How Strategic Branding Powers Your Pipeline with Dmitry Shamis

00:03 All right. Welcome to Marketing for Marketers, the series where we interview the brightest minds in marketing to unlock insights behind strategies that help generate pipeline. And today we're joined by Dmitri. Dmitri is the co-founder of OSnap, which I think is probably the coolest name for an agency. And I feel like I need to like say it with a bit of meaning. So co-founder of OSnap, a brand design and innovation agency for B2B tech companies.

00:31 And before O-Snap, Dimitri was at HubSpot for eight years. Good, stand at HubSpot. At last position was global head of creative brand. So we're going to talk a bit about brand today, how brand strategies can power pipeline and help the business grow. Dimitri, I think it'd be great to hear a little introduction from you, a bit more about the agency and a bit more about yourself.

00:55 Absolutely. That was a fantastic intro. Thank you. The name is something I'm incredibly proud of. Dimitri is cool, but oh snap is definitely cooler. And my co-founder Jen, she gives me credit for that one. So I feel like very like exceptionally proud to be to be fully transparent with you. But yeah, like like you said, I spent eight years at HubSpot. I started there as a dev actually.

01:19 And that was a career change for me. started my career as a talent agent and so had a real wild pivot, but it was cool coming into HubSpot as a dev because my growth path into brand and creative and the way I thought about the systems and the resourcing and all of those different pieces of it was wildly different from that kind of like more traditional agency person who came up through copywriting or creative direction or design.

01:47 So I'd like to think I do it a little bit differently and I approach it a little differently and not, you know, helps my growth at HubSpot that also led into Snap where, you know, we really focus on brand systems. And one of the big insights that we learned at HubSpot, cause Jen was director of design when I was running creative, was that it doesn't matter how good your brand is, how pretty it is, how polished it is. It doesn't matter if the rest of the team can't access it.

02:15 You know, your brand can actually be a bottleneck and we're trying to build the tools and systems, you know, starting with your brand strategy into your visual identity, into your like web design system, your canvas, your capsules, your airs, your CMSs, all of the tools that you use and not just as a brand or creative team, but as a marketing team, as a company, you know, as a whole really to make them as connected as possible so that

02:42 You know, the marketers can create what they need to create to go to market and learn and test. And, you know, we'll, I'm sure we'll be talking about that in a little bit. But then, so the creatives are actually more available to work on the bigger swings that are being, that they're generally being held back from because they're, you know, pumping out social, social posts and, you know, paid ads and things like that. That's super nice. I didn't know that for your background. So that's really cool as well. And we're going to have to get you on the.

03:09 Revenue career out of the other podcast. talk about that. That nothing's linear and people are constantly moving around. But yeah, that's, that's super unique. And I guess, as you say, it's, it's in that role, you are very much process driven and it doesn't, people often think the marketing is only a creative.

03:27 lens, but actually if you can flow processes and build these systems, it just helps everything work better. Well, that's exactly it. Where historically a lot of the creative work and it didn't matter if it was, you know, good creative, bad creative, was mostly run rate. Let's be honest. It's just the kind of like day to day, keep the lights on work. It had to get done and you know, it had to get done because there's still a business impact to it. Right. You know, you can't shut a lot of this stuff off. Even me as a head of creative or head of brand might want to.

03:56 because that's what pays your salary. But those are the constant blockers that get in front of those big experiments that you want to run, those web apps that you may have wanted to launch in the past, all of the different kind of giant campaigns, events, sponsorships, whatever it might be, that you're just like, well, I would love to do that, but it costs a lot of money and we don't have the time or space.

04:17 Well, now we're in a position where we can create that time and space. And before it was about just like making it easy as possible. Now we've got a lot more powerful automation tools and AI that we could build into it as well. And all of a sudden, you know, with, with a feature like bulk create from Canva, you can pump out those ads, you know, those same paid ads I was talking about a second ago, you can pump out a thousand of them literally in two seconds. If you, if you have the data put together.

04:46 Right? So like all of a sudden those thousand ads, which would have taken probably for being honest in terms of consideration of like meetings and PTO and you know, God forbid eating lunch that would have probably taken a couple of weeks worth of work. Now you're done in literal minutes and you have to, you have to fill those weeks and you get to fill them with good stuff instead of just like more repeatable nonsense. Yeah. That's a really cool way of looking at it. And I think like we were already going off subject, but

05:16 We're talking about that people who don't use AI are going to be the ones that are replaced. You know, you're not replaced by AI, you're replaced by someone who uses AI. And that's a prime example. And it's like, why push back on something that can take out all of this work, which you don't really like doing, and free up your time to go and work on these much cooler projects, which, which really is probably why you got into the job. Percent. And you know, I think about creative work in,

05:44 I don't know again maybe this goes back to my background but like something I say often or have said often is come to the creative team when you want to work slow. And the reason for that is because you need to do the research you need to do your homework you need to understand your audience you need to iterate the review around their speed backgrounds there's you know the CEO jumping in at the last minute with I hate this and we need to redo the whole thing right and that's not effective for marketing where you're actually just trying to get out to market and.

