[Podcast] Designers Don’t Build Brands with Kevin Finn

We talk about brands constantly.

Agencies claim to build them.
Startups launch with them.
Founders declare themselves one before their first real customer experience.

In this episode

• Why most businesses are not actually brands yet
• The difference between brand and branding
• Why designers cannot build brands on behalf of companies
• When designers become true strategic partners
• What signals show a business is evolving into a real brand
• Why design must be deliberate to create long term relevance
• The deceptively difficult questions leaders avoid when building brands
• Whether community is becoming the true moat of modern brands

About Kevin Finn

Kevin Finn is the founder of TheSumOf, a consultancy that works with organizations to clarify purpose, strategy, and brand expression. With nearly three decades of experience at the intersection of business and design, Kevin is known for challenging conventional thinking around branding.

Listen Here

Love the show? Please review us on Apple.

Play Now

Watch on YouTube

Learn Brand Strategy

Brand Master Secrets helps you become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. And in my opinion, this is the most comprehensive brand strategy course on the market.

The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to JUST Branding. Today’s episode challenges one of the biggest assumptions in our industry. We throw the word brand around constantly. Agencies build them, startups launch them, founders call themselves one before they even deliver a product. But what if most businesses aren’t actually brands at all? Today, I’m joined by Kevin Finn, author of Brand Principles, this lovely book here, and the founder of TheSumOf. Kevin has spent only three decades working at the intersection of business and design, and he’s not afraid to call out where our industry gets it wrong. In fact, that’s the reason why we invited Kevin on the show. Thankfully, he said yes. In this conversation, we’re going to unpack the difference between brand and branding, why designers cannot build brands on your behalf, what it really takes to earn the title of brand, and why design must be deliberate if you want long-term relevance. So if you’re creative moving into strategy or founder who thinks a logo equals a brand, this episode might shift your thinking. So let’s get into it. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

Thank you. Thanks, guys. Good to be here.

Welcome, Kevin. Excited to tuck in to your perspectives on this. It’s going to be an interesting one.

Yeah.

We’re going to get straight to it. It’s a cold opening. Kevin, you’ve said something that’s going to likely agitate many of our listeners. Designers don’t build brands. So what are we doing here? Can you explain this?

Yeah. Look, I think in our field, and I get why it’s said, but I think when we look at our field and branding designers go out and say that we build brands, it sort of frames it in a way that the logo and the communications and the websites and the narratives equals a brand. And I think that that has a really, really important role to play, but it ignores a whole bunch of other things that happen in a business that require a brand to actually be built and activated. I’ll give you a quick example. So we’ll take something that everyone knows, Nike, and I would sort of say, so Karl and Davison did the Nike Swoosh. Fantastic, wonderful, very valuable logo slash what people would refer to as brand. I get it. When that was created, it didn’t mean anything really. I mean, even when the sales team came to Phil Knight and said, when we’re going out talking about this, what do we say? This is this new thing. What do we say it is? And he said, look, it’s the sound of someone running past you. That was his definition of what it was. He didn’t like it in the beginning. He said, it will do. And then we look at that. And if we say that, you know, Carolyn Davison built the Knight brand because she did the logo. And even if she did a bit more and worked on a design system underpinning that, it ignores all of the other people, associations, the community, the athletes, the customers, society at large, media that declares that this is a brand over time. So what I say is that we have a really important role, like critical role at a point in time in the journey of a business. But it is the business that takes all of those tools and frameworks, builds on it, gives it meaning over a longer period of time. And indeed, there might be identity refreshes along the way of that business’ journey. And while I’m saying that that is incredibly important, hugely valuable, what I have a problem with is when branding designers decide they want to take sole credit for building a brand because they created a branding system. And that’s an issue that I feel that we’re undermining our own profession by misleading what value we can offer when we keep it in a basket of essentially superficial cosmetic elements that a business needs to use for them to take into their journey of moving from a business to a brand. Another little example is Trabani. Let’s say Trabani. There’s been a huge, a lot of accolades around this repositioning of Trabani. And it’s incredible, the packaging and the identity and wonderful. And if the branding designers were to say, we just built the brand, it removes, one, the product. Two, it removes the fact that all of the associations that customers and consumers have with that product. It removes the fact that Hamdi Ukuleya is heavily involved in the community. It removes all of the other aspects, the supply chain, the distribution channels and designers kind of go, yeah, but we did the logo on the Paxia Solos. And the difference with Chobani is that that was done in-house. So what I kind of have an issue with is that when we go out into the world as branding designers and have this sort of carte blanche, all-consuming blanket statement that we say we build brands, you break it down and use common sense and you go, you either don’t understand what a brand is, or you’re trying to mislead a business owner to think that you’re more valuable than you are by overstating something. And instead, I think we could have a conversation that says, because we play such an important role, it would be beneficial for us to work a long time with you over the long period, to help you at all the junctures for your market changes, for the business evolves, for a context shift, and we can help steer that narrative with you, depending on what’s required at any point in time. So that’s where I kind of frame why we don’t build brands.

