George Jagodzinski (00:00):

Today we discuss psychographics, first demographics, growing a brand agency with zero creatives, which is nuts. And how to set yourself up for scale by being less of a pirate. I'm joined by Tyler Borders, chief brand officer at Carnegie Higher Education, a leader and innovator in higher ed marketing and strategy. Founder of Dartlet, a successful brand strategy firm, Tyler's gone from a team of one to a team of 500. It's a fantastic story. He's got a lovely wife and three daughters in Tennessee and this might make no sense to you now, but once you listen, you understand Tyler is a blue and yellow. Please welcome Tyler.

(00:38):

Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no-BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. Tyler, thanks so much for joining me.

Tyler Borders (01:15):

George, good to see you, man. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

George Jagodzinski (01:18):

Yeah. Absolutely. Last time we spoke, something that got me really excited is frameworks. I'm a consultant. I love frameworks and I also love the entrepreneurial journey. And so I figured today we could talk about some of the insights and the frameworks and things that you've built out over your entrepreneurial journey. Lay it on me a little bit about some of the frameworks that you've come up with.

Tyler Borders (01:38):

So I have been a brand strategist, if you will, by birth, I'm an artist. I was a painter early on actually. I was drawing and designing logos on Microsoft Paint as a seven and eight-year-old. Remember paint where you click square by square. I've got OCD, pretty good case of that so I would sit at my dad's computer, the one computer we had in the house, and I would make entire images by clicking on pixels and changing the color and make an image and there would be hours of that. So I'm weird, right? I'm this weird ambidextrous brain of the creative, but also this passion for research.

(02:16):

I always had this passion for corporate branding. That sounds strange, but really young. I was designing shoes for Nike and I was delusional enough to think that they would want my basketball shoes. So I would sketch very detailed, all different images and angles of a shoe just with pencil and graph paper and I would send those in thinking Nike would love it and they'd always send back some like, "Hey, thank you. Go to art school and we'll hear from you in 20 years."

George Jagodzinski (02:45):

They didn't pick them up?

Tyler Borders (02:46):

No man, they never picked up my shoes. But I love this idea of influencing perception and taking an organization or an entity and helping it to understand itself. I didn't have any language for that at the time, but I just always loved that and I thought, would I be a painter? What would I do with these passions that I have? I never loved art for art's sake. I played baseball and basketball. I'd be on the boss and my friends would want me to do their portraits while we drove to an away game and I would sketch their point of view, this realistic portrait. And they were amazed by that and I didn't care. It was easy. I don't know how else, it's just in me. So later in life I went to Pepperdine University and it was going to be a doctor, which would've been a horrible mistake. I was a bio major and it was during the ER days of George Clooney. This was the early '90s.

George Jagodzinski (03:44):

Oh, yeah. Dr. Dreamy. Go to do it.

Tyler Borders (03:47):

Dr. Dreamy. I was like, "I want to do that." My mom intercepted and she was like, "Tyler, you're a creative." So I went into advertising and it was a perfect fit. And so most of my career, all of my career has been in the agency space branding, creative research strategy, and in that have developed some diagnostic tools and brand strategy methods and things that have been really informative to higher education and the industry at large. I'm happy to talk about any and all of that.

George Jagodzinski (04:21):

Yeah. So from pushing pixels to where you are now, how was your dad when he just saw you off in the corner of the room just pixel by pixel was like, "Hey, is Tyler okay?"

Tyler Borders (04:31):

I took up a lot of computer time. Back in those days that was the dial-up days. You had all the noises and you had to wait for it to get on the one phone line at the house.

George Jagodzinski (04:41):

Mom, get off the phone.

Tyler Borders (04:41):

I can hear that. Yeah. They're always supportive. He'll tell me to this day, he'll say, "Tyler, you're too creative for that." I'm helping to lead a business now of almost 500 at Carnegie Company that I've been a partner and helped to build over the last say eight years, quite a journey of M&A and bringing in other companies and agencies to support what we're doing. But yeah, man, from sketching shoes to helping to run this business has been pretty gratifying.

