[Podcast] Building Brands with Soul with Maria Brasil

The episode features a compelling discussion with Maria Brasil, founder of Essence Branding and a champion of conscious capitalism. Maria shares her journey from working in traditional branding agencies to pioneering a brand strategy approach that emphasizes aligning brand positioning with organizational culture. She explains the concept of conscious capitalism, which revolves around four pillars: higher purpose, conscious leadership, conscious culture, and stakeholder integration.

Maria and the hosts delve into the importance of building brands “from the inside out,” stressing that true brand authenticity stems from the company’s core values and culture, not just external marketing efforts. Maria shares insights from her work, including a project with a fintech company in Brazil’s favelas, where she helped develop a brand that resonates deeply with its community by addressing their unique needs and challenges.

The episode also explores the challenges of integrating conscious capitalism into business practices, emphasizing the need for leaders to take the time to understand and authentically embody the brand’s values. Maria concludes by encouraging companies to consciously build brands that are not only profitable but also meaningful and aligned with their internal culture.

What is Conscious Capitalism?

Conscious Capitalism is a business philosophy that emphasizes the importance of aligning business practices with social and environmental responsibilities. It advocates for a business model that serves all major stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, communities, suppliers, and the environment, rather than solely focusing on maximizing shareholder value. The concept is built on four core principles:

• Higher Purpose: Businesses should exist for reasons beyond profit. They should aim to make a positive impact on society, enhancing the well-being of people and the planet.
• Stakeholder Orientation: Success is defined by creating value for all stakeholders. Businesses should consider the interests and needs of everyone affected by their operations, not just the shareholders.
• Conscious Leadership: Leaders should be driven by a higher purpose and a commitment to creating value for all stakeholders. They should inspire and foster a culture of trust, care, and cooperation.
• Conscious Culture: A company’s culture should promote positive values and practices, encouraging ethical behavior, transparency, and accountability.

Listen Here

Love the show? Please review us on Apple.

Play Now

Watch on Youtube

Learn Brand Strategy

Brand Master Secrets helps you become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees. And in my opinion, this is the most comprehensive brand strategy course on the market.

The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript (Auto-Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello, fellow brand builders. We interrupt your regular programming for a very special announcement. From august 27th to 30th, join us for the Brand Builders Summit, a transformative four-day free virtual event designed just for you.

Whether you’re a creative business owner, designer, strategist, marketing professional or entrepreneur, this summit will help you become an extraordinary brand builder. There’s going to be live Q&As, workshops, expert panels, networking opportunities, and thousands of dollars in bonuses and prizes. With 28 speakers, including industry experts, this is your chance to elevate your branding game.

Join the waitlist now at brandbuildersummit.com to secure your free spot. That’s brandbuildersummit.com. Now back to the show.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of JUST Branding. This episode is going to be really interesting. Not only have we got a phenomenal guest who I’ll introduce shortly, but the topic, I think, will peak your interest because we’re going to be talking about conscious capitalism and branding.

We’re going to be looking at conscious capitalism in the context of some of the modern trends like ESG and some of the interesting concepts that surround it. That’s what we’re going to be looking at. Who is our guest?

It’s the one and only and the wonderful Maria Brasil. Who is she? She is a passionate brand builder and really passionate about building brands with soul.

She is the founder of Essence Branding, a B Corp of brand strategy focused on synchronizing brand positioning and organizational culture. And some interesting facts about Maria. She was the first woman president of the National Confederation of Young Entrepreneurs.

And she is currently the president of the Entity’s Advisory Council. She’s also a TEDx speaker. You may have seen a TEDx talk.

And she speaks internationally at various amazing conferences around the world. On top of that, she’s an author. She’s published her book, The Defendant’s Speech, which deals with topics such as marketing and conscious capitalism.

And she also lives in London in the United Kingdom, not far from me. She’s finishing her master’s in Brands Communication and Culture at Goldsmiths University of London. And if that wasn’t enough, she also teaches postgraduate classes in Brazil, where she comes from.

So that was a bit of a long-winded introduction, but Maria, welcome to the show. Great to have you with us.

Hi. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

I’m very, very happy to be here. I’m a long-time listener of the podcast, so it’s an honor to be here.

Not at all. I’m so excited that you agreed, so thank you. Thank you for coming on, because I think this subject’s really important for us to explore as people in the brand building space.

