Branding in a Day with Mend Counseling
We conducted an experiment: could we do all the work behind a rebrand in one day?
The 5-part process we use for building a brand and website can take anywhere from 3-6 months. The collaboration, feedback, and approval process with the client can be a lengthy one, and with many of our clients meeting virtually with members of our team, finding a spot on everyone’s calendar can be daunting.
We wanted to see if when we removed the Zoom calls, Loom videos, and emails, we could bootcamp a brand’s messaging framework, visual elements, and website wireframe to speed up the process and remove roadblocks.
Peter Cappon from Mend Counseling in Grand Rapids Michigan was our willing guinea pig.
Cappon knew he was ready for a new brand and website when he started to grow his practice.
The original DIY logo and branding no longer matched the brand identity Mend was evolving into. Cappon reached out and leaned on brand experts, Raj and Ben to guide him through the process of rebranding a professional and recognizable brand for this next phase of Mend Counseling.
In this week’s episode of the podcast, Ben sits down with Peter Cappon to talk about his experience “rebranding in a day” and things to consider when rebranding your business.
Check out the episode on YouTube and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Is it time for a rebrand?
Drop us a line, we would love to hear about your branding, messaging, or design project!
Ep. 45:
Branding in a Day with Mend Counseling
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders:
Does rebranding your company have to take so darn long? Maybe not. Hey, welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design & Strategy. Now, working with a new client to create their visual branding, messaging strategy, homepage content design, it can take a long time, often three to six months for us. Of course, our team is very talented and efficient. The problem is we are balancing many client projects simultaneously, and production time can be hampered by communication, feedback, and approval from our clients as well. Just the first part of a branding process can often take over a month just to establish the right brand strategy direction for our client.
However, Raj and I recently had this crazy idea to try sort of branding immersion exercise where we fly in a client for a full day of brand discovery, StoryBrand strategy, website wire framing, logo sketches, et cetera, and attempt to do two months of valuable branding work in one 8-hour period. The result, well, don't take my word for it though. Let's meet Peter Cappon of Mend Counseling in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who is our willing Guinea pig for this experiment. Be sure to listen to the end and let us know if this intensive focused branding exercise sounds intriguing to you. Are there any unintended issues that you think might arise from switching to this model? We'd love to hear your thoughts, but first let's meet Peter. Peter, welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand. Thanks so much for flying out here.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, it's my pleasure. It's good to be here.
Ben Lueders:
So like I just said, Peter was part of this experiment that Raj and I did, where we thought, hey, could we cram all of this brand strategy, all of this design, all of this rebrand planning into one intensive day? And Peter just survived that.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah.
Ben Lueders:
How are you feeling?
Peter Cappon:
I'm feeling great.
Ben Lueders:
Okay, good. That's a good sign.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah. So far so good.
Ben Lueders:
Before we kind of dive into how this experience was, can you just tell us a little bit about your counseling practice in Grand Rapids?
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, so right now I'm an individual therapist in Grand Rapids, so I just see clients out of an office there by myself. But I'm growing the practice, it's called Mend Counseling. And so right now I just hired a new clinician for the first time, and I have another one who's interested in joining. And so I'm in the process of growing and adding new clinicians and turning it into a group.
Ben Lueders:
That's so awesome.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah. Yeah, it's fun.
Ben Lueders:
Well, congratulations.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, thanks.
Ben Lueders:
You were literally Growing a Fruitful Brand right now. So as it's growing, you're now looking at rebranding because you were telling us the logo that you had created, you created it yourself, right?
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, basically so far my website, my logo, my brand has been all done on a pretty shoestring budget, just kind of DIY, and it's done the job. I've been able to get enough clients, certainly, and when it's just one person, it's not as hard. But now I'm hiring new clinicians, and of course they're going to rely on me for getting their caseload's full. And so the DIY version of my practice is probably not going to quite cut it. So I'm feeling that responsibility to build the practice and have enough people reaching out to fill a whole practice is worth of caseloads.
Ben Lueders:
That's awesome.
Peter Cappon:
So that's how I came here.
