Why Knowing Your Audience Beats Trend-Chasing Every Time

What if the problem isn’t your logo, but the foundation under it? We sit down with brand strategist Jessica Adanich to explore how real positioning, consistent visuals, and honest storytelling turn a business from forgettable to first choice. Adanich’s journey from sculpture and glass blowing to leading marketing at Mace, then launching Design Pod Studio, sets the stage for clear, field-tested advice: Branding is the sum of every touchpoint, not a mark on a shirt.

We dig into the brand discovery process—questions that force owners to name their five and ten-year goals, define target audiences, and pinpoint which aesthetics actually fit. Adanich shares a candid misstep about launching with a clever but confusing agency name, then rebuilding for clarity. From there, she maps how to move from transactions to experiences: packaging that earns price, photography that signals authenticity, and customer responses that build trust. If you want to charge more for a bar of soap or a specialty product, the unboxing, the booth, and the email all matter. Consumers are sharp; they spot stock photos and AI artifacts. Original images and a consistent tone of voice are no longer optional.

Adanich explains how to articulate your purple cow—the differentiator that justifies your price and attracts the right buyers—then proves it with a case study of a niche recoil pad brand that scaled by aligning product, visuals, and content. On tech, she’s pragmatic: AI and templates are tools, not strategy. Keep the human taste, use the tools to move faster, and make brand decisions with intent. Along the way, we cover email cadence that respects the inbox, how to test legacy tactics without sinking the budget, and why comparison is the thief of joy in marketing.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Host Intro And Guest Background
• 1:30 From Sculpture To Marketing Leadership
• 4:40 Moving To Florida And Shark Conservation
• 7:20 Defining Branding Beyond The Logo
• 10:20 Brand Discovery Process And Missteps
• 14:20 Target Audience And The Purple Cow
• 18:05 From Transaction To Experience
• 21:00 Handling Legacy Tactics And Micromanagement
• 24:00 Choosing A Niche And Excluding By Design

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:01

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Media clip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Jessica Adanich, who is with Design Pod Studio. And she's going to talk to us today about marketing and branding and all kinds of exciting stuff like that. And she's coming to us from Florida, even though she's a Cleveland native. And we talked a lot about that before the show. But now we're talking about marketing. Hi Jessica, how are you?

Jessica Adanich: 0:43

Good. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

Gary Pageau: 0:47

Well, Cleveland Rocks, let's just get that out there.

Jessica Adanich: 0:49

Yes, obviously.

Gary Pageau: 0:50

First, let's talk a little bit about your background, how you were attracted to marketing. How did you get into it? Uh, kind of some of the projects you worked on before you struck out on your own.

Jessica Adanich: 1:00

Yeah, so my background, my my college degree is actually in sculpture with a minor in glass blowing, believe it or not.

Gary Pageau: 1:08

So you went for the money.

Jessica Adanich: 1:09

Yes, yes. You know, I thought, how can I be a billionaire in life? Ah, yes, a sculpture degree from a private art institute.

Gary Pageau: 1:16

That's the way to do it.

Jessica Adanich: 1:18

Yes. So clearly that was the mission. Um, so the backup plan was I started getting graphic design internships in college, and throughout the years, I ended up bouncing around to various different companies. I worked for Vitamix doing graphic design in their commercial division. I worked for Hasbro in their Nerf division, actually doing soft good engineering, basically sewing prototype bags for the Nerf line. So that wasn't really graphic design, but it was still design in a way.

Gary Pageau: 1:46

It was 3D sculpture, kind of.

Jessica Adanich: 1:48

Yeah, yes, a soft, soft sculpture. Yes, correct. And then I worked for a commercial real estate company as a graphic design marketing specialist, moved to a photography company as a digital retoucher, then Mace Pepper Spray ended up moving from Bennington, Vermont to Cleveland, Ohio. And in that transition, they were hiring new executive staff and ended up getting hired to run their marketing and design department. So it's been quite a wild ride from sculpture and glass blowing to now here we are.

Gary Pageau: 2:22

And now you're in in Florida running your own company.

Jessica Adanich: 2:25

Yes, I was with Mace for six years, and I had always thought that I wanted to be a business owner, but as they say, you make plans and God laughs. I didn't have a plan. I didn't create a business plan or strategy. You know, things were changing at Mace in terms of management and whatnot. And I kind of saw an opportunity to take that jump. So I jumped out of the plane, as they say, and to see if my parachute would open. And I structured my company with the goal to move to the water within five years and ended up doing it within the first year. Um, I do have another company that is all about shark conservation, so that's why it made sense for me to move to the water. And also snow kind of kills my soul a little bit more each year. And I thought, oh, if I want to survive life, I might need to move to the tropics.

