“Is there any time when branding isn’t important?”
Your brand represents you and your promise to your customer. With creativity, skill, and a strategic approach, you can establish an identity with your brand. Great branding sells out to your customers because it’s what makes you unique and different.
Here today is brand specialist Kyle Asperger, and he’ll be deep diving into how branding gives “life” to your company. He would walk us through the importance of story making and overseeing creative projects to amp up your business.
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Branding: Knowing Yourself and Building Relationships With Kyle Asperger
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. As you continue along your journeys and build your own things, one of the important aspects of that journey is going to be branding. Branding is something that a lot of people have some weird and interesting thoughts about which we’ll cover in this episode. We all have a brand. A brand is a good way of understanding what service someone offers. You think about your favorite brands: Nike, Whole Foods, anything. There’s an automatic mental image or an automatic feeling associated with that brand.
Today, my guest is here to talk to us about the importance of branding and how we can go about visualizing and creating a good story for our particular brand. Today’s guest is Kyle Asperger, the founder of Studio 301.
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Kyle, welcome to the program.
Stephen, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. I hate talking about myself, so this is nothing but just pure torture.
Sorry. Most of my guests tell me, “Oh, I love your questions. I love coming on and talking about my things.” The first thing I want to dive right into is, a brand is a story. What do people generally think about their brands?
Probably the wrong way. I think that’s going to be my default, just because it circles back to what we were just talking about. This is the armchair expert in me. That’s the psychological “I’ve been through therapy. I know myself now,” yada-yada, “I’m always working on myself.”
As we all should be.
That is the crumbs of it.
Go through the painful moments of the conversations that you believe [you physically ill]. It’s through those struggles in life that marks/notes. Embrace the struggle. That, I think, is so true within the world of just branding. Know yourself. Know your product. Know it thoroughly. The brand will come to life as a byproduct of that.
With this “know yourself, know your brand, know your product”, is there an order to this, or does this all happen in parallel?
It is a bit different. If you’re talking purely product, that perhaps is a bit more easy to create and cover a brand around, as opposed to an individual, which is severely more complex. If somebody is a coach or something along that line that the individual is critical and core to whatever value they bring to the table, that versus a product — a product is pretty self-explanatory, what the uses are for; people are just more complex beings.
Interesting. Do you typically work with products more or people?
We don’t really find ourselves working within a niche as far as the services or products that are provided. What I do on a regular basis is strictly work with people. That’s what I do all the time. I just go out and try to find friends. That’s it. Just being here on the podcast, the part that was fun for me is just chopping it up about the psychological, social psychology course, understanding, “Okay. Where is Stephen coming from with this podcast? What are the tools that he is employing? What makes him truly Stephen?” That’s the kind of stuff that makes me excited. If I was just doing the same thing for one company, I would blunder things at one go. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Yeah, for sure.
Thankfully, that did not happen. I think my parents, all four of them, would be very happy to know [it]. The honest answer is, it’s strictly people. You can’t even think about products, because behind the product are people. We’re not at a place where AI has taken over so much that AI can now create products for us on our behalf. At the crux of every brand, you have people.
Is there a variance? When I think of a brand like Nike, I don’t tend to really think of people. It’s such a large company with a history. The original founders are long gone, and things have transitioned. An individual art studio, on the other end of the spectrum, this art studio is this person’s art. That art is usually showing, if they’re good, a very, very deep integral part of who they are.
I call it a personalized element. When it comes to what we can offer, that’s really the only main differentiator. We’re small. We’re highly communicative. The larger the team, the less Johnny-on-the-spot I can be with — how quickly the team could get back to you, or less and less meetings and rounds of revision and different people/hierarchies that things have to go through.
With Nike, there’s an interesting story. The former CEO was a good friend of a family friend here. This family friend ran over 100 marathons in his lifetime. For his 100th marathon, the former CEO of Nike had made a specific custom pair of shoes. There’s only two pairs that exist in the world, and they were made explicitly for him. His name is Mike. On the back — being a relative shoe layman, I’m going to call it the spine — of the shoe leading down to the heel, where we would often see Nike and say, “Mikey’s Nikes” on there, and the 100th marathon on there. It was epic. They were so cool. I thought, “What an extraordinary story.” It’s just very interesting.
