E55 – Creating A Strong Brand Foundation with Arthur Germain
Gary talks with Arthur Germain, principal and Chief Brandteller at Brandtelling, who describes his background from publishing to PR and explains that differentiation comes from client stories, not feature lists. They discuss how over-reliance on AI can make company messaging bland and uniform, and how AI works best with active human editing and guardrails. Arthur outlines his approach using Simon Sinek’s Start With Why plus an added “who” audience layer, and stresses writing a “brand bible” to prevent narrative drift as companies grow or acquire others, avoiding watered-down committee messaging. He shares “vibe coding” Brand Bots (brandbots.brandtelling.net), including tools to assess tone across five axes and an MSP-specific “MSP Sound Like” commoditization score. Examples include rebranding Sunrise Electrical to Sunrise Power Solutions and a law firm differentiating via a strong point of view on training. Arthur recommends using customer verbatims to refine messaging and says he works with growth-stage professional services firms, starting with a brand narrative audit at brandtelling.com.
Discover:
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:32 Arthur’s Brandtelling Origin
01:20 AI Makes Brands Sound The Same
03:25 Using AI With Guardrails
05:37 Start With Why and Who
07:55 Avoiding Committee Speak
10:09 Vibe Coding Brand Bots
13:26 Tools for Tone and MSPs
14:59 Narrative Drift and Foundations
16:12 Before After Brand Story
20:06 Differentiation Through POV
22:00 Customer Verbatims for Messaging
25:40 Who Arthur Helps and Contact
27:44 Wrap Up and Thanks
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Pipelineology podcast. Today I’m excited to be joined by a very special guest. I have Arthur Germain from Brandtelling. He is the principal and Chief Brandteller. Arthur, welcome to the show.
[00:00:14] Arthur Germain: Thanks very much Gary. I appreciate you having me on.
[00:00:17] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I’m, I’m excited to chat with you today, but I guess before we kind of jump into all the, all the topics we have on the, on the docket today, can you just kind of give people a, a little bit of kind of background about you and Brandtelling for anybody who’s not not familiar with you or your company?
[00:00:32] Arthur Germain: Absolutely. I started out in publishing. I was an editor in business and technology magazines. Moved into public relations. I like to say I went over to the dark side. I was doing public relations, marketing, content marketing, and a lot of the thing that kept recurring was that there was a challenge for companies to express their brand messages in a way that was differentiating for them. And, and what I could see, because I had done this as an editor, was it was the stories that they were telling. Not the list of features that they, that they provided, but the stories about the way that their, their clients worked with them. That, and that’s what I tried to, tried to pull out in Brandtelling.
[00:01:19] Gary Ruplinger: Very cool. So I think that that kind of leads into. To, to our topic today is, you know, where, well, where, where Brandtelling is all about kind of differentiating yourself, you know, one of our things we want to talk about today is how AI is kind of working against that and making things sound the same.
[00:01:36] Arthur Germain: Yeah. In, some cases now, and I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s anti AI because I’m not, I, certainly think of, AI as a really useful tool for helping to, conduct storytelling, for example. But what I see is companies will use the tool and just kind of give everything over to it. Hey, I want to write an article. and They let the AI just run amuck and write an article, that they’re, we see it a lot in comments in LinkedIn. People are, just dropping in cut and paste you know, right in, Hey, somebody said something smart in LinkedIn. Here’s what they said. Now give me something smart to say. Here’s my response.
They’ve never read what you posted, and they’ve never read what they’ve posted either. So what I like to say is there’s a balance. You can make the AI sound more like you. but it does involve your active participation. So that, you know, that’s what I found is that, the AI, if you don’t, if you don’t, like you said, the AI begins to make you sound like everybody else kind of bland. So, you knoI I, think that many industries had this challenge already. I work with a lot of tech industries and they use all the tech terms and they talk like the tech bros. And that’s what it sounds like. So they already sound a lot alike. Now when you add a lay a layer of AI on top, it’s really bland and it’s bland by something that’s never, you know, walked a mile in your shoes.
