Non-Traditional Approaches to Traditional Industries: A Q&A with Industry Peers Around Brand & Creative
We’re thrilled to announce that we’re starting a series of Q&As with our industry peers and friends.
While we love sharing our perspective, we also want to highlight fellow industry experts in a variety of marketing, branding, RevOps, and sales topics to share lessons learned.
Today we’re starting with Kevan Lee and Shannon Deep from Bonfire, a brand strategy agency. Suzanne had the pleasure of working with Shannon and Kevan on a shared client late last year. She was impressed with their modern and creative approach to branding and storytelling (you can read more from them in their weekly Substack). We dove into some interesting topics that we know you’ll take a lot away from.
Thanks for chatting with us at The Growth Stack, Kevan and Shannon! Tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you’re building at Bonfire.
Shannon:
We’re both tech marketers with a lot of brand, content, editorial, and leadership experience who started our own agency, Bonfire, about two years ago. We call Bonfire a brand strategy and storytelling agency, helping (mostly) B2B SaaS companies establish the foundational brand elements of purpose, mission, values, brand positioning, and brand messaging. These are the key ingredients for telling a compelling and differentiated story about your company.
We both come at storytelling from different fields—journalism and the arts, respectively—and we think that gives us a bit of a different POV than a dyed-in-the-wool B2B brand and marketing agency.
Kevan:
And maybe it’s because of these non-traditional backgrounds that we find ourselves interested in building a non-traditional company. Along with our branding agency, we also run an online community about career design where we help creative professionals (and professional creatives) figure out how to do work that aligns with their values–kind of a career brand and storytelling exercise, if you will. This fall, we are hosting our first in-person retreat in the French countryside, based on these ideals of work-life design and intentional living.
Ask us what we’re building a year from now, and we might have a totally different answer, too!
(I literally cannot go two weeks without suggesting to Shannon that we spin up an entirely new line of business: publishing house, t-shirt shop, chocolate company, you name it.)
Talk to us about your shift from Marketing to Storytelling and Branding. What was behind this?
Shannon:
The shift is kind of like returning home! Like we mentioned, we both started in story—Kevan was a journalist turned professional sports blogger, Shannon was a theatrical dramaturg and freelance writer—so marketing felt like a natural “parking spot” for a lot of those same skills. In our marketing roles, brand storytelling was always our favorite part. So when we started Bonfire, that’s what we decided to focus on.
How did your Marketing experience suit you for Storytelling?
Kevan:
Yeah, in a sense, you might say that we’ve always thought of marketing as storytelling.
We think about it like this: Marketing is connecting your company to your customers. Story is a really powerful way to do that.
There’s this neat research from Harvard Business Review that we often cite in our workshops, which claims that stories are remembered 22x more than facts and that customers who are emotionally invested in your brand are >50% more valuable. So we’ve prided ourselves over the years on doing marketing that is memorable and valuable, and we get there via storytelling.
Is storytelling a lost art in B2B? How do you think about modern storytelling?
Shannon:
Definitely. Very few B2B brands have the patience or understanding for it these days. It’s such a huge missed opportunity for differentiation, and with actual commitment to and investment in brand storytelling, companies in highly competitive categories (ahem, AI this and AI that) could really stand out relatively quickly. But the VC environment creates a lot of really fragile leadership teams—no one is brave, no one takes risks, and no one is willing to test and learn. The attitude seems to be: Better to fail slowly and subtly than experiment, fail obviously, adjust, and build resilience and vigor. Cool—have fun, guys!
Modern storytelling doesn’t have to mean being on every channel including all the newest ones. It means choosing the channels that feel authentic to both you and your audience and making real investments in quality content on those channels. Don’t try to be what you’re not! Just tell YOUR story with integrity in the ways that make sense.
What do PR and Marketing get wrong when it comes to storytelling? What are common mistakes you see?
Kevan:
If I had a dollar for every time marketing was asked to pitch the media on a new feature release…
Oftentimes, this feature-forward sense of storytelling is endemic to the company’s environment of product-first leadership or software-will-save-us business strategy. PR and marketing can quickly get storytelling wrong when the story starts with the product and not the customer or the zeitgeist or the purpose. Why do you exist as a company? Tell me an interesting story about THAT and not about how version 2.0 of your product is AI-powered.
Shannon:
PR is usually Brand’s best ally! In addition to being too feature-focused, a mistake certain marketers can make is thinking that storytelling means publishing literal narrative paragraphs that describe the “story” of your company or product. On the contrary, you only RARELY are granted that much time and attention from your audiences, so instead you need to think about the whole ecosystem of possible brand touchpoints—ads, emails, in product, social media, etc.—as ADDING UP to a cohesive story/idea about your brand. That’s why brand foundations are so important; they lay the groundwork for all expressive work so that the same messages are coming through in bits and pieces, all culminating in a unified “vibe.”
We hear a lot of Growth Marketers doubt the value of Brand and PR. What is your response to that doubt?
