"A brand is not just a logo. Work on your brand all the time, not just a few times a year. Then it's not branding, it's window marketing."
Do you know what they say about you or your company when you're not there? You don't? Well, you should. Because if you need to know what your brand is, this is it. And it's only if you know that that you can do anything about the brand.
Exactly. Brand is not just a logo, colors, typeface. Brand is so much more. Brand can't be changed in a few meetings with a graphic designer. But as a reward, it can easily offer you that people will forgive you for some of your occasional business missteps or start paying more for your services.
That already motivates you to learn more about the brand, right? That's why I've brought in experts for this episode of Ignition. Jakub Kantor and his Kantor has been creating brands long enough to be able to answer my probing questions ...
🔸 What is and is not a brand?
🔸 Should vision be subordinated to brand?
🔸 Where does branding end and marketing begin?
🔸 When is it time to rebrand or redesign?
🔸 How to measure brand contribution?
HOW TO USE THE POWER OF BRAND TO INCREASE SALES (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Today we're going to talk about whether branding is important even for a small and medium-sized B2B company. I've invited Jakub Kantor to join me, hi.
Jakub Kantor
Hi, Martin.
When was the last time he went to a hockey game?
Martin Hurych
Jakub is a brand strategist, certified brand architect and owner of Kantor Studio. When was the last time you went to a hockey game?
Jakub Kantor
I've been watching the NHL recently. I've been watching hockey on TV with my dad since I was a kid, so I fell in love with it and it hasn't been the same since. Since then I've been going to the NHL regularly to see the Colorado Avalanche, I'm a big fan, I'm a member of Eurolanche and my second favorite team is the New York Rangers.
Martin Hurych
What is it that makes it the best league in the world?
Jakub Kantor
It's about pushing not only the performance, like in other leagues, but pushing the whole, the complexity of the competition, the hardness, the speed, the goals, the good passing. Those NHL players have completely different shots than our players in the Extraliga.
How did he get into brand building and branding?
Martin Hurych
I thought it was a brand name. Let's talk about how you got into creating and building a brand.
Jakub Kantor
I got into branding 10 years ago in Miami. 10 years ago in Miami, I went to present my work to a company I was branding. It was a large construction company that covered all the construction and maintenance for the city of Miami at the time. I was showing them the visual identity and that was the mistake. That wasn't branding and they've taken me on a little bit since then. They told me what branding actually is, that it's about the management of that company, the meaning, the emotion of that brand, how it has to fit strategically into that whole concept. My boss said he'd leave us with a manager, Steve took me on and told me all the things I needed to learn, the impact it could have, and that it wasn't just about the graphics. From then on I started to educate myself a lot, learn a lot and I was already starting a couple of companies in America at that time doing some strategy and consulting. So I got burned a lot in the beginning by doing something I wasn't doing.
What is a brand?
Martin Hurych
I think that even here in the Czech Republic the brand is still a logo. Let me tell you in simple terms so that even us amateurs understand what a brand is.
Jakub Kantor
If you take brand as a whole, it's absolutely everything you do in and out of the company. But let's talk about the fact that it's really about the feeling of how that person perceives the brand. How do I perceive Ignition, how do I feel about it when I listen to Ignition? For me, it's actually a probe into the heart of B2B. I watched a few episodes, I knew some people, so I listened to them, and Ignition for me is a probe into B2B. But now somebody else listens to it and has a completely different feeling about it. You have to manage that feeling somehow and that's where the branding comes in, where you manage how it's going to be perceived.
Martin Hurych
So Brand is all they talk about me when I'm not there?
Jakub Kantor
Yes, you could say that. That's exactly what Jeff Bezos said, you quoted him beautifully.
What all brand is not?
Martin Hurych
So what isn't a brand?
