Content Makers Podcast: Beth Gladstone Interviews Imogen Roy
If I were to ask you: what's your vision and mission for life? What are your values? Do you know your own Zone of Genius?
In The Content Makers Podcast with Beth Gladstone, I share how I teach entrepreneurial people like you to harness your vision, values and missions so you can approach your life and work with more purpose.
What is my zone of genius? What are the things that I'm really good at and how can I build a company around my strengths?
In This Podcast Episode, Beth and I Talk About:
The difference between creating “popular” and “good” content.
How entrepreneurial people can find their Zone of Genius and why I felt called to invent the concept of Strategy Coaching.
What I learned responding to crises as a Social Media Manager for Eurostar.
What really goes on behind the scenes of a grassroots political marketing campaign & how my friends and I nearly got arrested launching #OperationCroissant against Brexit.
The four brand models and why picking just one for your brand is essential.
Links Mentioned in This Episode:
Learn more about coaching with Imogen.
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Read the Transcript:
Beth Gladstone: Can you tell us a bit about your current business?
Imogen Roy: Sure. I am a brand strategist and a content marketing consultant.
But I'm also a coach for self-employed people who want to become more productive, more present and more purposeful in their life and business. And interestingly, it was brand strategy that was the gateway to coaching. I started my brand strategy work and was really blown away by what a successful connecting tool these brand strategy frameworks are for changing the mood in a room and really providing huge insight. I've sat in boardrooms with founders and CEOs and ...the looks on their faces when they finally had the language to pinpoint what their company was all about: magical.
And I got so high off that feeling. And then one day I just thought to myself: these frameworks and the time and money that people are investing in building a vision and a mission and values for their company...Why don't we do this in our lives as individuals?
Imogen Roy: You know, if you ask someone on the street: what's your vision and mission for life? What gets you up in the morning, what are your values? Most people wouldn't know what to say, and I thought to myself: I'm not sure I like this. I think that it's more important for people to have this clarity than for brands. And so I just started thinking: how can I translate these frameworks that I've learned as a brand strategist, and help people to harness them so that they can approach their life and career and work with more purpose and vision?
Beth Gladstone: That sounds like a very holistic approach. So what does the Strategy Coaching look like? So, for example, with an entrepreneur – How would you work with them to develop their mission, how does that work translate?
Imogen Roy: Okay, so most of my clients are a mixture. ‘Entrepreneurial people’ can mean many things. Some of them are consultants or strategists or freelancers, some of them are artists or creatives or business owners. But they kind of fall into two camps. So a lot of my clients kind of know what they want from life, but they really don't know how to get there.
They don't know how to make that journey from point A to point B. Often they’re a bit overwhelmed or getting very close to burnout. And they're really looking for a holistic approach feel more in charge of their business and life, so they can pour more time and energy into the mission that they want to fulfill. The second group of people are those who want to go through a transition. So maybe they actually want to move from being an employee to working for themselves, or they want to start a new company. And they need to know what's next: what is my zone of genius? What are the things that I'm really good at; how can I build a company around my strengths? I help them design a business around their zone of genius.
Beth Gladstone: That's great. And you mentioned that you use the brand strategy frameworks that you learned when you became a brand strategist. I think a lot of the time, brand strategy is still surrounded in mystery and people know how to maybe deliver the executional work: the blogging schedule, the social media work... but struggle with that high-level brand idea. How did you find out more about that?
Imogen Roy: Really good question, and you're totally right. I think that the gaps that believe I fill the industry is that I go so deep to dig those foundations for a brand. That makes all the other decisions like, what are our brand values? What's our brand voice? What's our organisational structure?...so much easier. My strength is that I didn't study strategy and I didn't work in an agency – I was brand side for most of my career. And I was customer-facing, so I
had the experience of knowing what works within a brand including brand internalization and external communication. Plus I just did a ton of research and read a lot of books!
When I start a brand strategy process with a client, I'm looking for two things. First and foremost: what is the brand model here? So there are four brand models. But most brands try and tick them all because they think that the more strengths they have, the better. But in fact, in trying to be everything you dilute the main proposition. So you have 1) Experience brands: brands that are known for providing an amazing customer experience. 2) You have product led brands that are known for having the best product in the market. 3) Price-led brands, whose main proposition is that they will always be low price. 4) And then you have story-led brands, who are the ones that have a vision to change something in the world. And the most
compelling value proposition is the story that a customer can be a part of. So the first thing I work on is defining which model are you? And then planning to go all the way there.
Imogen Roy: So that's the first thing. And the second is: honing in on the Brand Idea. The Brand Idea is the stabilizing point between the inner ‘why’ - the soul of the brand. So this could be why the founder started the business; the beating heart of the organization and the thing that pulls all the employees together. And the external reputation of the brand and the market. So how the market sees this brand; where are you on the Gartner quadrant? What are people saying about you in the press? All these things that a brand would like to control, but they don't, and that's how the world works. So the brand idea is sort of balancing stabilizing force between those two concepts: inner and outer. And a good brand idea is something that is very short, very easily understood; is intriguing and compelling. It's something that all the employees can really get on board with, and it's a six, seven second elevator pitch for the brand.
So an example of one that I worked on recently for a PR company called Emerge, who are based in London – this very rebellious visionary PR agency – the brand idea is simply “PR, but better.” Because their brand is all about building the press office for the future.