Gary Pageau: 3:14

So, what's the appeal of sharks to you?

Jessica Adanich: 3:17

I feel, well, they first of all, they're definitely like the bees of the ocean. Without sharks, our entire ecosystem would fall apart, just like any other ecosystem on land, woods, you know, um prairies, things like that. You need to have a balanced ecosystem between plants and insects and wildlife. And the oceans are just that. And sharks being an apex predator, it's very important for our oceans to have them. And I, for whatever reason, ever since I was little, was fascinated with the water. I mean, design pod or all of our branding is ocean whale related, but sharks are they're like living dinosaurs, you know, they're misunderstood, but I think that they're absolutely fascinating. So I design and create products to raise awareness and educate on shark conservation.

Gary Pageau: 4:02

Because clearly the Great Lakes were the hotbed of sharks.

Jessica Adanich: 4:07

Yes, you know, my my family said the same thing. Like, what is wrong with you? Where did this come from? And I was like, I don't know, maybe in a past life I was in Atlantis. Like that would make sense.

Gary Pageau: 4:17

There you go. So it's talking a little about your branding philosophy, right? What do you bring now? You know, like I said, looking at the design pod stuff, you the pod part is clearly like pods of fish, right? You've got whale pods and different kinds of things. How important is that when you're developing branding for a client, trying to find out what their ethos or their core thing is?

Jessica Adanich: 4:40

Yeah, so branding first, a lot of people think that it's just their logo. And branding is much deeper than that. It really is everything that visually, aesthetically makes up your brand. So it's the colors, the fonts, what type of photography you use, the tone that you use in writing copy, or how you speak about your company, your mission statement, your core values. All of those things brought together is your brand. Your logo is like the face of it. So I tell people, you know, it's very important to understand all of those things, you know, planning your mission statement, figuring out those core values. It's as if you're building a house, your branding is the foundation. Often companies or new entrepreneurs, they'll skip over that or say, oh, we'll figure it out later. But then a few years down the line, they might have created a logo and it's on vans and t-shirts and you know, business cards, and they don't really like it, or it doesn't align with their target audience and they have to redo it. So they're investing even more. So and it's not just because I love it and it's what I do. I am a big proponent of it because it's so crucial to companies in selling their product or service.

Gary Pageau: 5:47

So a lot of businesses don't understand what branding is. Like I said, they think it's the logo when it's really what their customers think about them. So, what are the some of the steps that you take your clients through so they can kind of discover that? And if you had people who may have had a complete misunderstanding what their brand was, yes and yes.

Jessica Adanich: 6:10

So, the first question, I love that you say discover because what I literally do is send them a brand discovery questionnaire, and it's 20 to 30 questions asking them everything from simply what is your company name? You know, you might be calling it something shorthand internally, but what is the actual company name that you want in the logo? And is it too long, too short, all the way to what's your year goal, five year, ten year, where do you want to be in those years, your competition, what colors, fonts do you like, um, your target audience. So it really asks the client to do a deep dive and understanding their business because I think people they know it so well that they're like, oh, I know it and I they take it for granted. Whereas being forced to write it out really has them analyzing it and putting pen to paper or keys to a computer helps them understand that. And then that gives me a roadmap. I tell people that I'm kind of like a visual detective. If I can understand what's in your head, or even if you pull images from online saying I like this brand's website or I really like this logo, you might not be able to articulate why you like it. And that's fine because not many people can, but I can see the similarities and be a detective and say, okay, they like this kind of aesthetic, this vibe, they're going for you know this direction. Uh, and that's how we kind of start designing.

Gary Pageau: 7:32

So tell us about the story of the person who completely didn't get it.

Jessica Adanich: 7:37

I tell a story very often because I'm transparent to a fault, and I think that it's important to share some of our missteps. So Design Pod wasn't always design pod. I initially, when I started my company, called it Purple Cuttlefish Creative Agency.

Gary Pageau: 7:54

That's a mouthful.

Jessica Adanich: 7:56

Exactly. I love cuttlefish. I designed this logo, I still love the logo. I had a website done, business cards designed. I went to an event and I spent the entire weekend explaining to people what a cuttlefish was, not what my agency or company was going to be doing for clients. I back and I blew everything up. I completely went back to the drawing board and said, okay, yes, I love cuttlefish, but who am I targeting? Because I overthought it. And yes, this is what I do for a living, but I was so close to it that I overthought it. So I think it's important because as business owners, sometimes we project that we're perfect and we make all the right decisions, and that's not the case. Um, and I I do have clients that do the same thing where they'll come to me and say, I really love flamingos and I want a flamingo eating a cupcake. Okay, well, you're a roofing company, that doesn't make any sense. Exact situation, but separate between what we personally like and what makes sense for the brand.

