Sameness is boring, consistency is power: a story of hyper-growth

Lindsay Rogers • 00:05

Hello and welcome to the Brand Hunch Podcast where we explore ideas and hunches around how marketers are growing great brands. It's a look under the hood at how much is marketing science and how much is built on a hunch. In today's episode, I'm joined by Brony Popp, Senior Marketing Lead of Brand at Canva.

Chello, the agency I run, is a proud Canva agency partner, having worked together previously, and I think any marketer listening to this pod will be aware of the huge strides Canva's making more recently into the B2B space. Brony's been instrumental in developing the evolved Canva brand over the past five years. Prior to this, she was Brand Manager at The Iconic, and before this, over in media at Bauer and ARN. Brony's a Sage archetype, in my opinion, with a wealth of brand experience and wisdom and I'm really interested in your experience developing brands over the years.

​​So, take me back to the start of your career. Tell me a bit about what each of the stages you've had have built or marked a chapter for you at each role.

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Brony Popp • 01:03

I was always really addicted to print media. I had a subscription to Rolling Stone and Cosmopolitan magazine, and eventually just really wanted to move into press. Originally, I studied journalism, PR and comms and worked into newspapers. Then as I moved from regional Australia to Sydney, I got into magazines and it was really my dream job. I probably got there just before the heydays were over, which was a pretty interesting and tough transition into digital, but then I jumped from media across to e-commerce at the early stages of The Iconic as it was growing really big, and then just really loved the pace of tech. I think there's actually a lot of speed across both of those industries, and I've always liked hiring people from media to go into tech because a lot of it is similar themes around scrappiness and being able to work on the fly and change your strategy depending on what happens on the day, week, or month. I really got quite addicted to that scale up feeling, both at The Iconic, then at another scale up called Zilingo, and now at Canva.

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Lindsay Rogers • 02:13

And is your heartland still in print or has that changed?‍

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Brony Popp • 02:16

I think it's definitely changed. Print is unfortunately not where a lot of people consume their content anymore. When you look at the rise of, it wasn't actually the mobile phone that killed print, it was smartphones that really made a difference. You saw it in circulation figures when I worked in magazines, and now I'm a bit of a Substack reader instead. I love the Substack app and it's a really great way to still get a lot of the same content, even from some of the same writers I loved in beauty or fashion, but in more of a “2025” kind of way.

Lindsay Rogers • 02:50

It's been amazing, I think, to watch people from magazine days, Eleanor Pendleton and Zoe Foster Blake, all people that have had great magazine days, forge their own way with thinking about digital media in a different way.

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Brony Popp • 03:02

Yeah, I do think it shows that you have to evolve and find new audiences and I think content creators have probably done the best at that. And a lot of brands have to follow the same trajectory in terms of seeing what the landscape is, what users want, how they want to consume content, how they wanna follow you, and how to stay consistent in being recognisable in what you are known for or trusted for.

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Lindsay Rogers • 03:31

So your last two roles, your current role and your role before at The Iconic is in this brand space as a Brand Manager or a Brand Lead. How do you think about brand and what does success look like for those kind of roles?

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Brony Popp • 03:42

Success can change a lot in brand marketing depending on what company you're at, because brand marketing can be quite a wide remit across a lot of different departments, or it can be more narrow if you know you're in something a little bit more traditional.

Success, I think a lot of the time, comes down to a huge amount of metrics across the funnel. I don't think any brand marketer has just been told they have one metric that they have to increase. So, for me, it's really important to understand those top of funnel goals from a traditional brand point, but if you're not making an impact at the bottom, you're not gonna get the budgets for up the top. So, I think that's the bit that I always try to keep in mind for sure.‍

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Lindsay Rogers • 04:21

How has your relationship changed with data over the years, if it has, how has it shaped your thinking over the years?

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Brony Popp • 04:29

Data is one of my favourite things, and I think most marketers should have a pretty good relationship with their data analysts because they need to be your best friends.

