S2E24: Stop Hiding Behind Jargon: The Art of B2B Brand Storytelling That Wins

[MUSIC] Hey, B2B leaders, feeling stuck in your growth journey as you've exhausted all your plays? Tired of doing things the same way and not seeing results? I'm Stacy Sussman, your host, and this is C-Suite Strategies, your podcast for the explosive business growth you've been chasing. We'll bring you conversations with industry visionaries who've truly mastered the art of scaling businesses. This isn't just theory, it's what we live and breathe every single day. Get ready for game-changing insights that'll transform your approach to business growth. Whether you're a seasoned C-Suite executive or an ambitious founder, we've got you covered. C-Suite Strategies is your backstage pass to reaching that next level of business. Follow C-Suite Strategies now and let's make this your new reality. Hey, Pod Squad, super excited to have you for another episode of C-Suite Strategies. I'm your host, Stacy Sussman, founder of RevUp Advisory. I am very excited to have our guest on the pod today, Lauren. And she will introduce herself in a minute, but I want to talk to you about this episode and why you should listen up and why it's important. The title of today's episode is Stop Hiding Behind Jargon. The art of B2B brand storytelling that wins. And our guest, Lauren, with villain branding, which I love the name so much, is here to talk with us. Most B2B leaders underestimate the power of well-told stories they lead with features. They hide behind jargon. And then they're stuck wondering why nothing sticks. And so Lauren is here to debunk some of those mysteries and tell us why. So we're going to dig into the art and the strategy of storytelling, how it shapes brand identity, how C-Suite leaders use it, trust it, and why brands are willing to play the villain in their category always wins. So Lauren, I am going to let you introduce yourself, but just so everyone here knows, just 20 years of experience across global brand consultancies, high growth startups, enterprise challengers, she specializes, which I love, it's on the website, complex brand architecture, verbal identity systems, and enterprise positioning. I learned when I did some research about you, you called a BS in film and television with a concentration in screenwriting and a minor in psychology, and why I think it's so important is because Lauren is the triple threat. And I think it's probably because of all the plethora's background she has. So from a screenwriter strategist to what you're doing today, we'd love to have you on the pod. And we're super excited to have you here. Thank you so much for having me, Stacy. That's great. I have not thought about my college degree in quite some time, so thank you for making me feel young for a hot second. But yeah, yeah, I think like that is really the crux, like the meeting place of psychology and film and television, like the creativity meets sort of like strategy and the why behind it. It actually really drove a lot of where my career has gone accidentally, subconsciously, but yeah, it's a good hook. Love it. So tell us about your company, tell us what you do now, and then we're just kind of going to get into sort of the art of storytelling. But the company names so spot on and amazing. So tell us a little bit about how you got started, what you're doing now, and kind of what you're up to. Yeah. I mean, thank you for saying that. We do a fair amount of corporate naming and product naming. So hopefully villain branding is a decent name where we haven't done around work well. And we named the organization villain because it's really important to identify how you differentiate from a competitor in the space, a mindset, whatever it might be, that you feel that you need to be the hero or villain too. Right? And I use those interchangeably because it really is the power of perspective, which is what storytelling and serving by, to say you should be your own sort of internal hero, but to the market you should be the villain. And you want to have that role where everyone kind of wants to take you down. And that's really what we focus on. So at villain branding, we do essentially B2B tech, the more complex, the better our clients and we help them to define their strategy and their story. So what makes you different? What makes you relevant? What makes you credible in the market? And how do we get that story out in the world? Verbaly, visually, strategically. How do we make sure that the story that you tell is really clear? It's really simple and it's going to help you to win business because at the end of the day, if it is an operationalized to drive value back to the business, it's just words. And I'm not going to do anything for you business. I love that. I've read on your website you say you are a verbal strategy consultancy for B2B companies raising the bar. And I loved that. So you wrote that. Talk to me about that because I think a verbal strategy consultancy is even something most swelts may not have heard of. But I love that it's accurate to what you do. Yeah. Yeah. So we do brand strategy, but we come verbal first. We are word nerds at our core. And the reason that we do that is that if you come into a brand thinking visually first, color palette, etc. you haven't done the foundational piece that defines who your story is. And it's really hard to commit to specific words that you know will work in the market. Right? And so the more that we get folks to say this is what