Brand conversations and creativity at scale | Youri Sawersche #27

We keep on hearing about the fact that consumers are in conversations with brands. We keep on hearing that it’s a two-way street and everybody’s saying, okay, brands have to rethink everything, etcetera. And it’s true only to an extent because what people tend to forget is that yes, it’s a conversation. But as a brand, you’re the first one who speaks…

Ben: [00:01:51] Youri. Thanks very much for joining the podcast. Wanted to kick off with a pretty broad question, which is what is the role of a brand in the digital age?

Youri: [00:02:04] If we look at branding before the role of brands before the digital age, It’s very much about trust, right? If you were in the fifties, you wanted to go travel to a Hilton. So you thought, well, if I go to Hilton, I’m going to have hot shower and nobody’s gonna rob me. So a brand was very much about identifying quality service for people in the digital age. This has changed a little bit because it’s much more transparent, right? You don’t need to stay at Hilton to be sure that there’s going to be wifi. Right?

So the role of branding is a little bit more subtle. It’s more about building up association of ideas, right? If we think about B2C, right? If I buy this brand, what does it say about me? If I am a customer from this brand, what signal do I send to the people around me? And that’s pretty much the role of brand, which is going to be more about increasing the perceived value. I think fundamentally our brand is about reducing perceived risk and increasing perceived value at the same time. In a B2B setting, it’s still very much about decreasing perceived risk, right? Let’s say you want to buy machine tools for millions, from a new supplier.

It’s very hard to decide which one’s the best because you look at all the criteria. So the brand is this thing that’s going to make the difference. Thats going to make you feel “okay, I can trust them”. So I think in a digital era, the branding is a, is more and more about increasing, perceived value, and maybe a little bit about reducing the perceived risk in a B2B setting.

Ben: [00:03:42] If branding is about creating an association of ideas, then it doesn’t really work, does it, to try to micro-target? Right. And because, you know, we, we might be able to stimulate demand maybe by micro-targeting, but we can’t create brands by micro-targeting. Right. Because as you said that they are a statement of ourselves and the sort of lifestyle that we aspire to in many ways.

Youri: [00:04:07] I think all marketing practitioners will not fundamentally agree with what I’m going to say, but marketing is very tactical. You know, it’s about defining your own, your four Ps type of thing, you know, product you have or what price, which channel you use cetera. But what we miss most of the time is that these levers that we can use in market coherent with something bigger, which is what the brand is.

Right. And which is much more strategic. So what is your positioning? What do you stand for in the market? What are your key messages? How do you frame a brand? How do you present it to the world? And once this is clear, the strategic level, then you can go down to the operations of the tactic and decide, okay, we’re going to distribute our, our whiskey brand, we’re going to distribute it more into exclusive concept store rather than in duty-free to show that we are an exclusive brand because we are [00:05:00] positioned as an exclusive brand. So I think that two different things, right, and this whole microtargeting really comes at a, at a very tactical stage.

Ben: [00:05:10] So do you think that, you know, we’ve seen a rise of, you know, just on a kind of short term tactical proceeds versus the longterm strategic stuff like brand building?

Youri: [00:05:20] Well, I think we see obviously a lot of short term type of tactics anyway, but I think that they’re not going to build brand equity in the longterm. Because, you know, I mean, yes, you can increase your followers by 20% in a week, but what does it say about your real brand equity?

Maybe not much. What I think is really interesting when we speak about a digital era is that you mentioned it. We keep on hearing about the fact that consumers are in conversations with brands, right? We keep on hearing that it’s a two way street and everybody’s saying, okay, brands have to rethink everything, et cetera.

And it’s true only to an extent because what people tend to forget is that yes, it’s a conversation. But as a brand, you’re the first one who speaks you are the first one who speaks, which means you can define who you are. You can frame yourself, you can position yourself and then people can react to this. They can agree with it, not agree with it, and it’s good and it’s bad. And then the conversation starts, but the framing, you know, the positioning upfront of a brand at a digital level, it’s still a one way streets and I think people tend to really, really forget that and kind of just think that the brand is just something that you know, is going to be a completely shared, that intangible thing.

But actually first is something that is created by someone, a brand doesn’t appear because people think it’s their first, someone give a direction and then people have association of ideas. And then yes, the brand is in the mind of the people who are the audience, but. You know, to have an audience, you need to produce something first.

You see what I mean? And I think it’s something that’s completely overlooked in this digital marketing era, where you have all those digital driven agencies that just speaks about engagement and conversation, but they totally missed the point about it. What is the message you have and what is the content? Just this morning, I was in conversation with one of the big digital agencies in Switzerland and those guys trying to sell me services to take care of my Facebook ad and Google ad cetera, but by discussing with them, and you know, they were charging four, five, six, 10 K a month as a retainer. And then I’m really trying to understand, and maybe I sound a bit stupid, but what is it exactly that they do?

And then it comes down to, yeah, we look at key words and we can make recommendations and be like, well, that’s a lot of money for, for just looking at things. But then they’re like, yeah, because you know, then you’re going to push some really good content and I’m like, but who does the content? Oh yeah, this you should provide to us.

So it really goes down to something that was there before digital, and is still here after digital, which is what you have to say and do the value you offer through content is going to, in my view, definitely overtake all those short term tactical exercise you can do.

Ben: [00:08:07] What about separating products from brand. If you’ve got a great product, people will tell each other. So is in a world where everything’s more transparent. Does it shift the balance towards investing more in product marketing, you know, or to put it another way? Can you have a) a mediocre product, a good marketing team? and b) a company with good products and a mediocre marketing team?

Youri: [00:08:30] It depends what’s your internal benchmark for quality and value is, but if you have a mediocre product and a very strong brand chances that you’re not going to last forever are very high. So I think from the worst, which will be a fad to something, to be a trend to something which might be around, but then it’s going to die off.

