The following is a conversation between Barkley's Chief Creative Officer, Katy Hornaday + our Chief Strategy Officer, Chris Cardetti. The topic: What's a whole brand?
Chris Cardetti: From the top?
Katy Hornaday: From the top.
Chris Cardetti: Okay. Hey everybody. Chris Cardetti, Chief Strategy Officer here at Barkley.
Katy Hornaday: Katy Hornaday, Chief Creative Officer at Barkley, and we're going to talk about one of our favorite topics today.
Chris Cardetti: Whole brands.
Katy Hornaday: Right.
A whole brand at the center has an idea that we call the red thread, and that singular idea really drives every aspect of the business, not just its advertising, not just its content, but it drives how you train your employees and where you stake your sustainability goals and what types of products that you launch. And when all those things are really working together, those modern consumers believe in your brand because they understand that every aspect of your business truly is your brand to them.
Chris Cardetti: Modern consumers are simply consumers with very high expectations. They see an email, they see a TV spot, and they see a frontline employee interaction all as the same thing. They don't distinguish between those things. They don't see which department created which. They just see the brand, and so for us, that big insight led to the simple thought of, "So you've got to build whole brands for those consumers."
Katy Hornaday: What we had seen over the years was you would go and hire an advertising agency and you'd make a big flashy television spot that would talk all about what your brand was about, and then someone would call the helpline or would order a product, and those things are incongruent.
Chris Cardetti: Your advertising agency should do great advertising, but at the core, they should be thinking about every piece of your business and trying to find creative solutions to those problems.
Katy Hornaday: Absolutely. I mean, imagine spending millions of dollars to create a shiny TV spot that's beautiful and perfect in every way only for it to fall apart from a consumer at the hands of someone in-store or an email. It's a shame. It's a shame for good advertising.
Chris Cardetti: Tear.
Katy Hornaday: And so what we find to be most valuable is not only our approach to how to build whole brands but organizations that believe in it in their walls as well. It requires not just the marketing team to work with the marketing team. It requires the marketing team and the HR team and the PR team and the product team all to be connected by this one big idea, and that's when you build really powerful brands.
Chris Cardetti: As you grow and build into a whole brand, on the inside you're more efficient because everyone's more aligned, and on the outside, you're more effective. The advertising and the communication you have will be more effective because it's more true.
Katy Hornaday: Yeah. All the things every business wants.
Chris Cardetti: All the things you need, right?
Katy Hornaday: And so we started this little series, how to build a brand that matters because we wanted to talk about all of the different aspects of building a whole brand. And so you'll hear from different Barkley experts about the parts and pieces that we use to build whole brands every day.
Chris Cardetti: Is that what we're calling it?
Katy Hornaday: I think so. Did I say it right?
Chris Cardetti: I like it. I like it.
Explore more about How to build a brand that matters here.