Ben Lueders:
Well, and just off the bat here, there's no shame in that either. A lot of people starting out there at their thing, solopreneurs, they're on a budget and they should be. You want keep that overhead down. And so creating the logo yourself, the website or asking a friend or a cousin, we kind of joke about these things sometimes because we're the professional branders, but there's no shame in that. We did that ourselves when we were starting our own things too. And so it is a testament to you and to the business that you're operating that you... when I saw what you had come up with, I was like, wow, I expected you ask someone else. I was surprised that you did that yourself.
Peter Cappon:
Thanks. Yeah, actually, I'm proud of what I did. I think it was pretty good for, like I said, a DIY branding.
Ben Lueders:
Exactly.
Peter Cappon:
But there's definitely a huge gap between a pretty good DIY job and hiring somebody like you guys to take care of it.
Ben Lueders:
Well, that's a perfect segue to my first question, which is what was the problem that you wanted Fruitful to solve for Mend?
Peter Cappon:
During this process, you guys asked me multiple times, "What are some of the brands that you like? What are some of the websites that you like?" And it's not hard for me to find a website that looks nice, and I could tell you, this is really great, but I can't tell you why. I don't have the eye for that detail. I don't have the experience to understand what goes into a good design. I know it when I see it, but I can't pull it off by myself. I've tried. And so I really needed, I needed your expertise to help me take all of these ideas, all of these concepts that I have rolling around in my head about the identity of my practice and the business, and help me make sense of that and really kind of condense it down into a versions that I can share with a lot of people. And they can see that and they can recognize it and say, "Yeah, that's Mend, that looks nice, that looks professional, and it represents Mend Counseling." So that's why I reached out to Raj originally to see if he could help me.
Ben Lueders:
So going into this crazy one day of strategy of branding, what were your expectations going into that?
Peter Cappon:
I didn't know exactly what to expect, but what I was hoping is that you guys would lead the way that you knew the questions to ask, you knew the problems that needed to be solved, and you would just help draw that out of me. And I think that's exactly what happened.
Ben Lueders:
Good. I was waiting for a second there, and like those expectations were met?
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, right, right.
Ben Lueders:
That's awesome. No, I appreciate that. It was a lot of fun too, from my seat similarly, this was an experiment. This is something that Raj and I had been talking about how much could we cram in one day in-person with a client? How much would they be willing to take? And now obviously Peter here, he sits and talks to people and listens to people for a living. And so he was like, "Yeah, this is no big deal. I do this all the time." And so it was really cool though. I'll say from my seat as the art director, just getting to know a client so intimately in a day, we ate lunch together. In between sessions, I learned things about your story that played into, one of the things I learned is that in another life, Peter was a professional painter, and so he understands colors and-
Peter Cappon:
House painter.
Ben Lueders:
House painter. Yeah, that's right.
Peter Cappon:
Just to be clear.
Ben Lueders:
Good distinction. Not a portrait painter, not an abstract painter, house painter. But as a house painter, you understand certain things about colors and what they do. And that as we started digging into mood board and stuff like that, some of that stuff started to shine, I think. And not in a picky or difficult way, but you had a level of knowledge and expertise there that other clients wouldn't have. And it was just fun. It was fun as a designer to learn that about you. And again, I think we found that out in between sessions too, and just that kind of immersive.
Peter Cappon:
Just because we were together.
Ben Lueders:
Because we were together. And so there's something special about that. We've kind of been hinting around it, but let's walk through each of the things that we accomplished in our day together yesterday. And so I'll just kind of list those things and then we'll kind of dive in each one.
But one of the things we did together was define your StoryBrand brand script. We're a StoryBrand certified agency, and that's one of the main things that we do is help our clients map out their brand script that they can base all of their marketing, their website, everything on. And then I led a brand discovery conversation where we went through a questionnaire and a presentation, just really digging into the things that you're like, you're not like, your competitors, stuff like that, kind of from a visual standpoint.
