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"Flip of Scramble: The Brand Dictionary." A total of eight books, I believe—eight books! He literally wrote the book on branding. He's here! You guys want to stick around for this episode; we're gonna get into a lot of things: how he got started, what he's up to today, and why are we even having this conversation. So let's get right into it: Marty Neumeier, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks, Chris! It's great to be here. The Futur, yes! And The Futur is definitely here. I can see it—it smells like one-dollar bills or fresh printing or something

like that. Okay, so why are we talking today? When I set the tone and intention initially, it was because you and I were producing a workshop here, or at least I shouldn’t say producing; we’re hosting the workshop that you're having here at the end of February called "The Brand Masterclass." I wanted to have you on, so in case somebody who's been sleeping under a rock somehow hasn't heard about you or the workshop, this would be a great opportunity to find out about this. But, the class is sold out! You guys snooze, you lose! So the

next opportunity to see Marty in the United States is a two-day workshop, which has a certification part, which is incredible, and is in Philly. Yeah, that’s your next best opportunity to do this. You guys, we’ll include the links in the description below if you want to attend that—to go to Philly. I’m gonna tell you, this is something you do not want to miss! I agreed to host this just because I want to learn from the master himself. Now, before we get into all the brand gap, the brand goodness, definitions, misunderstandings, dialogues, conversations, and debates that

have happened prior to this, I want to take us back in time. So, whenever—whine the tape! Because we were just talking; we’re both Art Center people. You have a few years ahead of me, and the program was very different back then. Take me back—oh, tell me about Art Center. The sixties was a really cool place to be. It was in an old, used-to-be-girls' school, I think, in Hollywood on Third Street, and it smelled like pipe tobacco because every design teacher there smoked a pipe. They probably wore a wool vest. But it was a cool place,

and you had a lot of teachers who were actually working professionals. I mean, it was a lifesaver for me because my world opened up when I finally got to do what I always wanted to do, which was be a commercial artist. At seven years old, I had put my stake in the ground in grammar school, and that’s what I wanted to be, and I stuck to that the whole way. Did you know that at seven? I knew it at seven years old! Yeah, and everybody said, “Wow, you're heading for trouble for sure.” Well, you know,

you get these ideas in your head and it just becomes who you are. I’m just marking my days until I get to be good. Alright, so anyway, it was a great place to be. There was no graphic design track; they didn’t use that term really. It was just sort of coming out at the time. They had—you could go into advertising or you could be an illustrator. So, I took both of those, figuring that graphic design was somewhere in there, you know? Later they added the graphic design program, but it was a great experience. I lasted

two years until I couldn’t afford it anymore because it was $50 a semester. Okay, just for context, you guys, an Art Center semester now is I think somewhere around $22,000. No space for that! And this is important to note because some of the things we are talking about later about money and what we charge—just keep that in mind, all you young whippersnappers out there. It used to cost $50, and Marty could not afford it! Yeah, but my first really big job after I got out—really great campaign that I worked on—I got $50 per ad. So,

oh, I made—wow, I made the whole thing back! Okay, yeah. So, were you living in LA at that time, going to Art Center? At that time, I had moved—I left school, I went to Santa Barbara, got married. Okay, okay. Started a freelance business. There were no designers, no graphic designers. You’d go look in the Yellow Pages where you’d find people, and there was nothing. So, I had to actually have them put that in there for me, and I was the only one. Oh my god! The graphic designer. Heading—and I had to, as part of my

job as being the only graphic designer, I had to explain it to would-be clients. I had to tell them what it was and why they should pay any money for it at all. And they—their response was, “Oh, you’re like a commercial artist.” Oh, you know, that’s old-school. No, we’re serious professionals now—explain why it's gonna be good! That exercise of having to explain it—like, what’s the business value of design—was really good, and I think that probably set me on this course of what I’m doing now, explaining all this stuff and how business works and how design

and business interact—connect together. What’s surprising for me to hear in the story is I know you mostly through your books and your writing and just how clear you write, how you articulate very complex ideas that are very tangible and just very easy to digest. So, how did you develop this ability to write? Did you teach yourself how? Where does that come from? Yeah, I mean, it comes from writing. Okay? And one thing I have to interject before I answer that question is that what I’ve noticed about graphic design—and probably other kinds of communication design—is that

language is super important, even if you’re not the word person. Hmm. So, that’s what I discovered pretty early is that... I can't do really award-winning, cool work unless I have good writing to go with it because it'll drag it down to a lower level if it's not great. Yeah, and you know the words and the pictures have to work together. So what 1 in 1 gives you 3. So how am I going to do that? And I just started, you know, really looking closely at how award-winning work sounded, looked like, you know, how the words

and pictures went together. I started just teaching myself how to do it. I didn't really like doing it. I didn't like writing. It was hard. It was harder than graphic design. Mmm. I mean graphic design is like eating candy. It's like you have a piece of candy, and it's really good, so you want another one, right? And writing is like, oh God, I'm tired after that one. That's like, it took everything out of me. So it took many, many, many years before writing was pleasurable at all. But I always did like it when it came

out well, and when I made my work look really great, it was just like, yeah! And then, you know, who would win awards. And so I, you know, I had that experience of doing it all and having control over both sides of communication: the words and the pictures. And that really taught me a lot. It started leading me into thinking about how other things connect, you know? How does design connect with business? Where's the connection? Because my clients didn't really see it, right? And I wasn't sure exactly how I was contributing to their business. Mmm-hmm.

Because they wouldn't tell me really what their business was or how they were achieving success. And so I had to figure that out so that I could be in that conversation. So many... while we're on there, sometimes so many people in our audience, in our community, have a really difficult time answering that question: what value does design or writing, creativity have on a company? Because they're feeling that pressure of doing work for less, and they don't even know how to articulate that. So here I am in the 60s and 70s in Santa Barbara, and you're

already figuring this stuff out. How could you advise or help some of these younger people that are out there right now who have a hard time communicating what design is? What's the value of it? I would love to hear from you. Yeah, well, you know, so business has its own names, you know? I mean, it's really profit-driven. There's more to it than that. It's not just money, money, money. It shouldn't be. And design has its own history, and we all love that history, and we want to be like those people that we admire in our

business. And if it's a new, whole new thing, we want to be the leaders in that. But it's kind of divorced from business unless you connect it yourself. And that place that it connects is branding. That's the area where everyone plays together, right? So whatever skills you have as a designer, as a creative person, they become weaponized when you understand branding. Suddenly, you know where to aim those skills, that talent, you know? So it's a force multiplier. It's like, you know, once I understood that branding is the area where we can all play together, and

we understand each other's business and what we're doing together, it probably made me about ten times as valuable as I was in the early days when I was just copying what Milton Glaser did or Paul Rand before him, you know? So I actually knew how this hopefully award-winning work would actually be driving business forward, and I could explain it from my little corner of what they were doing—how I was helping them—and then they'd appreciate it more, pay me more, let me into more parts of the company that I wasn't in before. So I realized that

even though business wasn't something I was ever really very interested in, I had to be interested in it if I wanted my work to be great. So many questions here! I feel like I'm going to splinter into a thousand parts and pieces here in that the term branding, I think, unfortunately has become something like people use it interchangeably with logo design, identity design, or even sometimes typography. And maybe we need to set the record straight. And I know you're the best person to tell us: What is branding, Marty? Yeah, so let's start with what branding

isn't, okay? Because it's not a lot of things people say it is. Yes, it's not a logo. Okay? A logo is a very useful tool for a business, but it's not the brand; it's a symbol for the brand. A brand is not a product. So when people talk about this brand buying this brand or that brand, they're really talking about buying one product or another product. Branding is not that. People say the brand is a promise the company makes to customers, and there's some truth in that. Yeah, I mean, it does end up acting as

