‘If you haven’t diagnosed where the problem lies in the first place, how do you know which lever to pull?’
If your idea of a rebrand is a new colour palette and an updated logo, think again.
Too often, superficial design changes don’t just fail to deliver growth, they actively damage the brands they were intended to bolster. Rachel Fairley and Sarah Robb have helped some of the world’s biggest companies refresh their brands from the inside out. They argue that rebranding is more a strategic undertaking than a design project, and it’s definitely NOT something that should be driven by a new leader’s ego.
This is a conversation for anyone invested in understanding the deeper mechanics of making a brand work over the long term, but also for anyone who wants to write a book that makes a real difference for its readers.
Rebrand Right site: https://www.rebrand-right.com/
Rachel’s site: https://www.rachelfairley.com/
Sarah’s site: https://www.brandstrategysarah.com/
Rachel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelfairley/
Sarah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandstrategysarah/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Rachel Fairley and Sarah Rob, who have dedicated their careers to strengthening brands. They’ve worked with over 90 B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries as marketing leaders and brand strategists.
And together they are the co-authors of Rebrand Right: How to Refresh Your Brand and Marketing to Grow Your Business. So first of all, welcome Sarah and Rachel. It’s very, very lovely to have you here. How you doing?
Sarah Robb: Good.
Rachel Fairley: Thanks for having us.
Sarah Robb: Yes, it’s amazing be on.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s good to have you here and I’m just, I’m going to start with with the idea behind the book because it is interesting, isn’t it? There’s lots of books on branding, but what was the idea behind Rebrand Right?
Rachel Fairley: Well, it’s an area which most businesses go through. Most businesses need to at some point, update, refresh, kind of move on where their, where their brand is. But there’s no books. On rebranding which is quite weird. I mean, Sarah and I did a lot of investigations and we’re like, so it’s one of the most sought after Google, you know, it’s a really popular search term.
And there’s lots of books on the theory of brand and there’s lots of case studies, often quite glamorous case studies on how brilliant things went. But there’s very little that sort of combines that theory and practice to give you that confidence that you know what you’re doing. Which actually really really surprised Sarah and I.
But then it was kind of like, let’s write the book that we’ve always wished existed.
Sarah Robb: Yes. And that, that really takes the conversation to a much more thoughtful level than it often is when you read about it elsewhere. You know, I think a lot of people have this misconception that rebranding is just about changing logos and changing design. And what we wanted to really show is that actually, that’s one of the things that can get you in trouble.
Case in point. Cracker Barrels recent rebrand, all of the furore around Jaguar. You know, there is, there is so much attention now around rebranding, but partly the, one of the big problems is there’s a business problem and the the leap people go to is, well, let’s just refresh the identity and really rebranding is, is not and should not make that leap without really thorough diagnosis of what is actually going on with the brand. And we really have worked together on a lot of organizations where we’ve done that thorough diagnosis to plot a, a really thoughtful way forward, which often does not need to touch the identity, and that can often be the completely wrong thing to do.
So we really wanted to also expand the conversation, and the, and the thoughtfulness around the topic so that people can understand that it is much, much more than changing how you look. And often that’s not the right thing to do.
Alison Jones: And I want to dig into that more, because this is the thing that I found most fascinating about the book: is the fact that when you’re not starting from the ground up, when you’re not just creating a brand, when you’re, when you’ve got history and emotional weight behind a brand already, that’s a very, very different process, isn’t it?
So, so just tell us a little bit more, well, I guess, tell us how people get it wrong. because I find that fascinating, but, you know, what are some good examples of where people have tried to rebrand and as you say, they’ve, they’ve taken the, the visible elements and it’s just got gone horribly wrong?
Rachel Fairley: If we are really honest, usually it’s ego driven.