It’s, AI bland So, it’s like a big, a big blender. Maybe we’ll call it a blander that everything’s just been dropped into. And so if you use it correctly, just like a nice blender in your kitchen, you can get a, really good smoothie out of it. But if you use it incorrectly and, you put bad ingredients in, you’re not gonna get anything out that’s recognizable.
[00:03:25] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, it’s the, the, the in interesting thing about like the messaging I know is, you know, it’s one of those things, especially if I kind of get stuck writing something like yesterday, working on some messaging for a campaign and yeah.
[00:03:35] Arthur Germain: and it’s useful to use a tool to help you think through that, right? But.
[00:03:39] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, it was, it, it was, I was like, okay, that’s good, but, you know, and, but I kept, he’s like, no, we’re you, and I think the first, you know, your first result, you get back, you say, oh, that, that looks, that looks okay. Copy paste. And, and go. I, I feel like that’s what a lot of people end up doing. They don’t kind of go through the process of, let me copy that down.
Let me read that out loud. I’m gonna jot some notes down on this. I’m trying, you know, you kind of think like the, the editor, the proofreader, taking that back, it’s like, I don’t like those two sentences. Write, write them again. It’s cooperative. But, but yeah, if you just take what it gives you, especially, especially after like the first, first round it, it seems okay, but it just is so dull.
[00:04:24] Arthur Germain: Think about using like early technology tools. Everybody first screamed when they were using spell check and grammar check. You know, everyone said, oh no, you’re, you’re giving something over. And spell check and grammar check were useful, but you could still have correctly spelled correct grammar nonsense.
It wouldn’t necessarily look and say, Hey, this is an interesting article. I want to read. It, it wasn’t, it was a correctly spelled article. Just wasn’t interesting and and same thing can happen with AI. It’s generative, so it’s just looking at what’s the next token and making a choice to, to put something together. I find I use it to write an article and then pass it through some guardrails, some rules that I’ve created, and check me and make sure I haven’t missed anything. It catches things like a typo, certainly, but it also catches hey, you said you don’t like that phrase and I saw you use it. Or that’s a word on your no-no list and, and it comes up and, and pops up.
So there I find it really useful and I’ve had it flagged for things like em dashes, but I’ve used em dashes my entire career, so I’m not so worried. If some, if that offends somebody, it was offensive before AI, so I, I’m okay with that. It’s a, it’s just a punctuation for me.
[00:05:37] Gary Ruplinger: So when you’re, when you’re kind of working with your, clients on their messaging is how, do you kind of pull out the unique part of, what they have to offer so that their messaging can differentiate?
[00:05:51] Arthur Germain: Right. I, actually use Simon Sinek’s Start With Why model where I want to get beyond, you know, what do you do? So I say, what do you do? And somebody says, I’m a managed service provider. And that’s interesting, but it doesn’t really tell me what you do. That’s a title, a category. And, then I say, okay, how do you do it? And then, well, they don’t do the break fix model, they actually work on cybersecurity. So they’re an MSSP, a managed security service provider. Okay, that’s a little interesting. Tell me why you do it. And maybe when we dig in a little deeper, what they say is, wow I was having clients come to me over and over finding that it wasn’t the technology that they needed.
It wasn’t the, challenges of, oh, we’re growing, we need somebody new. It was, there was a foundational problem. There was no security, and without security, there wasn’t trust. And I’m like, okay, that’s interesting. That sounds entirely different from I’m an an MSP. Right. And, so. I add another concentric circle to, Simon’s model.
It’s the who. And what I try to do is capture the who is this message for? And I always tell people, there’s more than one who, it’s not just your customer, right? It might be a partner that you work with, might be employees. So you’ve gotta have a message foundation that you can build. And then you’ve gotta build separate messages for each of those who’s, that fall into there.
And then I, craft that message and write it out fully and put it down into a document. Kind of think of it as a brand bible, a place to go back to so you can find that information. And you’d be surprised at how many people don’t write down. They have a clear brand message. It’s in the founder’s head.
It never gets written down, and that’s a challenge when you grow. You hire your sixth, employee who’s in your, you know, he’s an SDR, he’s a, he’s a sales rep. And he doesn’t know the message, he doesn’t, hasn’t read the story because it’s up in the founder’s head. So I try to get it out of the founder’s head, get it onto paper or you know, into notion so that somebody can read it later.
