 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to DAV's first Caffeine Connect. I want to thank all of you for joining us today and thank our team from DAV Patriot Boot Camp. We've been doing these for a while. Patriot Boot Camp has been doing them for quite a while, but we're really excited to get back in the groove. We're excited to engage with all of you and let's get started. We have a really, really great guest to kick off our first event of this kind. Donald McDonald is the chief marketing officer for MX, a company that helps organizations everywhere connect to the world's financial data and use it to improve experiences and operations. The great thing about Patriot Boot Camp really is the people. It's the people who have been involved, whether they're founders, whether there's mentors or other people, just who get alongside and support the program. And they prove that you really don't have to be a veteran to serve veterans and to be involved and want to make things happen for veterans. And you'll be able to tell shortly here that Don is not a disabled American veteran. He's not an American at all. He's joining us from England today. I've heard Don before on pitch contests and, you know, to my uncultured Midwestern years, he kind of ends up sounding frequently like the Simon Cowell of whatever pitch contests. That's more refined version, but Simon Cowell nonetheless. Don is a longtime Patriot Boot Camp leader. He's involved with our national Veterans Entrepreneurship Council. He was on the board. He supported participants, both as a mentor, as a speaker, as a panelist. He's done all kinds of stuff for us. He brings three decades of experience in marketing, product development, and strategy for companies like Intel, Pfizer, Checkpoint, and Qualcomm. As CMO of Intel, he grew that company's brand to the fifth most valuable in the world. So he's going to talk to us about marketing and branding. Don, I'll kick it off. Go ahead and get started when you're ready. Okay. Thank you very much, Don. And welcome, everyone. I'm just going to share this presentation on here. Get this up on the screen. Can everyone see that? Okay. Good. Hey, so here's what I wanted to do, right? So I wanted to just not do a presentation on here. So about 10, 12 minutes of presentation material. But what I really wanted to do was to give you three tools that anyone can start using today, you know, no matter what you're actually engaged in on there. And basically those three tools will be a foundation, a tool for the foundation for defining your brand. Another tool for product positioning and a third tool for naming, whether it's a product or a company. And so I'm going to go through this very quick. I'll warn you now, but I'm going to post the slides into the chat so you can download them if you're so interested. Okay. So the first thing about building a brand is that very often, you know, you can actually personalize. You can turn your company or your product and say, if it was a person, what would it be like? And many years ago, we did this at Intel and I worked for Intel for 21 years. And one of the things that the exercises I did when I took over as Chief Marketing Officer worldwide was we kind of said, what would the Intel brand like be today if we were to personalize it? And we kind of thought, you know, we're about 40 years old, but, you know, there's some pretty cool, cool older people out there, like Richard Branson on Virgin or maybe Bono from U2. And so we did the research and it came back as Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed. And so on the face of it, you know, there was a number of positive attitudes on there. He was trustworthy. This was before the meltdown in 2008, of course. He was trustworthy, so wicked smart, but he is kind of old and, you know, we had all these new kids on the block like Google and Twitter and Facebook and so on. So we began redoing the brand identity and for anyone starting a company or even evolving a company, there's really two parts to this. One part is defining who you are. And the second part is expressing who you are. And very often a lot of companies start on the right-hand side, which is a little bit flawed, and they'll start working on their websites and their logos and names and stuff before they've done on the work on the left-hand side. And I'll give you a tool for this. But basically, who are you? What do you stand for? What are your beliefs, the essence of who you are and all that kind of good stuff? So step one is defining who you are. Step two is expressing who you are. And then obviously that will help you with things like your elevator pitch. This was some very old, this is about six years old from MX, where we tried to get it into 80 words or 120 words for, you know, different purposes. So tool number one is very simple. It's a nine box form, roughly nine boxes, that just like an individual, their personality is made up of all these features and facets, but they end up painting one consistent picture that gives you an opinion of that person, or in this case an opinion of your company. And I'm not going to go through in detail because you're going to get the slides if you want them, but the first one is who are you and why do you matter? And you know, certainly for MX, one of the reasons we exist is because even today, 15 million American children will go home hungry. And so there's just an issue with the lack of financial knowledge. I didn't get taught by my mother. I didn't get taught at school. Generally very few of us are taught on there and it has real problems in society. So that's why we think we matter. Our personality, who are we and who are we not? It's really important that MX that we're not considered to be arrogant or complacent or stuck in our ways. So we list down all the things we don't want to be and all the things that we do want to be. And then we write the founding principles, you know, and then the second one is or the next one rather is we believe what are our belief systems. And again, do this long hand. You don't need to be, you'll see on this list, this is the original list. It doesn't have to be fancy or articulate, but we do believe the essence of our belief is that we have a moral obligation to advance mankind. And every one of us has the ability to do something. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It can be, it might not be, but we all have a moral obligation to advance mankind and that drives the vast majority of us in MX. And our role is to develop and deliver a world-class technology that's beautiful and easy to use for the bank's credit unions or FinTechs. But every day we get up to strengthen the financial lives of citizens and there's a few other things there. And then our vision and mission are true in the last 10 years and they're still holding true today. Our mission is to empower the world to be financially strong. Why? Because financial wellness is good for individuals. It's good for communities, for society. And I would argue it's even good for democracy. And then those values there, we wrote them down and we still look to those very same ones within the company. They're plastered all over our building. And then what is our brand promise? To FIs, financial institutions actually buy the product from us or to end users who use the product or to our corporate social responsibility or to the partners that we work with, whether it's an online banking partner, a mobile banking, whoever it might be. And