Proven Podcast - Sell More w/ Authentic Branding - Howard Lim

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

In this episode, Charles delves into the intricate world of brand alchemy with Howard Lim, the visionary architect who's spent 37 years transforming businesses into unforgettable brands. Howard pulls back the curtain on his playbook for turning forgettable companies into industry icons, offering a masterclass in the art and science of branding. From his early days finger painting to orchestrating multi-billion dollar brand campaigns, Howard's journey is a testament to the power of strategic creativity and relentless innovation. He dissects his evolution from a design prodigy to a branding mastermind, revealing the DNA of his "brand personality" philosophy that's kept him at the forefront of an ever-evolving industry. Charles and Howard engage in a no-holds-barred dialogue, exploring the five dimensions of brand personality and the crucial distinction between logos and brand marks. They unpack the counterintuitive approach of "authentic branding," the magic of creating a cohesive brand story, and why understanding the psychology of your target audience trumps following trends in today's competitive market. Howard's insights crackle with practical wisdom as he breaks down his unique branding strategies, from the game-changing "mood board" approach to the revolutionary concept of brand equity. He challenges conventional branding wisdom, advocating for a radical shift from surface-level aesthetics to deep, strategic brand building that resonates with customers on an emotional level. KEY TAKEAWAYS: • Uncover the secret sauce of Howard's brand personality development and how it can transform your business identity • Learn why "authentic branding" is crucial for sustained success in the business world • Discover how the "mood board strategy" can inform your brand's visual and verbal identity without external consultation • Understand the power of strategic color psychology in creating a memorable brand • Explore strategies for optimizing your brand across different mediums, from business cards to billboards Head over to https://provenpodcast.com/ to download your exclusive companion guide, designed to guide you step-by-step in implementing the strategies revealed in this episode. KEY POINTS: 2:14 Lion King Positioning: Howard shares his experience positioning the Lion King Broadway show for Disney, resulting in billions in revenue. 5:38 Branding vs Marketing: The discussion delves into the crucial differences between branding and marketing strategies. 7:13 Brand Equity Explained: An exploration of brand equity and its significant impact on business value. 9:01 Importance of Strategy: Emphasis is placed on the critical role of strategy in successful branding. 12:37 Building Brand Identity: Howard outlines key steps in constructing a strong and memorable brand identity. 15:00 Designing Brand Personality: The conversation shifts to methods for crafting an engaging and authentic brand personality. 17:30 Understanding Ideal Customer: Insights are shared on identifying and understanding your ideal customer for targeted branding. 19:02 Building Brand Rapport: Techniques for establishing a strong connection between your brand and customers are discussed. 21:02 Tips for Teamwork: Howard offers advice on fostering effective teamwork in branding projects. 23:25 Legacy Discussion: The topic turns to creating a lasting brand legacy and long-term impact. 28:13 Value Proposition Explained: A breakdown of what constitutes a compelling value proposition is provided. 30:01 Logo vs Brand Mark: The crucial distinctions between logos and brand marks are clarified. 34:07 Starbucks Brand Evolution: An analysis of Starbucks' brand evolution over time is presented as a case study.

Welcome to the proven podcast where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Today's guest, Howard Lim, proves it's actually about billion-dollar positioning. With 37 years of experience behind campaigns like Disney's Lion King on Broadway and the L.A. Marathon rebrand, Howard has cracked the code on what separates million-dollar brands from billion-dollar empires. The show starts now. All right, welcome back to the show. Today, we're with Howard and we're talking about branding and so many other different things. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Absolutely. Pleasure being here. So tell the audience a little bit more about you. I know you've got some amazing stuff. We were talking about this off-camera, about all the campaigns that you've done and all the branding you've done. Tell the audience a little bit more about you and how you're an expert. Sure. I've been doing what I've been doing, but it's evolved quite a bit over the last 37 years.

And pretty much everybody's been affected by one of the things I branded or positioned or built over the last years. Like, for example, I helped position Lion King, you know, the Broadway show for Disney to their own. and now it's, I think it's made over $9 billion. The U.S.B. Access Card, which became the standard for all campuses now. I think, if I'm not mistaken, it's about $20 billion annually across all campuses around a globe. And then they're rebranding the L.A. Marathon, which we had to sell out of participation, and now they're using that format for all L.A. Marathons, and that drives a lot of revenue as well. I'm very much about when it comes to branding ROI.

