 I'm going to make a small introduction to myself. I'll be speaking in English for the day. I want to say, I can hope that there are people who don't like a very long introduction, so I'm going to be very short. The first talk, English talk, today, is from Daviella, and it's from... I don't know if that's it. It's mine, so it's me. Yeah. Thank you. Good morning. First of all, I apologize for my voice. I didn't work on this. I prepared for everything else, but so bear with me. I'll try not to cough. Thanks for being here. I'm happy to see that people are interested in my topic. You know, we're here. I want to start off before I get into the talk with a special thanks to Yoast. Yoast has established a diversity fund that has sponsored my attendance here, and they'll also be sponsoring my attendance in Belfast. I like challenges, so I decided last year to give a try at speaking at work camps, and so I applied to all the work camps in all the places that I wanted to go. And amazingly, to my amazement at least, most of them said yes. So two weeks ago I was in London, and this month I'm going to be speaking at a different work camp every weekend with this health condition. So it's, you know, let's see who's stronger. The special thanks to Yoast and to their support to diversity and to women and to older women in particular is something that I appreciate. Yes, I am in the tech industry. I am going to be 52 this year, and the tech industry has an average age, which is much lower. And for women my age it is more difficult, more difficult to access jobs, more difficult to interact, often because the person you're speaking with is a lot younger than you are. And this, like everything, implies bias and implies the difficulty, I think that we all have with interacting with people that are at a place that we haven't been at. It's easier to talk to someone that is younger than we are. You know, when I was your age, you know, but you can't tell somebody older than you, well, when I'll be your age, because, I mean you can say it, but it doesn't make a lot of sense. So I am very thankful and I'm very grateful for this, and I hope that this will be inspiring for other women or other less represented people to know that you can do it. You can also one day decide that you're going to give this a shot and, you know, my oh my, everyone says, yes, we want to hear what you have to say. Even if it's not very word-pressy, okay, we're technical. So thank you, Yoast, and I'm going to ask you guys some questions. So raise your hands. How many developers you're listening to me today? Okay, how many designers? Okay. And how many, like, not developers and not designers, others. Okay, cool. Hello. I used to be very embarrassed about the fact that I do a lot of things, and I used to feel very weird about being able and physically actually doing a lot of things and doing them well. With well, I mean well enough to ask someone to pay me for that, okay? Because then I do a whole lot of other things that I'm okay at but that I wouldn't sell. Mainly, I'm a designer with no or with many or none adjectives attached. A designer to me is a problem solver, is a translator from a need to a solution. I primarily design brands and I design communication. That is half strategy and half creativity. And that to me was always, also when I was very young, more interesting that simply, you know, just doing visual design. I also write. I study continuously. I love learning stuff. I teach at university level and I coach primarily professionals on communication and languages. And these are the three logos that define me. The first is the evolution of what used to be my agency. That was called Raffaele Zidori Design. Now it's called Design It. It's not an agency. It's a lab. It's a place where we put together teams according to what they need. There's no structure. Raffaele Zidori, it's me for a long time. I felt I wasn't good enough. Now my portfolio is under my name and I go under my name and I'm very proud of me. And Zetarafix is my nickname. So online everywhere I am Zetarafix and it's also my blog, which unfortunately is like, oscillates between position 70 and position 90 on my priority list. So I get this like, I don't know, three articles a year kind of thing. But anyway, so this is me. And we're going to talk about three things today. The first thing I want to talk to you about is what a brand is and what a brand is not. I'm not sure about German or about your native language, but in Italian, as in English, there's a misconception of what a brand is or what a logo is and so I'll try to make some clarification on that. We're going to see how the concept of branding has evolved because understanding the history of something helps you understand the dynamics and then I'm going to give you my recipe to create your own brand. So let's go. And this is generally what the reaction is. What are you talking about? And what I'm talking about is the fact that a brand is not a logo. And I'm going to give you some examples of what I mean. Do you know what this is? Say it. Nike, right? This is Nike, right? And this is Nike's message and attitude and their promise and their vision, okay? Their mission. So this is the logo, but this is really their brand, okay? I'm going to show you another example and please, if you know what this is, raise your hand, but don't say it out loud. You'll spoil me the surprise. Who know what this is? It's a logo, right? That's interesting. In London, everybody knew. So this is a logo and this is a brand, okay? This is the logo of the New Zealand Old Blacks and so you see the logo is a