a promise, but that's not what it is either. Advertising people like to say, "Well, it's the sum of all the impressions that a company makes on an audience." Yeah, well, you know, if you're trying to sell a lot of impressions, I can see where that might be useful to you. But from a business point of view, why do they want that? And how does that help people understand what they're doing? So none of those things are really what branding is. A brand is a result. It's a customer's gut feeling about a product, a service, or

a company. It ends up in their heads, in their hearts, right? They take whatever raw materials you throw at them and they make something out of it. But it's their making it; they're creating it. And so in a sense, when you create a brand, you're not creating one brand; you're creating millions of brands—like however many customers or people in your audience—each one has a different brand of you. So brand is like a reputation. All right? So it's your business. Reputation and everyone's gonna be a little bit different about what that reputation is, and that's okay

as long as you have it corralled, it's mostly where you want it, and that it's beneficial to the company. So we tend to look at companies, and designers tend to look at branding from our point of view like, "This is something we're doing. We're telling a story; we're making a claim, or you know, we're making a pitch." And that's what we do, but that's not what a brand is. A brand is the result of that, and if you don't start there, you don't know what you're doing. You actually don't know what you do; you think

you know what you're doing, but you don't. So from a designer's point of view, I mean, I always tended to be this way; it's like I just had a gut feeling about whether this was gonna work or not, and then I would sell it as hard as I could, get the client to sign off on it. From the client's point of view, they're going, "Well, it's a checklist. I got the logo, I got the tagline, I got the ad campaign. Click, check," and they think they're done, right? None of that's right. You know what's right?

It's what happens in people's heads—like, what have we achieved? What's the reputation that we've created through the products we're putting out, and the design of the products, the messaging we're putting out, the look and feel of them, our culture? You know, how does that affect people? How do our employees behave? You know, how is that affecting our reputation? All that stuff counts. So it's a big world, and it actually takes in almost all of the business—not so much finance, but finance is involved too because finance has to green-light all these things. But almost everybody in

a company is affecting the brand, doing something with the brand, doing it for the brand, or hurting the brand. So you have to think of it that way. Now, this is not well understood, so anybody who gets this and can explain it is in a very powerful position within the company. Designers are just naturally good at this; like, if we opened our minds to it and learned a few skills, learned a little bit more about business, we suddenly have a lot more control over how our work is perceived by our clients, how it works in

the marketplace, how much we get paid for it. At some point when you get really good at this, you don't have to charge by the hour; you charge by the results. Or not even that; you charge for being involved at the very highest level, and it can be huge amounts of money. So the range of, like, starting out as an hourly performer getting up to where you're an expert in something is huge. I mean, the difference is like millions of dollars in your income, so it's worth doing, is what I'm saying. So no matter what

skills you have creatively, if you find out how they apply in the world of branding, they're suddenly more valuable. Same skills, but you will be doing it differently, and you'll have the confidence that you're doing it really, really well, and you can explain why. Oh, yeah, I could. Do you want to say one word? Because that was perfect. This is unscripted. Marty's just talking from decades of experience and writing and articulating this. It's very clear to me. I'm trying to imagine myself in the audience right now, listening to this, like, "You mean I could have

a more profound impact on the business? Marty, are you saying there's more to this branding than the logo or the product?" And then it's like you're talking about business, and I can make more money? I can charge for the result or even my involvement? This sounds very exciting. So if they're watching this and they're in the traditional graphic design space, and they make things visual, what are some easy ways to just get started in this? Well, should I drive to learn how to write? Do I have to take a business course or get a business

degree? Point me in the right direction. Maybe not the whole plan, but just help me out. You know, the business degree is interesting. I've talked to some people who sort of learned how to do their craft, and then they've taken business, like MBA classes, and I think that's really helped a lot. But you have to figure out how to put those together because you're not going to hear anything about design in an MBA class—nothing, zero, zilch. They don't want to think about it, right? Yeah. So it's your job to get them to think about it.

So that's why I wrote my books. I would just say start there. Anybody else who writes books like mine—if there are that many people—but where they're trying to connect creativity and business, you have to connect them. You can figure this out yourself, but I think it helps to get inspired by it and get a few principles under your belt, and then suddenly the world will open up for you and you go, "Oh my God, it's like I'm really powerful if I understand what I'm doing." Right? Yeah. Paul Rand, the famous graphic designer, told me that

when I did this magazine. I heard a critique; I did this for five years until it almost killed me. And sort of similar ideas: how can I bring designers closer to being masterful? Yeah, like, you know, how do I teach them about business? How do we talk more about the ideas behind design instead of just the look and feel of it? Yeah. And when I did the first issue, I sent it to Paul Rand, who was old at this time. He was—I didn't know it—but he would only live a few months after that. Allah. And

he looked at the magazine and he says, "Yeah." Yeah, that's good. You’ve got some good people in here. If I were you, I would just only show good work; don’t show any bad work. Don’t show crap like those other magazines. It’s just, you know, do it. He’s kind of like that cigar-chewing, rough sort of person. He says, “You’ve got to teach designers what they’re doing.” That’s what he said, and I thought, “Gosh, that’s right.” I mean, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and nobody ever gave me that advice before. I did get some

really good advice when I was a young designer. I went to a poster biennial in Colorado where they have this annual (no, biennial) international poster conference competition, and the winners are there, and you’re meeting these famous people that you know have been in Graphics magazine and so forth. I was just really excited to have won an award and be talking to those people. I ran into, you know, or I’ll have our plates of food, and we’re sort of schmoozing and everything, and I ran into this old guy. He seemed like he was probably 90, but

you know—he’s probably only 70. I was pretty young—25 or something. He says, “So, you’re, uh, what do you do? You’re like a designer?” “Yeah, I was a designer. I used to art direct Graphics magazine when it first started.” I said, “Whoa, I think I’ve seen your name before.” He goes, “Oh yeah, you know, let me—I’m almost retired. I mean, I’m still working and everything. I love it, but let me just give you—young—let me give you a piece of advice.” And I said, “Okay.” He said, “Okay, just kind of telling you one or two things about

how you work.” I said, “All right.” He says, “Well, so you work at a desk or a table?” I said, “Yeah, yeah. I have a table with a drawing board on it.” He says, “That’s good.” “Okay, is the table like up against the wall—like you’re facing the wall—or is it out in the middle?” I said, “Well, it’s kind of like it’s on one side of it against the wall, and then it’s sticking out into the space.” He said, “Okay. Oh yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Okay, so here’s my advice: when you finish your sketch or

your drawing or your work—whatever you’re working on—get up and go to the other side of the table.” I said, “Yeah, just—oh, that’s it?” It took me about a minute to be like, “Uh-oh, all right, I get it. Look at it from the other point of view.” And he goes, “Exactly. Mmm, exacto. He says, 'French'.” So, I just thought that was charming and wonderful, and I thought, “You know, that’s a great metaphor for really what we should be doing. We have to look at our work from the reader’s point of view, the user’s point of view,

the client’s point of view. We cannot look at it just from our own point of view; it’s just not going to get us anywhere. We have to look at it from a different point of view.” So, I think that stuck in my mind for a long time, and eventually, that’s why I started testing my work. I wanted to make sure that I actually nailed it because it’s going to get judged, right? Sooner or later it’s going to be judged in the marketplace. So what if I could get judged before it goes into the marketplace and

correct it? We’re going to get into more of that. I just want to make sure the program or the YouTube community that’s tuning in to watch Jonah and Mark are checking out your questions, and the questions that are relevant to what we’re talking about we will bring up to Marty. Now, this idea of testing is going to make a lot of sense in a little bit, but before we get there, we’re going to do like a Quentin Tarantino-style edit here. We’re going to take you back to Santa Barbara, and then you moved to Silicon Valley

at some point. I think you said you spent 15 years in Santa Barbara, and basically the only listing under graphic design in the Yellow Pages—young people will know what we’re talking about, but I know what you’re talking about. You decided to move to Palo Alto, and you’re going to work there. I think something special is happening with Steve Jobs and Apple and all that kind of stuff. Take us—what made you go out there? How did you relocate your business? How did you get business? I want to know. It was such a wrenching change for my

wife and me and our daughter because we lived in Santa Barbara. And even though it was very difficult from a business standpoint, it was beautiful from a living standpoint, and then we had to leave that to make enough money to send our daughter to college eventually, you know? So that was tough. But we just weren’t getting anywhere. So, yeah, I started hearing a lot about Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and it seemed like not a big thing to me at the time, you know? But then I talked to a few people who were investors and stuff,

and they were saying, “No, no. Silicon Valley is like hot, hot, hot. It’s like—and at the time we were in a recession; the rest of the world was in a recession. Silicon Valley’s hot?” “You’re kidding me!” “No, yeah, I mean, you don’t know what’s going on there.” So, I started just looking around at what companies were up there. I mean, there was no Internet or anything, so there was no way to easily find this out. Were they even computers? I mean, one year we thought, “Well, the reason I wanted to move is because the Apple