It's all about ROI. So how did you get into this? How did you discover that you had this gift and that branding really what's your thing? Really, quite honestly, it's not going to sound kind of weird, but when I was five years old, the first time I ever finger painted, filling the paint. And back then it was like powder and mixing it with water. I just remember putting my fingers on the paper,

and it was so magical that I was able to create wherever I chose to whatever my imagination allowed me to do. And when I was in grade school, through junior high, through high school, the students noticed, excuse me, the teachers noticed that I was really into design art. So I'd be always taken to decide and given special projects. And I had a chance to go to, I think, two of the best schools in the world, Cal Poly and town of Subispo. And I major in applied art design before design became even a major and study packaging, photography. photography, design,

illustration, and the list went on. And then after I finished my degree there, I went to Art Center school in Pasadena. And that's like

where the model Audi TT came from, Volkswagen, some of the greatest movies you ever seen. So I really wanted to go to that school. And they had the first

Macintosh lab in the world, and I figured out how to get things out at the computer. And that's where it really hit me hard.

I was like, well, let me just do this for other companies, showing them what's possible to get really creative. And fortunately, Fortune 500 companies understood what I was doing.

So I started working representing like Apple, Xerox, and DreamWorks and started to show them what was possible. And lo and behold, by working with big brands, such as it was Fortune 100 companies, I started to learn what it really took to build a brand because brand is not taught in school. And so it really hit me that it was like,

well, okay, what is the makeup, of branding. The essence of branding, but honestly, if you really look at it, it's one design, which has to do with engaging and designing things that are aesthetically pleasing to engage to consumer and hit their emotions. And then advertising, which is all about positioning. And so when I was growing up, it's like, okay, my brother was in advertising. And he says, you have to choose between design and advertising. I said, why can I do both? And that's kind of evolved to the branding as we know today. Now, it's built. with more layers, but that's the essence.

So you talked a lot about how there's a difference in branding and that you've learned it and it started with fingerprinting and it all and ended up with Dreamworks and all that, which is just wild that you go from that. What are some of the major mistakes that people do when they do branding? I mean, other than having to rename their podcast in the middle of season. So a lot of times quite honestly, so there's two, what I found are two ways to build a brand. Yeah. From a hair or by design.

Right. what's happening is that most people are doing it from the hip without understanding to different, you could say the different principles behind branding. And how could they know it? Because it has to do with a lot of schooling, like I mentioned, design and advertising and so forth and so on. That has to do with layering of understanding and knowledge. So most people, and the other thing, too, is that they're thinking that they confuse branding. They're saying with marketing.

And they're totally two different animals. Walk me through that. How do you differentiate marketing versus branding? Because I think for most people who have done this, who have scaled, we get it. But some people would like, wait, what? There's a difference between branding and marketing. I just thought branding was underneath marketing. And it's not.

How do you describe the difference between the two? So branding is about the long-term position of a company to build its equity, to build its position in a market and to be understood based on, like, say, some of the core principles are like, well, what's your philosophy? That's part of branding. What are the values of the company? What is its position? Who's its target market? It's a little bit about marketing, definitely, but it's more about how do you want to get known in the mind of the consumer? Because a big part of branding is not what you're saying, is what everyone else is saying about you. The question is how do you get everyone to say who you are? The first thing, establish who you are and what you do.

The second part of its equation now is using marketing. as a, like I say, like a megaphone, to broadcast who you are through the different channels where they're online and offline. I think one of the things that people never talk about is brand equity. The idea, and I'm stealing this, this is completely your example, where you sit there and say, hey, I'm going to take a warehouse

that's full of Nike shoes. And I'm going to give you all the Nike shoes. They're yours, but you don't get to have the name. How valuable are their shoes. And I think that's the difference between brand equity, and people just don't understand that in any way, shape, or form. They're so focused on how do I just eat, How do I pay the bills? How do I pay my employees versus how do I build something that can become a DreamWorks?

How do I build something that can be this multi-million or billion dollar thing that you've been involved in? So one of the things you were also talking about is there's different people inside branding. There's different people that you hire and there's different environments. And most people just, I don't think understand that. I think like, oh, I'm just going to hire a guy for five minutes and my brand's done and I'm good to go and I never have to reevaluate it again. It's completely wrong. Walk me through that as we go into those things. Yeah.

So what's happening too is like a lot of people, they use branding, don't do branding. It's so funny because the popularity of branding really happened about 12 years ago. I've been doing it way back like over 30 plus years. The point being is this is it became more popular through like Tang magazines, Ford magazines, Money Magazine. Everyone's like to talk about branding, right? But then the next day, everyone says they're doing branding. And so there's a lot of confusion out there. So what happens is that a lot of people are not doing.

