Welcome to the Meehan Mission podcast and today I’m introducing our community to Alana Newman. Alana is the founder of Brand Therapy. She’s an author and she’s also the host of her podcast, The Speaker Salon. So she is a very creative strategist and she hasv success in the music industry, documentary filmmaking and content production. Alana is one of those movers and shakers that helps you identify and craft your identity, especially when it comes to making lasting impressions online because this world is so competitive nowadays. So if you need help with your branding, then I hope you reach out to Alana and I am excited to share her expertise with you.
Cathy Meehan: Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Meehan Mission Podcast. And of course, as always, I like movers and shakers and people that can bring us a wealth of information to help further our careers, our health, just get us in the know. And today’s guest is Alana Newman. And Alana and I actually met—guess where?—in the medical freedom movement of course where all of us disruptors kind of gather. And I was just so excited that she agreed to do a podcast because everyone needs to figure out about marketing branding and what all is actually going on and Alana is just at the top of the field. So, Alana, if you would please introduce yourself to our listeners. I’d love for you to give a little bit of background on you and with your company, Brand Therapy.
Alana Newman: Thank you, Cathy. I adore you. I’m so glad we met in Austin and I actually—we’ve online been entangled for a few years because it was you and Dr. Meehan who helped me with my kids during COVID and the mask mandates and you guys were the people who allowed my kids to breathe freely at school when they were requiring doctors’ medical exemption. So I am eternally grateful for you and for Jim for providing that and my interest in health freedom and the medical freedom movement has really informed just my role and how I want to contribute.
And so I was a stay-at-home mom for a long time, but my history is art school and branding and I’m basically really good at Photoshop. And when COVID was announced, I knew that it was a scam and I started building a new brand called Health Freedom Summit, an online conference and was working that for two years and trying to give our people more dignity. So with conferences, with branding, with associations and graphics and imaging, you know, we were competing with big pharma in the COVID narrative.
And now I have a book, it’s called Beauty First Method: Instantly Communicate Your Value. And I’m basically trying to help our people compete with big pharma and with our story, with our image, with our trustworthiness, and with our offers because what they try to do is they try to destroy everybody’s businesses. They make it so that we can’t go to work or participate in society unless we take their shots. And so I think the remedy to that is we are independent. We have our own businesses. We’re doing our own thing. And that requires branding and marketing. And so I am really fighting for freedom. And my biggest skill is that I have a trained eye and I know how to use Photoshop.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Well, and I can attest to that. You have a great eye. In fact, I see a lot of marketing materials and programs and I’ve always loved your branding. You can tell when somebody just has that natural eye and they get the words right, they get the layout right, they get the colors right, and they get your attention. And in today’s world, you’re right, the competition is fierce. And especially the fact that there’s a lot of us that are independent, like we’re an independent clinic. I mean, how do we compete with these huge corporations that have unlimited budgets and they have unlimited resources?
So, that’s really why I wanted to bring you on because when it comes to branding and imaging, how do you go about finding a specific person’s—like what their brand’s going to be like? Where do you start? It is so personal and excruciating for people to build their own brands that’s based off of like their soul.
Alana Newman: And it’s so crushing when you are rejected based off of what essentially comes down to an expression of your soul. Like for someone to—for you to make an offer and put yourself out there on the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of products and your babies, your brainchildren. You put your brainchildren out into the world and when people are like, “Oh, no thanks,” it’s soul-crushing or it can be.
And so it’s a delicate process of collaborating with someone you trust and iterating. You iterate, you attempt that and you put it out in the world and what do you think of that? And I have a methodology that I work with people when they’re building something new that kind of takes some of the difficulty away. And the first thing is: who do you serve? That’s the number one thing is like whose problems do you not mind getting all up in and suffering alongside people?
And with the case of Mindset for Kids and Meehan MD, you guys serve parents and kids and so you suffer alongside parents and their traumas and their woes and their worries. I’ve tried to kind of narrow my audience down to the health freedom movement to the best of my ability, but freedom-minded people in general, I’m interested in your problems. I am interested in helping you overcome things. And I think that’s where it starts. And then from there, after the “who do you serve,” it’s vibes.