Macintosh—well, it’s almost ready. It was ready to come.” Okay? They had to—I saw the Lisa. Okay, Apple’s team brought the Lisa to Santa Barbara in this trade show that… Had like three booths, and they were all just these, like, little desktop computers. Then, they had this beautiful one with the beautiful graphics, and I went, "Oh my God, where did this come from? Palo Alto, right? Silicon Valley?" Yeah, so I started looking at, you know, what companies were up there, and I saw all these, like, Atari was up there and Hewlett-Packard, and then I started looking

and finding them on the map, and I think these are all within, like, I don't know, five square miles—all of these companies. I think these are the clients that, you know, they're right there. All I have to do is, like, move in and say, "I'm here," you know? And say that's what we did, and it was just that easy. I mean, we started with a phone number only. That's just a testament; you could get a phone number that looked like it was from that area. Yeah, it really rang in your, you know? That's so, that

was a nice tricky little thing. So I'd get calls—alright, I'd cold call companies and say, "Can I show my portfolio?" Because that's what you did, and they'd say, "Yeah," you know? So I called Apple, I said, "Yeah, yeah." So I said, "Can I show my portfolio?" And I got, like, the creative team—they said, "Yeah, come on in. How about Monday morning?" So I get in the car, you know, Sunday night, and I drive up, and I stay over at a friend's house. You still can't know that, right? Because they've got to think I'm local or

they're not going to give me any work. So I just drive up, and I stay overnight, and I get there, and they forgot about the appointment. I mean, I only have to drive; that didn't mean anything to them, right? To me, it was like everything, right? So, you know, but I made that work. I landed Sun Microsystems; I got Atari—I was wonderful. We're from Atari, from Santa Barbara, and then I installed one of my former employees up there in a little one of those, like, you know, workspace offices where you get a cubicle. Yeah, and

she was doing more work than I was getting in Santa Barbara. So I said, "Okay, that says it; we got to be there." Yeah, we packed up the kid and the parakeets and the cats and the dogs, drove up. There was this horrible, horrible thing. The daughter hated it; she was just starting high school. Oh, it's just like, she just was really wrenching. Yeah, but as soon as we got there, it was like the roof just filled with work. And, you know, all I had to do was say, "Look, this is where I started to

realize specialization." It was a really powerful case. I mean, I just said, "This is a big lie, you know, sort of fake it till you make it." That's—I told clients, "Look, all I do is high-tech; that's all I do. Other designers, they'll do a little high-tech; then they'll do a museum. You know, they mean; they're just not dedicated to this. I'm all about high-tech." Like I had done two jobs for tech companies, but I could show those two jobs. Yeah, so I—and they said, "Hey, that's great, 'cause nobody really, you know, takes this stuff seriously."

And I got a lot of work. And then, I said, "This is totally working, right?" And my income quadrupled the first year. Yeah, so all I did is bring the same as I had to a different place—literally—yeah, into a situation where there was a framework for it. So, you did a couple of really smart business things. May I ask, like, at that time, how old were you? Your daughter's going into high school, so she's like 15 years old. Yes, back then, I must have been 30—early 30s. Early thirties? Okay, so here you are in your

early 30s; you realize you got to go where the client is—they ain't coming to you. You also did something that most designers would never do: you had the guts to pick up the phone and just call people and say, "Hey, I’m in town. I ever did." I'm just, you know—they say that if you're running a business, you're probably an extrovert, and I think you need to be. But I think a lot of designers are not born extroverts, so they have to learn to be extroverted or fake it. Yeah, like just force themselves to be extroverted

when needed, right? And that's—that's what I did. But you know what makes that a lot easier? It's if you have something that the person on the other side of the fence or the phone or the computer really wants. It's not a cold call; it's a very warm call, so you just have to have that thing, mm-hmm, and be able to express it. So, you know, so I would say, "Look, you don't know me, but I'm an award-winning designer." Like I thought that meant something—maybe you did at the time. Yeah, and I only do high-tech and

I'm doing identities and advertising and just like everything for small start-up technology companies, and I just, like, love to show you what I've done for X and X, you know, Sun Microsystems, Atari, Apple, because I was involved in the launch of the Macintosh Plus. So I had some things to show there, and it was like, "Yeah, come on over." So there was just really not this sort of distance like there is now. Oh—and like there was for me, if forever until I had something I could specialize in and say, "Look, this thing is what I

own. Right? Nobody else does this; if that's what you want, we need to meet." And I would—yeah, okay, or they would’ve said, "No, we don't need anything now." And that's fine, right? Later they might. I have so many questions about what was your—what was your instinct, or what drove you to... Say, of all the things I can sell, it seems obvious now, but back then, I’m just gonna tell people I do high-tech, and I only have two things that are on my belt. I mean, it’s pretty awesome that you figure that out because, again, just

like you're, and I’m seeing patterns here. You go to Santa Barbara, and I’m holding graphics on. I’m just gonna take over this category, and then you go to Palo Alto. It’s like a lot of computer companies—I should just tell mom high-tech. I mean, where do I come from, and how did you know? Like that’s what I want to say because so many people are afraid that by staking a claim or specializing, they’re limiting all these opportunities when it’s actually the opposite. I couldn’t have said it better. I mean, it’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? So, you know,

as a designer, you’re creative, and people who are creative, like, they do lots of things. Yes, I mean, they want to be Leonardo da Vinci. I mean, they really want to be Renaissance people! Yeah, and it’s fun to do that, but the world doesn’t want that from you. And so I had to understand that, and I think I understood it like in the first 10 years of being a designer. I’d watch how illustrators got famous. So, in the old days, I don’t think there are any illustrators of the way they were then, but you know,

you had all these magazines, and you know there’s Playboy magazine—you always wanted to be in that one because it got a lot of readership. Yeah, so an illustrator if he would settle on one style, one look, yeah, was unique and cool. And then that illustrator got hot, and within five years was dominating it, and then had another five years until they would be out of business basically, because everyone had seen everything they could do, and it just—the world moves on. So there’s like a 10-year career, yeah, that they could—and if they wanted to change after

that and adopt another style, they could probably have a second act. But I’m thinking, well, I don’t want to be the kind of person that has a ten-year career, but I have to admit they really get successful fast by doing one thing. And I said, what if I applied that to something else about my business, like the kind of work I did or the kind of—in this case, Silicon Valley—case, the kind of business that I specialized in so that I get a lot of word-of-mouth? So if people say, “Oh, you need to design it. This

guy did our whole everything; he did the whole thing. It’s like amazing; he brought us from nowhere to being highly visible.” You got it? “Here, have my guy!” Yeah, and so that was my original idea when I got there, and then I found out that actually Silicon Valley was moving past that really quickly, and it was so big, getting so big so fast that that was no longer specialty. It was— that was too general to say, “No, I do identity and everything for a company,” like I do all their communication, because software companies didn’t talk