Small studios shortly inherit vendors to think, “Okay. We’re going to get this boutique service,” thus, you have this expectation that customer service is going to be more intimate. You could even walk out knowing about each other’s [inaudible] — I don’t know. Whatever it turns into, you’re going to have that more personalized effect. Big or small, it’s still those little stories that I always think are interesting.
Whether it’s an individual art studio or a big brand like Nike, is it a challenge for them to get that story out so that when people see Nike in a store, they should be thinking about the CEO running his 100th marathon in the same similar story for any other product that you see?
I think that’s the important part — because the CEO knows these people that are running marathons in this volume. Those are the stories that I think are worth-telling. That’s what is indicative of a brand. A brand is how people talk about, whatever the product, whatever the service, whoever the individuals are.
If a brand is just a commonly known reputation, is that something that is important for every single person to think about? I can imagine a situation where someone’s got a whole bunch of pictures on social media, and every one of them is then falling down drunk. It suddenly becomes a brand. What’s the danger in people outside of business even not thinking about their brand?
The first word that comes to mind is reckless. Tighten up, people. Come on, do better. I’m not here to crack the whip like that. That’s completely unrealistic. Everybody’s allowed to do exactly what they are allowed to do. Perhaps if that’s their vibe and they’re out in nightclubs getting slashed on, fine, sure. I’ve been through those days. I just got to a point where my value shifted and there’s just been a greater understanding gain.
The point is, through growth, what one may feature as recklessness in their younger years can, for one, and hopefully would evolve into a more learning stance of [inaudible] with me. That was the old brand. Why not take this period to really reassess? Have those conversations. Reassess — where’s my love life? Is it healthy? Am I surrounding three or 10 people that I am putting the majority of my energy into? Are these good people to keep around? You’re going to be hauling trash bags out into the street if that’s the case. End of day, once you’ve done all that clearing, whether it’s just up here mentally or physically, whatever it turns into, that’s where you’re more or less clearing your canvas for what’s next.
When it comes to brands of products or established brands of groups, do you think it’s easier to start from scratch, or do you think it’s more interesting to turn around a brand because there are so many stories about companies that lose their way and their brand suddenly becomes associated with something different than what they want it to be and they need to actually turn that story around and establish a new one?
I think that’s a good question. I would see it as the before and after. You see it with breast augmentation, stuff like that. That’s a very face value example of that all the time. That’s how people come to gauge whether or not this is a successful endeavor. You can see the tangible differences between what this brand was versus what it is now, what it’s become. There is a journey of transformation that happens regardless of how many individuals put the work in to actually initiate the change.
I would then say that taking an existing item and shifting and carving out a new brand or reputation, I’m not going to say it’s more interesting. However, just based on how human psychology works, the before and after aspect affords us a much more pragmatic look at — was this even effective? We see — are they bringing in more money? Are they getting more viewers, or foot traffic, or whatever the different statistics are that they are aiming for and can change based on whatever the goals are? Having those tangible items is huge.
Starting anew, however, can be just as interesting because it gives you the opportunity. You’re not starting with anything. You’re starting with an idea. You’re cooking it. You’re throwing different ingredients in there. You’re making this full-body meal that hopefully serves a very specific purpose. As such, that gives you an opportunity to get a completely new message out into the market.
There’s joy that can be taken and found in both. However, within getting a brand new message out, there’s a little test and learning to it. A lot of it comes down to your existing market. If you take an existing market and you say, “We’re going to keep the same general service but shift a couple of different words or things internally,” then that’s not a huge shift. IBM, back in the 90s, or potentially 80s, or something like that, they had one of the biggest corporate shifts ever featured. A company like that size — that’s unheard of. Once you shift like that, you could be potentially changing your entire market, the individuals you’re speaking to, the individuals or businesses.
You’re saying that if you’re coming into an existing market and just competing with the existing companies or brands out there, although it’s a new story for you, there’s a story already there that you’re changing. Likewise, you could have a brand that already exists. If you’re completely changing your entire structure, then it almost becomes a new story. It’s not as cut-and-dry between the two scenarios.
One fascinating scenario that I’m observing right now is actually with Facebook, the platform. I, oftentimes, observed that Facebook no longer has the support of its initial target market. It was initially a college-student audience. Now, Facebook is, for better or for worse, known as the brand for people over 55.
I’m wondering how often it is that these IBM-type stories happen where when you completely change your target market, you’re completely changing your brand in a way and yet still be successful, and if there’s too much of a disconnect, that often tears organizations apart?