It’s so much of just figuring out how do you present yourself in a way where you’re not ashamed to show up and how do you make it so that people are proud to be associated with you, which is such a gut-wrenching process to make yourself someone that people would be proud to be associated with. But that’s what branding comes down to.
Cathy Meehan: Brand loyalty or something. I’ve kind of heard that phrase thrown out there.
Alana Newman: Brand loyalty. When your product or your service is intertwined with another person’s identity, you have produced something that makes them feel like, “Yes, that’s me, that’s my identity”.
Cathy Meehan: I love that.
Alana Newman: Yeah, it’s so important. Well, and not only that, but people are kind of also seeking community nowadays. And so if they can find community in your brand and your product, that’s going to just increase that loyalty there. Which is why it is so important if you’re going out on your own and you do need somebody to work with to help you along those lines because you can have the best product in the world, but if you can’t get it out there. And I mean Alana, you know how competitive it is.
There’s social media marketing that we have to deal with. First impressions say so much. And I’m sure that you got to scoop them up right immediately with graphics. All of that. And just making sure that whoever’s looking for branding actually works with a professional; it’s going to save them a lot of time and resources to do it right the first time. The sooner that you can get out there and get your message out there, the better. But I wanted to step back and talk about your book. The title is Beauty First Method: Instantly Communicate Your Value.
Cathy Meehan: You know there’s a lot of pressure out there. There’s a lot of challenges because we as individuals are competing. And I like the note that you had mentioned that especially as women are getting older, we have to compete and well, besides competing when it comes to technology which is not my favorite. So how did you come up with that title?
Alana Newman: Yeah, thank you. I did not put my face on the book cover because it’s not really about your face. It’s about beauty as aesthetics in general. I define beauty as evidence of a life-giving force. And like a lot of people, especially women, the first thing we think about is female beauty. We have these conventional beauty standards like—who’s a conventional—like Jenny McCarthyy’s in our movement. She’s like the most beautiful icon of beauty in our movement. She really is and she deserves it. And female beauty, if you think about it, it goes down to evidence of fertility, which is evidence of a life-giving force. So you have long thick hair and clear skin, free of disease, that’s evidence of a life-giving force.
But if you apply it to any kind of personal brand, older women who are past their fertile window are still evidence of a life-giving force. And that could be just great energy and vitality and an obvious wisdom or good taste, that’s evidence of life-giving force. For men, it always goes back to provider protector energy like: okay, this person’s smart enough. This person knows how to fix things. There’s a warrior spirit. There’s like, if I associate myself with that person, I’m going to live longer and I’m going to do better. And there’s all different ways of providing evidence that you are someone who is helpful to know because if I learn from that person I’m going to survive.
And then in our environments—I’m Catholic, I’m a convert and Catholics are good at this. We build cathedrals and there’s stained glass windows and pretty interior design. What the church got right was they realized that first you pull people in with beauty. There’s something about structure and environment where if it’s aesthetically pleasing, then it shows respect for the viewer and it shows automatic love. If you take the effort to make your environment beautiful, what it says automatically to your target market is that this person cares about my pleasure, cares about my soul, respects me enough to care about the details like that. Versus just when you go to ugly Soviet buildings and it’s just soulless. You’re like: these people, they don’t think of me as a human. It’s just pure functionality.
And so I think when we’re crafting environments and crafting digital architecture and our spaces, our websites, our apps, when we go that extra mile to make it aesthetically beautiful, it just instantly communicates respect for the customer.
Cathy Meehan: Right. Absolutely. Well, and I just in the back of my mind, I kept thinking of even as makes it welcoming, too. Think about when you have people over to your home, you don’t want a cluttered home with trash and pillows thrown over and everything. It’s just cluttered when you walked in and it’s chaotic. Instead, you pick up before somebody comes over. You make sure that the floor’s been swept and all that. It’s like you make it like a welcoming, inviting environment which is the same thing for your advertising and branding. You want it to be welcoming. So, not standoffish. And I don’t really think a lot of people have that natural thought process or mind to understand that. Which again is why it’s always good to seek out a professional especially for the details because you guys get the details too.
Alana Newman: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: So, you know, we are an independent clinic and again I said sometimes it’s so difficult competing with big pharma. They’re huge budgets and so I’m guessing that you would suggest branding needs to be on point to compete with those, right?
