Darren Jamieson: On this episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I am speaking with Martin Thorp of Hera Creative, named after the Greek goddess. So, yes, I will be getting my Greek mythology nerd on with Martin. Martin helps people build their company brand and their personal brand. And I’m going to be speaking to Martin about what exactly is a brand and how do you build a brand that other people recognise that competes with the big boys. Martin, hello.
[01:32] Martyn Thorp: Darren, how are you?
[01:34] Darren Jamieson: I’m good, mate. I’m good. Well, glad we got that one out the way.
[01:38] Martyn Thorp: Excellent.
[01:39] Darren Jamieson: First question I’ve got to ask. I have an absolutely useless qualification in Greek and Roman mythology and history.
[01:43] Martyn Thorp: Right.
[01:44] Darren Jamieson: Therefore, your company name Hera. Hera, is that the Greek goddess and why?
[01:52] Martyn Thorp: It is. It is.
[01:54] Darren Jamieson: Ten points.
[01:55] Martyn Thorp: Thank you.
[01:56] Darren Jamieson: Ten points.
[01:57] Martyn Thorp: Ten points. Okay, we’re keeping the score. There you go. Yeah. So, Hera was the original goddess. She was the daughter of the Titans. She was Zeus’s sister as well as his wife, because that’s how they operated back then.
[02:16] Darren Jamieson: Everything.
[02:17] Martyn Thorp: Everything.
[02:18] Darren Jamieson: That’s exactly how they roll.
[02:20] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. But she’s considered by most to be the original designer because she is the goddess of marriage and love and all that kind of stuff, but sort of all rolled into one. Now, we wanted something to represent how we operate with our clients because we’re very family orientated. We’re close relationships with our clients. We’re not a transactional agency. So we don’t just do the one and done and leave it to it. We build that long-lasting relationship. So, and the motif for our business, the peacock, is the motif for Hera. So, you said you’re not all up on the Greek stuff. I’ll give you a little bit of a background on it.
[02:58] Darren Jamieson: Okay. I can go a little bit deep into it.
[03:00] Martyn Thorp: I can go a little bit deep into it. So I will. Let’s go deep. Let’s go deep into the Greek. The most summarised version possible. So Zeus, as many people and many of you know, that Zeus was quite a jealous god. Even though he was top dog, he was quite jealous. He was also quite, he put it about a bit shall we say.
[03:24] Darren Jamieson: He did.
[03:25] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. He was very promiscuous, very and very vengeful.
[03:29] Darren Jamieson: Right.
[03:30] Martyn Thorp: So as was Hera.
[03:31] Darren Jamieson: As was Hera.
[03:32] Martyn Thorp: As she was. So she was. But Hera had a watchman called Argus. Not Argos. You couldn’t order from this guy. But he was a watchman with a hundred eyes, or it could be a thousand eyes. I think it was a hundred eyes and Zeus got jealous of him one day and banished him and demolished him essentially and put his eyes into the tail of a peacock. Now a little known fact about the tail of a peacock, every single eye on the tail of a peacock is like a fingerprint.
[04:00] Darren Jamieson: Okay.
[04:01] Martyn Thorp: So as we know, fingerprints are all individual and it kind of leads into our brand story, which is quite nice because we know that all our clients are individual and then we roll on to our brand tone and our message that we treat everybody as an eye of the peacock’s tail. So it kind of all links in nicely and we looked into it to think, are we just picking it because we like the name? Are we picking it because we like the motif? I love peacocks to be fair. Or is it something we can actually tie into the brand, you know? So after about six months’ worth of extensive deep diving, we figured out it actually does go quite well to our brand story and the message that we want to get out there and how we treat our customers. So it lent itself quite well to the tone that we put out there. So yeah, that’s the summarised version, should we say.
[04:41] Darren Jamieson: And what got you into Greek mythology?
[04:44] Martyn Thorp: I’ve always been a bit of a history buff.
[04:47] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[04:47] Martyn Thorp: So I’ve always been fascinated with history and I’ve always found the Greeks fascinating because if you ask a Greek, they invented everything.
[04:54] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[04:55] Martyn Thorp: If you ask an Italian, they’ve invented everything, you know. So there’s always this, and that leads into Roman mythology. But if you look at Roman mythology and Greek mythology, they’re very intertwined. So you’ve got to wonder who came first. Is it the chicken or the egg? So I’ve always been interested in that side of things. And I’ve always been interested in how deities that seemingly had everything could be so childish.
[05:22] Darren Jamieson: Yes.
[05:22] Martyn Thorp: They always seem to, like, I want more, or they don’t want to share their toys. If you look at any films that have been made about Greek mythology or even Norse mythology, like your Thors and all that sort of stuff, the gods are very childish. It’s always fascinated me. Like the whole reason for the Trojan War was because of the argument over the golden apple, which was for the fairest of them all or the most beautiful of them all, which Athena, Aphrodite and it was Hera.
[05:53] Darren Jamieson: Wasn’t it? I think were arguing. It was her.
[05:56] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[05:57] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Yeah. So, Aphrodite bribed somebody to be given it. Quite an interesting bunch to watch.
[06:04] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[06:04] Darren Jamieson: Paris, the judge, gave it to Aphrodite because Paris offered him Helen of Troy.
[06:10] Martyn Thorp: That’s right.
[06:11] Darren Jamieson: And thus sparked the war.
[06:13] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. Vengeful bastards.
[06:16] Darren Jamieson: Vengeful bastard.
[06:17] Martyn Thorp: Always over something small, isn’t it?
[06:18] Darren Jamieson: It is always something small. It’s a bloody apple. All over an apple.
[06:21] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[06:23] Darren Jamieson: Of course, it was the Greeks that came first because even in, have you studied Roman literature as well? So, Virgil’s Aeneid.
[06:29] Martyn Thorp: No, no, I haven’t. No. Something I’d be quite well impressed to look into, to be fair.
[06:35] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Emperor Augustus commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid, which was like the history of the founding of Rome. And it was about the Greek soldier Aeneas, who fought in the Trojan War, and he escaped the Trojan War, took his people off before the Greeks sacked Troy and went off to find new lands. And it’s a big epic adventure rather like the Odyssey or the Iliad where he then eventually found Rome. So it was the Greeks that went off and found Rome in the first place. So the Greeks didn’t just invent everything, they invented Rome as well.
