Show Notes

Your brand is more than your logo. It’s also the gut reaction someone has the moment they encounter your business, and it’s always changing.

In this episode of The Localist podcast, host Carrie Rollwagen sits down with Caleb Chancey, Creative Director at Infomedia, to answer real branding questions submitted by small business owners through social media. From AI-generated logos and expensive design quotes to brand kits, personal branding and knowing when to evolve your visual identity, Caleb brings honest, practical branding strategy to every answer.

Carrie and Caleb also use The Localist itself as a real-world case study in brand evolution, walking through how the podcast brand grew from a simple book cover color palette into a full brand system, and how Localist Lab was developed as a distinct but connected sub-brand for live events.

Topics Covered in This Episode

What branding really means and why it goes beyond fonts and colors
AI-generated logos: when they work and when to invest in something more
Why simple branding can actually be the most expensive option
What belongs in a brand kit and how it saves time and money across your business
How branding for a consultant or service business differs from a product brand
How to build a personal brand that fits who you actually are
The signs that tell you it is time to evolve or expand your brand
Behind the scenes of The Localist rebrand and the creation of Localist Lab

Mentioned in This Episode

Zag by Marty Neumeier
Brands That Mean Business by Blake Howard
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Matchstick (brand agency, Atlanta)
Carrie’s One Quick Coffee: Personal Branding
The Localist Brand Guide
Localist Lab Live Events

Thanks to Our Sponsor, Infomedia

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia, a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company that helps small businesses get big results online.

Contact Infomedia: https://infomedia.com/contact

Join Us at Localist Lab

Want practical marketing insights you can implement immediately?

Localist Lab is our free live marketing event series designed for small business owners.

Each event features marketing experts from Infomedia and partner companies sharing actionable strategies for growing your business online.

See upcoming events and register
https://infomedia.com/events

(We update the current event there, so check back often.)

Subscribe to Carrie’s Newsletter

Get more small business insights, resources and behind-the-scenes updates from Carrie delivered straight to your inbox.

Episode Transcript

Carrie
Welcome to the localist, a podcast where we talk about the highs and lows of building community through entrepreneurship. I’m your host, author of The localist book and small business consultant, Carrie Rollwagen, the localist is sponsored by infomedia, a Birmingham based website and media company where I work as senior vice president at infomedia, we help small businesses get big results online. Our guest today is Caleb Chancey, who is creative director here at infomedia, so occasionally I get questions from the audience, and a lot of times I know people from infomedia or from our sister companies uptick in tempo who would be just fantastic at answering these questions. Is one of my favorite things about working here is that I have kind of a secret way to get answers to my own questions, and I wanted to bring that to you guys as the audience today too. So before we did this episode, I went on my social media and asked, Do you have any questions about branding? Because that is what I wanted to talk about today, and you did. So we actually have several questions that I’m going to ask Caleb from you today. So if you ask one of those questions on social media, listen in and see if you hear your question. Welcome to the localist podcast, Caleb.

Caleb
Thank you, Carrie. I feel very welcome.

Carrie
Yeah, since we work together, I feel like that was a weird intro. So if anybody is listening, it’s because we have actually talked plenty today,

Caleb
many, many conversations. Freezing, right, right, exactly.

Carrie
We’re actually going to do a little more of that. One thing that’s exciting about this episode is that we asked for questions from the audience, and we got them. So I’m going to throw some of those questions at you, but you know, weirdly, none of the questions was an intro to the episode. So today we actually are talking about branding, which is a lot of what you do is creative director, or at least work with every day. So before we actually ask the specific questions, I just wanted to say, in general, what is branding, other than I think most people know fonts and colors, and that’s part of it. But can you kind of talk about what is overall branding?

Caleb
Yeah, I’m trying to remember the name of the author, and so if you, if you know it, please put it in the comments below. Yeah, let’s do it. It’s but the book is zag, and it’s a really great book on branding. And in that, I believe they talk about the quick definition of branding. A lot of people think it’s visuals, and it definitely applies to visuals, but it’s the gut reaction that you have when you see something that represents that company, whether that is talking to a person, like a sales person seeing a logo that kind of like, Oh, I feel this way about that company. Yeah, that’s their brand. Like, what do you see when you see exactly? And so, like, you could exactly for people listening, yeah. And so you might go, favorite drink, or, oh my gosh, my grandma loved bottled Cokes, and that was, was like, so that’s the brand, yeah. So in certain ways, you can absolutely influence the brand, but the brand is who you are, and so, yeah, so, but it definitely applies to visuals. Most people, when they say branding, they mean logos. That’s totally fine. They can be synonymous by the way, but it’s a little bit bigger than that, and that’s

Carrie
good, yeah, so I think that I really like how we went philosophical immediately. Yeah? Very. Caleb, great. So yes, it is like who you are as a company. So in some ways, it applies to everything from the color of your text to a customer service. But even when we are working on something at infomedia, or when somebody is working on something at another design house or whatever like, we don’t just mean colors and fonts either. So I know sometimes we mean even photography, even text, like, so even that brought like, what you would hire someone to do when they’re rebranding? What could that encompass? Or what?

Caleb
Yeah, you kind of hit it is that there’s if you, if the brand is kind of in general, philosophically, like who you are, you may have gotten into involved with a company at some point, whether through a service or something, and you go, Oh my gosh, like y’all are so much friendlier than the blank that I first thought or you weren’t like this. That means that your brand might be a little bit misaligned. There’s something out there that cued them that you were one way and you’re not that way. You’re this other way. And so to bring that kind of. Into alignment that can be the type of photography you use. So the idea, if you want to do something, if your brand is, like, you know, we want to be very personable with our customers, well, maybe you don’t use stock photography, because stock photography is Super General, and that would be kind of anti your brand. It would maybe it doesn’t. It’s not one for one, like, maybe you should use stock photography, but that could help. And it’s all those tiny, little incremental changes that when people encounter your messaging, the words you use, things like that, when they meet you or encounter your service, it needs to all align. And so branding can be fonts, it can be colors, it can be your logo, it can be the illustration style that you use, the icons that you use, it can be all an assortment of your things. Messaging is really huge. What are the words that you use? Are they so broad or general? Or do you use specific words like to convey what you mean by things?

