5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image, with Fabian Geyrhalter of FINIEN

“To [TARGET AUDIENCE] our product is the [CATEGORY] that provides [FUNCTIONAL, SYMBOLIC OR EXPERIENTIAL BENEFITS] because [REASONS TO BELIEVE].” It is that answer to the question ‘why,’ the ‘reason to believe,’ that can be the simple most important trajectory for your business. It will turn into a tag line or the key headline, it will be the ending of your elevator pitch, it will inspire marketing as much as sales and even affect product development.

A couple years ago we sat down and thought about how this would have read for a company we all know, Whole Foods, if they would have positioned themselves as well as we see the brand today. They would have said something along the lines of: “To health and eco-conscious consumers, our product is the grocery store that provides the highest natural and organic products that support vitality and well-being because we believe in Whole Foods, Whole People, and a Whole Planet.” If you focus on the ‘why’ behind the brand you can see how it educates what products will be on the shelves, who their audience and employees should be and what their greater mission and vision is. In just a few words. That is pretty powerful. Now, of course this is not how they started out and we took bits and pieces from their web site to create this statement. In fact, Whole Foods started out across the street from a SafeWay and they named their grocery store Safer Way. No joke. We all have to upgrade and re-energize our brand at times.

As part of our series about “Brand Makeovers” I had the pleasure to interview renowned brand strategist and creative director Fabian Geyrhalter. fabian is a prolific author and speaker on the subject of branding. He is the founder and principal of Los Angeles-based brand consultancy FINIEN, where he works with medium-sized to large corporations on crafting strategic, verbal and visual brand clarity. His client list includes Honeywell, United Way, Randstad, and Goodwill. Geyrhalter’s best-selling book ‘How to Launch a Brand’ became a go-to resource for entrepreneurs and creatives alike. His latest book is ‘Bigger Than This — How to turn any venture into an admired brand.’ Geyrhalter is also the host of ‘Hitting The Mark,’ a podcast about the intersection of brand clarity and startup success.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I have always been obsessed with brands, from a small age on I loved to draw logos of brands and that fascination only grew with age. I ended up studying Communication Design at Art Center College of Design overlooking the Lake Geneva and the town of Evian, with the view we all know so well from the Evian water bottle label. It was stunning, until the campus closed, and I moved to the main campus in Pasadena, California. After college I took on a few Creative Director roles until I finally received my green card in the mail. I started my first agency the week after I was legally able to do so. I ran that design agency for a good 12 years when I decided to pivot into brand strategy. Over the course of a few months, I morphed my agency, Geyrhalter & Co, into the purposefully small brand consultancy FINIEN. That was likely my most crucial re-branding project of my life and I am relieved and thrilled that it panned out so well.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing or branding mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Early on we did a lot of proposals. They usually are a big time waster and very unpersonal, but starting out it felt like the biggest honor to receive ‘a request for proposal.’ We always went all-out. I remember a particular proposal that was from a company that built building skate parks and I drove to one of their parks in a really bad area of Los Angeles and spent the day taking professional pictures of the kids riding their boards just to make the proposal more personal and to show how much we cared. So, there I was, the Creative Director of an already reputable agency, in a dangerous neighborhood, lying on the dirty grounds of a skate park, shooting photos of kids flying over my head on their skateboards. I got a lot of fun pictures out of it, but not the job. It taught me that there is a line between passion and business and that you should only cross that line for projects that you are well paid for that you also happen to be passionate about.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?

Especially in the creative agency world, bigger often means better. The larger an agency is, the bigger the clients will be, and, the better a CEO looks.

Completely wrong. Your company size does not matter anymore.

I scaled back my agency and I am thrilled to have only one full-time employee. I am proud to work with a Fortune 100 client (and a few Fortune 500s) and to have higher billings than my 18-person agency ever had. Bigger is not always better, at least not in the creative business.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

My consultancy is knee-deep in crafting meaningful and authentic brands for a handful of clients from all kinds of places, including a human resources fund in Amsterdam and an AI-driven energy startup in Switzerland. With all of our clients we start the relationship, and our work, off with an in-person brand strategy workshop to position the brand. That is the time where I bring the best out of a brand’s future direction and it’s exciting for me to see the pivots and the aha moments that day and subsequently see how I helped shape more intrinsic and meaningful brands.

