How Thought Leadership Can Differentiate Your Brand | Denise Blasevick

Peter Winick

How Thought Leadership Can Differentiate Your Brand | Denise Blasevick | 363

Using thought leadership to make your business stand out.

An interview with Denise Blasevick about codifying thought leadership in order to scale your business.

With so many brands in the marketplace, how can you elevate yours? And how do you stay unique, eye-catching, and authentic to your vision?

To help address these questions, we turn to Denise Blasevick, CEO and Founding Partner of The S3 Agency. The S3 Agency provides advertising, marketing, and PR for companies seeking stronger strategy and an authentic voice that differentiates your brand from all others.

Denise shares how thought leadership can make your business stand out, and earn trust. She was the on-air marketing make-over expert for an MSNBC program for nearly a decade, and that exposure allowed her company to compete with larger firms and punch above their level. She offers tips she learned staying true to her vision in a sea of competition, and how she found people that shared her breakthrough point of view.

In today’s society, your brand must be authentic. Some choose to lean into (or away from) certain political issues, but Denise used her unique perspective to guide her brand’s voice. Today, she walks us through the reasons how and why a brand should engage in the conversation about difficult topics. Further, she reminds us that leaning into a cause means more than giving lip service to your views; you must act on them, or your audience will call your authenticity into question.

The S3 Agency has helped clients, from BMW Motorcycles to Tetley Tea, develop their brands. Denise explains the Brand Elevation Process used to collaborate with clients and help them reach the next level. She explains how she broke years of gut instinct down into small, measurable parts, then used her insights to build a codified process that allows brands to scale their business.

Whether your brand is big or small, this conversation can help you find clarity and meaning – and find success!

Three Key Takeaways:

When codifying your thought leadership, break it down into its most basic pieces. Then, of each part, ask “Does this really matter?”
For thought leadership to change the world, it must do more than talk about it. You must stand for something, take action, and be the change you want to see in the world.
The only way to scale thought leadership effectively is to create a process that allows others to replicate your results.

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Denise Blasevik. She is the CEO of the S-3 Agency, which is a creative agency that specializes in differentiating brands to maximize their power and profitability. They have a brand elevation process. They’ve worked with such cool brands as BMW Motorcycles, National Kitchen and Bath Association and Tetley Tea. And without further ado, let’s dive in here. So where I want to start today, Denise, is if you were to introduce yourself at a cocktail party or something, I’m sure thought leaders not the first thing you’d say you would talk about the agency. You talk about the work you do. You talk about all those sort of things. How is the use of thought leadership help the business for you?

Denise Blasevick Sure. So very interestingly, there was a show called Your Business on MSNBC, and it ran for about ten years. And early on, maybe during the maybe the end of the first year, they reached out to us because they had heard about us, because we had been covered with our thought leadership in the media and asked me to be on the show. And I ended up being their on air marketing makeover expert for the duration of the show. It was almost ten years. So that was incredible exposure for my agency and for me through that show.

Peter Winick And I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because you were the biggest agency or an injury, Right? Right. Well, no. Well, you’re laughing, but I think that to me, one of the superpowers of thought leadership is there’s no reason you’re not as smart or smarter than anybody in an agency 100 times your size. You can’t outspend them. You cannot brand them. You know, here’s a list of things that you can’t outdo.

Denise Blasevick Exactly.

Peter Winick Who really good thought leadership. Somebody could look at that and go, Wow, she’s smart. Get her. Here’s her agency and all that. And I think it enables folks to punch far above their weight.

Denise Blasevick I agree with that. I also think that, you know, when you have strong thought leadership, if you if you have a vision and a visionary and a small company, you’re not held back by some of the things that the bigger companies and bigger agencies are holding back with, whether it’s appeasing shareholders or worrying about, you know, upsetting lines. Of course you want to conduct yourself in a way that is befitting, but you get to be who you are. I mean, my clients know who I am, you know?