I’m loving this already. I’ve got tons of stuff. I love the grenades going off. And I think Jacob and I are, I imagine, I don’t want to speak for you, Jacob, but I’m in agreement. But before I dive in with a few thoughts of my own, I was just going to get some clarifications. So how would you define what a brand is then? So you’ve said what it isn’t, just the logos and the fonts, also giving us an indication that it’s associations with lots of these other things. But is there a succinct definition that you’ve got in the back of your head that you could let us know so that we can work from that?

Yeah. And the definition does include our role. Okay. So I would sum it up if I was put into two words, there’s a recognizable reputation. So you put those two things together. The reputation is what the business has built through all of the associations, the product and service. And the recognizable part is probably where branding designers and all other people within the business has helped sort of reflect what that reputation is, shine a light on what that reputation is. But essentially, if we were to say, what does that then equate to? It is about how relevant that business is in a person’s life in a way that other businesses aren’t. Nice. Right. So it becomes, for them, it becomes, if we have a Venn diagram, in one there’s trust and all that comes from reputation and how there’s consistency. The other then is preference. So we know that we live in a world with so much choice. So a consumer or a customer might go, my preference is this business or brand. They wouldn’t use those languages words we do, but they would say, I have a preference for this. The other really interesting thing is that in a third bubble, is that it can form part of their identity. The reason why is that it’s so clear to that person that the values align, the product aligns, the status that I get aligns, and I am happy to be associated with that business slash brand. So if you’ve got that Venn diagram of trust and preference and identity, in the middle, you’ve got this word belonging. And I think a business becomes a brand when enough people like willingly align their personal identity to a business that is continuously adding tangible value in very relevant ways through products and services, excuse me, status, experiences, convenience, all of those things. Those customers aren’t saying, oh, that’s a brand. Their behavior to that business equates to what we would call a brand versus a business, which is we do stuff and we go, cool, it’s transactional. So, transactional might be a business, relationship might be a brand.

Can I dive in here, Jacob, because I just want to go to you Kevin, just for a minute. Yeah. So first thought, my mentor, Marty Newmayer, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Marty.

I know Martin.

He has a very interesting way of putting it, which I think aligns with what you’re saying to some degree, where he basically says that companies don’t build brands, but customers build brands. So if you put the customer first in your decision-making, and you have obviously an idea long-term of what you need the brand to stand for, but you put the customer first, you design the customer and the customer experiences, then the brand is built as a by-product of your thinking about the customer. So I think that’s what you’re saying. And that works. But I was going to throw something into the mix, right? Just to challenge everybody’s listening in. Because I’m being deliberately provocative here, because I know what you mean when you say designers don’t build brands. Because I agree, identity graphic designers do not build the brands in the way that we’re discussing it. But here is my challenge to, well, I’d love your thoughts on it, Kevin, but here’s my challenge to everyone thinking. I would say, well, why don’t we, as designers who understand brand, why don’t we go beyond the identity and work in business to design the experiences, the thinking, train up other parts of the business, work with operations, work with HR, work with untraditional areas so that in effect we do build the brand with the client, and ultimately with the customer in mind. And I just mentioned that because basically that’s my career trajectory, right? So I was a dynasty designer and I went right into strategy, and now I’m solo consulting in strategy, and I find myself in rooms where I’m thinking like 10, 15 years ago, that Matt Davies of those days would never have been there because I thought of myself as a graphic designer and a creative, and now I’m like, I’ve sort of learned different language to it, but still at the heart, I am a designer. I’m helping design experiences for customers that ultimately I’m working with clients. So there’s a thought. What are your thoughts on that, Kevin? Good designers can get it back. They just went beyond that.

Okay. There’s two things on that that really stand out. That’s a really good question and a great framing. So the first is we’re not doing ourselves any favors, right? Because we as a field, like I wouldn’t say all, but there’s enough people in our field that either don’t know how to, don’t want to move into that strategy stage, so have sort of wanted to inflate the branding side of it to be way more central to the business operation, that it’s misleading the business owners. And they think that, well, once you’ve done the branding stuff, I don’t need you anymore, right? Because you’ve built the brand. And so they actually don’t have a pathway to move into strategy because they’ve, what I say, designed themselves out of the equation. So that’s the first thing. All right. The second thing which I should clarify for you, listeners, is that there are three cases, three exceptions for designers to build brands. And the first one is when, perhaps like you, Matt, you’re a designer and you have a long-term relationship with a business where you do have access to the board and you are talking from strategic sort of meetings, product development, you might not be developing it, but you might be having a say in it. And you’re there in the mix at the heart of that business and over the long-term. So designers in those cases, and there’s loads of studios that have 10-year, 20-year relationships with businesses, and they can help build a brand over time. The big thing here is that our role is the assist. All right. The assist, not we do it all. It’s all credit, we did it, we built it, aren’t we wonderful? So we need to shift to we’re an incredibly important assist, and where you can help build a brand over the long-term is exception one, over time in a long-term partnership. Number two is you’re the founder, right? So you might be a founder as a designer and you can say, well, I can use my design skills to help build this brand over time, but that’s like on a day-to-day basis and also in conjunction with everybody else involved in the business. But as a designer, you can lay claim to say, well, I’m building my own business and hopefully it’ll become a brand. Right? And this case is there, Airbnb, Canva, etc. So we know that. The third case is in-house. So if you’re working in-house and you’re working on a day-to-day basis on a whole range of things inside the business, because you’re the in-house design team or designer, you are in a position over that longer period to help build that brand. Again, it’s an assist from the inside. So what I’m sort of saying is we have an incredibly valuable role to play. Like it’s almost outsized in terms of what it can do to help. But what we aren’t or doesn’t help us to do is say, we need to have sole credit for building a brand because we’ve done some branding and marketing, sometimes six-month campaigns and boom, I’ve created. To answer your question, I’ll sum it up. The first is we’re not doing ourselves any favor because we’ve designed ourselves out of the equation with how we brand our own profession. The second is that there are three exceptions to the case where I think designers can move into those areas, and it will take a mental shift and an education shift to stop thinking in pixels and colors and typefaces and serifs and sans serifs, and into strategic thinking for how this plays a role in a business’ journey. So that’s how I look at your question. Does that make sense?