In fact, quite honestly, out of all the hundreds of people I've met over the years at CadyD branding, two people. Actually, it's a very complex world. It is. It is a complex world. So going back to your question, there's different differentiations between different experts of branding. Basically, there's three major camps. So there's a camp as far as strategists. The strategists are looking at the long-term play, and I say that where do I look at is I design from your future?

and bring it into the now present. So it's really thinking way down the road. It's like, here's my business model. It's like someone comes to us and goes, here's our business model. Okay, how can we make it so we can maximize its value? And quite honestly, what is it going to be the cycle of that life of that product, service, or information? There's a lot of deep thinking that goes into it. It's like, well, you have to answer like, well, what's your overall philosophy?

starting off with not about even making money, but starting off with what is to make you distinct and different from everybody else and what would yield adaptability. And by the way, what markets do you want to actually be able to be delivered in and what industry? So there's a lot of like, it's like this. You know, you want to build a city. You try to start off with the blueprint, right? You just don't start building piece-melling things together.

Otherwise, you have a pretty dysfunctional city. I think you talked about before, you know, people, it's some people do branding right off the hip versus planning it out. And it sounds like the difference between the people who have spent the time to scale and build, which are totally different things. When they're going to do this, the difference from becoming a multi-million dollar business versus a billion dollar business all comes down to branding. And if they don't put the time in now, if they don't spend the X amount of days and ask specific questions. And I guess, you know, you talk about the. There's multiple versions of this. We're talking about the strategist.

But remind me before we get too far away, I want to tell the audience, like the top five questions or 10 questions they should be asking. So at the end of that, after we go through the different ones, let's definitely go into that and say, hey, these are the things that you should be asking. Because most people don't understand. And if you're not watching the video of this,

Howard did a really good job where he talks about, and all these people that he's met this entire time, he only met two people that were actually branders. And I don't think most people ever come across people who are actually branders in that case. Because if you're doing this for 37 years, and you go come across two, the chances of people like me running across people

like, you were pretty darn rare. So if we've got the branding strategist, which we understand that, what is the next person? What is the next, you know, kind of step in this? So the next part, after the strategy, you figure out who you are, what makes you neat,

what makes you different from everybody else, then the next part is execution, which I call implementation. So it's now, it's now what I call, you have your DNA, it's now, or you could say, even your ingredients to, I'd say a beautiful cake or meal,

it's now making that meal. It's now making that cake with those ingredients. And that's where it takes, like, for example, to be a strategy, in my book, it takes about 10 years to master becoming a brand strategist. There's so many,

there's so, it's like a whole different language in itself where you start to understand it. Like, what's the brand architecture of your business? Who's going to be the ambassador to your brand? There's like, there's so many components to that, right? Then there's the execution,

which is now, let's build it. Okay, so you got the blueprint. Let's stick with the analogy of a, of a city. You now have the blueprint. It's like, well, let's start figuring out the roadways. After we figure out the roadways, just figure out the residential area, just figure out the commercial areas. Let's figure out how everything needs to work around the water, electricity, right? And so now it's building it. Okay. So the building part of it, there's, in my book, there's like five major components to it. So branding memory is about not what you're saying, what everyone else is saying about you,

the question becomes how are you going to influence them and getting back to that brand equity, what's in the mouth, help them become familiar with your brand, with the face-to-brand. So I call it the brand icon. The brand icon is a name in the company. It's the mark, like the Nike Swish.

It's the font that you use, like Apple is very clear what font. It's the color that you use. For example, Pepsi owns red, and, excuse me, Coca-Cola owns red, Pepsi owns blue. So these are the things that really in the Fonda use of the tagline as well. These five elements are what start to build the face to brand.

Now, is that branding the logo for example? No. That's 5% to a brand identity. That's 5% to a brand identity. Okay. Now you're talking about, okay, that's the face to a company. Think of it like a brand like a person. Now it's the personality.

Okay. when you look at big brands, think about this like commercials. You got the Mayhand guy for Allstate. You got Flo for Progressive. You got the Geico lizard for Geico. Those are all personality of the brands. Now, why do people, why do big brands do that? Is because they want to make it personalized

and they want to be relatable to their target market. Right. And that's part of the design need in the strategy to figure out what kind of personality should we create for a brand. And what are the associations with that personality? So when you write a copy for a website or let's say commercial, now you're going to have some consistency between how you're actually projecting that brand, the storytelling, the tone voice. So what happens when people do it on their own and don't understand it, it's called the civil effect. I call it the simple fact.