We used to have a monthly meeting about data when I worked in print, or you might get to see the numbers from the news agencies once a week. Now you wanna see things daily. We actually just had a meeting about Canva Create, which is our really big event that's happening in a month, and we're talking about, what are we sending in three hours? What are we sending in the first 24 hours for updates? What are we sending in the first seven days, then the first 30 days in terms of what we report on and, literally, it needs to be that quick because it informs what you're gonna do next, and it's important to be fast.

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Lindsay Rogers • 05:10

Obviously, your role at Canva over the last five years has been a huge shift from, I'm sure, when you started to today.

A few facts I was looking up recently - there's a hundred, over 180 million users, probably more by the day,

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Brony Popp • 05:22

225 monthly active users.

Lindsay Rogers • 05:25

Is that right?

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Brony Popp • 05:26

So, people that design on Canva every month is over 220 million now.

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‍Lindsay Rogers • 05:30

Wow. And thousands of employees across the world. One of the most fascinating things that I, from an outsider perspective, I'm just in awe at, is that you are headquartered out of Australia, but your biggest markets are the US and even Brazil. So English, second language, or non-English speaking. How do you scale a brand globally when you're situated in a different market?

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Brony Popp • 05:50

It's a really good question. I think that's one of the true joys of my job is that I get to sit in Sydney and in Australia and work for a global company because so much of the time you need to be in New York or in London or somewhere like that. It’s really lovely to be able to bring such an incredible Australian brand to the world and now be famous in some of these markets.

The US, we obviously have people based in these markets who have a huge amount of expertise, and our job at HQ is to listen to that and our international marketing teams are made up of locals. That's why I also think where research and data we were just talking about is so important, because you need to be getting that qualitative and quantitative data to know what's working and what's not to be able to localise effectively.

We have a really incredible internal team of localisation and global services experts who help us translate things or hyper localise things and make beautiful global templates that are about the holidays that matter to those different markets, and that's really, really important. But it is really nice being in Sydney and being able to ensure that the Canva brand and that essence of who we are does translate, because it makes us unique compared to a lot of our competitors to be that local, Aussie brand who still has their founders as their CEO, and being able to bring that personality from the people that build the product here in Australia to the rest of the world.

Lindsay Rogers • 07:25

Do you consciously think about that at a brand level around keeping what makes Canva unique from an Australian perspective, or is that sort of secondary and dependent on the market?

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Brony Popp • 07:35

It's dependent on the market, but it's something that when we did Canva Create last year, a lot of our Australian team went over and I was checking people in at the gate and a few people said, “why are so many of you Australian?” And I was like, “oh, 'cause we're an Australian company.” And they're like, “oh, that's so cool.” And it does give us a point of difference, but it's not something we go super hard on. But Australians are loved. We're quite lucky that we're very loved in a lot of markets, and so it can be a bit of a string in our bow.

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Lindsay Rogers • 08:02

So, I can understand the success in the States. But why Brazil? What resonates about the product or the marketing or the brand in Brazil?

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Brony Popp • 08:11

Canva was first and foremost a very social media-heavy product in terms of that was the main doc type that most people went in to make. And social media in Brazil is everything. People are super engaged. Brazil is a very early adopter market as well, and so it's always been an area where we've had a lot of success and love and passion.

Anyone you ask from a brand, a global brand, will tell you it's usually quite a unique market as well. They behave a bit differently. It's where a lot of brands sometimes go and test the waters with something because you get quite a quick response, particularly on social media.

Lindsay Rogers • 08:48

Tell me your thoughts about brand consistency and the potential for sameness. Obviously you're scaling globally, I would assume you want to have the same brand voice and elements, but then be locally relevant. How do you manage that?

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Brony Popp • 09:02

Yeah, I think brand consistency sounds so dull. But realistically it's about consumers being able to find you when they need you. And if you change things up all the time, you can't be something that's easily found. I think you have to be willing to change when markets shift or strategies aren't working, but there has to be some sort of through line. So, if you are gonna change your strategy, how are you gonna get from point A to B and not lose the people along the way? From a global point of view, you have to have those local market nuances. We’ve done some really interesting marketing to Japan, the team that's doing that uses quite a different tone than what we've done before, but the logos and the colours and the sentiment and the warmth that comes with Canva is all the same.

