 as an individual or company is your most valuable asset. And at the end of the day, your brand values are the foundational beliefs that you stand for as an individual or organization. And as a brand, you are never not branding for better or worse. It goes beyond logos and how you name your company. Remaining true to your brand and your target market are critical to your success. Our next guest has plenty of experience in branding. Pete Canalicio specializes in helping brands achieve their full potential. After a successful career in brand expansion and marketing for companies like Coca-Cola, Samsung, and Rubbermaid, and helping them activate through events like the Sochi Olympics and FIFA, he's charted his own course by helping others thrive in the marketplace, as well as in the minds of their consumers. True to his own brand, he's made giving back a big part of what he does. A Naval Academy graduate and former aviator, he developed crisis tested leadership skills in the military that he helps other veterans rediscover in themselves. He's dedicated his time and talents as a mentor and speaker to DAV Patriot Boot Camp. And he's here today to talk about your brand, your promise. Welcome to DAV Caffeine Connect, Pete. Thank you, Dan. It's great to be with everyone today. I'm so excited to share a little bit about branding, about personal branding, how you think about yourself as a brand and to entertain any questions you have. So I'm excited to be with you and I'm gonna share my screen at this moment. Let's finally confirm that you can see it. Yep. Okay, fantastic. Let me just remove the chat box. All right, so we're gonna talk about personal branding and the reason I entitled it personal branding is because even if we have a company that we're running, the company oftentimes if we're entrepreneurs is a company that we created or we're partially involved in the creation. And so the story of that company, the story of the company's brand is our story. So they all tie together. And as I said, this is personal branding and I'm entitling it for entrepreneurs. But if you're not an entrepreneur, maybe you're an entrepreneur, someone who thinks entrepreneurially, this also applies to you as well because you can be a brand within a larger organization and you can have a tremendous amount of influence from your own character and reputation, but how you communicate yourself as a brand. So speaking of the word communicates, the first thing we need to understand is that no matter what we do, everything we say communicates something and everything we don't say also communicates and the way we dress or the way we handle ourselves in situations, whether they be comfortable ones or tense ones, that also communicates. And it's our non-verbal communication that likely is the strongest and most powerful form of communication that we can have. So let me share a couple of examples of what I'm talking about. So the first one, a lot of you will understand this to be a color guard. In this case, it's a color guard made up of many, multiple different disciplines of services, Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force. And while they're not saying anything, this picture shows a tremendous amount of communication, a spree decor, professionalism, dedication to country, dedication to branch of service, dedication to each other. So we say a lot through an image of a group of individuals coming together. Now, how about this picture? This gentleman looks like he's having a tough day or at least a tough moment. And if you were about to enter his office and ask him for some advice or get him to respond to something, a question that you had posed or in the instance of where you were just looking for some feedback from him, you might do an about face and say, look, I'm gonna come back at a different time because this gentleman is communicating that he's not really in a good place to share thoughts that are composed and that his emotions might get the better of him. Now, how about this individual? She on the other hand is very warm, appears to be gregarious, inviting. You know that if you were entering her office today that she would put aside whatever she was working on to be able to give you time and give you her best representation of what she thinks. And so we can see in these different pictures this idea that everything communicates even though in none of them have we heard anything verbally. Now, in that spirit, let me share a little bit about my background. Dan has been nice enough to share some biography on me but how about some pictures to kind of make it real? So this picture in the upper left hand corner is graduation day for me from the Naval Academy. I am a happy guy, shaking the hand of the superintendent. I thought that day would never arrive but when it did, I was over the moon with the opportunity to graduate and become a Naval officer. And here I am about three months later. I'm temporarily assigned to the Naval Surface Weapon Center in White Oak, Maryland, green eyed bushy tailed and just ready to take on the world and feeling very, very good about what's in store for the future. Fast forward about five years. I'm now a plane commander of the P3 Squadron and this is in Diego Garcia. The gentleman to my left is Chris Patton. He was my taco. At the time he stayed in the Navy active duty and then as a tar. Some of you will recognize that as an active duty reservist and retired as a Navy admiral. So I like to think that we were a good team and you can see from the following picture, here I am with the rest, here are Chris and I with the rest of our crew on deployment in Diego Garcia. Very, very proud of that crew. We were known as one of the younger crews but able to get the job done and do it in a way that was both enjoyable but highly professional. Now fast forward have gone to graduated or left the Navy went to business school at UNC Chapel Hill graduated from there and got hired to be a financial analyst for the Coca-Cola company. And I managed to finagle my way to Italy to do what we were calling at that point high level meetings, which meant we were on a ski trip associated with a finance meeting. And it was really terrific for me to meet these folks face to face that I talked to every day and build some bonds which enabled us to really work well together. Now, after a couple of years, I left finance and joined the marketing department and was helping with sponsorship negotiation. This is a picture of me in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympic Games where I am helping to ensure that there's no ambush marketing for those of you who don't know what that means. That's when a company that's not a sponsor of an event will ambush the event and try to get their presence there. And in this case, I was working for Coca-Cola, you can see my T-shirt and we were trying to make sure that Pepsi was not present at that event. And truth be told, they weren't and that was a good thing for us. Upper left-hand corner, now I'm working for Coca-Cola on the Salt Lake Olympics and there I am with the