But before we get to that, let’s hear about you. What’s your story? How did you come to kind of be a champion of conscious capitalism and branding generally?

Okay. So I have always been passionate about branding. Like, I don’t know, since teenager, I always loved to read about it and to research about it and to talk about communication and everything.

So I had no doubt on what to pursue my career. And yeah, I work at agencies for a long time in my life. And I served large clients and everything.

It was very fun. But I felt something that was missing, you know, at some point in my career, I felt something missing. I don’t know if the way that I saw agencies do branding was the way that I truly believed that could be the best.

You know, like I saw agencies looking outside instead of looking inside, you know, like for me, it was always about like, how can you do something that great without talking to people that are inside the company and listening to their perspectives? So that was always a big question for me. Like, we should look to people inside, we should ask them what they think, we should include them in the process, because they are a very important part of that.

But I didn’t see that it was something natural for the market to do. And yeah, so at the same time that I felt that something was missing in the branding field and everything, I was presented to the book called conscious Capitalism. It was 2015, and at the point when I read the book, I found that it was a real answer for a lot of the things that I was feeling at the time, and a lot of the gaps that I was realizing that I had in the market.

So I decided to kind of mix up the two things, two things that are the thing that I love, that is branding, and the thing that I believe in, that is conscious business, conscious capitalism. So the thing that I do, and the way that I found of blending those two things is about building brands that I call filled with soul, because they start by looking from inside, they start by looking from their essence, their beliefs, their purpose. And by that, I mean start looking at the people inside them.

because something that I always say is that you cannot attract people outside if you don’t attract, first and foremost, people that are inside.

Nice. Okay. We’re going to tuck into all of that.

Let me ask you a follow up question before we go any further. How do you define conscious capitalism for anybody who’s perhaps not come across that phrase before?

That’s a great question. So conscious capitalism is a movement that started in the USA, and it’s about four pillars, right? Essentially.

So the first one is having a higher purpose. So the brand should have a higher purpose that everybody believes in, that everybody looks at. The second one is about having a conscious leadership, because leadership is the main disseminator of that purpose, and they should be responsible for making that purpose be present in the daily basis of the company.

The third pillar is the conscious culture, because once the leadership do their homework and everybody is connected to the purpose, the company can nurture this conscious culture around. And the fourth one, and last, is the stakeholder integration. So it’s making other people outside of the company being connected to that same purpose.

So I’m talking about suppliers, I’m talking about media, I’m talking about customers and all of other stakeholders that the company interacts in the daily basis, basically. So upon those four pillars is this movement called conscious Catalyst that is about making companies be best for the world and share value with people around them.

Nice. I can see why that aligns with what you were talking about, because it’s inside before it goes out, right? So it’s an inside out movement, I guess.

I think it’s fantastic. This is why I needed to get you on to talk about this, to open our minds to this and stretch us a little bit, because we talk a lot about strategy and building brands. You’re absolutely right.

I think there’s a perception, I don’t know what your thoughts are, Jacob, but there’s a perception of brand that it’s just a veneer, just a marketing kind of thing. A lot of companies tuck brand down into the marketing department. In fact, if you’re building a brand, if you’re building a company, you need to stick all of the component parts of the business together around a long-term vision, around a purpose, to your point, that kind of ensures that the long-term decision-making is aligned to that.

People are developing the products, people in operations, wherever it might be in the business that they’re thinking, how does this align to something bigger than the numbers that I’m trying to hit this quarter? Any thoughts on that, Jacob?

I agree with you, and we’ve discussed this many times on the podcast about looking in to build out, right? To understand the why, and that’s going to advise how to do things and how to position your brand and how to send the right message, but it really comes from within. And there’s many different names to this, like there’s Essence and Soul and DNA, everyone has a different name, but essentially it’s really understand what’s at the core of a business and trying to create something that is authentic and also relevant to the customer and the marketplace.

just one other quick thing, and I’ve got a question for you now, Maria, because the other part of conscious capitalism, at least that comes to my mind, is that wider societal piece as well that might surround all of those four things, for example, the environment or social context of a business and a brand. Got any thoughts on that? Do you feel that that plays a big role in this idea as well?

Yes, absolutely. As I said, the fourth pillar, the stakeholder integration, like the environment, is one of those stakeholders. So that’s something that you should take on account when building a brand.

