Why is Branding Important in Business?

Commical – Episode title: Why is Branding Important in Business?

Published 19/05/2022 on Chasing Albert website, spotify and apple podcasts.

Marie 00:00

My guest today is journalist, author and entrepreneur Tim Burrowes. He needs no introduction to those in media and marketing, but for the rest of you, he's a funny, smart and successful entrepreneur. He's one of the founders of Mumbrella, a marketing and media news and events company. It started out as a news blog in 2008, a time when blogs simply weren't taken seriously, but then it became a serious news and events powerhouse and sold to a US events company some nine years later. Since then, he's published a book which was bestselling for a brief moment in the very narrow Amazon category of media studies. His joke, not mine. His new media business, Unmade, offers a unique perspective on developments in the global marketing world as seen through an Australian lens. I'd have had him on ages ago, but I was just too intimidated to ask.

Guest 01:10

You were intimidated? Why were you intimidated?

Marie 01:13

Well, because you're Tim Burrowes, and I thought, why would he come on my shitty podcast, even though it's not shitty? But the reason why I've always wanted to speak with you is you've had such a long career in journalism and have had front row seats to everything that's happened in the industry, the marketing wins, the fails, the trends. You've seen it all, and then you take that and you start your own business. And I've always been curious to know what it was that you learned and thought, I'm going to do that one day when I'm a business owner. What did you do and what didn't you do? But first, let's start with Unmade. Tell me about what Unmade is and how it differs from Mumbrella.

Guest 01:51

So Unmade is the thing I started, and thank you very much for the invitation, by the way. I am very grateful to have the invite. So Unmade started last year. It was back in August. And I suppose, with most things, there's more than one reason for doing something. One part of the puzzle was that I just became really interested in the way that Substack was emerging as an email platform. So in much the same way that, you know, when I was involved in starting Mumbrella nearly 15 years ago now, WordPress had just become a sort of mature publishing platform, it felt like Substack was beginning to do the same thing with a much tighter focus, because it was really for helping journalists predominantly create newsletters, create a paid subscription tier, and manage all of that side of things, and really take all of the hard work and drama and need for technical know-how so you could just sort of sit down and write. So that was one part of the puzzle. Another part was, for the previous four years or so, the thing I'd been most enjoying for Mumbrella was writing the weekly Saturday morning email. And it had just begun to strike me that although, for a long time, I'd been writing opinion pieces for Mumbrella and, you know, other jobs before that, there's just something ever so slightly different about writing an email. So that thought of, okay, well, building a brand where the central part is an email to readers, that feels like something that could be quite interesting to learn about. Learning about paid subscriptions, which is something I'd never really done before for journalism, that was quite interesting. And also, having previously built Mumbrella as a brand, I just thought it would be really interesting to kind of go again in a slightly different landscape, as I say, nearly 15 years later, and see what had changed about building a brand. Because my instinct is that Unmade, in time, won't just be a newsletter. It will be a brand, because that's the nature of B2B publishing. So I guess it was just a chance to kind of try some new things in a relatively low-risk way. You know, there was no big investment to begin with, other than my own time.

Marie 04:23

And you must have... well, actually, I'll ask you the question. When you started Mumbrella, what you were doing was really new and innovative, right? In terms of setting up a blog, yes, it was news and insights, but set up on a blogging platform. What research did you do then, and what research did you do now into Substack that made you think, yep, this is a horse I'm going to back? Or did you just go by instinct?