Gary Pageau: 8:52

Do you think there's a lot of overemphasis, if you will, on kind of the branding piece of it because of social media and all that? Everyone wants to be a personal brand, everyone wants to have a you know, put their brand out there and everything. But you know, if you don't have the fundamentals of your business to execute your brand promise, you're kind of missing the point.

Jessica Adanich: 9:14

Correct. And if you don't know who you are, whether it's the you as the individual or the company and what you stand for, you're not going to be able to communicate that. Right. I think a lot of people want to use their name as their business, um, which is fine. But again, unless you know what you're standing for or what you bring to the table and what's your unique factor, you can't sell to everybody. I often also bring up the book because I absolutely love it, called Purple Cow by S. And you know, what is your purple cow factor? The market is flooded with social media, the internet, our smartphones. We have many computers in our pockets everywhere we go. We can find something better, you know, FOMO. Uh, what separates you from everyone else? I have a few clients that are soap makers. You know, everybody uses soap, or they should. What makes your soap brand um connect with your target audience?

Gary Pageau: 10:09

Yeah. And you know, it's interesting you say it because, like you said, everyone uses soap. And, you know, I know there's this sort of trend towards like artisanal soap and goat milk soap, and you have people who like have soap shops, and people can come in and they have batches and do all that stuff. And you know, that's really cool because you're really leaning into more of an experience. You're kind of moving away from a transaction from the dove bar to the goat milk soap with raspberries in it, and who knows what else is in it. How can people transition from that transactional to that experience kind of thing, which where I think you can charge more and have a higher value?

Jessica Adanich: 10:49

Yeah, it comes back to the branding.

Gary Pageau: 10:52

Right.

Jessica Adanich: 10:53

A good example is if you are at any sort of market or trade show and someone hands you a piece of information, marketing collateral, and it's on copy paper, you're going to most likely probably fold it up and put it in your pocket. If somebody hands you that same marketing collateral content on a different weight paper, you naturally are going to treat it differently. Right. So if your brand wants to move from, you know, maybe $5 soap to $10 soap, it's about your ingredients, but about your packaging. How does your display look at the market? How does your front look? You know, everybody wants to be Apple and Under Armour, but they don't want to do that investment. Another question I ask clients are, you know, if you're an Apple user, how many empty product Apple boxes do you have in your home? And they'll be like, Oh, I have a lot.

Gary Pageau: 11:38

Yeah.

Jessica Adanich: 11:39

And it goes for Samsung and Google. The packaging, it's part of the experience. It's and that's part of the branding. It's looking at every single aspect a consumer can interact with your brand down to if they email you or message you on social media, what kind of response do they get back? Do they get an automatic response of, hey, someone will be in touch with you? You know, all those touch points really add up and matter.

Gary Pageau: 12:00

So when you've done your research or discovery phase with your client and all that, I'm sure you've run into cases where they still want to do things the old way. They like, I like what you did. This is great, but we're still gonna do the discount coupons on the green construction paper because that's always worked. Um, can you talk a little bit about how you manage that process?

Jessica Adanich: 12:24

Yes. As I take a deep breath. That does happen often, and I find that it's with individuals that are overall micromanagers in their business, right? Not isolated just to the marketing and branding design area. So I try to walk them through, you know, okay, if we're gonna try this, here are the pros and cons of it. Here's what might be our outcome. We can certainly try it, but then let's have a plan B and C for if X, Y, Z happens. I have no problem taking client down a short path, as long as it's not a massive financial investment, to allow them to see the fruits of their thoughts. You know, and often just like in Design, you have to see the logo that you think might work on paper to realize that's not the one that you want.

Gary Pageau: 13:20

Right.

Jessica Adanich: 13:20

And I think that that's just the case for being a human in the world and running a business of trial and error. And business owners that are open to understanding and learning that they don't know what they don't know, that's not successful.

Gary Pageau: 13:36

One of the challenges I think business owners have is they want to all everyone wants to grow their business, right? Everyone wants more, everyone's more stuff. But when you're choosing to make, you know, ten dollar bars of soap out of goat's milk and raspberries, you're excluding a lot of part of the market, right? You're basically saying, you know, that there are people who are not customers because they don't want to pay that much for soap or they don't care about the the ingredients or the handcraft and whatever. And what I find is you have people who just want to appeal to everybody and therefore they appeal to nobody.

Jessica Adanich: 14:07

Yes, that definitely happens. And that goes back to those types of business business owners, their end goal or their mission or core values is just to make more money.

