Author: Jasmine Bina

Categories
Brand Strategy

How To Find The Perfect Brand Name — Being Original Without Being Stupid

I have stage fright. I love the high of public speaking but every speech is preceded with heavy anxiety.

That’s why, when the talk is over, I can lose focus during the audience Q&A afterward. With the stress of the presentation behind me, I’m a little less than present in answering the questions people ask while I’m still on stage.

“Damn, I had a better answer than that.” Invariably, this thought runs through my head on the drive home, and a recent talk I gave on brand strategy is no exception.

An audience member asked me how to name a brand, especially in crowded markets where it seems like every name, from viable to ridiculous, has been taken. My answer started with, “I’m not a naming expert but…”

…but that’s not true. Naming is simply another brand challenge that can be approached with smart frameworks, and is in fact a challenge I have solved for many clients.

The right name can be the first step in creating an entire market or, as I mention below, the beginning of a powerful brand narrative that changes the behaviors of your target consumers.

A name is more than a brand. It’s a signal. It’s the first declaration you make as a company, and what you say in that declaration will set every consumer expectation and belief that comes after it. If you’re going to start that conversation, you’d better have a strategy for guiding it in the right direction. Brand strategy and naming strategy need to amplify one another.

As more and more people ask me this specific naming question — how to create a unique name that stands apart without losing value.

I’d like to offer clear best practices that can guide anyone at any stage.

  1. The first section describes my thoughts for successful, original naming
  2. The second section goes into the exercises that worked for me personally as we rebranded our company from J.B. Communications to Concept Bureau
  3. …and the third provides a long list of best practices I’ve found in my research (with the generous help of Jean-Louis Rawlence, CSO of Concept Bureau.)

It’s by no means comprehensive, so if you have any published research or thinking to add, hit me up.

 

One Of These Names Is Not Like The Others: 3 Paths to Originality

Being original in your name without breaking an authentic connection with your audience is perhaps the biggest brand naming challenge founders face today. If you want to be original, you have to think strategically.

Cheap tricks like removing vowels or focusing on phonetics are dated and don’t always work, especially if you’re trying to disrupt old, trust-based institutions like finance, insurance or housing.

That goes double for CPG brands that are asking consumers to change vital human behaviors like the way we eat with food tech, or how we medicate with health tech.

1. Create a movement, not a cause

People have to rally around an ideal that forces them to act. This point is especially true for non-profits and charities.

A cause is a feature. A cause is to plant more trees, end poverty or feed children. It’s a voting platform, better coffee or any number of characteristics that are a means to an end or a relief to a pain point. Causes sound like Save The Children, Alzheimer’s Association, Disabled American Veterans and Big Cat Rescue.

The problem with causes, especially in the non-profit sector, is that they often operate on guilt stories — and guilt stories don’t create lasting behavioral change or loyalty among millennials.

Movements, on the other hand, invite you to imagine an alternative future. Think Do Something, Doctors Without Borders, Habitat for Humanity and Teach For America.

The future vision is a compelling benefit. In these specific cases, the benefit is not only a new world reality, but a chance to belong to something much bigger than yourself.

Causes promise immediate solutions (at best). Movements promise a tectonic shift.

2. Make self-identification easy

Think of your audience and what beliefs or perceptions they identify with. What principles define them? What kind of movement or name would they be proud to belong to?

Your name should be something they can align with, either literally or figuratively. The name should echo a larger story that gives your audience meaning.

Keeping with the non-profit thread, Hands Across America was a narrative about acceptance. To say you were a part of that was to own a piece of the legend. Same goes for Make A Wish Foundation and Human Rights Watch.

Startups like Product Hunt and WeWork follow the same path. These are calls to action that begin a larger story and give target audiences a narrative they can align themselves with.

Even a name like LendUp, which is basically alternative payday loans for people with poor credit, tells an enlightened, positively spun story about financial empowerment for young people who may be in a tight spot now, but are still optimistic about their financial future.

Names that create easy self-identification give people a mental hook they can latch onto. It’s an extension of the benefit that compels them to act.

3. Map the consideration set

Once you have a shortlist of names, you can sense-check them against relevant consideration sets. What groups of competitors and substitutes will potential customers compare you against when they make a decision?

Let’s go from hypothetical to real-world here. Below is the map we created when my former agency, J.B. Communications, was looking to rebrand with a new name.

As a brand strategy agency, we looked at the many groups that either competed with, or substituted as, our company offering. We looked at extremes — huge companies that we’d love to one day be competing against, and smaller ones showing up in our territory right now— and listed them along a continuum.

Consideration sets are important because they hearken the familiar and provide context that will inform your potential customer, but they also risk lumping you in with others, providing little or no differentiation.

What’s important with consideration sets is that you want to be able to stand up to them in name. We knew that target clients would also be considering young creative agencies and/ or older consulting and communications firms when looking for brand strategy support.

Not all of these companies are direct competitors, but all of them easily migrate into strategy for their clients.

