Suzanne Proksa:
Welcome to the Suzanne show with me, Suzanne Proxa, HR and business strategist, former featured Etsy seller, plant addict, concert lover, gardener, landscaper in trainee, and human straight up obsessed with helping others and cheering on women. Here, we talk a little business, personal development, women's health, and a whole lot about things that matter, help people, and give them joy. Grab your coffee or your wine, break out one of your hundreds of notebooks, light that soy candle, and let's dive in. Hello everybody. So anybody that knows me knows that I'm living my best life today. Why? Because we are talking about one of my favorite topics and that is branding. And I'm even more excited because we have a very special guest today. I am talking with Kim, who, in addition to living an amazing life, which I'll let him tell you about, he has also written a book called branding Queens, where he talks with 20 incredible women who have built global brand dynasties.
Suzanne Proksa:
So I cannot wait to dive into this conversation. But first, Kim, I would love it if you would tell the audience a little bit more about yourself before we dive into all of the questions that I have for you today.
Kim Rozdeba:
Hi, Suzanne. And thank you very much for inviting me on your show. I'm pretty excited as well. So a little bit about me, I grew up on Vancouver Island. It's the most Westerner Western place in Hana. I traveled Europe when I was 18 on $10 a day for about a year. I can't do that for I don't think you can do it for a $100 today. I was Olympic torch escort runner during the 1988 winter Olympics.
Kim Rozdeba:
I founded the International Youth Ag Summit. That was back in 2013 and it's still going strong today. I'm an amateur chef and I'm a wine lover. I'm also a musketeer and a musketeer allows you the, the permission or gives you the permission to drink our menu. Anyways, there's, that's another story. I'm a snowboarder. I'm a blogger. I'm a husband, and I have 3 great adult children.
Kim Rozdeba:
I'm currently working for a Fortune 500 company as head of communications and public affairs, and I have over 3 decades of branding experience. So, Suzanne, I'm really excited that you're excited about branding.
Suzanne Proksa:
Thank you so much for that introduction. What amazing background you have. So let's just start with the basics just for those who maybe don't have an overall understanding of what brand and branding is. Tell us what is a brand and why is it important?
Kim Rozdeba:
So I'm gonna start off with a quote that I sort of paraphrase from Maya Angelou. And my quote is, a brand isn't about what it says or does, but how it makes its customers feel. So a brand is a feeling the customer has. It is that emotional connection that they have with your service or product. It's a set of expectations, memories, stories, relationships tied to that product or that service. Now, why is this important? It builds customer loyalty. If you can make a customer an advocate of your product, they will get more customers for you without you having to do anything. It'll keep you ahead of the competition as well.
Kim Rozdeba:
It'll attract talent and it will build employee pride. So a brand, it becomes extremely important. And particularly if you want to be a sustainable brand for a long time.
Suzanne Proksa:
Okay. So now that everybody has the rundown and what a brand is, why it's important. Talk to us about what are the 5 C's of branding. I cannot wait to hear this.
Kim Rozdeba:
Okay. So the 5 C's are really sort of broken down into the why, what, who, when, and how. So the first one is commitment and that's the why. And this is probably one of the most important ones for a brand, because this is about the brand's promise. It's about why it exists. It's cause or vision, its values and purpose. This is the foundation of the brand. This is where the storytelling comes from as well.
Kim Rozdeba:
The second one is construct. This is the what, and, and this is all the identical identity elements of a brand, the physical and emotional. So it's the logo design. It's the color. It's the name of the product or the the the company. It is the images, the fonts. It's the packaging. It's the decor.
Kim Rozdeba:
It's the tonality and feeling. It's the personality of the brand. The third one is the who and, and you know, a lot of people think, okay, so it's going to be customer and I'm going, no, it's actually bigger than the customer. It's your community because your customer is right in the center of your community. But you also have advocates and you have amplifiers and believers. You have, you also have employees that are really important. You know, they are the ones that help build your culture. And then of course there is the actual community that you are actually working in.
Kim Rozdeba:
That is also important. And then the next con one next C is content. And content is is the one I think most people associate with branding, and that's the advertising, the marketing, the publicity, the public relations, promotions, the sponsorships, all the digital presence of the brand. You know, also, what's really important is the word-of-mouth. I mean, word-of-mouth today is is more digital, but, you know, the leadership voice that is carried from the company and from the senior people is also extremely important. And then the last one is called consistency. This is the how, and, and this one, I must admit it maybe is thought the one that's the most exciting, but it is probably the most important because that consistency of delivering your product or service over and over around the world every day is really important for sustaining your brand. And so it's, this is all about the governance, the, the, this model of the, the production, the quality.
Kim Rozdeba:
It's the training of your staff. It is the research and development and monitoring trends. So this one, as I said, without this one, a brand will not be sustainable.