At EMERGE, they all know what that means to them. From the way they hire, to the way they organize the hierarchy of the company, to the kind of clients they work with, to the tone of voice they use. And likewise, with another client of mine, a jewelry company called Missoma – their brand idea was “soulfulness is your strength”.
And it comes from inside the organization – they're known for hiring very caring, sensitive, warm-hearted people who really believe in the soulfulness of the gemstones they work with. And it meets the outside, which is the idea that for their customer, their jewellery is talismanic.
It makes a woman feel safe and secure. She has her favorite pieces. She has a daily ritual of putting on her jewelry, layering them up, and feeling strong in herself. She can rely on these gemstones, touchstones to provide security. So those are the two things I'm really looking for when I start a brand strategy, and once those two things are locked down, everything else is really quite easy!
Beth Gladstone: That's such a great way of explaining. I think often with brand strategy, we can add so many layers, whereas actually pairing it back seems to be the key of creating a really strong brand. So once you've delivered this vision of this new brand, how do you make sure that the company can actually take that on and work with it? I've worked in companies before, and you kind of get this really nice brand strategy and it really clicks with you, but then working out how to deliver it in the day-to-day can be quite tricky.
Imogen Roy: Yep, I 100% agree – and it is hard! And I've had all kinds of experiences, so I've learned along the way. What I always do now is I insist that employees, stakeholders, people who will be there on the ground living, breathing the brand and bringing it to life are involved in the whole process. And if a client says to me: Oh no, we just want board members and the senior leadership team involved in the strategic meetings – It's a huge red flag for me. Because you cannot have a top-down brand strategy. And I think this is where a lot of companies get it wrong. So it's hard in big organizations, I really appreciate that, and most of my clients are smaller, growing businesses. But in a larger organisation, it just needs to be a longer process with more steps, because collaboration is absolutely key. I know that I've done my job well when the employees of the company believe that the brand strategy was their idea. My job as a brand strategist is a professional listener and a coach.
I will interview as many people in the organization as I can and I will often interview customers or look at a lot of customer data in order to pull out the language, then weave together all of these elements. Brand strategy very, very rarely involves bringing something brand new to the table. And I think those radical overhaul approaches are actually very unlikely going to work because there is already a brand – it’s already alive. It just hasn't found the right language yet to express itself. So I’m hellbent on making sure that stakeholders have been involved from the very beginning and that they really buy into the idea.
That for me is more important than the founder or the CEO absolutely loving every piece of collateral. I've sat in meetings where the CEO or the founder has gone: I don't like that. And I’ve said: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that you don't like it, sadly. It's far more important that your team are excited to get to work with it and the customers love it. So brand strategy is really diplomacy!
Beth Gladstone: So your work is mostly done remotely from Paris. How do you manage that, still feel connected to your clients and the people you're working with?
Imogen Roy: I’m really into building connection from the get-go, because with a new client establishing trust quickly is absolutely key. I use my own coaching frameworks to get to the heart of the matter and build rapport so they feel they can trust me. And the really important thing for me is I only ever work with what I call soul clients. When I work with a soul client, we have a special connection and they know I'm committed – therefore it doesn't really matter where in the world I'm working from. We have a bond.
Beth Gladstone: You produce a lot of content for your own brand: You create videos, you have a really interesting newsletter, and keep up all your social media profiles. How do you find time to do it all?!
Imogen Roy: Well you know, Beth, I am a content creator. That is just how I'm wired. I've been creating content my whole life. The way I process and understand the world is by creating content about it. When I was younger, I was creating handwritten, illustrated books...I made my first website when I was 14, made my own magazines. I had a pretty successful fashion blog in my late teens. So for me, it's a very natural impulse to create my own work and I've had a long time to create a rhythm and structure for creativity. I'm definitely the type of creator who gets an idea, does a first draft, a terrible first draft, reworks it, iterates, reworks it, scraps half of it, goes back etc. And over time, it becomes a lovely polished marble and then it finally goes out. I have a huge Trello board where I note down ideas as they come to me. Every time an idea gets developed in my head I add to the cards. I'd say that the moment I have about 400 cards on there!
Beth Gladstone: There may be people listening who are currently struggling with their time management. I know that a lot of the work that you as a coach is to help people to prioritise their time. What advice would you give on that?
Imogen Roy: I would say that a lot of us are very, very good at responding to external expectations, which means we work very well in structured environments where we have clear deadlines, responsibilities, meetings to go to. It can be really hard to work on your own goals independently, and so I often encourage people to flip the way they think about their own goals or work like marketing or content creation, those hardest, stickier things that we know are important for our business but we can feel a lot of resistance about. Pretend like you're working for your most valuable client or your most scary boss. Give yourself appointments with a set location, time and agenda and attend them on your own to do that work as if it were a real meeting.
I also advocate that planning your time ahead of time is really life-changing. So rather than waiting for huge, open expanses of time to magically appear so you can work on something important, proactively design those appointments into your day and make them a non-negotiable.
Beth Gladstone: That's great advice. I like the one about managing your own goals like it's an outside expectation. That's great.
I’m Imogen, and as a Strategy Coach, I help entrepreneurial people to be more prolific, productive and present in their life and business.
If you know that it’s time to work in as well as on your business, book a free call with me to talk about coaching.
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