What if the person who knows your work best got to ask the questions? That's this episode.

Aicila Lewis has been producing Cover Brand since before Ethan knew it was live. She's heard every episode, watched the frameworks land in real time, and spent years telling Ethan he needed to bottle up those coffee conversations where someone walks away going, wait, that's all I had to know? For episode 69, she finally gets to ask some of the questions she's been sitting on.

The conversation covers how Cover Brand found its format, what Ethan keeps hearing from callers across 68 episodes, and some of the nuance behind the brand science.

MAIN TOPICS COVERED

• How Cover Brand got it’s start.
• The biggest recurring theme: nobody is thinking about your brand. Eleanor Roosevelt said it about people, it's even more true about toilet paper. Nobody knows the color of the packaging.
• The brand category paradox — you have to fit into the category before you get to stand out in it. Parchment paper and toilet paper are not interchangeable. Neither are your category and your differentiation.
• The Geico gecko principle — your distinctiveness doesn't have to mean anything. Nobody knows the gecko's backstory. Nobody can tell you the service differences between Geico, State Farm, and Allstate. The cockney lizard still tripled the business.
• Consistency as strategy — you are bored of your own marketing long before 99% of your future customers have ever seen it once. Ethan wears the orange tracksuit to business events on purpose.
• When the hard work isn't knowing what to do — the real challenge for a lot of callers is letting go of the thing they're good at to make room for the thing they need to do next
• Brand story and brand purpose: three places where the internal stuff actually does its job — employee alignment, the 0.1% of category mavens who want to go down the rabbit hole, and the North Star effect that quietly shapes everything without anyone knowing why
• The loyalty myth — you can love Tiffany and own one charm bracelet. That love does not help Tiffany's revenue. Brand friends beat brand lovers for volume, every time. Jeff Leitner said it best: love is great, but it ain't where the money's at.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Aicila Lewis / BiCurean: bicurean.com
• Uncensored CMO with Jon Evans: uncensoredcmo.com
• Derek Sivers, How to Start a Movement: ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement

Subscribe, share it with someone building something, and come find the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com. Back next week.

Produced by BiCurean.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An engineer-artist who builds soft skills training like a video game — and the brand problem that comes with it: how do you look trustworthy to the suits who sign the checks while staying genuinely weird for the Gen Z workforce who actually uses the thing?

Sayre Blake is a systems engineer, concept artist, and founder of SkillSage (that's S-K-I-L-L-S-A-I-G-E — the AI is in the name) — a soft skills training platform built to replace the three-ring binder and the soul-sucking compliance video with something that actually works: character-driven, game-style training that lets your AI coach get ticked off at you for saying "I'll try" in an interview simulation.

The brand problem at the center of this episode is one Ethan calls the brand category paradox: how do you fit in enough to be trusted and stand out enough to be noticed? For SkillSage, it's layered. The people who use the product want a video game with style and teeth. The people who pay for it want beige with rounded corners.

MAIN TOPICS COVERED

• The brand category paradox — the tension between fitting in to signal credibility and standing out to signal difference, and why it's especially sharp in B2B SaaS where your user and your buyer aren't the same person
• Big B vs. little b brand — your reputation, offering, and story on one side; your logo, color, and font on the other; and why you need both even though people treat them like they're separate religions
• The blandification curve — why small brands start scrappy and distinctive and end up beige, and the few that manage to stay sharp or get sharper again as they grow (KFC, Salesforce, Aflac — yes, Aflac)
• The user/buyer split in corporate SaaS — dress for the banker when you're pitching; dress for the shop floor when you're deploying; SkillSaige already does this with two distinct UX environments, one for individuals and one for the corporate dashboard
• Raymond Loewy's MAYA principle — Most Advanced Yet Acceptable — and why your buyers want plus three percent, even when they're absolutely convinced they want plus thirty

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Sayre Blake / SkillSage: skillsaige.com
• I Prevail — "Blank Space" (hard metal cover of Taylor Swift): worth the whiplash
• How I Built This (NPR) — Ben Chestnut episode on MailChimp
• Cover Brand Covers Playlist on Spotify: Cover Brand Covers Playlist

Your buyers and your users are two different people with two different wardrobes. Build for both. If this one gave you something to chew on — share it with someone navigating the same tightrope. Subscribe to Cover Brand, dig into the frameworks at appliedbrandscience.com, and we'll see you next week.

Produced by BiCurean.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.