Uh, at some point it’s not going to fly and it’s not going to be a brand that will really get people to invest in. I think, especially because then you create a gap between the messaging you sent saying, Oh, we have amazing brands, but actually product is crap. And, and this gap. Into messaging and reality needs to be managed very, very carefully in a digital era, you know, back then it wasn’t the case, but good product is a key success factor you needed to, you needed to be in the game, right.

But a good product alone. It’s not going to cut it. You know, if you have a very good fashion brand or a very good academic program, I have some example about this. Oh, you have a very good boats rental service. It’s not enough. And we sit over and over and over again. We’ve got companies big, smallest that come to us.

They have a really, really good strong offering, good customer service, good product, but they just don’t manage to try to prove them out of it. And then we can help them with the commercial work we do increase that perceived value and reduce the perceived risk of buying them. But we can [00:10:00] only do this because the base product is good.

And when the base product is shaky when, when advertising is basically a misleading and lying advertising type of thing. And that thing, it’s a very, it’s a very dangerous slope to be on,

Ben: [00:10:12] So, you know, a brand starts the conversation, but it is a two. It is, you know, it is a two way conversation and arguably the customer is much, much more influential than they were, you know, pre-digital both in, in terms of, you know, acting as a ambassador for the products, but also I guess, in a sense in shaping the product, right? Because you can get feedback in a way that you couldn’t, when you didn’t have so much direct access to the consumer. So how much, how important is it consumer become in, shaping the brand in the, you know, as in, like now that that two way street is possible.

Youri: [00:10:45] Depends. Really? Which type of companies we’re talking about in reality. Yeah. In theory, yes, consumers are involved in everything, et cetera. In reality. There’s only big, big groups that can afford, for instance, different focus groups and having different market testing, et cetera, only big FMCG companies can afford. As soon as you are in the mid side, uh, segment companies don’t have the time or the cash to do these type of things.

So yes, they’re gonna involve the customer in the sense that they will collect the feedback for instance upfront, but you won’t have that collaborative process. I think there’s two schools of thoughts when it comes to involve the customer. Actually, I am on the one that has the feeling that you should not involve them too much because people actually don’t really know what they want.

They don’t really know why they buy things. And if you ask them, they don’t give you the right reasons. The typical example is the iPhone or the iPad that everybody knows, you know, nobody would have said, uh, Well, I want an iPad or I want an iPhone. You know, I think it was Henry Ford who famously said, if you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

I think we need to be careful with involving too much people in the, in the creation process, because we need to test it when we can. But from the creative inputs, I’m not sure how valuable this is. We need to understand who the people are and what they want overall. But. I wouldn’t make them co-creator. Long time ago, there was a very small business in Geneva, actually, it was called Leman Loisirs and, um, what they do is boat rental service, right?

So basically you pay money upfront in order to rent a boat over the summer, quite expensive, because you need to have a boat license. You know, you pay at least 3000 bucks minimum for the season. And the business was not going so well. And the owner asked a bit my help. We kind of had an agreement when I help him out.

It’s very small local business. If I had to ask the current customers, what do you think about the service they would have said? Yeah, it’s great. I’ve got my boad, its a good money. There’s not too many people. You’ve got nothing to be changed. So the things that is absolutely not valuable from a brand building point of view, however, what we understood was, well, there is money left on the table because this businesses is positioned as a local hobby, when it should be positioned as a private club. And if you position it as a private club, we can drive the revenue up and we can make it much more attractive for a target segments. So we rebranded the whole thing to Boat Club Geneva, and then, which is not original, but which does the trick, it corresponds to what target audience expect.

Then once we rebrand this whole thing to Boat Club Geneva and told the story about an exclusive club in the center of Eaux Vives in which you can be a member, not a client, a member, the sales picked up. And picked up because we didn’t ask the client what they wanted. So that’s why I think, yes, we need to listen to customer. Yes. If we see that something doesn’t work we definitely need to tweak and test in trials, it works a hundred percent, but at some point you need to take the cat and say, okay, we aren;t going to do it that way because that’s not how we can drive a premium. Branding is about driving a premium. And if you ask customers, they’re never gonna tell you, Oh, I would love this product was 25% more expensive because you tell me a better story about it, even though we know we can do it.

Ben: [00:13:55] Is that how you measure the success of a, of a brand to the extent to which it creates loyalty and the ability to charge a premium?

Youri: [00:14:03] The way we look at it. We look at branding from a very business perspective, which is if you do branding, you need to be able to drive a premium on your business. I need to be able in the longterm to lower your marketing cost because people want to be part of it.

So you don’t have to advertise so much because people want to speak about you, being the price et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, we see it now with an MBA program we worked on in Switzerland, we really had them reposition their brand, their whole program. We didn’t touch the syllabus because that’s not our job. And we’ve seen an increase of 30 or 35% of applicants.

And this is just by branding. And we’re talking about the MBA in a top university in Switzerland. You would think people are rational when they look for an MBA, they would look at the syllabus, look at who the professors are in the syllabus and decide based on the syllabus and the fees, whether this makes sense or not.

But that’s not how people choose an MBA. They choose it [00:15:00] because: does it tell a story I want to be part of? Is it something I’m proud to walk around with?

Ben: [00:15:04] How do you persuade people to come to you and how do you win clients and how do you also charge a premium for the work that you do?

Youri: [00:15:11] You mean us as Creative Supply?

Ben: [00:15:12] Yes. Or a branding agency in general

Youri: [00:15:15] The way we get, we manage to get clients and really build the reputation of the firm because we only are five years old company, but we really, really growing strong.

It’s really two steps process. Actually, it’s so simple, but I’m happy to share it because nobody’s going to do it. You need first to have really clear, good content. And when I mean content, I’ll speak about intellectual property, which means models, frameworks, analytical skills. We’re not selling a vacuum cleaner where I can tell you, try it, if you like it, you buy it. What I’m telling you, what I’m selling you is intellectual capacity to, to build your brand. So the best way I can do. I can do that is by sharing with you some models, some frameworks, some reports, some things where you thought, okay, those guys understand what this is. It’s very easy to do.

