"Be consistent and authentic. And maybe even allow yourself not to grow. You'll gain a new zest, calm down, and get a long-term plan. But don't rest on your laurels."
Pavel Cahlík | Project founder @ Jsem na značky
You are standing in the middle of a dense forest. You can't see a way out, just dark fog all . head is filled with all the advice you've ever heard. One tells you to go north, the other sends you south. Somehow, you make up your mind and step out. But still you keep wandering. No clear destination, no compass. And so you lose the energy and the will to go on.
This is exactly what a lot of entrepreneurs' businesses look like. This is what business looks like without a clear brand and strategy. You can have good products or services, but if you don't know where you're going and what sets your business apart, you remain just one of many.
In today's episode of Zážeh, I've invited Pavel Cahlík, an expert in brand strategy who helps companies find their clear goal to . Pavel knows that a brand isn't just about a logo, colors or a nice design. It's about long-term strategy, authenticity and the courage to do things differently. And that's what we're talking about today.
Pavel not only advises, but also stays in these companies and helps them to actually implement their strategy. Thanks to this, he knows exactly what works and what is just an empty marketing cliché.
I tried to get the most out of Pavel so that your company can find its way too:
🔸Why is branding not just about marketing? 🔸How does the brand help the business? 🔸How to create a consistent brand that makes ? 🔸Why is it important to have a clear goal and strategy? 🔸Most importantly, why should companies aim beyond immediate profit?
If you want your company to become a brand that the trust of your customers and the respect of the market, listen to this episode until the end.
FORGET ABOUT COLOURS AND LOGOS: THIS IS THE REAL FOUNDATION OF THE BRAND ( TRANSCRIPT)
Who is Pavel Cahlík
Martin Hurych
If you want to make your business a brand in the new year, you want to know what it means, how it's done and what it can bring you, you've come to the right place. Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Before we get into the anon topic, I have a traditional request. If you like what I'm doing, if you listen to the Ignition or read my blog articles, then be sure to sign up for my newsletter. At this point, more than 1,100 owners and directors of engineering, technology and manufacturing companies already subscribe. You won't miss any more of what I'm doing and you'll help me attract even more great guests like today's. As I outlined at the very beginning, today is going to be about marketing, marketing by my guest of the highest, because if marketing drives anything, it'brand management. I've brought in Paul Cahlik today, hi.
Pavel Cahlik
Hey. Hey. Thank you for inviting me.
What would his classmates say about him?
Martin Hurych
Before we dive into tags, what would your classmates from elementary school tell me about you? What's still with you today?
Pavel Cahlik
I'm sure I was quiet, I'm sure I was always in that group of people who didn't go completely with the flow, I don't think anyone would say anything bad and if they did, I'd deal with them.
I like my peace, but I guess that comes with age, so I like conferences but I also like my peace, I can appreciate both and still not go completely with the flow.
What is brand management?
Martin Hurych
I think it's gonna show today. So, for who may not have had a chance to see you at any conference, let's have a little introduction of what you do and how you got to where you are now.
Pavel Cahlik
I do brand , which is such a hyperbolic marketer's notion of digging into how that company should translate marketing into business, which is a full-time job and maybe for multiple generations. In essence, I'm trying to somehow plan that brand's guts in a way that makes sense with itsObjective. So I'm something between a marketing and business consultant, except that I work in that company. That was a big reason why I went freelance in the first place back then, because I saw a lot of consultants who said that, sold one slide for 5 grand, and then walked away from that companies. I wanted to do that differently, so I stay in that company in different roles. I'm not alone in that anymore, and we're still doing what we enjoy.
Martin Hurych
When I open your site, one of the first things that strikes me is that you make brands out of companies. Why would I make a company a brand?
Pavel Cahlik
To sell more. It's totally fine if you don't want to build a brand and if you just want to make money. But if you want to make something that's here to stay for your kids or for the next and the next generation, you've got to focus on what that brand is. I'm totally okay with the fact that there are e-shops that just want to sell, that's the main reason the brand exists and as long as they're not plundering the planet in the process, I'm even more okay with that. But the companies that are serious and don't just build it for the immediate profit, we really get along with those.
What is a brand?