Carrie
Yeah, well, and all of that like you are saying, connects back to the philosophy of the brand. So it is again, like, how can we and all of these touch points, all the ones that we can control, how can we represent ourselves better? And sometimes that’s who we are. Sometimes it’s a little bit aspirational, absolutely.

Caleb
And yeah, we say that with a lot of times with websites, is like this. This should give an accurate portrait of who you are today and not confine you to who you want to become. Yeah, and so you’re when we you know something that’s like a brand guide, which is basically laid out and things of what your brand is. It shouldn’t it should give you freedom, like there’s a lot of freedom within those type of what would see be seen as kind of constraints, of like, well, we don’t use any color. We use these colors. Well, that gives you freedom, because then you’re like, man, what do those colors go with? What does those make me think of and you can actually start following that instead of being kind of lost and go like, I don’t know. And a lot of this can feel like, well, what’s why? Why is that important, or things like that? And it’s like, honestly, if it’s not important to you, it’s not important to you, but everybody is always kind of presenting who they kind of hopefully want to be perceived as, and things. And it’s more just, it’s not that, it’s it is important in general, and we’re just kind of giving it kind of its due attention, yeah, in a lot of ways.

Carrie
So yeah. I mean, this came up a lot. We did a presentation last season on personal branding, and one of the things I was talking about is, like, you have a personal brand whether or not you want to, yeah, like, I mean, if you’re on social media, especially like your Interact like, to some extent, if you interact with people, you have one but especially if you’re like, putting out Instagrams, you’re putting stuff on LinkedIn, you’re dressing a certain way at work, you have a personal brand. It’s more like, what are some ways, some tweaks that I have control over, so that I’m helping to create the narrative that I want.

Caleb
And I think anytime you there’s a phrase like personal brand, makes me like, talk about the brand of personal brand, the gut reaction I get is like, because you think of like, a highly curated facade, that’s like, I want to be perceived this way? Yeah? Therefore, yeah, I’m presenting myself this way. It’s like, technically, you’re doing that however, really what a brand is supposed to do, and if you have a personal brand, is, are you accurately presenting who you really are, and are you doing in a way that’s consistent? Are you putting thought into it and examining your business or your life or how you want to present it, that’s a really good exercise, regardless. And then there are practical steps you can take to encourage yourself, encourage others, to be to know that you do that, or you know are available that way. There’s a whole the standard thing is like, anytime you see somebody with a blazer on and elbow pad things, oh, you’re a professor? Yeah? Think of it’s like, because that’s like, the personal brand of the professor that kind of feel, yeah. And so it’s like, do you want to be perceived as a professor really quickly? Are you a professor? You should get one of those jackets that’s a shorthand visually, that’s exactly right.

Carrie
And your classic? Well, I think this was a good kind of intro. I want to jump into questions. Love it. So we got several questions from our audience, yes, that I have on our brands, branded cards, details, detail. There it is. So some of these came in through social media, and then some of them came through our client. So the first one is, and this is anonymous, and you’ll probably know why I want to ask it. I’m starting a new business, and I don’t have much of a budget, so I used AI to make a logo. Is that really so bad? No. Know next question. All right, let’s talk about that, because we’re seeing that a lot.

Caleb
Yeah, it’s so again, logo can be a part of a brand. It’s not a brand. And so the first step would be like, I mean, yes, you can. You can associate with brand, so if that is accurately representing who you are at that moment and letting you move on from that. That’s fine. The whole point, though, is there is, there is a lot of feedback and a lot of value and having someone other than yourself examine who you are with you. We’re too close to ourselves. We’re too close. We need help other people to say, like, do you know that like You’re like you’re this way, which is good? Like you should you like you should emphasize that more. That’s why you would hire a designer and or someone who’s a brand strategist or someone like that, to really help with that, if you’re trying to churn out a logo and move on. I totally get that. I did that. I helped my sister in law with one of her startup businesses. Same thing where I was, like, it wasn’t AI, it was another thing, but it was very, very simple. And yeah, it worked. But I also gave her all these tools and things like that to kind of walk through, and it’s a good exercise. So, yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, I you’re going to have a lot of people strong opinions on AI that’s then, in many ways, right now, is seen as a moral question, taking it out of that, of, like, the simplicity of, is it so bad? It’s like, it’s not bad to go with a simple option before AI. They were icon libraries. Just go and find an icon and just call it your logo, like there’s a free range. Like, go for that, if that works. But at a certain point, I would encourage that if you’re going to do that, don’t ever see that as a final end point. If it helps you get started, great, but that is something that you need to kind of really kind of examine potentially later down the road.