Then worked with Raj to do your homepage wireframe. So taking that StoryBrand brand script that we had just worked on and translating that into the actual copy, the marketing copy for your homepage. And then we transitioned back to me and the design side, looking at a mood board that I literally put together while Raj was doing that other stuff, some mood board samples from across the web, some color things that I found, as well as even some initial logo sketches that I was riffing on during those conversations.
And then you guys finished up over ice cream, a little sitemap for your website conversation, although it sounds like that was more ice cream than sitemap, right?
Peter Cappon:
Yeah. Yeah. Mostly ice cream for sure.
Ben Lueders:
Mostly ice cream. So that was kind of what we did in a day. These five big pieces. And oftentimes that can take with all of the communication back and forth, email, Loom, Zoom calls in-person meetings that will happen with a client. To get all five of those things done and approved by a client can often take one to two months, depending. Some have gone a little bit shorter than that, but you'll send something for approval if it takes a few days or a week to get that approval, then you move on to the next phase and you can see how these things get drawn out. And so we did it all yesterday. Let's dive into the StoryBrand brand script. How was that process for you? Any insights that kind of came out of that exercise with Raj?
Peter Cappon:
I think in my recollection, the StoryBrand brand script probably took up the most amount of our time.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, 90 minutes.
Peter Cappon:
90 Minutes.
Ben Lueders:
90 minutes. Everything else is about 60.
Peter Cappon:
Okay. Yeah, Raj is just so good at, like I said, with my expectations or my hopes of just asking a lot of good questions, and I don't have the ability to be very succinct and I can just go on and on and on. And he's just so good at taking my own, just sort of stream of thought almost, and just free association to stick with the psychotherapy, sort of-
Ben Lueders:
He's kind of like your therapist a little.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, actually. Yeah, because it's sort of like, we'll just keep talking and then... well this is what I hear you saying and we could say it like this, and sort of translating almost and condensing down all of my crazy ideas and thoughts about what I'm hoping for.
Ben Lueders:
One thing I just want to interject real quick, that I thought was cool. It might've been in the wireframe part, but I noticed that Raj is asking all these good questions, getting all this good stuff from you, and then he himself is riffing, using his own words. But then you're interacting with what he's writing too and being like, "Hey, I wouldn't word it that way, and here's why." Something industry specific. And then he's like, "Oh, okay, erase that."
Peter Cappon:
Yeah. And he's like, "Yeah, you're right." Or like-
Ben Lueders:
Or pushes back.
Peter Cappon:
... you might want to think about it this way. And in that case I was like, yeah, I could see your point. And so it was really dialogue. It was an active dialogue that you cannot have in emails or text messages, and certainly not that efficiently because if I tried to write down my words and explain myself and I'm just talking and talking for five minutes and he's just listening and taking it all in, that's really difficult to accomplish in an email format, for example.
Ben Lueders:
That's a great point. And even if you were to record a Loom, we're doing a lot of Loom videos these days where we'll send a brand script with a Loom video kind of explaining our point. The client now is still on their own time. They've got to kind digest that video, go over the thing, find the time for all that. Then think their thoughts if they have thoughts, and then maybe are they going to have to record a Loom video themselves to send to counter? We get these dialogues that do happen in some of this asynchronous communication, but it just takes time. It's not efficient. I am glad that you said the word efficient and that was what we were trying to, if we just got in the same room and didn't leave, could this be a better experience?
So I think, yeah, and especially in-person now, I don't don't know if we want to totally put our stake in the ground on this, but it's no surprise probably to some of our listeners that Raj and I are big fans of in-person. We have clients that are all over the country. We do a lot of Zooms, we do a lot of Looms, we do a lot of work from home and all this stuff that we all have done since Covid. But there's something about being in person like we are right now. What are your thoughts on that?
Peter Cappon:
It really is.
Ben Lueders:
As a therapist because I know you do both too in your practice.
Peter Cappon:
I mean, kind of like you're saying, in my practice, I've really come to see the validity in the merit and how good a virtual meeting can be. And it's still my preference to be in person, and I'm wanting to go more and more back into that. It's more labored to try and maintain a sense of connection digitally. It's doable. But think about how much energy we spent yesterday and how hard it would've been to sustain that for a whole day if we were doing a Zoom call.
