Want to win in branding? Go beyond expectations. Make sure your customers leave amazed, not just satisfied.

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Today, we’re stoked to welcome Brandon Coleman Jr, a legendary branding expert with over five decades of experience. As a speaker, mentor, and author of the brand new book, Brand On, Brandon helps entrepreneurs unlock the hidden power of brand alignment to achieve transformational growth. Having launched and sold one of the US’s most successful mid-size branding firms, Brandon’s mission now is to inspire smaller businesses to amplify their impact through alignment. In today’s episode, we’re going to tuck into his wisdom, sharing practical strategies, captivating stories, and powerful insights to help turn your brand on. So welcome to the show, Brandon.

I’m grateful for the time. Thank you guys very much.

First off, I must say that you really nailed your whole brand name, Brand On, which is genius. I’m curious, how long have you been using this? Like, when did that light bulb moment come on or go off, I should say?

It was a real dull light bulb on my part because in 1975, what’s that? 50 years ago, I walked in a classroom at Texas A&M University for a senior level marketing class, and the old professor over there looked to be about 90 years old. He was actually about 70. And I walked in, he starts reading the role, and he goes, Brand on Coleman, are you here? I said, yes, sir, I am. He goes, okay, good. That was that. He failed me on my first quiz. He did essay quizzes. I filled out all the answers, didn’t study, thought I could BS my way through it. He failed me and wrote on the cover, if you think you’re going to bulls**t your way through my class, you’re wrong. Come see me. And I went and saw him. Really long story short, he became a lifelong mentor, dearest friend. We hunted all over the world together, fished all over the world together, consulted all over the world together. And his family asked me to give his eulogy when he died at 95 years old. He is who my book is dedicated to. Ironically, guys, brand wasn’t even really a word back then. There were some of the guys in Madison Avenue in Chicago that were using it. Brand was more like OK, Campbell Soup brand. And there was a brand, but that was the extent. You didn’t discuss brand strategies and there were no, none of that existed. And no one in the street level used it, minus the big Madison Avenue firms. Branding didn’t come of age. I wrote about this in the book. The history of it really didn’t come of age to the to the late 80s and 90s and really started blossoming in 2000. So I get no credit for the name. Mother gave it to me at birth. Second generation, there are now four of us, Brandon’s and my professor is the one who said brand on. So 50 years later, I decided to write the book and I said, wow, what a cool title.

It is a cool title and I’m curious, like how has that name evolved over time for you? Like what does it mean to you now, like brand on, what does it mean to be that?

Well, in short, it’s CX equals C-E-X-P. Customer experience equals your customer expectations. Period. No excuses, no offends or buts. You deliver. Time in, time out, deliver. We are going to begin in January honoring businesses that have achieved brand on acclaimed, which are those who have CX greater than C-E-X-P. In other words, we deliver the wow, or we deliver the magic over and beyond a customer’s expectations. And as you two guys know, Matt and Jacob, you know it goes well beyond marketing. It goes well beyond branding. It goes into the entire customer journey and the delivery and everything. The culture, the whole part about it. You’ve spoken about bits of that on all your shows. But for someone to deliver that on a consistent basis and be truly brand on, time in, time out, is very, very difficult. So it will be hard finding people that deserve that award. We’ve got a few lined up. We’ll start awarding them in January and looking forward to honor. Those people have achieved that.

I’m excited to tuck into all of that. And you’ve shared a little bit about the backstory of brand on, but there’s 50 years that we’re jumping over. So are you able to condense those 50 years into a few minutes, just so you have a bit of context, a bit of backstory, and then we can jump into brand alignment?

I’ll give you all I’ve got, brother. You just tell me what you would like. I’ll try to jump over all that. It’s a long jump. I know in writing this book, I thought, well, I’ll just sit down and nail this. And all of a sudden, 50 years starts boiling up and wow. But it is a brand on is a coast to coast read. You buy it in LA and you finish it in New York, or you buy it on one side of the pond and finish it on the other side of the pond. It is not a long read. It’s about 200 pages. I’ve been told it’s exciting, fun and engaging. I’ve been told by the dean of a business school, it didn’t come from an academician, which that’s a compliment. And so we’re pretty excited about it, but I’m happy to condense as much of what flavor of that 50 years you would really like.

Well, you did the agency thing, right? You did that for a number of years, and then you focused on consulting, and then more recently, you’ve gone into launching your own digital online presence. So I guess a little bit about your agency, a bit about the consulting, I think would be interesting.

