Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Jed Morley, Founder and CEO of Backstory Branding

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Jed G. Morley is the founder and CEO of Backstory Branding, a consultancy dedicated to helping businesses build brands that live up to their promise through consulting, coaching, and courses. With over two decades of experience, Jed has led brand breakthroughs for category leaders such as BambooHR, Lucidchart, Consensus, Grow, and Vasion. His proprietary Backstory Brand Wheel™ Framework has empowered organizations across industries to clarify their purpose, articulate their value, and codify their culture.Jed has also written a book titled “Building a Brand That Scales”, which is set to be released on June 3, 2025.Learn more: https://www.backstorybranding.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-jed-morley-founder-and-ceo-of-backstory-branding

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Influential Entrepreneurs is sponsored by Marketing Huddle, where we build an authority positioning portfolio for entrepreneurs using podcast and TV. interviews and guaranteed press coverage. For more information, go to Mike Saunders360.com. Today we have with us Jed Morley, who's the founder and CEO of Backstory

Branding. Jed, welcome to the program. Thanks, Mike. Great to be here. Hey, I love when I get that first impression of a name or a website and backstory branding. I love that because that gives the connotation of, you know, facts tell, but stories sell. So articulating what that backstory is. that Y story, that founder's story. So I'm excited to learn from you. Before we dive in,

though, give us a little bit of your backstory and how you got into the industry. I started out my career working in design and thought of logos as the way to represent brands that connect with customers. As I started to peel back the layers moving into my career and grad school, I realized that insights unlock opportunities for brands to resonate with people on an emotional level. So I became a specialist in doing in-depth interviews and uncovering those insights and translating them into actionable brand strategies and messaging frameworks so companies can communicate who they are, what they do, and why it matters to connect with the right employees, customers, and investors at scale. You know, I love that transition that you mentioned because it's like a lot of people think the brand is the website, the color, the logo. and boy, it's just so much more than that. It's almost like that's putting the cart before the horse.

And once you get that messaging down Pat and the story down Pat, okay, now we can talk about what do you want the logo to look like. Exactly. And sometimes clients will say to us that people have told them that they love their brand. And what I really think they're saying is I like your logo. So many times we mistakenly think of a brand as being a logo, but it's much more than that. And that's what we help clients understand and unlock. You know, it's like in marketing strategy and the textbooks.

And I teach marketing for the last 15 years for universities online as an adjunct. And one of the four P's, you know, product, price positioning and placement and positioning is what your target audience think of your company in the mind of the consumer. You know, it's that first impression. And it's everything. And it's not just one look and feel of the color, you know, and you can look at the psychology of color and extract out some, you know, insights that way. But it's color, it's logo, but it's the message. It's what that brand makes you feel like.

And I know you can give 10,000 examples, but, you know, you think about in the automotive industry, you know, what is the more luxury, safe brand of a car and what is the cheapest knockoff of a brand of a car? and people would answer those two with two very different models. You're exactly right, Mike. We like to define brand as the perception someone has a particular person, place, thing, or idea. And to create the desired perception, the P2, you've really got to understand what your current perception, your P1 is. And a brand strategy defines the images, words, and experiences to close the gap between the two, the P1 and the P2. Yeah. So when you're working with the company, I mean, I'm certain that you've got an SOP that's about 426 steps long and that you really dive in deep. But where do you start first with making sure that that brand's message is really fitting and matching what their market is desiring?

Our process starts with discovery. We dive deep to understand the vision, the founder and the founding team has for the business and where. they want to take it and most importantly why. After unpacking the insights that come from the internal perspective, the internal leadership team, we talk to customers, partners, and influencers in the industry they serve to understand what that outside perception is. And we look for alignment or gaps between the two and that's where the ideas come from to inform the actual brand strategies we deliver and activate for our clients. You know, that It sounds nice and succinct in one little answer, but that is not a 10-minute exercise, is it? It's not.

The thing that I love about the work we do is the opportunity to meet fascinating people from a variety of backgrounds and industries. Everybody has a gift of insight to share, and our superpower is the ability to surface those insights, interpret them, and translate them into actionable, go-to-market motions so that market. and sales teams can actually connect with our customers around the pain points, the problems, the jobs to be done that matter most of them. You know, when you're talking about articulating and creating that message to market fit, I like that you started with research. You know, let's figure out what actually the market wants. And I'm certain that you've worked with clients that go, oh, we don't need to do that step.

