Stay ConnectedBrand Builder brings you the people, stories, and lessons learned from the most innovative brands in the world. Presented by SnackNation. Hosted by Sean Kelly, Jordan Cohen, and Jeff Murphy.
Similar to How I Built This, The Dave Ramsey Show, and Seeking Wisdom by Drift.
This week Jordan is going back to school, because our guest is Brenda Bailey-Hughes, a Sr. Lecturer at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business - and Jordan's former professor.
Brenda is a communication expert, and she has coached executives in Fortune 500 companies around the world, helping them understand their audience, build a personal brand, and become more effective executives.
We go deep on the topic of influence - which, by the way, probably doesn't mean what you think it means - unlocking the 3 pillars of influential communication and the two dimensions of credibility.
Why does all this matter? Because if you're listening to this, there's a good chance you have to make big pitches - to your board, to investors, to retailers - and Brenda's here to help you nail that next big, important meeting.
If that weren't enough, we also talk about design thinking, which is both a fascinating topic, and a useful framework that will help you create a stickier brand.
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What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Think about the one thing you love to do.
It could be a task you perform in your job, in school, or in your everyday life. This is the thing that energizes you when you think about it, and motivates you to get up every day. When you're doing it, time seems to fly by, and you walk away with more energy than when you started.
This is your unique ability, and designing your life (and work) to spend more time doing it is the secret to greater happiness and productivity.
In this leadership-focused episode, we break down the concept of unique ability in the context of our working lives. You will learn:
BONUS EXERCISE: Love It / Loathe It
Here's Marcus Buckingham's quick and easy strategy for discovering your unique ability:
Links
Is happiness something good leaders should care about? Ask most business leaders fifteen years ago, and you'd be hard pressed to find one who thought that happiness was a primary concern.
Work should be about results, right? Happiness is incidental at best.
Or so we all thought.
Then came Zappos' visionary CEO Tony Hsieh, who realized that delivering happiness was a unifying theme throughout the business. Not only did delivering happiness sum up the ideal experience for his customer, but making happiness a primary concern internally actually drove results.
There's no one in the world who understands the power of Happiness better than this week's guest, Jenn Lim.
Jenn is the CEO and Chief Happiness Officer of Delivering Happiness, a consulting firm she founded with Tony Hsieh to inspire science-based happiness, passion and purpose at work, home and everyday life.
Jenn was a foundational team member at Zappos, and in 2010 she led the launch of Tony's book Delivering Happiness, which has sold over 600,000 copies worldwide.
Jenn refers to Delivering Happiness as a book that became a company that became a global movement.
This episode is all about how to supercharge your team with happiness. Jenn takes us through the Delivering Happiness framework, describes the life-changing events that led her to focus on positive psychology + the science of happiness, and shares her inspiring vision for the future of work.
LinksJoin our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Our guests this week are Becky and Jeremy Dahl, the creative minds behind Bex Brands.
Together they lead an agency that specializes in packaging design, brand identity, and brand management in the packaged goods industry (i.e., they are the perfect guests for Brand Builder).
If Bex Brands sounds familiar, that might be because they're the agency behind the transformative brand refresh and packaging redesign for Lily's Sweets (episode 116).
In fact it was our conversation with Lily's CEO Jane Miller that inspired this episode. We wanted to learn about the rebrand process from the agency side. How do they approach projects like these? What's the best way to maximize the chances of success when working with a branding agency like theirs?
Becky and Jeremy are the perfect people to provide this insight. In addition to Lily's, they have worked with Chameleon, Once Upon a Farm, Dr. Praegar's, and Primizie, just to name a few.
We also really loved what they had to say about trends... and why they don't believe in them.
Links
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Our guest this week is Steven Izen, the CEO and founder of Lokai.
In simplest terms, Lokai makes bracelets that promote balance. In every Lokai bracelet, one of the beads contains water from the top of Mount Everest and another contains mud from the Dead Sea - a reminder to stay humble in life's high points and hopeful in life's low points.
