Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Curious is interesting because of course you can describe your mindset as a user of Muse, but it could also apply to the software itself. And I do think there’s an element of Muse is a little bit weird. It’s a little bit different, it’s a newcomer, and it takes an approach that no other app has really taken before.

00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Mark.

00:00:36 - Speaker 1: Adam, so exciting times for you?

00:00:39 - Speaker 2: It is. I’m expecting a baby very soon.

00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Congrats.

00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And while there’s many things that make pregnancy its own journey both emotional and physical, I will say that one of the big challenges and one that’s emotionally fraught is picking a name. And I was familiar with this from picking names for products, companies, I don’t know, software libraries, but something that is going to affect another human whose opinion you cannot consult on it for literally the rest of their life. Oh, it feels like a lot of responsibility.

00:01:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet.

00:01:11 - Speaker 2: And maybe that also connects to our topic today, which is brand.

00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, brand is not necessarily the native territory for you and me. We grew up in the engineering and product areas mostly, but we’ve been, especially you have been getting into this, I think more as we’ve gone to start this business. So where are you at in your journey on brands?

00:01:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s been a long journey. I definitely started from maybe a place of assuming brand was, I don’t know, a logo or something and not the hard or important part of a business.

And one of the things that turned me around a bit on that or opened my eyes, I guess, to the importance and potential power of brand was reading history, as always, that’s something that gives a lot of context for me.

There’s a book here called Brand New and it essentially walks through some historical examples, including the company that was the first real department store in the United States, or some more recent history like Dell. The story that really struck me, I think was Heinz, which nowadays has a very strong brand for ketchup. They got started at the time when, and hopefully I can remember the story correctly, it’s been a number of years since I read the book, but basically they got started at a time when mass produced foods were first starting to become a thing that was possible thanks to the US being connected by rail transit for the first time. And apparently what had happened was Heinz was originally a pickled foods company, and apparently this was a big problem to solve because this was something that American families and traditionally the women would end up being in a position where they would do a bunch of essentially pickling of foods for the winter, and it was hugely labor intensive and not a lot of fun and whatever, and at some point someone figured out that, OK, you can send traveling salesmen around to sell pickled foods. But the problem with that is you’re buying a product that you won’t use for many months later, and so it would turn out that a lot of times these were shady and they would open it up in the wintertime and discover like sawdust inside. And so this was essentially a problem to solve if you want to take advantage of this potential at scale food business. But how do you build some trust in the same way that you would have trust with your local merchant where if they sell you something bad, you can go back and complain to them. And I guess Heinz was one of the pioneers here of thinking, well, I’m just going to literally put my name on the label in a very not only a name that’s always kind of the same, but a very recognizable typeface or logo or logo mark, and I’ll put that on there and I’ll work really hard to make sure the quality is high and build a reputation and connect that to the name and the logo and even the shape of the jar, and that was immensely successful and built the food empire that exists today, and now of course that’s totally standard practice, but at the time that was a huge innovation. And so thinking of brand as a technology, you use the term social technology sometimes. I don’t know if this would fall into that category, but that was an unlocking thing. And of course mass produced food, while we have some negative associations with that health wise nowadays, it was a huge unlocker for basically low cost food and more people being able to have full and healthy diets, um, which is, you know, for most of human history, getting enough food has been one of the primary concerns for most humans. So yeah, that historical context helped me think, oh, OK, maybe it’s not just kind of a logo.

00:04:30 - Speaker 1: Right, there are actually a lot of good and important reasons to have strong brands that ultimately will benefit the users and consumers.

00:04:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now, of course, I like to dig in on the kind of what’s that core thing, what is a brand ultimately? Is it a logo, is it a name, would be more like a reputation, like we’re describing with Heinz, how do you think about that?

00:04:50 - Speaker 1: I guess I tended to come at it from the reputation, character, voice, personality, angle, in part because I’m partial to these small giant type businesses where they often lean on that aspect of it a lot. But I understand there’s also the aspect of color and fonts and logos and names, and I’m just not as familiar with that, so I have more to learn there, but I’ve always been fascinated by the character side of it.

