Welcome to PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS - a curated content stream where I interview people who are extremely good at what they do, largely in the tech & startup world, regularly with overlap into the creative and cultural realm. Often, the most interesting operators in the creative and tech industries are the ones working a little out of sight, behind the brands you know and love. Kate Dinon couldn’t be a more perfect example of high impact behind the scenes (though she did just deliver a keynote in Sydney for hundreds of marketers sooo…) - Gaz

I've known Kate Dinon for over 10 years now, and have always admired the work she steers and the work she gets involved in, mainly via her boutique PR & Comms house Character & Distinction, which has assembled an awesome team over time too.

I’m an appreciator of great comms and great storytelling execution and great brand-building and Kate has been behind plenty of it in Aus, working with a mixture of prestigious brands and emerging founders over that time (and numerous v interesting activations)

Whilst it’s all cool to focus on the various brands - your Heaps Normals and your Up’s and your Luxury Escapes and your Substack’s and your July’s (as a small sample of companies C&D have repped now and previously) - I was particularly interested in focusing on Kate and Kate’s emphasis on her Slow Brands philosophy of late, as she articulates frameworks for brand-building and has started appearing on stages and media talking about that in a bit more detail. She’s a great and nuanced storyteller, is Kate.

Here’s the chit-chat:

Kate starts the conversation on the backstory by letting me know Character & Distinction didn't start with the standard business plan in effect. In actuality, it started with Mercedes-Benz asking Kate a question she didn't have a clean answer to.

After returning from Europe, Kate had been consulting, and was bought in on a project with renowned indie agency The Royals, who had a project with Mercedes-Benz called ‘Hack My Van.’ A hackathon, a grant and a pitch day, and at the end of it, the Mercedes team said they didn't have an agency and asked if she wanted to be it.

“Well, I don't have an agency. I don't have any people.”

And they said: well, why don't you get some?

Kate was introduced to Sarah Green - also consulting, also figuring out her next move. They hit it off and Character & Distinction was born. Their first client was Mercedes. A decade later, Kate continues to work with many of those contacts from the early days, often at their new companies.

The agency's client tenure reflects the long-term nature and ethos. Retained relationships that run four to five years on average - sometimes longer, to ensure it’s not a churn-and-burn operation, and never will be.

A few years into running C&D, Culture Amp had been a retained client for a while. The relationship started with a cold email Kate sent to co-founder Didier Elzinga - she'd started her career in HR, followed his early Medium posts, and just reached out. He wrote back. They had coffee every few months for a couple of years before the client work even began.

When Culture Amp asked her to come in-house and build a global brand and communications function from scratch, she took it - on the basis that it would be a two-to-three-year engagement to get the team and structure right, then she'd return to C&D.

That's exactly what happened. And amongst that were some significant partnerships, such as the Esther Perel one - a project Kate points to as easily one of the most satisfying of the Culture Amp chapter.

Kate returned to C&D about a year ago, having brought Annie Carroll in as a Partner in the business just prior to departing to Culture Amp - Annie who Kate had first hired as an intern at Portable back in 2013, and who'd since become one of the most trusted people in her orbit. The agency now runs with Kate in an oversight and senior consulting role, and a team she describes simply as "truly incredible individuals."

At nearly 10 years of doing this work, Kate has a very clear point of view on where AI fits in the comms and PR process - and where it emphatically does not. A super interesting discussion on a topic that flits around somewhere with the production of AI slop, how to extract critical thinking best, how to set teams up for success with converting what’s into the leaders head into action, and more. We got right into it

Gaz:

“I guess with an overriding influence of this AI-generated words, slop era - how has that elevated your thinking in terms of how founders should approach storytelling?”

Kate:

“Using AI to generate content - okay, so long as you know what it's good for and what it's not good for. It's definitely not good for thought leadership or strategic thinking. So what I'm finding is: I'm asking the founders I work with to send me voice notes.

I don't want anything written, because I know the temptation is there. I know you're just like, "but it knows my voice, it knows my context." But if you're trying to be interesting, you're trying to be newsworthy, you're trying to create an emotional connection - it's not going to come from an LLM. I don't care how much context you've given it.”

Gaz:

“I've been doing the voice note back and forth thing a lot myself - not under any particular guidance, just quickly identified that when I'm ghostwriting articles or running newsletters, a founder's written notes are (mostly) almost unusable. Voice is largely the only way I’m able to get this moving now.”