polar bear and actually my son Andy who came out for the games to experience a little of the activation. I oversaw the consumer activation as it related to the pin trading centers where we made lapel pins and sold them and other Olympic co-branded merchandise. And we had a thing called Coca-Cola on the ice where you could shoot a hockey puck, ride on a lose run, push a bobsleigh or even a curling stone. Lower right-hand corner, fast forward. Now I'm working on the Sochi Olympic Games and I'm there with the gentleman named Mike Herson who was working also for Coca-Cola. And happier than it could be because we had finally made it to the games. Our event was going off well and we had a little bit of downtime. So that's a little bit about me through pictures. Now let's talk about what is a brand and I'm not gonna give you a definition by Keller Kotler. What I'm gonna do is show you some examples of brands so you can see how broad and how deep branding has gotten. So the first one is a brand called Veja. It's Veja sneakers and I love this brand. They've been around since 2005 and they are all about social projects. They are about economic justice and ecological materials. They make their sneakers from rubber, actual rubber from the Amazon river area and their canvas is made from organic material from Peru and from Brazil. And their goal here is to create products that are made with the thought of human justice or taking care of employees. And so they're a platform for that but they also make incredible sneakers. So this is a very popular brand that's growing by leaps and bounds every day. Now of course I mentioned a lot about Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is what people think about when they think of an example of a brand as a consumer products brand, been around since 1886. Still completely relevant today. My niece and her family came in from Louisville, Kentucky. I live in Atlanta. And we all went to the world of Coca-Cola on Saturday and she has a two-year-old, a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. We all get to taste drinks from all over the world. It was an amazing experience. Now how about this? Star Wars, absolutely a brand. It started out George Lucas back in the 70s as a movie and then two, then three movies. But since they've been bought by Disney there are many, many platforms. They have consumer products. They have website platforms. They have video games and they are pretty much everywhere that you can think of, which makes them a very relevant brand. Now this character is about to turn 100 in a few years. Mickey Mouse was founded in 1928 and still thriving, living a very big life for fans of all ages, young and old, everyone from a two-year-old to a 92-year-old love Mickey Mouse. That's a character brand. Here's an example of a fashion brand. Gucci is a brand that oftentimes is an aspirational brand. Many people don't own Gucci, but they aspire to. And how about this woman? Beyonce knows, absolutely a mega brand. Her presence is known and connected with in the tens of millions. And her music is incredible. She's also an actor. And she has a lot to say about the world and how it could be better. This is an example of India Premier League. So sports are absolutely brands. And we know, of course, major sports. The Super Bowl was just a couple of weeks ago. The FIFA World Cup championship was just a couple of months ago. How about this woman? Naomi Osaka, Japanese. She has made her platform one to talk about social justice. She hasn't been playing as recently because of some injuries and some personal reasons, but won the US Open just a few years ago. And then this gentleman, Lionel Messi, lots of folks are calling him the greatest of all time, just led the Argentinian team to the world championships of the FIFA World Cup. So those are examples of brands and you can put yourself in there also. Now, I'm gonna give you a definition of a brand, but again, I'm not gonna pull out Kotler or Keller, but I'm gonna show you some examples of how we relate to brands. And the first one is this idea that we build relationships with brands. Brands connect with us just like people do. We become aware of people and then we give them time and we determine whether or not we like them. If we do, then we move to kind of an acquaintance relationship and then it builds to a friendship. And from there, same thing goes on with brands. In this case, this is an example of a picture of my car, which is an Acura MDX, which I've been driving for a long time. The reason is that this car, this vehicle just performs. I mean, it is good in all weather. It's got super handling, all wheel drive. It never broken down on me. It runs exactly as I needed to. I can fit seven people in this vehicle if I need to, or I can fold it back two seats down and take all kinds of cargo. Moved my daughter from Delaware to Chapel Hill, North Carolina a couple of years ago and then a couple of months ago, we moved her from Chapel Hill to Durham. So phenomenal relationship I have with the Acura brand and specifically with the MDX brand. Now, because of that relationship, we start to build trust. And so I'm showing an example here of the Starbucks brand because no matter where you go around the world and Starbucks is in many, many countries, you get the same experience from Starbucks. Whether you love them or not, what you can count on is the food's gonna taste the same if it's the same kind of sandwich or drink is gonna taste the same. The engagement you get with the employees is gonna be the same. It's gonna be warm, hospitable, friendly in most cases. And so therefore because of that, we can trust no matter where we go, let's say I fly to Argentina to visit some friends and I walk into a Starbucks, I can kinda tell that the experience I'm gonna have there because of the brand is gonna be very similar to the one I have in Atlanta. The next thing that I love about brands is they add certainty to our life. We know with a brand, we're gonna get the same experience every time and that makes it very important for us. So in an example where you're asked to take care of a small niece or nephew and you let the parent know that the niece or nephew is not feeling well, that parent might say, hey, would you go pick up some children's Tylenol and give her appropriate dose? If you go to the local CVS and you don't see Tylenol but you see a generic version of it, the likelihood is because of the person that you're taking care of, you're gonna get in your car and go to another grocery store or another convenience store, drug store to find Tylenol for children because you want that certainty. And because of the relationship, because of the trust, because of the certainty and oftentimes because brands remove risk, we are willing to pay a premium. That's right, we're willing, we gladly pay a premium. In this case, I showed the Apple brand because the Apple brand is sold at a high premium but people buy it without too much consideration because they know all of what they're gonna get is way beyond the actual device itself or