Alison Jones: Yes. Interesting. Tell me more…
Rachel Fairley: …because you know, the thing about working on so many brands between us is that quite often you, what you begin to realize is that the, the desired impact is much more about the individual, whether they’re the CEO or the CMO or you know, whatever their role is, wanting to be seen to make a mark on the business and that feeling of kind of a limited runway to be able to show that you were a great hire and that you’re making a difference. And this is a way where nobody can argue that you didn’t do it. You know, it’s quite a sort of ta-da, look what I’ve done, look what I’ve achieved. Right? It’s much, much harder to fix things where they’re not being cohesive, not joining up, not not, you know, where your promise is not actually what you deliver, where the experience is consistent.
You know, you can tinker with trying to fix things that are really fundamentally broken for the, either the talent or the the the buyer that are much, it, it, it can be much harder to show that you are the person that made that solution happen or that it has fixing so. I think that’s part of it. I think also there’s quite a lot of people working without necessarily the right information and training to have the confidence to do it right.
And so it can depend on who is influencing you, what your agencies love doing, you know, what your boss loves doing, what others in your, you know, so I think it’s that there’s, there’s lots of factors that lead people to quite a cosmetic approach to thinking about brand. What do you think Sarah?
Sarah Robb: I mean, totally that, and, and I think there’s actually quite a significant lack of understanding about what are the levers you can pull to influence revenue through brand, you know? And, and this cosmetic lever of design is the one that people willingly pull because it’s exciting and like Rachel said, and you make your mark with it.
But you know, it’s one of the reasons we wrote in the first chapter about the four factors that actually drive business growth that are brand related, and really unpicking them, because there’s a lot of good data out there now. There’s actually a lot of good marketing science, there’s lots of good data on brand strategy and its impact in the business.
But I don’t think everyone’s read it and I don’t think everyone understands it because a lot of it is full of jargon. Right. And, and terminology that. Many people don’t sit down and unpick, so one of the things we wanted to do right at the beginning was to sort of help people unpick, you know, it is not just about this one lever that can change the growth of your business. There are many different things that can be used. And you’ve got to know which one is, is where the problem lies and, and if you haven’t diagnosed where the problem lies in the first place, how do you know that which lever to pull, right?
So that was a lot of the work we did right at the beginning of the book, like a big chapter on, what are those factors? And then the second chapter on how would you run a proper diagnosis so that people can both learn what they need to know in normal language and then really apply it to doing a piece of research or a few bits of research that are actually necessary to inform the right decision making so that things don’t go wrong, you know?
Alison Jones: And that diagnosis bit, I guess is, is the bit that’s really distinctive about a rebrand as opposed to a brand, because you’ve, you’re, you’re working with something you need to work out when it’s working. I, I would love you actually to get a little bit more information about those brand factors because they are, I think that’s really fascinating.
And, and as you say, everybody focuses almost exclusively on what colour it is and, you Yes. So what, what are the four factors? Just give us a little bit more depth.
Rachel Fairley: Well, there’s four, Sarah, and I call them cred, CRED, because it’s a really good way of remembering it. Maybe I’ll just take you through Sarah and I will take you through them one by one. But the one that nobody talks about is cohesiveness. Cohesion is so important and. I mean, genuinely, I, it takes a while for you to realize how important it is.
I think you have to have worked on quite a few brands and seen them through, in terms of strengthening them, to realize how important it is. A lot of people talk about consistency. And they’re sort of getting at the same thing, but it can lead you to a, a sort of policing of brands so that everything is identical every single time, and actually it’s not about that at all. Cohesion is about making sure that whatever you stand for today, that you are pulling on the legacy of the past, of what made you strong in the past. So there’s this feeling of continuum of standing on the shoulders of giants, but then. Sometimes what can be wrong with a brand is that the brand strategy is absolutely fine, but it’s not being executed cohesively.
So, you know, you’re, you’re promising one thing, delivering another. Or, you know, people basically feel their confidence ebbing away the more they deal with you as a business because they realize that actually you are quite schizophrenic. You are quite sort of, you know, you’re, they’re never quite sure how you’re going to show up.