Jakub Kantor
That's a tough one, but I'd say mainly the logo. The latest research says that business owners primarily think it's about the logo and visual identity and that's where we have a bit of a problem. Because then when they enquire about brand work, they think they're looking for a designer. But that brand strategist is a person who has comprehensive knowledge, skills and goes to help them run the company. Because he goes in, he sets some values, he sets some strategy, he works with the vision, he works with how that owner wants it to be on the inside and then we work with what's on the outside, how the customer should perceive it, how it should behave on the outside. Everything around it builds on each other and theoretically the brand manager is the one that has to know first and last and deal with the owner directly.
Should the vision be subordinated to the brand or vice versa?
Martin Hurych
That's a bit of a touchy subject. Should the vision be subordinate to the brand or the brand vision?
Jakub Kantor
Brand vision. I liked what Tomáš Čupr said, that if the customer knows your vision, he will always forgive you. That's exactly why people forgive Tesla, even if it's not as good as it should be, but it has tremendous brand value, it has that fame around it, that circus. They've generated a lot of interest and it's become a valuable brand that's been making cars for 5, 6, 7 years.
As a B2B business owner, why consider branding?
Martin Hurych
I'd say computers on wheels. We broadcast to small, medium businesses, technical, tech, industrial, manufacturing, so really core B2B. As an owner, what should make me think about branding? I have some small custom manufacturing, or a medium sized IT studio. What should convince me that brand is important to me? Why shouldn't I just get an AI somewhere to design a logo, but why should I approach it in a more sophisticated and complex way?
Jakub Kantor
I'll give you a nice example. We have a company in our portfolio that is purely chemical and trades all over the world. In the first generation there was a grandfather, in the second generation there was a father, and it was all based on acquaintances like in the 90s business. Now the son is taking the helm, but he hasn't built those connections and how the hell is he supposed to complete the brand if those connections aren't there. Now came the realization that their brand is only strong because they know his father. They don't know their company, they say the founder's last name and they don't say the company name and that's wrong. We need to focus on how we want to be known, or what we want to do to have a strong and profitable brand. At that point, then it's not so much about quotes, where I get three quotes and I decide based on price. As long as someone has a strong brand, it doesn't matter what number is at the bottom.
What is an example of a good brand in the Czech Republic and abroad?
Martin Hurych
Do we have an example of a good brand, a good brand in the B2B we're talking about?
Jakub Kantor
I'm sure we do. We'll talk about Czech brands and then I'll throw in a few foreign ones, because the foreign ones are a few decades further away. In our country, it's definitely for example Zásilkovna, it's for example Alza, which cooperates with companies. Of the more well-known brands that people will know from LinkedIn, it's Radim Parik and his Fascinating Academy, which works well with that. It's brands like Freelo that work well with this in our country. I could name a couple of our clients as well, but it would be a small house, but anyway, it's just that there's a realization that they wanted to build a brand and something bigger and they went after that vision. When I look at foreign brands, for example, Salesforce does an incredible job with this. Everybody knows it, but so much of the content and what they're doing around that brand from the events for the I.T.s to the business owners to the education, the custom portal, a lot of content, it's genius. When I was just in Colorado, I had the opportunity to do some consulting there and I was looking at how well they've done it.
Where does branding end and marketing begin?
Martin Hurych
Now you've hit on one thing. What you're referring to is what an amateur, including me, would classify as marketing. So where does the brand with a capital B end and the day-to-day marketing battle begin?
Jakub Kantor
Brand with a capital B starts somewhere, where we shape the whole way the company will work, how people will perceive it externally, what is the goal of our journey, what kind of brand we want to be and who will buy us. But once that's all set, the brand doesn't end. It's terribly important to tell yourself that the single brand investment is stupid, that it's actually about longevity, the whole brand is about longevity. Marketing is a huge market today, we've got 200, 300 other positions out there where individuals are sharing. I think of marketing more as tactics, that we have a person who does PPC, who does Facebook, who does content, but those are just tactics. Brand is always on top, is the company, the brand and then everything else.
Should a brand create or pull good ones?