It’s very easy, in theory, it’s very hard in practice because one, you need to have the capacity to do it, two the discipline and three distribute it. And then once this is done, while you distribute it and you share your content to as many people as, as you can, and you use that content to open doors. And for us, the doors have been pretty much, uh, I don’t know, half of the startup incubator in Switzerland, some of the top universities, uh, in Europe and in Switzerland, the trade associations, magazine trade press because we provide them with valuable content, which is not selling our service. Right. Nobody wants to be sold. Everybody wants to buy it. Well, I read it in a book from the thirties, he was right. Nobody wants to be sold. Everybody wants to buy and we have, and we have to provide that.

And we’ve been very, very good from the beginning from day one in investing in content. And I’m not talking about just writing random articles to crowd everybody’s Google, but really think what are the models? How do we look at branding? How do we do branding for B2B, for instance, and then we’ve done interviews of 20 executives across Switzerland about the question: B2B branding. And the result is a report on the topic that we’ve made in collaboration with the eMBA of EPFL. And once you have that and you go to clients and you say, Hey, you want us to help you in BTB branding? Oh, if you want, you can have a look at our report on B2B branding that we’ve done with, guess what, the second best technical school in Switzerland. The pitch is very high. So now you can have someone who just become a B2B branding consultant, but what premium can you charge? And we are basically reducing the risk, right? Earlier in the discussion, I was saying a brand is about reducing the risk and increasing the perceived value by bringing those discontent pieces, we reduce the risk.

You think if you’re a potential client, okay. Those guys are able to actually publish something with EPFL, they cannot be that bad. So they trust us.

Then step two for me, so one is content. Two is a channel if you want to stay in contact. Oh, yep. Yep. So it’s content channel and then the third is closing, because then you get the clients.

Ben: [00:18:18] Yep. And then after that community, right?

Youri: [00:18:21] Yeah. If you want a four, you need the currency because you know, it’s getting project is as much about getting than giving. And you cannot have a short term mentality where everybody you meet is about selling them a project, because then you are a traveling sales guy.

Nobody wants that. But if you look at it, we look at it a very long term and we say, what is the vision for Creative Supply in 10, 15 years? And our vision in 10, 15 years is we want to be the reference in branding, at least in Europe. And if we want to become the reference in branding, we cannot have a mentality where we just moving from one project to the next, because that is just called cashflow.

It’s not called being the reference. So we grew an ecosystem, a community to pick up on what you said, and this community is made of what… people we teach at universities pro bono work we do with young startups that are promising. Direct coaching, publication, et cetera, and need to have all of these as part of our ecosystem, some will drive projects some months when in the longterm we can become a reference.

And a lots of our competitors don’t think that way because they have such a high payroll that they’re just driven by getting the next project to pay the bills. But since we have a very different structure, we don’t have that. I don’t need to send you a 3D rendering because my 3d guys are sitting, doing nothing, I don’t care.

So I can focus on, on growing Creative Supply as the reference in the industry rather than just getting more projects, which is a very short and we are looking at [00:20:00] it.

Ben: [00:20:00] So community view is a bit also a bit about creating multiple revenue streams. Right. But one of the things you just said there, it was quite interesting. Cause I was going to ask you that when you said you were working with startups, which is how do you monetize relationships? And I think you answered it right by saying a lot of it’s pro bono, because I guess, you know, you help them as they grow, you know, they come back to you.

Youri: [00:20:18] The way we did, with startups, we actually had to draw the line is we do pro bono work with startups which are involved with sustainable developments. That is very clear. Any startup that has, that has something linked to green startups, sustainable development. We work, we do typically workshop program with them. But other type of startups. We don’t do pro bono, but we cannot, uh, do full project for them because. We are too expensive and it doesn’t make sense for a startup to spend 50k on a, on a branding project.

You know, you just need to, you’re very smart with your resources. What does make sense for a startup is to do half a day workshop where we can give them the key tools to direction, the clarity. One, two hours of coaching here and there. The budget remains very, very valid and then they can grow with it. And actually a lot of startups weve had and some of them, you know, two, three years down the line, they come back and then they got the funding funds. That’s going to say, well, now we need to professionally. And then they come back. So I think different types of options, clients of companies have different types of needs and you cannot just sell a full branding and a strategic audit to a mid company in Neuchatel. You know what I mean? So we need to adapt.

Ben: [00:21:28] And how repeatable are some of the, some of the work you do? Because I think it’s know it’s interesting. You’ve created all these different revenue streams, which is great, but the sort of core engine of, of your business, which is branding work, you know, how, how often, how, how longterm is that? If you find a client, you know, or do you just do a rebrand and then move on to the next client

Youri: [00:21:46] Interesting that you ask this because you really hit the spot in term of how we’ve changed our strategy in the last six months is we used to be, I call it a Tinder agency, a one night stand or one type of project, right.

They come to us, they have a problem. The burn is not clear. The message is not clear. We do the work and then we bill and we disappear. And then we move on to the next one, right? The next swipe to keep the Tinder analogy. And, um, couple of months back, we realized that there’s a few problems with this.

Well, The lack of stable cash flow is one, but also from the client’s side, we realized that we did really good work at the strategic level and then implementation really failed because they went for the wrong provider. The one supplier didn’t manage the process well, or they didn’t have the skis all the time.

And it was not so much a question of budget, more question of focusing coherence. And so we thought it’s really stupid because then we do all this work, which is very good, not a shiny powerpoint and then comes to reality and it just doesn’t look like that. And we thought, okay, let’s, let’s, let’s go away from being a Tinder, uh, agency.

And let’s, let’s become a true creative partner, branding partner for all our clients, where we handled everything from strategy to implementation, uh, in agency jargon, we speak about the long tail, which means that you don’t do, you also do the small things, you know, like kinda like a motion design and a webpage design.

So we do these things now. It;s just that we’ll never do it for a client that needs just this. Right. So if someone comes to us and say, Oh, we need a poster design. We;re definitely the wrong agency to do that. But if someone comes to us saying, we need the branding and then we need someone to work throughout the year for our needs.

