The 'IDEA' Strategic Brand Framework with Trevor Bradford

The 'IDEA' Strategic Brand Framework with Trevor Bradford Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to an exciting episode of The New Frontier. As always, I'm joined by Jo. Jo, how are you? Speaker 3: I'm very good. Thank you. How are you, Max? I've seen that you're busy with some new launches. What's going on your side? Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm recovering today as Tottenham won the European League last night and I was part of the pitch invasion at White Hart Lane. It was a very heavy night, but I'm glad we're doing a podcast today because it's easier than doing real work. When you get my age, you start to feel this. But yeah, we do have some exciting new launches as well. We just launched Freemium Addy content, so I would encourage everyone to go and have a look. It's free and it enables you to get the catalog scoring of your listings, your Cosmos score, your IDQ score, how applied is your catalog for Amazon's algorithm. So we've got a lot of good feedback. Go and check it out and let me know what you think of it. But yeah, let's get on to the topic of the day. So I am excited about this because we are covering A new coming out on Friday which is tomorrow as we record this episode. Speaker 3: It's really exciting. Speaker 1: So it is exciting to have a bit of a press coverage debut. The book is called What Captures the Heart Goes in the Cart and it's written by a good friend of e-content at the podcast and Jo, amazing wave, Trevor Bradford. So he is a creator of IDEA strategic brand framework. He combines behavioral science, strategic creative and brand positioning to help Amazon, Shopify and DTC sellers to stand out and scale up. He has 35 years of experience in branding as an agency owner, including 15 years in online retail. He's collaborated with a wide range of clients from national retailers, globally famous brands and emerging entrepreneurs, such as the Titan Network, which he's a mentor. And on top of all of that, he practices what he preaches with his own six-figure brand. So without further ado, let's bring out Trevor. Speaker 2: Thank you very much for having me on. I've been looking forward to this for ages. Speaker 3: Thank you so much for being our guest. It's really actually, it's really awesome to have you. And to be fair, I think we've never actually covered a book launch and your book is really interesting. So I'm really excited to have you as a guest. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. I think it's really interesting because all three of us have arrived in the same space to understand that the important thing for customers right now is sales conversion. And Jo, as we met a couple of weekends ago, I was on your work group when you were going through your AI. And Max, you and I have known each other, what, nearly two years now, I think, isn't it? And we've all arrived at different ways of trying to optimize the sales conversion experience for our various clients. And within Titan, of course, that's what we're all about, helping people scale their businesses, helping people grow. And of course, much of that is very metrics, very numbers-driven. There are all kinds of SOPs for PPC and supply chain and all that other kind of stuff. But my space, my specialism is where we actually interact with people because people buy from people regardless of technology. We have to remember that on the other side of the screen is a real person. Speaker 3: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think this is, I think we talk a lot about AI in this podcast and AI is great and we are all data geeks, but at the end, like all that we are doing is to get to an end consumer who is like resonating with a certain brand or certain products. And at the end they are human. So I absolutely agree with you. And so actually I'm going to start with the first question, which is you've written a book. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 3: Congratulations. You joined probably like a very small percentage of The humans in the world that have managed to do what is an epic achievement. So first, congratulations. And second of all, what was the moment? Do you remember the moment when you were like, I'm going to write a book because I have to go? Speaker 2: It crept up on me, Jo, because I've been with Titan since its inception and I met Athena and Dan in China when I was on a China Magic trip and we started to talk about this and I did a short brief presentation on the trip on branding and everybody thought it was very useful because people were thinking about it in that way. In the Amazon business, in fact, even now, probably they're not really thinking about it enough in the Amazon business. It's still too metrics-driven, I think, and people are hoping to press a button and suddenly everything's going to be solved. And actually, there's work that we have to do. So even from that point, when we were generating presentations inside Titan, as well as my client work, direct client work, I'd accumulated this huge body of presentations that I'd done, either on specific brands or on general topics. Inside the network, Titan, I co-host the Conversion Work Party with a colleague, Ignite, and every week we see Lots and lots of people turn up with listings that are suboptimal, that aren't converting, their tech cost is too high. Now sometimes that can be a traffic problem and if it is