06:13 Let's see if this message resonates. Let's see if people like this. Let's see if they're clicking and buying and doing all the things that we want them to do, right? So, you know, with a lot of these systems, you can, and AI in particular, you can just go to market that day. And then all of a sudden you have this data and you go, you know what, that random thought or idea that I had, I created the landing page for it.

06:36 I put together a few paid ads to test. I put together a few social posts. I threw together some blog posts, but you know, and have the headers and graphics and all of the things now. People seem to love it. Like, let's make that a campaign. And now all of a sudden you're not playing the, you know, the CMO likes this project, the CRO likes that project game. It's no, we have a thing that has resonated and has proven itself to be effective.

07:04 Let's put our time and effort into this. So all of a sudden the guesswork is gone. You're actually going after the projects that matter and that will impact your, your revenue, which is ultimately the goal here. So true. So true. I love it. I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. think that's like nice to hear and definitely, you know, my experience of working with brand agencies, I think they often.

07:26 They do a lot of the work and spend a lot of time in a locked room and then they come with the results and it's sort of expected to work. And there's never been that iteration process or like, let's just get some things out and see what's actually working. So yeah, nice approach. mean, like one of our, you know, and again, like, you know, we've been in house and we've worked with agencies and we've seen the same thing you have. And so like, you know, we've started to, you know, almost put together our own like values and like thoughts around how we want to work. And some of it is happening on the fly. Some of it.

07:56 was established literally on day one and one of the first kind of big values for us is no big reveals because that's what ends up happening you work with an agency and it happens in house too if you have a big enough creative team they'll go off into the lab and show up a week or two later and you're like yeah this is cool but it's completely different from what we talked about it's not on brief your

08:18 creating things for channels that we don't even have, whatever it might be. And so like this idea of no big reveals is really important to us because all of this has to be collaborative. like, you know, I know, I know one of the big questions is like the brand versus performance side of things, right? Like, and I think there's just gigantic misconception around like it's one or the other. It has to be and it's brand and performance, they're partners, they need each other. And it's through that collaboration that you get the best of both worlds because like,

08:48 Performance needs awareness. Brand needs someone to close the deals, right? And like, I guess I'm talking more brand marketing than brand at a high level here. But you know, I've, I've, I've said this on, on other shows where like, think about, I think about performance marketing in relation to fishing, which is a really weird comparison. Cause I myself am not a fisherman by, by any means, but you know, it's like, you have, you have a pond.

09:16 that your, you know, your audience lives within that pond and your, performance strategy is fishing within that pond. And one of two things happens as you keep going back in with your, you know, your rod and your little buoy thing and whatnot. Either you catch the fish and they're now out of the water or the fish learn what's going on and they know to avoid it. So you've gotten to a place where you've like pretty much captured everything you can capture from that pond.

09:44 And you're not refilling it with more fish. Right. And that's where, where brand comes in to create awareness and to, to bring more fish into that pond for the performance team to then catch. again, like performance needs those other fish. Brand needs something to do with the fish that they catch. Cause if they have too many fish, then who cares if they can't close it. Right. Real weird thing to talk about every time. It's a good analogy though. I like it. think getting, getting into the first question.

10:13 Brand is often, it is considered, although I said the first question, we've gone through a few already, but when it was wrote down, brand is often considered as a nice to have. And I've been in marketing long enough and I've seen it cut enough times to know that, you know, the value isn't always obvious to people. Often it will be the first thing that's turned off. Growing a brand, I think is always seen as this daunting long-term task, which, you know, we're not going to see any returns on.

10:43 So how are you like connecting the efforts on brand building to revenue and really holding those conversations in a, in a boardroom? Yeah. Well, so, you know, the, brand and performance pieces is a big one, right? And I'm not going to, I'm not going to talk about fishing again, because I don't think that helps anyone necessarily, but that's, that's where it starts. It's the understanding that the, the two ways of going to market.

11:11 It's really just one way of going to market. There's just different parts of the process. There are different parts of the strategy. And I think we're seeing it in just the general space right now where most marketing teams are literally running the exact same go-to-market playbook. And it's all paid social. It's all paid ads. And it's all Google. Right? And then they're all confused about why they're not showing up in LLMs. But it's the same thing.

11:40 when everyone does the same thing, it's much, much harder to stand out. So all of a sudden brand is that one key differentiator in my, in my point of view, at least that's going to be the thing. And I'm not talking about just branding because that is another common misconception. And it's like, Oh, we're talking about logos and colors. Like, no, that's yes, that's a part of it, but that's not what a brand is. A brand is kind of that like core piece that it's the soul of a company and it needs to be felt across the board. So

12:08 You know, one of the other things that I believe wholeheartedly is that brand is bigger than marketing. I don't think brand team should sit in marketing works. It's an unpopular opinion and it's gotten me, not going to necessarily laughed out of certain rooms, but maybe Zoom's disconnected sooner than they should have. you know, we, and I will answer your question in a second. This is just a very roundabout way of getting there, but we keep running into these situations where, know, you, maybe you see a cool social

12:37 at a social post or an ad, you click through the website and you're like, oh, wow, this looks really sleek and cool. And I'm going to, I'm going to hop on a call and then, know, that sales rep pulls up a deck and it's nothing like anything that the prospect has seen at that point. Somehow they've, they've, they've decided to purchase, right? They're into it. They're, they're like, all right, you know what sales did their job. Now they go into the product and it looks like something completely different and feels like something completely different. And the message is disconnected.

