680 – Do branding the right way: Tom interviews Kim Derrick Rozdeba

Episode 680 – Kim Derrick Rozdeba
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, is Tom here with episode 680 of Screw the Commute Podcast? I'm here with Derrick Rozdeba, and he is an author of a book that is going to be very interesting to you. I think he hails from Canada and he's going to talk about branding issues. And a lot of you have heard me rag against branding. And so we're going to throw that around a little bit. See, I see his perspective on it. Now, I hope you didn't miss Episode 678 was my first 28 days on TikTok and you will hear me talking to you now, which means that people didn't from TikTok didn't kidnap me into child slavery. And as far as I know, they haven't stolen my identity. So I'm going to take advantage of their service regardless. I still got a lot to learn. And boy, one of my videos went 40,400 views. And so you can really make some fast progress if you do what you're supposed to do on TikTok. All right. And I want to thank the folks from Patreon. We started a Patriot account to help fund my scholarship program for persons with disabilities. I'm not taking any money for myself. It starts as little as $3 a month that you can support this program. We have three people in it and they are just beautiful people making great progress.

[00:01:43] Two of them are blind shooting better videos than I do. So thank you so much for that. You can check that out. It's screwthecommute.com/patreon and usually that's to help fund creators. Well just on training episodes alone I have 300 plus episodes at screwthecommute.com/training and the rest the other 300 or so or 370 are interviews with great folks like Derrick. Check that out. It's good to meet compatriot and you'll be doing some really great things for some people in need.

[00:02:18] All right. Let's get to the main event. We've got Kim Derrick Rozdeba is an author, a blogger and a branding guru, and he's guided some of the Fortune 500 oldest and most iconic brands. And he has over three decades of strategic planning, branding and executing multimillion dollar advertising and marketing campaigns, PR and corporate communications and agriculture, pharmaceutical, petroleum, airline, telecommunication and and automotive industries. And he's got a book called Branding Queens. And, you know, me as a jokester, could make some jokes about that. I think I'll hold that back for a little while. But anyway, it's about women who built large brands, and he loves to do a lot of things we'll get into as we talk to him. So, Kim, are you ready to screw? The community?

[00:03:12] Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm sitting here in my my home office. I'm good.

[00:03:18] Awesome. Yeah. So now you're from Canada, right?

[00:03:21] That's correct. I mean, Calgary, Alberta, just near the Rocky Mountains and it's close to zero Fahrenheit here today.

[00:03:30] Yikes. Yeah. Good for you. You can have all of that. You can have all the snow, everything. I'm not really welcome in Canada. I don't know if you knew that the first time I ever got a speaking engagement up there. It was years and years ago. And I get to the border and they say, Oh, what are you doing up here? And I said, I'm all beating my chest proud. I'm speaking, Oh, you're getting paid. Oh, yeah, I'm getting paid. Oh, is that right? Well, come on over here tour. I'm going to talk to you because I didn't have a work permit.

[00:03:59] Actually, I did listen to that podcast and I did chuckle because I've heard a number of people have run into that same problem.

[00:04:06] Oh, man, I had to bribe my way to get and missed my limo and the meeting planners telling me to. Oh, you should have just lied. Yeah. All right. I'm going to lie to the customs agency. That's perfect. I'd still be in chains up there somewhere, so. But I did. Did love love it up there. There was a us comedian. What's her name? I forget her name, but she said I. Canada is really great. It's kind of like the attic to the United States. It's, you know, there's a lot of cool stuff up there, but you kind of forget it's there. Yeah. So great to have you on. We met, I think, through a pod match, and I definitely wanted your perspective on things because, you know, I made my way without branding. Basically. I guess people branded me maybe, you know, and I guess that can happen to people if they don't pay attention to what you teach and work that good for me. But sometimes it goes the other way. So. So tell us about. How you came up through the system before we get into your current stuff, because we always love to hear people's trek through life and so did you. You've had a lot of jobs, right? And that's kind of a dirty word around here. But tell us how you came up through the ranks.