we stand for. This is the story we tell in keynotes on sales calls. It's the set of words that travel universally across an organization. And that really is what defines your business. It defines it should be the external articulation of your business strategy at the end of the day. And how do we make sure that everyone in your organization is saying the right thing in the right way, right? The right time, the right sort of depth, the right proof that you're alligning to. And then once we've got that verbal story, we can then layer in things like visuals. We can then layer in things like copy, right? And we can layer in motion and sonic and all of the kind of full experiential brand pieces that you need. But if you don't have that core story, that's really clear, really crisp. Investors aren't going to love you. Your business context and your kind of clients and prospects are not going to be understanding what you stand for. So that's why we focus on verbal strategy. We work specifically with B2B enterprise companies in typically mid-level folks. So folks that are around a billion dollars, not the 300 billion sort of monoliths. But really the folks that are either have been around for quite some time and they need a strong refresh. They just got acquired by PE firm. They're in the business of acquiring a whole bunch of organizations to stretch where they stand. We find that B2B businesses have so much opportunity in the brand space to tell a really clear story and to stand out really easily and see the value of that work, that that's what gets us excited. How can we just jump in? And raising the bar is really it. If you're not committed to making sure that you are a business that can stand out in the market to be the villain of your industry and you're not committed enough to say this is going to drive everything that we say and do going forward, then we're not the best fit for you. We believe that words have that kind of power. So many things to unpack there. I love that. I love your definition of, I think you said mid-market because in my definition of mid-market, I'm thinking like 50-ish million. It's not a better price. Not mid-market. I believe not mid-market. Mid-enterprise, right? Okay. I love that. I love that. And where do folks come to you? So like I always say people come to wrap up advisory because we're in like the messy middle of scaling. And I'm thinking, sharing from you is, do they come to you? Because they're acquiring and they're creating like more of like a portfolio. Do they come to you because maybe they've been on seeded as number one, two, like three in the category and they're like, we want to gain market share, like what are kind of good use cases of where they come to. And then I want to try to talk a little bit about the secret sauce without giving it away. Yeah. I'm happy to give it away. We're not we're not pressing the better methodology. I would love folks to do it. It's just hard. It's an easy sort of framework to follow, but it's hard to execute well. But to answer your question about when folks come to us, it's at a high stakes moment. So to your point, D, all of the above, right? They'll come to us when they are in an acquisition screen. They will come to us when they've got a seed suite change, right? They've got a new CMO and new CEO who's saying, wow, we've got some serious brand debt here. We have let the market get ahead. Our business and our products have defined sort of where we're headed, but the story that we're telling in the market is not speaking to that. We're known for one thing, but we do so much more. And so we've got to make up this debt. We have to shift perception in the market. We need to make sure that the right folks know us. So we're growing globally. We have a remit to move up market or down market. Whatever those kind of moments that will change the face of the organization, that's when they call us because they understand how important it is that everyone is rowing in the same direction. And typically the pain points that they come to us saying are things like that. Hey, we have everyone telling a different story. We've got our CEO just running rogue on peanuts unstaged and saying something that we don't even do. Or customers or our sales cycles are nine months long when I know they should be four months. Why are we having so many meetings with our clients? Because they don't get it. They don't get what you do. You're not simplifying it. So all of those reasons. are typically why folks will come our way. Amazing. I love that. I think brand and messaging is something that I rev up, like, are constantly inter-eating on. And I feel like, for me, it's an evolution. But obviously, when these companies are, like, having said it really high stakes moment, like, there's no time to dilly-dally and sort of figure it out. It's like, we have a moment. We got to capitalize. We got to move forward. We have numbers to hit. We have places to be in things to do. How did this become, like, so crystal clear to you that this was what I wanted to focus on because just talking to you and when we've met the way you articulate it, I was like, "Oh, duh. I get this. This is so great." But I'm not sure everyone does get it. So when did -- I feel like that's your superpower. So when did this become, like, crystal clear to you that, like, this is what we're going to focus on. This is what we're doubling down on. And wow, we have proven the market fit that people actually need in, especially the big enterprise