#608 – Improve Your Amazon Brand with AI

Join us as we engage with digital marketing expert Mark DeGrasse, former CEO of Digital Marketer and the Founder of  AI-Branding Academy, to explore the transformative role of branding in e-commerce and the significant impact of AI on marketing strategies. Mark shares his insights on why branding is more crucial than ever for Amazon and e-commerce sellers, as the market shifts focus from merely acquiring new customers to retaining them. Discover how AI tools can refine branding elements such as product development, logos, and messaging, and learn why building a strong brand identity is essential for thriving in today’s competitive landscape.

Listen in as we uncover the power of branding in securing long-term success and stability for businesses. Drawing parallels to the spread of major concepts throughout history, we discuss the importance of consistent messaging and vision for brand sustainability. Using examples of iconic companies like Apple, Amazon, and Coca-Cola, we highlight how strong branding can serve as a protective shield against changing technologies and increasing competition. Moreover, we emphasize the importance of ensuring that every customer interaction is an opportunity for brand recognition and instilling brand values in all employees.

Finally, we navigate the future of branding and marketing strategies in a rapidly changing digital landscape. As reliance on paid media and easy attribution has overshadowed customer relationships and innovation, we examine the challenges posed by AI and potential platform bans. Discover how leveraging AI to create original content and streamline brand management can secure your business’s future. Mark discusses how employing AI to guide decision-making based on brand values and company performance can transform traditional marketing methods, fostering stronger customer connections and sustainable growth.

In episode 608 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie, Kevin, and Mark discuss:

• 00:00 – AI Branding and Customer Retention For Amazon Brands
• 06:26 – Building Brand Trust With Customers
• 10:04 – The Power of Branding in E-commerce
• 16:35 – Consistency Over Perfection in Branding
• 18:55 – Navigating the Future of Branding
• 21:22 – Building Brands With AI Content Strategy
• 27:43 – Evaluating Brand Strength and Improvement
• 32:02 – Building a Strong Amazon Brand Strategy
• 32:11 – AI Branding Academy Maximizes Marketing Potential
• 36:46 – Maximizing Earnings Through Brand Extension
• 37:04 – Expanding Product Offerings with a Solid Brand

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today we’re talking with digital marketing expert Mark DeGrasse, and he’s going to be talking about how branding is your biggest marketing issue and how AI can help you solve that issue.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The Freedom Ticket course made by Kevin King is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. Now this course costs $997, but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to h10.me forward slash freedom ticket. Don’t forget that if you do sign up for a Helium 10 account, don’t pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Kevin King:

So, I’ll go ahead and introduce Mark while he’s coming in. So Mark DeGrasse is the former CEO of Digital Marketer. If you’re not familiar with Digital Marketer, you can go to digitalmarketer.com. It’s one of the biggest marketing companies out there. It was Ryan Dice and Roland Frazier and Perry Belcher originally started it. They ended up doing a mastermind out of that called War Room, which is $35,000 a year. The guys that started Helium 10, Manny and Guillermo were part of that, and it changed their trajectory on growing Helium 10. Those guys have since gone their separate ways.Digital Marketer is the company that continued to go and our speaker today, Mark DeGrasse, was the CEO of it. He since left and started this AI branding company and his specialty is in AI and helping people actually use AI as a massive tool to help you with your branding, with your product development, with your avatars. He just did a conference here in Austin last week actually that I went to. It was a two-day event, more like a workshop on actually how to use all these different tools to help you with your branding, with your avatar, with refining your message, with your branding, your colors, your logo, all that kind of cool stuff. It’s an important thing and there’s some really good tools out there.

Kevin King:

So he’s going to be coming on today to share with you how you can use the latest technology to actually help you develop your brand, because, as sellers on Amazon now it’s becoming more and more about branding than it is just about finding a product opportunity, and that branding can go from the advertising, to the color schemes, to the logo, to the avatar, to how your product makes people feel and what problems it solves. So that’s what Mark’s going to be coming on and talking about. But Mark’s got a little talk, a little presentation that he’s going to share with you and I just, I think, probably blow you away with some really cool stuff that you haven’t thought about and some different ways to approach everything that you’re doing as an Amazon or e-commerce seller. So, Mark, welcome man. We’ve got some stuff to share with these guys today, so I’m going to go ahead and let you get into it, because I know you got a lot of cool stuff to cover.