to hardware companies, who didn’t talk to, you know, chip companies, didn’t talk to—you know what I mean? They were all separate little universes, and you had to pick one. So eventually, I decided that I would be the guy you go to if you need retail software packaging, which was just starting out. It was just starting—and it was like I really didn’t want—I want to specialize, but I could see why it worked, you know? You know, it’s like—it just makes the decision so easy for clients. They go, “Well, we need this; we got this checklist. We

need the package. Who’s gonna do that? Who does these things? Joe, go find that. Go find the package designer,” and they go out and get Landor or somebody, and I say, “No, I’m gonna be the guy that does it.” And that means I have to do only that, or at least that’s what I say—right? If I do other things, I’m just not gonna show those things. I’m just gonna master this, and I’m gonna be obviously mastering it so that I can prove it, and then I’ll get it all for as long as that lasts. Mm-hmm,

so that’s what I did, and that worked amazingly well. And it was only about two years before we were charging more than Landor and more than anybody, actually, because Landor didn’t know what they were doing and couldn’t—you couldn’t explain why they were doing what they were doing. I went to get into all that. Mark, you flagged me—you're like, “Make a little signal, and then I’ll acknowledge you. Just give me one second.” I do want to talk about this a little bit just to kind of re-articulate what you’ve said. There’s a lot of stuff to absorb

here. So, you started out kind of broad as, “I’m a graphic designer, communication, advertising guy,” and you thought that was specialized enough. “No, maybe it’s just identity designer, or maybe it’s just for high-tech industry,” and then it became “software retail packaging.” You just—you went near all business—software business, “business software retail packaging guy.” So, if somebody needed that, there was one game in town—that was your game, yeah? Can you dominate it? And you win against—and people don’t know this—Landor’s such an enormous operation, a multinational corporation, right? It’s just high prices—too high prices. Okay, the market—we have

a question, either on branding or specialization or something like that? Go ahead, Mark. “Effectiveness of branding in terms of ROI.” Okay, that’s a good question! Yeah, so traditionally people say you can’t—you can’t measure it because it’s too soft; it’s—it’s too amorphous. But you can measure it in terms of engagement with customers, and you can measure that from year to year, and it’s cheap, and it’s almost free to do. Any company wants to do it. My book, The Brand Flip, has a really good formula for that. And it's called the brand ladder. Mmm, it measures how

people move up from how they regard your company—so how your reputation is doing. So there it is, there's the brand ladder. Yeah, so Chris, what's the crime with a ladder? The bottom of the ladder is satisfaction, right? So our customers are satisfied with the company and what they put out. Well, that's a pretty low bar these days, right? Yes, satisfied means, "Yeah, they did what I asked," and you know, "Maybe I'll buy it again." It feels like that. Then from there, you go up to what? The next step up is delight. Delight is when you’re

going, "Wow, I didn’t know it’d be this good! This is really cool, and I'm gonna tell my friends!" Alright, so you can measure that. The next one is engagement. So engagement is a customer going, "I love this company, and I really feel like I belong with this brand, with this product." Let’s say Apple: "I really am an Apple person! I really just buy everything they come out with because I know it’s gonna be good." Even if I've never even thought of that category—here comes an Apple Watch; I didn’t even know I wanted a watch! I'm

gonna get it, right? So that’s an engaged customer. Then from there, you have three things under engagement I want to point out to you, because I had the book in front of me. I'm a genius here! Automatic repurchase is how you can tell. You use that question: "They launch anything? I'm in! I'm bought in." The emotional attachment— you've talked about this in many of your books about how when Steve Jobs passed away, there were, like, individuals crying, eulogies, and all kinds of stuff. There was an emotional attachment. You don’t feel that way about a lot

of companies. And the sense of belonging: "I am an Apple tribe guy," and I know my PC friends—"I'm a Cristo tribe guy," right? I like that. And so what you’re doing, though, is you’re going beyond that. You’re at the top level. Yes, here we are at the top! The top of the brand ladder is empowerment. Talk to counter that. So that’s where as someone who's joined the brand—which is what you do with brands; you don't buy them, you join them—it's saying, "I don’t know what I would do without Chris Do helping me understand all this

stuff. I mean, I wouldn’t be making as much money, I wouldn’t be as happy. I'm totally about it! My life wouldn’t be as good if you took that brand away from me." So that’s at the very top. And your customers are gonna be at all these different levels, but you want to see how many have moved up to the top. So that’s a way to measure the overall success of the brand. Now, as far as your part in the brand, that’s a little more difficult. You have to, like, decide what it is you’re contributing to

make that happen on the brand ladder and then explain that. So a lot of it’s just being logical about it and just saying, "I know what we're trying to do together here. Some of my part’s gonna help." And so it’s a bit of explaining. Mmm-hmm. And if you know enough to know more than that—more than what your part is—now you’re becoming more valuable! Now you're someone to listen to, right? It would be fair to say, like, when you engage with the company that wants to enlist your services, that you probably want to establish a baseline,

some kind of metric. Like, let's measure something first and let’s make an effort toward improving that. Whether—like right now, let's just say they’re at the lower rung of the ladder, and like we just have satisfaction. We’re just barely doing what it is that we tell people we’re gonna do. We want to move enough to delight. And then you come up with ideas on how to add a little surprise. Yes, so you go beyond expectations, and then you can measure that—maybe customer surveys, satisfaction things, you rank things. So the first thing is to have this language.

Mmm-hmm. Alright, so a lot of my books are just about creating—and that’s why I have a dictionary. It’s creating a language so that you can talk with business people in a way they’ll understand, and it doesn’t mean using their language, but it’s using sort of a language that everybody understands, and that you could easily explain. That makes sense to both sides. So if you talk about engagement, they’re gonna get that! Yeah, and they’re gonna understand how engagement leads to customer loyalty, and loyalty leads to higher profits. Mmm-hmm. But if you can talk about higher profits

too—I mean, that’s what branding is about! Branding is a way to get more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price, and every business owner can appreciate that! And then you just have to say, "Here’s how we’re gonna help ya." But already, you’ve given them some information that they didn’t know! They didn’t know branding was supposed to do that! Right? So, I mean, that’s what my Level C program is trying to do: to teach all that language to people, and little by little, they absorb it so they can talk about it

without, you know, in their sleep. Mmm-hmm. And it makes sense to people who are actually gonna hire them. Yeah, a lot of stuff to process here! In case you guys are joining us, who is this wise gentleman sitting across from me, and who am I? Why am I reacting to him in this way? I am gonna just admit I’m a Marty Neumeier fanboy for sure! I think I have almost all of your books. I had to track down this through a used bookseller, and I was like, "I’ll get it any which way I can get

it," because I knew you were coming here. I'm like, "Let me track it down." Yeah, this is, I don't know, maybe you can get these like used on the gray market—maybe eBay, maybe, maybe. Yeah, yeah, this is a little dictionary, paper dictionary that was commissioned by Google because they wanted to use all my language of my system, my understanding of branding for their clients, their big high-roller clients. Yeah, and so they started it like a little school, and my dictionary is the text that they use for that. So I updated it from the earlier version,

put in a lot of cool terms. Since that, that one's pretty interesting, but I have an even newer one, more updated, that you can get on Amazon. So it's, yeah, okay, and that is linked—the dictionary of brand from A to Z. The dictionary that's called Brand A to Z, branded easy. Here we go! And you can actually get it free if you just sign up on my website—just subscribe, okay? We'll include that link in a little bit. As I was talking, Marty has authored eight books and probably has a couple of more in him, but

we've talked about The Brand Gap, and this is—I refer to this a lot. I also love Zag, and right now I'm just like rereading this like a gazillion times. This is The Brand Flip, and we're talking because some of you guys are probably super excited about hearing the way Marty articulates branding and our role as creative people and what we can do. There is a brand masterclass that you started out in Europe, in London, and you're bringing it here back to America. If you guys weren't able to sign up because the tickets sold out pretty

quickly for Los Angeles, the next time is in Philly. Diamond, do you know the date? We should have it, Andy. Yeah, if you go to Level CCC, all the dates are there, so Philly's the next one. Yep, and there are seats there. And then if you want to be a little more exotic and go to London, mmm, it's a fun place to do it. Yeah, and in London, we're going to do Masterclass One followed by Latin Masterclass Two, the first time that we've done that one. And then after London, we're going to Dublin in Ireland,

so that'll be fun. Yeah, I love both those locations, by the way. Yeah, and we'll get back into this a little bit. I'll put a pin on this and talk about the five levels of Level C, but I do want to read a little bit of something from The Brand Flip here because a lot of times you read books and you feel like a little bit smarter, and you learn a few new words. But what I love about your books is that I can apply what it is I'm reading. They're all frameworks built in, and

there's a lot to think about. From The Brand Gap, I think it was the only in a statement where there's like this structure, and I started to use it. Now, I have to say you're a far superior writer, and this is not like false modesty because when I read it, it makes sense. Everything clicks; every example you gave was like also so good. And then you driving the ball 300 yards, and then you can't do it on your own the next day. No, I'm not even that good. I just watch you do it, and then