[00:05:24] Yeah. So I started off sort of in a traditional sales environment many, many years ago. I was in Toronto and I was working as a sales rep for an oil company at the time. I had a number of service stations that I worked with and I actually kind of noticed that marketing was kind of cool and I wanted to get into marketing and I got into marketing, got into sales promotions as well, advertising. And I determined this was where I wanted to go. So I actually quit working for the company I was working for, and I went to agency, an advertising agency, and I was in the agency business for about 15 years, worked for large agencies as well as small agencies. What I learnt was the the number of different companies and industries because, you know, you can't just work on one, particularly when you're working with small agencies. You've got to work with a number of different clients that are out there and all different problems. And you know, it's all to do with communications. So I, I started getting into the whole brand idea many years ago. Ogilvy Mather, I worked for them for a number of years. David Ogilvy was a huge fan of branding. So I just over time have taken on wanting to learn more because every day there's something new that I learned. I can't say that I know it all. I wish I did. But the world keeps changing and you talk about your brand or you owning the brand. The brand actually is owned by your your customer. It's it's theirs. It's their perception. It's their impression of what you are offering them. So. So you can guide it. Absolutely You can. You can you can feed them what you want. But at the end of the day, it's their impression. It's their emotional connection they have with your brand.

[00:07:33] Yeah. Now, if you've listened to some episodes and we talked about before the show that one of my catchphrases is people brand themselves into the poorhouse. I mean, I've had actually people, you know, because I'm an Internet guy, they say they come to me and they say, Tom, I want my my brochure and my press kit to match the exact colour PMS colour of my web page. And I'm thinking, go down to Best Buy. I don't know if you have a Best Buy up there.

[00:08:00] Yeah, yeah.

[00:08:01] We do line up ten different laptops and look at your website on them and it's going to be a different colour on every one of. So they, they waste a lot of money on stuff that just doesn't matter. I mean it matters taking care of customers and getting cash flow, especially when you're small. It's a different thing if you're Coca-Cola or Bear.

[00:08:20] Yeah, well, it isn't. It isn't because it's what the impact that you're you're making. And if you can make a big impact with a small investment, go for it. But that impact has to be consistent over time. If you keep giving different impacts, different impressions of what your brand is, you are going to confuse your customer. So it's pick the right things, pick the things that will be noticed, not necessarily everything, because you can't do everything and it's too costly. The the women in my book, you haven't mentioned my book, but I just recently wrote a book is 20 Women who Started with absolutely nothing. And I'm sure your your your listeners can understand this when you start with nothing, your most important element is selling your product and branding. That's the last thing.

[00:09:13] You think of. Okay? Bills, Right?

[00:09:15] Absolutely. But eventually, as you said, there is a brand and the brand actually is something that your customers are walking away with. And whether you've done it intentionally or unintentionally, it's that impression I heard. I'm trying to remember who it was. You know, it's the aftertaste of of you know, I like to think of it after a really good wine. But but it is that impression that you leave with your customers. So so you can either be organic and allow the customer to to to come up with it. You have done something to create that impression. It's like a personality, like when you walk into a room and I'm sure when you walk into the room, you know, people notice you and why do they notice you? It's because your personality so. So, you know, that's your that's part of your brand.

[00:10:10] Well, how do people. You know, what I'm worried about is that people spend again in the beginning. Too much time on worrying about that and not just taking care of customers. Because if you don't take care of the customers, you're never going to make it to the point where you're going to have a brand. And that's the kind of customer service stuff more than and good products and services, more than branding, wouldn't it be?

[00:10:38] Yeah. So I when I wrote this book, I had to come up with some sort of nomenclature for people to understand where were these women, what were they doing to create a brand. So I came up with the five C's of branding. And I'd say the five C's quite quickly is commitment, customer construct, content and consistency. And I would say the two most important ones, you need to understand right at the beginning and you do you you intuitively do it. And the first one is the commitment. What is it that you're promising? What is it that you're delivering? What is your vision? What is your why? And that one is critical because if you don't know where you're going, nor does your customer. The second one that becomes really important is your community, and your community is your target audience. And and understanding what their needs are. So there's just that what you want and what they want. And then there's that sweet spot in the middle. Right. Okay. And then the other one is consistency. And this is the one you just touched on. The consistency of delivering the quality that they're expecting and continually ratcheting up that that that experience. Because, of course, as time goes on, expectations keep rising. So it's really important that you're always listening to your customers. And also responding appropriately to give them the services or the product that they're looking for.