00:05:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Yeah, I think for me at least that is the heart of it looking past the surface, you know, saying that a brand is a logo is kind of like saying writing software is typing on a keyboard.

It’s like there’s some literal sense in which that is true, but it really misses the essence or what’s at the heart of it.

Yeah, I think it was one of Richard Branson’s books. So this is a fellow that’s very good at his own personal brand, kind of flamboyant Playboy style personal brand, as well as his sort of business conglomerate, which is Virgin, and he talks about brands as being a communication on what a person can expect from your product or service. Hm, yeah, I like that. And one example he uses, that’s obviously a very strong brand is Pixar. Pixar makes a certain kind of movie, and I think that brand is so strong and so well known that if I say to you, hey Mark, there’s a new Pixar movie out, you want to catch it with me, you don’t need to know anything about the movie, even what it’s called, but you instantly have a picture in your mind of what you can expect, and maybe that thing is something you’re in the mood for, not in the mood for, but you know what you can expect, and that’s the power of brand.

00:06:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can see how that would help both in the classic marketing sense of it gets people excited or interested or aware of what you’re doing, but also in the more tactical sense of addressing the information asymmetry, you’re going to buy some ketchup, like you need to know that it’s going to be actually be there and be of high quality and not going to make you sick.

And that’s something that people encounter all the time, especially with our very global and distributed commerce now, like you need to buy a pair of running shorts. You can expect that if you buy it from Nike, it probably has some property, it’s probably pretty well made and it’s gonna fit well and things like that, where it’s not necessarily the case for the default pair of shorts that you buy online.

00:06:54 - Speaker 2: And Nike is an interesting example and certainly often listed as, you know, textbook case of extremely strong and well executed brand over the course of many decades, and part of that is that Nike swoop and the name, which are both good and somehow seem to capture some things about being a runner or an athlete or, you know, who their target customer is. But more than that, I think it’s also what they stand for, so. Yes, Nike presumably stands for quality athletic goods, but it’s really that just do it message and the imagery that they have used consistently over the years that says it’s about celebrating human athleticism and that individuals can strive. be their best self physically. So for a certain kind of person, say you’re a runner and you enjoy that process of pushing yourself to achieve more physically and that incredible feeling of pushing past your own boundaries and what that can mean for you personally, and you see this imagery that resonates with you and you think, OK, this company stands for something that I personally believe in or has been meaningful in my life.

00:08:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this comes back to the idea of aspirational marketing, which I think we’ve talked about before and it’s actually pretty, I think, effective and resonant in the tools for thought space. People want a combination of permission, vision, architecture, name around how you think better and have better thoughts, and the tools for thought movement, I think, has successfully tapped into that. So it kind of seems like it shouldn’t be that big of a deal just to say you can do it, but actually it is a big deal, and there’s a lot that goes around that to make it effective for people in their minds.

00:08:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, coming to digital products, do you think there’s particular products that have a brand that either speaks to you or just is really effective at communicating what people can expect or a particular vibe?

00:08:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I can give you a few examples. There’s perhaps the most obvious suspect of the high-end premium brands, stuff like Apple, and I don’t think we need to elaborate on that too much, but I think that is an effective brand for me. Another one would be, again, the small giants, so I think 37 Signals would be the classic in that space, company that’s very vocal and frankly kind of loud, but they’re also very clear and they stand for something. And if that’s something that you also believe in, that’s a very effective brand for you. And if you’re not, it kind of correctly repels you away. And you shouldn’t partake in their products.

00:09:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe being a bit polarizing is a desirable quality in a brand because it lets you know it’s a beacon for those who are drawn to that message or that set of values or that character, and it repels those who are not interested in that, and that’s actually what you want for business.

00:09:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Another category might be these brands that are extremely direct. So Duck Duck Go, I would put in that bucket. It’s like search that’s private. Tar snap is another one that I love in that space. I think their tagline is backups for the truly paranoid. And unless you fit in a very specific niche, that product doesn’t make any sense to you, but if you are in the niche, it makes total sense and it’s very appealing.

