Ep 29 - How To Build A World-class Brand with Feather, Ever/body, Better Mortgage & Bumble

Building and maintaining a great brand that stands out and gains the trust of your customers is a huge job. And growing a new brand is a completely different job than re-inventing a brand that has already been around for a while. So how do you go about both? Learn from leaders who have plenty of experience doing both for some of the most popular and emerging brands today.

Here’s What We Discussed: 

• [01:00 - 04:09] Our panel introduces themselves and shares their background 
• [04:10 - 11:49] How a brand determines and tests a target audience
• [11:50 - 13:59] Patricia and Kate advise that early-stage companies should test and adjust product and messaging as one 
• [14:00 - 17:52] How to fail fast and early when testing a product, brand, idea, or messaging – Conversion rates and staying close to the customer  
• [17:53 - 22:05] The importance of content as an expression of brand voice and brand behavior: Great content contextualizes how people use your product 
• [22:06 - 22:05] Jinal talks about the importance of consistency and clarity in your branding
• [27:09 - 35:50] How to measure ROI on brand building 
• [35:51 - 44:26] Our panel shares mistakes and marketing decisions they would have done differently 
• [44:27 - 49:55] Our experts talk about who helps them make critical decisions – Customers, non-customers, and peers  

About Our Speakers 

Kate Twist, Co-Founder & Board Chair, Ever/Body – Kate is a data-driven Consumer, Wellness & Healthcare brand management, and growth marketing professional with 15+ years of experience in Digital Marketing, Growth, Product Development, Content Creation, and Client Experience / UX. She is passionate about building emotional connections with consumers.

She has cross-cultural experience in the U.S. and Asia Pacific in Global and Operational Marketing, and her professional background prior to 2009 includes investment banking and strategic advisory to top-tier luxury branded products, retail, and licensing companies.

Derek Callow, CMO, Ex-Bumble, Tinder & Google – Derek is Co-Founder and Partner at Nest.vc. Nest invests in entrepreneurs and builds platforms to support each stage of their journey. They believe the path to achieving positive impact is to fuel the entrepreneurial spirtit: empowering startups on their mission to solve big challenges in a profitable and scalable way.

Derek is the former CMO + Advisor at Bumble. He’s an LA-based Global C-Suite marketer with Brand and Growth leadership experience across consumer tech, automotive, consulting, and agency worlds. He was the former VP of Growth at Tinder and Marketing Director of Google.

Jinal Shah, VP Marketing & Growth at Feather – Jinal is the Ex-VP of Marketing and Growth at Feather. Jinal is passionate about growing purpose-driven brands that are building new consumer behaviors. As a digital-first leader, she has built a niche connecting brand and e-commerce and excels at driving both creative and commercial capital. Throughout her career, she has successfully led teams through periods of intense growth, transformation, and turnaround.

Patricia Korth, CMO, Ex-Better Mortgage Huge – Patricia is a passionate leader who believes in the power of collaboration and flat teams to drive industry-defining customer experiences, Patricia is a regular commentator on digital transformation and what brands can do to better serve and communicate with their customers. She has been recognized as a breakthrough leader in the marketing industry by publications including Mashable, Adweek, The Holmes Report, DMNews, and the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Currently CXO, Nuula. Nuula believes there’s a better, simpler way to manage your small business — so they’re building it. Nuula is a mobile application that gives small business owners instant access to critical business metrics and innovative financial products, anytime, anywhere. It provides small business owners with the tools, content, and capital they need to be successful in a modern, competitive market.

About Our Moderator

Anish Shah is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Bring Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.

Quotes

“You want to enable yourself to launch everywhere at one go as much as possible. You need to understand localization that's more than translation. If you can get your product into as many places as possible, as quickly as possible, without an opportunity cost on budget, time, or people, what you can then understand from a product perspective is where the natural product market fit is.” –  Derek Callow

 

“When you're at a very early stage company, when you're thinking about product and messaging, you could try to divorce them, but you'll end up getting false negatives in both directions… For that first zero to five thousand customers, you almost can't think of message and product as two different things. You have to be in one world where you're adjusting both together.” – Patricia Korth

 

“There were some things we thought would definitely work that tanked and I think that's inevitable, it's part of the process. Test small, learn big, and fail fast and cheaply.” – Kate Twist 

 

“I found that a lot of early stage companies run themselves like later stage companies with very specific targets when they could have done a little bit more work on the front end to figure out whether what they were building was even valuable for whoever they're building it for." - Anish Shah    

 

“I think brands are expressions of customer experiences… And so content is putting the right context around how people use your product. Great content that just contextualizes how people use your product, puts the right emotion around it, and makes your product relevant to different types of audiences, is extremely powerful. It's gotta be anchored in communicating the benefits of the product in a way that's engaging to different audiences.” – Derek Callow

 

“I think that content as an extension and expression of the brand voice and behavior is extremely important, but consistency and clarity of it are even more important… Why will someone pick my brand over someone else's? I think that's where you start seeing the investment you put in your tone of voice, your assets, and how you show up in the world. That's where I believe it starts paying off.” –  Jinal Shah

 

“Questioning your own arrogance in terms of the nucleus of where you started and examining the power of some of the tools that may or may not be at the center of your wheelhouse is important.” – Patricia Korth

 

“You're not gonna create your point of difference or your true brand recognition based on pixels… You're gonna create your point of difference around your brand values, how you speak to customers, your ethos, your service model, et cetera.” – Kate Twist

 

“I think the one thing I find myself saying a lot to my team and myself is to have conviction. To a certain extent, we are told as marketers to not always trust our own judgment… But at some point, we also can't forget that this service was created to solve a very specific need that a lot of us as customers are also feeling. And I try and make sure that I don't completely dismiss my own intuitive voice, my own voice of reason, and my team’s as well.” – Jinal Shah

 

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

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