Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen:
Welcome to the E-commerce Marketing Podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Jason Byer who is the Marketing and Partnerships Manager at Crowdspring, a Chicago-based branding company that helps businesses, agencies, and nonprofits of any size create high-quality marketing materials through crowdsourced design contests. He is skilled in marketing operations, demand generation, ABM, and analytics reporting. He has a Master of Science in Digital Marketing from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor’s in Business Management from the same institution.  Jason is also an Ironman finisher and a father of two girls. He is passionate about finding missed opportunities where a partnership can add value. He is also a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Welcome to the podcast, Jason.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Hey, thanks Arlen. Great to be here.

Arlen:
Yes, thank you for joining me. You know, I’m really excited to talk to you today. You know, we’re gonna be talking about something that I know your company is heavily invested in, which is brand identity. So we’re gonna be talking about how to build an effective brand identity, which is a key thing these days, especially because with e-commerce at the level that it is right now and so much competition, if you don’t establish a specific brand identity, and set yourself apart from your competitors, you can kind of get lost in the muck of businesses that are in your category. So I think it’s gonna be a hot topic to dive into. 

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Absolutely.

Arlen:
But before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today. So, before we get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today. So, before we get into all of that,

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Absolutely. So, you know, I’m going on over a decade now in marketing and partnerships. And really what I’ve liked about this side of the business is you’re in charge of bringing in the revenue. You’re in charge of bringing in the clients, right? And that’s an exciting part of that business. And I think for a lot of your audience, right, they’re using your software, they’re thinking about ways to grow their different channels. And so it’s very exciting to be able to be a part of. the side of the business bringing in the revenue. And I think naturally with that on the branding side and through Crowdspring, it’s, you know, as you mentioned, this is that hook, this is that secret sauce that enables you to stand out in a very crowded marketplace. No matter which marketplace you’re in, no matter which industry, they’re all incredibly competitive and branding is just that secret sauce. And we work with a lot of small business owners, thousands. We’ve helped over 100,000 small business owners. and agencies that work with us. And so we get to do a lot of education. We’re really in the branding education space, and we just happen to help clients build strong brands with names and logos and so forth. So it’s very rewarding to be able to see the brand come to life, especially that visual brand you get to see being birthed. So absolutely,

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah,

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
it’s exciting.

Arlen:
that’s all. Yeah, it’s definitely an exciting time. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that you guys really start off as more of an educational space as far as being able to educate people as to branding, how to establish a brand identity because that’s key. And as most…

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Well, absolutely, because yeah, so many of us think about branding as belonging to large companies like Nike and Starbucks, but we each have a brand.

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And I think if I could just for your audience, you know, we should, we should identify what is a brand so that we don’t get too far using this term. And, and people think it’s not relevant for them.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
A brand is simply every single interaction that somebody has with your company.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
That’s it. It’s

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
every single interaction. It’s that simple, Arlen,

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
but it’s also that complex because what it means is that, you know, the tone of your email, the presence of your physical employees, if you have those, your website loading speed, this is all part of your brand. Right. And this is why companies like, you know, Nike spend so much effort on getting this right. You wouldn’t expect to go to Nike’s, you know, product page and see a grainy photo. of a shoe, right, or a piece of apparel. You’re gonna see zero mistakes in their copy and a strong product that loads fast because that’s how they wanna be known. Can you imagine Nike saying, we’re the fastest company out there, we support the fastest athletes, but then their website loads like dial-up? It would be a disconnect.

Arlen:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, thank you for breaking it down and giving us that basic definition. That’s really what it is. Like you said, every interaction that you have, somebody that has your brand is with your company, that’s the brand. Any type of messaging, anything that they see related to your company is your brand. That’s of course. relevant to any business. Now, if we kind of bring this down and focus this in on the e-commerce businesses, I want to just start off with to see if you can explain how an effective brand identity can really impact an e-commerce business or any e-commerce business.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Sure. So if a brand is every single interaction that somebody has with your company, the brand identity is everything visual about your company. It’s what people can see, right? So this is the obvious, like your logo and your website, but it’s also some of the less obvious. It’s your product. It’s the photos that you use on the website, right? It’s the unboxing experience. It’s the color of the packaging that you use. This is all part of your brand identity. think through each of these parts. They don’t leave any of it to chance. They think about what does the process look like when somebody opens up this package? Are they going to have the colors and the excitement that represent our product, right? And so it’s important, a brand identity is important for any business, right? Because we process imagery thousands of times faster than text. And so we want to be able to use this visual language, this visual shorthand to communicate what our brand is about, who we serve. So that somebody says, OK, I’m in the right place and I’m excited for this service or this product. So it’s important for any business. It’s especially important for an online business like e-commerce because you can’t touch the physical product. You’re making a decision to part with your hard earned money and not being able to see this. You know, you’re now. Amazon and companies like this have made a little bit of this a little bit less trustless. Meaning, you know, I can try it out and if I don’t like it, if you lied to me, I can send it back fairly easily.