Would I have all these different personalities out there of their brand? Guess what? No one knows who you are. You're actually diluting your brand before you even started. Yeah, I never sat down, even with everything. I've done never sat and said and said, okay, what's the personality of our org? What is it, what is the personality at? And how are we coming across this? And just while you were talking, I was going through a couple companies that I've worked with and I was like, oops. So, you know,

the idea that I'm like, we never had this guy. And we did great. We had, we exited. We had a great multipliers. We've never sat down and looked at our sales copy. We never looked at our website. We've never looked at our post. We never looked at it and said, okay, what is our personality that we're trying to come across. It was more about can we get looks and views and can we get virality? Can we get, you know, is it going to close? What is it going to do for the ROI? What is our upcoming sale versus, and it's interesting because when it comes to, because you gave the insurance ones, there are specific ones I will not buy from because of the personality that he chose. I'm like, that does not resonate with me. I'm not going to do that. And it was one of those things

that's completely subconscious that I didn't understand in any way, shape, or form. So when someone's trying to design this personality. I'm going to completely go here because this is fun. How do you find that balance? How do you find a situation where you might have gone too far down the road with one? For a simple example, there's a very specific personality for

political parties right now. And it is what is. It's a personality. We get it. I'm not going to bash one side to the other. I'm going to leave it alone. There's not a political show. But, you know, I talk about this all the time that people don't buy products and stories that buy, I'm sorry, products or services that may store identities and ways out of

pain, I'm going to have to add to that day by personalities because if I told you and I asked you, hey, here's a guy who's got a four by four truck. Who did you vote for? Here's a person who drives a Fiat. Who they vote for? Here's a person with a Louis Vuitton bag. Who's a person with a Whole Foods bag? You know who they're voting for. So I've always used these examples. I've never understood it as a personality. That's huge for me. When you're designing that personality, how do you design it in a way that you're not going to isolate. Right. And it's a huge chunk of the audience.

Right, right, right. So it's a lot of figuring out the persona of your ideal customer. You can't be all things to all people. Right. Because that becomes a waste of marketing as well. Seeing that over and over and over and over and over again. So really, it's really what's called, and this goes back to when I would do a lot of work in adding Cs back in the 80s and 90s,

which is still, it's now coming out. It's kind of like the trade secret of how good ads become very powerful ads. It's called mood boards. So you create the mood board to figure out your ideal customer, and you're figuring out, well, what would it wear? What would it shop? What, you know, who is this character? Is it female?

Is it male? Is it actually neutral? Okay. What's its age? And so you're really building in, quote, unquote, in his dialogue, is how its emotions will be and what its lifestyle is. Okay. Is it urban?

Is it a suburban? Is it a farmer? Right. No, absolutely. And it works. It's like, so how do you make sure you're not aliening is you make sure then you're figuring out that you actually have a brand that actually could maybe float between,

I just make itself, between 25 and 50, okay? Or let's say, why don't we get down to a teenager, but also pill, to the elder. Okay. So this is where you actually think very creatively,

what kind of different campaigns could be created? Like, what's the core? And in front of that core, what could be offshoots? Like what I always get with clients? As I said, what's going to be our core message? It takes about two hours to get down to the core message, right? The point being that core message, didn't you have different offshoot to appeal to those different market plays

based on what channel they're at, like are they on? YouTube, are they reading a newspaper? Okay. So because we got four different, now we got the four biggest buying power. It's the fourth one starting to pick up the Z generation. But the point being is that you got to really understand the psychology of your buyers to figure out what would be the right persona for the personality to be relatable. And a reason why we buy for the emotions. 100%. It sounds like you're building, not only you're trying to identify your target market, but it's about who does the target market want to have lunch with? Who would the target market invite to their house. That's who you're building because it's basically off

emotions. And it's something that I've never heard of before. Again, you've only met two of these in the world. I've never heard anyone describe it. I've always heard, you know, build rapport, get emotions, you know, avoid, you know, identify their pain, you know, find their watering hole. All of those things, I've heard a million times. I've never heard anyone say it's about personality. What is your personality of your brand? Absolutely game changing. So going back, okay, so we've got strategist, we've got the implementer, we've got, you know, we've got the blueprint of the city. Okay, now who's going to build the day? What's our next step? How do we go from there after that? Okay, so when I always got like when we were rebuilding WSS, for example, in 2010 in a recession,

but company that was not doing well at all, what we had to do is do a really launch. And so we came with the strategy. I worked with literally seven or VPs to actually come up with solutions to all them, but the biggest thing was to come from the standpoint to we're all on the same page. Like, everybody, because they had their in-house, granny, marketing, advertising. I also worked with the H. CFO and CEO, da, da, da, da, da. But everybody was moving their own different directions, and I call it as a silo effect. So the first thing was getting everybody were on the same scene sheet, and that's why what we call a master blueprint is so imperative to make sure everyone's clear where we're

and how we're all been moved there because it's everybody's business when it comes to building the brand. I know this is going to come as a surprise, but you're telling me that when you go to scale a business, that people don't talk to each other and inside the organization, they're actually not each other's friends? No.