Martin Hurych
Probably need to define the brand at this point, because until I met you I was making the same mistake myself. For a lot of people a brand is a color scheme, a logo, a font, a corporate identity manual.
Pavel Cahlik
That really falls under marketing, but this is branding. That's the outward manifestation of the brand, and then tonality and other things fall in there. Brand in the broadest sense is really everything you do. When we're talking to someone about a brand, we're talking about their business, and it's only on top of that whether if it's blue, if it's green, if it's loud, or if it's quiet. It serves a purpose, and that purpose is in the mark. So until I know that goal, I can't make any recommendations. Some people do it, that's their business, I don't do it.
Martin Hurych
Each specialist will recommend the channel they specialise in.
Pavel Cahlik
That's what Petra Jankovičová says, that they are channel marketers, partly they should walk through the channel and partly they haven't recognized anything else and haven't peeked out of their channel. Of course, they're experts in that channel, so it's clear that you're recommending what you're an expert in, but it's without that overlay, without seeing into other disciplines. I think every marketer should at least see the overlap into that business.
Martin Hurych
That , according to you, brand building or brand management is actually marketing in the broadest sense of the word.
Pavel Cahlik
Absolutely, that's Porter, that's the 4Ps. I'm often asked, what does the product roadmap look like, what does the innovation roadmap look like, how is the customer going to evolve, how is the market going to evolve? A lot of times everybody hears it for the first time so they don't know how to answer it, so then we address it together. How can you do that one P without seeing the rest of it?
Martin Hurych
That's where I understand the business leg of your activities. How do you in that leg? My experience is that I need help with the business, I need help with the strategy, and where to anchor, we don't know, we want to know from you. How are you responding to that?
Pavel Cahlik
I'm anchored in SMB, especially in the medium, and I'm very there, that's where I have the most added value. Of course I also help huge companies, but it's hard to push it through management and convince everyone. This is the third time I've been in one company, the third time I've seen someone new, the third time I've explained why it's good and finally we're doing the project we agreed on.
In those mid-range brands, it's about me really reaching out to the board or directly to the owner and being the first to show them the complexity of it all. All of a sudden it's about where your brand is going to be in 10 years and that's the first time that person puts a little bit of thought into it and that's where the business sits. It's how we get there because I can help him with marketing, which is essentially business, but if it comes down to some B2B strategy and salespeople, I'm just there to assist. But we can somehow write that into that strategy, into that plan and work it through.
I'm always incredibly happy when the board starts to make sense. Now this was confirmed to me again last month, we do it so that we have some sort of initial discovery session and we still have it so for the bigger companies that we offer that the biggest lead can just be there in the morning. Because it's the really important issues that are addressed and the afternoon is the quote-unquote marketing. They react positively to that because they're really expensive meetings when everybody gets together, but still the big lead always stays in the afternoon as well. Now this was confirmed this past month where the boss, who maybe doesn't stay in meetings at all, was there almost all the time. I have incredible respect for that, I try not to waste those people's time, but give them that big perspective that they often don't even get a chance to address in the day-to-day. So it's kind of the first time that they stop and think about the future of their brand, their business and that's the bomb, that's what I'm incredibly passionate about, that's where I've found myself.
Why is it important to have a clear goal?
Martin Hurych
I'll second everything you say, I rather imagine that when you get there and give them the binoculars and start looking where they should go that there's a crazy fog on the other side. I feel like sometimes when you're walking through the deep woods and you can't see the end but you know you're going northwest, that strategy kind of writes itself. I often meet people who are standing in the middle of that deep forest and they don't know which way to go. Then you must be having a terrible time building that brand.
Pavel Cahlik
That's not building a brand, that's performance , that's about surviving it. If you're standing in the woods like that, you're just fending off bears and wolves instead of getting into a clearing or something. We're touching on something called vision here, and I don't like that word so much, because the marketeers emptied it, everything must have had a vision for a time, now it's calmed down a bit. I'm more saying the goal and it's more understandable and digestible for those owners of the business.