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
But if you’re not selling on Amazon, if you’re selling direct to the consumer, now there is trust that needs to be built up. And you have to be able to do that with your brand. And so every part of that brand identity is critical. Choosing the right colors so that you create a sense of excitement, if that’s what you’re trying to do, or a sense of calm or a sense of trust. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Right. We know colors like blue and green are sending signals of trust, which is very helpful for a new business. We know colors like red and orange and yellow are vibrant and saying, hey, look at me. I’m doing something unique in this space. And so colors play a big role in this. But we want to think through each of these strategies.

Arlen:
Yeah. And I’m glad you mentioned the trust factor because that’s really huge. And establishing yourself for your brand is trustworthy and being an authority on a particular area is key. I know personally, you had mentioned Amazon, of course. And you know, for someone, you know, we always have to, I think, address the elephant in the room, which is Amazon, because I think if you’re like me, most people are like, you know, I would say a good percentage of what they order online is probably through Amazon just because of that convenience factor that they have. the same day, next day shipping, easy returns, smooth process, you don’t have to worry about it. They’ve established themselves with that particular trust. So for someone to step out of their ecosystem, deal with an e-commerce brand directly. That definitely says a lot. And that’s why I think you said, like you said, trust is a key factor. You know, me personally, you know, there’s of course things that I purchase outside of Amazon, but when I do select those companies that I tend to do business with, and I wanna do business with outside of Amazon, they have their own, you know, direct to consumer website. It’s something that, you know, I’ve kind of vetted a little bit, you know, I kind of know, all right, before I purchase, when I can expect the product, I’m comfortable with that. I know the return policy. I may have taken a look at some of their ratings, their testimonials, and with all of that, all those things kind of set me aside, or give me a little bit of ease. I look at their Google reviews, I see all of that, and all of that really kind of paints a picture and helps me in the decision-making process, and I’m sure others, it’s the same way. So yeah, the trust is really key.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Absolutely.

Arlen:
Yeah, what I wanted to really kind of get at next is wanted to see if we can kind of break it down and wanted to see if you could define some of the key components to consider when you’re building an e-commerce brand identity. What is this identity made of?

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Absolutely. Well, let’s start with the top and kind of work our way down, right? So it starts with your name, right? It starts with the name of either the company or the product, right? And so we’ve helped entrepreneurs create product names and company names, thousands of them. And so we get to see this process. We get to see the owner come to us with a name and say, Oh, I’m kind of married to this name, but I’d like to see, you know, what other options are out there. Typically, business owners are terrible about naming their own company. 

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
So we really need to get some outside input on this. And so if you’re married to a name, it might not be the best name. And so you want to be able to see what your options are. It starts with the name because the name is how people are going to remember this product. It’s the name that they’re going to use when they share it with friends and family. Are they going to want to? Are they going to be embarrassed by sharing this name with somebody else, right? Your name is that opportunity to… to start talking about your brand. We’re going to get into brand voice at some point in this conversation, but this is that brand voice. Is it meant to be a symbol of trust and security, or is it meant to be a little bit cheeky and kind of fun? Is it supposed to be a little bit more serious? These are all things that you want to consider when you’re thinking about the name. Is it going to be very just kind of bland? And I exist in a market where I can just say what the product is. And that’s fine, right? And so it starts with the name, having a strong name that people can remember, that people can easily share. They, you know, there’s no cute spelling, you know, with extra letters or no letters. They just know how to, they know how to look for it. And it’s a name that, you know, exists. They don’t, you don’t have to remember a different domain to get to this product, right? 