13:05 And then something's broken because something's always broken. This is the engineer in me. It's like, there's a second you put something out, someone will figure out how to break it regardless of how, you know, baby proofed it is. Um, they talk to your customer success team. That feels even more different than the marketing and the sales and the product up until that point. And so you have all this whole disjointed customer journey and what should feel like one solid experience feels like four different ones at that point.

13:34 And that's assuming you don't go into other touch points. Like maybe the event team hires their own vendor and like that's completely different. Like we don't know. We don't need to get into a lot of that stuff. But when I talk to execs, when I talk to CEOs, I always talk about the opportunity cost and the money lost at like creating a disjointed experience. Because when you create a disjointed experience, what you're truly doing is eroding trust.

14:02 You brought someone in with goodwill and intent. They're curious about a problem you may solve for them. And the further down the rabbit hole they go, instead of seeing what your brand is truly about, or getting just like a deeper, richer experience at every touch point, they get a more disjointed and consistent experience and they go, maybe they're not as put together as I thought, or maybe they can't actually solve the problem that they claim they can solve. And that's lost money.

14:31 Like there's so many just like lost leads in every pipeline, not because someone said something wrong, not because the product isn't as good as claimed, but simply because I clicked a button and expected one thing to happen and something completely different happened. And that turned me off because now I don't know what's going on. So throughout, I've seen it at like the campaign level where you know marketing or running a campaign, you've created some messaging, somebody's come through it, landed on an SDRs desk.

15:00 And they've gone with a completely different message and the prospects going, hold on. were a minute ago, we were talking about this and now we're talking about this. Like who I guys, what are you doing? Percent. It happens all the time. And again, that's one of the, I'm, really trying not to get into pitch mode or anything like that because I want to have, I want to be able to have like a neutral and cool conversation with you, but that's where like a brand system comes in because a good brand system is for everyone. It's for every.

15:30 every touch point. It helps the marketing team know how to show up. It helps the sales team know what message to carry through. It helps the product understand what pieces belong in there. You know, and I have this other belief, like where products are boring, websites are fun. And that's like intentional. That's not meant to offend. It's just like people go into products to be productive, right? Like if all of a sudden

15:54 You're in a product and the confetti is going and the colors are changing and there's gradients. You're to be like, I don't know what's happening. I can't get any work done, but there's still opportunities to inject the brand personality and the look and feel and some of the messaging across help text and things like that. Like a good brand system will help you identify all of the opportunities across the board to create that consistent experience that will build trust and keep, keep your customers around. Yeah. think that it was something.

16:23 I remember Scott Galloway saying years ago, which always stuck with me. And it was like, he gave the example of Canon cameras. And it was like, okay, you look at an advert for Canon cameras. It's obviously really nice photography. It looks amazing. Then you look at the material on how to operate the camera and it's like black and white, hard to read, makes no sense. And it's a prime example of like, you set this expectation of this incredible thing. And then once you've brought it, there's no, there's no effort gone into actually how do you use the thing? Yeah.

16:53 100 % like that enablement is the most important part of I think anything. I'm not even going to limit it to brand. Um, but in the brand context or in the systems context, like we're, saying you as a marketing leader, Sam should allow your non-designers to create contact content and to design content. Um, there will always be people who assume they can do whatever they want.

17:20 you you deal with them in a different kind of way. But for the majority, what happens is they say, I've never designed a thing in my life. I don't know how to use this tool as easy and intuitive as it claims to be. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to go off brand. I'm now super nervous about this all. And you were sitting there like, I bought this for you. I spent many, many, many thousands of dollars on this for you and your colleagues to make your lives easier. And all of a sudden there's like weird conflict going on.

17:49 So the enablement of it where it's like, hey, this is where the brand kit lives. This is where the templates are. This is the context in which you would use these templates. This is how, you know, if you're, if you're writing in German, for instance, and you know, something that English takes three character by, I don't know, I always use that example, not like purchase by, but like goodbye, BYE versus Auf Wiedersehen, right? Like that's going to take up a lot more space. So

18:17 This is how you consider localization and what you do if your content is too long. Like those are the questions that are super obvious that every team is going to have. And there's no reason not to get ahead of that, not to think about that as you are rolling out any new piece of software, any new program, any new channel, any collaboration, help people understand the why, help them understand the how. And you're going to start seeing the usage grow up and then you're going to collect feedback.

18:45 off of that and you're going to, you're going to iterate and you're going to refine and you're going to clean up and it's going to get better and better and better. And you're going to create this like flywheel effect as a result of that, but you can't do that without enablement and you can't. You then can't get mad at people for going off brand when you didn't help them get started in the first place. So on your LinkedIn profile, you talk about future proofing brand and I'm assuming a lot of that is about building these systems, knowing how to leverage tools, AI.