Not all names will fit perfectly, but you can generally lump them together and look for patterns. In our case, younger creative agencies had more tongue-in-cheek names formed from one or two nouns, while older communications firms went the namesake route.

Our name had to be able to stand apart from both groups, and at the same time stand up to each one. You can see some of our other shortlisted names in red that steered too far in one direction and risked losing uniqueness.

With this map, we could see that Concept Bureau was different enough from each group while being able to hold its ground against any individual name on either side.

You, too, will have consideration sets (oftentimes more than two), and a strong name will be able to fit into each while also being unmistakably distinct.

Find patterns you can break. Keep patterns you want to leverage.

 

Work Up A Sweat: Exercises To Get Your Brain Going

Exercises are great little hacks for getting your mind working in the right direction, but don’t expect them to directly lead you to your final name.

In our case, as I explain below, these exercises helped me very clearly realize what we are not, so that when I finally stumbled upon the right name, I knew it perfectly represented what we are.

Brand Deck

We used a brand deck to help us narrow in on who we were and what that meant for our name. It’s a simple deck with a brand attribute written on each side. So, for example, a card may say “refined” on one side and “precise” on the other.

You choose an attribute and put it in a pile for You Are, Your Are Not, or Does Not Apply. I’ve always said that good brands are specific, and this is an easy exercise that forces you to make some of those harder brand decisions.

For us, certain choices like “idealistic” vs. “realistic” or “welcoming” vs. “assertive” were surprisingly difficult and made us think.

Use a brand deck or make your own. Just make sure the characteristic pairs are forcing you to make tough decisions. Tough = strategic.

What I also like about this exercise was that it made us commit. Once we chose a card, we collectively devoted ourselves to that attribute… and each commitment gave us a clearer pathway to the name we were searching for.

Free Association

You’ll quickly begin circling certain attributes that embody your brand, either through the brand deck, group discussion or by way of a larger brand strategy for the marketplace.

You can narrow down some of those words and then begin doing some free association around them. I did ours on a conference call with the team during a long drive home. It certainly doesn’t need to be focused thought. In fact, a small distracting task (like driving or cleaning) can help free up your subconscious a bit.

This is a small sampling of our free association:

We also associated for words like manicure, fruit and sweetness just to see where they’d lead. All of them were valuable and got us thinking outside the box.

Full Survey

There’s a world of name types out there, and getting yourself familiar with them can easily inspire a new naming thread.

Here’s a high-level rundown that I pulled from Wikipedia, but it’s pretty comprehensive. You’ll already understand most of these, although you may not have stopped to consider them.

Pay attention to brands in your day to day life and begin categorizing them to see how they work and what effect they have on you as a consumer.

  • Acronyms (IBM) — Each letter representing a word
  • Amalgam (Nabisco) — Combination of word components
  • Alliteration and Rhyme (Youtube) — Pleasing to say
  • Appropriation (Caterpillar) — Borrowing a word for a different application
  • Descriptive (General Motors) — Simply describing the product or characteristic
  • Clever Statement — (Seven For All Mankind) — An expression
  • Evocative (London Fog) — Vivid image
  • Founders’ Names (Hewlett-Packard) — A combination of names
  • Geography (Cisco) — Location or term for a location
  • Humor/Slang or HomeNON — (Yahoo!) — A name with strong personality
  • Ingredients (Clorox) — Based on components
  • Mimetics (Krispy Kreme) — Alternative spellings for common sounds
  • Nickname (Adidas) —A founder’s nickname
  • Neologism (Kodak) — Made up word
  • Onomatopoeia (Twitter) — Associated sound
  • Personification (Green Giant) — Character
  • Portmanteau (Pinterest) — Word combination
Anything But A Dictionary

Don’t open a dictionary. Don’t flip through the pages of a thesaurus and randomly place your finger on words. It will lead you astray. You’ll get hung up on meanings and etymologies, and things that sound cool will rarely feel right.

I find that words in books can be helpful when they come in context. After we did a lot of brainstorming and strategizing (and perhaps even some soul searching — rebranding can be a little emotionally taxing, after all) I was confident I’d know the name once I saw it. It was just a matter of digging at that point.

Our name ultimately came from the pages of a Pharrell’s book, Places and Spaces I’ve Been. It wasn’t “Concept Bureau” in the book, but the words emerged from the pages and I put them together.

Here are some more places where you can go digging:

  • Coffee table books, comic books, cookbooks, manuals, novels, old notebooks
  • Visit museums, art shows, galleries, exhibitions
  • Song lyrics, album covers, liner notes
  • There’s an ironic name generator for everything — brands, hipster co’s, startups, character names, fantasy names, team names, Wu Tang Clan Names, pirate names— have fun with them and see if they inspire something
  • Maps, almanacs
  • Comment boards and threads where your audience gathers
  • Old speeches, transcripts and movie scripts
  • If you’re looking to go the Neologism route, you can use this great tool for creating new words based on the quality, number of letters, and fragments you’d like to include
  • You can also invent a word using prefixes, suffixes and core phrases
  • …or use this site for a number of word builder tools

 

What Words Mean: Collected Best Practices From Near and Far

Naming best practices can get tricky. I’d recommend using them to narrow down certain trains of thought, but don’t use them as end-all qualifiers.