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
You have, you have the same name across all of your, your e-commerce and social platforms. So it starts with the name. And then it starts with the logo. This is your core. piece of your visual identity. It sets the tone for the colors that you’re going to use on your website, in your packaging, on your product. The logo needs to be versatile. We’ve got to think about the logo size as something that can expand or shrink down on your packaging, on your social profiles. We’ve all seen the social avatars, the image on your small box on your social media page, where the logo is kind of truncated, right? And you only see in the middle part of it. That doesn’t send a lot of trust. 

Arlen:
Right..

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
You don’t see Nike or Starbucks

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
with truncated images.

Arlen:
Yep.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
They have logos that scale nicely to fit that space. And we’ve got to think about that for our businesses as well, especially when we’re selling physical products. 

Arlen:
Hmm?

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Because now, your logo could be on a much wider variety of different types of materials. You also need something that looks good in monochrome. Monochrome is your two color, your black and white. And so you want a logo that looks nice so that you can put it on a different background again thinking about the wide Possibility for an e-commerce different material Colors that you’re going to be putting this on you want to make sure it looks great monochrome one thing we find with free logos or artificially generated logos is that they tend to use a lot of generic elements and a lot of times what happens is When you remove one of these generic elements in order to make the logo fit the space better, you lose all meaning. Right. And so think about, you know, a clothing company that uses, you know, kind of a picture of a hanger, you know, with the name of the clothing store, you know, in that in that circle. That doesn’t say much. It’s not very unique just on its own. So forget the fact that it’s, you know, if you remove a part to make it easier to read, you just lose all all association with the brand and their industry. But there’s lots of e-commerce stores that sell products that fit on hangers, right? It’s not very memorable.

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And so what we’re looking for is logos that are designed specific to your business, specific to your brand. And these communicate much stronger. These create these excited emotions when somebody engages with your brand.

Arlen:
Yeah, I think with this whole world of social media, I think that’s more important than ever because a lot of what’s translated to the end customer is going to be through images, through how you’re represented in your graphic media online and in these images. Cause a lot of times, especially with social media, when people are scrolling through their timeline, it’s just the images that are catching their eye. They may not necessarily read your messaging. they’re gonna see your logo, they may see what’s associated with that particular ad or with that particular post, and then they kind of form that relationship with your brand in their head. And so yeah, that’s really, I think like you said, it’s very important that you make sure.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Well, and we know that it takes dozens of times for somebody to see your brand before they engage, right?

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
So you might have to show an ad 12 times and send a postcard and have an ad in the magazine. This is all times where you want to start building this brand equity in this design. A good example, I use the product element for hydrating for a workout.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And their science-backed is what they claim for their product. Andrew Huberman, big science podcaster, backs them, and Andy Galpin, and others. What they’ve done with their logo is they use, it’s kind of cute, so it breaks the rule about being cute with your name. But their name is actually LMNT.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
So it’s element as just kind of the consonants.

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
But they did their logo as like a periodic table of the elements, you know,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:

where it’s science backed. You think, okay, you know, this is grounded in science and technology. And so these are the ways where it’s specific to them. That’s very different than if they just did, you know, their name element and, you know, a salt block for, you know, for hydrating and getting your trace minerals in. So.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a great example. And thank you for pointing that out. And you can quickly and easily see that you like it. In their example, how that’s, you know, that logo, which is kind of like a periodic table of elements or that element, it’s directly related to what their claims are as far as the science backed, you know. research that’s been done on what they do, you can see how if you’re going to one of these sites that’s doing the free logo generating sites, where if you go that route, yeah, I mean, obviously, that’s just spitting out a modified template, if you will, and that’s not necessarily the…

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
We’ve got a very strict policy at CrowdSpring.com that we do not allow stock art and photography in our custom designs.

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Our designers are immediately removed from the platform. I mean, look, these are already affordable enough. It’s not like you have to spend thousands of dollars for a custom logo. They start at 2.99.

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And so, you know, this isn’t like it’s gonna break the bank to get something that’s custom and designed specifically for your business. So

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
it’s absolutely essential. These are the foundational elements of your brand identity, which is your name and your logo. 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And then if we want to move to finish the rest of your question, if we want to move from there, you know, with e-commerce, really the next step is the packaging, right?