the platform itself. If you're thinking about iTunes or iFotos, it is the whole encompassing of the brand, the badge, the service, the experience, the reliability. And because of that, we surround ourselves with brands that reflect who we are and we wear them as a badge of honor. So here's an example of a Yeti Cup and you can see the words Yeti on the front. Also, I have the Naval Academy emblem of my class. I use an iPhone, I believe in the Apple brand, I speak highly of it. And so these are some examples of brands that I associate with and they give me a badge of honor, they give me the halo effect of those brands. And so people who know me and connect with me also have their own opinions of those brands which reflect on me. So I mentioned a little bit ago about this idea of hierarchy, let's dig into it a little bit deeper. So the first thing I mentioned was this idea of building awareness. If no one knows your brand, then your brand doesn't exist. And so I give an example here with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the premier cryptocurrency brand. It is becoming more and more well-known. Crypto went up in value dramatically over the last few months because of what happened with that FX platform and it's crashing, cryptocurrency in general has gone down but Bitcoin is building awareness and over time probably cryptocurrencies will become more and more the standard. The next thing happens is we try, we try brands. Brands want us to try them. If you've ever gone into a Costco, you know they're always serving food there. Those brands don't necessarily expect you to buy that. They just want you to try that product and hopefully you're gonna like it and if you like it, then you may choose to buy it. Then you may come back later and buy it. But if they know if you actually get the chance to try them, then they have a great chance of winning your business. And we do the same thing, right? In my business, which is around consulting and coaching, I know that if somebody tries me out, this conversation is an example of it, but if they can try me out, they can go, look, I am relate to this person. I think he might actually be able to help me and then that might lead to me working with them. In this case, I've mentioned the Peloton brand because Peloton was all about trial because it was way more than a piece of equipment. There was a whole community that you were buying into. You were getting instructors that were world-class that would come into your home and help you become fit or better, you know, have a better level of fitness. The next one is this idea of preference. After you've become aware of it, after you've tried it, then you might start to prefer that brand. And when you prefer it, then it's like, oh, that's in your shortlist. So if you're thinking about going to a restaurant and you've tried 100 Montaditos, which is a Spanish brand restaurant. They have tapas and other kinds of fun related, products related to Spanish cuisine. Then you might say, hey, I'm in the mood for Spanish food. Let's go to 100 Montaditos. The next level is loyalty, right? Once we've gone from preference, loyalty means we want to choose that brand whenever it's available. I like to give this example with Spotify because I was on a cross-country trip with my daughter, Madeleine. She's loyal to the Spotify brand. She was playing her music on our vehicle using her app. And then I took over driving and I had to put in the directions to where we were going in my phone. And when I did that, she's like, okay, Dad, let me have your phone. I want to pull up the Spotify app so we can listen to music. And after about three minutes, there was a commercial playing, an advertisement playing. And she was like, why are we listening to advertisements? Why don't you pay a subscriber fee so we don't have to do that? And I was like, listen, I'm sorry. I don't listen to Spotify that much. So she is clearly loyal and I have just gone through the trial phase or maybe a preference phase. The next thing is this idea of insistence. This is where there's no substitutes. I show Coca-Cola because I'm an insistent person when it comes to the Coca-Cola brand. If I'm gonna have a Coca-Cola, if I'm gonna have a Cola, it's gonna be a Coca-Cola. If I go to a restaurant and order a Coke and they say, sorry, we don't have Coke, is Pepsi okay? I say, no, thank you. I'll take water, I'll take lemonade, I'll take iced tea, but I'm not gonna have a Pepsi. That's because I am branded insistent. The next level is this idea of advocacy. Now we're putting our own reputation at risk, right? We're saying, hey, go check out this Tesla. I know you're gonna be amazed by it. Now, if you're not amazed, if you actually have a negative experience, that's gonna reflect on the person who's making the recommendation, right? But because we know this brand so well, we're willing to risk our own reputation because we think actually there's gonna be a positive effect back to us. The final level is this idea of ownability. We are so fanatical about this brand. We think it's our brand and that the company that sells its products or services is just the steward of that brand. So I mentioned the cool brand here, which is an outstanding type of outdoor wear. Those folks who are much into the cool brand and I own a little bit of cool myself, they are fanatical. They think they own the brand, they think cool is only there to make sure that the brand is one run well. But these folks, they're your best advocates, but you have to be careful with them. You have to treat them with tight gloves because they expect to be informed. They expect to get information before everyone else and they expect that their opinion will matter more than anyone else. For some of you who heard the case about Coca-Cola in the 1980s, when it went from Coke and Coca-Cola to New Coke, the backlash of that because they had folks at the ownability level that were not consulted. And as a result of that, they let Coca-Cola know loud and clear that they'd made a mistake and fortunately Coke was smart enough after about five months to go back to the old brand of formula and they rebranded it at Coca-Cola Classic. All right, so we've gotten a little bit of an overview of kind of what a brand is and the way it's going. And so I just want to now give you a little bit more information about this idea of why is more important than what or how? And what I mean by that is, and if any of you know the author Simon Sinek or the speaker Simon Sinek, he wrote a book, Start With Why, which I advocate and highly recommend that you read it. You're gonna get a ton out of it, but it's this idea, if we know our purpose, which is why we exist, then we can figure out our vision, where we're going and how we get there, which is our mission. And so these folks, two of the examples, Oprah Winfrey, the founder of The Own Network and Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX and other brands, they understand their why. And in the case of Oprah Winfrey, she says, I have a passion to bring happiness and a sense of