Mark DeGrasse:

Awesome. Yeah, usually way too much stuff. So, I’ll just start by kind of talk about branding, because a lot of people, I think, don’t know the definition of branding and definitely don’t understand the impact that has on marketing. But after 20 years in marketing I’ve been doing, I sold I’m actually in Austin because I sold a company that I built through organic marketing and specifically content marketing, and then after that I started an agency. So, I was a marketing agency owner for about six years, developed about 300 brands. Then I was the president of digitalmarketer.com and developed some certifications there, became a fractional CMO for some larger companies like carparts.com.

Mark DeGrasse:

So I kind of saw the whole gamut of how people treat marketing and for the most part it’s not great, because what’s happened over the last 10, 20 years is we’ve all become really dependent on paid media where the only way to essentially get revenue was to constantly get new customers, where it’s like the name of the game is acquisition and as long as you can get new customers all the time you’re going to be profitable. But unfortunately, that’s not going to work for too much longer because there’s going to be a lot more competition and specifically on Amazon, you’ve probably seen that, where they’ve opened up the market to more sellers, and now you’re having to deal with a competition from the entire planet, and they don’t necessarily play by the same rules that you have dealt with before. And that’s all because of this kind of focus on new, and my proposition, from just being in the marketing industry and seeing all these different businesses develop, is that the only way you’re gonna be profitable in the future is by retaining customers, and so, instead of having acquisition being the name of the game, like I just got to keep on getting more stuff, more stuff the real name of the game in the future is going to be about retention. It’s going to be about community building. It’s going to be about lifetime customer value. That’s the specific metric that I’m recommending everybody get obsessed over.

Mark DeGrasse:

Uh, because, because of AI specifically, uh, advertising is going to get really automated, and what’s going to happen is there’s going to be a lot more. There’s a lot more advertisement competition, and so, instead of just a few people know how to figure out the, the algorithm, you’re going to have AI basically making it like automatic, because the one thing that AI does really well, two things are pattern recognition and consistency, where it’s not going to get bored. It’s not going to get upset over how the ads are going, it’s just going to keep testing and testing and testing. It’s going to figure it out. So, it’s just the perfect situation for paid media. So as that starts to happen, ad costs are going to go up really high and eventually you’re going to have a situation where maybe you don’t make money off your first sale. Maybe the first sale is always a loss, or maybe it’s breakeven, but it’s definitely not making you money. So the only way to make money in the near future is really going to be just repeat sales, and so the only way to get repeat sales is by developing a relationship with the customer, and the only way you’re going to do that is if they know who you are, they know what you do and they know that they could depend on your credibility or authority to trust that the next item you’re going to sell them is going to be good. And this, again, hasn’t been the norm, because it didn’t have to be. You can just get new customers all the time.

Mark DeGrasse:

But, in addition to AI coming online, the world’s different than it was two, three, four years ago, where people had more money, people were less discerning about where they bought from and nobody really cared. You know where it came from or what it was made out of or anything. And now you’re saying and this has been a trend probably for the last 10 years or so, but now people really care about where stuff comes from, what it’s made out of, how it’s made. You know, all these different factors are becoming more and more important. So all of this leads to how do I, you know, build this relationship with the customer so they trust me when I tell them to buy something? And then they come back and buy over and over again. And that’s really what branding is all about. It’s like how do I make an impact on my customer so much so that they see anything online or they see anything in person they think of me instead of going to, you know, amazon search? They know, okay, I’m going to come to this company because this company knows, you know how to make a product, knows how to deliver that product well, and I trust them because I’ve done this business so many times.

Mark DeGrasse:

And fortunately, what we have now is AI, where you can develop a brand like a real brand, where if you say, like what is branding? Everybody quotes like, oh, it’s Apple has brand down or Nike has brand down, and they do, but they’re also billion-dollar companies. You’re not gonna do what they did the way they did it, because they did that over 25, 50, 100 years. You don’t have that kind of time and, honestly, you don’t need that kind of time, because we have online marketing and we have AI, and so what we do at my business is we actually teach marketers and business owners how to manage their marketing in a way that builds brand with every single action you take, and now you’re able to start building that community and do what I call privatizing your following, where you’re not dependent on, say, Facebook for your community, or you’re not dependent on even Amazon, in that case, where you’re like no, I’ve built up a list of people where I built a private community where I could contact them whenever I need to and they trust me because I’ve worked with them for so long, and now my revenue stabilizes, my retention goes up like crazy, and now I have a business that’s not just sustainable, but it’s worth a lot more money because somebody else will want that stability. They’ll say, oh well, I could just buy this other brand and they built up all this awesome content and they have the awesome presence and their customers love them.

