Speaking and Communicating Podcast

When you wrote down those people you clearly want to impact, and you wrote down their thoughts and their mind that they're saying in their own voice, if you bait your marketing hooks with their care about language, that's going to help.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review in what you'd like for us to discuss on this show.

Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating branding style with the CEO and founder of RichBrands, Rich Kozak, who's here to talk to us about impact driven branding.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi Rich.

Hi, it is great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for being here.

Your name Rich, smells of abundance.

Well, what we've learned in the last few years is that using this process to reach into people's hearts and find out what the impacts they clearly see making are, defining the brand they must become to make those impacts, literally races them to the impacts and races them sooner to the abundance and then gives them a platform to step into purpose.

So that's why we do what we do.

And we're here for millions of entrepreneurs and professionals, some of whom are new, but many of whom have been are deeply experienced.

They know there's more.

They want to get to higher levels of impacts on the way what they do impacts people's lives or an industry or the world they touch.

But they're struggling with this concept of branding.

They don't trust it.

They don't know what it is.

They quote, know they need it, don't they?

But they want to get it right.

And they don't know what that means.

They don't even know there is a get it right.

And it's just a process.

And I've been teaching it for 46 years.

So we're here to talk about communication.

I mean, here's the main point.

The clarity with which your brand speaks, and that's all kinds of speaks.

That's verbal.

That's written.

That's the way people feed you testimonials.

That's what they see on First Impression.

The clarity with which your brand speaks shapes its impact.

And clarity is the missing piece.

How do I become clear?

And how do I create a clear message and know that, okay, the market will understand it and it's clear enough for them?

Because remember, you said, I need to see it from their perspective, not mine.

You're a very wise woman.

Let's put that in a straight talk message.

A brand, your brand, if you're listening to that, your brand, and I'm talking to any individual who's listening to this, your brand, whether it's a company or you personally, your brand is a perception, but it's not your perception.

You can talk about your brand all my brand is, but it's not what you think.

It's what they think.

And Branding is all the communication, and it better be consistent.

It's that consistent communicate that you get to do to create a consistent perception that moves your brand strategically forward toward where you want to take it.

So it's all about communication.

And your question was, how do you create a clear message?

Well, there are two kinds of clarity that make a brand come alive and turn it into a magnet.

There's an internal clarity where the question is, whom do we clearly see impacting that we really want to impact?

When that gets written down and the levels of impacts you clearly see on a person or an industry or whatever you're doing are written down and the brand is defined to make those impacts, everything lines up.

The other clarity is external clarity and it's the clarity of the picture that you, your brand, paints for what it sees for the individual or your target audience, whatever you want to call it.

When they let the brand in, what we see for you, the picture that follows, the clarity of that picture turns you into a magnet.

There are other little rules along the way, we've been doing this for 46 years now and I teach it.

One of those process steps is saying, well, what are the for these individuals or groups of people that I clearly see impacting and want to impact, what are they thinking in their own language, in their own voice?

What are they saying to themselves fairly frequently?

That has to do with what we do.

So for example, find people that are deeply experienced, say they've been doing something for 30 years, but now they're going to change direction a little bit and they want to take their impacts to a higher level.

And they're thinking, I don't know how to position my brand well to get paid what I'm worth.

I don't believe we're attracting the right people to our website.

I'm so frustrated that I don't want to get this wrong.

Those thoughts are in my target audience's head.

They literally think I don't have time to do this wrong.

I got to get this right.

I have no idea how to do this.

If I don't do it right the first time, sorry to interrupt you, Rich.

If I'm not clear enough the first time and the perception that I was intending is that's not the impact.

Is it possible to rebrand and learn from my mistakes?

You see it all the time, you know, there are some exaggerated examples.

And I don't like to talk about big company examples because they're irrelevant to my target audience.

Nobody ever heard of them.

So it doesn't relate to them what Microsoft does or Coca-Cola does or, you know, but there are two things happen when you communicate and you don't get clarity.

There are six bad consequences of taking that seriously.

So if we're talking about communication, I'm going to name them six bad consequences if or when you don't clearly language, define and language your brand and clearly define language, its messages so that everything is congruent with you and with the heart of the brand and with the impacts you want to make.

If you don't clearly define and language your brand before you used to open the brand's mouth, six bad consequences.