19:12 whatever else you're doing. that like the kind of advice you're giving to CEOs and other marketing leaders at the moment? That's a big one. I think one of the other pieces is understanding why you exist, right? Like, I think that, and this goes back to the point on differentiation from earlier and, you know, everyone following the same playbook. Right now, most teams are basically, saying what they think their audience wants to hear.

19:40 The message may or may not be true to who they are and what they believe, but they're just like, well, we, need leads, we need meetings, we need to close deals. So we're going to, we're going to write checks that we can't cash potentially. And the, the biggest piece of a device that I always give everyone this feeds into the brand system is you need a unique point of view. You need to know why you exist.

20:07 And that needs to be the through line through your brand strategy and through your visual identity and through your messaging and through all of the different touch points because you know, most founders will have started a company for a very specific reason. That's not just, you know, I think there's an opportunity here. You think there's an opportunity there because something made you upset. Some something made you angry. Something didn't work the way you expected it to. Someone made a promise that they couldn't keep. And those

20:35 Those things ultimately form the idea of your business. Like with O-Snap, that unique point of view is that you need a brand system to scale. That's what it comes down to. And I think that too many companies don't make that POV clear and they then have a disjointed brand because they come at it from this high level, we want to make your life easy or whatever. And it's like, yeah, who doesn't? Or it's like...

20:59 We want to be approachable. Okay, cool. No, I want to be, I want to be mean and grumpy and a curmudgeon. That's like, no one says that or things like that. So there, there's an opportunity in most cases to go many levels deeper to really truly understand what that differentiator is. And then build a brand around that and then make, it easily accessible for everyone at the company to be consistent within that.

21:27 point of view and bring it to life across whatever touch point they own. think in let's say scale ups, like your 10, 30 million dollar company. Most of the people I talk to, like they're chasing product market fit. I never hear anyone talking about like a brand market fit or to your point, chasing like a unique point of view. And it's almost like we, kind of get caught up in like, our product solving a problem, which it should do, but then we don't think about.

21:57 Are we sending out enough or are we differentiating enough or is there a unique, actually a unique point of view that we hold? think it goes back to the short term versus long term where, you know, you are actively trying to close deals and make money, right? It's, it's, it's, it's funny to talk about 10 to $30 million as like survival mode, but you still are in that in a lot of ways, right? You've probably taken.

22:23 fair amount of VC money, their expectations, there's a board to appease, there's a lot going on there. But that short-term thinking is what hurts the long-term thinking in a lot of ways. so, you know, there's this company that I've worked with in the past. I'm not going to share their name out respect, but they will immediately know who they are. They were trying to sell to me when I was at HubSpot and it was great. Like, I love the idea behind this product. I love the problems that it could solve.

22:54 The product itself wasn't mature enough yet for what I needed for, you what would have been two, 3000 users at that point. And so when I would talk to them and be like, you know, I need this and I need that and I need this other feature. And their response every time was, okay, yeah, we'll just build that. We'll build that. We'll build that. No problem. And I think in a lot of cases, most people in my seat would be like, oh, perfect. This is great. This is going to be the perfect use case for me. But the thing that I didn't want for them.

23:22 or for myself in the long run is just to have this kind of like closed off bubble mentality of, you know, this is the perfect, this is the perfect software for me. Cause it was the perfect software for me today in that moment for the team I had for the technology that existed. It wasn't going to be open enough to learn from other businesses and other clients that they could potentially bring in. And also if they're making promises like that to me, they're probably making promises like that to everyone else that they're trying to close at that moment. So.

23:51 Who knows when that thing that I want is actually prioritized. So what I said to them was I will not be buying because I don't want you to build Dimitri's version of this tool. I want you to build your version of this tool. And they took that to heart and they stopped doing the whole feature request bit as part of their sales process. And now like it's

24:12 It's a huge multi, know, multi-billion dollar like company. And I'm not going to take credit for that by any means, because I just basically said no to buying. But, you know, I come back to that example all the time because I think it's really important to just have that identity and have that perspective and have that kind of just like idea of what you think your specific niche or industry or vertical is missing.

24:40 and build that because you are probably not the only person that's thinking that way. There are probably many others who are looking for solution like yours that either don't have the ability or desire to actually build it themselves. And they're just waiting to see that message pop up somewhere and be like, yes, this is it. This is what I've been waiting for. This is for me. And that's how you

25:08 That's how you build a community as well, frankly, but you know, that's a whole other conversation. this is kind of going full circle on like why, or to me, at least it sounds like this is explaining why you see brand not in marketing because you're seeing it as such a strategic function, which is actually influencing way more than just, like you say, colors, logos, messaging. It's actually, what are we doing here? What are we standing for? All of that stuff.

25:35 That's exactly it. Like I think there's been this kind of misconception that brand is, you know, an arts and crafts department and that they just, you know, design pretty things. I think that comes from a lot of, frankly, you know, C-suite leadership. I'm not going to just put it on CMOs, but C-suite leaderships that don't truly understand the value of brand. They came up at a time when, you know, paid was the way to go and money was.