Ben Lueders:
Oh gosh.
Peter Cappon:
Like how exhausted we would've been.
Ben Lueders:
I think no one would sign up for the one day of Zoom. You know what I mean? That is a hard sell, but I think this could be something we offer this in-person immersive thing, it just sounds better. It is an easier sell. And I think that's probably just for human connection reasons. And I was even picking up too, and we'll get into it in a second with the mood board creation and stuff, but I was able to see your body language as you reacted to certain designs that I showed. I could hear your tone of voice or the way your eye darted around from looking at different things and things that you don't get on Zoom. Sometimes people turn their Zoom cameras off, sometimes you can't tell what they're looking at when you're sharing a screen. Their eyes are going this way, but everything's reversed and that kind of stuff. Whereas efficiency is a good word for it, but also just very human.
Peter Cappon:
Intuitively, it seems less efficient. The efficiency we normally are probably emailing because we think that's more efficient because I had to fly halfway across the country to get here. That sounds like less efficient, so it's somewhat counterintuitive, but actually it's faster, but it's faster and better.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, there you go. Preach.
Peter Cappon:
It's more fun. It's more exciting, it's more relational.
Ben Lueders:
Well, from this seat, we do this all the time. It's been pretty special. It really is kind of rocking our world. And as far as my expectations going into it, obviously I hope for the best. I hope we could get through all the stuff that we did, but it was yet to be seen how well the client would react to doing it at that speed. Would they be able to make decisions on the spot? Because we were just chatting before we started recording, is this for everyone? And I'm not convinced that it is. I think there are certain clients of certain sizes that have too many people that need to sign off on everything, that maybe this wouldn't be the best case for them. And not every design strategy firm is going to be up for the challenge too. I would say our team is uniquely gifted at being able to just riff on the spot kind of under pressure. Raj and I particularly work really well together. I can be sketching while he's talking and vice versa. We're kind of playing to our strengths in this, which is why we do this.
Peter Cappon:
You have a unique relationship, you two do.
Ben Lueders:
Thank you.
Peter Cappon:
Just in terms of your ability to work together and pull something like that off.
Ben Lueders:
Thank you. Thank you. Let's go into the next thing. So brand discovery, and this is one where we started asynchronous. Ted, our project manager, sent you some questions to fill out ahead of time. So it gave you some time probably to kind of pull that stuff together on the Spotify. I was like, show me all these websites. Maybe you could have done it, but you did have some time to sit with that. And then we just spent that time reviewing and digging into together. How did that feel?
Peter Cappon:
It was helpful probably to do some of that work ahead of time, like you said. So I gave you what, almost 10 websites?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, it was quite a lot to look at.
Peter Cappon:
To look at, and we just were able to look through them.
Ben Lueders:
I think one of the cool things in that process for me that kind of came out, one of the questions we ask during our brand discovery is what are three words that you'd want someone to use to describe you? And you shared a list of words.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah., More than three.
Ben Lueders:
More than three. And most people do, we'd say three. Because it is hard to narrow those down. And Raj, of course, he's in a taxonomy and whatnot. He got on the board and showed how there were three and we could kind of file some of these other words underneath those three. But that's a really helpful one to even see you interacting with that or responding to Raj doing that because in the room, live, we kind of really got to know the essence of men and how you want Mend Counseling to feel.
I know that throughout the rest of the day, as you were interacting with the mood board as we were looking at sketches, I kept on looking back to the whiteboard with those words on it as kind of a guiding principle for me. It's like one of the words was professional. You want to have this really warm, calm, safe environment for people in your counseling service, but you also don't want to be too friendly and loosey goosey that it doesn't seem professional, that you know what you're doing. And so it's like a lot of our conversations visually seem to be around how do we balance being this safe, warm, personal, safe space with this we know what we're doing professional kind of tone.
And I felt like that was gold as far as a guiding principle. And usually we just get that in that questionnaire and we just have that list of words and then it's up to us to figure which ones we think are the best. And we often don't get that much out of our clients that we got from you. And you were able to just really articulate, I feel like the vibe of men in such a helpful way for the design team.
