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Most businesses think branding starts with a logo and ends with a color palette. But what actually drives conversion is something deeper – the emotional world your brand creates. Branding expert Luna Battalia shares how psychology-driven messaging, brand personality, and storytelling work together to build brands people don’t just recognize but makes them want to belong.
Your Brand Is Not Your Logo.
Most of us were told branding meant picking the right colors, choosing a compelling font, and slapping a logo on everything. That’s not branding. That’s decorating.
Luna Battalia, founder of Caru Creative, has a different definition—and it’s the reason her clients are hitting sales page conversion rates between 11 and 25% when the rest of the industry is celebrating 3 to 4%.
She calls it a brand world.
What’s a Brand World?
Think about slipping on a VR headset. You’re fully immersed in a place—it has its own logic, its own feel, its own emotional pull. That’s what the best brands do. They don’t just explain what they sell. They create a space that people want to enter, belong to, and return to.
Luna uses Stanley as a case study. Long before the pastel tumblers and yoga moms made it a lifestyle brand, Stanley was a camping company. Luna was buying the black thermos at REI years before it exploded. Then Stanley tapped a new market, created a new story, and built a new world—one big enough to include people who’d never set up a tent in their lives.
“They tapped into a market of buyers and created a whole story,” she says. “And there’s people making fun of themselves, there’s reels of the giant Stanley cups—but they’re Stanley.”
That’s a brand world at work. And the key word is experience. Not aesthetics. Not messaging. Experience—which is what the right messaging creates.
Why Most Businesses Get Branding Backwards
Here’s where most companies go wrong: they start with visuals.
They hire a designer, pick colors the founder likes, and build a website before they’ve figured out what they actually stand for and who they’re talking to. The result is a brand that looks good but doesn’t convert—because nothing in it makes anyone feel anything.
Luna’s rule is blunt: copy dictates design.
“If you try to develop colors and pick fonts before you know the tone and the expression and the archetypes and the personality of both the brand itself and the audience—it’s cool, you as the founder might like these colors, but does it correlate emotionally to the values, to the tone, to the personality?”
It usually doesn’t. And customers feel that mismatch even if they can’t name it.
The 4-Part Messaging Framework
Luna’s process starts with messaging—always. And she breaks that into four parts:
1. Foundation Mission, values, culture, vision. Where are you now? Where are you going? What do you stand for, and what experience are you creating in the world? Luna gives clients a sentence stem: “We’re creating a culture where ____.” If you can’t finish that sentence clearly, your brand has no anchor.
2. Brand Personality Who are you as a brand? What’s the vibe, the tone, the archetypes? Are you bold and unapologetic? Nurturing and warm? Sassy and direct? This is where your voice lives—and your voice is what determines whether your pastel script font makes sense or feels completely off.
3. Audience Demographics are easy. Five data points, check. But demographics don’t tell you what emotionally connects your customers. Psychographics do. Luna’s question: if I handed someone this product or experience, what’s the one thing I want them to walk away feeling? That answer should be crystal clear—and it’s the thread that runs through all your messaging.
4. Storytelling This is where parts two and three meet. Luna describes it as a figure-eight loop between brand personality and audience desire. Your stories—whether they’re case studies, historical references, pop culture comparisons, or your own founder journey—all need to tap into that same emotional undercurrent. You can talk about anything, as long as you can bring it back to what your audience wants to feel.
Getting Into Your Audience’s World
Building a brand world means you need to visit your audience’s world first.
That’s not a metaphor. Luna means it practically: go where your audience hangs out, online and in person. Run polls. Host events. Have conversations. Look at your conversion data. And be honest about what you find.
“You only know by collecting data,” she says. “I’m a big advocate for real-world conversations as much as polls and looking at my stats.”
She also makes an important point about the tension founders feel when audience data conflicts with their vision. Her answer isn’t to capitulate to what people want—it’s to get clear on the culture your brand is creating. What’s the ripple effect, even if your “brand world” is only 100 people? If you’re clear on that, you can make smart decisions about when to adapt and when to hold the line.
Proof It Works
If this sounds like it’s more philosophy than marketing, Luna’s data says otherwise.