[06:59] Martyn Thorp: They invented the Italians, but that was from an Italian that wrote that. So I don’t know what the Italians are complaining about, but it was nearly destroyed as well.
[07:10] Darren Jamieson: Well, when Virgil wrote it, apparently he didn’t like it and was going to get rid of it.
[07:14] Martyn Thorp: Really?
[07:15] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. But then Augustus read it and said, “No, no, this is fantastic. Exactly what I wanted. It is the founding of Rome in a story format.”
[07:24] Martyn Thorp: There you go. So, yeah. I like seeing the art as well, like the painting, the depictions of that sort of stuff. You can read quite well into that. So, that’s the nutshell of it essentially.
[07:35] Darren Jamieson: So did you not want to do more with Roman mythology rather than go off into design and creative?
[07:41] Martyn Thorp: No careers in it, is there.
[07:44] Darren Jamieson: No.
[07:44] Martyn Thorp: So I’ve never been, I’ve always been more of a creative than an academic, should we say. So I’ve got one of those, I’ve got a stereotypical creative brain, whereas I can look at a logo or a poster or even an advert. I was that crazy kid on TV, you know when you were younger, I’d rather watch adverts than the programme. I’d be excited about the adverts coming up. And I’ve always liked depicting them. So I’ve always been quite a big fan of brand itself and the psychology behind brand. There’s a lot of human psychology behind brand. Everyone thinks it’s a logo or a design or things like that, but there’s a lot more to it than that. And that’s always fascinated me massively. So yeah, I could have gone down the academic route and to be fair, I would have done all right, but I’d always be sitting there daydreaming and if I was ever a teacher, I’d be that teacher that just, I’d give them a workbook because I wouldn’t be able to keep interest.
[08:37] Darren Jamieson: So you mentioned brand there. The phrase is that a brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. That’s a common phrase.
[08:44] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[08:45] Darren Jamieson: So a way to break it down. So a big USP for us is we like to put it in layman’s terms. We like to simplify it because there’s far too many businesses out there that try to baffle their customers with big words, industry jargon, just to try and get the deal on and charge them more.
[09:01] Martyn Thorp: So, our ethos is to give it in plain terms. So, if you take the word brand and rather than using phrases like what people say about you when you’re not in the room, which is essentially what it is, you just turn that word into reputation, it’s your company’s reputation. And that’s why when you talk about personal brand, it’s a bit of a buzz at the moment, isn’t it? Personal brand.
[09:19] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[09:20] Martyn Thorp: So you talk about personal brand, everyone’s got one. Everyone’s got a reputation. It’s just how you position yourself and put yourself out there. It’s what you want to be known for, isn’t it?
[09:29] Darren Jamieson: You know, and how would you define a company brand? What makes a company?
[09:36] Martyn Thorp: So a company brand, I think what makes a company brand is what you’re known for without having to advertise it. So let’s say, for example, it’s going to sound really cliche, but a company like Apple.
[09:49] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[09:50] Martyn Thorp: So everyone knows that Apple makes computers, the original Apple Macintosh computer company, and then they made MP3 players and phones and all that sort of stuff, but they’re not known for selling tech. Essentially, they’re known for selling ease and a lifestyle and a community within that tech. So you’re either an Apple user or you’re an Android user. Android covers loads of different phones. It covers Samsungs, it covers Huawei and all that sort of stuff. Apple covers one phone. So they’re a community builder and that’s what they’re known for. Simplicity as well. They’re disruptors. Nike, for example. Nike only used to be known as a running company and then they got involved in basketball, which was quite risky at the time, getting involved with Michael Jordan. He was a college player at the time and all that sort of stuff. And they waxed a load of money on him. But that then turned Nike from being known as a running company to a provider of freedom. So you look at all their adverts, they’re either athletes, elated and that sort of stuff. They create that feeling. So when you go and buy Nike, you don’t think I’m going to buy Nike because I’m a runner. You could be someone who likes to have comfortable clothing. You could be someone that likes to go hiking. So the way that I would define brand is like you say, it’s the way people perceive you when you’re not in the room. It’s a feeling that people have about your company and it’s a reliance so they know what they’re going to get.
[11:10] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[11:11] Martyn Thorp: So it’s almost intangible, isn’t it? It’s a safety. It’s, I’m trying to think what’s the best way to describe it. It’s assurance that you know, what’s that phrase, no one ever got fired for hiring Dell.
[11:30] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[11:31] Martyn Thorp: So it’s the fact that you know if you get that it’s going to be good. It’s going to work. You’re going to look well, you’re going to look good. It’s going to look good on you. You might not look good in it. It’s going to look good on you and other people will look at it and go, “Yeah, yeah.” You’re never going to get criticism for going for a brand. Whereas, if you are an off-brand, you’ve got to battle to get that customer share because you don’t automatically get given it because of who you are and what people think about you. If that makes sense.
[11:58] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. No, exactly. It’s interesting you chose Dell there. So Dell’s quite a good example because we were talking about Apple earlier breaking into the MP3 space. Dell’s a good example because Dell actually tried to make MP3 players back in the day. When Apple got onto the scene, they thought, I want a piece of this market. But Dell had already established themselves as a brand that was for reliable computers.
[12:21] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[12:22] Darren Jamieson: So for PCs. And when they broke into the market of MP3 players, everyone wondered why they did it. It wasn’t a case of, oh yeah, we’ve got to buy that. It’s like, hang on, don’t you make PCs? You make really good PCs. Why are you getting out of your box?
[12:39] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. So, it’s interesting that you use that as an example because that’s a good example of brand. They became so well established as a really decent PC provider, that they’re fully reliable. Most companies in the world use them, to be fair. If you go to any major corporation, the laptops they give out to their workers are Dell laptops. The operating systems are still Windows operating systems. So, they’re very reliable. When they tried to break into other markets, they got whipped back into shape. So this is how you know the difference between Apple’s brand and Dell’s brand, because they both started in the same space. Apple started making computers. There is no denying that, but they changed their brand into a brand of community. Dell still stayed in the tech. No one’s like, I’m a Dell user. They’re like, “I’m a PC user,” but they still say, “I’m an Apple user.” So it’s a good example that you use.
