 So, we'll get started. First and foremost, thank you for coming to my session. I know you had a lot of options for your 1030 session, and we appreciate you choosing ours. My name is Bill Beard, and I have been involved in branding, marketing, copywriting, and user experience for, it pains me to say, 20 years now. I'm feeling old, 20 years is a long time. And today we're going to talk a lot about what a brand is and how you can leverage it within your product experiences to help convert customers into more loyal customers. Just really quick, I also want to thank the conference organizers. They were very patient with me, with a guy who I currently reside outside of Savannah, Georgia, and it is quite difficult to get to this stage from Savannah, Georgia. So, I really appreciate everyone's patience with me as we tried to figure out how that exactly was going to work. Just to jump right in, I'd like you to take a moment, if you would, and think about the things in your life that you truly love, the things you're passionate about, the things that make you feel happy, things that make you feel happy, the things you love, right? Do you have, have you guys watched Marie Kondo, the things that spark joy even? So, think about those things for a minute, the things that make you happy, the things that you love, things that make you feel great. So, right away you probably thought of family, right? The people in your life, the people that you love, people that you care about, people who make you feel fantastic, cared for, and the people that also you make feel loved and cared for. Maybe you thought about your friends, the family you get to choose, the people who really make you feel great, help you build confidence, make you feel like you can accomplish anything, always have a good time with your friends. You know, these are the people in our lives that if we had the option, if we didn't have to work and go to conferences and all that stuff, we would, we would spend all of our time with these people because they make us feel fantastic, they make us feel loved, cared for, all of that. And when you think about the things you're passionate about, maybe you also thought about other things, not family, friends, but your faith, maybe you're very passionate about your faith. Maybe you are very passionate about charity and helping others and making the world a better place. You know, no more pursuits all. Maybe you're very passionate about politics and policy and how we implement policy and how we make changes within our countries, hopefully to also make the world a better place. I assume a lot of you, because you're sitting here looking at me right now in a conference room, are passionate about your jobs, right? Well, maybe passionate about your work, maybe not so much your job, but I won't throw stones at that. Passionate about your work, you love what you do. You love making amazing experiences and products for everybody. And that's great, and I'm glad you're here. And that shows me that you are passionate about that. Maybe you're more artistic, right? I was a musician for a while, although not a very good one, which is why I'm standing here instead of on a different type of stage. But I was very passionate about music, still am. You know, that song that you hear that really stirs the soul, that makes you feel alive, you know, brings up a moment of nostalgia from when you were a kid or whatever. Just music is very passionate. I'm sure we have some designers or people who are more aesthetically oriented in the audience. Maybe you're exceptionally passionate about art. A day at a museum is your favorite place to be a walk through there to see what beauty is. Two for one on this slide, maybe you're patriotic, right? You love your country. I love my country, despite its current state of being a hot mess. I also love sports. This is a sporting event I went to many years ago. Big sports fan, anybody wants to teach me about cricket, I would love to hear because I have no idea what's going on, but I'll watch any sports. That's great. So maybe you're passionate about those types of things. Why? Why do we care about that stuff? Why do we care about family? Why do we care about art and music and sports and all this stuff? What makes us care about that kind of thing? And the reason is that human beings, we love to feel, right? We love emotion. Not only do we crave the obvious things that we need to survive food, water, shelter, but we love emotion. We crave emotion. We search for it everywhere we go because these are the things that make us feel alive, right? It's not just about survival at this stage, it's about feeling emotion, passion, caring, making other people feel different things. It's a part of the quintessential human experience, feeling and emotion. We love to feel so much that we assign emotions, feelings to inanimate objects to things that can't love us back, aren't capable of that because they're just things. For example, a house, your house. Personally, I think my house hates me sometimes because it tries to break all the time. But I love it. It's my house. It's where I live. It makes me feel comfortable. It makes me feel sheltered and secure and taking care of, right? And my family lives there. My wife lives there. Our pets live there. My two dogs and my cat. I feel loved. I feel cared for. And that's why we have an expression. It's not a house. It's a home. It's a place where