Absolutely. You know, this is for the young people, the really young ones in college. I got a job offer when I was graduating at A&M. I was considered one of the top marketing graduates, and I promise you, it was not because of grades. It was absolutely not because of schoolwork. And I got an interview with Procter & Gamble. You’re familiar with them. And we’re in the interview room, and the guy looks at me, and that was back in the day. People still smoked, and he had an ashtray on the table, and he didn’t say a word, didn’t even introduce himself, and he slid the ashtray over to me, and said, sell me this ashtray. And I looked at his fingertips, and there was no yellowing, and I looked at his shirt pocket, and it was still pressed. It wasn’t puffed out, and his teeth were white. And I said, sir, I can’t sell you this ashtray. You don’t smoke. And he said, yeah, and you’re too damn smart to work for Procter & Gamble. So that left, and I got a job offer at a big corporation for, my gosh, almost $50,000 back in the 70s, which was big time, company car. And I’m like, man, I’m in. I’ll take it. It’s great. And my professor, the same guy that called me Brandon, said, how’d that interview go? I said, I got the job. He said, well, I got one more interview I want you to do. I want you to get your butt in a car tomorrow and drive to Houston. I want you to meet the chairman of an advertising agency there, a regional advertising agency. I said, why would I do that? He said, just please go. I said, okay, go. So I thought, okay, I’m cocky. I got a big job offer. I’ll go down there. And I go down and I interview and I go through the whole thing. And here’s this 70 year old man in the room. And he looks at me after three hours and says, Bubba. And he called everybody Bubba. He said, Bubba, I like you. I’d like to hire you. And I’m thinking, wow, is it going to be bigger than the offer? The offer already got me. I’m really doing good. And he goes, I’d like to offer you 15 grand a year plus 100 bucks a month for your car. And I’m like, okay, don’t make it yourself. I said, well, sir, would you mind if I thought about that overnight? He said, no, absolutely. We’d love to have you here at this firm. So I get in the car. There were no cell phones. I drive back to College Station, Texas. I get on my phone and I get home. I call my professor. I said, can we have a beer together? He said, sure. How did it go? I said, I’ll tell you when we have the beer. We got down to have the beer and said, that was a great interview. It went really well. I said, he offered me a job. He said, fantastic. Take it. I said, well, excuse me. It’s 50,000 plus company car versus 15 and 100 bucks. I don’t think so. He said, take it. In five years, you’ll own your own agency. If you go to the corporate route, you’ll be stuck in a cubicle. I trusted that guy so much. I turned down the corporate job, went to work for the ad agency, and about a year later, one of my clients had a Christmas party, offered me the opportunity to start my own firm and he invested in me. And so three years after that, I bought them out and we ran for 20 years. And I was a keynote speaker in San Francisco at a giant ad agency conference. A guy came up afterwards and said, I’d like to buy your agency. And I thought he was kidding. Long story short, he did. So that’s kind of how we got going. What we did early on, guys, was that when I decided to go into advertising, it was all because of Samantha Stevens. You may not be familiar with Bewitched over there overseas.

I have no idea who she is.

Top television show here in the States called Bewitched. The witch could wiggle her nose and make anything happen. And Darren Stevens, her husband, worked for an ad agency called the Tate Agency. And we would watch it with Gilligan’s Island and leave it to Beaver. And that was kind of an afternoon show. And I went to my English professor after I left the tennis team and said, what, you ever watch Bewitched? She goes, sure. Why? I said, what does Darren Stevens do for a living? I knew nothing about business. I was a coach’s son. I played ball. I played tennis and basketball. And so she said, well, he works for an ad agency. She said, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. She said, okay, you can either go to journalism, which is where most of the kids go, or there’s something new you can go into marketing and business because it’s really a business-based discipline as well as creative. And I think the future is in the business side. So I interviewed the head of journalism and then the dean of business and decided to go the business route. So early on, we were not just running creative and pitching campaigns. But we were talking strategies, as you guys did on one of your podcasts the other day, we talked in-depth strategies early on. And we would not do, we were the first firm in the Southwest to decline free presentations. At the time, in the 70s, 80s, and even in the 90s, the only way you got business was you went up against three, four, five other agencies and pitched it. And you did creative campaigns, and three or four of you lost, and one of you won. Well, who paid for the work of all those that lost? The existing client base. And we told our perspective clients, we would rather you pay us to do the upfront work. And if we really suck at it, we’ll give you our money back. But if you hire us, we’ll apply that fee you paid us to do the upfront work to your account. And we killed it. We were very blessed. We were very strategic oriented, so much so that as we grew and hit the giant size of 10 people, I said, we ought to make a strategy shift. And I went to Anderson Consulting and hired four of their brilliant young consulting superstars. And we integrated consulting and management consulting, which I turned into brand consulting in the mid 80s. We turned that into our discipline, rebranded ourselves from Coleman and Coleman, which was my brother and myself, my creative director, typically ad agencies, our law firm sounding name. We rebranded ourselves brand imagination and came at it with a huge business discipline of strategic involvement and assessment. And I remember winning a BMW account because we told them to stop advertising. And the guy was shocked. He said, what do you mean? I said, stop advertising. You’re hurting yourself. You got the wrong message. And so we just, we did things differently. Listen to some of your stuff, Jacob, on strategy. I just loved it. You’re just spot on with it. And we took that approach and it really shocked kind of the ad agencies down here that we competed against because it was very, very different. So we integrated brand, brand prints, blueprints, brand strategies, brand analysis. I’m talking eighties and nineties, but nobody was using it. Not in Southwest anyway, or Southeast. Nobody. And so we became a strategic consultancy, which is why that firm got interested in us in 99 2000 and bought us because we weren’t a typical adage. We had creatives, we had great graphics people, some of the best, but we didn’t hang our hat solely on creative. We hung our hat. So you walk into any ad agency in the Southwest United States, probably anywhere, and the lobby is filled with awards, right? We would not post any awards. Only thing sitting in our lobby was a 1905 candy store cash register. And when people go, well, why is that there? Because we’re here for one thing, and that’s to make yours ring. What is it? We’re here to make your cash register ring. We’re not here for awards or anything else. And that strategic approach turned our agency into a consultancy and elevated us above others. So that was that was our competitive advantage, and that’s what made it special and unique.