So, you have to localise, but also still keep the essence of your brand. Otherwise, it's very hard to build a global brand and you might end up with a bunch of different local ones.

Lindsay Rogers • 09:59

And is that all documented or is that just a gut feel on how much is this global Canva brand versus local nuance?

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Brony Popp • 10:07

It's definitely documented. So, there's regular checks and governance from like, we do most of our creative in-house, but if we work with agencies, we have our ECD who's based here in Sydney going through. Not to check things off or to restrict anybody, but to ensure that consistency and truth of the brand is carrying through.

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Lindsay Rogers • 10:27

And how ruthless have you been over the years? I'm assuming the brand's evolved. You've probably had to give things a go, test and learn. What’s been your experience with the broad brand evolution?

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Brony Popp • 10:38

I think the biggest brand evolution was when we had to go for a new logo. I was part of the project team that worked on that in 2021, and I was pretty hesitant at the time. We had this teal Canva circular logo that was everywhere. And I was nervous about us losing that equity in that brand, but the thought of doing it now would be so much harder because things have grown so exponentially since that point. And so, I think sometimes you have to choose now is better than later on, some of the big changes that do need to happen. It was something that needed to happen for us to have a more global and sophisticated brand that represented where we wanted to take the company, not where necessarily it was maybe then. Big changes like that are hard, but you need to do them at certain points. That’s probably when you have to take the risk that the payoff will be worth it in the long run.

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Lindsay Rogers • 11:32

And do you think in retrospect it has been useful to change the logo?

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Brony Popp • 11:34

Yeah, definitely. We have so much more room to play with it, from an animation, from how it shows up in App Store logos, everything, and it looks more expensive and sophisticated and not a startup logo, which you have when you start a company and, it's a factor, but you're working on a huge amount of other things at the same time, so it comes with a lot more consideration and planning.

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Lindsay Rogers • 12:01

Tell me a bit about your team and structure and what you're responsible for.

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Brony Popp • 12:06

Yeah, absolutely. So as part of the marketing team, our team is split out into B2C marketing, B2B, international, and education.

And our team predominantly sit in this B2C side of things now. I sit as part of the campaigns team. Our team is predominantly focused on bringing our really big moments of the year to life. So, things like Canva Create, or our big US brand campaigns. We mostly work on that central market of the Americas, I guess I would call it, and bring a lot of those big cross-functional campaigns to life, the things that require us to work with B2B, international, education, but also cross over into product and the things that are gonna have those really big impacts and maybe less of the evergreen work that a lot of our subject matter experts, so like lifecycle or social, all of those teams bring all of those things to life all the time and have really strong KPIs and ways they do that.

Then we bring every man and their dog together to build the really big complex campaigns that, sometimes will just be in the US, but also can be global as well.

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Lindsay Rogers • 13:16

What have you learned about marketing in the Americas that's different to maybe the Australian approach?

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Brony Popp • 13:21

It costs a lot more money. The competition is hot and we are not the only one where that is our biggest market. Everybody else is focusing on it as well. So, there's a lot more competition and it's such a huge market that you can quite easily go and do something quite big that if you did it in Australia, you would see it everywhere. You can't have the same sort of level of saturation, so you have to be a lot more considered. In terms of what you choose to do and where you choose to do it.

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Lindsay Rogers • 13:55

And do you think your mentality has changed marketing predominantly to your primary markets overseas in terms of reach and focus and audience? Or is it largely the same, just a shift?

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‍Brony Popp • 14:07

I think it's mostly the same. You'll find that the numbers change a lot. What you would've got in Australia that would've been a huge success, doesn't add up when you're in the US. The numbers are huge and for big global things we do like Canva Create, last year we had over two and a half million people sign up to watch that. That is not something you can do in Australia because that would be a 10th of the population. So, the scale of everything changes quite a lot and I think that's exciting, but it’s also still a challenge to hit those numbers.