fulfillment into every home through television and to make the world a better place through philanthropy. And we know she does that very, very well. And we also know that because of her level of expertise, she has called upon when the people with the highest to gain or to lose to tell their story, get to tell it. A recent example of that was Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, when they wanted to explain why they were leaving the royalty and leaving England to move to the United States. And in case I think they first went to Canada, they wanted to get their story out. And so Oprah was the person to be able to help them do that. They trusted her that she would communicate in a way that would put them in the highest light. Now, Elon, his passion, his mission, sorry, his purpose is to have a passion for more clean and sustainable sources of energy for a better and more sustainable world. We know Tesla took the lead as it relates to electronic vehicles. They've been at the forefront. And because of Tesla, many, many, many companies, even the large companies that created gasoline powered engines and diesel powered engines that propel those vehicles are switching to electric. Some of them are committed to all electric. And I'm pretty confident that had Elon must not come out with Tesla, when he did, this would have had a much, much slower effect. In fact, I remember back when I was a little kid in the 1970s, my brother-in-law owned a gas station and he was a well-known auto mechanic. And back then he was asked to transport a General Motors vehicle that had batteries in the back because it was run by electricity. So GM's been sitting on technology for about 50 years and now has decided because of the leadership of Elon Musk to get into this business in a big way. So now that we understand why, let's discuss what matters most. And so I pose four questions. And the first one is, and I recommend you ask yourself these and answer these in this order. Why do I exist? And so for me, a person of faith, I showed this example of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo painted this picture of God and Adam and the quote here, so God created man in his own image. For me, I believe I'm a child of God and so I have a purpose on this planet to honor God through what I do. And so that gives me certainty about where to move forward from. So I highly encourage you to ask yourself this question and to answer it. Then the next important question, the most important question is answer why you do what you do. In the case of Steve Jobs, he said, I wanna remove the barrier of having to learn. Now I had my little great niece visiting this past weekend. She was 21 months old, pulling her mom's mobile phone, her Apple iPhone out of her hands and watching a video game and controlling the buttons. Do you think that 21 year old, 21 month old had any concerns about a barrier to having to learn? No, and that's because Apple, Steve Jobs knew what he was doing and how he was gonna create these products to eliminate that and to make it so simple for us. So understanding why you do what you do is critically important. The next question you should ask and answer is, why should someone work with you? Not why you should work with them, but why should they work with you? And in the case of Truett Cathy, who founded Chick-fil-A, he said, I wanna honor God and help people. He didn't say, I wanna make the best chicken sandwich ever. It was about honoring God and helping people. They might create the best chicken sandwich ever. I love this brand. I'm a huge advocate for the Chick-fil-A brand. If you go to Chick-fil-A and don't have a great experience, I wanna talk to you about it because I know that every time I go, I do. Whether it's when I say thank you and they say my pleasure, not your welcome, the food tastes amazing. In fact, a lot of times we'll order cater the chicken nuggets and bring them to a high-end party because they're so well-received. They get eaten first, it's crazy. And then last question you wanna ask and answer is, why they should care about you? Why should people care about you? And in this case, I showed the picture of this SEAL team. Their mission is to conduct military actions that are beyond the capability of conventional military forces. If you are caught, if you are caught by terrorists and you are in a bad place and the SEALs are asked to go get you, you know they are gonna put themselves between you and a bullet to make sure that you are protected and rescued. And they do that because they have incredibly high mission to their country, to their service and to you as the individual that is represented by their mission. So these are the questions I challenge you to ask. They're the ones that matter most. And when you get clarity on those, you're gonna be a long way to understanding your brand. So now that we've learned all about what brands are, how they manifest themselves, what kind of relationship they build with us, how the hierarchy works and the questions to ask and answer to get to our purpose and why we exist, then we want to showcase or communicate our expertise and experiences clearly in terms that others can understand. So here's two examples, but you might have eight or 10 others of where your brand is exposed or presented that you would want to communicate as well. So the first one is on LinkedIn. In my case, this is my major platform for communication outside of my website. And so you can see my LinkedIn profile here if you go to my name, Pete Canalicchio, in LinkedIn, this is what you'll find. I have my brand alive banner in the back and it says, are you writing a story that makes your brand come alive in the hearts of those who experience it or those you serve? That's what the question I'm asking you and that's what I try to help brands understand and to perform. Then I showcase that I am an author and Wardwood author and I am a TEDx speaker. And then the first part of my profile is Pete Canalicchio's brand strategist. So under the part that says first name might put Pete Canalicchio under the last part, last name I put brand strategist. So that's all on that top level. These are tricks that you can learn about how to create your LinkedIn profile. There's also a speaker there. And if you go to my profile and you click on that speaker, you'll hear me actually pronounce my name because a lot of people don't know how to pronounce my last name, it's Italian. And so the CH gets confusing to some folks. And then I give my mission. I'm equipping overcomers everywhere with brand strategy, brand expansion and brand licensing tools, talks, workshops and coaching to enable them to compete with the big guys. I'm here helping you because I want to give you all of what I learned while working for Coca-Cola, while working for Noel Rubbermaid, while working on the Olympics and FIFA World Cup. And in the right side, you see my company name and you see my business school because that's the last school I attended. Now on the other side is a personal website. Here's an example of a person who has