Besides, if we were really talking about Porter, vision is something you never achieve and I don't subscribe to that. It's like putting a carrot in front of a donkey, but the donkey won't take a bite in life. So we're working with a goal and there already the bigger the company, the more experience they have with forecasting, with some planning and those things. We don't plan beyond 10 years, and once you have a starting point, which is the present, 10 years from now is the future, you can break it down to maybe 5 years and that's more digestible. So we're gradually piecing the picture together like that, but as a marketer I need to know if you're building a super premium business or if you're building something that's just to drive volume.
That there are two different processes, two different paths and two different sets of marketing. I can't tell you which is better or worse without you telling me as a business owner. I can give you some advice, but it's going to be general advice that's not going to be for your business. So that's great advice for all owners and all CEOs, drop the vision and really set a goal for where that business should be in 5, 10 years. Then it will make sense to everybody and everybody will breathe better in that brand.
Why should I look at my own company as a brand?
Martin Hurych
I'm deliberately going to shoot this out a little bit now, because a lot of people do what you say, some vision, some goal, BEHAG, that's actually there, that's what we as consultants push them to do, so somehowin the way they used to. What value does the brand add above or beside that? I understand that this is part of the brand, but if I choose not to consistently build just a company and start referring to myself as a brand, why would I actually that? Why should I not just look at it as a company, a business that feeds me, but why should I take something into it that I don't actually see as standard on those levels?
Pavel Cahlik
The first thing is, if you want to build something long term and when you're not here, make sure it's in your vision so that no one tarnishes your name and your brand name. The second thing is consistency.It's a bit derivative of the first one, but having the right gut will help you make better decisionsin this business. For example, I have a set of internal values, I proclaim some of them externally,
and for me that works as a first filter for the business.
If you were, say, a pyramid scheme, or did guns or gambling, we'd either not go on call at all, or we'd say goodbye very quickly. I've already lost a lot of cars and chats that way, but I sleep better and I enjoy the work more. I was on Forbes Better Czechia just now, where the head of J&T was speaking and he was talking about values quite a bit. Us younger guys watched him and the gentlemen in suits applauded him because they have some set of values and it down to the board of directors whether he was going to break it or not.
Maybe it can give the marketers clear rules on who to address, who not to address and there will be no debate at all.
It also helps you pull people into the brand who resonate with you at that base level, so you deal with fewer fuck-ups with employees. This is where we get into employer branding, and there's an incredible amount of those benefits. When you go to the marketing and performance marketing level, it makes the whole marketing thing cheaper. Even the marketers, again, when I jump into B2B, they don't have to explain what the brand is as often because everybody's heard of it.
Martin Hurych
A lot of ex-corporate people know this, where you feel like you have a bunch of friends and then you find out in the end it was about the business card and the logo on the business card.
Pavel Cahlik
Then there's just the emotions that you want to evoke, all the things that are a little more inward and come from the essence of the brand, the gut. A lot of people don't quite see that benefit. Like I don't do design at all, I have graphic designers or graphic design studios do the design for me and they go by myassignment. Last month I was in Ostrava, where we were talking and the copywriter who did all the texts, the sales texts, didn't have an assignment, so it's clear that the texts don't keep the consistency.
Is the Why, How and What together?
Martin Hurych
When I say the brand is Sinek's Why, How and What combined, does that make ? So if I pick one of those frameworks.
Pavel Cahlik
By the way, you can read about frameworks on my blog then, because that's also one of those marketing bullshits sometimes if they're used wrong. I'll answer that, but first to Sink. That why of his, the one in the middle, made an incredible mess in marketing because everybody translated it as a brand mission statement. While I would be thrilled if every brand had a mission statement, which you define as the thing beyond making money, why you do it, the intrinsic why, not all brands have to have one.
They will get to him after two generations, and if we are talking about the level of small and medium brands, the founder was in it for the money and it is completely legitimate. If he went in there for the money and someone starts telling him he should have a mission, that's an incredible inherent contradiction and that's not good. The marketeers have bent a lot, misunderstood a lot, and it needs to be handled very carefully, especially the why.
Martin Hurych
That's interesting because there are two approaches in the podcast climate. One is saying that when you start a business, you should start a business where you're passionate about it, and I've heard a lot of blasted opinion recently that a business is supposed to be a money engine and it doesn't matter if you throw airplanes in there today and diapers in there tomorrow. Where are you?