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‍Lindsay Rogers • 14:42

Yeah, and it's a huge responsibility. You’re on a mega scale. How do you talk about brand internally? It sounds like you've got great adoption in terms of the brand team and the traction and the, I would assume, the budgets that follow to do this great work. How do you, if somebody's listening and they don't have that same traction internally, whether it's talking commercially or having a seat at the table, what does that journey look like for you?

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‍Brony Popp • 15:05

Brand marketing or brand in general is very built into Canva in how Canva is set up. I would say Mel and the founders are still very tight custodians of the brand and a lot of what we do with the brand comes from our consumers and our users because we get so much feedback from them all the time.

We get millions of pieces of feedback a year, and a lot of that really informs what we make in the product because these are our biggest fans and the people that we wanna make happy and give them the things that help them create impact in their life and achieve their goals. So, I would say brand, probably here more than anywhere else, feels like everybody's responsibility, how it comes up in things that we do internally.

Every deck in Canva for internal meetings, whatever it might be, is beautifully done in Canva. Even WIP documents have a beautiful banner at the top, everything is branded, and I think that is something that everybody takes responsibility in. Whether you are working in our vibe team and putting on Friday night dinner, that poster that has the dietary requirements, that's all made in Canva.

Everything in here is designed, everything is done in a playful way that is full of colour and warmth, and so much of the Canva brand is built from internally out, and I think you can see that. If anyone has ever come to an office or joins, even an interview, everyone's got their coloured Zoom backgrounds on. And I think all of those little details mean that everybody feels really invested from every role at Canva. It's not just brand's responsibility to do that, and it's really nice, but it's extremely authentic.

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Lindsay Rogers • 16:50

So, it comes from the top and it's just how you operate rather than trying to move the ship in a new direction.

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Brony Popp • 16:56

Yep. And any time we do something that feels off brand, the staff will be the first people to be like, what's with this social post? Or how come we did this? Everybody is the custodian and I've never felt that as strongly as I have at Canva. Everybody walks the talk, in terms of how we bring this brand to life, and it's fun because normally, you go to agencies and have to be like, that's not on brand for us, or that doesn't work. But most of our creative is done in-house. A huge amount of everything we do is done in-house. And so, as a brand creative, you give way less feedback than you ever have had to because everybody here knows what that tone of voice should look like, and if that brand sting is wrong.

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Lindsay Rogers • 17:39

Yeah. Amazing. That's powerful. Looking back at your experience prior to this over at The Iconic, I was reading about your experiences that you led, the laundromat experience, the swim shows, etc. How do you think the event or the in-person activation experience in your career has helped you to date?

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Brony Popp • 17:58

Experiential is so fun, and I think it's really excellent in bringing digital brands to life because you don't have the bricks and mortar stores. And that was what we were trying to do at The Iconic, when we did experiential, was bringing something that people got to experience online into that tactile, getting to meet people, getting to touch the clothes or be part of an event or, have an experience. A lot of the brand purpose at The Iconic was around liberation, and so the laundromat was, here's a kind of laundromat and then you go through the machine and end up in this rave cave essentially. It was the funnest thing I've ever got to do, and I think that's where experiential is really, really powerful for digital brands. Something I feel really passionate about is showing up in those places, and we have an incredible experiential team now at Canva that has been built out over the last few years who do that in lots of different creative ways, whether that's at education conferences, or B2B dinners, or whatever it might be. Bringing that fun element to events and bringing all your personality, whether that's a stuffed kangaroo on your table to take home if you're at a dinner, or we do a fun thing around the world where we do Creative Juices, where people usually get to customise a juice they make and take home at a conference, and bringing a bit of the Canva fun to sometimes otherwise maybe a little bit of a dry event.

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Lindsay Rogers • 19:25

And from your experience, how much of that is able to be codified and documented, and how much of it is just a bit of a like, “ooh, I know this brand so well. That is right and that's wrong.”

