Building Trustworthy Brands in an AI World With Sasha Strauss

Sasha Strauss is the Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Innovation Protocol, a brand strategy consultancy that helps organizations define, strengthen, and communicate their identities with clarity and purpose. Since founding the firm in 2006, he has advised leading organizations, including Google, Disney, LEGO, PayPal, and Nestlé, on brand strategy and leadership communications. Sasha is also a longtime graduate professor of brand strategy at UCLA, USC, and UC Irvine, where he teaches the next generation of business leaders. An internationally recognized speaker, he shares insights on branding, leadership, and AI-driven strategy with organizations and conferences worldwide.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:23] Sasha Strauss discusses how Innovation Protocol is helping organizations define authentic brands that build trust and lasting relationships

• [5:11] Rethinking how businesses communicate their value and identity

• [6:52] Practical brand-building strategies for small businesses without large marketing budgets

• [9:23] The differences and similarities between B2B and B2C branding

• [11:26] Sasha talks about the connection between company culture and brand identity

• [16:52] How to train AI to reflect an organization's brand, values, and voice

• [20:50] Using AI-generated FAQs and content to improve customer trust and discoverability

• [23:36] Why AI enhances expert knowledge rather than replacing brand strategists

• [26:02] Tips for personalizing keynote speeches with AI while preserving authenticity

• [34:20] Leadership influences, professional speaking, and lessons from Manly P. Hall and Simon Sinek
  

In this episode…

Successful businesses often struggle to clearly communicate what sets them apart, leading to inconsistent customer experiences, reduced trust, and missed opportunities. As AI reshapes how people discover and evaluate companies, organizations also face the challenge of maintaining authenticity as they adopt new technology. How can businesses build a brand that customers trust without losing their human identity?

Sasha Strauss, a brand strategy expert and educator, explains that a strong brand is built on a consistent promise that is reflected in company culture, employee behavior, and every customer interaction. He recommends defining a clear brand identity through research and competitive analysis rather than guesswork, ensuring employees understand and embody the brand, and training AI tools to communicate in ways that align with an organization's values and voice. Sasha also shares how AI can accelerate research, personalize content, and improve customer experiences while reinforcing — not replacing — human expertise and creativity.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Sasha Strauss, Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Innovation Protocol, about building trusted brands in the age of AI. Sasha discusses why company culture and brand are inseparable, how businesses can use AI to strengthen customer trust, and why authentic human creativity remains a competitive advantage.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Sasha Strauss on LinkedIn

• Innovation Protocol

• The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy by Manly P. Hall

• "Customer Psychology, Marketing, and Growth With Bob Serling" on The Customer Wins

• "Redefining Meetings and the Agentic Future With Artem Koren" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Revolutionizing Rural Healthcare Access With Dr. Kara Hartl" on The Customer Wins

Quotable Moments:

• “It's an intentional, consistent way of seeing the world so that I, as your audience, can trust you.”

• “Real brand strategy is a deductive process. You're sort of winnowing down to what you should say.”

• “Culture is a better way to say brand than brand.”

• “We think you should be using AI, but don't believe that it's going to make things easier.”

• “They want to feel seen. And now I can maximally see them, thanks to AI.”

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Define your brand through research, not assumptions: Analyze your competitors, customers, and market before deciding how you want your business to be perceived to create a clear, differentiated brand that customers can understand and trust.

2. Align your company culture with your brand promise: Ensure employees understand why your organization exists and how they contribute to delivering that promise so customers experience greater authenticity and consistency.

3. Train AI tools to reflect your organization's voice: Develop AI systems using your company's values, messaging, and guidelines instead of relying on generic outputs to maintain trust while producing more accurate, on-brand content.

4. Create content that answers your customers' questions: Build detailed resources around the questions prospects and customers ask most often to improve customer education while making your business more discoverable through AI-powered search.

5. Use AI to enhance human expertise, not replace it: Let AI accelerate research, brainstorming, and personalization while relying on people for strategic thinking and creative judgment to combine AI efficiency with human insight for stronger decisions and more meaningful customer experiences.

   
   

Sponsor for this episode...

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16 

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Bob Serling of Licensing Lab, Artem Koren of Sembly AI, and Dr Kara Hartl of Troy Medical. Today, I get to speak with an old friend, Sasha Strauss, founder of Innovation Protocol, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik!.