Martin Hurych
You said, I'm going to go to the company, I'm going to start rebranding it. Isn't that a little dangerous, shouldn't you be pulling out of the company what's already ideally good there? Because every change is an intervention in that company, some new element that those people have to deal with, and I imagine that even turning people around within a new brand must be difficult. They have to get used to it, sit with it, experience it. What's your approach to this?
Jakub Kantor
What you said ties in beautifully with my point about pulling out of the company what's already there that's good. That's so forgettable, these companies always want innovation and new things. I say, let's first discuss what you have here. A lot of times it's about having god people in the company, god pros, and they do something absolutely top notch versus if we're inventing something new. That's where the question actually comes up for me is that it's not always about bringing something new to that company. Like you said yourself, it's a big hurdle to bite just within the leadership, the staff, and then the application comes in. The sales person who goes into a meeting, they've been saying something for 20 years and now they have to say something new because they've made it up in management. That's where it's great that we work on workshops with those sales people as well, with all those people, to make it as soon as possible they understood and started to see the brand in a whole new way. If I'm going to sell chemistry, for example, I want it to be about offering the benefits of the brand first, not the product. They say either the company has the cheapest price or they do the branding.
Where to start with branding?
Martin Hurych
So, if I wanted to somehow polish and highlight what I already have in the company as a business owner, where and what should I start before I invite you? What would I need to master, to prepare, to start working on the brand in some small way myself before bringing in outside help?
Jakub Kantor
I think a checklist would be a good one for that, and it would be useful to people, so we'll make it into a bonus. There are such basic points, there's a vision, you put that down on paper, but to apply it, to develop it creatively as a brand is a lot harder for a person who's not a creative. Most business owners tend to be technical people, or they're brutally good at something, but they're rarely creative. So I would start by being aware of the brands I like, how I want to operate and start thinking about what emotion we want to evoke in those people. Because a good brand evokes emotion. I would say why are we in the market, why did this whole thing come about other than we want to make money.
How to manage brands across regions or countries?
Martin Hurych
When you're talking about what emotions we want to evoke, I was thinking that in that case the brands of German car companies are not so good, because it depends from country to country what you associate with the brand. Typically Bavarian in the Czech Republic, I guess we can both figure out who it's associated with and who Audi is associated with here. All it took was one Audi crash somewhere in Shanghai to turn the whole thing around, because one particular person came out of it and managed to turn around a completely different brand in a completely different market. What about it? If I'm spread across multiple states or multiple regions, how do I work with that, how do I defend against these things, for example?
Jakub Kantor
It's exactly how the PR department handles it. It knows the brand strategy, it knows where we want to go, what our goal is, and it evokes that emotion at that particular moment. Nice example, Tesla, autonomous vehicle, hit and killed a pedestrian, problem. It's a problem of the moment and there's a question of how the PR will play it. We can always notice that people forget, people like to forget, but they don't forget the qualities of that brand. If you name a BMW, nobody tells you it's going to go up a steep hill, but if you name an Audi, that's where you know the four-wheeler is going to go. When I say Mercedes, I know I'm going to get that luxury, that comfort, that feeling of that ride. A lot of brands evoke those long-term emotions, those qualities.
Martin Hurych
Is it no longer true that Mercedes is for German pensioners or Czech circus people?
Jakub Kantor
It is, but that's not what I meant to say. I'm always insulting other brands because I'm an Audi owner, so I like the edge due to the tech, but that's exactly where it's at. Where did that feature come from? It came about at the end of the 1970s, when Audi came up with the four-wheeler, put it in rallying, and it was as fast on gravel as Formula One was on concrete. That's where it all started. That's the first emotion, and it's been with the brand ever since, riding that wave since the company was founded.
What is brand essence?
Martin Hurych
So going back to the small and medium sized companies, is this something I should look for in that company and start building that brand on?
Jakub Kantor
Sure, we call it professionally brand essence. Let's find that one core idea, that uniqueness in that business, because a lot of people are trying to look for a different or unique business, but you can't do that these days. Nowadays ChatGPT is there and they'll come up with a business model for you in 10 minutes, but coming up with a unique brand, that's something, because if you create a unique brand, it's hard for them to copy you.