listed herself on this site. She gives some clear, crisp facts about who she is, what she does and she makes it easy for people to discern the information she's trying to convey. There's nothing confusing here. It's very simple, straightforward. And that's the way we need to think about profiling ourselves. Now the difference between LinkedIn and a website is on the website, you get to put exactly what you want to put and the only person that's going to make you change it is you. But on LinkedIn, that's their platform and we have to follow their rules. And that's why it's important to have our presence on these platforms that realize that we don't control them. We only control our own property in this case, which is a website. Now we're getting towards the end here and I just want to share this idea which is critically important around being ruthlessly consistent. And what I mean by that is when you start to convey who you are, you have to do it like a steady beat of a drum. Not too loud, but just consistent, consistent, consistent. So I'm going to show you an example of an individual Roger Federer who is no longer playing competitive tennis but is still at the top of his game as it relates to his presence in the world as an expert in this industry and as someone who many, many brands want to associate with because of what he conveys. So here are some images of him on the tennis court but also an evening attire with a Rolex watch which Rolex is a big endorser of him. Here's an example with a champagne brand even when he's having a few drinks he's still under control, his brand RF and then it forms the word perfect. And then you can see an example where he treats a young ball boy and then finally with his foundation. So he's giving back. And even though like I said, he's no longer competing. He has over 90 million social media followers. He is the second most, the second wealthiest tennis player behind somebody who actually left tennis and started their own company. So he is the wealthiest of all tennis players. He's won more tournaments than any other player. And so he is what you would call as a ruthlessly consistent brand. Final, final point, attitude is everything. So by bringing a positive attitude to what you're doing changes everything. And for me personally, I would rather work with somebody who may not be as intelligent but comes with a willingness to roll up their sleeves, comes with a smile, comes with a, what can I do attitude any day of the week? Because with someone like that, I know great things can happen. And so when you start to do that, have this positive mind or positive vibes, your life becomes positive. There's no doubt about it. And then that energy is reflected on other individuals which makes everyone better. And when everyone's better than you have this mindset of can do. And we see this example with the Wright brothers, even though they were poorly funded, were not expected to do anything. They were the ones that actually figured out how aircraft could fly because they had this amazingly positive attitude. And when you have that positive attitude, then you get to reach this level of self-actualization where you're doing what you're called to do and others benefit from your presence. So that is the end of my formal presentation. I'm hoping there'll be a number of questions to ask. This is a copy of my book, Expand and Grow Thrive, which you can find on my website, pkmalikio.com, or you can find on Amazon or any of the other platforms like that. My email address, I will connect with you on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to answer any emails if you have any questions. I want to help you in any way I can. So I will stop share and open the floor, I guess, Dan. Hey, thanks Pete. And you can find that book on my desk too. It's a great read. And the website too. Pete's got a great website out there if you want to go check that out. We did have some questions. One of them was from Cherish Pedraza. She's over on LinkedIn. And I think this is a personal branding thing. She might be looking at a website possibly. And she asked, she's a, where is it at? She's a data broker. And she wants to know, what sort of things might she incorporate as part of her personal brand strategy? Great question. I'm so glad you asked it. So for me, one of the things I do is I work with individuals and help them to build their brand strategy. And there's really three pillars to a brand strategy or three, I call it legs of a stool. The first one is this concept of writing down your story, your brand story. I could speak to you for an hour, tell you all kinds of facts and figures about who I am. But if I don't include the inflection points in my life, that story is shallow or hollow. So it's really important when you write brand story to include those, even to your earliest memories or maybe involve people that know you like your parents or a close sibling or a colleague or a friend from childhood and say, hey, tell me about your impression of my life story. What do you remember most about me? And that story, what you write down starts to articulate your why, why you do what you do. And that story becomes the marketing platform to your target audience. So the second leg of the stool is this idea of brand architecture. And I usually say, before we start the brand architecture, let's make sure we've defined our purpose, our vision and our mission in that order. Why we do what we do, what does it look like when we've gotten there and how do we get there? And then we start to fill it in with things like, what do we believe? What do we value? Beliefs inform values. Values typically have standards associated with them. And then we look at things like, what are our attributes? What are our functional benefits? How do people benefit functionally from us? What's our core message? What are our emotional benefits? When somebody works with us, how do we make them feel? And finally, we get to this idea of brand mantra or brand essence or promise. And then the third leg of the stool is this idea of positioning. Who is your target audience? And when I say who, I don't mean just demographics. I mean psychographics. I also mean, what are their values? So you really need to understand who these people are. What is their problem? Get real clarity on that. And how can you solve that problem better than anyone else? What makes you better? And then you want to have proof points that allow you to make the claim you do. So when you have your story and you communicate it to your target audience knowing clearly who they are and what problem you're solving, then people are gonna lean into that story and they're gonna go, oh, I think this person might be able to help me. I'm willing to at least engage with them. Have they written something? I'll read it if they have. Are they giving a talk? I'll listen to it. Or maybe I'll just reach out and ask them to give me 15 minutes of their time. So I hope that helps answer your question and I'd be happy to follow up with you directly. If you have more questions. Thanks