Using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, I've been looking forward to this episode. Sasha Strauss is an organizational brand strategist, educator, and speaker who helps organizations and individuals define their identities with clarity, purpose, and authenticity.

 As founder and Chief Brand Officer of Innovation Protocol, an award-winning consultancy, he specializes in AI-centric brand strategy for organizations and personal brands. Since 2006, Strauss has taught graduate-level brand strategy at UC Irvine, UCLA, and USC. Throughout his career, he's advised leading organizations such as Adobe, Disney, Lego, Microsoft, and PayPal. I'm telling you guys, we got a power hitter here and many others. Sasha is recognized for helping organizations build meaningful brands that create lasting impact in an AI driven world.

 Sasha, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Sasha Strauss: 01:59 

Thanks, Rich. It's so nice to be here with you. Thanks for having me.

Richard Walker: 02:03 

Yeah. I'm, like I said, I'm excited to talk to you. So for my audience who hasn't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. So Sasha, let's understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?

Sasha Strauss: 02:23 

All right. Well, as a brand strategy consulting firm, our customers are the executive teams for organizations or nonprofits, for religions, for universities, for startups, for fortune 500 organizations. The leadership team is our customer and we help them know thyself, love thyself, and communicate thyself, both as individual personal brands and as organizations.

Richard Walker: 02:53 

So I got to tell you, you've had a huge impact on my view of business and brand because when I met you, I learned all sorts of things about brands. I was in such a learning mode at that moment, but also you codified it in a way that really helped me see the brand clearly. And I don't want to butcher that, but my main thing is that it's a promise we're making. So I'd love for you to articulate how you view what a brand is doing and what it's for.

Sasha Strauss: 03:20 

Well, thanks for remembering what you learned so long ago. Yeah. So brand is a promise. It's an intentional, consistent way of seeing the world so that I, as your audience, can trust you. When we meet someone who shows up differently every time we experience them, we don't want to trust them.

We're kind of spooked. And so what we try to help organizations do is pick an identity and forever communicate that online, offline, IRL and otherwise. And it creates not only a reason to trust, but an ability for me as the buyer or customer to refer to you, to tell others who you are and what to expect. And that creates long term value. Short term transactions also help you deflect competitors because competitors are going to try novel things and speak up in the wrong channel.

 And you can't keep up with all of that. And the only way to protect your market is to own the story of you.

Richard Walker: 04:21 

Yeah. You know, that reminds me of like, you're out at some social event and you meet somebody, you're like, hey, what do you do? Oh, I'm an accountant. How do you respond to that? Like, what does that mean?

But if that person said, oh, my average customer saves $100,000 a year, now I'm more interested to understand, well, how are you doing that? Especially if they're more specific. I give them tax strategies to save $100,000 a year on average. Oh, by the way, I'm an accountant, right? So I think part of what you just articulated is that the brand helps us have an identity that people can understand and, and really start to refer to, and see what you do better.

 Do you think the brand I mean, there's slogans, there's identity marks. Like all these things go together. Do you think that always tells the story or is it just the start of the story?

Sasha Strauss: 05:11 

Well, you're right, and I would add that what real brand work does is it helps you rethink the question. Hey, I'm going to this networking event. People are going to ask me what I do. Do I want to respond with, I'm an accountant or do I want them to think about something? And so what brand strategy does is it helps you predetermine what you hope to be able to say so that you can create a deep impact.

In the example that you gave meeting an accountant, you're right. If someone just responds with their tactical role, it's hard to engage. But if they pose a question in response, you know, you ask me what I do. Let me ask you a question. How do you strategically guide your finances to enable success?

 Durability. growth. Then the person self reflects a little bit and says, oh, you know, I don't know, make it up on the fly. And that gives that accountant the chance to say, well, making it up on the fly works for 1% of people, but for the rest of us, we'd rather have a plan. I help people plan to get the most out of their capital.

 All right. Well, there's emotional discourse there, and that creates much more stickiness and recall.

Richard Walker: 06:24 

Yeah. All right. I want to guide the conversation a little bit because a lot of my audience are financial advisors, fintechs, smaller companies. Yes, we have some big companies too, that will definitely appreciate the style of Adobe and whatever. But how does a smaller company really differentiate, you know, from that noise?