And just as Jacob said, it’s different people have different names for that, Essence, ZNA, or call it whatever you want, but it’s about starting from the inside. And that’s the main thing. Like, as you said, now I am doing my research on my masters, and I’m doing like this huge literature review about big authors in the history and how they propose brand building platforms or brand building ways.

So what I find is that most of them focus on doing market research and benchmarking and looking at competitors. And they might talk about Essence or Soul or maybe DNA of a brand. Yes, that is present in literature, but it’s very, very few.

And it’s very, very few, like, efforts on talking about that. It’s like one paragraph in the whole book, you know? So that’s something that is coming very, very strong to me now.

It’s that a lot of people talk about it, like Jacob said, but I don’t see a lot of people, like, diving deeply into that to discover what’s that. And mainly, none of those books propose that you talk to the people inside the company to make that happen. Like, it’s always about, like people say, our little marketing room.

We are here, like, united, doing our meeting with the high leadership, and we decide what’s the purpose. We decide what are the values, and that’s it. And we put it top down to the people in the company.

And sometimes you have, I don’t know, 100,000 employees, and they just know about this purpose because you hang a banner on the wall, and that’s it. You know, that’s the main thing. It’s not about, the conversation for me is not any more about having a purpose.

I think we’re past that phase. I think the moment now is like, how did you build that purpose? What did, what does it come from?

And how do you communicate that for people inside? So, that is why I always say that just as Matt said, like brand should not be only built into the marketing department or only brand department. Brand is built by everyone in the company.

Brand is built by every single person. So, if we know that, if that is not something new for us, why is that we keep important people outside of the process? Why isn’t HR or talent people together in this and the other thing that I’m doing for my master’s is talking to CEOs from global companies.

Most of them public companies with stocks being traded on the market. And I’m talking to them and I always ask them, like who builds brand around there? And all of them told me like, okay, it’s marketing.

And I say, have you ever thought about connecting marketing with HR or people, people departments, whatever you call it? And they always say, actually, no, actually, I don’t know if those two go along very well. It’s like two separate worlds.

It’s crazy.

And that is the thing. That is the point that really bothers me. And I’m writing about this right now, because I think that brand should be built by everyone.

And everyone means people. And when we talk about people, I think that people, managers, should be into that. And why are they not?

So it’s not made top down, you know? Like our purpose, our values are the things that people inside believe together. So they should participate in that.

Yeah. And it has to be authentic, doesn’t it? That’s the problem.

That’s what I see a lot of. You know, the kind of the idea that it can be imposed upon people never works, never works. So, you know, I kind of, I push back a little bit on some of the couple of things you would say, because, you know, we’re on a podcast.

I’ve got to be contrarian a little bit from time to time.

Of course, please.

Not massively, not massively. I’m not going to disagree with what you said. I’m just going to suggest something.

So one thing I come across in my work as a consultant is a fear from the leadership team, right? That if they let this could be completely built from the bottom up, that it’s going to get them completely in the wrong space as to where they need to be commercially. So what I tend to do is a bottom up and top down approach, right?

The two together. So we’re listening to what everybody’s having to say. But it’s my, I would argue that the leaders have to ultimately take responsibility for where the business goes and where the brand needs to be built.

So, you know, in the set of principles that you talked about, conscious leadership, kind of, it really, I think, you know, is a driver for that leadership team. It’s got to be in their hearts and in their minds, and it has to be a drive for truth and a drive for authenticity. But it has to be a leadership team that listen, that want to make sure that they’re basically creating something real, not just a fake veneer.

Got any thoughts on that? Like, do you agree it’s a sort of a fusion of bottom down, top up? Is that the wrong way around?

Top down, bottom up? Or do you see it a different way?

Absolutely. What you said is great. Like, as I told you, like we have a main purpose.

It’s the first pillar. And the second one is a conscious leadership. So leaders should be the main role models of this whole thing.

They should breathe that. So some common errors, like first error that we see in the market, leaders that do not represent those values. So they want people to do that, but they don’t.

I come across this all the time. It’s like the killer of any strategy. If a brand stands up and says, you know, we are going to be, as you say, you know, we’re going to be thoughtful about the environment.

