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Adam Sockel (00:01):
Adam Sockel. Joe Ray thinks a lot about identity. He's the director of marketing at Lighthouse Technology Services. He leads brand strategy, content, and community initiatives. He's constantly working on figuring out how to connect talent and businesses with IT to create helpful solutions. He also is helping sales and marketing leaders build content-driven growth engines. Now, when I wanted to talk to Joe, it wasn't just because he's all about aligning brand narratives and sales enablement and retention, but it's also because he just became a father of two. Now, what that means and related to B2B marketing is that he is watching his older child sincerely create an identity for themselves. They're coming up with their own thoughts and opinions and ideas. They are figuring out who they are in the world around them. And in terms of B2B marketing and branding, it just got me thinking, when do brands decide they need to shift focus and when do they realize actually we need to stand path?
Adam Sockel (01:14):
I asked him a playful yet sincere question. What do his thoughts on identity have to do with B2B marketing in the sense of when should organizations consider changing their identity and when should they just keep going?
(01:29):
Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message.
Joseph Ray (01:36):
Thanks for asking that, Adam. I really think that there's something unique about identity changes that come with big life milestones. Something that's very top of mind for me recently becoming a dad of two. And that was a huge shift too. When my wife and I had our first kid, there was a lot of excitement within the family with the first grandkid. There was also a lot of excitement obviously for my wife and I too, that our identity changed going from not being parents to now being parents and learning what all that included and what that entails and what people saw in us and what we saw in ourselves and kind of new things that we learned that way. When we had the second kid, when we had our son last month, something changed that I think the focus differently, but almost entirely just shifted to looking at our two sons and their identities uniquely.
Joseph Ray (02:21):
We looked at how does our older son embrace the role of being big brother? How does he learn to love his cars and his animals and his trucks and all the opinions that he has about what he wants to do and what he doesn't want to do? And he's a whole human forming who he wants to be, and we need to help open up those doors and let him shape that identity and learn what that looks like. And then we have another son who is this new bundle of joy and a ball of potential and could be everything right there. And so often in business, how many times do we have a new product line come up that is tangential to our core offering? And now we have to figure out, hey, how do we juggle these two very distinct identities within one brand? If we want to, there are instances where a business might start up a separate business entirely because there's something related to their core work, but it doesn't necessarily fall under the same brand.
Joseph Ray (03:10):
And how do you organize those identities together? So if we think about when do you shift your identity and when do you stick to your identity and what do you need to keep the same? What do you need to change? Or maybe even just clarify in the market. There's certain things that really should never change. There are things that are so true to who a brand, who a company, who a person is. You think about your mission, you think about your core values, you think about why you got into this work in the first place. I think about our company, Lighthouse Technology Services that I represent, and we have three core values and we're very loud about them. That we talk about follow the golden rule, always treat other people the way you want to be treated. We talk about be a lighthouse and come up with a lot of stories about those that it's about shining a light and helping people find the solutions they need.
Joseph Ray (03:54):
But it's also about being there, being present. People know where they can find you, people know they can trust you. That's a big element there. And then light up those around you too, because in our marketing and in our work too, people like when you can have positivity and fun injected into your work. So those are certain things too that through everything that I've seen the company go through in the last four years and whatnot as the marketing lead, there's so much that has changed, but also so much that hasn't. And core values are those kinds of things that maybe we've gotten some nuance, some flavor to those, but those are really principles that haven't changed. They define who we are. People know us by them and they recognize those characteristics in our company and in our people. And then those can also guide you to what changes you might want to make, what changes might make sense.
Joseph Ray (04:38):
I think about in our marketing strategy that when we first decided that we wanted to do a podcast, I thought about be a lighthouse in our core value in that sense, because here's this brand new thing that we're looking to bring into our marketing strategy, but how do we bring other people into that process? How do we pass the microphone to friends in our community, clients of ours, experts in our space? Can we help others? Can we be a lighthouse for others by elevating people who have great perspectives and conversations to share and things like that? We want to be helpful. We want to help people find the solutions they need, and a podcast could be a way to bring that core value to life. In our work of marketing, I think identity is the most important thing that we can work on because we are the bastions, the stewards of how our companies show up in a market.
Joseph Ray (05:22):
And I think it's a really important thing to refocus the work of marketing on how we show up in a market. And identity is how that happens. Visual, verbal identity, content, all these kinds of things.