How to Find Your Brand Story

Barry Silverman (00:02)
And so in our minds, this became very interesting because these are clearly people who struggle being comfortable in spaces, right? And what a wonderful way to present our unique selling proposition through this cause, this idea, this need that exists today that we could begin to champion. So there was sort of a real win-win for us. There was the opportunity to get involved in something important and growing and

meaningful and communicate that to larger groups of people.

Benjamin Ard (00:57)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Barry. Barry, welcome to the show. Barry, I'm excited for this conversation. It's gonna be a lot of good storytelling about what you're doing and how you look at it content and marketing. But before we dive into that, Barry, let us get to know you and your background. And then we always ask, what do you love about content and marketing?

Barry Silverman (01:03)
Thank you.

Sure, sure. So again, thanks for having me on, Ben. So my background is I'm a long-term marketing professional. Been in the business for about 30 years, combining experience both on the ad agency side, the company side, and also the consulting side. As I mentioned, I spent a lot of years in brand consulting and fell in love with the strategic art of building brands, something that I always loved.

I've taught part-time at the graduate and undergraduate level, mostly in the brand strategy arena. And today I am the vice president of marketing and branding at Ultrafabrics. And we produce a very high quality synthetic leather product that's sold into about eight or nine different vertical markets, both in furniture and in transportation.

Benjamin Ard (02:00)
I love it. I love it. And what do you love about content and marketing?

Barry Silverman (02:03)
I think content marketing for me is an opportunity to tell a richer, deeper, more interesting story about the brand. I think that people get flooded with messages that are fundamentally things that they could understand on their own. There are so many digital tools these days to kind of serve up sort of the standard information about your unique proposition. But

I think content marketing enables you to kind of take people on a journey about what's important to your brand, what you're interested in as a business, why you value certain things as a brand and how that should impact what they're doing. So I think to me, I've always loved it and enjoyed the process of kind of dimensionalizing the brand creation and brand management process through content.

because it had to be strategic, had to be relevant, it has to be unique. And so with all the mediums now available to us like YouTube and social media and even our own web properties, there's a lot of opportunities to deliver relevant, interesting ideas that ultimately is designed to deepen, strengthen, and even create relationships.

Benjamin Ard (03:11)
I love it. love it. Well, Barry, you have a great example of this in the business you work for. It's such a cool story about how you found this insight and turned it into this really cool content marketing strategy and initiative. I don't want to kind of give away too much because I think it's such a fun story, but Barry, where did you get this insight and how did you kind of turn that into a content marketing strategy?

Barry Silverman (03:34)
Sure. So the insight we had really, or at least the challenge we had, first I'll talk about the challenge, then I'll talk about the insight. The challenge was how to deliver our unique selling point, which is having a highly and possibly the most comfortable product in the marketplace. And that's a difficult thing to message because comfort is something that you feel, that you experience. It really requires something more experiential to deliver.

You know this idea so we went through a lot of different things, know defining comfort. What does it mean? What is physical comfort? We we took the science angle There's something called thermal comfort, which is our product helps keep the body cooler when you sit on it You know, there's there's different Ways we talked about this idea in each of our vertical markets, but it still is a very difficult concept as I said because

It's much more experiential and to some people somewhat subjective as to how they define comfort. So we began searching for a way to tell the story. We were on the lookout. We really wanted to communicate this idea because we felt that it was clearly and tightly associated with us as a product and as a brand. And some of our sales team were talking with some of our customers that just happened to mention the fact that this idea of

designing for a neurodegenerative population is gonna become much more important and something interesting. And I didn't really understand it, but when I started looking into it, I realized that upwards of 15 to 20 % of our current population actually kind of deals with a neurodegenerative condition.