Carrie
Yeah, I think that makes total sense. And I’ve done like you and I both, I think we, we do a lot of side hustles that may or may not be monetarily rewarding, yeah? Mostly not Yeah. I think, I think both of ours are just like, I think this would be really cool. So we’ve both done a lot of that. So I do think again, I think so much of this was before AI with us, or we also have access to at least people who may know some about this, so we can kind of take a step forward, but like the first localist color palette that I did, like I did hire somebody to do the logo, to do the book cover at that point. So I had a color, because it was the color he used on the book cover. I had a font, well, not really, because he used the font. The font he used was not a web font. So I had a print font, which there was nothing wrong with. Nothing wrong with that. He did a perfect job. Andrew Thompson, good job. He’s great. Yes, he did a great job. And the assignment was a book cover. But I did. I couldn’t use that font on the web, so I just Googled font similar to this font. Yep, good. Google, not the perfect way to do it, but it worked out. And then I took that color, put it in a color picker website and found similar colors, yeah, and it was okay, because that’s where I was at that point. At that point, it was just a side project. It was a free thing. We’ll talk some more later about how Cana, who’s a designer who works with us, expanded that color palette and brought so much more creativity freedom, like you said, so much more in but I I couldn’t have hired Cana at that time when I was just doing a podcast on the side for fun. Yeah, and so I yes, those were the tools. Then I think AI might be there now. So it’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s maybe not made. It’s maybe incomplete, and it’s maybe not going to grow with you,

Caleb
yeah, and we may get into this later, but there’s very few brands that haven’t developed because their people have developed. Their company has developed. They’ve brought more on services. Therefore their visual changes to kind of reflect that, and so their language might change to reflect that. At the very beginning, what you value is probably getting it done, and like trying to do that. However, if you’re starting off with something that, it’s like, no, the honestly, everything about this needs to be dialed in. Yeah. It’s like, don’t try to do that yourself, because, again, you’re too close to it. Yeah, that’s the other thing of there’s there’s company, companies that come to us to help either with a rebrand or to help expand their brand guide, and they’re very precious about their logo and. That’s great. That’s totally fine. But do understand that so many times that was then and this is now, and you should, you shouldn’t dismiss what was there. But there’s a natural growth. Even you mentioned Coca Cola. These major brands, they’re not the same as what they were. You might think they were, but if you look at their whole brand guide social media didn’t exist when Coca Cola was around. So how are they gonna fit that script logo in a tiny circle? Yeah, and so they have to say, like, Oh, what if we just did the bottle? Like, what if the outline of it and, like, that whole design philosophy. So it’s every like, three to five years, there’s this, like, industry take stock of where you are, and do we need to add or subtract from our current brand principles and guides, whether that’s additional vocabulary, additional visual language, things like that. Yeah.

Carrie
I mean, it’s the very like the what got us here won’t get us there, necessarily, and that applies to so much about business. I do Totally agree. The other thing about your logo is like, when you look at it every day and you develop a positive association this to like, to me, the infomedia logo might mean history. It might mean all the good experiences I’ve had with infomedia. But that’s not how a stranger is reading it. Yeah, when it’s hard to

Caleb
imagine what you can’t imagine. Yeah, so that’s why you bring another person in. And so we will tell a client every now and then, you know, if we do exactly what you want us to do, we can only we’re only doing what you can imagine, but if you’ll allow us to potentially have the freedom to go beyond it, we can go beyond what you imagine for it. And that could be negative, or that could be like, overwhelmingly positive. People hire interior designers all the time for that. I don’t know what to do in this space. And all of a sudden somebody comes in who hasn’t been in that room for so long, and it goes, Oh, we should do this. This like I would have never seen that.

Carrie
So I love the you can’t imagine what you can’t imagine. Because I do think it connects directly to AI, because AI is like expounding on what you can imagine. It’s, I mean, we talked about this actually on multiple of localist episodes, like AI is typically telling you you’re right about what you want, giving you what you wanted, telling You’re right. You’re right about everything that you think. So I think when it comes to everything from logo to relationship, it’s like, is that what you’re looking for? Or are you looking for someone to challenge you, to show you where the gaps are, and to take what you imagine further or in a different direction? Are you just looking for more of what you already thought about?

Caleb
Yeah, that is it. Is the do you want to stay within your circle, or do you want a little bit of that tension, or that positive conflict, or that question of what you said is like, saying like, but what about this? And that takes you out of that constant circle of affirmation to like, Oh, I’ve, I don’t know, yeah, maybe this, yeah, and so. So I think it is a really, potentially a good starting spot for an AI logo. If that’s what you value, it’s all value again. If, like, what do you value at that point when?

Carrie
What’s your business? Because if your business, if you’re wanting to go international, then you need to invest in, in my opinion, you should invest in a logo.

Caleb
Yes, yeah. It’s where you are at that time. I totally get that know that that’s a beginning point. And I would say that even if you go full on into, like a full brand kit, everything that’s that’s amazing. Three to five years later, deep breath. Bring trusted people in from the outside. Hey, is there anything I’m missing? Is there any expand, yeah. And that is great, or we don’t need to use that anymore. Subtract, yeah. And it just becomes way more accurate. Instead of this, like, set it and forget it. Mindset. We made that decision 30 years ago. We don’t have to make it now. It’s like you’re very different than who you were 30 years ago.

Carrie
Hopefully, yeah, yeah. That’s, I mean, that’s the idea,

Caleb
yeah, hopefully, yeah.

Carrie
All right. Next question, good answer, thanks. You’re on a roll.

Caleb
Good night, everybody. Yes.

Carrie
All right, I got a quote from a designer, and it was crazy expensive. Do I really need all of this? Can’t it just be simple?

Caleb
I have a quick answer that

Carrie
is, well, like the last one, unlike the last one, is it so bad to use? Ai, no moving on.