Peter Cappon:
Good. Yeah. And like I said earlier, I just have so many words for all that, it's so hard for me to condense that down. But you and Raj are able to just kind of soak it all up and just take it in and digest it and make sense of it in your own language, in your own field, and figure out what I was saying as I was just going on and on how it's relevant. and that's huge because I can't do that work for myself.
Ben Lueders:
Well, and I think too, one of the exercises in that is what brands out there are kind of like you and which ones are not like you? And I think a lot of times we'll get to know a client's preferences in that like, oh, I like this. I don't like this. Which is helpful to some degree, but I think in person with the extra time, we're able to really get at why. We were able to look at things together and really dig into, okay, do I just like this? Or why do I like this? And is this me though? Is this men? Would this connect with my clients? You'd see an image and be like, I like this image, or I don't like this image.
But then really getting into like, oh, here's why. I remember we were looking at some competitor websites, and they will not be named, but overall fine website, but there were some photos up in the header where they had pictures of people that were just so exuberantly excited and happy and joyful that it almost was offputting. It was almost like, okay, yeah, you want to be joyful again. Maybe you're struggling with something and that's why you're coming to counseling. But it was almost like too far where it'd be like, okay, that's annoying to me because I don't feel that way. And so we had an opportunity to talk about that stuff, even how specific kinds of imagery can convey different things.
Peter Cappon:
And you guys took the time to ask me about what I do and really trying to understand what I do and where my clients are at when they're coming in the door. And that took some time, but you really took the time to listen and really try to understand which like you're saying is so much more than like, dislike.
Ben Lueders:
Right, exactly.
Peter Cappon:
It's so much more complex than that.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, exactly. Yeah. And from my standpoint, I'm not just listening to you to make you feel good or feel heard. It's like I'm trying to get valuable insights, going to help me design what I need to design. It's such a benefit for me and my team to get all those insights because it's going to help the rest of the process be so much smoother. I feel at the end of the day, we didn't come up with a final logo design. It wasn't like you came away with stickers and a t-shirt with your new brand on it yet. But goodness, I don't know that I've ever felt. So just well set up for that though. Time will tell, the idea is that we're going to try to finish up the rest of this process, the logo, the website in just a matter of weeks, and we're going to prioritize this, and then we're going to measure how did that go? Were we able to do it?
And my sneaking suspicion where I'm at right now is that it's actually, it's going to go well if yesterday was any indicator. And that it actually might be even better than usual because of the level of depth that we were able to get into with you in that day. So the next step in that process was the homepage wireframe, which I touched on a minute ago. But that's really you working with Raj, adapting the brand script into the actual words of your website. And I will say, this is a part for me, because tried doing this before, this is a specialty of Raj's, I will say.
Peter Cappon:
Absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
And there are a lot of people, even you, you had tried brand scripting yourself before, and a lot of people will read Donald Miller's StoryBrand book or even go to a conference or something, attempt to brand script themselves, but then translating that into the language of the website can be such a challenge.
Peter Cappon:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
And so yeah, how was that process for you, and did you feel like it was helpful or successful?
Peter Cappon:
That was a good process. That was a process that I would say stretched my comfort zone a little bit.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, tell us about that.
Peter Cappon:
... in a good way. Because somebody like me who's a therapist, I go through all of this schooling and you learn all of these concepts and theories and you have this sort of vernacular in your own language. And there are certain words that normally we use in day-to-day life that maybe land with me a certain way and they maybe have a connotation that is dissonant with me. It's like, ah, I don't like that word because it feels like this other thing that I'm thinking of. But the fact of the matter is most people are not thinking of those things that I'm thinking of. And so actually the language that Raj comes up with is really understandable and much more understandable than whatever language I would come up with with my own lexicon and my own niche part of my world.
Ben Lueders:
Well, that's part of the benefit of just partnering with someone other than you for that, if you're going from DIY is like-
Peter Cappon:
Huge benefit for sure.