I think that’s super smart. If you think about it, I think that is one of the major flaws in the industry, right? There’s a lot of people focused just on creative and design, and nothing wrong with that. But the issue is, is that that in isolation is not worth very much to business people, right? As you exactly say, Brandon, you got to, you know, what are they interested in? They’re interested in positioning their businesses for success, for outmaneuvering the competition, for basically, you know, scaling and growing and leaving a legacy behind them that’s of high value. Now, if you can’t connect your creative work and show them how it’s going to help them do that, then you’re missing a trick. And also, if you just come at it from the creative, like you’ve rightly said, brand is not just the look and feel of your advertising campaign. Brand is, you know, what you’re doing for customers, your innovation, your product, your operations, your customer experience, all of that combined creates a brand, you know, a proper brand in the market. So it doesn’t surprise me whatsoever that that was a success, but it’s pretty bold to do in those early days. What kind of drove you to do that?

Well, I gave credit to one old man. His name was Professor Herb Thompson. I’m going to give credit to another. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in old men’s. Maybe I can get you guys to listen to me. You know, I turned 70 when I was a member. We listened to some old people. There was a man named Peter Wolf out of San Juan, Capistrano. He’d worked with big agencies, small agencies, all over the world. The guy was brilliant. He was 69, 70 years old. He ran something called the Agency Management Roundtable. Owners of independent ad agencies around the United States in non-competitive markets could sign up, and 12 of us would get together for three to four days somewhere in the United States at a resort. And the first one to sign up from Houston, the first one to sign up from Miami, or the first one from New York City, and no other competitors were allowed. One of the entry fees was not only your money, but you had to submit your financials. And they would rate your financials. And you literally got to be in a room with 12 peers struggling with the same s*** every day, the same challenges, the same pressures, the same opportunities, the same failures. And you got to share them with people and you became lifelong friends. And one of the things that Pete preached, and I’m talking 1983, was don’t do any upfront work for free because somebody’s paying for it and that’s not fair. He said, one day, spec agency creative will be gone and business strategy will prevail. And I so believed that because of my business background. I said, man, you were just like so spot on. So he said, I want you to do something called a master plan for your clients. And you’re going to work for it. You’re not just creating three ads saying, well, what do you think? You’re really doing homework on them. You’re spending the time. You’re investing a lot of money in it. We really want to earn your business. So we’re really like going to study and we’re going to put time in. We’re going to do research and we’re going to come up with business strategies first, communication strategy second. And we’re going to make a presentation to you. And he said, I want you to charge them ten thousand dollars. Now, we’ll tell you that number today would be one hundred grand. So imagine going to someone who has never worked with you. They’ve got three other people in the hallway willing to do SPECT Creative and you go, we’re going to charge you a hundred grand, here’s why. And we won those things, guys, like nine out of ten. Again, some of the best aides, you’ve heard of the Richards Group, world class group out of Dallas. Biggest independent ad aides in the United States. They’re still going today. Stan Richards, great man, great people, did great work. But it was fun going in and being different, right? And just saying, hey, it’s okay, if you want to throw us out, it’s cool. But we’re going to put the work in. And we’re going to do it right. And then we’re going to nail your creative. And it was a different way of thinking. And the two people that loved that most, it was never the CMO. They hated us. They hated us. I had a pistol, a cowboy pistol. We’re in Texas. I had a cowboy pistol in my desk. It was from the 1930s. And every time I got a CMO fired, we’d put a notch in the handle on the gun, kind of like the gunfighters do when they shot somebody. Because they usually blocked the way of the C-level people who made the decisions. Because it was turf protection. And we would always get into the CEO and the CFO with our approach. Because they could logistically and strategically understand it. Whereas the CMO is like, no, no, no, no, no. You do that, I can’t control this thing. It’s no longer about the message or what I’m telling the boss it’s about. It’s about, you’re developing the pure strategy for this entire organization. I can’t let you do that. So our strategy really connected at the C level and made a lot of enemies at the CMO level. You know, not intentionally. We’ve got some dear CMO friends, but we dealt C to C more often in the C suite.

Brandon, you’re ahead of your time. And I can tell there’s just so many stories. I could sit down, have a beer with you for many hours. But I do want to get into brand alignment.

Oh, what is that? Yeah, tell me what that is. You’re a branding guru, Jacob. Tell me what brand alignment is.

Well, you wrote a book on it. So we have to talk about it. Okay, let’s do it. So brand alignment. Let’s just start at the top.