Here are some accepted standards almost everyone agrees on:

  • Keep it short, under 10 letters and 4 syllables
  • “Names that display a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, like Gatorade, Lipitor, and Amazon, are often easiest to say, since these sorts of letter combinations are among the first that infants learn in any language”
  • Alliteration and assonance can be pleasant to a consumer’s ears, but don’t get too hung up on them
  • Find the word(s) that evoke the story your consumer wants to hear
  • “c,” “v,” and “p” convey liveliness and vigor

If you really wanna get deep…

  • Fricatives (consonants produced by forcing air through the narrow channel between tongue and front teeth or tongue and upper palate or tongue and molars: f, s, v, z) convey “faster” and “smaller” — as do vowels that are voiced near the front of the mouth, like the a in “bat” or the i in “hid”
  • Plosives (stops or consonants in which the air flow is blocked: b, d, p, t) convey “slower” and “bigger” — as do vowels that are voiced at the back of the throat, like the o in “token” or the double o’s in “food”
  • Voiceless stops (such as k, p, and t) are more alive and daring but emote less luxury than voiced stops like b, d and g, which emote more luxury
  • … of course all of this depends on context, use and situation, so proceed with caution

The Minimum Viable Name Framework is a way to categorize your name ideas to see where they fall in a spectrum ranging from Benefits and Features to Functional and Emotional.

Each quadrant has benefits, implications and drawbacks. Mapping your competitors and substitutes in each category will provide clarity as well.

Lexicon’s Branding’s Blog is a bit dry, but they have some good articles that make sense of successful names. They’ve named the big name brands out there, and I’d recommend reading this one on how spelling reveals character, and this one about how the sharing economy is affecting naming. Here’s a bonus NYT article on Lexicon itself and the stories behind how they named some of the best known brands out there.

P.S. They’re the researchers behind the insights relating to fricatives, plosives and so on above.

Categories
Strategy

The Business Of Storytelling

A framework for developing compelling brand narratives

[Abridged] Concept Bureau Storytelling Presentation from Jasmine Bina

[Click here to download the full deck of slides and watch the accompanying video recording where I walk you through my framework.]

A lot has changed in the world of brand storytelling, especially in the last 5–10 years, but the frameworks we use to develop our brand narratives remain dated. We’re essentially using old tools to reach new audiences in new markets, and it doesn’t make sense. The challenge is twofold:

  1. Aggressive Evolution. We’re living in incredibly dynamic landscapes. Regardless of the market you’re in, change is happening at an ever-increasing rate. New entrants, bandwidth technologies, legal policy, generational personnel, emerging territories — this is not the industry or climate our parents grew up in. It is certainly not the climate that our familiar brand frameworks were once created to address.
  2. Inconsistent Behaviors. Where once you could count on the major behaviors of a generation to be consistent across age, time and psychographics, we now see a proliferation of sub-cultures and idiosyncrasies with millennials. Geek chic, bro culture, riot grrrls, foodies and hipsters are just the tip of the iceberg. Behaviors have fractured across all dimensions, and what remains is the overarching ambitions and mentality that begat them.

Taken together, these two factors necessitate a new framework, not just for brand storytelling among millennials, but any brand strategy that will resonate with an increasingly informed and empowered audience.

Watch a recording of my workshop and an in-depth look at the Active Story Framework for your own brand here.

My work with startups, established brands and B2C companies reaching millennial audiences allowed me to develop a new approach for decoding the fabric of a brand, and I was recently fortunate enough to share it during a workshop.

You can watch the video and get access to the full deck here .

The Active Story Framework

I call this the Active Story Framework because that’s exactly what it is — active. Each of the three elements propels you into the next and forces movement.

Build A Defensible Territory: Building a defensible territory as part of your brand story will 1) take you to a part of the landscape where your competitors will be unable to follow, 2) allow you to sing your siren song clearly, reaching the very target audience that is crucial to your success, and 3) allow you to be specific… because you can’t be a generalist today. If you’re not specific, you’re not valuable.

Create Meaningful Tension: There is a push and pull action that drives conversion. You ‘push’ your audience by tapping into existing (but often hidden) behaviors and either align or oppose their collective belief systems. You ‘pull’ by leveraging macro movements that resonate with those core beliefs.

Change Hearts and Minds: Your voice is key, but voice is not marketing channels or tone. Voice is tactics. Voice is gestures. Voice is actions, because when it comes to millennials, actions will always speak louder than words. Through your secret language, you have the one-on-one conversations that audiences demand in a such a noisy, static-filled environment.

All three of these elements together force movement.

They force you to make the hard brand decisions key to your success in a crowded, hostile market.

They force you to always land on the right side of the line between core market and mass market — regardless of what stage your company is in or which market you need to reach.

And most importantly, they force your audience to react, decide and convert.