Ben Lueders:
Obviously, I think Raj is specifically gifted for this, but just bringing someone else in from the outside, because Donald Miller talks about, it's called the Curse of Knowledge. He calls it the curse of knowledge. It's like the problem with you is, Peter, you know too much, you know all the right things to say.
Peter Cappon:
I know about the thing that I'm trying to give to people.
Ben Lueders:
Right. But that may not be the way that you would say it, may not be the thing that they're looking for. And so it's really kind of putting yourself in your audience's shoes, how would they say that? But that being said, and I hinted at it earlier, is there was a few times though where Raj was using language that you're like, ah, that's not exactly right. And I'm trying to remember exact words, but I think it was a part where he was wanting to say that you will help simplify the complexity or basically take away the complexity. Do you remember the wording what was on that?
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, you're right. Yeah. It would be to take away the complexity, something along those lines.
Ben Lueders:
And you immediately were like, I'm going to give them the tools to navigate the complexity and whatnot, but their life still might be complicated in the end.
Peter Cappon:
I'm not simplifying the world. I don't have the ability to do that.
Ben Lueders:
I'm sure I wish you could offer that service. You have a lot of business.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah.
Ben Lueders:
I thought that was really cool though, because first of all, I think a lot of people wish they could say that, but you were very honest in like, you know, that's not a promise I want to make because at the end of the day, you can have all the counseling you want, all the therapy that you pay for, your life may still be very complicated, but you're hopefully going to be in a better place to be able to interact with that complexity to process that complexity.
Peter Cappon:
To help people manage their lives in a way that works for them. It's different. It's different.
Ben Lueders:
Exactly.
Peter Cappon:
And that was an example where Raj was really receptive to that. He's like, yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. And other times, like you were saying earlier a minute ago, that there are other times where maybe he kind of pushed back and it was a really healthy dialogue in that push and pull with each other.
Ben Lueders:
I love that you started your answer here saying that it kind of pushed your comfort zone, though. I think that's good too. I think that is something that once you're building up a rapport with someone you've been in, at that point, we had been in a room together, we had a lunch together for a half day and a relationship's been established. And there was some push and pull earlier in the day, but it was the point in the relationship where we could go back and forth and push people's comfort zones and there was trust.
Peter Cappon:
Absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
Hopefully, a safe was a space for that. And you need that. And I do fear that sometimes when these longer projects with asynchronous communication, you don't know that you're ever fully there. We do get there to some degree, and Raj is really good about really pushing people in healthy ways and pushing what they're comfortable with. But it is harder, I'll say it that way because we don't want to stop doing things ever virtually, just like you were saying. But there are limitations to I think, what you can accomplish, especially in the timeframe.
After that, we went into reviewing a mood board that I had kind of put together showing different branding marks from different therapists and counseling services across the country. We looked at color schemes and we even got to look at some very rough logo sketches together. I prefaced all of that yesterday with saying, we don't usually show this stuff to our clients. So I was going out on a limb, I was showing you we do that internally and then we really try to spend the time and curate these really narrowed down curated decks for our clients. But we didn't have the luxury of that time. And so I let you a little bit into our design process. And so I'm curious to hear from your words, from your mouth, Peter, how was that? Was that helpful? Was that cool? Was that overwhelming? All of the above?
Peter Cappon:
Not overwhelming at all. I think I wondered at one point if that felt a little bit vulnerable for you.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, it did a little
Peter Cappon:
Bit sort of just sharing something that was so fresh.
Ben Lueders:
Right.
Peter Cappon:
But I think you did a good job of hearing my feedback without taking it personally. And most of it was positive, but we were just working together to try and figure it out.
Ben Lueders:
Well, and I liked that, especially when we got to the sketches because they were rough sketches, they weren't super refined. It wasn't as many as we'd like to have before we show a client to. I didn't have the chance to put them all together. It was a lot of wordmark stuff and symbols separately. It was a little messier than I'd like. And so it did feel a little vulnerable, but you also didn't have the fear to be like, hey, not this one and here's why. Here's what this makes me think of, and then you were able to be like, I like where you're going with this concept and here's why. And I got some really helpful stuff. We came to agreement on why all caps bold lettering may not be for you but not going too soft in all lower case either. And that's a really interesting insight.
