This week on the Lead With Your Brand! podcast, Jayzen Patria tackles a question every professional and leader eventually faces: What do you do when you go off-brand?
Fresh from a visit to the original Starbucks in Seattle, Jayzen revisits his signature question, "Are you coffee or are you Starbucks?" and explores what makes a great brand truly valuable. Starbucks transformed an everyday commodity into a super-premium experience that customers are willing to pay more for. But even the world's most recognizable brands can lose their way.
Drawing on Starbucks' history of navigating major brand challenges, Jayzen explains how the company's pursuit of growth and efficiency sometimes took it away from the very things that made its brand special. The lesson applies directly to our own careers. Whether it's a difficult meeting, a poor decision, or simply losing sight of what makes us unique, we all have moments when our behaviors don't align with the personal brand we want to project.
The good news? Going off-brand doesn't have to define you. What matters is how you respond, reconnect with your strengths, and take action to rebuild trust.
Key Takeaways:
Own it when you go off-brand. Everyone makes mistakes. The first step to getting back on track is acknowledging when your actions or behaviors haven't reflected the professional brand you want to be known for.
Get back to your roots. Reconnect with your supersized superpowers—the unique strengths, qualities, and abilities that make you stand out, regardless of your role or job title.
Take action to rebuild your brand. Acknowledging a problem isn't enough. Rebuilding your brand requires intentional, consistent actions that demonstrate who you are and what you stand for.
Remember, your brand is an experience. Just as Starbucks built its brand around more than coffee, your personal brand is about more than your résumé, LinkedIn profile, or professional image. It's what people see you do and hear you say every day.
Joining Jayzen for this episode is Jen Randle, Co-Architect of SGNL Advisory, a strategist and cultural architect whose career has centered on building and restoring trust. Jen shares her remarkable experience helping Starbucks navigate a major brand crisis, the career journey that led her to identify trust as her professional through line, and why aligning who you are with how you show up is essential to building a powerful personal brand.
Together, Jayzen and Jen explore how embracing your unique qualities, trusting your internal compass, and leading with authenticity can help you build stronger relationships, navigate difficult moments, and unlock your next career breakthrough.
Guest Bio
Jen Randle, CEO-Founder/Co-Architect, SGNL
Jen is a strategist, systems thinker, and cultural architect whose work makes one truth clear: trust is the business multiplier. As a Co-Architect of SGNL, Jen partners with organizations navigating crucible moments—when trust is fractured, alignment is unclear, and the next chapter demands more than a surface fix. She activates Brand Trust Networks: strategic, cultural, and behavioral systems that allow organizations to move with integrity and coherence—inside and out.
Her perspective is simple but profound: strategy stalls without trust. Culture fractures without trust. Capital erodes without trust. Jen’s work builds the conditions where trust doesn’t just hold, it compounds—turning bold ambition into enterprise value.
Her portfolio includes transformative work with companies like Nike, Pinterest, Virgin Brands, Juul Labs, WeWork, and Starbucks. Notably, in 2018, she guided Starbucks’ response to a racially charged incident in Philadelphia, shaping an unconscious bias conversation for 175,000 employees across 8,000 stores. A system-wide intervention to begin repairing trust.
Beyond organizational systems, Jen is the creator of Intrinsic Wayfinding. A practice that helps individuals realign with their internal compass. This work is uniquely personal: a space for clarity, wholeness, and alignment that doesn’t have to translate into an org chart or a shareholder report. It belongs to the individual.
Her organizational work, by contrast, is both systemic and human—rooted in the belief that lasting change only takes hold when trust is present: between leaders and employees, companies and customers, investors and markets.
A native Californian, Jen now lives on the coast with her two pups, where ocean air, nature, and community are her sanctuary.
Links
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