Build Better Brands Danielle Clarke

Danielle spoke with Caroline McQueen, Founder and Chief designer at Impulsiv®, a digital consultancy specialising in branding and custom Shopify Themes. Impulsiv® helps independent companies in fashion, beauty and lifestyle connect with customers through engaging brand experiences. They blend neuroscience, brand psychology, and cutting-edge design to craft engaging customer interactions.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Caroline delves into how she decided to pivot during the pandemic from focussing on tech and, thanks to a grant from Baroness Karren Brady, founded Impulsiv®, an ecommerce consultancy specialising in interaction design. 
Danielle and Caroline discussed how brands can enhance their online presence and make meaningful connections with their audience. Caroline suggested a good starting point is to do a website audit. Making sure the brand is communicating its values in a way that customers can really understand.
Caroline shared a case study of working with a client and how Impulsiv® helped reduce the bounce rate from the clients website from 70% to 40% by making one change.
BEST MOMENTS
‘If you can get your customers to engage in the brand building process with you, especially if they're early adopters, then they are very open to giving you their feedback on what they think of your website or what they think of your products and how you can actually use that.’
On working with clients - ‘I take it all the way back to the beginning and start looking at the strategic approach. What their goals are, what their visions or intentions are, and then also who their customer is and also what research they've done on their competition and how they're different’
‘It was a lifeline because it came during the pandemic. If you're running a tech company, you are burning cash. She (Baroness Karen Brady) awarded us the grant money and I was chuffed to bits when that came through because it was just enough for me to just kind of go, okay, this is what we're going to do’
‘Depending on what conversation you're having on social media will depend on whether or not someone will sign up to your list. If you've taken the time to understand what their needs and wants are, that would determine whether or not they're actually going to click through onto your website and buy something.’
ABOUT THE GUEST - CAROLINE MCQUEEN
Impulsiv®: https://impulsiv.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinemcqueen/
ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKE
Danielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.
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Danielle spoke with Andy Starr, Managing partner of Level C, an education program teaching principles of modern brand to business professionals, which he co-founded with international brand expert and author Marty Neumeier. Andy helps clients outmanoeuvre competition and conditions in their markets, and make marketing, advertising & PR content work better, land stronger, and drive real results.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Disruption is something that Andy is really passionate about so he and Danielle talked about what this really means and why it’s so important.
Andy explained to Danielle how his collaboration with Marty Neumeier began and how Level C originated from his personal circumstances at the time.
Branding hasn’t always been Andy’s thing. He’s a trained musician, majored in English Literature, worked in finance and studied law before coming to the world of brand.
Andy spoke about how his branding classes with Marty work, why they are different from traditional teaching and how they teach you how to think about brand.
BEST MOMENTS
‘These days, if you're a brand, if you're a business and you're trying to stand out and you think that just being different will get you there, we make an argument that it won't, that it's not enough’.
‘Creative thinking, strategic thinking, design thinking - more and more so called experts and coaches and mentors out there, they've been doing the whole how to do thing - how to do this, how to use this template. More and more of them have been trying to copy us now and it's kind of weird because they end up almost completely contradicting what they were doing just a couple of years ago’
‘I won't work with anyone now who won't acknowledge that this is what I'm doing, who won't allow me to have the opportunity to teach them how to be a great client, teach them where I'm coming from right now’.
‘We believe that creativity is more valuable in problem solving than just being more productive, but it needs more people who are able to think about what they do before they do it, while they do it, and after they do it’.
ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKE
Danielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.
GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05
WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4
CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/
SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke 
This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

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Danielle spoke with Simon Dixon, co-founder of DixonBaxi, which is a global agency that's worked with clients like AC Milan, Warner brothers, Google and Samsung to name a few.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Simon spoke about how and why he started DixonBaxi, what brand is and what is important to him as a business owner.
Danielle and Simon discussed DixonBaxi’s Essentials book, the practical thinking that drives them. How they run the company on principles and an ethos rather than technologies or what people say they should do and how diversity is so important for DixonBaxi.
How the business survived Covid was a big talking point and Simon’s view on remote working. People will still want to interact in some way, but there's now space for people to have time to themselves and privacy.
Simon and Danielle discussed how to take your first steps into the industry and the attitude you need to succeed. Simon feels there is tension between education and the industry, where education is teaching people great creativity, but also there is a perception that everybody should have everything and should have it easily.
BEST MOMENTS
‘People get a little caught up or confused between identity and the design aspect of branding and branding conceptually, in terms of what it means as a whole. Basic branding is people's relationship with the company, the benefits of the service or the product or the business's relationship with them’.
‘When we started the agency, we wanted to go back to something simpler, a bit more selfish and a bit more kind of refined how we wanted to create, because it was a kind of pivotal stage of our career and it obviously was something new, so we could build it in a different way’.
‘You have to literally invest in training people, because if they haven't had the ability to go to St Martin's and you have to train those basic skills to get them into the industry, you might have to get visas and bring them from different countries and help them get into the industry’.
‘The eternal thing is doing work that makes us excited. We'd rather be better than bigger, or we'd rather be the size that allows us to do the work we want, rather than it being about a certain size of company. So it's how it feels to make the work and make the work we want to’.
ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKE
Danielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.
GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05
WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4
CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/
SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke 
This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

