Branding Basics: Building a Strong Foundation with Kevin Adelsberger

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our series, our season of Develop-a-Nor, Building Better Developers, and we are Building Better Foundations. We're once again bringing a guest on, which if you're watching this, you've already figured that out. But we're going to be talking today about marketing and some of the foundations there. Before we dive in, I should introduce myself. My name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we are a petite consulting company, essentially. We sit down with you. We talk to you about your business. We help you create a roadmap for success and then either help you execute on it or we can go execute for you. Whatever you need, this is technology agnostic. We use simplification, integration, automation, innovation to help you find the best way to go from here to where you want to be and make the most leverage out of that most expensive investment known as technology outside of people, of course. Like the person I'm about to pass it over to, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Moulache. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we help businesses take back control with custom software that we build around your needs, not the other way around. We don't build cookie cutter software. We build custom software. Our focus is simple, great service, smart solutions, and a rock solid quality. We build tools that replace frustrating systems, streamline your operations, and are fully tested to work right the first time. Check us out at Envision QA. We combine development and quality assurance to give you software you can trust and support you can count on. Again, check us out at EnvisionQA.com. And because nobody does it better than him, I'm going to pass it on to Kevin to go ahead and introduce yourself, please. Well, thanks for that. Kevin Adelsberger with Adelsberger Marketing. We lead brands to conquer digital marketing, and I'm excited to be here to talk to you guys about marketing today. Excellent. So, see, this is a marketing kind of person. He's quick to the point and gives you exactly what you need to know. So, I want to dive right into it. We've even skipped the good thing, bad thing, all that kind of good, bad stuff that we typically do. I want to dive right into this one. So, I want to start right into the foundation. Let's start with a... And really what I want to do is back it all the way up to, like, side hustle level, because I think that is where I find so many people struggle in the marketing and branding world. And I know that we had some of that as well, where you start off in a side hustle, and it grows into something that is either... It has enough legs that it's a product or a service that you're going to do on a regular basis, or it's something to happen. So, it essentially flips from side hustle to day job or side hustle to an actual company. And now while you're side hustling, I think there's certain attitude that people have towards it, the way they advertise it, the way to talk about it. But I want to sort of see if there are maybe some things that we should think about when we are in that startup mode, that side hustle mode, that will help us from a marketing and branding point of view down the road. Because we're not really in that marketing think right now. We're really more in the just thinking through the process and creative piece. But I'm wondering if there's not some things that you would recommend that maybe we could do to put ourselves in a good position for the future. Well, I'll go to my own story for that, even though I'm not a developer. I never claimed to be one. But when I started my firm a little over 10 years ago, a little over 11 years ago at this point, I started as a side hustle. I was working at a nonprofit in Jackson. So, I'm in Jackson, Tennessee near Michael. And I started doing a side hustle for marketing. Funny, I started working for burritos, which is how I got started. There was a burrito shop called The Burrito Meal, which is like this like Jackson, used to be a Jackson institution and used to go there during college. And he got to be friends with the owner and I was like, hey, can I help you do some marketing in exchange for burritos? So, for and that started a beautiful friendship. Had lunch with him a couple days ago. He said the business has been closed for a few years, but I started working for burritos. So, I had a lot of good free food for many years doing that. But when I started as a side hustle, everything I would do anything for anyone at any time, if that makes any sense, right? So, there's a quote by Leonard Bernstein that when I talk about starting a business, I use this reference a lot. It said, I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I know that the answer is yes. And so, when you're starting out, I feel like frequently, unless you're coming from decades of experience, if you're newer in a field or younger and you're trying to figure out what you're going to be doing, I think the answer is yes to everything that comes your way. Just to make some money, build some connections, get some work done to show to other people. The problem with that is that when you start to become more serious about it and it takes up more of your time, you're going to be spread too thin doing different things that maybe aren't in your best strength area. And so, you are setting yourself up for not having the highest and best use of your time in the future. So, an