Alana Newman: Yeah, I think it’s our best bet. The advantages that we have in the health freedom movement is people have totally lost trust in the medical establishment because of COVID. So, we have an advantage with the people who were right about COVID. People are now listening to us more. But also the fact that our movement avoids poison and we’re better at nutrition is we do have naturally more vitality. Like if you compare Rachel Lavine to Bobby Kennedy, you know, the transgender HHS secretary.
Cathy Meehan: A man.
Alana Newman: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Common sense. I mean, that to me is like common sense, people.
Alana Newman: So, when Bobby showed up doing like back flips off of cliffs and shirtless push-ups and these pull-ups and stuff, whoever came up with that idea was genius because it just automatically communicates like he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to health, especially when there’s comparisons to Rachel Lavine and all the half-dead public health policy people. And so I think one pretty simple way that people in our movement can compete is just by being visible. Like yes, graphics and logos—honest, I can make a logo for anyone who wants a logo—but if you are 10 times healthier than your fat doctor next door that’s working at a corporate hospital, just film yourself in your vitality. And that automatically makes the point that you know what you’re talking about and they don’t.
Cathy Meehan: It totally sets you apart. Which actually, you just used the words. You used brand and you used logo. So, let’s hit on brands and logos because some people think it’s kind of the same thing, but it’s really not because one is a lot more in-depth.
Alana Newman: Yeah. Logo is the stamp where it’s really like the least of what a brand is. But people, they want their stamp, they want what they put in the circle on their Twitter feed or their Instagram. But a brand is everything that makes someone trust and recognize you. So if the people that you associate yourself with becomes part of your branding. One of the things that I think has been most powerful with my summits—like I did the Health Freedom Summit, I did Courage and Health series—and you’re in the relaunch of the Courage and Health series. When you are next to 30 other faces of people who have proven themselves—and Dr. Meehan when he was alive, he was in Health Freedom Summit. And so his content on masks and breathing and everything he did coupled side-by-side with Bobby Kennedy and Dell Big Tree and everybody helps each other so that we’re building like a big team. So the people that you associate yourself with is part of branding.
There’s color psychology and I always encourage people to find their signature color because color has a vibrational energy—not to get too woo woo—but everybody knows that there’s a really big difference between black and red as a color combination and pastels. It’s a huge psychological difference and I think people need to spend time learning about color psychology, doing their—if your face is going to be in places, do a color schematic on what colors you look good in and then decide what vibe using color that you want to project. This is why banks always use navy blue. Navy blue is the most trustworthy color.
Cathy Meehan: Ah never thought about that but I agree.
Alana Newman: Navy suits are the bestselling suit color because it automatically conveys trustworthiness. And so I think what the health freedom movement maha really needs to spend some time curating is our trustworthiness. And we needed to take a look at the colors that convey that. And it’s not neon green.
Cathy Meehan: No. I mean, neon green is cute, though.
Alana Newman: For kid playful colors, we can use our neons. We can use our primary colors. But you got to know your audience and if trustworthiness is the thing that we want. And I think if we’re going after the movable middle and be seen as the leaders in science, we need to just take extra steps for trustworthiness.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. So you mentioned Maha, which to me that’s a movement on its own, which started at this little ripple and it’s turned into this big wave. And I’d like to get your thoughts on what they’re doing successfully for branding. And do you have any recommendations for where they could tweak besides on colors?
Alana Newman: Maha. When I think of Maha, I think of Bobby. So there’s always a strong personal brand just like Steve Jobs had Apple and Colonel Sanders had KFC. There’s always a leader and so Maha definitely succeeded with—they found their leader and I guess it’s like a duo but it’s really Bobby at the end of the day. And so I think that’s one thing that they’ve done really well is they found a strong leader that people want to be associated with, who is trustworthy.
Cathy Meehan: And a leader that leads by example.
Alana Newman: Yeah, that’s key. Absolutely key. I think Maha has definitely done a good job of communicating their wins, which is another thing associated with branding. Like it’s your job to communicate your wins. And so schedule it into your calendar like: on Wednesdays we’re going to communicate our achievements. And so people associate in their imagination all of the achievements and that it’s good to be associated with you because you’re on the winning team. And so they do a good job of that and celebrating. They have maja balls. They have fun events that people can participate in. Gosh, if I were to critique anything, I don’t think I dare publicly critique anything related.