Caleb
They the person might be making cheap and simple synonyms, and they’re not simple, can be expensive, yeah. And just take a moment and think of the companies and brands and things that you. Interact with and simplification is actually stripping something down to a core message, or things using less words. Poetry is really hard. You know, writing really lengthy sentences is hard, but poetry is like the idea of like, settling down, of like, what are your real brand colors? What is your real message working with a brand strategist right now? I mean, you interview somebody and they’re gonna say, Oh, our company has integrity. Our company cares about the customer. And I was in the room with the brand strategist when they go, you know, every single company says that, what makes you different? And they’re like, well, it’s our integrity. It’s like, what about it? And just driving that home, we’re simplifying the message down, and so that simplification can be more of a process also, again, it’s the value the exercise would be the same question, but about timing, not price. Hey, why is it shouldn’t like this? This should be simple. It shouldn’t take so long. It’s like, Oh, so you value it being quick. So if I were to give you, I heard this example, I’m trying to remember who it is, again, put it in the comments. This is saying, like, so you’re saying that if I were to produce an incredible logo in five minutes, that I could charge the same thing, they’re gonna know, you should charge cheaper. If only took you five minutes. It’s like, so it should take me six, six months. Like, where’s your value? Yeah, of it. And so what I hear when somebody says that’s too expensive is, you don’t value it, yeah? Like, they to that extent monetarily, and that’s fine. So it’s too expensive for you. Yeah, it’s too expensive for you right now, or you haven’t seen the value and so incredible brand house in Atlanta is matchstick, and Craig there said, either on podcast or somewhere like whenever somebody comes with you at price, you talk about value, because what they’re saying is, is that from what I’m thinking and valuing, that doesn’t match. And it’s like, you’re right. Let me show you what this really applies to the value of it, that it adds. Oh, have you thought about how if you do this, every single one of your sales people will never have to labor over slide shows ever again, yeah. How many hours is that gonna save? Yeah? How is like, oh my gosh, yeah. Where it’s like, you know, all of a sudden it’s like, oh, that’s, that’s that will stuff marketing. So then all of a sudden their marketing budget is pulled into this, and that solves copywriting services. Other copywriting budgets pulled into it. And all of a sudden, it’s like, this is going to be potentially saving us money. And it’s like, there you go, Yeah, you didn’t talk about money, and it’s all value, yeah. So it’s, you know, that that’s kind of the simple answer is, you know, it’s, it is simple as expensive, or can be expensive. It’s, at the end of the day, not about necessarily money. It’s value tied to it. And so,

Carrie
yeah, yeah, well, and I think I was interpreting the question a little bit differently slightly, and that I thought, because they, they said, Do I need all of this? So I’m thinking maybe it’s more than fonts and colors. It’s like a bunch of different like, a lot of time when we do a brand kit is several pages, yeah, which you did touch on a little bit with what you’re saying there. But let’s say, like, if typically what is in a brand kit when we do it and maybe, why is that valuable? I mean, obviously you don’t need it, but why do we include more than just here’s one color, here’s your logo. Yeah, there is one color. Here’s a fine

Caleb
I had a conversation with somebody yesterday about it, because they said our colors are black and white. And I was like, we can do that. Yeah. Like, we can absolutely do that. The problem is going to be when you want to emphasize something like, it’s just going to all involve look the same. That’s why you have kind of these emphasis colors and things. So standard brand guide for us is very simple. And if you ever do something like a, you know, a freelance designer, or if you’re getting you need to do AI or things that these are things to kind of lock in is, what are your primary colors? What’s your secondary colors? What’s your primary font, what’s your secondary font? The reason you need those is, again, this kind of a visual hierarchy. Again, you can just be black and white, but what if you want to draw attention? What if you want to have a subsect within it? Everybody goes italics with it, of like, so it bold. It’s going to be regular, it’s going to be italics. And it’s like, okay, sure. It doesn’t read well in certain ways. It looks a little busy, yeah, when you do that. And so, and it’s, it almost feels too much if you need to simplify it down. And so, there are, there are primary fonts, there secondary fonts. There are web fonts. There are, that’s, that’s the sizing of how the actual. Logo and logo mark should run the different versions of it we include within that are all incredibly practical real quick. Yeah? And what will happen is, if you don’t have those things and say, I don’t need all that is, you’ll eventually be making those choices arbitrarily, arbitrarily, arbitrary, yeah, down, down the road, and it’s not going to be consistent.

Carrie
So I agree, like so much, of the reason you would do a brand guide is so your brand is showing up consistently. For example, at infomedia, different people work on the website versus, say, the social media. But because we have a brand guide, we all, we all have that guide for like, how do we do this? How can different people do this and be consistent? Yeah, but that’s where you see a lot of businesses, their social media maybe looks different than when you go into the their physical location, or when you’re looking at their website, because even if you have the same logo, the more steps you get away from that. If you don’t have a guide, you’re gonna just go in different directions.

Caleb
And when you say that there might be someone listening, go, why does that matter? Yeah, why does it matter? And it’s like it might not matter to you at this point, but for every decision that’s not made as a standard, that social media person had to make a decision, that other person had to make a separate decision, that other person has to make a separate decision. You could have set parameters that was a given. You could have a library of images and say, Don’t even question. These are our approved brand images. This is what we use for everything. So now no one’s searching around, going, what should we use? Yeah, and it doesn’t matter, until all of a sudden they post something or do something that is so just them, not the brand, right? That it’s so not the company, or things, that it’s like, oh, that that’s the problem, yeah? And it’s like, Well, the problem started a little while ago. Yeah, there wasn’t that alignment for it,

Carrie
and you’re right, this stuff, it goes everywhere, from slide decks to ordering T shirts for a company to even like in store signage like or just all across the board, you can save so much time and really money if you’re getting things printed.

Caleb
Or, yeah, oh absolutely yeah, in putting that thought in a little bit before we’re doing we’re serving a client right now that they made a pretty quick decision on some things, and very wisely, knew that we were going to be coming in. They just needed something. So they’re all their orders were very small for it. They knew. They’re like, yes, we’re going to burn through these. We just needed something. And I was like, I respect that so much. But a lot of the times you don’t think ahead like that, and you’re like, Oh, well, I can’t change that. I just printed 50,000 of them. And so it’s like, oh

Carrie
man, how many companies have we talked to who don’t want to change our logo because of their trucks?