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
It’s that opportunity, that unboxing. You know, how are they going to feel? You know, one of the obvious ones is frustration-free packaging, right? I hate when I’m excited for a product that I’ve been waiting for. And it’s a pain in the butt to get into. And now, you know, I’m associating this negative feeling with the brand.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And that’s never nice. But but what else with the packaging? You know, do the colors, you know, create excitement? Do they build on this excitement?

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Do they you know, does it feel exclusive? You know, is it is it a full black box with gold lettering? You know, do I feel like, you know, I’m in the club. I’ve reached, you know, I’ve reached the pinnacle here. And so colors and packaging and how it interacts with the product plays a big role.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And one thing we could say is even the product design itself.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
So the product design itself will speak to your brand. So we actually do a lot of product design, physical product design that folks go. We’ve worked with Amazon, we’ve worked with AliExpress and their manufacturers where they go and build these products. And, you know, the product that you design should speak to your brand. If your brand is trying to be you know, innovative and sleek, you want that into your product. I mean, the obvious example is Apple, right? They have a very sleek product. So regardless of whether, you know, the insides of the Apple product are better or worse than a competitor, they position their product themselves to do a lot of the marketing, to say, look, we’re a premium company, just from the outside. You can see that.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and it definitely translates to the packaging. Packaging is key. And even just looking at Apple, I’m thinking about all of the Apple products that I purchased, the iPhones that I’ve had over the years. Their packaging is definitely unique. You kind of can set it apart from almost any other type of packaging for sure. Just the quality.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
It just continues that excitement, right?

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
You’re obviously excited. You know, you’re excited at checkout when you purchased it. There’s some anticipation that shows up and you open it and it’s fully charged and it’s just presented nicely. It’s right there. Yeah, it’s, we’ve got to think about these to build that positive recognition with the brand.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now, I’m always a huge advocate, and I’m always looking to see how I can learn and how businesses can learn from the mistakes of other businesses. So I wanted to see, what are some common pitfalls that you see in building an e-commerce brand identity, and how can these pitfalls be avoided? Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Absolutely. I think one of the most common ones is just waiting too long. Right. There’s that Chinese proverb, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. 

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Second best time is today.

Arlen:
Yep.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Right. When you think about the cost for bad design,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
it far exceeds the cost of just getting it right the first time. Right. Because what happens is, is you’re just missing opportunities. You’re missing opportunities to sell the product. You’re missing the opportunities for investors. You’re missing opportunities to sell the company. You know, you’re missing opportunities all along the way. And so I think there’s this mantra of, you know, move fast and break things. And, you know, that works, I think for some, for some businesses, but you have to think about what are you trying to do and what does your competition look like? Um, you know, you, you want to make sure that you are investing early. Uh, and again, when I say investing, we’re talking about a couple hundred dollars on ground spring to get a custom design. It’s not like you’re spending thousands.

Arlen:
Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And so the earlier you can do that. the better to be able to start building that brand equity. You don’t want to wait years to be able to do this. And so, you know, if your company looks like it’s 30 years old, people are going to think you’re just stuck, you know, in the past. And what we want is we want age to be on our side. We want people to say, you know, you’re a mature product, you have trust. I want to work with you because of this. We don’t want somebody looking at our age as a hindrance, saying, wow, you’re not really innovating.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
I don’t really know. If you’re going to be here, you’re not really investing in the future. So are you going to be here tomorrow? 

Arlen:
You’re right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Those are not the types of associations we want to make. So invest early in this and continue testing. We want to continue testing our brand. We don’t want to just stop with, you know, hey, we did a nice logo and a name. We did a rebrand maybe in a couple of years ago. We want to still test and we want to push that brand further. Right. And so what I mean by that is maybe our website. is newer, logo looks nice, it’s checking all the boxes from what we’re talking about. Where else can we push? Is the packaging still showing up in generic boxes?

Arlen:
Alright.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Does the packaging itself kind of a generic clamshell that anybody could purchase and put their product in? These are areas where we can push the brand further. And then of course, in things like custom illustrations, 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Can we communicate the value of our product on our website better? than just stock photography. So I think this is a big opportunity because we see a lot of just random stock photography or product photos, which are nice. But the nice thing about things like custom illustrations is we can communicate a lot of emotion. We can communicate a lot within a visual. And these are areas where you see brands push a little further. Another example, Darn Tough Socks. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Big fan of Darn Tough Socks. They’re made in Vermont. They have a lifetime warranty every time you get a hole. I send them in and they send me a new pair of socks.