[13:34] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. That’s the way. It is very intangible for sure, but you know it when you feel it.
[13:41] Martyn Thorp: You know it when you feel it. So, if you buy a nice pair of shoes, for example. I don’t know if you’re a shoe man. I’m a flip-flop guy. But a nice pair of shoes. Everyone has a favourite style of shoes. You have a style of shoes like a brogue or an Oxford, but then you have those real hardcore shoe brand fans that go for Loake or John West’s. There’s loads of different brands of shoes that might not necessarily be as good as the other brands, but it’s how they’ve been put out there through their marketing. Because brand and marketing quite often get mixed up. We get mixed up as a marketing agency all the time. We’re not. We’re a brand agency. We’re strategists and we’re brand management. But marketing and brand can’t work well without each other. You need both at one point for a company to be successful.
[14:23] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[14:24] Martyn Thorp: It’s the order in which people confuse it. So if you’re a startup, for example, everyone thinks that you need to build a brand first. No, you need to build a brand identity first and perhaps a message, because then you’ve got to have something to market. So you’ll have your colours and your assets and your logo and all that sort of stuff. That’s your brand identity. It’s your visual identity. And you have your message because you’ve got to let people know what it is that you’re putting out there. But then you have to have the marketing department because there’s no good in having the world’s biggest diamond and then keeping it in your pocket. And then at the same point, when you’ve grown and people know exactly what you are, that’s when you bring in the brand thing to strategise, to then refine that brand message and that brand tone even more. So then people start to trust what they’ve seen put out there. So it has to work hand in hand. And when they don’t work well together, that’s when things fall apart.
[15:16] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Well, that brings me on to the key of what I think is worth us talking about here. How do you establish a brand? What are the steps you go to? So if you’re a startup business and let’s say it’s not even a competitive thing like trainers or clothing. Say you’re doing a B2B business like an accountancy or a financial adviser and you want to start up a business and you want to create a brand and you want to be known for a thing. What are the first steps you do and can you even do that to challenge well-known brand names in those fields?
[15:58] Martyn Thorp: Absolutely. New brands come out all the time that smash the old boys into place. If you think about airlines, Richard Branson started his airline and he did it with no money. I think he had to borrow the money to get the first plane, that sort of stuff. But there were well established airlines already in place and he was going up against some really big names. So it’s not hard for brands to break onto the scene, otherwise commerce doesn’t perpetuate. So the way that we always recommend to people, especially when startups come to us. We’ll have startups come to us and they will say, I want to start a business. I don’t know how I’m going to go about it, blah, blah, blah. The first thing we’ll start is, right, why do you want to start that business? What problem are you going to solve? What have you seen that you think you can solve? And then secondly, how can you solve it better than other people? So our business, for example, we started it because I spent nearly 20 years working in corporate and I saw how corporations were baffling people. Are we allowed to swear?
[17:00] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Yeah. Swear.
[17:02] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. You want to say bollocks and it. Go for it.
[17:05] Darren Jamieson: Awesome.
[17:05] Martyn Thorp: So I was sick of people baffling with bollocks, basically. There’s companies, sales teams getting on the phone saying we can do this, this, this, and this. Now, if you speak to a customer and you’ve obviously got a marketing agency.
[17:22] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[17:22] Martyn Thorp: So you speak to a customer and you say to them, “Right, this is going to be CTR. This is going to be ROI and this is going to be your ROAS.” They’re going to sit there and go, “What are you going on about,” but then you’ve got to be able to explain that. Now, when I was working in corporate, and it still happens now, they wouldn’t explain it. They just go around in circles until the client was either brow-beaten into submission or went and researched it themselves. And then by that point you’re thinking, well, you just did that to overcharge them. So we started what we do so we can simplify everything and help customers build a brand without having to get baffled with it. And we don’t overcharge for it. We’re not the cheapest company in the world, but we make sure that they know that they’re getting the value. So that’s the first thing. You’ve got to look at the why. You’ve got to look at what value you provide, how you can provide it, and how you can do it better than others.
[18:10] Darren Jamieson: Okay.
[18:11] Martyn Thorp: Now in our space there are still many agencies out there or even freelancers who don’t want to share the toys. They will say, “Oh no, I can’t give away my little secrets,” because they think it will lose them business. But essentially, this is what they’re not getting, and I’m giving away the farm here, but this is just how we operate. If you tell a customer what they need to do, you give them all the information under the sun. They’ll either firstly see how difficult it is to do and then hire you to do the work, or they’ll think they can do it themselves. Go in and they might do well. Fair enough. Then you’ve empowered them and then where are they going to come to when they need more information? They’re going to come to you because you’ve created yourself as an authority in that space. Or the third one is they’re going to, and this is the one that no one likes to admit to, they’re going to think, “Yeah, I can go and do that.” They go and give it a go. They completely mess it up and then they come to you to fix it and then you can charge more. So there’s all this sort of stuff in place that you can put to help companies, but there’s different ways of doing it without having to be like, “No, these are my toys. I don’t want to play. I’m not going to give you any information.” And then out comes the baffle mentality because they want to give as much information and make themselves sound full of piss and importance basically, and make themselves sound all clever. If you can explain it in layman’s terms, it means you understand it. If you can’t, I’m sorry, but you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
[19:32] Darren Jamieson: That’s an Einstein quote, isn’t it? If you can’t explain something simply enough, you don’t understand it yourself.
[19:39] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. I do have a tendency to go off. So if you just stop me and move me back, that’s fine. So that would be the first would be the why. Figure out how you can do it, why you want to do it. And then you’ve got to look at the what you do. You’ve got to figure out the why and you’ve got to figure out, right, this is what I’m going to do to achieve the why. So it could be like you say about an accountancy. Now, everyone thinks accountants are boring. They’re not. We’ve got accountants as clients. It’s just how they position themselves. I find it fascinating that people aren’t more interested in the financial sector because the financial sector is one of the big ones that struggles with brand at the moment. It’s one that we’re having quite a lot of success with, to be fair, right now because they’ve all got the same message. They’re very FCA regulated. They’re heavily regulated. So there’s certain things they can say and certain things they can’t say. And by default, they’re not a creative industry. So you have to go in every now and then, you have to help these accountants, these financial advisers and mortgage advisers pull out their personality because that’s essentially what leads into a decent brand.