00:09:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s the ideal thing is that the brand conveys either on your first encounter of it or more just anything that you come across if you have consistency in the materials that you’re presenting, that should, for the target prospect for the right kind of person, they say this resonates with me. I want to learn more. Yeah.

00:10:08 - Speaker 1: What about you? What brands come to mind?

00:10:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I was thinking about this question, one that came to mind was slack, and I think one of the places they managed to be really effective is in projecting a playfulness.

And that is really what maybe sets it apart from all the group chat that came before and in general from work and productivity products.

Maybe this has actually become more commonplace since they have come on the scene. Maybe Mailchimp has a similar thing, a little bit of reverence and fun, but for something as practical as an enterprise communication product.

And you just associate with that, OK, you need it, but it’s not really gonna be particularly fun, and slack really turns out on its head and makes your work communication into something fun, a little silly at times, playful, taps into some of those consumer social media dopamine hits, which, you know, you can debate the merit of that, but again, it presents a very differentiated and strong character relative to other products that solve the same problem. And I was contrasting that to there’s plenty of other products that I think do not have a particular strong brand in the sense we’re talking about.

One that comes to mind for me is Trello, and I really like Trello. I think it’s a great product, it’s fast, it’s reliable. I’ve been using it for many, many years for all kinds of business ventures and personal projects, but even so, if you ask me, and I don’t know, they’ve got a pretty good name and they’ve got like a cute mascot, but if you ask me what does Trello stand for, I would just kind of think, I don’t know, being organized, I guess. So it’s just a product that solves a problem, and that’s fine. I don’t think every single company and every single product needs to have some strong mission or some strong character, but it’s interesting to contrast those two.

So then coming to the muse brand, vibe, character, whatever you want to call that, I was reminded of when you and I were first brainstorming this a bit along with our other colleagues back when we were getting started with the business, and we sort of looked through some different products that we thought had good brands, and in particular characters that maybe fit a little bit or were similar to what we wanted. One that stuck in my mind is a Go player. Sort of a Go program slash assistant just for desktop computers called Sabaki and their website is very simple. It just says, you know, it’s an elegant Go board and an SGF editor, which I guess if you’re a Go player, maybe you know what that means for a more civilized age, right? So they’re telling you practically what it is that it’s this editor and, you know, game board, but they have a couple of words in there like elegant and civilized. There’s a Star Wars reference in there as well. And then visually, you know, they show a screenshot of the product, that’s the main thing you see. But there’s sort of this mood imagery on the side, which they have a wood table with some, I guess these little clay or wood jars that contain go pieces. So it’s obviously relevant to the product, but it’s also something that just gives a vibe, right? It’s a little bit relaxed and elegant. And there’s a little bit of humanity to it, and it’s a small thing, but to me that really makes a big difference from the, you can imagine a version of this that was slightly more practical. You take away those little mood images and you just have the screenshot, you take away some of the adjectives there, like elegant and civilized, and you can see what it is, and maybe people would still want to buy it, but it doesn’t really convey a character, right? If you had to characterize the muse character and the brand vibe based on either what we thought we were gonna make it back then, or maybe what you think it has evolved into today, what are some words that come to mind?

00:13:44 - Speaker 1: I think thoughtful is a big one. You people are spending a lot of time in use thinking and striving to come up with better ideas. I think high quality as well, in the sense of it’s a tool that you spend a lot of time with, and your hands are on it constantly, and you want the sense that it feels good while you’re working with it.

00:14:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, those two are on my list. Two others that I often reach for, one is serene, and we sometimes use calm or something like that, but to me this is in contrast with the, I would call it franticness of a lot of digital products of the digital age, maybe, you know, social media is a good punching bag there, but In general, I feel like software products, even productivity tools are very often trying to grab your attention and being pretty demanding with what they want you to do and calls to action, and there’s a million things and pop up dialogues and do this, do that, and one thing I think we always try to do is be more relaxed, calm, serene, and we try to convey. That through websites, through any materials we do, but then in the product, right, that’s something like we actually had this come up on the team just today. There’s a situation, a rare situation where there’s a certain circumstance that an easy thing to do or an obvious thing to do would be to pop up a dialogue, but that feels very kind of demanding and I don’t know. That’s the sort of thing, at least I’m against, and I wanna see how far we can get at the moment. There is nothing you can do inside music that will pop up a dialogue that demands your attention, if you don’t specifically ask for it, and I wanna see how long we can keep it that way.