then we have other specialists in time that will deal with that. But if it's a conversion problem then what's actually happening is we're winning the click and then we're letting people slip through our fingers. And so all of this All of this work that I've been doing over the years, I was looking through my files and thinking, my goodness, there's a whole heap of content here. But it's not in a form that I could just say to someone, there we go, it's all there. That's all you need to know. So I started to think about how I could do that and how I could bring that to a broader audience because that has tightened as a query. It was an imitation only network and I just knew that there were sellers out there, people out there who were struggling. They did everything that they possibly could to actually build an online business and the concept that they'd been sold as of this semi-passive income stream and it's an hour a day and all, it's just completely false. So, I know that there are people in pain out there that could really do with this understanding. So, gradually, I started to format it into bite-sized pieces. And, of course, then, that needs a linking narrative to make sense of each of these different steps. And so, gradually, that's how the book began to emerge. And having got that far, I thought, I might as well just finish it and publish it. So, I did. Speaker 1: Amazing. Congratulations. Yeah, I think it's a fantastic book. I've kind of skimmed over it for the purposes of this podcast and also because I massively respect you, Trevor, as a kind of leading thinker in this space. And I think I'm right in saying maybe the core of the book is this trademark framework that you have, which is the IDEA framework for building trust. Do you want to go into that and like what you've created here and really what it is? Speaker 2: Sure, IDEA is an acronym and it stands for Insight, Distinctiveness, Empathy and Authenticity. So these are the four pillars really of the way that I think about branding and that I approach my own brand, my own products and those of my clients. And I thought to myself, How can I get sellers who are so wrapped up in their own problems and issues to think about their strategy? Because that's not what's top of their mind. They want sales conversions. They need revenue. They need profit. They need sales conversions at lower costs, lower tacos. And the last thing that they want to talk to me about is brand strategy, although that's what they need. And so I thought, if I can find a way To package what is classic brand strategy steps into something simpler, into something easier to remember and very easy to use, which in the end will give them all the right strategy elements that they need to connect with their customers. Anyway, that's going to be easier to get people to take on board and remember. So, that idea started as almost a teaching aid. A framework to actually get people to. To think about their own brand and their own products and the needs of their customers in a way that wasn't peachy. I didn't want to sit there and lecture people. I didn't want to try and corral them into some kind of university lecture theater and then talk strategy at them. I wanted to give them practical steps and frameworks that they can use really simply and easily and get some instant results from, as we know, because if we change Our messaging or our imagery, we can really quickly turn around that low conversion rate. Within a matter of days, we all of a sudden get click-through and conversion, not just click-through. Okay, how are we going to do that? And so that's where the framework comes from. And those are the four pillars, the IDEA. And in order to make that work properly, I felt that we needed a better way of looking at the customer, the avatars itself. Because traditionally, the way that we've done customer avatars in the industry, it's a throwback era of mass media. When actually those demographics came from publications and media houses who tried to target their newspapers or their magazines or TV programs at a certain demographic, as it was called. And back in the day, that was how media was sold. And that gets you so far. Of course, we need to understand demographics, but only the relevant portion of that huge amount of demographic data relevant to the sale and the product and the customer. So what comes first? The buying intent comes first because that's the only thing that we know for sure because we have that in the search data. The customers already told us what they're looking for. So if we start from what we know and work backwards, then we're going to get a much deeper understanding of the customer. So first of all, in the Avatar 2.0 tool that's in the books in the framework, I start with buyer intent. And then we tried to picture what the motivation behind that search was. What job are they trying to do with this product? What are they trying to achieve with it? How do they want to feel once they've achieved that? What's the future vision of life once this problem that they're trying to fix is solved? Underpinning that, there'll be a number of emotional triggers that we can present to them that demonstrate that we actually understand and empathize with what kids they're trying to do and what they're trying to achieve and we need to show them. The custom of that in our listing, in our images, in our text, in our copy. And then there's some pieces of research that I found