[21:04] Darren Jamieson: Now with accountants, it’s fascinating how they can find little loopholes or legal loopholes of how to either save you money, get you capital gains, all this sort of stuff, make you money at the end of the day, help you to get paid more, maybe pay less tax or take more tax home or help you hire. The accountants are like a backbone of your business.
[21:20] Martyn Thorp: Now, one of our clients is actually our accountants because we were so impressed with what they do. They couldn’t, and they’ll tell you when we have meetings with them, they couldn’t tell everybody what they do. They couldn’t get it out of their head. So you say to them, right, what do you offer to your client? “Well, we can do this, this, this, and this.” It’s quite boring stuff. So we say to them, right, let’s pull out a bit of your personality. We’ve got one of the directors who’s a keen cyclist. Right, let’s use some analogies from cycling to put that out. We’ve got one who’s a rugby player and a secret heavy metal rocker, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. So you’ve got to pull that personality out. And then that gives people something to come to you for. They’ve got to want to work with you.
[21:45] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[21:46] Martyn Thorp: So the way that we do that is we sit down, we just have conversations. Sometimes these conversations can go on for hours. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes just to pull it out. And it’s because a lot of the time you’re very close to your own business. A good example is we work with an executive coach. Now, bearing in mind we’re brand coaches, we can do brand coaching. This executive coach is someone who works closely with CEOs, MDs, people that are leaders of businesses. They’re too close to their own business to figure out their own personal brand. So they come to us, “Right, I can’t figure out why I should be getting myself positioned,” etc. So to the outside world, it would seem easy what we do. Obviously we have a framework that we work to, but what we do is sit there and we work out, right, this is how you work, this is how you operate, this is how you benefit, this is the return that you can give for this customer, this is the result they get. Have you asked this customer for a testimonial? “No, I haven’t.” Right, okay, why haven’t you? And it’s often a case of can’t see the wood for the trees. And this is a problem that a lot of customers and a lot of companies have in the early stages. They’ve got all this stuff going on in their head and they think, right, I can do this, I can do this, I can do. And then they’re more concerned with, right, well, I’ve started a business, I’ve got to get money in. And rather than thinking, right, I’ve got to get money in, but how am I going to do that sustainably, because a good brand is sustainable, they start thinking, right, I’ve got a little bit of funding here, I’m going to wax the lot on Facebook ads without knowing fully why they’re doing it. And then people come to, “Okay, why should I choose you over so and so?” “Oh, you should choose me because we get your books balanced.” “Yeah, but so do they.” “All right, you should choose me because I can get your tax down.” “Yeah, so can they.” What’s that differentiating factor? And this is where a lot of companies struggle.
[23:29] Darren Jamieson: No, 100%. I’ve done quite a few talks at networking meetings about your USP. What is it about you that’s different to your competitors? And I always hear the same basically come back and it’s like, oh, we really care. We’ve got great customer service.
[23:44] Martyn Thorp: Well, they say that as well.
[23:46] Darren Jamieson: We’ve got really fast response times.
[23:48] Martyn Thorp: They say that as well.
[23:49] Darren Jamieson: We go the extra mile for our customers.
[23:51] Martyn Thorp: Yep.
[23:52] Darren Jamieson: They all do that. People struggle, really struggle for a USP. Have you got any advice about how someone can find a USP for their business if they don’t think they have one or they’re struggling to come up with one?
[24:04] Martyn Thorp: Yeah, my sole advice for that, to find a USP, would be to look at yourself personally. This is a lesson of introspection. Look at yourself personally. So yeah, have we got good customer service? Yes, so have they. Okay, but this is how we’ve got good customer service. Give examples. So, like I said, for example, our USP is that we break through the industry jargon and we’re very transparent as a company. We’re very family orientated. We treat our customers as if they are family. We build that relationship. Now, loads of companies go, “Oh, yeah, but we’re like a family.” It’s like, “No, we’re not like a family. We are a family.” If we’ve got a customer that needs help either drawing through their brand, pulling out their personality, all that sort of stuff, we’ll deep dive into them. We’ll pull up threads. There will be times where we have meetings with customers to pull out their brand. They won’t like the questions we’re asking because a lot of people don’t like looking at themselves internally. And this is where the problem starts. To try and find the USP, it will open up positives like we can do this, we can do this, we can do this, but it also reveals some negatives. Instead of thinking, “Right, I can fix that negative and turn that into part of my USP,” they’ll skip over it or they’ll stop the exercise. “I don’t want to do that anymore. It makes me sound like a…” If you break through it and you’re coachable, if you’re able to break through it and build that USP and get through those problems that you’ve had, that is your USP. I’m able to work with my customers on such a granular level that we know more about them than they know about themselves and they come to us. We get most of our work, to be fair, through referral. I think we’ve done very little advertisement. We’ve been going four years as an agency. We’ve done very little advertisement, done a bit of networking. Most of our work comes through referral and that’s because of the level of granular detail we go into with our clients to help them find their brand. And like I said, a lot of the time very uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. So if you can find a way through the discomfort and find a way to answer those difficult questions yourself, or in your team answer the difficult questions between you, you will get to your USP. It just might take a little while. You can’t expect it to happen straight away. You can’t say, “Right, yeah, we’ve got a ten-minute meeting, we’re going to find a USP in this.” It could take days. It could take months.
[26:24] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. I think that’s an important thing for people to get when they’re listening to this. Your USP isn’t something you just come up with, because if you come up with it, it’s not a USP. And correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a similar process for your why. Most people come up with a why. “Oh, I want to help people.” Why? Why do you want to help people? And you keep having to go back and dig deeper and deeper, like you said, pulling up threads and finding out that your why is quite possibly something that happened when you were six years old.
