For the last 13 years, we’ve been helping brands zero in on their “north star” and aligning hearts and minds to get them where they’re going. During our time in the industry, we’ve seen a lot of weird stuff. We’ve been refining our opinions over the years and, whether you like it or not, we’re going to share them with you.
Is Brand Strategy BS?
The answer is nuanced. It’s both “yes” and “no.” Brand strategy gets a bad rap sometimes because it’s often relegated to navel gazing. Unfortunately, it can feel good and sound good and still accomplish absolutely nothing.
How can you tell if you’re engaging in brand strategy or BS? If it’s not BS, it’s changing more than just your mood. If it’s not changing anything, it pretty much has to be BS. Even if the strategy is immaculate, if it’s not applied (or applicable) it’s worth 💩.
We tend to view brand strategy as an all encompassing practice. It’s not one and done. It’s forever and far reaching. It’s not just the hard work of defining and aligning, it’s a constant cycle of curiosity and creativity applied to real life.
Here’s the process we’ve been using for 13 years to help brands identify their place in the world* and capitalize on that position through ongoing curiosity and creativity.
The Key to Unlimited Growth
Yeah, it sounds crazy. In fact, it even seems to make some people really mad. When we tell people their organization can grow forever, they just hate it. They want to be limited by things like addressable market, cost/benefit evaluations, etc. But that is a myopic view that you can decide to adopt or not. More on that later.
For now, here’s the process.
WARNING: This is just common sense. Don’t be disappointed. But in our experience, common sense doesn’t always win the day and it probably doesn’t hurt to be reminded.
Find
Collect and review available information and data. This doesn’t have to be crazy. This phase for us has consisted of all kinds of things, from brand audit to market research to ecosystem mapping and beyond. The purpose of this phase is for us to have a sense of the reality of a situation. How are you perceived? What’s working and what isn’t? Where are there hidden opportunities and low hanging fruit? What’s the honest truth about what’s going on and where we’re starting from?
PRO TIP: Check your expertise and ego at the door. If you want the truth, approach this phase with a beginner’s mindset.
Expertise can be great, but sometimes it leads to assumptions. Brains are lazy. We find routes and we stick to them. Our brains create neural pathways that are very difficult to get out of. They’re super useful when they’re useful, driving efficiency and efficacy. But expertise is necessarily derived from repetition. So we need to trick ourselves into open mindedness.
When you’re looking at the intel, you need two types. Facts and feelings, typically referred to as quantitative and qualitative data and analysis.
Come at this with curiosity and common sense. Don’t miss what the data is trying to tell you!
Expose
Sometimes your brand needs a lot of work. There may be things about it that are horribly unsavory. But there’s always a nugget to be exposed, polished, and put on display. This phase is all about uncovering the edges of the brand.
If you’re not intentional about defining the brand story, it will be defined despite you. Without your careful work, the public won’t get it right. And you probably won’t get it right either.
We use this popular quote attributed to Michaelangelo when thinking about this work,
I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David.
This quote conjures up images of the meticulous process of chipping away until you find what you’re looking for. It’s easy to stop once you’ve revealed a humanoid form, but if you don’t keep digging for the masterpiece, you’re relegated to becoming just another face in the crowd. We need to get deep enough to identify what makes the organization unique.
If the results of your exposition expedition are common, you haven’t chiseled deep enough. Question everything. Be curious. Dig deeper.
Persuade
Once you know your unique value, you need to identify how to express that unique value. Show your audience why you’re the right choice in language that resonates specifically with them.
Pro Tip: Start by actually being the right choice for your audience.
Understand their unique pain points. That’s the only way to present compelling solutions to their specific needs. If you’re curious, if you’re empathetic, you can connect in incredibly meaningful ways. Identify and obliterate obstacles between you and your audience, then tailor your offering and language to them. Make it easy for them to not only buy, but to buy in.
I am unreasonably attached to this stupid gif I created. I even used it already in a past article about UX and CRO, but here it is again.
Leverage
Go from navel gazing to navigating. We firmly believe that ideas have very little value without action. At this point, if you want to go beyond the BS, it’s time to begin the alignment process.
Apply the work to existing initiatives and ideate around new campaigns and opportunities. For us, “leverage” is the beginning of application. Maybe we start by applying the thinking to a brand identity. Maybe it’s as simple as rewriting product pages for the audiences we’ve gotten to understand and using the value we’ve identified. It could be launching a new campaign and beginning to collect responses to the new, or updated, direction.
This phase is where so many organizations fall down. Lots of companies pay for brand strategy, but I can’t tell you how often it turns out that all the brand really has is a slick deck. A deck that is unused – or worse – unusable. What we’ve seen ranges from un-operationalized to totally untrue or unspecial.
How do you know if you’ve got it right? Or at least directionally right? By putting it to the test.
Here’s a real life case study of what happens when you leverage brand strategy.
Grow
Here’s where we get our most woo woo. We actually believe that organizations can grow forever. We think you can build on all that momentum we just created with a simple formula:
Ideation + optimization = infinite growth.
Double down with human-centered design and iterative optimization; you’re in an exciting position. From here, you can grow and adapt for as long as you want to. Maybe even… FOREVER.
Design thinking fuels innovation and identifies your next opportunities. Iterative optimization improves performance. Isn’t this fun?
A lot of organizational leaders tend to look at their opportunity in a very finite way. Where they are in a discernible market compared to competitors and their offerings. What’s the size of their addressable market? Can they sell more to said market? What’s the cost/value assessment look like? What other data can we collect? There’s growth potential, but it’s finite.
Data needs interpretation. We have worked with clients for all of our 13 years and seen growth as many years as they want to find it. How? By staying curious. Sure we look at data, but we also interpret that data – looking for the signal in the noise. We are more than just aware of the opportunities, we are alive to the possibilities.
*Our great friend Lindsay Jamieson once said “your brand is boring” in a talk he gave. That short phrase completely encapsulates my feelings about the importance of your brand in the context of the world. Your brand is only important to “the world” for what it provides to it.