We can jump right of it because our market wants whatever. and I'm sure you hold tight and go, let's do the research anyway, and I'll bet you've come up with times that your client goes, wow, I assumed and thought that our clients wanted X, but we've just discovered that they want Y. So true. When clients commit to the process, they win the rewards that are a natural outgrowth and outcome from following proven principles. One case study comes to mind. we were engaged by a company called Clarivine. And when we first talked with them and asked them, what do you do? It took them about 30 minutes to explain their story.

And obviously, that doesn't work for the kinds of conversations you're having with prospective customers at the top of the funnel. And it slows down the velocity of the funnel. Over the course of the discovery process, we had interviewed the executive team from Clarivine and had collected a bunch of hypotheses as to what messages they thought would resonate with their customers. Then we took those messages and tested them with their customers through our message market fit process, which is the other side of the product market fit coin that Eric Greece popularized

with Lean startup and the whole community of practice around Lean. And what we discovered was that they were a few clicks off of where their customers saw them contributing the most value in their relationships with Clarivine. We were in interview number 18 out of 20 when it would have been easy to become fatigued and distracted or disinterested. But because we're genuinely curious and love the work we do, we were listening for signals that we could amplify. And there was a conversation with an SVP at a major media company in studio in Hollywood who prefaced what he was about to say mid-interview by describing himself. He said, I'm no copywriter. But to me, what Clarifying does is they take the drama out of your marketing data.

And because of all of the work we had done up to that point in the process, it put us in a position of recognizing that moment of truth. Sometimes I've referred to it as tripping over the truth. Because if you're not careful, you can accidentally just keep walking after the conversation has stumbled on. to an insight that can be the unlocked for the whole brand strategy. And in that moment, I realized that he had just helped me understand what the brand was all about. So now when you go to Clarabine's website, they start the conversation by saying, we take the drama out of your marketing data. They create consistent taxonomies and naming conventions across campaign data sets so that you

can realize the promise of modern marketing, which says, let's make better decisions in real time and redirect and double down on investing where it matters most and where it's making the biggest impact across multi-channel, omnichannel campaigns. And for big companies like Nike and the other kinds of clients that Clarivine serves, it's been difficult to try to stitch together those datasets on the back end to make real-time decisions. But every conversation, regardless of who you are in Clarivine's universe of customers and partners, everybody understands that if you don't have clear data that aligns across data sets, it's a debate. And that conflict slows down your go-to-market, creates friction, and Clarivine solves that problem. You know, it's interesting.

That 30-minute initial explanation of what they do probably had some wonderful content in there that probably once you have helped them clarify that down to that one punchy tagline, they probably still cover all of that content, but it's doing it in piecemeal and in the right context and in the right order, whereas the first time, 30 minutes of explanation, wow, you know, a minute and a half in and people's eyes are glazing over. So my question is this, once you've clarified that and gotten that articulation just down pat, what do you do with your clients who have many, many, many actors and players in their company to make sure that that is synchronous across the whole organization because the worst thing in the world is for the top brass to have it down pat

and then the people enter the phone or the salespeople or whoever else to still be going in 19 different directions and confusing the process. Such a great question, Mike. You're on the mark when you say that synchronicity is the ultimate aim and objective when it comes to positioning your company as the authority and its category, the process that we've followed has led us to the development of an application we call on message, which encapsulates all of the company messaging at a high level that spans all of your audiences and offerings, and combines that with audience and offering specific messaging in a messaging framework

so that you create a message library that the CMO, or the appropriate member of their team, maybe it's the chief revenue officer, can manage and retire outdated or outmoded messages and refresh them on an ongoing basis. So everyone has the same single source of truth, repository and reference, so that when they create content,

it's consistent with the best version and best way to express the value of the company at an overarching level and at an audience-specific level. So that on message application is the way that we help our clients go to market in an aligned, clear, concise, consistent way to achieve that synchronicity. So it's a digital tool that you're helping them with, right? Exactly. We used to deliver the outputs of our engagements in Google Sheets. And for people who were close to the process, that was a useful expression and format for the content.

newer members of the team were sometimes challenged to understand how to use that tool because some of those matrices, those messaging frameworks get pretty big where you have audiences and offerings listed on the left hand side and across the top of these massive Google sheets or Excel spreadsheets to make it more manageable to allow business leaders to put parameters around what parts of the story, different members of the team based on their role and responsibility, could see We created on message a way to help everybody go to market in an aligned manner. Yeah, that's really huge. And it's kind of like when you go through the exercise of let's create our vision and mission and marketing plan, and you spend six to 12 months doing that, the executive team high fives, it goes, this is wonderful. And then nothing gets done with it. So you've got to have that tool to have easy access, easy, clear way to use it. So that's just really, really powerful.