we feel loved. So we assign emotions to inanimate objects, to things. We do this also with consumer goods. We love different consumer goods, right? Whatever they may be, whatever you're into or passionate about. With me, it's electronics. I love TV and I love sports. Those two things go very well together, right? So I would set up multiple TVs. I'd watch every single sport that I could at the same time, three or four sporting events at the same time. It made me feel connected, right? And I loved to feel connected. I love to feel in the know to win those arguments with my friends, those debates about, you know, who's the best player and all of that. And this was my setup until my wife moved in and then that went away really quickly. But we assign feelings and emotions to inanimate objects and essentially to brands, companies, to organizations. And while there are a lot of different definitions of what a brand is, this is my personal favorite. A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a color pellet or rounded edges on a box, right? A brand is how a customer, a person feels about your product, your organization. It's our job as organizations to influence customers, potential customers, prospects into feeling a very specific way about our product and service. And the reason for that, as a writer, I like to be the one who said the clever thing in the clever way. But I guess I'll defer to one of the greatest American authors of all times, in this case, Maya Angelou, who said people will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel. And really, when we talk about branding, that's our goal. The goal of branding is to create an emotional association and through repeated interaction, turn that emotional association into an emotional attachment. We have a term for this in psychology called fear of loss, right? We want to create emotional attachments to our products, our services, our company. Make people feel like they can't live without it because they love it so much. And it's important to note, it's important to note that when we talk about branding, a lot of people use that as a reference to what we call brand artifacts, a logo, a color pellet and so on. Those are brand artifacts. They're a representation of our brand. But branding in and of itself is not a logo. It's not a color pellet. It's a process, right? It's a process of doing exactly, sorry, this keeps going out, doing exactly what's up here, creating that emotional attachment, repeated interaction into an emotional attachment. The emoji version of what I just said to really break it down for you. Again, create an emotional association and over time, repeated interaction, create an emotional attachment. So the big question obviously is how, right? How do we go about doing that? It sounds very hard. It sounds complicated. You have to influence people's emotions, which is never easy to do. So how do we do that? Well, traditionally, the answer was advertiser, marketing to some extent, but primarily advertiser. You know, when we wanted to sell a product, advertisers are masters at generating excitement, creating desire, right? They could make you want something before you've ever seen it, before you ever touched it, or you ever, in this case, if it's a sneaker, tried it on, right? When I was a teenager, the Air Jordan was the biggest sneaker on the planet, never before had they associated an actual piece of apparel with an athlete. Michael Jordan was the first and I was a basketball player. I know I don't really look it, but I was a basketball player and I wanted the Air Jordan because I wanted to, as they said in the campaign, be like Mike. And so they'd run these ads, they'd run these campaigns, and over time you really wanted that desire, you really wanted to wear those sneakers and be the better athlete, even though there's no way on earth a sneaker can actually make you be a better athlete. So we'd use advertising, we'd use campaigns traditionally to create that sort of emotional attachment. But the problem is the landscape has changed, okay? If the landscape with advertising has changed, we now have streaming services. It's much harder to get people's eyes on an ad. Netflix, Hulu, and so on. People aren't watching as much TV. Traditional advertising has definitely faded. I will not call it dead because advertisers are nothing if very clever. So I won't call it dead, but I will say it's fading. And they've taken refuge in other places too, social media, YouTube, and so on. But advertising in general has faded. So what happens now? So how do we do this? With my belief that we, the product creators of the world, we need to pick up the slack here. We need to help people create that emotional attachment. It's on us now because if it's harder to get eyes on our marketing, if it's harder to get people converted to our product, we need to treat every single person who comes into our funnel as more precious than we ever have before. It's always been important to retain, but now we're on a different scale. We can't afford to let someone slip through our fingers once we've gotten them, because it is so much harder to get those people. So we need to leverage our product experience to create those emotional attachments. This is why I encourage my teams to think, the teams that I interact with, to think like advertisers when you create product. You have to think about emotion, you have to think about