How NOAN is helping build a brand based on trust
When Gemma & Mark Kingston began their marketplace business, The Family Edit, the goal was to solve a problem they were facing themselves - how to find fun, healthy ways to entertain their growing family as they explored their home country, Ireland.
“Gemma was pregnant with our first baby and we weren’t too sure where to look for any information or tips about family life and newborns.
“Once our first baby girl arrived Gemma wanted to do classes and found it so difficult to find out what was happening and where it was happening. Cue a lot of time spent on google .. many pages open on her mobile .. and missed groups because she couldn’t find the information.”
The Family Edit was born, a directory and marketplace where family-friendly venues, activity providers and retailers can list their products, and where parents can recommend the ones they trust the most to other parents in the same boat.
Trust is a key word for them. It’s parents helping each other find the locations and services they trust with their kids. The Family Edit is built on a bedrock of trust and authenticity - two things that people often struggle to square with AI tools.
“Our whole business is built on trust. So we can't be just putting out generic information or information that even remotely feels generic. It has to feel and it is very authentic.
"And yes, I want to save time, but I'm in no way willing to give up on any of our trust element or in any way willing to give up any of that authenticity. I feel our community would see through it immediately, they know us so well.
"I feel they'd know as well if it wasn't our voice.”
So for NOAN to work for a company like The Family Edit, it had to save them time but also become something to which they could entrust with their brand, in the same way as their audience trust their recommendations.
At the start, just after onboarding, Gemma spent some time carefully filling in strategy modules to direct NOAN on The Family Edit’s tone of voice, mission and founding story. By the time she started to use the NOAN Creator tool, she had laid strong foundations that would serve her well once she started creating content.
When a major campaign loomed, it was time to put it to the test.
As The Family Edit built out its County Campaign - a suite of recommendations rolling out on a county-by-county basis – NOAN’s time-savings came into play. Said Gemma:
”In the prep work, it definitely saved me five hours easily in the lead-up to this. We're getting sales in already from this county campaign. I would not be able to manage this by myself, I would 100% need to have taken somebody else on board in a part-time way. It just physically would not be possible to do all the aspects of it that were needed.”
NOAN’s goal has always been to save busy entrepreneurs time, and give them back hours in their week to do what is most important to them.
With a brand that is so deeply and personally connected to its users, NOAN also had to show it could really understand the users and serve up content that really spoke to them in The Family Edit’s voice. That way, Gemma & Mark could add the most personal touches before sending, but still save time. Thankfully NOAN’s magic lies in its ability to deeply understand a brand and adopt its voice.
Because Gemma had already built out The Family Edit’s brand identity and voice in NOAN, it was ready to put it to use when called upon.
“I actually could have cried with happiness when we did up the intro post about the county campaign.
"It was a message that was going out to families and to businesses.
"We needed to show our value proposition for both the families and for businesses, and that can sometimes be hard to put across in messaging because you think, 'Is it a bit too towards the families? Or does that sound a bit too salesy?', and you don't want to alienate either.
"So that can be hard, and that takes time. I put it into Creator and it came back with my perfect post for Instagram.
"Then I said 'Do this for me now please, for Linkedin' and it did. I then asked 'Do it now for Facebook' and in a matter of 10 minutes I had what I would have spent an hour on, because I know I would have been thinking “Is that ok or should it be another way?”. Whereas NOAN gave me the framework.
"I did one or two quick little tweaks and they went out and they did great.”
What sets NOAN apart from generic AI text-generation tools is how you are able to teach it how your brand should act, sound, and what it aspires to. NOAN’s AI also helps you to evolve that context, and retains it as the core context for everything else you want to create. Whatever you generate using NOAN Creator stays on-brand, on-mission, and in your tone of voice. You set the rules, you set the tone, and for the rest, you lean on NOAN.
Gemma describes it as like having an additional team member or mentor at your shoulder to keep you on track - invaluable for an entrepreneur.
“I feel I'm able to go into NOAN from a really positive place because I have told the strategy side of it: 'This is what we are, this is who we are'.
"So it's not as though it's coming up with 'A family website in a country might do this.' I feel NOAN knows The Family Edit speaks this way, this is their, you know, kind of motive.”
The time-savings only get greater as you continue to use NOAN, because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you log on. Your company knowledge is stored and structured, and the more you work in the system, the better it knows your brand. Any time you return to the system to log on, that initial back-and-forth is done, you don’t have to revisit it. NOAN knows your brand.
“For all those elements that I need that output, you might need somebody else to help you with it, or you might discuss it with somebody else. I kind of just feel that because of all the background conversations that we've had, you know, that's all there.
"So you're not repeating yourself because I don't have time to repeat myself.
"Whereas for me, with Chat GPT you'd have to keep repeating yourself. I don't have time for that. So when I'm able to save that time, but in a way that I can trust it – because I'm just obsessed with trust – that's just hugely beneficial.”
For NOAN - founded initially by two dads of small families, what The Family Edit does, and the struggles its founders face on a daily basis are exactly why we created NOAN. Building is hard - building a business with all the pressures of early parenthood is even harder. But we believe it doesn’t need to be that hard.
The Family Edit is exactly the kind of business we built NOAN for – it’s got a fabulous mission, a great vision for what it wants to achieve, and with NOAN, its founders have more time and money to get out there and make it, and family life happen with a lot less stress.