I’m so on board with this, Kevin. Yeah. This is exactly why I created a community called Brand Builders Alliance, which is to move the conversation around from just design to actually brand building. That’s what we do. We help creative move from just like the order-taker to integrate it to the strategic partner to help actually grow brands versus just the identity portion. So totally on board. I know you have some really great examples in your book. Like you talk about Apple is one, well, you have dozens in there, but is there anything that comes to mind? You mentioned Shabani, but is there anything else that you would- Yeah.

There’s one I was thinking about just earlier today, which I think is a really good example for perhaps what you were just saying, Jacob, and also what we were just talking about, and it’s Supreme. Supreme started in 1994 in Manhattan as a skate shop. We look at Supreme today and go, wow, it’s one of the most valuable brand labels in the world, literally to the billions. But it started in 1994 as a skate shop and as a failing skate shop. They decided, we laugh at it now, to make a bit of extra cash, they’d start doing some t-shirts. So what I find interesting here, and why Supreme is a really good case in point, is that they had this idea. And we think about businesses, we think about founders, and we think about how the passion that comes with it, with starting a business, that the life cycle of that journey is a founder has an idea. And then that idea can turn into, let’s say, a business. And then that business eventually can become a brand. A lot of founders and a lot of businesses, they claim brand status at the idea stage, when there’s nothing validated in the market and there’s nothing kind of delivered, but they go because, and this is our fault as a field, because I’ve got a logo and because I’ve got some comms, maybe I’ve got a bricks and mortar footprint, but they said, that’s it, I’ve got a brand. Because our field tells them, that’s what you’ve got. The other thing about Supreme is that the logo, which now is one of the most valuable logos in the world, was created by the founder and it was created to reflect something that most of their customers and community have no idea where it came from. And it was influenced by pop artist Barbara Kruger, who is anti-consumerism, anti-capitalist. So when you put that idea as a reflection of the idea of Supreme, which is skate, rebels, youth, anti-authoritarian, that makes absolute sense because you go, that logo is a reflection of the idea that they wanted to build in time. Most of the customers would have no idea about that. They just go, cool, Supreme, white, red, cool, that’s… And Supreme, as a sort of an evolution of its business, has given their customers status, enough for them to queue for hours for the limited drop that they can go, I’m part of this tribe. This is where I belong and I will show my status and I’ll show my tribe and my belonging by wearing a Supreme shirt because that gives me cool status or whatever they’re looking for. So we look at this as sort of an ecosystem of the branding or the logo was created to reflect the philosophy that was fledgling that then they used from a philosophical point of view to build a business that then became a brand because there was a consistency from idea through to execution, delivery, experience, et cetera, et cetera. So the way that I talk about it, whether it’s Supreme or if it’s Apple or if it’s Chobani or if it’s whomever, our field, we talk a lot about logos. We talk a lot about branding. And the reality is that the brand gives the logo its value, not the other way around. And the way we talk in our field is often the logo is the most important thing for you. The branding has given you the value and has given you this pathway to become a brand. And it’s the wrong way around.

So a follow up question then. So at what point does a business become a brand? What signals are there?