Caleb
Yeah, exactly. And so, and I get that, I absolutely get that. And that’s another topic of just like, you can do a re you can do a redesign or rebrand that plays well, yeah, with the current version, so that it’s not like a night and day difference. I mean, sometimes you need that, but sometimes it’s like, we’re gonna be running the old logo probably in these locations for the next 10 years, right? Yeah. So, like, let’s make sure that it plays well. And it’s like, oh, that’s, those are great parameters. Again. It breathe kind of gives freedom.

Carrie
That’s another reason I love. Like, I would see that as a reason to work with a professional team too. Like, because you our visual team, that’s you and our other designers. Know how to do that, where it’s like these actually still work together. They’re consistent. Whereas if I were just to plug that logo into AI or use AI to generate a new logo, they would just look like two totally different logos. Yeah. But a good designer can kind of tell that story, which is cool, so you don’t have to get a new truck, yeah?

Caleb
Yeah, yeah, maybe you should, but I don’t know, yeah. Okay.

Carrie
Next question, this is from Courtney from Instagram. How is branding for consulting different from branding different than branding for selling a product,

Caleb
going to, kind of what we established, of that definition of the brand is kind of that gut feeling that people have the applications might be different. So if you’re a consultant, you’re probably not doing like product box design, like things like that. So the application would be different. Also companies that have products, products. Sometimes a company is founded on a singular product, and the product is the company. But sometimes the product is kind of a sub sect or a sub brand of that, and so we’ll keep using cocoa. You didn’t realize that that was going to be just a great. Reference, totally did it on purpose, but

Carrie
just the so you have, every time we talk about I’m like time for more sponsored

Caleb
by Coca Cola has kind of their major brand, but underneath it is Coke Zero, is Sprite, is all these sub brands to it that have their own, that immediately have effect on that packaging, but as far as kind of the overall brand, they’re just trying to tell their story accurately, which is what a consultant would do as well. But a consultant is going to have me thinking of things that aren’t necessarily visual, because they’re probably going to be more service based. And so it’s how do you consistently tell the same story through different services, so that the services don’t look wildly different from each other and make sense. And it actually helps to know and define who you are as a brand, as a consultant, to know what you’re really good at and maybe something that you want to recommend somebody else might do instead of like, I’m a consultant for everything. It’s like, no, no, I do this within that. I do these things, and here’s how I speak about each one of those clearly so people understand what my differentiator is. So product design probably leans a little bit mess, definitely messaging and but definitely visuals towards that. But since a brand is that gut reaction to it, it’s going to be the way that you communicate your services uniquely.

Carrie
Yeah, I think that’s good in it. It kind of goes into our next question a little bit, because I think the consultant touches a little bit on the personal brand, not necessary. I mean, you could have a group of consultants, but I think a lot of consultants are working individually. Working individually. And the next question is from Rachel on Instagram, same last name. I didn’t use the hand. I was like, I’m not gonna get into trying to pronounce a handle, yep, but if you’re that’s how I’m approaching this. If your name is obvious on Instagram and not so unique that I would be calling you out. I’ll use it.

Caleb
This is from, I love trucks.

Carrie
So Rachel’s question is, how do I build a personal brand? So I know this is a little bit, a little bit of a pivot, because we’ve been talking so much about the Yeah, again, fonts and colors, that kind of thing. And personal brand includes some other things. I think this meshes a little bit with that consultant question. But what does go into a personal brand? Does it have to be a logo? Should you have a logo? Should you have a color palette? What do you think

Caleb
you could have a logo if you if you wanted to, if you’re kind of putting forward public facing things, so like videos or talks or documents or like white pages, they download and things, it would probably be helpful to have that visual guide, as if you’re in a company in a lot of ways, practically, I would recommend buying a couple books on branding, just in general, not necessarily personal branding. Like, there’s going to be some out there for it, but even, like that book zag that I said, like, just that, that’s a good it’s a good start spot brands that are radically relevant by Blake Howard. Like, is great. Like, there’s a few other ones, but to kind of get a sense of what it what kind of materials brands put out and things, I think that’s really good. But for a personal brand, you can build it a few different ways. The major thing is deciding who you are through those books will have exercises and questions to ask. That’s why I would say to get them. Go through those exercises, ask, figure out who you are and what your messaging is, and then try to figure out ways to be consistent in delivering that message. And so there’s a million different things that you can do. What do you what do you feel like your outlets, social outlets and things? Maybe you’re not for Instagram, maybe you’re more LinkedIn, maybe that fits you better, because you’re not going to be trying to be trendy and doing the thing that is of the moment. No, you want to maybe give advice, or maybe you want to have these talks. Oh, well, what if I put together talking points for it, and what if I broke those up into little videos? Okay, great. Where would I host those? Oh, is that YouTube or Vimeo? It’s probably YouTube. And like thinking through that and make don’t think you have to do everything like again, find out. Use those exercises. Find some brand exercises, decide who you are, and then see what platforms align with that and stick to only that. There’s plenty of amazing brands that have happened through, like, sub stack, because they’re just like, they build an audience. Yeah, they build an audience just through writing and being like, I have no guy who got a book deal because of that, and it’s like he just built his audience. It’s up, and it was amazing, but he would not have been able to do that Instagram. He actually gave up Instagram because it was kind of worthless to him, like then to his audience, and that was a really good decision. Yeah, so figure out who you are and kind of what your voice is, and then find platforms, and then develop a pace that is as consistent as you need that to be, yeah? That false narrative of always putting out stuff all the time, it’s not true. Being consistent, though is so decide what that is yeah and stick with it.