Mark DeGrasse:

How much does that increase the value of your company overall? Probably significantly, because the majority of businesses just rely on EBITDA or they rely on, maybe, their customer list, but more likely it’s just like here’s the revenue and here’s the product suite. So if you could build a brand now, you have a tangible or intangible, technically asset that another business will want, because they’ll not just be buying the manufacturer or the product, say, but they’ll be buying the community and they’ll be buying the goodwill that you’ve generated through the brand itself, which is huge. I mean it’s in terms of, like, say, a big business trying to attack a new marketplace. They’re much more likely to be successful if they just buy somebody who’s already there, already has a community and already has trust. So when you’re doing this brand building I’m going to describe today, you’re not just doing it because, hey, I want to retain some customers. You’re doing it because you’re building your company into a real asset that will command a much higher price. When you go to sell a price, it’s not necessarily dependent on your current revenue or even your current product suite, it’s just the brand.

Mark DeGrasse:

So that’s why, uh, you know, or kind of, how I got into branding. It’s funny because I was never real. I always liked branding. I’m very visual and I love content and that always lends towards branding. But the more I researched, the more I was like it’s not just products that sell well because of branding. It’s literally every successful concept that we’ve ever had in the history of humanity because every religion. What do you have to have to have like a religion? You have to have presence, consistency and adoption. Those are the factors, and mainly adoption. But how do you get people to adopt? You have to be stable and you have to say the same thing a million times and you have to get other people to say it. And so that’s literally how all of our concepts, our philosophies, our religions and even our technology started to spread. It wasn’t because it was the best or it was right, it was just the most adopted.

Mark DeGrasse:

And so that’s essentially where I came to the fact that if you don’t have a brand, you technically don’t really have anything. You have a temporary product that you can sell and make some money, and that’s pretty much it, and you’ll always have to deal with competition and you’ll always be replaceable and it’s very unstable. So I had to start with branding and then we expanded onto performance marketing and those kinds of things, but it starts with branding. So what I’m going to show you is just a short presentation where I’ll kind of describe some of these factors, give you some better idea, and then we’re going to build what I call the brand vision, which, again, the brand vision is the most fun part of branding that you can do and also the biggest miss that most companies just kind of say ah whatever we don’t need to change the world, and even if they do say change the world, that doesn’t mean anything.

Mark DeGrasse:

So I’m gonna show you a way to do it where it’s tangible, it’s useful and, again, it’s really fun. So let’s go ahead and get into it, all right. So why? Being on brand is your shield against unpredictable change, and so this is really about protecting yourself from this onslaught of AI tools and really increase competition, because AI makes everybody better technically, because it has way more knowledge than you do, and if you know how to use it right, you’ll be able to use that knowledge to increase almost everything you do in terms of scale and quality and all the other aspects you’re looking for when you’re talking about marketing. So why do some companies thrive for years or decades despite the changing technologies, while others fail or flounder? And so if you look at companies like Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nike, Microsoft these are mainstays, but they were pretty similar size to these ones at one point right, BlockBuster, Nokia, Yahoo, Blackberry, myspace, Kodak and those companies fail like why is it? Why do some companies succeed and some companies continue to do? And I think it’s all about the brand. And when I say brand, it’s not like okay, it’s because they developed the next great product or they did some big thing, big management thing. No, most of the time it’s just consistency. They were consistent with their message; they were consistent with their vision and they just propagated that one thing over and over and over again. Now, Apple now isn’t the best-case study, but they were the best-case study because what people were buying when you’re buying Apple wasn’t like a whiz bang phone. They were buying intuitive design that was easy to use. Buying intuitive design that was easy to use. And intuitive design that’s easy to use is infinitely expandable. They can make cars, they can make airplanes, if they wanted to, they can make pillows. You can really expand it into any concept. Just with that one phrase. What you can’t do is continue to make people buy DVDs, because how would that work? Nobody uses DVDs anymore.

Mark DeGrasse:

Now, BlockBuster they had the same opportunity that every other company had. They were Netflix and BlockBuster were competitors at one point and instead of adopting to the new market, being consistent with their vision which, if you think about BlockBuster what was really the vision? Well, their vision was to get everybody into the store and spend, you know, 10 bucks on renting a DVD for a night, which back then that was like $50. But you can’t expand that, and so their vision was so limited that they just couldn’t continue to expand doing the thing they were doing over and over again. They weren’t, they weren’t capable of that. And so you know, the brand is really the only thing that you can have that’s sustainable. And I don’t know if you can. You know I’m going to play this. Let me see if you could hear the vision, if you want to tell me, Kevin. But basically, it’s Alex from Rosie kind of talk about his realization about brand that, no matter how good he got at performance marketing, when it really came down to it, if he didn’t have a brand, he had nothing. And it goes on with Branson was quoting the same or similar things, and then Ogilvy, he was also in there quoting. So I’ll send that video so you guys can see it.