And then one of their leaders is like driving some huge truck around the world, you know, a great expense and cost to the planet. You know, you just think like how that doesn’t marry up. Like, you know, you’ve got to have some sort of policies and some thinking that back up.

And also, as you say, just on a personal level, that they’re trying to do the right thing. So, yeah, very difficult. Sorry, I jumped in.

No, no, no, it’s perfect. That’s the first thing. First thing that we see, like as consultants and being on the market.

And the other thing, like you said, like it’s up top down and bottom up. Yeah, it’s always a mixture of those. But what I’m trying to say mainly is that I’m not telling you to put the business strategy in the hands of all people.

It’s not about that. It’s not about what, where will we be in five years and what will be the main drivers of the company. It’s not that, okay?

It’s about the values. And if you tell me, like, I don’t want to listen to the values that they want to bring me because that might take me to a different direction, I have bad news for you. You are already going to a different direction because the values that people have inside their minds and their hearts are guiding their daily actions.

They’re already doing it. You just choose to not consider that, you know? Like, if you don’t listen, you’re just not listening to what’s truly happening there.

Like, I have some story I could share about it. Like, someday I went to this company to do a work there and we asked for everybody to be in the workshop. Like, really everybody.

It was a small company, so it was possible. And then the CEO said, okay, but everybody, like the lady that helps us with the coffee as well. And I said, of course, she knows the best in the company.

She walks through every single room. She talks to every single person. She listens to every single thing that happens here every day.

She knows more than you think. And it was really like that. She did a huge presence in the workshop, like talking about things that happen in the company that other people didn’t know, and mostly the CEO didn’t know about.

And at the end, he was like, oh my God, I didn’t know she had so much to contribute. And I said, of course, people have a lot to contribute, and the best contributions can come from the places that you least think of. It’s not your immediate director that is with you every day that can give you the best ideas sometimes.

It’s someone that you never talk to, and someone who knows the real daily basis culture of the company. Not the culture that is written on your wall, but the culture that really, really happens. So that is why, as you presented me, when I build brands, I say that I synchronize corporate culture, business culture, brand culture with brand positioning.

because the culture is already there. We have to have great ties. just pay attention to people.

I think you’re so right. Yeah, and it’s like, it’s the thing that I find, I don’t know if you find this as well, the leadership team can be, it’s like onion rings of a way. So they’re sort of right in the middle, aren’t they?

But by the time you get to the end of the onion, that’s where the reality is, right? And so I’m the same as you, I think it’s so important. People, I call them on the front line, right?

So people that talk to customers as well. So I know you’re talking about culture, but even when you’re trying to position a brand in a marketplace, so even when you’re taking the market view of the brand, you’ve got to go and speak to the people that are actually talking to customers on a daily basis, their complaints, their problems, their challenges, the value that you’re offering. You’ve got to hear it from either those customers or from the people within the team that know those customers inside out.

And if you’re neglecting that, you’re going to go off in a wrong direction. So, 100%, 100%. So, question then.

So, let’s just center it back around. So, how do you find then that strategic brand building can really help a company become, you know, embrace these concepts of conscious capitalism? Is it through all of these things that you’re talking about, through workshops, interviews, discussions, listening?

How do you go about that? Maybe I could center the question around, how do we get companies to be more conscious?

I like the usage of the world, of the word, I’m sorry, because conscious is about, in my opinion, right? I don’t know, it might sound a little bit polemic, but people say that conscious is about being great for the world and about doing everything right. I think that being conscious is having consciousness about your around.

That’s it. I can do something bad. If I know that, I’m conscious of it, you know?

I know that. I know that I’m doing that. It’s not that I only do good things.

So that’s the whole basis of being a human being. We make mistakes as well. So that’s something that I’d like to state here.

So listening to people is the main thing. And yeah, I do that by doing a lot of workshops, interviews, listening and everything. And I have this framework called Brand Anatomy that I have developed that helps me with that.

So it starts with the inner part of the brand that is exactly this core DNA essence called whatever you want. And we do that by listening different groups. So we do appreciative and investigation.

We do focus groups. We do workshops. We do interviews with leadership.

We do meetings with HR. We do whatever it takes. For us, you have photograph of the culture in a more realistic as possible way.

And then we can go to the other parts, like you said, of the onion, other layers that I call the brand narrative, the brand interactions, and the brand ecosystem. So those are kind of the layers that we work with and in that exact order.