Suzanne Proksa:
Okay. So I'm sure that not everybody is doing this perfectly. So of the 5 C's, what do many companies poorly execute?
Kim Rozdeba:
Suzanne, this is a really tough question that you've asked me. And the reason why it's tough is can depends on the actual company and the target audience that they're involved in. So, so if you're a small organization, you could be a consultant, may have a 100 customers and that's okay. You know? So when you look at it from the size of the organization and who your customer is, the answer might be different. But in general, I would say that the commitment and the consistency are probably the 2 that some organizations get wrong. So let me talk with the about the commitment. What I mean by that is a lot of companies think what they're solving is with a product of one particular thing. So let's, let me use an example of, of, of, let's just say it's a shampoo and it's just shampoo that allows you to, you know, use and it makes your hair shiny or makes it thicker or whatever it is.
Kim Rozdeba:
But that isn't your purpose or your goal, your goal, your purpose, your promise is much bigger than just that product solution. So it's understanding the big picture of what you're trying to do. And I know I know we're going to talk about my book, Branding Queens, but I'm going to use an example there of, of Elizabeth Arden and Elizabeth Arden started with a, you know, a face cream and she called it a jar of hope. So she didn't get into the attributes of the the the cream of making maybe your skin softer or younger. She got into the big picture of what she was trying to do, and that's what customers can relate to. Consistency. This is the one that I said is really hard because if you've got a product that, that, you know, requires people to per, deliver it, You've got to make sure you've got good training. You've got to make sure you've got good people.
Kim Rozdeba:
You got to make sure that you've got systems in place of delivering. I know, you know, there's airlines every day that aren't making people happy because of consistency. And so, so, you know, how do they fix that? You know, that's a big question that I'm not going to answer here today, but those would be the 2 that I see where cuss companies fail.
Suzanne Proksa:
I often help a lot of new people to the online space, new to new to business. And so I am really curious for their sake for a new business, which of the 5 C's do you think is the most important for them? And why do you think that?
Kim Rozdeba:
Okay. So I'm, I'm gonna go back to commitment because I think that's extremely important. I'm understanding where you're coming from from a brand, but you also need to understand your customer and your community in particular, your customer, who is your customer. And, and sometimes that's hard, particular if you are doing a podcast, for example, you know, I, when I wrote my book, same thing, I'm still trying to find out, you know, who is my reader. And I think I've figured it out, but at the beginning, I wasn't really sure. And so to understand that commitment, and you're going to have to be relative, relative, You gotta be relevant to your customer when you build your promise. So that becomes really important. And, and, and doing that, you know, Hey, it seems obvious sometimes.
Kim Rozdeba:
And sometimes it's not so obvious, but that's where I would spend the effort upfront.
Suzanne Proksa:
Great information. Thank you for that. So those of you who are new in business, keep that in mind. Alright. Now we are going to move on to the good stuff, what I've been waiting to hear about, and that is this book. You recently wrote a book about 20 entrepreneurial women who built iconic brands. Who are these women and these brands we've, we need to hear about this.
Kim Rozdeba:
So this goes, this book goes back to the early 1800 and the youngest brand is about 18, 18 years. The oldest brand is close to 200 years old. So the women that were in the book is Barbara Nicole Cleco, the champagne, Anne Bissle, the, the vacuum cleaner company in the cleaning carpet industry, Madam CJ Walker. Madam CJ Walker was the millionaire black woman in the United States. Elizabeth Arden. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Elizabeth Arden. And Coco Chanel. Coco Chanel is a very interesting designer.
Kim Rozdeba:
She started off when she was quite young. She started as a hat maker. And, when the 2nd world war came along, she, she disappeared from France for about 10 years. She ran off with a German lover. And when she came back after this, the war was over and everything had all the dust settled. She came back and in her seventies, she started up the company again. And if she hadn't started up the company again, I don't know if it would have existed today if she had not started up. And in her eighties, she passed away finishing work.
Kim Rozdeba:
She worked about, she lived about a block away from where she worked. Margaret Rudkin. I don't know if this is a familiar name to you, but Pepperidge Farms, I think probably is a familiar name. She started off by making healthy bread by using milled whole wheat. And she started because her son had allergies and her doctor said, you know, maybe if you fed him a whole, because at that time, back in the forties fifties, you were starting to see, you know, everything was, instant, you know, bread, was, white and fluffy and we had Tang, you had all of these different, you know, products that aren't probably as healthy as, as they could be. And so she started Pepperidge Farms. Another famous product of hers is Goldfish Crackers. If you've had children, you'll have sure to have had those in your house.
Kim Rozdeba:
I still have them in my house. My kids have all left for a while now. The next one was Olive and Beach Aircraft. Here's a woman that had never flown on a plane in her life. Her husband did. He passed away suddenly when he was in his early fifties. She took over the company and made it a mass of organization around the world running, I would say in a very male oriented industry. Lauder, again, another famous name that I probably don't have to explain.
