Alumna profile: Kelcey Braine

This month we have the pleasure of shining our spotlight on Community member and BTC Academy alumna Kelcey Braine 🥳🎉

Kelcey loves to learn and is driven towards making experiences better and fairer. She has spent her career focused on brand experience, combining her analytical thinking with creative flair. She started in creative experiential marketing before she moved to work with startup founders to develop their strategic brand experience.

Today, Kelcey is working as a Design/Experience Lead at a SaaS agency, which marries her experience with design thinking, strategy, and product design.

WG: What's the story of your name?

KB: Kelcey has a couple of meanings: from the Irish side (a big reason it was chosen) it means 'brave', the Gaelic 'a treasure of life', with Celtic and Norse meanings of 'Island of the Ships'.

Both Kelcey and Kelsey spellings are correct but my mum always associated the version spelled with an 's' as male (probably thanks to Kelsey Grammar from Cheers/Fraser). So, Kelcey with a "C' it was.

WG: Name one thing that you love about the place where you live.

KB: I live in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. I love the people and the culture – I've met and had the opportunity to learn from some amazing people.

WG: What problem in the world keeps you up at night?

KB: Unfairness. Inequity is so interlinked with bias, which means it is a behaviour change that’s self-manageable. So it frustrates me to see people shut out of opportunities or not be (made) aware that those opportunities exist – especially when organisations or individuals do not recognise that they haven’t provided a pathway to level the playing field.

WG: What inspires you to get out of bed in the morning?

KB: Sometimes... knowing I'd end up on the list of shame at the gym! In all seriousness though, I like knowing that I'm helping people move the needle towards their vision, and I hope that most of those visions are making our world a better place to be.

WG: What is the big change you want to see in the world?

KB: I want to see and experience a world where underrepresented groups are no longer unrepresented. To me, that would be most prominent in 2 places:

1. Women’s sports would receive the same representation opportunities as men’s sports (women’s sports currently tend to receive <10% of all sports coverage).

2. The number of female founders, founders of colour, and founders from the LGBTQI+ community would receive investment equal to that of the CIS-male Caucasian contingent – AND that investment would come from a diverse gender mix of investors/ from within VCs.

WG: How are you working towards that change in your own way?

KB: I'm working with a focus on brand experience. It’s a pretty wide interpretation of brand, but I see it as everything from strategy to the physical or digital experience that an audience has with the brand. This has led me to now work with startups and founders as a Design/Experience Lead for a software-venture design agency. 

WG: What brand do you look to for inspiration?

KB: Nike. I’m a huge sports fan, so that’s one part. While I don’t agree with everything they do (from a business perspective) their commitment to creative storytelling has made them a world leader in the space. When I think of a brand essence, theirs is a story I can tell, understand and explain without effort.

WG: What is the biggest branding mistake you ever made?

KB: Honestly, it's probably a mistake I'm still making: 

I don't focus much of my attention on my brand. I started in an agency where a team is working to make each project a reality. And (see my comments about 3. Unfairness) I find it hard to separate my contributions from the combined effort of a team. I’ve found working with startup founders very similar; it's never usually the individual contribution that leads to success – it's the combined efforts. And also, as probably is the case with many creatives, the next project is always more interesting!

WG: What is your biggest branding success?

KB: The Mindset of Design festival – in Wellington, which we informally call: MoD. 

This was a joint initiative to switch the focus from the fairly common rhetoric of ‘technology solutions’ to instead focus on understanding and solving deep problems before involving technology.

It was the first rebrand I worked on the brand strategy end-to-end, including putting forward the proposal for why it should rebrand.

We were a tiny team, starting with the festival director, digital growth manager, and myself, and we were balancing stakeholder objectives and attendee expectations.

Across 5 years we put on 4 festivals, with 110 events and ~120 speakers to a total audience of ~2,750, all on a shoestring budget. Sadly, the funding was cut ahead of 2023, so it looks unlikely to continue.

WG: What do you want people to think and feel about your brand?

KB: I would like people to think of me and feel my commitment to learning about them as individuals and as a business, along with their motivations and behaviours. I hope people feel the curiosity and enthusiasm that I bring to each project (I love learning new things!)

I think my learning mindset is a superpower. I prefer to collaborate on crafting lasting experiences by learning with and from founders and end users throughout a project.

WG: What would you love to figure out about brand building that you still can't quite master?

KB: How to measure the value of brand! The tangible, quantifiable analytics so that brand and brand building are not seen as an afterthought or nice-to-have, but as an essential part of any business or organisation.

WG: What is your first memory of a brand?

