Interview with Gabriel Shaoolian, CEO and Founder, Digital Silk

As a CEO and Founder in marketing and advertising, how would you describe your approach to building brands that remain memorable in a crowded digital marketplace?

I think the strategy and discovery phase at the start of each client project is the key to my approach. I take the time to understand your business, your customers, and what you want to achieve moving forward. Your branding and marketing are more connected than you think, because your core vision, mission, and values inform your unique take on marketing collateral.

It’s easy to create a few campaigns and get some clicks, likes, or shares. But what people want more than anything is to connect with brands that make them feel like they’re part of something greater.

That feeling usually comes from a company having a point of view people can share. A greater cause. A remarkable story. An odds-defying mission. It’s why your company exists and why your customers remember you.

What career experiences in brand development and digital marketing most shaped the way you think about creating memorable brands?

Growing my own company was a defining experience for me. You never truly experience the perils of building a brand and marketing your services until it’s your own.

In the early days, I had very little experience running a business or making sales, but I knew the company was becoming something exciting. Over time, I got things moving with no funding and grew a team of 17 people, which put immense pressure on me to get things right.

This taught me that a brand is everything a company does. It’s about handling your sales calls, assessing your deliverables, and communicating with your customers. All of these are marketing touchpoints.

I stopped thinking of branding and marketing as two separate things. I learned that marketing campaigns are only as memorable as the brand experiences that guide them, and that perspective guides my efforts at Digital Silk.

When a brand is competing with thousands of daily messages, how do you help clients identify the one idea they should be known for?

Your unique attribute should demonstrate the value you provide to your customers. You can easily say you’re this or that, but if your target audience doesn’t benefit from it, it’s practically useless.

As far as differentiation goes, the idea is to be the most relevant brand for a specific 'why' or 'when.' Look at competing alternatives and isolate the things you have that they lack. Tie it back to the value customers could get, and you’ve identified the one thing you should be known for.

From your work in web design and digital media, which online touchpoint has the greatest potential to make a brand memorable, and how can businesses improve it?

I think consistency across all touchpoints and distinctive brand assets across media are the most effective strategies for driving recognition.

With that said, I see the website as the most promising touchpoint in the sales funnel; it therefore has the greatest potential to convert or deter your leads. Your site is your main salesperson, so you should treat it as such.

As for how you can improve it, my advice is not to do it in isolation. I've seen brands with websites that look nothing like the persona they're trying to portray on other channels.

Slapping your logo or slogan on it is only the starting point; it's how you use your colors, messaging, typography, and imagery that makes it memorable and specific to your business.

You have emphasized clarity and consistency in branding; how can a growing company maintain both as it expands across SEO, paid media, social media, and its website?

The idea is to make those touchpoints easily identifiable as part of your brand. The more you treat them as separate channels, the easier it becomes for them to feel disconnected.

That's why your brand strategy matters: it's the core foundation you use to build the rest of your campaigns. Create your core assets, stick to them, and resist the urge to refresh them constantly.

Define what you want to be known for and the topical coverage you plan to target, then use that structure to plan your strategy across all your digital media. Use a shared content calendar that every specialist can access and contribute to, so it feels like you're all working toward a specific goal and sharing the same story.

How do you distinguish between a brand message that gets attention briefly and one that creates a lasting emotional connection with consumers?

You can argue that the relationships between brands and consumers are largely transactional. Growing your brand awareness comes from your company’s reach and distinctive assets, while it is also defined by people’s gut feelings about your product or service and the expectations or memories they associate with it.

As such, messaging that creates lasting emotional connections compounds over time; it’s not something that spikes and is gone soon after. Show both empathy and authority, and address all the different aspects of the customer’s problem. Describe what you offer in terms of how it helps them, and show that you understand their pain points.

If you’d still sound like a distinctive brand even when they can’t see your logo, your brand voice and messaging guidelines have already made their mark.

What role does frictionless website or e-commerce experience play in brand recall, based on the digital projects you have led?

I believe businesses are often preoccupied with why people should buy from them, rather than what puts them off. Remove as many barriers to purchase as possible so users can easily complete their transactions.

Even then, high customer satisfaction doesn’t automatically translate into lasting brand loyalty or recall. However, this strategy can reduce customer disloyalty and minimize the chances of customers leaving for a competitor.

We did this for a client whose site loaded in 6.23 seconds and had very low conversion and returning-visitor rates. We completely reorganized the information architecture and navigation and built a modular e-commerce experience, supported by a marketing and conversion roadmap. This helped the brand improve customer loyalty, brand recall, and long-term growth.

How do you use analytics to determine whether a brand is becoming genuinely memorable rather than simply generating impressions or clicks?

A high number of impressions doesn't necessarily equate to a long-lasting memory of your brand. In my opinion, brand memorability goes far deeper than the funnel metrics used by traditional trackers, which is why this connection can be surprisingly weak.

When it comes to branding, customer surveys, social listening, and unaided brand recall remain the best indicators of memorability. Marketing specialists can often misjudge the effectiveness of their own assets because they tend to confuse momentary popularity with genuine originality.

For a business with limited marketing resources, what is one practical change it can make this month to become more memorable to its ideal audience?

As unfortunate as it may be, customers often treat brands in the same category as near substitutes. As such, anyone who shops at smaller businesses usually also shops at big-chain ones. Therefore, differentiation on a limited budget can be tricky, since it requires your target audience’s mental availability.

The one thing I would do is interview a handful of your most loyal shoppers, since having a little data is better than having none. Skip customers you don’t want to attract more of, and focus on the ones you already have that are bringing the most bang for your buck marketing-wise.

You can then use those insights as your voice-of-customer language to get closer to your ideal audience segment. If you show that you understand their problems and can see things from their perspective, people would be more inclined to give your business a try as opposed to the other, more generic big-name brands.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I can’t end this interview without noting the impact AI has on brand building and digital media as a whole. Yes, it’s a very useful technology, but it can also be a dangerous tool because it enables businesses to accept average work more easily.

With that said, AI doesn’t exempt marketers and strategists from putting in their two cents and building that initial trust with customers. The ceiling is still set by those who use their human judgment to define core differentiators, proprietary customer insights, and proximity to revenue.

AI only helps smart people get smarter; it doesn’t replace brand-building strategies or long-term customer retention campaigns. If you want to learn more about this, I sometimes post on the Digital Trends section of our website.

This article was first published on Featured News.