Speaker 0 00:00:00 Earlier this year, the Castillo's team embarked on a brand update exercise, the idea and the goal of this was to, to bring our brand, our website and, and kind of our presence online up to the standards that we believe the company and our products, uh, are kind of at these days. Uh, the result of that is a fantastic, fast, beautiful website that you can see at Castillo's dot com, a new layout and styling within the customer dashboard, where hopefully many of you manage your podcasts, uh, and an update to our mobile app. And the story that we're telling here in this episode is the story of, of a brand exercise of us as a company, uh, formulating kind of our brand and position and what we want to say and who we want to be. Um, you know, there's a saying that like, everyone has a brand.
Speaker 0 00:00:52 If you don't define it, someone will define it for you. And really, I think the goal of this exercise for us was to be really intentional about defining that brand internally, uh, sharing that through our products and our website and our messaging and our emails, and I've kinda everywhere we are online and that customers see us. Um, and I hope you enjoy this as kind of a case study of what brand really is and what a brand exercise looks like. Internally. In this episode, I chat with three members of our team, uh, to get their thoughts on the brand exercise, uh, and kind of what the outcome of it was for us and how you as podcasters can take the lessons that we learned in the process that we went through and apply it to your show. And your show is brand as well. I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 0 00:01:42 I start the conversation today with Francoise Brill, our in-house designer, who really led a lot of the creative process of the brand reimagination here at cast us. And I thought that it might be a good place to start with, like why we started to do this in the first place. Right? Like I think a lot of people say, why, why do we need a, a new logo and color scheme and website and stuff like that. I have the reasons I wanted to do it, but like curious if, if like the why behind this influenced the creative process for you any
Speaker 1 00:02:15 Yeah. And I think, um, as I try to remember kind of the goals around why we wanted to do it, and also I think why now, um, cause I've been working with the castles brand for, I think it was over two years now and it's, it's, I've seen it mature over that stage as well and with a timeframe. And I think it was always, it was always pending. It was always something we wanted to get to. Um, and I think naturally just from my perspective, like I saw the company growing and maturing and we just got to this natural point, we, we needed to update the website, but it only made sense to update the website and the marketing and everything. If we really went back all the way back to branding back to the ground or the yeah, the, the ground roots of like, why do we actually exist? Like back to customer personas and really how to put, how do we portray that visually? Um, so that's kind of my understanding of it all perspective on it.
Speaker 0 00:03:11 I was really impressed by how you like wanted to run this as like a process, like a creative process. Is this something you've done in the past with other like companies and brands
Speaker 1 00:03:21 We normally run through a similar process either if it's a brand new startup or existing companies that just want to kind kinda refigure what's going on, because I think sometimes there's also this idea of it's good enough for right now. So I think a lot of companies just get to a point, get to decision and kind of needed it. And at that dollar then at that point and never really looked back. So I think it's as good now and then to reflect back and see, see is that still the best decision that we made. Um, and it's really, once we start digging into the core principles and the branding and all of that, we really need to understand what makes us different from our competitors, what really makes us tick. And yeah,
Speaker 0 00:04:02 Yeah, that, that part for me was interesting. Like I think, um, you know, as like the founder and a single founder, there's a lot of weight on my shoulders to get all this stuff right. And, and like brand and the creative part is my weakest point. And so it was really reassuring to see that, like what I thought we stand for and our purpose and vision and mission was pretty consistent with what everybody else, uh, had input on. And like, you know, we had to wait. So we had input from, uh, like marketing, um, like success support, uh, and then like product and engineering, five different people, I think. And it was, it was nice that like, we had a little bit of kind of additional breadth to what, what we wanted to do, but a lot of consistency too, which is reassuring, you know?
Speaker 1 00:04:52 Yeah. I think it also speaks into how, again, a brand changes over time and naturally you would go through a maturing stage, I think. And it's, it's interesting for me to see that it, it actually hasn't changed that that much. And sometimes these type of things, you go through the exercise, um, and you end up with something very similar to where you were and it's, it's just reassuring, um, a lot of the times. And, um, yeah, I think it's, it's the fact that it came, came from so many different people in different, um, areas in the company. Um, also just reassures us that we are on the right path, that the mission or the vision that you have is stalled the same as it was a couple of years ago. And we still pushing on that same path and we're not going down a different path completely.
Speaker 1 00:05:41 And it's just a case of like freshening things up, um, and not really changing the perception tumors. Cause I think with it being, uh, an established brand, we also don't want to change things completely. And then when we did have, once you get into concept development, we, we went through a couple of back to the drawing board, clean slate type of ideas and wins in completely different directions. And I think we could start feeling on some of them that that's a little bit too far from our current audience, that it would feel too much difference. And there's a lot of brand work and reputation work that we've done up to this point. And we don't want to throw all of that out of the door as well. So I think this there's some visuals and certain things that people are used to seeing with the casters brand. And we definitely try to capture that and make that part of the process as well.
Speaker 0 00:06:32 We embarked on this journey about six months ago, thinking about the, the brand that we want to portray through our website and our customer dashboard, our mobile application, our avatars online, and even this podcast. And I sat down and chatted with Ken McCaffrey, our customer experience manager, to talk through how she viewed this experience of a brand exercise with previous iterations of this type of thing that she's done in other jobs and other kind of parts of her professional life in particular, Kevin and I talk about the amount of time that this process takes and it takes to do it right.