26:01 flowing and prevalent and everyone had it and it was a competition about who had the biggest wallet versus who was the most creative. And I think now that we are in a place of no one has the biggest wallet anymore, we're going to start seeing brand take on a very different role, which I'm personally very excited about. It's time for people to put their money where their mouths are, you know? Yeah. I saw this earlier when you said it's well, think like creativity.

26:28 is a competitive advantage. I don't know why people don't realize. I always give the example. One of my favorite consumer brands is Yeti, the cool boxes. Absolutely. These guys are incredible. And I own too many Yeti products, admit. It's a bit embarrassing. But like, why would I pay that much more for something? It's not a quality thing. It's because I've brought into the value of the company, what they're doing, what they're building.

26:53 believe that by buying this toolbox, I'm going to have this amazing trip out into the forest. Cool box though. And I think that's something where they really have pushed for me, they've pushed it on the creativity side. The brand is almost all the product is almost a backseat. Um, it's always featured. It's always there, but they're selling the dream better. That's exactly it. Like funny enough yesterday, I'm scrolling through just like, you know, doing my doom scrolling and,

27:22 I see a headline is like, think it was Aldi, the supermarket brand. They're like, you know, Aldi's $7, you know, Yeti competitor. I was like, good for Aldi. And I just kept scrolling because I'm in the same boat as you. Or it's like, for some strange reason, it makes way more sense for me to spend $30 for a cup than it does to spend $7 on based on the headline. Like literally, like I wasn't even curious enough to read the article or click through, or it was like, yeah, somehow 30.

27:51 makes more sense than seven simply because I am bought into the Yeti brand and the vision and what they've set out to achieve. right. Let's go back to B2B. Although I love the B2C brands, think it is more challenging for B2B, I would say. And I think we've got different levels of pressure. So brand awareness initiatives often get the mist. Let me start again. Brand awareness initiatives.

28:21 often get dismissed because their ROI is harder to track. So obviously you spoke about your fishing pond already, but how should B2B marketers measure the impact of brand? can we really, can we show an ROI? Is there a way of proving it? If we had to put it on a spreadsheet, how would we do it?

28:43 I yes, the short answer is yes, there are ways and I think there's some traditional answers and some non traditional answers. And like the traditional answers are ask your prospects and customers right? Where did they first hear of you? Like the it's not first touch attribution or last touch attribution. I'm not getting into that whole debate. That's a can of worms. I do not want, but ask people where they saw you and where they first heard of you.

29:04 And if it's on social, if it's through your podcast, if it's bait, you know, a billboard or, know, something like that, like, then, know, clearly something is resonating and that people are seeing what you're putting out into the world. set up dashboards, right? You're measuring awareness and recall and sentiment and an intent. You can track progress over time where it's like, Hey, people are people seem to be more aware of us simultaneously.

29:29 The performance marketing team is up X, X percent year over year, whatever. You connect those dots where it's like, believe it or not, the more people that hear about us, the more people that buy whatever it is that we're offering. Another one, it's like you can do like brand marketing experiments in like, you know, small geographic target areas, right? So I want to run a campaign. I don't know if it makes sense to do it or if it's a smart thing to do.

29:57 rather than just going global with it or national, whatever it might be, I'm going to, for a month of time, buy a few billboards and other, or, you know, invest more in Google search or whatever it might be in this one city. And then let's track performance in that city. And if, if the numbers from there are better, you've got something, you've got something to chase there, right? You've got a thread to pull.

30:22 If they're not, then maybe the experiment was long enough or maybe your creative wasn't good enough or maybe you just maybe just put up a billboard that no one drives past who knows but ultimately it gives you an opportunity to go back and and think over what's going on. You know the non-traditional side of it and this is gonna I think align more with like how I've been talking about brand overall but like I want people to measure how easy it is for their team to stay on rent. So that's not

30:51 You know, that's not is their performance. That's very much like an internal NPS kind of thing where, know, I want everyone to be able to go off and create whatever it is that they need on their own. So if the sales team is still bombarding the creative team for cleaning up decks, something's not working. If the content team doesn't have what they need to create those blog headers, something's not working. Right. If the product and the, you know, the website don't

31:21 have a similar look and feel to them to a certain extent, something's not working. So you need to find what those areas or gaps are and fix those. But you can't do that without asking those questions of the people that you're asking to literally put your brand out into the world day in and day out. And then it's tracking your brand across every customer touch point. know, one of the things, this was literally the most eye-opening thing for me in

31:51 my, probably my professional career. One morning, and this was back at HubSpot and, know, Jen did this. She was just like, Hey, do you have some time? And like, you know, that's, that's, no one ever wants to hear that. like, Oh God, what's about to happen? And we, we hop on a call and she pulls up this just absurd, I don't know. We were probably using Miro at the time. I don't know, but this like Miro board and it was huge. And it was just like the tiniest little images. You couldn't see any of it.

