Why do we often put up a front in our business lives to disguise our real selves? In this episode, Emily and Kate Bradley Chernis, Co-Founder and CEO of Lately, are breaking down that front for a refreshing take on being yourself in the business world. Plus, tips on navigating the psychological impacts of pandemic PTSD.
Mikal Abdullah is an entrepreneur, Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu coach, and competitor, founder of Aces Jiu-Jitsu Club, U.S. Army Veteran, and professional fighter. Mikal’s diverse background makes for some very interesting conversation in this latest episode. Emily and Mikal talked about an array of topics including: entrepreneurship, problem-solving, branding, the military mindset, leadership, and more.
What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
Alison Greenberg is a naming expert, brand strategist, and verbal designer. As of 2023 Alison is the Co-Founder and CEO at RuthHealth. Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of aflow, a conversational AI studio designing and building AI-powered, NLP-backed chat and voice assistant experiences. Over the past 12+ years, she's helped brands find their voice in the marketplace.
Alison’s branding and naming work includes brands + agencies: McCann, VSA Partners, Siegelvision, Elmwood, OpenIDEO, Edwards Lifesciences, Stryker, Summit Health/City MD, Pfizer, General Motors, McDonald's, Hungryroot, The Helm, Fidelity, Llamasoft + others. (Alison Greenberg- LinkedIn.)
Alison Greenberg, Co-Founder & CEO of RuthHealth, and brand naming expert and strategist. Twitter: @ALiS0NLAURA
Emily spoke with Alison about her approach to naming products and brands with a few great examples from fashion to CBD. Plus, should voice assistants have a gender? And what makes a good chatbot?
This episode has good old fashioned branding, voice and conversation design (VUI), startups and women creating cool products for women, and the keys to designing a great chat experience for your customers or audience.
1:50: Alison shares her background and how she became involved with naming brands.
2:15: Language is a currency and in any form of advertising, marketing, or branding it is the core piece of the craft. Naming is the most condensed way to apply language to a brand. Naming is the way that you take language and really put it to work for the brand it’s poetry, but it’s also a strategic execution of ideas.
3:35: Naming can be subjective, so how do you objectively define the success of a name?
3:50: You can’t decouple a name from what it represents. The naming doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but the success of a brand is mostly qualitative. Is it succinct? Does it telegraph meaning?
5:20: Successful names often stop us in our tracks. In B2B naming you don’t have much of an opportunity to do that, but it’s becoming easier to be creative and innovative with naming.
6:00: Slack is a great example of this. It resonates with the user. People often say “slack it to me” or “slack me.” It’s simple and surprising: two criteria for a great name.
6:55: There’s a science behind why names with harder consonants such as k and z. Experts in linguistics study sound symbolism, phonosemantics, and phonaesthesia: the idea that the way a word sounds have lexical meaning and meaning in the way that they sound. It’s all about the relationship between sound and meaning.
'Phonaesthesia occurs when certain sounds become associated with certain meanings, even though they do not attempt to imitate the sound (as in onomatopoeia). ' 'Phonaesthesia has been described as a type of conventional sound symbolism.
Women in Voice is building community for women in this new technology space. Alison is chapter founder of Women in Voice NY.
9:11: Often, brands run into legal problems when trying to establish a name to their brand. One such company that Alison worked with is Where Mountains Meet. Brand owners approached Alison after being hit with a cease and desist letter for the brand name they were originally using when launching their sustainable women’s clothing business. See more about Where Mountains Meet on their Instagram.
11:05: calmbound is another female-owned business that Alison has worked with whose owners had a passion for language and creating a brand of CBD edibles curated with the proper dosage of CBD and available to people of all walks of life, i.e. veterans, elderly, etc. calmbound echoes the literal compound used in CBD, but also has a deeper meaning that resonates with the brand’s hope that users would be “calm bound” with their mental and physical health. See more about calmbound.
12:45: There is always a need for naming. Whether it’s podcasts or brands, the ability to be clear as well as memorable is a true art. -Alison Greenberg
14:25: Some of the most interesting perspectives can come from an intersectional and diverse background. When we’re thinking about voice, having a background in understanding the human element and how language and communication function on a level with human emotion is really helpful.