Cathy Meehan: Well, it doesn’t have to be negative. We call that constructive criticism. But no, I mean, I think they’re doing fabulously well. If you also the thing about being in the medical freedom movement—which Jim and I experienced it—for a decade now from when Vaxxed came out, you are going to be attacked by the other side. That is a constant battle. I mean, to this day, it’s still a constant battle. I think right now, our biggest enemy right now is the American Academy of Pediatrics. With all of the changes in the vaccines that Bobby Kennedy and they are actually getting done and creating this awareness of the corruption in there. You’ve got the American Academy of Pediatrics; they’re just putting out crap. I cannot stand. But they still have an audience. I don’t understand that. They have an audience and they have a supportive base and how much of that do you think is like made up and especially with AI nowadays? I mean, and bots and that kind of thing because I just—when you start seeing the actual lack of data in safety studies and I’ll just use the example of taking HEP B out of the mandated child vaccine schedule for the CDC on day one of birth. How anybody can say that was a bad thing? I just don’t understand. So when you see online people are still supporting it and they want it back and they think, “Oh, we’re going to bring all this disease back and everything else,” is that the American Academy of Pediatrics just making crap up and putting it out there?
Alana Newman: Gosh, that’s a good question.
Cathy Meehan: because I just don’t understand that you can have one topic and two completely different sides and that just baffles me. We’ve had it since Vaxxed came out. I mean we’ve got the trolls and all of that. I don’t know what to do with all that.
Alana Newman: I hear what you’re saying and there’s cognitive dissonance there. Is it astroturf—this fake grassroots? They spend money on fake grassroots movements where it’s like the Somali daycare stuff. It’s fake. Somebody’s paying for the fraud. I think the American Academy of Pediatrics has money because of big pharma and they use that money to frame—it’s like lipstick on a pig. They have a really expensive frame but it’s—gosh what’s that artist? Do you remember? It was like postmodern art. There’s this famous—it was a urinal—there’s a fine artist who put a urinal in an art museum and called it fine art and it was totally scandalous. Do you know this about art history?
Cathy Meehan: No, I’m gonna have to Google that and see if I can’t find a picture of it to put up in here.
Alana Newman: It touches on what we’re talking about. It’s not true. It’s not beautiful. It’s really ugly, but because they have the access to an art museum—a nice art museum is essentially one big frame. And so when people put bad art in a big expensive frame, then there’s this confusion that happens of: oh, are we supposed to think that this is good? Are we supposed to think that this is quality? Because it’s at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. And same here with medicine. You have these institutions who have really expensive frames like the name the American Academy of Pediatrics. It’s so regal in its name which shows you the power of a name right there—names are important. But really it’s a urinal. It is a urinal.
Cathy Meehan: I want to say the American Academy of Pediatrics is a urinal. That’s all it is people. It’s a fancy urinal.
Alana Newman: And it’s a process of getting their people. Everybody wants to identify with the fancy thing, with the elite thing. And so, there’s a psychological process that has to happen where you transform people’s identities. And it’s like the emperor’s new kids. There’s got to be some kid who’s willing to shout out, like you guys, “the emperor’s naked, that’s a urinal”. “This is crap”. And then people have to—nobody wants to be the one who’s not cool, who doesn’t see the thing. We got to do that with our movement is getting all the pediatricians on board to realize they’ve been participating in a lie.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, they have. Well, it’s happening. It’s not happening as fast as I would like it to see. But, you know, that’s why we keep doing what we’re doing. That’s why my main topic is talking about pediatricians and do we really need all of them? We won’t even get into that now. But I also since I’ve got you, I want to talk about social media—Instagram and Facebook and Tik Tok and Twitter—and you know they did not have those when I was a pharmaceutical rep 30 years ago. How is that influencing people’s brands nowadays? Is it just moving so fast? One day everything needs to be on Facebook and then the next day everything needs to be on Instagram or you need a Tik Tok account. And I will be honest with you, it’s exhausting.
Do you have any recommendations for your clients when it comes to social media?