I went to swing and went right into the lake or wherever away. But there's some great frameworks. Now, we're looking at our community and the brand that we're building around The Futur. I remember having a management meeting. I turned to the teams like, "Let's stop talking about click funnels and marketing and retargeting and all that kind of stuff." Yes, we do need to do that, but I want to talk about how we empower our community, the pro group. I've made it like our mantra that I sit there and think about how we can achieve these

five things that you talk about in the book for our community. I want to go over it: personal growth—how do we help our community grow? How can we give them emotional support? That was number two. How can we help them to achieve business success, make more money, charge a higher rate, do fewer pictures? Whatever it is, we want to help you grow in your business. Social status— and that's not something we think about—how do we celebrate the people who are doing a great job and help them rise in esteem among their peers? And to achieve

fulfillment. So you guys, if you get nothing from our talk today, remember those five things. Whether you're a solopreneur, if you run a big firm, or if you're managing a team of a hundred thousand people, think about your customers in that way. And if you can do that, that's the top of the rung—empowerment, right? So, go back to the definition of what a brand is: it's a person's gut feeling. That's not a product, service, or company. So that means it's not what you say it is; it's what they say it is. And once you understand

that and start thinking about what that means for you, it changes everything. So that's the big sort of flip: you, in your mind, have to realize it's not about you, it's about them and what they achieve. So if you have customers or clients, think about how their life is transformed by what you're doing in some small way, or how their company is transformed. And you've got to be aiming at that all the time, not aiming at your own success. You have to worry about that, but that's not what's really going to make you successful—it's doing

something big for your clients. And once they understand that they can't live without you, all things are possible. Mmm, okay, let's see. Marco, is there another good question? And thanks for kicking us off with that question. To prompt a unless you find like a really good question, 'cause I have more things I want to... okay, I'm gonna prioritize my questions over your questions. We'll just keep going here. So, Marty, you—before we went live—we were talking a little bit about how you were the reluctant salesperson, but you did it and you achieved success. Like, even in

the first year, you quadrupled your business. But you shared with me something that we have to recreate for the audience here. You talked about at the Neumeier Design Team, your pitch was, “I've got a presentation on 20 ways to sell more software.” This sounds genius! Tell me about it, and who could refuse this at this point? Yeah, this is a breakthrough for me. This is kind of... it's the perfect question after what you just said about, like, how are you going to do something for... you know, what are you doing to change your customers, our

clients? I really wasn't fully getting it at that stage, but I didn't know I had to specialize. So I took up the specialty of software packaging and figured out every part of what a software package needed to do, and ways of measuring it, and ways of testing it, and all that because I had it. I put together a typical portfolio showing, "Here's all the great work we did, and here's what we did on this one. We did this for this company," and so forth. And then here's some of the results we got. For instance, for

Apple, they said... the president of Clarisse, which was Apple's software division. I asked him how it went, and he goes, “Are you kidding? No one told you?” I said, “No.” He said, “We got a 40% increase in sales across 15 products without changing one product.” Hmm... Wow! I went, “That sounds really good.” He goes, “Yeah, that's 40% with no extra work—an extra 40! You don't know how much money that is. Like, I'm a hero!” And I said, “Can I quote you?” His name is Bill Campbell—just a wonderful guy—he does, “Yeah, you should. Yes, definitely quote

me!” So I had that slideshow kind of put together, and I showed it to a guy who had... really nothing in common with. He was completely a marketing guy and a retail consultant, helping software and hardware retailers to sell stuff. Like, it’s just not my world, even though my packages are in those stores. I really don't think about it the way he thinks about it, so I said, “Would you kind of look at my slideshow? Because I think it'd be great if you recommended us to some of your contacts, ’cause you know all these retailers.”

He goes, “Yeah, I've got it.” So I looked at it, and he didn't say a word throughout the whole thing. At the end, he goes, “Well, where's the ending?” I said, “What do you mean? I showed you all the stuff.” He says, “You didn't tell me like how much money this is, how much it costs.” I said, “Well, you know, we designers don't...” Yeah, it's... it's all, you know, we—as designers—you know, it depends on the assignments, right? “No, no, just tell me how much it costs and how much it just does for me,” right? I

said, “Well, Bill Campbell said, you know, that they got a 40% increase.” And he goes, “Are you kidding me? Just—that's your ending right there! If you don't say that, you're out of your mind! What's wrong with you?” So I realized another client had said, “Look, we've got... we do— you did a series of products for us and we got a 500% increase after that!” Wow! Good! So I started collecting those and using them to prove the value of design. Yeah, it's like, this is a measurable thing. You know, you do a package, it was— the

product was selling X and now it's 10 times X or 5 times X, so that’s something you can put in there, and you should. Does it really tell you that much about why that happened, though? It doesn't tell you anything, but business people aren't as geeky as you think about business. They just want something that they can tell each other, so give them something—give them something true that sounds like a business result, uh-huh, and you're all happy—and just keep learning how to do it better. My business coach used to tell me that they need a

repeatable story, and you gave them plenty—40% increase, 500% increase. Those are some stories! They forget the rest of the presentation. You just go back and look, "We need you! This guy, they didn't change a single community. Sold 500%. I think an important part of that particular pitch, aside from here the results, was—and here's how much it costs to get those results. I was smart enough to realize that if those results were, like, amazing—I don't know if a landowner could get those kinds of results. I don't think so because I don't think they've thought about it

very much, like how to actually accomplish what they needed to accomplish. See, if I was going to say, "Where were we? Take me back." I went off on that side road. I don't know where we were at either, so let me think here. I was talking about the repeatable story, yeah, and about the impact you were able to create—40 percent, 500 percent—that they forget the rest of the story, and this is kind of like what you need. Yeah, it's like, so the main thing I need to tell you is I forgot it. So come back.