[00:12:17] All right. So I got lost here. Commitment community customer service can construct. I didn't really understand and consistency.

[00:12:26] So let me let me walk through them quickly. So commitment is I said, that's the promise. That is your that is your promise that you're giving to your customer construct is the brand identity. So it's all of the you know, the logo was the colors that you mentioned. It's it's the it's the personality attached to the to the brand. The community is your target audience. It's it's your employees, it's your stakeholders. It is the people in your community that you are. I mean, you've got some advocates possibly out there that are associates that are part of your community. The next one is your content. And content is really this whole idea of marketing where marketing fits in all of those those tools of communication to get your message out. Which it's just one piece. A lot of people think, you know, marketing is branding. Well, it is, but it's only one piece of branding. And then the final one is consistency. And this is the one this is the one that I think a lot of companies kind of miss on, because it's the it's the after fact, it's the measurements, it's the data, it's the it's the feedback process. It's the you know, how many how many complaints are you getting and why what kind of complaints are you getting? It's also the the ability to ensure that you're ahead of the game. What's the what's the competition doing? What's the trends? So the consistency one and again, it's also quality control and making sure that every time your customer is is is receiving whatever the service is or the product they're getting. The same thing that they got last time. I mean, that's the Coca Cola. Coca Cola magic. Every time you open one of those bottles, you're going to get the exact same product.

[00:14:22] I think they're cheating. And given McDonald's more sugar, though. Different McDonald's. But yeah, consistency people I mean people when they ask me all the time on podcast interviews and what is your keys to success? I'm consistent and persistent. I'm persistent, but I'm consistent. You know what to expect. People in the short attention span world are too easy to try something and then quit before it even had a chance to work. And then then the customers doubly confused. Well, last week you told me this. So now we we kicked a little bit about before we got on here about the difference between personal branding and business branding, and we were kind of aligned there. Tell them about that.

[00:15:06] So I love it. Brands are trying to become more human, and for some reason humans are trying to become more like brands.

[00:15:16] That's right. That's good.

[00:15:19] And and I puzzle I mean, sure, there's a huge market out there for for it's the it's the I think the the latest greatest I don't know how many books are out there about personal branding. And so I question the value of of this. To me I would spend more time on a good resume and a good introductory letter that I would of trying to brand myself. I mean, brand brands aren't real, they're not human. So so to put yourself and one of the women in the book I'll just tell you a bit of the book that I just wrote. One of the women that were in the book was Queen Elizabeth the second. And and she was a personal brand. And the reason she's in there is that she wasn't a person to all of us. I mean, she she came across as, as, you know, a queen, and she was consistent throughout her reign. But you knew the way she was going to respond. You knew what you were going to get from her, because that was the face that she put on every day. She put that same face on. We don't know about her in our personal life. No. So so do we all want to be like that? I don't think so. Do you have to when you've got a service? Sure. You can try and make yourself look different. Differentiate yourself from your competition. That's why the commitment becomes really important of understanding. What is it that you're offering that's different than anybody else.

[00:16:58] Well, you know, this time I mentioned I I've been in the last six weeks or so concentrating on tick tock.

[00:17:05] Yeah. And I've been listening to your, your congratulations on the 40,000 views. I mean that's incredible.

[00:17:12] But a lot of the people on there would dispute you vehemently the young ones. That is because a a person that looks great in a bikini that can't even spell probably in some cases becomes a brand with a million followers or 10 million followers and people are throwing money at them like crazy. So so I guess they would be considered a personal brand, their name.

[00:17:40] Or.

[00:17:40] Their image.

[00:17:41] So I think they're just becoming famous.

[00:17:44] And that's different than being a brand.

