We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brian Santa Maria. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brian below.

Brian, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

When business big wigs look to emulate someone else’s wins, they tend to think the tactics led to the brand success. Usually it’s the other way around. The brand’s success led to the tactics. The adventure has to start with who you are and what you’re about. Two brands whose products seem like competitors might have totally different tactics, but equally successful FOR THEM, based on who they are as a brand.

Conquering your brand starts with knowing what you’re about.

Brian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a brand conquistador. I’ve brought all my work together under Flagship. I make ideas brands, launch new ones, recenter old ones. I take the adventure of brand marketing, map out the strategy, build the identity then launch the campaigns.

I figured out my gift for it after years as a writer and creative working with Ray Bradbury, Disney Imagineering ,The Onion and more. I got sick and ended up in an Ad Agency during treatment. From there I helped Disney, ConAgra, Best Buy, Plum Organics, Amazon, Samsung, Union Pacific and a lot of other brands navigate this new world.

Now I have a small group of new brands that I’m setting sail. I love identity brands. I love missions. I bring faith to my work. I tell and live the stories. As simply as possible.

And I have a passion for kids books. I’ve made a few myself.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

“You’ve got to be good at everything.” That’s bullshit. You don’t.

That message gets sent out a lot. Sometimes it’s a softer “work on your weaknesses” note. But it’s almost just as irrelevant.

As a business, as a brand, as an employee, as a creative. It’s never true.

I learned a lot of great things in art conservatory, but the mindset there is that you should identify your weaknesses and build up a creator who is ready for anything and strong in all areas.

But people aren’t out here shopping for people who are *pretty good* at things. They want people who are great at them. They hire for greatness, they buy for greatness. So figure out what you’re good at and make yourself great. If you’re already great at something, make yourself undeniable.

That’s what you’ll be known for. That’s your value.

No one remembers Dennis Rodman’s free throw average. Who cares? He was great at rebounds. And that’s all anyone was ever going to pay him to do.

So for me, I had to break the habit of perfectionism in the things I was only ever going to be average at in the first place. I had to focus on the adventure and the story of it all. That’s what I do. That’s what I offer.

And when I work with a brand, I work on getting to the heart of what they are and what they do so that we can live, sell, and practice that 100% of the time. If you’re a luxury item, don’t sell on price. If you’re junk food, don’t talk about health. If you’re serious, don’t try and make jokes.

Just be what you are. And be it as hard as you absolutely can.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

I have a brand Promised Grounds. We’re incredible. We make incredible coffee and do incredible things with the money. We’re also incredibly strong in our faith. We’re a Christian brand and we’ve been told over and over by grocers and retailers, consultants and salespeople, that we need to tone it down.

But we’re not a toned down brand. That’s not who we are. Christ is why we do what we do. So if you think I’m at 75 and I need to be at a 50… what I’m hearing is that I better turn it up to 100.

So that’s what we did. We had a go-to-market choice: We can soften what makes us who we are, and maybe get some shelf space, and compete with 10,000 other coffees on the things that make them who *they* are… or we can let our brand lead our tactics. How you do what you do is who you are. If we go-to-market traditionally by watering down our beliefs, then that’s who we are: A watered-down do-gooder who acts like the rest of them in an oversaturated market. That’s not who we are.

How you do what you do is who you are.

So if we go-to-market through Christian channels unapologetically with uncompromising ideals on quality and sourcing, that’s who are as a brand.

Because remember, our product isn’t who we are. In both scenarios the product is the same. The product is the vehicle the brand uses to reach their audience.

So we took it to market in churches. Building community and concern for our mission a few thousand Christians at a time. Answering their need for volunteer service. Supporting our mission for Christian water missionaries around the world (in over a dozen countries and counting, giving needed water without condition). Well that blew up.

Now the largest Christian organizations in the country, like Gloo and RightNow media, they want to work with us. We want to have a coffee shop, but evangelism doesn’t sit down and wait for the congregation, it brings it to the world. So we put our shop on wheels and The Wake Up Wagon is launching in Austin Texas in 2025, waking people up with coffee and the Good News.

Let your brand tell you how to behave. Let your brand guide your tactics.

How you do what you do is who you are.

Contact Info:

• Website: FlagshipBrand.com, PromisedGrounds.com
• Instagram: @briansantamaria, @promisedgrounds
• Facebook: /promisedgrounds
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/santa-maria/
• Twitter: get off twitter

Image Credits

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