Kim Rozdeba:
Ruth Handler. So Ruth Handler started with her husband, Mattel, and she was the CEO. And she actually was the one that, developed and created the Barbie doll, which is still a product that's out there that's being sold in the millions around the world. Anita Roddick, who started The Body Shop, Katharine Graham, the west, the Washington Post. She was the only female CEO on the Fortune 500 at the time she was a CEO. Mary Kay, Mary Kay, same thing about her. She started her business later in life after her kids were, were much older and she was, had the time she quit working for a company because she kept training people. Generally there were men and, and they would get promoted above her.
Kim Rozdeba:
So she said, I'm gonna start my own company. Actually, she's wanted to actually to start write a book on how to to succeed as a woman. And then she thought, well, why can't I just do that? And she did. She did exactly that. Queen Elizabeth, the second Lillian Vernon, the direct marketing queen. She started from her kitchen table when she was pregnant and she was looking for extra money for the family. And she started a direct mail company in her kitchen at her home. And it was at one point, she had a circulation of over 166 mailing addresses of customers around the world.
Kim Rozdeba:
Liz Claiborne, another nurse who started the separates and an interesting, she waited as well until her son had finished high school and that was going on to university to, to start her business with her husband in support. And, she had a half a $1,000,000,000 in 10 years as a in sales, with over 2,000 employees in less than 10 years. Incredible success. Martha Stewart, no introduction necessary for her, but a person that has reinvented her throughout her life. I mean, she started as a babysitter and she went on to be a model. She was a stockbroker. She was a home designer, a caterer, a cookbook author, a TV host, you know, and now she's a comedian. Oprah Winfrey is another one I don't need to, to introduce, but she became the 1st black woman billionaire.
Kim Rozdeba:
And, you know, she was successful in helping, sell, I think over 55,000,000 books around the world. And Debbie Fields at Fields cookies, Tory Burch, the designer, as I said, the, the youngest brand, which was in years. And then the youngest branding queen I have is Sarah Blakely and Sarah Blakely started Spanx.
Suzanne Proksa:
Thank you so much. I just love to hear these stories about women doing, you know, just amazing things like this. I mean, what an amazing accomplishment, right? I'm curious, what was your inspiration for really doing this work in and writing this book?
Kim Rozdeba:
So it actually started with Barbara Nicole, click all, you know, the, the oldest brand that I have in the book. And I had discovered that vuv, click all. So vuv translated from French to English is widow. And when I discovered that I go, why would you put widow Clicquot on a bottle of champagne? And that started my, my quest, in trying to discover why, and you'll have to read my book to find out. But this was a woman in Napoleon Bonovarte's day where, you know, he was, fighting wars all over the place. Her husband passes away suddenly of yellow fever. She has a young daughter and she's a widow. So, so I wanted to find out exactly why she put widow on that bottle.
Kim Rozdeba:
So you'll have to read the book. That's got me started to start thinking who are other women out there that have built such incredible brands and have taken such incredible risks as well. So it took me 3 years, to uncover all of these gems and learn. And, and what's amazing. Well, maybe it's not that amazing is how little has been written on many of these women in particular on their business, on their business skills, their how they ran a business. I mean, there's been a lot of writing about Coco Chanel, but more it's on her personal life, not so much on her business. Same with Oprah Winfrey. I mean, there's a lot of stories on Oprah, but a lot of them don't get into to her business savviness and her incredible abilities to build such a huge company.
Kim Rozdeba:
So so that's how I started, and and it got away from me. I wasn't really I wasn't really planning on writing a book. I have a blog and I was thinking maybe this would be some really good blog blog articles, but it got away from me. And and, yeah, I found 20 incredible branding queens.
Suzanne Proksa:
Okay. Y'all did you know that I offer tip jar specials every month where you can get something cool for tipping the podcast? If you are loving the episode or the podcast in general, head over to tip jar.viporthepodcastpageat the suzanshowpodcast.com and check out this month's options. VIPs also get special access to events with my guests. Thank you for letting me cut in, and now let's get back to the episode. I have to ask this question. What did you learn from these branding queens that we can all learn from? Your, what, what did they do that we may be able to tap into as well?
Kim Rozdeba:
Great question, Suzanne. So not surprising. These were all extremely hardworking people. Quite a few of them were perfectionists. You know, if, if you know, you had to work with them, I think it might be difficult because their expectations are so high. Now that's not to say they didn't have loyal employees. In actual fact, they did. But there were a lot of people that came and went because they just they couldn't handle the bar being so high.
