Are you armed with a compelling brand story that captivates your audience?
Get ready to unleash your brand's superpower with G. Kofi Annan, the maestro of brand strategy who's shaped narratives for giants like Puma and Mercedes-Benz.
In an era where every second counts, your brand's story shouldn't just be heard—it should echo.
That's what we explore with Kofi, dissecting the layers of strategy behind storytelling that doesn't just sell but sustains.
Tune in for an episode that's less about listening and more about transforming the way you think about—and grow—your brand.
You can find G. Kofi Annan here:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gkofiannan
Website: www.linktr.ee/gkofiannan
Are you armed with a compelling brand story that captivates your audience?
Get ready to unleash your brand's superpower with G. Kofi Annan, the maestro of brand strategy who's shaped narratives for giants like Puma and Mercedes-Benz.
In an era where every second counts, your brand's story shouldn't just be heard—it should echo.
That's what we explore with Kofi, dissecting the layers of strategy behind storytelling that doesn't just sell but sustains.
Tune in for an episode that's less about listening and more about transforming the way you think about—and grow—your brand.
You can find G. Kofi Annan here:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gkofiannan
Website: www.linktr.ee/gkofiannan
What's up guys? This is Kaylee Johnson here with Digital Journey. If you're a person that's wanting to learn social media, maybe that's just for you personally, maybe it's for your business. This is the right place for you. Today, we have with us G Kofi Annan. He is a brand strategist, technologist advisor and an investor with 20 plus years of a career spanning over 200 brand building efforts. Kofi has an impressive track record that includes working with global companies like Puma, pfizer and Mercedes-Benz and innovative startups like Nurochron and Swatchon. He distills insights, skills and tools into actionable strategies to help executives, founders and entrepreneurs stand out and grow their brands in the smarter way, and that is a whole lot of fun things. You've been able to do in the past and you do a whole lot now, so tell us. How'd you get to where you are today? What was your journey like?
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on, kaylee, it's a pleasure to be here and thanks for that wonderful introduction. I've always had a curious mind so you know, always want to talk to wonderful people like yourself and just different people. So I guess from a personality perspective that's kind of how I've gotten here. But professionally I would say that I started off early on in my career trying to really try to explore how people and companies and entities, organizations, communicate really. And at the end of the day that's ultimately how I do. How do you bridge, how do you communicate what you have to offer or what you're trying to communicate to another person, another entity, another community?
Speaker 2:So I started off in design and then I realized, you know that I was good enough at design, but you know, as we all, you know as we, as we all, in our professional careers, at some point you have to realize where you're best at, and I always call it my superpower, like what's your superpower? Right, you can do a lot of things, but what's your superpower? But in that regard I realized that design itself wasn't really my thing. It's really more about thinking through the problem of how people communicate and putting that platform and putting a plan together and helping people do that.
Speaker 2:And of course, design is part of that, you know, as it happens. But really it's kind of like how do you really make people clarify what they are doing to other people? And you know, obviously I've worked with some large brands, but where I've netted out is I realized that smaller companies, growing companies, who have the best ideas and really able to change the markets, don't a lot of times don't have the expertise, time, money, budgets to really shape the market and impact the right people. And that's where I am now kind of trying to take the learnings from a lot of the big companies and what I've done there and helping smaller, growing companies really apply that in an efficient manner.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. It is interesting the more you work with small companies, the more you're like these people have better ideas than some of the big companies, but they just don't know how.
Speaker 1:They need help implementing it or need help putting it all into words. And it's encouraging to see that America is not just going to be corporate America. There are other small businesses growing and it's a very needed thing for people to be able to have that structure, to learn how do I communicate and realizing it's okay that I'm not at the level as a big company on my communication skills, because it's a growing process.
Speaker 2:And technology is a large part of that too, right? You know, in the past I would say 15, 20 years ago when I was really kind of working, technology wasn't as accessible, right? So you did need a lot of money and a lot of resources to do these things. But now we have so many technologies that facilitate that and for a lower cost of money and resource wise, you're able to do a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:but you definitely have to have that strategy, and without that strategy, you can spend so much money if you don't have a strategy, because you're just, you're throwing spaghetti at the wall, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try that, and there's no rhyme or reason behind it. You don't know where your audience is. And that's really true when it comes to social media, because people are like, okay, I have to hop on ad campaigns and okay, I need to be making this kind of content on this platform, and it's like your audience might not even be on that platform.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, and then you're wasting your time, you're wasting your money to where you could be putting it into other other aspects and it'd be much more simple. Yeah, I call that the hype cycle and that's happening with ai right now. When social media started some years ago like really started to kind of get um to bubble up I mean obviously it's going strong now, but a couple years ago it's crypto. Everybody wanted to do a crypto thing and everybody wanted to do. Now it's ai. Not all of those platforms or all of those tools are valid. Obviously social media is, but, to your point, it's how you're using and not necessarily what you're using, and everyone, to your point, tends to just jump on and without any kind of strategy. It's to your point, is your customer or your audience, even on TikTok? I know TikTok is the hot thing now, but is that where you need to be? Who knows?
