Cover Brand

Nobody wants your logo on their stuff, and why that should change how you think about every piece of branded merch you order. Swire Ho runs Garuda Promo in LA, printing and producing promotional product for companies. The episode suggests you ditch the logo-first instinct, find the unsexy market nobody else wants, and let the product itself do the talking. Swire's been quietly building a niche in...

Two brands, one founder, and one of the most interesting brand architecture problems you'll hear on this show — how do you launch something brand new when your most valuable asset is the reputation you built doing something else? Rachel Lederman has spent eighteen years running Sweet Sadie Productions, a creative studio behind commercial, experiential, and live work for clients ranging from Kraft...

What if the person who knows your work best got to ask the questions? That's this episode. Aicila Lewis has been producing Cover Brand since before Ethan knew it was live. She's heard every episode, watched the frameworks land in real time, and spent years telling Ethan he needed to bottle up those coffee conversations where someone walks away going, wait, that's all I had to know? For episode 69,...

How do you turn people who stumbled into the Farmer's Market on a nice Saturday into more engaged partcipants? Mackenzie Sehlke is the executive director of the Boulder County Farmers Markets, a 40-year-old nonprofit running seasonal markets in Boulder and Longmont, plus a food hub that's been quietly building for six years. She came in wanting to know how to convert casual visitors into lifelong...

An engineer-artist who builds soft skills training like a video game — and the brand problem that comes with it: how do you look trustworthy to the suits who sign the checks while staying genuinely weird for the Gen Z workforce who actually uses the thing? Sayre Blake is a systems engineer, concept artist, and founder of SkillSage (that's S-K-I-L-L-S-A-I-G-E — the AI is in the name) — a soft skill...

John Tayer has run the Boulder Chamber for thirteen years. He knows the joke — the Chamber is your father's Oldsmobile — and he's not here to argue with it. This episode works through what you actually do when your brand has been aging with its customer instead of recruiting new ones, and the honest answer is more interesting than a rebrand. Ethan and John pull the Oldsmobile metaphor apart live:...

A pillow that took six years to build, a third of your life to use, and one conversation to reframe — what happens when you've got a genuinely great product but the pricing, positioning, and place are all pulling in different directions? Siri Schubert-Nicolella is a wellness expert, bodywork practitioner, and the creator of a contoured natural latex pillow she designed from scratch — hand-carved w...

Every few years, someone slaps a new name on the same old thing — and suddenly there's a conference, a certification, and software to go with it. Is account-based marketing actually a discipline, or is it just marketing with a better LinkedIn bio? And if you can't describe what you do without a subgenre, is the subgenre helping you — or just hiding the ball? Laura Dodds is a digital marketing and...

This week Ethan chats with John Pabon . John is a sustainability strategist, former McKinsey and UN consultant, and author of three books including The Great Greenwashing and the just-released Strategic Sustainability: A Pragmatic Blueprint for Responsible Business . This episode digs into one of the most stubborn gaps in brand communication: the chasm between what companies say about their values...

Two brands, one expert, and a mission that makes being the expert feel like a contradiction — how do you build something institutional out of something that personal? Carmell Clark is an executive coach with 25+ years of experience, creator of the Core Self-Discovery curriculum, and founder of the Center for Transformational Influence (CTI) — an organization built to help individuals and companies...

What if the reason your marketing isn't landing isn't your message — it's that you're still treating people like targets instead of humans? In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker welcomes back Chelsea Burns , brand ethicist and relational psychologist at The Marketing Psychologist . Chelsea's work sits at the intersection of consumer neuroscience, relational psychology, and ethical influence...

What does it mean to be out — fully, authentically, unapologetically yourself — especially when the culture around you keeps trying to make you invisible? In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker welcomes Jamie Rich , a community builder with 23 years of experience producing live cultural events, including founding the Kansas City LGBT Film Festival. Jamie is now launching Out Here Together ,...

Are you spending weeks trying to find a brand name that explains exactly what you do? Stop it. Your buyers are mental misers. They aren't parsing the literal meaning of your name; they just need a reliable shortcut. In this episode of Cover Brand , Ethan Decker welcomes Dror Yaron, a life coach working to humanize business. Dror is struggling with a literal name ("Ethics Coach") that feels heavy a...