What powerful brand strategy does

Think of this as a tapestry. When you look closely at the individual elements of a brand strategy, it’s hard to see what you’re really creating. But when you pull back and look at all pieces collectively, an image emerges. That image is the brand identity that your followers are looking for. A strong brand strategy gives that image resolution.

But what matters even more than that, at least in practical terms, is the power to solve problems with a strong strategy. A decent brand strategy will take 3 problems and solve them with 3 solutions. A powerful brand strategy takes those 3 problems and solves them with 1.

Don’t miswrite your own story

You can’t live outside of the story framework. You can fit into a current cultural narrative or oppose it, but you cannot exist outside its realm. We are all human, and we are all looking to make sense of the options presented to us in the marketplace. Stories help us do that.

Whether you’re an incumbent CEO or a startup founder, the worst thing you can do is miss the great story that’s sitting right under your nose.

Your hunch led you to a product. It wasn’t just a need. It wasn’t merely good product-market fit. Most leaders and entrepreneurs subconsciously see something bigger when they take the reigns of a company, and under that subconscious draw is a story. The real story. The story that wins.

Use this framework to find it.

Categories
Brand Strategy

3 Stories We Tell Ourselves: Pain, Villains and Fuck You Money

(Photo credit to the awesome Craig Cameron Olsen) 

The stories we tell ourselves, both as a group and as individuals, have immeasurable impact on our beliefs and behaviors. Brands trying to reach millennials should know who they’re talking to in this regard.

Every generation has its stories. There was the brave selflessness of the Greatest Generation spanning 1910–1925 (just ask Tom Brokaw, he’ll tell you, but don’t ask 2 Dope Queens), the cautious optimism of the Baby Boomers and the idealistic “just do it” consumerism of Gen X. Millennials, however, stand apart.

Not only do we tell ourselves a greater number of collective stories, but our narratives have become more fragmented as today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings find themselves moving through the in-between spaces of the gig economy, non-marriage and a changing American Dream.

The cemented goal posts of our parents are moving for the first time, and we spend more of our lives between jobs, between adolescence and adulthood, between impermanence and permanence than ever before.

It’s from within those ‘in-between’ spaces that some of our most compelling generational stories have emerged.

Three of those stories — pain, villainy and fuck you money — are actually old stories (even that last one), but perhaps for the first time shattered and put back together in a new form. They matter because they shape us, and since a story reveals just as much about the storyteller as it does about the world, we need to ask ourselves why we created them in the first place.

Perhaps even more importantly, there is no right or wrong. All cultures have a framework for viewing life experiences. These are ours.

Let’s start with the easy one.

Pain — To suffer is to succeed

Familiar with this one? Yeah, me too.

If you’re not suffering, you’re not doing it right. If you’re not working 12-hour days and burned out by Wednesday, you’re not living up to your potential. You’re not doing something worth doing.

Although we may think this is a newly popularized ideal stemming from the sudden rise of entrepreneurship, our Zuckerberg-esque heroes and the glamorization of the hustle we see in movies and content, it’s actually much older than that.

It comes from our puritanical pilgrim roots as Americans, and it was a lot more hardcore back then. It was life-and-death — a somewhat severe focus of Protestant work ethic that neatly parlayed into the pervasive “Manifest Destiny” that shaped so much of who we are as Americans today.

The ideas of pure intention, complete self-sacrifice to one’s service and a god-given edict to tame the land that threatened our lives daily, were all strong forces that never left the American identity. Each of us has played Oregon Trail and watched movies like The Witch. We don’t just get it, we revel in it.

So deep is a story like this, that I’d argue there’s no way to escape it without changing the very fabric of Americanism itself… and that’s not happening. What we have instead is a modern incarnation that every generation before us has morphed into their own, and now we have ours.

Pain happens in the extremes, so let’s look at the extremes to see how we continually perpetuate the pain story.

SoulCycle is about perseverance and suffering, all in the name of getting to the front row. It’s a cult-like, pain-centric movement that mirrors other new, extreme fitness faiths like CrossFit and ultra marathoning.

Elements of bro culture and startup culture overlap with the romanticization of all-nighters and impossible deadlines. WeWork stocks bathrooms and front desks with mouthwash, toothpaste and toiletries while Silicon Valley execs get caught (and sometimes die) using illicit drugs to keep up.

Arianna Huffington has built a profitable Sleep Revolution platform that “sounds the alarm on our worldwide sleep crisis”, and in my opinion, further canonizes the story of pain. Every great phenomenon has its high profile detractors, after all.

But these are all obvious.

There are still different forms of pain to consider. Look at the self-deprivation of The Minimalists and the popularity of Soylent — smart guys telling you how cool it is to give up the comforts of life.

Anytime you see celebs and CEOs relaxing on vacation, it’s simply the other end of the same spectrum. Work hard, play hard. The higher the stakes on one side, the higher they become on the other.

There’s a pattern here. When it’s no longer the elements that threaten us, we seek to develop power of will through extremes. Without a physical frontier to roil against, we create mental ones.