So, yeah, surprise. Don't be all the time. The biggest problem in the organization is not the fact you're trying to get customers. It's just internal. Your culture is broken. And when you're doing this. They're just completely. The CFO hates the CIO and the marketing person.

Exactly. We hate each other. It's the biggest problem. You've got to unify your culture. When you run into this, you've done this at pretty high level. You know, you've done this for billion-dollar companies. I'm completely taking us off course here, but what are some of the ways that you unify? What are some of the ways when you come in and you're like, hey, guys, I get it.

Marketing thinks branding is garbage. Branding hates IT. It hates fulfillment. How have you found a way when you come in and you help out these huge organizations, which is what you do? How do you say, okay, guys, we all need to play nice to each other because we don't like to in two months. How do you do that? What are some of the tips and trades that you do? So that's a great question. So I always start with the philosophy and I always work with the spearhead, the founder, the CEO, or it could be the president or a combination, right? But whoever

is in charge, okay, I get to understand who they are. And what's funny is that employees, like with companies that have been around for decades, even like generations, you could say the management positions, finally get to understand who he or she is and how they think. So always start with the very top to get that understanding what's in her head and questions that have ever been asked before.

So then we could start to figure out, well, what are we looking at, first of all, as a business, and where we're heading. So I always start with the philosophy and I have this very deep question that I ask this quote unquote the leader you could say and once

those questions are answered and I form this statement and that that statement should not be more than two sentences long any longer than that because it's not memorable for anybody okay and it's confusing the last paragraph right so what are the questions that you ask the founder

what are the one that you walk in what are they like the top two or three that you're like hey I need to figure out what you're the spearhead how do you find alignment here what do you normally at sure so one the questions could be like if you're facing the you're facing the more horrific challenges with your business what values are so inherent your company would cease to exist gotcha i can tell you most sea levels because this is whom that's my world i interact with the

c guys i would say majority of them would have no clue how to answer that question immediately right up the hip. They would have to sit down and form that together because they've never thought about it. You know, one of the things that I love talking to you about, Howard, is the fact that you're asking questions and you're bringing it from point of view, because you've been doing this for 37 years, that even as someone who I've done scaled and I've done exits, never asked these questions. Never even thought of asking these questions. So it's absolutely right. Okay, so that's one. You got another one for me? Because I'm just stealing information. This is great. Yeah. So now I want to be like, what legacy do you want to leave behind?

Legacy is huge. Yeah. What legacy is want to leave behind and why? You know, why is the big part on that one? And so, you know, you're right.

And a lot of times, the CEO, um, um, they have been asked this question. So I, of course, I helped coach him through it.

What happens is, though, is that they start to see a bigger picture than they ever thought was possible. The reason why ideas, by the way, is it's kind of like reverse, working in,

and in a, talking, to over 100,000 business owners because I speak all over the world. The point being is this, as I looked at the common denomination and looking at patterns, and I realized that most companies

only reach 25% of their potential. So I want to create a model so they can reach your full potential, 90 plus. And so with these deeper questions, it allowed us to tap into it was the opportunity of really creating something which is a huge or bigger ROI, but also deeper penetration in the marketplace

and actually actually having it, we're going to do more good for all stakeholders. So there's reason why I start figuring out, what is the questions they're not being asked that could actually create a company where it's a hell of a lot more sustainable, a hell of a lot more scalable, and actually a place that really people want to work with or work for.