Because brands are hard to build. It takes a long time to really put it out there. And if you don't have the marketing dollars of big, big companies, what are the small companies really doing on this day?

Sasha Strauss: 06:52 

Great. There is a misperception that we need a big, loud, bodacious brand to create impact. And wow, that's unfortunately not true. What matters is that you have audiences. You have the employees you're trying to recruit, even if you're a mom and pop employee.

Number three, that you're trying to recruit, you need to give them something to believe in. If you are scaling and buying ads online, attending trade shows, you're going to be interacting with humans. Brand strategy is the pre. Think about what you want them to hear and know about you. So this is not about capital expenditure.

 This is about deciding what you want the world to know about you so that you're intentional and that they can recall you. So the quick answer to what an organization of any size can do to strategically build their brand is to simply listen to their competitors, like and subscribe, download their newsletters, listen to their podcasts, etc., and learn from what their best and worst practices are. And that will help you narrow down what you want to say. What makes you different? And that is one of the most tactical actions in brand strategy.

Richard Walker: 08:01 

I love that. I don't think I've ever thought about it from that standpoint. I love that.

Sasha Strauss: 08:05 

It's very fulfilling. It's a very fulfilling action. Not to cut you off, but we often think like, oh, I want to build a brand. I got to go on a retreat and like, have post-it notes and okay, you know, do that, but that's not going to get you where you need to go. Real brand strategy is a deductive process.

You're sort of winnowing down to what you should say and do rather than imagining what you hope is possible. And that's probably my primary teaching in graduate school, don't go on a creative journey, go on an analytical one, and you will get to what your brand voice should be.

Richard Walker: 08:43 

Yeah. And I think a lot of us are hearing our customers and prospects complain about the competitor. So you have this other feedback loop to, to, to fuel from like, if you just say the things, if you are the things and not just say. But if you become the things your competitors do not that also differentiates you and builds into the brand. All right, Sasha, there is a question that's been burning in my mind for years, and you are the ideal person to ask.

Oh, and it's a two part question. Okay, so the first part is, is there a difference in branding or strategy for branding between a B2B company versus a B to consumer company?

Sasha Strauss: 09:18 

Are you going to give me both questions at the same time?

Richard Walker: 09:20 

I want to hear this answer first.

Sasha Strauss: 09:23 

Awesome, I love it and I'm a B2B. I love businesses that sell to other businesses. It's intellectually exciting. It's hard to do. And honestly, most of the branding work going on in the world is for B2B.

So we might think as day to day consumers buying ice cream at the grocery store, that that's where all the branding is. But that's actually a very small piece.

Richard Walker: 09:49 

I didn't think about it that way. Yeah.

Sasha Strauss: 09:51 

And so to your question, is there a difference between B2B and B2C? In simple terms, we're talking to humans. So whether it's a buyer in a business or a buyer in a household, we need to know who those humans are and what they care and think about and communicate to them as authentically and consistently as possible. So fundamentally the same, but maybe the communication vehicles are different. Maybe the frequency of communication is different.

That's really the only thing that separates B2B. And B2C is the venue and the vehicle, not necessarily the formation of the brand. Answer.

Richard Walker: 10:27 

Yeah. Okay. So this helps inform part two, which is why I wanted to keep them separate. And that is my first, I'm going to reveal to you what I've learned and experienced that B2B branding is not just a slogan. And it's really kind of hard to articulate.

So what I've learned about my own company is that it's actually my company culture, because what we're doing is we're creating this emotional predisposition people have towards us when they hear about us from their friends and peers, and they see us in the marketplace or whatever, and especially if they use our product to have some kind of experience and look, we work really hard to make a great product, but it always comes back to they love working with us because of who we are and our culture. And they reflect the four cultural tenets that we have. We've done three different surveys with three different consulting firms, and it always comes back that way. Do you think that is a good result? Do you think brand and culture have a lot of connectedness or even identicalness to it?

Sasha Strauss: 11:26 

Yeah, they're one and the same. And often when I engage a very like legacy institution, like every branded top university with great histories, religions, I can't just walk in and be like, let's talk brand. You know, they have this propulsion. But I can absolutely say, who do we want to be as a workforce? How do we want the humans that engage us to feel when they're with us?