32:20 Don't I truly like I don't even know what I'm looking at at the time and it was every customer touch point. This is how we're showing up on social. This is how we're showing up on YouTube. This is our website. This is what the sales materials look like. This is what our reports and eBooks and whatever. Look like this is this is what the paperwork that we send for renewals looks like. literally like start to finish. It was I don't know how many hundreds of different pieces and they were

32:47 all different and I like it could have died in that moment. You know what I mean? It was just such an eye opening awakening kind of thing where all of a sudden you realize just how off base things truly are. And it was that opportunity to really sit back and say, you know what? We have to fix this. We have to do it right. And that was honestly one of the key kind of starting points for the HubSpot brand refreshing in the way that it did and thinking about scale and the

33:16 that we needed to, because we had all these teams creating and we were all about autonomy and giving people room to breathe, which I think is the right thing to do. But this goes back to the point on enablement, we weren't giving them the right resources or tools to do it. So everyone was just kind of creating their own version of the HubSpot brand. And there were 100 plus of them all on this one mural board.

33:40 I've seen that as well. I've seen, think it comes, mean HubSpot was obviously growing very fast and it comes through the growth. And like you say, wanting to enable things. But like at my time in RingCenter, we had a period where the UK brand and the US brand were completely different, know, like completely different. And we had to pull it back in. And as we were launching into Europe, it was like, if we don't get systems in place now, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse. So luckily we stopped.

34:08 and got control of it before we got too bad. But it was one of those things where you could see, you know, we would have had a Frankenstein pretty quickly. It's so easy to do and especially like the global expansion, like we'll do that because, you know, and God bless regional marketers, they just don't get the resources, especially, you know, if a company is North American based or North American headquartered, like forget it.

34:32 You know, we're going to we're going to go into France and Germany and Japan and Australia and we're going to hire one person and they are going to do literally everything. They're going to be the entire company there. So, you know, I've always been a big admirer and supporter of theirs. But like if you want to do it right again, that's to your point. You need those systems and you need to help the regions like put their messages out. And then also like going back to the feedback point and the internal NPS point, like different regions are going to do things in different ways. Like Japan is a prime example where

35:02 the way we market in the States and in Europe, completely different. The things that they value, the websites that they want to see, the experiences that they want to have are totally different. When you or I design those, it fails. So working with those regional marketers to develop the systems and evolve the systems in a way that will benefit their market while still retaining that like heart and soul and that point of view.

35:28 is so critical. many, many, many years ago, I used to work with Cummins, the diesel engine manufacturer, and we were like the European leg. We were like the European agency. We would get this creative handed over, again, this is back in print days, but like an A4 piece of paper in the UK is different to what it is in the US. The measurements are different. They'd give us this paper, and then we'd have to translate into like 14 different languages, one of which was German.

35:56 So we were given this design told we couldn't change anything over the content into the language. And it's like, well, it doesn't work. Like the words are so much longer. It's taking up, I can't think what the numbers are. It's like 25 % more room or something crazy. And it was always one of those things where like, we were trying to stick within the guidelines, but there needed to be that flexibility to allow us to localize it. That's, that's exactly it. Like, and more often than not, it's people who don't speak the language.

36:23 It's people who may have never even been to the country or met someone that speaks the language that are creating these experiences and then enforcing rules that are just unreal and make no sense. you know, brands need to be flexible. They need to be able to stretch and you gotta, you gotta know where you can push and pull on them without, know, without, again, without getting rid of what makes the brand the brand and like, it's not going to be, it's not line spacing or letter spacing or, you know, it's, none of those things.

36:53 So like, yeah, create, create a design that can be flexible enough to add 25 % more space for, for all the Alphieter Zanes out there. right. So me as a, VP of marketing, what would be the number one tip you'd give to me for like, if I want to get buy-in, I want to start investing more long-term. I want to look at like design systems and brand systems. What would be your tips to me? How can I, how can I start selling that story?

37:21 I mean, first it starts with understanding your POV because if you don't know why you exist, you can't tell a good story. You can't, and you're not selling it internally. You're definitely not selling it externally. So go back to your POV, understand what makes you unique, build it out and build the vision around how you go to market with that message. From there, you got to experiment and you got to test. Cause I think like what ends up happening, we see with a lot of, and you see this with like rebrand activities where

37:49 You do this massive rebrand and everyone like you put it out and everyone expects it to be amazing and like, like, yeah, all of us, you know, our phone, we're going to hit publish on this new website and our phones are just going to be off the hook. know that's exactly what's going to happen. And then they're shocked when their phones are not just blowing up immediately. So like figure out ways to test and use your existing channels to do that, to collect the data. So this is where, you know, those, those

38:15 workflows that you have or those processes around like paid ads or like that geo testing or whatnot. Start building into that and start playing with that to test that POV and test the new messaging because that's when you know, like the CEO doesn't, I know we're all big on vibe marketing and all the things, right? Like that's like the big thing today, but your CEO doesn't care about vibe market. He doesn't, he doesn't want to know that the vibes are immaculate. He wants to know that you're gonna, you're actually going to sell something. So

38:43 By by by nailing down the story and then testing it, you can go back and say, this is how we need to go to market. This is why it works. This is, how it increased revenue in these small pockets of the business. This is why we should put more money behind it. And then it's repetition. think we as marketers overall, we get tired of saying the same thing over and over again. And that's, think, human nature, but someone very smart. And I hate that I don't remember who it was like literally like it killed me.