Okay, yeah, but that was just a huge, you know, experience for me to see that you didn't need to be the biggest company to compete—to just wipe out the biggest company. You just need to be so specialized that they couldn't afford to do the same thing. Yeah, and so the rule is the bigger the market, the more you need to specialize because there's more competition. You'll do better if you do less. Okay, you guys hear that? The bigger the market, the more you need to specialize, right? The smaller the market, like when I was in

a little town and I was the only designer, I had to do everything. I was not a country doctor; you know they needed me to do everything. And sure, I sewed up all the business because there wasn’t much competition, right? But you know, it only went so far. So, yeah, it's all about that. If you want to compete in the big world and make good money, you need to specialize more. Mm-hmm. And that’s the counterintuitive thing. You think, “Oh, well then, I’m ruling out all this business that I’m getting now. I can’t do that anymore

because now I’m just going to do this little sliver.” So I would encourage you to think about it in a different way: think about it as if there’s enough money in that category and you got a lot of it; and let’s say that category is growing, right? That could be huge! You can grow with the category. So I just think that’s the way to go: specialize. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t do other kinds of work. So all you people who are worried about all the clients you’re going to have to say no to—don’t worry

about it. Just take that look. Yeah, just don’t talk about it; just take it. You got it; it’s profitable. Talk about the one thing you can do that nobody else can do and talk about it in a really clear, powerful way. Make sure they understand you’re the only one that knows how to do this, and you’d be surprised at what that does for you. You’ll still get other work from that that you just want to talk about. Yeah, okay, so if I had a software company and they did the software, they might say, “Ken, like

Apple said, can you do the Claris logo for us?” Yeah, charge a lot of money for that because it's Apple, right? Think: I don’t like to make sure it works all around the world. Yeah, that means traveling around the world and testing it and all the kinds of things we did. So it was probably, I don’t know, half a million dollars to do this little logo that you could just buy for $40. Mm-hmm. But it was the right type and it was the right solution, and they were all really happy and felt very strong about

it. So it was valuable. We made a lot of money; we just never made a big deal out of that because it’s not what we do. It’s not our niche. You were talking earlier about segmentation and how different companies don’t talk to verticals of other things; like software doesn’t talk to hardware and hardware doesn’t talk to retail. So when you are able to pick a lane, which you did—business, retail, software, packaging—if that sounded like you, you were the guy to call. And you could basically outdo a firm that was probably 100 times your size and

start to charge. And I want to talk about this a little bit: how much were you able to charge for this business software retail packaging back in the day? Right, so allowing for inflation—I mean, it would be a lot more now—but probably triple it, and that’s how much we would beat. Okay, so guys, keep that in mind: take these numbers and guess that—triple. Yeah, so we started out doing packaging at the same prices as other firms that weren't specialists; you know, like Landor and Primo Anjali—lots of food packaging and really beautiful packaging, but not specialized

in software. It took us a couple of tries to get up to that level where they were, and that was at about $10,000 per package. Okay, it’s basically six panels of a box and whatever goes on that, and for us it meant also testing. So, well actually, at the time we didn’t test; we didn’t know about that. Apple got us into that; they forced us to do it. It was the best thing I’ve ever been forced to do. So, $10,000, and then we started getting up to $15,000. And as we got more, when we could

say, “Look, all we do is software packaging, here’s five examples—was probably every one we’ve ever done. Here’s just a section, a cross-section.” And so we’d get more and we could charge more. Now, once we got to the point where the retail stores were recommending us; like you know, a software company would go into CompUSA or Fry’s Electronics and they’d say, “Look, we’d like to get into the store,” and they’d say, “Well, the package really— we find packaging is very important. Nobody can really test your software, and so if the package isn’t really— doesn’t pop on

the shelf right and it doesn’t look like yours, you really know what you’re doing.” And the reason they thought they knew what they were doing is because we’d been in there, hmm, in Silicon Valley, testing them and talking with the managers and the salespeople. We indoctrinated them over a few years, and so they now had all the answers, right? Yeah. Oh no, you’ve got to have the name really big on the front, you’ve got to have some symbol; you can’t put all those screenshots on the front of the package. Nobody wants to see; they don’t

need to know; they have that on the back, right? You’re just not doing it right. So, okay, that's what we should do. They’d write out our phone number; that’s fantastic. And they’d say, “Use these guys,” like a prescription. So they’d come to us and they’d say, “Oh, we’ve got to use you guys. We were told!” Like, I was surprised, right? Okay, so at that point, the price was $60,000. Hmm. Now we’re doing the same work as when we were making a profit at $10,000, but now we’re charging $60. So you see how that works? Now

we are... Also, I got better at it after a while, and we really knew that we could make a lot of money for companies. It was so measurable because it's a package. It's a little more difficult when you're selling logos and trying to get a hundred thousand dollars for a logo when they can get one for, you know, fifteen hundred or something, someplace. But there are ways of doing that. There are so many layers to peel away from this one story, this one example that you have, that I would be remiss not to point out

some of them. Before we went live, you were telling me at the end of the presentation of your carousel slideshow of the 22 ways to sell more software that they would ask you, "So, what's the price?" and you were saying, "Like ten thousand bucks," even though that's more than what you have ever charged. You were doing something very powerful: you were dropping an anchor. Eventually, you got at ten thousand, and then you blew past it, which seems kind of like almost unfathomable that you could take on land or own one section of it and do

6x of what they were charging and beyond, and just keep going. You went in; you were so well-known that you actually went into these big retail spaces, and you educated them on what you need to do, so much so that you became the de facto authority. They were using your language to tell potential manufacturers, "This is not going to work here," and you guys don't know this, but retail stores, these big chains, have a lot of power because shelf space is very valuable to them. They put a dud on there, and they're not making money.

It behooves them to say, "We're not going to accept this. Go hire a Neumeier Design Corporation; that's who you need to work with." Amazing! So now they're doing your selling for you. When you specialize in your field, as good as Marty is, people sell for you. Incredible! Yeah, and you know that language thing is really important. Having the words and keeping it simple, and making how you express your work memorable is super important. So that's one of the things I try to do in my books: give people that language so they can just take it

and use it. I mean, a lot of it I took from somebody else. Mhm. And talking about software companies, one of them that we had, we ended up doing, I don't know, 50 packages for them. They just kept, after a while, testing packages with no software in them to see if there was a market if they built that software. Oh, this is like early prototyping here! Yeah, it's like product prototyping. Right? "Here's a product; would you like this product?" And people, if they went, "Oh yes!" they would go; they would program it. They would build

that product. So we were doing a lot for them, and after a while, I got more and more comfortable with the people I was working with there. I talked with the head of the whole product division, and I said, "So we've been doing a lot of work together. This has been great; it's fun! We like working with you guys, and I just hope it goes on forever. Now why did you make that decision to use us when you didn't even know we were in the beginning? Right? What was it?" My contact said it was the

"Zag." I said, "This AG. Remember what you said? When everybody's zigging, zag!" So, okay. Yeah, because I just remembered that story. It's like, right, that, what's that word? Stuck in his head. And I want a title that'll stick in people's heads, so it's "Zag." And Seth Godin said in his review of it, if you read it, he says, "Before we even read the book, you know one thing: this is the best title of any business book ever!" So it's all about how you name things and how you express things in your work. If your work

is specialized and you do something that nobody else does, or do it in a way that nobody else does, you've got to name those parts. You have to name the things you're doing, and that'll help you sell it. You don't even know when it's working, but you find out later; usually, it's like because, like you say, they tell people, they tell other people. Yeah, I have one little quick question, and then Mark, you have somebody lined up here to give me a signal. Take me back to this awkward Marty doing this sales pitch because you

shared that when you picked up the phone and wanted to get one of these meetings and talk to them about the 22 ways to sell more software. Take me through that pitch. Like, how did you do this? Take military; are you guys ready for this? You know? Yeah, the dial. Yeah, come on. Yes! So push the buttons. Yeah! Like I pushed in the hang-up just like it was so hard. But I got somebody on the phone, and I picked up the phone because they probably didn't know it was a sales call, and they're used to

not getting that. If you get their number, it's hard to get the number, but yeah, they'll pick it up. And I'll say, "Okay, hey, you don't know me. I'm Marty Neumeier, and I've got a—I do software packaging—and you're in the software business, and I'm the guy who has kind of helped shape how a software package works in stores, and I think we should know each other. I have this slideshow called '22 Ways to Sell More Software,' and you know, no rush, whenever you're ready, whenever you think you're interested in this, ayah, we'll bring over a

slideshow called '22 Ways to Sell More Software,' and I'll share with everybody for free, and you'll know all my secrets." “Tuesday? Yeah, 15 people, good! Yeah, I'll be there. See him. It's like they were like, you know, you don't get any feedback like, ‘Hey, that would be great.’ You just get, ‘Okay, Tuesday,’ and how many people can I bring? ‘15.’ Okay, great. And then be there to be 30. So, huge room of people, and God, given the slideshow, and with all the questions, they would go on for like three hours just talking. It was a