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Brony Popp • 19:35

It's a good question. Some of this stuff we have definitely put into playbooks, Canva's really big on playbooks. If something has worked and we've tested it out a few times in different markets, we'll create a playbook.

So there's a Creative Juices Stand playbook that you can take if you are working in the Prague office. We had a Canva Connect event last year where we popped up Creative Juices there. So, some things can be made a little bit more uniform, and then there's other parts that are gonna be unique to a specific event or audience, more as a one-off.‍

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Lindsay Rogers • 20:09

Yeah. Amazing. Quite a few different Chello people are over at Canva or friends I know of - we know many of the same people. One thing that I've learned about Canva's culture around hiring is this high-performance culture. What's your ethos personally around investing and developing in people when you are looking for new people to join your team? How do you think about that?

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Brony Popp • 20:28

I'm obsessed with finding really great people and developing them. It's one of the things that I'm super passionate about. Canva has an incredible knack for hiring really great people. It is such a nice place to work because everybody's really smart, but also really quite kind and the people that don't fit into that culture don't tend to stay a long time. Everyone has everything that they're working on that is really high performance, but it's super collaborative and a huge part of what myself and the team that I work with do is so much around relationship management because everything is so collaborative. You need to be able to win people over. And that's what I always look for when I interview is like, can you win someone over? Can you sell the dream and then get them to put down the other thing that they need to do to help? Because as brand marketers, a lot of the time our work is collating a lot of other people's work.

We need the performance marketing and we need the creatives and we need the data guys and we need the agencies. And you need to be someone that people wanna work with and people wanna help and people wanna follow your vision, and so it's really important that you are someone who is authentically great to work with and willing to listen to the subject matter experts to create a tapestry of all of those different people into something that's a bigger picture.

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Lindsay Rogers • 21:49

It's a really interesting point. A mutual friend of ours, Mo, who's also at Canva in data and analytics, we were talking recently around the difference being an external provider into a company like an agency is, or working internally, and she was saying one of the biggest differences is, internally you're trying to get people on the same page. You might be providing recommendations, but you're trying to corral people around an idea. You still have to work with them the next day, and the day after, and the day after. So, there's as much about getting people on the same page as also picking your battles, and preserving relationships that, perhaps, as an external party, you can be more bullish, but you don't have to turn up each day. I had never stopped to think about the importance of relationship building and winning people over on a consistent basis. I guess it's even more important when it's such collaborative work and your success rides on rallying a group of people around an idea or agreeing and signing off on a piece of work.

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Brony Popp • 22:42

Absolutely. It is crucial. I would say that the Campaign Managers in my team probably talk to more people every week than most other people at Canva because they are working on different campaigns who have different stakeholders. Then the breadth of the amount of people at such a big company that takes to bring it all together is so big, and you wanna make sure that you are getting the best out of everybody. So, you need to make sure that they're engaged. And then you are working with finance to make sure the budgets line up and working with external agencies to make sure different parts that they might be filling in integrate well.

It's definitely a crucial role, but that's why I love it because I think you have to like working with people, and if you don't, I don’t know if brand marketing would be the funnest place, to be honest.

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Lindsay Rogers • 23:31

How do you personally pick good talent? What do you look for?

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Brony Popp • 23:34

I look for people who are good at detail and a bigger picture. Because you have to be able to manage both, in terms of what is working and what isn't working, and testing and learning, but also what we said, you have to be able to win people over from a bigger strategic plan that you're trying to make happen. And those things can take years. So, you have to have a longer term picture and then also be able to work on things quite short term.

I look for people who are warm and willing to say that they don't know everything because not everybody is able to know all of the details. We aren't specialists in every single channel. So, you have to be able to rely on the people that are, and also ask the right questions to make sure you're getting the answers or getting the right plan or strategy from all the people that you're working with.‍

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Lindsay Rogers • 24:30

At Chello, we hire off this framework that Patrick Lencioni, author and known business person, talks about - hungry, humble, smart. And it sounds similar in that you want people that are great at what they do, but are just nice people. Do you believe in the T in terms of specialism, or not? Do you want people to be deep in their expertise or are you more of a generalist hirer and you can shape skillset over time?