After running split tests comparing quick, minimally-branded pages against fully developed brand experiences, the results were consistent: the branded versions converted at 11–25%. The industry benchmark? Three to four percent.
“I have programs that—okay, if the industry standard is three to four percent—my minimum conversion pages for different products are above that,” she says.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s the difference between a business that struggles and one that scales.
What to Do This Week
If you’re ready to start improving your messaging, here’s where to begin:
Finish this sentence: “We’re creating a culture where ____.” If you can’t do it in one clear sentence, your foundation needs work before anything else.
Audit your touchpoints. Is the experience you’re delivering at every point—website, email, sales call, customer service, social—consistent? Or does it shift depending on who’s doing the work?
Talk to actual humans. Not just analytics. Go have a conversation with someone in your audience and listen for the emotional language they use to describe what they want.
And if you want to go deeper on brand world strategy, check out Luna Battalia at lunaloveleadership.com or find her on Instagram at @lunabattalia. Her brand studio, Caru Creative, is where the work happens.
Your brand is either creating a world your audience wants to live in—or it’s not. Time to figure out which one.
Transcript from Luna Battalia’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is a leadership mentor and the founder of Caru Creative, a full-service branding, messaging, and website studio.
She developed “Animist Branding”, a psychology driven approach to marketing, shaped by her 15 plus years at the intersection of digital marketing. And by her psychology, she partnered with leading mission-driven entrepreneurs, building brand worlds that reflect the depth and impact they lead with.
Through her proprietary messaging strategies, she helps founders cultivate their brand voice, build legacies over businesses, and communicate with bold, unignorable confidence.
Today we’re going to be talking about building brand worlds with Luna Battalia. Luna, welcome to the podcast.
Luna: Thanks so much. I’m so happy to be here.
Rich: So looking back, how did you first get interested in branding and messaging work?
Luna: I started in fashion, that was my undergrad. I was a 16-year-old with a sewing machine and created a clothing line out of my bedroom and sold it to boutiques all over my town and where I grew up.
And I knew how to put together a brand. I had labels on the clothes and that I would make and sew in by hand from things I bought at Michael’s, and then a tag that matched and had a whole story with it, and people would have a whole experience. And so from a very young age, I understood the whole experience that someone would have with a purchase.
My mom was someone who we didn’t have a lot, but what we had was nice and simple and going to last a long time. And so these little things throughout my life that were beauty centric, and experiential, and minimal, and not just things for the things sake, but really purposeful was how I was brought up and the kind of world that I lived in.
And so once I got into fashion and we’d have collections, it really kind of showed me that. And then I had a whole spiritual awakening and got into a different world of coaching and psychology and addiction care and counseling and all of these things, and it just kept coming back to helping people that were creating something in the world.
That’s what I like. I like to work with people who are makers. They make things happen. They get things done. And so anything that can help them do that better, and I believe in their mission, I’m all about it. So it’s been a really cool kind of evolution.
Rich: Excellent. Now, when I gave your introduction, we talked about a brand world. What does that mean in plain English?
Luna: Think of a VR headset that you would put on that Meta has, and you’d go into a whole world. That’s what I do for brands is create an experience for people.
And the way that they have experiences is oftentimes emotional. I could be with five people from five different nations. We don’t speak the same language, but someone starts laughing or crying or feeling nervous and anxious, we all know what they’re experiencing, and it gives us a shared experience.
And so the world that we’re creating is an experiential world. And brands need to not just be able to explain what they do. Yes, you need to be able to verbally explain what you do, the deliverables, all the informational stuff, but that’s not what converts people. What converts people is feeling like they belong in a space, in a world with a product you could sell. Anything, a certain type of cup. And if you make people feel like they belong in a world where people need this cup and it changes their lives by drinking out of it, they’re going to buy it.
And so, oh, this brand world is really from every touch point that someone is going to relate with your brand. Whether I’m sitting next to. And like, I don’t want to low level employee, but like a…
Rich: Frontline.
Luna: Yeah. Frontline employee or the founder on a plane, they’re both going to be able to share about this company, this brand, in a way that I’m sitting on the plane and as soon as the thing goes off, I’m looking it up. As soon as I get home, I remembered it. And so everyone start to finish, from contractors to clients, should be experiencing the same thing inside.