One of my most exciting current projects though is working on my new book, which will be called ‘The Brand Therapy Book,’ — the title says it all!

What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?

Have a clear focus and stick with it. Don’t run after the shiny objects, instead have clarity around what you are best at, create a process and replicable contractual procedure around it and then hit ‘step and repeat.’ Burnout happens when business life gets messy. Don’t allow for it to get messy. A narrow focus and process to stick to will help eliminate those obstacles.

Ok, let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?

Brand strategy is a clear path forward for a company to turn into a (more) beloved brand by finding (or further defining) its unique reason for being that is rooted in values, which are shared with a specific audience, that, in turn, will wholeheartedly embrace the brand’s essence, which needs to be showcased through a conceptual, focused and consistent verbal and visual identity. That brand essence showcase is brand marketing. Advertising is taking this essence, or the ‘why’ of a brand and turns it into funnels, the ‘how,’ and messages, the ‘what.’

Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?

Going back to the last question, if you don’t have the brand’s positioning, vision, shared values, persona, et cetera established, you are just shooting from your hips. I see it over and over again that young entrepreneurs, especially those with direct-to-consumer product offerings, question the need of brand strategy. Then, a few years in, they keep throwing money towards paid advertising and SEO, but they begin to realize that competitors moved in and start taking over market share and they can’t understand why. It usually is because their competition built a brand, and with that comes a tribe that shares their philosophy, their values. They love to spread the word. They even tattoo the logo onto their skin because it stands for something bigger than just a product they buy. Those things cannot happen through a campaign, they have to happen on a C-suite or Founder/Co-Founder level, and they have to be fueled by honest passion.

Let’s now talk about rebranding. What are a few reasons why a company would consider rebranding?

Some companies need a re-brand, because they never really took the time to do it and they look stale, the brand is undefined, and they need to make their brand as great to the outside (and inside) world as their offering. Others saw tremendous change inside the organization, may that be new leadership, a product pivot or a merger or acquisition, which demands a new look at the brand so it can be showcased in the correct light and for years to come.

Are there downsides of rebranding? Are there companies that you would advise against doing a “Brand Makeover”? Why?

There are companies that want to change their logo, call it a re-brand and hope it will create change, but change needs to come from within. A logo won’t change company culture, product positioning or market share. For those who are just looking for aesthetical changes, a re-brand often won’t show any tangible results and it could end up being a ginormous waste of budget that could otherwise have been allocated to creating a better product or culture.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Can you share 5 strategies that a company can do to upgrade and re-energize their brand and image”? Please tell us a story or an example for each.

First, sit down and assess your brand’s current positioning. Start by giving this simple statement a few hours of thought:

“To [TARGET AUDIENCE] our product is the [CATEGORY] that provides [FUNCTIONAL, SYMBOLIC OR EXPERIENTAL BENEFITS] because [REASONS TO BELIEVE].” It is that answer to the question ‘why,’ the ‘reason to believe,’ that can be the simple most important trajectory for your business. It will turn into a tag line or the key headline, it will be the ending of your elevator pitch, it will inspire marketing as much as sales and even affect product development.

A couple years ago we sat down and thought about how this would have read for a company we all know, Whole Foods, if they would have positioned themselves as well as we see the brand today. They would have said something along the lines of: “To health and eco-conscious consumers, our product is the grocery store that provides the highest natural and organic products that support vitality and well-being because we believe in Whole Foods, Whole People, and a Whole Planet.” If you focus on the ‘why’ behind the brand you can see how it educates what products will be on the shelves, who their audience and employees should be and what their greater mission and vision is. In just a few words. That is pretty powerful. Now, of course this is not how they started out and we took bits and pieces from their web site to create this statement. In fact, Whole Foods started out across the street from a SafeWay and they named their grocery store Safer Way. No joke. We all have to upgrade and re-energize our brand at times.