KB: McDonald's – but not in the way you'd think! 

After my dad’s early heart disease diagnosis, our family was very health-focused. My parents saw McDonald's as unhealthy (fair enough) and taught my sister and me to see Ronald McDonald or the Golden Arches and to respond by pointing and saying "Eww, McDonalds!"

It worked! I still don't ever really go there!

WG: Which brand is totally overrated?

KB: I might get some stick for this: Tesla. 

I appreciate the concept – and the technological advances Tesla has front-footed – but Tesla has become synonymous as a status symbol. 

To borrow from another automobile maker, Henry Ford is credited with saying, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” 

I think Tesla is the ‘faster horse' equivalent of electric cars – and there's nothing majorly revolutionary about them as a means of transport.

WG: What brand should finally get the attention it deserves?

KB: Aside from Brand the Change? Oh, so many! I'd say almost any from the world of women's sports – but I'll highlight one (and try to sneak in a couple of other mentions! 😊

Angel City FC. I believe they're paving the way and providing a blueprint for women's sports teams to be considered good business investments instead of the old-school 'charity' mentality. They’ve been getting attention due to their investor group (which is honestly ridiculous – in the best way!), with the most visible – especially in the stands – probably being Natalie Portman and Jennifer Garner, as well as sports stars like Serena Williams, Abby Wambach, and Lauren Cheney-Holiday. They’ve committed 10% of corporate partners’ contributions to support the local community and launched revenue-bonus schemes for players so that home ticketing revenue supports participating players.

The role that sport plays in culture as a form of entertainment gives a brand like this such a powerful position to act as a brand for change, which is why I'd also highlight:

Correct the internet! When people, and young kids especially, search the internet for inspiring sportswomen, all they see are men. Why? Because the internet has learned to prioritise sportsmen, even when the facts put sportswomen first. And that’s not right. 

Narrative Muse, I love what they stand for: they're working to bring representation and – with it – belonging to the entertainment industry.

WG: What was your biggest takeaway from the Brand the Change Academy?

KB: The vastness of brand! 

I knew what branding was and I had plenty of experience ‘implementing’ a brand from my marketing and advertising work. While working with startups, I'd started to learn some of the strategic elements (like positioning) but Brand the Change helped put a framework around it and provided me with a safe community to question and challenge my thinking. My classmates, and the conversations we continue to have, have helped to shape and grow how I look at my contribution to brand.

WG: How is your background an asset in your current work?

KB: As designers, I believe one of our key assets is empathy; we provide a voice for the audience back to the organisation. My background working with startups means that I can appreciate the journey a founder is going through and understand why they might place less importance on certain elements; I’m there to temper this with what will provide the best outcome for the end user, as well as the longevity of the organisation.

WG: Business is/can be a force for good. Agree or disagree?

KB: Agree. Wholeheartedly. But with a caveat. Businesses need to have the right leaders in place – and not just in official 'positions of power'. They need to be aligned and have the humility to be ok if they're proven wrong.

WG: What is the next thing you want to learn?

KB: This is a really hard question for me! I’m curious by nature and I LOVE learning, so maybe it’s more about the ‘first’ next thing I want to learn… which I’ve already made a start on:

I'm learning about the investment landscape, what makes a business proposition ‘investable’, and about the venture design space – which can feel like a combination of being a founder, supporting founders, and venture capital.

WG: If you could give someone or something one million dollars in services from the best brand builders in the world, who would you give it to and what would you want them to do with it?

KB: I'll answer differently and I think a quote from Abby Wambach, after picking up her ESPY Icon award (alongside Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning) will help set the context for my answer:

"…while the three of us were stepping away from similar careers, we were facing very different futures. Our retirements wouldn’t be the same at all. Because Kobe and Peyton were walking off that stage and into their futures with something I didn’t have: enormous bank accounts. Because of that, they had something else I didn’t have: Freedom. Their hustling days were over. Mine were just beginning."

I'd want it to be invested in women's sports teams focused on supporting athletes as they approach their post-athletic careers. I say ‘invested’ in the hope that any 'dividends' or returns could be reinvested and developed into a self-sustaining programme with continuous and compounding growth.

WG: We always say it takes a village to build a brand. Who is in your village – who is supporting you?

KB: Family – the blood ones and the ones of the heart, my chosen family. In Te Ao Māori there is the concept of whānau – which I interpret as family, extended family, chosen family, or community – I'm lucky to have some amazing, strong, and kind people within my 'village'.

WG: Where do we go to find out more about you and your work?

KB: I'm not too active on social media, so your best bets are LinkedIn and my personal website kelceybraine.com