On today’s Word on the Street episode, Katie speaks to Emily Monsell-Holden, Founder and Brand Consultant at hollow & hill – Helping premium and heritage brands with purpose to be the best version of themselves by embedding brand into the heart of their culture.
For almost a decade Emily headed up brand and marketing the iconic family-run wine and spirits merchant, Berry Bros. & Rudd and she now runs her own consultancy, Hollow & Hill, specialising in helping heritage brands thrive.
Her approach is to focus on purpose, customer experience and internal culture, in order to increase loyalty, attract and retain top talent, and ensure long-term, sustainable success.
Over a career that has spanned almost 20 years, she has worked with many great brands and businesses, including Fairtrade pioneers Cafédirect, English Sparkling wine brand Gusbourne, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Somerset House and The Royal Albert Hall.
In this episode you will hear:
- What a truly good brand experience looks like
- How to get the most out of your branding
- The overall make-up of brand reputation
- Helping your clients build stronger brand experiences
There were so many amazing takeaways from today’s episode, and these were just a few of our favourites.
The overall make-up of brand reputation
There are so many elements that go into making up the overall experience and reputation of your brand, some that you might not even be aware of! Brand experience is linked to your brand reputation, and you can control certain factors of your brand reputation, obvious ones being your logo, website, campaigns, etc. Your brand reputation is made up of thousands of daily interactions such as customer experience which is really critical, but there are a lot of experiences in addition to that which add to your brand reputation such as interactions with employees, suppliers, culture, and potential employees through interview processes and recruitment strategies, etc. It’s important to recognise that your brand reputation is made up of thousands of touchpoints and interactions and they’ve all got to come from the same place. Your brand is not owned by your marketing team, your brand is something that everybody has responsibility for even if they are not working in customer-facing roles, everyone should be connected to the brand and be responsible for representing your brand in the right ways.
How to get the most out of your branding
Be really clear about who you are and your difference within the market! Who do you serve to exist? Decide who you are targeting and become the brand of choice. Make people loyal advocates of your brand and make your experiences so good that no one else can copy what you do and the culture you have created. One of the most important things for any business, especially now, is the culture which is by far the thing that shines through the most. What can you do to make each touch point of your branding more unique to you and your agency? Changing and reviewing just one thing within each touchpoint will make the experiences people have with your brand more authentic.
Links & references
Katie Street: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiestreet/
Emily Monsell-Holden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-monsell-holden/
Our Sponsor
Series 6 of Word on the Street is sponsored by Tanba, The Agency New Business Academy, is a brand-new initiative aimed at equipping agencies of all sizes with the knowledge, content, partnerships, and opportunities needed to accelerate agency growth by optimising their new business ‘engine’. Tanba is an on-demand and affordable solution for agencies looking to upskill their team via training courses, content and insights delivered by our panel of industry experts, leaders, and partners.
The academy is all about empowering agency teams to get noticed, attract opportunities, increase conversion rates, and reduce the costs associated with the sales process. Visit https://tanba.io/ to find out more and start empowering your agency.