Pete. Danielle Corbin, Danielle, did you want to come on and ask your question? Yeah, I'd love to. You're on. Okay. Hi, Danielle. Hi. So, is it just audio that you wanted on? That's fine, either way. Okay. Video is great if you want to also. Yeah, I thought maybe that would help. Hi. Hi. Okay, so first of all, thank you for putting this on. I'm really grateful. I am really glad that you gave Oprah as an example because I feel like her as an example aligns more with what I'm trying to do that no one understands. So when I talk to people about a brand, a lot of people always just say, it's you, the brand is you. And I'm like, okay, but I have, I'm a multifaceted creative. And so what's been tricky for me is trying to create a brand that encompasses everything that I do. And I'm at a point now where I think I'm realizing it's much bigger than that. And so what I need to do is actually, I think, and this is what I'm trying to gain clarification from you on is create multiple brands for different services and products. And so I think the part that I'd love some insight on is if I do that and I've got these different pieces to what I'm offering the world, do I also create a bigger umbrella brand that is me? And then I have multiple brands under it? Yeah, great, great, great, great question. And you're getting to an area that talks about, and it's another, and I try to dispel any kind of jargonism in marketing. But there's another form of brand architecture, which is this idea of a house of brands or a branded house. An example of that is Procter & Gamble, which has a house of brands, Pampers, Tide, you know, you can go on and on, right? They all have individual brands, they're billion dollar brands, they mean a lot to individuals that use those products. Then you have a branded house like Marriott, for example, which has JW Marriott or Fairfield by Marriott and all hosts of brands that are connected by the word Marriott. So the question you need to ask yourself, and that's why I really recommend that you answer those questions, you know, why do you exist, why do you do what you do? Because that's gonna help you understand all of these other services that you're gonna provide. Are they connected? If they're connected, then the idea of a branded house or an umbrella brand makes a lot of sense. If they're disparate, but very important, then you might have something about who you are, but they're each individual brands below them that have their own connection with the target audience of how they're gonna solve those problems. Hopefully that helps. That's so helpful, thank you so much. My pleasure. Great stuff, Pete. Ray Antonino just said that the last three minutes is gold, you'd pay for the recap, a true blueprint for success. Fortunately for everyone here, it'll be recorded in the archive so you can come back and look at it. Dr. Marvin Parker is on LinkedIn and he had a question for you and he just downloaded your book from Audible, by the way. But his question is, can you have more than one target audience? Yes, you can. And thank you for downloading my book. I spend about, I don't know, 40 hours, a couple of summers ago recording that. And it was one of the most challenging things I've ever had the chance to do, but I'm so glad I did it. So I will be in your ear for about 10 hours if you listen to the whole thing. But can you have more than one target audience? Yes, it depends on what you're trying to solve. But we need to get very specific about who the person is and what the, or who the, it could be a company, right? It could be B2B, who are they and what is their problem that you're trying to solve? Now I had a client recently who I worked with who had multiple targets they were trying to satisfy at the same time. They were a real estate hard money lender. So they were trying to solve problems for investors. They were also trying to solve problems with the same platform for their borrowers. And they were also trying to solve problems for their employees. We looked at all of them and we said, how does this company brand satisfy these individual targets? Because all of it has to come together. And if it doesn't, then the system's not gonna work. So what makes it attractive to investors? What makes it attractive to borrowers? What makes it attractive to employees? And we might have had even one or two more. So in that example, you can see where you have multiple targets. Now, in an example where you're talking about two different products for two different organizations, then it might get into what I was sharing earlier, the idea of that branded house or the house of brands. It just depends on what that need is. But you can see in the first example, three different constituents, three different targets all under one company, one brand. That's great. Eric B with Old Salt Coffee, which is an interesting brand. I took the time to look them up. Single Serbs are now available. Old Salt, it's a Navy based group. And he's saying, what can we do to take a brand that's growing but needs to make a significant jump? What's out there for us? How do we take and make that thing so that our brand really starts to soar? Well, first off, I love coffee. So, and I'm Navy, so I'm gonna have to check out Old Salt Coffee. I love the name and I'm excited for what you guys are trying to do. So it really gets down to understanding the real, I would call it the DNA of that brand, right? Have you done the hard work of the things that I mentioned earlier? If you haven't done it all, then I highly recommend you go back and do it. You have to pour your why into the brand. Like why did you guys or ladies get together to develop this brand of coffee? What was the compelling reason, right? We lean in, we buy based on our why. So in my case, I'm a lover of coffee. I may become someone who prefers your brand because of my connection to the Navy or my connection with your experiences. So it's really important for you to articulate those things to your target audience. And who is your target? Is it somebody like me that will buy high-end beans, grind them in the morning, froth my non-dairy milk, put it together? Or is this somebody who wants just one of those K-cups and is going to fill it up? So you have to really get clarity on who that target audience is and what they're looking for. And if you haven't done all that, that might be a place to start, but happy to have a one-on-one conversation and see if I can help you even further because I'm very supportive of what you're doing and I love coffee. We, one of the things you were talking about before was Chick-fil-A and you love that brand. Yes. So Chick-fil-A is, it's beloved and it's a unique experience and they've done a lot of things great. With their branding though, one of the things that's not convenient is that if on Sunday I want Chick-fil-A, I'm not getting Chick-fil-A on Sunday. Can you speak to how, how does, how is it, I mean, there's some baggage that comes with that, isn't there? For sure, but we just literally talked about this idea that you could have more than one target