Nice, yeah. Now the one that’s on my list is Curious, and probably it helps, you know, I think there’s some degree to which the character of your company comes from the character of the people who started it. You know, we are all curious people, so some of that is just who we are.

But I think it also fits with, you know, you have this tool that is designed to help you learn about the world, solve problems. To explore, to understand something and curiosity, I think we even mentioned this on the last episode there talking about how to spot good ideas and how to have good ideas. The curiosity is upstream of having good ideas, and so that naturally fits with kind of the purpose of our product, and additionally, we try to, through other means, live that. A good example of this is that we have our product newsletter that goes out once a month, and it’s mostly stuff about what we’ve been working on and what’s new in the product, but I always try to include at least one or two small sections. It’s an interesting book we’ve read recently, or a podcast that we like or an interesting new tool, and that just kind of fits with this sense that it’s about more than a laser focus on the thing that’s right in front of you. It’s a willingness to see the wider world and just be open to possibility and have an open mindset.

00:16:30 - Speaker 1: Curious is interesting because of course you can describe your mindset as a user of Muse, but it could also apply to the software itself. And I do think there’s an element of Muse is a little bit weird. It’s a little bit different. It’s a newcomer, and it takes an approach that no other app has really taken before. And I think that kind of pervades the product, the marketing, like we don’t quite do stuff exactly like other people do, and a lot of our users, I think, appreciate that.

00:16:55 - Speaker 2: Hm, yeah, exactly. Maybe the product itself walks its own path, and that in turn, maybe attracts people who are also willing to take that on the road, take the road less traveled, you might say.

Yeah. Now when it comes to the practical elements of what is a brand, I’ve talked about the vibe or the character, but what in practice are the pieces that make a brand.

Once I discovered or read about this history and started to look closer and realized that a lot of the products that I like or companies I respect the most are ones also with strong brands, and then that leads into, OK, what actually is a brand, not in the sense of character, but in the sense of what are the pieces.

And we touched briefly on the kind of the visual element there, and we can speak to that a little bit, but I think the really big one, or even a almost the starting place of everything else is name.

Hm yeah, names are so tough. Names are important and challenge to get right and not something you want to change too often if you didn’t get it right.

The one place I found, once I got curious enough about what makes a brand, I wanted to dig in a little bit on the practicalities of it, looked around for books to learn more about that. And there’s a few different ones, but I think one of the seminal ones for me is, I think it’s a pretty old book, might be from the 70s or 80s, called the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. And here it’s talking about pretty old school stuff, but they make this list right from the start of what the author believes are great brands, and that’s Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Jello, Band-Aid, Rolex, BMW, FedEx, Nintendo, Tide, Heinz is in there, Visa. And it’s notable that for many of these examples, I’m not a customer and never have been, but I instantly know the company, I know what they sell, I know what it’s going to look and feel like, and in many cases I have a sense already of character, what kind of person would buy products from this company, for example.

00:18:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and apparently those have stood for several decades anyways.

00:18:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly so. And this book kind of rattles off a lot of the, it’s called the practical mechanics, which include the name side of it. And for example, the author makes the point that you want something short and punchy, it’s memorable, and it needs to be in this kind of middle ground between not too generic, but also not too weird.

So he gives some good bad examples. So a good name from his point of view for laundry detergent is tied. A bad name would be the Procter and Gamble home laundry detergent. Now, of course, you can make a brand on maybe not a great name. I think a good name makes it easier for people to remember you, makes it easier to brand things, but ultimately you can attach a company reputation and a vibe and a character to any name you choose, but certainly something like an abbreviation is not great.