Carrie
We also have a we did our I did a talk on personal branding. Last one quickquestion Season One quick coffee season. Sorry, and that’s on. We’ll link it in the show notes, and it’s also on infomedia is YouTube, so just like personal branding is in the title, but there are a couple exercises in there. That’s why it made me think, like one is to find your unique value proposition, like personally, and there are a couple other things too, but yeah, I think that that kind of work is helpful. It’s like, interesting. It’s kind of interesting as just like, looking at who am I as a person versus who am I as a I feel gross about saying as a brand also, but like, as a business, maybe you’re like, What am I putting out there? Yeah, which I think typically we are going to be too, too, very related. There’s a lot, it should be a large overlap on the Venn diagram, but you don’t have to share every single thing you think as a person. It doesn’t have to be part of your brand, absolutely. So I think, I think it has been really interesting as we’ve been exploring personal branding more, but I would agree, I think, as a person who has a personal brand and a logo, we infomedia did a logo for me. Sam Humphries, I think we have an episode on that. Actually, it won’t be

Caleb
when this episode comes out, but I think it’s her birthday today. By the way, happy birthday, Sam.

Carrie
Well, it’s a beautiful logo. I love it. It won an Addie. It’s perfect. I rarely use it, just because most of my stuff is like speaking events, being on a podcast, that kind of thing, and I just don’t have a need to use it. I do use it sometimes. I love having it, but I do agree that that isn’t necessarily like, that doesn’t need to be your first thing, right?

Caleb
I love that you use it in your newsletter. And that’s like, an exact like, you know, it was one of those you you kind of reap the benefits of that decision that you made. And it was like, oh man. Like, I want to news, I want to do a newsletter. I want it to look good. It’s like, oh yeah, some visuals right there that kind of are helpful with that. But you did the work on deciding kind of like, what you wanted to do and what your unique voice was, yeah. And that immediately, I remember that process with Sam of just like you didn’t know what your color out palette was going to be. So we was, we said, show us your favorite books, yeah. And we like, took pictures of them and,

Carrie
like, book covers I liked out on the bed, took a picture of it, and yeah. And it was

Caleb
like, Oh, this is a starting point we like. And it’s what do you respond to? And that’s just, that’s a fun exercise to see. Like you’re kind of the sum of all of these different influences. And so what are the things that you are, your favorite things, things? It’s like, oh, that’s a good starting spot to kind of point towards, like, Oh, I didn’t realize I like sans serifs. Yeah, that’s fun. Yeah. It’s like, I guess I’m a sans serif kind of guy. And so that would be, that’s a good kind of exercise with it, yeah.

Carrie
And this is, this is a perfect transition. Caleb, it’s true, you kill it on the questions. But I did want to talk some about the localist and our branding, because we’ve been shifting that, and I think that’s helpful to know that. So Carrie Rollwagen, as an entity, I guess, has a brand. So it has a logo, which is what I use in my newsletter, because it isn’t necessarily. My newsletter is not always about local stuff. It’s just about, you know, life, things, sometimes, sometimes writing. If you’re listening, you should sign up. We’ll put a link in the show notes, like, but that was, it was when I needed a localist logo, like to grow from the book, I wanted it to be able to live with that like umbrella brand of Carrie Rollwagen, so it didn’t need to look I wanted to be able to talk about either of them, but to also have its unique presence. And both of those times with Sam, with the Carrie Rollwagen branding, and with Cana, with the localist branding, exactly everything you’re saying is completely right. It is so helpful as a business or as a brand to be able to narrow down what you’re thinking because someone. Else is asking you those questions that, you know, I’m thinking I’m perceived this way, but they’re perceiving me this other way. You know, I’m not paying for market research, so that’s very valuable, like having those questions and me having to decide, Oh, I’ve been talking about these various things, but that’s confusing to everyone. I need to narrow my focus.

Caleb
Well, in yours, not to not to puff you up, but let’s do it. You’re kind of

Carrie
doing great. It’s only going up.

Caleb
The pattern that you followed, or the journey that you followed, is what a lot of companies should do in that you put out a book, and you had a brand of yourself as a writer, but you didn’t have any visuals or anythings with that, but you did have a book cover done by Andrew Thompson, who’s incredible. And so when we created your brand, which would be like the parent company, it’s like, I want, I have a product called the localist the book, and I need branding for that, but then you’re like, but, yeah, I’m more than that one book. So we could have fit everything under the locals, right? But then it would have stopped making a lot of sense, because there’s things that aren’t necessarily localist type subjects you wanted to cover. And so it’s like, okay, so now let’s create a parent company. Google did this. Google is not the parent company. Alphabet is the parent company, but Google’s the main product. Alphabet branding heavily influenced by Google branding. Your first branding that Sam did was not the same, but it was influenced, I’m thinking of the colors you’re wearing now were part of that initial one. And so it was like, great. And so you did that parent brand, but then what that did was it helped free the localists to not be the thing, and to be able to grow and expand from there, because then it was the product. But then it was, oh, the podcast is this other thing. And so for a while, the podcast was just the same branding as the book, but it’s not the book, right? It needs to be a little bit more than that. And so that’s when Cana came in and we expanded it and gave that freedom of other colors in ways that kind of was, it’s it’s not like, it’s different, but it’s not like crazy, right? Different. Like, didn’t shock the audience. You can see that they’re related, like family members, yeah, in a lot of ways. And so all of a sudden is like, this makes so much more sense. Now we can do all these things when that’s great. And then we expanded even more recently, yeah, no, if you want me to talk about but, yeah, I do. But first