companies you're working with. Yeah. So, where villain is 10 years old? So it probably took us eight years to get there. Eight years of saying kind of the wrong thing or things that we thought were right right. In the beginning, you're just kind of figuring out, "Hey, anyone needs some help. I'm happy to help you." And part of this is because my background was in both agency side and in-house that I had a strong sort of generalist background in brand and marketing overall. And it really became hyper-clear to me in the last five, six years or so that agencies need to be specialists. We need to go in with a surgical scalpel and solve a really specific problem really well. And in-house marketers, CMOs need to be more of the generalists to be able to say we need this kind of person in to solve these problems. And I saw the market moving in that direction overall. And so I and working with really smart folks on our team, you know, we have an amazing grow strategy consultant, Melissa Lour, who owns We really have. And we've got some really smart ops in strategist, our head of strategy, Nora Geiss. All of these folks kind of together, we said, "What problems do we love to solve?" Like what lights us up, right? What was the ideal client? If we had one client that we could clone a thousand times, who would that be? And we sort of took a step back from there and we would say, "Okay, we've got these great stories to tell where we're providing a right level of support. We are setting our clients up for success and we have really clear case studies of how the work that we did directly drove measurable, monetizable values." So we could literally see, "Hey, for one of our clients, the business process outsourcing company, for source, for those guys, we could say, "Oh, well, we helped them in four months hit their milestone of a billion dollars in business by operationalizing a message throughout." They doubled their stock price. They finally turned it around from having months, quarters after quarter of decline into consistent growth. I will take a tiny percentage of that as credit on our end. For the most part, obviously, it was the CEO, the CMO, their team overall that operationalized the work that we gave them. They asked us for what they needed. We gave it to them and they put it to work. And I think that that's the real difference. But the short answer is, we looked at what work that made us happy. We looked at work that we made a difference around. We looked at work that we were better at than anyone else. Frankly, there's not a ton of people who do this really well. Everyone's a writer, right? Everyone is how to write. They all think they're writers and marketers. You get this all the time. I'm sure it's easy. But to do it really well is truly a talent. And that's when clients will call us. They try it themselves. They be used every AI tool. They're like, "This is just not working. You don't get it because they don't have the experience on the F." So that's how we nailed the ICP that we've created, the position that we've created, etc. I love that. I think marketing and messaging is so important, especially in the age of AI and process optimization and automation. Having that unique voice, I like that here on the villain play. I think that's really clever. And then also it's like everything is starting to sound like AI slug at the end of the day. I mean, I get so many messages in my inbox, which is like the last place I feel like I'm looking and slack in this and that. And like it's all just sounds the same. And it's so obvious that it sounds the same. So I think in the age of this AI and we love it because we do process optimization and we love technology. You really do need to differentiate yourself from verbal strategy perspective because everything is starting to mush together. What's your thoughts on that? Because I feel like it's just so relevant to the conversation that I'm seeing on LinkedIn and in my circles. Yeah. Same with us. We are constantly helping our clients to implement AI, whether we're doing the work or we're partnering with their tools and their teams internally. And we are the number one thing we say is pretty much what you just said, right? Which is if you need to stand, if you would need to be found in this space, which business doesn't need to be found, you have to stand out, right? Differentiation matters more than ever. It's why you're seeing Forbes and Wall Street Journal and New York Times all talking about how the storyteller is this generation, I don't know, this sort of decades role to have, right? Because it's so important to help stand out and tell a story that LLM's that bots and humans alike understand. And so from that standpoint, I think that using AI is a non-starter. Everyone has to do it. You have to find the right way to do it and you have to have a clear foundation created first before you can actually scale and build upon that. And I think that just jumping in and not having a clear positioning and a clear story and a clear reason why you stand out is going to turn into slot. And we're seeing that everywhere to your point. Which marketing channel closed your last three deals? How much did you spend and what revenue did it generate? At RevUpAdvisory, we help CMOs prove marketing IROI with real attribution connecting campaigns to closed revenue. We create strategic alignment between marketing and sales teams and yes, we know the buzzword. We're using Agentec AI2. If you're ready to show pipeline impact