45-minute slideshow that ended up three hours because they want to know everything about it. Now, once you get to that stage, who else are they going to hire? I mean, it's like if they go to somebody else, another company, Pentagram or Landor, and they ask the same questions like, ‘What do you think about what should happen on the side of a box?’ or ‘What do you do with the top of the box?’ and they don't know, well, they can't hire these guys. Or they say, ‘How do you know your design is going to work in

the marketplace?’ and they go, ‘Well, because we are experienced. We've been doing this for a long time.’ They'd go, ‘No, we're not going to do it.’ Neumeier's design team, they test. So, we just basically sewed it up, and then when you get to the point where you own that category and there's nobody else that can compete with you, that affects profit margins. The price goes up, you know, if it's valuable. The amount of money they were making in software— I mean, it was really expandable, from hardly anything to billions of dollars. So, this is not

a big investment for that; it's a job, it's huge for me. It was like I couldn't believe that they were paying me this much money. Yeah, so I went from being like broke all the time, like most designers, to being able to buy another house, and to, you know, upgrade my Toyota Tercel to a Honda. People think, like, boomers, they got it made. Well, you know, yeah, now sure. But, yeah, you know, it took a long time, and you have to learn how to do it. But you can do it! That's the whole thing. It's

not magic; it's just like figuring it all out, trying things, trial and error, putting it together, finding out who you are, what you love, getting it out there—make sure that you know everything there is about that. Life gets better. Yeah, I'm going to say this just so that everybody's watching: you're probably going to want to rewind this and loop this part where Marty does his sales pitch and study it. Study it and figure out his framework, his process, because it's the most natural, true, genuine way to do a sales call that I've ever heard. This

is so— you were like, I wish this was one of those competition shows where I could hit the golden buzzer and the confetti rains out on you, balloons and everything. That was pitch perfect! I wanted a plot, but I didn't want to break your story there. So you guys— listen to that part, see how he structured it. High piece of content, high value. You know how good he is because when they don't ask you any questions like, ‘Tuesday,’ because to open up their appointment book, that's a big freaking deal to say, ‘Can we invite other

people?’ and all the executives taken offline that are these highly paid executives to listen to something? Yes, three hours, right? And with rapt attention. When you go from 45 minutes to three hours, you know pretty much the fish. You want the fishing where the fish are. Jumped in the boat and your veggies are jumping, and that's time. And actually, that's the way you want the scene. You don't want to have to sell or push. Pushing is a tell for clients. ‘Oh yeah, they really want the job’—yeah, they're just saying anything to get it. But I

never— like, no. I'd say, you know, we're not for everybody; that's really expensive. So, part of the thing is when I showed them the price, I wanted it to be more than I even wanted to get, because I wanted to, like, make sure they understood that this is super valuable. Right? And we can always argue about the price later if they say, ‘We loved your work; you're way out of our budget.’ And then say, ‘Well, how much way out are we? You know, it’s like ten thousand over?’ Well, what if we compromised? Right? Well, maybe,

but usually, it was more like, ‘We want the best chair, so we have no choice!’ Right? And through specialization and your testing, you were able to spot and see patterns that these other generic firms could not see. That's why you can say, ‘We always put the screenshots in the back; this is what's on the front, these are the colors; this is what works with authority because we've tested it.’ Okay, that was perfect. Let's segue to another question. Mark, take it away. To be a brand specialist, what do you recommend so that they could up their

game? We already answered that question, and you touched on how they're wondering, kind of like Gala, as they progress. You know, like, I'm saying for Marty, I'm going to say it for Marty: the first thing you do is you buy every book that Marty’s written, and you read them, and you reread them, and you highlight them and take notes, and you start trying to incorporate this and you get the language. Now, this book, “Brand A Tizzy,” is new to me, so I need to go through this because you can see that Marty is very specific

and particular about language and words. And when you use the right words to describe something, you communicate. The other person, they know what they're talking about. So, yeah, I think that's what I would suggest to you: start, read my books in order. You can go online and Amazon and you can see them.” dates when they were published. Yep, the brand gap is the first one, then zag. It's actually the order that my brand teaching program follows; that same order starts with a general idea of what branding is. I sell people fit, and then it drills

into strategy, and then it opens up a little bit and so forth. Once you've gotten everything you can out of the books, take it as far as you can, and then maybe sign up for a master class. Yeah, we like to have people that have read the books; not just come out of the blue because they might not pass right past with us, and that would be very embarrassing. But so far, everybody's read at least one of my books—probably the brand gap—so they're primed for this, and usually, they've been in the field for a few

years, so it's not like they're just out of school or something. Yeah, okay, so we will include a link in the description below with our affiliate link, guys, and the order in which you should read them. I felt like this, and thanks for reminding me of this, it's like I think zag's like the philosophy, the primer, and I'm sorry, it was the brand gap that was the philosophy and the primer, and zag got a little bit more tactical, and like I could get into a little bit more. Zag is about differentiation. What's what makes—just like

I've been talking about—how did I become successful in Silicon Valley? I specialized. So what is that like? So that is actually the bedrock of branding: that difference, a difference that people can believe in. Right? They see it, they understand it, they get it—that this is how you're valuable in the world; this is that lane that you're in. So the question at the center of this book is: "Our brand is the only blank that blanks." There’s the only-ness, only the only. And that's a very high bar to say you're the only anything, but that's what you're

shooting for, and so that's the centerpiece of everything I do right there. So if you just want to go right for the strategy, zag is the book to get. Nothing I do recommend that you understand branding first, so maybe brand gap and zag are really good. When I was writing this, brand gap, the publisher came after me. They said, "We saw you give a talk; we want you to write a book." It hasn't happened to me since, but that was really great. And I said, "Okay, if I have to come up with some ideas, I've

got some thoughts. Let me get back to you." And they flew out to California to talk about it, and I said, "I got two books. I don't know which one to do. I got one that's called the brand gap—oh, that's good—and then I have one called zag—oh, that's good too." And so, I told them a little about it. They said, "Oh, this is an easy thing: you do the brand gap and then you do zag." So I sold two today, two titles in one meeting, and that was the right thing to do. Yeah, because first,

you find out about the general layout—what's the game, what's the playing field of brand? Yeah, where do I fit? Oh, this is kind of cool. And then you get to this part about differentiation, which is the first part of that book, and you know, this is really counterintuitive. I'm not sure I'm getting this; I don't understand how this works. So the zag is the next one to read and explains exactly how it works. And once you've got those two things, you could pretty much build in pretty good shape. And that's more—okay, so the rest is

just… yeah. So I always recommend this because people always ask us the same question: "What course should I take?" I'm like, "You know what? Why don't you look at all the free content or just take small steps: read the books or listen to the podcasts first." There’s a nurse shortcut, guys: read the book, and then you’re primed, and now you know. And when you take the course—and hopefully some of you guys will want to take Marty’s master class that’s happening in Philly and then back to London and then Dublin—participate in that way. And then you

use its layers to just peel it back so that you don’t get overwhelmed. I wouldn’t say to absorb it all at once. Yeah, it’s a lifetime of learning; you know it is, and you’ve got a long life to do this. But I just keep making progress little by little, and make sure you understand whatever you’re learning—really understand and absorb it. Even if it’s just one thing a month, like, I really get that concept, and you remember it all the time, and you add that to your repertoire. Yeah, you’re gonna get there. And if we apply

some of the things that you’re talking about today, even in the way that you learn, I know I probably read brand gap probably twelve times now, maybe more. Exactly. I don’t know; I mean, at some point, the books are gonna fall apart because I’m going over it rather than spread yourself out wide. You can buy these two books, read them, stop, think about it, reread them, because you're gonna pick out new bits that maybe were just too much for you to process the first time. Something else that you talked about: you’ve had a lot of

