. It's everything everywhere, and it's something you can't quite put a finger on or to find, but that's what makes it magical. Ari is the head of brand at Island, and as the first marketing hire, he helped shape their identity from day one before there was even a product in market. He's built a brand rooted in story. So of course I asked him, what does it really mean to say that brand is the soul of an organization? Here's what he had to say. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message. Ari Yablok (01:22): Hey, Amanda, I guess I missed you, but still wanted to make sure I got this through to you. I was mentioning to you the other day how I felt strongly that brand is the soul of an organization. I just wanted to explain a little bit what I meant by that. So soul is this thing that we know is the essence of who a person is, and yet it's the hardest to define or to grasp. It's almost like at the same time everything and nowhere. And I felt like that was the perfect metaphor for what brand is. I've spent many years now building brands for B2B tech companies, and it's still a challenge within companies that value brand to define it and to give it the proper goals and tasks and planning and strategy and budget and all that. Because I think in a similar way to a soul, a brand is so fundamental to what a company is. (02:15): It encompasses their personality, their values, their identity, the story they tell to their customers, the experience that they deliver. It's in the clothes they wear, the colors they show, the conversations they have. And yet, if you try and just capture it in one thing, you have nothing to hold onto. What is it? It's everything. It's nothing. And that to me is like a soul. And I also think that a soul is the essence of a person. And you don't actually build a soul. You don't actually design it. You are it. And you spend your life almost revealing what your soul really is, discovering it in a way. And I think brand follows that same journey where there are some things built into the DNA of a company and it's the goal of the brand builders to extract it and maybe reverse engineer that process of having a soul to build one for the company. (03:04): I thought that's important to let you know about. And I think that translates perfectly into where content fits into this strategy of brand building and just business goals in general because frankly, content is under attack right now. People don't need to read blogs anymore that expired. We could just ask the AI in our pocket for anything we need to know about. And therefore there is a bit of a crisis. We should think about it as a crisis where we need to consider what is my content doing. I can't just win by blunt force putting out all the listicles and eBooks that I can and hope that enough of it sticks. I need to think about the conversation I am shaping. And that's really the perfect extension of what a brand is. A brand is saying. I am trying to differentiate and define myself for you so that you know what I am and what I am not. (03:54): And content should behave the same way. What is the conversation I need you to have with me? And what isn't the conversation you should be having? And at Island where I've been building this brand for almost four years now, we've been deliberate about which conversations to happen, which not. We do not want to have classic cybersecurity conversations, for example, because that takes you to a different world. It limits actually the value that we actually bring to enterprises. We want to talk about enablement and productivity and re-imagining enterprises that can modernize and accelerate as opposed to simply protect and fortify. And that's core to our content strategy as an extension of brands. So anyways, I guess I'll catch you up the next time. See you later. Amanda, Amanda Smith (04:51): Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.