George Jagodzinski (05:10):

I love it. I think you were mentioning a psychographic framework. I think some people are asking, what the heck is that?

Tyler Borders (05:18):

What is that man? I would've asked what that was 15 years ago too. I didn't know I was developing that. Opposed to demographics, which is the easy stuff you can buy aggregate lists for. Demographics like do you live in the city or rural or what kind of a vehicle does the household drive or what is the household income? Those kinds of macro stats that are easy to get at. And what I found is really hard to get at in the world of communication at large is psychographic data. That you can't just buy lists for. And that is what motivates a person. What is their personality like? What do they want? What do they desire? Again, you can't buy that data.

(05:58):

So psychographics, I began applying that to branding and later I turned that toward actual students and student groups. And I'm in higher education as I mentioned so we're helping schools to find and recruit the right students to matriculate. And so if I can help a university understand student populations that have converted and are at Clemson or Alabama or wherever they might be, then I can help them understand those student populations in a totally new way. Anybody can buy a list and say, "Johnny lives in Kansas," and maybe there's a draw market in Kansas, but is Johnny A. Good fit? We can know that they eat Chipotle a lot or whatever the credit cards show that they're buying behavior is. But if I can tell a university, "Hey, Johnny is driven by these sorts of personality characteristics." I'm making this up, but he's achievement driven, he's confident, he wants to win, he wants to grow those kinds of ideas. He's motivated by these psychographic ideas. Well then that changes how you can communicate. What advertising we might send, what email campaign we might send when we know that Johnny's in that particular segment. So that's psychographics.

(07:10):

I always think the easiest way to think of it is counter to demographics. Demographics are easy and relatively cheap. Psychographics, I have to go do some research, mixed method research that's qualitative typically. So we're on campuses talking to people. And then you can take some quantitative survey tools and yield more confidence. Validate and verify some ideas. So I would know for example, if you were on a campus, I would know through workshops and through your home address and through all of this mixed methods psychographic work that George fits in this type of a psychographic group and that George is driven by ... I'm making it up. Innovation, ingenuity, developing something new. In my world, I've color coded it. So if you work with Carnegie, what I did, my claim to fame was develop this model with a big team of us over a number of years and really we're still refining it to this day. But I color coded it. So when I say, so there's nine colors, nine archetypes in my psychographic curriculum, blue means something. Blue stands for power, confidence, achievement, growth. Yellow, which I just said assigned to you, I made it up, innovation, ingenuity, intellectual, intelligent. Google, Tesla, that kind of thing. So I'm taking you through 15 years of work, but when we say psychographics, it's been that kind of a application for me.

George Jagodzinski (08:36):

Evolving Industries brought to you by Intevity. We bring order to chaos, whoever people, process and technology converge. Our culture drives our solutions and we are solution obsessed. We see every challenge as an opportunity, every partner as a collaborator and every project as a chance to share our values and commitment to excellence. Gives us a shout. We'd love to hear your challenges and turn them into opportunities. Find out more at intevity.com. Now back to the show.

(09:04):

That's great. Adding some objectiveness and quantitative to what otherwise was just based off of feel before. And for those just listening, not watching, I got blue and yellow on my gold, so I'm powerful and innovative.

Tyler Borders (09:16):

Innovative, how that must've been a cue that I even pulled those out or maybe it's just the feel you're giving off.

George Jagodzinski (09:21):

I feel like you're just building me up here.

Tyler Borders (09:23):

I know man.

George Jagodzinski (09:23):

Making me feel king of the castle.

Tyler Borders (09:25):

That was psychosomatic. I didn't even notice that. But yeah man, I was in agency working Malibu. I went to Pepperdine, was working at ad agency in Malibu and what bothered me is I was doing all this work and we didn't really know why. We'd be doing this campaign work for big brands and I was like, "I'm just trying to make you laugh or I'm just going to pull the sheet off of this work and make you cry." But is it right, is the communication and brand work that we're building here and the way that we're messaging this and the way that a video might look, is it actually right for the brand? And I didn't know how to answer that because it's not how we were taught. You just do the work and you try to sell it and make it creative.