Guest 04:47

Look, I'm slightly embarrassed to say, because I'm not sure it's to be recommended, but it was much more by instinct than by research. Now, that said, it was instinct informed by experience. So I think by the time I came to do Mumbrella, I'd had a lot of years under my belt writing about the media and marketing industry, a lot of years under my belt as a B2B editor who'd had quite a lot of commercial exposure as well. So I sort of understood a lot of the levers of B2B publishing. I had an opportunity already to play around with blogging a little bit. In the previous role before I came to Australia, when I was in the Middle East, I'd launched a blog for the magazine I was the editor of then, and I was doing some blogging as the editor of B&T as well. So all of those things helped. But actually, my terrible idea for Mumbrella, which fortunately we never executed, was I had an instinct that actually what the space was for was a series of newsletters for narrow parts of the industry. So I was thinking a weekly newsletter for media agencies, a weekly newsletter for PRs, and so on. And at the time, I was thinking that these, bear with me because this sounds like a dreadful idea, the dreadful idea was to do it as PDFs, which I know sounds laughable now. But one thing at the time was, by the time I joined B&T, it was publishing an online daily newsletter, but it wasn't getting much advertising support. And then they relaunched it as a PDF, and there were advertisers who were happy to buy a full page in a PDF who didn't want to buy a display ad on a website. It was just the time, 2007-ish. They just weren't quite ready to make the jump. So I kind of thought PDFs was going to be the way to go. But luckily, because we launched Mumbrella in very early December, there was no point launching these newsletters that side of Christmas, so I just kind of started blogging away on WordPress just to get a bit of SEO going. And luckily, that was the bit that took off. It came along just as sending email became cheap as well, so suddenly all of the barriers came down at once, and we were just very fortunate in how we timed our run.

Marie 07:32

You've mentioned two things that interest me, brand and SEO. As a business owner, and as a lot of people who listen are business owners, how important were each of those when you set up your business? And how important are they right now to Unmade?

Guest 07:47

Look, I suppose, as a journalist, again, I was sort of grasping towards the sense that they were, but I guess I didn't actually really understand or appreciate just what a big factor they were going to be. So I think a good decision that I made with Mumbrella was to go for a unique word. And I kind of went down to the pub with an ad-wanker friend of mine who, you know, his first thing he said when I suggested the word was, yeah, that's a really warm word semantically: mum. So, you know, I guess owning a word. And I think the other thing he said to me was, or maybe it was Adam Ferrier later on, you can imbue values into a brand. He just made that point that, with a blank sheet, you can create the brand, which is what we're now trying to do with Unmade as well. That word is quite thoughtfully chosen to try and get this picture of understanding how we got here, and understanding that everything's changing and that we're going somewhere next. So there's that thinking. And then the second part of your question around SEO, I mean, that's where the penny began to drop. I can just remember I used to obsessively watch YouTube videos, particularly from, at the time, a guy called Matt Cutts, who was the face of SEO for Google when Google was, I guess, quite transparent about those things. So I would just try to apply what I was learning as I went. So it was very much on the tools. And then, of course, I think when you're doing publishing, you probably have a lot of wastage as well, but it is the sort of content that Google likes because it's original, it's fast-changing, hopefully it's high quality. And also there was a real ecosystem at the time of people commenting and blogging, so you're also getting a lot of inward links as well. So I think it all became quite self-reinforcing. It's easier to kind of post-rationalise it than claim it was a plan at the time.

Marie 10:07

But what about from a branding perspective? When you set out to start your business, did you sit down and go, brand is going to be critical, and here's what I'm going to do to build it?

Guest 10:18

No, no, not really. I suppose I came to, again, that instinctive understanding as a journalist and editor where your masthead stands for something. So we had our own, I suppose, implicit values. Initially I was the only journalist on the team, and then obviously we grew a team. And some of it, in terms of those internal values, you instill into the team by demonstration and behaviour. But I guess so much was just instinctively where I tended to be at as an editor. You know, pro-transparency, questioning of the status quo. If you've got to get into fights, punch upwards. So there were a bunch of kind of rules that I suppose were there in the back of my mind, but there was no bit of paper written down with them on.

Marie 11:13

So you had your business values already defined in your head, and building your brand was a matter of sticking to those values in the way you operated the business?

Guest 11:24

Honestly, I wouldn't have defined them like that then. And I guess I've also had the benefit of an extra 15 years since then of writing about marketing and communications, and obviously you think about what you're doing as a business. So yeah. One of the things I found in the process of doing Unmade, and my former colleague from Mumbrella, Damien Francis, has now joined me, is the first thing we did was we sat down with a whiteboard, and actually, we're chatting, we can see each other on video, and just out of the shot, I think from where you are, is that whiteboard with our various kinds of... there are words on it that we wrote down in our session, and they're still there. Things like community, point of difference, habits, expectations. So we've been talking a lot about how to be thoughtful about where we go and what we want to stand for.