representation of a brand. It's the representation of all the intangible values that make up a brand and the brand is that set of values. And mistakenly using the word brand to identify a logo and a logo to identify a brand is like calling a steering wheel a car. You know, they're not. The steering wheel is part of a car, but it's not the car. To borrow from Han Handley, the brand is the emotional aftertaste that comes after an experience with a product, service, company, person or entity. Mind you, that could be good or that could be bad. I'm sure you all have brands that you dislike. You may know why or you may not know why. They just take you off, you know? Sometimes there's this like, you know, Coke Pepsi, you know, Canon, Nikon kind of thing. This is like, you know, either or, you know, Adidas and Nike. You know, it's like, I don't like that. But anyway, so you can think of the logo as the two-dimensional icon of a multi-dimensional experience because the brand is made of a lot of things. The visual, it's certainly part of it, but we'll see in part three that the visual part comes long after many other aspects in the strategic building of a brand. And you know, you see all these are logos. I'm sure that if you look at all these things, you have a reaction. You know, you see something and say, oh God, I hate them. Oh God, I love that. So that is the brand. That thing, you know, that you feel inside. But how did we get here? So branding has evolved and the meaning has evolved. Sometimes evolving and sometimes just adding meanings. The first practice of branding can be traced back to 50,000 BC. And it's basically this one. In the Lascaux Caves in southern France, some of the paintings show marked animals. And researchers think that they were marked with tar or some sort of paint to, you know, identifying, you know, that's my calf. I'm not going to take your sheep, so don't take mine. By approximately 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, people thought that tar wasn't really lasting. So they decided that they needed something more, you know, permanent. And, haha, you know, let's burn the suckers, okay? That's permanent. And there's, see, there's, we have proof that they did this. I'm sorry. So the term brand comes from the Old Norse brander. I don't know if I say this right or not, but which means to burn. And it's stuck. The second practice of branding, the second need that was solved by branding was to identify the origin and the quality of an artifact. And we know that potters and probably also other artisans that we don't have trace of used to mark their work and identify not only who they were, but also where the artifact was made and sometimes what material was made with. And Chinese were like way ahead. This is like a label and it's about 5,000 years old. In the Roman Empire, archaeologists have identified about 1,000 unique potter's marks. These are actual lamps that were found near Modena, where there was a factory. And I'm not sure if you can see it, but they all, let me try this, see the little, you know, the little different brands. I wonder how I made this. In the Middle Ages, guilds began using the same concept to identify their work. So printmakers and printing houses used watermarks and stone mason and quarries developed an elaborate system to identify what came from where and who provided that. And in the Renaissance, artists like Michelangelo started signing their name to their work instead of putting symbols. And this actually created, this is here. It's the ribbon across Mary's chest. And this identified a new concept. They added a new meaning, which was authorship. Which was, you know, I made that and also I own that, you know, that he made. So there's, as you can see, there's a progressive value attached to the concept. Fast forward to the late 1800s and the Industrial Revolution. With machine, with the Industrial Revolution came mass production. And with mass production came, you know, products that had to be identified. So a poor little cat was saying, you know. So companies started first branding the crates their products was shipped in. And then they started branding, you know, differentiating the product itself. I'm always freaked about this. The first, the Campbell soup from 1897. It's so much better looking than the current ones. But anyway, you know, and also on the Coke bottle we could discuss. And the Nevia cream has changed very little. Okay, so there's something there. So by the late 19th centuries, companies that invested a lot of money, you know, in naming and packaging their products. And so they wanted, they demanded and they obtained legislation who would protect their work. And the trademark Registration Act in 1875 did two things. It protected gave legislation to protect the work and to, you know, intervene. If someone was, you know, passing their work for somebody else's. But it also made the brand a valuable asset that could be sold. Okay. Okay. With so many brands entering the market, though, and so many parity products, you know, because jars are jars or toothpaste is toothpaste. I mean, yeah, you can flavor it, but I mean, it's toothpaste. And, you know, how, you know, brands, companies needed to differentiate and give and try to convey a different value. Make people choose their product rather than somebody else's. So the rising advertising is always makes me laugh because it's like this really unwanted and unliked pun. But excuse me. Enter Mr. James Walter Thompson. He had a real vision. He just had a very far vision. He was the first to establish a creative department in his advertising