(10:02):

Typically it's make it funny, like I said, or make it sad. Pull on the heart strings and you watch Doritos commercials or Red Cross commercials, it's usually those. But I'm like, "Hey, what about what's right for the actual brand? How could I know that?" And that left side of my brain was like, "Hey, let's," to your point, "apply some objectivity and data to this." And that's been a career journey to go, could I actually know who a brand is? And I say that very intentionally. Take a brand and treat it like a human being. Could I know who it is and therefore make better decisions by that brand? So that's the game.

George Jagodzinski (10:38):

It's so timely with how much buzz and push there is around AI and automation right now. I always view that as more of a data readiness problem more so than an automation problem because if your existing sales process and your sales team is just using a lot of stories and a lot of qualitative and zero quantitative or very, very useless quantitative, how the heck are you going to automate it unless you can plug into their brains and maybe that's coming soon.

Tyler Borders (11:08):

Seems like it, doesn't it?

George Jagodzinski (11:10):

I think having the right data frameworks and the right tools to be able to put this stuff into real numbers is really interesting when it comes to that.

Tyler Borders (11:21):

To that point, most branding in my experience has been creative first. I wanted to flip this thing on its head and say, no, it's research first. And a lot of it. In fact, when I launched my company ... So I started a company, it was just me, my big leap of faith and then it became one other partner and then a lot of growth since, we didn't even have creative in the company. So it was a research and strategy branding company called Dartlet, and when I formed it back in 2013, we didn't have creative. As I said, I'm a painter artist, I'm a creative, and I was like, "You know what? That's not what interests me." What I really wanted to get at was how can we define an organization, a company, and help it know who it is and let its own stakeholders tell me that information and it's really all research.

(12:10):

Think workshops. And I've got candy and music and we make it really fun and there's exercises and stickers and we crafted this whole model. But it's research first and it's months of it. Probably three months of it. Before the creative even comes I always say so many brands are making creative. Do they ever ask the question, is it right? How can they know if the creative is right? Not just do they like it? I don't even let my team use the question or my clients, I like that. Hey, it's like, look, I appreciate your opinion that you like it, but we'd all pick different colors of couches and we all put up different artwork in our homes. So I can't go into an organization of thousands of people and ask them what they like and come up with an outcome that I hope everybody likes because you're going to get vanilla. It'll be so benign that it applies to everybody. I go in and I say, "Yeah, but there's a DNA to this organization. Who are you? Let's align to that and put our preferences aside."

George Jagodzinski (13:08):

Yeah. Or the old way I think was just relying on the ego and the hubris of the creative that you have in there. And maybe sprinkle in some focus groups and then he or she tells you why those focus groups are wrong and then you move forward with something anyways. Did you come across that? You have any stories there?

Tyler Borders (13:26):

You've been in this world, right? It's like I can tell. Yeah, so much of it is just a dash of ... I'm not going to name competitors, I won't do that. But why we were successful is because we came into an industry and we did it very differently. It was hard at first. I'll tell you, we would lose RFPs and proposals because they would say, "We've never seen this before and this is really cool but it's scary because this is not typical." Typical is there's this brand creative jargon. We're going to help you find your ethos, we're going to help you find your brand promise, and that's all fine. Everybody has a method and we're going to, like you said, dash it with some workshops. I'd look at competitive proposals, it'd be like we're going to do five interviews.

George Jagodzinski (14:10):

Geez.

Tyler Borders (14:11):

They're going to probably call the most important powerful people in the organization to pretend that the job is done. We're talking to hundreds, often thousands of people. Thousands truly through mixed method research. And then by the time we're presenting our findings, we will have auditoriums full of stakeholders because they were a part of the process. So it's like lend your voice to it. Most agencies don't want to open up, that's messy. When we started the company, my business partner Scott, and I said, you know what? There's going to be about consensus and the people that know the brand the best should tell us who this brand is, not just the five 10 most important people on the org chart.