practice writing because you’ve had years of writing and editing the magazine critique. Right, and I started—I was writing advertising copy and learned how to do that, and it has like, really hard, but I could write a headline, and then I could write maybe 20 words of body copy and make that perfect. So, you know, I just learned a little bit. Critique, though, that’s what really gave me a lot of strength in writing—because, yeah, you know, you have to write 3,000 words in a couple of... Days, yeah, and it has to be good. So, maybe that's

another tip: practice articulating your ideas by writing. Maybe even do public speaking, but at least start writing and formulate the things that you think you've learned. And maybe you can pick up one or two books on business and marketing, and I think you have a pretty good foundation to build your house of branding on, I would think. Mm-hmm. Okay, Mark, are we good with that? Okay, and I think we've—I could sit and talk to you for 14 hours, but I think at some point, you and I, if you have time, I'd love to have lunch

with you as well. How do we wrap this up here? We need to kind of finish it strong, and maybe it's another story—something else you want to talk about? Marty, I want to talk about my latest book because I love it. Yeah, I love writing it. It's different from the ones on the whiteboard. Scramble. Scramble! Scramble! Yeah, so I've been writing these whiteboard books, which are very simplified; the fewer words, the better. Mmm, just get it down to pure gold and illustrate it and make it interesting. And those work great, but I realized that as

you take branding into a more collaborative setting where you've got executives that you're working with, this is advanced branding—not just being a designer but being involved in advising companies. It's a whole different can of worms because you've got a lot of different personalities and people protecting their turf. This is where things go wrong in companies: it's people at the top being Machiavellian, basically—not that they set out to do that, but that's just the way people are. So how do you show how to get through all this complexity, this human complexity? I think the best way

is with a story. So, I decided that I would write up all this brand stuff as a thriller. Mm-hmm. So, it's a business thriller—so a new category. Mm-hmm. It's about a company where the head of the company is young; he has only been in the job for a year. He started out as an architect, so he's a creative person. He led this architecture firm to get to be like two, three hundred people—like, an amazing number of people, and it's very successful. One of the clients, a hotel client that they were building hotels for, said, "Why

don't you come and run our business? Because you've already been running a pretty big business, and you can design amazing hotels." So, why don't you run the company? He takes the job, and the first year is a disaster—not his fault, but he's facing all kinds of headwinds, as we say in business, that he doesn't know how to deal with. So, the Board of Directors gives him an ultimatum. They say, "You have to reinvent the company in five weeks, or you're out. We can't tolerate it anymore; we're gonna go out of business after this business has

gotten to the size of 3,000 people in 40 years! Suddenly, in one year, we could lose the whole thing, so it's up to you to reinvent it." So that means changing the strategy of the company. Brand strategy becomes very important. So, that's just page one. Yeah, so he's like in trouble from day one. Yes, he gets picked up by an Uber driver who asks him a few questions that just totally stun him. Hmm. So, he becomes a major character—the Uber driver. The guy becomes his personal driver, essentially, even though he's an Uber driver. So, it's

that story of how this young CEO learns a new way of looking at things through the lens of branding to reinvent the company into something amazing—like really innovative. And it's awesomely innovative! What happens when you do that? What happens to you? What do you have to go through to get that to happen? Well, you know how you deal with the Board of Directors, who may not be so open to something new? How do you get design involved in this fully, you know, like all the way in, and make it a design-centric solution? All this kind

of stuff. Mm-hmm. So, this book now is the first book I've written that's outselling The Brand Gap. The Brand Gap is just because it was first, you know? I mean, it's been read by 23 million people. So, but this one is selling really well, so I know it's working for people. I know they're getting a lot out of it. And there are two more that I would love to write, so we'll see if it goes well. I'm gonna follow it up with the sequel and the next one, but it follows this same company all the

way through to like amazing, awesome success, Apple-sort of success. So, the book is Scramble, and it's a zag for you because previously these were kind of instructional, very graphic. It's a narrative, but it's actually pretty visual. Yes, and everything includes a lot of design and designing and visualization things. So, the whole thing is to make it palpable for people—to bring in a lot of sensory experiences into the story. So, you'll see a lot of stuff there. So, it was a great experience for me—not that different from the little stories I've been putting in the glass.

And I mention that this is just an expanded one, right? And my goal is to create an atmosphere where design is much more appreciated. So, it's for you guys out there, so when you come into a company, you're gonna get invited into the big room, the big conversation. They're not just stuck in the back room or stuck in the basement with no windows. If I don't know anything about branding, if I read this book, do I learn about branding through your narrative? Okay, this is perfect! Yeah, I mean, I'm trying. To teach CEOs about branding,

because they're the key to all this. If the CEO doesn't really value design or puts it down and lower on the food chain, that's where you are. You can't get beyond that. So I want everybody to understand what their role is. It parallels all the other books, but it just puts it into a narrative. So for people who love stories or even thrillers, they're going to really gravitate to that one. If they just want the principles in the most memorable way, maybe the whiteboard books. Although these can—the stories can make things memorable. Yeah, and this

is also now self-published under the Level's imprint. So this is great, and as you were saying, this is now outselling the original book, "The Brand Gap," which looks very promising for books two and three. I hope that that does happen. You guys go and pick up this book. Like I said, we're going to include all the links in the notes below. Marty Neumeier, I—like I said, honestly, I'm not just saying this: I could sit here and talk to you forever. But here's the good news: this is actually the prequel to the workshop, which is happening

at the end of February, and we're looking forward to that. I think we're all sold out now; you need to know somebody on the inside to get a ticket at this point. I think we're sold out at 60; that’s it. You guys, go to Philly—that’s the next location. Otherwise, you can make a beautiful trip across the pond and go to London or Dublin. And before we go, you talked about Level C having five levels. Yeah, and I said I'd put a pin on that one. So what are the five levels that you plan? So the

first level is what we're doing here in the Futur, and this is Certified Brand Specialist. So this teaches you where you fit in the big world of branding, where you're going to be most successful, how to collaborate with people, and make the most use of your skills, and start to learn the terminology; start to learn the language of branding. The next one is more like the book "Zag," and that's Level 2. Level 2 is Certified Brand Strategist, so that's where you get to think bigger and really connect design with business success. If you get to—if

you're lucky enough to be a strategist and make money consulting that way, that’s a step up in terms of profitability for most people—not always, but it is. The third level is Brand Architect, and so that’s like going from checkers to chess to three-dimensional chess. That’s where you can lead a whole company basically. You can lead any part of branding—very valuable in the world. The fourth level is Brand Instructor. That’s where you get a chance to teach the same stuff that you were learning, and that really cements it in your mind: once you start teaching it,

you know it cold. Right, and from there, you're ready to go to Brand Master, which enables you to be a CBO—Chief Brand Officer—in a large organization where you're working side by side with the CEO in full partnership. So that’s a new job classification that wasn't there before; it's just coming out now. By the time we get that in place, there will be jobs already. People in our first class are already getting those titles. Oh wow, they just heard about it, and then it’s just like they tuned into it, and they're getting them for smaller companies

or for divisions of bigger companies. But it’s an emerging role that you can play, and that’s not for everybody. Obviously, not everyone wants to be a leader and lead hundreds of people. But if you think someday you may want to do that, we can show you how to do it. Did you coin that term CBO? I thought I read it in one of your books. Yeah, I put it into "The Brand Gap," my first book. I envisioned it right then: we have a CBO; there has to be someone. So now it’s starting to exist. Okay

guys, on behalf of everybody I know that's watching live, first of all, thank you. Marty, it's been a true pleasure; this has been fantastic. I know this is going to get tons of repeated views because of how much information you've shared with us—the learning, the sharing. Like I said, we probably need to do a follow-up on this episode sometime. Oh please! I have a thousand more questions to ask you. Thank you very much, guys. Thanks for tuning in, and the team—Jonah, Mark, and Ricky—thanks guys for doing your bit. See you guys next time!