each one of those has a different set of expectations from our company or from our brand and that's also true for whatever you're building. And then taglines are really nice but they're hard. The Intel inside is a good one, I think. But frankly, I've been working on one for MX and having found one that I really like at the moment. We've got some candidates but this is a nice to have. But you kind of look at, you know, some of the Apple like think differently. Although they don't use that much these days but having a kind of tagline is certainly something worth pursuing but don't sweat it if you don't have one. And then you build it all together. And so that ends up being, hey, this is really everything you wanted to know about your company. And in this case, like I said, when you get the slides, you'll be able to click the URL and this was done about six years ago. We turned it into a video that kind of a 30 second video that described who we were, why we mattered and all the things that are in the nine boxes there. And it was good for prospects. It was great for customers. It was even better for employees, especially as you're successful and you grow. How do you make sure that the culture that you started as a founder, or as a member of the company continues as the company like MX did when I joined it was 150. I think we're at 909 as it goes from 150 to 300 to 500 and so on. So that's just a foundational tool for building your brand. It may seem simplistic, but it's ultra powerful. And especially if you're a founder, I've criticized most founders because they know what they mean. But not often do they are very often they don't articulate it. So other people can say, ah, I get why you founded this company or what you're all about. So the second tool is on something called product positioning. And again, product positioning is more about the mind of your audience than it is about the product or service that you're building. And so positioning is not what you do to a product is what you do in the mind of a prospect. And it's been said before that great devices or services are invented in the laboratory or the software department, but great products are actually invented in the market department because we get into the minds of the target audience. And it's incredibly cluttered environment out there. Most of your targets get thousands of messages and they begin to tune out. So positioning is essential for helping you break through the clutter to stand for something and then use that positioning across all of your spends or your every pixel that goes out of your building. Now, you're going to be credible. This is actually a real example, but Colgate, the toothpaste company back in the 70s, actually tried to extend their product line by launching a range of fast foods. And so you've got to have brand permission to be able to go in a certain place. And frankly, it was a complete disaster because who would believe that Colgate lasagna would taste any good or Colgate pizza. So again, you've got to be credible when you do your product positioning. I guess they could have done the sandy flavor toothpaste. That might have been a better option. So one of the challenges got loads and loads of competitors out there is how do you get into the mind of your target audience first? And then once you get into that mind, how do you invest to keep it next to grow in your category? And a good example would be going to any supermarket, go to the shampoo shelves and you'll see bucket loads of shampoos, every flavor, sex, shape and size you can imagine. And so segmenting down and positioning yourself to have a useful, specific, ownable segment is a big deal. And so obviously if you then say, hey, name a shampoo, you'll get all these kind of things. But if you said name a shampoo that helps you prevent dandruff, almost certainly you're going to think of head and shoulders. And so how do you make sure that your product, your service is memorable and occupies a position that you can own? And so sometimes you might not be the first in the category. So for example, Vicks Nyquil was not the first cold medicine, but it was the first nighttime cold medicine. And that was very powerful because people thought, hey, it's going to help me get a night's sleep when I'm feeling crappy. It's going to be stronger because I shouldn't be driving thing when I'm sleeping, etc. And then similarly with toothpaste, Crest wasn't the first toothpaste company, but it was the first toothpaste with the American Dental Association seal of approval. So beginning to look at things like this can really help you break through and then you can expand from there. But to do that, you need to look at the industry, look at your opportunities, identify your audience, who is, who's not your audience, your competitors, and then look at your own product or service and say where are we strong, where are we, and pick a position. So tool number two is this very simple positioning statement. But if you do it properly, you will get migraine, you should do. And basically it just shortcuts the benefit of your product to your target audience. And it basically includes the key areas of interest, and it's a five box tool. The example I'm going to use is one that we, when we did a couple of decades ago, we did a joint venture with Mattel, the toy company. And we created a range of toys called Intel Play. And this was my favorite is the actual the Intel QX3 microscope we plug the USB slot in the USB cord in rather, and you could then put your kids could put bugs and bacteria and all sorts of funky things. And then you could actually click the button and record a video or take a picture and use it in your school reports or just have it for fun. And so the tool goes something like this. And this is a real example. I use this one because it is probably the cleanest example I've ever been involved in. But basically the target audience here was PC owning parents with kids age five to 12. If you didn't have PC or you didn't have kids, you were not an audience. And many founders will just try and sell to anyone with a pulse. So being clear on who is and who is not your audience is a big deal. So the target audience PC owning parents with kids five to 12 Intel Play products is a category of interactive toys. And the benefit is it revolutionized the way that your darling precious children play and learn. And it does it by combining the power of PCs with the magic of toys. And that's roughly 27 28 words in there. And that should be the foundation for your product or service or indeed your company. And so if you can actually fit them into this five box, you'll be well in the way of having the foundation that you can then use to do advertising copy messaging communications call centers, all that kind of good stuff. Very simple but incredibly powerful. And I think this is a really wonderful example you can play around with. So in summary on product positioning, you're focusing on the target audience and the minds of the prospect focus on products not devices, your positioning is going to evolve over over time. And then it's crucial that positioning really makes it clear who is your target audience and who's not. Okay, so where are we well where we got to as you've developed a product. It's actually an awesome product it really is a world beating product in fact it's going to change the world. You just need a name. So there's a couple of ways of doing this the first ways you sit down with a beer or