Every branding dollar is wasted without this

Thank you. Looking forward to the conversation.

So the short answer is while at the University of West Florida teaching broadcast journalism, I was also part of an international documentary unit. And so on one of our trips at that time to Panama, during the Noriega era that shows you how old I am, you know, we got kind of detained by the Panamadian Defense Force. And so there I was, a mom, a mother, a wife sitting in the back of a Panamadian Defense Force police car with big guns and going ooh I don't know now at this moment as I look back on it obviously it it probably wasn't as frightening or as dramatic as I felt at the time however it did it was like one of those moments in life where you knew maybe a different path right a different path But what do you do? Right? I'm a teacher. I'm a storyteller. What do I do? And so literally on the plane ride back from Panama, I started to think, what could I do? And I thought, okay. Probably I'm very entrepreneurial by nature. I'll start a business and I'll take my skills as a storyteller and I'll start an advertising agency. No background, no knowledge, no nothing. yeah, it took me a year or two to make that shift, but I did and literally took the last paycheck, which was not a lot from the University of West Florida and rented a space from a friend and started what was then called Image Development Marketing Group and all my branding brilliance. and so that was the beginning. it was really a desire. To tell the stories of things that were important. And I entered the branding side of this versus the advertising side of this because the work we did in documentary was about change, using stories to inform and inspire, motivate. These were PBS style documentaries. And I thought that's what we need. I want to do stories that tell and engage the emotions. of people in doing around organizations and not international affairs. So that's how I ended up at what is now ID group.

I I love go ahead.

Yeah, I just want to build on that because you know a lot of young people do ask me, how did you get there? Yeah, you know, how did you get where you are? And the way I explain it to them is I said, I wish, because I teach do a lot of work with strategy now. So I do say I wish I had a very clear strategy. but in fact, what I define it as is just imagine a jungle and imagine vine swinging, and just out of pure instinct, and maybe it was. embedded in me, maybe it was about my real purpose, but for whatever reason, just taking one jump, the next jump, the next jump. Now being completely honest, hoping that I didn't fall into the alligator pit below me. Unfortunately I didn't, you know, but I it was truly instinct, passion, a desire to do something that was meaningful. And frankly, from the owner of an organization, I just want to be in charge. I didn't want somebody to tell me what to do. So I didn't understand that a lot of responsibility came with that. But yeah, so that's how it happened and I I've learned a lot on that swinging vine approach. But it's been a good journey.

And you know Go ahead. Now please.

Yeah, let me tie this back to what we were just talking about. I you know, it would be nice if we had a path forward and everything was clear and every step was guaranteed. Right. You said it. It's just, you know, rainbows and fairy tales just are not the way it is in business. But here's what I want to say, and this is why I believe the systems approach that we take, this branding from the core that we call it is so important. You will always have to adapt as a business leader. But what you have to hold on to is your purpose and your values and what you really believe in. Because the job of a leader, I believe, is this idea that you are there to be the North Star, to guide. But what are you guiding around? And so this idea that Branding from the Core was born around is that we need to understand as an organization who we are, what we do. why the world should care. That has to be a collective. We have to be able to bring individual people. Every person is important. Every person in your organization is important. And we can never lose that. But the person must be a part of the whole, right? Must be a part of the whole. So I'm going to bring my skills, my talents, my passion to the table. And then we're going to organize organize around a shared sense of mission, a shared vision of the future. And so branding from the core was originally created in order to create what I saw as a gap as I did my work early in my life. there was a gap between what stories were being told. Remember, that's where I started. Let's go tell cool stories and let's well, we did, and we were very good at it. But what we saw was this gap between the stories being told and what was really happening in the organization. And the people inside the organization, we didn't even bother to engage in creating these stories. So we were leaving the most important people in the organization out of the story. And so when I talk about whole systems, if you want me to talk about that, is that where you want me to go? the system creates there's three pieces. What is the vision of the leader? What is the culture of the organization? the people in the organization. Are they aligned? Then the brand. Now let me say this about brand because that word is so misused. So brand is about creating meaning. Meaning that lives in the minds of people. So when they hear your name, they have a feeling, they have a a a sense of something, right? Like when I say Nike, you know, when I say Starbucks, what do you