Yeah, those are just code phrases for culture. So one and the same, but they're built the same way. A brand is, which is through research, analysis, deductive conclusion. Who are the humans? What do they need?

 What do they hope we say? How do we differentiate what we say from our competition? And so I think that culture is a better way to say brand than brand. Because brand people often say is a logo or a tagline where those are signals, but those aren't the answer. The answer is how do we show up as an organization?

 And the code word for that is what is our culture?

Richard Walker: 12:34 

It is. I mean, I have this joke if you want to stop swearing inside your house. Sorry, out in public, you have to stop swearing inside your house first.

Sasha Strauss: 12:42 

Oh, I got to do that. Shoot.

Richard Walker: 12:46 

Like everything comes out. And so if we don't treat our people the way that we would want to treat our customers. How can I expect my people to treat the customers that way?

Sasha Strauss: 12:57 

Yes, I was teaching last night with my graduate students and I was walking through a project, an end to end project. That's kind of how I teach if I take real work I'm doing in the field and I use it in my coursework. And I showed them that this organization who was going through bankruptcy, that went through a rebrand, spent about $250,000 figuring out who they are and why they matter to the world. And then we helped them understand that they needed to spend another $250,000 to implement it with their workforce, through activities and engagement, etc. and it was interesting. The client was very resistant to that notion. Like, can't we just put up a flag and show up at the trade show booth?

And we're like, no, because it's going to come down to your workforce when they answer the phone or talk at the trade show booth, if they don't know who we are and why we matter, The deal is done, there is no deal to be had. And so I like your example here. How we speak outside has to reflect what we speak inside. And that's where the big premise is. There's no purpose in doing a rebrand.

 If you're not going to teach your coworkers how to use it.

Richard Walker: 14:06 

Yeah, yeah. So imagine how high I was told to tell you that you can trust us.

Sasha Strauss: 14:12 

Yeah. Honestly, that is what really happened. We were hired by a financial services company that had their own call center, okay, like an onshore owned call center. So we go to the call center as part of our research, etc., and we're sitting with the call center technicians and taping them to their cubicles, which is like the things we say. And so, you know, in between calls, we're like, hey, why do you say those things? And they're like, because we're told to say those things.

And we're like, no, no. Why were those words chosen? And like, I don't know, I just work here. Well, all right, so when they're on the phone, chatting or otherwise responding to customer questions and they're just reading rote phrases, there's no authenticity, there's no passion, there's no belief. It's utilitarian, transactional.

 And so there is no transference. There's no like, I like what I'm doing. I like who you are. I want to help you. I'm just trying to close this call.

 And what was so fun about that project is that the culmination of it was training the phone staff, having an event for them, like guess where you work and guess why we do it. And that makes them love their job. That makes them passionate about being there, right? And that therefore inevitably translates to more deals done.

Richard Walker: 15:42 

Yeah, man. And I think when you can put things in terms of how it hits your customer, their experience. Look here at Quik! We have 45000 forms in our library now. We are building and publishing around 2000 forms a month. That means any of those changes can affect somebody's ability to transfer money, open an account, get a contract for life insurance, whatever.

And so our team actually looks at it as this field is so important to make sure that transaction works. And they build it with high care and quality because they understand if it was their money and their form being filled out. So I think when you can kind of put this into that whole perspective, it helps that that culture work with your brand. Okay. Look, I think this is a perfect segue into the problems with AI because look, the number one thing I'm hearing across the industry is, can I trust AI?

 It's a trust equation more and more. And what is AI doing? It's regurgitating. It's doing what you are told to do. It's affirming.

 It's just giving you like, hey, you're awesome. It's brilliant. What is your role now with AI and how are you guys navigating with the brand, this AI landscape that's changing so much.

Sasha Strauss: 16:52 

Listen, we're treating the bot like talent, which is you got to train the bot. So if your employees are using AI to do work, I approve. But it can't just be an out of the box widget. They can't just pick which AI tool they want to use. They have to use the tool that has been trained on who we are as an organization, how we say things, what our lines in the sand are.     

And that's really what we focus on is what do we want the LLM dot text file to be? And how do we ensure that it is responding in a way that is not hallucinating? And that's really what the goal is. Can we go about our audience research? Can we go about our competitive analysis?     