Kate:

“Exactly. So use your own voice. Literally your own voice. Audio, voice notes - I'm not demanding, that sounds too strong - but I'm not accepting written stuff back from my clients at the moment. I'll give you the questions, you give me the voice notes, then I can do something with it. If you give it to me from an LLM, I'm not even going to read it.”

Gaz:

“And the broader concern for you there - it's not just about the output quality?”

Kate:

“Our brains are atrophying a little bit. People are losing their voice. Having a point of view is the number one key to PR, and it always has been and always will be. Because the number one key to PR is being interesting. Just be interesting and people will want to talk about it.”

Character & Distinction has recently begun working with Substack - which, given Kate's longstanding philosophy on media, makes perfect sense. She's been ahead of this particular curve for a long time.

The metric Kate works from isn't reach. It's what she refers to as audience potency - who is it that you actually need to talk to, and who has real distribution to those people? Increasingly, the answer is Substackers (or, beehiivers, depending on your preference): independent newsletter writers, and beat reporters who've taken their audiences with them when they left mastheads.

“A lot of great beat reporters are finding that their audience goes with them when they leave. These reporters with their cricket audience? That audience follows. Leaving the AFR's work and careers desk? Same thing. Nobody influences the influencers like Substackers right now.”

She's pragmatic about where this sits in the broader mix. Brand awareness is real, and shiny logos and big reach numbers do matter for certain goals. But she always has Substackers in the mix across everything C&D runs, as a standard part of the strategic play.

The underlying philosophy is one Kate traces back to Ana Andjelic's notion of growing through niches - an idea she's been applying in practice for years before niche media became the obvious answer for everyone else. (Ana is a Forbes Top 50 CMO and her newsletter is one of the most-copied on the internet)

When Kate’s engagement at Culture Amp finished up, she returned to C&D, and had three or four months before she was back at full capacity. She used that window to do two things simultaneously: give Claude everything she'd ever created - ten years of presentations, strategy emails, interview notes, phone notes, all of it - and think seriously about the framework she'd been operating from intuitively for years but had never formally named.

A LinkedIn series for Tracksuit, commissioned through Passionfruit, gave her a sense of direction to move forward: focusing on an approach to building B2B Brands. She called this philosophy Slow Brands, and it’s Kate’s main thing now, with a lot of writing on Slow Brands, on the way.

Kate recently presented the keynote talk at the Generate Conference in Sydney to a room full of a few hundred B2B Marketers, on the philosophy behind Slow Brands.

The Five Pillars of Slow Brands:

Kate of course has numerous reference brands for each one. For Aesthetic Integrity, she can't look past Aesop - the store design, the use of local architects, the product design, all of it utterly coherent. For Community Depth, she points to what Culture Amp built with their People Geek community - one of the most genuinely embedded brand communities in Australian tech. For Pace Control, it's The Masters - everything on their terms, their way, no exceptions. July, Sublime, Rationale, Flamingo Estate, On, and Notion all appear in the framework.

The framework has since moved beyond the posts. Kate's since presenting it on more stages like Generate, run intimate CMO roundtable events under the Slow Brands banner - at Rationale, at Emily Nolan's Atelier - and written somewhere north of 160 pages toward what might eventually become a book. She's not rushing it.

“It's definitely the model I use now when I'm doing my own thinking and advising. I don't know - could be a book. But I'm also aware I'm usually the one telling other people how to do this stuff. It doesn't sit entirely naturally with me, being the face of something. There's discomfort there. And uncertainty. Am I doing this for my ego? If I am, that's not a good reason. But I feel compelled to keep going, even though it's sort of against what I've naturally wanted for my life.”

Kate's writing on Slow Brands is available via her LinkedIn and Instagram. Keep an eye out for the book.

Find Character & Distinction at ofcharacter.com

As I do with each guest on PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS, I asked Kate for a recommendation on what keeps her brain happy outside of work.

📍 Friday September 25th 10am, The Great Northern Hotel Carlton North.

For: Technology Builders, Brand-Builders, New Media Builders (& in Sep - Sports Fanatics) ​MOAT BUILDERS Melbourne is a regular social gathering for tech builders located at some of Melbourne's best places to assemble a group.

​Created specifically as an inclusive environment to nerd out on tech with a diverse range of folks, each working on their own meaty problems.

​Category Creators, Product Designers, GTM Executioners, Brand-Builders, PR Campaigners, Hungry Founders: All welcome.

​We're gathering on the AFL Grand Final Public Holiday for the NFL game: Green Bay Packers vs Atlanta Falcons (The Great Northern Hotel is homebase for Packers fans)

​Part of the SEEDS events series, c/o GROUP GROUP 🙌

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