fascinating. Shopify did a great piece of research last year. They surveyed about 8,000 shoppers in Europe. And they broke it down into four shopper types. Now, obviously, we have a huge amount of respect in the industry for Shopify. It's a fantastic platform and those guys know how to sell. They know how to present product in a way that customers feel comfortable with it. It's just a super platform. And they say that about 50% of shoppers in their survey sample of 8,000 were what they were the value seekers. And they were looking for price above everything else. They were not brand loyal. They were not likely to come back and buy from you a second time if your price went up a little bit. And so if we're thinking about who we want to serve in a given space, they might not be top of our list of priorities depending on what product category or niche that we're in. About 35% were people who bought into quality, who are seeking not the cheapest price. They want a fair price because fairness is a big psychological factor when we're shopping, when we're dealing with people, what feel that we're being treated fairly. But we're not looking for the cheapest price. And they represented I think 37% of shoppers. So there's a good chunk of people that actually if we deliver a great service and a great product, we relate to them in a way that they want. To receive their information, they could be a really great audience for us. So they're type 2. The value seekers are type 1. These guys are type 2 shoppers. And then there are two much, much smaller groups. And Lowe is the connected crowd. And they were single digit percentages. And so they don't represent a huge Today we're going to talk about volume opportunity for us. So right in the middle of our target audience are a crowd of people who are responsive, who will be brand loyal, who don't seek the cheapest price, but are really looking for a good customer experience. So understanding where our customer in our customer avatar tool sit in that mix of customer types. It's really quite important to us, I think. So then there's that. And then underpinning all of that, once we drill down through motivations, emotional triggers, customer types, then demographics come into play. And only the relevant demographics relevant to that customer experience. Because sometimes it may not be that we're selling to the same demographic every time. It might be a problem focused sale. So someone with, I don't know, let's say in my space haircare, dandruff. It's not restricted to an age group. It's not restricted to male or female. So it's a condition. So it doesn't necessarily mean that the demographics of that customer will be male aged 35 to 45 say. So those demographics aren't relevant necessarily. Because it's condition related. So understanding the context is really important to say, okay, which bit of the demographic mix is relevant to our understanding and then which is nice to know, but so what? And that's the underpinning. So that's avatar 2.0. That's the way that I look at my customer when I'm putting a new brand together. Now, if we take those two tools, the IDEA framework and the Avatar 2.0, and we put them together, we've got an approach that's incredibly simple, incredibly powerful, and starts with what we know, not what we suppose or surmise about our customer. So it's fact. We know that they're so cheap for this product. And then I thought, okay, that's great. I can't leave my Titan members and my clients with that and hope that they're going to piece all this together. So the final part of the puzzle, creating what I call the IDEA brand canvas. And the IDEA brand canvas is a single sheet where we capture all of those outputs. In individual boxes, it's a fill-in-the-boxes approach, and it delivers your brand strategy that you didn't know you needed. And I haven't been trying to sell to you, but it delivers it to you anyway, because that's actually what you need. You need a plan. You need a strategy. You need understanding in order to be able to create content and images and products that will meet the needs of those customers. So that's the brand canvas. And what fascinated me about Jo's workshop the other weekend was I could see immediately how using some of Jo's approach to try to find some of the things that I'd be looking for as well, that conversion piece, you were approaching in a not dissimilar way, but you were using really deep prompts. And I thought that was fantastic. I got an awful lot out of that workshop. And what I would do is take my brand Canvas, I doubt some of the prompts that I've been using to Jo's approach and get even more out of it when I build my own custom GPTs. And those GPTs... Speaker 3: And I haven't even paid Trevor to say this, but I might do after this call. Thank you, Trevor. Speaker 2: I got so much out of the Seller Sessions that weekend, but the best bit I thought was the time that we spent together in that much smaller workshop, and I took a lot of really good insights away from how to use GPTs and ChatGPT in particular. Better even than I was doing before I arrived on that morning. So the next step and the output if you want from the IDEA framework is to end up as a customer with your own brand custom GPT set. As we know we can make as many as we like and we can test each custom GPT with a specific type of output. And we can have a selection of these in our toolbox, but they are all trained on the IDEA framework. And they're all trained on