 Can we go about our talent analysis and bring together this culminating document, for lack of a better term, that can master train the LLM so that whenever it is answering our employees these questions. It is on brand. It's authentic, it's trustworthy. And that's the real goal now is to create those master training modules so that these bots used by talent are, as I said, sharp, purposeful on brand, and trustworthy that you can trust what is spit out. You don't have to like to send it back through the meat grinder before you use it.

Richard Walker: 18:15                

That doesn't sound easy though.

Sasha Strauss: 18:18 

Well, I know that's the funny thing about AI. If we've tricked ourselves into believing AI equals easy, and we tell our customers all the time, we think you should be using AI, but don't believe that it's going to make things easier. Yeah, there's just a new kind of work required.

Richard Walker: 18:35 

I have to imagine you're putting in very curated work to give that language model, that bot, whatever it is, the understanding of the business and the brand. But that takes work. And I've met so many people who aren't willing to do the interview process to tell you everything about your business and the landscape, etc.. So is that part of what you guys helped them do?

Sasha Strauss: 18:58 

Yeah, that's exactly what we helped them do. We first of all, we trained their workforce that the bot itself is dumb.

Richard Walker: 19:05 

Yeah.

Sasha Strauss: 19:06 

What you put into it and then what you do with what comes out of it, that's the mastery. So the training up the bot comes with a recipe. You know, there's historical stuff, there's categorical stuff. There's what the analysts care about in the sector. And by gathering all of that knowledge, training the bot so it gets it and then practicing prompting it so that what we see comes out of it is all the things that we want to commit to.

That takes a lot of time and training and you're constantly perfecting it. It's not the kind of thing that once you build it, you're done. You know, you need a. AI technician or AI whisperer to constantly be evaluating and tuning it up and making it great. Especially because all of these AI suppliers are constantly updating their models, which, by the way, completely changed the frequency of the outputs.

 You know, it's not like 1% better. It behaves totally differently. And so that's been a part of this journey too, is to make sure that they understand that once you set the ship of sail, that it's not, you know, all sails up and go.

Richard Walker: 20:15 

Yeah, I think we have to like it, resist the urge to build ten times more stuff and focus on the one thing we can build and support. Because what you just said is having a bot has a support mechanism behind it to provide that kind of capability ongoing. Okay. I'm curious, just from your perspective, working with customers and seeing the market, and I'm sure, I'm sure, in fact, I've heard you talk about when Starbucks changed their logo, what it meant. What are you seeing happen with AI?

Is it eroding trust? Is it eroding brand value out there?

Sasha Strauss: 20:50 

Well, I'm an optimist. And I love AI. So here, here my bias goes. What I'm seeing is that the businesses that are taking it seriously, for example, are building out sections of their website that particularly align with how AI asks questions. A simple example is that AI likes, when frequently asked questions, literally are readable, deep, and are held on their own pages. Not just like a long running list, but like.

These are the kinds of questions. And so I'm loving that because what it's forcing my clients to do is back up a little bit and say, you know, what are our customers baffled by? What do they deserve an answer to? And so then they have to go back to the drawing board and figure out like, oh my gosh, these are the questions our sales team gets. These are the questions that our talent team gets, etc., and build out this ten 000 word plus subsection of their website, which is not for humans necessarily to delve into, but for the bot to query and respond with.

And I love that because it's really forcing who our customers are and what they are asking. And that's what I've always tried to get my clients to think about. But, you know, as far as they're concerned, it was a sales script for a phone call center, you know, or for an executive presentation, not a ten 000 word dialogue that could go on for hours. And so I love it. I think that it's one of the most exciting things that's ever happened in my career. We're finally forced to have the patience and dialogue that the world deserves because people are not googling anymore.

 You know, Google search results are way down because everyone's asking AI first and AI wants to give you the most informed answer. Whose job is it to inform it? You, you, the business. And that's what we're helping our clients do.

Richard Walker: 22:43 

Yeah, I'm, I'm there with you man. I am because Google's amazing. Especially if you go back to the year 2000, 2005 and what was enabling us to find information, but to answer questions. And really, that's, I think, a fundamental thing that we're always doing, answering questions. And then to turn all your content into questions, answer prose so that the AI can read it and understand it, and help you find it, etc..