a cocktail. You can come up with great names like nest for self learning thermostats or Netflix for down the wire content delivery, or Tesla for autonomous electric vehicles or, you know, gorilla for tough glass on your smartphone. You know your colleagues will think you're smart your boss will think you're smart little girls called Geraldine from Georgia will think you're smart, your kids will think you're smart in fact they'll think you're very smart. Your profits will rise and you'll make out like a bandit so that's one way to get all the stuff put together. You'll probably need a plan B and plan B is more of a framework and I should point out here that when people recognize brands and logos and so on, the actual sequence of recognition starts with shape, then color, and then content. And so targets my favorite example, it can be black and white and you'll recognize the target logo. You add that color on there to unique color it's beautiful, and then obviously the name as well but generally in the interest of time we're just focusing on naming here. So a successful name will contribute to business goals and help the buyer create a shortcut to your brand. And so again I'm going to let you read these at your leisure so don't worry the fact that I'm going through this extremely fast. But you're going to do lots of brainstorming, you'll read, you'll capture ideas, you'll read again, jot them down, you'll capture kind of words that sound like what you're trying to do, you'll identify the key features of whatever it is. And then you're going to organize your inputs, you're going to read, you're going to talk, listen and repeat and repeat and repeat, you'll create your positioning statement, you'll focus on the most compelling benefit, you'll be clear on who the audience is and who's not etc. So either in pharma or in medical you'll probably have to pay attention to regulatory, all of you will have to pay attention to trademark considerations, and then definitely pay attention to cultural and urban test there's just an awful lot of ways to offend people. And so look at urban dictionary check it with younger people, really pay attention to cultural and phonetically linguistic concerns. People are going to take the piss out of whatever name you're talking about quite frankly, and I'll show you some examples of that in a second. Be very clear on who is the ultimate decision maker, keep all the names even the God awful names they have the good ones look even better. And so it's always good to say we looked at 300 names and this is the top 10 and whatever it might be. Sometimes you'll use icons I'll show you some examples of this in a second. But you're trying to achieve a couple of things one is it needs to be distinctive the second is you want it to be interesting, and ideally say something new commensurate with that category that you're trying to position your product. And again I'm not going to all four of these except for one, but if you can check these four boxes it's gone good meaning the structure the words is good it sounds good, and the storytelling is good you'll be in a well on your way. So my favorite example is a buddy of mine Jim car that could Intel we were probably 2004 I think it was. And we were working on personal area networks, and we were trying to get the standards of the car industry and the phone industry and consumer electronics and the PC industry aligned. And so Jim was flying to Finland to meet with Nokia and Ericsson. And he was reading this book about this chap on the screen called Harold King Harold around about 950. And he actually unified all the warring nations that we call the Nordics now and made them peaceful. And so, Jim kind of thought that was a good metaphor for what we were trying to do with all these industries and get the standards unified. And so he had rotten teeth this chap. And so his name was Harold Harold Bluetooth because his teeth were so black and blue. And if you actually go into the alphabet of the Nordic runes at the time and see H for Harold and people Bluetooth. You end up with the Bluetooth logo that and the brand that you almost certainly are probably using every single day. What a fabulous story right. And you can do that with everything that you're you're working on it's only one element. But if you can make your name have a story behind it and I've got some other examples I can send some other time. It really is amazing what kind of notice people take of you on there. And then there's some notions on sounds some are stronger some are softer notions on structure using palindromes like rotavator civic Xanax and so on. But again, you can read them. Then you get all your names and you're going to have a bucket load of names and I would argue that you should put them into. In this case, I always start with five but I reserve the right to change the buckets, classic words, things like Sony or Helios or Maya. Things like common real words are always kind of strange they look good on other people but they feel weird if you're doing them. I mean that's just ridiculous who could possibly be successful naming their company after a snake infested swampy river in South America. I mean that's just stupid right or Apple, for example, ridiculous. Compress names, things like integrated electronics becomes Intel financial services becomes five serve. And constructed names like Facebook, for example, and many others like that. And then completely coined names George Eastman and his mother completely made up Kodak has no meaning whatsoever it didn't have because they wanted a name that no one else could use and then they put the meaning into it. This is a longer term resource intensive way of doing it. We did the same with Pentium. Every single employer Intel thought we were idiots for coming up with this name, and eventually became one of the most recognized product brand names in the world. So then you've got all these different kind of categories and you can add other ones on there and I'll show you some examples of that. This is a process we use for a new product at MX. We did it in a week which was kind of stupid really because we've been developing the product for over a year, but we did leave it rather late. The first thing we did was provide a long form guidance as to, you know, what we want this thing to do and so we're looking at things like personal financial management. Yeah, people understand what it is, but it kind of conjures up some negative images of something that doesn't work very well. But right on there. And then what you do is when you've got those things that we said, right, this is about financial wellness. Get as many articles as you can and feed them into a word slide like wordle.net. These are free so they don't cost you anything. And it'll spit out a whole bunch of names that are kind of adjacent to, in this case, financial wellness. And then you go to antonym.com or synonym.com and start putting in these names and it'll spit out 20 or 30 others. So for things like financial guidance or guidance, antonym.com or synonym.com will come up with chaperone, counselor, vanguard, coach, I mean all sorts of funky things that will kind of be interesting candidates for names. We added in their kind of classical mythical names, pioneers and explorers, fictional explorers, philosophers, stars and constellations, common real words, descriptive names, constructed compressions like money map, fin data, fin strong, whatever it might be. And then some names from