Yeah, look, this is tricky because, number one, I don’t believe that there’s a moment in a business that goes, boom, we’ve got this amount of revenue, this amount of experience, and this amount of exposure for a brand. It’s also incredibly individual and personal. So I think that a business becomes a brand, like we said earlier, when enough people recognize it as something that is valuable to them beyond another business that might be in the sector. If we go back a bit, if we go back to 20, 30 years ago, we would probably define when a business becomes a brand as when it becomes a household name. So you go, lots of people who may not even be customers, not even interested, but they recognize it, they know it. So you might say to yourself, I hate fast food. I never eat it because I’m healthy or whatever, but I know McDonald’s. Right, so it’s got this rent-free space in your head where you have all the associations that you said that is a benchmark in the market or in the community that I associate is elevated enough because of consistency, exposure, awareness, that is the benchmark in that field. And that might be broad because it’s McDonald’s, but it might be very personal and small when it is a smaller geographic location and it might be very hyper-localized business. The people in that community go, oh yeah, that would be what we would term a brand in our relevance here in our world, in our community. So I think there’s a problem with us if we start to go, your life cycle is idea, then it builds into a business and then at this point you’ll become a brand. I think it’s more a mindset. I think it is more an awareness. I think it is back to this recognizable reputation where people, enough people go, I see you over others. Another really quick example would be when the iPod came out with Apple. I love this phrasing with the iPod. I can’t remember where someone said it to me or read it somewhere. And it was, there’s the iPod and other MP3 players. I think that’s when you become a brand. When you’re identified as the benchmark, the innovation, the game changer that consistently delivers, and then you compare that to everyone else in the market, who you might not even know their names. You go, there’s other MP3 players, but it’s the iPod. So I think that’s why we have this problem with, when does a business become a brand? And I think the way around that is to go back to this idea of recognisable reputation. If we stop thinking about the word brand and start thinking about how can we get a reputation, first of all, and how can we help get that as recognised as possible? The way I see it is that, well, the by-product, a bit like what Martin Neumir was saying to Matt, the by-product is that a brand may emerge. It may not, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that you could have a brand mindset. Your brand mindset could be, let’s build a reputation that is tangible and solid and consistent, and let’s try and make that as recognizable as possible through media, through associations, through word of mouth, through branding and comms and advertising, but let’s make that as recognizable as possible. That’s probably in my mind enough for us to say that could be interpreted as a brand. I don’t think Apple goes around saying we’re a brand or Supreme says we’re. I think they go, we’re Supreme, we’re Apple, we’re Trevani. I think we’re probably better served as an industry as well as a business community to move over to how do we create this recognizable reputation and dispense a little bit with this idea of brand. I know why it’s there because we have built it up that brands are valuable. When you talk about brands, Wally Owens once said this to me, the most important thing to a brand is money. I understand why any business out there would want to equate themselves to a brand because they see that as a pretty fast track to money, return, financial valuation. When in fact, as all three of us probably know here, is that in order to become a brand, you have to earn that. That can put a lot of pressure on you. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if we start to say, how do we build this recognizable reputation? Because that can become valuable and people can stick a brand level on it if they want. But you take the pressure off. Also, it helps our field to say, and to your point earlier, Matt, if we stay on your journey with you business, to help make your reputation, which you have control on, if we can help make that more recognizable, then we have a long-term relationship, conversation, dialogue, relationship, partnership. Rather than give us a brief to do a six-month marketing program or design system and boom, boom, we’re out of here because we’re on to the next project, but we built that brand. It’s undermining us.

If you’re serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you’ll get live master classes, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you’re done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the waitlist. That’s joinbba.com.

Yeah, there’s a lovely expression that I like to use. I think there’s a check with Alex Smith that mentioned it to us when he came on and he called it unique value. I know it’s beyond that. To your point, I like recognizable reputation because there’s this awareness piece as well that comes with it. But that idea of what can I get from you as a business that I can’t get from anywhere else, that’s how you start building positive, assuming it’s of value to the audience. That’s great. I just think we need this way of thinking 100 percent. Particularly, I guess, if you take a step back as just a classical designer and you look at what’s happening with AI, it will not be long. I know people are doing it now, but at the start-up phase where they’re scrapping around for every penny spent or whatever you have in your part of the world.

Yeah.

If a founder can go to ChatGDP and say, this is my business idea, give me seven options for a new logo design and color palette and some general conditions from my guidelines, and hits enter and bang, seven appear within three minutes. Now, I know all the diehards amongst us will be like, it’ll never do what I do. Yeah, but if everybody’s just equating the brand with a logo, that is what’s going to happen. And the thing that I’ve been saying for a long time now is that you could have the world’s most greatest design logo, but still not have a brand as far as I’m concerned because of all the things that you’ve been saying, Kevin. So I think that’s something to bear in mind.