I think it's the next level of where we're going. It is hard though, right? It is causing us to rethink and redo and re-spend our money in these ways too. Yeah. I'm also curious though, because AI has given a lot of people, myself included, the ability to have brainstorming sessions 24 over seven and, and honestly, to talk about branding or other things, do you see any kind of competitiveness out there with AI and what you do?

Sasha Strauss: 23:36 

Oh, you mean like AI chomping at my business, chomping at my. No, that's not me being, like, territorial. All right, I'll give you some examples. So for my venture-backed or PE-backed clients, you know, the CEOs are just brilliant. Like, I don't deserve to be in the same class as these people.

And what are they doing from midnight to 3 a.m.? They're vibe coding.

Richard Walker: 24:05 

Yeah.

Sasha Strauss: 24:06 

Okay. So it's kind of funny because I'm like in executive meetings with them at like at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday and you can just tell they're haggard, you know, just totally broken because they're trying to do all this work themselves. And after, you know, seven days of this, their spouse is like, you know, this isn't working. Yeah. And so that's the magical answer to your question is, you know, whether it's evaluating an X-ray or, you know, building a web module.

Yeah, I guess executives could do it themselves. But what they're putting into the bot and what they're taking out is not expertly informed. And so I'm watching these leaders try it themselves. Spin, spin, spin, stay up all night. And so they're coming back.

 That's kind of cool if they're coming back and saying, you know what? I need experts to evaluate my X-ray. I need experts to help me build out this module so I know what features and functions I want, but who it is and why it matters to the world I'm seeking counsel on. That's what they say.

Richard Walker: 25:08 

No. Look, I'm glad you're saying it this way because I'm seeing this cycle. I'm feeling this cycle. AI is giving me 20 hours back. But I mean, added 20 hours to my schedule, not freed it up.

It's incredible what you start to take on because AI yeah, here's my other thing, like The Customer Wins the title of this podcast. I came up with that. I used AI to help me brainstorm ideas, but I came up with the name myself. And same thing with other products or other things that we've, we've worked on. What I find is that it's really good to spark ideas, but the human idea is still the winner.

 Categorically, across the board. I've always seen the human idea win, and AI is just an accelerator. Maybe it removes some of the entry-level steps that we'd go through, the rote work we might go through. Yeah. So I imagine you're doing some of that with your clients to eliminate some of the basic hard work that gets you going faster to the result you're after.

Sasha Strauss: 26:02 

Let me give you a simple example. I myself am a professional speaker, speaking at conferences all the time. I really want my content that I'm speaking on and the bio that is submitted to all of the attendees. I really want it to be niche. I want it to be for them. And classically, I spent months organically trying to gather up insights about a category.

And that's fine, but it has to be cost-prohibitive. And so as an example, I spoke at a really niche conference last week. So fun to do. I love the more niche, the happier I am. and I was able to download white papers, podcast transcripts, etc. and then rewrite my bio using a trained LLM to make my bio contextually relevant to the people in the room.

Richard Walker: 26:58 

Nice.

Sasha Strauss: 26:58 

I know, it's awesome. I know they felt it. I felt it when they, when, when the emcee was introducing me, I was like, I would have never thought about it that way, but that totally makes sense. And then to the content, to the actual speech that I delivered, which was authentically me, etc. many people came up to me afterwards and said, I really like how you used like nuance details of how our industry works to explain these brand fundamentals, which I was like, oh, that's all I want. I just want you to win and I want to help you understand these practices as it relates to your work every day.

I'm just saying, I can do that 40 or 50 times a year. Now for all of these conferences and summits, because I have trained a bot on all my speeches, all my vocabulary, and then I just push in the industry, the niche industries, content, and then out comes like, hey, Sasha, think about these things in your speech, which I know makes me feel more devoted to the audience rather than just kind of like inconsequential. Here's the standard slides. It's for you, me aligning with who you are. And that's what they want.

 They want to feel seen. And now I can maximally see them, thanks to AI.

Richard Walker: 28:16 

Okay, I'm going to bring up something we were talking about offline because it's so awesome. Oh, and it really fits into this because AI is creating looks, everybody has the same AI. Everybody can produce this kind of stuff. But you have found a way in your presentations to be ultra unique. That is 100%.

Sasha Strauss Nobody can steal from you. Can you look, this is on video. So most of my audience is going to watch this. Can you show one of your slides that you're showing me, like how you present and explain what you're doing.