Think. Well, there is an intentional effort to build that meaning, and that's branding. Now, at ID Group, branding from the core is an intentional attempt, attentional not attempt, an intentional design to build meaning that aligns with the core purpose, values, mission, unique value proposition. We call them the storylines of the organization. And so it's so logical, right? It's so logical. But we saw as we did our work early on this disconnection and eventually over time created this process and this view of organizations as systems. Everything is connected, everything communicates is our mantra. and so that's what this is all about. And the more aligned your system is, the distance between what you're saying you are and what people experience, you create trust. And we know right now trust is a very scarce commodity out there in the world. And so that's why we believe this process is more important than ever, that you create integrity between your intentions, your actions, and what's being said. And that builds the trust. Over time, trust builds advocacy, advocacy builds customers, customers builds growth. So nothing to it, right?

Ha ha.

Yeah, I I definitely have an opinion on this. And it's an opinion born of experience and a lot of research. You know, I'm a my doctorate's in organization development and change. Let me tell you a quick story and let me tell you how this connects. So when I was doing my doctoral work, I did my my my research at a company named Interface. It's called Interface Carpets. they're a global carpet manufacturer. And the reason I was drawn to this company, to study this company, is I was really interested in, and this was 2004, so I was very, very interested in the world of sustainability, corporate responsibility. And then I was looking at how do you take a company maybe not born but with that, right? So you look at the Ben and Jewries of the world or Anita Roderick of Body Shop. And so these people were kind of born, their whole business was born on this sense of responsibility and purpose. But I thought, how do you take a company that wasn't, did not start out that way? And how do you, how do you adjust it? Can you adjust it? And what will happen if you do? And so Ray Anderson, the CEO founder of Interface, Atlanta, Georgia, has since passed away. But I had the unique opportunity to spend one year doing deep research and then another six years working side by side with your sustainability people, looking at How do you build an organization that was a take mace waste, dirty carpet manufacturer? How do you change that? Well, Ray Anderson's vision was to create a zero impact. In other words, he wanted to build a manufacturing company that had no negative impact. It was called Mission Zero. And so what I saw was certainly, I will tell you the end of the story was they did it. several years after Ray had died, they continued this process. But here's what was really important and I think important today is we look at really what I said, I think when we were off camera, this whole crisis of what I'm call what many people call the kind of the post-pandemic hangover, you know, lack of mission, map purpose. Do I matter? You know, why am I here? Do I trust anyone? Do I have any community? All of those things are going on. Well, what I saw, and why I believe Interface is so still important today, and frankly, what we do and what we try to do is what I saw at Interface was a group of people who were coming around to get around an impossible mission. This is a carpet manufacturer trying to have zero net impact. Impossible. Impossible. Yet Ray Anderson showed them how what they were doing could impact. not only industry but their children and their grandchildren. So when we come together around purpose, something that really matters, we have a big mission, not a little mission, big mission, and we bring everybody together and give them a voice in all of this, then I believe we are creating better companies, better businesses, better impact. So when you ask me my philosophical frame, I believe at this point in history, in society, globally, there is no more important time than now for leaders to step back, ask themselves the question: what do I want? What impact do I want my business to have? How do I build a container of an organization where the complete potential of individuals as well as collectives. How do we build that? And if we can build it, here's what I can tell you. If you can build it, which you can, then you build purpose that leads to performance. I perform because it means something to me. Right? And when people perform well around good leadership and this is where strategy it all comes in. But that's what creates profit. Profit comes from and begins with the core purpose, values, mission of people working together collectively to make an impact. And right now we need that more than ever. And as people are really suffering, suffering from a sense of, you know, do I matter? Suffering from anxiety, depression, organizations, right, and leaders have an amazing opportunity. to be a antidote, antidote to the pandemic COVID-19 hangover. So that's my philosophical frame and branding from the core, what I write about, what I speak about, what we do here at ID Group. And I'll share, you know, our next chapter if you want me to a little bit later. But you know, how do we as an organization Knowing what we know, how do we leverage our impact? How do we make a difference? And so that's why we're here and that's why I believe organizations right now have the opportunity more than ever to be an agent of positive impact for people, for communities, and ultimately for the world.

Thank you. Well you're gonna make that happen. Together, together we're gonna make this happen.