Well, here’s a really interesting way of thinking. I agree totally. And we’re at fault for telling businesses that that’s where the brand is, right? So you’re right. We undermine ourselves because AI can do it in five minutes. And all the diehards, as you said, will get up on arms. And the problem there is that when we say we’re brand builders, if we do branding, and if we say AI can’t do what we do, this is all about us. And those businesses couldn’t give a s*** about us. So, you know, suck it up, really. That’s that. And unfortunately, that is the case, right? But the other side of it is that with AI coming in, with the way that we have educated those business owners, we have made ourselves in their minds irrelevant. And if you look at our entire field over the space of about five years, we have helped to create a narrative about ourselves in the minds of these business owners that we are probably irrelevant or we’re inflating our costs because we could get this for way cheaper. Why won’t we pay you? So I have a thing that I talk to business owners about and communities and whoever, where if you take most… And this is in the branding space too. This is in the narrative building space. If you take most businesses out in the world, they’ll go out there and say, We’re innovators. We’ve got this heritage and this legacy. We’re awesome. We’ve got this unique offer. We’ve got this value proposition. We have this amount of staff. Here’s all of our case studies. We’re known in the field. We’re fantastic. Choose us, not them. That’s what a lot of businesses tend to do. How do we get above the noise? They think we add to the noise because we got to shout louder. What I say to them is that might be beautifully crafted text. It might be very genuine too. It might be heartfelt. You believe in this and it’s true. It’s factual and you put it out in the world. I literally tell them, I’m not kidding you. I literally tell them, I’m sorry, but people don’t give a shit about your story. They look at me as though, so what do we do? I said the only thing that they’re interested in is where does your story show up in their story? So you need to go out into the world and say, I am gonna tell you, my customer, my client, my market, I’m gonna tell you your story. I’m gonna tell you that this is your life, this is your world, and I’m gonna tell you that because I need you to know that I understand it, that I know what you’re facing. And then when I tell that story, I’m gonna say, and here’s where we show up. Just over here, we show up here, in a relevant way, in your world. The other way, which is the traditional way is, here’s our world, we’re amazing. Like this is what we do, like, why would you not even look at us? And where you show up is you give us your time and your money. That’s the flip. Now we need to do that as a field. We need to, when you’ve got AI coming at us, and you’ve got shrinking budgets, and you’ve got all kind of vulnerabilities and the disruption, we’re going out there saying, we’re amazing, pick us over AI, because AI can’t do what we do, we’re incredible, look at all our case studies. What we need to do is say, I understand what you’re facing, and you might have a better success rate if we have a long-term relationship, and we can use AI, but we’re in the mix because we are relevant, and the way we can do that, and we might be going a bit of a sidebar, but it is related. I hear it all the time when people in our field go out and go, AI is a tool. It’s like Photoshop, it’s a tool, and I’m like, I’m biting my knuckles going, the clue is in the name, it’s artificial intelligence. We, as a result of saying it’s a tool, are making ourselves irrelevant, because a business owner will go, awesome, I can learn that tool, I don’t need you. What we need, and it’s a language thing. I’m a visual designer, but I’m a word person. If we replace the word tool with collaborator, it keeps us in the equation. If we go and say, yes, we collaborate with AI. Instead of, yeah, we use AI as a tool. This goes back to how do we position ourselves in the minds of the people who traditionally hire us in a relevant way that says, I understand your world and what you’re facing, but here’s where I can add value. It’s not us saying, are we build brands? They’ll just laugh at us in two years. Probably still, probably are at the moment. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Yeah, 100 percent. I used to run a design studio many years ago now, back in the day, and I’ve probably told this story a little bit. But we used to have a whole team of people that would code by hand, websites. We were only a small studio, so we did the creative identity stuff, and then we had a small team, and they would literally do CSS, HTML, line by line, and they would build five, six, seven, in those days, like six-page websites. Great. But then what we saw from a business perspective was Wix, Squarespace.

Yeah. WordPress.

Yeah. All of these other ones entering the market. And we were like, oh, never mind. They can never really do what we do. Our code is clean and everything’s perfect. But as you rightly say, a business owner does not care, particularly at the early stages. Yet later, of course, they won’t want something scrappy at the bottom. So if you are operating as an industry, it’s like a pyramid, isn’t it? There’s only a very few number of global agencies at the very top that can get the big work. But it just means the bottom of the pack just shuffles. They just become irrelevant and they go. So I found that with my agency, it became obviously impossible to sell that. Who now would spend five grand on a six-page website? No one’s going to do that because you can literally spin one up yourself for $5.99 a month. You just wouldn’t do that. So the point is that, and if you want to go back even further in time, we can talk about the Luddites and the Pritzker’s, and the Industrial Revolution, which I won’t bore everybody with. But the same mindset, things are shifting and I like the way you talked about relevance there. So someone sat there, let’s imagine there’s a listener and we’ve completely shattered that world, right? They entered this conversation all happy, and now we’ve completely shattered their life. Let’s build things up a bit, Kevin, right? So what would your advice be? You’ve mentioned language, but let’s just say you’ve got your average designer, say they’ve been in the field for five years. What would your advice be to them to stay relevant in this world that we’re facing?

Yeah. I have a simple piece of advice. First of all, I’ll apologize for shattering your dreams, but unfortunately, it’s the inconvenient truth, as we would say. But here’s the opportunity and here’s what excites me. If we look at where we as a field have positioned our services, our offer, our talent, or whatever we want to call it, I would say if you’re in that basket, you’re not thinking big enough. Therein lies the opportunity and the excitement to actually fully understand what role this branding program platform does for a business, and then start thinking, well, what else in design can I be involved with? And I’ll say this because it’s something that I think is relevant to where we are right now. Years ago, I was chatting with Edward DiBono, and for your audience, if they don’t know who Edward DiBono was, check him out. He was probably the godfather of design thinking before it was a label.