15:30: Being brief and getting your message across concisely is key. Brevity goes beyond just the way you look at brand communication. It has to be done visually and verbally because we are constantly being bombarded with information.
17:15: You don’t have a lot of real estate with voice. You have to use as few words as possible to get your message across.
Voice User Interfaces (VUI) are the primary or supplementary visual, auditory, and tactile interfaces that enable voice interaction between people and devices. A VUI can be anything from a light that blinks when it hears your voice to an car’s entertainment console.
18:34: When you’re building a custom voice experience responding in the fewest amount of words while maintaining a personality and conversational flow is a balance that you have to strike.
19:00: How do you bake the tone of the brand into pre-programmed chat responses while maintaining brevity?
19:19: You need to remove the formalities and just focus on conversation with chat. Telegraph meaning and utility. The whole point of a chatbot is to get something accomplished. -Alison Greenberg
20:35: Make sure that your chatbot voice is honoring that brand. A beauty brand might use emojis while an insurance brand would be establishing trust.
22:10: Bots and voice should use language to be solution creators, not just problem solvers.
23:10: Make it known that a chatbot is being used from the beginning. The BOT bill (Senate bill 1001) in California makes it illegal for bots to pretend to be humans online.
24:30: Considering gender with virtual assistants: The term virtual assistant is a better term for a chatbot. Using the first person plural can be a good way to stay gender-neutral.
25:40: There is no reason to give a bot a gender unless it’s strategic. For example, the brand Swoobie’s target customer is a female, so it makes sense for their voice and chatbot to take a female gender. In financial services, it doesn’t matter.
27:45: Staying gender-neutral with voice can be tricky.
28:48: Female topics can often be taboo, but some brands in femtech and sextech are starting the conversation around them: Lola, Cora, etc. Chatbots allow for these topics on women’s healthcare to be explored in an environment that feels safe and non-judgmental.
30:21: Book recommendation: Questions of negotiation are really common in the voice industry, especially for women. Alison recommends “Getting More” by Stuart Diamond.
Guest: Claire Winslow, CEO Best Practice Media joins Emily Binder to discuss the evolving definition of creativity in advertising, plus the problems with the ways that we recognize and award women in business.
Claire and Emily discuss whether “advertising as we know it is dead” - prompted by Larry Light’s opinion piece in Forbes. The author writes:
The focus on short-term, disposable viewership is an unfortunate byproduct of the digital age. Sustainable advertising campaigns designed to create and reinforce brand loyalty will be a thing of the past.
The love affair with digital, data and devices has eclipsed the understanding that truly creative, memorable, persuasive and consistent advertising has an important role to play in brand building. Advertising is not a single use wet wipe. The primary role of marketing in general, and advertising in particular, is to create, reinforce and increase brand loyalty. -Larry Light
Audience segmentation and funnels are the new form of creativity
We should not limit the word “creativity” to a traditional definition of coming up with the ideas - it’s more than the ideas because it also involves the technical skill and strategizing of promoting the message, which can be done creatively even if it doesn't resemble Mad Men
The evolution of language: it always changes. Look at Olde English. Old people always dog young people - it’s the pattern of humanity.
Instead of taking slogans from traditional media and putting them on social ads, reverse it and let inexpensive social advertising inform the traditional ads which are more expensive to produce:
Case study from Claire's agency Best Practice Media: Buc-ee's Texas road stop, an amusement park/gas station - how Claire’s team is helping Buc-ee's choose effective copy for their road sign using digital (A/B testing 15 slogan options on Facebook to inform outdoor advertising).
More info: Buc-ee's, the convenience-store chain with a cult following and 'world-famous’ bathrooms
Female Founders Are Changing the World. Please Stop Calling Them 'Mompreneurs' and 'She-E-Os': Enough with the cutesy nicknames - Inc piece by Leigh Buchanan
Social Media Week Austin: smwatx.com
Twitter: @bestpracticesmm
The official Tuesday night event at Project Voice:
Increase the discoverability of your Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing live at #SkillSetters premiere cocktail hour!