Speaker 2 00:07:11 I think if you've done it in six months, you haven't done it well. Okay. It should take time.
Speaker 0 00:07:18 Like what, what about it just needs to take time?
Speaker 2 00:07:22 So like in the voice and tone guide, like I've started adding some things. So like, so your voice never changes, right? It's who you are. The company's voice, the brand voice never changes, tone changes. And I always use the example of at a dinner party with friends versus at a football game with friends, still your voice, but your tone is going to be very different. If you're consoling a friend versus celebrating with a friend or whatever, honing in on that voice. If you look at all the greats, you know, the ones that have come before us and the ones that we kind of turn to for voice and tone, you can look at an error message and spot it. That's that's, uh, you know, it's clearly, you know, slack is clearly Google. There are certain groups, um, that have done that. And you know, that that will happen likely over time as we kind of refine that voice.
Speaker 2 00:08:19 But, um, if it's not clear and succinct from the very first step, your voice will then also be changing. As things are refined, we want the messaging, we want to get better at expressing that voice, using tone in everything else that, that we'll have to change. That's not going to come out of the gate, like completely like baked all the way through, but your voice needs to be, cause it's, it's, it's us. It's, you know, you don't want to mess around with that because it will be defined in a way that isn't us, you know, um, if we don't define it first,
Speaker 0 00:08:57 So this is my first time doing this right. Other than like in my old business and podcast motor, like outdated the website and change some copy. And that was it like that, that is not what we're doing. I hope that's not what we're doing. Like, I, I view this as a bit of an aspirational move, you know, and like, uh, one of our, one of our mentors, um, and investors, you use the term like aspirational pricing, even like, Hey, I want to be this good. And I want to be this feature rich. And I want people to, to, you know, our customers to perceive us in a way that is this valuable. And a lot of this exercise is leading towards that, not pricing, but, but perception, you know, of, of like we are currently today because we've not rolled this out yet, like a, a good brand. And like what the impetus for me would, this was let's give ourselves the opportunity at least to be like premier brand in the space. And I think, I think that the way I see it as like from a design and UI perspective, we've given ourselves a chance now, you know, with like the new website and the app design and all of this stuff, like creating
Speaker 2 00:10:18 Space, for sure.
Speaker 0 00:10:22 Kevin, I continued to talk about how the ability for us to define our voice will attract talent to the team and allow us to do things that previously we probably wouldn't have been able to do
Speaker 2 00:10:35 When you define your voice. Like we're talking about whether or not we have, like, maybe we think that there needs to be other people on the team and people that will bring in different elements, you will attract the appropriate talent because of that brand voice. They would, they match that. So that's one of the reasons I joined the team. I had found a blog post that you had created. I think it was 2017. Um, I saw the values of the company and that, that for me is very important. And the idea of working with this customer base, it was something I was just, Ugh, it would just thought of it would make my heart sing, but that's what brought me here. But I was, I dug for that. I, um, that was an intentional choice. So it wasn't like, I was like, you know, like in the market and, but I wanna work for this company.
Speaker 0 00:11:36 It's not surprising, but still really amazing that things like voice and tone and brand and image of a company can attract someone, uh, to an organization like ours or to your podcast or to your brand. Uh, Kim is a huge asset to this company and we wouldn't be where we are without her. Just another way of showing the power of brand and the things that it can do for a company or for, or for you as a podcaster also spoke with Matt <inaudible> director of podcast or success about his experience doing brand sprints and brand re-imagined nations, uh, in his previous life and a web design agency. Uh, Matt has led interesting insights about what this allows a brand in this case, cast us as a brand to do going forward. What about the process, especially if the early process of like, kind of re Brie defining the brand and like the whole exercise you went through with Francoise and the logo and the colors and the who, who we are and what reps represent and stuff like, what about that stood out and surprised you?
Speaker 3 00:12:44 I wouldn't say I was surprised as more that more than I would say I was happy that we, we started taking that direction. It's not that you had never like considered or thought of it as important. It's just that now that Casos is the size that Casos is. Um, and a lot has changed in just six months in terms of like how many employees we have and who we're working with. It was a moment for everyone to get together and say, this is the clear direction. Uh, and can we get to a point where we all agree of where we're headed right now, knowing that it can still change in a year, but it is that north star for, uh, the brand message and the culture or whatever that we, as employees are, are looking at the north star that we're looking at. And also that our customers see that too.
Speaker 3 00:13:37 I I've done a lot of those kinds of brand exercises before. So I wasn't really surprised it was the fact that I was much more happy that we've matured to this point where we're all sort of headed in the same direction and that our customers are seeing that at the same time, this is the direction that they want to go in because it makes everything really clear for all departments inside of Casos, everybody from onboarding to support, to sales, to engineering, uh, it makes that all really clear and it matches up with what our customer's expectations are. It, you know, once you can align those two, it's really smooth sailing for both customer and employee
Speaker 0 00:14:24 Beyond the pretty colors and illustrations and things like that. We might ask ourselves like, where does great design and great UX really come into play? And where do we see it? Talk with Kim about where, where we should see this and where customers should see it. And the answer is a little surprising earlier this year, the Castillo's team embarked on a brand update exercise, the idea, and the goal of this was to, to bring our brand, our website and kind of our presence online up to the standards that we believe the company and our products, uh, are kind of at these days. Uh, the result of that is a fantastic, fast, beautiful website that you can see at Castillo's dot com, a new layout and styling within the customer dashboard, where hopefully many of you manage your podcasts, uh, and an update to our mobile app.
