Full Transcript: LadyDrinks Founder Joya Dass on branding and communications during troubled times
I was in conversation with Suzanna Keith, founder of Hello Career Guru and three other colleagues April 21st, 2020. The topic was your branding and communication in troubled times
You can see the video here. Below, we’ve posted a lightly edited transcript of the conversation, sharing my answers only.
If you like this, be sure to subscribe to the LadyDrinks newsletter, sharing actionable tips on content that converts https://ladydrinks.com/signup/
Transcript by Rev.com
Suzanna Keith: Well, I am so honored to moderate such an incredible panel of women. We have Annabel Monaghan, Haley Hoffman Smith, Joya Dass and Sue Yasav. And what we’ll do first is have each woman give a quick like two to three sentence bio.
Joya Dass (01:05):
I am a longtime television anchor here in New York City. And about eight years ago I founded a leadership platform just for South Asia and executive women and founders. So I’ve now left television. This is my full-time hustle. And I’m really excited to be on your panel today.
Suzanna Keith (01:22):
Oh, that’s great. Well, all of you are just absolutely amazing. And I know this is going to be a great event tonight. So why don’t we start off with a question for Joya. Joya, what accomplishments in your career led you to found LadyDrinks and tell us what that is, please.
Joya Dass (01:38):
LadyDrinks is a leadership development platform for South Asian executive women and founders. I pulled from my 20 years of being a business news anchor and moved the dynamic of interviewing CEOs out from behind a television screen and moved it in front of a live audience. This to create ateaching moment. I’m also curating the room so that this demographic of women could start to build their own support systems for whatever success means to them.
And that is really kind of born out of the pain points from my own story. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to become a TV anchor. But when you tell that to your Indian immigrant parents who are not emotionally equipped to support a dream like that, especially for a girl and they aren’t financially equipped, I really had to do this alone.
I paid for college, I paid for grad school. I paid for every move around the country to come to New York and, and do this for a living. But I realized that I really had to, I had to install other smart women and other start smart men from college onwards as my support system in order for me to be standing here today. So that’s truly the mission with which I lead my women’s movement today, which is called LadyDrinks.
Suzanna Keith (13:30):
How do you see the future of branding and communication intertwined? What does that mean for the global economy?
Joya Dass (13:45):
I’m going to tell a story. I was connected to a really lovely woman the other day. She runs a nonprofit that provides holistic wellness to battered women. And she was connected to me for two reasons. One, because I have a network and two, because I’m South Asian, and she, while had had, had enjoyed a great amount of success fundraising from her friends and family, she wanted to widen the net. And so she came to me because she wanted fundraising ideas on how to widen the net. And the question I asked her was, are you on social media? And she said, no, it’s not my thing. And I was like, so let’s, let’s think about this. If you had not told your friends and family that you had this nonprofit and then went one step further and asked for the money, would you even have a viable organization today?
Joya Dass (14:28):
No. Okay. So if you want to widen that net, I think putting out a digital footprint of who are you, what do you value, what is an ideal donor? Who are you helping and how are you transforming their lives are very important pieces that should be out there in the ether net. Right, and I think I know what the wheels were going in her head when she said no. I guess not. It’s not. My thing is that she thinks that this is boasting, but it’s not about boasting. It’s about how are you going to connect to that ideal client or that ideal donor that is empathetic to your cause. But you haven’t reached it yet because you haven’t put anything out there that tells me that you even exist. So let’s transfer that now to this current environment. If you’re a business and you’re operating, I would want to know if you’re doing, if you’re a restaurant, you’re doing takeout.
Joya Dass (15:11):
I want to know how are you protecting me? How are you protecting your employees and how are you injecting a little bit of personality into it? There’s a restaurant in North Carolina sending a little bar of soap with every single takeout order. Just a little cheeky reminder that you should be washing your hands and there’s a hair salon here in New York City that’s making custom hair color kit so people can, you know, color their hair at home. But like they are, what am I going to remember after this is all said and done? Of course, I’m, I’m sensitive to the fact that you can’t be tone-deaf to what’s happening, but I love that they’ve risen to the occasion and met me where I’m at and so long after this is over, I’m going to remember that brand because they did that for me.
Suzanna Keith (22:22):
What are some differentiators that can set companies apart? Joya, do you want to take that, cause you sort of alluded to that in your earlier comments.
Joya Dass (22:38):
Big fan of listicle. So I’m constantly reading and to Haley’s point and to Sue’s point, you know, if you’re an accounting company, you know, what are the five tips that you’re offering on how you could file your taxes even though they’re not due until July or I know of my bookkeeper is actually walking people through on zoom calls through their small business applications and their PP applicant PPP applications. But she’s affording that zoom call so that she can course correct in real-time and say, Oh, you know, you shouldn’t pick that, you should pick this. So I think that people that are doing things that are not necessarily tangential is what they do but are an extension of what they do. And, and talking about it and making it easy for me to find them or refer them when I know that somebody has that need is probably the best favor that they can be doing. I don’t mind the thought leadership, but I need it to be, and I think Sue made this point earlier, I needed to be germane to what it is that you already do. If you’re a firefighter, I don’t want you to talk about my taxes.