[00:07:55] Gary Ruplinger: Can you kind of run into the, I guess, issue where I, feel like it’s like mission statement by committee where it’s, you know, you start with something that seemed pretty good. It seemed pretty clear, and then everybody kind of gives their thoughts on it, and then you end up with something super watered down and generic.
[00:08:11] Arthur Germain: We, see it all the time. You walk into the conference room and there’s a mission statement that says always do the right thing. Whew. We’re done. Always do the right thing. Because, you know, the last company I was at said always do the wrong thing. And no, it, as you said the, mission, you kn I, I think of the vision statement is this, you know, it’s a longer term. It’s what you want, what you want to achieve, you know, to, see storytelling used to connect people in, all walks of corporate life. Great. Okay. That’s a, that might be a big vision. What’s the mission? The mission is to make sure we capture all of the stories within a corporation in a way that others can hear it and replicate it.
Okay. That’s a mission, but I don’t. in either of those cases, I think of them as a strategy statement. I don’t have to say how or why. Those are tactics. I, want to make sure that a mission is clear enough. That, and as you said, differentiated enough, but, still, in a strategy, statement. it’s not telling me how, because tactics are gonna change over time, and, I recognize that sometimes your message is gonna change over time.
For example, if you acquire another company. But if you don’t have the message written down and, if you haven’t agreed to the message to begin with, boy, it’s really a mess when you acquire another company because now there’s two, companies come together, neither of which wrote a message down and who wins?
I don’t know. As you said, it’s that committee by default, you know, everybody looks and it’s like, we’ll use the first word of my message and the third word of yours, and then we’ll go back to the eighth word of my message. And, that’s what you get. You get something that looks like it got put together, like those magnets up on your, in your kitchen on your refrigerator.
And you go, wow, I, don’t know what we’re trying to get at here.
[00:10:03] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah. You get generic corporate speak. Yeah.
[00:10:05] Arthur Germain: exactly. Exactly.
[00:10:08] Gary Ruplinger: Well, good. Well, good deal. So I, I was looking, I was stalking your LinkedIn posts before we hopped on here. And kind of speaking of the whole, not, not necessarily being an AI hater, you had confessed that you had spent about a month vibe coding and working on a new project. I wonder if you could kind of tell us a little bit about that project and what, it’s all about.
[00:10:28] Arthur Germain: Yeah, absolutely. So I, created a, number of what I call them Brand Bots, just to have a fun name for them. But each one of them is a, piece of code that I’ve created that does one thing. So in one case, I realized that if you, have a piece of language that’s on your website and you want to see, so what’s my tone of voice? I have these five axes that I’ve used, and I’ve used them for years mechanically, you know, I would write them down and we would determine are you more friendly or are you more corporate? Are you more approachable or are you a little bit more serious? And, you might say, oh, well, we always want to be fun,
not serious. But if you’re a law firm, you know that you need to be serious and you know, because there’s certain language that you have to use that means something. So, one of them says, you know, are you more jargony or are you less jargony? And you might have to use jargon or maybe in your industry it’s accepted to use certain, a certain piece of jargon.
So there’s no right answer. There’s just these, these bars and it’s sometimes hard to figure out where is your language, if you’re writing something, maybe you’re preparing something. So I created something that looks at that language very, very carefully. It’s called the Brand Shifters. You drop some language in and it tells you where you fall across those five axes, and if you see that you’re not falling where you want or you find you’re dead center in the middle, and you say well, I want to be a little bit more friendly. You can move the slider over and then say, how does this look? It does, I’m using Claude as my, as the backend for this, but it, you know, it just does a quick look and says, okay, here’s what we see and here’s what would happen if you made a change. That has been very helpful for, clients to just get a, quick, you know, a quick pulse on something they’re writing, is it in the voice that we all agreed to? Because they’ll, know, oh, we’re supposed to be a two and now we’re a five. I did something wrong here. let me see if I can make an adjustment back.
[00:12:35] Gary Ruplinger: That’s, that’s very interesting. I, I’ve never even kind of considered something like that. Are you getting pretty good
[00:12:39] Arthur Germain: feedback?