and scale with revenue predictability, contact Stacy Susman, CRO at RevUpAdvisory. So how do you guys take clients through kind of what the framework looks like? You said you're willing to talk about it and give it away. So talk to me about what the framework is. Talk to me about how you do it differently because I do agree that it thought leadership, brand storytelling, verbal strategy, the more articulate one here. But all of this is crucial to the growth of the company at the end of the day. Because then you're going to operationalize it and put it in assets. And that's where you're going to make the money. But if you don't have that right at the top and I always call it like, I think everything's going back to the foundations, back to the basics of marketing. And what I'm finding with our clients is people have leapfrogged or forgot the basics or we call it the band-aid method. They're just patching everything together to the point where you're in the ER and you're like the company's bleeding out. But it was like, oh, if you just fixed that little small decay over there, small ulcer and got some bluntinners, whatever it is, I feel like you wouldn't be in this position. So talk to me about what you're thinking here. Yeah. It all comes back to Taylor's wife, right? Band-aid's on bullet holes. And I think, yeah, like everyone's trying that for sure. And I think that it's not a bad idea to prove that you have tried everything before you engage someone like us that, you know, we are not inexpensive. They do need to spend time with us, right? We do need to get up to speed well. And so it's not a bad idea to sort through kind of what exactly is the goal that you're trying to achieve, right? And it's not necessarily, I need a brand strategy framework. I need a, you know, a rev-up solution. I need performance optimization. You don't have to have the solution defined, but coming and saying like, I want our organization, everyone top to bottom, be saying the same thing. Great. Cool. I get that. That means you need, you know, and that's where our job comes in to say fantastic. Then we need to define what that foundation is. We need to articulate the message and we need to give you a way that your team can utilize an operational event. So for us, the framework is super simple, right? It's defined on our website. It's discovery. Overall, so how do we get to know your customers and your prospects, right? Who you're going after? Let us understand what really makes them tick. What needs of theirs are not being met. How do we make sure that we get in their head? Sometimes that's with qual. Sometimes that's with quant. Sometimes that's the client knows that their own customers really well and their own prospects really well where they can articulate that to us. That's fine too. It's just kind of the level of depth and how far away from relevancy they are that will define how we get that information. Credibility. We have to know your product. We have to know what folks think about your product. Where is it strong? Where is it weak? Where are you investing? Where are you perceived to be great and maybe less great? What else is out there in the market that delivers this? Then from a differentiation standpoint, what are other folks saying in the market? How else are your customers solving this problem? What does it mean to be in the B2B enterprise tech space? There are multiple competitors. Sometimes someone will say, I've got this brand new thing. No one is doing. We are the only ones who do this. Typically we can say that's not really true at this stage. But sometimes that's the case. in which case we say, well, how are your customers or your prospects solving this problem today? What's their mindset? Are they doing it in-house, et cetera? So those kind of three hallmarks that I've talked about, differentiation, credibility and relevancy are what we need to define and we need to triangulate, right? So that's kind of getting to our discovery portion and getting to our strategic framework of understanding, okay, how do we talk about that? Defining your position in the market, defining your purpose and your kind of overall story that you need to tell from a strategic standpoint. Then we articulate that externally. How do we use a language that matters to your audience? It's gonna resonate with them. How an audience now are LLMs, right? What do LLMs need to see as well? What are the bots searching for right when they're when you're asking a question and folks are prompting, well or not well? And so we need to give that actual language and messaging and framework so that it defines what's the overall story you're gonna tell, what's the what, what's the how, what's the why, so that your bases are all covered. And then we have to train folks on how to actually use it. When do you talk about all these things, right? How do you speak, right? So brand voice is a big piece of what we do. Particularly commoditized spaces, you need to stand out and how you speak. What's the word choice you use? Are you bold? Are you sassy? Are you welcoming? Are you, you know, everyone's best friend? Are you a ruler and you just define the space? And so how you articulate that is equally as important. And then how do we train folks on it? Then the AI pieces will come in where we will say, okay, where are your teams actually doing this work? Are they in Salesforce? Are they in HubSpot? How do we actually create the right tools that they can write an email, then click a, you know, voice and