Marie 12:26

But you didn't do that with your first business, right?

Guest 12:29

No, no. And then, of course, we didn't really know at the time what it was going to be, whether it was going to be quite a small thing. So I think once you do it once, you're probably a little bit more ambitious the second time around. So you look back at all of the little things you did that made it more difficult to scale, and you just... silly little things like, the first time around, my email address was just, well, initially, tim@focalattractions, which was the holding company, but then tim@mumbrella. And of course, it would have been much better to create the newsdesk email address, newsdesk@mumbrella, so that when other journalists joined they would receive the press releases too. So just silly things like that. If there is a fighting chance that you're going to become a bigger business, then I guess just being a little bit more thoughtful about structures and that kind of thing comes in a little earlier.

Marie 13:32

Throughout your time reporting on the media and marketing industry, you would have heard a lot of stories. You would have learned a lot. What did you learn about that you went, that is absolutely essential for my business, and it proved to be true?

Guest 13:46

I think one of the things about writing about media and marketing, of course, is you do learn by osmosis. I'm not a marketer, but I have had to do marketing. And there was a point where I stepped off the news desk and, when we were running our events and stuff, for a year my main job was marketing. I was effectively making the business case for hiring a marketer. So I have been probably lucky to get exposure to some quite good people over the years. You see them speaking at our events, you talk to them.

Marie 14:25

So mates like Adam Ferrier, yeah?

Guest 14:28

Mate, honestly. A couple of examples. One is, I quote Adam a lot. Just that little insight of the best number of brands is one. When we were thinking about doing certain different things, but when you had built a brand like Mumbrella, why then start another sister brand? I just remember the bizarre one where we'd organised the Mumbrella 360 conference, and we were having a bit of a meeting about a new product we were launching. We were literally just grabbing coffee at a table at the Hilton while Mumbrella 360, the conference, was going on upstairs. And the brilliant marketer Mark Ritson walked past, so we just began to grab him and get him to join the huddle to quickly explain the principles of pricing to the team as he was on his way to get a coffee. It was the sort of privileged access you get to great marketers that you don't get if you're doing something different. So yeah, you are lucky to get bits and pieces. I'm not sure there's any single one piece that has defined us. There have been so many really great people who've taught us great things. We worked with Tony for a while, who is now chairman of oOh!media and was chairman of Junkee Media back in the day. Certainly in terms of running businesses, one of his mantras was talking around repeatable processes. If you're running a number of events, in our case, try and run them all in the same way, against the same sort of critical paths and all of those things, which is really boring, but when you're scaling it makes all the difference between success or not.

Marie 16:22

Absolutely. What about from a marketing perspective? What did you guys do as Mumbrella that you think was absolutely critical? Did you have a marketing budget? Actually, let me ask you that. When did you hire a marketer, and what kind of marketing budget did you set?

Guest 16:42

Eventually we did. It took us some time. So one of the realities of a lot of publishing of all sorts, but certainly B2B, whether it's magazines or online, is you have to think of the journalism as a form of content marketing. You're investing in that journalism. That's what's building your brand and reputation and authority and all of those things that gives you the right to run a conference or run awards or whatever it might be. So from that point of view, you could argue we had a marketing budget right from the beginning. We just wouldn't have thought of it that way. So for the first few years, the way we did our marketing for organising an event, we would just write a news story saying we were organising an event, and it was as simple as that. And as a result, we probably left an awful lot of money on the table because there were people who didn't come along who might have come along, because if they didn't see the initial news story, that was it. So we hit a point as we were beginning to reach a certain size where we began to get the hunch that the next big hire we needed to make was a marketer. So to make the case, I stepped back from the news desk for the best part of the year and just went through a cycle of doing the marketing plans and a lot of the execution as well myself for that year. An awful lot of that was still just using our own platforms, though. It was just being a bit more planned about, in the daily email, having a little message somewhere high up, somewhere further down, that was tailored to each of our events. And it was planned for each day, and it was the schedule and writing the copy for those and all of those things. And then, when that began to work, we hired somebody to do it on a freelance basis and take it off my plate. And then when that worked, and each time we were just bootstrapping it, if it paid for itself, we did more of it. We hired a really good marketer who was then with us, and grew with us, for several years. Effectively she became a big engine of profit of the company, really. And we were always quite disciplined about, okay, if we spend $100,000, and that would have been a lot for us, on marketing this event, will it turn into a million dollars in revenue? Those were the sorts of conversations we would have. Generally, we would then back down the number a bit and be a bit more realistic. But definitely we were always very ROI-based as well because, as a B2B company, an awful lot of it was about selling conference tickets, for instance. So we tended to, I guess, the long-term brand-building was the product itself, the publication, and then the short-term marketing was kind of activating against a particular event.