popular culture, stem inventors. And what we came up with is money map with Pulse. So money map is the personal financial automation. And then Pulse was a series of AI add-on features that would, you know, basically give you a notion to say, hey, you're going to be an overdraft in three months time, things like this. And that became the product that's actually selling, you know, tens of millions of dollars right now. Another example would be with Schoolzone, which was when I worked with Qualcomm, we were working on an education initiative that combined the education software content with LTE or long-term evolution, or most people would know it as 4G technology. And so we had our positioning statements. And then we started putting in into the word clouds, themes around education and the digital divide. And it came up with parity, verge of steam. You start pumping them into the antonyms.com and synonyms.com and so on. And, you know, we started coming up with candidates around themes around outcomes, education pioneers, culture, themes around equality, learning connectivity, even some of them where we made the hero, the LTE, the long-term evolution technology, the hero like agility or ability and things like this. And then what we did was to make it easier for people like the executive team to really kind of get this. We added some icons. We got the graphic team to add a couple of items around education and connectivity. And, you know, if you've got the team, just get them to do as many. This was one of my favorites. Again, it was the phone 4G coupled with education. And so this one is a SIM card. Is it a book? I thought it was just a really clever design, actually. I don't know if we copyright any of these. So if you see any of them on there, grab them and use them at your own risk, but, you know, help yourself. And then we just had lots and lots more. Marry them with some names just to give people a flavor as to what that name might really feel like. Because sometimes a name on its own is alien and strange. Okay, so when should you change a name if you have a company or a change of name in general? One is if your name is Donald McDonald. We have cruel parents and people take the piss out of you all your school life. And I always like to joke. I'm the one on the right. Obviously, when you get things like the Egyptian Sun God, we've named a chocolate bar for the last five decades on there. The events obviously in the Middle East and conspired to make that not a really good name anymore. The scourge of AIDS back in the 70s and 80s obviously caused problems for this dietary supplements and company on there. Even if you're changing, we had Centrino for laptops, we had Pentium for desktops. And so we wanted a new name for servers. We originally used the Pentium Pro. Then we decided we wanted to have a complete name for servers. So we moved it. We did a slight move from Pentium to Pentium Xeon to the Xeon processor. So again, there's lots of techniques you can use to start an effect to change. Or if you go to a restaurant, you know, it might be delicious, but who the hell is going to order Patagonia and Toothfish? But you change the name to Chilean sea bass, and then suddenly it just sounds better. And so you can do this with your product or service. If your company name, you know, inspect roofs with drones or your recruiting company or whatever it might be. And then obviously there's a raft of companies. If you've killed tens of millions of people with lung cancer, yeah, just change your name from Philip Morris to become a hospitality company with a nice colorful logo and call yourselves Altria. Or you know, good fellows, dry goods becomes target. Obviously Tokyo or Sushin Tokyo is very difficult for most Americans to change your name to Sony. And this tool, this actual page is very good if you've got a partner or somebody who's very reluctant to change a name. There have been some incredible success stories of companies who've really grown when they made that leap to change their name. So I went through that 300 miles an hour. But in summary, you know, tool number one is helping you define who you are as a brand and then you can begin to express and promote your brand. So just fill in those nine elements in that box. But be clear what your category, we didn't talk about categories, but anyway, product positioning is crucial. Complete the five box exercise, but make sure you define your target audience with precision. And then investing in name is definitely migraine inducing as well, but it's worth it. And typically if you go to an agency to do this name, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so you can do it yourself if you follow the tool and the framework that I've provided you on there. So with that, I'm going to stop there and stop sharing. And I went through that extremely fast. I'm going to copy the presentation into the chat so anybody who wants it is welcome to do that. But in the meantime, do we have any messages? Any questions rather? Don, one of the questions was, what is it about supporting veteran entrepreneurs? I guess someone was asking, what inspired you to do that get involved with that? Frankly, we had started off as a, well, both my parents were in the army. And as I joked with you the other day, Dan, they were obviously in the British army. So apart from a hiccup 200 years ago, we've been pretty good buds since then. So I do come from a military family. But the way I got introduced to it was through USAA. And they were big sponsors of Patriot Bootcamp. And they were also an investor in MX. Another part of USAA was an investor in MX. And then they were a customer for the products. And so one of the ladies on the board had basically said to two of us, our deceased co-founder Brandon Dewitt and myself, would you guys come and do some presentations and things that you take for granted? We've got a bunch of entrepreneurs who've got great ideas, but they may not know about finance or they may not know about marketing or may not know about engineering or whatever it might be. And we said, yeah, sure. And so I think the first one we did was in San Antonio or anyway, wherever it was. And it was so much fun hanging with people who've served or the spouses of people who've served. And we just got such a good, feel good feeling from there. And so we then realized then again, a lot of us are ignorant. So for me coming from military family, I didn't realize that there was actually prejudice in terms of hiring. You know, you could be, I'm not going to hire you because you could be whipped out and all the trainer give you or your spouse is going to be wasted. And so we made sure that we went back to our HR people and said I want to make sure that we particularly welcome military members, military vets or their spouses into our hiring. So it was very educational for us. It was just great fun. So it wasn't exactly a hardship to kind of hang with the entrepreneurs. Sorry, I've just pasted that the documents on there. Just knock yourself out of your fancy using any of that stuff. So that was really the main reason was it was the right thing to do. It was a great bunch of people, really good fun. And it was something where it was just very rewarding where the skills for us and other sponsors and mentors, you know, added together is really helping people. And then we actually help quite a few people, even after Patriot Bootcamp, Dan Luns, Marine, he was the winner actually of the Utah Patriot