Pavel Cahlik
The primary thing, which is also given by law, is that the brand has to make a profit. I add to that that it doesn't have to plunder the planet and people. In personal brands when you start a business at all, you instinctively choose what you enjoy and you're good at. So I'm somewhere in the middle, that's my positioning of that grey, because it's neither white nor black. I'm sure you should enjoy it, this life isn't quite long enough to do work you don't enjoy for a long time, but there's always the folders. I mean.
I'm a little bit of an alibi in between, but that's why I try to find those entrepreneurs what they enjoy and what makes them money, so they feel good about it.
How to glue all the marketing basics to make sense?
Martin Hurych
So, if I have now decided, thanks to you here, that I want to build something more than a company and I have some history behind me, where should I start building that brand? Maybe I have some goals, I have some visions, missions hanging in my kitchen somewhere, maybe I've gone through some values workshop, maybe I'm starting from scratch, but I've got it somewhere. How do I glue it together into a consistent picture and how do I move forward?
Pavel Cahlik
This is a very difficult question. I'd rather ask you if it's worked for you so far or not.
Martin Hurych
If you're talking about me, I've started building this deep foundation relatively recently and I don't have it covered yet. I'm a freelancer with a bunch of satellites. My point is more that I see the non-stickiness in much larger companies as well. Ironically the more enthusiastic the business owner,this idea, that action, I'm not going to say something to my management here, I want to push the company forward, the more you whistle on a flute that something comes out of, but it doesn't sound pleasant. So how do I conjure up a consistent song out of that already on the human side and start to improve so that before I knock my boots in 10, 20, 30 years, I've built a brand?
Pavel Cahlik
It all comes from the target, maybe a Polaris. Once you set it and know where you're goingplanning is suddenly easy. I have a goal too, my goal is to giveideally to every brand in the Czech Republic what it deserves, which is a brand strategy. It took me a while to find it, it wasn't like I sat down with a piece of paper and there it was, it took a while of iterations and so on. It's not that if I put something down on paper, it's valid and it's not going to change anymore, not at all.
The second thing is that I forgot about it for a while and then suddenly my satellites came in and just started coming up with these ideas and what if we did this, what if we did this. My other brain is in Notion and all of a sudden I started to get projects that looked really cool, but all of a sudden there were too many. All of a sudden another satellite came in to fulfill that, and then I thought, I don't have that many productive years yet with my health history, so I thought, what's going to serve me best at that particular moment is for every brand to have a strategy here. It doesn't even have to be in my lifetime, somebody can then continue that.
Based on that, we realigned the projects, a lot of them went into a drawer, and now we know what we're doing and we know where we're going to put our energy. I didn't want another satellite, not because I couldn't do it financially, but because I couldn't do it mentally and I didn't want to build an agency out of it. We are more like a studio and it should stay that way, because I feel comfortable again. All
But it came out of the fact that I defined this big goal and now I'm really going for it and I'm not saying I'm going to meet it, but maybe someone else who enjoys it will. So we have that planned for next year and we have a bit of an outlook.
What does the brand consist of?
Martin Hurych
For people who may still be a bit foggy about the brand, can we define what the components of the brand consist of?
Pavel Cahlik
Surely is what's here, the goal, the vision, the mission and how we're going to get there. Then the two biggest chapters are the customer and the market. He's actually kind of a triangle that you're always moving in, sometimes a bit of a very sad triangle, but it's a balance. The more you know about the customer and who's going to pay you, the better, and the more you know about the market and where that market is going when you're not the driver of that market, the better as well. Then the brand benefits sit on top of that, which are just the emotions that you want people to feel from you. Then there's the outward manifestation, then there's the tonality, the logo, the colors, and those things, but they all sit on top of that core.
Martin Hurych
So can we maybe give examples of those benefits that I have to look for in a company to that?
Pavel Cahlik
We can then add that to what I was giving you as a bonus here, something called a benefit ladder. Theone at the bottom starts with a problem that people come to you with as a brand. Then there's product features, that's the next rung, which is how the product isbuilt. You can imagine, for example, how much it weighs, how big it is and these things, and above that are the benefits of the product itself. That is, how that feature of it somehow benefits that customer and then on top of that are just the benefits of the brand.