your specific brand because you've been through the IDEA process. You've understood exactly who your customer is and we've captured all of that data in the brand canvas. And that document is one of the training documents that we upload into the back of the GPT to make it deliver very specific responses that are... It doesn't have to go and search the internet. And bring back generalities to us. We've given it parameters. We've told it exactly what the kind of outputs are that we want. We trained it on our brand. And in my case, on my GPT, I've trained it on all the behavioral science, the literature that I reference, either directly or indirectly in book. It will deliver to me exactly what I'm looking for in terms of outputs that are framed in the IDEA framework terms. And it works so much better than just general ChatGPT or any other general GPT that I've used. So if we put the work in, Jo, in the way that you were teaching people, And in that work party, they're going to get so much more out of AI in a significantly better way for their brand than if they were just fiddling around with Claude or fiddling around with ChatGPT or any of the other things. Now, I guess, Max, all of this feeds back into e-content. Because then once we understand exactly who our customer is and we understand what our brand means to them and how it fits into their lifestyle and what role it plays in their life, then all of a sudden we can generate imagery that shows them the brand's role in their life, that shows them within the imagery almost as it were, they can see themselves in that space using that brand. I'm feeling comfortable. Speaker 1: You've done a weeb, Trevor. The weeb that Trump talks foul way goes through all of the different talking points and hits them all. So, congratulations. Speaker 2: I'm not sure I like being called that. Speaker 1: I'm just joking. I mean, I think that was really a tour de force and thank you for it. I guess I'm someone who likes to learn by maybe examples. So could you take Nike or one of the big brands and just show how they're using the IDEA framework, even if they're not specifically using it, but capture many of those elements. Speaker 2: Max, I'd like to go a bit smaller, if I may. Speaker 1: Sure, yeah. Speaker 2: Because in the book, there's a really great example of personalization. So personalization is a key motivator for customers. They like to feel that their needs are being driven, addressed directly by the brand and the customer. And so it's prinnylondon.com. It's a makeup site. Now, this lady Trini used to be on TV with a partner and they used to do a how to dress, how to dress for your body shape thing in the 90s. And that era came and went for them and their TV program gradually faded away and they were doing stuff in India, things like that. But as far as the UK was concerned, their main market, their telly games were over. And what Trini did, which was really clever, she created a range of makeup for certain skin types and certain skin colorations and tones. And nothing particularly new about that, really. But the clever bit was she developed what I believe is called Match To Me, Match Numeral To Me. It is their tool. And you fill in a small Question about how old you are, your skin type, your tonality, your coloring, all of that stuff, which helps them say, okay, through our makeup artists testing all of our colors and all of our products on different kinds of skin, this is what our personal recommendation to you is. And then it narrows down their entire Product portfolio into products that might only be right thing for me. That was if I was looking for that kind of product. And then obviously, there's all the you might also you might want to consider upsell, downsell, sideways and all that kind of clever e-commerce stuff. But it starts with personalization. And that whole personalization thing is a massive trigger, rather than being left to try and figure it out for yourself. A particular online job, if you buy makeup, Because it's not like being in store when you've got testers and you can put a little bit on the back of your hand or there's a makeup where you can try a bit of blush or a bit of that. This is a remote experience. So how she's made that remote experience feel personal is incredibly powerful. And she's gone from basically a starter because her business was a start over. I think he's doing something like $400 million a year or something like that. It's huge. And it's not necessarily had a ton of TV advertising. I think I may have seen on a TV slot way down the channel listing somewhere in the 30s on one of those specific channels. I can't remember which one it was now. And it wasn't very long. There was a quick burst and the ad campaign was done. $400 million from zero in about three or four years. That's going so. And she's also got in-store outlets and that kind of stuff. I think she may be in Harrods or Selfridges and a couple of other people now. But it started as an online business, a direct-to-consumer business. And if we have ladies looking at podcasts or listening, go to trennylondon.com and you'll see a prime example of what I mean by that, that whole understanding of her customer in such depth. That she was able to think about how they might like to experience the shopping process rather than just say, okay, here's what we've got. Take a pick. Price is good. It's cheap. People don't always care about price. If you get the rest of it, then