So that's why I went with this quote-unquote strategy of going with deeper questions, is so the client would actually end up with something with that deeper potential of a bigger business, okay, if they chose that for themselves. or to exit faster, for that matter, too. So it sounds like, you know, doing these things, you mentioned it earlier, that some of the stuff you did in the 80s and 90s,

which no one was alive back then, no, it was so far ago. Some of the stuff you did back then is still reaping fruit now, something 30, 40 years later, these companies are like, hey, we're still implementing it. And this is the value of branding, not marketing, about building this and sitting down and answering these deep questions. One of the things you told me about that you do is you work with, you know, yes, you speak all over the world,

you've spoken to all these people, but you work with individuals and you really do a brand analysis for them. What if that sound like? Because most people haven't ever done that. They'll just say, I need a brand. Okay, give me a logo, which you already mentioned, like 2% to 5% of who you are. Right. Most people have never sat down with someone who is a brander. So if they're walking in and they're like, hey, I'm going to work with Howard on how to do this because I want to say a brander, but I don't know any other brander. So Howard.

So what is it environment? What are they going to be doing? What is that experience like for them? So no matter, and you're right, I work all the way down to solopreneurs, like literally. It's not for me the size of companies. It's more about the difference that they're making. And so my job for me is really, is so honestly, so I look at this place at this globe that we are on. And I look at a standpoint, how can you actually make it better?

And so it's made up of all these different personalities and different individuals. So what I look at is like when I work with someone, I always look at are the operator of integrity, do you want to make a difference? Are they coachable? And do they want to have fun on the way? I wish people would answer the third one. Are they coachable? Good God. I always talk about it.

It's not about the size of you. It's a question that's going to scale you. I've said this for years and years and years. The coachable. Holy Moses, I tell customers as well. I was like, okay, do they want your product? Can they afford your product? Will they buy your product?

And then the last one being the most important. Do you want to work with that? And people always forget the last one. So even when you're trying to coach people on scam, are they coachable? And that's a hard ballgame. So when someone comes in, let's say they created a podcast name and it sucked and they have to change it on the fly. What are they going to be expecting to walk into?

What are some of the questions? What does that environment look like? What should they prepare before they show up to have this? conversation with you. So what I always start off with, the matter of who they are, what size, what industry, or B2B, B2C, or B2G, which is business the government, I always start off with an assessment, an assessment. And I do it online that allows me to work here and work with anybody. And so what I

do is I ask them to turn in like their logo. And there's a bit, which we don't have, we could talk about, different between a logo and a brand mark. But let's say the logo, they turn in their website, they're turning in for sure, they do have a product, their product, their packaging, even storefronts, because I did a lot of designing storefronts, or billboards, or radio spots, TV spots, their social media. And what I do is I will look and critique it in a way to take it from good to great. And it's usually an hour long, and I work really fast and the whole thing's recorded,

and I'm marketing things up and going, okay, where's your value proposition? Okay, like their website. For example, the website, I have this process that I take company. me through is like the way I look at website is that the home page should really be like a trailer to a movie. Most websites I see is that

they're throwing everything in and plus the kitchen sink. So everything is shouting at you, right? And the reason for that is because a lot of times these people that are designed websites are not designers, your desktop publishers. Yes. Desktop publisher is someone that has no experience in design

that picks up a computer and it's called himself a graphic designer without any four years, eight years of schooling. And so what happens is that there's a whole pattern to read in a website, anything for that matter. Dominant, subdominant, subordinate, dominant, subdominant, subordinate. The headline should be the first thing that people engage in, like a really strong headline that's engaging. And subordinate would be like the body copy to back that up, right? And subdominate would be a lot of times would be the subheadline, just like a great newspaper. when reading the headline, it catches you, and you read, it's just formula, and you're right.

These principles will never go away. It's a while how we digest information. Right. And I think people don't understand that, that these ideas, you're talking about human behavior. Sure, there's different ways to get it. It could be a newspaper or it would have been smoke signals and now it's social media. The core of it hasn't changed. The delivery method has changed.

But the core of it of humans, humans are humans or humans. We talk about this. You know, I've talked to special force operators and we have this conversation all the time. They're like, just shoot to wound. I'm like, why would you shoot to wound? Why wouldn't you, you know, eliminate your target? And they're like, because the target has friends. And I'm going to turn one target into four.