Sasha Strauss: 28:45 

And this can be awkward. I'm gonna have to go off screen here for a little bit. I'm going to go over to my beach writing wall. Excuse me.

Richard Walker: 28:53 

So while Sasha's doing this, he was telling me that he had a presentation that he'd been given and somebody was just taking it, using it verbatim. And he's like, how do I stop that from happening? So he found a way to do this, which is really cool. And he'll explain this in a second when he comes back to show it.

Sasha Strauss: 29:13 

Was he that awkward?

Richard Walker: 29:15 

Sorry, no, I filled the space. I told everybody what's going on, but I didn't tell him what you did yet. You're going to reveal this.

Sasha Strauss: 29:22 

All right. So. Yeah. A handful of years ago, I was trying to really revolutionize how my keynotes unfolded. Just for context, when I'm on stage at a conference, they have these huge screens behind me.

Okay. And so I'm standing in front of the huge screens, you know, like doing my thing, holding the microphone, etc.. And so, you know, a quote, standard PowerPoint, etc. can only be so engaging. So I decided that I was going to start drawing my content instead. And I'll tell you on the record, when I first started doing this, the drawings were terrible.

 Like, I don't mind saying that I'm not hiding it, but I constantly worked at this. So this is a perfect example of one of the doodles, which basically talks about the premise of the brand, which is, you know, we have how we run our organizations, the services we offer, the tech we host, who our staff is and who our strategic partners are. And each of these things is really complicated. It's so hard for talent. We're recruiting our customers who are engaged to understand those nuances.

 That's why when we build a brand, it helps us infuse a message through how we run our org, what services we render, etc. and that through line is the consistency that helps people remember us and care about us. Anyway, that's an example. Yeah, it's been really magical and fun for me, and I help people figure out how to go from like products and solutions to repositioning their business into like a leadership partner vendor and all that. To say that this has really changed who I am on stage and, more particularly helped people realize that there's no AI in what my speech is other than helping me do my analysis. The actual content is coming from my soul, which has been extremely important to me for lots of reasons.

 So I don't know if you're going to get there, but part of my passion for this is that I'm drawing these things. I like sitting at the table with my kids and, you know, doing my thing and deeply thinking about the speech. And it helps me emotionally prepare for the speech, by the way, because when I spend an hour and a half doing a doodle, it is from my soul. It is in my being. ET cetera.

 So the reason why I'm being so verbose about this is that an art marker company, a company that makes markers for professional artists, they're like the Ferrari of markers, honestly has. Has made a marker set like, I don't know if this is in focus, but it says the Professor Strauss Sasha Strauss speech doodle set to help other people make their own doodles for their own speeches.

Richard Walker: 32:09 

Oh my gosh, that is amazing. That is so amazing.

Sasha Strauss: 32:12 

It's been amazing and so meaningful to me to be able to create that journey. Yeah.

Richard Walker: 32:16 

Oh no, I look, I'm really glad you're willing to share that because I know you share it publicly when you do all your presentations and such, but it's such a unique thing. And yeah, I suck at drawing. I come from a family of artists, by the way, and I'm the black sheep of artists. Like I suck at it. And yet if you practice and try, you get better and better.

Like you've done, you're if you're only listening to this and you didn't see the images. They're brilliant. They're beautiful. They're really, really nice and authentic. Obviously, it doesn't look like a PowerPoint slide anymore.

 So thank you for sharing that. Look, I hate it when I have to wrap up my shows when I'm having fun.

Sasha Strauss: 32:52 

Are we already out of time? Oh my gosh.

Richard Walker: 32:53 

Yeah, we're getting there. Before I get to my last question, Sasha. What is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Sasha Strauss: 33:02 

I'm bummed that we're wrapping up. I just say that for the record. All right. Well, I'm findable my name. Sasha Strauss is unique in the world for whatever reason.

And so if you seek me out on LinkedIn, that's where I talk business. If you seek me out on YouTube, I post videos and reels almost every week, short clips. And then same with Instagram. I think for Instagram, it's Sasha Strauss, but a simple Google search will help you find me, especially on LinkedIn, just put my name into LinkedIn and you'll find me. I'm happy to be in touch.