George Jagodzinski (14:47):

I want to draw some parallels between that and some of the challenges that we face. So we work a lot in software where we're automating customer success teams, sales teams, what they're doing. And some of the pushback you would get is, Hey, nothing's going to replace me going out on the golf course and shaking that person's hand and really hearing what's going on in their life. The frameworks and everything will never totally replace that. But I think that you could start to get more scale and more insight out of more structure. Did you get pushback like that? What are your points of view on that?

Tyler Borders (15:19):

Man, I've learned a lot. I'm still learning in that regard. As our company grows, I like you, am like, it's all just people and relationships. And I never thought of myself as a seller, but I found myself selling because I love to talk about this stuff. And the world in my view, the world just runs on relationships and trust and without trust, nothing works internally or externally. But I've also found my lack in that was I didn't didn't supply enough systems and data and structure around that like an account-based marketing, an ABM system, a CRM. My brain doesn't typically operate that way. I go just do the right thing, be kind to people, deliver good work, do what you say, and it typically will work out. But to your point, I have learned a lot and built a lot more structure into our business from budgeting and financial management all the way through client management. I've been blessed to have really good people around me that are really good at that because I'm pretty weak there.

George Jagodzinski (16:18):

I bet you're much stronger than you say. I always like for fun to bring these into the home. Have you leveraged any of these frameworks with your spouse?

Tyler Borders (16:32):

My wife and my three daughters. I've got an 18-year-old going now to Pepperdine, by the way. My alma mater.

George Jagodzinski (16:39):

Nice.

Tyler Borders (16:39):

We take her in a month. And then I've got a 16-year-old, so two drivers. And then my third daughter is 13 and they know my archetype model better than they ever wanted to. I take the nine archetypes and we have a curriculum, but I applied it to people. I said I talked about student segmentation. But we also deliver this as a diagnostic test like MBTI, like Enneagram. And you can take it. And in fact, I'll send you the link, George and so we can find out what you are. It's a 15-minute diagnostic test and you would know your three archetypes and succession on a 20 point scale. So I am a blue-yellow, which is probably why I use those two and it's your microphone. So that is me. And then my third waivers between pink and silver. So pink is the sophisticate. So the pink is all about elegance, excellence, aesthetic, and then the silver is disruption. So the rebel breaking the rules. So that usually fights for a third place when I take the test. So to your question, my whole family knows their colors and they are probably sick of me talking about it.

George Jagodzinski (17:52):

Well, in there you did mention MBTI, Enneagram and you weave ... My name is George, as a curious monkey, I've probably experimented with more of these frameworks than others. Does it feel like it sometimes gets flooded with too many frameworks out there? How do you differentiate? How do you manage that?

Tyler Borders (18:13):

Man, that's a great point and everybody has an opinion on a framework, and I've taken them all. But I think at the core for me is understanding the self at some level. Any of that insight is psychographic insight. I always say from stages, it doesn't have to be my diagnostic program, but if I know something about you that is psychographic, personality, motivation, desire outside of demographics, it's valuable. So I think it depends on what's applied. So if you're going to work at Carnegie, you will take our diagnostic test. Even during the interview process, we'll typically want to know that. For example, we'll know ... And I won't say the archetypes. But we know on the sales team what archetypes usually perform the best. So when I'm hiring for somebody, I'll know if I see these two archetypes, they typically will succeed as a seller. And if I see two or three others, they might be a great analyst or a researcher. Because we've developed it such that it's predictive. We can know romantic interests. We can know probable majors that an archetype will select.

(19:17):

So for me, there's a lot of ... Enneagram is hot right now and I find a lot of value in that. I love its simplicity. I'm a three, I get what that is. But I think we get flooded by data to where it's paralysis by analysis, it's like what do I do with that? So our color model is really simple. When I say purple and my company, the whole company and my clients, they know what I'm talking about just like that. In Enneagram, if you say five or seven. So I think for me it's like find what's poignant, keep it simple, and usually you can extract some value from it.