messaging button and it automatically rewrites their work within HubSpot or the like, so that it's on brand and on message. And we measure that, right? So we have dashboards and tools for CMOs that essentially act as a scorecard to say, hey, this team is crushing it, right? These guys are all stars on their messaging and voice. Then these other folks are actually your product marketing team is actually not doing great, right? And let's figure out why that's the case. Are they pushing back against it because it's not working? Are they feeling like they don't know how to activate this? So, you know, quarterly, monthly, yearly, depending on the work, we'll go back in and help the CMO and CEO to define what's working, what's not, and how we can fix it. So, 30,000 foot view, that's how we work. - I love that, I love that. You may be thinking of so many things. I would say one, the relevant seed piece is interesting to me 'cause I feel like my word, I'll say it is, some of the clients are, I call it Dulululu, and I think that they are living in their own fantasy of what the company can and cannot do. And so, I feel like there's a gentle way to unpack that and say, you know, great you think I wrote down like you're defining a new category, but you're actually just within this category and you have maybe like a secondary or church area offering, but this is what you're actually known for. So, I feel like that is known. - You nailed it. Like, I said, we just hosted a dinner in New York with a bunch of brilliant CMOs, you had folks in DocuSign and Pega and Flatter and Health and all these incredible enterprise organizations. And we talked about how everyone's defining a category and what we say is, like, no, you're not, right? You need to truly prove it to me that you are. And you need to prove it to the entire analyst community. Is that where you're gonna put your, you know, $600 million in sales and marketing budget? Is that really what you're gonna do? You're gonna put all of that in educating the market on this new category. Why wouldn't you use that money to tell them about yourself, right? - I love that. - So we try to convince folks not to go down the category creation, too. - I love that. Yeah, 'cause I doubt it was start-up, so they're like, we're creating a new category and it's like, you're actually not, you're just a subset of like a category that exists. And I find it so interesting 'cause we get pitched all the time for all these new CRMs that are AI enabled and I'm like, you're not on seating unless the apocalypse happens and if it does, listen to this recording on seating, Salesforce and Hubsa. You're just not in the world that we play in our least the world I play in. So I was like, integrations in, yes. You know, ISV's connectors great. I was like, but my enterprise, I call like mid-market clients are not, you know, getting off of these because if they wanna get sold or bought or acu acquired or merged, like they need these systems to then connect the puzzle pieces into larger organizations, et cetera. And then they're like, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. You just use those tools. You don't need to be wildly different, right? Like that's all right. Like your brand needs to be, but you don't need to be changing the entire world. Just change how your customer does their job. That's enough. Yeah, I love that. And then I would say we just did an episode, two episodes on AO and SEO because I think for now, I can really, I'm like SEO's dead. That's not true. But I would say there is a new game in town. It is AO. And I love that when you're doing these branding and positioning and verbal strategy, you're also saying like now that we have that down pat, all the other stuff can come when you're talking visual emotion, et cetera. You're keeping in mind that the LLMs are moving so fast that in order to crawl the web and get the new messaging out there in front of some, you know, a hundred millions of eyeballs, we need to be able to get these bots to pick it up easily and obviously understand that we've shifted the perspective of what that looks like. So I love that too. Yeah, yeah, roughly right. It's a new buying game. There's people, there's bots and there's hybrids. And I think that we need to what that balance will be in the next few years as anyone's guess. You know, some folks will say it's only bots, but I don't see humanity ending tomorrow. So for now, we just need to sort of understand how you can be found period and understand how your users specifically are finding it, right? If you are working with CIOs and CTOs, they're gonna be more tech savvy and how they're searching for you than, you know, I can't think of an example of anyone who's not using AI significantly right now, but certainly how they're using it is on a spectrum. And so understanding and meeting folks where they are is still marking 101. Yeah, that's great. So talk to me about what I consider like thought leadership and sort of how that intersects with the company story and the positioning because like you had mentioned earlier, you're saying, you know, the CIO or the CMO is going out there doing the keynotes obviously as you're updating, upgrading, changing the messaging, they need to keep up with that and their keynote needs to adjust like, what is the intersection between what the company says and is doing and the verbal strategy and the messaging and then what those executives are going out to the marketplace, keynotes, fireside chats, dinners, et