[26:52] Martyn Thorp: Yeah, you don’t know it until you’ve gone down and really worked out why it is that you do what you do. Not everybody knows. A really good way of finding out what your USP is, and this is if you’ve managed to pull on clients. A lot of companies are reluctant to do this, by the way. They’re reluctant to pull on what we call proof of concept clients. You’re probably familiar with the term, the proof of concept clients, your first pancakes. So proof of concept clients, for anyone listening who doesn’t know what it is, are the clients that you will offer a heavily discounted rate to in order to work with them, to show them what you can do, to get reviews, to get case studies, to then be able to put them out to showcase what it is you can do. We did it when we first started offering web design. So we offered five free websites to businesses in our local area. Some were bigger websites, some were smaller websites. We offered five free websites and all we wanted in exchange was a customer testimonial and a case study and for us to keep our name on their website for at least a year. Now, all of those websites that we developed, like I said, this was over two years ago when we started doing websites, they’ve all kept our name on there. They’ve all come back to us for other business. And it wasn’t because we did the first one for free. It was because of how we work with them. Now what we did, more importantly, by getting those client testimonials, because testimonials are all fluff a lot of the time, we want a deep-dive testimonial. So that’s why we go for the case study as well. What we did after we got all that is we went back and we asked them, “Right, realistically, don’t beat around the bush. I’m a big boy. I can handle it. Tell me why you worked with us and why you would continue to work with us.” Now, if you look at all those answers, you only need around five to get a nice medium, but if you look at all those answers, you’ll find your USP in there. “Why did you work with me? Why do you want to continue working with me?” “Well, it’s because of this, this, this, this, and this.” Now, if your USP comes from someone else, that’s solid. And that’s just the same as building a brand. Your brand comes from someone else. You’ve got a solid brand because people are referring to you and thinking of you in a particular way.
[28:55] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Because it’s what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.
[28:59] Martyn Thorp: Exactly. And that’s how you find a USP as well.
[29:04] Darren Jamieson: So with all this work you do with people on brands, do you work with people on their personal brands as well?
[29:07] Martyn Thorp: We have done. Yeah. Personal brand is a little bit more tricky because, like I say, everyone’s got one and most people don’t like hearing the negatives about their personal brand because it is about positioning. So there’s certain things, because everyone thinks that when you do a personal brand you have to put everything about yourself out there. You don’t. My children have never been on social media. There’s one photo of each of my children on social media, and that was the day they were born. We did the announcement of their birth. They’ve never otherwise had a single photo put on social media. My dog’s on there, which is great.
[29:36] Darren Jamieson: I like my dog.
[29:37] Martyn Thorp: I like my dog. You very rarely see images of me, I don’t know, outside my office. If I do videos, normally inside my office, because unless I invite people in, we don’t have footfall. We’re in an industrial estate. We’re not in a footfall area. So things like that, because there are certain times where I will need to just hunker down and work away. But what people think when they’re building a personal brand is they think, “I’ve got to get all my information out there and I’ve got to give absolutely everything.” It’s like, yeah, if you want to. You don’t have to. So when we work with people on personal brands, we do a bit of a vetting system beforehand. “Do you want to get everything about yourself out there?” And if they say yes, we say, “Right, why do you want to do that?” Because if you do, then this is total transparency. This is like video on the toilet type stuff. You’ve got to open. It’s like Big Brother is watching you. You’ve got to open that door and you’ve got to be willing for people to invade your privacy, because then people will have an opinion on it. And this is something you can’t control, the court of public opinion. People will have an opinion on what you do. Or do you want a personal brand that is centred around your abilities and what it is that you offer? So is it a professional personal brand? So there’s different levels of it. Do you want a professional personal brand? Do you want a personal personal brand? Do you want one that’s like a vlogger? Do you want to be an influencer, for want of a better term? So there’s all different levels of personal brand. And a good example is we helped this one person develop their personal brand, and they already had a fantastic personal brand. They had a very interesting job. They worked with some very interesting people. And in the first two weeks of working with them we did some work with them on a marketing level as well, some low-level content marketing. But the way we developed their brand, we helped them to organically be found in around 25,000 searches in the first 14 days. We downloaded the stats, sent them over to them. “Look at this.” “Fantastic, it could be more.” It’s like, right, you always get that, don’t you? So then we start looking at the indepth of it. “Do you want to build a personal brand because you want to be famous, or did you want to build a personal brand to help your business?” Turns out this person saw influencers doing well, wanted to do that. They didn’t want to do their job anymore. But we didn’t find this out until three weeks later. Now, we’ve done this before and this is something I would recommend not being afraid to do. We cut ties. So we said to them, “Right, this isn’t a good fit. We don’t want to work with you anymore. We wish you all the best.” They were shocked. “What do you mean you don’t want to work with us? We’re paying you.” Yeah, that’s fine, but we can’t work with someone who’s not coachable and who doesn’t give us all the information up front.
[32:17] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[32:18] Martyn Thorp: So, building a personal brand is a massive minefield and I don’t recommend going into it unless you are totally willing to decide what angle it is you want to go at, how deep you want to go into your life, how guarded you want to be, and whether or not you can take that feedback, whether it’s good or negative. Whether your ego is going to get smashed to pieces by it, or whether you’re going to get through the clouds and your head’s going to swell so big you can’t get through the door. There’s elements of being able to control and maintain your personal brand, because it’s, again, a long-term thing. As with brand and as with anything and as with most marketing campaigns, you’ll find it’s not an overnight thing, but it can be irreparably damaged overnight, personal brand. You’ve heard that saying. I don’t know if you’re a music fan. It was a Stereophonics lyric. “It takes one tree to make a thousand matches. It takes one match to burn a thousand trees.”
[33:18] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Never a truer word spoken when it comes to brand.
[33:23] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. So you have to be willing to be consistent. And this is why we always say there’s a directive going around at the moment where people are saying, or marketing agencies are putting out, are saying, “Right, you’ve got to be authentic.” Now, authentic isn’t a directive. You can’t say to someone, “Right, be authentic,” and they’re going to go, “How am I going to be authentic?” You can’t. You just have to be yourself, right? That’s a big part of brand. If you’re not doing what you’re telling people you’re doing, your brand is flawed. The minute someone finds out you’re not delivering on your brand message or your brand position, your brand is tanked, and it takes ages, if you can get it back. It takes ages to get your brand back to build it back up to where it was, or even surpass it, or even close to where it was.