 I'm constantly zooming with mom and pops and all kinds of international businesses. So drop me a note and we'll set up a zoom.

Richard Walker: 33:48 

And we didn't even get to talk about you being a professor and what that experience must be like, oh my gosh, we're gonna have to do episode two, right?

Sasha Strauss: 33:56 

Yeah. Being a professor has been a gift amongst gifts. It's really I learned more from my students than they learn from me, there's no question.

Richard Walker: 34:05 

So look, I get to ask my favorite question at the end of the show, which I think is actually a gift to all of us when my guests answer it. And the question is, who had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Sasha Strauss: 34:20 

Ooh, okay. Wow. So many magical souls come to mind. Okay. I'm very focused on being a speaker, even as a business owner and managing talent or as a professor.

Engaging students speaking is kind of my thing. And so I'll mention that I seek out inspiration from other speakers. I guess singers and bands probably do this too. Okay, so you don't want to hear me sing, trust me. But as far as speakers that have influenced me, I would.

 Two come to mind, one contemporary and one classic. So I'll start with the classics. There was a man named Manly Palmer Hall, m p Hall, and he was a deep student of faiths around the world, traveled the world and became members of these faith communities, everything from the Masons to. Hindu ritual in North India, like amazingly deep. And then he gathered all those wisdoms and he wrote encyclopedias about it.

 Well, like one of the encyclopedias he wrote was called The Secret Teachings of All Ages. And for those who can see me on screen, I have this enormous book here. Like it's really this big.

Richard Walker: 35:52 

Wow. Yeah. That's big. That's awesome.

Sasha Strauss: 35:57 

And my favorite part about this person is that he, as he gathered this wisdom, he wanted to share them. And so he started putting on a lecture series in the late 1920s, where he only charged people a dollar to attend the lectures. Well, he went on for 60 years having these seminars, teaching people about these wisdom traditions. And he never raised the price.

Richard Walker: 36:20 

Wow.

Sasha Strauss: 36:21 

I know. It's like he loved them. He wasn't conflicting them. He wasn't like Christianity believes this and Islam believes that. He was merely sharing the wisdom built into these traditions.

So I say that because he was extremely modest and ready to share, but also an amazing orator. No notes on stage teaching these wisdoms. And for me, because I listen to his recordings all the time, his voice was always cracking because he was so emotionally invested in the content. Like, oh, that's who I want to be. That's the speaker I want to be.

 So that's my classic answer to your question about who I want to acknowledge. But to give you a contemporary one, I really delved deep into the speakers I share the stage with. So I've shared the stage with Magic Johnson and all these interesting people. But one really cool one is Simon Sinek, the Ted talker slash author. It's actually how I think you and I met Rich, however many decades ago.

Richard Walker: 37:18 

You were on stage with Simon. I was sitting next to him in the audience. It was great. Yeah.

Sasha Strauss: 37:22 

So, that was really cool because over the last two decades or so, he and I have ended up sharing stages. And I'll fast forward to during Covid when as professional speakers, we have like a year of speaking engagements lined up and then Covid happened. And then obviously all of those got shut, shut down. So Simon put on an online university, put together an online university, and he picked his like six favorite speakers to be co-teachers with him. And I have to do it.

It was amazing to be in like Simon Sinek University. And I thank him for giving me that chance. And he remains inspirational. You know, people love hearing his words, love reading his books. And he's been doing that for two decades.

 And so that's my contemporary inspiration and answer to where I would share gratitude.

Richard Walker: 38:13 

Man. Now look, I, I aspire to be you, my friend on stage. You bring so much great energy to the show. It's just so powerful to watch you. And likewise, Simon, the thing that's really amazing about him is that he speaks and writes almost identically.

If you read his book, you hear him talk, and it's just so nice. It's such a great way to experience a book.

Sasha Strauss: 38:35 

I agree.

Richard Walker: 38:36 

All right. Like I said, I hate to wrap this up, but duty calls; I've got to do that. So I want to give a huge thank you to Sasha Strauss, founder and chief brand officer of Innovation Protocol, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Visit Sasha's website at innovationprotocol.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier.

Hey, I hope you've enjoyed this discussion as much as I have. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Sasha, thank you so much for joining me today.

Sasha Strauss: 39:12 

Thank you for having me.

Outro: 39:14 

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.