And I was like, that's universal across the board. It doesn't matter if it's a 50 cow at 1,000 yards or if it's a bow and arrow at, you know, 20 feet. So it's these core parts of the human idea and the human existence that if you haven't gone to school and if you don't have these level of experiences, you're going to run into it. I kind of feel like you're like a U.X designer in a way in the same. sense of, let me explain. There's so many times where someone who does UX, which is you as your experience where they've designed this whole great thing and you get this very well-trained UX designer, they're like, yeah, you're

changing everything. They're like, why? I'm like, well, people with colorblind can't see that. Your stuff's in the wrong place. This can't be there. This is how people read. It sounds like branding is like the grandfather of even that as well. It's like, okay, UX is cute. Let's talk about branding. You talk about the difference between a logo

and what was the other thing? Brandmark. Thank you. A logo and a brand. mark. It's so foreign to me. I didn't even know what a brand mark was still right now. What the hell is it there between a logo and a brand mark? Okay. So yeah, well, because I started to create what's called an authentic brand. So I create, start creating a glossary of distinctions. And that's a lot of times why people haven't heard this because it's the own category I created over the years. So the point being is that a logo, a lot of times people create a logo

based on personality like, okay, I just show my friends, you know, what, you know, my brother-in-law did and see if they like or dislike it, okay? And, you know, ask them why and this and that. But it's all based on the personality. And a lot of times logos, for example, I call them a liability where they're not simple, they're not bold enough, they're not unique enough. They won't work in black and white. So they work as a brodery all the way down to an app. They won't work for an app to a billboard. So they missed a lot of science to it. The second part that they miss is how it connects to the business.

So a lot of times I just look at something. I go, well, what does it have to do with your business? What does that have to do? What you just told me five minutes about your business or what it's about? How to connect, quote, unquote, your quote unquote, identity to your consumer or customer. And, oh, go ahead. So I have a really important question about this one, because I always have, how the hell did they get here when it comes to one specific brand?

And I'm curious if you've got a famous brand of going, how the hell is that related? For me, the one that stands out is Starbucks coffee. The logo of the mermaid holding upper legs that is cropped, it's a very famous, you know, it is what it is. How in the same Azizuze's butthole did they get from there to there? And I guess my question is, if you've got a logo that you've already been in bed with long enough. It's been part of your brand for 10, 15, 20 years. Pivoting your logo or your brand mark

is not easy. How does someone who didn't know that you existed a couple years ago go, oh crap, we have a, you know, a mermaid with their legs spread wide open as our logo. Good God. It might work. It might check those boxes. It might, hey, look, we can embroider it. It looks good in black and white. It's clear. But it doesn't align with our brand. It doesn't align with the personality of our brand, how does someone go through and say, okay, how do I fix this? How do I do this? How do I pivot this? So that's a great question. So it's really interesting because when I present and I'm, you know, teaching and presenting, I'll showcase studies of where a company had a logo to a brand mark and one of them is Starbucks, by the way. So Starbucks, if you look at it, it's very

like hand done. It looks very junior level. It looks like, you know, someone's done it, you know, in their basement. And then you could see the transformation over years. And I knew they're going to have problems. I first saw Starbucks and it took like three more reiterations, probably cost millions of dollars to redo all the storefronts and everything associated with all the marketing, all the advertising, all the product itself, right? Right? To redo it all. So what they had was really, God, this is a loaded question. So let me just finish this discussion. So, so, so you, so they had the evolution from the logo to a brand mark. And the one that was prior to the one that they have now, it's called an emblem mark where they chiseled it down graphically. So it looked beautiful. It looks

simple to digest. But they had the words integrated into the actual mark south of what's called a pectoral mark or the mermaid. The problem with that is that as you start to migrate, you start to grow your company in different countries, guess what? That needs to be, that can be translated from English to Arabic or Chinese or whatever, right? It would look like a whole different brand. It looked like you just got knocked off. Right. So what they did, which is I'm a firm believer in that,

and I actually started to figure that out building brand marks. I got years ago, the point of being is this. You want to separate the two. So the mermaid is now separate from the words. So now the market itself, the pictorial mark, the picture is filling it up in a sense you don't have to have words anymore. Right. It could stand on.

You have something now as universal, and all language is it has nothing to do with the words. It has to do with an image. Right. So that's how that one was able to do it. To keep that story, but, you know, how he came out with the book because,

you know, Moby Dick, da, da, da, da, da, we keep that part of the history behind it. But the point being is that now it actually is a brand mark. So now we don't have an even limitation into we have a lid on it and we now are able to grow that into any part

of the world for that matter, because now you have a strong brand mark. So one of the questions that people are going to ask about branding, especially now that we live in a world where you can't get domains anymore, where you can't get the name that you want. And that influences a lot of the name of the company where it's like, oh, I want to name my company

the Bed Pest podcast show ever. And I'm sure someone owns that. How do you survive when you're building your brand, where you fall in love with an idea and you've got your brand mark and all of this, but the domain's not available. Do domain names matter anymore?