George Jagodzinski (19:49):

Yeah. And I love the way that a common understanding and common language just accelerates that understanding and conversation. As you've really grown in the higher ed space, what have you found to be unique about that space? And then also seems to be changing a little bit lately. I don't know if ... Is it ever-

Tyler Borders (20:07):

I hadn't noticed. Yeah. It's changing a lot. A lot of it is this shared governance model where it's not a corporate model and there's a real beauty in that. I was used to prior my work had all been with tech or healthcare, hospitals, nonprofits where you get in with the C suite and that's typically where you can stay. You never have to leave it. That's easier for a consultant. Like, hey, I've got the three to five power players, as it were, and skate through. Higher every day that doesn't work. There's this shared governance model where yes, there's a president, chancellor, but there's also tenured faculty, there's also a provost, there's a cabinet, faculty and staff. Their voice needs to be heard for anything to work. And so that collegial environment, there's a real beauty in that organism, that ecosystem on a campus. Which I think is why our model worked because we came in and like I said, we opened our arms and we said, "We really authentically want to hear from you." So that's a big difference with higher ed for sure.

George Jagodzinski (21:08):

Yeah. You got to be forced to really have good value that can be communicated clearly. It's not just a account plan with four different blocks on it that are yellow, red, green, and you're taking them out to dinner. It's got to be true value communicated in a simple way, I'd assume.

Tyler Borders (21:26):

Yeah. It's amazing, man. I'll go into projects where there'll be a university that says, "Man, we love your model, but it's a mess. Culturally in here, you're never going to be able to get consensus." This and that has happened or whatever it might be. But when you have a consistent simple model, diagnostic model, we have never not had a project where the client's wide-eyed going, I don't know how you did that. Because then you get 80 people in a room or 50 or whatever it might be, and you ask them to think a certain way. And we have them hold these cards up and say, "What was your selection for our current day? Who are you today? Who are you tomorrow? Who do you never want to be?" These are some of the questions we ask. And the whole room will typically hold up the same color card and gasp that they're reaching consensus. So I think it's never as much discord as some cultures might believe going ... If you have the right tools.

George Jagodzinski (22:18):

And now do you find yourself getting less pushback about a different way of doing this? Before people were probably, what the heck, Tyler? Why is there not a team of expensive creatives on here? That's what we're paying for. You think you're over the hump on that a little bit now?

Tyler Borders (22:35):

Man, that's a really good question. I say to my team ... In fact, we're going to Chicago for an offsite with my leaders, and at the moment I'm in right now is to say, "Hey, we can't rest on our laurels." We brought a really disruptive, potent way to do this, but that was 10 years ago and we can't be iPhone one or two or three. There needs to be an annual, the Harvard S curve of innovating to curve up and curve up. We still go to RFPs, request for proposals and pitch and they'll say, "Man, this is really different." We'll still get that. But also we're a household name now and I'm always thinking about who's in a garage developing the next thing that not thinking about. So yeah, it's an interesting time now because 10 to 15 years into this in total and started out as the major disruptor. And now like I said, we're pretty well known. So it's like how do I keep my edge sharp and ensure that my team is always pressing and innovating and figuring out new ways to do something better in my world?

George Jagodzinski (23:36):

I love the top of anti complacency here. We've talked about it on quite a few episodes, I think. Had some entirely to them. You got any tips or tricks on how you're making sure that not only yourself is not complacent, but the team as a whole? The culture?

Tyler Borders (23:51):

Building my company, the journey I've experienced is when we were two people or 10 people, you're agile and there's this environment of change and disruption and innovation. And I always think of it like a pirate ship. I would always use that metaphor. I think I had a poster of that that I gave to the team and we were this pirate ship. It's exhausting because nothing's locked in. We have these ideas and we're disruptors and innovators and nothing is locked in and we're changing every day and we do a presentation and let's make that better. And we're so agile and so nimble. It's tiring. And I remember when we merged into Carnegie, I had this realization like I have to make this repeatable for quality control. As you're growing, there's got to be some spectrum of like, hey, I just can't keep kicking down every wall and changing something every week. We literally would. "Hey, adjust that handout." And I had this moment of we need some repeatability. We had to start thinking about margins. Some of the basics.

(24:53):

And so I'm just at a point now with a lot of the growth that we've enjoyed and size that we've enjoyed work, not a pirate ship. We're a battleship. And so for me it's like, hey, I'm not asking us to go back onto the pirate ship, but we have got to continue with a lot of that spirit. But at scale it's hard because you're doing so much work and it's become so repeatable that I think it's easy to move the other way on the pendulum. So that's been my journey.