Suzanna Keith (23:37):
And definitely like a big shout out to all our healthcare workers and all the people that are on the front line right now. We really appreciate you and I know every one of us has someone in her family who is out there. What are some of the future trends in marketing communications that you foresee as companies emerge in this crisis?
Joya Dass (24:51):
I saw a beautiful, beautiful ad yesterday by Apple and you didn’t even know there was Apple to the very, very end. But what draws you in is this emotion, right? So they had all the people on zoom who were playing chess with their kids. This guy created a wave out of like cardboard. His kids were playing in it. It was all the creative ways that people are essentially at home, but doing interesting things. Right? And, and at the end, it was like brought to you by Apple. Right. And so Apple has always been about creativity and they didn’t necessarily go off the reservation with that. They were talking about all the ways that we’re being creative in this particular time in this period of time. So I really loved it. It was totally emotional. And by the end, I wanted to know what the brand was that was, that was putting together this beautiful commercial.
Suzanna Keith (28:47):
Given the sudden shutdown, most small businesses are switching their B to B and B to B strategies to online marketing and sales. How best can small businesses generate leads online? Who’d like to take that? Joya.
Joya Dass (29:09):
You can start an Instagram shop. You can start a Facebook shop. You can start a shop on Shopify. You could go on Bigcommerce.com. Many sites to help you to make that transition. Several have marketing components built in to blast out to the community already shopping there.
How can you leverage AI to push your product in front of them because the consumer is searching for a similar item? May 5th, I moderate a full-day summit. I had to buy a green screen, right? I was searching for green screens. They are out of stock, they’re out of stock everywhere I looked. Because I have Rakuten, which saw what I was searching for and sent a pop up to my screen. I can get a greenscreen at XYZ company AND I can get it for $4 cheaper. Leverage AI that’s going to help you to get in front of other people.
Joya Dass (31:40):
I would offer up WhatsApp for business. I think that that’s a really underutilized tool for communicating with your customers. But if you set up a business page on WhatsApp, you have the ability, as soon as somebody says, I want to order a cake or I want to get flowers, you can communicate with your customers directly. If you set up a WhatsApp business page.
Suzanna Keith (32:00):
Joya, thank you. I didn’t even realize you could do so many of those things. And I understand also that eBay is offering pages at a low cost to also just small businesses. You know, maybe somebody who’s tried that and can share that with us privately. And then we have one more question. Let’s see. So what aspect of Covid19 has been most difficult for communicating within your businesses and how do you overcome these problems soon? Sue do you want to try this one?
Joya Dass (34:52):
I immediately pivoted all of my programming to virtual. And so this is how I communicate with all my members now, but I just as Sue was talking, I just think the economic impact is going to be far more far-reaching and it’s just going to take a really long time to recover from. I think the health part might sort itself out sooner, but the economic damage is, it’s unfathomable to
Suzanna Keith (35:19):
It really is quite devastating..
Joya Dass (38:24):
So I had a conversation with a pediatric dentist today and he was talking about all the different ways that he is reaching his patients at a time when they’re probably going to have an emergency. So they’re going
Joya Dass (38:36):
To have needs to be, you know, they need to be seen. And so he talked about a couple of tools, something called Mouthwatch. It’s a tool for dentists to be able to use and it’s, I think it’s HIPAA compliant, which is another consideration. And then there was something called asynchronous conferencing. Again, it’s allowing doctors to kind of come together and be able to either, let’s say you’ve got 18 doctors that report into you, you’re able to share case studies, you’re able to share cases, you’re able to talk about patients and you’re able to arrive at some best practices. So I just think that that’s something that shouldn’t go away. How great is that that you can do that even if you’re siloed in different locations.
Suzanna Keith (39:16):
No, that’s fantastic. We’re going to take one more question. And that’s, as a recent college graduate, how should I address the way I reach out to professionals I want to network with virtually in a way that’s authentic, respectful, and also kind of taking into account that so many people are actually out of work as well. Who would like to take that? Annabele?
Joya Dass (41:32):
I have a tactical piece of advice.
Joya Dass (41:34):
If you go on LinkedIn, which is my favorite place to network and you just put into the search bar “we are hiring,” you’ll pull up people’s taglines which feature that wording. People/companies that are hiring right now have put it the verbiage right in their taglines. Those are people you can start to network with right now.
Suzanna Keith (42:39):
And I think a lot of what you said could also apply to anyone you know, looking for a job right now. So thank you, everyone. I want to thank everybody for all the questions. I think we need to do a wrap given that it’s around 7:23 PM and I really want to thank our panelists, Annabel, Haley, Sue and Joya. You’ve been fantastic. And I think there’s been so much synergy in what you’ve said and hopefully for everyone on the discussion tonight, you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. It’s been really informative. There have been some brilliant insights and I think we’re all really hungry for this information because so much is unknown and it is a bit scary and, but I think the key thing is for us to all be authentic and to help each other and be as dependable as we can. So be sure to subscribe to Hello Career Guru. We’re open to your ideas, things that you need, and we hope to do another panel soon. And most importantly of all, we wish everyone good health and safety. Thank you for coming tonight.
Joya Dass (43:45):
Thank you Suzanna. Have a good one. Everybody be safe.
