Make People Care About Your Brand with Tom Geary
May 09, 2022
Nobody takes action until they care about a particular issue. So getting people to care should be your #1 goal. In this episode of Cash In On Camera, Tom Geary from School of Thought, a San Francisco-based creative agency, shares how humor and emotion can help grow your company.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll hear…
▶️ [1:29] Everybody hates advertising and that's fine but we all like stories, we all like to smile or laugh or cry. So, connecting authentically using emotion is just the way to go. We did a call yesterday with a prospective client and she was talking about how she's working on sustainability and she's just like, "Everybody does things that are so stocky, it's just stock photography, a picture of the sun for the obvious solar ad" and she's exactly right.
▶️ [4:42] No, it's about tapping into the emotional truth that we have and so it doesn't have to be, make you cry humor, it doesn't have to make the make you cry emotion but it's better if you can do something that kind of strikes a chord and also incidentally, it shouldn't be about yourself, right?
▶️ [7:28] I mean, we basically presume that 90% of communications get ignored. What are you going to do? That's going to be the 10%. Well, you better have an awesome opening. We did some work locally for Pro-Bono for a vaccination effort to get people in the black community in Oakland vaccinated and the headline was black lives matter, we had a really strong hook and we needed that because people were skeptical and jaded understandably based on what's taking place here in the U.S with healthcare in the black community.
▶️ [9:28] There's a kind of a famous San Francisco ad guy who used to say, "People don't read advertising, they read what interests them". So, make it interesting and you'll get there, that's the trick. Again, we're not trying to come up with that. So, we try to come up with things that are emotionally resonant that will get people's attention.
▶️ [11:57] Yeah, that's a great point and it's something that we recommend to our clients all the time. There are risks in business and there are capital risks in business, right? If you're Volkswagen, you want to come up with a new car, that's a billion-dollar investment. The new shape, the new everything, three years of tooling, that's a capital R risk.
▶️ [14:06] I love that because it gives permission to our viewers and listeners to say, "Go out there and just try some things" like you said, "Polarizing the audience is not a bad thing". I think a lot of times people think, "Oh no, I don't want to alienate". No, you do want I think polarized because that's actually an indication that you're probably doing something right.
▶️ [16:05] Yeah, I agree. If I think back on relationships and clientele in most cases the ones that I've really enjoyed working with have stemmed from having had a relationship first. So, I agree with you. Tom, this has been so much fun. This has really been a blast to hear your perspective as someone who is deep in the trenches of the creative process to be able to help people with their brands and make people care about the brand.
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