Peter Winick Right. Well, the other piece is and I’d love to get your thought on this, is, you know, we’re all being commoditized, whether you’re on the product side of the house, the server side of the house, the professional services, etc., etc.. And it is an antidote to commoditization, right? Because at some level, you can have a typical client and you’ve got some stellar client and say, well, you know, and agencies and agencies and agency and they all claim to be smart and they all claim to be creative and they’re going to work hard and like, nobody doesn’t do that, right. But, you know, when you put your leadership in front of a client, you’re like, wow, they have a perspective. They have a point of view, you know.

Denise Blasevick Even if you don’t agree with it, right? You know, and then, you know, okay, this company is not for me and that’s fine. But you can you don’t wonder, like, are they going to be like me? You know, if someone has a vision and you know, the thought leadership of that makes sense to you, that that brightens you up. Mexico Yes. That that’s the thing. And that energy, you know, like you said, everything is becoming commoditized, but people aren’t commodities. And when you find people that have that express breakthrough viewpoint that you really align with, you know, that’s when you know, yet these are the people for you and everything comes down to chemistry. And ultimately you want to work with people that that you really enjoy working with whatever side it’s your vendor, it’s an agency, it’s a partner, whoever it is. And if you don’t have the word people just, you know, on your team, you want to make sure that you have that. And that’s it’s a rare thing to find. And that is the opposite of commodity.

Peter Winick And what do you think about because I’ve seen this as well in both in my work and on behalf of clients, There’s also a self-selection piece where, hey, you know what you signed up for. If you don’t want an agency that’s out there, if you don’t want an agency that has this belief or you don’t like, then what you’re also saying without having to say it, we might not be for you. And that’s true.

Denise Blasevick And it’s okay to say that, too, you know, And I think that that to me, you know, translating into what I do for a living for brands, so many brands are afraid to take a stand. And I understand that, you know, they if you are a mass brand that doesn’t have any kind of differentiation, you are a commodity that you just want to appease everyone, then it’s probably not for you. But if you do want to appeal to certain people, you have something to appeal to and turn others off, right? If you want to be exact, if you can’t appeal to the other people.

Peter Winick Well, I want to stay on that on that brand piece because it’s really interesting to me now. And it’s this is maybe a little bit of a tangent, but it’s interesting. So why not? So when you think about what’s been going on in the world politically over the last 6 or 12 months, maybe a little bit more post Floyd, You know, so I’m thinking of like the Georgia voting rights issue, right? So it used to be think about two big companies based in Georgia, UPS and Coca-Cola, theoretically, and this has always been their playbook. They couldn’t care less where you are in the political spectrum. Everybody needs to ship a box within a brown truck. Everybody could drink a Coke product, but then all of a sudden the market said, Where do you stand on this? And their typical response was some sort of corporate blabber speak of, you know, we don’t stand on it. And people are asking for companies to take a position, which is really interesting, right? Because if I’m Coca-Cola, I’m going, geez, do I want to, you know, alienate 37% of my clients? That’s a bad idea. Right. But how do you deal with that as a brand today?

Denise Blasevick Well, so it’s interesting. Not everybody’s asking for a brand stake position. Some people are saying, brands, please don’t take a position. Right. I just want to drink.

Peter Winick Drink.

Denise Blasevick Or have my stuff delivered. Right. So this is great PR for Coca-Cola. But but the thing is, you have to do from a brand perspective what feels right for you. And it’s the same. You know, we talk about differentiating brands that leadership is a pillar for differentiation. And it has to, Commander. We always call the air and it is not augmented reality. Air stands for authentic to you and relevant to your desired audience. So if you authentically can lean into or away from an issue, then that is what you should do and it should be relevant to your audience. So if you know, our audience does not want anyone taking a stand on their issues, they don’t want to look at their Facebook feed and see brands telling them what to do. From a social justice perspective then, and you probably want to live alone. Or if your brand is, you know, appealing to people who are very motivated by that, then you probably need to figure out how to speak to that.