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Brony Popp • 24:53

When you're in brand marketing I think you have to know everything at a certain level. If you're too deep into one specialty, you probably need to go into that specialty if that's the thing that you are really passionate about. I definitely like people to have a range but also be motivated by a range and being able to go into deep different little bits every now and again.

Some of our campaign managers will go and deep dive into education for six months or so and get really into webinars and all different aspects of doing an education campaign, but then you might end up going and working on a developer's campaign that means you need to understand Discord and how to talk to developers in different channels.

So, I think you need someone who is hungry. I agree with the hungry. I often will say they're hungry, hungry hippos, and you gotta give lots of colourful balls to brand marketers because we like learning, and different campaigns give you a different level of information into different specialties and into different marketing channels.

I also think that as marketing evolves so quickly, you have to become a specialist on new channels or new specialties all the time. There are so many things changing all the time, particularly with AI. Now, I think it's 60% of Google searches are clickless. So, if you are an SEO specialist, you're already having to completely change what you are doing.

I think there are definitely roles that require a very deep specialty. If you are working on mobile app stores and you need to know about app optimisation, or if you are working on SEM or something, I would be looking very differently in who I hire, but instead I tend to look across the board. Are you excited to dive into little things and get into the weeds of stuff, but be able to have that big picture to bring it all back together into something that makes sense?

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Lindsay Rogers • 26:53

So essentially be hungry, do it all, be a nice person.

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‍Brony Popp • 26:59

Yeah, it's really easy to find. I don’t know what you're talking about.

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Lindsay Rogers • 27:04

So, you mentioned before Canva does a lot of your own marketing work internally. You've got a huge number of creatives and really talented - I would know, some Chello people have moved over - talented creatives internally. How do you keep creative people engaged and challenged?

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Brony Popp • 27:17

I think it's really hard when you wanna make cool stuff. Marketers wanna make new stuff, creatives wanna make new stuff. But realistically, your user or consumer is not sitting on your Instagram looking at every single post, clicking the landing page every day that you've been designing. They’re not seeing everything. You might be lucky if someone sees something once a month from your brand, and I think that's where that consistency, changing things up all the time can be a little bit difficult to juggle the longer that you've worked at a brand, but I think you have to remember that if you're bored, you might just be starting to make traction.

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Lindsay Rogers • 27:56

It's a really interesting point around consistency and all the research showing “apply consistency over time”. It doesn't mean the sameness and definitely not control C, control V across every channel, but the consistency of positioning, and messaging, and tone of voice, and key distinctive assets across all channels, how important that is.

I feel like the easy option is creatives reinventing the wheel, the harder route is applying that consistency nonstop.‍

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Brony Popp • 28:23

Yeah. Sameness sounds more accurate in terms of when things can get boring, where as what we're talking about is evolving. The rate that your marketing channels are changing, consistency might mean something very different to what your strategy is on TikTok. Doing the same thing every day there is not gonna work so it's about applying what you know to be true about your brand and your brand strategy and showing up in all of these different marketing channels in a way that you're still getting attention and that people can still recognise you, and bringing them along on that journey as you do change your brand as you need to, to evolve with the market.‍

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Lindsay Rogers • 29:00

It's sort of like people, right? You can be a really extroverted, outgoing person, but in an environment, I don't know, at a funeral. It's just not the time and place to turn up in that. So, it's still you turning up, but just a slightly evolved version of you that's still true, but relevant and applicable to the context in which you are delivering the message.

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Brony Popp • 29:18

Absolutely. I think the context in wherever you might show up, whether that's stuff that we do, you know, Canva has a huge foundation. We have a step two plan. So, the vision and mission of Canva is to create the most valuable company that we can, to do the most good we can, and allowing everyone to be able to design. And the way we talk about not-for-profits or about our planting a tree every time you print something initiative, the tone you use on that is very different to the tone you're going to use on an Instagram reel or about a fun event you're gonna do in Comic Con or something.