example of that is we have a client who's a friend, and he started working with me before a lot of people were working with me, and I was grateful for that, and he needed a cooler with his logo on it. Now, this was 10 years ago, so yet he was just becoming a thing. And so, I didn't know, you had to have a minimum order to buy customized coolers and stuff. So, I figured out how to buy a cooler and buy a sticker and then put it together and give it to him. I wouldn't do that today because swag is not our area of expertise or specialty. And so, that's kind of an example of like, hey, at that time, anything to make the client happy, that was going to move the project down the field and build that relationship a little bit deeper. Now, I can hand those people off to different areas that is better suited for them to work with. And I'm okay with that because I know that I am being more successful in these other areas. And I think that kind of mentality would apply to the developer world as well. The further you get, the more specialized you can get, and really, the more specialized you are over time, you can usually charge more too. And so, who's ever mad about that? Exactly. And I think we've just coined a new word that specialties is specialty and then expertise at the same time. Sorry, to be clear, I coined that word. I think the recording will show. So, when the checks come in, keep me in mind. Oh, definitely. Yeah, you'll be at the top of that. We'll be like further down on the author list of that. So, actually all the way at the bottom. So, I love that. Thank you for saying you've even brought us a new word that we can start using. That is always awesome. So, I guess one of the things is what are your thoughts on doing these kinds of things? And particularly, let's consider a side hustle or business that's been around for a couple of years. So, you do have some customers, you have some history. It's not like you just made this up in your head and nobody knows about it. It's like there's it has some level of people know what people know that it's there. And then you're getting into this point, which is often like you say, is he you start out, you do everything. And now you start figuring out, OK, this is sort of where I want to go. And so how do you see or or what are some maybe some some thoughts on doing like either a relaunch or rebranding or something where you say, OK, what I did? Do I just get rid of it? Do I want to create something completely new or maybe what are some some thoughts that would possibly go in if you're when you're talking to somebody about that? Yeah. So the first thing I think about is like audience versus brand. So if if you are if you're a new focus area is different, a different audience than the one that you've been working with for the last five, let's say you've been in business for five years, let's be side hustling for five years. And you've been working a lot of different things and you've figured out the thing that you want to focus on has nothing to do with your preexisting customer base. Yeah, no, probably a decent idea. You could do a rebrand without a lot of cost if there's a lot of overlap in those two things, which there probably will be. I think it's a harder decision to make. Why is that branding is valuable for a reason? Like the most powerful companies in the world, the most expensive companies in the world, it's not just they have a great product, they have a brand that people want to interact with. Now, not to say that the Adelsberger marketing brand is worth a ton, but like our name is known in West Tennessee for good marketing. And so what I why would I want to change that? There's a there's a unspecified value in having a name in an industry or in an area for an extended period of time. And so when you're thinking about changing your name or your brand or your logo, visual brand, whatever you might want to call it, you should think, am I am I hurting my dollar value? Am I hurting my networking opportunities? Am I hurting my my exposure in the community by doing this? And so that's the real cost that you have to think about. Now, I'm talking about mostly a visual brand or a name here. If we were to get into like messaging and verbal branding and talking about your focus and that that's a for sure thing that can happen within the existing brand framework that doesn't that would not hurt you to focus in on that. Now, I think a good part of that is being able to then communicate clearly what your new focus is and then being willing to when a customer, old customer comes to you to do something that's not your focus. We say, hey, I'm sorry, I'd love to help you with this, but we're working on just this now. Call my friend Rob. Rob does that and he'll take care of you sort of thing. So is that sort of the fall of that? Is it when you're doing it more from the messaging side of it? Is it is it typically going to be better to just sort of ignore what you did in the past or is it more like a, hey, you know, one of those like, hey, we're we're new, we're changing, we're evolving. And so we're moving into this area and to sort of pull people along with it or do a little more of a I guess a harder cut or does it does it is it situational? I think it's a lawyer's a good marketer should answer things like a lawyer. It depends. Right. There's a lot of situational components to that. The I would my encouragement is very rarely like a hard change because you're going to lose some of that brand equity that you've built up