Alana Newman: Yeah, I think the health freedom movement has to be extra careful about this because they deplatform us. Health Freedom Summit’s Facebook ads account got completely shut down. It ruined all of the businesses, not just the summit. And I grew up in Certino, the heart of Silathan Valley. The culture there worships money and they worship technology. And so there’s a ton of cross-mingling of big tech, big pharma, biotech—the same umbrella companies that own Google also own pharmaceutical companies. And so Google has a chief health officer and they have massive incestuous relationships with pharma.
And I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Facebook Meta Instagram—especially Tik Tok—they’re not going to make life easy for us. And I am investing my time on a platform called school (s-k-o-o-l) and it basically bridges online education community and social media. The two main partners in it are Alex Hormosi and Sam Ovenans. Alex Hormosi became almost—he’s on his way to becoming a billionaire and he got his money building gyms. So he’s kind of a bodybuilder guy and I guarantee you he is freedom oriented and he’s not—he’s the least likely mega-millionaire to deplatform people based off of vaccine concerns and all that. And Sam Ovenans is kind of a hippie coder, very freedom oriented. They’re not Mark Zuckerberg. They’re not lizard people or undercover Satanists.
I’m showing my cards a little too much. But I think school for people who want to build a community and want to teach health on some level and monetize the information related to lifestyle changes that actually produce good health. I think school is a good platform and then Rumble is definitely the free speech platform and they just came out with a premium where you can post once to Rumble and then it cross-posts to YouTube and all the other platforms. I want to even say Facebook. So I think investing in Rumble is a good use of time especially now that you can cross-platform. But I do not think YouTube is trustworthy for health topics. I tried to post a podcast on holistic cures for cancer and it got removed by community guidelines. So YouTube’s not a free speech platform.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. No, it’s not. Many of my husband Jim’s YouTube videos got removed. So, it’s just so aggravating. But that’s okay. New avenues pop up like we have Rumble. As one disappears, another new one’s going to come up to help because there’s such a demand. And mainstream media, those guys have just fallen like crazy. Nobody trusts them. And that’s all the better for us and for alternative things like podcasting and just getting out there and being visible, being in your community.
Those are some priceless things. COVID was really bad but you look at all the blessings that came out of COVID which is all of these organizations—you know they might have been gun rights and free speech and religion and stay-at-home moms—and it just brought everybody together. I don’t think anybody was anticipating what would happen when you got all of these people together. And not only that but most of us are kind of disruptors internally.
Alana Newman: I’m very disobedient. I cannot be controlled to my detriment.
Cathy Meehan: Right. Yes. It’s great that as you’ve grown you’re taking all that energy and your character traits and you found something absolutely fabulous to do and to share with people which is helping them with their branding. But so Alana is there anything else that you would like to tell our listeners? Any projects coming up or something that we need to know and don’t forget how we can get a hold of you.
Alana Newman: Well, thank you. My role in health freedom movement is to help other people succeed and my best advice I can give to let’s say there’s—you’re trying to be independent and get out of corporate healthcare and do something on your own. My best advice is to just work on—think about what would it take for you to be proud to share yourself because visibility is the name of the game. So, you got to be comfortable online. And for some people that’s going to be the thing that helps them overcome their visibility wound: getting a haircut and getting a new wardrobe because that’s the thing that’s holding them back. They’re not proud of how they themselves look. For other people, it’s going to be their website. They don’t have anything tailored there.
So really take a moment and assess your central nervous system and just think: what is the barrier that’s keeping me from being seen out there in the idea marketplace? What am I ashamed of? And then just go fix it. Just get rid of that barrier. Get rid of that block. And then if they want my help with it, I’ve got a whole process and methodology and questions and step one, step two, step three. The best place would be to go to my school community which is skool.com/alana and they can read the book. That’ll help them get through some of the blocks too.
Cathy Meehan: I think that’s great. And I just know that being around you radiates that electricity and that motivation and that spirit that we need to keep going because even though we’re winning a bunch of little battles here and there when it comes to medical freedom, we still have a long, long way to go. So we can’t sit back. We need as many people out there fighting for our medical freedom rights. Talking to other people, sharing podcasts, sharing videos, sharing resources. It’s non-negotiable. We need to keep doing it every day. And Alana, thank you so much for your appearance today on the Meehan Mission podcast. And I am sure that we will be moving and shaking more in this coming year. Thanks so much for coming.
Alana Newman: Thank you, Cathy.
Cathy Meehan: Thanks, Alana.