39:12 Cause I want to give this person so much credit, but someone very smart once told me that by the time you were tired of saying it, that's when they're first hearing it. So you have to keep going and you have to keep repeating it. that for your existing audience, that just reinforces the message. You you create, you know, like deal front stands for X and when they start thinking about X in the future, deal front.

39:36 Right. Or Oh snap, whatever, whatever brand it might be. And for the new audiences, you start creating that association and by, by repeating it instead of. Constantly saying something new, you're creating that association. So again, in their minds and you know, they hear X, they think of deal front. then when that problem emerges, when problem X shows up at their doorstep, who do you think they're calling? They're calling you Sam. And that's, that's where the, repetition kicks in. So POV experimentation, repetition.

40:03 Yeah. And I think that's the thing, everything you described there shows that it can be data driven, but you can experiment with things before you can collect data. You can understand how it's going to resonate. And then actually you can test, as you mentioned earlier, like how people now coming through and they're seeing us in places and they're understanding what we're selling to ultimately sell the reason why we invested in this in the first place. What I feel happens often is people

40:33 As you said, by the time they understand it, by the time you're tired of saying it, is the time they first hear it. I think people change too often or maybe too quickly. We're like, oh, it's been 18 months. Should we, should we go out with a new message now? And should we try this? I've been asked in the past, like, you've been running that brand campaign for six months now. Why isn't there a new one out? And I think because it's only been six months. Why do need a new one? what, what, what did.

41:02 Did this one just like tank? Like, are we just at zero now where we need to desperately change everything? Yeah. It's just, it's, it's the short-term thinking. It always comes back to that where it's like, we need to go bigger. We need to do more. We need to go better. Well, sometimes you just need to reinforce the message. Sometimes you need to share that more broadly or, you know, like, I think the, the other part of this is the, the, the message and the words you use to share the message aren't the same thing.

41:32 Right. It's like positioning versus messaging. So that unique POV doesn't mean you have to say it in the exact same way. It's just about coming back to the same idea. So like, fine, you know what you need to freshen up your ads. Come up with some new words that say the same thing. And that is just in and of itself, a great creative exercise because you start again, pushing and pulling and stretching things in a way where like, know what, that actually gives me an idea for a podcast now.

42:00 or a newsletter or for speaker series. Like, you know, I'm obvious, I'm sticking to it to marketing here, but you don't know. And if you're just immediately like, Oh, it's been six months on the dot. Let's, let's shut it down. Let's, let's, let's put something new out there. Like you're, you're never, you're never really going to see if something works or not in the right kind of way. like things fail. Like that's okay. I think that's, that's the other part of it where like,

42:25 You know, it's okay to make mistakes as long as you're learning from them. Because sometimes you stretch too far. And that's, you would never know that if you didn't do that in the first place. Like, I have three kids and my middle child decided she wants to play T-ball, like baseball for her kid. We're not a baseball family, so it like trips me out a little bit. But I've been going to her practices because I want to be supportive of her and show her that I'm behind her.

42:53 And the coach said something really interesting the other day as they were like wrapping up and it's been stuck in my head and he goes, it's okay to make mistakes. That's what we're here to do. I was like, Whoa, like that, that's, that's like a real major insight to drop on a bunch of kindergartners. But I think it's the same thing here where, know, you're never going to know what works and what doesn't work, what resonates, what differentiates you if you're not willing to experiment and play around and,

43:22 give, give things a shot and make those mistakes. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that again, one of the interesting things that just came out and it like triggered in my head straight away, because we talk about long versus short. And in my head, when I talk long versus short, I'm talking like long-terms brand and short-terms like paid media, like demand capture, all kind of that stuff. But actually short can also be.

43:51 short sightedness of your brand campaign. So you might be investing in brands, but you're still doing it in a short term or with a short view on it. It's the expectation. Like we, we just kind of are, I think as a society expecting, you know, it's the Amazon prime effect where, know, it's like, yeah, I want it, I want it instantaneously. And if it doesn't, if I don't get it, then it's either, it's not good. It doesn't work.

44:18 And that's just not how this works. Like a lot of these messages take a long time to break through, especially with so many competitors in the space, right? Like we're not the, Oh, snap is not the only player in town. Deal front is not the only player in town, right? Like I look around my desk and all the random nonsense products or whatever, right? Like I literally have two pairs of headphones on my desk as we speak and they're from different brands. You know what I mean? Like there's so many different.

44:46 players in the space in any given space. If you're trying to break through, the only way to do that is by staying true to your message and just continuing to put it out there like build that POV, share it, share it, share it and share it. attract your tribe attract your audience and sell to them. think like the other kind of short term thing here is that you know, everyone is our audience or our total addressable market is everyone like no, you don't want that.