So we talked about CX equals CXP. It’s when your delivery absolutely meets the expectations. That’s the simplest form, period. And that’s at every point. And it goes well beyond branding, as you guys know. It goes from culture to finance to billing to… You don’t want another story, but that’s what I do, brother. So like, for example, we had hired by a giant health care clinic, 80 physicians, one of the biggest in the United States. And we do all the assessments of their alignment. I think it’s important for you guys to know the clients that called us out maybe two or three times out of hundreds, out of 50 years, were they failing? They were always doing well. They just knew something was missing. We didn’t get called from people going, oh, we’re going out of business, help us out of here. You know, once or twice, mainly it was people were doing good, but they just knew something was missing. And if we could take one client who’s, you know, at the hundred to $200,000 revenue level and find that one thing that’s missing, and he’s now 25 years later doing $35 million a year, then it works. So we’re at this clinic and they do great health care. They do great patient welcome. They do great on boarding. They do great everything. But when you got in your car after paying $3,000 for your whatever and going through the needles and the problems and the picks and the prongs and the things we all don’t like to go through at the doctor’s office, then you go get in your car. Well, you’re relieved. You get in your car like, oh, thank God. But then you drive out and you hit a toll booth. And a lady that, you know, two, 300 pounds away who doesn’t care about you goes, that’d be $15. Excuse me? That’d be $15. Thank you. How was your appointment today? Are you feeling okay? And by the way, your parking is 15 bucks. And so I told them a presentation to 300 people. I said, y’all, y’all need to add one discipline to your group. A proctologist. And they said, well, why? Because your parking is a pain in the a**. And so what happened was they were doing all this great stuff on the front end, not realizing it, they were spitting it out negative on the back end. Because the last time a patient slash customer saw them, they were driving off after paying an incredibly high parking fee from someone who had a really bad attitude. And those kind of adjustments make a difference in the total delivery of care in that instance. So, alignment is every single piece of the business. And one of the things I’ve done for people that buy this book is that they get a scan code, QR code, to go online. And I have two documents for them, very in-depth. It is a culmination of 50 years. They’re the two documents I use to start with every client. And they’ve been refined through the 50 years. And it is all the things you need to go through to assess your own brand alignment and all the things you need to go through to try to adjust and change. And it’s probing, and it’s difficult. And I would tell you the one biggest thing, if you go read those two documents, I’m happy to give you a link to them. But if you go read those two documents and you take 50 years and say, like, okay, boil all this crap down to just one thing I need to do. First thing you need to do is be honest with yourself. I can’t tell you how many times C-level people were dodging the truth and they tried to feed my consulting team and a bunch of, you know what, trying to get to an end result on an ad campaign. Doesn’t work. If we’re going to really, truly make a brand alignment correction, we need to be able to tell you, your baby is ugly and you need to change his name. And you need to be able to hear it. And if you can’t, we’re not going anywhere with this project because great brand alignment. I mean, is Jacob, the truly great brand alignment project, have to start at the top, nowhere less. And they have to be championed by that leader. And I’m not talking about the CMO. I’m not talking about the vice president of marketing. I’m talking about they have to be championed by the man or the woman because it has to go that deep into the core. And they have to be honest. And if that company is having issues and they’re not being honest about those issues, I’ll tell them, maybe you’ll be 60% successful, maybe 70. You’ll never hit 100. And because most of our clients were successful anyway, it was about taking them from hitting at 70% effectiveness to hitting at 100. And the only way you get to 100 is truth.

Why do you think it’s so difficult for entrepreneurs or people to be so truthful? Like, why do they struggle with this, a wine and a brand?

I know you don’t know any stories, so I’m not going to give you one. Because I’ve got so many stories. I’ve got so many of those. Let me tell you, there’s one guy I threw out of an office once, not like out of the building, but like out of the meeting, at a huge multinational company in Houston. And I kept telling him, you know, y’all got these family issues, a family-owned business, you got this issue, that issue, that issue, that issue, this issue, and we need to deal with that. Therefore, you can create the culture you want. But until then, you’re not going to do it, so you’re going to hit it 60%. Guy stood up and told me to FO. And I’m supposed to be in there for marketing. I said, sir, we’re much more than about marketing. We’re about helping you reach your ultimate potential. We’re about success for you. And that’s all we’re about. Well, he got really angry at me and ultimately, ultimately, ultimately got us fired. And I see him at a gas station five years later and he’s pumping gas and he starts walking towards me. And I thought, God dang it, I better get to my gun in case he pulls his. We’re in Texas. And he comes up and goes, can I give you a hug? I’m like, okay. He said, what you told us to do five years ago, changed our company, but not until you were gone for a couple of years and I can finally own the truth. He said, but thank you. And that has happened 25, 30 times. Those kinds of conversations, but you have to be willing to fly into the teeth. You have to have the courage to be able to tell somebody that what they’re doing is dead wrong, dead wrong. Whatever it is that is holding them back from reaching that perfection level, from truly delivering excellence to their customer base.

So I’m curious on the process you’d use. Like if you, if you’re trying to uncover this truth, like how do you get it out of them? And then how do you go about fixing it? I guess.

That’s an awesome, that is an awesome question. And here’s how it usually went down. To me, all branding firms, they’ve got them all packaged, they’ve got names for all of them. And the reality is we all use the same process. And that process is we go into discovery, right? And then we go into assessment. Then we’re going to lay down a snapshot of how everything is. And we call it the as is and the to be. Here’s the as is, here’s how things are based on our research, based on our interviews of your organization, based on interviewing your customer. Here’s the as is. Now over here is the to be, and it’s what you dream for it to be. It’s what you told us your dream was. So we’ve got to build a bridge from the as is to the to be. I mean, everybody uses a very similar process. And then you map out the strategies that are going to get you there. And then you map out how we’re going to measure that. Well, somewhere during, if you’re hands-on, and this is something I’d love to talk to you guys about, and you may not want to do it today. It doesn’t happen as much in today’s marketing firm world, because everybody wants to deal online, away from the office, and on Basecamp or monday.com, and they don’t want to talk to you unless it’s by Zoom. And it’s really hard. Look, I can love you guys and get to know you a little bit and become a Guinness drinking buddy with you. But I probably can’t really, really get to know you really, really well on Zoom, and there’s other people on the phone and everything else. But when you’re doing those in-person interviews, or you catch them down the hallway, when you take that lunch break, or you take the guy out and buy him a scotch, and he goes, you know, Brandon, you’re working your ass off, but damn. You need to know, man, Joe over here has just screwed the pooch on our couple. What do you mean? Well, he’s doing X, Y and Z. Oh my God, you’re kidding me. He said, yeah, if you could ever unveil that, we’d be the best there is. And so those kinds of conversations don’t happen on Zoom. Those kinds of conversations don’t happen through email or text. And I love all the systems. I love the process and I get it. But so much personality has been taking out of our industry, except at the very big levels, the McKinsey’s, the big agencies that are getting paid millions enough to spend that time with clients. But all the little guys, the regional guys are getting screwed because there’s no personality being put into it. I just had to fire a marketing firm that was helping me with my book. I had six people on my team. I will never name them, but I wouldn’t give you five cents for any of the six. Any of them. And I gave them every opportunity to be successful. Every opportunity. But there was no personality. Everything was a process. Everything was a widget. Everything was an app. There was no human side. So they wondered why I would deny the creative on their approach, or the wording, or the strategy. Because there was no heart. They had taken the heart. A lot of the heart has been taken out of marketing. Too much process has been built. And I did a video on the whatever it is, the 50 words brand whatever, that create a brand salad. It confused people like crazy. And branding really is simply common sense. But too many people go over and around it. I would love to see people become more personal. I’m sure you guys do in your businesses, because you all have that personality. But you have to be willing to risk losing the client by asking the hard question. And we started every interview with one question. It was the same one if I was interviewing you on my podcast. I started and go, welcome guys, glad you’re here today. What makes you great? I’m gonna listen to your answer. I’m gonna listen real closely. What makes you great? And it’s that personality that’s missing today. And so when we drill down to small businesses, the people running the small companies, it’s really hard for them to get good direction and good ideas because that personality is out of it.