cetera, talk to me about the intersection of that because I find that really interesting. Yeah, it's sort of a spectrum of sort of different types of messaging that are all stemmed from the brand messaging which is at the very top, right? There's brand messaging, there's product level messaging, there's sort of PR and social messaging and the timeline shifts, right? So as you get further down or however you want to stack this but in kind of my visual brand is at the top and that is the longest lasting, right? Five years, 10 years, if you're Coca-Cola a century, right, of talking about nothing but happiness, those messages don't change. As you get down further into, as I said, PR, social, keynotes, point in time messages, those are built from the brand messaging, right? You're always going to talk about in the case of Coke, you're always going to talk about happiness but how you actually experience that and define that in a keynote or the like is going to shift a bit. How you prove that brand story of happiness in this case really does depend on how folks are seeing you. So in the case of the keynote example that you gave, you're kind of treating each of these different voices for your business as a different way to prove that story. Is your CEO telling the vision of where that happiness story goes next? Is your CMO talking about how it relates highly to the customer? Is your product team talking about how happiness drives forward a new product innovation, et cetera? So they're all sort of proof points of the same story but how they tell that story is going to be different. So you're just using each person in this case or each touch point is a strategic lever of getting the same story out in the market and how you do it creatively, definitely matters and definitely is where the creativity comes from. You're just not reinventing the wheel and saying something different every time, which is the work that we try to stop. And are you working with companies and helping with taking the larger messaging which you're saying top down bottoms up, however you look at it and then inserting it into the different departments, disciplines, key leaders, et cetera, throughout and where do you play? Are you playing everywhere? Are you focused on a certain title, et cetera? Yeah, great question. So yes, we operationalize that work. We generally will do this sort of, hey, let's help you get through launch. We'll do the operational piece. And then we thankfully have amazing partners in PR, in web, in motion, et cetera, that help you to articulate and execute on that story, media planning, buying, et cetera. We'll essentially do the like, OK, here's the launch campaign. Here's the larger thing that you need to drive forward. But where that buy is, who you're reaching, which events you should go to, et cetera. There are, like I said about the surgical versus sort of blunt object agency approach. I think that each of those folks, PR agencies, event agencies, et cetera, do that sort of execution and creativity really well. So our job is to say, here's what good looks like. Here's how you should map to that higher level story overall. Here's how we need to operationalize and measure it so that we know how every team and every agency is performing against this larger brand message overall, so we can see how it's moving to needle. But from an execution standpoint, for each of those, generally we're guiding those agencies and those teams. but we're not doing every piece of the work. I find that brands, when they get brand agencies, when they get over their skis, and try to do strategy and execution, generally they're not great at one. - Yeah, yeah, I like to say we're the bridge between, I've rubbed up the strategy and the execution, and that makes us different, but I'm a big proponent of like, stay in your lane, and then have great partners or collaborators that you can refer out to, because if you have done this for a while, and you're at 10 years, and I'm at eight years, I would say, I feel like you've learned to be like, we're really great at this, and this is our zone of genius, and I've learned to stay in our lane of what that looks like, and say, no, we're gonna pass that part of the partnership off and we have a great network of people that we can refer out to, and I found that has worked really well for us. - Yeah, otherwise if you try to do too much, you ruin your relationship, and as boutique agencies and consulting firms like us, your reputation matters more than anything else, right? So I'm not willing to take the risk of trying something and trying to do it better than someone else who does this for a living just to get that business. It's not worth it in the long run for us. I'd rather our clients who all have extremely hard bars of quality and success to get that not just in brands, but in PR, but in event strategy, in web, et cetera, and I wanna make sure that they're delivering the best. And if I can't with certain TSA that our team can do it, we're not gonna do it. - I love that, us too. - Well, we're gonna wrap up here soon, but a few last minute questions is, when a leader does this well, I would say what does that look like? And then on the flip, when a leader, I'd say, a ghost rogue and doesn't do it well, sort of what does that look like? So maybe you can use examples. You don't have to name companies if you don't want to, of clients, you guys have service that. This went well and this was why, and this is what happened. And then, you know, where falls apart and some of it could be totally out of your control. 