And now that I know that I got to find that out in the initial sketch phase before I've even put together a fully fledged comp, that's incredible to get that level of, and again, it's not just because of Peter's own preferences and he likes logos that way. It was tied to those branding things that we established in the discovery.
Peter Cappon:
Absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
Because of that marriage between safe and professional, you need to look like you know what you're doing. So maybe the capital letter, but not all caps where it looks like yelling or too bold or masculine. So there was some really cool stuff, and we talked a lot about inclusivity with your brand as well. And so all of those things we established got to really inform that phase. And I got to hear live confirmation from you on which sketches were going that way, which ones weren't.
Peter Cappon:
Yep. And I don't even know if I would've ever even gotten to the point of articulating something like all caps versus all lowercase versus a combination. I just would've been looking at something if we were doing this asynchronously and had some thoughts about what I liked and what I didn't like, and maybe I would have, but really we were just talking so much and just building off of each other and it happened so quickly.
And I also think you were so close to capturing the kind of vibe that I would want you to, and the colors that you came up with, I think you had all these colors, and I was like, well, I'll take that one out. The rest of them are all spot on. And I can't help but wonder how much of that was informed even without you even realizing it because you're just sitting there, just listening as you're drawing. And I know you're very intentional, and I'm sure you had all of these thoughts about, okay, he said this, so I'm going to incorporate it this way. But I bet a lot of that is you're just soaking it up and just letting that inform your creative process.
Ben Lueders:
It was a very organic experience. And designers do this where they're picking up on little vibes. They're picking up on little things that you're dropping down. I remember as we looked at some of the websites earlier in the day, there was certain images, certain color schemes that are on existing websites were connecting with you or disconnecting with you. There were some that were just way too bright or the colors were so garish that as I was looking at other design comps during one of Raj's sessions, there were certain color schemes. I'm like, I bet Peter's going to love this. It's just calm enough. It's just cool enough. It's just warm enough and finding those balances. And then I found out you were a painter and all this. And when I put that color, I felt pretty confident showing you the colors.
And here's the thing, full disclosure, we don't usually show clients colors until we're done with the logo. So this is the thing that I get excited about is color is a thing that we try to put off because it's like we don't want it to affect the design, we want to let's focus on the concepts here. But we were able to smash those things together. So you can see not only did we get all of this strategy work and all this stuff done in a day, but there was some significant getting in your head, the colors that best represent your brand or connect to your audience. So that I got really excited about. But when I was getting ready to show that with you, I felt pretty confident about them. I didn't expect you to really push back. I felt like I was kind of vibing with you in a way.
And I felt the trust too. Because I think the other thing is I think you have a really cool balance, and a lot of our clients do, I will say, of really knowing your target audience, knowing yourself and your brand ethos, and trusting us that we know what we're doing too. And so when you have that kind of trust, you can show things. You know what I mean? There's a little less reservation to hold things back. And so we kind of just went for it. And I really appreciated your feedback. It was really fun. It was really fun to see you interact with it. I'm glad that you picked up on the vulnerability. It was really vulnerable and it felt weird. That's not a part of our process. Hasn't been.
Peter Cappon:
Sure.
Ben Lueders:
But gosh, maybe it needs to be. So the last piece was over Coneflower ice cream. You did a little bit of sitemap work. I wasn't there, but you and Raj did, and you have a pretty simple site map, but that was kind of the last piece.
Peter Cappon:
Well, as we're talking about it in light of what it's like to do this in this one day immersive experience, when I was looking at this list and we were talking about going through this list of items, I was thinking, well, I don't have much to say about the sitemap, but now as we're getting to it right now, I'm realizing, well, I do have something to say. And it's ice cream. And that's something that wouldn't happen.
Ben Lueders:
That's a good point.
Peter Cappon:
That is a unique benefit of maybe that's a more mundane part of the work. And it's not that complex for me in my business, but it was still more fun.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Yeah. You'll probably remember that. Yeah. Coneflower.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah. I remember the ice cream.