Ready?

You create confusion.

I'm not really sure what it is.

Misinformation.

I've been married for 46 years as well.

And even in a marriage, it's a beautiful marriage.

We get these moments where I thought you said, really?

Really?

What happens with brands too is I thought you said, well, women, you do this.

I thought you did that.

Number three.

So we had confusion, misinformation, we'll just call it no credit.

You don't get credit for what makes you outstanding.

Getting credit for what makes you outstanding is part of positioning.

Crafting X categories of expertise in language that only your brand uses sets you apart.

And if you don't do that, you don't get credit for what makes you outstanding.

Bummer, okay?

You spend a lot of time on marketing and money and it's gone.

You waste money and time on marketing.

Five, competitors who do have their act together and have consistency in the way they show up, get ahead of you.

And six is time.

That's the great leveler.

We all have the same amount of time.

So if you waste a year with some campaign that you thought was a brand and you're like, oh man, yeah, I think we need to rebrand.

What was the value of that year?

Okay.

So it's like, say, confusion, misinformation, no credit, waste a ton of time on marketing.

Competitors get ahead of you if they've got their act together because they've defined themselves well.

And you lose time and maybe you run out of energy or maybe your time's up.

But think of the travesty.

There are millions of entrepreneurs and professionals, many of whom are deeply experienced.

They're heart centered.

They care about others.

They want to make an impact.

And they know through their work, through their gift, through their calling, they can make an impact on others' lives.

And they're not doing it.

They're not connecting.

There's no connection because they're not doing the branding right.

They haven't defined and language the brand so that the messages are all congruent with the impacts they want to make.

But imagine if they are when everything a brand says and does when it shows up in any way is congruent with the impacts they want to make.

They race to the impacts.

They get to the abundance faster.

And that branding activity creates a platform for them that makes it much easier for them to step into their purpose.

And we all have God given purpose.

In our businesses, I have clients who are doctors and people who run diversity, equity, inclusion and law firms and people who are coaches and people who are speakers and authors, people that deal with mental wellness.

It's like it's across the board.

It doesn't matter what a person is doing.

If they are impact driven, if they're heart centered and they do this work in this way, it always works because the brand is defined to be the brand it must become to make the impacts.

And that's what aligns everything.

Is that why you say you help people find the authenticity?

We say we usually don't associate branding and advertising.

We always think it's this mask.

It's like this.

Oh, yeah.

They are put on this superhero costume.

So we don't usually associate it with authenticity.

Thank you for bringing that up.

We say just simply that doing branding right, that using the steps accesses your own authenticity.

So imagine instead of you have to be this brand that somebody thought up for you and slapped on you from the outside, the brand gets developed from inside of you and it's the most comfortable pair of shoes you've ever worn.

Every client is like that.

It accesses your own authenticity.

If you're a coach that helps take people onto a path that is clear for them and helps them take off and soar, and the name of your brand is Your Time to Soar Elevating You to New Heights, that's a brand we create.

If you've written 20 books and you pitched for the New York Yankees and you ran a radio show for 40 and you're 82 and you don't know where to go from here, but you're not done.

You just played three sets of tennis this morning and we've created a brand that stands for generational wisdom because every one of the books you wrote was to bring attention to something that was really important in life.

And now you have a brand that stands for educational wisdom, a wise word, activating your best life.

That's a person that we just launched.

A woman who lost her husband, lost her business partner, was floating and not knowing who she was and stuff, and literally got through that and now has a brand called Wellness Playroom for the best version of you.

And she helps people late in their careers who are like, if they lose their career, like they are their job.

And if that job goes on, who am I?

Takes that person and helps shape them and talks about your next career being a life of unlimited wellness.

It's like, does that language, you know, make sense shows down your spine?

Yes.

That's the point.

It's language that transfers energy and is unique to the individual.

It came out of them listening to the impacts they clearly see making and the types of people they know their impact and writing these things down.

It gives a foundation of clarity to the brand that is purely you.

That's accessing your own authenticity.

And then the language, the messaging hierarchy, the positioning statements are derived from that foundation of clarity.

And two things happen.

When a brand speaks with clarity, shows up, look, it's all aligned.

When everything you say is congruent with who you are and it's all aligned to those impacts, it feels like a magnet.