Bootcamp. And I've actually helped him with the name of a new product. I'm not sure if it's public yet, so I better not share it yet. But you guys are just fabulous. We just love it. Right thing to do fun thing to do. Makes me feel good. I would imagine for a lot of starters, founders, they've gone down the road with a name. They fell in love, you know, they connected with it, with some ideas early on and they're still with those ideas. And maybe now they've seen this presentation. They say, I'm not following some, some rules here. And I've, we've put so much into this. What do you tell folks like that? You may not put in the rules in terms of some of the knowledge specific ones. Right, the name's not quite working based on the guidance. Yeah, you know, it's a hard one. I've had even Mx, Ryan Coldwell, the founder. When we first came, it kind of works for us because, because it does our audience is banks, credit unions and fintech. So it's a very restricted audience really is not consumer audience. And the audience we know knows who we are. And they know plaid and they know you'll be our competitors and people like that. So it's a very small audience on it. It's great as well. When you go into New York and say, yeah, I'm with Mx and they say, Oh, I'm X will give you the hammocks hotel rate. And so we get kick-ass pricing on hotels. And frankly, even when I was with Pfizer for four years there in Milwaukee, they would do the same thing with Pfizer, the big pharmaceutical company. And again, I'd get kick-ass prices on hotels and things. So the downside is that people do get your name confused. And again, things like Mx is used in motocross. It's used in like the Mexico for, you know, the URLs.mx and so on and so forth. And so, yeah, so we, I wanted to change it. The nice thing is with a really short name is we got the Twitter handle. We got the URL. You've got to pay attention to these things this day. And it's very difficult getting two letter Twitter handle. So when I got there, we didn't have Mx as the Twitter handle and a true story. It was actually being used by an Australian brewing company. That's right. Not Australian media company. And news, news international Rupert Murdoch, not Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, it was Rupert Murdoch. And anyway, so I tried for two years to get the Mx actually was a bit creepy and tried to say, Hey, I said trademark infringement and things like that. And they just told me where to go. But they stopped using it. And eventually we actually bought it for $5,000. And for a donation to Rupert Murdoch Children's International Hospital in Australia, $5,000 Australian dollars, $3,600 bucks. And so I wanted to change the name at Ryan Caldwell. I have a kind of three strikes rule. I tried three times to change the name. And after the third, I said, okay, I'm not going to do this. And we've got a name that we would like to use, but I'm not going to share it because we're keeping it up our sleeve. But one day we might get to use it on there, but it's very emotional, especially if you're the founder. And so you have to ask yourself, do you really believe this is the right name? And it's much easier for outsiders to come in than it is for somebody who founded it and created the name. But like I said, that long list of them, if it's good for Jeff Bezos or it's good enough for whoever, it's just really hard. It's very, very, very emotional. But that's why if you can do this in a way with the tool, that you can say, look, here are some people you admire who changed their names and went on to great things that can help if you're trying to influence the decision maker. And then you just have to kind of go with your guess. Sometimes we like to have dates, obviously, but and then there's a kind you just get on with it and just say, right, unless you're really losing a lot of traffic to a name that people are just confusing you with somebody who's similar. But, you know, what problem are you solving? You like it? Or it's actually causing you to make commercial damage. Those are two different problems to solve. But generally people will bring in a third party to kind of help with the discussion. We've had that. I've been brought into quite a few banks where, you know, they've had a merger and they're trying to think, should we use one or other of the names or come up with a new name? But it's just one element of building your brand, obviously. But I think it's an important one, but I wouldn't sweat it if you're not able to change it. But I would encourage you to really ask, is it working for you that name? Great question from LinkedIn. Do you have any advice about developing a logo for commercial use, things to avoid and what to look for? Yeah, for sure. You know, I mentioned earlier, this is actually a really passionate topic of mine. You know, shape, color, name. And so if you look at the logo I had for Fiserv, it's a shame I didn't, I mean, I kept down the slides for the interest of time. The Fiserv original logo was this horrible, it was like mechanical. I'm sure it was very fashionable in its day, 30 odd years ago, but it was blue. Everything is black or blue. And so the idea being is how do you stand out in the crowd? So you want a name that's kind of distinctive. Logos are really good fun, but they're kind of hard to get, but that's fine. I know we had somebody at Patriot Boot Camp who basically had a, I think it was a security service for farms. And the logo was an owl, which I just thought was, it just resonated with me. You've got the wise owl looking over you at nighttime kind of thing. And so, you know, you're looking for that storytelling element, but the colour side of it is a big, big deal. So that orange we use, generally you can't use red in banking because it implies you're overdrawn, right? And so we weren't going to use black, we weren't going to use blue. And so I actually came up with a list of all the brands. I think from, I think it was from Stella Artois in 1366 to all the modern ones. And it was like business brands, consumer brands and those that straddle both. And it's only a very recent phenomenon where people have started using colour and so, but if you're going to use a colour, use one that stands out. So H&R Block Target is a beautiful one. Harrod's colour, that green they use is just one that you just see in the corner of your eye, you recognise it. And again, you want to be recognised quickly. So that people will click on your icon or your URL or whatever it might be. And so colour is a big deal. We spent huge amounts of time. That one is Pantone Reference 21 C, in case you're asking, I'm sure nobody's bothered about that, but it is. And so shape colour, it's worth a huge amount of your time. It really is. And then the nice thing is, you can always evolve a logo if you want to, if it's kind of needs to be changed. But getting that colour right and getting the name right, again, you're not going to go far wrong even if it's, you know, not one that's particularly, you know, you're not very successful with the name. But A, you can change it. But B, if you can get it right, the colour, the name and the shape can work for you as long as you're not imagined. So put a lot of effort into it. Great answer. One of the comments you made before I thought was interesting for a lot of folks. Why is it important to know the people who are not your customers? Because otherwise you end up saying, I'm going to try and sell to everyone with a pulse. And, you