Should we break it down then? So peel off those onion layers. So like, let’s talk about the next layer down.

So you’re working on the inside and then you mentioned the next layer. So how do you go from doing all the research and the interviews to, I guess, aligning it with the next layer? Can you remind us what the next layer was called?

Of course. So the first one is the brand Essence, as I call it. So it’s the moment of knowing who truly this brand is and what does it like shows to the world, wants to show to the world.

So as I told you, like through interviews, focus groups and everything. So we’re going to find, reveal that Essence. I never say that we build the Essence because the Essence is already there.

Right? In my perspective, the Essence is already there. I don’t build the Essence of other people.

It’s there. I just have to have a careful look and listen so I can see that. The second layer, Jacob, would be the brand narrative.

So how does the brand speak? So now we start to talk about things like the naming, the logo, olfactory identity, visual identity, sound identity and everything. So how does that brand speak?

If we’re talking about identity, it’s now. So the narrative and everything. The third layer would be the brand interactions.

So now that I know my essence, now that I know how I speak and my identity, who and how would I interact with people? So now I’m talking about all the actions that I can do about digital marketing and events and everything and advertising and all the things that are like to reach people outside. So the brand interactions.

And the fourth one, that is not a layer of the brand, but I would like in the little dotted line actually, is the brand ecosystem. So here I have all of the stakeholders that I’m talking to or that I’m not talking to. I choose not to talk to them right now, but they’re there.

So I have to look at them and I have to do the strategy of how I should interact to them.

I had a question to interrupt you. At what point are you looking at, you know, competitors in the market and, you know, the customer? What stage is that?

Perfect. So we have another part that I don’t call a layer, but it’s like something that it’s in the middle of brand interactions and brand ecosystem. So it’s like the membrane that it’s called the brand monitoring.

So that’s something that I call monitoring because it’s something that never finishes. You have to be always monitoring. So that is when we do like a market research, price research, benchmarking and everything.

So we also do at Essence, my company, we also do market research to talk to customers, to talk to competitors, to talk to potential customers, and to research them. So I understand that it’s very important for the brand. I do not keep myself only in the inner part.

I know that’s very important. But I think that those are things that help me organize my strategy, but they are not like the main drivers of that, you know? The main drivers should be the things that are inside the company and the things from outside, and they help me to guide, to navigate that better.

Hello, fellow brand builders. We interrupt your regular programming for a very special announcement. From august 27 to 30, join us for the Brand Builders Summit, a transformative four-day free virtual event designed just for you.

Whether you’re a creative business owner, designer, strategist, marketing professional or entrepreneur, this summit will help you become an extraordinary brand builder. There’s going to be live Q&A’s, workshops, expert panels, networking opportunities, and thousands of dollars in bonuses and prizes. With 28 speakers, including industry experts, this is your chance to elevate your branding game.

Join the waitlist now at brandbuildersummit.com to secure your free spot. That’s brandbuildersummit.com. Now back to the show.

I read something the other day where it was saying like when you’re building a brand, it’s actually, you’re actually thinking about what you want to become, if that makes sense. And that is very much fueled by who you are. So there’s a kind of an interesting crossover there.

And I think the thing for me, from what you’ve said, Maria, is, and I passionately believe in this, the balance between the inside and the outside, right? because no brand will exist if it just ignores the market, right? It has to create value for customers.

That’s the main point of a company. If you don’t have that, you’re going to die very quickly because no one’s going to buy what you’re offering. But as you say, there’s this real importance that that’s consciously done inside.

And it’s funny, I’ve been doing a project at the moment, and I can’t go into too many details, but it’s in a very stale, boring, dull kind of technical marketplace where everybody’s very geeky and it’s all very jargon heavy. But I kind of got in with the company and I was doing various things and listening and surveys and some of the things that you’ve talked about, focus groups, and trying to understand the opportunities ahead and understand their culture. And these people, they were actually really, really friendly.

So even though this is quite a big global company, very in that sector, they had this appearance like everybody else in the market of being very, very boring, frankly. But when I got to know them, I was like, you guys aren’t boring. You’re really exciting in doing all these events and blah, blah, blah.

So we were looking at the strategy. So that’s an internal truth, that they are very social, very exciting, very friendly. And then I started to go to business events that they do.