Gary Pageau: 14:17

Right.

Jessica Adanich: 14:17

I had a potential client actually that I did a consultation with eight months ago, and the first thing that out of their mouth was, Well, we feel like this is gonna be a good route for us because we think it's gonna make us a lot of money. And then when I started consulting with them and having a conversation, they didn't understand their target audience. And I said they wanted to make a perfume. And I said, Well, you know, Burberry is a very different vibe versus Chanel.

Gary Pageau: 14:43

Right.

Jessica Adanich: 14:43

Those are target audiences. You might like both, but I'm sure if you walked into a store, you might gravitate one more than the other. Those are different target audiences, and they just had the mindset of, oh, perfume costs a lot, we can do this, we're gonna make money. But at the end of the day, you have to have other information in order to sell.

Gary Pageau: 15:02

Right. Yeah, because I mean, really, I mean, as a non-perfume user, when I see the ads for it, it's really nothing about the scent, it's about you know, the actress having some sort of weird romantic experience, diving off a cliff and landing in the water and swimming around, and then some guys there, and he's all ripped. And who knows what it smells like, but they're selling a brand.

Jessica Adanich: 15:32

Yes, they're selling an experience that if you put this on, you're gonna somehow be a supermodel diving off an island cliff to a supermodel man on a yacht that's right, exactly your boat, correct. But they understand their target audience, so yeah, it is very interesting. And I think the the companies that are most successful are the ones that hone in on who they are. You know, definitely don't pick something that you're also not in line with. You are making natural soaps, but you're allergic to goat's milk, like maybe don't do that, right?

Gary Pageau: 16:06

Or you don't you don't really care about the craft that's involved with that. You're just churning out bars of soap, and it just happens you want a higher dollar of soap, so you churn out the goat soap, and you're really not doing a good job with it, right? Because you don't care.

Jessica Adanich: 16:22

Yeah, yeah. I I'm a huge, huge advocate of positive reinforcement, uplifting my clients that if they really love what they're doing, it's gonna show through. And that's most times I feel business owners start their business because they love what they do, right? Or they're really good at a service, and then they're like, let me start this as a business, and then you're trying to figure out all of those components. But in today's world, with the market being so flooded as it is, people love authenticity. You know, a few years ago, Forbes did a study, and I bring this up a lot as well. That people today now are following the owners of brands and not the brands themselves. Right. They understand what that company is donating their dollars to, what they stand for, because money, you know, you want to put it back into a company that you believe in. So being honest and authentic to who you are doesn't matter if people don't like you. Honestly, that's a good thing. Because then that means that people that do like you are gonna like you a heck of a lot more.

Gary Pageau: 17:18

Right. Yeah, and then an authenticity piece I think is is important because in the photography industry, right, when you talk about a physical print or shooting film or something like that, that's really more of an authentic experience than you know, just shooting a great picture on an iPhone where the computational photography inside that camera is going to correct all the problems, it's gonna fix the blemishes, it's gonna perfect the exposure, it's gonna do all these things. So a lot of my listeners and you know, the retailers I talk to, you know, they're saying, you know, people are leaning into print and film for that authentic experience, right? If it's a little bit imperfect, that's okay, but they made it that way.

Jessica Adanich: 17:59

Yes. And I tell clients all the time that they need to have professional photography done of their products, of their services, their office space. Stock photography, you know. In the last five, 10 years, the average consumer has gotten very, very keen to understanding something's photoshopped. You'll not in mainstream of you'll be in the grocery store. Oh, well, she was photoshopped. That wasn't the case. People didn't know that retouching was really a thing unless you were in the industry. So now to really be authentic, you need to have good photography done and consistent. It can't just be stock photography. You know, I have a lot of clients who are like, oh, I really love this website and I want to look like them, but they have no photography and they expect to have the same design, but with stock photography, right?

Gary Pageau: 18:46

Or even AI generated stuff.

Jessica Adanich: 18:48

Oh, good lord. The things that have been generated with AI are things of nightmares. Like, I know that AI is up and coming, but it's not as keen as what people think. Like you ask it to do stuff and it will give you, instead of trees, weird arms and legs.

Gary Pageau: 19:03

Like it's or six fingers on a hand, right?

Jessica Adanich: 19:07

You can see that correct, huge component of high-end photography. And it's gonna last you, it's not like it's a bad investment. People, it's a cost, and I tell them you need to change your words, it's not a cost, it's an investment.