It’s interesting because you’re correct that a) if I ever want to see my parents’ photographs from a trip they’ve taken, Facebook is the immediate answer.
Yeah, exactly.
Right there with you. B) I’ve been with Facebook for a number of years. I can say that I’m so brand loyal; I’m still on Facebook.
Yeah.
I barely use Facebook. They have grown and evolved most certainly. I don’t know if they’ve made the same kind of pivot that I referenced with IBM specifically. IBM took everything that they were doing and said, “We’re not doing that anymore. We’re not doing this.” I think it came down to a supply chain from China or Japan — I don’t know. I just read about it. Unfortunately, my information retention is minimal in that sense. Before I get to too many boshed details in there, I’m going to stop talking, but Facebook did start exactly as just what you mentioned, the college directory to just find girls.
Yeah, essentially.
From there, it’s grown and grown and grown exponentially. That’s the difference between IBM’s pivot that we noted, whereas that’s a hard stop. Let’s start with this. Facebook still maintained the crux of their original model, but they’ve just been building it, and building it, and building it. Every time that Facebook has another update, you hear people be like, “Fuck Facebook. This layout sucks.” You get that all the time. I still feel that way with my iPhone. There was a time that they moved the alarm button and I had to download a different app. I’m like, “We’re on number 11 here folks. How haven’t — come on.”
Haven’t we figured that out now?
Yeah. It goes to show the biggest companies in the world, the Nikes, the Apples, Facebooks — Facebook has a litany of lawsuits. There’s privacy issues.
It’s everywhere.
It is to say that [inaudible] don’t fuck shit up regardless of how big the companies are. Potentially, it’s even easier to do that with more people, because then, you have to deal with all these different communication channels and chains. The farther the people are from the CEO, the communication just gets more and more ambiguous.
Yeah, unless you have some of those purposely really flat or holacracy type of organizations.
Yeah. Smaller organizations have less of an issue, because you can have a very easy open-up conversation most often with whoever the founding partners are and within no time at all. Everybody’s on the same page. It’s all hunky dory. No World War III, look at that.
Do you work with the challenge of brand transformation or brand recognition more? In the early stages, oftentimes, people are just trying to get their brand recognized, get someone to notice that they’re out there.
Transformation and recognition are both massive words within the realm of just ambiguous marketing. Owner’s kid comes in; it’s his summer gig. Let’s say this company hasn’t really had a logo in 40+ years. Kid comes in and says, “Pops, what are you doing? You have zero brand. You have to do something about this.” That, in that sense, is a transformation, because the company has been around. They’ve been operational. They have a viable product. They have a market. The transformation is going more or less from zero to one, and one is having that brand established visually — the logo, the design package, all that stuff. That is a transformation opportunity, which is just indicative of refining existing.
Recognition is different. One can transform and not be recognized because of the people behind it. You could have the least functional website out in the ether, just everything at face value. Any expert would look at it and just be like, “Oh my God. I sincerely hope that these people are looking to transform, get a copywriter, bring in the designer, bring in the video team, and do all this stuff to fix it.” That company may well not actually need to, because they just have extraordinary people. They have solid networks.
You don’t need the most polished brand in the world to actually have a decently recognized brand. I’m the first person to say that. If somebody says, “We need a logo design.” I say, “Go to Fiverr if you don’t have much of a budget.” It’s what you do with it that really matters. You can take a dog turd and throw it, and people will be well-aware of it if you throw it correctly. If you just leave it lying, no one’s going to be aware of it.
Interesting. If someone is struggling to get their brand recognized for one reason or another, what do you think is the most important thing that this person or these people should be thinking about?
The crux of it is, it depends on what the service, what the product, the intricacies of what is being provided to the market whether that market is B2B, B2C. It’s going to be highly dependent on that and highly dependent on, by extension, who they’re talking to — the specific market, the individuals. If you cater to my parents, for example, they’re mid 60s, then sure, Facebook ads are going to be more ideal to communicate with them. However, if you’re dealing with Gen Z, that’s a very different approach.
I’m assuming that a different approach not only includes the platform, but also how you’re going about telling the story and what types of stories are going to resonate with that particular group of people?
Yeah. For the Facebook group, your inclination could be, we’re going to bring in a copywriter for this, get a quick punchy video that’s well-worded, something that will make that quick impact and grab people’s attention. It could be a bit more mission-driven in that sense. Facebook could be a very good medium and platform to address that.