Martin Hurych
Something tells me that in this case it doesn't matter if you're building a brand for Nusle or for the whole world, because what we've been talking about, some of the fame, some of the basic associations, it's probably the same everywhere.
Jakub Kantor
That's right. I may not be getting a lot of ovations here right now, but there's no difference between B2B and B2C in how you build a brand. Absolutely the same principles are used to build brands in any segment. What differs are the tactics afterwards, how you work with it.
What if I have a commodity product?
Martin Hurych
I imagine I can build a brand where I have something a little unique. What if I have a nut or bolt factory?
Jakub Kantor
Let's make a unique brand. Why can't the mother factory have a brilliant visual, a godlike mascot? It doesn't even have to be a mother, let's talk about the wolf from Nu, pogodi!, a cap, a cigarette, I can imagine. Let's get creative, let's get creative around that. They can say, for example, they're a crazy mother factory and they're going to listen to rock and they're going to have t-shirts and it's going to be totally special, they're going to have beautiful boxes, something that's not here.
Martin Hurych
Here I imagine it can work very well inwards as employer branding. But in this particular case, I can't quite see how it will help with the Skoda bid.
Jakub Kantor
It will help you with the Skoda quote the moment everyone is talking and writing about the brand. You'll find it's unique in the way it behaves, the owner of the company will somehow behave, the company is set up somehow and at that moment the Skoda company will have a completely different attitude when an offer comes in. They immediately recognize the company, they know it's good and they will approach it differently. The question is, of course, what the parameters will be then and how the dealer will sell it.
When is it time to rebrand or redesign?
Martin Hurych
I have another example. Now we've talked a lot about how to pull something positive out of a positive state. When is it time to rebrand?
Jakub Kantor
This one is quite common in B2B companies because a lot of companies started in the 90s and didn't catch on. They have bad names, marketing that's not catchy and they forgot that everything should fit into one tone, one company culture and everything is different. Clients who come to us have bad trademarks, they can't work with foreign countries. So we need to see if our name is a good one. If we're doing mothers and it's called Screw Shop or something like that, that's totally not good because it's descriptive. We're describing what we do and it's not good. The same way it is if a graphics studio is named Graphics, that's not good either, you're not protecting it and that's when you have to rebrand. Another point, we're irrelevant to that market. We're still doing 90's marketing, old clams and that market is already behaving differently. Those owners in the companies and those people in that management are getting younger and younger. What we're finding with our clients is that it used to be assistant directors or buyers who were 60-plus who were making the decisions, and now it's changed. Today there are young people and they want some innovation, dynamism, better contact, that's where they want the portal, that's where they want to log in. How is the company supposed to know that if they haven't worked with customers before, they haven't done research? When I come to a B2B company, whether it was Slévárny Třinec or whoever, talking to the customer, that doesn't happen much there. In these companies, they ask why they should do that. That's another point, we're irrelevant to that customer. I'm sure there would be more of those points, but those are some basic points. Let's take design for example, a lot of these B2B companies are going in some gray. I like the Tetris rule, if you fit in, you disappear, and that works in branding as well. You put 5 manufacturing companies side by side and they all have the exact same colors, communication, everything the same. But then there's always one that's obviously working on it. They have a cool slogan, cool colors, cool photos, polished communication, content on their networks, their managers are on LinkedIn and the owner of the company is known on LinkedIn. All of a sudden you're like, this is what you love, this is the uniqueness. If the company doesn't have that uniqueness, then maybe it's time to think about changing it and rebranding it, or doing a redesign, some kind of change.
Martin Hurych
What's the difference?
Jakub Kantor
A rebrand is a complete change in the strategic direction and overall company, and a redesign is just a change in the visual.
What are the trends in branding?