Marie 19:51

And is that a model that you think you are going to continue with, with Unmade?

Guest 19:56

Yeah, look, I would have thought so. I'm on a slightly different trajectory this time around. So for the first year of Unmade, because I've had some support from Substack, the organisation - they provide support to a few journalists around the world to effectively help them go it alone. And one of the parts of that deal is they give you a lot of support, financial support, but also a Getty Images subscription, and they'll fund some podcast editing for you each month, access to LexisNexis, the news database, and various things. But the other part of that deal is that you don't have advertising in that year because they don't ban advertising, but they don't love it. So we're not an all-singing, all-dancing sort of traditional B2B publication yet, because we've got some months to go until that year is up. But then we talk to an industry where, fortunately for the publishers in that space, there are a lot of organisations that want to talk to our audiences and are happy to advertise to do so. So increasingly that would be the next step. But Damien and I, we're again in that scaling thing. Although there's really only the two of us, we already have Slack channels on various different subjects, and one of them is called event ideas. You just find that, having done so many years of running events, you just have ideas. So there are so many we're dying to do. But of course, first of all, you have to hit the scale where you've got a large enough audience that people are actually aware, when you're doing something, it will be right for them. So in time that will be the plan, but it's kind of slow and steady to get there.

Marie 21:48

And I mean, you are lucky as well in that you have built up a reputation and a personal brand of your own where people, I think, would be very ready and willing to follow and to jump on board and see what you're doing next. Have you seen that with the launch of this business? Has it been easier to get your subscribers and people visiting than it was the first time with Mumbrella?

Guest 22:11

Do you know, that's a good question. Yeah. I mean, I look back at the first few months or couple of years of Mumbrella. It was constantly leaving phone messages with reception saying, yeah, yes, like umbrella with an M in front, as you kind of explained it. So I still chat to people every day who have maybe vaguely noticed that I don't seem to be at Mumbrella anymore, but the penny hasn't dropped that I'm now writing at Unmade, so there's still a lot of work to be done. At the same time, we've got more than 7,000 people, getting on for 8,000 now, on the database as we speak.

Marie 23:01

Yeah, look at that.

Guest 23:03

And that's great because I don't think, without my contacts and profile in the industry, it would have gone as fast as that. And obviously most of those are in the free tier, but we've got in the very low hundreds of people subscribing to the paid tier now as well. So we're very much in the beginnings of that. But that's, as I say, 7,000 or 8,000 at this stage. And I'd hope by the end of the year to be close to 10,000, but that's in an industry of maybe, depending how you calculate it, 100,000 or 200,000, so there's still plenty of people to reach. And of course, because this is primarily an email platform at the moment, there's a lot of people you're not reaching through that SEO side of things, who, when you do everything, you do reach. And again, because I guess I'm much more analytical this time around, I'm writing far fewer things, but longer and with a lot more context. I think it's more of a slow burn as well, because I'm just not publishing in the same sort of quantity. And there is an absolute direct correlation between traffic and output.

Marie 24:10

So what's the vision then for Unmade? Where do you want to be in five years?