Like we can really, really be good at that and make sure that we, we ensure all the touch points. we werked for example with a private school in Geneva, we’ve reached a level where we have this role of kind of final think. All the branding and communication efforts. And I think it’s, it’s really a, it’s really paying off

Ben: [00:23:53] In preparation for this podcast I was watching something, a video of you talking about storytelling. What’s what’s the role of storytelling in branding.

Youri: [00:24:00] The role of storytelling in branding is essentially storytelling is a tool to explain, share what your positioning is to your audience. So storytelling alone depends from your brand positioning.

And depending on the story you tell, you can influence again, the perception and the, uh, association of ideas that people have with your brand. I think the main difference between storytelling, where we speak about branding versus, uh, you know, movie stories and movie, is that a story in a brand should never have an ending.

Cause, you know, in all the movies you have type of a linear structure, right? The hero does something. They have some challenge in fights and again, he wins and the printer stops there. And then it’s the end. But as a brand, you can;t think like this because you’re a brand, you don’t want yourtbrand to end. So your story at its heart at its center must have an idea, a concept that a brand can never, never fully [00:25:00] reach.

Right? I did ask there’s as for instance, impossible is nothing. Which means there’s always a way to get something further. So it’s a story that never ends. Yeah.

Ben: [00:25:11] And you don’t feel like some of these, some of the storytelling’s a bit kind of contrived? Like it’s a fabrication. It’s like, it’s, it’s clearly a marketing tool for us to engage with the company. It doesn’t feel authentic.

Youri: [00:25:26] Storytelling is a bit like a, I guess, a murder, you know, as long as you don’t get caught, it’s fine. And I think if you take, I can mention you at top of my mind, a couple of brands that I know Ted Baker, have you heard of them Ted Baker? There’s no Ted Baker, right? You would assume that that’s the name of the designer, right? this guy doesn’t exist simple as that. Right. So there is, there’s so many, so many brands that, how can I say this? That. That are telling story that actually are not true. Or Hollisted, maybe you know, it’s like a bit of a teenager fashion brand. It says that Hollister is from California and it was founded in 1922, but actually the brand is not from California and it was not founded in 1922.

It’s just that, you know, people don’t check because imagine how many decisions you have to make every day. And if you had to do a full due diligence on every brand, you buy. This would take you a lot of time and consumer don’t do it. They don’t one because they don’t have the time, but two, they also don’t do it because they don’t want to because, you know, it’s so nice to, to be, to buy from this Hollister brand from California since 1922, you don’t want to know that this is a lie, right?

It gives the fenders to the brand, especially in consumer branding. What I’m talking about is more consumer branding. I think when it comes to storytelling in B2B, we’ll have to much, much more careful with the reference that we use, but the logic is the same. There’s a very strong example in B2B, actually from Holcim, a cement company and I love it because really you would not expect a cement company to be, actually be a benchmark in branding. So when you sell cement, you basically sell stones, crushed stones, right. And those, those are called ready-mix and. They all have very rubbish numbers, right? They call Alix 205 Alix, 206, and those are the product number.

And that’s how they’ve been known in the industry. But in one day, one guy in Holcim thought, well, what if we give names to our cement? So let’s call the very strong one Robusto and let’s call the one that’s a bit red Rosso. And then they spinned those names, those Latin name for each of the products or some of the product line… and all the industry laughed at them.

They took the piece saying, can you believe you are selling ALX200? Why do we need to call this Rosso? What do you think you are, an espresso? Right, but the client didn’t think that way. This, this is very good. The red one is Rosoo, everybody knows what I speak about. I like it. So then what happened next is the clients of Holcim but also other cement company went to other cement company and say, Hey, we would have to buy some whole Robusto or some Rosso from you, but the company had no choice but to say, Oh sorry those ones are from Holcim, but we have Elyx 205 for you. If you like. So the story is very different. I will speak about ingredient branding in technical terms.

And so I think you can tell a story at so many levels. It’s just a difference, right? From a B2B or B2C.

Ben: [00:28:25] What makes a good hotel brand? Because I notice that you guys work with a lot of different hotels. What stories should a hotel be selling? What, what, what are the association of ideas? What’s the lifestyle association that’s important for a hotel?

Youri: [00:28:38] Hotels have a high in a very difficult situation because at the moment it’s a, I think it’s a whole different topic actually, but overall, it’s very tough to build brands in the hospitality industry. For the one reason that people only stay with you once and even the best hotel brands out there. And they will never want to share the numbers, but maybe five, 10, 15, 20 for the best one for us of the customers actually returning customers. But most of them are just out of one to one nightstand for literally. So how’d you be the brand with people who never come back. The industry just doesn’t want to accept that, but they still try to build brands based on that operational proposition, which is so dumb if you think about it, because nobody cares about it since you only stay once. So what would hotels have to think about? And I think it’s, this, this, this virus is gonna really help them think through. And I think the strongest and the more, agile we’ll really be surviving. After that, they have to think if we were not selling rooms, what would we be about how do we there attract people to us?

And that’s a very, very tough question for most of the hoteliers, because most of the hoteliers branding pitch, or the communication pitch is. Hey, come to a hotel. Great for family, business, couple or whatever you want. We are good. We have a nice swimming pool, fast wifi, and a [00:30:00] breakfast is included. Come stay with us.

This is pretty much the messaging of every virtually, every single hotel brand in the world. Some will throw the word luxury in there or exclusive in there, bespoke or tailored, but they’re telling you the exact same story. You take an advert of Ritz Carlton vs an advertising of Four Seasons.

Those things are the same. Just the room designs, slightly different. One is beige than one is blanc. You know what I mean? So once you start thinking about what the hotel is doing, you know, check-in checkout and housekeeping. When you start to think what is our role? Can we be a creator of something? Can we be an educator?

How can we contribute to our larger community? Not just the local one. Right. What role do we take and find, since we worked with these clients in Paris, building a full new brand for them called French Theory and. We thought about it saying, well, it’s not a hotel brand with something between a, probably a media company, a retail company that happens to have rooms.