One thing that I’ve noticed, Brandon, so I consult all over the world and that personal bit that you’ve just said there, it’s absolutely spot on, right? So I’m a single solo consultant and I find that often it is after the workshop in, you know, down in the hotel bar, you know. A quick beer or in the coffee lounge, you know, or whatever, where everybody sort of stood around in the break. And as you say, that’s where the insights come from. It’s not always, you know, in the room, in front of others. And there’s often massive personalities, egos, stuff at play that as an outsider, you coming in, you have no clue about until you really get to know the people, get to understand what’s going on. So I’m like you, I really, really love getting hands on real people in real rooms. I fly all over the world to do this. And I find that particularly when you eat with people, I don’t know if you’ve done this, it’s just maybe but eat with them.

There’s something after a day session. Yeah, go for a meal or whatever the next day.

Yeah, precisely. I mean, I’ve got a Norwegian client and they are huge on eating. And I love them for that.

I’m in.

They always take me out after anything we’re doing together. I’m with them in London next week actually. And I know they’ll take me out and we’ll have a really nice meal and funny enough, we’ll do a full day’s work. We’ll be absolutely exhausted at the end of kind of bouncing ideas and stuff. But I know for a fact that the real work will be done probably about eight o’clock at night, just over a steak. Seriously, that’s where it will happen. That’s where it will click. I don’t tell them that now because we’ve got to go through the process. But that’s probably where the ideas will come from. And then when I’m playing stuff back the next morning, that’s where it will kind of the magic will be.

It’s amazing how smart we look the next morning after the steak and the beer.

Yeah, precisely. But it’s true. And I think the other thing is that one, I don’t know what your thoughts are on this. If you’re doing branding properly and advocating for it to touch all parts of the organization with the alignment that you’re speaking of, what that means is that you really need to be comfortable, not just with the marketing team. You need to be comfortable talking to operations and finance and other areas of the business. You might not be an expert in that. But you need to get to know those types of people and you need to be able to connect them and inspire them with the work that you’re doing. Because you’ve got to glue everything together with the brand and the strategy and the positioning that you want to take the business to.

Spot on, Matt. Spot on, brother. And you know what else? The one group you leave out, I don’t care which of those discipline, human resources, inventory control, security. The one group that you leave out is the one that will undermine you all the way down the project.

Absolutely.

You got to get They know they’re all part of the brand. They all need to be supporting you.

Yeah, they need to understand it, connect with it, feel that they’ve been part of it, that their their piece of the pie, if you like, has had a voice at the table. There’s a couple of analogies that I’ve kind of mixed together, but you know what I mean? They need a voice in the process to buy in, to at least understand. You’ve got to challenge them. I like what you said earlier about having the courage to tell people that what they’re doing is not right. But that is sometimes very scary, particularly if you’re saying, for example, to someone in HR and you’ve not got a HR background, we think that there’s something you’re doing here that’s affecting the culture, which ultimately is affecting the customer experience. That’s a problem. That’s quite difficult.

If you can do that, just make sure you say that in front of the CEO, too. Don’t ever say it in just the one…

Absolutely.

You got to get like Jack Nicholson, you know? Jack Nicholson, you know, in the movie, What’s the Military Movie? Oh, anyway, old man memory. Jack Nicholson, my favorite line that we used in branding all the time. At some point, you get to the point where, you can’t handle the truth. A big time line, probably Jack Nicholson’s most famous line. And it is reality. This is about truth. This is about reality of truth. Especially when you’re presenting that to your customers, right? And that’s what you propose. Yeah.

And Brandon, earlier you said the heart’s been taken out of the industry. So, I’m curious, you’ve just launched your own digital presence, and I guess you’re going from that very in-person relationship and now into a digital space.

And I’m really sucking at it, Jacob.

It’s a learning curve. But no, it’s going great from what I see. And when you publish your PR for the person who pitched us, which we get daily, your brand stood out. So, it definitely…

You’re very kind.

Thank you. And moving into the digital space, like how have you found that process, like getting that hard and bringing it online and just like getting your brand off the ground?