agency so that their clients could get, you know, personalized and content. But he also wrote these two books that I would love to get my hands on, not the books, but like content. In the early 1800s, he wrote the naming, you know, the Thompson, red and blue books of advertising. So not a great copywriter, but these were guides for companies on what advertising could do for them. You know, try and think in a world where there's no advertising and you're trying to try and convince this is easier. Try to convince someone they need a website. Okay, you don't need to do it now. But for those of you who were around like, you know, 15, 20 years ago, convincing someone, you know, you should get a website. Really, really you should. It was not that easy. And basically Thompson created, introduced the concept of trademark advertising, which is basically what today we call branding, brand building. So quickly, 1920s, 1940s, advertising was print and radio. Because of course, advertising goes hand in hand with media and media dissemination. In the 1940s and the 1950s came big, huge game changer, which was television. And we're going to see if I can do this. You can hear the audio. There's a little audio at the end that says, America runs on bull of a time. And that was actually the first ever advertising commercial ran on television. This was 1941. By 1952, so 10 years, TV ad revenue had surpassed magazine and radio ad sales. We saw that. Okay. And this brought the golden age of advertising or what we can friendly refer to the mad man era. In between the 1950s and the 1960s, advertising evolved from a unique selling proposition to an emotional selling proposition. Because if at first I could say to you, buy my product, you really need it. There's nothing else. So you either buy mine or I create a need. As people get more sophisticated and product become more popular and I have a choice, then I have to make you buy something because you like it more. You feel for it. And so putting a logo on a product is no longer enough. You have to give your products a personality and an attitude and people are going to either buy into that or not buy into that. But you can see how this is evolving and it's becoming more and more of a deep relationship and a deep process. In the 1970s and 70s and 80s, there's the rise of mass media product branding. And that's basically because TV sets at that point are everywhere. Every family has a television more than one. And consumers start to become very brand conscious and very obsessive, obsessed, I'm sorry, with brands. And brands are becoming more and more a status symbol. And as everything, you know, enough time has passed that people can start thinking about media as a process. And media theory becomes something that is studied and questioned and, you know, people start having critical views. In the 1980s and the 1990s, big brands start to focus on not so much selling their products as to selling their company. And this is quite obvious, right? If I sell you this glass of water, I'm selling you this glass of water. But if I sell you the source of this water, then tomorrow I can sell you the water, the lemonade, the soda, the whatever. I make, you know, that. So it's an interesting evolution. And then in between the 1990s and the 2010s, we really witness a revolution. And it's a really a cultural social revolution in 15 years from 1995 to 2010. We see the rise of companies that today are the companies. Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, WordPress, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the iPhone, which was a huge revolution. Because none of the before things would have the same power if we couldn't carry them in our pocketbook. And in terms of branding, this has had two major implications. The first implication is that there's nowhere to hide. I'm sure you can all recall a United Airlines passengers being dragged out of the airplane with videos of this happening. The brand didn't do very well. You know, you don't do that. Today, if you do something good or bad in no time, because what, 10 minutes, an hour, the news can't be everywhere. And I mean everywhere, globe wide. So, you know, and if you make a mistake, it's bigger because everyone knows everywhere. So, you know, you've got to be really careful. And the second big implication is that all of us today are brands. Each one of you, me and all of you and our kids. And because primarily through social media and through Internet, that being blogging or writing, we can all become like very famous, very fast, or very infamous, very fast. At the same time, we are also exposed to scrutiny and judgment and trolls and abuse and all the nasty stuff that we unfortunately are trying to cope with. So, that's kind of, you know, not that great. And this before was a, was only a famous people problem. You know, like, we didn't have to worry about paparazzi being outside the hotel, you know, wanting to take pictures of all of us. Today, we kind of, we could, you know, if we had some like VIP here, you know, we could. So today we can all kind of, you know, rise to a new popularity and please do say it with me. What is, what can we become today? Influencers, you know, ask any kid. When I was 20 and you asked the kids, what do you want to be? I want to be a sucker player. I want to be a rock star. You know, today kids want to be influencers. Get paid to tweet. I mean, you know, some of these kids, she, you know, made loads of money. You know, that's Chiara Ferragni. She's actually just had a baby, so I'm not sure. I don't follow her, so I don't know if she's been