And it's really fascinating because there's a large spectrum there from, you know, just basic ADHD, you know, I'm not paying attention to, you know, I'm really bothered by certain lighting or, you know, I can't sit still for too long or from an olfactory standpoint, the sounds in the room may set me off or cause such a level of discomfort that I can't really remain in a built environment for that long. And it certainly was.

important especially to our contract furniture business which is sort of know office buildings and office space and and how you design for that to to enable this and there's also an interesting thing and this hasn't been you scientifically connected yet but but it feels like there's a connection and i've always been fascinated by just the you know the media overload in our world and how that possibly could be contributing to this idea that you know our brains are developing differently i mean i think there's this

there's natural scientific evidence that we are human race. There's more allergies these days and there's different type of food things people have to contend with and that applies to our minds and our brains and the way they react to things. So for a long time, people who had this condition or at least experienced this were left just to have to deal with it. There wasn't really any specific

focus on it there wasn't really any specific attention paid to it and you know there started to be some work around autism and being on the spectrum and you know where i think everyone's on the spectrum you know to some degree now i'm not sure exactly where those lines are drawn but there has clearly been advances in how i think that the medical community and even the business community started looking at people that you know had something they had to contend with

And so in our minds, this became very interesting because these are clearly people who struggle being comfortable in spaces, right? And what a wonderful way to present our unique selling proposition through this cause, this idea, this need that exists today that we could begin to champion. So there was sort of a real win-win for us. There was the opportunity to get involved in something important and growing and

meaningful and communicate that to larger groups of people.

And ideally impact or have an effect on change the way that designers look at the build space. So that felt very good to us. And as I said, it worked very well with where we wanted to take our brand and the meaning behind it and the story we wanted to tell. So there was this wonderful connection between this very important growing idea.

and our brand and the points we wanted to make and the associations we wanted to have.

Benjamin Ard (07:46)
I love that. So you gathered this really unique insight and then I love how it fit in with the brand and the mission and the goal of the company and what you're trying to portray with the product. What did it look like when you're saying, okay, cool. Now we have this essence of what we can do. What did the execution look like? How did you take that and turn it into something tangible that, you know, you could write about, talk about, share, make an impact in this space.

Barry Silverman (08:11)
Sure, so it took on a couple of forms. One of the first realizations we had to come to is that we are not experts in this space. And so it became very clear to us that we had to start working with experts because there are people and companies and designers who have studied this and are working within this area, have written extensively about it. And on a global basis, we became familiar with people that are doing really

interesting and important work in this area. what we started doing was conducting panel discussions and we would take advantage of an investment we were making in one of our event marketing where we were basically

had you know forty five minutes to do whatever we want it you know we were partnering with you've had to trade show we were at so we decided to create a panel discussion this was the first one we did in london and we got experts to to do that and then we also work with a couple experts to write a white paper that we contributed to but we hired a couple folks in the working this area and create something that we can give away so we did a combination of this

kind of event which was a panel discussion that I moderated and we gave away the white paper and we posted the white paper on our website and it went really well. The reception was much bigger than I ever expected in terms of the interest level and the demand and request for the white paper itself and so

We thought, hey, maybe we have something here. And so we started integrating it more into our event marketing and doing more of these panel discussions. I've got another one. And then we started working closely with our actual customers who thought, you know, this is really interesting. And our customers actually sell to designers. So their audience is similar to ours. And that ultimately we want a designer to think of this idea. So they started inviting us in to kind of work closer with them to conduct

these panel discussions. And that's been a real win for us because it's helped with those relationships and further deepen them and exposed us and our customers brand in an important, meaningful way to a shared audience. So we're starting to create video content from around this, which we'll also start to distribute. And ultimately, I would like us to be a real champion of this idea, become associated with it and maybe known for it.

you know, contribute more and more content relative to either simple ideation of what people can do or just bringing attention to the cause. As I said, I think it helps us as a brand and allows us, as I said earlier, to tell that richer story as to what comfort actually means and how we as a company contribute to that.

Benjamin Ard (10:48)
I love that. That's so powerful. So there's a lot of lessons to be learned from this. I'm curious what you have from an advice standpoint, having gone through this experience yourself, gathering an insight, turning it into a cause, seeing all of the huge outcomes and great results come out of this. What would you recommend to anyone listening to this podcast to do? How do they find these insights?

How can they really generalize and figure out, how do we turn our content in something meaningful? Any recommendations that you've learned through this experience that if you had to go through it again for another business, how would you kind of approach the same situation?