audience, right? And in the case of this company I told you before, they had investors, borrowers and employees and all of them had to be fulfilled. All of them needs had to be met, right? So in the case of Chick-fil-A, their employees are very, very important to their business. Their employees are treated with so much respect because they demand so much from them. So the idea that, and they're faith-based, right? So the idea that they could kind of live their faith and most of the people that work there don't have to be, but typically have faith also, who want to have this idea of one day of rest, it could be Sunday, it could be Friday, it just happens to be Sunday. So they're satisfying that target audience while they're satisfying folks like me who wake up on a Sunday and go, I wish I could have a Chick-fil-A sandwich and they're not open today. But I gotta tell you, being a faith-based person myself, even though I'm a little bit put out, I respect the heck out of why they do what they do. That's why I buy them in the first place. And so I'm able to get all around or over the problem of Chick-fil-A is not open on Sundays because I realize there's more than one target audience here. I am a consumer, but I am not the only one that matters. And so for them, typically they will sell more in six days than their competitors do in seven. We have a question from Osvaldo Marino. Osvaldo, did you wanna come on camera? Yep, I'm here. Can you guys hear me? I sure can. Okay, I actually have two questions. That's okay. But my first question is, I just put it down. Where do you see brands going? Oh, I'll start my video too. Where do you see brands going when it comes to how and where they brand themselves to be the most successful? And then the second question is, what are some big don'ts? But maybe typically a lot of people do nowadays when it comes to brands. Okay, so maybe we'll answer the second question first and we can talk about where they're going. One of the biggest problems that brands have, a big don't is they don't act with ruthless consistency. And so they are in one space, which could be their target space, right? They're saying all of these things and they're making a lot of sense and people are leaning in and going, yep, I get that brand and I prefer that brand or I'm even loyal to that brand. And then out of the blue, they will decide for whatever reason to do something over here that has nothing to do with this. And the target audience goes, wait a second, you told me you were this, your promise was this, but you're not being true to who you are. You're doing this stuff over here. And quickly, those folks will put a question mark. Now, if these folks get it right, they figured out, go, hey, wait a second, we're sorry, we screwed up, we'll get it right, we won't do it again. Most brand loyalists will give them a pass because nobody's perfect. But if they continue to play over here and do these things, these folks say, you know what, I don't think I can trust this brand anymore, I'm out. And that, I've seen a lot of that. Now, where are brands going? Well, I think the brands that matter are going up higher and higher and higher. We lean into them more. All those things I mentioned, this idea of building a relationship, establishing trust, providing certainty, removing risk, willing to pay a premium rate. In times of difficulty, people lean into brands way more than they do in times of ease or in times of affluence. So we've had a lot of difficulty in the last couple of years, last three or four years with the pandemic, you know, with inflation, with, you know, debt out the wazoo. And what does this mean? That's when we lean into brands the most. So the brands that do all those things right, they're gonna continue to perform higher and higher level. The ones that don't are going to suffer and generic are going to be a commodity. And they're only gonna command what a commodity commands in the marketplace. So I believe in brands so passionately, I say, figure out who you are, why you do what you do and do it with Ruthless Consistency and you will get more business than you know what to do with. Thank you, that's great. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Someone had a question before about logos. Okay. We get pre-wrapped around the axle with logos. Do you have any advice on personal branding logos or company brand logos? I have a lot to say about logos. So I'm so glad this question got asked. First off, do not create a logo for your company until you've created your brand strategy. I'll repeat that. Do not create a logo for your company until you've created your brand strategy. Now for all of you that created a logo before you created your brand strategy, realize that logo probably doesn't reflect who you are because it came out of the mind of some designer who thought, well, I don't know what this person or this organization stands for. I'll insert what I think it should stand for. So you are already communicating something inconsistent with who you are because you haven't defined who you are. So that's the first thing to say about logos. What I suggest is you develop your brand strategy and then you get a graphic designer or creative director who really understands brand strategy and have them work with you to build your brand attributes into your visual identity. Visual identity consists of the logo and all the other elements that make up the brand's visual connection, visual representation with all the dos and with all the don'ts. So you saw like my LinkedIn profile banner, right? That was designed for LinkedIn. There's one for Instagram, there's one for Facebook. There's certainly what I put on my website, but they all came and started with my brand strategy first. And then I developed the logo and then I developed all the attributes, the colors right down to the PMS code, the fonts specifically used at certain times and not at others. And then the backgrounds, is it a dark background? Is it a light background? All of those things are done well, communicate it well through someone who does this for a living. So I don't do the creative side, but I work with individuals that do who really understand why it's important to have a brand strategy. And when the work I do becomes like the greatest brief for a graphic designer, but if they don't have that, then typically what they'll do is they'll ask a lot of questions to try to get at those same kinds of answers. But that's what I have to say about logos. And truthfully, if you're a personal brand, then you should have a personal brand logo. In my case, it's that, here's my business card. It's the PC, it's kind of the identifier with my name and then brand alive. And you can see it on the dark background on the back, on the other side. So just an example of how a logo should be made. And believe me, when you, and we don't do this very often, but when we hand out business cards, how, what their thickness, their print, their colors, the font, everything right, that communicates so much. So if you're not willing to spend a little bit