I'm crazy. no. if if I may, yeah, there's two things if I can touch on very quickly for you. One is the book, and good Lord will, and I'll finish it. and then but I would like to share just one little piece with you of what we are doing. I said to you, our challenge right now, we have worked very hard and made, I think, a good impact on the people we've touched and the people who've come through here as employees and clients we worked with, but it's not enough. So our question, as we talked about, remember those vines, we saw the vine, and the vine is how can we leverage our impact? And so what we did is for the last couple of years, we have taken all of our intellectual property, our processes, our methodology, et cetera, and working with our tech guru here, he has translated that into what we call METIS ID intelligence platform. So I'll be clear, it is, it is it is AI light, meaning that it is a combination of our intelligence in our platform. It is not going out there into the world, right? It's our platform built on our IP. But the most important piece of this is we are combining what we believe are the frankly the strengths of appreciation appreciation of AI and the human side of this. We don't believe one without the other is a maximization of potential. So we are working on Metis ID. It is taking branding from the core, putting that into this intelligence platform, combining it with the human consultant and creating something that is much more accessible to more people. So at the end of the day, what we could do, just us, now we want to leverage. through this Metis ID platform. So that'll be coming out in the next year, not excuse not year, next month or two. And you'll I'll send you something. You'll be one of the first to know when it's ready, ready to go. So it's in testing right now. so that's exciting. So I guess the the reason for branding s beyond SISL was my attempt. It was okay, you know, you write a book and you go, well no, no, no. You know, but I did it. And could it have been better? Sure. Could it have been more tightly edited? Yes. But what I felt I was trying to do was to reshape the perspective of branding, not from the sizzle, right? The book's called Beyond Sizzle, not as sizzle, the the logos, the colors, all of which is important. Okay. I love it. But that is the end, not the beginning. So the concept of branding from the core is that you start upstream. If organizations are not clear about who they are, what they do, why the world should care, their identity, if they don't have that internal story, nothing else at the end of the day, no matter how good you look, when people experience you, there will be a gap. And so every dollar you spent downstream, i.e., the pretty stuff, you're wasting if you have not set dealt with the upstream. So that was one reason. I really, like I said, this was a a journey of Me seeing the obvious integrity gaps in organizations between stories told and stories lived. Okay. So I wanted to write a book that at the end of this book is called the playbook, and it really shows the process. Okay. The philosophical piece of this is built around interface. And my belief of leadership, the purpose of business, how our social contract with society is and organizations is important. and that if leaders don't have that frame if you if you're not looking through that window if the only window you're looking for is how I make money is still important but you do all interesting things when your only frame is money and so my purpose in writing Beyond Sizzle was to expand two things the view of branding as a process of building meaning branding from the core Building that meaning from inside out, and then the concept of leadership and the role of leadership. So that's why I wrote the first one. The next book, the working title is Built to Trust, Designed to Thrive. And so what I'm looking at here is how do you evolve holding on? Because we're in the midst of so much change, right? So how do you evolve, grow? thrive while still holding on to that core, that purpose, those values that so many founders people struggle with this, right? You found a company and then you wake up one morning and my goodness, what is this? I didn't wait, you know. So it is a strategic approach to getting clear, you know, that identity piece, but also through something we call integral strategic planning. How do you over time turn your organization into a learning organization that maintains this sense of identity, but also is able to grow and shift and change like ID group. I mean, that's what's going on here, right? We're still a believer in what we believed in 35 years ago, but now we're trying to hold that while evolving to meet the changing needs of society and clients. So that is what the next book is about.

no, that is not a fair question. let's put it this way. I've written a lot of pages and work, I'm working with editor. I'm I'm I'm hoping and and I am like I said, we're in the midst of testing and Metis ID and like everything. right. But my hope is that we will have this ready to go out the first of the year.

Well, it's been a long time still. It's taken too long to write it. Yeah. Yeah.

You will one day.

Yeah, so I have a personal website, Mona Amadeo.com. And so that's one place. IDgrouppartners.com is the company website. Now we are in the midst of shifting that because as you I shared with you, that will tell you the story of branding from the core. It will show you case studies of our work. and then that we are shifting that website to be much more of our purpose as we move forward, which is to educate. people around this to introduce Mattis ID, bu build and recruit other people who want to do this. So but that website will tell you and and then my my email address is just mona at idgroup partners dot com.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.