Guest 24:15

I think the answer on the five years thing is murky, to say the best. I don't have much of a crystal ball on that. I think there are certain things that you would want to be central to it. So you'd want to be a respected source of analysis and insight. You'd like to think you were vying for being seen as the outlet to go to when you want to understand not just what's happened, but why it's happened. So that would be the reputational thing. I would have thought that by then we will have other pillars to the business model. And I think events is the obvious one, which isn't just a means to an end because I think if you kind of think, I mean, I think any B2B editor or B2B publisher should probably be organising themselves with the thought that their job is to help their audience in their working life and in their career. So if you're running really great conferences or events where people are learning things that helps them do their job better, then you're not just doing it in order to generate revenue. You're doing it because it's intrinsic to what you and the product should be about. So yeah, in a weird way, I am missing curating events, actually, which is the bit you can't really do at scale until you've got a big audience because getting people to make the decision to give up the time to leave their desk or leave the house and actually come along, particularly post-COVID, obviously, is still a stretch. But that's definitely something which I think, having the ideas or the insights and knowing the right people to get along for the right mix of content, that's a really interesting part of the process. So yeah, that's definitely something I'd like to get onto the path to sooner or later. But again, also to be a company that's growing. As I say, it's myself and Damien at the moment, but I have ambitions that we're a business of some size.

Marie 26:40

You actually, speaking of events, you have a really great one coming up. And I'm paraphrasing here about how to market to poor people.

Guest 26:50

You are paraphrasing slightly, but that's fair enough. Yes, marketing in a cost-of-living crisis. Which, depending when this goes up, might or might not have happened, because as we're speaking, it is next Tuesday, which is the 24th of May, I want to say. I don't have it in front of me. That sounds about right. But yeah, look, for me, this is going to be one of the defining things about marketing in Australia for the next couple of years, is going to be cost of living. And that affects everybody. So for marketers, just value becomes so much more important in terms of how you think about your product, how you talk about it. Persuading people to change brands might be easier, might be harder, but certainly there's just going to be so much more thoughtfulness. And yeah, I think it's actually something that's relevant for everybody. Everybody notices price. I've been in the UK for the last two or three months, and I'm one of those shoppers who does look at the prices and the value for the different sizes. So I've been shocked to notice that, this is just such a minor example, but baked beans used to be about 45 cents per 100 grams. Since I've been away, that's gone up to 58. Now, I'm in the very privileged position that doesn't change much for me, but that's the cheapest way of buying baked beans, and it's gone up by a third in less than a year. And for people who really care about those sort of numbers, that changes everything about how you act as a consumer.

Marie 28:37

So did you ever use an agency in your own business, or get support from an agency, be it from advertising, media, anything?

Guest 28:49

Yeah, on a couple of occasions with specific projects. So, for instance, there was one point where an SEO agency, probably about three years in, helped us do a bit of a report on how we were doing. And I remember when we got the 100-page report back afterwards, I very quickly concluded that we were getting it about 90% right, and the amount of effort that it was going to take to do the other 10% was probably going to detract from the product itself. So that report then mouldered in a drawer for a couple of years, and I'm afraid I never really acted upon it, which isn't to say they were wrong in any way. But there was that. And then probably the only other thing is, on a couple of occasions, PR agencies helped us out with a specific project. If we were looking to get some mainstream press coverage, for instance, at one point we did a kind of survey of the public that we called the Encore Score of how much the public liked or disliked various TV characters. It was just to get a bit of outside coverage because that was what they were good at. And hey, look, we were the lead item on both A Current Affair and Today Tonight. So yeah, there were definitely times when agencies can help you with stuff when it's outside of the core of what you do.

Marie 30:19

Did PR live up to your expectations? What do you think it did for the business?

Guest 30:24

Well, that's a very good question. I think in that case it burnishes the brand a tiny bit. That's probably the main thing. In the same way, I would always take opportunities to go and, if invited, give expert commentary on mainstream media, whether it was occasionally popping up on Masters of Spin, or on Weekend Sunrise on Seven, or reviewing the newspapers on ABC News Breakfast and that sort of thing, which is really, really hard to define what it does for the brand, particularly when you're a B2B brand. But I suspect some of it is every now and then one of your advertisers will see you and it just gives them a bit of confidence. So I think an awful lot is actually really hard to define, what it is you're getting from it. But just because you can't measure it doesn't mean that you're not getting something from it.