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Lindsay Rogers • 29:59

So Canva's obviously been birthed over many years out of this B2C, an individual designing on the platform. How much of that is then developed into your B2B offering, more recently? How many individual people are then going, “Yeah, that's interesting. I'm gonna use this for my business.” And then maybe, “I'm gonna use this for my enterprise.”

Is that a customer journey that's growing, or do you think about them as distinctly different markets?‍

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Brony Popp • 30:23

No, I think that that's exactly right. You think about how you might've originally started to use Canva. I did it to make resumes and birthday invites and things like that. And now obviously I use it every day for work, but a lot of people follow that journey without having to work at Canva.

You might start making something personal and then think, “oh, that's gonna make a really beautiful presentation that I need to do for work.” Or a lot of our enterprise users hear about Canva first from their kids using it at school. We have 90 million people a month globally who use Canva for education across teachers and students. So, it's a huge part of how people find Canva is through schooling. It can be a lot of different individual ways that you lean into Canva, and then ideally, a lot of the time, you will have these advocates who in their business are the Canva person, and slowly, often will be the ones saying, “we should be doing this in Canva.Why aren't you doing that in Canva?” And those champions are the ones who tend to usually get a lot of their business on board.

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Lindsay Rogers • 31:23

This is a little bit out of your remit, but I'm interested in your perspective. How do you think a B2B brand should behave, and do you think that's shifting over time?

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Brony Popp • 31:32

Absolutely. I think our B2B brand, how we're trying to evolve it is remembering that we try to think of it as B to H, B to human. Because realistically, the people who are buying a product in a business, still are humans who catch the train to work and need to see an ad, or are on social media at night, they don't have a whole different set of ways that they're communicating. A lot of the ways you're gonna reach an enterprise is very similar to how you're gonna reach consumer. So, we try to bring that Canva playfulness and light to our B2B offering and B2B marketing as well, because that's who Canva is.

But also, why does B2B have to be Navy morning teas? You know, why does it have to be dry? Why does it have to be something that feels like, oh, I only do that at work. I think realistically, our biggest power users are the people who understand that you can flex across all aspects of your life, and Canva can help you achieve your goals, whether they're personal or professional.

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Lindsay Rogers • 32:34

I know I've talked to you about this before, but you talk about the law, the legacy, and the history of brands being important. Why and where does that come from for you?

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Brony Popp • 32:43

I love history in general, but I think it's what, especially even with new brands, you still have law and legacy. I've worked on Harper's Bazaar, which had a brand that literally started in the 1860s, and I now work on brands that might've been around for a decade.

People love Easter eggs. Look at how successful Taylor Swift’s marketing has been with Easter Eggs. People love understanding the world, and I think world-building is really important from a brand point of view. Canva’s always, I think, understood that. When I first started, and this was in 2020, and the pandemic, there was a quiz you used to do as part of your onboarding, which was to go and find things that happen law-wise on Slack, and Canva runs very heavily on Slack. And one of them was about someone leaving a half banana in the kitchen and then everyone turning this whole thread to town about this, who eats half a banana, you know? And that got made into socks. It's an emoji that we use all the time. And there's little things like that that, even if they're just internal, make people feel like they're part of something bigger and I think it's really important to make you feel like a brand is not just something corporate, but has feelings.

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Lindsay Rogers • 34:01

Sounds like the sink junk in our office, but funnily enough, it's not been made into socks yet. Canva Create, you mentioned this before, I'll be in LA with you in a month to see it all in action. Why are community building events important to digital brands?

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Brony Popp • 34:14

It makes you feel part of something. I think post-pandemic especially, people wanna get back in person all the things that we probably were a bit over, like networking. Everybody is keen to do that and understands the value of having that face-to-face interaction. I also think there's something really powerful, personally, about getting off Zoom. Getting out of working from home and turning up into a place and seeing how a brand comes to life so that you can have that tactile, like how I mentioned before with the laundromat experience, I think Canva Create is a really exciting way to bring a lot of things that we do online into real life, like workshops. People are so hungry to learn how to use the latest Canva products or even how to do some of the basics, and we've seen so many of those sessions already book out for Canva Create, which is in a month.