People sense the clarity that's there because of the consistency of the language and the messaging.

And that makes a brand come alive in a way that others don't.

Fall flat.

I mean, we all go to a networking thing and somebody says, hey, this you say, hey, what do you do?

And they say, oh, that's nice.

That's false flat.

But if they say, well, I'm the founder of Wellness Playroom for the best version of you.

And people go, oh, I got to go.

But can I have your card?

I mean, yes, because of the words.

You know how some of us, including myself, we were not poetic and good with words and alliterations and all the tongue twisters, because it feels like sometimes when people put together these programs on the impact they want to make, there's a, like you said, language, there's a certain way of using words that sticks with people, or you just sound generic, like, you know, just the words you use on a daily basis.

How do you craft that language, like you said, wellness, playroom, things like that?

I'm going to give you what sounds like a non-answer, but it's not.

It's a simple answer.

It's a process.

There are seven steps.

And so branding the right way, like real branding, when branding is done this way, it couldn't be done this way.

My largest client was a $14 billion company, and my smallest client has been a teenager focusing on what their career path would be.

And it's when you do the steps, when they're done, they're done.

It's just steps.

It's a process, and that process allows and inspires the choice of words.

But they're words that are congruent.

One of the steps says, OK, you wrote down step four, it's called characteristics, and you wrote down in step two those types of people, maybe a few of them, that you know you will impact and you really want to impact.

And the levels of impacts that you clearly see, and let me be specific so it doesn't sound correct.

Levels of impacts are like this.

If you said to me, Rich, when you do this branding, what are the levels of impacts on an experienced entrepreneur, female of 40 to 60?

She's done something for 20 years and she's ready to take it to another level, but she doesn't know brand.

What's the first impact?

First impact might be mental.

She reframes how she sees what branding means.

She reframes how she sees herself in the world and the impact that she can make.

She learns a new mindset.

She takes on new skill sets.

She practices the skill sets and gets new results.

The results get bigger.

She shares the results with others.

It's like impacts get higher and higher and that she ends up sharing what happened with her with other people and giving back.

She's very, very abundant and shares the abundance and she spends three months a year in Africa digging wells for people that need clean water.

The levels of impacts just go higher and higher.

You're in step four and it says, hey, let's take a look at step two to make those impacts on that person.

What characteristic must the brand become and get credit for to make those impacts?

And you say, oh, and you look at the one impact and you go, well, to make that impact, you would have to be patiently teaching or you would have to be technology centric or you'd have to be empathetic or you'd have to be projecting, you know, well, these results come or modeling, do it this way or, you know, I mean, it's like you pick characteristic.

The individual whose brand it is gets to choose the words.

They might say, well, you said validatable, but I don't like validatable.

I would say validating.

You would?

Yeah, I like that.

I like it.

So you like validating.

Yeah.

So you want to use that word?

Yeah.

Okay.

So we use their word and then ask, okay, in what ways?

Well, we validate the person, you know, their capabilities are possible.

We validate the program, we put them on and we validate the results of the program.

So there are three ways that you must be validating.

Yeah.

When you write those characteristics that you must become and get credit for to make those impacts, if you would read a step four of anyone, any brand we've ever worked with, it's just words on paper.

It's complete sentences explaining in what ways the brand must be those characteristics.

And there might be 30 of them, 20 of them.

I could throw mine up, but it's on a Bridges-Irebrand Triangle step three with a characteristic show on it.

And we prioritize the top 10 characteristics on first impression, so that when a photo shoot gets taken, we bake in hand gestures and facial expressions to get credit for those characteristics.

With deeply listening or understanding or heart characteristics, which transfer first.

It's just a process.

And this might sound, well, I don't know, it's a lot of work.

Hey, everything takes work.

Life's a lot of work.

Get over it.

This is the right way.

You know, it's kind of like, you know, there's no book for parenting.

Oh, there's no book for branding.

Wrong.

There's a steps.

I've taught it to some of the biggest companies in the world.

And they're like, oh, branding was airy, fiery bullshit.

I'm sorry.

But you know what?

Just marketing.

Well, the marketing, advertising.

Oh, you're going to be on TV and say, these are my services.

Call me.

And the CEO is finance guy, you know, or he's an attorney.