And our role is to relay the culture and intellectual life of Paris fifth district. So once you think about a place like this, you not about your role is not about selling rooms. That’s the outcome. That’s what happens next, but issue about relaying. The cultural life of a district.

There’s so many more things you can do. And that’s where I think you can build strong hotel brands because people don’t come to you because you have a room with wifi anymore. So yeah, I think it’s a bit, I know I have a slightly controversial view on stuff. If we actually just published it, talking about publication, we’ve recently published last week, a full hotel concept handbook in collaboration with the École hôtelière de Lausanne which really shows what other, those trends happen in the hospitality industry coronavirus aside. And then what are the steps you need to take in order to build a strong hotel concepts, strong hotel branding, ultimately,

Ben: [00:31:58] is that what you propose enough to see off the Airbnb phenomenon? Let’s pause for a second about how Airbnb fairs posts lockdown, but like just ignore corona for a second.

Youri: [00:32:12] I love that you bring this because you know, what’s what have Airbnb been doing? It’s it’s dematerializing the hotel offering. It’s saying, well, you don’t need to go to a hotel in order to have a room, you can do this through different settlements.

And a lot of attention has been focused on Airbnb in the past years because most of the hotel revenue comes from rooms, right? 70, 80%, most of the time. However, what hotels failed to realize is that. It’s not just the rooms business that is being dematerialized. Hotel pickup is now called Uber. The in room entertainment is called Netflix.

The concierge service is called Google maps. The business corner is called zoom, et cetera, et cetera. So the entire offering an added value of a traditional hotel is actually being dematerialized. So if you think about it, you can book yourself an absolutely amazing Airbnb in Paris, top luxury, you can get picked up with a limousing from Uber. You can have delivered to you some of the top Indian food with a delivery of uber eats. You can have your personal trainer that comes in to, with you to help you to the thing you can use your meditation app in the morning. So do you still need to go to a hotel, questionable right? So once hotels agree to that analysis, they need to say, what is our role?

What can we offer that those digital, uh, offerings cannot. And that’s when branding starts to be very interesting because branding becomes a compass for what’s next, maybe to draw around, not to completely speak just about hotels, if you’re a hairdresser, for instance, right. Depending on how you frame yourself, depending on how you position yourself.

You can also have very different types of services. So a hairdresser typically before the coronavirus would say, I’m a guy who cuts hair in a hair salon, right. That’s how it will be positioned right now. There’s no salon anymore. So what are you? Well, you can be a guy who does cuts hair without the salon, but that’s not a good value proposition.

So you could say, well, actually I’m a guy who knows how to take care of hair. So that’s a very different brand promise. So once you reframe it and you say, I’m the guy who knows how to take care of air, what are the things you can offer, where you can have? I don’t know. an e-shop that shows people how to do that, or that sells a shampoo to people.

You can have a tutorial about taking care of your hair. You can sell a home kids to do braids yourself. I don’t know. It’s endless because your branding is different. And I think hotel, you have to understand that it’s tough. 80% of your business comes from rooms. Why change?

Ben: [00:34:53] Not to go down this rabbit hole too much, but how should marketing branding respond to [00:35:00] the pandemics? So you’re saying, you know, post pandemic, you probably have to reposition a brand reposition the brand promise in some cases, but what about during the pandemic? You know, look. We can take an example of the hotel if you want. But right now you’ve got, you’ve got very little business, I would say. almost zero business. Therefore do you just stop marketing or do you, or do you market knowing that eventually customers will come back and this is the chance to, you know, to gain, share a voice, for example, what are you telling your clients?

Youri: [00:35:30] I’m obviously biased, right? Because the more you’re stopping marketing the more we are going to go through that crisis as well. Okay.

Ben: [00:35:37] So make the case, so we know your biased, you have to make a really good case.

Youri: [00:35:40] But I can make the case by simply telling you that we put our money, where our mouth is. And we are doubling down at the moment. Everything into marketing, as a company, we are changing our website. We are pushing up new content. We are reaching out to new partners and we really doing this using a timeline that, that is really fast because it’s very easy now to just like, Lack the discipline and just let it slip through one day, two day, five weeks type of thing.

I really want to use that time to, well, number one, top of the mind of everybody we work with, number two, prepare the, after, you know, a seat like the army was not fighting now. So let’s make sure those guys really retrained instead of just having everybody chill. And I think that’s a good moment to, uh, to get in you call it share of voice, we call it awareness share, but same thing, right when everybody’s panicking you need to make sure you’re not, and we can get more visibility. You get more publication out there. Get more leads. I don’t expect much in term of business conversion in the next six months. I think it’s unlikely that we’re going to. We’re not going to do a record. Yeah. These being said, we just had a very, a major project coming in literally next week that we just signed in middle of the pandemic for a client. Who’s launching a robot, a co-bot is called, which is about automatization of supply chain for foods. So some industries are very resilient and those industries will need branding as well. And those ones are also pushing the branding.

So yeah, I think that’s what, that’s what brands have to do it, you know, I mean, besides the obvious survival thing, which is about protect your cash and make sure I don’t go do anything stupid, if you can afford it. I think it so much to reach out, but nothing to a, let me try to sell you my product to survive type of way, because you know, you should never try to sell something when you are needy because people feel it.

However, you can share a lot of value to a lot of people. We’ve been organizing a couple of online sessions for free, actually to kind of give people advice about how to run with the brand during this time of crisis, simple, personal branding, et cetera. We have grown our audience. I think you have three, 400 new people in our database since the beginning of the pandemic.

I don’t know if Icould sell out a lot,or not, but it’s definitely people that we would not have reached out if we hadn’t moved our asses. So I think that’s what really brands have to do. And we’re going to double down on branding and marketing efforts in the next six months. We’ll see how it goes for us. I mean, we have a very, very strong pipeline and we have the chance to be very diversified, actually, something I was very often critical criticize for by my peers.