Martin Hurych
I know that the brand is not a question of one or two seasons, but it is a long-term issue. When I decide I want to do something with myself, where should I look, what are the trends, what should I prepare for and how far ahead should I look?
Jakub Kantor
That's a good question, what are the trends. A brand shouldn't give in to trends, that's one thing. It's another thing to do campaigns where we do advertising and there's a trend. The trend in brands in the 90s was different than it is today and today we can talk about companies primarily trying to catch up with those trends. We have sustainability, protecting the planet, recent studies show how much people care about protecting the planet. But then there are customer studies, where the customer wants a better price or some other benefit that is for them, so people are selfish. It's going to be the same with pricing for those companies. When I say what to look at and where to look, I would look primarily at ourselves and who our customer is, or who our customer might be. I'm starting a smaller firm, so I'd look to the biggest competitor in that particular category, which clients I can steal from them, what I can offer them better, what I can offer them better. Is it going to be the service, is it going to be the product, is it going to be the service around that? You need to think about it that way.
Is the added value offered part of the brand?
Martin Hurych
We're already grinding somewhere where I'm the value-add to that client. Does that mean the value- add is part of the brand?
Jakub Kantor
Yes, I'm sure. It's called brand benefits, and whether they're perceived benefits, or whether they're directly given benefits, whether it's some worldwide education that nobody else has, or whether it's how the person gets the service. Now we can talk about they come in and they get a box, they get some catalog in there, how we serve that service, whether it's online or offline. Today everything is online, but theoretically if you get three offers in PDF and then you get a fourth PDF that's very nicely done, or there's still a form of video, that's a whole different thing. Imagine if I invite you to a corporate event, a Christmas party for partners and they all send a DL in the email, but we send you a personalized video. We'll say, hey Martin, we'd love to invite you to our event. That's completely different, you get a completely different feeling from that because video conveys the most emotion.
How to measure brand contribution?
Martin Hurych
My group is very judicious about where they invest any penny. It's always about whether I buy a new programmer, whether I buy a new lathe, or whether I invest in marketing or branding. How could I measure the benefits of a brand?
Jakub Kantor
There are several metrics. Let's talk about the fact that the first one is that it's terribly important to treat the brand as an investment, not as a marketing expense, because then we're going to start pushing exactly different metrics than we should.
Martin Hurych
I'll jump in. Of course I understand that, I understand that it is, and why you guys say it. On the other hand, if I'm an amateur in the field, I'd like to have some minimum clues. I can be okay with it being an investment, but I'd like to have clues that I'm going down the right path and that I'm not actually throwing it out the window. We both know that as an amateur I can fall victim to a trap very easily and it may not even be a bad thing, I may fall for someone who doesn't have
experience, or they won't understand me, we're not a chemistry match, there could be a lot of reasons. What are the things to keep track of so I can keep spending and investing happily but know I'm doing it right?
Jakub Kantor
I would say, as I tell our clients, let's follow the money first and that's where we'll see if the brand has started to pay off in any way. We watch those customer reactions, if they're happier, they're paying more at once, they don't mind at all that we've raised the price. Brand awareness is harder to measure anymore, it's more expensive and the smaller companies don't know how to work with it, but we have a lot of analytics like Google Analytics and other things that can be measured. All of a sudden a term gets searched more, we're more visible, we get written about more, there's at least some brand awareness when people start talking about it and following the discussions, they start recommending it because the company is better. What we can measure ourselves is Google Analytics and the data we have from customers. We did a rebrand and we figured out exactly what metrics it could go in, how it can grow, and we're at double the sales in a year because we took those steps to do that. That needs to be evaluated as subparts with that brand. You can't say we're going to make 10m more because there's a new brand.
Martin Hurych
My group has a long sales cycle, so no one doubles sales in a year, we typically sell for a year, a year and a half or more. So what are some other potential KPIs that I could be tracking so I know something is going on beforehand? I can understand Coca-Cola changing a bottle and in 14 days you can see if it was a good idea or not, but you can't do that with wind turbines. So what are some other signs that I'm moving in the right direction?