There’s a good example of an airline in America. Never remember the name of it. I think it was Continental Airline, not the tyre company. I don’t think, I think they’re totally separate, but they had an issue for years and years and years of the airline always being late, having to pay millions in fines and that sort of stuff. And then they were known for being a really poor airline, a really cheap airline. I think this is in the 70s or the 80s, it was quite a while ago. So they went through CEO after CEO after CEO. And the one CEO that came in to help them out, can never remember his name, but he came in and he realised it was something to do with the internals. So he worked on the people first. Now this is something that many larger companies don’t understand. Brand starts from the inside. If your people aren’t on board with how your brand is and they don’t know what your brand message is, they don’t know what the tone is, they don’t know how to deliver it, how to position themselves or anything like that at all, they don’t know how to put it out there when they’re speaking to customers. That’s the major breakdown in your chain, right? So, he understood that it was the people that weren’t happy. He worked on the people, got in with baggage chuckers and all that sort of stuff. They then started being happier. The customers were happier. The planes were on time because there were fewer delays due to customer service or baggage or anything like that at all. And then the airline turned itself around. It took a good, I think, 10 maybe 12 years. So it was a long time. It turned itself around to being, turning a profit for the first time in their history. So they held a record for having made no profit whatsoever in their initial stages and then they managed to turn it around because they worked on the brand from the inside out.
Martyn Thorp: So there’s a lot to be said for how you look at a brand and how it can be damaged, but it can be repaired. It’s whether or not you want to put in the work. Now most people don’t have the bandwidth to put the work in. They don’t want that leg work. So a good way to avoid that is to not leave yourself open in the first place. If you are going to build a brand and you are going to build a company, make sure that your why is right. Make sure your how is right as well, how you’re going to do it, and make sure what you do is bulletproof.
[36:11] Darren Jamieson: And of course it can go the other way, as you say. The most famous one is somebody I’ve met, a guy called Gerald Ratner, who famously said on a radio interview something about his products being rubbish and absolutely tanked his business overnight. It can happen easily.
[36:30] Martyn Thorp: Remarks.
[36:31] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Taken out, well I don’t even think it was taken out of context. He actually meant it. His products were rubbish. But there we go. It’s just something you don’t say in public. Here’s a question. It’s a difficult one for you. If you’re building a personal brand because you want to be known within the industry, you want to be your authentic self as you say, but you also want a company brand. How tied is your personal brand and your company brand if you are thinking at some stage I want to sell the business? Because you don’t want to rely too much on your personal brand as being the person that is synonymous with the business and is getting the business in, because if you were to then leave, that business wouldn’t be worth as much without you. So I’m not sure I’m asking the question very well. How important is your personal brand if your company brand should stand on its own right if you want to eventually sell a business?
[37:16] Martyn Thorp: So your personal brand is important to be tied to your company brand only in the respect that it could build credibility. So if you want to develop a business that’s going to gain brand equity and it’s going to build and be sellable in the future, the first thing you want to do is you want to separate your name from the company name. So there are separation points. If you were to call your business, I don’t know, say I was to call my business Martin Brand Agency. It’s not valuable because it’s my name on the brand agency. And if I wanted to sell it, no one’s going to want Martin Brand Agency. So you’re going to want to have the name totally separate. When you build your personal brand, you do still need to feed into your company brand because it will help both your personal and your company because it helps people know what you’re known for. When you’re building your personal brand for professional reasons, you want to showcase your abilities and not what it is you do as a company. So I’m a graphic designer, for example. I design logos, I design websites, but I also do the brand strategy. Now the brand strategy is more aligned with my personal brand because it’s something I’m actually interested in. I’ve been obsessed with it for decades. Hera, for example, we are known as a brand management agency, but we always use different language. We use language like, “We do this for you. We can do that. We can do that.” And it’s all simple little tweaks, because there’s people that we use within our company. So there’s myself and my wife who are actually employed with the company and we have partners that we use for specific roles, just to keep head overs down really. But we make sure that people know that there is a team within Hera. If people want to deal with me separately, they want to deal with me because of how I am personally. Now I can separate myself from Hera and I can, literally, we had a meeting earlier with someone today that we would be potentially speaking to about coming on board hopefully if it works out. But I know that that person, because I interviewed them, is aligned with my values. This is your differentiator. So it’s not my personality, not a clone of me, but they’re aligned with my values and how I would treat customers. I know I can leave Hera within their capable hands while I went off and did something else. Now your personal brand is based more on your personality than your ability. Your company brand is based on your company’s personality. So that’s the ability of what you can do in there and how your company treats people as a whole. If you were to use a company that specialised in EPOS systems, you want to know that that company as a whole, not just one person, because that’s difficult to go to, you want to know that company as a whole is going to help you with any problems that you might have. If it’s only one person they rely on, it’s frustrating for the customer and that’s bad for your brand. But if they want a specific thing sorted, so say they want the tech help, the tech help is going to come from the company. They know they can go there, but they want someone who is also really good at analysing the business and can help them grow. There’s one specific person they can go to. That’s where the personal brand comes in. To separate those is important, but serial entrepreneurs, if you look at, the way to explain Gary Vaynerchuk. You familiar with Gary Vee?
[40:30] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. Gary Vee.
[40:31] Martyn Thorp: So Gary Vee, his personal brand is built on kindness and empathy and all that sort of stuff. You look at him attached to other companies that he’s involved in, that he owns, like VaynerMedia, VaynerSports, VaynerX, you’ve got all these other companies that do totally different things, by the way. One’s a sports management agency, one’s a marketing agency, one’s an ad agency, he’s got NFTs, they’ve got all these other companies. They will feed off his personal brand because his personal brand is advertising it, but the companies themselves have people within them that have their own specific functions that customers know they can rely on. So he could walk away from any of those brands at the moment. And even though it’s got their names, the name is quite valuable at this point, but even though he’s got his name attached to it, he can still walk away from it and that company would still be okay because he’s fed into it with his personal brand.
[41:27] Darren Jamieson: So in the short answer, and I do tend to go off here, but the short answer, your personal brand is important to your company brand, but it’s also important to have that barrier to let people know that, personally, you’re skilled specifically at this. As a company, you’ve got this to offer. Does that make sense?
[41:51] Martyn Thorp: It does. It does make sense.