Some other points this book makes is that the brand is not the name of the company, it’s the name of the product, and it’s really important, and the only one that really cares about the name of your company is your team, and that’s fine, and you know, you do want your team to be motivated, but ultimately you should be really thinking about customers and how your brand is filling a space in their mind, and a test for this almost linguistically is People use it as a noun or a verb, he says, basically it’s what’s in the box. You say, I’ll have a Coke. You don’t say, I’ll have a flavored beverage from the Coke company, right? You say, I’m going to drive a BMW. I say, let’s play a Nintendo, or you can do the Verb version, which I think maybe is more common a little bit in the tech world, which is, yeah, I’m going to Google it or FedEx me that document. So that’s a brand.

00:20:28 - Speaker 1: So what would be some examples of getting this wrong and confusing the product of the company?

00:20:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so there’s a few examples of this.

One of the most notable ones that unfortunately is pretty prevalent in the tech world, I think, is something where you put the company name and then the product name after. So in the Microsoft suite you’ve got Microsoft Word, and this is actually a clumsy name because you can say Word with a capital W by itself, and many people will know what that means, but it’s a Little too generic, so you kind of need to prefix it. Well, it’s MS Word or Microsoft Word, but now you sort of have two things because there’s Microsoft, a company which has its own identity, and then there’s this piece of software. And the interesting thing there is a contrast to another product in the same exact suite, which is Excel.

Excel is a great brand name because Excel is what you buy in the box back in the days when you bought software in boxes. Now it’s, I don’t know what you download or whatever, and you say I’m going to use Excel, or let me put that in Excel, or let me check my Excel spreadsheet, so that does not have any of that confusion.

I think Google’s also quite an offender here.

Google Docs is one of the most awkward product names of all time. In my point of view, it’s hard to use in a, let me put that in my Google Doc, I guess, my Google Docs doc. It’s just, yeah, it’s terrible. But Google, as the search, let me Google that and I’ll look up a Google search, that works great. Yeah.

And notably also Gmail, Gmail’s a perfectly good brand, and yes, Google is in there, that G is in there, but it sort of is, you don’t have that confusion of like pasting these two things together. Gmail is its own brand that stands essentially alone.

00:22:10 - Speaker 1: OK, that’s interesting. So naming the thing that’s in the box and not the company. What are some of the other things in this book that were most surprising or interesting to you?

00:22:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another point that this book makes is talking about how you want to think of owning a piece of mental real estate with your brand, and that you stand for one thing, and that that thing should be pretty simple. So, it gives the example of FedEx.

So FedEx stands for overnight.

And apparently this was actually kind of a pivot for them. They used to be more of a general purpose mail provider, they competed with UPS and the post office and so on, on that basis, and their big breakthrough was, and actually there’s a great book, I have to look up the name of that for the show notes, which is kind of an autobiography by one of the FedEx founders of the early days of that.

They basically made a kind of pivot into overnight as their focus and something where when you think of FedEx, you think of getting something to someone reliably really fast, like the next day.

Yep. And that’s connected to their logo and their colors, and even that distinctive. The envelope that you buy to put stuff in and then you even get the reverse of that which is when something comes in a FedEx envelope they oh this is important so that shows you right there a powerful brand because they don’t just stand for male or male that’s efficient or something like that. They stand for something really specific and differentiated.

And this points to a mistake that’s easy to make once you have a strong brand as you think, well, great, let’s put that brand name on a similar product, essentially expand into a new space and we can use the reputation on that new product, but you can actually destroy your reputation. If you move into a space that doesn’t feel related, and you can find yourself putting a name that owns, for example, in the case of FedEx, owns overnight, and you put it on something else that just confuses it and now you’ve essentially destroyed that real estate in the customer’s mind.

00:24:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the FedEx example is interesting because I think that brand has been very effective and it’s premium, it’s super fast, it’s reliable, it’s high value, and the flip side of that is you expect as a sender to really pay for it.

So whenever I think, you know, I got a mail, uh, I don’t know, you know, t-shirt, if I’m gonna send a FedEx, it’s gonna be like $72 or something, you know, and so I’m always hesitant to do that, whereas if I’m sending a really important piece of paperwork, OK, sure, I’d be willing to pay something like that.