Speaker 0 00:15:19 And the, the story that we're telling here in this episode is the story of, of a brand exercise of us as a company, uh, formulating kind of our brand position and what we want to say and who we want to be. Um, you know, there's a saying that like, everyone has a brand. If you don't define it, someone will define it for you. And really, I think the goal of this exercise for us was to be really intentional about defining that brand internally, uh, sharing that through our products and our website and our messaging and our emails, and I've kind of everywhere we are online and that customers see us. Um, and I hope you enjoy this as kind of a case study of what brand really is and what a brand exercise looks like internally. In this episode, I chat with three members of our team, uh, to get their thoughts on the brand exercise, uh, and kind of what the outcome of it was for us and how you as podcasters can take the lessons that we learned in the process that we went through and apply it to your show and your show's brand as well.
Speaker 0 00:16:21 I hope you enjoy.
Speaker 0 00:16:25 I start the conversation today with Francoise Brill, our in-house designer, who really led a lot of the creative process of the brand reimagination here at cast us. And I thought that it might be a good place to start with, like why we started to do this in the first place. Right? Like, I think a lot of people say, why, why do we need a new logo and color scheme and website and stuff like that. I have the reasons I wanted to do it, but like curious if, if like the why behind this influenced the creative process for you.
Speaker 1 00:16:58 Yeah. And I think, um, I was just trying to remember kind of the goals around why we wanted to do it. And also I think why now, um, cause I've been working with the castles brand for, I think it was over two years now and it's, it's, I've seen him mature over that stage as well and with the timeframe and I think it was always, it was always pending. It was always something we wanted to get to. Um, and I think naturally just from my perspective, I saw the company growing and maturing and we just got to this natural point, we needed to update the website, but it only made sense to update the website and the marketing and everything. If we really went back all the way back to branding back to the ground or the yeah, the, the ground roots of like, why do we actually exist? Like back to customer personas and really how to put, how do we portray that visually? Um, so that's kinda my understanding of it all perspective on it.
Speaker 0 00:17:54 I was really impressed by how you like wanted to run this as like a process, like a creative process. Is this something you've done in the past with other like companies and brands
Speaker 1 00:18:04 We normally run through a similar process either if it's a brand new startup or existing companies that just want to kind of refigure what's going on, because I think sometimes there's also this idea of it's good enough for right now. So I think a lot of companies just get to a point, get to decision and kind of needed at that data then at that point and never really looked back. So I think it's as good now and then to reflect back and see, see is that still the best decision that we made. Um, and it's really, once we started digging into the core principles and the branding and all of that, we really need to understand what makes us different from our competitors, what really makes us tick. And
Speaker 0 00:18:44 Yeah, that part for me was interesting. Like I think, um, you know, as like the founder and a single founder, there's a lot of weight on my shoulders to get all of this stuff right. And, and like brand and the creative part is my weakest point. And so it was really reassuring to see that, like what I thought we stand for and our purpose and vision and mission was pretty consistent with what everybody else, uh, had input on. And, and like, you know, we had, so we had input from, uh, like marketing, um, like success support, uh, and then like product and engineering, five different people, I think. And it was, it was nice that like, we had a little bit of kind of additional breadth to what, what we wanted to do, but a lot of consistency too, which is reassuring, you know?
Speaker 1 00:19:35 Yeah. I think it also speaks into how, again, a brand changes over time and naturally you would go through a maturing stage, I think. And it's, it's interesting for me to see that it, it actually hasn't changed that much. And, uh, sometimes these type of things, you go through the exercise, um, and you end up with something very similar to where you were and it's, it's just reassuring, um, a lot of the times. And, um, yeah, I think it's, it's the fact that it came, came from so many different people in different, um, areas in the company. Um, also just reassures us that we are on the right path, that the mission or the vision that you have is stalled the same as it was a couple of years ago. And we still pushing on that same path and we're not going down a different path completely.
Speaker 1 00:20:24 And it's just a case of like freshening things up, um, and not really changing the perception too much. Cause I think with it being, uh, an established brand, we also don't want to change things completely. And then when we did have, once we get into concept development, we, we, we went through a couple of back to the drawing board, clean slate type of ideas and wins in completely different directions. And I think we could start feeding on some of them that that's a little bit too far from our current audience, that it would feel too much difference. And there's a lot of brand work and reputation work that we've done up to this point. And we don't want to throw all of that out of the door as well. So I think there's some visuals and certain things that people are used to seeing with the Castros brand. And we definitely try to capture that and make that part of the process as well.