generating that excitement and desire. And I know a lot of you who are anywhere from on product teams to developers probably think, Bill, I have enough to think about already. I've got enough on my plate. My job is crazy. I've got deadlines. I've got KPRs and all this other stuff that I have to meet. I don't have time to think about brand. And I understand that and I sympathize and I'm going to help you with that. But there's a problem with not thinking about it. And the problem is it's only a short-term strategy to ignore this kind of long-term thinking. We're in this for the long game. I know a lot of you are probably startups and you're scraping by to survive every day and I understand that. But you need to also be thinking about the long game, about creating those loyal customers. I know a lot of you go about your day. You get up in the morning, you go to your office building, you go into your office building, or if you're an entrepreneur you go into your mom's basement or wherever you go. And you start to, maybe you go to a scrum, we're at an agile conference, let's talk about scrum and stand up. You go to a scrum and you talk about what you did yesterday, what you're going to do today. You pull a card off the board, right? Cards, user stories, everybody hopefully to some extent. As a user I want to accomplish X, right? And you go in your room with your teammates and your brainstorm and you think of ideas and you sketch. I hope you don't wireframe. I hope you just sketch and you think about what you're doing and then you go out and you build, you know, some fantastic new feature, right? And that's great and that's good and that's the process and you're at a process conference, you know? So I hope you're working on improving your process. But there's a problem with that model because there is a you who is not you, who goes into a different building, who goes to a different scrum, who pulls a different card off the board, right? Sits down with their team, brainstorms, sketches, maybe wireframes, hopefully not. And then goes to work and builds a feature, right? And that person is your competition. And if your competition is doing the same thing in a similar way and you're doing the same thing in the similar way and maybe you're working on the same exact cards, the cards they have and the cards you have because you're trying to solve the same problem are very similar, right? We end up in a product development foot race. Who can be faster? Not necessarily even who can be best, but who can be faster. Hopefully who can be best faster. And that is not a long term solution, right? We need to leverage every tactic at our disposal, including starting to think like advertisers. We need to leg up on the competition. And I know you guys, maybe you're better than your competition. Maybe you're just flat out better. You're at a conference trying to get better so I hope that you are. Maybe your competition is also here, which just proves my point, which is great. Hope they are. We need to think more like advertisers. We need to generate that excitement, that interest, that emotional aspect. And you think, well, Bill, we've got better features in the competition. We're better than them. We have better features. Sure. Features can be differentiators. They can make you stand out until they're not. Anyone familiar with Swarm back in the day? Check-in app? It was a check-in app. It gamified the aspect of being in a location saying, I was here, your friends could see where you were. And it was great. It was very popular until one day, the big boy in the room, Facebook said, well, we like that idea, but you're taking advertising revenue away from us we're just going to build a little button right here, build that feature. And overnight, they rendered Swarm's main feature pretty much irrelevant because when you have Facebook already, you're already engaged millions and millions of people with that platform. Why would I go use a separate app when I can do it right here? And now Swarm has still survived to their credit, Foursquare has still survived to their credit for because they pivoted a lot in a different direction, but it just illustrates features are incredibly hard to win with in the long run. That's a short-term success strategy. And just to be clear about where exactly I'm talking about in this funnel, this is a typical customer experience funnel. You know, you start with some sort of ad marketing aspect, maybe an ad on Instagram where someone sees your ad, your very emotional, I hope ad, leveraging the benefits, the emotional benefits, the logical benefits of your product. They go to your landing page where they see even more of that stuff. Here's why we're awesome, here's why you're going to feel great when you use our product. And then we get into the actual product experience. And this is where typically brand goes to die, right? Because first off, these are managed by two different teams. There's a marketing team and there's a product team. And these two teams are given very, very different goals. The marketing team, our job is to get people into that funnel. We need to leverage traditional tactics, marketing tactics, advertising tactics. If you're lost, like we talked about, social proof, you know, getting, hey, a lot of people are using this, you should be using it too. And they're very good at leveraging emotion. But the product team is given a very different set of