Peter Winick Yeah, I just think that certain brands are now and it wasn’t their intent or reflecting a political statement, just like I was at a friend’s house over the weekend, their pool and I just grabbed a T-shirt. Right. I’m going to be pulled on like I’m not making a political statement. And it was like a tie-dyed Ben and Jerry’s t shirt. And they’re like, I can’t believe you’re still wearing that with Israel. I don’t like, you know, like, I didn’t even realize it at the time. I’m like, No, I’m actually just like a chubby dude that likes Ben Jerry’s. Like, this is like, I’m not making a political statement. It was on the top of my T-shirt pile like, geez, now do I have to think about every time, you know, did this brand do anything right or wrong? Am I offending anyone? Whatever. It’s just an interesting time relative to brands making a or representing a political perspective or whatever. Yeah.

Denise Blasevick And you bring up a really good point because there are many people that aren’t keeping up with that, right. That have no desire to keep up with that. And they just like, I want some chunky monkey, you know? Exactly. You know, and I’ve been.

Peter Winick Aware of what, you know, the whole the whole controversy there. But it just like it wasn’t not to discount the problems there, but I’m like literally just grab a shirt from my, you know, bureau and put a shirt on and didn’t want to I didn’t think through the ramp. And they’re going to be like, I’m wearing a green shirt that is green mean something bad. But I did not get the memo.

Denise Blasevick Okay. You didn’t get the memo. Well, you know, it’s the whole idea of canceling out, you know, actions and people and brands because of something they did or did not do. It is tough. I think having one thing here, one thing there, that’s not the big picture. And when I say speak to it, as I mentioned earlier, speaking to an issue when I speak to it, I don’t mean just saying something. I think that’s also been a big problem, right? If you are going to authentic, lean into something as a as a brand and have thought leadership as part of that. You can’t just say it. You have to actually do something about it. Like, you know, a post, a press release, a press conference. That is not enough. And if you don’t back it up and then people are going, you know, show me the receipts, show me how this is really happening, What are you supporting? What do you do? What change are you making? And if not, don’t pretend that you are. That’s a dangerous space. And that’s the worst of all things. Right? You came out, you made a statement because you wanted to get these people. But these people are going, hey, you didn’t really put your money where your mouth is. Exactly.

Peter Winick And these other you didn’t go in knowing.

Denise Blasevick I didn’t want you to do that. I don’t want you either.

Peter Winick So that’s the way it is now. Everybody’s pissed off at you. Yeah. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcasts, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts. I want to pivot for a moment because part of sort of what unique about your agency and this is sort of front and center when people are looking at your site and your materials and getting to understand what you guys are about is your brand elevation process. And without getting into the process, the fact that as an agency you’re going front and center and saying, Hey, it’s not that we’re the most creative, it’s not that we’re smart. Those are all important things. But we have a process, a framework, a methodology, and we’ve used it on others like you, and we know that. So maybe it’s my nerdiness, but I’m a big fan of process, right? Because I don’t get when you’re dealing with either creatives or technicals that talking, you know, whatever mumbo jumbo that you don’t get, but a process I get. So tell me what it took to develop it and how it helps you differentiate and win business in the marketplace.

Denise Blasevick Sure. So our brand elevation process, it started out we started the agency 20 years ago. My business partner and I and we would just sort of do elements of this. And as we matured a little bit in the business, you know, we kind of hit it out of the park and feel like, we just have a great gut on this and everything. And then we realized the great gut is not anything that you can grow or you can’t leverage that for other people to grow your business. So then we thought we need to codify what we do here, and that made us look at it process and go, you know, we always thought this part that we did over here was really cool, but this doesn’t really seem to move the needle for guys. But this thing over here that maybe isn’t the coolest thing. We haven’t used the brand development more. So that was. Yes, go ahead.