price becomes less of an issue. And Max, that was one of the drivers for me to try and capture all of this in the book. Because everybody's worried about price. Everybody's like, oh my God, I've got to be the cheapest. There are only two power points in pricing. One is the cheapest, one is the most expensive. And seldom are we ever at either end of that spectrum as direct sellers. So what we want to do is position our product to have A fair price for our customer because we want to treat them fairly. That's what they want. They don't want to feel that they've been price gouged or anything like that. But at the same time, we need enough margin to run our business. We need enough margin to pay Amazon because heaven knows they take most of the total gross revenues and more disappear into Jeff Bezos' pocket. And that's even if we are running a brand that has managed its tacos, total advertising costs to spend, to deliver something like a sub 20% tacos overall and a margin in the order of 25% that we can take out of the business, pay ourselves perhaps, reinvest in more stock, hopefully, And keep the cycle going. So the importance of the conversion piece in all of this is so vital. It's critical. I would argue it's as important, if not more so than any other piece of the puzzle, because we can put all the effort we want into getting people to our listing. And I've put a good product on there and we've got it from China. We got through the tariff barriers. We've got a PTC campaign dialed in. We're getting traffic a reasonable price. And what happened? They slip away. We didn't say the right things. We didn't embrace them. We didn't figuratively put our arms around that customer. When they arrived on our listing and said, that's okay. We understand. We get you. Yeah, we've got what you need. You can trust us. And if they don't trust us, they don't buy. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think personalization is a really important piece. And I think it's going to be an even more of a possibility now with AI. So I think it's really exciting. But I wanted to go a little bit back into Amazon seller mode, which is Praxico. Which is, okay, so this is a, an awesome framework. I now have it. I need to understand my customer. I need to do my homework properly, but how do I start? Where do I start? What do I do, Trevor? So do you cover that in the book and like, how should any seller really start with this and actually execute? Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: Start with the customer. Because in the end, it's all about the customer. It's not about us. Our brand story isn't about us. It's about them. Their customer journey is theirs. And then they experience all of these different touch points with us in our brand at various places. They may or may not see us like social media, for example, or in their initial browsing. And so this customer journey piece is all about the different stages that our customer goes through. And at each touchpoint, we need to be showing them that we're the right choice for them. Before we do anything else, we need to understand, therefore, what the right choice for them looks like. For them. From their point of view. Through their side of their eyes, not ours. The way that they see it. And so understanding how people actually show up and the emotional triggers that we can build into our communication. And I don't want to sound manipulative when I say that, Jo. Because I don't want it to feel like we are manipulating the client. What we actually want to do is understand how to serve them better. Because if we give them what they need, they'll buy from us. It's really that simple. So rather than try and fix a listing that may not be optimized from the listing end of the telescope, What we need to do is turn that around and look at it from the end that the client, the customer sees through. And are they actually, are we showing them what they need to see in order for them to say that they look like they know what they're doing. They look like a brand that might understand me, might get me. And there's a piece of research that was done by Accenture, their digital arm. I think they've changed their name a while ago. But again, it was a really big piece of work. And one of the key outputs of it, and I reference it in the book, is that customers want to feel that we see them. In this age of mistrust that we all exist in, where this fear of AI, am I being told the truth? Am I being shown something that's real? Can I really believe what's there in front of me? In that context, what customers really want is a bit of humanity. They want to feel that we get them. They want to feel that we understand them. And so that's what I call Authentically human in the book, I make this reference that we need to present ourselves back to our customer as being authentically human, not robots behind the screen, not bots just delivering automated responses to them. It's possible it would be fabulous to reach through the screen and just take them by the hand and shake their hand. Of course we can't do that. But we could make them feel that might be possible if we were ever to meet them. And customer service therefore clearly plays an enormous role in all of this, but it's all customer focused. And actually, unless we really do understand that customer in such depth that we almost feel their pain as it were, how can we generate messaging and how can we generate prompts for AI and