TikTok — conversation could be as simple as, “My daughter’s in high school. Let me see if I can get her to do something.” That shit works. That’s the unfortunate thing. You can try to make a formula for it as much as you want, but some cases and some things — with TikTok, there’s different strains of media that come out of TikTok exclusively. They could be the dances. They could be memes. They could be just syncing up a song to just a quick two-second video of somebody snowboarding, all of these different things. We’re not industry-standard even five years ago.
Yeah, exactly.
Facebook did start this, so we were pushing in this realm. Even now that we’re really deep into the social media culture, all these different strains of video/media/yada-yada changed. The way that somebody can write a meme and then show somebody else’s responses, I was thinking, “How the hell was the first person that even made this? Now, it’s going gangbusters as you see it all the time.
It sounds like it’s hard to predict. A lot of people watch the Superbowl primarily for the ads, because those are the ones that people spend the most money on. You still see these really high-powered ads that just fall flat. You see things that you probably didn’t expect to take off just go viral. One thing I know about TikTok is that every month or so, a different song from 40-50 years ago just suddenly catches fire and creates all these new dance memes.
Yeah, The kids are like, “Hold on. I’ve never heard this one before.”
Yeah.
“Who made this with such a vintage sun?” “Well, kiddo. It was made back in the vintage day.”
The song was made in 1978. Now, someone just put a little slow to it, right?
I will say they’re helping me with Abba. I know who and what Abba is. I’m well-aware that they’ve been around for quite some time. Somebody played a song recently, I’m like, “That’s just, ” it hits.
To be fair, it can be a little bit confusing when you have artists like [Dogs or Cat] constantly making songs that have that 1970s-ish flow sound to it and even the video — they went to a disco toward the end of it. It does make sense that there will be some amount of confusion in that realm.
What I’m wondering is, is there a way of knowing or having a good idea about whether or not a certain video, a certain ad, a certain image, wherever you’re putting it, is going to work, or does the randomness of what catches and what doesn’t just overwhelm that whole system?
In some ways. randomness is part of that testimony. You just see what works, what sticks — great, move forward with that. If it doesn’t work, if people don’t respond, we’ll ditch it, move on.
Marketing is about learn-quick, fail-fast, and let's keep it moving here. Share on X
That said, the skeletal system of the structure of the conversation is what I’ll refer to. This is within the realm of psychology, within social interaction, within podcasting, where people can then make it their own and muscle on fibers to this skeletal system. Not every skeletal system is going to look the same, but that base-level skeletal system, it’s more or less the rules, the standards, the best practices. They exist for a reason.
There may be twists and turns and all these new different iterations, but the crux of what these old schools, the best practices, and what we see with the Superbowl commercials, the tried-and-true methods of cold call, the longer form commercials with maximum 2.5 minutes if we’re on the long end or something like that — I don’t know the true duration of them — that’s a format that’s been around for decades.
There’s that knowledge of what stories connect with people. I like using the Superbowl ads, because those are the few areas where those ads don’t seem to be necessarily targeting a specific demographic group. They expect that nearly everyone from the five-year-old kid to a 95-year-old will be watching the Superbowl, because it’s one of those things that you expect pretty much everyone to watch. There’s certain psychological factors that determine or that you’re supposed to follow — best practice. You don’t start an ad by pissing everybody off
I’m not going to say, “Don’t start that way.” That is a completely viable route.
Wow, okay.
I look like an asshole for doing so, but I’m of the mindset of whatever your message is, you’ve got to get it out there in an effective way. That means, if you got to piss people off, in the meantime, this is the world of business. You’re not going to be making friends every single place you go. That said, with the Superbowl ads, they’re arranged in the entire gamut in most senses. If you’re doing Google marketing and Google ads, Facebook, Instagram, those platforms provide hyper-targeted scenarios where you can refine age group, demographic, all that stuff.
There’s two different approaches. If you think about a smaller business, they’re not going to have the budget to create that Superbowl ad. It costs millions, because you’re going to get in front of the eyes of millions. That’s how it works. When you have less money, you have to be more cognizant of where you’re putting that money. That’s where all the initial work, the understanding of yourself, the product, whether it’s therapy or reading, go work it out and just find what works. While that pre-work, know exactly what your practice and who you are talking to, so that you can make these more specific Facebook, Instagram, Google, all these hyper-specific marketing platforms work for you. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, specific or Superbowl, nothing is going to stick.