So if you’re a company that says that their values are X, and then you treat your contractors a certain way, but you’re giving your clients this, it’s incongruent and it will show up somewhere else.
So it’s that whole experiential world, from every touch point being something that people can immerse themselves in, know that they belong and then they want to return to.
Rich: When you first said ‘cup’, and I’m guessing you were looking around and you saw a cup and you’re like, that’s a good reason. That’s a good example. I immediately thought of Stanley Cups. Not the hockey ones, the Stanley brand, and also Yeti mugs, which have almost become ubiquitous for corporate gifts. Are those good examples or what is a brand that we’ve all heard of that you’re like, they walk the walk, we’re living in their VR headset?
Luna: Stanley is a great example, because not that long ago… I am a tea drinker. Well, I’m a tea drinker period, but I have this Stanley mug at Thermos. I camp a lot. I I’ve always had a Stanley camping. And they have this master series, this black one that’s amazing. This was before all the colors and the fancy stuff and the straws and the yoga moms and stuff.
And I would go to REI and I’d be like, “Do you guys have Stanley mugs, because I used to get them here?” And they were like, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’m like, “Green, gray lid, you know?” And they’d be like, “We don’t know and we don’t have it.” And then like two or three years later, so they tapped into a market of buyers, and they created a whole story. And there’s people making fun of themselves. And there’s reels with like the giant, giant, giant Stanley Cups making fun of themselves, but they have a market.
So like me as a person who camps and drinks tea, I’m going to buy one Stanley for my entire life. But the yoga mom who goes to PTA is a great advertisement. Me camping in the woods by myself is not going to necessarily get people to buy the green/gray Stanley that’s been around forever. But you put it in lots of colors, and you get it in the hands of these women who now it’s a sense of belonging. I go to Pilates and they’re like, “Oh, I love your Stanley, it matches your outfit” or whatever. And I’m kind of laughing with my mason jar.
But yeah, they created a whole experience. So it’s a great example because there’s someone who pivoted who wasn’t really doing that well. They had a product, it was very signature, like contractors who would work and dig the foundations for the buildings, the high rises in New York, the contractors, they’d have their Stanley. That was their market. And life is different. That’s not what people are doing, so you have to adapt.
Rich: So why do you think that so many businesses struggle to create something? I mean, I think a lot of us understand branding and we put our logo and our colors on our website, but how do we create a consistent experience across our website, across social media, across all of our marketing and across our physical products if we have them?
Luna: Well, I love that you shared logo, colors, website, because I think that’s what a lot of people think of when they think of branding. And the thing that I would say is branding is messaging. To me, that’s the foundation.
You can’t really, if you try to develop colors and pick fonts before you know the tone and the expression and the archetypes and the personality of both the brand itself and the audience, it’s like, cool, you as the founder might like these colors, but does it correlate emotionally to the values, to the tone, to the personality, to the mission, to all these other things that are much more messaging founded. And so I always start there.
And to me, the message has four parts. So the first is the foundation – mission, values, culture that you’re creating, vision, where you’re at now, what’s the vision for right now? Where are you going? So it’s kind of foundational pieces. And it’s the brand personality. So who are we as a brand? What’s our vibe? What’s our expression? What’s our flavors? Also, the voice is the big part of that, like the tone and the archetypes.
The third part is the audience. And I focus, you know, the demographics are really easy. Check, check, check. There’s five of them, but the psychographics emotionally are really what kind of weaves all those people from potentially different demographics together. What is the one thing that if I were to – and that’s the question I ask – if I were to give you this product or give you this service or experience or this book, what’s the one thing I want you to take away? That should be really, really clear.
And so then once we have that audience and we know what the experience that we want them to take away is, the fourth part of messaging is storytelling. And I like to think of that as kind of making a little figure eight between part two and part three. So the brand personality and the audience desires, and that to me is the storytelling. How does the brand personality and the audience’s desires weave together into anecdotes, things about historical figures, a Peaky Blinders comparison, like anything that you could do to kind of get your audience and their interest to connect with your brand.
And so you can talk about anything as long as you can segue it back to that same undercurrent of their emotional desire. And that’s the story. Stories as old as time. But you have to know those kind of four pieces of messaging before you can really put the website together. I always say copy dictates design.