Mark DeGrasse:

But it’s pretty interesting that even at like the high, because everybody thinks that branding is like this super high-level thing, like they’re the only people who can afford it, but really it’s for everybody. And the reason why is because branding is all about recognition, and recognition is what you need in every interaction you have with a customer. And when I say every interaction, I don’t just mean like, oh at checkout, oh at customer care. No, I mean every interaction, every impression that you can make with a customer. And this goes down all the way to your lowest level, employees, which is kind of funny because most people, you know they’re the least trained people but they end up being the direct contact with your customer. And if you don’t have this person branded and when I say they’re branded I mean they’re saying the right things, they’re using the right terms, they have the right emotions, their personality is kind of geared towards the brand If you’re a happy-go-lucky coffee shop and you have Cindy here being upset, she’s off brand and so now that impression that could have led to more sales is now damaged.

Mark DeGrasse:

And now maybe that person, that customer who you know you’re never going to meet, will never come back. And it’s because this person wasn’t on brand extends your workspace. You know I have the background, but if you looked at my actual background, behind me I have my logos up, I have neon lights, I have all these different features that make it on brand. And honestly, if you don’t have this, at least for your Zoom background, but especially for your office location and I’m not saying that you have to. This is a retail location visual. This is all AI. By the way, if you don’t have people coming in, doesn’t matter. Is your space on brand Like? Even if it’s just you, it should still be on brand, because what you’re doing is saying that your brand isn’t important enough to actually visualize it for the customer, so you’re disconnecting there too, on every visual. Same thing for events. If you have events or you have expos or all this kind of stuff, I see you’ll walk by you know, I go to expos all the time and some of these booths you’ll just have the sales people in the back, chatting, sitting in chairs, doing nothing, instead of being on brand, which could mean being outgoing, greeting people, smiling, handing out flyers, like whatever it is. But that’s another factor of impressions you can make your internal team.

Mark DeGrasse:

I always talk about how branding should be integrated into your HR policies and your operations, because if the people who are making the decisions for your company aren’t doing that with the vision of the company in mind, who are they doing it for? They’re doing it for themselves, and so what happens is, instead of having a group of people moving towards the same direction. At the same time, you have a bunch of individuals that have their own objectives, their own visions for what they should be doing, and now, essentially, what you have is a company full of individual brands. And does that increase your ability to sell? Probably not. And then, finally, you have your senior managers where you’re saying, okay, are they making decisions like the founder would want them to, or the owners of the company would want them to? Are they, is their personality correct? Is their management style correct?

Mark DeGrasse:

All of these aspects, while to date have been very difficult to create, ai is actually allowing you to make sure that all of these factors could actually be on brand. So every single interaction, every single touch point that you have with the customer is now on brand and you’re increasing the perceived value, the authority. And it sounds like I’m just talking about the ideal scenario, but you experience this all the time with brands that you frequent. You don’t just frequent any brand. You took time to select that brand and now you’ve bought that from them over and over and over again.

Mark DeGrasse:

And the funniest part is that’s not about being the best brand or the best product, because everybody says like oh well, the assumption is that the best products always make it, and that’s not true at all. Does McDonald’s have the best hamburger? Does Starbucks make the best coffee? Just look at the biggest people in any industry and say is that really the best that anybody could do? No, no, but they’re consistent enough where I’ll take something that’s pretty good over something that’s perfect, because I know I could get pretty good over and over and over again. So that’s another myth of branding is that you have to be good. You don’t. You just have to be consistent.

