Great ideas begin with great conversations—Interviews with thought leaders in branding and beyond

“There is one very simple question that all of us should ask ourselves at all times with everything we are doing, whether that is about managing our own careers or doing client work, or if you are on the client side when you’re thinking about the strategy work that you’re doing or branding, any of these things, the question you always have to ask yourself, and be brutally honest about it is ‘who gives a shit?’.” – Finn McKenty ?? , founder and YouTuber @ The Punk Rock MBA?

So much of great branding is about collaboration. While our culture loves to celebrate individuals, the ideas that move the world forward are often the result of perspectives coming together, bouncing and shifting off each other, and creating something new. This mysterious alchemy often begins with something very simple: a conversation. At Brandingmag, we’re proud of the articles we publish from individual contributors, but we’re equally thrilled about our interviews with branding thought leaders, which come in many forms—in written transcripts, podcasts, and now videos in our new Insights with Outsiders series.?

This week, we’ve put together a sampling of our recent conversations, which illustrates a breadth of perspectives. In the inaugural episode of Insights with Outsiders, Brandingmag’s managing editor Noah Lekas sits down with Finn McKenty, creator of the YouTube channel The Punk Rock MBA. They discuss the original vision for his channel and how it evolved, when to push an audience toward new things and when to go with the flow, and the one question every brand constantly needs to ask themselves. (1)?

Next, brand designer Brian Collins , co-founder of influential design agency COLLINS , shares his optimistic vision on how brand design and language can influence the future by remaining true to timeless storytelling principles. (2) Third, Jim Misener , director of the tech-focused agency 50,000feet , breaks down the increasingly crucial role of branding in tech as the bridge between people and the sophisticated tools that shape their lives. (3)

Below are excerpts from the interviews, which you can watch, read, or listen to in full at Brandingmag.com. But since we’re here on LinkedIn, we’d love to keep the conversation going with you and your communities, or in the comments section of this post. When different perspectives come together, that’s when things get really interesting.?

Insights with Outsiders Ep 1: Finn McKenty

Interviewed by Noah Lekas?

“‘If I leaned into ‘new thing bad, old thing good’, I’d have a much bigger channel.’ – Finn McKenty

In our first episode of Insights with Outsiders, a video interview series dedicated to hearing from your less-than-usual (read: less-than-obvious) branding thought leaders, we spoke about shifting brand narratives and building content communities with The Punk Rock MBA founder, Finn McKenty.?

Finn has reached well over 9 million people globally with Youtube channel. With a background in brand, design, and punk rock, the channel was originally intended to serve alternative audiences with business, branding, and career insight. Now with over 500,000 subscribers, 80,000 Instagram followers, and a host of other impressive metrics, Finn has created a brand, leveraging his marketing and branding experience with DIY ethos that’s not just a content platform, it’s a content community.[...]

Finn on Procter & Gamble’s approach to customer testing

‘What Procter and Gamble is incredibly good at is ask people what they want, but learn how to go several layers deeper and understand what they’re really saying. Because what people say they want is oftentimes different than what they actually want as revealed by their actions. And the people who are the best at this are able to parse out what you really want, what you’re telling me. You said X, but we have developed a process or we’re just innately good at understanding that what you meant when you said that is Y.’

On strategic work

‘There is one very simple question that all of us should ask ourselves at all times with everything we are doing, whether that is about managing our own careers or doing client work, or if you are on the client side when you’re thinking about the strategy work that you’re doing or branding, any of these things, the question you always have to ask yourself, and be brutally honest about it is ‘who gives a shit?’ You made this 75-page PDF, who gives a shit? I’m not saying that work is useless, but what I’m saying is if it stays a 75-page PDF that somebody paid a bunch of money for and only the five people who worked on that project ever really understand deeply and the rest of the people just skim it and that’s all it is, that’s a failure because nobody will ever give a shit about that work.’

On listening to your audience

‘If it’s driven by me and by what I want, that’s going to be a tough pitch because at the end of the day I don’t get to decide what’s meaningful in this world. I might get lucky and maybe it so happens that what’s important to me is also important to hundreds of other people all over the world, but it might not be. And I don’t get to decide it and you don’t get to decide it. The people get to decide. And that’s the part where I think a lot of people maybe go wrong. It’s ultimately a self-centered, selfish point of view. If it’s not important to everyone else, then you’ve got to recognize that and make some adjustments.’

On his own brand strategy

‘The problem that I wanted to solve with my content was, for people who have the mindset, I wanted to give them the skillset. And I didn’t realize this at the time (and this is an example of a branding strategy framework that actually is meaningful), are you trying to give people the skillset, the mindset, or both? That’s a very important strategic decision that has huge consequences. In hindsight, that’s what I was trying to do. And the strategic mistake was trying to give people the skillset when what they really need is the mindset.’

‘We don’t get to decide what people think is meaningful. They decide.’”

Brian Collins: The Brandingmag Interview

Interviewed by Flavia Barbat

[...]?

Brandingmag: “Many people believe that involving stakeholders in the creative process is what leads to great, human-centered design. Is that not what we all want?”

Brian Collins: “We’ve learned how to design for the last hundred years completely apart from nature. Now, we have to learn how to design as a part of nature. Human-centered is not an idea that will help us get there.?