Barry Silverman (11:25)
Yeah, so I think it's similar to how you go through any ideation around a creative idea. It needs to be relevant and it needs to be unique. So relevance you could find oftentimes by talking to your customers, by understanding from them what are the important trends, what do they care about, what's important to them, what problems are they trying to solve for. And this came to us through types of discussions that our sales team was having with their customers.

So leveraging the relationships they have to uncover that. And then doing a little bit of research and seeing that there really aren't any other fabric companies that are representing this, that it truly would be a unique spot for us. And the relevance also, I think, is strategic to us in terms of creating the relationship between your brand goals and ensuring that there is a clear relationship there, that there's not much of a departure. I think you just don't want to

latch on to anything because it's of interest or even it's of intrigue to your customers, clearly it has to be able to support the brand goals that you have and that relationship has to be very clear. And then when all those pieces fall into place, that's when you can begin to on it. And so those are the lessons I think that I learned a little bit. I think more importantly too is to be open to things. When I first heard the idea,

I was very skeptical about it. I thought it was too intellectual, too cerebral. People wouldn't pay attention. There were gonna be too many words on the title. When we advertised it, people wouldn't click on it. They'd move right past it. And I have found just the opposite to be true. And I'm really glad I opened my mind to it because I think we discovered something important and interesting and unique and meaningful. So I think if you're strategic enough and...

You're open to things you can find the right idea to latch yourself to.

Benjamin Ard (13:12)
Very cool. Well, Barry, we're almost out of time. So I just have one final question. I just want to double click into something you said earlier that I find really interesting. And I'm curious how you approach this. You talked about this insight coming from the sales team. How do you collaborate and work with that team to kind of pull the insights out of that team cross departmentally? How do you approach that and that relationship with other departments to really learn from the experiences that they're having?

Barry Silverman (13:38)
Yeah, so in our company, we've established a very close working relationship with our sales team. We actually have an individual on my team whose job it is to, our primary role within her job is to work and help with the sales support process. You know, it depends on the organization, right? If you're a very sales driven company like we are, I think it's critical to have that person in place. And she is regularly communicating with our senior sales leaders about

what we need and what we're interested in marketing. so through a little even a little bit of training, we've been able to work with our teams very carefully and closely to help them understand what we need because it serves our common goal, is to do something interesting and unique. And it's quite easy too. mean, it's really as much as helping them understand the type of questions that we would like answered from a marketing team.

you know, what's meaningful to you these days? What are some important trends you see impacting the business? You know, drop these questions into your ongoing conversations that you're having, you know, and then make sure we have a feedback loop so we can hear that. Now, you know, sometimes it can be a little challenging because our sales team might have, you know, five minutes with a customer and they have to utilize that five minutes.

in a more transactional way. And we totally understand that, but we continue to remind them that when appropriate, please drop in these questions and go from there. The other thing you could do too is we recently put chat bots on our website and asked questions of visitors we were getting to understand things that are important to them. Although they have to be kind of top line, but there are opportunities to even research your customers with your sales team's help.

I've gotten on the phone with customers as well, and customer meetings, and as our senior most marketing person, it's very appropriate for me to have these type of conversations when they can be set up. And I'll probe for things of importance and of interest and intrigue, and sometimes I'll even options for them to think about, or even select out of three or four things that would be of most interest. So yeah, by those things, I think it's a good way to...

to gauge the marketplace and get what you need from it.

Benjamin Ard (15:47)
I love it. Well, Barry, these episodes go by so quickly. I really love the insights and the story today. I think it's a great inspiration about how we should be treating content marketing in general, how it can serve higher causes and connect with our audiences. love it. Barry, if anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?

Barry Silverman (16:07)
Yeah, sure. you know, through LinkedIn, of course, I'm happy to talk to anybody about this topic if they're interested.

Benjamin Ard (16:12)
Love it. And for anyone listening to today's episode, all of Barry's information is gonna be in the comment section and note section below. So feel free to find his information and connect with him there. Barry, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today.

Barry Silverman (16:27)
Thank you.

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