The Lokai story is one of rapid, viral growth. They've sold 10 million units in about 6 years, and because they donate 10% of profits to charity, they've raised more than $8 million for charitable causes.
But while Lokai bracelets symbolize balance, the brand is coming out with a new functional product line that promotes balance in a much more tangible way.
Meet Elements by Lokai, a line of herbal tonic concentrates made with adaptogenic plants that work with your body to give it what it needs.
We talked to Steven about why a bracelet brand is launching a beverage, why athletes like Cam Newton love Lokai, plus how Lokai went viral in the first place.
Links
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
This week on Brand Builder, we're talking about one of the most important aspects of your brand, yet one that so often ends up being accidental, un-strategic, or even an afterthought.
The name.
Whether it's your brand or a new SKU or product, a name is the ultimate first impression. And if you do it right, a name can do a lot of work for you - set a tone or mood, impart critical information, or communicate a core value.
To tell us how to do it right, we've got Aaron Hall, the Group Director of Naming at Siegel+Gale.
Aaron has one of the coolest jobs in the world - he's a professional namer.
We talk to Aaron about all things naming, and go deep into his process to find the perfect name.
Links
Recommended Reading
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
Our guest this week is Jane Miller, the CEO of Lily's sweets.
Lily's make a line of delicious chocolate bars, baking bits and baking bars that have less than 1 gram of sugar per serving.
Jane represents a slightly different type of guest for us. She's a CEO with 35 years of food business experience... but not a founder.
Jane's background is as a high level executive at places like Heinz and Frito Lay, and she joined Lily's with a specific goal in mind: help scale the business. With a new look, new SKUs, and the rising tide of awareness around the drawbacks of too much sugar, the brand is poised for mainstream success.
This role is a new challenge for Jane as well. She's used to coming in and fixing things that are broken at big organizations. Now she's on a total rocket ship ride - which brings a whole new set of obstacles to overcome.
In this episode, we talk about the Lily's rebrand, Jane's personal philosophy of "running your own race," and the surprising way they use data to find their sweet spot.
Links
Recommended Reading
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
This week, a conversation with Omaze co-founder and CEO Ryan Cummins.
Omaze is an online fundraising platform that offers once-in-a-lifetime experiences and exclusive merchandise in support of charitable causes.
They've worked with a who's-who of A-list celebrities, including the cast of Game of Thrones, George Clooney, the gang from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia... and that's barely scratching the surface .
But what Omaze really does is tell stories. Their philanthropic model relies on getting consumers excited, and they do that through their incredibly creative campaigns. They've raised more than $150M for over 400 different charities.
Now that's impact.
If you're a mission-driven brand, you need to leverage the power of storytelling in order to move your mission forward. That's what this episode is about.
Takeaways
Links
Recommended Reading
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
If you're a business leader, employee happiness should never be your goal.
Sound strange? That's according to today's Brand Builder guest, David Hassell.
David is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of 15five, software that makes continuous employee feedback simple, and helps drive high-performing cultures.
We talked to David about a wide range of subjects, but what we found most interesting was his belief that the goal of his product is not to make employees happy, but to help them become their best selves, and ultimately to create an environment where they can perform at their highest level.
15five's product and philosophy has been a huge hit with enterprises of all sizes, and they recently closed a $30.7M series B round.
We think you'll find David's point of view highly valuable - especially since we know a lot of you are working with remote employees and need an efficient feedback loop, or just want to empower your team to direct their own personal and professional growth.
Takeaways
Links
Recommended Reading
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
How important is my logo? Should I hire a full time designer? Do I need to rebrand? Can I rebrand? What's a brand book anyway?
This week we learn the answer to all these questions and more from veteran Creative Director Eric Wilkinson, who teaches us the secrets of creating an irresistible brand identity.
Brand Checklist (make sure your brand does this if you want a brand that sells)
Links
Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!
What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!
Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod
Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.
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