Carrie
I want to say part of the reason we knew we needed to rebrand the localist at the end of last year was because this is how we felt the tension about growing it. So we wanted to get a business card, because so much of us on many of us on the localist team would just run into people and they’d be like, you know, we mentioned the podcast. We wanted them to have a takeaway that had a little QR code that they could just listen or whatever. And kayna mocked up a business card, and it’s good, but we all, none of nobody on the team was in love with it, and it came down to it had nothing to do with the design. I think Taylor, who’s our show runner, was like, it just doesn’t feel fun. And I think the localist brand is kind of fun, and that, I think, was the thing, and it was true, like it was, it was just more serious, and it we are serious, but also kind of, like, quirky and scrappy. So I think that that sometimes you do feel the tension on this is when it’s time to rebrand or to iterate on the brand, because you are producing something like, maybe you’re mocking up the trucks, or maybe you’re gonna open a new location or whatever, and you’re like, This doesn’t feel right, even though everything about it is technically right. So it was a cool process. And then we were like, we asked you to do a business card, but what we really want you to do is a massive rebrand.

Caleb
Again, that’s kind of a dream scenario for us too. Is that because we feel that tension too and can sometimes give suggestions, but being aware, you develop the habit of knowing that it’s an option. And so even the idea of Taylor saying, like this doesn’t feel fun. Y’all thinking, Oh, maybe it’s time that’s an option. Yeah, that’s great, and it was, that’s not a huge pressure point a business card. You made that pass brand work. Really, a lot of people wait so long because they they think there’s no solution yeah to it, or, like, No, we just got to stick with this, or we’ll make arbitrary decisions. We’ll just throw things like, but you can, you there is an option to expand that brand or change it, or let it grow. Yeah, I

Carrie
mean, and speaking of, we’re still using that business brand with where that business card with the old branding, and we will it. Totally right now, yeah, but it does. It is exciting, and it was fun to see that. I think Cana knocked it out of the park on the branding, because you could also see the team members, like Alana was still working with us at that time, and her eyes, just like, lit up, like, and she was doing most of our social assets, and just seeing like, oh, have so much more to play with, and because there are so many colors, and that’s something that I do love about infomedia, is brand kits. When we give those to clients, we give so many more colors than I would have ever imagined were necessary. But it means that even like if I want to go into Canva, choose something that looks great. Click on the brand kit. It’s like, change all the colors to my brand kit, change the fonts to my things. Suddenly it looks fantastic.

Caleb
A lot of really good decisions made in the past. Your benefit Exactly.

Carrie
Yeah, and it is, again, it’s more colors than you would have imagined, but it’s so fun to be able to as somebody I’m not. I don’t consider myself very visually literate. Like, I typically know like, this looks great, or I think this looks terrible, but I have no idea how to fix it, and I don’t know how to explain it. It’s so exciting to be able to, like, really, like you said, it gives you more freedom. The constraints give you freedom. Yep. So yeah, let’s talk about the expansion of that brand. And part of the reason I want to talk about all of this is for people listening to understand these are the real things that happen to a brand, yes, to Coca Cola, but also just to carry roll icon in the localist brand. So these are pivots or changes that you can make so we decided to do a live event of the localist called localist lab. And these are sponsored by kind of a different group of people than the localist podcast, same, but different overlap. But we wanted there to be some distinction. I want there to be distinction, yes, for the audience, but also just internally. It was confusing. If we just had the locals, it’s like, Wait, are we talking about we have to drive across town to Saturn, or are we talking about, we’re gonna go in the studio, like, what’s going on? Yeah. So it’s weird how we think about, I think we always think about audience, but even internal, internally, the branding can be helpful, yeah? So kind of tell people about what happened when we, like the localist lab, is not a rebrand, but it is a change. So can you kind of explain that?

Caleb
Yeah, it’s, it is exactly what you said, same but different. Of and that was the question that we had, is when we first met and we knew that we were going to potentially do this kind of gave, I think it was like three options of the directions we could go. One is, do we want local slab to be its own brand, pros and cons and or do we want it to be, you know, something that is associated with, you know, mixture in between, and it would need to be same, but different. So it’s truly an expansion of it for that application. This would be the equivalency of another company doing a live event or a new product line, and things where all of a sudden it’s like, okay, so it has to feel like localist, but it has to be able to be its own thing. So even the idea of its localist lab, not the localist lab, tiny, tiny change. But just like, oh, localist lab. That’s its own thing. Localist same font lab, same font introduced a couple new colors of just like, and it was mainly like the dark and it was more of the emphasis. Color changed a little bit where there’s a few different versions of it. It is stacked differently. And the main thing that we wanted to do with it, we wanted to have a distinct visual that was associated with localist lab. Needed to feel like the local is still in some ways, and we developed a little bit of a visual vocabulary we could use on signage so ways that it stacks on top of each other, which if we want to put a link to the brand guide in the show notes. And so it is. It’s stacked in a certain way that is actually kind of natural for signage, like vertical signage, to have, like title and things. So it was leaning towards that. And then we came up with this, like fun dot matrix that made us think of like the beaker holders and labs and things. It got really heady, and then we just stripped it back.

Carrie
Well even then, like, I mean, I was debating on several different names. And so I think that even the branding process was helpful for that, in that I came to you guys with the names, and you were like, like, immediately, I think you were like, localist lab, this is going to be great. Like, we have, I don’t think that exact visual, like, I think Kana brought that to the table, but there were all these visuals. I actually was talking to somebody about this today. The same thing up with the localist book. They were like, when did because I used to have a blog called shop small. And they were like, when did that? Switch to the localist. I was like, Well, I needed to switch it when I published the book, because American Express owns shop small, so I can’t use that. And I was thinking, like, should it be localist or, like, localist papers, kind of like Federalist Papers. And I think I was working with Andrew at the time designing, and we were like, he was like, simple is better. And yeah. So I actually think working with your designer on that can be really good, yeah.