[41:53] Darren Jamieson: And it’s something I’ve been working on myself with personal brand and company brand and differentiating the two, because I’m not going to be around here forever. And you want to make sure that Engage Web is not seen as me, which it shouldn’t be, which is why I tend not to do a lot in the office. I don’t do anything very much. And people know I don’t do anything. So that’s okay. So they don’t need to speak to me. It’s all handled by other people. That’s important. Are there any types of businesses, industries that you would really love to get involved with, but you haven’t yet?
[42:23] Martyn Thorp: This is a difficult one because I’ve got a white whale. I’ve got my Moby Dick, right?
[42:30] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[42:31] Martyn Thorp: So when I was in corporate, I worked with many big companies. I’ve worked with the Mercedes Formula 1 team in Brixworth. We’ve done some work with those guys. I’ve worked with Next clothing, software solutions. We’ve worked with massive firms like Hachette Publishing, and these are all great. They’re all fantastic companies. But there’s nothing majorly exciting about them, but there’s one company that I’ve had a bee in my bonnet about, and I’ve never been able to get into it.
[42:59] Darren Jamieson: It’s strange that you mentioned Mercedes Formula 1. There’s nothing particularly exciting, but go on.
[43:04] Martyn Thorp: No, no. So, and I’ll tell you for why in a minute, right? And this is the difference in brand as well, because there’s a subbrand there. That’s a thread we’ll pull on in just a sec. But one that I want to get into, and this is going to sound really bland in comparison as well, by the way. But there’s one I want to get into and it’s Weetabix. So Weetabix have been around since the dawn, right? Everyone knows who they are. Remember the old campaigns, “He’s had his Weetabix this morning,” and all that sort of stuff. But there are holes that I see in Weetabix’s brand, but also in the way that they, not just in the brand itself, but the way that they position themselves. I’d love to sink my teeth into it. And I got very close when I was in corporate, very, very close. But then the guy I was dealing with left and went to another company and subsequently I worked with that company. That was fine. So obviously I built the relationship with that guy. But yeah, Weetabix have always been my Moby Dick.
[44:00] Darren Jamieson: But going into the Formula One stuff, the reason I say not overly exciting. So this subbrand, the Brixworth team, it’s a data centre. It’s where they develop the cars, develop the tech, work on what makes the car go quicker, or how they get all the statistics and everything from it. It’s literally that. It’s a data centre.
[44:25] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[44:26] Darren Jamieson: The real excitement from the Mercedes Formula 1 team comes from the races. So that’s the by-product of what they do in Brixworth, which is really cool, don’t get me wrong. The racing side of it, and they wouldn’t be able to get to that without that, but for most people it’s not overly exciting. You expect to go in and see all these massive cars and all these, it’s not. It’s a room full of computers, servers, people working on stuff and tweak this and tweak that. It’s like, let’s say for example, the Gherkin building in London, right?
[45:03] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[45:03] Darren Jamieson: Quite an interesting building, the way it’s designed. The glass, if one pane falls out, it’s designed in a way that it will fall away and it won’t hurt anyone. So it’s a really interesting way it’s designed. If you went into the architectural agency that designed that and see how they operate. Now, I’ve got a friend who’s an architect in Woolwich. Their offices are very white. They’re very clinical. They’re very quiet.
[45:27] Martyn Thorp: Yeah.
[45:27] Darren Jamieson: So, if I was to say to you, “I was working with Johnson Architecture Agency and they did the Shard and they did the Gherkin and they did this and they did the Flatiron,” you’d be thinking, “Oh, that’s really cool.” If you go into the building itself, it’s not overly cool. It’s interesting, not overly cool. So, there’s a differentiation there between brand again. It’s the perception of what people think is cool. Mercedes Formula 1 sounds fantastic and everyone watches the races and they’re really great. It’s what’s behind it.
[46:05] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. So are you an Apple user or are you a Samsung user?
[46:10] Darren Jamieson: I’m a PC user, for phone Apple phone.
[46:14] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. It’s interesting you say, “I’m a PC.” There was a campaign, wasn’t there? “I am Apple. I am PC.” Remember, about 10 years ago?
[46:17] Darren Jamieson: Yeah, it was David Mitchell who was the PC guy, the boring guy.
[46:23] Martyn Thorp: That’s it.
[46:24] Darren Jamieson: And Robert Webb was the Mac, because he was cool.
[46:27] Martyn Thorp: Exactly. If you look at the components though, most Apple phones are made up primarily from components that are developed through Android or Samsung or some sort of Android phone. But people don’t look at that because Apple sounds really cool. It looks really cool. But if you look at the bones of it, the stuff that makes it cool is stuff that people often push against. It’s so intricate, the way that you can look into brand and how brand has an effect on everything. And that’s a big one. People don’t want to know how the sausage is made, but they tell you they do.
[47:00] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. That was the main reason, wasn’t it, that the iPod launched so successfully because Microsoft had one at the same time. I think it was Microsoft, and Microsoft launched it as, “Oh, it’s this big again, 4 gig, 8 gig, it holds this much data, it’s this fast,” whereas Apple was, what was it, “2,000 or 10,000 songs in your pocket.” The technology was irrelevant. The spec was irrelevant. The data was irrelevant. It’s what you can do with it, and that’s what they looked at.
[47:29] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. It’s fantastic. So they were a master at that. Steve Jobs was a master at that. And this is why I said earlier they build a community. It’s not the tech, as you say. It’s not, “Oh, this has got 25 gig and it’s 20 cm by 5 cm,” all that sort of stuff. It’s “a thousand songs in your pocket,” and you think, “That sounds amazing. What could I do with a thousand songs in my pocket?” And then you start, it causes you to dream, causes you to think. The same with Nike. Nike sells freedom. They don’t sell running shoes. Most people that buy Nike are runners, right? But they’re going out for a run, they feel free. It’s that feeling that they’re getting. That’s the packing behind it.
[48:21] Darren Jamieson: There’s a guy I’ve had on my podcast, a sales trainer from Liverpool called Andy Bounds. He talks about the afters. Nobody wants the service you give them. They want the feeling that you leave them with afterwards. So nobody wants a website. They want the business that website generates for them without them having to market themselves. They want what comes after. And too many people in business, in marketing, in advertising, at networking events, they stand up and they talk about what they do. They don’t talk about what they leave you with, which is what people really want.