And so that cohesion of the execution of the brand strategy is basically how people actually know that you have a strategy and how they experience and feel it. So it’s, it’s really important that it’s executed well by everyone, which is one of the reasons why we often debate with people whether or not brands should even be in marketing and whether it should actually sit with corporate strategy, because you have to execute it through how you enable your people to deliver the desired client experience, but then also how you set them up for success and all of your marketing and all of your communications and the interfaces of your products and the things that arrive through the post, all of it has to be cohesive. So that’s the first one of CRED, is cohesion.
Sarah Robb: And the next three are relevance, ease and difference, and they, there are three because there’s a lot of data now that proves that those three things contribute to what Kantar called predisposition. And all that means is making people feel that your brand is the right choice. And they have a ton of really great insight and data and proof on the need for predisposition and how that impacts the price you can charge for your brand, you know, your sales, your retention. Like all, all of these statistics that would make any CEO get very excited about the value of brand is all linked to this notion of you having to predispose people to want to buy it and their, that predisposition is 60% relevance and difference and 40% ease.
Now relevance is that second factor, right? And relevance is another one of those words that’s thrown out in branding, but isn’t it really unpicked a lot? But there are different ways you can be relevant. Like there were five in the book, but I’ll just give a couple for this sake of the, you know, time.
One is being relevant to the right people. You know, so that sounds very obvious, but there are points in a brand’s development where they are perhaps limiting their targeting too much. It happened for Nike. One of the turning points for Nike was when they realized that they had to expand the appeal of their brand to basically anyone who likes sport versus a really narrow section of elite running athletes. So there’s a point in the brand’s growth where they have to appeal to the majority of buyers, and that was something that Byron Sharp proved out. And then relevance is also just being relevant to what people care about. And it sounds so obvious, but many organizations, particularly smaller brands, talk about brand, and all they’re doing is talking about themselves.
Like my features, my functions, look at my product, look what I do, you know? We have 76 of these widgets. And, and actually you know, all of the data shows that you, you need to be meaningful to people, to something that they care about. And, and getting to those in the sciences, part of that diagnostic process of figuring out what is the benefit of what you’re doing to people.
Why is anyone going to care that you want to grow by 26%? So that relevance piece is about that. And then, relevant to cultural codes. You know, sometimes you have to adapt because your brand is stuck in a time where you are talking about something where the audience has moved on and they don’t see the category like that anymore.
Like Taco Bell talking about food as fuel when everyone was really in this food as experience. And so there’s all of these different like nuances around relevance. Do you want to talk ease?
Rachel Fairley: Yes. So the third one is is ease. And actually it’s very straightforward. If you are not easy to mind in a buying situation for the reasons people come shopping, they won’t consider you. And so if you think about it, people are not shopping for everything all the time. So you come in and you enter the market essentially to, to buy.
And in your head are the brands that you think are the options for who you can buy from. And it’s really unusual to end up buying from a brand you’ve never heard of. So you have to be in people’s minds connected to that reason to come shopping before they come shopping. So you’re easy to mind. And then the second thing is really obvious but surprisingly, you know, something that a lot of brands end up having to fix, which is just being easy to buy. Genuinely being really obvious with how you’ve organized your products, how you’ve named them, how you know, how easy they are to select, to choose, to check out with, you know, to buy from a human.
But that easiness means that then all of this wonderful work you’ve done on building the brand and getting in front of people actually converts into sales. So that’s really important. And then the last one’s D, differentiation.
Sarah Robb: And again, it’s one of those words that has been around for a long time and then you, there are a couple of different perspectives on it that aren’t really helping people understand it. And one is that people are trying to nuance it with different language and say, well, it’s about distinctiveness and differentiation, and there’s a lot of sort of unnecessary complication of the term.
And then there’s also a lack of real understanding about what it is. So people talk about USPs, you have to have a unique selling proposition for your brand. But like that’s a 1930s term that you know, when, when Persil launched in the 1930s, they could say, we, we, you know, we make clothes whiter. And they did, and because there was no other really good competition. But today, you know, this notion that you must be unique and differentiate or die, you know, it, it’s all quite overblown. So there’s, we’re trying to make, put some perspective around it, but also to say, look, it is important, you know, brands that are differently, 35% higher sales. And so you need to work on it, but there are different aspects to it, and one is looking different.