Jakub Kantor
There's gonna be a lot of those stamps again. Could be the service's satisfaction. Again, you need to evaluate that customer's journey at those points. If we're talking about larger businesses where the impact of that brand or those new things that are set up are measurable in two years, which is in those B2Bs, then you need to evaluate those baby steps there. I understand that we're not talking about now customers are going to get a new quote, there's going to be three times more and they're going to say we're crazy. That's exactly where we need to look again for that metric of how they perceive us. It's a good idea to ask those customers how they perceive us as a brand and evaluate those points because those will be important to those owners. Of course, B2B is what it is and it's more business-oriented, it's all about price. But to give an example of our client, they got a big order from the city and from a big company because they were seen to be in the right place at the right time. The work we did the year before made sense because we were getting it to the right customers and the right people. So, in the city government, they already knew the company was good because it was written about, because we did the PR around it. The branding was right because we know that we deliver a good service, that we deliver a good service. Then it's much easier for that company to order them or for that city to order them because they know they're going after quality.
What brands does Jakub like?
Martin Hurych
Which brand do you respect the most here in the Czech Republic? You said they're a couple of decades ahead out there. What are some examples of brands that you like and what do you like about them?
Jakub Kantor
I would start with the ones that are closest to my heart, whether it's Audi or the NHL, and then there are brands that I wear in some way, that I enjoy, but there are also brands that I enjoy basically just for marketing purposes. I'll start with Audi. That's where I like the edge because of and there, maybe the customer service isn't as great as the product. The product is great and everything around it is fine, but the customer service in the Czech Republic is a bit worse than in Poland, which is strange. Another brand that is part of my life is Tommy Hilfiger. It seems like a silly thing to say, but back then Tommy Hilfiger was a wow brand in our country, in America it was worn by those beach boys. But then you find out the reality that when you come to America, it's not like that anymore. Tommy Hilfiger is weaker at the moment, even though they are one of the main sponsors of Mercedes in F1. But that brand was a trend in the 90s, Tommy Hilfiger was one of those business people and it was worn on those beaches.
Martin Hurych
That's a good example, we'll make one last digression here so we don't get too long. Tommy Hilfiger as a brand is considered relatively luxury here. But in America, it's normally everyday fashion. So how do they work with the brand? From what we've just been told, I don't think it's great.
Jakub Kantor
Every market, different brand work and that's what you can see here. If you look at F1 on a Sunday, where the Mercedes stable has a big Petronas logo, there are those three Tommy Hilfiger stripes above it. Because they work well with the brand around the world and they know exactly where their target audience is. They're in a better position in Europe, and in America it's standard fashion today.
Martin Hurych
Does this mean that I can position the brand differently in different markets?
Jakub Kantor
Yes. It can be done, it is being done, and we can see it with Coca-Cola, who do not brand it differently in other countries, but it is branded differently in Arab countries than it is here in Europe.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If you were to sum up what we've said here in two or three sentences, what would we be chiseling in stone?
Jakub Kantor
Brand is not a logo, first thing. The other thing is, work on your brand constantly, don't leave it to a one-off thing once a year, because then it's not working on the brand. It's that marketing window where you sit on it for 15, 20 minutes and you don't look at it holistically as a whole brand, as a whole company, but just a given slice of it.
Martin Hurych
Thank you for your opinions, your perspective and last but not least for the bonus, which is now available for download on my website.
Jakub Kantor
Thank you.
Martin Hurych
You see, the brand is not a logo. I make this mistake all the time, so I'll take away this lesson from today's episode. In addition, be sure to check out my website, where the promised bonus from James is now in the Ignition section. If we've got you thinking about your brand, your brand, your company in any way, we've done our job well. In that case, be sure to like, share, comment as the platform you're currently watching or listening to us on allows. I for one will be very grateful for that, it will definitely help me get Ignition back to more eyes and ears. I can't help but keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.