Kim Rozdeba:
One of the most interesting thing that I did see across all of these women was their ability to use their intuition. And again, you hear this all the time in particular, Oprah, you know, you know, listen to yourself, you know. But others, you know, use their talents. Lillian Vernon, she was the shopper for all of the products in her, her catalogs that she had been so successfully to sell over and over season to season. And she said that she had this, this, this gut feeling of when she saw something and goes, yes, and that's, you know, going to be for my customers and it would sell, you know, multimillions of them. The other thing was empathy. They actually understood their customers probably better than anybody because they were their customer. And and they wanted to solve, you know, problems of their customers, and and they knew how to do that.
Kim Rozdeba:
But this empathy was really important. And and today, we hear, you know, of of of, you know, being socially conscious as a brand, these women were doing it well before anyone even talking about it. And they were doing it with their employees, as well as their communities. So, a Rita, sorry, Anita Radek, you know, she became famous as you know, every time she was promoting her products, she was promoting some sort of, of save the world, you know, save the whale was I think a big popular one that she did. She never did advertising. What she did do is, was took her brand for a cause. And one other major one was, was, you know, not using animal testing in any of her products and, and, and any cosmetic as well. And the other thing they were obsessed, I said with perfectionism, but they were consistency and quality of their products was hugely important to them.
Kim Rozdeba:
And, and they weren't afraid to try new things. And, you know, lots of these things didn't succeed, but they learned from those things. And, and now that leads to my final one, which is they all came to this with not having any experience whatsoever in a lot of cases, no formal education to help them. And they had no, you know, mentors out there. They were doing all these things themselves. And they were, you know, they were a woman in a man's business world. And so, so, you know, they could only trust themselves and they only listened to themselves and they did things differently. And they had that faith in themselves that they were doing something because it was important and it was something that their customers needed and they were solving a problem.
Kim Rozdeba:
So so, you know, it is amazing. As you can tell, I I'm, I am in awe of these women because as I said, they, they, and I, I was trying to see if I could see different things, but I saw common things amongst all these women that I've just sort of said, these are really common traits that they all had.
Suzanne Proksa:
Kim, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing with us today. You know, I am a big believer that that brand is just one of those crucial things. Right? And I am so glad that you wanted to be on the show, wanted to talk about your book and your story. And I'm sure that other people feel the same and would love to connect with you, reach out, maybe even buy the book. So where should people find you? What is your favorite social media or maybe it's your website? And then also how do people get their hands on the book? I'm sure that there are people out there waiting to hear.
Kim Rozdeba:
So my last name is not a common last name. So, so if you can go to my website, which is rozdeba.com, which is rozdeba dotcom. You'll find more about me and my book there, but you can also find the book basically anywhere. Barnes and noble Amazon. If you go to Amazon, there is the ebook. There's a softcover. There's a hardcover. There's also an audio book at Kobo.
Kim Rozdeba:
You can find it at Kobo or Google as well to find, find the book. And I'd love if you you wanted to, to, buy the book and, and read. And please, if you're going to read my book, I would love you to to give me a review either on Goodreads. I'm also there as well as on on Amazon. I'd I'd really appreciate that. My favorite place where I hang out from a social perspective, well, LinkedIn is is 1, and you can find me there under Raj Diba. I have my name, Kim Derek, both Kim and Derek there, but last name is Raj Diba. I can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
Kim Rozdeba:
Yeah. Please reach out. I'd love, as I said, if you do read my book to to leave a a review. Greatly appreciate it. I really enjoyed this show. Thanks, Suzanne.
Suzanne Proksa:
Alright, everybody. Awesome. Head out, make sure you find Kim and find the book and let's get that branding game on point. So, Kim, do you have anything else that you want to leave the audience with? You'll maybe 1 or 2 takeaways from the discussion that you really want people to leave with today.
Kim Rozdeba:
So, Suzanne, I'm gonna go back to my quote. A brand isn't about what it says or does, but how it makes its customers feel. So at the end of the day, all the things we've been talking about, it's really just about the customer and an understanding what they need or even anticipating probably better what they need and ensuring that you have the product or the service with that consistency that I spoke of earlier, but also understanding your why. Why are you doing this? Because that is really what they want to know is why you're doing this.
Suzanne Proksa:
Once again, thank you so much for being on the episode and I am sure we will see each other around soon and to the audience as always. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the podcast. I hope that you loved this episode as much as I did.
Kim Rozdeba:
Well, thank you very much, Suzanne. I love this as well. As I said, you know, I'm excited when somebody else is excited about brand and branding. Thank you.
Suzanne Proksa:
I hope that you loved this episode. If you did give me those shout outs, show me some love on iTunes, give me a rating. And hey, if you wanna know where to find me, you can find me on pretty much all social media at suzanneproxa. That's suzanneproxa, and you can also head over to my website suzanneproxa.com. Until then, I'll see you in the next episode and here is parte music for you.