It sounds like you’re talking about the importance of trial and error too, and trying on a small scale. I think a lot of companies, a lot of people in their endeavors do that, where it’s like you do a little test market. I remember, I spent my high school years in Illinois. At the time, the town of Peoria was known for being the most average town in America. Every single fast food chain would just say, “Okay. If we want to know if this is going to sell everywhere, we’re just going to try this new Western Whopper, whatever the product is, in Peoria as a test.” You see if it works before you go nationwide.
Of course, that’s a really big scale, because it’s still a whole city, and a whole country, or a whole continent. In this case, there’s other ways to test a story out. I think that’s where people go into — I don’t know if you do this in your business — with focus groups and some of these trial groups.
Yeah. There is a massive benefit to those focus groups. We don’t actually handle that specifically. We will go in and build out these character profiles of who you are talking to. Are you talking to middle-aged Susan with two kids who live in the burbs of Peoria? As a Chicago native to it, I couldn’t help but laugh. Just bringing back memories here.
Yeah.
You can really only know your audience when you’ve seen how they interact with whatever it is that you’re serving up to them. Up until then, you can only put in as much planning in hypothetical scenarios of, if this, then that, that happens, then how do we get them into the sales funnel, and all this stuff. You can forecast, and forecast, and forecast until you have these specific use cases. That’s where this user-testing whatnother – there’s businesses that are exclusively around for this kind of thing. That’s the information that will illuminate businesses of all types.
That’s the only way to really get it. The important point is finding a way to build — I think a lot of people call it the minimum viable product or whatever version of it is — and test it with a big enough audience to get that information and know what’s going to work but not with your entire crowd where you’ve blown all your money on something that potentially is not going to work.
It’s an interesting concept. I’m not a product expert. I hear product experts say, “Think about it like a water bottle.” Companies are starting to come out with more intricate water bottles that have add-ons and all these different little knickknacks that a water bottle could just turn into a rocket ship or something — I don’t know.
Yeah.
You hear these product experts say more or less what you just said. “We’ll start simple,” because you need to know that simple product A is going to work with your entire market. If you go A, B, C, D, through the entire product line, get everything out there, and then it just doesn’t stick, you’ve blown through your entire dinner budget. That’s appetizers, drinks, dinner, dessert. Now, you have no money left for any food.
You’ve wasted it on an audience that does not care, does not know how to utilize it. What’s the point?
I also want to make sure I talk to you about your business, specifically Studio 301. How long have you been creating this photo and video content, the storytelling for brands?
It’s been four years now. Storytelling is just the art of conversation. It’s the stuff that in life makes going to networking events and going out and being with friends. That’s what human interaction is. Why else are we going out if not to hear these stories that drive culture and help us learn new things and find new exciting stuff? That’s the whole crux of it. Why should we handle a brand, a product, or service any differently? These stories we know resonate with people. It’s just a matter of, you got to find the people that are good at telling stories.
What kind of people and what kind of products do you generally try to work with?
We don’t aim to work with specific types of products. I’m the first filter so to speak. I will talk to people. I will figure out what makes you Stephen Jaye. You’ve gone through social psychology. You’re a podcaster. You’re a [rand] dude. You get the New York blood flowing through you.
Yep.
Cool, okay. We got that. Now, what makes me want to work with you? Are you an individual that’s focused on doing good? Are you completely, selfishly just aiming to get this product on the market, sell it in a couple years? Everybody has a different MO with going into business. Some people are in it for the passion of the game. I did that. I started because I love what I do. I fucking hated everything I did. I realized then, and I shifted my role within my company, and said, “I’m not going to have hands-on.” I’m not hands-on camera. I’m not designing. I’m not doing any of that stuff.
I’ve now found people that are far better than I am. These contractors, they are the people that I put on projects. Based on the project brief, whatever actually needs done, the team, the respective people that I bring to the table, shifts accordingly. There’s videographers. There’s photo editors. There’s experts within different categories.
Studio 301 — I speak about it in the “we” standpoint, because I’m just the frontman really. I go out and I have the conversation. When I speak about 301, what I really mean is that, any projects that we’re able to get, this is an opportunity to showcase these badasses, these friends that I’ve come to meet in whatever capacity. I want to work with them. I want to pull them in and showcase their talents.