Mark DeGrasse:

Okay, so everybody knows this, but we still don’t do it and unfortunately, it’s getting much more important, and I described a lot of this at the beginning about why it’s much more important. But it’s all about retention, retention and then also the changes of modern marketing, and so modern marketing, it’s the Wild West right now. It’s all the systems. I talk to hundreds or thousands of marketers all the time. I’ve done over a thousand podcasts, I can do these events and speaking and all this kind of stuff, and everybody is saying similar things where basically the line is stuff I did in the past isn’t working today. That’s the situation, and so these are just some of the situations we’re facing in marketing Soaring Ad Rates, Mass Layoffs of Professionals, Declines in SEO Conversions, Decreasing Social Media Engagement, Lower Email Open Rates, Algorithm Changes Impacting Traffic, Increased Customer Acquisition Costs, Decreasing Brand Loyalty, Regulatory Challenges, Technological Disruption, Negative Public Sentiment and Increased Focus on Data Privacy. These are all very difficult things that in marketing, we haven’t had to deal with before, and they’re all happening at the same time. And then you have what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the actual economic situation is much different too, where people have less money, the debt rates are higher, people are getting laid off, political strife, disaster I didn’t even put disaster in here, that’s been a big one but all these things are impacting decisions as well. And then you have big companies like Google coming out and say, oh, search, search urgency is slowing, like it’s, you know, and that’s why you see kind of Google is shifting theirs. It still works. You know, I actually just did an article about that, but this is this is long-term trends.

Mark DeGrasse:

Social media you know social media was kind of a bastion of free speech and be able to contact everybody. Now you have TikTok might get banned in America. Then you have, you know again, the paid media. You know every it’s just increasing, prices are increasing, and then we actually have new reports that are showing that a significant amount of traffic online isn’t actually people, it’s just bots kind of pinging off of each other, and so up to I’ve heard up to like 70% is actually just bots clicking on their ads, and so if you think about this kind of stuff, you’re kind of like, oh my gosh, like what data is actually good? Now, amazon, if you have that, they have internal tracking and they have direct connection to their transactions. So it’s much less, I don’t know, not fraudulent, but shaky, as this information.

Mark DeGrasse:

But this is really what we’re dealing with and it’s hard. And so if you think like, okay, everything’s broken, what can you possibly do in this situation? Nothing’s working anymore, and that’s really why I come back to we’ve been spoiled by paid media and easy attribution, because, as a marketer, you’re always looking for okay, if I do this, this is going to happen, like that’s attribution. So, okay, I run the ad on Google and then I get a sale. Okay, I know where the sale came from. And so that’s why Paid Media got so popular, because you could finally say the thing I did led to this much money. But you know, that’s starting to be shaky and because we became so spoiled on that, we forgot about customer relationships, we forgot about innovation and we forgot about long-term growth. We were all about the now because why not? It was totally working. You can’t even blame people for doing it.

Mark DeGrasse:

But these things have happened too, where customers are feeling unwelcome or not taking care of most companies. If you look at, really, the development over the last 20 years, yeah, we’ve had some tech stuff happen, but back when I grew up in the 80s and 90s, we had tech stuff. We had big things happen all the time. It was just kind of like a constant scaling of improvement and it kind of just stopped because, honestly, it didn’t have to continue. You could make money without building customer relationships and without innovating new products and without actually worrying about long-term growth, because even as an entrepreneur, you could be like well, I’m just going to sell once I get to a certain size, so I don’t care about long-term growth, I’m going to get to an eight-figure exit, I win, and now I’m going to go hang out for a while. And that’s kind of been the mentality of everybody and that’s why you’ve seen things happen.

Mark DeGrasse:

But because of this Paid Media thing, because of the AI, because of the changes to digital marketing in general. These are coming back, and so how do you manage these things? So what you need to do is build a brand powered by consistency, dedication and information, and that’s content. And the information side is actually a bigger piece that I’m trying to convince people of because of AI, because what’s happening with AI is all AI. ChatGPT, especially, is really powered by 10 to 15 years of data that we had online, and that’s great, but people change a lot, situations change a lot, and now everybody’s using AI to create content. So is it original content? Because original content is going to get much more valuable, and then, if you use AI to essentially track that content so you could trademark it, now you have proprietary data that’s going to be very valuable to AI models that are going to get weaker as the content gets worse, and so, in addition to all the brand stuff I described at the beginning in terms of hey, you can make a company that makes a lot of money when you sell, this is another piece to it that could make it even more valuable.