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Lindsay Rogers • 35:06

Amazing. How do you know which brand elements that are sort of fixed and forevermore, and others that are seasonal or a campaign or an idea that addresses a specific product feature or moment in time? How do you distinguish the difference between the two and/or are they both always evolving?

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Brony Popp • 35:23

I think everything's always evolving. You need to be consistent in terms of things like logos and colours, brand systems and all of those beautiful brand ID kind of things. I think tone of voice has become something that everyone is paying a lot more attention to now. I would say you look at brands like Go-To Skincare or even Duolingo, and tone is super important. And I think if you wanna change things, you can't just change it tomorrow. It needs to be this slower evolution. So, the things that stay consistent, it's maybe like bringing people on the journey. I think I said that earlier, if you wanna change things because maybe the market's change, maybe you have new owners, maybe you have new competitors, maybe you need to go into a new area, whatever it might be, that is part of business and you have to do that so you aren't left behind. You just can't tomorrow say, “oh, we're gonna be a really funky, weird brand now.” Because everyone will be like, huh, who? Who is this?‍

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Lindsay Rogers • 36:25

It's incongruous.

Brony Popp • 36:27

‍Yeah. So, you have to, if you do know that you need to change strategy or you wanna go in some particular way, it needs to be true to your brand core, and then what the version of that will be going forward.

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Lindsay Rogers • 36:40

Who do you think does brand building really well? Who do you admire?

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Brony Popp • 36:43

I think a lot of brands do different aspects well. I don't think any brand has it down pat. And maybe that's actually what we should take out of it, is that we should be kinder to ourselves because nobody has it perfect. You know, even some of the biggest brands in the world can make creative or do a campaign where you go, oof, I don't know about that. And it's because humans run brands, right? And humans are flawed. And the more people that are in the mix, the more likely it is that things might get off track. But there's lots of different things I love about a lot of different brands, but I don't think I have one brand where I'm like, you are perfect and you've done everything right.

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Lindsay Rogers • 37:19

Lastly, what kind of trends do you think we'll see over the next few years or trends or ideas in the B2C or B2B marketing space? What do you think is big?

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Brony Popp • 37:28

I know this is gonna be a really boring answer, but a lot of it is gonna be around AI. I think how you adapt your marketing to utilise it as much as possible, how your company adopts it to be not left behind, it will be a huge leap.

We're really lucky that it's been part of Canva for quite some time. We build AI, we have acquired some different AI. We work and partner with different AI companies, so I think that's gonna be probably all anyone talks about for a while. It's something that I've spent a lot more time on this year figuring out how to get into our processes, how to utilise to make us more efficient.

I don't think it replaces anyone. I think it just changes how you work, and my emails have become much, much faster as a result. I think in terms of a lot of where brands visually need to go is how they juggle the changes that are happening in society, the changes in how people are wanting to consume products, whether that's understanding whether that product is made ethically, or whether that company has got values that they align with.

I think there's a lot of different things that are gonna come up in the future that Gen Z is gonna shape in terms of what they care about and where brands need to be probably more transparent than they've ever had to be before.

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Lindsay Rogers • 38:56

On the topic of AI, I think Canva's just released the AI in Marketing report. So, we can go and have a look at the adoption of AI in senior marketing roles and how it's changing the approach to marketing funnel work.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been a really interesting conversation and can't wait to see you at Canva Create.

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Brony Popp • 39:15

Thank you so much, Lindsay. I can't wait to see you there.

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Lindsay Rogers • 39:21

My biggest takeaway from Brony was this idea that her brand team are the most curious and interconnected people across the business. And for me, that just sums up how brand should and could, and absolutely does at Canva, with their high performing and distinctive culture, permeate everything. I think it's a great reminder that anyone in a brand role should be interested, interesting, and well connected.

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