Kevan:
It’s just so bizarre to me that a single department within marketing can be so myopic as to doubt the value of marketing’s constituent parts. Let’s say for the sake of simplification that brand marketing is “who you are,” product marketing is “what you sell,” and growth marketing is “how you sell it.” Clearly, growth marketing is critically important in today’s day and age, but also, isn’t it obvious that growth marketing needs good brand and product marketing in order to be effective? If growth marketing undervalues brand’s role in the marketing mix, then the end result is stale, soulless, poorly-converting growth content, which, come to think of it, is what a lot of people complain about clogging up their feeds today.
Shannon:
We won’t mince words…
Growth marketers: Think about your performance marketing results over a longer time span. In one year, three years, five years, what’s your plan for making your strategies and spend increasingly more efficient as the company scales? ::waves at you:: Hi! That’s us! We’re your plan. Brand and PR are the major levers of company awareness, trust, affinity, and reputation. And you know what all those things do? They shorten the awareness and consideration phases of the funnel, they make sales and customer success initiatives a lot easier, and keep your churn rate low.
Just because you can’t see the impact in WoW and MoM reporting doesn’t mean that, in the end, YOUR marketing results won’t realize those measurable impacts. We know that the VC tech landscape is anything but patient, and that pressure gets translated directly onto you. But we’re over here playing the long game, and we’d love it if you joined us. (Quick! Before they lay us all off and then you have to do literally everything by yourself!)
What's the biggest shift you're seeing in how companies think about Brand in 2025?
Shannon:
Well, not gonna lie: They really don’t get it anymore. We’ve seen an epidemic of companies conflating their brand positioning with the product positioning, their brand purpose with their product vision, or brand marketing campaigns with a holistic brand strategy. The overwhelming pressure from VC overlords to measure everything to death has pushed us to the very dregs of C-suite/exec team understanding of brand and its true impact. It’s now something that they know they SHOULD have, but they are completely resistant to the reality of brand building because you can’t promise them an immediate increase in MRR. The shift, we guess, is how much education we need to do with our clients just to get them to understand what they’re buying from us—and why it’s valuable.
Bonfire talks a lot about creativity. Where is there opportunity for creativity in B2B? Can you talk about how technical organizations can (and should!) approach creativity?
Kevan:
We’ve talked a lot about creativity in our Substack newsletter. Our favorite definition of creativity is this: connecting novel ideals in pursuit of a goal.
Notice there are no fancy degrees or fancy gel pens or fancy design software required. Everyone is creative, yes, including the technical roles in brand-hesitant companies and the non-creative roles in all departments everywhere. You can solve problems creatively, you can build spreadsheets creatively, you can hire creatively and hold 1:1s creatively.
Expanding the aperture on creativity is one easy way to encourage more creativity in B2B. Helping people to see that creativity is possible throughout the business might eventually lead to more creative campaigns, more open conversations, more brave ideas.
And if you are a creative marketer or PR pro who wants to fight the good fight for more creativity at work, we do have a list of specific things you can try:
Piggyback on trends
Speak your stakeholders’s language
Position creativity as problem-solving
Bring in customer proof points
Show, don’t tell
For reference:
If you could give one piece of advice to a founder who just hit $5M ARR and is thinking 'maybe I need PR and/or Brand help' - what would you tell them?
Shannon:
We’d say: Do you really mean that? Seriously—think about the commitment and investment and whether or not you will actually support this work in concrete ways. Because if you support it in name only, if you “want it” but you don’t want to pay for it or participate in it, it WILL be a waste of money. A company at this stage is also likely to need the founder to be the spokesperson/face of thought leadership. So…do you actually have leading thoughts? If not, can you dedicate the time to co-create them with your PR and brand partners? It’s a level of visibility and vulnerability that a lot of people aren’t prepared for. Search your heart! The meek need not apply.
Kevan:
I’d also be tempted to tell them, “You’re too late! You should have thought about this from Day One.” But seriously, it’s like the old adage goes: the best time to plant a tree was yesterday and the second-best time is today. The same holds true for brand.
And certainly, brand professionals are used to companies retrofitting a brand story onto an existing business strategy. So if it’s the case that a founder is investing in brand once they reach a certain revenue milestone, I would advise them 1) to embrace whatever storytelling is necessary to pay off the debt of being story-less up til this point and 2) to accept that brand investment is not a short-term play but a long-term moat.
Like Shannon said, be sure you mean what you’re asking for!
What are the top 2-3 qualities you look for out of a PR vendor and why?
Shannon:
Understanding of different altitudes of stories and where they’ll perform best. Not everything is an embargoed feature story. Be realistic about where we may or may not get coverage and manage client expectations.
Creativity! (Surprise, surprise.) We want all the bonkers ideas and unexpected angles on things. Let us say no and pull you back vs. pushing you to get weirder.
Being real people-people. We hate cold emails, sending LinkedIn requests, calling people on the phone, following up and up and up… A PR vendor who gets genuinely lit up by making connections with and between people is a must!
Kevan:
And if I could add a 4th: A vendor that is plugged in to the zeitgeist and understands how to authentically take part in relevant conversations. Strong brands are built with a Why Now component, so it’s critical that a PR partner understands this and proactively recognizes where, when, and how to engage the brand in the right conversations.
This was so interesting. You have such a modern and refreshing take on Branding in B2B. Thank you so much for your time, Kevan and Shannon!
If you want more of Bonfire, you’re in luck! They also have their own substack, Around the Bonfire - please subscribe!
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