Speaker 1:Exactly, and that's one of the things we talk about at Digital Journey. Let's figure out where your target audience is, because I'll have people come into my mastermind course and be like I need to be on these five platforms and I'm like I'm not even on five platforms and I create content for a living. I can almost guarantee you your audience is not going to be on five platforms if you're a small business owner yeah, yeah wasting your time with that.
Speaker 1:So let's sit down, let's figure out a strategy so that you can save time and you know the couple platforms that you want to be on. You do well in, yeah, versus just being intermediate at a bunch.
Speaker 2:Be amazing at one or two yeah, and then with smaller businesses also, right, like it's even more important, because, again, you don't have the time, you don't have the money, you don't have the resources. I worked on a big campaign with a healthcare provider a couple of years ago and the budget was over a million dollars. It was for a launchable project and this is like peanuts to them. It was a big launch that was happening, it's. The conversation was the same where, oh, we need to be on this, this, this and this. We went back and forth, we advised them against it, but again they were like no, we have the money, just put us there.
Speaker 2:And, needless to say, it wasn't as effective because their customer wasn't there. So they had a million dollars. They blew through more than half of it before they realized that they didn't need to be on TikTok or Snapchat because it was a B2B context. And even if you're a customer or your audience is on Snapchat or TikTok they're not necessarily looking to do business there either, right? So there's also that context. Some of the bigger companies with big budgets also make that mistake and it's very much a human thing. But it has a bigger impact on a business perspective for smaller businesses.
Speaker 1:And I love what you're saying about it being a human thing, because people are so eager to hop onto AI now that it might be. They're trying to do most of their content or written things through chat GPT. You can tell they use the same 10 buzzwords over and over. People can look at your post and be like and that's chat GPT. So I know one thing you talk about is brand storytelling in the digital age. What are some of those aspects that you dive into when it comes to brand storytelling?
Speaker 2:I mean, and to that point, crafting once you realize where you need to be and you can make sure your audience is there. It's also about how do you engage and at the end of the day, it is. Communication is about storytelling, and the simple structure that I always use as a framework to start figuring out how they're going to communicate and tell their story and add value in any of these channels is first, start off with the hero. Who are you talking about? And the hero is not you. Your hero is the person that you're serving. The hero is this person in the audience that you're serving. Then you understand the context or the conflict. What are they trying to overcome? How are you helping them overcome? What is kind of the thing that's either holding them back from doing anything? It could be something as simple as it's holding me back from being able to celebrate my son's fifth birthday.
Speaker 1:Today we have with us G Kofi Annan. He is a brand strategist, technologist advisor and an investor with 20 plus years of a career spanning over 200 brand building efforts. Kofi has an impressive track record that includes working with global companies like Puma, pfizer and Mercedes Benz, and innovative startups like Nurochron and Swatchon.
Speaker 2:So you have the hero, and then you have the conflict, and now you have the mentor, and that's you need to come in now. How do you now help that hero, your audience, get past that conflict? What is the unique situation, news, unique perspectives that you're bringing to the table to help those people understand, to help those people move through that conflict? And there are different ways to kind of contextualize that. And then finally, at the end of the day, we want that promised land. That that's's.
Speaker 2:You know, now that, now that the you, you and the hero have uh, have, uh, collaborated to get through that conflict, what is that promised land? What is that great place that you're going to bring them to? And again, it could be something as simple as now I've um, I am celebrating my son's fifth birthday because I've been deployed or received. It could be something as simple as that. And obviously it could be something as complicated, as now I am able to deploy my product into the market. So it's a simple kind of four-step process to storytelling. This is what Pixar and Disney and, all through the years, any kind of culture generally. The storytelling falls into these four areas the hero, the conflict, the mentor and the promised land. So that's a simple framework that anybody could use to at least start making sure that their communications and their stories are more human and regardless of the tool that you're using.
Speaker 1:Yes, I majored in communications in college and we went through that whole story model quite a lot of going through it and sometimes you have the hero and you get to the conflict and they might not realize what the true conflict is. They have, okay, I think it's that I'm struggling with getting more clients when really it's no one knows about them at all.
Speaker 2:Something simple like that.
Speaker 1:At that point the mentor can step in and be like, yes, this is the challenge, you see, but it's really this challenge Exactly and kind of retrain them, which is why having a coach or a mentor of some kind is so valid A thousand percent, and a lot of people when they think I don't want to pay money for that, it's like but do you realize how much money you're going to be losing if you don't? Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We're going to put a quick pause on it and I have a question for you. Are you struggling with social media? Are you overwhelmed by what platforms to be on, what to post? We talked a little bit about how, knowing where you should be, I can help you.
Speaker 1:Digital Journey is an exclusive group mastermind that teaches you how to grow your social media, to find where your target audience is on, so that you can spend less time on social media and increase your profits and gain new respect from clients and grow your product in general. You deserve that. So if you're interested, I'd love for you to set up a call with me. You can reach out at wwwdigitaljourneynet and you'll be able to find me there. If this is something you're serious about. I want to hear from you If you have a question. Maybe you're still trying to figure out. Where in the world should I be for social media?