Nic Hinwood returns to Cover Brand for a Shop Talk episode about the messy middle of brand building—the place where client expectations, practical marketing work, and brand science collide. Nic runs Keo, a brand and marketing agency in Tamworth, Australia, working primarily with small and medium-sized businesses. After sixteen years in business, he has watched his agency evolve from producing tact...

How do you choose the right marketing tools when there are thousands of options claiming to do the same thing? In this episode of Cover Brand , Ethan Decker sits down with Jay Friedman , co-founder of Cartograph AI, to explore the increasingly complex world of marketing technology. As AI lowers the barrier to launching new products, the number of martech vendors continues to grow rapidly. While th...

How do you build awareness for a movement around an issue people often avoid discussing? In this episode of Cover Brand , Ethan Decker talks with filmmaker and founder Karen Moore about her mission to address colorism through film, workshops, and community conversations. Karen’s company, The Color of Beautiful Media & Entertainment Group, works to redefine beauty standards for dark-skinned Bla...

How do you focus a brand when your expertise could help almost anyone? In this episode of Cover Brand , Ethan Decker talks with Chelsea Burns , founder of The Marketing Psychologist, about the early-stage challenge of narrowing a brand’s target audience and defining its core offering. Chelsea’s business blends psychology with ethical branding and marketing, helping organizations build trust-based...

How do you compete with big-city agencies when you’re based in a town of 50,000 people? In this episode of Cover Brand , Ethan Decker talks with Nic Hinwood , founder of Keo, a branding and marketing agency based in Tamworth, Australia. Together they unpack the perception challenge facing regional agencies—and why buyers often rely on subtle cues when judging expertise and credibility. Ethan intro...

Ready to stand out in an industry that wasn’t built for you? This episode is a sharp, honest conversation about identity, confidence, and what brand science actually says about change. Victoria Carrington Chávez —TEDx speaker, narrative strategist, and founder of Lilac & Aspen—joins Ethan to explore how young, multi-identity marketers can cement their presence without sanding off what makes th...

How does a small marketing agency grow when buyers struggle to tell agencies apart? In this episode, Ethan Decker and Megan Bortner explore the mechanics of differentiation in B2B services. They discuss why most agencies are comparable in the eyes of buyers, how growth comes from acquiring more customers rather than creating extreme loyalty, and why focus is often more powerful than breadth. You’l...

How do you know if your personal frustration is a real market opportunity? In this episode, Ethan Decker and Tatyana Huseynova unpack the early thinking behind a niche consumer product idea in the outdoor sports space. The problem is specific. The category is crowded. The need is under-addressed. The discussion covers how to evaluate demand, where to find early signals of interest, how to think ab...

Thinking about moving your brand upmarket? This episode is a masterclass in how luxury actually works. Ethan Decker and Christy O’Connor explore what separates premium and luxury brands from the rest, how affluent customers think and behave, and why white-glove service is as much about systems as it is about personal attention. You’ll learn how luxury brands signal value through design and behavio...

Brand people love novelty. Buyers… not so much. In this episode of Cover Brand , Ethan sits down with Sebastian Hidalgo , co-founder of Durindal , to talk about why some brands endure while others keep tripping over their own “fresh ideas.” The conversation opens with AC/DC (as all serious brand conversations should), and the famous Angus Young quote about having 13 albums that sound exactly the s...

Most brands spend a fortune polishing what customers see . Very few think about what customers hear . In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan sits down with Shez Mehra —DJ turned multisensory troublemaker—to unpack why sound is one of the most overlooked (and most powerful) tools in branding. From marble bathrooms with zero acoustic privacy to forgettable ads no one is watching, Shez and Ethan make...

Most marketing teams are still trying to choose sides: brand or performance, creativity or data, vibes or dashboards. That’s adorable. And wildly inefficient. On this episode of Cover Brand , I sit down with Casey Hill of Do What Works to unpack how demand actually gets created, why SEO is still misunderstood, and how A/B testing at massive scale reveals what marketers think works versus what actu...