Darren Taylor On Impact Branding And Storytelling To Engage Audiences

Darren Taylor is an award-winning brand strategist, keynote speaker and author who has helped hundreds of organisations – from traditional family-run businesses, not-for-profits and social enterprises, to mature multinationals and startups – to develop and grow their brand to compete in a global environment.

Educated at Swinburne and RMIT in Engineering, Marketing and Japanese language and The National Theatre in Music Theatre, he co-founded B Corp certified brand agency, Taylor & Grace, in 2006.

Darren is an accomplished pianist and pipe organist and an experienced NFP Board director, having served on the boards of Georges Mora Foundation, Chamber Music Australia and currently, Musica Viva Australia. Darren is passionate about the role that business can play in addressing the wicked social and environmental issues of our time and is on a mission to help all Australian businesses, regardless of size, stage, structure or sector to amplify their impact by leveraging their brand.

Darren discusses why effective impact branding and conveying your social enterprise's purpose is essential to engaging stakeholders and ensuring sustainable progress towards achieving your mission.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion for sustainable business, social enterprise and branding?

[Darren Taylor] - I was born and raised in Gippsland. From a very young age I was studious, musical, entrepreneurial and knew I wanted to use my talents to help people. I went on a bit of a circuitous route (as many of us do), studying chemical engineering, commerce, marketing, international trade, Japanese language, and musical theatre. This education laid the foundation for a 20 year-long love affair with branding and marketing.

Early in my career, I was often outraged to discover that businesses offering shoddy or superfluous products and services outperformed those offering things the world needed. I was determined to elevate those businesses and people within doing good in every way, so that they could be successful and make a positive impact.

In 2016, I wrote a book called Rebranding Branding, and that was to help non marketing leaders, boards, and C Suite members to understand what branding is, and the case for making it a strategic focus to build culture, drive performance, and achieve impact. One of my high school friends is none other than Julia Keady (Episode 466 of Impact Boom Podcast linked below), and she reached out to congratulate me after I'd written the book. She presented me with her brainchild the X Factor Collective, which is now known as Benefolk. They're a certified B Corp and social enterprise professional services intermediary doing some great work in helping social sector change makers achieve their missions without burning out. They're doing extraordinary work, so I was in like Flynn! I wanted to support, help, and be involved any way I could, so we've worked extensively together over that time on game changing brand transformation projects that have made a big impact on the community. This prompted us to pursue our own B Corp Certification, which we achieved last year. Led by our fabulous GM Craig Bulman, we now go deeper in our work with social enterprises, NFPs and corporate businesses wanting to double down on their ESG commitments.

I don't know what you were doing during COVID-19, but we weren't doing a hell of a lot! We decided to rebrand, but we wanted to make our rebranding not about us. To do this, we ran a competition calling it 50 for 50, which was basically 50 words for $50,000. We wanted to give Australian for purpose organisations an opportunity to throw their hat in the ring and win $50,000 worth of rebranding work. To cut a long story short, Social Traders was the winner, an amazing organisation which does great work in bringing buyers and social enterprises together. That was the beginning of a very successful and impactful relationship, and we partnered with them to relaunch them as the peak body of social enterprise procurement. You may be familiar with the project, the It Will Never Catch On campaign. It was well supported by the networks, and they've gotten a lot of reach, which was fantastic. I remember listening to the amazing Daniel Flynn, founder of Thank You, at SEWF in 2022, he said this is the time for bold and audacious brands to do bold and audacious things. Many social enterprises certainly do that and that's something we fully subscribe to achieving.

As the Founder of Taylor & Grace, can you share more about this organisation and how your B Corp is integrating better business practices?

I should say that we are just at the beginning of our B Corp journey. There are probably two key principles which have guided us here, and the first is that it's not just about being good, but it's also about doing good. Proactive action is important and not always done. The second point is that social impact initiatives need to be sustainable, and there is no point in going out of business trying to have an impact. We have had so many ideas on what impact we want to have as an organisation, and it was important to assess all those ideas through the lens of sustainability. There are lots of things we can do, but what can we do now that supports the business? There's no point in going out of business, and as a small business (there are only ten of us), we decided to stage our initiatives over time by starting small.

We created a social impact plan or a theory of change outlining the impact we want to make, how we'll measure it and communicate it. That's been helpful in terms of aligning us all to that plan. The three beneficiaries of the plan are firstly our people, secondly our clients, and thirdly our industry. The other thing I'd say is for impact to be sustainable, whether that's through a social enterprise, not for profit or corporate business, the pathway to impact needs to be baked into the business and brand strategy. It's not just something we do on the side, because it won't be sustainable. It'll run out of puff, and it won't serve a purpose for anyone.

Our purpose is to harness the passion and ingenuity of good people to ignite change for a fairer and better tomorrow. Our vision is that all Australian businesses and organisations, regardless of their size, stage, structure, and sector can ignite the change that's needed in the world by leveraging their brand to amplify their impact.

For our people, it was important to have an office that adhered to the highest social and environmental standards, and we recently moved into a fellow B Corp Hub Australia which was fantastic. We also offer an employee profits share scheme and seek feedback from staff on operational and strategic policy changes. We have an open book management style and encourage the team to self-manage. We also only take on clients who are aligned to our values and who are demonstrably committed to contributing to the UNSDG's. We're also in the process of fundamentally changing what we offer and how we offer it as part of our impact plan. I've learned that impact and brand are inextricably linked, and over nearly 20 years in branding I've seen many organisations fall short of achieving their impact because their brand lets them down.

How can a brand achieve optimal impact if people don’t know who they are and why they are remarkable or without having a strong emotional connection? brand is important for impact.