[00:17:47] To a degree, yes, because to be a brand, there's some consistency. Again, back to the word consistency and understanding your commitment of what is it that you're going to deliver every time and you're not going to disappoint your your customer. You know, there's there's there's famous people, there's musicians, there's actors. You know, they get into their genre, they get into, you know, it's a it's an evolution for them. But once they get stuck in something, that's what their customer wants, try to, you know, so, you know, there's some some singers that have tried to deviate and go on to something else. Some have succeeded, some haven't, because their customer expectation is this. So so you do eventually become a brand, but just because you're famous and you're popular doesn't mean that you're a brand.

[00:18:37] Got it. Got it, Got it. So more about the book. So how many Queen queens do you have in the book? You know, I'm a kind of a comic and I hear that. So. So how did you how did you how did you interview any of these people or did you just research them?

[00:18:59] I just researched them. So it goes back to.

[00:19:02] You were you weren't even born but when they were dead.

[00:19:05] Right? Yes. Yeah. It goes back to 18. 1810 was the first brand, which was Barbe-nicole Clicquot. So I know I researched them all. I did try to contact them all. I did call the Queen a couple of times. I spoke to somebody at Buckingham Palace, very nice people, but I got nowhere. And this was, of course, before she passed away. So I, I because I couldn't get a hold of anybody directly. I wanted to keep it consistent. So I used all of this. All of that's in the book is all through the research. But there's 20, 20 women that go right up to their current day. And women know these are women from around the world. There's two from France, two from the UK. I can give you sort of a sense of who these women are and abyssal the Bissell Vacuum Cleaner Company. Madam C.J. Walker, first millionaire black woman in the United States, Elizabeth Arden. Elizabeth Arden was a Canadian. She was born in Canada. Coco Chanel out of of France. Margaret Rudkin maybe not so well known. Pepperidge Farms. You know, the fishy crackers. The goldfish crackers. That's one of hers. Olive Ann Beech. Beech Aircraft. A really interesting woman running a. Aircraft manufacturing company.

[00:20:48] Okay. Yeah, that's a new one on me. I was a charter pilot for a while. Yeah.

[00:20:52] So and so, you know, Beech aircraft. I mean, they're.

[00:20:55] They're incredible planes for many hours in those.

[00:20:59] Yeah. And one of their secrets, of course, why they were so loved by their customers is they kept the equipment simple so that there, there, there didn't have to be a scientist to be able to to drive one of their planes.

[00:21:17] No, no. I thought you said earlier all of these women started with nothing. Is that.

[00:21:23] True?

[00:21:24] They weren't silver spoon kids? No, All of them started with virtually nothing.

[00:21:29] Pretty much all of them. There was a couple There was a couple that had again, capital was a huge problem starting off with I mean, go back 48 years ago, a woman wasn't even able to open up a bank account by herself. That was only 48 years ago. So so while there were there were some men involved. Some of them had husbands, some of them had husbands. They had business together. They passed away. They could have sold the business. They could have got out of the business, the calico, the champagne. Barbara Nicole, she started with her husband. He passed away quite suddenly, very young. She didn't have to continue on. She could have could have been in the business up. But to another family member, to her father in law, possibly, but she didn't. So these are these are women who persevered, but they started literally no education in a lot of cases, no experience in a lot of cases. And they started from ground zero. They were the ones that wrote the copy for their ads. If they had to do ads, they're the ones that came up with the the product. They're the ones that came up with the packaging and to figure out how they're going to do it. So they started real small. Absolutely, like every entrepreneur does. But then they went from there to mass production to a global organization.

[00:22:58] Amazing is that's amazing. So what do you think from all your research and that you've done with folks, what do you think are the mistakes that small business owners make when with regard to branding?

[00:23:12] Good. That's a good question. I think some of them possibly want it all. What I mean by want it all is they they they don't want to sell one customer at a time. They see the big picture. And again, in today's world, you know, ramping up and scalability becomes really important with the technology and with the Internet that we have today. But I saw most of these these women start with one customer at a time, and then it's a slow process. And that slow process allows them to make the mistakes at the beginning so they don't make big mistakes.