So I understand you've got a book coming out. Tell us a little bit about what that is. The book is called Building a Brand That Scales. It's coming out from Fast Company Press in early June. It explains the brand wheel framework, which is our branding process. It consists of three concentric rings, starting with the inner circle, brand foundation, comprising your brand purpose, the difference you make beyond making money. your brand position, what you stand for or want to stand for in the minds of your customers,

brand promise, the overarching value you deliver to your customers, brand pillars, your five biggest differentiators and the benefits they provide, and brand personality, how your brand looks, sounds, and feels. The next ring out is brand expression, and this is where we define the characteristics of your best customers, the kind you would love to have more of. And if you're a B2B brand that starts with an understanding of the firm of graphics or the company characteristics, your ideal customer profile definition, and customer personas, the people who make or influence the buying decision, which obviously applies to both B2B brands as well as B2C brands. And once we get those audiences defined, we create messaging frameworks, as I mentioned a moment ago, where we list your audiences and offerings where the two intersect. there's a value proposition or not.

Sometimes there's not a need to communicate with a given audience, depending on what their use cases are. We create those messaging frameworks, and then look at the company brand narrative, including your elevator pitch, your About Us statement, your problem statement, and your pillar paragraphs, and we create company overviews.

Those deliverables consist of that message library that I mentioned a moment ago. We also look at, the corporate identity or visual brand identity of the business and evaluate and assess whether or not it needs to be refreshed. Sometimes the name of the company needs to be revised or changed altogether. Obviously, the difference between a brand refresh and a rebrand is with a rebrand, you change the name of the organization or the product. And we provide guidelines for communicating the brand in writing or in the spoken word. So brand tone of voice,

along with visual brand guidelines and experiential guidelines. So that rounds out that second build of the brand wheel framework, brand expression. And then finally on the outer ring of the brand wheel is brand activation. And this is where traditional marketing tactics live, websites, social media, funnels, traffic, trade shows, collateral, that typical portfolio of marketing deliverables lives on that outer ring. And so the process we take our customers and clients through builds from that center and works its way out. In fact, you can take a brand assessment on our website and evaluate the state of your brand and its readiness to go to market at scale. Excellent.

Well, I want to make sure we include that link in the show notes. One of the things that you were describing there made me think of a question that takes us all the way back to the first statement that you made, which was we help the brand. and articulate their message to market by doing research. So in your book and in your work with clients, how do you make sure that the brand is ensuring that their sales and marketing department has their antennas up so that when they're talking to clients, the users and the boots on the ground kind of a feel, and they're picking up on nuances of problems or new needs or new ways that their product

or services being used and filtering that back up to the marketing team to see if it needs to be polished up or tweaked and put into the messaging strategy. You're right. Everybody is responsible to be on the lookout for a better way to articulate the value and connect with customers. As I mentioned in the message market fit part of the discussion, we purposefully develop hypothetical messaging, we call it minimum viable messaging to test with customers. And that's the way we think about all of the messages that our clients take to market. Until we find a better way of

communicating, we're going to continue to use this message. But we're never satisfied. We're always looking for something that might better communicate the value and create a more meaningful connection. There's a chapter in the book that talks about how to ask thoughtful questions to glean insights from people who participate either informal or informal conversations in that message market fit process. The underlying value or principle is empathy to genuinely care about what the person needs and why that you're talking to. We use the analogy in the book, which explains that whole brand will process as gift giving. And branding really is the process of giving somebody a gift in a way that they makes them feel valued, appreciated, and they're

understood. So yes, receiving a gift is a nice thing, but it's even more satisfying to be the one to give the perfect gift that connects that makes someone feel like, oh, you really get me because you were paying attention. Yeah. Wow. So detailed and this is definitely not something that you just check the box and do. So if someone is interested in that brand assessment and getting alerts on when your book is released, what's the best way they can do that? Would love to have people sign up for the newsletter and the updates that are coming out about the book. They can do that on our website, backstorybranding.com under the Insights tab. They can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

Excellent. Well, Jed, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today. My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity, Mike. This has been great. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.