They can be functional, emotional, there's a lot of other things that could be there, and it's more about what function the brand serves in my life or what emotion I get from it. Your brand might make me feel smarter or more informed or give me a shortcut to something that I would normally have to study for, say, an MBA. Those are all emotions that you want to evoke, and then we talk in marketing, in that outer shell, about how we're going to evoke those emotions in the people that we've described two chapters down.
Martin Hurych
We were talking about cars before the shoot, and you mentioned Toyota. Can we describe these chips on, say, a Toyota?
Pavel Cahlik
There can be an incredible number of problems that this person comes to you to solve as a brand. The more money you have in marketing, the more of those problems you can cover, but mostly here
we just go to the shop and listen for a while to what people are coming up with. I need a new car because I can't fit in it, maybe I've gained weight or I'm having a new baby or the lease is up.
Those are the problems that those people are coming up with, and that salesperson or that salesperson should be trained to set those scenarios in motion, either a business or a sales scenario, or just the brand scenario. When I come in and I want a new car, I'm going to start with a product feature and that might be engine size. Do you want a more powerful engine, or conversely do you want an electric car and now that should translate into a benefit for me. If you have this car, this engine is going to be faster, the electric car is going to be more fuel efficient, it's still a feature or a benefit for that customer, but it's still that product. If I had more brands like that at that car show, it's the benefits of that brand itself that should come in now. When you choose this car, you're going to be perceived as somebody, you and your family will be safe in this car.
Martin Hurych
This has typically always been a Volvo. Some 10 years ago they did a survey on what the safest car was, it's been 50, 60 years since they developed seat belts back then and it's still there.
Pavel Cahlik
Exactly, but again, it had to there somehow. Volvo was stuffing that emotion everywhere so that would stick in the customer's head. It's done either at the dealer or through marketing, that the person comes in already pre-prepared and knows that the Volvo is safe.
Martin Hurych
So is it the case that I should pick one highlight for the brand, like Simply Clever, really any claim? But if I understand correctly, the claim is something I want to be said about me and not offended.
Pavel Cahlik
That's the materialization of those benefits, but it's actually a marketing translation of all thosebenefits. Too bad she wanted to be the smart center, bring a lot of benefits for relatively little money, and some ad agency or internal team translated that into those ads and slogans. Simply Clever is the emotional expression of that brand.
Martin Hurych
What did we forget when we listed those individual brand attributes?
Pavel Cahlik
We probably forgot about a lot of other things, because you can approach positioning either by positioning or by so-called category entry points. Now, in each of those chapters, we would go deeper and deeper and dive down that rabbit hole and pick out what's right for your brandthe best. Some brands can still go through that positioning, that classic, then you have brands that are maybe already in more commoditized markets and there you need a little bit different approach.
You should just orient yourself according to that market, if you have a hegemon or if the market is much more differentiated. That's what we do in those discovery sessions, for example, is we really go chapter by chapter in a fairly superficial way, and that's how we probe what the brand is missing or what it's already worked on. Then only we can start to address something at all. I don't advise from the table, I don't like it, it's irresponsible, I still think if we get in there and start something straight away I can put the brand down.
Who should be in of the brand in the company?
Martin Hurych
If you look at the Czech companies at the moment and if you want to push your goal out into the world, give every brand everything it deserves, unless you invent a blue ocean, you can't succeed and you have to start reducing that market. Now, if someone listened to us and wanted to start doing something with an internal team, the deeper they wanted to go, the more they would need specialists and a bunch of competencies that one person in the can't have, however, one person should drive it. Is it me as the business owner, is it me as the hired CEO, is it me as the corporate branding guy, where would you put this function knowing how things work in companies today?
Pavel Cahlik
I'm just trying to make marketing great again, even though it's definitely not the side of the political spectrum that resonates with me, but it's actually the one. I'm trying to emancipate those marketers a little bit by working with that board, so I get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that those people actually stay there and I'm trying to show them that not everybody can do marketing.