So this is where this distinctiveness word comes in, right? So your brand identity has to look different from others because you have to get noticed. I mean, it is pretty basic stuff, but you would be shocked about how many brands don’t really understand, you know, what they have that’s actually distinctive versus the competition and how they really look different and what are the things they have to play with.
We go right into the detail on that, in chapter four about, how you create distinctive brand assets, what are they? And then difference today isn’t always about having something that nobody else can say or do. It’s not always about being the only one that can say or do this, because even the brands that have that, that difference is often fleeting.
But you do have to figure out how you are relatively stronger versus another brand. And that is really what difference is for most brands out there. You know, so if everyone’s panicking going, oh, I don’t have anything, that’s only me. It’s okay, you, it would be good if you did, but it’s okay. But if you need to like land on something where you have a relative strength and then build on that, like, you know, Kit Kat talked about taking a break and they’re the brand that are associated with taking a break.
Could another biscuit brand do that for sure. Right? Like, you know, they’re not the only one that would allow for that, but it’s about that, you know, taking something and owning it. You know, Volvo with safety, right? We all think safety: Volvo, but are they the only safe car? No, they’re not. But they did have a benefit.
They were better at it at one point and they’ve consistently talked about it. And so that relative difference. And then there were a couple of other quite more unusual things that help a brand be perceived as different. And one is having emotive clarity. Standing for something emotional and getting an emotional reaction with your brand, with your communications, with the way that you talk to people.
It’s really important. And there’s a ton of data on why that is. It’s in the book too. And then the last one is like being perceived as a leader or someone who is challenging the status quo. And again, you don’t have to have all four of these aspects of difference to be a strong brand, but they’re the sort of four things that you can play with that’s been shown in data to sort of prove out that you will be perceived as different.
And that’s important again, because it drives up to that predisposing people to pick you, you know, over others. So that’s a long explanation of the four factors, but we could go on and on about it.
Alison Jones: And do you know what you’ve done brilliantly? Is, is make the case that this is a strategic issue. It’s not, you know, it doesn’t belong in the design department. It, this is absolutely core to your mission, to your purpose, to, Yes.
Rachel Fairley: Totally. And that’s, I think that’s what has brought some joy for Sarah and I, is that, you know, the first chapter, which really kind of takes apart and puts back together the theory so that you can understand what levers you’ve got, has gone down so well with CEOs and CFOs and that’s really helpful for the marketing leaders that are using the book, because they’re able to articulate in one chapter, you know, what, what it is that actually drives brand strength and why you should care commercially about it and what levers are available. And it, and it changes this conversation immediately.
So I think that that is been super, it’s just been really wonderful actually being able to get that kind of feedback from people that they are dishing out. Chapter one, which is a free download, you know, dishing out chapter one to people that they need to influence in the business to be allowed to actually strengthen a brand in the right way.
Sarah Robb: Yes. And yes, so I was just going to say, and to be allowed to then diagnose the brand properly with the right research. And so we developed this free quiz on, on those factors. So you can do this quick analysis of, well, you know, how am I performing on cohesion and relevance and needs and difference?
And we put that on our website too, so that anyone can take that, or a marketer could take it, do the assessment, show the CEO, or they can sit together and do it so that you can start to understand that there are all of these different things you’ve got to unpick. And that’s just one quick way of getting people’s head around what those things are, and making that case business case for the investment to do the diagnosis. Yes.
Alison Jones: And you two have worked together with brands so often. What was it like becoming co-authors as well as sort of collaborators and joint deliverers of programs?
Sarah Robb: Oh, it was lovely. I mean, it was lovely.
Rachel Fairley: We’ve known each other for years and we’ve worked on stuff together, and we’ve worked on stuff apart. When you put together everything we know, this is, this is the kind of book you get, and so I mean, there’s something really joyful about that, isn’t there? That, that coming at this from so many different angles and from so many different experiences and some of them where we’re like, oh my God, you remember when that happened?