Absolutely. Before you even think about the name, though, you really want to think about the position, the strategy session, to figure out what is your position, who's your target market, what media you plan to be reaching those target market. And when it comes to naming,

there's five basic categories of creating a name. And first of all, you want to create a name that really you don't want to have more than three syllables. And then ideally you don't want to have it more, it's more than two words. Why? Because it goes back to how we think.

If you want someone to remember who you are, you've got to make it simple. That's true. The bomb error, they make up all these fanciful words. Well, you never never be able to find a website because you can't spell it anything. That whole era was like,

total chaos. I'm like, what a freaking nightmare. But anyways. Yeah, you do want to have it where, so let's go back to like there's five ways to create a name. There's generic, which is not trademarkable, which hotel in the Las Vegas try to create the hotel called a main hotel. They battle. God knows how much money they spent trying to figure out they could trademark that name. They could not because it's a common word.

Then you get into, you know, descriptive we're describing like Motel 6 when it used to be $6, right? Not anymore. Okay, and then you get in suggestive, and then you get into arbitrary, like apple to fruit and apple to computer, right? Then you get into fanciful totally made up, like Exxon. Now, here's the beautiful thing. As you start to go up the chart to the, you know, where it's arbitrary or fanciful, you're to have something that separates you from the pack. It will take more to get people to know who your brand is, but the beautiful thing is, you will leave. the path and get more known and be more unique to be more memorable, like Lulu Lemon,

for example, right? Or as much as we don't like, I didn't like the word of beginning, Google, right? But the point being is that as you move up the chart. So, you know, there are plenty of words that are when we come up with names, we come up, like literally when we were with clients, we come up with hundreds of names. And my job is to look at if we get a high percentage of dot coms. because there's ways to articulate what kind of name should you be creating based on a strategy and from that DNA starts to build out, well, what are all the possible things that we create based on that strategy

to actually best represent that brand position? Right. There's so much that you've shared here. There's so many things that even with, I'm in the middle of a renaming and a rebranding now where I'm like, that's got all change. There's so much that people just don't know. How do people find you? How do people, you know, sit down and get some of this knowledge and maybe save themselves millions of dollars in, you know, not trying to brand something that they can't brand and make it so that their company can scale up into that next level? How do people find you?

How do they sit down with you? How can someone pick your brand and get access to you? I make it really simple. I give away my mobile number and my personal email. So my email is Howard at howcreative.com. Howard at howcreative.com, H-O-WCreative.com. And then my phone number is 310, 804, 4251. And we'll set up like a 10-minute discussion.

And if you want to, you know, go through quote-unquote, it's up to you. If you want to go through a full assessment, then what I do on my website, I sell it for $2,500 for an hour, but through a code using H-O-W to hit the coupon, say, apply, it brings it all the way down to $500. And I'll do a whole evaluation, a whole assessment on what you've been creating,

show you the gaps. Here's what you, here's what you did tell me where you want to be and who you are, but this is how you're representing yourself right now, and what is that gap? So if someone doesn't have the ability to call you up or jump on the website, are there other resources you have that people can get access to? Are there tools that you like to use? Yeah, so I took this time to write a book. It took me five years.

I think it's been about 15 years, and it's called Authentic Branding. It's sold, you know, not so much in bookstores, but globally. But the fastest way people could find it is on Amazon and are authentic branding by Howard A. Lim. And you could find my book. Now, the reason why I create this book, by the way, because at the time, there was maybe five branding books when I wrote this book. And there's one book I really admire called Strong Band. by the way.

That really inspired me. But the point being is that none of these books really had any exercises. Yes. And no one wanted to divulge any of their trade secrets, which, you know, that's fine. I get to respect that, you know. And I said, well, I'm here to help out as many companies as possible. I don't actually say, okay, what do you do to create your values and how do you test your values? And then give examples and da-da-da-da.

So that book is not just a book to read. It's based on actually how you actually think about your own brand. And it's available on Amazon. It's on Amazon, yeah. Need to go to Amazon after this. Okay, perfect. I really appreciate you. I just wanted to make sure we have that.

I really appreciate you coming on and changing so many different things. Just the idea of, you know, for me, the biggest takeaway was that it's a personality, that you're building that. I was like, oh, crap. Every company I built in scale, I just went, oh, my God. I left so much money on the table. Oh, to Moses. So, yeah, there's, oh, darn it. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so very much for coming on. I really appreciate you blowing my mind. Yeah, no, this has been really fun. This has been really fun. Thank you. Success isn't about having the perfect strategy on paper. It's about executing imperfectly and iterating based on real feedback. While others spend months perfecting their business plans,

winners are out there testing their assumptions with actual customers.