Uh, because, you know, we acted in so many different things, different countries, different industry, and it’s always something that people kept on telling me, you need to focus. You need to focus. You cannot be an agency doing hotel industry and luxury and education, investment branding. But right now I’m very glad that we have doing this because some industries are picking up, some are not, and we have those levels,

Ben: [00:38:38] would you work with tobacco companies? Would you work with arms. Where do you draw the line in terms of the ethics?

Youri: [00:38:45] We don’t draw. We don’t work for tobacco and anything weapon related. We had to turn down a couple of times and it actually would, you know, from a fees point of view, you know, that they pay you for your loss of soul, so it’s very profitable, but then you gotta tell me well if you worked for UBS, which we do well, some of the money they invest is maybe not in the best place.

So then for us, it’s very, very hard to draw the line. We tend to have better conditions for companies that are involved in sustainable development. So we want to emphasize that with having a check out and saying anybody who’s not in a sustainable development, we don’t work with, for instance, while it’s economically not viable.

So, yeah, it’s a bit of, um, you caught me a little bit here because as I think as a, as an industry, the marketing and branding industry as a whole, we are really guilty for, uh, the, the state of the world in which we are. Right. Because you should look at global warming, which now is less of a topic because there’s something called COVID-19.

But if you look at global warming, this is so much linked to over consumption, right? If people were not traveling as much buying so much clothes and eating so much beef, we would not have a problem. And the reason why they buying so much is because they are incentivized to do so by the branding and marketing [00:40:00] industry.

So yes, we are not the one who pulled the trigger, but we provide the gun.

Ben: [00:40:03] Part of the, of the solution to that over consumption will be marketing related, right. I mean, we’re going to have to create a new narratives.

Youri: [00:40:12] The problem at the moment is the whole narrative about green consumption is only, it’s a very negative narrative basically saying, don’t do this, don’t do that.

Don’t do this, can’t do that. And this is really so not attractive. And if you, if I tell you all think about the sustainable fashion brand for instance, They kind of all look the same and you have this image of, you know, something with the linen badly cut, and then you look like some sort of hippie, so the association of ideas linked to anything sustainable are not sexy.

So how can we reengineer the narrative, change the story so that we can emphasize consumption that are more reasonable. I know I’m issue, issue, uh, do much more wellness and meditation. This is consumption, but it’s not hurting the planet. So I think there’s a lot of things that can, that can be done at that level.

And we’ve been doing a bit of work with Climate Kick, which was one of the major European agencies, which is funding and giving grants to sustainable projects. And we really saw the potential because you know, it’s people in those industries, they are, so they are in there because they want to make a difference.

And so they think that their value proposition is the fact that they’re making a difference. And this is true for very small niche audience, but for the mass, it’s not the case. I met a couple of years ago, I think the co founder of Fairphone, a smartphone that use like material that are sourced responsibly? Not, not destroying the planet, but the whole pitch they have is we are, we are nice and we are fair. And I told him, well, the problem with that. I said, who are you clients? You say, well, 70% of our clients are people with PhDs. So highly educated people who think the cause matter, which is great, but you’re not going to make an impact.

Because in order to make an impact, you need to get the mass. And the problem as sad as it is, is that the mass will not react to a message of restriction. So the messaging has to be difference.

Ben: [00:42:09] The answer is probably not to consume less, but to consume more sustainably, right?

Youri: [00:42:14] Yeah. Constant, more sustainably, constant things that mostly dont need resources. Yeah. If you consume education, for instance, if you were consuming lentils instead of beef, if you consume a super fancy, uh, secondhand shops like they have in Tokyo. It’s different. Right. So I think there’s a lot that can be done at that level. And it’s not, I make it sound like it’s very easy to solve or actually so many different facets and dynamic in that, in that question.

But. I think that’s actually the contribution that the branding industry can do to that. I think that’s why I said,

Ben: [00:42:46] I want to talk to you about your business model. Cause this is, this is really interesting and it’s, um, it’s something that we have talked about quite a lot on this podcast. Right. Which is essentially you’re moving away from a sort you know, static kind of hierarchical model, to something which is much, much more networked, right?

Because, so I’ll give you the chance to describe how it works. But basically if I’m in the marketing team of a company, the likelihood is overtime my skill set is going to, you know, going to diminish because I’m not challenged because I’m working for the same company doing the same thing every day.

Right. And then there’s, and then you’ve what you’ve also understood is that there’s a sort of, there’s a gap, right? If I, if I try to sort of unbundle my, my marketing team and source them using freelances via Upwork. I still have to manage the overhead of managing all those people. So what you’re doing is you’re sort of creating some sort of platform that mediates and transfers risk from both parties, right?

Because, because you are matching the best companies with the best creative talent, but you’re doing it in a way where you take responsibility for the deliverables, you take responsibility to make sure the people that work on your platform are looked after financially in terms of mental health and so on.

So it’s, it’s like a new category of platform company. That, of which there aren’t many examples yet. That’s the way I would describe it. How would you describe it?

Youri: [00:44:06] I think we’re definitely a hybrid actually in the sense that we do work with independent creatives. I tend not to use the word platform because it’s too associated to a kind of peer to peer type of model.

And we don’t offer this a client who worked with us. Don’t get to choose which designer they work with. Right. So we don’t have. Were not a matchmaker, we, the best we come up with so far is that we are a branding company as far as it, as it goes. And the fact that we work with this creative network, it just about how we do it, the client come to us because they trust Creative Supply to be the best partner for them, to meet their branding meets.

And how will you make this happen? To an extent is secondary. It’s secondary because we run the entire project from strategy to implementation. We project manage it. If there are problems on the client side or actually creative [00:45:00] side, we handle that. So from a client it’s super smooth, they will never have the feeling that they are working with independent creatives.

You know what I mean? They don’t get that field. So yeah, we, we bridge both worlds because we can access too. We really kids specialists, you know, let’s say top 3D guy motion design. Copywriting transaction services. Illustrators is a good one. And, but even graphic designer, because the graphic designer who is very good for a food festival is not going to be the best person for a corporate website for banks.