George Jagodzinski (25:18):

People are going to be annoyed by this because I talked about this on the last episode that I recorded, but I haven't looked it up again to remember it. But I spent quite a lot of time in Iceland and worked with some Icelandic companies. And similar to pirates, they have that Viking DNA in them. And they actually have a word that basically says ... It means that process is useless and we'll just figure it out because everything's always changing. I need to look up the word, I have to memorize that word, but it's a similar thing. It's like you will at some point have to start ... You got to find a balance, I would think. You can't be-

Tyler Borders (25:53):

I distinctly remember that moment. Because I am more apt to that motto. Just change everything.

George Jagodzinski (26:00):

Sure. That's the entrepreneur. Change everything overnight and no one will hate us.

Tyler Borders (26:07):

Totally. I had to grow and develop and realize that there had to be more of an operational mindset. And for me it's the adage of just get better people than you around you that are better at a lot of things that you're weak at. And I was lucky to surround myself with really amazing people. I didn't know where I was going 20 years ago. I just kept trotting along each day. But I found some of the right people that have taken this to places that I never imagined. Like a PhD that I brought in that has proven this out and made it credible, made it predictive, taking it to new heights. And so forever grateful for the team. It's a team that makes everything go.

George Jagodzinski (26:48):

It's a fantastic story, man. And I also love the fact that we connected the dots between psycho graphics and pirates here in our conversation.

Tyler Borders (26:57):

Those are two words I truly love, man. In fact, this last thing. I've got a sextant right up here. I should go get it. I married, I officiated the wedding of the PhD I just mentioned. I didn't say his name. His name is Jared. I married Jared and his wife in what? Four or five years ago in Portland. And he gave me that sextant as a gift, as the efficient. And it said something like, never lose the pirate ship mentality now that you're a Commodore of the Royal Navy or something like that. So I really talked about this ship thing all of my career. It's all people, it's just what makes all of this meaningful and matter is just being in people's lives and doing great work. It's been beautiful in that regard.

George Jagodzinski (27:44):

A hundred percent. And frameworks like psychographic frameworks like that, the way I interpret them is it's a mechanism for you to ask questions beyond the boring normal questions that you're asking them. Yes. My neighbor has two kids and lives over there, but what's really going on with them? And that's what excites me about those types of frameworks.

Tyler Borders (28:07):

You said that better than I ever could. You did that in one sentence. [inaudible 00:28:09]. Well done.

George Jagodzinski (28:12):

Well, Tyler, I really appreciate this. I always like to finish with one fun question, although I wonder if you already answered it with that last one, which is, throughout your life and career, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Tyler Borders (28:25):

One, I think about I had a CEO tell me, you're never going to get a hundred percent certainty. Get 80% of the way there and go. If you can get 80 move. That paralysis thing that we deal with. And then the other one I think about all the time is just trust. I know that might sound cliche, but I think trust makes everything go. If I look back over my career, there's so much I didn't know and still don't know, but if you build a culture on trust and your team knows you've got them on a personal level, that is the bedrock for everything. When you don't have that internally and externally, watch out. So building trust and empowering people, helping people to flourish and soar has been my mindset throughout my career.

George Jagodzinski (29:15):

I love both of those. And maybe what I need to do to become less of a pirate is go from where I'm at, which is 51% and go up to the 80%.

Tyler Borders (29:24):

I love it, man. You're 51 and you go.

George Jagodzinski (29:27):

Yeah.

Tyler Borders (29:27):

I love it. Maybe that's the better ... Maybe not. Maybe I'm waiting too long.

George Jagodzinski (29:34):

No. I think that's how you scale. I think that's how you become less of a pirate. Tyler, I love everything.

Tyler Borders (29:37):

Thanks for having me, man. This is great.

George Jagodzinski (29:40):

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Tyler Borders (29:41):

Pleasure. Yeah, bro.

George Jagodzinski (29:43):

Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications. If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com, or reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.