Evolution Of Branding (Design, Strategy, Web3, NFT’s)

Evolution Of Branding (Design, Strategy, Web3, NFT’s)

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How Jacob Found Branding and Brand Strategy

Stephen Houraghan

A lot of our listeners will know who you are and they’ll have heard about your journey before, but plenty of them probably will have not as well.

So why don’t you kind of give us a bit of a background as to where you came from?

Where you started within the industry?

How you got into the industry?

And then how you found branding specifically, and even more specifically then brand strategy?

Jacob Cass

So 2007 is when I really, first read this of my business, which was called Just Creative Design at the time. 

So just to give you a quick understanding.

I’m a brand strategist, I’m a brand designer. I run a podcast myself and I also run a community and upload for Just Creative. 

So that’s what I do now but going back to 2007, what my business was back then was literally a blog. It was a way for me to document my studies at university.

That was when I got thrown into this world of blogging and Branding, I didn’t know at the time what I was doing, but I had this attraction to logo, design and typography. 

I repelled from art and drawing, but I knew that I, loved logo, design and typography. So that’s where I focused my efforts.

I was riding them out logo design all the time.

That got me into the world of branding and that kind of evolved into becoming a brand identity designer and then many moons later into a brand strategist when it came across folks like yourself and the future ton of other strategists out there.

And that’s really the journey to now a very condensed version. 

So Logo designer, identity designer, strategist, and now I’m a business coach as well. So that’s it in a nutshell of the many ups and downs along those ways.

The Challenges In Branding and Brand Strategy

Stephen Houraghan

So why don’t we jump into a few of those challenges that you mentioned? 

I know that probably like me, there were a few key points along the road that made you reconsider what you were doing or how you were doing it. 

Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about the challenges that you’ve faced along the way?

Jacob Cass

So there are always different challenges along each stage of the journey and suddenly really in hindsight, you can realize that there are actually challenges and at the time you thought you were doing things the right way, and that was what your skill level was at the time and you didn’t know better.

In particular, when I first started, I didn’t have any assistance or processes.

You’re trying to get your business sorted trying to find your niche and your positioning in the market. 

I didn’t even know what those things were back then. There’s no wonder it’s a struggle when you really trying to figure that all out on your own.

To be honest, back then, there was not many resources online about at all. So it’s all, books and trying to learn from your lecturers and your teachers. 

So it was a bit of a different game now is too much information now, who do you know, who to trust and who to learn from and who has the right solution, and so forth.

So the problem back then was business problems, like how do you position yourself?

How do you send the right message and how do you attract. 

So once you learned that and you got the systems in place. It’s like at that time I was focusing on brand identity with the focus on logo design.

So I set up my niche in terms of logo design, and my positioning was all about logo design and that kind of stemmed.

I guess that was a top of my funnel, if you will, and which stemmed into brand identity and so forth. 

So the challenges then were business and attracting clients.

It was actually too much work. It’s like it was the positioning had to change because it was too much work and I couldn’t fit it all in. 

So that was a good sign to like raise rates and to learn something and so forth. 

Then, you know, once I was aware of strategy or brand strategy and how deep branding actually goes, I realized, I didn’t know shit about branding or what I thought because there’s so many different assets and that’s easy to say in hindsight, but so many different lenses that you can look through brand from.

I see more and more every week, the more people I interviewed, the more people I speak to, there’s a, so many different ways that you can approach brand, whether it be from the comms or could the customer or operation. 

So there’s so many different ways.

In a nutshell, just to summarize it was business in the beginning, then it was positioning and then it was like

How do you sell strategy? 

How do you talk about strategy? 

How to communicate the value of strategy?

So that was some of the issues that I’ve faced to face along the way.