[00:23:57] Yeah, if you make a mistake with one or two people, you can fix it before you put it in front of 10,000 people.

[00:24:03] That's you got it completely. So. So they learned and they had to learn. These were. These were. Quite a few of these women, again, didn't have a formal education. They didn't have a university degree. That was for sure. And again.

[00:24:18] Well, at least they had Google. Oh, well.

[00:24:20] Know some of them. Some of all of these. There's only five of them that are still alive today. So so this is quite a few of these going back, the ones that today. Yes. Or family members. I have been able to contact them. Oprah Winfrey is in the book. I did contact her company. I never did speak to her directly, but I did talk to her. A company that were aware of this book.

[00:24:49] Wow. How about Meghan Markle? Is she going to be in?

[00:24:53] Not in the book.

[00:24:55] So. Oh, man. So where do they find it? Is this in different formats, hardcover, softcover or Kindle? What? What?

[00:25:05] All is all of them. So. So you can buy it. Hardcover. Softcover. You can buy it digital. You can buy an Amazon. Any. Any book store or retailer that you like supporting. And you can go. You can get it autographed, I guess if you send me an email and I can I can send it to you. Yeah, you can.

[00:25:30] What's your website?

[00:25:32] My website is Rozdeba.com.

[00:25:39] You couldn't get Branding Queens?

[00:25:42] I could. I just. It's. I looked at it and go Branding Queens. Just one of maybe many books. So I don't need one just for one book.

[00:25:53] Yeah, and. But I wonder, is there going to be a part two of this?

[00:25:58] Well, I think the part two is is really focusing on the five keys that I mentioned to you. What I found when I did this, the first book, I had a lot of branding information and education in the book. And what my beta readers quickly told me was they loved the stories of these 20 women. I keep saying their stories is just as big as their brands because fascinating. These are fascinating women that persevered during difficult times. And, you know, they struggled wasn't easy. And and they only had one person that they could listen to, and that was themselves. And and, you know, because everyone else said they were crazy. So. Oc Queen Elizabeth, maybe not you know, she she was put into a job, you know, in her twenties, but she made it what it was. She defined what that brand was going to be. Nobody else did.

[00:27:02] All right. Who's your favorite?

[00:27:06] Oh, you know, I like them all. I mean, there's there is a couple the ones that that had the sense of humor. And I'm going to go to Olive and Beach. She was she had there is a beach blue, which is famous, and it still exists today. They just came up with a one of their new planes. It was a it was a anniversary and it had Beach blue. And it's it's a color that was her favorite color. She had she had every year she got a new car, She got a Cadillac. And. The company that she worked with also bought planes from her and they said, we will buy ten planes, but we don't want any beach logos on the plane. And. And. She goes, okay, fine. Well, I don't know if you've known us, if you've ever been in a beach aircraft. There's a lot of beach logos all over the plane, all the dials, everything's got forgotten. They're all over the place. So she had them all removed. The next time she went and got her Cadillac, she said, and she would get it custom made blue, this her beach blue. And she said, I don't want any Cadillac logos on my cars.

[00:28:36] That is good.

[00:28:38] One other story from her, because, you know, just again, give her a personality. She had a flag. You know, we see flags in airports, right? So she had a flag outside her office and the flag would change each day. And there was a flag that was sunny and bright and, you know, nice walk in. You know, it's going to be sunny inside. And then she had ones that were, you know, sort of again, like on a beach when you see, you know, the waves coming and crashing in and you got the red one. There was one with the stormy skies and you came in, but. Beware.

[00:29:15] Yeah. I think I love her so well. Great. Thanks so much for coming on and giving us your insight on branding success. So, folks, that Books is Branding Queens by Kim Derrick Rozdeba. Rozdeba.com. And yeah, it's going to be a great read and very inspirational for all you folks out there that you can start with nothing and make it so. Thanks so much for coming on.

[00:29:50] Thank you, Tom. I really enjoyed this.

[00:29:52] Okey dokey. Folks, we will catch you all in the next episode. See you later.