more in creating it and then having it printed well, then what are you actually communicating to your target audience or whomever it is you just spoke to? Probably not what you would hope for. And I just leave you with that thought. That's great. We have one more question from the incomparable Ray Antonino. Ray, love you Ray. There, how do I do this? There we go, picture. I still can't get the video up, but that's okay. You don't need to see my helmet. Oh, there you are. Yay. Yay. Hey Pete, this has been incredible. The timing of which, I mean, it's just beautiful. First of all, thank you. Incredible, thorough walkthrough of how we should think about things. But here's what my question is. We're currently going through EOS. Are you familiar with EOS? Tell me a little bit more just to make sure. Entrepreneur operating system. A lot of businesses will work on EOS. And in that there's a couple of key dates where you work the whole day on certain workshops. And we just came out of Vision Day building one. And part of that was building our core values and our core focus and a core value statement. And I'm going to tell you that was a lot harder and we still, then I would have thought and we still didn't get it. Taking your book, wanting to throw a plug out there, so I also go get it, is to say what chapter in your book is the chapter we could look to first for taking the real true first step as a team? To say, let's jump on soon. Let's talk about this. Answer these questions what we think and start that process of building blocks toward building exactly what you're here showing us today. Well, thank you very much. And I'm so glad this landed where it did with you. I will tell you that I'm literally taking, so I do this coaching, right? I've converted my coaching into a self-paced course which is available, but I also then took that self-paced course, transposed it into the words and have been in the process of creating a book out of that self-paced course, which is in its kind of first draft right now. I expect that book will be published in April of this year, so in a month or so. And that will literally give you all of what I've just shared but at a deeper level. So I know you can't wait for that, but you and I can talk and I can start to feed you some of the drafts and I'd be happy to do that. But if you were gonna take Expand Grow Thrive, I would say the first chapter of Expand Grow Thrive is my chapter experience with the Nagano Olympic Games. So this is when I got, I was an employee of the Coca-Cola company, got brought into this group called Worldwide Licensing and asked to pull together a team to figure out how we would create co-branded merchandise for the Nagano Olympics, which we're starting a year from then. It was just like super fast. How we came together as a team, what we did to showcase the Coca-Cola brand and the Olympic brand and how we thought about who our target audience was and why they mattered. I think we'll come through loud and clear. One thing I will leave you with, which was the compelling point of all this is, when we did it right, and thankfully we did it right, we had a crowd and I thought we were in trouble because I wasn't in Nagano at the time. We had a crowd that was like more than a mile long lined up in the middle of the night, the last day of the Olympic Games, waiting to get the last pin of the day that was gonna be sold basically 12 hours later. And when we went to the person and we only sold 1,998 pins because that's when the Olympics took place, and we told the 1,999 person that there would be no pin of the day for them because we'd be sold out. They still didn't leave the line. They were so impassioned. And that's helped us realize when you do right by your brands and when the brand lives its promise, in the case of Coca-Cola with the Olympics, and amazing things happen way beyond us as individuals. So I think that story in chapter one could help you kind of figure out how to rally around this idea. And then I'll get you the draft of the book and that might fill in the details. Got another quick question from Frank. He's asking, and I'm assuming this is about his branding, probably branding and advertising marketing for a bootstrap startup. Is there a percentage of overall budget allocated that you recommend? Oh boy. Tough question, but I get it, right? Like every penny matters, right? But I can promise you as much as important so of getting your minimum viable product created and getting it out there and making sure it works flawlessly is essential doing your brand strategy work, understanding why you've done it and communicating your story is also essential and telling that story, which is the marketing is essential, right? Because as I said in the hierarchy, if no one knows you exist, you don't exist. If you don't have awareness, if you haven't given people the chance to try it or build a loyalty to it, all of that amazing work goes for naught. But if you have done it and now you're marketing a great product or service and you know once somebody tries it, they're gonna have an amazing experience, then you wanna tell the world, right? So how do you do that? Well, do that brand strategy work first, make sure that that's built into your product and that doesn't cost you a lot of money. But then you can figure out, okay, what are the smartest ways that we can now start to tell our story? And so is it a question of percentage? I don't think so because you might do one thing and I'm not suggesting you do this, but let's just say you had, I don't know, $2 million and what you were trying to sell was a consumer products good and you had only $2 million, you might decide, I'll take a 30 second clip at the Super Bowl and let the world know about this. 400 million people will see our brand and that may be the best way. Or it might be, you know what, we're gonna piecemeal it out, we're gonna do some great PR, spend a little bit of money on an expert to get us, give us a chance to tell our story and what we call earned media, right? Literally where somebody publishes a story in their trade magazine about who you are and what you do and why you matter, right? So the cost of getting that article written is zero, but getting the professional to help you connect with that person may be the best money spent. So hopefully that answers it. I can't get into a percentage because when you're bootstrapping, is it five or is it 50? That really is uncertain because we're really talking about a low amount of money either way. Well, Pete, thank you so much for your time. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We're gonna get off here real quick. Before I do, visit patriotbootcamp.org for more information about upcoming events and to get alerts to attend these events via LinkedIn or via other services. Thank you, Pete. You can check out Pete at pitcanalequio.com, check out his site, check out his book. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time. Thank you everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you, Dan. Really appreciate it. Thank you to DAV.