Ben Lueders:
Ice cream. What flavor did you get? Do you remember?
Peter Cappon:
It was Cherry Cobbler was one of them.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, wow. Yeah, it was my wife's favorite over there. Was it pretty good?
Peter Cappon:
Yeah, it was good.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. Coneflower is-
Peter Cappon:
It was good.
Ben Lueders:
They know what they're doing.
Peter Cappon:
That's good stuff.
Ben Lueders:
Little advertisement for them. But that's a great point. I've said we had lunch together, but you also got ice cream. And so not that we would necessarily work ice cream into our five part processor or whatever, but I mean-
Peter Cappon:
You're not promising ice cream, a trip to the ice cream shop.
Ben Lueders:
But maybe we should. Maybe it's like that is part of the process we just kind of bake in.
Peter Cappon:
Bake in something fun, something a little different.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, exactly. And maybe we can even have some fun with that, but I think that is the benefit of being in person you can kind of do more impromptu things. And here we are. We're also hopping on a podcast to talk about it too, and talking about your business, getting that out there. And so it was a pretty exciting and interesting experiment from my standpoint. But I just want to ask you now, I mean, you've already hinted that it was a positive experience, but would you recommend this process to others?
Peter Cappon:
I'm trying to think about who I wouldn't recommend it to because you already know that I would, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
Ben Lueders:
Awesome.
Peter Cappon:
I mean, yeah, it is been really helpful, which is sort of the point, right? We're going to have an end product when everything is all said and done, so that's going to meet a really specific need, but it was really rewarding and rich and enjoyable, and so-
Ben Lueders:
That's awesome.
Peter Cappon:
I've never been to Omaha before either.
Ben Lueders:
So great.
Peter Cappon:
Got to see a new place. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
Well, thank you Peter. And I think it's the same from us. And the thing that I was thinking about this morning was for those listening, would you rather spend one intensive day accomplishing these five big brand strategy pieces that we just talked about or spend one to two months doing those same things at your own pace over Zoom, email, Loom, kind of asynchronous communication. And I think for some clients, this could be a really kind of a big game changer. This would be a much more efficient way, more fun way. A lot of upsides to it. And so thanks for being our Guinea pig.
Peter Cappon:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ben Lueders:
Peter, this has been an absolute pleasure to work on Mend Counseling with you. I'm excited to kind of push it into the next phase. But for those listening, what I wanted to kind of end on is, has this been interesting to you? Is this concept, would this work for you or your organization? Have you ever tried anything like this before? Or if you're an agency listening, have you tried something like this? We're really curious to hear who doesn't this work for? Kind of like Peter was saying, who wouldn't this work for? Because from our standpoint, this could be a really, really interesting way to move a lot faster and deeper and better. And so it's not often that you get both of those things usually like, okay, if we're going to go fast, the quality is going to go down. And my suspicion here is if we were just to schedule this a little bit differently and change our processes a little bit differently, maybe we could have both.
Peter Cappon:
Yeah. That's my impression. Intensive sounds like it's just faster, like you were just saying. And it's not just faster, I think it's better, it's richer, it's more relational, it's more complex, more interesting. So it's intensively more than just fast. Right? It's intensively deep as well.
Ben Lueders:
Well, Peter, thank you so much for that. Thank you so much for sharing with our listeners, and if people want to check out what you're doing, obviously by the time this airs, I'm not sure if the new website should be up. So where can people check out your practice?
Peter Cappon:
So the practice is in Grand Rapids, Michigan, right downtown. Right now, I'm outside of downtown, but we're moving to downtown probably by the time this might air. And the website is mendcounselingmi.com.
Ben Lueders:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the-
Peter Cappon:
Thank you.
Ben Lueders:
... Growing a Fruitful Brand podcast.
Peter Cappon:
Absolutely.
Raj:
In our last outro, it was just Ben by himself asking you to like and subscribe, which made it look like he didn't have any friends. Please like and subscribe. So he has at least virtual friends.
Ben Lueders:
I have friends, Raj.
Raj:
I'm one of them.