Well, the actual use of the tools, it’s a tool. Like all the other tools have been brought along through all the decades. It doesn’t matter whether it’s billboard or print or magazine or radio or TV or social, they’re all tools. Obviously, social is the most powerful tool to come along ever, and has so many legs and so many moving options. So it’s very difficult to get your arms around that, especially if you’re an old school guy, really, really hard. And so I would encourage the firms that are consulting with that to make sure they clarify direction, clarify where they’re going strategically, and bring together in one piece how that’s going to occur and how they’re going to be successful. Too many times I’ve dealt with three of them now. They just want to start posting. Can we approve this? I just met you yesterday. Can you understand where I’m going first? And they’re all 20-something years old, and they’ve already written the post before they leave the meeting, and they got their deal, and they don’t understand. Why don’t you like our graphic? Well, because it sucks, number one. Number two, no thought’s been put into it. But I get the fact you’re not doing graphics like I did graphics. I get that. I’m respecting that. I’m respecting I don’t understand your space, but I’m not going to prove a graphic is not in line with the brand. I’m writing a book on brand alignment. I’m not using purple and pink in my post-its, okay? It’s red and white and black and yellow. So we need to be red, white, black, and yellow. And they’re in, especially in the past five years in the United States, I don’t know about where you lads are from, but people are wearing their free-lens on their sleeve. They’re so soft and especially in the marketing spaces. I get so many soft people that one guy did me a spec video. One, I didn’t ask for it. Two, it was literally the worst thing I’ve seen in my 50-year career. My six-year-old grandson could do a better video from scratch with no instruction. It was that bad. So I kindly went back. I said, well, I really appreciate you putting in the time and the thought to do something without me asking for it. I love initiative, man. That means a lot to me. Now, tell me what you were thinking. And he goes, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, way off, and I went, well, why don’t you send me the three best videos you’ve ever done? Let me look at those so I can understand how you work. He goes, oh, I’d loved it. He sent me three videos. God bless him. They were worse than the one he sent me. They were terrible, guys. I mean, it was a disaster. And I finally went back and he goes, well, what don’t you like about them? I said, I’m going to put this in a short summary because I don’t have time to hold hands and see them come by. They suck. They’re just not even close. They’re not on brand. They’re not on. They’re nothing good about them. I’m sorry. I don’t have time to play games and hold your hand. The guy started crying. The guy wanted to get on with his six teammates and have me apologize on a Zoom call. I’m like, oh my God. And you can’t get to great work that way. My creatives were always told, guys, you’re brilliant. You do brilliant work. There are going to be things you do that people shit on. For whatever reason, everybody’s got a different taste. And some people aren’t going to like them. I’m always going to have your back. But when you hear that somebody thinks your idea stinks, just turn around and say, that’s great. What do you think it ought to be? And work with them because any other response isn’t going to get you anywhere. And I’ve seen so much of that guy’s, literally in the past 12 months of marketing, getting this book ready for launch in January. It’s scary. I’ve talked to many other agency CEOs, small and large, and said, guys, world’s changing. And they tell me how it’s changing. And they tell me the difficulties. And so truly great consultants like you two guys that can get in personally and serve people, I think are worth your weight in gold. I don’t think you need to carry a huge team when 90% of that team is incompetent. I really don’t. And I don’t mean that to be demeaning. There’s some great marketing talents out there. The problem is the word expert has died. And my next podcast is on such. The word expert’s gone. Because of this, because of the iPhone, and the ability to create a graphic in five seconds, the great words and AO in ten seconds, and post it and go, Hi, I’m Martha. I graduated six minutes ago, and I’m a marketing expert. And I know branding, I know posting, I know this. Well, everybody calls themselves an expert. And I got news for you. If you line up a hundred branding guys, maybe two of them know what the hell they’re doing. And now you got all these experts. And so guess what? Susie that owns the coffee shop, hires the marketing expert. That’s a horrible experience. Flush is $50,000 or $20,000. It means a lot to them. And it really makes me sick. And so that’s one of the reasons I did the book. And I’m out alone speaking to her, trying to share some of this knowledge with these small businesses and say, hey, open up your eyes. It’s all simple. Brand alignment is art, science and common sense. Art, science and common sense. But if you give me any one of the three and I look back over 50 years, I will take common sense every single time in making a great brand.

So when you did this yourself, it sounds like you had a lot of hurdles, like dealing with agencies and experts, as you say. Like, what was the process? Like you’ve done this for so many other brands. Did you do much of this yourself or did you work with?

What the hell are you an idiot, dude?

Did you work with others or did you do a lot of the like planning the strategy yourself or like how did you do that?

No, no, no. I intentionally, I knew the power of being the third party. I knew the power of taking an entrepreneur out of the forest. So they could, out of the trees, right? So they could see the forest. I knew the power of that. I preached to him my whole life. So how could I go in and dictate a strategy? And go, well, guys, we need to go this direction and do that. No, I said, no, I’m going to be wide open just like I asked my clients to be. I’m going to trust like I asked my clients to do. But what I learned after the second firing was that because of my background and who I am or what I’ve done or not done, too many of the really young people were scared shitless. They never said that. They were just scared shitless working with me. So they would go, everything was nerves. And they would overthink and overthink and overthink and send me stuff that was terrible. And I’d say, well, that’s not that great. Oh, God, they’d blow up and have their feelings hurt. And it is because of who I was. So I take responsibility for that because I did not realize that by positioning myself that way, guys, I put an undue pressure on them and they couldn’t handle it. They could not handle it. And especially if you take the heart out of it, especially if you take the personal touch and the phone calls and the direct conversation, zero personal meetings. How do you ever get to know somebody? The young lady I’m working with now, I’ve been working with for four weeks. And she said, I insist on a weekly meeting in your face. I want to get to know you. We’ve now traveled together. I mean, four weeks, we have done more than my last two firms added together over nine months. And she’s about to knock it out of the park because she cares. And she’s young. She’s 26. And she but she’s she’s engaged. She’s intense. She wants to make it happen. These people are working for these marketing conglomerates that are checking boxes. They’re assigned so many hours on a project. And I get six and my six is up. I can’t work on this anymore. And, you know, a CEO called me when I fired one group. He goes, You purchased 50 hours? I said, No, I didn’t. I purchased a firm that was going to deliver excellence. Nobody ever told me about hours. Well, on our package, it’s 50 hours. I said, Nobody ever told me about 50 hours. Well, not only that, we spent 100 hours. I said, I’m sorry. If you spent 100 hours doing the crap y’all did, you need to fire everybody at your firm. Because I don’t know who’s keeping time sheets, but excellence and hours don’t equal up, dude. In our industry, in our industry, excellence comes within seconds. We never build by the hour. You can’t buy me by the pound like a candy bar. You may, you guys have probably both done this in your lives, and that’s within 30 seconds of meeting a client. Came up in your mind with a campaign that made them millions. I know you’ve done it. We did it over and over again. How do you build somebody for that? You can’t do it by the hour.

