Building Better Developers, Episode 504

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-newer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season with a series of interviews. We have wrapped up the prior one and we start this new one with DP Knuten. We will talk at length about some of the things he's done, but the thing that attracted me to reach out and try to have the conversation is he has a book on fiction and nonfiction brands. Actually, the focus being nonfiction brands and what that is and how marketing has evolved. This is someone who has spent a lot of time, many, many years in the marketing world. Advertising understands it and it may be a little different from some of the technical stuff we talk about, but I think it's one of those where it will expand your horizons significantly to hear about things like brands and personal brands and emotional connections to sell to customers and all the different things that we talk about. It was fascinating to me. Hopefully you will find it even more fascinating, at least equally fascinating. And if it's even half as much, it will be well worth your time. So I've spent enough time talking. Let's get started our discussion with DP Knuten. Welcome. And today we are talking with DP Knuten and he is a author of, which we talk about, a brand, which is some of the interesting concept we're going to talk about. Also has the nonfiction brand podcast and is a, in my summary, is sort of a branding, marketing kind of expert that I think you'll find very interesting. And he will, as I am not as much that area, I think we'll get pretty deep into some things and teach you many things we've not discussed. That being said, I'll go ahead and let DP, if you want to give us sort of a background a little general, you in a nutshell. Well, that's quite a nutshell, but I'll try to make it short. My degree is a bachelor of science in theater. Yes, such things exist. And I especially appreciate that it's a BS in theater because that applies to just about everything I do with advertising and marketing to a certain degree. But I've been in advertising and marketing for about 30 years, going all the way back to the early 1990s and even before that. And I was I started out as a copywriter and a copywriter is responsible for the written word when it comes to advertising materials, you know, coming up with the story that is going to be communicated through whatever channels you're going to use. And back then it was traditional channels like three broadcast television networks, outdoor boards, newspaper, radio, TV ads, things like that. Things dramatically changed, of course, with the advent of the Internet and all things digital and advertising and marketing has changed all along with it. During that time, working on brands like Coca-Cola, Georgia Pacific, the Athletes Foot retail stores and everything, you know, literally I've touched just about everything, including some early coding software companies and things like that. I developed what I call my nonfiction brand point of view when it comes to branding, because a lot of people look at marketing and go, yeah, that's all about getting people to buy things they don't need, to which I say no. Well, in some cases it is, and that's bad salesmanship. But in reality, it's about matching the right audience with the right people, the right products and the right services so that both people are not only benefiting from that kind of symbiotic relationship, but actually super satisfied with it. And ideally, a brand creates not a one time transaction, but a lifetime of transactions, because what you've really created is a relationship. So if you ask me, what is branding about? It's about building relationships that can lead to a lifetime of transactions, whether it's in the form of purchasing products and services or consulting or, or consultation contracts or, you know, gigs working with you or references to other people, you know, the best thing a brand, the best thing a brand can do for you is give you a reputation before you walk into a room that you control, that you have a certain amount of control over, because there's a difference between reputation and brand. And I'd be happy to talk about that if you're interested. That's actually a good, I've got a question about it. So please take that a little deeper with differences between those two. Okay. So if I have a reputation, that is not in my control. It's actually in the hands of the people who have heard of my reputation or have been telling the story of my reputation. That's in the eye of the beholder. You know, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is reputation. But a brand is something you control. You are the ones providing the stories about who you are, what you do and how you do it, you are the one who's packaging everything you are in a way that people completely understand how you are different than someone who does something exactly like you. And let me put that into the developer's world for a second. If you develop in a certain stack or a certain part of language or a certain application framework, you are just like anyone else who can claim that accreditation. You know, JavaScript. Well, guess what? You're just like anyone else who does JavaScript, right? Unless you're not, unless you're something bigger or higher than that, which is, yes, I do JavaScript, but I also am known specifically for this higher functioning capability, which I would call a premium brand level quality. And consequently, people come people don't come to you just for JavaScript. They come to you because he's the guy who did the JavaScript that was in, that was used by this company to create this. And it went seamlessly and everything was wonderful. So this person isn't just simply a cog. They are a doctor. It's always better to be a doctor than a cog that can be replaced by another cog that fits the same shape and size and specification. Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. So do you see brand is sort of trying to impact reputation? Because since reputation is, it's how others see you and brand, I guess, is you projecting that, that image or who you are, is that, do you see that those sort of work, I guess, work sometimes even against each other a little bit or trying to work, make them work with each other? A brand? Well, you know, they, there's this relationship between the two, a correlation, but here's the thing brands do. They try to tell you what to think in ways that are based on facts, on truth about what that brand is. And let me give you an example. I always like to break things down to kind of the elemental when it comes to products and services that are brands. So let's pick two, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Everybody knows both of those. Coca-Cola beat Pepsi by a year by coming out in 1886. Pepsi came out in 1887. So Coke had the first mover advantage, but not by much. But if you think about it, I'm guessing some of the people in your audience are already saying to themselves, well, I don't like popia. I don't like Pepsi. I'm a Coke guy, or I don't like Coke. I'm a Pepsi guy. And anyone who's ever gone to a restaurant and had a server come up to them and say, can I get you something to drink? And you say, I would like a Coke, please. And they say we only serve Pepsi products. I've heard more than one time in my life, that person who wants a sweet, brown, bubbly liquid say, oh, no, thanks, I'll just have water. Are you telling me the flavor profile of Pepsi and Coke are so different that you wouldn't be satisfied with the other flavor? Well, the answer is if you are a Coke guy, if you have bought into that brand, if you have an affinity for that brand, the answer is of course I'm not going to get Pepsi. So that relates to everything. Coke is, as I said, sweet, brown, bubbly water. Pepsi is sweet, brown, bubbly water. And yet our associations, our mind's share, the mind share that Coke has been so careful about building over a century is that Coke is what you have at Christmas and the winter holidays. It's what you have at picnics and football games whenever you're out with friends. Why do you think that? It's because Coke has been telling you that and showing you that and proving itself to you or over, let's see, we're all going on 140 years. Coke is literally controlling their reputation in your mind. Now, you don't have to buy Coke if you don't like soft drinks. And I don't drink soft drinks anymore. But if I do, I'm getting a Coke. That makes sense. Yeah. And that's, yeah, this is, we can go very deep into that. I think I do want to step back, I guess, before we go off, because there's, there's a lot of great material there. Let's start, let's take it down to a personal level, particularly because you mentioned reputation is that there's everybody personally, I think is more. People have more relationship to a personal reputation as opposed to there are definitely corporate rep, you know, reputations as well. But I don't think people, you know, necessarily equate those. So down at a, how do you see personal branding and particularly when you're talking about the, the relationship reset, you know, having, instead of selling somebody something once having that relationship and that trust is changing that from, you know, a corporate, I trust this entity and then, you know, how does that work in the personal world? Well, the reality is that there's, as we talked about a little bit earlier, there's been a sea change in the way things are being marketed and advertised. Why? Because the audience is now in charge of everything. The buyer is now in charge of everything. It used to be an under well understood about among marketers that the most valuable eyeballs in any family were those of the mom, because they held the purse and they bought the majority of the stuff that was advertised for families, whether it's clothing, it's food, it's vacations, it's insurance. All those things have to grab mom's attention because even if dad is the decider, mom is the power behind the decider who makes things happen. So that was the way things always were. But it wasn't as strong as it is now, because now a lot of people think we're in a post brand environment because the social media has fractured everything to the point where things don't matter the way they used to. There was a time when we all knew the commercials that were all on TV at the same time and we could recite the taglines, you know, to all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on the sesame seed bun. Why do I know that? Because McDonald's drilled that into my head. I still remember it 40 years after it was on TV and we all did. That doesn't happen anymore. So now we have a very fragmented environment, but the same things are at play when it comes to telling people who you are, what you do and how you do it. And not only that, why you should want me to do it for you. And, you know, that that's a, it's a, it's a pain in the butt. If you're a huge national company that wants to reach everybody all at once, because you can't do that anymore. Even the Superbowl and the Olympics, the Olympics are on right now. And the eyeballs aren't there. It used to be, we all watched the Olympics at the same time. Now I don't know anybody who's really going out of their way to