tweeting a lot or not. But, you know, at 30, she's, in 2016, she had a net worth of 12 million dollars. She started, are you all familiar with her? She started with, she started with a blog where she would post her outfits. Okay? And there was no, ten years ago, there was no such thing as fashion blogging. Like, who cares? There's fashion designers. I'll do what they say today, kids. Do what Chiara and people like Chiara say. Don't ask me. This is beyond me, but, you know, the next girl is much more up my alley. I like her. I love her. I am a huge Grumpy Cat fan. In fact, I use Grumpy Cat with my students. You know, I teach the first day of class. I showed them a big picture of Grumpy Cat. And I say, whenever you get an email with Grumpy Cat, you're in trouble. Okay? Professor is not happy. So, mind you. Grumpy Cat, or her mom, actually, it was Forbes Toppat Influencer for 2017. She has a total reach of 68 million followers. This girl, she blew me. I did not know of her. I'm not a big, you know, YouTube follower thing. She's 28. She was Forbes Top Entertainment Influencer 2017. This is data from December 2017. So, it's really recent. And she has a total reach of 247 million people. She does these, like, little comedy videos, which I swear to God, they're not really funny at all. Because I was like, wow, you know. I was like, you know, maybe there's a career there somewhere for me. But anyway. So, branding has evolved, right? We went from ownership, like, take your hands off, to, I made that. To, I made that and it's better than somebody else's. I made that, it's better than everyone else's, and it makes you feel good. I can sell you that, because I've built it. I have that, so I'm cooler than everyone else. To reputation, which is what actually today a brand is. Today, your brand is your kept promise to your customer. And this is true for me. This is true for Nike. This is true for Giorgio Armani. This is true for any brand. You establish, you as a brand, you establish a relationship with your users, with your consumers, with your followers. That's based on intangible, on emotions, on values. So if you break your promise, people are going to turn on you. If you're lucky, they're just going to like, you know, tweet about it for a couple of days. If you're not lucky, they might just leave you. And remember, it's an economical value today, a brand. Whenever some bad tweets about some, you know, bigger brands that are in the stock market come out, their stock goes, okay, so all these turns into money lost. So this is what Jeff Bezos think, and I think is pretty right on. Okay, it's the opinion that people have of you. It's what they feel. It's that emotional aftertaste that we spoke of before. But you could say, okay, so yeah, Nike, yeah, you know, IBM, Google, you know. We kind of have like no budget, you know. Should we build or manage our personal or business brand? Buy all means yes. Yes. Oh, I'm a developer. Should I build my brand? Oh, yes. You know, I mean, you know, do you want to go work for like the coolest company and whoever. Each one of us has like a cool company that they want to go work with. I want to go work for Elon Musk, but I think I'm not alone. But I love to go work for Tesla, you know. So here's my recipe. Okay, this is the approach is the same. It's the same if it's a personal brand, if it's a client, you know, a small medium size company. The first thing you need to know is to know yourself and know yourself means to have a clear idea of what you're selling, what you're offering. The second thing you need to know is who you're talking to, like who cares about your lovely product? Because if you make baby diapers, everybody who does not have a baby that needs diapers is not going to give a who. I mean, like really, really zero. I don't care. I don't want to hear you. There's a lot of noise out there. So don't talk to me if I'm not in your target. You're bugging me. See, you know, those Facebook ads that you're like, why is Facebook shown this to me? You know, like, what did I click on to get these ads? Right? The third thing is know your market. You know, what's out there? You know, where can you put yourself? Because today we're beyond parity products. Today there's loads of everything in every shape and form. So you need to find, you know, that little corner. It could be an industry. It could be a geographic location. It could be whatever. But look for it. And know, you know, your competition is because your competition is not just your competition. It can be an asset for you. You know, maybe you could find someone in another place that does the same thing you do. But you know, you can create a synergy because, I don't know, you have a localized activity. You're in a hotel, you know. So, you know, maybe you can get together with the old hotels in your area and do things to work better. Or maybe you can set up a net of hotels like yours in other countries or in other places. So, you know, your competition is neither good nor bad is what's out there. Have it. And if you don't have, get a clear vision. Branding is like a road trip. You know, those road trips where you, like, get in the car and start driving. I don't know, I've always wanted to do that and I never actually did anything like that. Because you can do it for a couple of hours and then you just can't hop on a car and go. You know, it makes no sense. And so, the clear idea you have of where you want to go, the easier it's going to be getting there. Values. Remember the point where news travels really, really, really, really, really, really fast. If you talk about being honest