Call it the virtue of turmoil. Nobody likes the love stories that didn’t almost end in heartbreak. I’ve never seen that movie.

The opposite also rings true — it doesn’t count if it’s easy. That’s because we measure ourselves in experiences.

Our self-worth and identity is gauged by what we’ve been through. For millennials, those trials and tribulations are markers of suffering that go beyond what we’ve seen in previous generations. Less from the outside and increasingly from within.

Villains —When heroes become unfamiliar

Think Dexter’s Dexter Morgan, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, or The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano. We didn’t just love them, we identified with them. People mourned Walter’s death with mock obituaries and funerals. It got real.

We wanted them to win. Despite all our cringing and gasping, it felt good when they got away with murder. No matter how conflicted we felt, we quickly resumed rooting for them by the next episode.

These aren’t anti-heroes who lack traditional qualities of valor and moral ascendancy. Nor are they good guys who sometimes do bad things. They’re consistently heartless characters that cause chaos and destruction.

Although there’s discussion on what truly separates a hero from an anti-hero or flawed protagonist in media, it seems we’ve actually started to glorify villain protagonists.

The generation before us had Hitchcock, who deliberately created complex heroes that were hard to love, but that’s as far as it went. Meant to be disorienting and uneasy, Hitchcock’s characters pushed the boundaries, but they never crossed them.

Our millennial characters are different. These are clear villains with harmful tendencies, but if you dig down deep, you see their original motivations are very human and relatable. Walter was the humble, under-appreciated middle class parent trying to make a living. Tony, also a family man, just playing out the only life he ever knew. Dexter living with uncontrollable urges, which he offset by killing bad people.

Our total embracing of these characters creates a new kind of obsessive fandom. These are stories of misunderstanding and gray moral code. Stories of standing on the slippery slope between right and fair. Stories about how, as a post-Hitchcock generation, we’ve learned to make peace with the messy discomfort in this in-between space.

There’s a lot to be said about how socio-economic inequality, eroding faith in public institutions, or a general millennial malaise have created paths to this new character… but there’s more to it.

Every generation has the power to choose what they see in themselves. Baby Boomers saw Superman, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee — a somewhat mixed backlash to the whitewashed, suburban idealism of their parents.

Millennials continue that shift to a further degree. Heroes, in the traditional sense, stand guard between right and wrong. That kind of black and white life view no longer rings true for us.

I’d argue that a clear right and wrong, at this point, even feels uncomfortable.

We live in the gray area. It’s complicated. It’s polarizing. And it doesn’t form a consensus.

Our heroes are an embodiment of the world we see ourselves in. Not right or wrong, but somewhere in the middle.

Fuck You Money — The formidable task of finding your passion

The most significant story on this list is the quest to find oneself. This one’s a biggie, and I think most of us live within it.

Fuck you money, for those who are unfamiliar, is having enough success and cash to be able to (metaphorically) say “fuck you” to the people who failed, hurt or ignored you along the way.

Up until this generation, success was seen as largely formulaic. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant. The fact is that there were rules and structures that once existed, and people believed in them. Things like graduate school, babies, the corporate ladder and buying property were inherent truths in and of themselves.

What happens when those things move around or disappear? You get a new story.

For years I fought with my parents about my career ambitions. My father wanted me to become an artist, my mother just wanted me to stop stressing out, but I wanted to be a successful business owner. I went to college, then grad school, then set up my first LLC.

Looking back, that formula was not the best one, nor the fastest, nor the smartest. Definitely not the easiest (and absolutely not the cheapest).

But my career was my life. It was me. When my parents questioned my decision, I felt it to be a deeply personal attack on my identity.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that for my parents, and the parents of most millennials, a career didn’t mean the same thing. Granted my parents are immigrants, but for them, work was a means to an end.

Yes, they wanted to be successful as well, but their jobs had a lot less bearing on their perceived self-worth than it did on me. Work, for them, was something they had to do in order to live their real lives outside the office.

Millennials like me have chosen a different story entirely. Work is synonymous with identity because we believe in a financially post-apocalyptic world that decided to change right before we got here.

Our story is a dramatic, self-important reinvention from the ashes that remain. A survivor story. I believe this too. It frames my good times and my bad times, and lays the groundwork for single-minded career ambitions.

Now that leaves us in a tough position.

Finding yourself and finding your passion are inextricably tied. The pressure to find one’s passion is immense, even though there’s no guarantee this meshing of life and career will make us happier. For many, it can feel like a burden.

It perpetuates the belief that passion already exists within and it’s our job to follow it — a belief that Cal Newport and others have already started questioning.

It’s go big or go home. It’s backpack through Europe to discover your destiny, then come back to America to change the world. It’s do it on your own, like that suffering, solitary hero trying to navigate troubled waters.

I’ve heard enough entrepreneurs and CEOs daydream out loud about fuck you money to realize that for many, this quest is underscored by a sense of comeuppance.

We may not believe that right or wrong exist, or that fairness is a reality, but we do believe in our right to enforce that balance when our turn is up.