goals, right? You're typically given goals that say, we need to help people complete this task as efficiently as possible. There's no discussion of emotion. There's no discussion of creating attachments in any way. Emotional attachments, not paper attachments, paper clips. So we get to this part of the funnel and suddenly we take this amazing emotional experience and we turn it into a version of the doctor's office, right? Please fill out this form. Please fill out part two of this form. Please sign up here. And it becomes very staid, very, very straightforward. And that's in the best case scenario, usually. The worst case scenario, we continue to use things like computer language, right? We, because we are developers, product developers, we tend to think about things in computer language because we are so closely integrated with that portion. There's just an example, every time you go to enter your password and we all forget our passwords all the time, you see something like your password is invalid. And not only is this not human language, it's certainly not brand level emotional language and no human being goes to another human being and says, you know, the word invalid. Like, hey man, your shirt's invalid, you know, nobody talks like that. That's not human language. You know, so at the very least we need to use human language. At the very best we need to incorporate more of that emotional aspect into our product experience. So this is what I'm talking about in a nutshell. As UX teams, product teams, we're here to create useful products, right? Products that accomplish a task I need to accomplish, I want to accomplish something I have to do. Has to be useful. UX teams focus a lot on the usable, right? Not only do I have a useful product, but it's usable, it's intuitive, it's easy, it's simple, it's fast, and so on and so forth. So that's the minimum we're trying to accomplish with our product experiences. What I like to encourage teams to do is to think about the emotional aspect. Not only focus on the user journey as they go through the process, but also the emotional journey. How do we connect with people on an emotional level to incorporate that branding process we talked about earlier? You are at an Agile conference, so I am sure you've heard this term mentioned quite a bit, minimum viable products. For those who don't know, minimum viable product is a process of creating the simplest thing, the easiest thing, the fastest thing, fastest version of your product so that you can get immediate feedback and go on to iteration two, like incremental improvement iterations. And that's good, that's great, grand, awesome, right? What I suggest, and I realize that if you're an entrepreneur and you're struggling and you're coding and designing yourself, I suggest desirable and I understand that's a difficult thing to achieve. I suggest a minimum desirable product, that's the end result of the useful, the usable, and the emotional. Incorporating emotion makes products more desirable than just completing a task because you have to remember most of the time when we're helping users complete tasks, they're things they don't want to do, they have to do them. Nobody wants to go online and pay bills, they have to do it. So it's our job to make people feel better about that and work towards that emotional attachment. And now I know a lot of you are thinking this is complicated, how do I think about brand? I don't have time to read a whole brand guidelines and understand what that all means so I'll help you out with that. A few years ago I was very fortunate to be involved with UCLA on a branding exercise. University of California, Los Angeles, for anyone who doesn't know, one of the best institutions we have in the country. And their hospitality team which is the team that's responsible for everything from the dormitories and helping students find housing to study halls and providing computers and even cafeterias and such places to eat. They had undergone what I will politely term organizational upheaval. Many, many layoffs and craziness and stuff like that, different leadership. So at the end of the day they had these fractured teams. They had no idea really what the point of the hospitality team was. They didn't understand the larger message and how we get 5,000 people on this team to work together towards a coherent goal. So I did a branding workshop with the team, the core team, the marketing team mostly. We went about defining the brand and we came up with this amazing set of guidelines for the brand. And then we sat down and said, you know, for the marketing team this is very useful and they can go forth and they can use this to do to spread the word. But for the average Joe on this team, the person, the secretary, the janitor, the person serving food in the cafeteria, they're never going to look at this. They don't care about brand guidelines and color palettes and things like that. It's not useful. But we still need to present a united front, a coherent message. So we developed this. This is something I call brand focus. It's a single, unique sentiment that everyone on the team can understand, right? A simple phrase, summing your brand guidelines down into one message. What is that emotion that we want to focus on? How do we want to make people feel? For UCLA's hospitality team, we realized that we had to be in conjunction with the university's mission, right? UCLA has a