The idea of ‘problem solving’ doesn’t work anymore. The world is moving too quickly. Designers cannot wait around for problems to show up on our desks. We must become problem seekers, to go out and hunt down emerging challenges before they turn into real problems.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that you cannot enter a world unless you have the language for it. We don’t have the language for this new world. So we end up with stupid stuff like ‘human-centered’ or ‘future-proofing’.

Really? Insulating yourself from the future? And, I mean ‘target audience’? What we create is ammunition to aim at and strike unsuspecting consumers? I design to hit a ‘target’? Seriously?

On one side of our profession sits this language of marketing, which has become thoroughly militarized. Go to any ad agency. There are ‘war rooms’ where they plan and ‘execute campaigns’. We not only talk about ‘target audiences’ but about videos going ‘viral’. We say, ‘Let’s get some boots on the ground.’ We plan strategies, engagements, lines of attack, groundwork, delivery, and advancement with chief creative ‘officers’ as if the purpose of building a brand is to engage people like a dangerous enemy.?

The way we speak about our clients and customers informs the way we treat them. How the hell did we ever think talking about people like military targets made sense? [...]

Lately, I hear designers say, ‘Design is about empathy.’ If I hear this cliché one more time I’m going to lose my mind.?

Empathy means nothing. Empathy means the ability to walk around in somebody else’s shoes. Fine. It doesn’t mean you care. It means the ability to observe. But the world doesn’t need any more observing. What the world needs is compassion. What the world needs are people who give a shit.

That word compassion is good. It means ‘I so deeply understand what you’re going through that I am moved to do something about it. I am moved to take some action to better the condition that you’re in—or these people, this community, or the world is in. I have no choice but to take action myself.’

Enough with empathy. It’s table stakes.”?

Bm: “So how do you communicate that with clients in terms they understand?”?

BC: “Who doesn’t understand the word compassion?”?

Bm: “But how do you contextualize it in a way that all of them care about? Because they do run businesses at the end of the day.”?

BC: “In 1847, the Commission on the Health of Children in London was founded. Given the horrific living conditions of the poor in England, they wanted a thorough, fact-filled report about children who were being forced into workhouses and coal mines at the ages of 8, 9, and 10. Young kids were being used in industries and factories all around the country. So the Commission hired a local writer to document all these horrible things—to show how many children were dying, how many children were getting sick, how many children were not going to school and all of that.

They asked him, ‘Would you go visit and examine these places? We need people to see and understand so we can treat these children better. So please present us with what’s going on. Get the facts.’

So this writer goes out, travels to where these children are across England, and sees just how brutal and grinding their lives are. He had no idea. And he became heartbroken over all of it.?

‘The grim facts here are overwhelming, but they are not going to help us,’ he believed. So he went back and wrote something else. He wrote a story, instead. A Christmas Carol.?

Charles Dickens knew that people weren’t moved by facts alone. People were moved by stories. People understood the power of stories and Dickens understood the power of language to create one that would generate compassion.

A Christmas Carol has been turned into 97 different films. It was the first time-travel story, I think. If you don’t understand that story, then you aren’t going to understand anything. And Scrooge, over 150 years later, remains an iconic, powerful warning of the dangers of blind greed.

Scrooge, in the end, was not transformed by keen observation or empathy. He was transformed by compassion, both for the sick child Tiny Tim, and, in the end, for himself.

Scrooge didn’t hold data-driven, best-practices, future-proofing, empathy-oriented, human-centered, Post-It fiestas. He took action.[...]”?

Business-to-Human: Keeping People at the Heart of Tech Branding, Branding over Wine podcast with Jim Misener?

Interviewed by Martin Schiere ?

[...]

Jim Misener: “We often categorize our worlds as B2B or B2C. To cut to the center, we should say that all the work we’re doing is really B2H–business to human. If you put the human being in the center, suddenly you have an organizing principle to say, ‘How do I create a connection with the human on the other side of this? How do I surprise and delight, and even build community?’” [...]

Brandingmag: “You mention ‘mission, vision, and values’. Does a belief system play a bigger role in branding than in the past?”?

Jim Misener: “I think it does. In the last few years, purpose has really risen to the fore. Brand, as it’s often defined, is a combination of the head and the heart. There’s the logical, practical appeal of a product, and then there’s the emotional appeal. The belief system has only grown. In the current landscape, there’s a great capacity for brands to deliver experiences that really truly fulfill on both rational and emotional levels…

You’re even seeing local sovereign states and countries recognizing the importance of growing their brand. That should tell you something about how the dimension and capacity of brand has only grown in recent years.” [...]

Bm: “Can you build a beautiful and emotional brand experience for a brand that’s, let’s say, boring?”?

Jim Misener: “Healthcare is a wonderful example of a category that is very scientific and very clinical on the surface, and the emotional element of those things is often taken for granted. There’s wonderful capacity for healthcare brands to connect with both caregivers and patients on an emotional level. Governments around the world are another great example. Even things like homeland security are helping people understand what they do with things like transportation safety, airport safety, and things like that.

No matter your industry, you have to consider the idea, the action, and the impact of your brand. Any organization has to ask what the core belief and animating idea my organization is built on. Next,? we have to ask, ‘What actions do we take to connect with customers in the world?’ And finally, we have to think about what our impact is on the world. ‘How do we show up in the world? What good do we do in the world?’ Any company or organization can discover their emotional impact of their brand if they ask those questions.[...]”?

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