And they don't have a lot of, you know, they think marketing is like something you have to put up with, you know, and branding is like part of it.

But then you go, look, you guys are building platforms in the North Sea.

It's a process.

It's steps, it's project management.

So is branding.

Same thing.

And that's what I taught for years as I, you know, was on global brand teams and working with big, big companies.

And now we use the same process with individuals and it gives them access to their own authenticity.

So the brand is them.

When my mom was an English teacher, that's a predicate nominate.

The brand is they, but nobody talks like that.

So yeah, anyway, you said you were an English teacher too, right?

In South Korea, I did.

Yeah.

I love that.

Right.

And so when I'm authentic about my brand is then the audience, my target market, going to feel that authenticity based on the process of going through.

Because we always think it's the fluff that sells.

I think that's where a lot of us get stuck.

We think it's the fluff that looks pretty.

No, let's let's take a couple of words.

Let's take a sword in them, OK?

Fluff is not what you want.

Have you ever heard somebody, they're talking about the words and they say verbiage?

And it's had an I in it.

Verbiage is the word.

Verbiage.

But they say verbiage because they mispronounce it.

Verbiage.

OK, fine.

Well, verbiage means highly technical and unnecessary language.

It's like verbiage is not your friend.

Verbiage is your enemy.

Verbiage is not what you want.

So it's like verbiage, fluff, you know, all those words that people think.

That's not what you want.

It creates confusion and misinformation.

What creates the magnet is the clarity that you have internally of whom you clearly know you can impact.

Those characteristics and those categories of expertise, you must get credit for to make those impacts.

The purpose of marketing and communication becomes getting credit for those.

So when things are written, titles and sub, I'll give you a very specific example from step six.

Step five is categories of expertise.

So if we say a woman, the woman speaking at the Rapid Growth Business Conference next year is an expert at, and I have to go into her zone because I got to see the words here.

Hold on, is an expert at simplifying the critical tech and accounting decisions for your business to reach millions.

Oh, when was that?

Well, can you tell that she has a bookkeeping business, that she has 15 people that work for her, and she's been doing bookkeeping forever and ever, but she knows how to teach people who are in high growth businesses, how to rebuild their tech stack so that that central hub of general journal and all the stuff that gets attached with these days is going to work seamlessly and beautifully when they're in rapid growth instead of falling apart and they go into a deep hole.

And now, you know, it's like bookkeeping.

That's not bookkeeping.

So her number one category of expertise, simplifying the critical tech and accounting decisions for your business to reach millions.

Now, I understand that.

I want to do that.

That's a category of expertise.

Who else says that?

Nobody.

She says that.

That's her brand's number one category of expertise.

So it's a spreadsheet.

Underneath that header are titles and subtitles of content written in the language of the brand from the characteristics we talked about in step four.

So you can't use like so if the brand is patient, you can't say do it now, do it now, do it now.

You can't be incongruent with your characteristics and get credit for them.

So titles and subtitles of content that give credit to the brand for what's at the top of the column, your category of expertise.

And there are different angles about rapid growth and critical tech and accounting decisions.

You know, my tech people and my have to talk to get and you have titles and subtitles of content written in purely congruent language that give you credit for your category of expertise and give you a roadmap for content for two or three years when the while the brand launches and establishes itself.

What?

OK, people don't understand it falls into place when you use the process.

The language is created and reused.

What you're doing is you're getting credit for what you must get credit for.

So instead of saying, well, what kind of content?

Because people struggle.

We hear all the time.

What kind of content do my target audiences really want?

What kind of content is really going to work for my brand?

Well, let's put it this way.

When you wrote down those people you clearly want to impact and you wrote down their thoughts in their mind that they're saying in their own voice.

If you bait your marketing hooks with their care about language, that's going to help.

They'll go, oh my God, they're in my head.

Oh, they really understand me.

These are my people, right?

It's like you, it's just a process.

Please.

It's not trick.

It's steps.

So that's why I'm writing the book, Impact Driven Branding, Seven Steps to Ensure Your Brand Impacts People's Lives and the World.

When you do the steps, things happen.

And when a brand is clearly defined and languished in a consistent way with unique language that transfers energy in the way it states its categories of expertise and the titles and subtitles of content, oh, I really like that, it comes alive uniquely and gets credit for what makes it outstanding.