'Cause I always say we've delivered your work and we've delivered your messaging and metrics for us and we put your board reports together, I said, but and I could go to sleep knowing I gave you the true data and answers based on your CRM and your office system. But if you wanna go out in that room and tell a totally different story, I can't help you there. - That's right, too far. (laughing) - Yes, exactly. You can lead a horse to water, but you can. - Yes, yes, I love that one. - Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, answered a couple different ways and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. I think it's gonna be clear when a brand is doing it well versus not, right? When you have a brand that's a brand first, right? And the B2B space look at folks like, you mentioned Salesforce, for example. Those guys are so specific about their message from day one has been about customer relationships and that's it, right? They talk certainly about growth overall, but it's growth in the right way, quote unquote, right? It's three-putting customers first, et cetera. They are so simple in their message and they have a wildly complex portfolio, right? They've done acquisitions better than anyone else that I've seen overall. And what you see with that is you see a return on their brand investment in the form of true measurable value, right? And how I get asked this all the time, how do you actually measure brand value, right? - Yes, that's a great question. And so one way that we'll look at it is, is, is how does your brand align on three sort of strategic levers? One is choice, pretty simple. Are people choosing you over someone else? Most people, to your point, if you're gonna get acquired, folks are looking at, do you use best in class tools? Because I know when I'm acquiring someone that you use Salesforce, they're pretty clean. I know what I'm getting, right? And so choosing Salesforce signals that you know what best in class is, right? So if you are Salesforce, you say, people are choosing us more than the competition overall, right? You take it down to a CPG level. People are choosing Coca-Cola off the shelf versus store brand more often, right? And that gets me into my next point of charging a premium, right? You can charge more money because people want to choose you more often, right? They're saying it's worth it. I see that ROI value, right? I see the value of Coca-Cola versus store brand Coke, right? I see the value of Salesforce versus someone else because of everything that they represent. And the last piece of engendering loyalty, I'm gonna stick around for longer because I know there's no better choice out there, right? Coca-Cola loyalists, especially in the South, are die hard. No, they're not, you bring anything else that isn't a Coca-Cola into a barbecue in Atlanta, like you should be shot on site, right? And everyone knows that. That is a loyal conversation to have. And Salesforce as an example is a similar one. And there's tons of these folks, right? There's tons of brand service now as a brand led organization as well. They have a wildly simple story, et cetera. And when you put all those things together of you put the driving choice, driving premium, driving loyalty together, you should be able to see the value of the brand, right? So you see that people, how do I actually categorize this? And there's a ton of folks who measure this. Interbrand does this really well. They have their best brands, best global brands every year. Cantar Media does this well. There's a whole bunch of folks who measure what is brand value. And essentially that is all of all of the money that you bring in. How much of that can we attribute to a brand? And a brand led organization can be upwards of 70% of their entire value is driven from the brand. And then you see businesses that are brand led. They've been sort of doing everything that you said a moment ago. They're sort of doing tiny optimization, band-aid approaching on things. They're only focused on short-term goals. They're just kind of only focused on demand without brand, which doesn't exist anymore. And with that, they're only seeing their brand value at 20-ish percent. There's so much more to be had in the opportunities that they're leaving on the table of that gap of 50% in their brand value because they're not investing. So when folks say you actually can't measure and can't value brand, it gets me very fired up because you can and you should, right? And it doesn't take a $500,000 brand tracking study to do it. You just need to make sure that you're being smart about looking at your day-to-day KPIs and tying those to the brand work that you're doing. - I love that. - Last question I'll say is in the age of 2026, where we're recording this, is there anything these days that surprises you as an agency owner? (laughing) - Daily, Stacy, we talked about 10 things before we started recording of like, "Oh, here's a new thing, here's a new thing." It's just daily drinking from a fire hose. Like more than ever when I'm so old that I remember when Twitter was kind of out and everyone described it that way. It's drinking, it's information from a fire hose. Little did we know that 20 years later, 30 years later, we'd be here looking at open claw and, mold bod and whatever they're called today, right? And all of these tools, I sound like such a boomer when I say it that way. But whatever these new things