Rich: Let’s talk about that audience component for a second. Because earlier we were talking about your love of Stanley Cups back when it was like, take it off to the woods and maybe they were all the same color, and now it’s like this yoga mom power move or something like that. And I’m not putting any aspersions anywhere. I’m just, you know, throwing it out there.
It sounds like there was a shift, and that happened there. I think some of the challenges that we have are how do we know if our audience is actually our audience? Like maybe, and I’m putting words into your mouth and Stanley’s mouth, like maybe they went in thinking, oh, we’re going to create this amazing product for campers and work site employees. And then they were like, wow, we can make so much more high-quality products for a wider variety of people if we just add color to them. And maybe that happened and maybe that didn’t, but how do we know what our audience actually likes?
It seems like it’s a very simple question, but I know it’s more challenging than that. And I know that you focus a lot on psychographics, not just demographics. So maybe you can walk us through how you work with your clients to uncover that piece.
Luna: I love this because we were originally talking about brand world, which is inviting or magnetizing your people into your brand world. And I think the answer to this question is really about you getting into their world.
So your audience hangs out here, go hang out here. Go talk to them, engage with them, whether that’s online, in person, take a poll, create an event, invite a bunch of different people. Have them invite their friends. You only know by collecting data, and so you can kind of guess, “oh, this is who I want my audience to be” when you’re building something. And you might have this ages or things, but then the more you start sharing, you’re like, wow, these people are really responding. Or, I’m getting a bunch of people who can’t afford my services. Okay, well I either need to, I mean, I wouldn’t suggest this but lower your prices or talk to a different audience.
It’s very easy to talk to different groups of people. I say it’s easy, but there’s people in the world who can be thrown in a room and talk to everyone there. And there’s people who can talk to their kind of people and that’s it. And so brands are similar to people in that way. So I would be like, okay, immerse myself in their world if this is my audience. And you’ll quickly realize, oh, there’s something that’s not resonating, that’s not allowing us to connect. Is there another avenue of connection is like it’s collecting data and so. I’m a big advocate for just like real world conversations as much as you know, polls and, and looking at my stats and conversion rates and all of that stuff and looking at Meta ads and all of these things to know who these people are.
It’s amazing how much information that they have on us to be able to do this. It’s quite phenomenal. That’s all really valuable, but I find that nothing is better than just having a real-world conversation with someone and understanding their needs.
Rich: Luna, it feels like there might be some underlying tension where we as owners, founders, whatever you want to call it, we have this idea for what we want to make, what we want to bring to market, and then we start talking to people and they start providing us maybe the answers we weren’t expecting. And yes, maybe we can go off and find the right audience, but maybe not.
How do we understand how much we should give in to what our audience is asking for? And how much should we stand up and say, “No, this is what I believe, this is what I stand for” Or is it the typical marketing answer, “Well, it depends”?
Luna: Oh, funny. I was already about to go, “Well, there’s a middle path.” I think that the middle path for me would be to really name what’s uncompromising? What are you willing to compromise on, and what are you not? That’s a good thing to go into. Any relationship, any agreement, anything that you’re going to say yes to and no, what are the things I’m willing to compromise on and what are my non-negotiables? So start there.
The second is, what’s the motivation? Is the motivation to sell a product? Great. Those people are going to have a lot more wiggle room on what they do, because their motivation is to make sales. The people I work with, they have different motivations, which is much more impact culture shaping, experiential, transformational. And so I think that knowing which type of company you are and what those values are, are going to really steer that ship.
And lastly, I think it’s really about this wasn’t landing. It’s often not that you have to change the offer or the product. It’s mostly just the way that you share it. The product in the offer can stay pretty much the same. It’s rare that that’s really the issue. It’s usually from, there’s a gap in the messaging and the marketing and the storytelling that isn’t allowing people to understand why this is going to be so valuable for them, or they don’t feel like they belong or resonate with in the brand world.
And so you’re either speaking to the wrong people or it’s the words that you’re saying. I don’t necessarily think it’s the product. I think you can sell anything really.
Rich: So let’s talk about that a little bit. Because if messaging is the foundation of everything, then what does a strong messaging foundation look like?