massive institution, very powerful mission, which is to shape the people who will shape the future, right? They're empowering students, they're making students smarter, educating them, so that they go on and do the next big thing. They go on and become the next Anita's, you know? Just as an example. So what we decided is what's the key role of the hospitality team and all of that? How do we help shape the students who shape the future when we're serving meals, you know? We're not teaching, we're serving meals. We're finding people a place to live. And what we realized is that we're the engine for these kids, for these students. What we need to do is empower them, right? So when I interact with the hospitality team, I feel empowered. Like I can go out and shape the future. And so we started spreading that message. Your job is to make students feel empowered, right? All the way through the cafeteria guys, secretaries, whoever, whenever you interact with a student, try to make them feel empowered. And what we saw was a subtle shift in interactions where before there would have been a very typical how can I help you? Whenever interacting with a student which is not a unique message. It's a basic core hospitality question. What we started to see was what do you need today? What do you need today? What can I help you with that will give you the power to go out and do those things? What do you need today? That's a very, very powerful emotional shift. Whatever they needed, not just what we have here, if you need something that's not here, we'll get it for you. We'll make that happen. You need a faster computer. We'll get that for you. What do I need today? What do you need today? And so when you're working with your teams, try to figure out what this is and share it with your teams. Developers and the like, they don't have to read the whole brand guidelines. They just have to be cognizant of the emotional that we're trying to incorporate into our products and to create that emotional attachment. To give you an example of what this looks like in application. MailChimp, anyone ever heard of MailChimp? Email marketing platform. Email marketing is really not exciting. Most people probably don't want to do it. Again, they have to do it for their business. It's tedious. Maybe you like creating the content, but doing mail merge lists and all that stuff is not fun. And MailChimp did a very good job of identifying this and saying, we need to make this enjoyable. We need to be different. We can't be like the constant context and all the other companies out there that just go through the motions. We've got to be different. And so they said, when I use MailChimp, I feel like I'm having goofy fun, while I spam everyone. But goofy fun, right? And that's a different approach to email marketing. And they've incorporated this concept throughout their entire product, their entire product experience. They have these very whimsical drawings, which I'm not even sure what's going on, but it's just very light-hearted. They have a guy measuring a snake over here when they talk about templates. I don't know what that's about, but it's just very light-hearted and it reduces the friction of going through this process. They do a great job of incorporating it in their language. Confirm you're human. Since you've made it this far, we want to assume you're a real, live human, but we need to be sure you're not a robot. And in earlier iteration, the monkey would pop up. You know, and I know monkeys have a different meaning here. In the United States, they're very whimsical and funny. To us, for whatever reason. But the monkey would pop up and say either helpful advice or funny things, like, you're in the jungle, Ben! You know, just crazy stuff that made you feel like, okay, this is a lot more fun. I'm actually having a good time while I do this. A company that is surprisingly good at this that you wouldn't expect is Google. No offense to anyone who's from Google in the audience. And we can argue for days about what kind of company Google is and what their goal is and all that, and I'm sure a lot of you have very strong opinions. Let's just say for the sake of this discussion, Google's an information company. And so if you're an information company and you want people to feel better about your product, what do you do while you leverage that limitless supply of information? And that's how they came up with the Google Doodle. Very simple idea. Very easily executed. Where they would take historical information that they all, they have all of it and they would create these doodles, regionally based, celebrating artists and significant historical figures and India Independence Day and things like that. And it makes you feel more informed because it was maybe something you didn't know and they did it in a pleasurable way in an enjoyable way and you're like, hey, maybe Google's not so bad. But Google was a company I would never expect to think like that and they have been. And just to clarify what I mean by unique, let me reiterate, it's important that you're unique. Because a big part of this is differentiating yourself from the competition. Right? We're not just here to do this for fun. We're not just here to create an emotional attachment but an emotional attachment to us. Not just to our product but to us specifically, our organization, our product, our service. Nike, as everyone knows, is still the market