So I went to an event in Düsseldorf in Germany. Turns out exactly the same, that they were very friendly, welcoming everybody onto their stand. Their stand was the busiest stand in the whole of this massive arena.

Why? because they were pouring alcohol, they were having fun, there was a bit of dancing. Even at one point, it nearly blew my mind.

So I was kind of like, right, okay. So weirdly, all of our communications, the way we’re positioning ourselves is like we’re copying everybody else in our sector. We’re trying to look serious and jock.

But the truth, the internal truth is that we’re super friendly. And also that’s an external truth that all of our customers, so I spoke to customers as well, they loved the fact that they were very friendly and everybody could kind of get FaceTime with their account manager and all this stuff. I waffle.

But the point I’m trying to say is this, that the truth was that they’re very friendly. And that is a market positioning, which we’ve started to go down for this particular company, as well as an internal cultural truth, that they’re very friendly and they’re building, they’re actually a Norwegian origins in Norway. And there’s a phrase in Norway called Higli Higli, I’ve probably said that wrong, which basically translates as a friendly, comfortable experience, right?

And that’s their philosophy. It runs inside the business, but also in how they do business outside. So I think you’re right.

I think there’s threads of truth, usually if it’s a successful company that they’ve built their company on, but they’ve forgotten sometimes, why was it, why wasn’t we successful? And what’s inside our company that’s special? And I think as a strategist and a brand builder, you’ve got to connect to that with the market opportunity that customers want.

And if you can do that, that’s where you get the powerful secret source that will fuel the company forward. And as you say, it’s that word conscious. You’ve got to do that consciously.

A lot of companies do it organically, accidentally. If you can find it as a brand builder, that’s where you’re going to get a lot of success, in my view. What are your thoughts on that?

Yes, perfect. consciously, intentionally. If you’re very friendly, why do not let the world know about it?

If you’re already getting customers, you could get so much more or build so much better relationships with people, if people knew about it. That’s the example that you gave us, is exactly the thing that I say that sometimes you have a great culture and you’re not letting people know about it, and sometimes it’s the opposite. So, on that case, it’s the best scenario, because it’s like, let’s let people know about what’s going on in there, and I think that should be very good for the company after all.

So, yeah, that’s the thing. Like, how can you integrate? How can you attract?

How can you inspire people from outside, if you’re not inspiring people from inside? In that case, how can you show people on the outside, that you’re already inspiring people on the inside? And that’s beautiful.

I guess that’s amazing. I want to work with that client as well.

No, they’re my client. But it’s so true. And that whole concept of letting people know is now becoming the biggest focal point as we roll out a new, deliberate, conscious positioning for the business, which is distinctive and different in their marketplace.

So creating a whole new positioning around humanity and the human touch and being personable and approachable. And it also affects just, I’m just using this as an example because I think it links with what you’ve said. It also affects the way that they are building their operations, their systems, their products going forwards.

Now they’re going to be way more deliberate about putting a little bit of humanity into everything that they’re doing. Big task, we’re going to be doing it for, I’ll probably be consulting with them for a few years because they’ve built up such a kind of a rigid, I would call it, I call it like the copy number one in the category. And so that’s, you know, it’s going to take a little while for them to embrace this and be like, oh, so we can be friendly?

Yes, you can. We don’t have to write the copy as if we’re really dull and boring, you know, like, let’s have some fun with it. We can do it.

So it’s going to take a while, but it then becomes the basis of the strategy to position the brand authentically going forwards. So I’ve got a question for you. Let’s shift to kind of, we’ve talked about the positives and how it could be really helpful for a business and a brand.

What about the negatives? Like, have you ever found, what are the main pitfalls that you find when you do your work, when you’ve been working and talking to these CEOs? What are the main pitfalls and barriers that you’re finding for people embracing conscious capitalism?

Okay, there are some of them. So, we have nowadays a lot of other emerging narratives around conscious businesses, like ESG and so on. And yeah, there are people that truly do not understand about how capitalism can be conscious.

Like, I had a lot of people telling me that. Like, I don’t believe that capitalism from like its core can really be conscious. And it’s not the basis of that.

Yeah, so there are people that understand things differently. If you read my book, maybe you can change your mind on that, because my book is about talking about capitalism since like the beginning. So I bring Karl Marx and, you know, Adam Smith to talk about it.