Just like the superheroes we created, we deserve to set things straight in our own, deviant way.

 

 

The trifecta here, incase you haven’t already seen it, is that all three of these stories fit snugly together. They reinforce each other, and over time become stronger. The virtue of suffering, the villain’s misunderstood journey and the ultimate reward/ retribution flow into each other. Take one piece out and the other two become weaker.

As brands and communities work to engage millennials from the outside, they have to first reconstruct the millennial mindset from the center. What are the stories that make sense of the world we live in? What notions help propel us forward?

Stories help connect the dots, and it’s fascinating to see what narratives emerge when those dots suddenly become mutable. The narratives we tell ourselves today have to wrangle a huge psychographic spread, especially as we mature into the next stage of adulthood.

“Everyone is a hero in their own story”.

That’s one of my favorite quotes. If you consider it from that point of view, everyone makes sense, regardless of age, time or country.

Categories
Brand Strategy

5 Signs of Killer Business Strategy

 

The best business strategies — I mean the ones that can truly change the game forever — all have a handful of qualities in common.

You should already have the basics of a good strategy down. Eric Jorgenson recently published a great roundup of strategy frameworks for Evergreen (I recommend reading) and it got me thinking about the lesser discussed, more qualitative factors that separate good strategy from killer strategy.

Good strategies make the most out of the playing field. Killer strategies change the field altogether. If your business or technology has the potential to redefine the norm, then check your strategy against these five factors to see if you’re pushing your framework far enough.

1. Killer strategies place bets

Visionary founders have a hypothesis about where the world will be in 5, 10 or 20 years and place their bets on that vision. You can solve a problem that exists today, but that doesn’t take into account the fact that your target audience is dynamic and always changing. Our cultures and beliefs are evolving with increasing momentum, and great businesses are built around a forward-looking point of view.

That means inherent risks are involved. Placing bets on the future should feel risky. WeWork has made huge bets on the future of how we define our work lives, where in the world we will be working, how we much we will be willing to pay to work the way we want, and how fragmented the workforce will become as the gig economy continues to replace corporate careers. They’ve even expanded that hypothesis to WeLive.

Ask yourself if your brand strategy dares to look into the future, and if what you see there is informing your approach today.

2. Killer strategies create pressure

Your strategy is often your story. For Snapchat (excuse me, Snap Inc.) the story and strategy are synonymous.

According to Evan Spiegel, “It’s not about an accumulation of photos defining who you are … It’s about instant expression and who you are right now.” If you think Snap’s new Spectacles product is a misguided step into hardware, consider it from that strategic narrative. Spectacles are about reliving memories, not creating a curated online album like every other social network out there.

Snap Inc.’s strategy created pressure to move into a different market. Killer strategies pressure you to make divisive decisions. They pressure you to change your consumer’s behavior and mindset.

They also pressure you to talk directly to audiences that are on your wavelength, and force you to risk not talking to the rest of the world.

They’ll push you to do the impossible. In this case, that means winning where Google Glass failed, with an arguably simpler product no less.

3. Killer strategies create unexpected friends (and enemies)

Apple was the first to borrow luxury marketing principles to sell electronics. That’s why it makes perfect sense for Angela Ahrendts to be where she is today.

By the same token, Snap Inc.’s Spectacle has the potential to unbind the chat platform from smartphones. That places them in a very different competitive set, namely against Apple. Look around and the examples are abundant — Uber and car makers, Netflix and content studios, Amazon and grocers, and so on.

If your strategy is disruptive, then you should already be seeing peripheral industries your brand may be moving into.

4. Killer strategies do not confuse strategy for tactics

A strategy is a lens through which to see the world. It’s an approach that defines your actions, processes and decisions. It is not actions, decisions or practices in and of themselves. Those things are called tactics, and I’ve seen far too many companies confuse the two.

Even the big names make that mistake. Four years ago, analyst Patrick Moorhead wrote his reactions to a Yahoo! earnings call where CEO Scott Thompson outlined a 6-point plan to get the company back on track. “When I looked at the list, they all made sense as operational principles or even action items… unfortunately, operating principles or action items aren’t a strategy.”

For Moorhead, the big question behind strategy is Where does a company intend to win? “Yahoo! needs to lean into something.”

You, too, need to lean into something. Look at your tactical plan and see if you can identify the guiding principle, the North Star that ties every action together. There should be a strong and unique assumption behind those decisions.

5. Killer strategies solve many business problems with a few solutions

Your strategy shouldn’t be reactive. Killer strategy is not about spotting a group of problems and finding individual solutions for each within your product. That’s ultimately shortsighted, and often a loser’s game.

You have to get your head out of the current construct and see things from a new vantage point. Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them,” and that’s a perfect way to encapsulate how bright founders mold big ideas.

If you have a clear hypothesis of how the future will be different, then your business should be creating the new playing field in which you will operate. It’s not just about developing a new market. It’s about changing the rules so that things that were once business problems are no longer problems in your new context.