Speaker 2:let me know and we're going to get back to the episode yes, and, and to your point, I've seen a lot of um smaller businesses, especially again, and I focus on them because the impact is that much greater. Right, you know puma, you know pfizer, mercedes, they'll get it. It's going to be a hurdle but they'll get it. We need to to really empower um smaller and growing businesses. But yes, to your point, you are saving money up front and it's short-sighted. Right, I'm not paying this much upfront, but really, in the longterm one, you're delaying your, your success. And then the other part about that is that you are spending incrementally more and more money to reach your audience and to have that impact on them, whether it be from ads that you're spending, and Facebook and Google make it sound so attractive like, oh, you need to do is $10 a day or whatever. So many small business jump right into the ads without having their story or their communication strategy together and then that's money you're throwing out the door.
Speaker 2:The other side that I always talk to small businesses about investing and taking the time in strategy, and these days that can mean an extra week or even two weeks with the tools that we have. The other impact there I always tell small businesses that by spending that time you actually add value to your brand and you reduce in the startup world is the customer acquisition costs costs. So the amount of time, money and effort that you're using to reach your customer, either through ads or anything else, is reduced because now you're more succinct, you're now focused and both you can reach the right people in the right channels with the right message, but then also it is so succinct and so thought through that they now can take that message and take it to other areas where you can't go monetarily. So you're actually increasing your reach and your impact by spending whatever amount of money that you think is upfront, that you think it's not really having that impact. It has a bigger ROI than any of the ads that you're able to run quickly on Google and Facebook.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and that's so key, especially with small businesses, because I think a lot of times they're like time is money, and, yes, 100%, especially even as a small business. You have less people, you have less resources, but if you're wasting time going out on a ledge trying to figure out advertising on your own or trying so many different things, you're not only spending money on it, but that's time you could be pouring into your business in a different way, or time you could be cultivating a relationship with your customers, and instead you're doing it, trying to do it on your own, because, oh, I don't want to pay X amount of money to have someone help me, when, if you think about it, like you're really not paying anything because you're going to be getting more customers that are going to make up for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that can sometimes be intimidating to look at something and be like how am I doing this? Going back to that brand storytelling process of you have to overcome. You have to recognize the challenge and overcome it in order to get to the final destination.
Speaker 2:Yes, and a coach or, in this case, a mentor, a strategist like myself, will help you do that.
Speaker 2:We are able to recognize the patterns and we know the quick ways to get that impact.
Speaker 2:And another analogy I always use is if you're at the bottom floor, you're entering a building and you want to go upstairs, and that's where success is. You can either take the stairs you could put in all the efforts or you can partner up with someone who already knows the floor and has an elevator that can have the conversation with you right before you enter the elevator to say, okay, this is where you need to be, not the floor that you think to X, y and Z, and then they usher you into that elevator and boom, you're where you need to be much quicker and with a lot less effort and you're able to climb in that sky rise. So you go into different levels, whereas if you go into the stairs, you're trying to figure it all out yourself, and that might work for some people. But most successful businesses I've seen small, big, regardless of the budget they do understand that value and how time is money and that you should be using the time more efficiently.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people, especially small businesses, just can give up because they don't have that accountability. And that's one thing about group coaching programs and masterminds and coaches. That gives you a person that is going to be like, okay, how did this go? And you don't want to come up and be the only person in the group that hasn't done their homework Like, well, I'm paying for this, but I don't know. There are other people here that want to see me succeed. I'm not alone in this and you know I need that encouragement and that push Because we all do.
Speaker 1:You know we're human, connected people Like we're not meant to do everything alone.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And when you are doing a small business, you know you might not have a lot of employees and it might seem it's just you. So having that connection with someone that can hold you accountable and teach you is more valuable than I think most people realize.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally agree.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was super, super amazing. I know my audience. They love talking about this kind of stuff and love listening to it. I loved all the analogies you shared, especially the elevator one. I think that's a cool idea, because if you're climbing 15 stories you're eventually going to be super tired and at that point it's like how much is this even worth it?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:The elevator you're going and it's going well.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So where can our listeners find you if they want to reach out to you?
Speaker 2:Yes, kelly, yes, listeners find you if they want to reach out to you. Yes, kelly, yes, I love having this conversation. Thanks for having me on again. So my company is called the Brand Sensei, so the Brand S-E-N-S-E-I, so you could find us at thebrandsenseico or thebrandsenseicom. But, more importantly, I have a couple of resources One, which is assessments that can help any small business quickly assess how they can leverage, how they should be leveraging, ai for their brand marketing. And then you know obviously some and I have some other resources and you can find that at thebrandsenseico forward slash digital journey. So that's going to be for for listeners of this podcast. So that's a brand S-E-N-S-E-I dot C-O, forward slash digital journey, and you could find the two minute assessment. It's free and it's to help small business. But then also some other resources to help people take the elevator where they need to be faster with better brand storytelling.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for that. That's amazing. We'll have all of that linked down below for you listeners. So if you're driving, doing laundry, mowing your lawn, don't worry about it, you can come on and click and do that. So, kofi, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure having you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Kaylee. It's a pleasure being here.