Mark DeGrasse:

Or like you could say the AI Branding Academy. We’ve probably produced about 600 pieces of content on our website in the form of graphics and pages and videos and courses and all this kind of stuff. How much is that going to be worth to a business that wants to get into the space and doesn’t want to have to do all that work? Yeah, pretty, pretty good. So by defining your brand, employing AI to ensure consistency and creating tons of content, you can secure your future, and this is all connected. So actual insights longest live brands aren’t just on brand today, they’re on brand always. Branding is recognition, and recognition needs to be ingrained in every interaction you have. Many marketing methods are no longer working like they used to, and the only way to ensure your brand survives current and upcoming changes is through branding. And finally, it’s time to get back to customer relationship building, innovation and long-term growth. Now, all of that sounds like a ton of work. I know, because I’ve built the processes to correct it, but because of AI, because AI essentially gives you the ability to be much more capable than you are. Based on your experience and your skills. You could build a solid brand really easily by just setting parameters on your brand and then using AI to make decisions, and this will simplify your marketing, simplify your hiring of marketers and it’ll simplify almost every project you have, because it’s no longer a brainstorming whiteboard time. Right, like oh, we’re going to do an ad campaign. Oh, how are we going to sell this product? How are we going to develop the next product? It’ll be a hey AI.

Mark DeGrasse:

Based on my vision, based on my values, based on the current performance of the company, what’s the best path I should take? Not to say you’re going to take it, but imagine you could just ask somebody that question, not a biased person like an employee or customer or your mom, but something that’s impartial to the situation and doesn’t care and just says, logically and based on the parameters you gave, this is the best path. How great would that feel? It feels fantastic Because you still have to execute it. And that’s the part where people kind of misconstrue what AI is going to do, because they just think, oh, ai is just going to do it. It’s like, no, there’s still quite a bit of work to do. So if you’re worried about that, don’t worry. But just to show just how much information you gave, what I did was create these two parameters. One’s a custom GPT, which I’ll explain what that is and how it was made, and then another is just a prompt, and all the prompt does is allows you to evaluate a brand and score it with almost no information. So let’s go ahead and do that right now.

Mark DeGrasse:

Okay, so this is the quick brand assessment prompt I recommend using perplexity AI. So perplexity is similar to ChatGPT, but it’s much more integrated with the current internet environment. So ChatGPT is basically powered by years of data. Perplexity, isn’t it just could look up stuff better than Google, essentially, and do really cool things like what we’re gonna do right now. So all you have to do is grab this prompt and then and this is basically judging any brand you want based on these parameters. So does anybody have a website like the brand website they want to share? We’ll go ahead and assess it right now. Let me look. Yeah, I see some people. I don’t know Zesty Greens from Jeanette, that’s the website.

Mark DeGrasse:

Let’s go grab the link. And this is how a lot. So we usually give prompts or we’ll give a full GPT, which I’ll show you next. This case is just a prompt. Basically, we’re instructed the AI to do something. So review the following link and perform a brand assessment based on the definitions provided or specified below the link, rank each specification. I wanted to 10 point system and deliver the summary on the entire brand to summarize assessment for each specification, the score for each specification and the total and average score for the brand. Now, this is a new capability because before I actually created this prompt, I didn’t realize that Perplexi could do something. That’s complicated but it can, and that’s kind of how you’re seeing AI develop too. We’re like oh, it couldn’t do that before and now it can, so let’s go ahead and check out the assessment. So, brand assessment summary.

Mark DeGrasse:

Zesty Greens is a company growing and consuming microgreens. The brand appears to target health-conscious individuals and those interested in indoor gardening. Now what you’re seeing here is the nine brand pillars that we recommend that everybody generates as soon as possible. First one is the brand name. Got an 8 out of 10. Zesty Greens is a clear, memorable name that effectively combines zest, suggesting flavor and enthusiasm with greens indicating their product focus. It’s unique and easy to pronounce, making it a strong brand name while not explode. This is your brand summary. While not explicitly stated, the brand summary can be inferred as zesty greens provides easy to use, sustainable microgreens growing kits for health-conscious home gardeners, growing fresh, nutritious food and environmental awareness. Pretty good. Brand vision the vision is not clearly stated on the website. It seems to revolve around making microgreens cultivation accessible to everyone and promoting healthier, more sustainable lifestyles.

Mark DeGrasse:

Brand slogan core brand values. Core brand offer oh good, nine and 10. This is a great brand. Usually, if you get 50, you’re doing pretty solid and you got a 64 out of 90, which is solid. Average score is 7.11. Pretty solid, and you got a 64 out of 90, which is solid. Average score of 7.11. So, uh, according to AI, zesting Greens uh demonstrates strength in its core offer, brand name and alignment with customer values.

Mark DeGrasse:

Areas for improvement include developing a clear brand slogan and, more explicitly, staying the brand vision. Overall, the brand presents a cohesive image focused on easy, sustainable microgreens cultivation for health conscious consumers. So solid brand, and that’s kind of what the point of this is to evaluate and figure out where can you improve? And so, honestly, the only thing you could improve is just being more clear with a couple items and honestly, over 60, I say you’re doing pretty solid. So that’s just one way you could do it. And you could see, if I tried to do this because I’ve been again, I’ve been decades in marketing If I did this myself, which I could I could create a spreadsheet and I could create parameters for how all these things should be judged.