watch the Olympics. So all of a sudden everything's fragmented. It's even more important that you build a brand, but in this case, it's more important that you build your personal brand, because in the words of my friend, Mark Schaefer, who has a great book out called marketing rebellion, he believes, and I believe right along with him that the personal brand is now the company brand. Why? Because emotion resides with people, not with companies. Who do we listen to? We listen to the people who recommend, Hey, have you seen Netflix? The mayor of East town? I hear it's great. Yeah. I kind of looked at it and said, no, no, I watched it. It's fantastic. The first episode's a little slow, but then it gets really good. Well, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to watch mayor of East town because my trusted friend recommended it to me. Now Netflix at the same time was serving that up into my queue saying, Hey, based on what you watch, you might be interested in this, but I didn't watch it until I heard a recommendation from a friend who knew the brand of mayor of East town, what it was, what it was about, why it was interesting, and also that you would probably like it because I know you like that kind of murder mystery stuff. So you, so when, as you say that the corporate brands becoming the personal brand, is that where you're saying really now it's, it is reaching that it's, it's getting to that, which, and again, I think makes sense, maybe a little bit as the, this fractured and advertising environment that we have, is it really getting down to more the idea of instead of talking to masses of people and trying to get everybody to think, associate, you know, Coke with Christmas or something like that, instead more of that is you talk more of that personal appeal of, you know, like right now you're thirsty. This is a great time for you to have this, you know, nice, sweet, dark liquid, or, you know, we're just go a little, a little deeper in that because that's interesting is how corporate and personal branding are, are sort of becoming one in the same. Well, if you think about any big purchase that you've done in the past year, or maybe let's go past it pre COVID back when you could actually go to a show room or a big box store, you know, someplace where you walk in and you go, you know, I've done a lot of research. I think this is what I want, but the reason I go to this store is because of the team or the individual I know who works there, who can steer me right. And I trust him because I've known that forever. For example, there are still camera stores in spite of the fact that you can buy any of the latest Nikon or Canon stuff direct from Amazon and probably have it a little bit cheaper. There are still physical camera stores. Why? Cause people want to go there and engage not only with the product, but also with the experts of that product. So I, for example, I was in the market for a decent DSLR, you know, digital single lens reflex camera, but I also wanted it to be able to pump out some clean HDMI so that I could live stream with it. Well, I could do what I do most of the time, which is go to the university of YouTube and I watch a ton of videos and I get all that stuff, but at one point or another, I'm going to want to go to that store. I want to talk. I want to feel that device and I want to say, okay, Nikon, Canon, which one should I be thinking? And then when the person says, ah, have you seen the Sony a6000? And I'm like, Sony, so really does. Yeah. For what you're talking about using, that might be the one for you, especially because you're not paying what you have to pay for what you think you need. You know, so like for what you're describing, you don't need a $1,400 camera, you need a decent $500 camera. So guess what? That guy just, he saved me money. Told me about a product that I hadn't, didn't even have on my radar and has provided me tremendous value. Oh, and by the way, he works for a company called the camera company. I don't care about the company name. I care about the recommendation that that human gave me in a face to face environment, in spite of the fact that I did a ton of research digitally. And that seems like a good place for us to pause. We will pick up next episode with further discussion with DP. Hopefully, like I said, you'll see already that there is quite an amount of knowledge that is in his head. And he has been so gracious as to share that time with us and help us get a little bit of an insight into what his world is like. Hopefully this is something that's gotten some of the wheels turning in your head about your personal brand, maybe about your job, whether this is your own company or whether you work for somebody else and how you can build or reinforce the brand and the image of whatever products it is that you represent. And hopefully now you know it and realize that you do represent those products in a way, regardless of your position, there is a way that you can maybe not necessarily make or break, but definitely either benefit or be a a loadstone to the brand of whatever product it is you support. That being said, I think we'll wrap this one up. So go out there, have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the DeveloperNoor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernor.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of DeveloperNoor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the DeveloperNoor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Rodhead or Source Code of Happiness, you can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week. And this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.