if you just do this really drastic change. If you are doing a lot of continuous business with the same people like once a quarter, they're coming to you for the same thing sort of thing. That's going to be a harder conversation to have for them. And you might even just need to tell them this. Hey, we're going to help you out for the next year. But beyond that, we can't we're not doing this anymore. We're not going to like we're not going to we're not going to throw you to the curb because I've seen that happen. I've seen people make pivots in their business and throw people to the curb. And I would never send that company business ever again. Right. Like, even if even if I understand why they made their decision. But when you cold turkey someone and you leave people holding the bag like that tells me a lot about how you do business. But if you gave them a warning to say, hey, in a year, you know, this is a vital part of your business in a year, we're going to not do this. So you need to and we'll help you find someone help you transition is more of what I would think would be the appropriate path for that. Of course, if you're doing something completely different, there's no crossover. You're not going to burn any bridges. You're not going to lose any business. Making a identity that's more specialized to the application would would be a reasonable process to take. And when we talk about branding, we like to think about it in four elements. Can I share my screen in here? Is that going to be acceptable? No, go ahead. Sure. So that are listening here. You're not going to be able to see as much. I'm going to talk through it. I'm going to talk through it, though. So this is just a promo PDF that we use internally when we talk about branding. That branding is actually four things. So branding is your visual identity, which is what you guys think of as a logo. Right. It's your positioning. It's what you bring to the market and how you bring to the market. It's your identity. It's your mission, vision, core values, who you are as a company at your core, beyond any colors that you have on the side of your your truck or on your shirts or whatever. And then there's the messaging. It's the how we communicate who the company is and our tone of voice and our elevator pitch and those sorts of things. And so changing any one of these elements is a big deal. It should be a big deal in your company. Like these should be solidified things. But as you make pivots, changing parts of these things may make a lot of sense to present a more true a true approach to the world for who you are and what you want to do in business. So it's interesting that you brought this up because my question actually was going to be about this, but more for kind of the side hustlers going into becoming a more formal business. At what point do they need to start looking at these points? You know, when do they need to really start focusing on like, who am I? Things like that. Can you give us some examples of where you've seen this be successful and see where people make mistakes? The the if I'm being real, I'm this is a side note. I'm I'm trying to retire the phrase. Let me be honest with you. Or if I'm being honest, because I hate that phrase, because it's like I was lying to you previously. So I'm trying to switch that out with if I'm forthright or if I'm transparent in this answer, you can be successful in a lot of businesses without a lot of these things dialed in. Like you can make money, especially a lot of boring businesses, you know, quote unquote boring businesses can make a lot of money not doing these things. But I think if you want to have a culture that is a competitive advantage, if you want to have a business that is that is going to win in a competitive environment as opposed to a commodity, you've got to have these things figured out. So it's a part of being successful. But also you don't have to have it to be successful, if that makes any sense in the world that I want to live in, the businesses that I would want to grow. These things are super important to get nailed in right now. That being said, for my company in particular, we didn't have mission vision core values for a few years in. We were still figuring out who we were. And so while you don't need all of these things right away, the two that I would recommend you get right out of the door is the visual branding and the positioning and the messaging. The identity is probably a little bit more important to wait and figure out over time. The positioning is important when you figure out what you're taking to market and how you take it to market. For example, if someone was to introduce in our market a guy that would come to your house and do your oil change for you, instead of having to go to the oil change dealer or mechanic, which is what they would be called, most people call them mechanic. I just can't, I don't know, my brain doesn't work sometimes. That would be a unique positioning that you would want to build your messaging around. And so as you figure out what you're doing, I think some of these things become more clear. So I don't know that you have to have them day one. You need a name or some sort of visual brand to identify yourself and help people see who you are. But the other components, I mean, the positioning, ideally, positioning comes really early because you figured out that there's a niche here that I can expose and make some money at. But that doesn't necessarily, because sometimes you might just be getting