Mark DeGrasse:

It would take me a while, right, probably a few hours at least, and I was able to do this live in two minutes. And so just to give you some idea of just how capable the system is, that’s just one example, so let’s go ahead and do another one. So we’re going to perform a brand assessment based on a logo. Who has a logo they want to share? I’ll just grab one here. Give me the website, grab off the website. Yeah, mytapscore.com.

Mark DeGrasse:

Perfect, all right. So what this does is it actually allows us to judge the visual identity of a brand instantly. So let’s see what tap score means. That’s a clever name. These are good brands, okay? So this is our Logo-Craft reverse engineering tool. Basically, again, it’s taking our parameters for what we call, or the visual parameters that we call, brand essentials. All right, so this is Logo-Craft. So all we’re gonna do here is say I need my brand essentials and color scheme from this logo. We’re gonna upload the logo, that’s it and voila. Great Thanks for sharing your logo. Based on the logo, here are the brand essentials I’ve generated. It goes through basically these parameters that help drive what we call the AI brand blueprint, which eventually leads to I’m not going to describe how this is done, but eventually leads to the creation of an AI marketing department that allows you to basically perpetuate all these things that are learned just by assessing your brand. So, brand essentials, brand personality and identity.

Mark DeGrasse:

Personality the logo exudes simplicity, clarity and a modern touch. The magnifying glass with a water droplet symbolizes precision, testing and water purity, employing a scientific and analytical focus. Identity it positions the brand as trustworthy, focused on detail, examination or scoring, likely in relation to water. It emphasizes a balance of technology and transparency and it goes into your and these you kind of find. You know you’ll input the actual ones, but it still assesses what type of font it is Design aesthetics minimalist and clean Tone. And messaging. The type of font it is Design aesthetics minimalist and clean Tone. And messaging the messaging is one of professionalism mixed with approachability, scalability. Simple design ensures the logo maintains legibility across various formats, from small digital icons to large scale physical signage.

Mark DeGrasse:

I’m going to skip that one and we’re going to go to mood and emotional resonance. This one I like the most because it really gives you an idea of if you’re hitting what you’re trying to do or not. In this case, it says the mood. The logo evokes a feeling of confidence and trust, coupled with an invitation to engage with a brand that provides clarity and reliable information. That’s solid, and then it keeps on going. So, oh, actually this is. We use this tool for a few different things and it’ll actually generate your color scheme just based on your logo.

Mark DeGrasse:

So when I was developing the 300 brands, when I was working with my agency, that’s how I would develop most websites. I wouldn’t start from scratch because that was going to take too long. I basically reverse engineered their logo so I could say, okay, here’s how I stay consistent with the brand, by focusing on the logo only, and then it allows you to do that. And so, essentially, what AI is doing is something that took me decades to do, and it does it almost instantly. Now, once you have this information, what you could do is generate style guides that you could then employ to manage marketing projects.

Mark DeGrasse:

You know, imagine you’re trying to build a new website and you don’t want to answer 5,000 questions and you don’t want to have 5,000 meetings to figure all these things out. The contractor or your internal employee could actually just query the AI. And so, in terms of your operation, how much better does it get on top of how much better does it get just because you’re on brand all the time? So that’s the gist of it. I can keep on going, but I want to leave time for comments. This whole thing basically leads into what we call the AI brand blueprint, and that allows you to create the marketing department, which then you’d manage all of your content, performance, marketing, branding with.

Kevin King:

This is just the start of what Mark does with his AI brand academy and it can take you through the whole thing of actually developing all the avatars and developing the whole. So you know how to target your advertising and everything and developing the whole. So you know how to target your advertising and everything. It’s pretty amazing what you can do when you properly combine AI tools with this massive amount of data. Like he said, that’s been out there for 20 something years and just look at what he just did in just a few minutes that literally this would have taken a staff of people quite some time to do and they might charge you about $25,000 for a little five page report.

Mark DeGrasse:

And that’s the key right there, because, really, if you’re going to do it right, that’s what big companies do. When I was with big companies, if they needed a single job done, they’d go out, they’d do a quoting process, they’d spend $50,000 a month and then they’d trash half the projects, and I was like this is a waste of money and time. So, if you do this right, though, if you get your brand parameters done right, then you’re able to do oh, I should share my screen again. So for me because basically, I just assessed my logo and I have a very simple logo, but I was able to generate a daily video series. Here’s my podcast.