Come share your Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing, speed dating style! 50 Alexa Skill creators have the opportunity to give a short elevator pitch for your Skill in 1 minute to each person in the room. After each interaction, guests can scan each other’s QR code badge that opens their Skill on mobile.
You’ll leave with up to 50 new users, new friends, and great ideas! Come network with the #SkillSetters at Project Voice!
Emily Binder (Voice Marketing with Emily Binder)
Daniel Hill (The Instagram Stories)
Amy Summers (The Pitch with Amy Summers)
With featured guest Bradley Metrock, host of Project Voice along with Audiobrain and more great sponsors! Register now, spaces are limited.
Listen to Part 1 - podcast with Brian Roemmele about Alexa hardware and more
Brands have defining points with their customers, as any human relationship does. What makes a brand successful longterm? How does voice play a role?
02:00 How do we build a relationship in which our customer is the hero? (A la Storybrand framework)
02:53 All products, companies, and brands are a relationship with their consumer.
03:20 Every purchase is an emotional purchase because it is defined by neurological reactions - neuropeptides bombard every cell of our body when you make a purchase
04:00 Every brand has an emotional connection to the people who use their products. Some covet it better than others. This means a narrative is being spun overtly or covertly all the time.
Apple has a powerful brand narrative on a cerebral (higher brain) level
05:45 It took millions of years for apes and chimps to speak and listen: we had to create a new O.S., the neocortex on top of the limbic system in order to communicate
07:15 Neuropeptide release of a transaction or purchase - pleasure in the body, your cells will remember this
08:15 Carl Jung - the twelve archetypes
Archetypes, introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, are models of people, behaviors, or personalities. Jung suggested that archetypes are inborn tendencies that influence behavior.
08:30 Voice has the opportunity unlike any other one (including film) to create a rich deep emotional lifelong connection with the customer. If you do this ethically and build the persona correctly for our brand that resonates with your cohort
09:00 The human agenda is connection
09:45 Brian consults with brands and tell them to understand where the transaction and neuropeptide release occurs
09:55 A voice comes from a person - it’s not a thing - it has a persona (a life, a gender, a background) - we are hardcoded to assign these traits to a voice
10:25 We instantly categorize anything we hear or see anthropomorphically because of flee or flight mechanism
11:05 Your brand has a voice: who is it? Fashion brand example from Brian’s work
11:30 It is impossible to make a persona that caters to everyone: there is no voice of everybody
12:05 You need to assign a Jungian or Myers Briggs archetype to your brand
12:30 Your customer is on their own hero’s journey, along with you (Apple and Patagonia and Tiffany and Starbucks do this or have done this well)
14:00 Why is Alexa female? This could be a smart move by Amazon: female voice = authority on a neurological level! - profoundly important. Google has an androgynous voice - a mistake? Brian would argue yes.
14:15 The voice of authority is and always will be a female. The first voice your hear is your mother. Long before eyesight you have the resolution of identifying your mother - this is a survival mechanism evolution has granted. That is why we are wired for communication and voice.
15:40 We can’t change our hardwiring in our brains - female voice is authoritative, especially one in tune with your mother’s voice (can prove this neurologically)
16:10 Anthropologically and culturally, the wise woman (hence the archetype) was always the leader of the tribe until western culture labeled them witches
17:30 The divine feminine and goddess culture came because women were the voice of authority, which we knew instinctually. Women became the voice of the tribe and holder of wisdom. “Don’t eat that, you will die.” Sounds like mom.
18:40 We are a victim and a success story of our reptilian brain
20:15 If a brand keeps us too reptilian we are probably not going to be longterm fans or customers; jealousy or FOMO pulls at the lizard brain but that is short term thinking. Apple is successful because they get cerebral (higher brain, invoking ideas of fashion)
19:15 There is more to this than throwing out an app, you are building a tapestry to weave between the customer for life. We define our life by our brand relationships to some degree, e.g., “That’s when I owned that car, that’s when I got my first iPhone…”
Thomas the Tank Engine helps children make sense of the world
20:20 It’s not the brand we connect to, it’s the story and its role in our own narrative (e.g. Thomas the Tank Engine helped kids understand the confusion of the world with “The little engine that could.”