But then they have now it’s like FedEx Ground and FedEx 2 day air and 3 day air and FedEx fast, you know, it’s kind of a whole thing, so it’s a little bit confusing to me.

00:24:38 - Speaker 2: So that’s names, and that can bring us to the visual or aesthetic side of the brand, and there’s a bunch of elements to that.

The logo, of course, is a big one, and so here that can be your name, typeset in a particular way, is a good way to go, may also be a little mark that could be either paired with the name or use standalone.

And then we’re in the iOS world where your app icon is essentially your most important logo, and that has some slightly different properties from a logo that you would put on a sticker or a t-shirt or a business card, but it is extremely important in terms of it’s the first thing people see every single time they run your software.

00:25:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this area reminds me a lot of this branding stuff is a combination of memetic and emotive. So by that I mean, emotive is like how it makes you feel, of course, a big part of the brand is people aspire to or want to feel a certain way and a well executed brand can do that. But also, especially these days, the memetic aspect is very important, you know, how does it help you remember, cut through the noise, share with your friends, get transmitted, go viral, the name, the image, the fun, they all play a big role in that.

00:25:44 - Speaker 2: Exactly, and I was thinking of some examples from the tech world and notion comes to mind in terms of they have this kind of black and white illustration style that they use throughout and even their team members will often have a, I don’t know if they have an illustrator on staff whose job is just to draw people in this particular style, but it’s a very notable style. It’s not a logo. a name, but it is this visual style that you come to associate with and the black and white, it invokes kind of, yeah, printed paper or maybe a notebook or something like that and fits with their generally pretty kind of pragmatic but chill, but you know, nicely designed but not overdone, very different from the highly richly saturated colors of slack, for example.

And then maybe to take a third example, which is quite different from those two would be Craigslist, which I would describe as brutalist HTML. And some of it may evolved organically in the sense of it’s just an old site, and when it was originally made, it was not put through the kind of let’s do a classic visual design past, but now it’s very much part of their brand. It says to you, this site is no nonsense, it’s practical, it’s just the basics, it doesn’t try to be something fancy or impress you needlessly, it just really is focused on this very simple way to list and look up classifieds.

00:27:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think a flip side of that, perhaps the other end of the spectrum is brands that do a lot of proof of work around some quality that they want to show. So this would be very well designed websites that gives the viewer a sense that there’s basically a higher probability that the product itself is going to be well designed if you have a well designed website. Of course, the correlation isn’t perfect, but if you come to a very well executed website, you have more confidence via this proof of work mechanism that what’s underneath is going to be good too.

00:27:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, what’s the old saying, you can judge a book by its cover. Yeah, yeah, so that’s logo and illustration and name, but also something like the typefaces you use throughout all your material on your website and your product and your advertising, you may have a single font family or a set of font families that hang. and if you use those consistently over time, I think something like the typeface Apple has used for many years in its advertising, you don’t even need to see that little apple with the bite taken out of it. You can just see the typeset text and you already know it’s an apple. It’s something Apple related.

And certainly for physical products, packaging is absolutely huge, and there’s a lot of folks who are very skilled at packaging design.

I actually quite enjoy going through, for example, packaging design on Drribble or 99 designs or whatever.

You can scroll through the portfolios of these folks in there, they need to work within the constraints of the physical world, you know, if it’s a can for a Beer or soda or something, they need to work with that cylinder shape and there’s practical things that need to be put on the can, but people get very, very creative with that and conveying these ideas and having a visual brand where all the elements hang together across something like a physical package, a website, a digital product that work within their medium and what’s needed for each of these different settings, but also all hang together, all identifiably part of the same universe of stuff.

And for me, a great visual brand is one where in the end, it feels a bit like a flag to rally behind. Or sometimes I think of it as sort of a peg to hang your feelings about the brand on.