And others are like, I have to tell you what happened. You know? And being able to share those stories. But also we’re, we’re really good at respecting each other’s knowledge and giving each other sort of first draft, like, okay, you write that one and then kick it over to me and I’ll have a read and I’ll say what I don’t understand or where I think we’re missing something still, or you know, so really kind of constructive to sort of just get on with it, but also collaborate on, so, you know, every chapter has had the two of us, you know, combing over every single word.
Alison Jones: And you do have a very consistent voice throughout the book, which I think it can be really hard for people to do, and I’m sure that that’s the…
Sarah Robb: …Yes. Yes, it’s interesting that, isn’t it? Yes. I think, you know, it does keep your momentum going. If anyone’s listening to this, thinking of writing a book with somebody else, you know, it does keep momentum going that you’re both accountable to each other. Like, you know, I’m sure both of us have thought about doing books before, but you know, having those deadlines for each other and with each other, it does help you move it on quickly, because we, we wrote it quite, I mean, relatively quickly, I think. I mean you, you are the judge Alison, but, but, but it was because it was like, I promised just get this chapter to Rachel by Tuesday and she’s promised to get it to me. So if it would been us, she’d be like, oh, well maybe I’ll just do it next week. But you know, you kept that momentum.
Alison Jones: I think that’s so true. When you’re writing for yourself, there’s nobody who’s demanding your book from you. You know, unless you’ve got a publisher like me giving you, giving you hell over deadlines. Was there anything about the process that surprised you?
Rachel Fairley: Well, I only have one regret. And that is not doing the footnotes as we went…
Sarah Robb: …oh my…
Rachel Fairley: …which feels a bit like a university essay. You know, when you put your dissertation in and just before you’re about to do it, you’re like, oh my God, what was that source? I…
Alison Jones: …Past Me, you’re so flaky. I know. Yes.
Rachel Fairley: We’ve got like 230 things in our index. There’s probably about 100, 120 sources in all, but you know, some of them with different mentions. But just that kind of discipline of thinking about what the end manuscript has got to have locked down when you write it. I kept thinking to myself, as long as we sort of know where it is, it’ll be fine. Or as long as we sort of write it in and then you’re like, oh God, now I’ve got to spend a whole week just doing sourcing. So
Alison Jones: Which is nobody’s idea of fun.
Rachel Fairley: I would definitely be a bit more pedantic about that. Writing it.
Alison Jones: What about you, Sarah?
Sarah Robb: I think maybe it’s not surprising, but it was very cathartic, you know, that you, you do, you’ve done all this work for each of us 25 years, like 50 years of experience, right? And, it’s surprising what you remember, and it’s surprising how cathartic the experience is because. I think in the world that we’re in, there’s not a lot of great training.
There’s not a lot of great practical resource even in the world’s biggest agencies where we’ve both worked, right? Where you would think you’d go in as a strategist and you’d be trained to the, you know, with all this material, you’re kind of making it up as you go along and, and you learn by experience.
And it was just a cathartic experience to put all that down and hope that it might help someone. Leapfrog the 10 years it took us to figure it all out, you know?
Rachel Fairley: You know, the other thing, just, just hearing you say that reminded me of. So we wrote the first draft and then we sent it out to 25 CMOs, essentially. There was a couple of CEOs, but basically CMOs and they were from lots of different industries, different sizes of business, you know, some were in their thirties, some were in their fifties, you know, just quite a wide variety.
And we gave it to them and I think, what I was really scared of was them coming back and going, oh God no. Please don’t say that. Oh dear. Oh God, no. That is not how you do it. Or, you know, just something that would, that would make us realize that we didn’t actually know how to do something we were explaining how to do.
And they were all, it was so interesting because what they all came back with is, essentially, could you add something more on X? Could you also talk about Y? And a lot of those things we’d stripped out because of the word count, we were like, just keep it really tight. You find yourself having to go back in and sort of eke out a sentence worth to sort of add something else in.