leader in athletic apparel. For years and years and years and years, they ran just do it. That was their campaign. And that makes perfect sense. When you're the market leader, you have the largest market share, I think in the late 90s when Under Armour came into existence at Google. Nike had something like 57% of the market. So when you're the market leader, you say, hey, how do we grow our revenue? Well, we grow the market. We get more people to work out. We get more people involved. We get more people exercising. More people buying apparel. Perfectly logical position. And a great brand, encourage. Go out and do it. Come on, you can do it. I believe in you. Now, Under Armour in the late 90s was one man, a couple of guys, and they realized we can't compete with Nike. Nike is a juggernaut. We're never going to steal from them. We're never going to get anyone to buy our products. If we just go out and do the same, let's encourage people. That's not going to work. So they took a different approach and they said, hey, we're going to target typically young men and we're going to make them feel tough. Which is a very different emotion than encourage. And if you think about it, really Nike is the coach who's like, hey guys, let's go. You can do it. I believe in you. Get out there. Give it your best shot. Under Armour is the coach that maybe you're not sure you actually really like. He's like, oh, are you going to go out there and do it? Are you going to make a play? Come on, Johnson, get out there. Let's see what you got. Challenging you. We must protect this house. There are a lot of their early ads. We're very large men yelling at the TV screen about, are you strong enough to do this? That's a very different emotional state than Nike. And obviously, it was very successful. Under Armour is, I think, the third largest clothing apparel company in the world, athletic apparel in the world now. So just to start to sum up a little bit, I think the most important thing that I would like to offer to you is that really as product developers, product creators, we need to cherish every interaction. We can't just go through the motions anymore. It's not enough to take a customer from A to B to do that task completion. We have to consider and work on the emotional journey of that user. Create that emotional association, move it to an emotional attachment. This is a, I was in Vegas a few years ago, and this was the line to check in. They clearly don't care about the people in this line. They're just going through the process of checking you in. There's nothing fun about this. Let's not treat our customers, our users the same way. Let's consider the emotional aspect of their journey. So just to sum up, reiterate a little bit, our goal as product developers, as product teams, is not just to get from A to B, but to craft experiences that create a unique emotional association. And through repeated interactions, continued use of our product. Build it into an emotional attachment. Make people love us by targeting that specific emotion. Pick up the slack for those advertisers that are having a harder time now. It's on us now. We're the product teams. We have to start thinking more like advertising teams as well. And if we do that successfully, that's how we'll go about creating dedicated loyal customers over the long run, not just the short term. Thank you. Do we have time for questions? Thank you. It was great to hear you. One question comes to my mind. I think typically when you talk about in working emotions, we tend to have positive emotions. So would you be able to give some other examples as well of different kind of emotions and then how people have built products around different emotions other than just positive emotions and any such examples? Example of negative emotions? Other than positive emotions, for example. I think ideally we would never want to create negative emotions. Yeah, I think when I said other than positive it could be, for example. The thing that comes to my mind is if I I mean to watching horror movies, right? So when I go to watch horror movies, I'm not expecting to have fun or laughter. It's a different emotion that I mean only. So are there any such things that come to your mind? So that was my question. I don't know if I have examples of companies leveraging that kind of thinking. Typically, I think marketing teams in general would run as far away from that kind of idea as humanly possible because they want people to associate positive emotions with their experiences. I get what you're saying. I think if you had, you know, for example, if your product was the Netflix of horror movies, right? Then that might be something you might consider. I'll stop my head. I can't think of anyone who's leveraging negative emotions. There are things that we might, as human beings, consider negative like, like I mentioned earlier, fear of loss, right? Don't miss out is like one of the most common advertising phrases of all time. But no, I'm sorry. I don't have examples of like making people intentionally scared to buy more of your actually. Now that I say it out loud, I think any sort of doomsday prepper company, they do exactly that kind of thing, right? You need to be prepared. Sorry. Insurance, exactly, right? Good examples. I don't think they, I don't think they really think of those as negative emotions. They think of it as preparation, right? We're going to help you be prepared. I would encourage you to use positive emotions across the board, unless you have a brand that dictates that you should scare the crap out of people. Yeah. It's a great example. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. I lead engineering and product for a e-commerce company. Yeah. And my, and also head design nominally, but like, Nice. Yeah. Well, kind of. That's not really what I do. So it's just sort of, I'm good friends with our head of design. We talk a lot. And he, I read the Mailchimp, you know, blog post, the famous one, the talk from, you know, several years back, and he keeps referencing that. And that's a desire that we have to, to add more, you know, more branding and more character to our, our experience. Sure. However, Yeah. There's the Mailchimp example, and then there's Clippy. And they're kind of the same thing. One just went well and one didn't. They are. So how do you do that without being kitschy? As one, which I think is a fear we have that we don't actually do a lot of that stuff for that reason, particularly because we appeal to a very large demographic and because we serve a very functional need. We sell groceries online. It's not like we're selling product handbags. We're selling biscuits and soda. And so from an e-commerce perspective, we're very sort of, what's the word, like mass appeal, sort of brands, very functional products? How would you recommend doing this in a way that doesn't alienate some users that come across as kitschy or waste people's time? Yeah. The very complicated answer is research and testing. Do a lot of research, test, you know, different. Come up with what you think is not Clippy. Come up with the Mailchimp for your product, what you think it is, right? I will also biasly say hire good writers, hire people who are creative and even people who have backgrounds in things like drama and script writing and things like that, maybe get some freelancers. But the core answer is testing and research and testing. Try to get a sense of what your, what would appeal to the masses. Test very small portions of it. Say, okay, I think this is funny, you know, but will Jeff, who's our persona, you know, and Mary, who's a totally different persona, will they both think this is funny, right? And try to find those people and test them. There's no easy answer. It's very difficult to do. I think it gets, like any brand, in any aspect of any brand, the more you start to widen that base and you start to appeal to a larger audience, it becomes very difficult to appeal to everybody and to have a unique brand at that point. That's why you see a lot of large organizations like the Amazons of the world. You don't really have any feel there, right? Because they're so large and they appeal to so many people, they would rather appeal to the masses than target a very specific emotion or so on. Is that helpful? And they have a lot of problems that I talked about too with computer language and things like that, especially the farther down the funnel you start to dive when you need specific things from them, they get very much that way. What was it, Whole Foods? Whole Foods. Yeah, yeah. And I think you can find, but again, you know, it's Whole Foods a mass company. You know, they're appealing to a very set amount of people who are very health conscious, who have more than I can afford to go to this grocery store, right? So yeah, it gets very tough the larger you get. Have you come across any product which had introduced the emotional journey as an afterthought, after it had failed in the market and later became successful? As an afterthought? Yeah. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone. I mean, I've worked with a few different brands where typically when I'm brought in to help company with a brand, it's a much higher level and results in a completely new, redesigned rebrand of their existing website. So it's hard for me to say, like, this was the exact part of the journey. I will say, you know, I like that UCLA example. It's an offline version, but you know, this does have the power to change how your teams think about it, right? And if one person on your team just says, hey guys, what if we think about, you know, this emotion when we go into this process? I think that is a long-term play and will eventually help you in longer. And off the top of my head, people impending this from where they were bad and now they're good at it. I can't think of anyone off the top of my head. Sorry. Most companies start out. Yeah. I would say most companies start out thinking this way, like the Mailchimp to the World, right? Thank you. It's a very different example that comes to my mind. I think there are two movies from Indian context, one Bollywood movie and another Bollywood movie that I don't remember the names of the movies, but one of the movies, Amitabh Bachchan, I think you even know that he's the superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, acting in Hindi film actor. One of the movies end what changed just because I think people did not want to see that. He dying. And similarly in Tamil, one of the movies end what changed just because Rajnikant was shown as dying. So that was something closer to what you're thinking. I don't know whether that helps. Actually, I do have. Let me blow up my presentation for one second. I can answer that now that I think about it. Hopefully it shows this. Nope. So I thought