It’s most of the traditional agency they’re stuck with one or two art director. You know what I mean? Like the things chef in the kitchen, and then they all, they just send the same person over and over and over again. And then one day the art director leave and they have no design capacity anymore. And this is something we wanted to avoid from beginning.

We work with a pool of different people who have different skill sets, different interests. You know, we have people who are really good art director, but they just cannot do web. But that’s fine because we have someone else that can do web et cetera. And this, this really allows us to assemble like genuinely the right team for our clients.

And because we don’t have a hidden agenda of sending certain skills or discipline because we have to pay for it because you know, we study first and then we source them your way. The way it works is very nice because we have standardized processes, you know, in term of what type of project of products of services we sell, what is the process for a brand platform, a brand entity, all of these things have been super streamlined, you know, so we like a product company in house,uh, the timing needs the number of rounds of review, et cetera, in all the people who work with us, you know, down to how you save your files. Everything has been streamlined, which means that we can not actually just, just a couple of hours before our call. I had a kickoff with a team of seven people, uh, for new projects and everybody’s remote.

And everybody’s on board and in what’s going to be happening, et cetera. So we have the capacity to have very big creative team, like the biggest agency, right? You never have more than 10 people because it’s just, it’s just not needed even for very, very big projects. And, and we have that capacity in watch.

The amazing about this is that now we have this 10 people working on something tomorrow. We have another big project that we have. We don’t have a major capacity issue. Because we have a pool of people. Where we get the bottleneck is in the project management and the core consulting team is Zurich so far we are managing and the company we grow, we grow its core as we go.

So yeah, I think it’s a very good model and the client love it because you know, they have one point of contact, they have one email address and they say, Hey, we need to do some 3D renderings for a new machine. Oh, we need to do a photo shoot for our new offices. Or we have some transition done to be done. And they know that we pick the best people.

So they come to us and the quality is there. The pricing is right. Yes. There’s a premium of price, but you pay the premium for us because we reduce your perceived risk. Now of course, all of them know about Upwork, but if you try to book a designer on Upwork, good luck. You’re going to spend half a day, just sorting out another half a day, discussing with them half a day to brief them, but then you’re not even trying to get it.

And then it works. If you’re a small startup makes total sense. If you’re a small to midsize company or big company, it just doesn’t make any sense. You better have strong partner that handled this for you.

Ben: [00:48:26] A hundred percent because you don’t know if they’re good or not. So. You don’t save any time there. And then when you actually want them to do something, cause you say, no, you have to brief them.

So there’s not a time saving with the briefing. And then if you want to make them part of a team, then you have to assemble the other parts of the team. And then you have the overhead of managing that team and managing the outputs. So it’s like, yeah, it Upwork for me doesnt work. it doesn’t work.

Youri: [00:48:45] I think it works for very specific clients

Ben: [00:48:48] or very specific projects, very narrowly defined projects, but where you really want to run marketing at scale or branding at scale, it doesn’t work.

Youri: [00:48:57] Yeah, because, you know, I mean, if you think about it, if you have a company you don’t want to rely on random people. To do your brands. You know, it’s a bit like who handles your files? You know what I mean? Is this secure? If you need something, is she on holiday or is she still around, or is she now doing other freelancing work too?

You know what I mean? You don’t want that as a partner, you need something that’s more stable and that’s the role that Creative Supply have for those clients.

Ben: [00:49:23] But I also think the converse, which is everybody works for me is on my payroll. It doesn’t work either, because as you say. You know, you don’t have access to a large enough pool of people to deliver everything that a customer might want or everything your, your, your company might want.

And secondly, the people that work for you because they, because they don’t have, they don’t see the variety of projects that, you know, they stop learning and they stop developing new skills. And so I think it’s got to be, you’ve got to create this arbitrage, right? You’ve got this concept. You’re uncomfortable with platform, but there’s gotta be some party that sits between the sits between [00:50:00] the body of freelancers and the corporates.

Youri: [00:50:02] In any case, you need it? Either its a client who does it directly, or it has to be someone like us who handles it for, for big projects or midsize project, for sure.

Ben: [00:50:13] Was it like on your part, a major insight that, you know, if you want to get the best people, then you know, you have to, you have to look outside of your company,

Youri: [00:50:22] you know, it’s funny. It’s very personal actually, because I started my career in a small consulting firm where I was one of the junior partner. So it was a very traditional type of company. And then I moved to a big branding agency and I only stayed two months and I just quit the place.

And I realized that the agency model is dead and it took me two months? Actually it took me a week when I tried to convince myself for the remaining weeks that everything was going to be ok but then I realized there’s no point because you know, the typical agencies, everybody shows up on Monday, there’s a brief, then everybody has lunch together on this big, long communal table.

And then there’s beer ping pong on Friday afternoon. And if you look, thats the cliche of creative agency and from Sydney to Shanghai, they have the same pitch. And I was like, this is so weird. We, as branding company, we are meant to help our clients stand out yet we all communicate in the exact same way. We do the exact same thing than all of our competitors.

How can we be trusted by our clients to help them stand out if we’re not able to do it for ourselves? No. It’s like all the people who tried to sell me digital services, but I have more LinkedIn followers than they have and be like, Hmm, not sure I can trust you on that. And I saw all these people who are so comfortable in the job, you know, you have the creative, you know, he’s a bit there, then a bit coffee, a bit chill.

And then the copywriter and they be cheap and nobody has their ass on fire because they are hired. And if you, and so the connection between the work you do in the results gets loosen up. it is even more true in a big company, but even already in an agency of 30, 40 people, you see it, you know, and then people have to fill in time sheets, they have to say, Oh, on Monday morning, I work four hours in this project. So everybody’s cheating on those sheets to make sure they look like they’re doing some work. Right because you don’t want to be the one that has not the right profitability ratio as they call it. And I was thinking, this is so dumb.

It’s treating people like children. It’s making sure they’re very comfortable. So when people are comfortable they are not out of the comfort zone, which means they don’t get creative and at the end they don’t develop themselves. And they’re just gonna, you know, be there. So I quit that whole time. And then I promised myself that I will never go back to any agency that works like this.