Yeah, you can find them at, brandbots.brandtelling.net. And that’s where I’ve, where I’ve hidden everything. So you can, you can see and they’re fun looking, you know, kind of fun looking bots. And each one of those has that specific thing that they do.
[00:12:54] Gary Ruplinger: That’s fun. What was, what was that address again? Because it sounds like that one’s pretty, pretty tucked away and hidden.
[00:12:59] Arthur Germain: Yeah, it’s brandbots.brandtelling.net.
[00:13:04] Gary Ruplinger: Okay.
[00:13:06] Arthur Germain: Yeah, my usual website is brandtelling.com, so I’ve just put the, put the bots on a.net domain.
[00:13:11] Gary Ruplinger: Gotcha. We’ll make sure we stick that in the, in the show notes so people can, can find it there because it does, that sounds like something kind of fun to, to play with and see if it kind of matches, you know, what, what you want it to, the way you want to communicate things.
[00:13:25] Arthur Germain: Yeah. And for, for managed service providers, since I had mentioned them before, I have one specific for them. It’s called MSP Sound Like, because in the managed service provider industry, a lot of MSPs, they sounded a lot like one another because they’ve been using language from their vendors, so as well as the industry. And so at some point, they begin to sound like one another. And as we said early in the, in your program, if they’re using AI, they really begin to sound a lot like one another. So this particular tool lets you throw I think 300 words into the, into the tool and look, and it will tell you if you sound more like a commoditized voice or if you sound more like an individual voice and it kind of gives you a score. And it indicates where it sees commodity, like it’s saying things that you’ve, that you have said before. We are the, we are your outsourced IT team. Every MSP says that, so, so it’ll, it’ll score you on that, or we take care of your IT for you, okay, all of the MSPs say that. So it begins to, to locate and score and, and, and tell you, but sometimes it sees something unique. We work with small mom and pops in retail. Okay, that’s different. And it’ll give you a higher score because that was more unique. So that’s a really nice tool. sometimes a little uncomfortable because somebody has put it in and they get a low score. But it does help you indicate there is a way to, to move forward, a path forward. But all of this is done in, in my world. I do all of this to build a strong brand foundation and avoid what I call narrative drift. That happens when, let’s say you and I start a company, Gary, and it’s in our heads. We know what it’s gonna be. We begin hiring people. We’re building, but we don’t take the thoughts in our head and really codify it,
put it down and explain to everybody as we, as we grow. So we grow, we’ve got new services come out and service A and service B come out. We’re not sure which one to lead with because we haven’t really taken the time to codify the brand. So now every time we come out we’re saying, oh, we do this. Oh, and we also do this.
Oh. And we also is not a really good way to express the new service in your brand. So what what I try to do is, make sure that everything, is, is weighted when we, when we go and, and put it down so you can look at the brand foundation and say, okay, if I put this new brick on the foundation, I know where it goes.
It’s a new, a new service, or we’re expanding. Or if we acquire a company, I understand where that, where that’s gonna come from because I’ve got a language model to, to support it.
[00:16:12] Gary Ruplinger: So I’m wondering if you have any stories you could share on kind of like a maybe before and after types of ones.
Because I know sometimeswhat happenswith these things is people will say, yeah, yeah, that’s all well and good. I’ll get to it eventually. I’ll look at it one day. You know, right now I just, I just need more leads.
Or right now, you know, we just gotta get sales in order.
And they just want to skip it.
[00:16:35] Arthur Germain: I had an opportunity, a few years ago to work with a company that was, they were called Sunrise Electrical. And as I came into the office, I was invited in by the head of their solar, of their solar unit. And, we’re sitting in a, you know, nice, room. Big, round, you know, big table. And the owner said, what do you think we do? And I said, well, I know that’s a trick question because Sunrise Electrical sounds like you’re electricians. But I was invited here by the solar guy and I saw a, sign about mechanical engineering when I came in. So why don’t you tell me? And he said, yeah, that’s just it. We do electrical contracting. Not, we’re not electricians, like home electricians. We’re commercial electrical contractors, we’re union guys. We’re also commercial, commercial mechanical engineers. We do something called combined heat and power and we do solar and now we’re also doing battery storage.