But that was amazing, that feeling that people that, that we hugely respect and admire would read it and say things like, this is really motivational. I, you know, I realize I’ve missed a few things. I’m going to, when I get back from holiday, I’m going to get my team to work on that because I think there’s gaps that we can still close, even though we did our work on refreshing the brand two years ago or whatever.
And it was just, that was honestly joyful because in the end, it’s your peers that you, that you worry most about judging what you are saying and you want it to be helpful. It just felt like we landed the theory and the practical nicely entwined together, but that we covered enough ground without covering too much.
That was a, a real joy.
Alison Jones: and,
Sarah Robb: know what else…
Alison Jones: …when says to you, I’m going to do that different…
Sarah Robb: …so sorry. No, was going to say, the other really surprising thing to me was that, in my head, like I’d written a chapter of a book before, but someone else had dealt with it. You know, I’d just written a chapter and given it to them and I thought, oh, writing a book is just writing a book.
You know, we just write the book. And I was so surprised about the whole industry like it and I’m so grateful, we’re both so grateful for you, Alison. Because when we started off, we’re like, oh, maybe we’ll self-publish. And we’re like, oh no. It’s like learning a whole other thing that you don’t want to learn because you just want to write the book.
And I think surprised about how complicated it was to get the book actually out there and, you know, distributed and on Amazon and all of the things that you do that. I think you just don’t appreciate if it’s your first book that that and, and so I was very surprised about how it felt like a minefield of stuff that we had to learn and was very grateful we found you and found someone.
Also, the surprising thing that was quite negative was other publishers we talked to who gave us offers, really wanting to take all of the intellectual property and all of the decision making around things like the cover. And, to us, you know, we’re writing about brands we, we need, we can’t have a cover that we don’t like, right? It is like, just would be just so wrong. So finding you and finding that lovely middle ground that you have that helps people but gives them that still that ownership and the freedom and… yes, that was a joy, that was a blessing. So thank you.
Alison Jones: Well, you are welcome. And it’s only now that I notice you’re both wearing green as well. I’m so off brand. I’m so sorry we we’re running out of time, but I, I need to ask you both separately, I guess, for your best tip. So if somebody’s just setting out on this journey, Rachel, I’ll come to you first, what, what would you want them to know if they take nothing else away from today?
Rachel Fairley: I think that really getting to a kind of crisp sales pitch for what you think this book is going to do is really important, because it can give you a lot of motivation later when you’re drifting, that that’s what you embarked on to do, even if you end up articulating it differently when the book launches.
I just think really being kind of galvanized towards something is really important. And the other thing I think that did us a lot of good was really structuring the book, so working out what each chapter would cover, because then when we divvied up writing it, and even if I’d had to write it on my own, or Sarah had had to write it on her own, it’s like you come back and you’re like, that’s right, i’m going to cover all these things. And that’s why it makes it easier to write, because you’re not. If you’re not having to kind of start at the beginning and work your way through, you can actually write things as a kind of complete idea and then put other ideas together. So I think that was really, really helpful.
Sarah Robb: Yes… …and I…
Alison Jones: …how people do it without that table of content. It’s, it’s just gold, isn’t it?
Sarah Robb: …and having find someone to bounce it off at the beginning, like you, that you did for us. You gave us that very structured you know, thing to fill out, you know to, to really help us clarify what the book was about. And the questions it asked in there were hard, you know, but they were really the right questions.
And so if you, even if you, if you want to publish by yourself, you’ve got to find a way of having that rigour in your process so that you do have a really clear idea of what it is, and then find the right person to help you publish who supports your own particular goals for the book, and, and your, the ownership that you want to have.
So…
Alison Jones: …yes. And your vision for it.
Sarah Robb: Yes, exactly. Yes. It’s really important. Yes.