The harder it becomes for that company to find new and new customers, the more it will need these specialists because it will open new and new channels and the more it needs to trust someone. That's something the owner should figure out for himself. The reality of Czech companies is they get burned by the marketeers, I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but the owner has to learn to trust the specialists.
The the company gets, the more and more channels will be needed, the more specialists will be needed and the more middle management will be needed and here we are at the moment of company transformation.
Martin Hurych
So who in the company should be responsible for gluing it all together?
Pavel Cahlik
Ideally it should be a marketing manager, which is usually 80k a month plus.
Martin Hurych
I'm honestly very skeptical there, because a lot of times these people for this money will sit down in the of, shop, tell me what to do about it.
Pavel Cahlik
That's exactly the burn I was thinking of. That's why I recommend that companies start with a marketing coordinator, which can actually be a great project manager who has at least a little bit of an idea of how marketing works. He then manages the satellites around, we deliver the strategy that he goes by and then he's already managing from copywriter to PPC specialists and so on. This marketing projectionist is also not exactly cheap, but it's still a good start because you have to give the marketing manager a budget and responsibility to achieve just those sales targets and that's often not there either.
Sometimes my clients come to me and tell me they can't handle it anymore and don't want to deal with it anymore, so I recommend a manager. I'll give them the price tag where it starts and then I'll calculate the budget that the marketing manager will need, and that's fairly simple. You've got 150k a year for research, then some media budget according to what we've planned in the strategy for example, plus of course the person should have another budget to see what they can do with it as well.
What kind of annual budget to prepare?
Martin Hurych
If you think of a company of 50 people, say an IT studio, what do I have to prepare for branding per year?
Pavel Cahlik
I can tell you what might be in that budget and I can add guide prices, which are usually low,because I also pick people who deliver great work for great money. So there must be some researchor some brand tracking, I don't meanproduct, but some way of tracking the brand, customer surveys, that sort of thing.
There we're around 150 to 200k a year, it's got to be there. Then the other line item has to be for experimentation some things just may not work out. It depends on what channels you're in, if it's already 50 plus, its definitely going to be a big company where it's definitely going to be upwards of 100k. Then you've got PR, where a PR agency will get you from 50k a month upwards. Then there's some online marketing, which can eat up hundreds of thousands a month easily, but with some benefit it can eat up a couple of thousand a month, we can shoot up a lot there. Then you should have some graphic stuff in there, a shoot day, which is also tens of thousands or maybe even higher tens of thousands.
Martin Hurych
We're at mid-millions a year and we don't have an internal manager yet. So it's not cheap fun, but it's still worth it.
Pavel Cahlik
It should also bring something. If you want to go backwards, the mythical percentage that determines the marketing budget is something between 10 and 5% of turnover. Again, it depends on the business, the category and so on, but when someone is starting out, it's good to take a step back from that.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If for some reason only the last 3, 5, 7 sentences of this podcast were to remain, what would that be for you?
Pavel Cahlik
Don't plunder nature and people, no more than , that's one . Consistency is definitely the other thing, authenticity, don't play at anything, people are not stupid, they will know you are playing at it. Allow yourself not to grow, for me, for example, one when I allowed myself not to grow was the best year I've and I regained my energy. So if you don't have shareholders or anything like that, it's perfectly fine not to grow for one year. It sounds very left-wing, but it will give the company a lot of drive and it will calm down, but it must not rest on its laurels. Definitely start by having a long term plan or at least a vision or that Polaris thing, that you know what you're going for and that other people know.
Martin Hurych
I'll head northwest and honor your work. Thank you for here.
Pavel Cahlik
Thank you, likewise, may I meet you at your mark.
Martin Hurych
You've seen it, if you want to approach this year a little differently and want to work on your brand fundamentals, I hope we've given you at least a few ideas. If so, we've done our job well with Paul. If that was indeed the case, consider two things. Sign up for my newsletter, which is already subscribed to by more than 1,100 owners and CEOs of manufacturing, technology and engineering companies. If you don't want to completely sign me up in blood, at least lick here or subscribe wherever you're listening or watching us at the moment. Be sure to download the bonus that Pavel has prepared, it's a ten how to start building your brand and it's also on all the channels we're streaming to you at the moment. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thank you.