and people catch you lying, you know. If you sell organic food and, you know, and it's not organic, it's, you know, you don't need to. So, values are important because we are easily be held against. Now, have a plan. You know, this sounds like very, like, sneaky, you know. But this is not about finding love, although you could apply it to finding love as well. You got to have a plan. You know, a short-term, mid-term, long-term plan. It doesn't have to be complicated, but it helps you visualize it. At this point, you need to give your brand an appropriate personality. And this is when we start to thinking about logos, okay? And how do you give your brand a personality? First thing is graphic design. So, logo, symbol, color. And the key here is consistency, okay? People are going to start to associate your logo, your color with you. If every year you change it, you're going to drive them nuts. They're going to think you're a new thing every year. Tone of voice and type of language. Remember the target? Who you're talking to? You got to talk to them the way they're used to and they want to be talked to. And it's going to be different if you're talking to millennial, they're so popular now. You're going to have to use certain topics, but also certain type of voice. And if you're talking to seniors, it can't be the same. They're not going to react the same. They're not the same. And again, you have to be coherent, okay? If every day you're changing, one day you're serious, one day you're funny, one day you're sarcastic, people are going to be like, who are these people? You have to think before you communicate and not vice versa. And you have to communicate in the right channels, in the right way. Again, your targets are going to use different channels, different media. And the key here is competence. And it means that if you don't know something, you A, study it. Or B, you go to someone that knows and you pay them. Service is key to your brand. How you talk to your clients and how you treat your clients, especially when things are rough, they are going to make or break how your clients think of you. You have an issue, you look for help, you get help, people love you. You've had this experience, all of you. Oh, wow, they solved that thing in five minutes. They treat you bad. How many times have you said, A, I'm never going to use your services again. B, I can't dump you now, but I will the minute I have an alternative. Okay, this is not good. So back to the big points. Don't skip. Okay, I mean, we spend money in a lot of ways, sometimes stupid ways. Investing in your brand is investing in yourself, in your business. It doesn't mean that you have to take out a mortgage on your house, but it means that you can't expect to be doing everything for free. By the way, nothing is free. And I think we now know that, right? Cambridge Analytica, anyone? It applies to life in general, but it applies to branding as well. You've got to work on it. You've got to stay consistent. You've got to check often. Is it going in the right way? Because time moves really fast today. And so, since we're talking about really delicate and sensible things, I can't say, oh, okay, I did that five years ago. I'm sure it's going, you know, inertia. Be mindful, meaning be aware, be present, stay, you know. You're not somewhere else. You're in a specific situation. And if your brand is a personal brand, so, okay, steps one through seven apply exactly the same. Rules nine through 11 as well. Number eight, you are your brand. And that means that you all know Cardi B. No, never heard of her. Okay, look it up. I just discovered Cardi B a few weeks ago. She is amazing. She's really amazing. I don't want to, you know, but I mean, she's really funny. She makes all these, she's weird. She is a singer. She's a rapper. But she is the weirdest sounding woman you'll ever see. She's everything women were told they shouldn't be. She's funny. You know, she makes all these weird noises. She looks like, she looks dumb sometimes, you know, but she's not. She came from nothing. You know, she was a stripper to make money, to survive. And she makes really cool music, by the way, you know. So anyway, be yourself. Obviously, curb it a little bit, you know. But be yourself. The things that you find weirdest about you are what make you special. So find them and use them well. A brand is an organic, leaving, breathing being. A brand is alive. And you have to care for it, like a baby. A good baby because, you know, they don't annoy you. They don't want things. They, you know, I want those shoes. No, no, no. So care for it. And when you step on a poo, because we all do, we all do. It's okay. You know, you own it. Apologize, fix it if you can. Fix it at best as you can. Learn from it. Thank you. For those of you in Belgrade, if this part interests you, I'm going to be leading a workshop on branding. So it's going to be a little, you know, it's three hours. It's a little more hand on. Hopefully I'll have a voice by then. This is me. You'll find me everywhere. Please, if you have feedback questions, you know, especially feedback, especially negative feedback, not like you're horrible, we hated you. But that, you know, that's just being nasty. But no, really, if there's anything that you think that I can do better or that I can include, please, you know, let me know. This will help me be a better speaker next time. And when I get home, I'll be posting slides here. Yes! I know. I'm good with timing. Do you have questions? Oh, yes. Yes. Thank you very much. Give her one more round of applause, please. Thank you. Thank you.