know, I'll give you a great example in banking right now. And it's actually a really interesting strategic shift. So most banks are almost exactly the same. We all, you know, they all claim to serve their customers wonderfully and, you know, that's about the end of it, right? And so, but how can you actually say if I'm a small business owner where I've got, you know, turnover of $50,000 a year or something in my early days versus I'm a small business owner with, you know, $3 million turnover or a large enterprise or a consumer or whoever it is, your advertising is exactly the same for most of them. Now, there are things that you can do, but generally you're advertising, unless you've got lots of money, you can advertise in different spaces. You end up having a messaging that's aimed, that really aims to kind of target everyone, but actually targets nobody. So what's interesting in banking, like I said, is that you've got these banks who are incredibly focused on a very clearly defined audience. So for example, one United Bank, three major cities, the largest black-owned bank in the US and actually bank with them, not on the target audience, but just to see, but their messaging is fantastic because it's not corrupted by trying to message everyone. It's basically saying, hey, you know, black owners, black consumers, bank with a bank that knows about you, that cares about you. And so again, it's very appealing and the messaging is unapologetic. Daylight Bank, a New York bank absolutely unequivocally messaging that is aimed at that community. She banks with Julie Rasmussen aimed at women who are getting, you know, kind of disrespected in many cases with many banks on there. USAA aimed at military vets. You are talking to an audience that you know, they get me, they understand what I need and the messaging can be, you know, especially for USAA, which is we only let military vets in their families be a member and so on. So that's one example of this, if you're trying to find somebody in your services, I don't know, even if you're a plumber and your services about, we are targeting people who care about, you know, immediate service or great response times or we promise we're going to call you back within your inquiry within 15 minutes. That's almost a very kind of niche level of segmentation. But how do you make sure that, you know, otherwise you're just another plumber and there's thousands and thousands of plumbers in Boston, New York, Los Angeles. So how do you break through? Or if you're a roof inspector, how do you break through? We use drone technology, so we don't want to run. Again, another Patriot Bootcamp alumni company on there. Or we send packages to troops, Chelsea or whoever it might be. So, you know, again, it's just and then you can expand from there. But getting started when you're just blah, blah, blah, you might think you've got the most brilliant service in the world and you may well have. But if you're going to go to different companies, you know, people are going to go through there. I can't tell the difference. So, you know, you really have to kind of find segments and think about Avis in the early days of car rental. Hertz was by far the number one and their messaging was and again, this is slightly off topic from segmentation but their message is we try harder. I can guarantee based on my experience recently they stopped trying hard. But what they were saying was they were not taking you for granted. So if you want to deal with somebody who's going to really kind of care about you, come to Avis. And so those are some of the things that you can do to make your message resonate and eventually you can expand it. But getting started, focus with precision on who's your audience and then who's not just don't waste your money wasting your breath dealing with people never buy from you. So try and identify who they are. A good example actually, this is probably a bit dodgy. If you're spending money on an election and you are a Democrat for example, are you going to spend any money sending a leaflet or a phone call to Sarah Palin? Chances are it's a total metal waste to many, right? Guaranteed certainty in fact. So things like that. But then even amongst your Democrat, you can reverse this the other way around for Republicans as well. But even for a Democrat, and so you might want to target them with precision, not to vote, because you've already got their vote, but to take Mrs. Jones next door to the polling station or to give you $10 for the campaign fund. So again, you need to think about who is my audience? It's four things that you would do. One, who is my audience? Who is not my audience? Two, what do you want them to do? Three, what are you going to say to them messaging? And four, how are you going to reach them? Online, mobile, social, radio, knocking on doors, whatever it might be. And those four steps are applicable for every single business you have. And so again, it starts with not wasting your money talking to people who are never going to buy your product to service. A lot of people, especially founders, there's so many limitations and they're trying to do so many things at one time. Do you have a hard and fast rule for how much time and resources people should invest in marketing and branding as they're starting a company? You're going to be careful. When I was in Intel, I had a budget of $1.3 billion a year for marketing spend. And so it's like, I don't know if you guys know who George Best was. He was a very fashionable footballer in the 60s from Manchester United. He basically said, he made a fortune and he lost it all. He basically said, yeah, I spent half my money on wine, women and song and I wasted the other half. And so the point being is that with advertising, it's so easy to waste your money. It's more expensive than before. There's just more noise out there. And so, yeah, you've got to be very every dollar is precious, which is why the positioning and the messaging and all the stuff that we went through just now is so important. You need every single pixel to be working for you. When you're in Intel with bucket loads of money, you still need it to work for you, but frankly, you are going to waste money on your Facebook or Google. But if you're starting your own business, you cannot afford to lose one cent. And so getting the basics right is where you need to put all your energy in there. And then like I said, on those four steps, I verbalized just a few minutes ago, you can then just say, how do I reach them? Wow, TV is out of my range. What about radio? What about taxi toppers? What about whatever it might be? And then your budget is going to dictate the actual channels of how you do this. But again, obviously, it's a different gig if you're dealing with consumers versus you're dealing with a very niche audience. But generally, the more focused you can be, the more success you'll have in the early days. But I would put effort into making sure your messaging is kick-ass. It breaks through, and then you are going to get a lot more return on whatever dollar you spend. Every dollar is going to give you more than it would have done if you've got bland positioning or bland messaging. A lot of founders have a specialty that took them down the path to become business owners. And then marketing becomes something that they're just having to pick up as an extra duty or something. It was kind of almost an afterthought. Can you speak to the difference between branding and marketing