When Airbnb came out with a new visual mark and identity two years ago, they simultaneously launched their “Belong Anywhere” campaign. Despite the jokes and drama, it worked. It worked because it was more than a mere marketing push. It solved a host of challenges for the brand.

 

Airbnb’s new “Belong Anywhere” branding push also includes a video series and host-generated content.

 

A compelling narrative like “Belong Anywhere” immediately mobilized local communities. In NYC, especially, Airbnb has reached out to hosts in grassroots efforts to help push back on impending hotel taxes. The money and resources Airbnb spends on dealing with resistant local governments is a significant business problem, and a new story helped favorably frame the fight in the company’s favor among pivotal communities.

With major investor pressure to rapidly grow to mainstream scale, Airbnb can’t afford to be a niche product that rich millennials use. This new identity succinctly speaks to both would-be hosts and guests. It communicates the brand experience and sets a very clear expectation that a mainstream traveler can understand without alienating their core audience.

Perhaps most importantly, “Belong Anywhere” immediately sidelines every competing hotel. In this story, there‘s no comparison between the products. Hotels are a place to stay. Airbnbs are a place to live out special moments. Cost, convenience and technology aside, these are suddenly two very different offerings.

Airbnb forces the user to define travel along an entirely different set of metrics that hotels have no hope of adhering to. Citizen M can have amazing, inviting common spaces that you never want to leave, but I’ll never book a room there when I go on my longer personal travels. Airbnb holds the promise of understanding new worlds. Hotels can only talk about amenities.

Your strategy must also move you above and beyond the obvious players, into a new territory where incumbents can’t follow. That’s the most effective way to solve many business challenges with a handful of smart, resourceful solutions.

 

 

I don’t think strategies or identities, or even brand stories are made up… meaning it’s not a creative process where you tie disjointed concepts together. I think the bones of a killer strategy are already there. It’s our job to dig and dig into the space until we unearth it.

Like George said, “There’s always money in the banana stand.” If you pay attention and doggedly search for the true elements, you’ll find them. The process, if done right, always feels like a discovery at the end of a long excavation. The pieces fit together as if designed that way.

Keep digging until you find it.

Categories
Fashion

How New Luxury Is Undermining The Old Guard

 

As New York Fashion Week wraps up and rolls into London, I’m realizing that my consumption of luxury, and even the very definition of it, has drastically changed. As someone who both studies millennials and counts among them, I’ve always felt this shift happening but this year was the most striking.

I watched most of my fashion shows via select model or celebrity snaps, not even the snapchat handles of the designers themselves. Even then, my favorite highlight was watching Kylie and Tyga hang out with Luka Sabbat in a hotel room after a long day of front row runway snaps. I wanted to virtually spend time with certain people that were there.

Sure our consumption behaviors have changed and modern celebrity is melting into design in new ways, but when you dig in, it’s clear that these are mere signs of something much bigger.

‘New luxury’ is evolving right before our eyes, and it has very little to do with the familiar concepts of luxury we grew up with.

New luxury — the sought after brands that are eating away at traditional luxury market share — is not defined by high price points or restricted access. In fact, many top tier and even old school names like Louis Vuitton are now catering to middle class audiences and social media pretty much leveled the access playing field a while ago.

We’ve seen the classic signals of price point, privilege and aspirational appeal dissolve into something very different.

I define new luxury as those brands which engender such fierce loyalty, people would rather buy their products than more established and often expensive brands… regardless of how much money they may have to spend.

By that definition, things like workmanship, cost or history may be important, but they are no longer deciding factors for the millennial consumer.

So exactly how does new luxury create authority against these bigger brands?

New luxury brands create their own language.

There are written languages and visual languages in old luxury that we’re all familiar with. New luxury reinvents both.

Look at print ads by Chanel, Max Mara or Dior. They’ll pretty much all look the same. Their digital sites read the same. Their point of sale imagery is synonymous, whether in Sephora or Macy’s. Their videos and short films capture the same polished aesthetic and wistful themes. It’s all classic luxury language buttressed by decades (if not centuries) of building on a singular identity.

Now look at a new luxury brand like Milk and you’ll immediately tap into a very different discourse.

In a sea of gold black and red, you will always be able to spot the sterile white Milk kiosk in Sephora. In fact, you’ll be drawn to it. Models faces are captured at odd angles, whose looks range from androgynous to tomboyish to ultra feminine.

This isn’t just good point of sale marketing. This is a conversation. You’re immediately forced to identify or dis-identify with the brand and its subjects.

Milk’s visual language is so specific, that you either get it or you don’t. And when you get it, you fully realize that the 10 girls behind you didn’t. You speak a language that others aren’t privy to, and that’s the modern reincarnation of ‘access’ in the world of new luxury.

To put it simply, good brands create tension. (I wish I could take credit for that insight but it belongs to Seth Godin… and I’m sure many others said it before him.) Milk forces a reaction that binds you to their identity.

They aren’t priced or packaged like a luxury brand, but they command the same authority and loyalty from luxury consumers that might have otherwise spent money at a Chanel or Dior makeup counter.