Peter Winick So stay with the codification for a minute, because this is we do a lot of we spend a lot of time with our clients where you put a problem in front of them depending on what their domain expertise is. And they’re like a supercomputer bank itself. And it’s the curse of the expert. And you’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa. How did you do that? Like, I just did it. Like, No, no, no, no, no. Okay. But that’s where you. That’s your billion-dollar magic. How do we break that down? Like, I don’t know. I just. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I could look at this and look at that, and it’s like you bring your car into that old school mechanic and before you even took the key out of the ignition, when you rolled it in, he’s like, It’s the muffler. I know you probably like or you know, or a great cardiologist that can just tell, like breaking that down so you can communicate it and replicate it into others is not easy. It’s usually just put the thing in front of you and go up. The answer is right. Like, So what did it take you to codify it? You fast forwarded through that. I think it’s.

Denise Blasevick Important. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And because that’s the only way to scale, right? I mean, you can stay small and stay expert and just be one person. Yeah. So we really started going through all of the different things we do when we’re differentiating a brand that, you know, my, my partner and I would, you know, would do just that came naturally to us that we had absorbed through the years previously and things that we made up. And we started analyzing them and saying, does this thing really matter? Does this thing really matter?

Peter Winick So breaking it down to the to the Lego pieces.

Denise Blasevick All the Lego pieces, measuring them, determining when you put them together, how do you put them together? What order do you put them in to make the biggest impact? Were there things that we did that were confusing to others? But we knew they were important and there were some of those? How do we communicate those so that they are more beneficial, say to our clients, we’re working with them because, you know, we do it every day. It’s in our nature. But so it’s different when you’re when you’re doing something collaboratively and collaborative was huge. So creating something that we could work collaboratively with any kind of client. And we’ve done it from brands from like BMW Motorcycle to the National Kitchen Association to CPG brands and health care brands. You know, so it has education has nothing to do with the type of brand that has to do with actually differentiating brands. So those are all different kinds of people. And it had to work with all different kinds of people. So we have it a bit modular where we can go, we’re working on this. This doesn’t seem to be resonating, will replace it with this. So we have the whole process that can run without us. And that was very important so that Auntie knows how to do it.

Peter Winick So I would imagine there’s a timeline, if you will, where you’re introducing this, I’m guessing tell me if I’m right or wrong. It’s part of the selling cycle to talk about it. And then you’re onboarding a client, you’re educating them, and then in the process, you can go back and say, Actually, here’s where we’re stuck. Remember, we talked about step number seven, You know, we’re going to redo that or do it a little bit differently because we’re not on the same page. Is that is that does that make sense? Exactly.

Denise Blasevick Yes, it does. And in fact, this is the way we honor our client. So it’s in the selling process. We have to be careful not to be too detailed in the selling process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Overwhelming. But you can’t be too short with it either, because then it just looks like every agency has a process, every agencies, as they think about the idea they do something with the idea, they measure the idea. Yeah, that’s true. I mean, you could say that about anything. Like, everyone makes the coffee, they drink the coffee. Yes, but there are differences, right?

Peter Winick There’s good coffee and garbage. Coffee, Right.

Denise Blasevick Right. Right. So, you know, we have this way that we do it. And in the selling process, once people see a little bit of the results, we’ve gotten further clients with it, then they want to know more about the process. But they can’t know all about it until we actually do it with them because it just we’ve tried sharing it with people so that they could, you know, we’re going to do this. And they’re like, Yeah, that doesn’t sound like that’s going to be really meaningful. But when I tell you like the number of times we’ve gotten standing ovations at the end of like our workshop, that is the most.

Peter Winick That’s amazing, right? Right.

Denise Blasevick It’s and it’s not because we’re so great. It’s because they’re pulling their own data out of their heads in a collaborative way that we’re facilitating and they’re seeing, my goodness, we had all this data and my data, I don’t just mean like, you know, numbers on the back end of something. I mean, I knew they were aligning, right? This we’ve done this with companies more often than not where different departments have completely different ideas of what the company is and what they stand for and it helps them together. And all of that, by nature has to make your marketing work harder, has to make your organization flows. Yeah. Because now you have you understand what’s special and different about you as a whole. Yes. You all have different jobs and you all ladder up to something. But this is what makes you special as a whole. And that’s when you figure out your special purpose, right? Like, wow.