Luna: Okay, great. I love this. So a big part of the foundation for messaging for me is what is the culture that your brand is creating in the world? And I give this prompt to my clients. “We’re creating a culture where…” and it’s just a sentence stem, fill it in. The fact that your brand exists, the fact that you’re choosing to bring a product or service into the arena is a feat in and of itself. A lot of people do it, but there’s a lot of people who don’t have the courage to bring the things that they have inside of them to life. So just throwing your hat in the arena deserves recognition.
And by doing so, that also comes with a lot of responsibility to create a business, to create a brand, to create something that is public facing, is naturally going to impact and shape the culture around it and the people who engage with it. So I think seeing a sense of responsibility in that is really important.
So the one of the first questions I ask is, what is the culture that this brand is creating? What is the hope for the world? And when I say, ‘the world’, I mean the brand world, which could be 140 people, and that’s plenty for that particular brand. They don’t need more than that. It could be thousands of people, tens of thousands, millions, whatever that brand world is it’s going to ripple out.
So if it’s a hundred people, the people in that world, contractors, employees, clients, customers, they’re going to have some kind of experience and impact that is going to ripple out. You have bigger numbers with that. So for me, the message is really rooted in understanding the responsibility that comes with throwing your hat in the arena and creating anything in the first place.
Rich: All right, so we’ve talked a lot about messaging and storytelling and the words to use. How does the messaging influence the visual side of branding? What’s the relationship between the copy or the words we use and the design, in your opinion?
Luna: Yeah, so when we’re in messaging, we will find tone. In the personality phase, we’ll find tone, archetypes and expression, and point of view. But for me, the personality in the messaging part is tone, expression, and archetypes.
And so it’s really how do you express that point of view? Are you tough love? Are you kind of nurturing? is it kind of sassy? Is it bold and unapologetic? And obviously if it’s bold and unapologetic, I don’t have this pastel soft visual script font kind of aesthetic that goes with it. There’s maybe a more romantic or nurturing brand that products can be wrapped in those colors and fonts that is going to be more.
So I always start with the brand personality. It’s also, what are people attracted to. So when you have that audience, there’s their desires, their emotions. And I often think that there’s something that the audience thinks that they need, and then there’s something that we know that they need. And we really need to be able to speak to what they think they need, not necessarily what we know might help them.
And that’s the emotional piece that really kind of shows up again and again and again. So if they need to feel safe, if they need to feel kind of pushed to their edge, these are the type of people that are not going to take action until push comes to shove. Okay, well I might have more colors that have reds and browns and darker, bright, stronger colors if that’s where they’re at.
So it’s personality and then audience. The emotional desires that they have and how those weave together. And obviously, you can look at something and be like, wow, this really elicits these emotions. I’m in a world; this is the vibe. I can look at this world like a Pinterest board. You can look at the world, and you can be like, this is the vibe. And you can look at this world, and you can kind of go, this is the vibe. And it’s like, what’s the vibe that your world is creating? And is that where these people that you’ve decided, or your audience want to be? You have to kind of throw it out there to actually know.
Rich: So all of this sounds good. But I always like to just kind of lock this in with some real-world data points. So I’m sure there are people out there going like, yeah, I’d love a better brand, or I’d love a brand that was more in line with my audience or myself or whatever. But I’m really just looking for leads. So if you are doing a branding project and somebody’s looking for some proof that this is actually working, what are some of the KPIs, if any, that you’re tracking? How do we know if this is working?
Luna: I mean, engagement conversions. So I’ve done split tests for my own business and for different clients where we’ll have kind of like get it up quick, short and sweet, keep it simple bullet points, mostly because of time and a scheduling thing. And then we’re working on the brand in the backend. And they need to put out an offer or something, or they have something that’s ready to go. And part of selling it is how they’re funding the rest of their brand growth. This happens all the time with startups, and so you’re collecting data as you go. I love this approach. And so we’re looking at these conversion rates.