Speaker 0 00:21:15 We embarked on this journey about six months ago, thinking about the, the brand that we want to portray through our website and our customer dashboard, our mobile application, our avatars online, and even this podcast. And I sat down and chatted with Kim McCaffrey, our customer experience manager, to talk through how she viewed this experience of a brand exercise with previous iterations of this type of thing that she's done in other jobs and other kind of parts of her professional life in particular, Kevin and I talk about the amount of time that this process takes and it takes to do it right.
Speaker 2 00:21:54 I think if you've done it in six months, you haven't done it well. Okay. It should take time.
Speaker 0 00:22:01 Like what, what about it just needs to take time?
Speaker 2 00:22:05 So like in the voice and tone guide, like I've started adding some things. So like, so your voice never changes, right? It's who you are. The company's voice, the brand voice never changes, tone changes. And I always use the example of at a dinner party with friends versus at a football game with friends, still your voice, but your tone is going to be very different. If you're consoling a friend versus celebrating with a friend or whatever, honing in on that voice. If you look at all the greats, you know, the ones that have come before us and the ones that we kind of turned to for voice and tone, you can look at an error message and spot it. That's that's, uh, you know, it's clearly, you know, slack is clearly Google. There are certain groups, um, that have done that. And you know, that that will happen likely over time as we kind of refine that voice.
Speaker 2 00:23:02 But, um, if it's not clear and succinct from the very first step, your voice will then also be changing. As things are refined, we want the messaging, we want to get better at expressing that voice, using tone in everything else that, that we'll have to change. That's not going to come out of the gate, like completely like baked all the way through, but your voice needs to be, cause it's, it's, it's us. It's it's, you know, you don't want to mess around with that because it will be defined in a way that isn't us, you know, um, if we don't define it first
Speaker 0 00:23:40 That, so this is my first time doing this right. Other than like in my old business and podcast motor, like outdated the website and changed some copy. And that was it like that, that is not what we're doing. I hope that's not what we're doing. Like, I, I view this as a bit of an aspirational move, you know, and like, uh, one of our, one of our mentors, um, and investors, you use the term like aspirational pricing, even like, Hey, I want to be this good. And I want to be this feature rich. And I want people to, to, you know, our customers to perceive us in a way that is this valuable. And a lot of this exercise is leading towards that, not pricing, but, but perception, you know, of, of like we are currently today because we've not rolled this out yet, like a, a good brand. And like what the impetus for me would, this was let's give ourselves the opportunity at least to be like premier brand in the space. And I think, I think that the way I see it as like from a design and UI perspective, we've given ourselves a chance now, you know, with like the new website and the app design and all of this stuff, like creating
Speaker 2 00:25:01 Space for sure. Yep.
Speaker 0 00:25:05 Kim and I continued to talk about how the ability for us to define our voice will attract talent to the team and allow us to do things that previously we probably wouldn't have been able to do
Speaker 2 00:25:18 When you define your voice. Like we're talking about whether or not we have, like, maybe we think that there needs to be other people on the team and people that will bring in different elements, you will attract the appropriate talent because of that brand voice. They would, they match that. So that's one of the reasons I joined the team. I had found a blog post that you had created. I think it was 2017. Um, I saw the values of the company and that, that for me is very important. And the idea of working with this customer base, it was something I was just, Ugh, it was just the thought of it would make my heart sing, but that's what brought me here. But I was, I dug for that. I, um, that was an intentional choice. So it wasn't like, I always thought, you know, like in the market and, but I want to work for this company.
Speaker 0 00:26:19 It's not surprising, but still really amazing that things like voice and tone and brand and image of a company can attract someone to an organization like ours or to your podcast or to your brand. Uh, Kim is a huge asset to this company and we wouldn't be where we are today without her. Just another way of showing the power of brand and the things that it can do for a company or for, or for you as a podcaster also spoke with Matt Modaris director of podcast or success about his experience doing brand sprints and brand reimagination, uh, in his previous life and a web design agency. Uh, Matt has led interesting insights about what this allows a brand in this case cast is the brand to do going forward. What about the process, especially the early process of like kind of re redefining the brand and like the whole exercise he went through with Francoise and the logo and the colors and the who, who we are and what we're representing stuff. Like, what about that stood out and surprised you?
Speaker 3 00:27:27 I wouldn't say I was surprised as more that more than I would say I was happy that we, we started taking that direction. It's not that you had never like considered or thought of it as important. It's just that now that Casos is the size that Casos is. Um, and a lot has changed in just six months in terms of like how many employees we have and who we're working with. It was a moment for everyone to get together and say, this is the clear direction. Uh, and can we get to a point where we all agree of where we're headed right now, knowing that it can still change in, in a year, but it is that north star for, uh, the brand message and the culture or whatever that we, as employees are, are looking at the north star that we're looking at. And also that our customers see that too.
Speaker 3 00:28:20 I I've done a lot of those kinds of brand exercises before. So I wasn't really surprised it was the fact that I was much more happy that we've matured to this point. We're, we're all sort of headed in the, in the same direction and that our customers are seeing that at the same time, this is the direction that they want to go in because it makes everything really clear for all departments inside of Casos, everybody from onboarding to support, to sales, to engineering, uh, it makes that all really clear and it matches up with what our customer's expectations are. You know, once you can align those two it's, it's really smooth sailing for both customer and employee
Speaker 0 00:29:07 Beyond the pretty colors and illustrations and things like that. We might ask ourselves like, where does great design and great UX really come into play? And where do we see it? Talk with Kim about where, where we should see this and where customers should see it. And the answer is a little surprising.