Mark DeGrasse:

I shot 60 episodes in, I think, a month and a half, and I generated my own magazine in a weekend called Magazine Mark, and you can download all this stuff on my website. It’s all free, but the whole point of this was basically to show like, hey, if you have your brand parameters, all of these things can happen without you having to think very hard or spend a million dollars or just not do them, because you know it’s going to be difficult. All these projects I’m showing you right now I never would have done if it was going to take me a million years. Actually, this is my favorite page because it shows who did all the work. It was me, except for the.

Kevin King:

The byline, the hairy byline in the masthead, is you, and that’s what you do with it? I don’t see a chat GPT in there anywhere In credit chat GPT in there, anywhere. You can credit chat GPT, but it’s you programming the chatGPT. So let’s just explain something too real quick. A lot of people think a brand is a logo and a name. That’s what a lot of people think. But a brand is a much, much more than that. Like you said, when you see the colors of a, there’s a famous ad in McDonald’s and it’s in Tokyo and you know all these bright lights of, uh, Tokyo streets, all these neon signs everywhere and there’s one little yellow mark at the end. It’s like the McDonald’s yellow and you know, oh, you don’t even see them, but you know that’s the McDonald’s, you’re like there’s a mic I think that’s a McDonald’s down there.

Kevin King:

Or if you see Tiffany Blue, if you see a blue box anywhere and you’re at all familiar with jewelry, it’s Tiffany Blue. Or you see, you know, sometimes you’re driving down the street, you don’t. You know, I just had this happen at a CVS. I was driving looking for a pharmacy and I didn’t. I was like where’s the CVS? And I saw a building, square, building, you know, stucco, brick, building, whatever, and up at the top was just a red bar going across the top. It’s a CVS, yep, and I didn’t even see the logo. All right, I just knew that’s a CVS and that’s when you, when you do proper branding.

Kevin King:

That’s where it gets to and it’s consistency and that’s where a lot of people I think a lot of you that are watching this mess up is. You’re not consistent between your Facebook ads and your Amazon ads and your packaging. You, you’re designing, you have an independent people design each thing and there’s no consistency. If I see a Facebook ad and it’s got yellow and green stripes in the ad, I don’t know, maybe someone’s wearing a yellow and green stripes shirt. I’m just making this up on the fly when I hit, click that to go to your landing page. It needs to be yellow and green stripes, it needs to match and have a consistency. And the only way to do that is actually to do what Mark is showing you here, which you used to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for someone to do, or spend months of your time figuring this out and create what’s called a brand guide. You know the tap score guy. He said this looks like it came from our brand guide. It sounds like he’s actually created a brand playbook, a brand assessment. It says these are the fonts we use, these are the colors we use. It’s Pantone, number 562 and 2007 or whatever. And anybody that’s doing your artwork, anybody that’s doing your graphics off of Fiber or Upwork, or whoever’s doing it. You always give them this and say follow these rules, always use these three fonts, always use these three colors, or whatever the colors are. Our low always has to be in the top left and it has to be a quarter of an inch off the right I mean off the edge or whatever it may be, whatever the world. But you establish all that so it’s a consistent look, and then customers start identifying that and then, anytime you do something, it comes out and you know, and when you see a white box, a nice white box, you don’t even have to see the Apple logo on top. You probably know that’s an Apple product because it’s a cool looking box. So that’s an Apple product because it’s so cool looking box. So that’s where you got to get your brand on.

Kevin King:

And that’s what Mark was saying is in today’s world, with Amazon, making money on that first sale is becoming harder and harder. You got to make money on repeat sales and by extending that brand either. That doesn’t mean you have to have a continuity program where people are buying supplements every single month. That’s great. If you are dog treats or something where every month you’re automatically shipping them, that’s perfect. But even if you’re just selling spatulas and that was your first product you got to expand off of that so that people are like this spatula is cool and I like the way it looks and I like the wooden handle and I like the package that came in. Oh, they just came out with a barbecue thongs or what are prongs or whatever, and so it extends that brand, or if that’s right for your avatar. I don’t even know if that’s the right product for your avatar, but by doing this exercise and helping it, using the AI to help you refine, this can be very magical, very massively time-saving and save you a ton of money. Mark, I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on today, man.

Mark DeGrasse:

Thanks y’all. That was tons of fun. Really enjoy the community with you, it was great!

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