So if the visual brand is strong, then that means that love it or hate it, it’s easy to attach those feelings and recognize right away, particularly when there’s a new product or even something like something coming out of their Twitter account or any communication that you know right away who it’s coming from and what their character is, and you draw up those feelings you may have about the brand. So I think in the end with these elements together, the right name, strong visual brand that’s conveyed throughout a set of values or a vibe that it stands for that makes sense within the product and the mission of the company and the product but also has maybe something a little more expansive, something like curiosity in relation to a tool for Thought as an example.

And in the end, I think all of that can add up to hopefully if you do a right kind of almost a tribal affiliation because I think for many people when they make product purchases, they’re thinking not just does this solve my problem, but they are also thinking, what does this product say about me as a person? Are the people who make it, and the other people who buy it, are they part of my tribe? Do they share values with me, and then what will people think when I purchase this? So, in the Nike example we were using earlier, maybe if you feel like, OK, the people that purchase these products are people who care about personal athleticism and trying to push yourself to reach higher heights, and I want to be seen as a person like that as well. So, therefore, I wanna purchase these products.

00:30:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s a big one. It’s such a powerful force, a desire for tribal affiliation. I think both be affirming in the sense of, OK, I am an athlete, so I do want to buy from this brand, but it can also be aspirational. OK, New Year’s resolution, getting off the couch, let’s make sure I have the right vibe around me in terms of my clothing.

00:30:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. One of the examples, I think that was from one of the earlier books I mentioned that I found quite remarkable was Harley Davidson, I guess they’re a motorcycle company.

Although again, another good example of something where I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, I’ve certainly never purchased one, and nevertheless, that name, Harley Davidson, evokes a pretty strong vibe in my mind. I feel like I know what that stands for, for sure, which says a lot about their effectiveness as a brand.

Part of what they’re saying, the tribal affiliation or the what kind of person does this make me or as you were just saying, what do I aspire to be, and for them it’s very much I think about a kind of masculine but independent, a little bit rebellious, you’re out on your own, you’re taking some risks, you’re kind of dangerous.

And so it may be that you’re drawn to that because, in fact, you are those things, but it could be that you want to be those things. You want to push yourself to be those things or you aspire to be those things, or you see something laudable in that, and buying, maybe not the motorcycle, but maybe the jacket or the shirt, or whatever other product that the company is selling will somehow help you make that come true or grow into that person you want to be.

Yep. So we said that Muse today stands for thoughtfulness and maybe it’s a little serene and a little curious. What do you think in the future would be an expansion or an addition to that set of values?

00:32:13 - Speaker 1: Well, there’s a lot more that I want us to do around developing and articulating the character of Muse, this personality small giants idea, and we’ve, I think, done some of that with the podcast, but there’s a lot more to do with writing and video.

But I think an interesting fulcrum for us over the next year or so is going to be the question of privacy. We came into Muse with this hypothesis that privacy is really important and perhaps we would even elevate it in terms of our brand. And that’s kind of the path we’re pursuing now because right now it’s a single player app, it’s a single device app and so all of your data is private.

But as we go to expand Muse to sync across multiple devices and perhaps even collaborate across users, that becomes a much bigger question.

There’s a question of can we implement something like that in the end encrypted way. There’s a question of do users value that if we had this as part of our brand, would actually resonate? Would that be something that people aspire to participate in? And there’s a question of is that even legal to do anymore at some point. So that’s a big question mark, I think for us in our brand. I could see us going quite deliberately in that direction, perhaps not as much as that duck.go, but making it a big piece of what we’re about. And I can also see us going more in the standard enterpriseas direction where our data is in the cloud. So I think that’s a big question mark for us.

00:33:27 - Speaker 2: From the tone of your voice there, we can see which uh outcome you would be happiest with. Yeah, absolutely it is. I think it’s something we personally value privacy and particularly in connection with creativity and tool for thought because your thoughts are such an early raw, intimate thing.

It’s something we want to just see more of in the technology world is greater attention paid to privacy and protecting the user’s content.

And yet, there are huge technology challenges here. We don’t even know, as you said, what’s actually going to be possible, and if that comes into conflict with other more important things that are just more important to our customers, we need to listen to that and we can sit here and say, well, we value this thing as people, but if that is just not achievable in a practical way with the business, then we can’t say that’s part of our brand.