Speaker 2 00:29:26 So UX writing, UX design, if done well is invisible. It doesn't register because it's, well, of course the button label is this, of course, this seamless consistency of design across the app. It's invisible. So if anybody's interested in getting into UX writing and UX design know ahead of time, it is a thankless job thankless, because if you do you're, if you're, if you do what you do well, nobody notices that, but at the same time, if you don't do it well, it creates a fragmented experience as sticks out like a sore thumb. It's very powerful
Speaker 0 00:30:09 At the very beginning of this brand exercise Francoise send out a survey to, to a handful of us in the company asking us to score where we thought the cast was brand should, should lay on a series of spectrums. Uh, these, these spectrums were from elite to mass appeal, serious to playful, conventional to rebel, mature and classic, to young and innovative, friendly to an authority figure and rugged to refined and sophisticated. So for some of those, think of, you know, elite being Chanel and mass appeal, being something like H and M conventional being something like Honda versus a rebel brand like Tesla and rugged, like Harley Davidson to refine and sophisticated, like Rolex, you start plotting out where you want your brand to appear on these kind of spectrums. It really gives a clear idea of, of who you are and who your brand is. And the, the image that you portray externally to your audience, talk to Francoise about his impression of the results of these surveys and how it guided the rest of the process.
Speaker 1 00:31:15 And I think what was surprising to me is I kept on getting all the results of each person in different colors, there's dots on those lands. So it was interesting seeing some of them grouped together naturally, and something where in a wide spectrum, like completely different. Um, and I think the fact that it's interesting for me, or is, is like a lot of people are, they don't know what they like until they see it type of thing. So it's difficult if you ask someone like, what should this be? Or what is this bread? Like? It's difficult to articulate for a lot of people, um, because they're not tuned into that. And it's even for creative people, it's difficult. Um, but if you show someone something, then it's easy to relate with something. And I think that's why we ran the exercise of these personality sliders to say, are you more like a Porsche car?
Speaker 1 00:31:59 Or you're more like land Rover, like rugged? And it's like, oh, that type of thing, or are you more like fast moving high consumer brand? Or you're more like timeless elegant, like that type of thing. And it's, as soon as you put that type of other, another brand image into someone's mind, it's easy for them to relate and say to convert that back into a casters brand from their own perspective, as well as what we want to be portrayed is, um, by our customers, because when it comes to branding, it's always like we can try and shape this as much as we want, but a brand at the end of the day is what our consumer or our users say about us. Um, so that's kind of the image that we wanted to capture the,
Speaker 0 00:32:39 Yeah. And I, like, I think that's a really important thing because, um, our brand is not me, you know, I'd like our, like our brand is we've never met in person, but I think our brand is probably more you with like the cool hat and the, like the look and everything. Um, and I D I do think that it's like, it's okay for, especially non-technical non-creative folks to be aspirational with like, what their brand ends up being, you know, like we want to be the Louis Vuitton, the expressive, the bright colors, the sexy kind of thing, um, where, like, I'm pretty like blue collar nuts and bolts about a lot of things. Um, and so that was cool for me to be able to abstract myself from what I want the company to be perceived at.
Speaker 1 00:33:26 Yeah. And I think a big part that plays into that as, as our target market is creators and they creative by default. I mean, to be able to put together podcasts and come up with the content and do the storytelling and everything that is around with that, that's a creative process. And I think creative people like associating with creative brands, or like not the typical accounting, black and whites type of brand. Um, and I think that's why I think he hit the nail on the head with saying it's aspirational. And we want to be in that creative field. And we want to be expressive with, with what we portray as a brand as well,
Speaker 0 00:34:06 Taking a step back. I talked to Matt about the need for this in the first place and what, what we all hoped this would achieve, uh, for, for the brand and our, our ability to do the kinds of things that we want to do as a company would apply for, for you as a podcast as well. You brought this up kind of as a concept, like write a few joint, or right before you joined, even maybe just like, Hey, we gotta, like, we get up our game here. Like, but what is like, what does that mean? Like why, why is that important? Like w what was the driver behind that, that you saw?
Speaker 3 00:34:40 Well, as somebody who comes out of the web design world and has somebody who's sold web design for over a decade? Um, the first and foremost is that is the trust of the brand. And it's not that pre-existing website was untrustworthy if you're trying to like, throw a label on it. But when you look at how fast paced the podcasting space is, how many competitors we have, you see them constantly pushing the envelope. Um, customers need to see something at the same level or beyond it to trust that you have a very capable tool before they even, you know, talk to you. It's not trust in the sense, like, do I trust them with keeping my podcast up and running? Like they just want to make sure that they can trust us to solve their immediate problems. And especially when we get into some of the enterprise accounts that we service, they want to make sure that they're, you know, when they show us off to their stakeholder team, their C-suite team, that they feel like they've made the right decision, uh, or their stakeholders feel like they've made the right decision by looking at castles from the surface.