What you’re saying is, one of the biggest benefits of starting your own firm or your own company is the fact that you get to choose who you want to and who you don’t want to work with. If there’s someone who you really feel like it’s a bad fit or they’re not in it for the right reasons, you can say no and choose to use your time and your contractors’ time and talents for something that you would rather be doing or a store you’d rather be showcasing.
Yeah. The more work you do on yourself or your product, whatever it is, the better you understand that when you get an offer that just doesn’t align with you, you say, “Nah, I can move on here,” and then you never really find something that’s bigger, better, suits you more specifically. It could be even smaller, or it could be just that great — it hits all the right notes. That’s what you hold on for and say, “I’m so happy I did that.” Again, it circles back to all the initial footwork. You got to know yourself. You have to put in the effort. Do all that and then you can know this is going to be worthwhile in the long run.
Sometimes, that’s something that people neglect to do at a young age. What do you think if anyone listening out there right now is thinking about an idea or is thinking about what their passions are, should do to make sure that they know themselves sufficiently before they choose what endeavor to get involved in?
There is no simple answer to that. Everybody’s path is hyper-personalized. Everybody’s solutions are incredibly non-linear. A brand is a little bit more linear in a way that you can actually get it out there and tell something about that. When it comes to personal development, there are tools and things that you can do. You can read self-help books. You can go be therapized. I didn’t grow up with any understanding about mental health or maintaining one’s overall mental state. I grew up in the middle upper class suburbs of Chicago, not Peoria. It was a mentality of, we have everything we need, so why are you sad?
The starting point is to go out and meet people. The more people you meet — for me, for instance, I met more people. I’ve met people going through depression, through all these different things. I started to see, “I kind of feel like what you’re talking to me about right now. Does that mean I’m depressed?” The more people you come across, the more you learn. The more you learn, then you can relate them back to yourself.
It’s like watching a movie. You could be sitting in somebody else’s storyline, but you’re thinking, “Who am I in this? What do I relate to?” Inevitably, as you’re talking to all these people, as you watch all these movies, these different stories, you’re going to start piecing things together. Whatever works for you, just the queues, go on and find people. Find new different strategies. Somebody may exhaust all therapeutic items and all this stuff. An answer could be, they have to do an MDMA thing in Costa Rica or whatever — I don’t know.
We’ve all read that story, that place in Colombia, where you can hunt the mushrooms and have that trip.
Yeah. It’s not for me. I’ll put it this way. I’ve been sober since last June.
Wow.
While sobriety has been a massive element of change, however, it’s not an easy thing to say, “Oh, yeah. Just go be sober. That’ll fix all your problems.” There is potentially enormous truth to that. However, the path to getting there, for me, was, just as I said, non-linear and hyper-personalized. Meaning, you can’t advise one to get to sobriety. That’s not an easy thing to achieve. Somebody just has to go through it for themselves.
The key is that you continue putting yourself out there, finding people, going through these different experiences. Share on X
Sure, alcohol will make you experience all of these different life lessons. It’s the vehicle for that. I say experiences, as opposed to learning life lessons. You can experience things whilst you’re drunk. However, it impairs your overall cognitive function of what you’re experiencing, so are you actually learning? In a lot of cases, I’m going to say probably not nearly as effectively as you would otherwise.
It’s interesting, because this reminds me of the advice that a lot of people see in self-help books or YouTube videos, where they say, “If you wake up at 4:30 every morning, you will be successful,” or some sort of combination. It feels like, as you said, it is a very individual [thing]. What works for one person is not going to work for another person.
Exactly. Yeah, the 4:30 club or 5:00 AM club, there is validity to it. There has been incredible success that is born of it, but if you just get up at 5:00 AM, and I don’t know, go jerk off, grab three cups of coffee and just sit around and play video games.
Yeah.
What else are you doing with your life? You can put the right pieces in order and still not doing anything with them. You have to actually follow through with it.
It reminds me of people who get into a bad place in life, and they think moving to another city is going to solve all their problems. Oftentimes, they need to move to another city, because you need some change. That alone, doing the exact same thing you’ve done in your city in just another town is not really going to change that much. Those same patterns are going to emerge.
One of the thing I want to make sure my audience gets is a chance to get a hold of you if they’re interested in Studio 301, if they’re interested in talking to you about their brands, the brands that hopefully a lot of you out there are developing right now as you get inspired by some of these episodes. What will be the best way to contact you?