Marie 31:23

I imagine it would have played a role in building profile, awareness and the reputation of the business. That probably came in really handy when you were at that point of selling.

Guest 31:35

Yeah, look, that could well be true because at the point when we were beginning that sales process or exit process, your reputation is really important, obviously, because you want people to be interested, to have the conversation in the first place, and to feel that there's potential to get involved in something valuable.

Marie 31:57

Yeah, absolutely. I've been approached by companies where all they've wanted is to be everywhere right before they're ready to sell the business, to help inflate the price they get.

Guest 32:09

Which is smart. It's rather like I now do a very small amount of investing, usually seed or early stage, and it's actually very reassuring to see coverage and people have won awards. Funnily enough, one of the proof points for an investment I made recently was they'd won a major award. So it's okay, well, a rigorous jury has looked at this specific organisation and been impressed by what they've seen. So yeah, I think those external validations do mean something.

Marie 32:53

They do, absolutely. Although let's use the term rigorous juries loosely. Well, sometimes they're not rigorous, and sometimes it's if you can't pay, you can't get in.

Guest 33:04

Well, look, don't get me started on that because, again, I talked about that 10% thing: 100% of effort, you might get 10% more credit. It's exactly the same thing when you're putting together a judging process. Over time, you get a tiny bit more respect. Hopefully it becomes a little bit more meaningful, but sometimes it doesn't feel a lot of justice in the effort you put into judging stuff versus the shonks who don't.

Marie 33:32

Tim, I want to ask you a question about the About page on Unmade.

Guest 33:36

This sounds like dangerous territory.

Marie 33:41

I'm just curious about the picture of yourself and Damien sitting in the bushes in the country, hiding. I don't know... what was the thought process behind this?

Guest 33:55

Okay, so the story behind that particular image is it was actually taken shortly before Damien joined Unmade. We spent a couple of days just working on the business plan. Damien came back to my place in Tasmania for that, and we went on a site visit for somewhere we might run an event in the future, which was off in the Tasmanian wilderness slightly. So that image was taken there. I really dislike that pomposity you get with journalists and journalism, you know, people with their hand on their chin and the picture's black and white, although bloody well it was taken in colour and they've literally had to turn it black and white. So to me, that picture is just a bit... we're trying to be funny, because there's too much pretension, I think, in this industry. So I think it's really important that you take what you do seriously, but it's death for journalists who take themselves too seriously.

Marie 35:06

Way too seriously. I love it, and I love the approach, and I often pick up on it, and it's quite subtle in the stuff that you write. But when you bring through your sense of humour and make jokes, even though it's subtle, it's there, and I feel it has become part of your brand too, that you're quite witty.

Guest 35:26

Oh, bless you for noticing and for saying so.

Marie 35:30

And listen, one of the good things for you about doing this podcast is, A, it sold a book. So I did feel like, if I'm going to speak to the man, I must buy his book.

Guest 35:40

Oh, thank you very much.

Marie 35:42

Which I did, and I've started to read. And I have to say, my favourite part so far is the introduction, because that's as far as I've gotten. But I've loved it, and I will finish reading it. But your writing is really... you have a style of writing that makes reading B2B subject matter actually feel like you're reading...

Guest 36:04

Well, you're very kind. And if any of your listeners want a free sample, then I've also done an audio version, which you'll find on the Media Unmade podcast if you go back and search. So I did the narration myself, with the very kind help of ABE's Audio who did the production. But yeah, the whole book is out there, chapter by chapter, on the Unmade podcast. So share a link and people can find it in audio form too.

Marie 36:35

Thank you. I will include the link in the podcast summary and description and on the website. Tim, thank you so much because, honestly, you've done such an amazing job of covering the industry. What you did with Mumbrella was amazing, and you're a brilliant writer, but you're also a fantastic business person, so I'm thrilled to have you on, and thank you for sharing.

Guest 36:57

Well, thank you so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed it.

Marie 37:02

Pleasure. Me too. Thank you.