So that’s part of what makes it an open question to generally hard and challenging problem.

I think one I would be inclined to list is one of my, I guess, goals for the company generally is to help people be more thoughtful, so it’s not just that our brand or vibe or the product’s vibe or the product’s character is one of thoughtfulness, but then in fact it will help those that are already thoughtful or aspire to be to move more in that direction or to embrace that fully.

And so one maybe expansion or future direction I might see that as We do go to say more like team collaboration features, that that’s something that we could bring along for the ride that I think thoughtfulness for an individual and bringing thoughtfulness to a team kind of collectively is bringing that into say a team culture of let’s make decisions and considered and thoughtful ways. I think that sort of value or approach is fairly common among designers. Maybe also among certain categories of more leadership and managerial people, but maybe is not a kind of necessarily as broad across a given team. And so, is there a future where somehow bringing news into your team’s work flows when it’s some future time, when we have some as yet undefined features around that, is there a way that it actually allows your team collectively to be more thoughtful or move in that direction? I think that’s a big challenge, but that’s all the more reason to build a strong brand around it first in the easier single player space.

00:35:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is actually giving me another idea, maybe this is too diffuse, but I think there’s this sense of agency that we could really emphasize and use.

So it’s traditional software, especially these days, it’s like all your data is locked up, yet the company’s hosting it can see all of it. You have no ability to really manipulate or control your software and you’re part of a big org, you know, you’re part of this enterprise software org and you’re just a data point in that.

The model that I’m interested from use is more of the.

Individual agency network of collaborators model where you have your stuff, it’s your stuff. Also you have some elective collaborations with other individuals, other groups, and perhaps other organizations, but the individual is kind of the primary node, and I think that’s too abstract and diffuse to bring that into a brand as is, but I feel like there’s something there around software that brings the power back, the agency back to the individual creative user.

00:36:36 - Speaker 2: Mm. It reminds me a bit of the, maybe the consumers. of IT or they talk about bringing your own device, which was in the, I don’t know what ancient times, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever, particularly in the larger the company was, the more you were issued equipment to use, you know, your laptop came from the company, certainly your BlackBerry company issued and very locked down, right? There’s all these IT administrator controls, you know, there’s a VPN you have to log in just to get access to anything.

And what that meant was that these products were good from the perspective of the administrative legibility side of things.

But they really weren’t kind of optimized for call user experience, but just the happiness and productivity of the individuals use them, and then on comes things like the iPhone and Gmail, whatever really raises the bar on what people can expect, and then suddenly by comparison, their clunky kind of company issued stuff is just so far below, and they just don’t want to do that, and eventually there’s have to be This adaptation, and now it’s even to the point where, at least for me, like a company issued phone, that seems crazy. The phone is such a personal device and each person has strong feelings about which one exactly that they want, and certainly the idea of not having total control over my device to set the preferences as I like feels very weird to me, and I think that’s become quite common. So yeah, is there a version of that for productivity and collaboration tools where there’s less of the IT administrator decides exactly what’s best for the user, and more that you have the creators who are part of this collective, that is the company or the project team, they can bring their tools and their practices and make their own choices to this larger whole rather than the top down process. Yeah, nice. But yeah, you’re right, how that gets boiled down to a, you know, one or two word brand character thing, well, I guess that’s an evolution that happens over time. Yeah. Well, certainly I think brand development is like product development, as much discovery over time, not a sitting down upfront and figuring it all out, but a process of developing that. It’s a combination of your personal characters on the team, it’s a combination of what the product is today and what you aspire for it to be, and then it’s Also the users, the customers, and the people, particularly early on, who come in with their own set of values and ideas and affiliations, and that’s something that evolves, develops, grows over time. So looking back on this discussion maybe in a couple of years and seeing how the Muse brand has grown and developed in that time. Right on. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, please feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter, or you can send an email to hello@museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. Thanks for the chat, Mark. See you next time. Thanks, Adam.