prompts for words and listings and images unless we understand what looks good from our customer's point of view in the first place. Speaker 1: Yeah. I want to ask you a bit about creating a brand voice. I know you talk about this in the book. I know it's one of our biggest learnings from customers and this is super important and we've spent a long time building tools to enable people to take brand voice. And also, my first part of the question is how should customers do this? And then secondly, in the end, you have to be a bit Controversial. In the Amazon world where most customers believe they're buying from Amazon, they don't really, if you're a private label seller, they're not really distinguishing between the private label sellers, in my opinion. The customer will be like, oh, I got this from Amazon. They won't necessarily know that it's coming from X or Y seller. How important or not important is brand voice in a context of Amazon? Speaker 2: Much brand voice exists, whether it's good or bad, or whether it's even hardly perceptible. But what we're putting out there effectively is our brand voice. So it's there. It's as personal to our brand as our own voice is to ourselves. And whether we're communicating clearly or not, empathetically enough, We have a certain amount of warmth or understanding in our tone and the way that we address one another in the flesh. The same happens when people interact with our brand. What we put out there is what they receive. So, in that sense, regardless of whether people trust Amazon or not, or trust us or not, The brand is always part of that whole piece. It is present whether we like it or not. So my view is we better do a good job with it then because there's a piece in the book also that talk about and that's about build that you call it rent trust. So that's the TikTok dilemma and influencers. If we hand over the success of our business in its entirety to Jeff and Amazon, Or to any number of TikTok influencers on any number of other platforms, then we're just renting trust. And that trust can evaporate in a moment if Jeff decides we don't want to deal with you anymore. Or all of a sudden an influencer stops working with you and you've been plugged into their audience and all of your traffic's been coming from that source. You don't own that. So my view is, now more than ever, is that we ought to be thinking multi-channel and owning some of that trust that we're trying to build and keeping that to ourselves and making it ours. And we can do that, of course, by having our own direct-to-consumer store, whether it's Shopify or whatever other platform you choose to use. And we do that by putting The right kind of messaging out into the world through which other channels, social of course, but any other channels that we might interact with that customer on their journey, it's got to be consistent. So consistency of brand voice is possibly foundation because Inconsistency breeds disgust. If we say one thing one day and something else another day, people say, you know, that makes, I don't get it, he said this and then he said that and there's just something I'm not comfortable with that. And it's the same with no brand. Whereas Jo, every time I see her, she's dead straight down the line and she's as consistent as they come and I'm buying into what she's saying. I believe her. I trust her. And so that consistency element in In behavioral science, it is critical. There are studies about it, Max, numerous studies in fact that show that consistency is one of the actual major factors in whether or not we like and trust someone else or a brand or a business or whatever. In fact, interestingly, I was listening to a podcast the other day Which was talking about how fraudsters managed to take us in. So back to this trust thing again, how they build our trust and then misuse it. And one of the ways that they do that is being incredibly consistent in the way that they message us through their emails, making it look like they're calling us from the bank. And the minute we sense an inconsistency on a fraud television call or emails that come in that we think there's something not right about that, We get it. Subconsciously, we immediately think there's something in us that says, no, this is not right. This is spam. This is fraud. But the flip side is the same. When it's so consistent with our life experience of that brand, we accept it and we delete it. I know not all of a sudden we've been caught by fraudsters and that's how they do it. And consistency is such an important part. So therefore, if we can take that understanding and use it for our own benefit, be consistent in our listing. I've seen so many listings guys where the image stack looks Huawei, we get to the A plus content, it's got a slightly different style. And then we go to the storefront and that again isn't quite in line with all the other stuff that's happening. And if I'm a shop, I'm good. What's going on here? These guys aren't professional, are they? How good is their product going to be, therefore? How good will their customer service be if they can't even be consistent on their list? And they took through and they continue to show. So that's why it's important because there are plenty of other options on Amazon and then Amazon have the trust. Max, to go back to your original point, Amazon have the trust so how important is brand voice in that context? It's about conversion. We have consistent brand voice. Aids, sales, conversion. Massively. Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I have an interesting question. I think it's maybe like a debating point, which is at the moment we're talking a lot about AI and AI-generated content and AI-generated imagery. And we talked about the point of competency and trust. And we are all in the sphere of, hey, AI is great. It can create all of this content for you. But I also, I've been posting a lot of links on LinkedIn and a lot of people are messaging saying, yeah, but this can erode trust when customers figure out that this is not real, that this is AI. So how do you feel like AI might affect this in the future? Because let's face it, AI is not always going to be a positive thing when it comes to customer experience. Speaker 2: If we start from where we are today, Jo, there's a huge mistrust of everything that is being said to us in the public space. And that's our starting point, whether we like it or whether we don't. We exist in a bubble, we three, the Amazon people more broadly. It's a microcosm and the rest of the world is out there and for the vast majority of them, they're the recipients of the outputs of AI. They're not AI users and they're fearful. They're fearful that they'll make the wrong choice, for example, that they've been sold something that isn't right for them necessarily and How we solve that is AI is not going away. We know it's not going anywhere and it's increasingly part of our life. Therefore, How do we bring some humanity into what we put out there, whether it's generated by AI or whether it's written by humans or whether it's a hybrid where we told the AI key points that we want to make, it gives us subcontent and then we edit and we do iterative generation until we get to where we want to be. The more human that is, in my opinion, the better, because There are telltale signs, if you know what you're looking for, that something's been spewed out by Airy. And people will get slaughtered about spotting that. Because it's important to them that they want to be able to feel comfortable in putting their credit card details into the platform and transacting. And what it comes down to is they don't just want a transactional relationship. They want a more personal relationship as Accenture research showed us. That was the key piece that the customer wants. So if we always look at it from the customer's point of view. What do they want and what do they need from us? Then that should guide how we use AI. And I've been using AI since since the off. In fact, that's how Max and I first met. We were talking about it at a meetup and ChatGPT had only just been launched. You were already in that space working away on e-content. And so you were very much at the forefront of all of that. And we were having these conversations back then. I remember various meetups that we've had. How can we humanize the outputs, in your case, visuals, Max? How can we make that image look as human as possible? And therefore, engender trust in the people who are looking at that image and say, wow, that's real. That's not generated by AI. The impact that's going to have on the world as we move forward, if you cannot tell what is human and what is not, then you're I don't know what the answer to that particular issue is because it's coming. It reminds me of one of my favorite films, Blade Runner. And when the Blade Runner cop, Deckard, is at the Tyrell Corporation and he's talking to the boss and the replicant, Rachel. And more human than human, that was the Tyrell Corporation's strapline. And that was in the movie in the 80s. And we're arriving at that. At least on the screen, not in the flesh yet. Of course, we're not making clone humans that are more human than the human, but in our messaging, in the imagery, the way that movies are going to be made, the way that if we wanted to, we could bring back dead actors and have them performing as they were in their prime. Now, obviously, copyright and that kind of stuff would have to be negotiated with the estate, but it's possible like it's coming. It's clearly coming. Now what that's going to do to Hollywood, heaven knows. But this slightly old Chinese curse, in a way, may you live in interesting times. And we certainly don't. You guys are at the edge, the cutting edge of it. And I'm benefiting from working with you guys and understanding what it is you're trying to do and implement that in my own way. I think that for me, there's always going to be a need for the humanity to be present in the outputs. Speaker 1: Yeah, coming on to that point and I think this is one of the last chapters of your book which is about building a personal brand and it links quite nicely to what you're just saying about bringing the humanity to all of the stuff which could be AI generated in one's business. So how do you think about founders, entrepreneurs, the influencers, Jo being a non-influencer but a very well-followed LinkedIn personality. How do you think about building personal brand? Speaker 2: I think it's as important for some sellers on Amazon, for example, and other people in the educational space, which Jo is, of course. She's teaching others how to use AI. I am now. I'm a published author, or will be on Friday, and we're helping other people. And the personal brand element of that becomes critical because People have to trust us. Max, you've become the face of Econkin. I believe people know your name more so than that of your