Oh man, so many stories. All right.

That’s what happens when you get old, brother.

Where to go from here? There’s some examples in your book about quantum growth. What’s one that stands out for you from that book?

Great question, Jacob. One that comes to mind is a little village called Santa’s Wonderland. They were about 10 miles outside of a college town in Texas. Long story short, the guy and his family had a passion for Christmas. So he goes out, decides to buy a couple of acres of land, and he goes, he’s an entrepreneur, so he literally goes to every Walmart and Kmart in town and buys out all the Christmas lights, hangs them up in the trees, cuts a path through the trees, puts up a little booth and charges cars, $10 a carload, throw as many kids in the car as you can, and drive through the million lights. Well, it was as cheesy as you can believe. I mean, it was just cheesy as hell. I mean, it was just poorly done. But they were lights in the middle of a dark forest, so people stopped and they drove through. And my family and I drove through because my kids were like, oh, look, daddy, Santa Claus. You drive through and you’re like, oh my God, I can’t believe this guy gets money for this. 10 bucks a car. He did that for two or three years. He was dying on the vine, just barely staying alive. And real long story short, I bumped into him at a restaurant one day. I didn’t know him from Adam. He comes up and goes, you’re Brandon Coleman. I said, I am. He goes, I’ve been told I need to talk to you. I said, who are you? Well, my name is Scott Madeline. And I run a place called Santa Claus. I’ve driven to there the last three years with my family. Great job, man. Blah, blah, blah. He goes, yeah, well, we’re, we’re struggling. We’re hitting $100,000 a year. And that’s just not enough to survive that thing. I got four family members working and I got the lights and electricity and the property and we’re barely paying bills. We’re not making any money. So he goes, I’d really like to hire your service. I said, dude, my retreat’s back in that day, started 20 grand a day and usually take a minimum of two days, but I’ll do it for you for 10 grand total. He goes, deal, done. So we went and did a retreat with him and realized that they were Christmas, but they weren’t anything special. And, and we said, well, well, what are you doing with those little outhouse buildings back behind? Oh, well, those are barns that hold machinery and equipment and da, da, da, da, da. So they put on, they had a little gunfight, which wasn’t Christmas and other things going on out there. So those are yours. He goes, yeah, we own the property, but we’re trying to make it work. We just believe in this dream. Okay. End of the day, end of the two days, we came up with something so simple you’re going to go, well, that’s not even worth putting on a podcast. Santa’s Wonderland, a Texas Christmas experience. All we do is add the word Texas, seems obvious enough, but we changed his brand to align everything around that. And we said, we want to get within two years, we don’t want you letting cars drive through the lights. We want you selling hay rides, and we want you selling horse drawn wagons and carriages. And when those little buildings over there, we want to turn that into Santa’s Village, and we want gift shops and cotton candy. And he goes, nobody’s going to pay to walk in the woods to a little village. He goes, oh, we’ll do it free for a couple of years, but they’ll be paying. And at that time, I said, $10 a carload is what he did. I just left there five days ago. I don’t consider it Christmas unless my wife and I go spend a night or two there or take the grandkids there. The place is fricking amazing. He does $35 million a year, open six weeks. Wow. All because he aligned the brand to Texas. Every bit of it. He’s got Marshall Frost by it. He’s got Santa Claus in cowboy boots. He’s got it all. He spends $2 million a year on snow. We don’t get much snow in Texas, so he ships it in. Giant machines. And it is the most… And go to landoflights.com. landoflights.com when you get a chance. But I’m about to release a podcast, some videos on it. We did some interviews with him. He’s on a podcast, two podcasts ago. He’s on there, the interview. But to watch his family reach their dream, watch him buy his 70-year-old daddy a home, the car he’s always wanted in 1950 whatever, and to watch them live large. And they now serve, they used to get 100 cars a year, 200 cars a year. He now brings in over 600,000 people. You know what it costs to get into that little village that he didn’t have? 65 bucks a head. And that gets you nothing. You want cocoa, you want reindeer juice, you want burgers, which… You want to go through the food village, you want to go through the hay ride, the snowfall. Average ticket is 135 bucks a head. They bring over half a million in there. Some of them spend a lot more than that. And you can rent a village in the woods. Alignment, one thing. Texas, one thing, just one thing.

Let’s come back to that customer experience, right? We spoke around at the start.