21:00 90% of what we do on our computers is trying to make sense of the world, e.g. social media as confirmation that what we did was right
21:15 Brand expression is to attract members of a desired tribe (e.g. why I use Apple)
22:20 When we build voice brands (brands around voice, which are coming) - ask: what does your brand sound like? Who is it? Where did they grow up? This is more than a Hollywood storyboard - and this is why you need experts to help with branding.
Guest Bob Stolzberg, Founder of Voice XP, and Emily dug into a key question about where e-commerce is headed: can brands stand as independent ecommerce channels while reaching customers through Amazon Alexa?
Furthermore, will branding really matter in an increasingly AI assisted future? (Bob and Emily disagree here. And we’d love to hear Brian Roemmele’s take!)
Bob Stolzberg, Founder Voice XP, Alexa Champion
The convenience factor of a single voice command could reinforce brand loyalty. If you can have a company call you back or send you a car or a pizza hands-free, you might just go direct to them and never shop around (and that could be through their Alexa skill). Or maybe the voice assistant of the future does the research for us and we don’t bother remembering brands anymore.
Personal assistants will help us buy things and it doesn’t have to be direct from Amazon. Ecommerce businesses can build voice experiences directing users to buy direct from them (e.g., via text message or multimodal touch screen that opens a separate page). Think about this for DTC (direct to consumer) like a Casper or M Gemi.
What you can do today to improve customer experiences for shopping and getting information
How voice will impact the future of advertising
How you can create a custom skill which lets your customers request a call-back from you through Alexa
How to engage people with your voice experiences - omnichannel marketing and voice as part of the funnel
Twitter: @BobStolzberg
With Trinity Audio, publishers and bloggers can turn their readers into listeners by turning their written content into lifelike speech. All it takes is a short snippet of code to audio-fy your website. Get started for free at trinityaudio.ai
Ben runs professional sales for Blue in North and South America, has been with Blue ten years
He handles B2B business, distribution, and educational sales
How does Blue differentiate in the microphone industry?
Blue’s unique history (very music focused, podcasting has been recent)
Started as a high end microphone company (many of their mics are still $6,000-$10,000)
Took premium sound and made it affordable (see their podcasting mics)
Blue’s marketing stands out - fun names like Yeti and Snowball <— please use my link if you want to buy a snowball, this helps support the show!
4:34 Story: Snowball was originally called Softball - founder story
Softball (Snowball) was built for GarageBand, per Apple’s request- a simple USB mic
Founder Skipper turned them down
Emily used Snowball on her first podcast (throwback: The Digital Dive Podcast)
Blue Microphones are the #1 SKU on Amazon for Music / Musical Instruments (these mics are not in the electronics department) - if you want to purchase a Blue Yeti, please click here to use my link to support the podcast!
Hear about podfading (half of podcasts fade after 6 episodes) in Emily’s episode with Phoebe Mroczek
8:10 Emily asks: are people ready for a more passive media experience (e.g. podcasting and voice - audio content) due to social media overload?
"Half the picture is sound" - George Lucas on the importance of audio in film
High quality audio is paramount for communication and marketing
Bad audio on YouTube is worse than bad visuals
Ben is seeing a trend of XLR mics, not just USB mics (XLR is used at major music recording studios)
If you’re paying for an expensive computer and Alienware, it makes sense to upgrade your audio too
Video games are part of his market - gamers are buying nicer mics
Joe Rogan uses a broadcast mic
People are spending more money on higher quality mics
Ben is seeing a consumer purchasing trend with XLR mics, not just USB mics (XLR is used at major music recording studios)
If you’re paying for an expensive computer and Alienware, it makes sense to upgrade your audio too (gaming)
Video games are part of his market - gamers are buying nicer mics and willing to pay
Example- Joe Rogan uses a broadcast mic
Ben with Chino Moreno, Deftones singer. “We all had the same music manager for a bit. Alice in Chains and Deftones are still with them but I’m a mic guy now.” - Ben Thompkins
Instagram: @bthompkins, @bluemicrophones