Speaker 3 00:35:53 You know, you have people say, Hey, go start a podcast. And they go, yeah, I use this company called cast. Those. You want them to see the website and be like, oh, okay, sharp looks great. It looks like they know what they're doing. Um, which can seem so trivial from the outset, but from a sales and marketing perspective, those are the things that are one off the call off the zoom conference that we just never hear about. And I think, um, I'm excited because I think that's going to be a pretty big shift for our direction,
Speaker 0 00:36:25 Putting your director of podcast or success hat on how, and like talking to the listeners of this show specifically about their podcasts and their brands. Cause we start using this word podcast and brand interchangeably a lot these days. How should folks thinking about their own shows kind of relate what we're saying in this episode too, to kind of how they think about the, the image that they're portraying to kind of their audience into the, you know, there's genre in the podcasting world. Like, what are the takeaways you think that almost anyone could could take from this? Well,
Speaker 3 00:37:02 The biggest standout is when you do a rebrand, like Casos like we've done and you set the direction that the course that your whole company is going to go down, you know, your company, your customers, it's that moment that says, okay, we're, we're all here for the same reason, both the customer and the employee. So just like when you're creating a podcast, you have your premise, even if you haven't, you know, we have our other show, three clips hosted by Jay Acunzo. He really drew tendrils down into premise. Like he, if there were like an ultimate ninja warrior of premise creating E that's the show you want to listen to, um, you know, even if you've only thought about it on the surface, it, when everybody gets into that boat, you all know where you're going, you all know why are there, uh, we're all headed on the same direction.
Speaker 3 00:37:54 We all got the right ticket. We're all going to the same destination. Yes. And that's what a major rebrand like this does. And you do that with your podcast. So if you're opening up with a premise, you've defined a premise and you clearly articulate that with your listener, uh, in each and every episode, then they know why they're there. They know why they're listening. Uh, and then they know why they're buying into, you know, whatever your, whatever your mission statement is for your podcast or whatever your call to action life. It's somebody that you're really just trying to measure the success of a podcast. They're all there for the same reason. And they know what they need to get from you every single episode. And then just from the fancy bells and whistles, like you got to make your brand look good. You know, people talk about all the time.
Speaker 3 00:38:39 It's like, you know, Hey, how do I rank up higher in apple? And, you know, if I better get a better microphone or this fancy software thing, I mean, those things do matter. But at the end of the day, like you have to treat your podcast like a well branded business with a great looking website, with the right content, with the right call to actions fast and just a notch up from your competition. So you can stay ahead of the game, like, you know, from the colors and design and the fancy stuff that people like to talk about. Yeah. That's a massive lesson. Have a great looking website, right. That that's going to look good and be a notch up from your potential, uh, listeners competition,
Speaker 0 00:39:25 Aside from the personality sliders. One of the things that we did was ask these handful of people within our group who were involved in the brand redesign to, to select a few words that they believe, describe our brand and the customers that we serve and our purpose as, as a business and as an organization, if you haven't done this for your podcast, it's a fantastic exercise to get really specific with words that, that you want to be, or if you believe your brand is, and the reason that, that your brand exists and kind of the audience that you serve, talk with Kim about the results of that and how it formed some of the language we use on the site. And, and in a lot of our communication, I think very fortunately we used the word creator, a lot creator and creative, and then we used the words like tools and growth a lot, um, and then like connection and audience a lot. And so, I mean, if you just look at everything we're doing right now, like, it's, it's just, you put all those words in a sentence and that's, that's who we are. So that's, that's really cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:40:37 I do remember being relieved that we did not end up with a bunch of buzzwords that, that makes me want to get a little ragey things like empower, enable powerful words that really don't have meaning.
Speaker 0 00:40:54 Yeah. So I'll, I'll read it and see if anything jumps out at you. Okay. So what we stand for, why use dose, uh, and the headline is creative freedom. Our customers are content focused brands that have a desire to create. They want a platform that supports their creative endeavors and gives them the tools to grow their shows. We are their trusted partner in podcasting with the services and tool set to make their podcasting experience easier, more efficient and give back their time for creative freedom.
Speaker 2 00:41:24 Uh, so we look at like private podcasting and we look at people that are looking at creating private content and monetizing. We see as an opportunity to break from the norm to chart your own path, you know, obviously generating revenue from wherever you want to, however you want to, you know, using, uh, the, the platform in that way. But there's a lot of others, not monetize, not private RSS fees that find freedom just in the being able to have a platform for their voice. There's a lot of silence people in this world, or that just don't have a camera to turn on. They're not in front of it on television. They're not interactive in media, but podcasting with the flip of a switch and for chili, you know, nothing special, you have the freedom to communicate. And, uh, there's a lot of, a lot to be said about that. Um, I actually just changed my signature in my email. I used to have an Albert Einstein quote and I just changed not too long ago. Um, words and words and words are power. Yep. Uh, that was Margaret Atwood, the author, or
Speaker 0 00:42:47 How about this one? Uh, our purpose. This is the why we're in business is to be the voice that inspires challenges, educates and empowers the creator economy.
Speaker 2 00:43:00 I remember when I first, um, when you and I first met and I was kind of like, oh, I would to work for that company. I was kind of in that mode. Um, I had applied for a role and you had asked for a video and I created a video and said something very similar in that, um, that there are a lot of voices that are out there to educate, to make us laugh, to teach us things, to challenge our thinking. Um, but I love the fact that we look to inspire that, to inspire the comics, to inspire the people that do challenge our thinking and, um, and to teach us and all of that teaches us To be the voice that inspires that first line was the voice to be the voice that inspires. Correct. Yeah. And challenges in educates.