product. And that's because you've been present. And you've been active. And you've been out there at events. And you've been pressing the flash. And you've been there to talk to people. Now, okay, this is a microcosm in our space because you're not selling your product to the mass market. As I am not really, or Jo, to the average punter, dead, but our personal brand is still us. And we need to do just the same things as if we were creating a brand. And authenticity, fundamentally, be ourselves. Be honest about what we do and how we can help others. And if we can't necessarily help them, be honest about that as well. You might say, okay, this is, my service is not for you because your problem is not the thing that I fix. Your problem, but in my context, you've got a traffic problem over there or you've got a product problem. Your supply chain's screwed. They're delivering poor product and customers are getting a bad experience. Same applies to us if we're delivering a good or indifferent or a bad customer experience. It's the same thing. We just happen to be the conduit through which that experience is delivered because it's, in my case now, with the mentoring and the book and Jo's with workshops and so on, it's a much more direct one-to-one conduit as opposed to mass market. But the principles are the same really and our brand voice is exactly the same. How we speak, how The words that we use are tone, our gestures, whether or not we can get people to lean in or they sit back. And what we've got to do is get them out of the chair and lean forward by the way that we engage. And we do that through our personal brand. And just by being who we are and being genuinely ourselves, I think that we can try to be something we'd like to be, an image that we have in our own minds about what perhaps, wouldn't it be great if, would it be great if I was a rock star? But I'm not. So I'm just a sort of a happy strummer. But I'm honest about not people that I play with we don't put gigs and things but we are you I wouldn't be up there with Springsteen Necessarily, I wouldn't pick me to be in his band probably but Probably not maybe he just doesn't know what he's missing. He doesn't know what he's missing. Yeah, but that's let's take Bruce is a brand. I saw him a couple nights ago in Manchester. It was fantastic cake and the most Compelling thing about Bruce is his authenticity. What is what you get and it's what you always had from Bruce. So consistency is a play there, that very important element. You know what you're going to get and he's going to over deliver every single time. And you come away having spent a substantial amount of money on the ticket. Feeling fantastic. Feeling that you hit the embrace that happened at the venue. That you were all there together. You'd experienced something. I wouldn't call it transcendental. But for a period, you were with your tribe. And this is what we have to do as personal brand people. We have our tribe. We have to make them feel welcome. We have to embrace them. We have to bring them in. We have to help. Speaker 3: Awesome. And I think your book will definitely help a lot of people with a lot of essentially how to connect with their customers. So I think now we get to the end of the podcast and I would really love you to share with us how people can buy your book, how they can find it and yeah, how they can get in touch with you as well. Speaker 2: Great. Okay. First and foremost, because I'm about to be in the launch phase, I've sold my soul to Jeff and I put it on Amazon. We don't judge. For a limited time, Jo, there's going to be a silly price on the book. That's $2.99 to get the Kindle version. There is available, or will be available on Friday, A paperback version implant. I got my proof copy the other day. So, so it's real. It's in the flesh and that it will be available from my website, which is idea consult. Sorry, start over. Idea brand consultancy.com. Speaker 3: Awesome. We'll link it all in our description. And then, in general, if people want to get in touch with you or do you want them to get in touch with you, how would they do that? Speaker 2: Yes. Again, on the website, Jo, there's a Contact Us page if it's a general inquiry or if they want to talk specifically about their problems, there's an opportunity to book a half-hour consultation with me. There's a calendar link on there. And they can fill in the form, tell me what their problems are, send me as much information and leads as possible so that we can have a meaningful conversation and see if there's a fit, see if we can make some magic happen or not. Or at the very least, they'll walk away with some value that says, okay, my problem isn't what I probably thought it was. It's this in Trevor's painting, at least, anyway. And they get some value. So that's the website, too. I'd be delighted to speak to brand owners of any size, because particularly if they're budding, they've started, they've got a product in the market, but it's not going the way that they told. I'd love to be able to help, because we've all been there. We've all had that moment of struggle, and we have to help people get through. Speaker 3: Awesome. Speaker 2: Cool. Speaker 3: Trevor, it was a pleasure. It was super interesting and thanks so much for being our guest and to all of our viewers and listeners, please join us next week again where we're going to have another awesome guest. So until then, bye bye. Thank you. Speaker 1: Bye.