So they had these five areas, none of which was being conveyed by sunrise Electrical. Which is a fine name, it just didn’t convey what they did. And these were, this was a really smart team, really agile. They, explained to me some of the work that they had been doing. So when we came back, what we did is we built them a new name that could support each of those five areas. We came back and called them Sunrise Power Solutions and we said that they’re clean energy contractors and that was a way for them to stand away and stand out and really have much more of an ease during a sales call to say who they were to really stand up against larger, other, competing contractors and subcontractors. They were able to really hold onto that, and hold onto that moniker, and then each of the five areas supports it. and if there was a new sixth area, it could fall under that. If they had some kind of a gas recapture, for example, that might be something that fell under the clean energy contracting.
So that’s a real practical example of looking at a brand that. The brand foundation just wasn’t firm enough, and, you know, created in a way that was going to support everything else. And so the, the question I usually get after that, Gary, is somebody said, well, why’d you keep the word sunrise? And I said, there was nothing wrong with the word sunrise.
And, and the woman who was the admin answering the phone outside, I heard her say, pick up the phone and say hello sunrise five times. And I said, well, that’s a habit I’m not gonna break anyone of, so maybe we’ll incorporate part of the old name into the new name and, and that worked out very well.
[00:19:21] Gary Ruplinger: Well, very cool. Yeah, it just, it, it, it seems like, you know, sometimes, you know the, this, this foundational stuff. Is what can really be the thing that kind of moves the needle and makes it easier to, to get, you know, the, get somebody to give you the time of day. Like if, if, if Sunrise Electrical showed up at my door and was like hey, you want solar panels?
I’m like, sunrise. I didn’t call the,
you know right, I didn’t call the electrician because that’s, that’s the first thing that’s coming mind.
[00:19:50] Arthur Germain: Like I said, they’re a really smart team and, and which is good, you know, a, a smart team like that recognized the, the challenge they were having and knew that they wanted to overcome it. And this was a, this was a, a really forward motion way to do that. There are other, you know, other examples that, you know, where I’ve worked with, where, a firm is looking to, you know, really. Differentiate themselves. And sometimes it’s not a change in the name or anything. Sometimes it’s just sharpening a point of view that they have. I’ve worked with a law firm where the founder had a very sharp point of view about, about training, you know, and he said one of the challenges we have here that we are always bringing in new, tools that we’re using in the law firm.
Maybe it’s a, case management system or something, and we’re not really doing enough to, train everyone to do it. So he was a big believer that this is not only an industry problem, but a, larger problem that, companies aren’t reinvesting in their own teams to handle training. So he really wanted to talk about that.
So we developed a series of articles and presentations, put together podcasts, really talking about that issue where he was, striking out this kind of a strong point of view around training and reinvesting in, your company. And what does that do? It helps him stand apart. His law firm’s different from other law firms because of this belief in training.
And you know that if you’re gonna hire his law firm, you’re not just getting one lawyer, you’re getting a, well-trained group that’s always continuously training because that’s what the founder believes in. So that’s a really great way to differentiate and I, consider that to be a kind of, what I call a brand forward or story forward way to, differentiate yourself is that strong point of view.
[00:21:46] Gary Ruplinger: Great. Is there there any other like really important points you want to mention? Especially if somebody’s thinking about how, how do I differentiate my, my company? Is there there anything else you would kind of mention or things you would say I want to, I would look at these areas to,
[00:22:00] Arthur Germain: Yeah, I, I think that, you know, it starts with the idea of what is it that your business can achieve for your clients? And sometimes it’s really talking to the clients, which I know is a little difficult to go back to your own clients and ask this, but it’s the, what is it that we’ve been hired to do and what is it that has been the greatest benefit to you?
And, and sometimes you find it’s not the same thing. You may have found that you’ve been hired to help them build a pipeline of new business, but what you, what you find is there that the, the biggest, value they’ve gotten is better understanding of the customer journey of their customers. When you began to help them build a pipeline, they understood oh, a pipeline has different couplers and different links to it. And, and that’s the, that’s the, the customer journey. And we may have been missing some part of that. We needed to put something together. You’ve, you’ve probably run into this. The biggest one they’re missing is what, what was going on in follow up? That there was, there was, there’s a good coupler here and there’s a good coupler here, and there’s just, there’s just seemed to be pouring out in the center, and that’s because there was no follow up. So working with you, for example, might be that they’ve, that they’ve found that. I found that to be the case with many, with many clients that, that benefit.