Well, in the podcast with him, I asked him, I said, Scott, I said, when I knew you, you had your customer, your customer journey had like three touch points. That’s pretty easy. How many do you have today? He said, I knew you were going to ask me, so I counted. We got like 365 customer touch points. I said, how do you get those in alignment? Well, they created it at our request. They created Santa’s Wonderland University. So they have an LMS, a Learning Management System, online. But you got to realize they have 2,000 annual part-time employees. Think about that nightmare. 2,000 annual part-time employees, 90% of which are college kids. And you got to train them to brand, train them to the right words and the right body movements and the right everything. And they do it, and they do a damn good job. And if you guys flew in, and if you did, by the way, I’ll get you in there, it is an amazing experience. And they’ve got craft beer huts and wine bars. And I mean, it’s just, it’s beyond belief. It’s not a kiddy place. It is beyond belief.

Sounds like an experience. That’s for sure.

Again, it was all about alignment. Without the alignment, they’d be still doing 100 grand a year, 200 grand a year.

Right. Thank you for sharing all your stories, Brandon. We have a couple of quick fire or rapid fire questions for you. And then we’ll wrap up with some final advice and where we can connect with you as well. So, you ready?

Please.

Okay. What’s the biggest branded myth you’d like to debunk?

That brands are built by committees. Brands are not built by teams or committees. No way.

One brandy mistake entrepreneurs should avoid.

Looking up an ad agency on the internet and picking them.

A tool or resource you swear by for branded success.

Man, that sounds kind of self-serving, but if you buy my book, you get a total checklist that is everything you need.

There you go. We’ll link to that. The best piece of branding advice in one sentence.

I’ll go back to something we talked about earlier in the podcast. Without a doubt, unequivocally, after 50 years of this stuff, I can promise you, it starts at the top. If there’s not sea level engagement, you’re treading water. You’re not going to make it. If you want a great brand, you want great brand alignment, start at the top. Start at sea level and don’t let anybody get in the way. And that leader has to lead. Love it.

And last one, what’s next for you after Brand On?

Brand Off. I’ve already done the outline and people, I’ve been blessed. I’ve had everybody from the chairman of Southwest Airlines to some small business owners read Brand On. 50 people have read the early advanced readers copy before it comes out. Got some great reviews. I feel very fortunate, very, very, very blessed. God’s taken care of me despite myself. And they love it. It’s fun. It’s engaging. It gets right down to the core issues real quick. Got some fun stories. But the truth is that people love bad news or they do good news. People love to hear about the failures. And we’re going to we’re going to highlight Brand Off businesses. We have something called Brand On Acclaim. We’re going to go around the country and find those few businesses that are beyond Brand On. We’re going to award them. We’re going to video them. We’re going to highlight and promote them. But Brand Off is already outlining. We’re already putting it down. And you don’t want to be a Brand Off restaurant and have my wife and I eat there. You don’t.

I look forward to that.

I’ve got one other quick question for you, Brandon.

Please, Matt.

You mentioned that you have a passion for small businesses. You’re doing this to help smaller businesses. Where does that come from? And why a focus on that rather than, say, go for the big boys, just out of interest?

Well, it comes back to the story on Santa’s Wonderland. I mean, we didn’t take anybody under $100,000 in fees start and point. And I took him for $10,000. And look what happened to his company. And because it affected his family and so closely, it was just like, how many small people out there putting their life savings into a business after they retire or are into a franchise because they really want to succeed and it’s their dream, it’s their goal to be a business person on their own without any bosses and run their own deal. And those people in the day couldn’t afford us. They couldn’t afford most of us. And they certainly couldn’t afford the big agencies. But I wanted to bring them that level of education, that level of wisdom, that level of expertise, that level of creativity, that level of courage to their small business. And I will tell you a couple of my favorite stories, which I want to tell you right now, were when I told people to shut it down. When you do enough analysis, you go, you’re throwing enough good money after bad, you stop. And here’s why you need to stop. And that was OK. That was OK because it helped them. It helped stop the pain. So, just being able to help people that can’t afford that help, that are in search of that help, that are just out there in La La Land trying to figure it out on their own. What’s amazing about entrepreneurs is, you know, nine times out of ten, entrepreneurs know the answer. That’s why they’re entrepreneurs. That’s why they got in it. They know the answer. Inherently, they know the answer. And then they talk themselves out of it. Or they listen to those around them and they talk themselves out of it. So a lot of times, all I’m there for is, as you guys have both done, Matt and Jacob, both you, in your travels, it’s just encouraging the guy to go through what he knows already.

Yeah, it’s confidence, isn’t it? Confidence and bravery, like you said at the start.

Confidence and courage. Absolutely. Confidence and courage. Get the clarity. Once the clarity is there, get the confidence and courage. Go do something about it. Don’t be afraid of it.

Brilliant. Where can people connect with you and get the book?

Wow. So kind to ask. Brandon Coleman jr..com, jr.com is a great place. Read the blogs, all that. The podcast is the brand on show on any podcast network, the brand on show. We just launched it about a few months ago. Hey, we just made the top 10 percent in the world, but that means we’re in the top 400,000. I don’t know how awesome that is, but I feel good about it. I would be honored to have either of you or both of you on as a guest as my show develops and becomes something worthy of your attendance. And we’re on social. We’re on LinkedIn, and we’re on Facebook, and we’re on Instagram. Not very heavy on Instagram yet, as you mentioned the social. I’m still working on that. But Brandon Coleman jr.com and Amazon is where you get the book, and any bookstore. Any bookstore will have it. It launches early January. And we’re going to start the year off right. Turn over a new leaf. Get your brand on.

Get your brand on. Thank you, Brandon. It was an absolute pleasure hearing your stories and your wisdom. So thank you for being on the show. Thanks for sharing.

It’s my honor and pleasure. Thank you guys so much for putting up with me.