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
On the page where you submit your socks, this is kind of an exciting moment. I don’t know about you, but for me, New Sock Day is like the best day of the year. My

Arlen:
Right,

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
My girls get all, they think it’s weird that I get so excited when new socks show up. And so when I go to the website to submit this form, right, there’s kind of some excitement. There’s some anticipation. You know, I’ve got all these memories that, you know. put all these holes in these socks, now I’m getting new ones. On their page for the order, they show all these socks with these old stories, you can just tell because they’re all worn out. They’ve pushed the brand further than just having, I think what the majority of us would do is just have a page on our website that says, hey, fill out this form, get your new socks.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Darn Tough is trying to push this brand a little forward to build that trust, to build that excitement, to say, look. We know it’s unusual that a company would stand behind a lifetime sock guarantee, but here’s basically the testimonials. Here’s our buckets of socks that we’re getting back at. 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
These are fun areas and ways you can push the brand further.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And it also, those types of things in that example, you know, really just gives, uh, social proof as well, where you’re showing customers, you’re showing testimonials of people that were excited about the product. They’re showing, you know, the old socks and they’re excited about getting the new ones. And so all of that really just helps people, uh, to, you know, validate their purchase decision and, you know, helps also to minimize, you know, any type of, uh, buyer’s remorse that somebody may have, because they know that you’ve got this huge gallery of others that have used the product that were excited about getting the new socks and had these different stories there. So yeah, that’s some really good stuff. Well, Jason, as we get ready to wrap things up, I wanted to see if you could possibly share some other examples of successful e-commerce businesses that have established a solid brand identity that you’ve either dealt with directly in your business or that you’re just familiar with in general.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Absolutely. We’ve talked about a couple examples already, but a couple more is we worked with this company called Asabasa Spice Company

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
and they were on the East Coast and they had this goes back to the importance of naming, right? They sell spices both in online and in stores and through retailers. Their original name was Artisan Spice Company. Okay, not very memorable. 

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Just sounds like you know something you’d find on the shelf. They actually got a cease and desist letter.

Arlen:
Oh wow

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
For infringing on the intellectual property of somebody else.

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And this was actually a blessing in disguise for them because

Arlen:
Mm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
it was a terrible name and it forced

Arlen:
It’s weird.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
them to reconcile this and create something more unique. And so one of our creatives on CrowdSpring named the company Asabasa. 

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
On crowdSpring, you get dozens of different custom names or designs to pick from, and you get to unlimited iterations, and you can give some creative feedback. You can say, hey, here’s the direction we wanna go. You see the designs or the names come in. And then from that process, you give feedback and say, oh, I like this direction, or let’s stay away from this direction.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
And so one of the names that were submitted was Asabasa. And, you know, the, the creative said, you know, it’s kind of a unique story. You can spell it, you know, front to back either way.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
You can’t help but smile,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
you know, with, with the, with the way the word, the letters are coming out of your mouth. And so they renamed the company and redid the branding. And so I think that’s a, that’s an exciting opportunity where, you know, we look at our companies and a lot of times we’re not forced to rebrand. A lot of times we don’t get that cease and desist letter where it forces us to confront our brand identity and our full brand. I think that was an important one. We work with thousands of e-commerce stores. When you think about, I’m trying to think of a couple other examples, we worked with the world’s best tweezers.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
So this was one where they already had the product. They already had a good name. They didn’t want to change the name. It was, it was already working for them, but their packaging was terrible. So world’s best tweezers sells a tweezer for $20. Okay. Most tweezers are like $2, right? That