And it gets credit for those characteristics that it must get credit for to make its impacts.

And it gets credit for the categories of expertise that it must get credit for to make its impacts.

And what do you think happens?

It makes its impact.

It raises to the impacts.

So I feel like a broken record.

It's filled with abundance and everything.

And so if you're listening to this and you know there's more, you know there's a higher level for what you do because maybe you feel it's a calling.

Maybe it is a business, but you know you can make higher level impacts.

Maybe new target audiences, new geography, new media.

Maybe it's higher level in terms of connectedness with spirit, you know, or stepping into your purpose, whatever you that is for you.

And you don't want to get it wrong.

You want to get it right.

Please take advantage of this.

Literally, I say to people, I know I'm not going to tell you how old I am, but I've been doing this for 46 years.

46 years we've been doing this, yeah.

You can do some math and I feel like I'm 30.

Okay, and I've got a bunch of energy and I'm not going to stop.

I get to do this work.

I get to help people who have great impacts to make, raise the level of their impacts and step onto a path to purpose.

Praise God, we're all here for a reason.

What a great thing to do.

And today, this work I do, it doesn't feel like work.

I'm not kidding.

I work with individuals.

It feels like love.

And that's how I know it's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.

So you might think somebody might be...

Question on that, sorry, Rich.

Question on that.

If your work feels like love, would you say anybody following this process, they will then get to work and it will feel like love?

I think the probability is much, much higher.

I'll say it in a way that might translate a little bit better.

When people feel they have, you know, somebody slaps a brand on them, you know, they paid somebody some money and now they have this brand.

Now they have to wear a secret super suit, you know, or call themselves the this or that.

There's a feeling of disingenuousness.

There's a feeling of conflict because it's not really that well, it's not really me, but I have to do this.

That thing just goes away.

You'll never feel that.

You'll feel that this is absolutely completely congruent with you.

That's the difference.

So, you know, will your work feel like love?

It might already.

I mean, from any of the people that I'm back for literally could be millions.

We're just beginning to reach out and show up in bigger ways to give people worldwide access to this process and to the steps and to their own authenticity.

So, it's not up to me how big it goes.

I'm pointing up to the God I work for.

It's not up to me, but that's okay.

We're going to show up, and it takes the disingenuousness out of the equation and makes it absolutely genuine to you.

It absolutely connects you to what's authentically you and what's in your heart and the vision you see for impacting yourself.

Yes, and the impact you want to make.

But chances are the answer is yes, and I hope that for you.

My prayer is that you do have that feeling.

I feel like the luckiest man in the world having that feeling.

There are a lot of people that hate their job, feel like they're on the hamster.

You know, it's like my heart goes out to them.

For those that are doing something that they love and they want to take it higher and they know there's more, those people particularly, I mean, I don't turn anyone away.

You literally can jump on my calendar.

You can go to the website, richbrands.org, and it says, talk to Rich for 30 minutes.

I'm not on a yacht.

I'm not on a beach.

Probably should be.

I'm on Zoom, baby.

Jump on a call with Rich.

This energy that everybody can feel right now, that's exactly how your Kozak is going to be.

Very energizing.

Rich, thank you so much for being here.

I would like to invite you in the future because I think there's so much more that we didn't cover today.

It would be my delight.

You're right.

There is a lot.

And with your background and with what we're doing, even if it's just examples, the next book is probably going to be called Impacting Humanity, Stories of Impact Driven Brands.

When people realize it happens over and over and over and it happened to her and it happened to him, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

It starts to get very, very real and be a wonderful thing to aspire to.

And I hope people don't wait.

I do.

Time is of the essence.

We don't know how much time we have.

If we're going to summarize this, here's the summary.

This is not about branding.

This is about we're all in this life for a reason, and we all get to make the most significant impacts we can with the gifts we've been given.

That's what this is about.

Words of wisdom from Rich Kozak, the founder of RichBrands, richbrands.org for your impact driven brand.

Thank you so much for being here.

And I mean it when I say come back.

There's so much we didn't cover today.

Thank you for being here, Rich.

Well, you are very welcome.

It was great.

And I look forward to being here again.

Excellent.

You're most welcome to return.

Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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