We are building an ecosystem of products and services to ensure every Australian business can hone their brand for impact. For start-ups we are packaging up our brand strategy IP, so that for a one-off small fee they can buy a workbook to guide them through developing a brand strategy. For scale-ups we're offering three entry-level low-cost packages to develop their brand strategy through a co design process. For more mature businesses, we offer our traditional bespoke consulting services, and for boards, peak bodies, and special interest groups I offer services as a brand advisor and keynote speaker. We're hoping to launch some of these new things soon, and for our industry we're looking to partner with our peers through licensing their IP to be included in the DIY start-up offering and to incentivise them to distribute the offering among their networks.

It's quite interesting when you realise that there are over 400,000 new businesses created in Australia every year. This amount increased over COVID-19, and we want to help at least half of these businesses by equipping them to improve their brand in a meaningful way. [We are ambitious], but you go big or go home as they say. There's a lot of need for these tools.

Where do you see key opportunities to grow the purpose-driven business movement, and what is required to take it mainstream?

Firstly, I think certification is the starting point, but while it's very important, it is just a starting point. Last time I checked there around 33 certifications you can go for, such as GRI, B Corp, FSC, or Certified Humane. I just went to the B Corp Assembly conference where they introduced new standards for B Corps, and these standards will be harmonised with other certifications to reduce duplication and barriers for organisations looking to certify to multiple standards. I'm all for these impact certifications and the networks that come with them, but we need to be careful that we don’t start seeing them as a means to an end or that those certified organisations just hang out and buy from each other without taking more affirmative actions. These certifications are a big achievement and milestone, but we are often seeing businesses stopping there, not because they don't care about impact, but because they don't know what the next step is or how they should take it. Another barrier we see is people holding back on doing more for fear of getting it wrong and everything that goes with that. I see one of the biggest untapped impact opportunities for social enterprises, NFPs and for-profit businesses is to strengthen and leverage their brand to help them raise their performance and impact. We often find that business owners or leaders are often too close to their brand to be able to do that themselves. Some of the questions I ask businesses is do you and your team have a shared clarity on who you are, what you stand for, the impact you want to have, why you matter and why anyone should care about you?

Another question I ask is ‘do you have an emotive belief or vision statement about how you believe the world could be that attracts people to you because they share that view? Are these visions so important and powerful that stakeholders can't help but get involved?’

Another question is ‘what is your business uniquely doing to realise this vision and how is it relevant to your stakeholders’ world?’ This should be so compelling that they wouldn't think twice about working with you. Are you engaging in regular emotive storytelling to internal and external audiences to communicate your value and impact? Are you communicating this consistently and powerfully across every touch point and stakeholder group?

I recently created a simple framework called the Impact Brand Framework with the support of several of our fabulous Benefolk colleagues. This framework helps organisations to take the next step, and it's a resource we give away to those no matter how far they are along their journey. Feel free to take a look at this resource and download it.

What are the most important and common traits you have identified in impact-led leaders and entrepreneurs you have worked with?

We have what we call the Four C's model which we can apply to this question, and the first C is Clarity. Entrepreneurs must have clarity around their business brand, impact, and intent to ensure that they achieve that impact whilst meeting business objectives. The second C is for Courage, the courage to pursue a purpose led path, to keep going, learning, and taking risks. The third C is Capacity, seeking out tools and resources from others by asking questions and joining the dots. That's important because this is such a dynamic space and no one person has all the answers. Lastly, Collaboration is crucial because lasting impact at scale requires cleverly working with others.

I suppose what underpins that is a relationship focus, having those old-fashioned values. Our humanness is an absolute strength here. It is also about having a we not I mindset, so when you come together for conversations, it's not about what I can get but what can we do together.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

We’ve got several clients who are frontrunners of systems change we are lucky enough to work with. One of those is ACRE, the Australian Centre for Rural Entrepreneurship. They are doing some inspiring work. Most recently they have set up a rural impact network, which is scaling the rejuvenation of rural communities across Australia through social entrepreneurship. They've spent 10 years bedding down their methodology and building a very compelling case for rejuvenation in Victoria. Now they're taking it nationally and it's so exciting because they're using an impact network framework to scale that work. It will be very exciting to see unfold, it's all come together but there's been a lot of work, blood, sweat and tears that have gone into creating that outcome.

Another one is Alchemy Construct, which is also a client of ours. It's a profit for purpose construction company that focuses on building social infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and medical research labs. They have a strong purpose and CSR plan driven by the two visionary leaders of the business. They have some big hairy audacious goals around impact, and one of them is that they want to achieve gender parity in their workforce of 200 people by 2025. In the construction space, this is very ambitious, and they're well and truly on the way to achieving this. They're doing inspirational work that is lifting everyone around them, and they're inspiring the bar to be lifted which is exciting to see.

Social Traders I must mention because they're truly fighting the good fight with business and government to convince them to switch their spending for good. The clarity and leadership from Social Traders have been critical for them to achieve an internal consensus on who they are, and they've also invested in education and storytelling effectively. If you'd like to know more information about any of those organisations, feel free to jump on our website taylorandgrace.com.au.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

I would be remiss to not mention the book I wrote five or six years ago, Rebranding Branding. You can download that book for free on our website. One of my favourite books on brand (if you want a quick and fundamental overview of what brand is and its importance) is The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeyer. Impact Networks by David Elrichman is also a fantastic book, it’s very much a book on how to create an impact network, which I strongly recommend. Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great Enduring Organisations by Alex Hill is a fantastic read.

On the 9th of May we are running a Perfect Purpose Storytelling webinar for Social Traders. Then on the 16th of May, in partnership with the amazing filmmaker Jonathan Dunn, a Benefolk specialist, we are running a webinar on brand storytelling to win the hearts and minds of stakeholders.