Speaker 0 00:44:01 Hm. Challenges was the one that, uh, I was scared of a little bit because that's a neg that can be a negative word. Like you can have negative connotations, but, um, but I think that a lot of our customers want to be challenged, uh, in, in their creative endeavor, in their way to express themselves. And I think that you can't inspire and empower without challenging. And, and I think that's why we wanted to include this because it's, um, you know, we got to keep it real, you know, we gotta keep it real that like the creative process is hard building an audience and keeping them as hard. Um, and, and I think, well, this, you know, this is what we're doing right now is part of that challenge is it's challenging for us. It's challenging for me to talk about this, cause I'm a left brain engineer by, by trade.
Speaker 0 00:44:59 And so to, to put process and, and thought around who we are, is challenging for me. And I think us sharing our, our experience of this is, um, is that like transparency that, that shares the challenge that we go through. And I think that other people hopefully can relate to, um, with this. So I, I think th th like educate and empower, I think maybe, yeah. I think the rest of them are kind of layups, you know, like inspires, educates and empowers that's that's given for like, I think a lot of creative companies. And I think that the challenges one is for me, the, the one that, you know, like a big part of this brand exercise is to get us out of the box. That is, that is me, you know, cause I can think a lot of times when you start like a company is a lot of the founder and, and a big part of having you and everyone else involved in the creative process is to stretch that a lot, you know, and is really uncomfortable, but it's really good because now we're something much, much, much better than I could come up with.
Speaker 0 00:46:05 Um, and I think for me like that word is maybe the biggest example of that. Um, and use it appropriately. Maybe it's the second biggest one
Speaker 2 00:46:15 Being a creator is, you know, it is challenging. And sometimes we do find ourselves in a position where we have to kind of communicate, you can do better
Speaker 0 00:46:30 Going back to the creative aspect of the visual elements of the new brand, the color scheme and the logo and the wordmark and the fonts talk to Francois about the, the actual process that, that he and I went through after we collected the input from the team of the words that we use and where we want the brand to fall on these personality, sliders time to put that into action with actual visual elements. Uh, and the concept here is just create a lot of options. And then from there we can refine them down, talk Francoise about the, the process of, of creating those options and refining them from there.
Speaker 1 00:47:07 The biggest thing I believe in the greatest process, the only way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. So we kind of like try to put it all out on the table. And I think even stated to you in that first presentation of the options is like, normally you only do three options, but I had seven different directions. I'm showing everything and we can filter it from there. Um, and I think that's part of the creative process is like trying to put ideas out there, not getting too attached to that, to any specific idea. And then, like I say, pushing it through that iterative process again, just to go back and forth on that,
Speaker 0 00:47:41 How difficult for you is it to, to like put all those pieces together between like the, the shape or the image and the colors and the font. Like, to me, those are all three kind of big things that we want to consider. Like you're any of those harder for you to really nail or is it going to all of them have to be considered together?
Speaker 1 00:48:04 I think again, it's kind of taken an it sorts of approach. So the first differentiating factor that would definitely make is color. So we leave color art. So you normally try and do it in black and white. Um, and I think when it comes to logos is there's a bunch of rules that you'll learn in art school as all like a logo must be able to work in as an, a small postage stamp. Like be very tiny. I think these days it's more like a social media icon, but a postage stamp anymore, but it's like, it needs to be able to work really small as well as really big and, um, still convey the same meaning. So I guess, and then also within that you get different types of logos. You get one with icons, one with just the word mark that's just takes one that has like different shapes and forms that it can almost like a morph into different things.
Speaker 1 00:48:49 So it's always, I think you don't necessarily know what type you're setting out to achieve, but it's definitely playing a bit with funds. You're playing a bit with icons. And I think coming with, again, the baseline of casters with having a microphone as icon and a pretty like slick and modern fonts as well, and trying to just see how we can work with that. Um, and yeah, so I would say the process was probably focusing on the icon first and I think even there, like try to move, not move away, but try to explore different things besides just the microphone. And I think things came up like obviously other audio things like speakers or other types of things, and it's, um, it, it fell to like a other thing that you want to avoid is getting too narrow with our iconography. So I think that's where we kind of decided that even with some of the elements, it was too audio specific focused, and already we focus, or we allow you to publish to YouTube or there's other parts of the business that extend beyond audio.
Speaker 1 00:49:52 So we don't want to be too narrow in our thinking by choosing a new icon. That is, that is not wide enough. And I think the reason we stuck with a microphone was, um, again, looking back at that base work, we did, we, we did say we still kind of serving the creator economy and the creators are always around the microphone talking, whether it's audio video or whatever, that's the type of audience that we interacting with. So it's, the microphone was still like central as an icon that we could pull into things. Um, so I think that was kind of the thing. And even coming back to the point of after that first version, where we narrow down the seven options to like a single option to pursue even there the next rounds, and that was really going into each one of those elements, so that the icon specifically the funds and later on color and really digging into each one of those and creating, I think the, for the funds, we created 20 different options, um, to really try and find, uh, uh, funds or type phase that that suits our brand.