are, the ability of what we can actually do in a moment is astounding to me. And I think as an agency owner, things that surprise me are sort of the, the teams that have so much to lose that are not, that are sort of forgetting how important trust is. And by that I mean, they're putting so much stock into, let's figure it out, let's use AI tools, et cetera. When you realize that, when you just sort of run and gun with that kind of attitude and using any tool in front of you, you forget that you could very easily break trust by putting something that's not predictable, that's not governed well, that's not confident in front of your customers. And so just because there is this huge wave of innovation happening and just because you can experiment, doesn't mean that you should experiment on every piece of your business all at once. So that's kind of the thing that surprises me is how many multi-billion dollar businesses are doing that. And I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop for some of these folks. - Yes, and I was just at an event in Miami this week called an anti-networking event, which was fascinating and there was 11 rules about what you couldn't talk about, one of them being, you couldn't talk about what you did. But everyone was, I'll say tech savvy, tech forward, entrepreneurs, venture investors, et cetera. And he was so interesting how still with everyone having bots talk to bots and we were talking about vibe coding and all the journey buzzwords that were saying we shouldn't even say, they still shut up on a Monday night in Miami to have connection. And so, and I think it's that interrelationship, it's the trust it's saying, I'm a real person, you're a real person, we extend beyond the computer screen. I just thought it was like a fascinating social experiment. - I think we need it, right? We're still humans. And in these intimate CMO dinners that we host in different cities, I said this the other week in New York, like showing up for folks really still matters, right? Being there, being present, putting phones away, having these connections, getting better at what you do and who you are as a person, right? Is not only found out in, you know, replant and lovable and sort of seeing what you can do and how productive you can be. I think it really does matter to be human still. And I can't believe that's a thing that we're saying, but it truly is. And I think that's what's gonna be the difference in how we use these tools going forward is our own humanity. - Yes, I love that. Amazing, it was a pleasure to have you on the pod. I love the work that you're doing. I love the way that you distill it, articulate it, break it down 'cause you're making it sound very easy, pod squad, but it's not as easy as she's making it seem. But that's why you're an expert and that's why you're in your team or in your zone of genius and staying in your lanes. If folks wanted to contact you, get in touch with you, talk to you more about that, who are sort of the ideal people, you want to come into your orbit and how can they get in touch with you? Thank you. I appreciate that. And thank you for having me. This is the fantastic. I always learn 10 new things when I talk to you, Stacy. So thank you. You can find us at villainbranding.com, V-I-L-L-A-I-N, the tricky spelling of villain. Sometimes I'll get folks that say like, what? Why did you spell it that way? I'm like, that's the dictionary spelling of villain. And I'm on LinkedIn waxing philosophical about this stuff all the time. LinkedIn.com/insashlorinwarnic. And I'm Lauren's with a Y. We had to say that. Lauren's with Y. Like Lauren Hill, I had nothing to do with it. Thank my mom. But we'll put in the show notes. But yes, the folks, so anyone can come and chat. I love you talking about brand any day. But the clients that we work best with tend to be folks that are around a billion in business that are really at a point of high stakes that are struggling with this brand debt, right? Your story's not not keeping up with your business. And we're happy to help there. We have, I have office hours every week. If folks want to just like chat, it's open. So just get in touch with me anytime. I'm Lauren L.A. You are Y on at villainbranding.com. So you can always just shoot me know. Amazing. Thank you for coming and talking about this topic. I think in the world of AI swap, I think this is a crucial lunch plan to success of a company. And I think the art of B2B brand storytelling will always win in this innovation era, drinking from the fire hose. So pod squad, thank you for joining us. Thank you for sticking around till the end because your next big business break through maybe an episode away. See you soon, pod squad. Bye. As we wrap up this episode of C-Sweets Strategies, I want to express my sincere gratitude to you, our listeners for tuning in and engaging with our podcast. Your commitment to business growth and operational excellence is what drives this podcast forward. A special thank you to our guests today for sharing their valuable business insights and experience. Your wisdom is a gift to our audience and we're honored to have had you on our show today. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be thrilled if you follow and subscribe to the podcast. Your help supports us to reach more ambitious business leaders just like you. And if you didn't enjoy it, well, I guess I'll see you never. This is your host, Stacy Sussman, Chief Revenue Officer at RevUp Advisory, signing off.