Second, look at your core values and assess if they still speak to who the company is today and wants to be over the next years. Does it resonate not only with your staff and future employees, but most importantly, are these values that are shared by your tribe, your customers? Shared values sell more, it’s that simple. Values, if introduced into your brand’s messaging can have a big effect on your sales.

I love to cite GEA, an Austrian company that makes hand-made, long-lasting and easy-to-repair traditional footwear. Selling, what can easily be seen as commodities, they have 44 Stores in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and a tribe that loves them. Why? Because the founder boldly voices his opinions on hot topics such as politics, religion & the economy. He condemns consumerism and capitalism and the shoe company publishes a political newspaper. He proclaims “Rights to the people rather than the banks” in interviews and you can only imagine how he does not get along with politicians and with banks, yet when he needs funds to expand, thousands of people rush to crowdfund his company. His entire business is based on values and a strong belief. An extreme example, but it shows you how values can create tribes easily and effectively.

Also look at your customer journey, the touchpoints and user behavior. In the end, that is how your brand is being experienced and more often than not you will find huge areas of improvement if you follow your customers’ journey from web site to product usage to social commentary.

Planet Fitness, for instance, realized that all gyms are catering to the exact same target audience, yet they left a large number of the population unsatisfied in that journey. 10 million people to be exact, which is the number as Planet Fitness is now catering to, who like to not be judged and want to do fitness on their own terms. Planet Fitness’ brand ideology of ‘no critics’ got them to 2,000 clubs today and counting. It’s empathetic brand love based on solidarity, and it can often be found when you study customer journeys and sentiments.

As a fourth strategy, understand that it is crucial to create a visual and verbal brand language that is strategic, consistent, simple and visually stunning.

I recently had Michael Lastoria, the Co-founder of the counter-culture pizza brand ‘&pizza,’ which has 36 locations in the U.S. and is rapidly growing based on its inherent brand thinking and employee-first commitment, on my podcast ‘Hitting The Mark.’ He talked about how his company’s logo is a simple ampersand sign (&) but because of its simplicity it not only stands for the ideology of the brand, but it allows for positive interpretation. When he noticed that some of his employees started tattooing the company logo onto their arms, he made it a company policy that ‘&’ tattoos are paid for by the company. And this is how you create a visual language that also fosters company culture and creates a tribe of loyal followers.

Last but not least, identify, what I call, your ‘Brand DNA,’ by asking “What’s bigger than our product?” Let that question answer to your brand’s DNA which should be your brand essence in a single word.

For Planet Fitness, their brand DNA could be ‘solidarity.’ It’s not ‘inexpensive nationwide gym locations for all.’ Imagine what that simple word could do for your brand?

In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job doing a “Brand Makeover”. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?

Not one in particular, but I always applaud large organizations, like Mastercard and Bank of America, that have iconic logos yet they understand that making subtle changes and simplifications to their logos and overall identity along the way can make a big change in how they are being perceived by the public. From complicated to simple and from stodgy to tech, it teaches you to always stand back and assess your brand for the years to come. Don’t be afraid to update your logo like you update your car: Sometimes you need a new ride because things have advanced so much, but most often you just need a fresh coat of paint and a full inspection.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I feel like I am currently my own mini movement for creating better brands. Sounds ridiculously small, not really like a movement, but if I can positively change the course of 50, 100, 1000 brands a year through directly working with them, but also through my books and lectures, imagine how many people — from employees to customers — I could indirectly affect?

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I am not big into quotes and I surely do not have that one big one handy, but for someone who is not a quote person, I found myself sharing this one recently on Twitter: “To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart.” Sr. Thomas Watson said this and to me it really captures entrepreneurship if lived the right way.

How can our readers follow you online?

The best way is through our site, my books or podcast and my Instagram channel where I started a habit I call ‘Brand Therapy Thursday,’ a thought every Thursday to inspire entrepreneurs and marketers, which followers seem to like quite a bit.

Thank you so much for these excellent insights! We wish you continued success in your work.

Thank you for having me, Fotis! It was a great pleasure.


5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image, with Fabian Geyrhalter of… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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