Speaker 1 00:50:55 Um, and even in, even in something like that, even I think after choosing the actual fund, we always take a break like in design called break it up into parts. So it's not actual takes anymore. It's just shapes. And then we kind of work with it, roundups roundups, some ages could like change the kerning to make it fit closer together, to read like as one piece of hole. And it's like, everything is like fun tune like that, um, in each round until you get to the end. And I think we kind of, we kind of went through that process to finish the icon and letters. So the funds altogether get that kind of ready. And when we were happy with that, we only moved onto colors,
Speaker 0 00:51:35 Bringing the concepts and the assets that we have created from the creative branding process then allows us to put those into use on the website and in communications and in emails and in social media and the ability to be consistent with the unified voice and tone and image across all channels that, that you communicate with your audience and gives you the ability to, to really create a brand, to talk with Matt about bringing this back to the podcasting world for you, what that can mean.
Speaker 3 00:52:10 So when people say, how do I grow my podcasts? It's like the number one thing, one of the number one things, how many number ones can be the number one position, but it's, uh, it's being consistent. So it doesn't mean you have to do it every week or every day, but you have to be consistent with the schedule that you have. So even if it's twice a week or even just once a month, you have to keep that consistency. So people know that you still exist and you still stay relevant in their podcasts, uh, and their podcast players, but a design brand design sprint. Like we did, it sets that design language, which I know everyone starts to like roll their eyes. Like anyone. Who's just like, you know, a money person. Like I don't want to spend any money on this stuff. They hear design language.
Speaker 3 00:52:51 They go, that's going to cost me a lot of money. Like what, what are you going to do? You're going to make me this palette of colors and brands and friends while I did exactly that. But he does it in, in a way that we can repurpose for all of the different scenarios. So if you start promoting your show, for example, and you have your logo made, like when I create have my designer create logos for my own podcast, create them for many different contexts, show it to me on Instagram, show it to me on LinkedIn, show it to me on a Twitter background, like give it to me in all these different areas so that I don't have to think about it when I go to something on Instagram, let's say, but more importantly, uh, so that I don't get inconsistent. And we did this with all of our colors, getting out out of all our type, our graphy, like when you should use colors, when you should use type biography and, uh, you know, friends, why not friends, why?
Speaker 3 00:53:41 And I work together the other day to load up all of those assets into Canva so that if I want to make a one pager for a particular customer or a tile for a YouTube video, it's already decided for me. And I don't have to think about it. And I most importantly, do not deviate from the brand language so that somebody sees me do something and it looks different than when Craig does something. And then when Chad does something and Sam so on and so forth, it stays consistent, which is very important for the brand.
Speaker 0 00:54:12 Yeah. Yeah. And we, and we, we put this out and we, you know, kind of open-sourced it. So folks want to go to tempo.us.com, check it out. It's our, it's our entire brands, guidelines brand and style guidelines as everything from fonts. Um, well, no, I should say it starts with like kind of our mission and our vision and our values. Right. Which is where all of this starts is like who we are, who do we want to be? Who do we serve? Why are we here? Um, what are the goals of the business? Cause this, this is a business for your podcast. You can have different goals. Um, but, but I think most folks are, are definitely goal goal-oriented. Um, and then, and then really dives into the very specifics of color. What, what is the purple like are our new primary color is purple?
Speaker 0 00:54:52 What is that purple look like? When is it used? How is it used? What are the different hues and colors and variations and all this stuff? What are the fonts we use? When do we use that font in this font? Um, and then Kim came in with a lot of guidelines and content around how we create content written content. Um, and it is voice and tone and, and, you know, chatted with her a lot about voice and tone and what those things mean. And, and know one stays the same one changes a lot. And yeah. Now say we hire a new person next month. We can go and say, okay, first thing you do, new marketing person is go read the tempo, right. And read it twice and really grok it because it is how you will express yourself on the site and an email and in YouTube and in podcasting, everything to be consistent with our brand.
Speaker 0 00:55:40 Um, yeah, I think it's, it's massive. It just, it allows us to be consistent and put out really high quality soft without thinking about it and reinventing the wheel every time I hope it was helpful to hear some of the background and the backstory of, of the brand process for us here at cast us, uh, launching the new website in the new brand was, was a really wonderful experience, as you can hear from the conversations with Francoise and Matt and Kim at a lot of thought, and a lot of intentionality wind went into this from, from the creative perspective and the words we use and, and really laying out, you know, our vision and our mission and, and kind of what we stand for and who we serve, uh, to some of the practical aspects of, of what this means for our ability as a brand, to do the kinds of things that we want to do.
Speaker 0 00:56:31 Uh, and I would just encourage you in your podcasting endeavors to, to think about your brand and what the things you put out into the world, whether it's the sound and the design and the visual elements of your podcast and your presence on your website and in social media and email, what, what that means to, to people that are consuming your brand and listening to your content. Uh, and, and I hope that some of the insights that we've shared here are helpful, and you crafting a re forging that brand and putting better content out into the world, because that's what it's all about. Thanks so much for listening. If you have any questions or comments, shoot us a message.
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