Of course. We are the studios301.org. The .com was taken, and I don’t want to have to buy out anybody for it. [inaudible] business owner. kyle@studio301.org. I am always happy to have a conversation and at the very least probably send along a couple tidbits and things that you can just take and implement on your own time. The people along the way that have given me those little moments, the mentors, the people that have stuck with me, I wouldn’t be here. I’m not saying I’m here. I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be. However, I would not be in the stands where I’m perpetually learning, poaching, challenging, applying pressure to myself, without the people that have stood by me in some of my darkest moments. Because of that, whatever it is that you’re in it for, I want to help raise you up.
That’s amazing. A lot of people are realizing that, for a while, we had this narrative/cultural story of the inventive person who puts their headphones on and just sits in front of a computer for 75 straight hours and just develops this cool new app, and now, all of a sudden, they’re rich, ready to go. A lot more people now are realizing it’s not really about that. Most people need the support of someone to get by. Even the person who spent 75 straight hours coding needed someone to cook for them for a couple of those meals, so they could stay awake or something.
Somebody that’s like, “I don’t give a fuck what you’re going through. I’m still here for you.” That’s hard to come by. If you have those people then diving the level deeper of the people that will actually say something when something needs to be said, but most people on the planet will not say anything. That’s really significant people that keep around if you can find them.
Yeah. I feel bad for the people that don’t have them. To be honest, I think there was a survey recently about a quarter of Americans right now. I feel like they don’t have a single person they can confide in, so it is tough. I hate to finish this out on a darker note given that we’ve talked about so many other happier things throughout this episode.
Let’s go back to 9/11 then we’ll feel a little bit more [depressed].
We talk about those things, but there are a lot of happy things going on. I think the fact that there are people out here that are following their passions, getting to know themselves by going out and meeting people. I think after a couple years of some form or another of keeping to ourselves, to this pandemic, we’re all ready to go out there and meet more people, interact with people, get to know more people, get to know more cultures, all these great things that are all going to help us get to know ourselves and build more cohesive community as well as that social interaction that we all need to have a really good, happy, healthy life.
It’s an interesting concept. If you think about podcasting — and I don’t want this as a note to underplay the significance of podcasting — with telling stories, working through issues, whatever it may be. You think about everything that’s going on in the world. This is on the tail-end of COVID, and now, with everything, with Ukraine, Russia, and wherever that ends up going, there’s incredible strife in our world. There’s part of me that’s like, “Are we just talking on a podcast when the whole world is just crumbling at our feet?” I think back to how we get through COVID. The world still has to maintain course. Things must go on.
Yep.
Content, as much as I hate the term, must be made.
To bring it back to your main point, people still want stories. People, whether you’re going to a movie, which usually is a story or a series of stories, or looking at your brand, it’s still a story — people still want those because you’re still human being with the same human needs that don’t really change when a virus hits or anything else happens.
The stories are the one moment of solace, solitude and escape. It could be platonic or whatever it is that you, as an individual or a business are looking for.
Definitely. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling a little bit of your story as well as describing the importance of all the stories you’re telling for all your brands. I’d like to also thank everyone out there for listening today and encouraging you to continue tuning into Action’s Antidotes. With these interviews, I’m telling stories about people who have followed their passions and achieved something that they want in their lives.
In Kyle’s case, it’s being able to work with the people and the brands that he wants to work with and being able to go out there and meet and get to know more people. For some of my other guests, those stories will be a little bit different, but enough of these stories, and hopefully, you’ll find the one that really resonates with you and the path that you really want to pursue.
There you go, Stephen. Thank you. It’s been just a pleasure to reflect the brand and story in the broadest of senses, I guess.
Yeah. I guess I tend to be broad.
I appreciate that. They actually gave me more of an opportunity not to talk about myself. Simultaneously, a writer only writes about what they know.
Yeah.
Here I am talking about myself just in third person.
We all talk about ourselves in that way. Have a good afternoon, everybody.
Thank you. Bye, guys.
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About Kyle Asperger
Kyle Asperger is the Founder/Creative Director of Studio 301, a boutique production house that specializes in photo, video and design (thinking/strategy). There are visual storytellers that integrate within teams (both for profit and non-profit) to craft brands and plow through their communication gaps.
Like many others, Kyle has been refining his approach as a business owner. The folks who’ve stood by his side through the thick of it are most telling of his overall message: never stop connecting with people. When you find the good ones, the standouts, do everything you can to keep em’ around.