[00:00 - 05:12] Eric: Hello, welcome to Brand Front Lines with your hosts, Marissa and Eric Labrecque, me. Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, by the way, please subscribe and rate and share it with any marketing nerds, you know. Marissa: And check us out on Instagram @brandfrontlines where we are continuing the conversation with some practical exercises and tools, so you can apply all of this to your own brand or your clients’ brands. Eric: So, this is our first season, and in this season, we're diving into one new foundational element of a brand. And every episode, what it is, why it's important, and how to build it. Last episode was our first look at what we call the brand wheel, which is our model for a successful brand, a successful brand story. Marissa: So now we are in the wheel, the very center of the wheel, which is held by the core naturally, we're also getting into brand drivers today. These are really important themes to get right. They're pretty straightforward, but I see marketers describe them differently all the time. Today, I googled them, brand drivers to see what came up. And the very first thing that I saw was personality attributes. That's what we would call them. Eric: Like what? What were some of the things that you were finding? Marissa: It was a description on a marketing consultants’ website, like a little blog post she done on brand drivers. And for her they were, you know, she had a list of personality traits like affable, fun, authentic-just personality traits. Eric: Yeah, you know, so real quick thumbnail here. If you're using an adjective, it's probably a personality attribute. And if using a noun, you're probably talking about a driver or a theme. Think about a story, you know, a writer doesn't sit down and say, I'm going to write a story about the theme funny, you might write a story about the theme growing up. And it might be a funny story, you might inject a lot of humor into it. So just keep those two things in mind as you move forward in your brand work. Marissa: Yeah, so we'll get more into it. But you know, we'll define them as we define them. And I want to reiterate, we talked about this in an earlier episode. But I think a lot of marketing programs and a lot of courses you can take online, start the brand, later than we do the brand work, they start at the stuff that customers can see, might start with a tagline or an elevator pitch, or even a mission and vision statement, which is very foundational. But you know, these are all things that might end up on your website or in your email communications. But there is some work that's a little deeper that might never see the light of day as far as customers go, but it informs everything that comes after. And it's so important. So, that's really what today is about. It's about that that stuff that is the foundation, it's underneath the building. And it's the platform on which everything else is built. Eric: Yeah, you really put that well, I mean, just remember, as a brand marketer, you're a storyteller, a little different in many ways, but you share a lot with novelists and playwrights and screenwriters, and cowboys sitting around a campfire. And yeah, and all those people, even the cowboy has done some pre work to understand where the story is going to go and how it's going to hang together. And that's what we're saying, you know, we're about is doing that pre work. Before we dive into our exploration of brand core and brand drivers. What we've been up to today? Marissa: Well, this is the first episode that we're recording after the quarantine. So, I'm working on, client works looking a little different these days, like I mostly am working with the same clients, a couple of projects got kind of put-on hold but doing different things like brands, most of the brands that I'm working with have shifted a little bit. So, a lot more focus on online sales, communications, pipelines, building email lists, all that kind of fun stuff. All of a sudden, got way more important than long term strategy. It was like alright, let's shift let's make sure we're still talking to everybody. They know where we're at. We're getting in front of them. And so it's been fun. I've learned a lot and I think deepened my relationships with my clients, we're like, in the trenches together on the brand front lines. [05:12 - 10:24] Eric: You know, I've been working with two clients today who called with sudden needs, they wanted to craft their response to current events. First, you know, a couple months ago, it was the COVID-19 crisis. And now it's their response to the real social conversation around Black Lives Matter. I don't want to get too anchored in the moment for the sake of people listening in the future. But basically, both of these events are singular. And yet, the clients, the companies, the brands need to consider how should they relate to them with respect to their brands? What's the ...