Arlen:
Okay. Right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
they sell $20 tweezer and it works. It’s great. If you’ve ever had a $20 tweezer, it makes everything else look like junk. And so it works well, but it was packaged in $2 packaging. It looked like dollar store. 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Packaging selling a $20 product. And so this was a disconnect for their brand. You can’t use the term world’s best tweezers, have a great product, but then package it in something that doesn’t support the product. So we designed packaging specifically for them. It was designed to show a premium product, but also highlight the product within the packaging. This is packaging kind of where you’re putting the product first, you’re putting it on the pedestal and saying, look, we’ve got a great product. We’re not afraid to show it off, right? People who have cheap products that don’t work want to hide them. We want to show ours off. So we designed the packaging for World’s Best Tweezers and they had a lot of success with that. So thousands of stories like these, you can go to crowdspring.com. We’ve got case studies, testimonials. You can see a lot of our work that’s not intellectual property protected, or privacy protected. We have a lot of, you can imagine, e-commerce store owners are… trying to get to the next big thing. And so if they’re trying to name the company or create that first product, we value privacy very highly. We were founded by an intellectual property attorney. And so we want your privacy is first. So for those that have not selected the privacy, you can see those designs publicly,

Arlen:
Okay.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
but great place to be able to see, get some ideas.

Arlen:
Okay. Great. Great. Well, yeah. Thank you for sharing those examples. Those are some great ones. Um, you know, that kind of help us kind of paint a picture of, uh, as a business, as an e-commerce business owner of kind of what you can do and just the lessons that they’ve learned from that. Um, you know, the rebranding and a lot of times, like you said, brand owners, you, you’re, you’re You may have come up with the brand identity, the logo, the slogans, and it’s sometimes it’s hard to part from something that you kind of birth. But yeah, you got to look at, um, you know, what’s going to be best for the, for the company and don’t necessarily get so attached to, to an identity. If it’s not working, you know, you gotta, you gotta really revisit, always revisit things and keep, keep things fresh for sure. Well Jason, it’s been awesome talking to you. Definitely learned a lot here, and I know our listeners and viewers have as well. So this was a great conversation. But before we do let you go, I always like to switch gears so our listeners and viewers can get to know you just a little bit better. So if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Oh, sure. Well, you and I were talking before we hit record. I live in Cody, Wyoming, outside of Yellowstone. I’m surrounded by eight million square miles of nothing. And that’s how I like it to be able to spend spend time after work with with my girls to just spend time in nature. And yeah, I did an Iron Man sponsored by Sam Adams. So Iron Man is a pretty long day of working out. 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Starts with it. Two and a half mile swim, 112 mile bike, and then a marathon at the end to cap it off. 

Arlen:
Wow. Wow.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
So that was fun. And being sponsored by Sam Adams was fun because everybody’s sponsored by like boring bike parts or shoe companies and

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
people were excited when the beer guy was running by.

Arlen:
Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, that’s some good stuff, man. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, it’s hard for me to kind of wrap my head around 8 million square miles away. What was that? 

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Yeah,

Arlen:
I’m sorry, 8 million square miles.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
eight million square miles, just mountains and woods.

Arlen:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that’s

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
It’s a lot.

Arlen:
a lot of wide open space. I mean, I just can’t imagine the, you know, kind of just being out there, the different wildlife that you possibly will see and just the… the calm and peace and the serenity that you would have being so apart from a major city. And I can imagine, you know, on a clear night stargazing would be pretty awesome there with, you know,

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Oh,

Arlen:
no

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
it’s

Arlen:
big

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
beautiful. You can

Arlen:
yeah.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
see the Milky Way. Yep.

Arlen:
Yeah, that’s awesome, man. That’s good stuff. Yes, definitely on my bucket list. It’s one of the places I’ll definitely have to visit at some point and, you know, see if I can experience all of that firsthand for sure. Well, Jason, well, thank you for sharing that. We definitely appreciate that. Um, and lastly, before we let you go, um, you know, if you don’t mind sharing one of the best, any of the ways for our listeners and viewers to, to reach you directly, if they’d like to pick your brain anymore about brand identity.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Sure, Jason at CrowdSpring.com.

Arlen:
Okay, great, great. Well, I just encourage people to shoot you an email if they wanna pick your brain or if they’re interested in what you guys at CrowdSpring have to offer, definitely encourage them to check you out. Definitely sounds like you guys know what you’re doing and have based what you guys do on solid research, solid education, which is always good to hear. 

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
perfect.

Arlen:
right.

Jason @ crowdspring.com:
Well thanks, Aaron. It’s been a pleasure talking.

Arlen:
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us today, Jason on the eCommerce marketing podcast.

Podcast Guest Info

Jason Byer
Head of marketing and partnerships at Crowdspring.com