So it’s not boring, I promise you. It’s a fiction, and it’s very, very fun. But I don’t know, let’s see.

It’s not, it might seem fun, but it is. So I think that this is one of the most, the biggest challenges that conscious capitalism can face in the market. And as I said, other emerging narratives that are right now getting traction.

And I respect and I honor all of them. Like Essence is a B Corp and I’m proud of that. I understand what B Corps want to bring to the world and it’s a different vision and it’s all so great.

So I don’t think that there’s only one pathway. I think that the right pathway is the one that you really find yourself connecting the most, because that’s what will work better for you. So it’s not about having one right answer.

It’s about people truly connecting to something, believing in something and making that work. So there are a lot of pitfalls on that case, like you said. But yeah, I think today we have a lot of ways and you just choose your own.

Could I just ask for some examples that you’ve used the brand anatomy framework, so to jump from conscious capitalism back to your framework, but just to understand how you’ve used it for a particular business, Matt shared one of his examples, but love to hear from you how you’ve used it.

I use that for all of my clients. So it’s easy to talk about it, but I don’t know, maybe I can talk about this recent work that I did that is a very interesting one. And I’m very proud of having done that.

It’s a digital bank, a fintech, destined made exclusively for the people in the favelas in the Brazil. You know about the favelas? Those are places where historically, mostly people who didn’t have the money to be in the main parts of the city would go.

Another word is like slums. I know it’s not exactly the same, but some people may be familiar with that phrase.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s very diverse territory, but mainly we have people who are struggling in the financial feuds. And in Brazil, we have a lot of those.

So we have this new bank that has been built for them. And that’s very interesting because if we talk about data, we are talking about a population that it’s not banked. In a very high level, a lot of them still use cash, and they don’t have a bank account because they face a lot of prejudice by not knowing financial terms or not wanting to enter this glass wall, air conditioning place that we call bank agency.

And a lot of times those people face a hard time on going there. So that’s the kind of things that, I don’t know, people from abroad or us white people, we don’t sometimes even know about because it’s not something that we face, but there it’s something very, very important that we have to pay attention to. So the thing is that the favelas, they are not like this environment of poor people.

No, it’s people say that favela is not, they are not needy, they are potent because there are so, so many people that billions and billions of dollars circulate on that. Like in Brazil, it’s Brazilian reais, but here I’m saying like dollars or pounds, but money circulate that. So it’s power because they have together, they have a great purchasing power.

So they truly move the market. So put that aside, I had the honor to help them to build their brand book and to position the brand and everything since the beginning. And it was great because for that, I had to do a lot of research.

So I talked to community leaders from all across Brazil through interviews. And then we did focus groups with them to listen to them, to listen to what were their needs, to what they wanted. So yeah, we started from outside if you take a look, but essentially we wanted to see how they felt.

It’s not only about what product do you want me to launch, it’s about how do you feel and how can I put that feeling inside the brand beauty. So that was the main effort to do that. So by that, by talking to them and afterwards, of course, by doing workshops with the leadership and the founders of the company, they didn’t have employees yet, they were founding the company, now they have, but they are founding the company.

And we talked to them, we listened to them, and we were able to create, to design this brand platform that is very well entangled and connected to the purpose of helping people in communities to live better and to have a better financial life. And the bank will go from just simplifying financial terms to having managers and branches that are welcoming and friendly for them, to not having terms in English, what is very common in the financial background. So we kind of translated that for their language.

They have very specific language, very specific slang and everything. So we introduced that for their own way of talking. And that was the way of doing this brand, I call it from inside out.

because it was, it started like a startup. So it’s not like I have this big employee team that I have to listen to, they didn’t have it. So we started from the essence that is like to really embrace people and their needs.

So if you don’t understand English, I’ll do that for you. If going inside an air conditioning glass branch is hard for you, we’re going to do a co-working in your neighborhood that you can go whenever you want. And if you don’t want to talk to a manager, because that’s very distant, we’re going to make them all godmothers and godfathers.

That’s what we call them. Like, so your bank manager is your godfather that will help you with your new business or with the payment of your new house that you’re buying your first own house. People say that’s the first dream of the Brazilian people.

It’s having your own house.