Alison Jones: Brilliant tips. Yes, absolutely. And, and very wide ranging, so yes, it is, it’s a broad spectrum of things you’ve got to be thinking about, isn’t it? That’s really helpful. I always ask my guests as well to recommend us a book, so I’m really interested, you can’t recommend your own, sorry, but is there a book, it doesn’t have to be even a business book, that you would recommend that listeners read if they haven’t already? Sarah, I’ll come back to you first on this one.
Sarah Robb: So I’ve read, I mean, hundreds of books. I just, I’m a total book nerd and I spent a long time reading loads of books about being more productive as, you know, being more efficient, being, and actually the best one I’ve read recently is one called Meditation for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. And the reason this is the best thing I’ve read as a business person is that it just gives you a real grounding on the realistic limitations of life, which sounds a bit morbid, but once you sort of realize that you, you are never going to get that whole to-do list done, you are never going to read all the stuff that comes at you, and, but he gives really practical, thoughtful chapters like that. They say read it in a month and you read one a a day. And it just gives you such a lovely perspective on making sure that you’re focusing on what really counts to you. And it’s just so, it’s just a very different take on doing what counts in your life and in your, in…
Alison Jones: …and beautifully written.
Sarah Robb: Oh, have you read it too? Yes. It’s lovely. Isn’t, Yes.
Alison Jones: Oh, it’s gorgeous. Yes. Yes. And very liberating that sense…
Sarah Robb: Best book this year so far. Yes.
Alison Jones: You sort of have this expectation that you’re going to get through all the things and, and you’re not. He’s just like, you’re never going to get through all the things. You have to make peace with this. So I found that great.
Yes. What about you, Rachel? What would you like us to read?
Rachel Fairley: I’ve got two. I’ve the Jefferson Fisher book on The Next Conversation I thought was brilliant. I think he’s, he’s so good. I mean, I, you know, if you follow him on, on the socials, he’s, he’s brilliant, but the book is fantastic. And there’s some bonus chapters as well you can get online. And then the other book I really love is Alison, I think her surname’s, Fragale and it’s Likable Badass, which actually men and women should read, but it’s about how you show up and how you get things done.
Yes, she’s amazing. And her stuff around imposter syndrome was a real breakthrough for me. The idea that you have to have EQ and IQ and be stretching yourself to even be able to feel imposter syndrome. And so suddenly it’s like when you recognize it, it’s like you should celebrate it and hope it’s momentary, right? But celebrate it…
Alison Jones: …something happening. Yes. Oh…
Rachel Fairley: …it’s something wonderful. And I love that because reframing some of these feelings that we have as, as ways forward rather than things that hold us back, I think is also really amazing.
Alison Jones: I love that. Now you do want to find out more about both of you, more about the work that you do. I’ve got to come to you first on this one Rachel, what, where should they go?
Rachel Fairley: You can just come to rachelfairley.com I Fix Brands Marketing Experience, so I’m always working with businesses on that. But I would also prioritize, frankly, the Rebrand Right website because it’s got this wonderful diagnostic tool on it that helps you get your business case together about CRED and how strong your brand is.
And you can find Sarah and I as well from there. So that’s quite a good first destination. Sarah runs a really brilliant brand strategy academy, though.
Sarah Robb: So…
Alison Jones: …I come to you? Sarah, do you want to add to that?
Sarah Robb: Brandstrategysarah.com, and I run a academy that teaches people how to do brand strategy with clarity and with confidence. And I’ve also got quite a lot of free resources, like free courses on there just to help people get through the minefield of what brand strategy can be and the jargon, and to make it a lot more simple. So hopefully that helps somebody.
Alison Jones: Going to bet there’s people listening going, do you know, I thought I had my brand strategy nailed, but clearly I’ve not even thought about half of it. So that’s, that’s where you go people. I’ll put those links up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com and thank you both for your time today.
It’s been really fascinating digging into the brand stuff and the writing stuff and, and I think it’s lovely as well when you come back after a period of, you know, a few weeks post publication and just sort of reflect on it all. So it’s been really joyful talking to you both about that, all of it.
Sarah Robb: Thank you, Alison. for your help. Yes.