And then I saw that I need to create mine. And that’s how Creative Supply was born. Actually, it was born out of frustration, a frustrating experience, which give me the, the courage. If I’m honest, the courage to go out and say, well, Let let’s do this. And then I went out there and I really looked for people, it took me so much time, middle creatives.

You know, you have to fill them, test them. Some are good, some are bad, some say they are, but they’re not, you know, announcing and build a team, which now can grow because you know, people know good people and the people are going to bring new people. Now it’s very easy to grow, the beginning was tough, but now it’s very, very easy.

And once we had that, now we are able to deliver. And it’s funny because I see sometimes those agencies that were on my radar as dream employer, like five to six years ago. And now we are winning pitches against them because we have a proposition which is to some kind more attractive, some kind of more, the more conservative one are very hesitant because they’d be like, wait, what how does it work cetera. But, you know, it’s a very good filtering mechanism because the client who reacted that way, we know they’re not for us, because if they cannot accept already this, how are they going to accept that we will transform the business branding. It’s too much. So they are out already.

Ben: [00:53:57] I mean, I don’t want to, I do want to revisit the conversation we had earlier or in any way undermine the importance of branding, but what you’re telling me, and I totally agree with is that you’ve got a business model that’s winning in a market because it’s superior to everybody else’s business model.

Cause it’s based on a distributed workforce that allows you to get just access to better people at scale.

Youri: [00:54:17] Yeah, that’s it. And that allows us to scale as well, because if now you tell me, Oh, we have a three major projects coming in tomorrow. Well I’m going to be in a rush for three, four days, just to arrange the project plan and to line up sthe resource.

But after that we can run it. There’s no problem on time on track because everything has been, so, yeah,

Ben: [00:54:36] I mean, you’re, you’re in a way you’re bringing a sort of, you know, sort of digital phenomenon to the non digital world in a way, right. Because you know, why, why is Amazon so successful? Because it delivers better quality at scale.

And it’s, it’s kind of difficult to do that in a service industry, but that’s what you’re doing here. You know, you’re taking a technology business model and applying it to the service industry and that’s why it’s trumping the others.

Youri: [00:54:58] Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t say that [00:55:00] it’s fully done yet because I think we have so much room for growth ahead, you know, and saying that this is done now, it would be. Yeah, it would not be correct you. Yeah. It’s not like done. And now we can just relax. I think from a backend point of view, from a, you know, it’s always in development, you know, from how you communicate with the team, how your quality, quality control is a huge topic with us. Yeah. Yeah. You know, how do you make sure that the designer don’t misspell the client name?

You know, those very simple things. So operationally, you know, how to make sure that the consultant puts the right dates on the documents, you know, in those little things at the moment, the core consulting teams spensd too much time policing around. So we will have to. The client doesn’t say this because at the end we deliver something that’s great. But on our point of view, we could be much more optimal. So I think that’s where this whole internal streamlining has to, has to get much, much, much better, but, you know, we are so much far ahead than the others well, competitors, I think because they are. Now, they;re just, after coronoavirus, I think a lot of agencies are just panic because they don’t have the usual place where they all meet.

The canteen is no longer there. Uh, all their files were on an internal folder. Some of the employees don’t even have their own computer. So they used to work on a desktop, you know, and you have all that thing in there. They must be so challenged. And for us, it’s a bit like business as usual, you know?

Ben: [00:56:24] How do you create an adequate sense of belonging with the team that’s distributed?

Youri: [00:56:28] Yeah, we, we spoke about that. The choice we’ve made early on is to not to pick creatives from everywhere because you know, the tempting thing to be say, Oh, let’s get creatives from anywhere. Right. Because we can. We can but, there’s a couple of problems with this. The first one is a timezone problem, right? If you have the best guy in Mexico in Shanghai, good luck coordinating the project because we mainly work in Europe.

The second one is from a cultural point of view. It’s nice. If people can, can see each other sometimes. So we made the deliberate choice to build the creative networking in, Paris, Paris, because it’s, who’s the strongest market after Switzerland. And because the, the level of people you get in Paris is so high.

There’s so much competition that if you are a director in Paris and you survive, you must be good. In Switzerland you just sit there in Zurich, and you know Stefan, Fabienne and Urs. And you went to school together and you charge everybody 200 bucks an hour and nobody blinks. Because the market is so protectionist.

If you are in Paris, you cannot do this. If you are in Paris, you must deliver. And that’s why we build the network in Paris, which allows us to actually have 90% more or less of the creative skills in Paris. So typically we can do every year, a Christmas party in Paris, we bring all of them together every night.

And then we have meetups where not always everybody meets, right. But some people meet physically in Paris to try, you know, dissolve the zoom lifestyle that the whole world is used to now. It’s actually very strongly in building a culture. You know, you have the internal Slack channel and et cetera. Uh, so it not that bad.

If you think for a big company. Yes. If you have your colleague that you see severyday, but you don’t see, you see you every day. Right. So I think. I think we manage it fairly well. In the future I would love to be able to offer much more value to the people who are the member of our network. Right. So that’s, can we offer them discount on further education? You know, what are the things that we could offer them? Could we help them with their accounting, for instance, you know, what’s the service we could offer, not, not as a revenue source for us, but more as a strengthening the link we have with our people. Cause you know, you have people you’re working with for four or five years now and, and it’s going strong and they just love it.

They still do their thing sometimes next week, sometimes they have their client, their own project, but they like Creative Supply because it gives them access to projects they could never get otherwise.

Ben: [00:58:46] Yeah. And then you take care of the customer acquisition costs.

Youri: [00:58:48] Exactly, they’re not so deep then, you know, when the client don’t pay on time, which happens at the moment 95% of the time we are running after the bids, but we are paying the creative sometimes.

So yeah, there’s, it’s a very, it’s a win, win situation for everyone actually.

Ben: [00:59:03] Definitely. Great. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak to us.

Youri: [00:59:07] Thanks Ben. It was a pleasure.