New luxury creates diversity, not hierarchy.

You want to be rich, you want to wear diamonds, you want to go yachting with models and you want to summer (not vacation) in a beachside Italian villa. Perhaps we all want the trappings of wealth, but old modes of luxury always create a distance between you and that future vision.

That comfortable distance is what aspirational marketing is based on. Your aspirations are meant to draw you to the brand without alienating the people who are wealthy enough to actually buy it.

Problem is e-commerce and globalization of manufacturing erased many barriers to entry, while the sudden proliferation of subgroups like hipsters, bro culture and skater boys created communities that old luxury couldn’t authentically touch — but new brands like Warby Parker, Herschel and LRG owned them seemingly overnight.

Old luxury is still aspirational and on some level expects the mass market to identify. New luxury, however, works to resonate with your values today. It’s what allows new luxury brands to get very specific with their tone and authentically speak with like-minded consumers.

That means growth is happening sideways, not hierarchically. From athleisure to lifestyle to haute couture, diversity of brands within each category is growing at a far faster clip than new categories themselves.

New luxury values community over affinity.

While old names try to go broad in their appeal, fashion startups like Wildfang are deliberately working to resonate with very specific communities. And how do they do that? Not by speaking to the the things we like, but instead, as they put it, acting as the “front door of this revolution.” Wildfang is looking to “liberate mens wear” for the “tomboys”, “female robin hoods” and “shapeshifters” they’re speaking to.

Not only is that a new language, it’s a shift in what constitutes identity. Consumers no longer band around the things they like, but around the people they are.

Rich is not an identity for today’s millennials. Rich is an aspiration, something we may strive to be, but it is not who we are. Even jetsetting, worldly and affluent are weakly defined attributes for today’s consumer. The signifiers of that world — handcrafted leather wallets, monogrammed loafers and foreign watches — are merely things.

True, there are still thriving markets for the incumbent brands that sell these goods, but they’re no longer universal identifiers. Previous generations may have rallied around an affinity for them, but today that is not how we organize ourselves.

You can look outside of luxury and consumables for plenty of examples of this. Soulcycle isn’t a meaningful brand because people like to gather around intense cycling workouts. It’s a brand because people have a life view about what grit and perseverance and pain mean, and that’s what brings them together.

Crossover communities like rap and Gucci are the strongest because they deliberately celebrate overlapping values. That shared perspective of lifestyle, not affinity for certain products, is what defines them. If wealth and upper class stations are evaporating as lifestyle markers, old guard luxury brands are in a tough position.

This isn’t anything new. When Cristal’s managing Director Frédéric Rouzaud made disdainful comments about rappers naming his product in their songs back in 2006, Jay Z called a boycott. Today, Kanye designs for Adidas (not to mention all things Yeezy), Angela Ahrendts went from Burberry to Apple and Fetty Wap models for NikeLab. These aren’t mere collaborations. They’re examples of how community has overturned affinity.

Yet although the community is a defining factor, one major story element creates a unique counterbalance.

New luxury tells the story of the individual, not the group.

As a generation (at least in the US) the story of the individual has taken priority over the group. It sounds a bit abstract, but it’s easy to see it everywhere.

Groups like boy scouts and little leagues have seen a sharp decline in recent years while parents opt to register their children in any number of individually enriching activities like coding camps or afterschool math programs. A big part of this is the push for STEM, but I’d argue that on a bigger level, ideas of community service and charity have taken a back seat to entrepreneurship and the honor of personal pursuits.

Increasingly in sports, it’s not the team win that matters so much as the social stardom of individual players. Everything from American football to Olympic gymnastics reflects this.

The consumer parallel is that before we’d seek acceptance from the group. Today, we self-identify with others who already know who they are. We don’t ask for permission. We declare our identities as riot grrrls, foodies and chic geeks. What traditional luxury brands fail to understand is that story and history are two different things.

Why does this matter? Because it forges a very different connection to a brand.

New luxury earns its authority by taking risks.

Brands can no longer declare their authority as ‘luxury’. Grandiose runway shows like the Chanel Fall 2010 Couture Collection that was punctuated by an imposing 40-foot gold lion, or Dior’s 2014 Spring/ Summer Collection which took place in an 18th century mansion covered in floor-to-ceiling flowers perhaps show that old school names are working harder and harder to own their territory.

Meanwhile, smaller, more nimble brands are working to earn it. They take bold, risky steps in both their product design and marketing to create an image that only audiences who “get it” will understand. It’s pull rather than push. In a world that is more fragmented than ever, a pull strategy is an extremely competitive advantage.

And that’s one way to earn authority in the world of new luxury — deeply resonate with who people are now rather than what you think they hope to become.

In many ways, what’s happening in luxury is very similar to what we’ve seen happen in any number of other disrupted industries. What fascinates me about this sector, however, is the millennial mental shift that ushered it all in.

I think the biggest changes and brand stories are yet to come.

 

This article also appeared on Luxury Daily.

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