Thinking hats, I know from the sixth-

Yes. Yeah. Six thinking hats, lateral thinking. He created the phrase lateral thinking, right? So he was the forefather of how to teach thinking as a skill. Right? It’s incredible what he had. And I asked him, I had the fortune of working with them and chatting with them, I said, give me a definition of design. And he gave me three words, design is deliberate. Now, if you look at that, and just what I said earlier, that we’re not thinking big enough, we build brands and branding programs. If we go design is deliberate, well, we can now frame that with the businesses that we work with and say, whether it’s an app or a logo or a business model or an economy, design is a set of deliberate steps to an outcome. And along the way, we can get multiple people in to help realize that design. So I’m looking at design big, right? I’m looking at it in terms of how we can use what we’ve learned in the trenches or in education, and then lift our eyes a bit further up and say, well, I’m a designer, therefore, I’m in the design world. And if I’m thinking design is deliberate, I can go and have a conversation with a business and say, what are your greatest challenges? Well, is it a supply change problem? Is it a distribution problem? And now together, let’s design a solution for that. And then we can plan that design out. And that takes us out of this, what I would call within the age of AI, the age of AI, a narrower, smaller conversation about what design is, that we’re inflating to, oh, it’s a brand, a Bill Brands. You’re not thinking big enough. If you step out of that and you say, how can we now have conversations with businesses that we work with in a relevant way that says, we’ll just use whatever design is required. And I am a designer and I will help work with you to design that outcome or that solution. That’s a big conversation.

100%, love that, love that. And we should be, we’re prepared for that, right? Designers are used to stepping into the unknown. As you say, no designer will know the end result for any project that they go through at the start. And that terrifies the heck out of most people, but we’re trained in it. We understand this is a mindset. As you say, it’s a series of deliberate decisions, iteration and testing and sharing, seeing responses, that messiness, we’re kind of used to, right? And I found that as I have got on that journey that you’ve described it. And I would just say to folks, anyone sat in there thinking, sitting there thinking, oh, I couldn’t do that. You can, you just have to go to work on yourself. Yes, you have to understand different language. You have to kind of step out of the comfort zone and try new things. But trust me, you have got the skills to do this if you are a good designer.

The other thing too is we have to stop being defensive. So when I look at how the business world works, and in the book, there’s a chapter called Two Types of Thinking. The business world thinks in analytical thinking. And that is generally what has been. So what has been done? What has worked? What hasn’t worked? What do we need to… They’re looking backwards. And they kind of go, okay, now we have a bit of a sense of what worked, but didn’t work. We’ve got some patterns. Great. Designers come in and they say, what if? So we’re thinking in the future, right? And we’re saying there’s all these potential things that we could look at and create out of nothing and sort of pull ideas in from experience and other things, and we can create things. And what happens is that there’s a divide between those two. The analytical thinkers say, well, this is tried and tested and works, and what you’re saying is risky. And what designers are saying is, yeah, well, that’s dull and boring, and it’s going to be repeating, you’re not going to innovate. And I think this is what I said about being defensive. Designers need to go, analytical thinking is super important, and we should be in there helping to leverage that into the future. And if we can act that way and speak that way, then we’re going to try and reassure and convince the analytical thinkers to say that what you do is super important, but it won’t move the needle. It won’t get you to where you are if you want to be seen as an innovator. So how about we take all of that into the future and look at what if, and we have a problem in the business community and in the design field where we get defensive when we’re not allowed to play with our toys, and we’re like, what do you mean? We’re creative and wild and chaos is wonderful and stuff happens. And the business world is like, that’s just it’s not grounded enough for us, and you are not reassuring us that’s going to get us what we need to get to. We all need to work together, and we need to think design with a big D, deliberate design over the long term. We need to start talking about recognizable reputations, that build reputations around whatever it might be they want to do, whether it’s innovation, whether it’s about climate, whether it’s about finance, whatever it might be, and then make that recognizable over the long term using both analytical and design creative thinking. And as a field, we got to stop getting defensive on AI can never replace us, and why aren’t you letting us play with the toys business? You just don’t understand it. And all that kind of stuff you see all the time, we need to just get a little bit of humility, and then I think we can add value in those conversations.

Brilliant. Wow. Thank you. So with that all said, I’m just thinking back to our conversation in the beginning, should agencies stop saying we build brands if this is the case?

Yeah, I do. I think if they want to have that sentence, and I’ve actually had people say to me, if I stop saying that, I won’t get business. So I get it. And I know your listeners might be going, oh, God. I can’t not say that, right?

We may have to change our podcast name, Kevin.