and offer any advice you have for folks who are just kind of dipping their toes in these waters? Yeah, first of all, I would actually say that if you've got that inside knowledge for whatever it is you do, you are already a marketer. You know the audience. You know how things work. I remember there was another example at Patriot Boot Camp where this guy was basically licensing electricity substations or something. I mean, it was so esoteric that therein lies the beauty. He knows how you have to get these things licensed and what you have to do. Another guy was licensing professionals in I can't remember when it was like your professional certification, like divers or first-aid responders or whatever it might be. That knowledge is, as a marketing guy what I used to do at Intel is I would go and buy the architects or the engineers, the guys and gals who really knew what they were doing at beer and I would say, why did you build this? Help me understand why you built this thing and they would say, you know this is like voltage regulation in a CPU and it saves energy so it doesn't burn your lap or whatever when you put a laptop on your lap and then you say, oh my god you've got something awesome here. A quick message, but the owners the actual founders have knowledge that is the essence of that positioning statement it usually is the essence of saying what problem are you trying to solve and that really is pure gold. So one is that is absolutely essential to make sure that comes out. Then again, a lot of it is just knowledge in common sense. Most marketing people are charlatans as we know so you end up with it's not that difficult again, who's my audience and what would I have them face to face what would I say to them and most founders can do that in their sleep they can tell their story they're sat across the table from you and so the challenge then is how do I then replicate that so I can talk to 100,000 people or 10,000 people or 5,000 people and then how do I deliver that so they're already marketers they just need to be able to get some professional help maybe in like some of the tools I'm using they're not that hard so as a founder you're going to know more getting Ryan Caldwell we spent hours when I first joined MX Ryan Caldwell and I spent hours and hours and hours and he would go off for bloody hours actually on all these tangents but in those conversations it was all in his head as to what turned him on why he was doing this why there was a gap in the market and as the marketing guy or the marketing gal you can just lap that up so again the founder has all this information that is actually foundational for anyone in marketing no matter what their skills are they can just interview the founders and drag it out of them or just capture it and so on so the founders have a huge role actually I would argue the founders are most responsible for that nine box template I used at the beginning because they knew why they founded the company they know what company they know what behaviors that they're willing to tolerate in their company and what behaviors they're not willing to tolerate so getting it captured is just like a shortcut for everyone else getting new employees up to speed making sure that you can replicate that if you've got a graphic designer you've got a copywriter that they don't have to guess what you want and my other one no offense to you founders is a lot of founders are not very good at articulating some of this stuff some are but many are not and so getting it captured should really be job number one as you're building the company Sean O'Keefe from LinkedIn asked did you create the Pfizer proof point yes it was actually an interesting one because we we had this it was funny for a couple of reasons one was I actually I pissed off the agency for sure and I pissed off some of the people in the team when I actually joined I actually joined a meeting a branding meeting a week before I started officially and they were talking about oh nobody knows who Pfizer is and again if you saw all the old logo you'd understand it's just so mechanical and so anyway long story short they were saying yeah we need to get a new name and the agency were obviously pitching for a couple of million dollars to get a new name and do all the research and everything else on there and then they said Don what do you think and bear in mind I hadn't officially started I wasn't going to start another week I said well let me ask a question how many of your customers banks and credit unions buy something from Pfizer 75 companies many of them were left on their own they were called CBS or ITI or you know Premier or whatever so there were all these brand names that had no relation to each other and I said how many of them buy something so things like check processing he said well probably 75% of all the banks buy a service they kind of they said but they know Pfizer but they just don't know what it stands for and I said well that's perfect because if they know you you're halfway there what we can do then is put energy into putting the meaning behind that name so they're aware of it so you have kind of an awareness preference and purchase intent if they've got awareness that'll save you a bucket load of money what you need to do is now tell them why that name that you're kind of sort of familiar with can deliver help in terms of helping you grow helping you reduce costs helping you reduce fraud and so on and the agency were looking at me like daggers so we actually decided to keep the name but that's why we actually ended up with that orange logo and it was a beautiful font and everything Jeff and I spent he had more tolerance for this and I did many many days and hours but we actually took about 300 logos all different color schemes and so on but the proof point was to say that was actually if you look on my tagline actually said partners and possibility was the kind of like the closest we got to a tagline and so the proof point was that hey this is the new Pfizer we call it Pfizer 2.0 and this was the proof point and Jeff and I came up with that as we looked at all these designs and so obviously the square we didn't invent squares but we actually invented the meaning behind why that was a square as opposed to a round thing very marketing through food perhaps but it actually ended up with people saying hey we're we're not the same Pfizer if you knew we are a different Pfizer we've now got mobile banking we've got this we've got that and it was incredibly popular we grew the company from three billion dollars when I joined to 13 when I left four years later and again you're asking people why should I talk to you what's new I think I know you don't I know you don't let me talk to you about something new and just getting in front of the prospect is half the battle Jason on YouTube asked about email campaigns and maybe this applies to multiple channels how do you choose an outreach channel for your product for your for your brand sometimes it's budget related and you don't have a choice but you do need to make sure we can do another talk at some stage we've got an amazing market demand generation team and we have evolved in the last five six years from you know being reasonably good and being kind to ourselves to be an absolute awesome and some of the tools are fantastic so email is a big deal we tend to use a lot of content and you know one of our aspects about who we are as a brand is our pathfinder we didn't want to be a we didn't