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Danielle spoke with Matt Clutterham who is a transformational brand strategist and founding partner of Q Branch Consulting. He's also a speaker, board member and knows a lot about branding. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Matt talked about his background in creativity, passion for graphic design and how his career in theatre lighting led him to the world of branding
Danielle and Matt discussed their love for branding and how storytelling and creating a feeling in the customer is key to a successful brand. Brand building is getting the customer to recall the business at every possible opportunity. The aim is to link the business and brand with a deeply emotional experience.
Matt explained how his business has changed since he started working with his partner, Jenny. Working together has allowed him to deal with the emotions and the audience psychology of building a brand that connects to people outside while Jenny deals with the people inside the brand and helping them control and build the right emotions that are going to accelerate what they are doing.
BEST MOMENTS
‘In psychology, they call it anchoring. That for me is the whole purpose of what we're trying to do when we build brands is to anchor our business and what we're doing with people because they're the people who are buying and they're also the people who are going to come and work for you and invest in you’
‘Overnight a team of people with diggers and machinery dug up all of the grass outside of City Hall in London and planted a fake UFO in a huge crater with smoke machines pouring smoke out of it. The press came down and are taking photos and we're like a UFO crashed in central London. We built the story up over a couple of days’
‘I think it comes down really to one question, which is a powerful question and it's hard to answer. What do we want people to feel?’
‘We want to help as many people with great ideas as possible, with the strategies and the confidence to take the action that will make all our lives better’
ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKE
Danielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.
GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05
WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4
CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/
SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke 
This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders


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This episode is a recording of a live webinar Danielle did with Katie Brown, who is a social media marketing consultant. Katie helps small businesses, or SME's, refine and create a social media strategy that really speaks to their target market. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Danielle and Katie discussed why brand consistency is important for building trust, why consistent branding on social media is really important, and how to translate branding onto social media effectively
Social media strategy and branding overlap. Often clients aren't really sure who they're trying to communicate with, what they're trying to say, how they want to come across. The starting point for branding and social media is to focus on this
If you want to actually make some progress and you want results and you want to know that what you're doing is actually moving you further towards your goal, then at some point you need to move away from reactive decision and become more strategic
BEST MOMENTS
‘I talk a lot about the social media funnel. You've got the top of the funnel which might be that first time that you see something or maybe I'll just give them a follow. Visibility, repetition, consistency is where we get to the middle of the funnel. You're building that relationship, you're building that trust which hopefully ends up with that person then reaching out or whatever it is you want them to do’
‘When I do strategy with clients we'll look at competitors and we'll look at who else is out there that's doing similar things. And the difference could be in price, the difference could be in terms of location and the difference could be in terms of efficiency or the quality of the product or how quickly they can turn things around. There's lots of different areas that you can look into to go or how are we different?’
‘It's about moving away from that idea of branding being a logo and a colour, and actually brand is more of a living, breathing thing. Your business, however many people are in, it doesn't matter if it's one or if it's 3000 it should still be this living, breathing thing that's made-up of human beings’
ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKE
Danielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.
GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05
WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4
CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/
SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke 
This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders


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Whether you are a long time listener or you've just found us, thank you for supporting the show. Danielle wanted to highlight and look back on some of the incredible conversations she's been lucky enough to have over the previous 62 episodes and re-share some of the learnings that may help with your journey.
In this episode we hear from Kingsley Peters - founder and creative director of Kingel, Tze Ching Yeung from We Disrupt Agency, Sane Mafa from Studio M, global creative leader and brand strategy consultant Ezequiel Abramzon, the mental health PT James Roffey, personal brand manager Viktoria Jancurova and Ben Gallagher - veteran, athlete, explorer and keynote speaker.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Are you a student looking to get into the creative industry? Hear about the skills you need to learn from being newly qualified to actually doing the job. 
What about starting your own brand? You’ll hear how branding is a key part of a startup's birth and what you need to start building your brand.
You’ll also learn from people who are currently building their brands. What has their journey been like so far? What impact are they having on their customers?   
BEST MOMENTS
Kingsley Peters: ‘One of the things I was kind of saying to them (students) is that when you come out of university you might have a craft, but actually you don't really know anything about the industry. As a creative director, I'm not looking for them to come into the business and know everything about everything. What I'm looking for them to come into the business with is passion and ideas’
Viktoria Jancurova: ‘I think of competitors as collaborators. They might have the same processes, they might have the same systems or similar, but they will never give branding the same personality as I do just because it's me. It's what makes me unique. My clients know exactly what they're going to get and that's a really important aspect to think about. Again, linking back to branding’
Sane Mafa on the importance of brand for Studio M: ‘I will literally have this conversation with the partners everyday - How are we sticking to who we say we are and can we practically say that's what we're doing as a brand. I think continuous reflection (is important) on what it is that your values are, your philosophy is, and how you are as a company and sticking with those things in a practical sense’
ABOUT THE HOST - DANIELLE CLARKE
Danielle Clarke is a Brand Strategist and University Lecturer. She spends her time consulting and working with health and wellness business owners to help them attract and retain their ideal customers.
GRAB YOU 3 ACTIONABLE STEPS FOR BRAND GROWTH: https://danielle-clarke.ck.page/b1043e5d05
WORK WITH DANIELLE TO BUILD THE BRAND STRATEGIES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS TO GROW: https://calendly.com/d/48p-6ck-vy4
CONNECT WITH DANIELLE ON LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-clarke-brand-strategy-consultant/
SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/danielleclarke 
This show was brought to you by: The Media Insiders

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.