Caleb
And we, actually, we did a practice that I love is making decision and trying to live with it for a little bit. Instead of trying to war over what decision you should make. It’s creativity. Inc, is an amazing book, and he talks about, like, if you’ve got two mountains and you know that your destination is up one of those, yeah, the best thing you can do is choose a mountain and run up it as fast as you can, because that way you’ll know if it’s the right one, or really quickly, if it’s the wrong one. So when we were having the the name conversation, you throughout localist lab, we all liked it, but we said, for the rest of the conversation, for the next like week, let’s just call it that and see how it fits. Yeah. And that was awesome. Yeah? Like, that was just a great thing of like, Does it fit? Yeah. So from that, we were able to chase that idea of, like, what is a lab and things like that, which led to kind of this, like, fun dot matrix that immediately this ended up being down to like, oh, this could be arrows and signage and things. So it was really fun. But the this is a perfect example of, there’s gonna be products, events, applications, you don’t foresee. Some of them fit within your brand. And if you just make room for them a little bit, sometimes they need to be entirely different. Things could have ended that way, but this fit within it, and it actually, I think, adds to the brand. It makes the localist brand feel stronger because it has this kind of segment over here for live events.

Carrie
I think so too. And I also enjoy having you guys to talk to about, like, what needs to be a sub brand and what doesn’t. Because I think we even, we even discuss, well, I’m getting very meta these episodes, like, where I’m interviewing experts from our different companies instead of a business owner. We’re like, Does this need to be separate? And we’re all like, No, it doesn’t. Or is this a lab episode, or is this this episode? And it seems weird like, it seems like, oh my gosh, like, just get over it, like and like. But it is really helpful to be able to talk through those decisions at the beginning, instead of getting all the way into it and being like, oh, we need to walk this back, because it doesn’t make sense to our audience.

Caleb
Again, it is those the decision will be made. Do you want to make it thoughtfully, yeah, or just kind of arbitrarily, and just have it be something that we did that one time, we did this on time and immediately, that will start to create some confusion, even if it’s just internal confusion. And so having those conversations seems kind of like, why would you need it’s like, have those conversations because you will reap the benefits later of past decisions and kind of the that criteria to kind of keep within,

Carrie
yeah, definitely. Speaking of reaping benefits, this is a callback, but I actually think we use the same colors for the localist lab. I think we just use the sub colors. Yes, it was emphasis color change, yeah. And that was one of the things that was so cool about having all those colors in the beginning is that, yeah, they’re minor colors in the localist podcast, but they’re pulled through so so that, again, these are not things your typical person scrolling through Instagram and finding out about localist lab or coming to localist lab is not going to notice, oh, that light pink is the same light pink that I saw in a minor color on the localist podcast graphic. But subconsciously, these things do resonate, and they help it to feel cohesive and to people like to communicate what you’re doing.

Caleb
So there’s a there’s a great quote, I think it’s Johnny Ives that said, when he was in his apple era, said people can intuit more than they can articulate. And so yeah, is like, they don’t know why. They don’t have to know why. All of a sudden it’s like that just Yeah, feels right. Like, that feels accurate. Yeah. It’s like, yeah, that’s it.

Carrie
And all feeding together to that idea of like, when we wanted to switch, we were our team thought, we think the localist is more fun than this. The brand became more fun. But now, because the branding is more fun. You can see, oh, there’s a localist lab event. And this isn’t going to be just a boring event, like even the branding has an exclamation point in it. I didn’t decide that, but Cana designed it that way. It looks great and it looks more fun. It doesn’t look like this is going to be the same business event that I’ve been to a million times, because it’s not Yeah. And it is cool how that all comes, like feeds in on itself, yeah.

Caleb
It feels hopefully people walk in and they think this was better than I anticipated, yeah. And it feels right, yeah, like it’s like we offered more than I thought. And oh my gosh, this feels that that. Makes sense, yeah. Like, y’all were cueing me the whole time, like, it’s like, I thought it was gonna be an oral business event. But look at everything. This all makes sense now.

Carrie
And that’s how those events are usually. Like, we work really hard to not in the presentations that we do. We work really hard to say, like, yes, we’ll tell you the professional way to do it. We’ll also tell you the scrappy way to do it. We’ll also tell you the fun way to do it. We’ll make little jokes throughout. Yeah, you’ll have free tacos, you’ll have some coffee, like all of those come to being more fun. And also, I really love the lab idea, because it’s like small business is always kind of an experiment, and that that is what we want people to leave with knowing. And so it is cool that that the brand is telling them that they’re they’re intuiting that before they even come. So in case you’re listening, please come to a localist lab event. If you’re in town, they’re very fun. Yeah, they really are. And if you’re not in town, we actually do put them on on line. So we’ll link to that.

Caleb
And those are less fun because you’re not there. So you should come to it, because you have to go get tacos first. Yeah, that’s right,

Carrie
you have to make us yourself a coffee. That’s true. We should put a thing on YouTube first. Go get your snack. Yes, step one snacks. These are in localist lab, better with snacks different than a regular lab, so it just rolls off the tongue. Thank you so much, Caleb. I think people who ask these questions are gonna be happy with it, and hopefully it’s always fun to talk. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much to Caleb for coming on today, and if you submitted a question, thank you for that as well. If you’re interested in submitting questions in the future, do that through my Instagram. I’m at sea Rollwagen, the localist podcast is written and produced by me. Carrie Rollwagen, our show runner is Taylor Davis. Our outreach manager is Hannah craigen, and we record right here at infomedia studios. Our engineer in the studio with us today is Aaron Duncan. Thank you so much to infomedia for sponsoring the podcast and making everything we do possible until next time, whether you’re buying from a local business or running one, thank you for all you do to make our community stronger every day.