of Microsoft, actually, as an example of this. How do I unhide this on the skip slide? So Microsoft for years marketed the Pro, Microsoft Pro as a completely solely a business tool, and if you look at all iterations of their marketing page, you would see the Pro Microsoft Surface, the Surface, that's what I was thinking of. The Surface up there and it would have a pie chart and it would give product points like the tablet that can replace your laptop, like completely devoid of any sort of emotion whatsoever, solely pitching it as a business product. In the meantime, Apple would run these amazing ads for iPad that showed someone traversing the world and taking pictures and sharing with friends and these incredibly emotional ads. And even though it was a business product, and they were targeting a business audience, Microsoft realized that we're not doing enough of a job harnessing the emotional aspect. So they came up with a series of ads. I don't know if they're out here, but in the USA where they took people who were either influencers on social media or in this case the two guys in the bottom are two American football players, and they started running ads with these people and how they used the Surface Pro throughout the day-to-day of their business to help them be more efficient. The two girls on the left are called the Salmon Sisters and they run a fishing company. So they use the Pro and they told these emotional stories about how they use this and how their business was started and it draws you in so much more, particularly as a small business person, to say, wow, this is a really powerful story I should investigate using this. That's kind of it. Does that help? Yeah. Google? Yeah. I had them earlier? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's a good point. You answered, yeah, for me. Go ahead. Sorry. I was in a rock band for too many years. I can't hear anything. So... Can I go ahead first? Oh, he's already... We'll come back to you. Mic with me. Hi. Hi. I work in a digital application or digital product space. Then we have a great company like Google, SuccessFactor, who spends considerably amount of time on the X side of the story. One of the dilemma we face in my space is how much to spend on UX, user experience. Yes. So how much to spend on UX part of the game? So is there any tips or practical guidelines? How do we make a judgment? How much to spend on UX side when we design a product? How much money to spend on your user experience? Yes. I am the wrong person to ask that question. I typically, being on the creative side, being a creative director, I'm told how much I get to spend on that kind of thing. I don't generally decide it. I'm sure there's people at this conference who can answer that way better than I could. I wouldn't even know where to start. I'm sorry. I don't have an answer to that question. I guess there was someone. I wish I could decide my own budgets when I work with companies, but it's really not up to me. Thank you for that very interesting talk. Hold on one second. Always ask for more than they give you. That's what I'll say. Go ahead. And a considerable amount, 80-20 rule. Yeah. So I've worked across different products and one challenge. I've been working as a product manager for close to eight years now and one challenge. I've worked with MNCs and startups, both ends of the spectrum. One challenge that I have seen and I want to ask about is how do brands that have built some kind of an emotional connect with their users when they have to pivot? Yeah. Now, how do they handle that set of users who already have an emotional connect and when they have to pivot and rebrand themselves? How do they gauge the EQ of the new set of users that they're going to connect with? So there's two answers to that question. The first one is with those people who are already associated, who already have an attachment, who already know the brand really well, my answer would be to treat them with kid gloves. Be very gentle with them. Reach out to your existing users specifically and explain why you're changing and what's going on and why this is happening. Be very forthright and be very clear with them and I think usually when you do, if they love your product and you're not doing something completely different than you were doing, they'll stick around and they'll at least give you a shot. If you completely change your product and there's always that moment of inertia when you're like, I love how this works. Why did they change it? That's going to happen, right? But I think they'll stay around. In terms of trying to draw on new users, this is the answer I give to half the questions I get. The answer is research and testing. Research the heck out of your new audience, figure out what they want, figure out what they need, figure out what their emotional journey is and then test it. Put it out there to that group, small batches, whatever you need to be statistically significant and figure it out. There's no like, hey, here's what you do. It's like all of user experience, right? It's all research and testing. If you're not research and testing, you're guessing. And guessing is okay, but it's not a long-term solution. That help? I guess we need to take the questions of the session now. Okay. I'm happy to hang out. If anybody wants any more questions or anything, I'm happy to hang out for a bit. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.