I can see you bridging through the next stage now. So you’ve got the insights, you’ve uncovered the problems, and now you’re kind of creating that narrative that you mentioned with The Voice. So how you interact with your customers and how you act.

Yes, all the layers. So that’s the thing. When I say that I was very proud of doing that is that because I know that’s something that will really change a lot of things in the landscape of finance and relationship with money for that people.

Yeah, it sounds like a very impactful project and very meaningful for a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah, and even for us.

Yeah, for sure. And that’s the type of project you have to really listen deep, right? I mean, you’re from Brazil, so that makes sense.

I literally had, funny enough, I’ve been working on a similar project with Latino immigrants in the US. Now, I’m a white guy from the UK, right? I have literally no clue on what it’s like to be a Latino immigrant.

And that was a massive project where we had to listen ever so heavily to that community and to the people who were Latino immigrants helping people with… In that case, it was a brand helping people with remittance payments back home. So very similar project in a way, but amazing, amazing that you’ve taken the time to go through that with us and show how it relates to the framework and to conscious capitalism at the end of the day, which is, as you say, just doing some of these things very, very carefully, thoughtfully in a listening way from the bottom up, as well as guiding it commercially from the top.

So thank you so much. That’s been absolutely fantastic. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on?

We’re coming sort of to the close of our time together. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on?

There was something that you just said that I think that it should be addressed, that is like taking the time. That is very important because when you answered about the pitfalls, that’s something like a lot of managers, a lot of leaders, they don’t want to take the time. Why is that?

Why is that?

because the… I don’t know.

Time is money. I know. But long term, this is what I say to my clients, long term you’ll make more money.

The money is the outcome of creating value. You create the value and the outcome is the money. We’re so focused on the outcome that we sometimes forget how do we get to the money.

It’s because you create value and you create that culture within your company of innovation, of producing useful things for the brand’s audience. But if you don’t take that time, you’re not doing it consciously to Maria’s point, what are you doing? You’re not going to get there.

It just frustrates me, obviously working in this space a lot, you can see it. The more businesses that you’ve worked with over years and then you realize, oh yeah, it’s just obvious to me, but it’s not obvious when you’re in the thick of it, I think. When you’re in a company, like you’re saying Maria, there’s the day-to-day, there’s the short-term numbers, all of the pressure, people are navigating their careers, trying to get up the next rung.

I think it’s got to start at the top, in my view. Someone’s got to say, let’s stop, let’s take some time, as you were saying, to figure out where we’re taking this, let’s do that consciously. I think it’s been great.

How can people find you, Maria? How can people interact with you, find your book, find some of the projects that you’re involved in?

Great. So, I’m at everywhere. So, I’m on Instagram at Madi with an I, Brazil with an S, underscore on LinkedIn.

Great.

I’m at everywhere, so I’m on Instagram at maria-brazil.com.br as well, and essencebranding.com.br, the website of the company, and it ends with BR because it’s presented and hosted. The book is on Amazon. It’s in English, The Defendant’s Speech, so you can easily find there paperback, Kindle, audiobook, everywhere.

So good. Can I ask you a question? Did you change your name to Brazil because I can’t believe it.

It’s amazing that you were born in Brazil and your last name is Brazil. How did that happen?

Thank you very much. You know something that’s even different in Brazil. When people in Brazil listen to my name, it’s like because, some curiosity, Maria is the most common name in the world.

But in Brazil, it never comes alone. It’s always Maria something. So I am JUST Maria, like JUST Branding, I’m JUST Maria.

So that is different for people like Maria, Maria what? And I say JUST Maria, simple as that, less is more. And Brazil is my family name.

So my mother, my sister, my grandpa, they all have Brazil. So it’s just my name. But some people in Brazil think that’s an artistic name, like you made it up.

And no, I didn’t make it up. It’s just my name. As simple as it gets.

As Brazilian as it gets. It doesn’t get any more Brazilian than that. Like Maria, most common name, 30 million.

Maria is in Brazil and the name of the country.

That’s it. Wonderful. Well, listen, thanks so much for carving out the time to spend with us over the course of this episode.

It’s been a really interesting conversation. This is JUST Matt and JUST Jacob from JUST Branding. Thanking JUST Maria for our contribution.

It’s been absolutely amazing. Thank you.

Thank you very much. It was great to be here. We could spend all day talking, but I know that Jacob is late for him, right?