want to say one of our elements of the brand was we know it all we wanted to say hey there's so much changing in our industry we're going to play around with this we're going to muck around with it and we'll share with you some of our findings and you know maybe you'll start the journey with us and so a lot of the content we use is we actually try and have webinars and content type things and use email to tell people about it and we excuse me growing rapidly as long as you don't spam people so you do need the tools to make sure that you've got can you measure the reactions at what point do you stop emailing them at what point are they stagnant now making sure keeping the list of emails up to date it's just a real challenge for anyone people leave people change roles all that kind of stuff and then a lot of events I personally like events now we're lucky because we're a business target audience and fintechs and so we just get very creative and so what a few of us do is we're actually going to sign up to present the California Nevada Credit Union League so you get 300 credit unions there and then you always ask to go on after the person talking about regulations that's so boring that no matter what you say it's going to sound interesting but you just got to get very creative within your budget but email is obviously a great free tool more or less as long as you actually monitor how often you're spamming and then secondly if you can link it where you can kind of promote people say hey they responded to this one how do I take them there I think helping them with education is a big deal helping them say I can help you understand what this regulation means in you know God Frank for example in banking and there's a lot of people will give you a two minute overview of this you don't have to wade through 500 pages things like that are a big deal I'm not as big a fan of traditional advertising as I was when I was doing consumer stuff with Intel it really is expensive and it's just less and less unless you've got a really awesome agency it's very difficult to get creative that really breaks through but you know there's a role for it but you've got to have the budget for that and then the events are a big deal oh and then the other one obviously within our industry within banking is using the data so we actually work with banks that can see that if Chelsea is getting ripped off by say a big bank in terms of charging a 4.2% on mortgages then you know and we've got that access to that data which the bank would do whoever Chelsea but banks with they can say hey why is she paying 4.2% when our normal rate would be 3.8% that would trigger a thing to say hey who's going to call Chelsea or send her an email or print it on there so in some instances like banks you can then target with precision to an audience of one and that is by far the most lucrative so that's a large part of what we do with credit unions and banks is help them identify which of their customers are paying too much for financial services with someone else so there's a litany of things but emails obviously good, education is good events where people go to learn is really good yeah advertising but expensive especially if you're a founder and then word of mouth is just fantastic the storytelling part of your brand is potentially a really good tool to kind of grow what people say about you because part of that brand what do you want them to do remember I said it was who's your audience who's not what do you want them to do well what you want them to do might be say I want that person to tell someone else and word of mouth has been incredibly powerful for MX quite frankly where credit unions have said oh we're looking at this who would you have anyway so things like that long winded answer but don't just think you've got to blow bucket loads of money on advertising again that's why the agencies hate me but in what other areas of life do you think you can apply some of these lessons you know personally it sounds kind of strange but I do a lot of the business stuff with my family I'm just dealing with a family I've been here for December actually we've been doing this for two years where I have a son who's got mental health addiction issues so an adult son so I'm here kind of getting him through that system on but it's things like having clear objectives it's things like really understanding what messaging is going to work and again you know you really want to make it work for somebody who's an alcoholic and got addictions chances are you're good at that you can make it work with you know someone who's struggling to you know find the service person or whatever the solution is that you're offering on there so you know basically it really is about when you talk to people in every walk of life you know do you really know them how do you know them how do you understand what they care about and what message is going to kind of link to them it helps you with empathy you know that person who gave you crappy service in the cafeteria today you know what was their problem on there so I don't know I think on things like the you know the positioning and so on it helps you with you know getting noticed if you're trying to get service on something I can give you some examples there but I just think having this logical approach to getting into people's minds I actually have a degree in law and the actual legal profession is very much like marketing because if you think about it the lawyer has to rely on things that have happened before so marketing is you know there's nothing we're doing in marketing now that wasn't done 100 years ago 50 years ago or maybe email and stuff but you know five years ago say secondly you're trying to get into the mind of the jury and you know 500 people may have seen Chelsea stab that person with a knife 121 times but your job is still to get Chelsea off the hook sorry Chelsea I'm picking on you here so you know what's your messaging yeah but she was just animated and waving her hands and it was all an accident or whatever I mean anyway I don't mean to make light of physical violence on there but the point being is that you're trying to get into people's minds understand how they think and then match that with what you want to achieve whether it's medical whether it's business whether it's family stuff how do you get your kids to eat their greens whatever it might be anyway it must make me sound like the most boring parent on the planet but I think there's a lot of things we can learn in everyday life thank you so much Don do you have any other comments or questions you'd like to add no I'm very happy to help people within the constraints of obviously got big distractions going on right now here in the UK but so I can't always promise that I'll be very responsive but if I can help you I love I just have a passion for the naming I have a passion for the logos and the colors and stuff if you just want another set of eyes and ears to bang something off as you're doing your thing within the constraints I mentioned I'd be just really happy to help anyone so yeah bring it on well thank you so much thanks for all your support and everything you do for the entire Patriot community and thank you everyone for tuning in if you want to stay in touch with Patriot Boot Camp and upcoming events we're going to have some announcements for October just around the corner here add your name to our newsletter distribution at PatriotBootCamp.org thank you Don thank you MX