Gary Pageau: 19:20

Yeah, well, and that's one of the things I think. I mean, I think there's a place for it, right? I mean, you mentioned Photoshop earlier. There was a time not that long ago where even retouching an image digitally was, especially in the news world, was verboten, right? You just didn't do that because people were gonna lose their faith in reality if pictures are being retouched, and that went sideways, obviously. And then I think I think AI generating stuff is gonna kind of go that way where you know, if you weren't very good at photography, you could be replaced by generative AI. But if you're really good and understand your craft and work with clients and you know how to please the client, give the client what they want, and all that, there'll still be a place for you.

Jessica Adanich: 19:59

Yes, and I get that question a lot of well, you're a designer, you have marketing agency, you know, AI is you know gonna ruin your business.

Gary Pageau: 20:07

And Canva's coming for you.

Jessica Adanich: 20:12

I you know, it's lurking in the shadows, but there's still a massive amount of people out there that want to work with a real true professional, and they can have their ideas be heard, have a conversation with, you know, it's like if you were to buy concert tickets, would you rather hear AI-generated version of Adele, or would you rather hear actual Adele? Right. People really respect creative talent and want to work with a human being. I think AI is a massive tool in the toolbox, it shouldn't be used for everything. It's gonna help all businesses do a lot of different things, but just like the computer and digital photography, it's there's pros and cons to it. Evil, good sides is how do we use it for good versus bad?

Gary Pageau: 20:55

So, what is the project or campaign that you've worked on that you're like this is represents the work I want to do, like most successful?

Jessica Adanich: 21:07

Most successful.

Gary Pageau: 21:08

Well, I mean, it's like okay, if you're gonna showcase something like a the client that got the message that followed through all that fun stuff, you know. Do you have an example of that? You may not be able to name them, but I just I want to understand because we kind of talked about people who didn't do the right thing and kind of screwed things up. Now it's talking about somebody who did the right thing.

Jessica Adanich: 21:28

Yes. I would say I I have a main one of my main clients is Kickies. They are a recoil pad company. So recoil pads are a thick piece of rubber that goes on the end of a shotgun that absorbs the energy when you shoot a shotgun. I started off with them helping them with they were smaller at that time. Well, the ownership was new. Started off doing some packaging for them. And now, I mean, gosh, it's now I've been with them six years. Now they've grown the team. They're really great about understanding. Let's add this. How can we really come together as a team? No one person can do everything. I think the most successful companies are where they bring together different experts in different areas. You know, every week we have a meeting with their head of photography and social media and video, the owner and myself of okay, this event's coming up. How do we prepare for it? How do we plan? How do we capture the event? Where proactive versus reactive, they over the last few years are growing because they know their brand, they know their target audience, they want to be the best in their category because they feel like they they are an elite pad because of the material that they're made out of, and they're not going to sacrifice. Like they know where they are, and I think that that's incredibly valuable. You know, they know their purple cow factor and they're not going to sway, and here we are, and let's go.

Gary Pageau: 22:53

But I think it's interesting because you named something that was not something probably my audience is radically familiar with, and yet you're kind of you're very clearly defined like what their market position was and why they're different in a very, you know, niche area. And it sounds to me like they're growing and doing well by leaning into that.

Jessica Adanich: 23:11

Yes, they are, and they're passionate about it. You know, we had a conversation, for example, about email blasts. Well, the industry standard is to send X amount of emails a month or a week, but the owner's very adamant about okay, let's send email blasts when we have new content because our audience doesn't want the bad bath and beyond emails of let's spam you. They know that when an email blast comes in from kickies, there's going to be new content, new product, something to see. So they're going to be more likely to open it versus just emailing them to email. And that goes in line with the brand. Whereas doing more massive emails continuously over and over again might work for another company.

Gary Pageau: 23:52

Right.

Jessica Adanich: 23:53

You know, I'm a again a big component of telling people you need to figure out what the box looks for you versus trying to fit in another box that somebody else is doing. Right. You know, people will look across the street and be like, XYZ is doing this, I should do that too.

Gary Pageau: 24:07

Right. No, like comparison is the thief of joy, as they say.

Jessica Adanich: 24:12

Yes, yes, it is in all aspects of life.

Gary Pageau: 24:16

Exactly. So if people wanted to discover what design pod is all about and what Jessica is all about, where would they go for more information?

Jessica Adanich: 24:25

Yes, they can go to designpod.studio. And then you can also find me, Jessica Adanich, on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. Just give us a follow.

Gary Pageau: 24:36

Sounds great. Well, listen, Jessica, it was great talking to you. I learned a lot and you reinforced some things I already thought. So that's always a good thing. I've had a blast. Thanks for having me. Exactly. So thank you so much. Best wishes and hope to talk to you again.

Erin Manning: 24:48

Yes. Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.theadpixels society.com.