No, no, no, no, no, no. You can keep that sentence. You can keep that value offer or proposition, but I would recommend you just add in a word or two, which goes back to what we were just saying about this breakdown, the divide between analytical thinking and business thinking and design thinking and creative thinking. We just say, we help you build your brand. We assist in how you build your brand. Now, that alone, they will go, okay, so I have a role to play in this. You go, of course you do, because you got to deliver on it, number one. Number two, when I’m saying we’re going to assist you on that, you open up the door to start to educate and explain that if you want to become a brand, or if you want to have a recognizable reputation, this is going to happen over the long term. And things are going to shift and context will change, and we would like to be there with you along the way. So how about we start talking about a long-term relationship with you in order for you to do that? And all of a sudden, we’re shifting out of this defensive, we build brands and then we’re replaced by AI, and we’re moving into what you were saying earlier, Matt, about having more strategic conversations that actually gives those business owners the credit that they deserve, that they have to build and deliver on this on a day-to-day basis. But if we design ourselves out of the equation on a six-month marketing design program, then we’re undervaluing ourselves and we’re removing our relevance. Whereas if we add in, we help assist you build your brand, that’s a conversation you can expand into a long-term negotiation. Also, it’s not a radical change in terms of how a business might be talking. You just say, no, no, let’s just be real, and use common sense, and respect these people, and say, we assist or we help, and here’s how we do it.

Well, just shifting the conversation a little bit here, you have a chapter around six deceptively difficult questions. So this is for business leaders. So what are some of the questions that business leaders avoid?

Yeah, so if we’ve got time, I’ll run through quickly because it will make sense. Over my career, I’ve been asking a lot of questions like a lot of designers do, and I’ve been looking at what’s important to businesses and where the value is and how things move the needle. So the first question is for a business, maybe even for a designer. First question is, what value do you provide? That is not easy to answer. So you got to look at that and it’s not value for money. It’s like what value, where’s the relevance? Why am I in your mind worth talking to? So what value do you provide? The second question then is, what are you saying? So back to what we were just discussing about how businesses or designers might change what they say. So what is our core message? So if we know the value, question two is, what are we saying? The third then is, who are you talking to? It goes back to what we said earlier about if you’re going to be customer centric, who are you talking to? Now, a lot of people will say, everyone. And you go, and I’ve had this before in businesses that I work with. I say, oh great, you talk to everyone. So you’re talking to three-year-olds and 96-year-olds and they go, of course not. So who are you talking to? And in not demographics, what kind of person is a progressive person? Is it a conservative person? Is it a climate person? Is it a finance? What kind of person are you talking to? And then you can see, does your message resonate with that kind of person? Fourth question then is what channels are you using? And we all know that I use EDMs and I use this, that, and the other, and we do cold calls. Have you asked them what channel they prefer to be used? But how do they like to be contacted? Where do they hang out? So what channels are you using to get to them? Then the fifth question is where are egos kick in? Fifth one is, can you live up to it? And people go, yeah, of course. Okay, so where’s the proof? Where’s the proof that you can live up to what you say? And if you got it, great. And then the last question is, why should anybody care? Now that stops people usually because they start racing and scrambling to getting to this defensive mechanism and mindset and go, oh, because this is… And why those six questions work is that the answer to question six is the same answer to question one. People care because of the value you provide, the relevance that you bring to their life. If you remove that relevance, they would miss you. If you remove that value, they would miss you. On the other hand, if you remove that and you disappear tomorrow and no one cared, you haven’t done those six questions correctly. Now, I’ve been in situations, I’m not kidding you, where I’ve run workshops with businesses, pretty successful and pretty high-end businesses, where I ran a six questions exercise, and the response from the business owners was, they’re the hardest, best questions we’ve ever had because we don’t ask ourselves these questions. So, they’re the six questions that if you run through them, and I recommend if you’re going to use them, you run through them a few times, not once, and you try and get a seamless, smooth answer to question one, lining up to the answer to question six, and you can see that this is the message that reflects that. These are the people you are talking to, if you see that value, these are the channels, you can live up to it because here’s the proof, and if you removed it, those people would miss you because the value has disappeared.

It’s like the fundamentals of branding, really. There’s the core questions.

Yeah. So you see the thing about those six questions for the business owners goes back to trying to understand. What we’re talking about here as designers, we do this in space empathy, trying to say, what’s your world like? If I can say, these six questions are going to help you understand what it is you’re trying to bring out into the world, in a way that is really tight and helps you say that succinctly, that isn’t necessarily, this is what we’re doing in branding. That’s giving them the means to talk about their business or their idea with clarity and they can back it up. So it’s not about us, it’s about them.

With that said, what should every founder be asking their customers to get into that mindset of it being about the customer?

Well, I mean, every business is different, every founder, every startup is different, but I think the first thing that they need to do is to understand that there’s a life cycle for what they’re about to embark on and from founder, which is just an idea. When you have an idea, that’s not a business, that’s an idea. You’ve got to go out and validate it. When you go out and validate it, that’s when you’re actually asking your customers. If not directly asking them, which I would say you should do, but you’re iterating, as you said earlier, with whatever product services you’re going out with and seeing what’s connecting and what isn’t connecting. I’ve actually seen businesses that go out with an idea that they realize and have been pushing hard, and then they realize that actually the idea is right, the market’s wrong. Let’s just put it over here and then it goes gangbusters. It’s just sort of knowing that this iterative understanding of your customers is going to be key. And secondly, that when you’re working either with AI or with branding designers, whatever, that you do not have a brand because you’ve got a logo. In fact, you might be in operation for 10 years and still not have this idea of a brand. And I would say they need to start thinking around this idea of recognizable reputation. And that reputation has to be built on the connections you have with your customers, your clients or your market. And if you can focus on that, all the rest of it is say, how do we shine a light on that? And it’s your job as a founder to steer it. Everyone else is there to help you.

