Every brand should have a story. Or at least those that believe in transparency and connecting with their audience in a genuine way.
Anyone can build a website, incorporate a business, and call themselves a brand. But it doesn't mean much if you're not delivering value and connecting with your audience in an authentic way.
This is why authenticity is at the core of our principles at Casted. In fact, our foundation was built off this. "Always Be Authentic" is a core component of who we are as a company.
So everything we do revolves around this, including how we manage our podcast and customers. As you'll find, we're consistent with having expert voices in our episodes, which is key to driving forward authentic conversations our audience will enjoy.
And our superpower behind it all—the thing that keeps us moving forward, is our passion.
So, in a nutshell, our core principles are simple but powerful:
1. Always be authentic
2. Harness expert voices
3. Passion is our superpower
Being real and creative is how we convey our authenticity and passion in the B2B podcasting space.
So on that note, here's a story that’s near and dear to my heart showcasing just that...
How Podcat Was Born
Notice the cute little feline watching you from the chatbot in the corner of your screen? Well, that fella wasn't always a part of the Casted family.
The concept was born one day, a day I remember well, while our three founders were having a whiteboarding session at our old office. At the time, I was our fourth and only other employee. So naturally, I was present by default at this whiteboarding session.
As I was working on some designs for our platform, and the others were in mid-conversation, I noticed Adam write “Podcat” up on the board. This was obviously a mistake (didn't he mean podcast?), but it was a beautiful mistake that I couldn’t ignore.
If you know me at all, you know I love a good joke and our founders love a good pun. So as I sat there watching this mistake play out, I knew I had to do something with it. While I am the Senior Brand Designer at Casted, I’m also an accomplished artist, so it only made sense that I needed to bring Podcat to live through my illustration abilities.
I mocked up Podcat and showed it to the founders. Needless to say, they loved it and we knew this very authentic, silly mistake had to be a part of the brand we were building.
And in my opinion, it's the little things like this that sets apart the authentic brands from the stuffy ones. We don’t take ourselves too seriously and we want the personalities that live behind the logo, website images, and messaging to come alive in our brand.
Those personality traits, the ones that stand out, are sourced from all parts of our business. We take guidance from everyone on the team, not just the founders and leaders.
And you'll see this in everything we do here at Casted.
How Our Core Principles Translate Into the Real World
When you visit a brand's website, you'll normally find a section discussing its core principles. We have one too.
But rather than throwing out pretty words that sound awesome and relatable, we show how we incorporate them into the real world.
For example...
Passion is our superpower
It sounds pretty awesome, but how does this translate into our day-to-day activities? Well, the passion represents the drive we all have within our respective crafts.
As you just saw, I demonstrated my passion for my craft when I created Podcat.
But our passion also extends beyond our skill sets—we are passionate about the roles we play within the business and its culture.
Being passionate about my own craft isn’t enough, I have to bring that passion to my role at Casted to help build a product, educational material, and branding that helps marketers better access, amplify, and attribute their podcast at the center of their marketing strategy. Passion is our superpower because we have people who are passionate about what they do and about Casted’s vision.
We're not just growing a company but creating a movement behind it.
We truly believe that a brand’s true superpower is the people behind the brand, because when you have a set of passionate people in a business from the top down, it can get pretty magical.
Harness expert voices
If there's one thing we want at Casted, it's to connect with our audience beyond the scope of a business deal. So we make it our mission to reach out to the B2B marketers who are harnessing the power of podcasting and invite them to speak on episodes.
Sure, we could try to research their brands and create content around the strategies they are employing, but there's nothing authentic in doing that. People want to hear from the people who are doing the work.
So our goal is to find the best experts to become a resource for our audience. This may be a marketer from an enterprise we work with. Or it could be a showrunner from an up-and-coming start-up. The important part is to seek out the people who inspire us, the people who are the experts in our field, because that’s who our audience wants to hear from.
Always be authentic
Inviting leaders to our podcast and putting every ounce of passion into our everyday tasks is great. But it doesn't mean much if we're not creating authentic experiences.
This is why we aren't hell-bent on perfection or trying to present ourselves in such a light. Do we make mistakes? You bet we do. But we also don’t punish ourselves for it because vulnerability should be present in the conversations we have on our podcast, which means being okay with things not going according to plan.
We find that conversation acts as an incredible power that humanizes our brand and culture. So we're always encouraging guests to be themselves, even if that means being authentically silly, serious, or even a bit grumpy (we love you Podcat).