a side project from an existing customer. So there's a lot of, there's a lot like you might not be doing anything different. You might just be doing the same thing over on the side. And then you slowly figure out your positioning over time. So it a little bit depends. If I had a preference, like if I was to like design this in a lab and do this the exact right way, you would start with identity. You would then go to positioning. You would then go to messaging. And then finally, you would do the visual branding. But frequently it happens, I think, in the exact opposite order of that. Now, go right ahead. So you're getting a good example of this. So you've been in business over 10 years. Can you give us some examples of where you've seen some bad marketing attempts or where businesses just got it wrong completely? And like how to avoid that? Avoiding bad marketing is part of bad marketing is in the eye of the beholder. So there's that's the first challenge. There may be things that we think are really bad that make a lot of sense for that customer and their audience. Because keep in mind, we are not always the customer of these particular efforts. And so keeping that in mind is really important. Now, that being said, there's been some really dumb stuff that I've seen. Do you guys use Slack? Man, I hate that they changed their logo so many years ago. I'm still mad about it. And but, you know, talking to my friend William Donnell, Williams like, well, you don't know what design challenges they were trying to solve with that rebrand. And I was like, you know what? I don't stop trying to make me sound reasonable. I'm mad about this, William. And so knowing what the customer base is and what their needs are is a super important thing to deciding whether marketing is good or bad. Here's an example. We worked with an HVAC company here. And we knew that the owner was not super marketing savvy. OK. I built a good business, but not super marketing savvy. So he was not thinking our marketing was being very effective because he wasn't seeing it. Which is a red flag for any marketing person that's ever would have ever heard that me say that like they've seen that before where the customer doesn't see the marketing. So they assume it's not working. Well, here's the thing. He's not the target market. And so what we did to appease him, though, was we ended up buying a set of ads, spending company money, a little bit of it on ads on stations. We knew that he watched so that we could appease that concern from him. And so while it was not the best use of money, it saved us all a lot of headache. So sometimes so bad marketing may not be bad marketing. Sometimes it is. And usually that is because you don't have enough people having input. And what I mean by that is what we've seen the worst marketing. Like, for example, recently Nike had an ad for the WNBA that said, let her cook. Now, let her cook and let him cook or let them cook in sports parlance or in modern parlance is like, hey, let them do their thing. They're doing something awesome. Let them cook. But putting it in juxtaposed to a WNBA game all of a sudden feels very sexist. Likely two situations happen there. One, you had a manager of some sort think this was a great idea and didn't listen to another soul saying this is going to end poorly. Don't do this. Or you had a room of people who thought it was a great idea and there's probably not a middle-aged woman sitting there to say, hey, maybe don't say this phrase because it's not going to land the way you want it to. We've also seen some things where there might be something that comes across as racially insensitive. And it was likely a room of older white men making that ad pitch without having someone that has a diverse set of viewpoints in the room. And so, one, you may not be able to have a team of people in a room making that decision, especially as a side hustle. But you can try to think if I've got a friend down the street that thinks about the world differently than I do, how are they going to respond to this? Am I stepping over any boundaries that I – now, there may be people who want to step over boundaries on purpose, right? But if I'm not trying to start fights, am I doing something that's going to start a fight? And they say that every day there's a main character on Twitter and you don't want it to be you. Am I saying anything that's going to make me be the main character on Twitter tomorrow? And so, thinking through it that way is one of the key things. But the biggest thing that people do wrong with marketing is they stop thinking about their customer, right? And so, if you are doing something just to brag and not providing any value to your customer, you're going to have a bad time. And so, that's sometimes the easiest way to fix bad marketing is by focusing on your customer. So, you mentioned in some of the – like getting started in that is, you know, like the coloring and the logos and stuff like that. And there are stories of – you know, I've seen huge amounts of money spent on logos and colors and corporate fonts and the whole kit and caboodle. And then sometimes – and there are some that they are in themselves. You can tell that there's a level of iconic or ingenuity into it. Like the one that jumps to minus, like the Amazon where it's got like the smile from the A to Z kind of thing. So, you've got the hidden messages in them. How much is that – is that something that sometimes we over – and I know I'm asking a marketing person. This may be like asking a raw person. But is that sometimes overthinking it a little bit? Is it especially when – I mean, I guess if you're going to be like a Nike or something and maybe if that's your goal, then yeah, you want to have something that's, you know, life altering for people to see that logo. But if you're, you know, a marketing company in Western Tennessee, is it really – how much do those things factor in, do you think? Yeah. So, let's talk about Nike for just a second. If I branded a new shoe company today, Nike didn't exist with that swoosh, I would probably get shot at by the customer and be like, what does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. Whatever. So, Nike's logo is completely devoid of any meaning except for the meaning that they've built. And that's really what the power of the brand is, is like they have created the value to go with the icon. Now, your question was, you know, do you have to have this show-stopping logo to – a good – you're right, you're asking a man with a hammer, does the problem look like a nail? And so the question is yes. But a couple things to think about. A good logo, maybe not even a great logo, but a good logo used well adds professionalism to your product. And so if you are in a competitive space or you're new and you've got a professional-looking brand, you're like, okay, maybe they – you get some credit for that. Also, over time, if you have a professional logo and you use it consistently, you add some brand value, you add some brand equity to yourself where you can lean on that and tell people – people will begin to identify in the right customer space if you're marketing yourself to a certain demographic of customers. But a bad logo can get you confused with other people, could have some imagery that you don't want to have in it, you don't even know about. The biggest thing that we see is I can spot a Fiverr logo from a mile away. Like I can generally know – yeah, they went to Fiverr for a logo pretty quickly. And so I may have a certain feeling about that, but what that means is like other people, they might not know that it's a Fiverr logo, but they might be able to be like, this looks like 30 other mechanic shops that I've seen. How am I supposed to tell them apart sort of thing? And mechanic shops are generally – mechanic shops and real estate agents are generally the worst. I see Fiverr logos constantly. And a mechanic shop doesn't necessarily need to have great branding to be successful. Real estate agents need good branding to be successful. And so it's kind of funny to me that they've invested in it that way. So do you have to have this show-stopping logo? No. You should have a good logo that represents your business and an ideal brand kit. Like if you work with a professional, you get a brand kit. So you'll have vector and raster images. You'll have different color samples. Let's say you sponsor a local high school softball game or whatever. Your logo can get printed on the jersey the same color as it should look. It should look right on that jersey, whether it's full color or not, right? A professional sets you up with that. And so it's a little bit more on the front end to have a professional do it. But the payoff is like you're going to have a logo that will be relevant for the next 20 years, maybe if you're lucky, I guess, 20 years. And you'll have a kit that will give you all the tools that you need to utilize it properly. And a lot of times the cheaper ends don't do that. And it's very frustrating from a design standpoint when someone doesn't have what they need. And then you have to go make it because they were cheap on the front end. And that is going to be where we're going to pause our conversation with Kevin Adelsberger this time around. Don't worry, we will unpause. And we're not holding our breath until it. We like went right on through it. So don't worry, we're safe. We're being healthy here. We'll come back with part two and we're going to continue the conversation and get into it. Really, I think this is really good. Like one and two split of how we do this is because really got some foundation and basic stuff. But then we're going to get into like applying that a little bit more in the next episode. So come back and join us for that one. As always, I have to start off with if you have comments on this, if you have feedback of any sort, shoot us an email at info at developer.com. You can check us out on developer.com. There's contact forms. You can leave comments, feedback on any of the blog articles anywhere that you see podcasts or listen to podcasts out on YouTube on the developer channel. Facebook on the developer page. We are pretty much everywhere we think of X. It is at developer. You can follow us there. Follow us on all these different places so you can hear about all of the latest stuff we do. We are, as you've noticed, getting a little deeper into interviews and stuff like that. We may have to even update our schedule a little bit and do a little bit more because we just are starting to pile up a lot of stuff potentially. And also we've got the seasonal specials coming up pretty darn soon. We are in October right now as we're recording this. And pretty soon we'll be doing the November Thanksgiving specials and the end of year and Christmas specials. So always some stuff to look forward to. Hopefully you are looking forward to your day. Go out there and 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 Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Thank you.