[48:50] Martyn Thorp: Yeah. Exactly that. And most people, if you ask them truthfully when they start a business, you’ll have two sets of people. You have the people who say, “Why do you want to start a business?” “I want to make money.” Okay, that’s great. “Why do you want to make money?” “I want to drive around in a flashy car. I want to have a big gaff. I want to go on holidays five times a year.” Great. That’s a personal reason for doing it. And you’ve got the other people who want to build a legacy. Two very different things, because building a legacy will make you money. How much depends on. The “I want to make money” attitude is a very selfish one and is one that will only serve that person that owns that business, because their mind will always be “I want to make money.” Even if there are people that work for them, you’re not as important as me making money. Somebody who wants to build a legacy is thinking about the entire big picture and they’re the ones thinking about building a big brand. You’ve got a business or you’ve got a brand. Where you want to go with it depends on, like you said earlier, your why and the kind of feeling you want to leave people with. Like you said, going into a networking meeting, you leave people with a feeling. Now, every good networker will tell you that, let’s say for example, and I will blow smoke up my own arse, I’m a good networker. I spent the last however many years going to networking meetings, building the network and like I said, we do very little sales activity up until recently, because we want to scale. But most of my business has come from these networking groups. I’m very quiet in the networking meeting. The ones that are bad at it are the ones that go in, like you say, they go, “Here’s my business card. This is what I do. This is how I can help. What have you got? What have you got?” And they stop. They bang on and on and on. The good networkers are the ones that ask one question, listen, let the other person talk. Ask leading questions for them to talk and then to talk, and you’re gaining all that information. Then what you do is you go away and you process it. You develop that and then you contact them a little while later and you say, “Really nice to meet you at this event. You mentioned this, this, this, and this. We may be able to help you with that. Let’s have a chat.” It’s a much nicer way in, but it also shows that you’re considered. You consider what that person wants. You’re not trying to just sell for the money’s sake. And that goes back to your why. If you genuinely want to help people, you want to grow your business for whatever reason, depending on what business you’re in, but if you have a genuine why for why you want to start this business, you’ll do a lot better naturally or organically. You’ll do really well. If you just have a selfish reason of “I want to start a business because I want to smash it out and get loads of money,” you’ll do well for a short period of time, or you might do well for a long period of time, but eventually you’ll have a very stressful life.
[51:27] Darren Jamieson: It comes back to the whole sales piece, doesn’t it. Sales is about listening. Sales isn’t about talking and preaching. It’s about listening. So if you ask someone a question, you listen to what they say, you’re better prepared to give them the solution that they want rather than trying to force a solution that doesn’t fit down their throats. And when you mentioned as well about letting people talk and letting people speak to you rather than you speaking to them, they’ll come away from that thinking, “What an interesting guy that Martin was,” even though they did most of the talking, because that’s what people like.
[51:55] Martyn Thorp: There’s a time and place. So this, for example. You do your podcasts. You invite people like myself on. Now is the time for me to talk. You’ve asked a question, I then give that talk. If it was the other way around and you were coming on to my podcast, obviously the dynamic would be very different. I’d be asking you a question and letting you speak. And this is what I think a lot of companies can’t get their head around. I think a lot of it comes down to desperation in a way where they just need to get that money on. They’ve either over-exerted themselves, their overheads are too big too early on.
[52:26] Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
[52:27] Martyn Thorp: We started our business in my bedroom. So my business cost me £12 to start, which was at the time the Companies House registration. I had an old laptop. We worked our way up to what it is that we’ve got now. And obviously, we’re in an office and we have people come in. But I think a lot of people think, “Well, I’ve got to start a business. First thing we’ve got to do, I’ve got to get an office.” Boom. How are you going to pay for it? “I’ve got to get a flashy new computer because I’ve got to look like a business person.” No one cares. Your computer could be a Dell, it could be a Mac, depending on how you want it to look. Essentially, the skills are coming from you. It does the same thing. It’s your knowledge that you have to sell. There’s a great place over here, we’re based on the Wirral. There’s a great place over here called Building 41. It’s like an innovation centre and there are many of them scattered all over the place. I know there are loads in London, where you have offices but within that office building you have shared office space. So you can rent that office space for £100 a month and you can hot-desk it, but you’ve got a place for people to come for meetings. So if you are desperate to look overly professional in your early stages, there are solutions for it, but people don’t look for those solutions. They just think, well, Jordan Belfort did it, or whoever. All these big flashy sales people, but they don’t look at what they went through for it. So yeah, you have to look at the overheads and whether or not you want that desperation, because it’s a monkey on your back, or whether you genuinely want to build your business.
[54:02] Darren Jamieson: No, I get what you mean. People starting out getting offices straight away. It is crazy. You don’t need to do that. The first thing you need to do is to get clients, get paid working, get money in. Then you can do all the other funky stuff that quite frankly isn’t that important. And when I started a business, it was 16 years ago. We paid £100 between the two of us each, so £200 in total. That’s it. That’s all the money we invested. And we started from a back bedroom.
[54:26] Martyn Thorp: The office came probably three or four months later because it wasn’t needed and it was a very cheap serviced office as well.
[54:32] Darren Jamieson: Now we own the building. You got to look at it. You got to look at the future of it. And obviously you own your office, right?
[54:38] Martyn Thorp: We do now. Yeah. This one. Yeah.
[54:41] Darren Jamieson: Yeah. So now what you’ve done is you’ve spent years building it and you’ve got an asset. But there’s a patience problem at the moment. And this is a big issue with brand. There’s a patience problem with building stuff like that because it’s like building a house, for example, using an analogy. No one just comes along and goes, “Right, throw the bricks over there and it’ll build itself.” It’s not how it works. You’ve got to look at the plumbing.
[55:01] Martyn Thorp: It’s not Minecraft.
[55:02] Darren Jamieson: Exactly. Yeah. So you have to look at that kind of thing. Right. Martin, we are out of time.
[55:14] Martyn Thorp: I know. Who’d have thought?
[55:16] Darren Jamieson: As a final question, if someone is listening to this, maybe Weetabix for example, and they’re thinking, I want to get in touch with Martin, I want to work with him. What is the best way for someone to reach out to you?
[55:26] Martyn Thorp: So if you want to send an email, info@heracreative.design