45:11 Literally, that's the worst possible thing for a brand because then you need to do a million different things to try to keep all of those different, you know, sub subgroups and cultures engaged. No, find the people that believe in what you're saying and market the hell out of that. Like sell to them because I'd rather have those people that are immediately engaged and on board start doing my own marketing for me than have a bunch of people that I have to like desperately convince because like

45:40 They want to save money. They want an easier workflow. They want an all in one solution, whatever it might be. My favorite one that someone said to me once before was, favorite isn't a bad thing. I said, we sell to CIOs, they don't care about brand. I'm like, what? Like this isn't just, you don't do branding just when you're selling to marketers. It's like everyone is impacted by this. They still want a need. And again, like for us there, the message was all about.

46:08 security and reliability. Like they want to know that you stand for these things. It's literally like those are the definitions of trust. And that's what a brand builds for you. It builds trust. It creates trust. It develops relationships. And then CIOs want to have those relationships. Like what do you think the CIO isn't out on the weekend, you know, going camping with their Yeti, with their cooler? Like they absolutely are. Like they are just as bought into these things as everyone else.

46:37 Yeah, I don't like, not, I'm not, I'm not going to keep repeating the, the, the message here, even though I probably should, but like, yes, everyone cares about brand. We're going to create a, create another podcast called the crazy things we hear. we'll just go through the, uh, that comes out. CIOs don't care about brand. Get out of here. All right. Let's go one more question then what's, what's the one actionable tip you would give a VP of marketing, uh, someone that wants to walk away.

47:05 They've listened to the podcast. They've heard us talk a lot about brand, but what's one thing they can take away and start acting on now? would start on internal enablement. Take like, I think the, the other part, and like most people would just expect me to say like, Oh yeah, you know, give, give to me for your call and I'll take care of all of it. And like, listen, I will happily do that. I will happily help you, but there are already tools and systems and frameworks and ideas and thoughts that have been built out within any company. Make it easy to work with them.

47:36 You know, if you spent the money on Canva, help people learn how to use it. If you spent money on a CMS and built it out with reusable components and modules, help people understand how to use it. If you have a Google slide deck template, help people understand how to use it. Like it seems kind, it seems so simple, but it's those simple things that changed the game. Like one of the, one of my core beliefs is that

48:00 habits are hard to, they're easy to make, but they're hard to break. And if in the back of your mind at some point is, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna raise another round. We're gonna IPO, we're gonna hit whatever that next major milestone is, and then we're gonna change everything up. You are in for a rude awakening because you have a bunch of people who are gonna be set in their ways, who like things the way they are, and you need to ease them out of whatever it is that their current way of doing things is into whatever that next way is gonna be.

48:30 So think about internal enablement. Think about how you help your team show up and go to market and then think about, not think about, identify what the gaps are and what they don't have and fill those gaps. Then, then give me a call. I like it. Really good. Nice, nice, subtle sales pitch, but we still want to do on our own, which is good. Right. Like there's, there's something we can take away right now. Go in action. And I, yeah, I've been in a lot of companies and I can say.

48:57 For sure the enablement piece is overlooked. know, there's obviously a lot of enablement that goes on. talk about product and messaging maybe, or what we want people to talk about if we're launching a campaign, but I've seen some really terrible pitch decks out there from salespeople, you know, and I know that they're creating their own things and actually with AI now they tend to be doing it more as well because they can do it. So yeah, the enablement piece, I really do see the value in. Nice, nice action.

49:27 Yeah, I mean, most software, most processes have like a single champion. And that person is so excited, right? Like they're the ones who are going to get to the finance department. They're the ones who are selling it to you or to whomever. And like that person is so pumped when that new piece of software, that new tool is delivered. And everyone else is like, I don't even know what this thing is or why we need it, let alone how to use it. like, you know, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.

49:55 give them give them the tools to drink. That's a weird. That's a weird one. mean, we've been fishing where we've got some holidays like I don't think that was going on anymore. Like spending spending as much time as I did in Boston and with like Boston based companies, there's so many kind of like marine based metaphors and whatnot. And every time I'd hear you know, rising tide lifts all ships or whatever. Every time I'd hear them like my eyes would roll to no end.

50:25 And now here, here I am, here I am talking about water and fishing and all this nonsense and repetition. There it is. There is your example of repetition. And you weren't using them in Boston. It took you moving away to start using these. There you go. That's exactly it. We've cracked it. Demetri, it's been really fun. Really appreciate chatting. I've definitely learned a lot. I'm going to go look at our systems now and see what we can, what we can improve and enable people on.

50:53 Amazing. Where can people find you? Where can they follow along? Sam, thank you for having me. This was a blast. So the, you know, I'm all over LinkedIn, probably too much if you ask my wife. You could definitely follow me there. I have a podcast called What's Your Process that is currently on hiatus after a 13 episode season one, which I'm super proud of. on YouTube and Spotify and Apple podcasts.

51:20 would love to know what people think and who they think I should interview for season two. Weekly newsletter called the Brief Creative, which if anyone listens to this will be like, Demetri's not brief at all. I do try to keep it short. And of course, OSNAP is the agency and the URL is osnap.agency. So check us out. We're all about brand systems and we're in-house people who understand what it takes to scale and grow and we're ready to help brands who are ready to do that.

51:51 And you get all the credit for the name. And I get all me by myself completely. No one else helped at all. No, Jen absolutely helped 100%. Good stuff. Thank you, Dmitry. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Sam.