Brilliant. Well, let’s talk about the future.

Well, yeah, I think for me, it’s about if we’re going to shift to the future and pick your brains, Kevin, you know, I guess it’s like, what is the future for brand building and brands themselves? How do you see things playing in this new world, sort of seeing emerging in front of us?

Yep. There’s two things I’ll say about that. The first will be about our field and where I think the future of our field is, and the second is going to be where I think the future of the brands and the businesses need to be. So I see that there’s four roles for our field, designers, brand designers into the future. The first is already happening, and as we just discussed earlier, it’s having those long-term relationships with businesses and brands, and with the advent of AI and everything, and we’re already seeing it, there’s going to be casualties, but there’ll still be enough studios and businesses that are working in that space at that highly strategic level long term. So that’s going to be a role for our field. Now, a lot of your listeners will be like, going, there’s only so many jobs there. The other role where I’m seeing is already emerging, and I think is going to become mainstream, is these big businesses and brands are going to actually have a chief design officer, an actual, not a marketing officer, like a chief design officer who’s going to be sitting at the table in the C-suite, and that’s going to be managing not only an in-house design team, but also how AI is deployed in a way that they understand. So I think a chief design officer is going to become an actual title role for a lot of the people in our field, and that will become mainstream, I think. The third way is we’re also seeing this happening, but I think it’s going to just amplify is in-house design. Now, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, in-house design was looked down on. It was like, if you can’t make it in a studio, you go in-house and tough on you, gosh. In-house is becoming super flexed, really valuable, very, very, I mean, Chobani is a good example in case, in-house design team. So really, really deep expertise are coming in-house. Then the fourth is with all of our skills to help businesses, to understand what they’re doing with their products and services and to have that wide design thinking kind of mentality and education. We need to start building our own ecosystems of products and services and build our own markets and our own customer bases because that’s going to give us what I would call a diversified way of earning a living and applying our trade to bigger opportunities rather than getting a brief and doing a branding project which AI can suck up in 10 minutes. That’s where I see our field for key areas. Businesses and brands, this is going to be a lot shorter. There’s an organization called Profit that does a brand relevance index. They just did the 2023-24 was brought out. They do it every two years, brand relevance index. And what has emerged from that is that relevance in the brand, big business space is partly practical, tangible. I get what I need. It’s the thing that I come to for the function, but a massive, massive indicator for the future from 2026 on for these businesses is from a customer’s point of view, what makes them relevant is how do you make me feel? And that sounds to a lot of businesses and analytical thinkers that it’s kind of soft power, but no, they are making consumer choice on, do you make me feel happy? Do you make me feel like my time is respected, which is convenience? Do you make me feel like I am seen and heard in a feedback loop? So how these businesses make people feel is going to be critical to how they look at the future of their business.

Brilliant. I love that.

Yeah.

And then how do you design around that, right? Like going from the start.

That’s big thinking design, right?

There you go. There you go. Brilliant. Amazing. Well, thanks so much for that. We have got just to round things right off. I think we’ve got five or six sharp quick fire round. Are you ready for a quick fire round, Kevin?

Yikes. Give me a go. All right, we’ll try it.

All right. These questions, Jacob’s written some questions down. I’m not asking that one. Jacob, you asked these questions and they’re miserable.

Go on.

Go on. Try one.

They kind of just wrap up our whole conversation. We didn’t have to go in-depth. Brand or branding first?

Brand.

Logo refresh or strategic reset?

Depends.

All right. Can AI build brands?

Not yet.

Most misunderstood word in our industry?

Brand.

And one habit every brand builder must adopt?

Always ask yourself how relevant you are.

Boom. There you go. There you go. I’m glad you did those, Jacob, because I was reading them thinking, well, I don’t even know, but you guys did an awesome job. I just became irrelevant myself for about three minutes. So that’s all good, but I can cope. I’m going to reinvent myself. I’m going to design a new way forward, and hopefully become more useful into the future. Well, I guess that the real final question is, where can folks follow more of your work, Kevin? You’ve got some books and stuff. How do we get hold of the material and the thinking that you’ve started to share with us on this podcast?

I think at the moment, the best way to get in touch or to follow is on Instagram, which is just.kevin.fin. LinkedIn is where I do a lot of this sharing of this material, and that’s just Kevin Finn in LinkedIn. And then another way is I recently just in the last few weeks started up a sub stack where I am taking a lot of the stuff out of the book and I’m starting to bring it out in ways that are relevant in today. And that’s like, I think I’m four posts into that. So that’s the place where I’m going to be digging in deeply on this. And then for any background stuff is my website, which is thesumof.com.au.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much for coming in. It’s been great to bounce some ideas around and hear your thoughts on this. So thank you. We really appreciate it. I’m sure all the listeners also wish to thank you. So from myself, from Jacob, from everybody, we appreciate you, Kevin. Keep doing what you’re doing. And yeah, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Share This Post: