For most of us, the business we’ve put up is a product of our vision, our hopes, and our dreams. We’ve thought and crafted well every detail of this business including the logo which we believe is what represents our brand. Contrary to what most of us believe, brand is more than visuals. Integrative brand psychologist Gina Hussar sheds some light to the real meaning and purpose of a brand which most business owners miss. She shares how her team helps solidify our brand in people’s mind along with our voice, points of view, and our values. Discover Gina’s multidimensional integrative strategy that brings the vibe, the visuals, and the messaging all into one spectacular brand.

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I am excited to bring you somebody on the creative side. We don’t often get to talk about the creative side of building websites and building brands and building our podcasts and video shows. A lot of times what Gina does, what you’re going to learn in this interview with the creative side is overlooked by people and that’s why we wanted to highlight it. We’ve got Gina Hussar of HIGHER Media Group and she is an integrative brand psychologist. She’s going to work on your brand vibe, not just your brand logo and your brand messaging. It’s all integrated. Gina is an award-winning writer and she’s built a successful company based on the belief that cross disciplinary blend of spirit and strategy is the key to success with the focus on alignment and integration. She calls herself an integrative brand strategist and she has tremendous experience and background, which she’ll talk about toward the end of the interview. She certainly has a lot of experience that made her uniquely suited. What ended up happening is her business and her clients found her at a time and she built a business around it. It’s very unique. Everybody talks about the brand. There are a lot of people that espouse to be brand experts. There is so much to it that you may not realize. This is not what your average brand strategist would have you do.

I find that so many of the brand strategist I meet are one-dimensional and she’s very multidimensional. Gina has this multidimensional integrative strategy that brings together the vibe, the visual, the messaging. To me, that’s what you are all about here as podcasters and video casters and Brandcasters. You get it because you’re passionate about what you do and you know that’s what’s resonating with your audience and coming back to you. Somehow sometimes it falls apart when it goes to your website or goes to your Facebook page or goes to your emails.

Listen to the podcast here


 

Integrative Brand Psychology: Creating That Spectacular Brand with Gina Hussar

Gina, thank you so much for joining us. I’m excited to talk about visual branding as opposed to just message branding, which is we get a lot.

I’m excited to be here.

This is the thing that I get so often from people. They think that a brand is just a logo or the way their website looks. In reality, it is. It just goes deeper than that. Tell us a little bit about your process.

We practice integrative brand psychology, it’s what we call it. We do that because it’s a cross-disciplinary approach. We feel that there is no separation between you, your brand, your offerings, your audience, but that the most lucrative brands out there are fully integrating. Your brand is the visuals but it’s also the vibe. It’s the energy. It’s the feelings that are evoked when somebody stumbles onto your website. It’s the words that make them want to scroll down and read the next line of words. We take people through an onboarding process that asked them questions that sound random but there’s a science to them. It questions everything from their niche and their ideal client to personal things. Their values, their visions, their hopes, and dreams. We take that all the way down to what we call their core truth and only then do we start wrapping it in words and colors and imagery.

It’s hard for most people to separate out, “What are my customers? Are they readers? Are they listeners? Are they viewers?” We get all kinds. When you think about how they’re consuming our content as podcasters, our brand matters in all media as well. If it’s not fully integrated throughout that, then you’ve got a mismatch. You’ve got dissonance.

Your brand is the visuals, the vibe, and the energy. It's the feelings that are evoked when somebody stumbles onto your website. Click To Tweet

There are a lot of opportunities for brand integration and brand alignment across all platforms that people miss. You might have a podcast page and then you might have a website for something else and you have your social media pages. Even in your welcome email, in your client agreement document, there’s room for the vibe and the voice of your brand to come through. A lot of people miss those things. That’s just how you take it deeper and deeper by layer to the point that your brand is solidified in people’s mind. Your voice is solidified, your point of view is solidified.

Gina, how do you address concerns that the client might? Some of my clients only care about the numbers, the bottom line and how much is it going to cost them. Other people are more relationship-focused and they want to feel comfortable with who they’re buying from. They want to feel trust. Other people want to know tactically, “How am I going to do it?” Different people are thinking in different ways. How do you address that in some of the messaging in your clients’ sites?

We try to hit all of the main things that influence buyer behavior. They’re well-known. There’s urgency and there’s exclusivity. We also encourage people to have their content be consumable in a variety of ways. If there is an audio, maybe there’s a transcript of that audio that’s available so that they’re speaking to all of the different learning styles. We have a lot of people that have tiered offering so that they’re hitting every budget. Most of the time, the audience behavior is clear. There’s enough of a majority that we know how they want to consume and you can run your data and find out where they’re coming from. Are they on mobile? Are they on PC? The demographic matters. If you have a younger audience, you want your platform to extend the places like Instagram and Snapchat. There are a lot of layers. The way we do the onboarding process, it chunks it down so that it doesn’t feel quite so big.

That’s a big problem for most people. They think that it’s just going to be overwhelming. You said something that’s interesting about how they miss the opportunity to put it into their email. They put it into their corporate documents to put this brand voice or vibe as you put that out. Why do people miss that? What’s going on that they missed those opportunities?

It’s because we are programmed to only deal with what you first see. When we’re Googling, the first thing you see is somebody’s homepage. Maybe you take it a step further and click on the Facebook icon and go to their Facebook page. Those are the top layer. That’s what we see. I liken this to a house. Those first touch points are the front door of your house. The goal is to get people to come into the house and into the foyer and maybe your next offering gets them all the way to the kitchen and they’re sitting down. Each layer is drawing them further into your house and into your awareness. That’s why people miss it. They’re just not used to going another couple of layers. Once you know your main point of view, what you do, who you do it for, and why it’s different, everything gets easier because you just repurpose that same information across every touchpoint.

Brand Psychology: There is no separation between you, your brand, your offerings, or your audience that the most lucrative brands out there are fully integrating.

 

There’s a logistical business growth reason that might be happening. That is because we touch the outside of things because that’s the first thing and we maybe have a limited budget when we started. We’re like, “Let me spend as much as I can because the website homepage matters.” We were like, “Let’s just translate that and I’ll stick it on my Facebook page by myself.” You’re like, “Let’s hire someone on Fiverr to do this.” We start to logistically do the things that are needed, but we don’t keep that brand vibe. We don’t have any documentation of it. We’ve not explained it to anyone or to ourselves in the process of it. You have a different way of working.

We do, because at the end of the day the things we’re talking about might not be spelled out in words on your site. When we’re talking about the vibe and the energy, it’s important for you as the business owner to know, but it truly does translate in the experience people have. I’ll just give you an example. How many times have you signed up for somebody’s email list and you get a generic confirmation email that has no warmth, no personality, no personal touch? I received one from an online store that was happy and spiritual and there was a beautiful graphic. It said something like, “Did you notice that the sun is brighter, the birds are singing, the sky is blue and we finally figured out why? It’s because you’re here now.” It was just this welcoming into their community that felt so different from every other email I had opened that day.

I got one from a UK company and the email said, “Howdy.” That’s the standard WordPress one or something, which I happen to know but I thought it was odd.

Those are little ways that don’t cost a lot. You can infuse your brand with your voice even more. The biggest value in having somebody to work with you is having somebody take you layer by layer.

We have team members. We may get it as the owner of the business and we may have worked with you and that’s wonderful. A lot of times communicating that across the team who happens to be writing those emails or do that, that’s where the difficulty starts to lie. You’ve done this thing where you do a vision board in addition to helping through the copy. Talk a little bit about that because that helps people.

The vibe and the energy of your brand translate in the experience that people have. Click To Tweet

It does and it’s one of my favorite things to do. It allows us to be creative and to try to take the business owner’s personal vibe and wrap it in colors and imagery. We give people a document they can walk away with and share with their team, their web designer or whoever. It’s a social media poster that has their color palette, their imagery, and their fun. We even sometimes put our brand rules and sometimes we don’t swear so that a copywriter or a social media person knows, “Here’s how this has to look and here’s how this has to sound.”

I saw an interview with someone who’s going to run for president and she said that she was going to try hard not to swear, but it’s a part of who she is. That’s so interesting to think about. Those little things express who you are. Yet when we try to explain that to different people, we don’t always get it across. Sometimes when we share it in a visual way, people get it faster.

A lot of times, the trap that people fall into is they try to be professional. In doing so, they miss the opportunity to stand out and online, blending in is the kiss of death. What we try to get people to do in the onboarding process is go deep enough that we’re able to pull out the paradox. A perfect example of that is the brand, Nerd Fitness. A nerd and a gym are not two things you would typically pair together, but it became that company’s unique value and we all know how much they’re valued at now, millions and millions of dollars. That person perfectly integrated. He took that paradox, integrated it together and it became a unique and popular brand.

This seems to me what Gina does is creating what we’ve known in graphic design or brand identity for ages. It’s being a style guide for how your brand or your logo is to be appearing and representative at all times. It’s a style guide for everything about how you need to present yourself in all situations and that’s brilliant. When you think about people, even business owners, even if they know what their vision is, what their mission is and how they want to represent themselves, a lot of times they don’t pay attention to certain things like the auto-email response. It is a time crunch. As our business has grown and we hit 150 podcasters at the end of 2019, that was a point where I realized I was cursory reviewing emails, but I wasn’t writing them anymore. There are a lot of those things where you start to lose your hand in it and you don’t want that vibe to get lost. You want somebody to be able to take it on and make sure that it continues in that vein. I can’t do it myself. That’s not a viable growth strategy.

You’ve got your brand identity workbook. That’s what we call the onboarding document. You keep your vision board. It makes enrolling your team in the vision a lot easier.

Brand Psychology: Branding is like your house. The first touch points are the front door of your house where your goal is to get people to come inside and into the foyer.

 

I liked that workbook because it implies it’s not done yet. I never feel that my brand is good enough. It’s always in revision. Don’t you think that that’s a phenomenon? It always needs to be growing and flexible because our businesses are growing fast, our technology is growing fast.

Here’s how I look at that. I don’t look at it as not being done or not being good enough. I look at it much like life and nature. It’s a constant evolution. Your brand is going to naturally evolve as you naturally evolve and it should. The trap that people fall into is thinking they have to stop until the next iteration of their brand. It got to stay in a flow and it’s in a sequential flow. Maybe you do need to rework and evolve your visuals or whatever, but that doesn’t mean you stop. Even if your visuals evolve, odds are your point of view hasn’t changed completely. If it has, your voice hasn’t. It’s about finding that common thread that your audience can hold onto while you’re revamping a new identity.

We have something we called the hypothesis brand. A hypothesis brand is for a lot of our podcasters who come on or video casters who to come on. They started a show, they have some things about it, but they didn’t know when they started whether or not it would resonate with an audience. They had this idea, “I’m going to create a show and it’s going to attract this kind of person.” They don’t have a sense of that yet so there’s no data to rely on. There’s no avatar yet. You don’t even know who is attracted to it. We did this when we started our 3D print podcast. We were like, “Who are we creating this for? I don’t know. Let’s just get started and we’ll see who shows up.” You have to create a landing page, a website for it. You just do something and I call that the hypothesis because you need to put a stake in the ground and just get started. It was four or five months later, we did the website, did the brand, and did all of those things because we had more information. Had I done it before we started, we would have made a huge mistake.

We thought that it would be young people who are the only people that listen to podcasts. Instead, we found out we had a tremendous amount of retirees, people in corporate jobs, engineers, who were listening on their commute. It would have been completely the wrong website we would have created. It would’ve been completely the wrong brand messaging we would put together. The only good thing we did was keep the name of the show, which was WTFFF?! because it was perfect and it was geeky and it was what we were about. That worked out in our favor. People are so afraid to get started and they spend too much money at the beginning before they have enough information. There’s no shame in reinventing a few months later.

I have no shame at all. You make a good point. You said that the one thing we didn’t change was what the podcast was, its core, its essence. That’s important too because if you at least know your truth and your unique value and your point of view, you can start speaking to that. You can start leading with that. You can start talking about that on every platform. That’s the fastest way to find out who’s paying attention.

The biggest value in having somebody to work with you is having somebody take you layer by layer. Click To Tweet

We call that the “it factor.” You have your it factor. We do this in product design all the time. For us, we thought we knew what we wanted to do with the show and what we wanted to bring. We just didn’t know who was going to show up and like it and listen and then want more of it. For us, that was the constant. For some people, it might be their audience that’s constant. They do know their audience. They just aren’t sure how to make what they say or what their show about resonates with it and then they have branding on the opposite side.

We can all agree that the current social and cultural climate is a little precarious right now. We’ve been talking a lot about how buyer behavior has changed as politics have changed. There are five layers to this. There’s three that are in your control. That’s your digital presence, which is your content. Your physical presence, which is your aesthetics. Your energetic presence, which is your vibe and your point of view. There are the two that you can’t control. The personal ecology of your audience and the cultural vibe that’s happening. You have to pay attention to those five things. That’s an opportunity. It might sound overwhelming, but that there is money to be made if you can pay attention to what’s going on. It can make slight tweaks to relate and meet your audience where they are.

Gina, let’s talk a little bit about how you work with people. You’ve talked about your onboarding process, which I love because of the good branders that I’ve worked with. I’ve worked with a lot that I thought we were going to be good. Their onboarding process was such junk that I knew they were just putting their idea onto somebody else. I was like, “That’s it. They’re gone and never again will I use them.” This is in the product world. You can’t have somebody put a brand onto something and have it not embodied that at the end of the day. Talk a little bit about how it moves through the process from there.

I was thinking about this whole Gillette thing going on. One of the things that they’re doing right is going above the brand and trying to connect to what’s being talked about in the world and showing people we’re not just about numbers. We do have values. We do have beliefs. We are paying attention and that’s important too.

I should mention one thing that is very core here because I want everyone to know. If you haven’t seen it yet, Gillette has this ad about what it means to be a man. It’s anti-bullying and it’s all about being models for the next generation. What we have to remember is in retail, specifically in when we’re selling products, women buy or influence the mass amount of purchases, well over 80% of purchases including what razors are bought and all of those things. When you’re not synergistic with your buying audience, even if you were at some point synergistic with your using audience, it’s not the same thing. I always talk about it like, “You can get the dogs to eat the dog food and it’s the best thing ever but if the owners won’t buy it, you’re done.”

Brand Psychology: If somebody cannot make a decision or cannot be happy with their choices, there’s something deeper going on. There is a misalignment.

 

We’ve seen that a lot. We’ve seen websites that are geared towards children, which is great except children aren’t buying. It had to be geared towards the parents, the parents’ desires, and the parents’ fears and all that stuff. That’s spot on. Once we take people through the onboarding process, we hand them the workbook and they give it back to us. We spend a lot of time going line by line through their answers and you’ve seen it. It’s a hefty work.

What you were saying about Gillette going above the brand. These are things that most companies can’t think about themselves because they’re in their day-to-day.

It’s up to us to go through their answers line by line and pull out the paradox and pull out the patterns. There are so many times people repeatedly use a word without realizing it and that becomes one of the words in their title or in their product name. We are so used to ourselves. We don’t even realize that we have these patterns and then your idiosyncrasies and things that make us who we are. That’s our job. We go from there and we take their words and their answers and we write homepage copy. We write several names and taglines for them to choose through and we create their two visual identities for them to choose from.

People are like, “I want lots of choices. I want 99 designs.” It’s such a mistake. When you’ve got a great designer and they dial it in, there might be one or two variations because they’re not you. We do this with the product all the time. If there are three, I’m shocked that we came up with three because I know one is right. There’s not a reason for you to waste money when you’ve got a great designer working with you on coming up with all these variations just to have choices. It makes it harder and worse for you.

This is one thing that is part of what is our unique value. We will not continue if that’s happening. You and I both know that if that’s happening or if somebody cannot make a decision or cannot be happy with the choices, there’s something deeper going on. There is a misalignment. There is a stuck in perfection problem. One of the reasons we call this integrative brand psychology is, we deal with the person in addition to the brand. We will have a coaching session and find out what’s going on and why they’re not ready to move forward. Sometimes it has nothing to do with business, but it’s something that needs to be dealt with in order to move forward and get it done.

Your brand is going to naturally evolve as you naturally evolve, and it should. Click To Tweet

When we bring people to our show, we bring them on because they’ve impressed us tremendously. Our clients have raved about them or we are excited to be working with you. I am excited because we have not had a great creative to work with. It’s not a part of what our core business has here, although Tom and I have a creative background, we value it. It’s not a part of the skill set that we’ve developed here because it’s not the most important thing to our clients. Having it is important to a subset of our clients and those that need to build a bigger, deeper, more important brand. We’ve not had someone to partner up with so I’m so glad we have you to refer people to. I’m so glad we’ve gotten to expose everybody to your very cool and interesting process. You can see why I’m excited about it because I love stuff that makes me think. I love this brand psychology. I love having a deeper meaning than just making pretty logos. I want somebody who thinks deeper because I know that there’s deep value there and that it’s going to translate into making my job easier when I have to go and build their websites.

Thank you. I’m happy to be here and to be working with you. It’s exciting to me that we’re having this conversation around integration and around blending. You’re a tech genius and all of the amazing things you do with the vibe and the point of view and the energy because it all matters. All parts of a whole.

This is the other part of it that I love because of that vibe matters so much. It’s coming across in the show that we’re doing. It’s coming across the airlines. Whether we’re doing a video or we’re doing audio, that energy is what makes the show we found so often. When the hosts are great, when their energy is up, when that vibe is good, the shows take off. It can fall apart beyond the show if the site doesn’t support it, if the emails don’t support it. If all of that collateral doesn’t support what they got from the show, then the deepest someone will go is the show itself and stay subscribed and that’s it. Now you can’t capitalize. You can’t Podetize. You can’t start to turn that into a valuable business.

It all matters. At the end of the day, it’s all a tangible representation of your identity and your gifts. It is important to pay attention to all of it.

It should be important to everybody. If you’re serious enough to be in business for yourself and you’re wanting to be successful, you’ve got to not only stand out and differentiate from the masses. You also have to stand for something and you need to be clear about what that is. Not just clear about it in a direct way, but in all these other ways. I love the language that you use, Gina, and how you talk about these things. Alignment is a very great word. I love that word. It makes a lot of sense. I don’t think enough people realize that there is psychology wrapped up in all of this. Whether they want to realize it or accept it or not, it’s there. It’s better that you embrace it, understand it, and then be intentional about it than to have some other impression forced on you.

Brand Psychology: At the end of the day, it’s all a tangible representation of your identity and your gifts. It is important to pay attention to all of it.

 

That’s why we love the word integrative too because it’s a science and psychology, but it also speaks to the heart. The emotions, the spirit or the soul in some cases, the identity, it is important to blend all of those things.

Gina, we’ve got to talk about all the stuff that you do and what’s going on here, but we skipped getting to know you here. I want to let people know that you didn’t just come on this overnight. This is something you’ve been working your entire career towards. Can you tell us a little bit about how you did get started in the branding world?

I started working out of college at Saks Fifth Avenue as their special events coordinator. I found myself designing invitations for shopping events and putting on fashion shows and all that stuff. From there, I decided when I had babies, I was going to start a digital magazine and I did. It’s called Front Row Monthly and did well. We had the cast of Dancing with the Stars on our cover and MTV came to our party and then I got unexpectedly pregnant with my third. It just became too much. I will never forget that. I had a baby on my hip and toddlers and I got a call from Epic Records asking to speak to my legal department. I was like, “It’s just me in my living room. There is no legal department.” Long story short, I shut that down. When I started joining some business groups, people heard that I had worked in magazines and started asking me for help with their copy. As you know, magazine writers are some of the best copywriters because they do the market research for you. I started doing that to help people out and before I knew it, it became a business. It’s been a lot of fun.

That’s the thing. You’ve got this background in putting on a show and pulling it together, but that’s what our businesses are about. That’s what our brands are about. Having that all the way through, you understand all the different things matter when you put on an event. When you’re inviting people in, the invitations matter, the music matters and every part about it matters.

Not only that. One of the offerings we opened up in our media division is content curation. It used to be that you wanted to look bigger than you were when you were starting out and that has flipped. The brands that are coming into the center and being tight and personal with their audiences, they are sharing content. Not just about their product, but content about life and giving people a bird’s eye view into behind the scenes footage and stuff like that. Those are the brands that are connecting and holding onto their buyers. We are encouraging people. If you don’t want to write, get somebody who will curate and write regular blog posts for you. It ups your Google rating to have regular content but it’s also about connecting to your audience.

If you at least know your truth, your unique value, and your point of view, you can start speaking to that and leading with that. Click To Tweet

That’s why our podcasters and their blog posts that come from their podcasts do so well. It’s because all that deep personal voice, they have it all built through. That connection is there. They didn’t lose it. We do have many of our clients to go from that long tail 6,000-word transcription style blog post to then writing articles, seeding them out to trade publications and/or putting them on the website and writing summaries. There are so many ways in which you can do it in a much more curated way. It’s working everywhere on a technical level, but on a resonance level with your audience.

Go above the brand. Even if what you have is a podcast about business, the people that are going to come back and want to hang out with you are looking for more than that. They want to know about the human behind the microphone. They want to know about your private life a little bit or what you love, what you’re reading. Our clients that are doing six figures and beyond, they are making offers and they have a brand. They have a solid product line and they write things like, “My top ten favorite books,” or “What I’m cooking this week.” They’re just giving a glimpse of humanity and that’s what people are hungry for right now.

Those are some of the questions I get all the time when I guest on shows or when I do panel discussions and speeches. People want to know, “What did you read? What do you listen to do? Do you meditate?” These are all the most common questions. They want to get into that. I’m like, “Do you want to know who I used to work for?” It’s a totally different question and it took me a while to understand that that was more important to their audiences at the end of the day. Gina, I’m so glad we’ve met you and gotten to know you. We have Juliet Clark to thank for that from Promote, Profit, Publish. Her podcast is launched and she introduced us and she was a raving fan of yours. It is absolutely justified as we’ve gotten to know you deeper. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with our audience and for being a partner with us here at Brandcasters, Podetize.

Thank you for having me. It’s fun.

Integrative Brand Psychology: Creating That Spectacular Brand – Final Thoughts

The word vibe is a very strong word. It’s very appropriate here. It’s also a bit of an older word. When I hear vibe, I think of the ‘70s and the ‘60s. We grew up in the ‘70s, we grew up very young kids but our parents had grown up as teens and twenty-somethings in the ‘60s and vibe was a cultural term of the time that has an old feel. It’s a very appropriate word. That’s what we’re getting. We’re getting frequency and vibration and all of those things right here through the airways. That’s what’s happening when we do our shows and when we bring passion to it. We’re sending out a vibe and then we’re getting people to listen and that is powerful in that. To be able to capture that in a creative way, in a visual way, in a messaging way like that, it’s that integrative approach which is so thorough and so necessary.

It is necessary and it’s not just incorporating it into. You are incorporating it into all different aspects of your business, but it’s about how you’re communicating out to the world. It’s that vibration you’re putting out. It’s that feeling you’re putting out and that is as important as anything else. We’re all in business in some way. You have to earn money, you have to sell something, whether it’s yourself or a product, a service, whatever it is. I have this happen. The reason that I relate to a lot of what Gina said and I was talking about words that are very important like the alignment, it reminded me of my training with Bill Sterly. He is an expert in all these issues of how people think and what they’re going to respond to and choosing the right words to speak to them.

Knowing who your audience is and how to communicate to them is incredibly important. This all resonated with me. Everything Gina does makes total sense. I have this experience when I am “selling” to somebody on the phone, something that we sell. The way you speak to them and the way you communicate with them, even if you’re not speaking to them directly and it’s your website or it’s messaging. I have people say to me many times a month, “I don’t know what it is, Tom, but I have a good feeling about this and I want to work with you.” It’s that level that we’re talking about.

Brand Psychology: Go above the brand. People that are going to come back and want to hang out with you are looking for more than that. They want to know about the human behind the microphone.

 

This is where we cop-out too much and I say global. As business entrepreneurs, we’re great on the phone or we’re great in person, so we go and do more speeches. I know I’m great there. That always works for me. I get that all the time. I’m on stage and they’re like, “You’re so excited about this. You made me excited about that.” That’s what happens all the time. I’m able to express that energy and vibration in person in a great way, but it falls apart when it hits the website or when it hits the lead page. It’s just not consistent in all of your touch points with people out there.

If you want to know why you’re not closing, why you’re not converting, why you’re not that is because that vibe they got isn’t transferring. It isn’t translating through the process of how they come back and work with you. That’s where we’ve been tuning and refining. It takes time. It’s not fast. Trying to keep that throughout everything that you do is critically important. It’s hard in the early days because you’re doing everything. You’re doing too much. It’s hard to make that consistent, but there’s no reason to stop and that’s what I loved about Gina’s response. It’s this organic process and that it’s natural. It’s supposed to evolve just like your business is evolving. Who we were when we had five customers is completely different to who we are when we have 150 customers. It will completely be different at the end of this year when we have a thousand customers. I expect who we are at the core not to change. It’s how it’s expressed, how it’s moved through the process and how it comes across will be different.

We’ve already experienced that in this business. When we were at five customers, night and day are different from where we are now and we’ve already gone through some brand evolution. I always liken it to a natural selection. It happened and it was supposed to happen. It makes sense at the end of the day. It’s not that there won’t be more variations as we go forward. There will be, but you do get to a point where you talk about a hypothesis brand. You start out with one where you think it’s going to be, but also you have to constantly reevaluate where you’re at, who your customers are, how they’re responding, does it make sense. You need to pivot. Sometimes a bigger pivot than other times. I have a feeling our future pivots are going to be very minor ones compared to where we’ve come from. That is typical in the evolution on most companies. When you have a very mature company to take a big pivot and completely changed brands, that doesn’t happen that often.

Sometimes it’s necessary though when you have so much bad brand damage having done or such a bad paradigm set about you. You have to take a massive pivot and you have to move that in a harsh way. Sometimes it requires a complete name change and company change and we’ve seen it happen with cable companies and other stuff because the negativity was so strong. It happens. More often it happens in biggest cellphone companies when one buys another and the previous brand goes away. We have seen it happen where the company changes brands for some important reason they deemed necessary.

I invite you all to come to the website, FeedYourBrand.co, where you can check out all the information. You can get connected straight to Gina on and HIGHER Media Group and also you can get more things that we’re providing there. There are some things that are on the website that you didn’t hear about on this episode. I did a whole entire content strategy, three-part webinar that is available on the site for you to be able to connect and to be able to do your plan for 2019. All of these things are free. This is what we want to provide for you. We want you to be successful. They’re there for you. Find some of these resources. Connect with great people like Gina and Juliet and all the people that we have been presenting you as a guest on our show. You can connect with us on social media, @FeedYourBrand as well. We’ll be back next time with another great episode.

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About Gina Hussar

Gina Hussar strives to help creative, visionary entrepreneurs build (and ROCK!) their passion fueled businesses. Because building your dream business and brand should be a fun and nurturing experience in which you extract the gold from within, your unique value, and blend it cocktail style with powerful messaging and business strategy that aligns with YOUR vision (not the vision of all the people who send you emails and product pitches) but YOUR big, beautiful, “OMG I can’t believe this is my life” vision. Gina is a published author, internationally published magazine writer, certified Law of Attraction and Business Coach, total book nerd, mom of three who geeks out finding the EXACT words that perfectly capture your brand and set you center stage with a big old neon spotlight.

 

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