Peter Winick Exactly. That’s our magic. Yeah. So let me ask you last thing on the process side, and I’m just scribbling some thoughts. As you were talking, there is the classic agency creative attracts a certain type, right, as a client. Right. Those that are enamored jazz, love, the creative, want to get into the fonts of what color magenta is that like? And that’s all fine and dandy, right? But it also ostracize is to some extent the more technical, the more financially savvy, the more, you know, let’s call it broadly speaking, right brain versus left brain stressors. But when you put out something like a process, you’re kind of opening a door and saying, come on in, Mr. Finance. Come on in, Mr. CEO, Come on in. This, you know, ops person because we got something here for you too. And it’s not just about the cool and the slick and the whatever it is that worked in your favor.

Denise Blasevick That’s absolutely worked in our favor. And that that is true because, you know, when you’re doing this, it has to bring people it has to start with top down and be embraced. Right. And it has to have representation across different areas of the business in order for it to be a true reflection and understanding of what the differentiation is. So without question, it brings the both sides of the brain together. And I would also say, you know, creative these days does have a lot of technical and money. And so I feel like that they used to be that you didn’t quite have to show it the way you do now, but now you do and you’re optimizing and changing midstream. But what’s very important, you’re doing that now, not just kind of on a hunch or let’s try to you now have this roadmap of this is the filter we have to go through things by and that helps you determine before you start putting things out there to optimize what the best things are to start optimizing from it.

Peter Winick Yeah, there’s no there’s no black box. There’s no, you know, Sheila in the back just has magic power. That’s right. She just knows. Trust her, whatever.

Denise Blasevick It also helps us as an agency when we have clients that that come on and we have sometimes to switch people on the accounts because we have an account growing over here. We do well. So it’s not that there isn’t a way to transmit this knowledge. You have this corporate knowledge both on their side and on our side so we can continue to serve them and not be held aside. Like I have to work on every account, right? My business.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Denise Blasevick Let’s can do that. And they can share that knowledge with each other.

Peter Winick And that’s, that’s the trouble with your so last couple of minutes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on if someone’s out there and I know they are that is founder, CEO etc. of some sort of a professional services or consulting marketing agency whatever and they’re and they’re struggling with or thinking about yeah I know what you know I hear this thought leadership thing. Maybe I should do something. What would you counsel them? How would you counsel them?

Denise Blasevick I would counsel them to look at it. And this is I was just talking to someone about this yesterday. Everyone says they want to be with everyone, but lots of people say they want to be a thought leader. You actually have to have the thoughts to leaving right down for part. yeah.

Peter Winick That’s why I say I want to be an NBA player, but I’m five nine, so it kind of hasn’t worked out right. Like I said, it’s probably not.

Denise Blasevick Going to work. Maybe. Maybe you never know. But probably. Right. Be realistic with thought leaders is you have to be willing to commit to really putting together this is how if you don’t know it from inside you need to work on figuring that out and then you need to be an active part of it. This isn’t something that an agency can go, okay. Yes. You’re a thought leader, believes in this. We can do all this for you. No, no. We’re going to do this with you. You. We’re not the thought leader in your. Space. You’re the thought leader. Exactly. Making sure you understand, like you will not be able to just say one thought and move away or have a press release. Go out and have other people pick up the pieces. You have to be involved. You know, when you look at some of the great thought leaders that were out there. Right, You know, Steve Jobs, Riley, it wasn’t like he wasn’t involved. I mean, the thoughts were deeply involved.

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes being thrown across the room and others like, like a wild shoot or something. In that case, this is awesome. So great. So I appreciate your time. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today, Denise. I appreciate it.

Denise Blasevick Peter Thank you so much for having me on. It was truly a pleasure.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.