And then understanding that you can, you can help tailor your message. Oh, we help you, we help you stop missing points in your customer journey. We help connect the dots for you. Whatever the message becomes, that might be a little bit different because you’ve heard it from your, from your customers. I call it the, the verbatims.
The what did your customer say verbatim? So you can use their language, when you, when you bring it back to someone else.
[00:23:50] Gary Ruplinger: It’s, it’s really interesting you should kind of mention that. Especially with, with Pipelineology or, you know, I thought, you know, the big draw initially would be, hey, you know, it’s like meetings on your calendar and, you know, it’s like, yeah, we need, we need more of those. And after talking to people, it was no, I, I, I don’t actually, I don’t have time.
And really the reason we brought you on is because I don’t have time. So we need you to do this without putting too much on my calendar because I, again, I don’t have time. So we’ve, we’ve really leaned into that facet of our business is that hey, we do it
you.
[00:24:24] Arthur Germain: You’re time savers and, and that you, that you are bringing in this, outsourced expertise that they don’t even have time to develop for themselves.
So, you know, you, but you don’t recognize that benefit on day one. You, you put out a shingle and say, I’m gonna do X. And you find out, no, I’m doing a lot of Y and Z. you know, it really depends on, on the client and it, and it’s no different with very large firms. Very large firms begin to have a, a product that comes out and their clients are using it in a different way. Or they are coming out with additional products and they realize that the third product they’ve come out really is the big leading product, not the first couple of products, but it was the third time.
And so having to make a decision in their product marketing to move things around. I always say if they can build the brand and, and, and have a strong brand, it helps them build trust no matter what those products are, so they can build that layer of trust that acts like a halo for all those, for all the brands, for all of the, the other products that they’re coming out with.
[00:25:39] Gary Ruplinger: Well, good stuff. Well, well, Arthur, for anybody who’s kind of listening and saying, you know, I, I’m, I’m guilty, I, my, my company could use some help in this space, could you kind of tell us like, who, who kind of are the right fits for you and kind of who you work with and how they can get in touch?
[00:25:54] Arthur Germain: I, I work with those growth stage firms. Professional services companies in technology, manufacturing, in engineering that really want to differentiate themselves and stand up and stand out in a, in a crowd. I have a lot of companies that say, you know, we want to get our name out there. The first thing I try to do is make sure that there is that strong foundation.
So those companies that are, they tend to be about 5 million plus in revenue, although it often it has more to do with size. They, they found that they’ve hired their third salesperson and they begin to understand that they, they feel like they’re talking, there’s a bit of a fractured voice. If you ask three people in your company to write down what you do and you get back four different answers, that’s a challenge.
And that’s what I like to try and try and work with. So, those companies that are in that growth mode, hiring sales team, but really not getting back what they want. The, the sales team is struggling to get the message out, that’s a really good client for me. They can contact me at Brandtelling and brandtelling.com.
They can come by and take a look. I always start with what I call a brand narrative audit, and that’s the, because I don’t want to guess ahead, I, I conduct an audit of where they are today and where they want to be, where they think their language should be. I look for those gaps and then we come up with a plan to help them come up with a category of one and build a story operating system, a way to, to really codify and write down all that they want their brand to be. And then I can help them to maintain that. You know, should that be on the website, should that be in their sales deck? That kind of thing comes later. But the first thing is to build that foundation.
[00:27:44] Gary Ruplinger: That’s awesome. So good, good stuff, Arthur. So if you’re looking for some help, with, with any of that, visit Arthur at Brandtelling.com. I’ll make sure we put a link to the website in the show notes so that you can check it out. But Arthur, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
[00:27:58] Arthur Germain: Thank you so much, Gary. I appreciate it. It was great.
[00:28:01] Gary Ruplinger: Well, thanks so much. Hope you, hope you have a great rest of your day and take care.
[00:28:05] Arthur Germain: You too.
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