And so when I have pages like this, I’m comparing them. You can do this with ads, I’ve done this with ads. Keeping it really simple versus having a really branded experience and different things work on different platforms. And so some platforms are more world oriented, especially visual places. And some of them are going to, like, you go to Substack, everything looks somewhat the same. You can kind of change the fonts on that header to two or three options. So there’s different places that are going to create that world, but the storyline is going to create that world. And the pictures that they use for the cover of each Substack. These two little things are going to create a world.
And so we’re looking at conversion rates. If I just do quick, I think it’s just comparing them. We do quick edits. And so I have seen from my business and lots of clients, that conversion rates, what I hear often is industry standard conversion rates for sales pages are 3% to 4%. And myself and my clients are consistently between 11% and 25%.
Rich: Wow.
Luna: And so I have programs that if this industry standard is saying 3% to 4%, and my minimum conversions pages for different products and sales things are 11%, well, what am I doing that they’re not doing?
And I look at a lot of these pages, and they all look the same. And so industry standards is to just sell things quickly and to convert, convert, convert. And so there’s reaching out to big pools of people without really clear messaging, without all these qualifiers, with pages that look the same. And so that’s industry standards. I’m like, okay, cool. That’s great for the industry. I’m doing a whole different thing over here that it might not reach as many people, but I have seen again and again that we can get higher conversions by creating a more emotional experience.
Rich: All right. What do you think, I mean, when it comes to branding of strong opinions, what is some widely held messaging or branding belief that you believe is complete bs.
Luna: Oh, this is the one of those ones where I was like, I don’t need to, don’t send me the questions. I don’t need to prepare that. I’m like, oh, yeah, it would’ve been good. I love this because it’s, it’s something that I’m actually not paying that much attention to. And what I mean is I’m, I’m really in my own lane. I’m doing what I do well, and I’m not that concerned with these big opinions that other people have. I think one of the main things is, I don’t know if it’s an opinion, but I see a lot of people doing it and I highly encourage them not to, is putting so much weight in business advice from someone who doesn’t have a business like yours, or has never even seen the backend of your business or had a conversation with you.
So if people are spending a ton of time on YouTube or Instagram following these accounts and expending a ton of energy to try to learn strategy versus actually being in relationship with their audience, their brand, their message, putting that same amount of hours and energy into what they’re creating and kind of… not that it’s not good to know what’s out there, understand your competitors, do your research, but don’t get, I find so many people are trying to figure out things, and they’re really looking as at their brand as like a problem to solve that is always needing better, better, better, better. And then they’re always searching for more answers, more answers, and relating to it as a problem.
And I find that that’s one thing in business and branding that I would really shift is like if you were relating to anything you created like a problem, it would not thrive or grow. And so your business is something you created. And if you’re looking at it constantly as something to fix, something to better, is that necessarily the environment for which it’s going to really thrive?
Rich: All right. If somebody wanted to get started about improving their messaging this week, what’s the first thing you’d recommend they should do?
Luna: Interview someone who they think is their ideal client.
Rich: Awesome. And I understand you have a freebie for the listeners today and a discount for your course. How can people find those?
Luna: Yeah, so building an AttractionBrand is the freebie. And I’m sure you’ll have the links.
Rich: We’ll include all the links, yes.
Luna: Great. So that’s the freebie. And then Messenger is the – it used to be called Magnetic Messaging – Messenger is the messaging course. It’s a really great program for DIY. It’s what I do with my private clients that is thousands of dollars and customized over 15 years of me doing this. I’ve taken all the bits and pieces that I walk people through into a DIY self-paced program to really understand what brand messaging is and craft it as you go.
Rich: Awesome. And I’m sure those are great resources and people should check them out. But if they just want to reach out to you and make a connection, where can we send them online?
Luna: I hang out in two places. One is Instagram and I’m at @LunaBattalia. And then Caru Creative is the brand studio, and www.lunaloveleadership.com is our website.
Rich: Awesome. And those links will be in the show notes as well. Luna, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Luna: Thanks so much, Rich. Thanks for having me!
Show Notes:
Luna Battalia is a branding strategist and founder of Caru Creative, where she helps entrepreneurs clarify their messaging, strengthen their brand voice, and increase conversions through emotionally intelligent marketing. Her “Animist Branding” approach brings psychology and strategy together to create brands that stand out and stick. Be sure to follow her on Instagram where she shares creative branding tips and advice.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.