When brands create tension, they force people to move.
Tension turns people into lovers and haters, but the one thing it doesn’t allow is for people to sit still. That’s good, because the last thing you want is a brand that’s ’nice’ or a brand that people are indifferent to.
Tension can come from a few places, such as comparing what is to what could be, or unearthing a new belief. Whatever the source of tension is, it 1) has to be about the user and 2) has to be consistent.
When done right, it creates loyalists and avid fans.
When done wrong, it can make people angry (Pepsi, anyone?) This video shows you the right and wrong way to create tension that actually moves people.
Read the full case study on “The Magical Art of Making People Move With Brand Tension” with examples, here.
Lifestyle consumers are changing. Your brand should, too.
Lifestyle brands have existed for a very, very long time. From Pears Soap of the early 1800s, to the Marlboro Man of the 1950s and the Glossiers of today, all of these brands are part of the same lifestyle heritage.
The existence of lifestyle branding hasn’t changed. What has changed, however, is the role that lifestyle brands have played in our lives over time.
Early lifestyle brands were gatekeepers that informed us of our stations in life and how to act within them. You used a certain soap in order to be a good member of society. You shaved your legs if you were an upstanding woman.
This reflected a larger truth about the consumer. We looked to institutions for meaning. Government, marriage, education, class, career — all of these goalposts sorted us among our peers.
From left: Pears Soap prescribing identity, Marlboro promising the life not lived, Glossier creating a likeminded tribe.
In the late 20th century through to today, things took a dramatic shift. Our goal posts began to evaporate and those same institutions (known more commonly as the corporate ladder, the American Dream and the nuclear family, among others) no longer served the same purpose.
Meaning had become democratized and created a fantastic vacuum for companies.
New lifestyle brands like Apple and Nike allowed us to self-organize around ideals of our own choosing, regardless of our lot in life. We could find our tribes and rally around the aspirations that stirred us.
Lifestyle went mainstream and was layered over every vertical, from fashion to finance. As a culture, we moved from interacting with brands as vehicles of self-labeling to vehicles of self-expression.
This is where we are today.
We can stop here and build a lifestyle brand based on this insight, and that would be enough to get your company off the ground.
But the consumer is changing again, and I absolutely do not believe that building a successful brand is about the current market.
Successful brands are built in the future market.
In which case, we need to ask ourselves where lifestyle brands are headed next. And of course we’ll start where we always start: with the user.
There’s no denying the fact that users are becoming more and more sophisticated in the brand vernacular, and more demanding of the brand value they pay a premium for.
Without gatekeepers, institutions and traditional life milestones, users have come to create their own centers of meaning around lifestyle brands that help them signal to the world who they are. I may not have an executive title, but I have a WeWork office because I believe I am a disruptor.
But self-expression opens the door to something much more important on the horizon. Today we want to belong, but tomorrow we will want to matter. Accordingly, the lifestyle realm is undergoing a transition from aspiration to something with more substance.
We’re moving from self-expression to self-discovery.
This is not about design aesthetics or leveraging influencers, or even creating buzz as we see with the bulk of lifestyle brands today. It’s not soothing sans-serif fonts and pastels that make us feel tuned into a trend. And it’s certainly not a USP.
This is about a maturing consumer that’s seeking new centers of meaning in their lives, and accordingly will seek out brands that help them discover who they are in the process.
We’ve gone from macro to micro, outer world to inner world. It’s a much more intimate and personal relationship that adds a layer of intrinsic value to the product.
The successful lifestyle brands of tomorrow will need to follow consumers deeper into themselves in order to resonate.
This is where you start building in the future.
This is where tension comes from. If you can create a brand that pushes your audience to get to where they are going (perhaps when they don’t even realize they are going there themselves), then you will create and capture a special kind of value that will serve your brand for years to come.
With this new perspective, let’s look at some of the elements that should go into your brand blueprint.
Start with the conversation, not the lifestyle.
A lot of brands falter from the very beginning because they don’t understand what a lifestyle brand actually is.
A lifestyle brand is a conversation that happens at specific points in a consumer’s life.
Forget the aesthetics or aspirations. Those are mere tactics. If you want to be a lifestyle brand, you need a rock solid understanding of the values that you want to explore with your consumer.
Keep in mind you can’t effectively explore values like “transparency” or “honesty” or “social responsibility”… the common items listed in company’s mission statement. Those are baseline requirements (self-expression at best, features at worst) that you should be delivering to your consumer anyway.
The values worth exploring are the ones that help your user move down the self-discovery path.
Values sound provocative, revealing, and you either really care or you really don’t because as a consumer, you immediately know if that value will get you to someplace deeper within yourself:
“The thrill of vulnerability in an unforgiving world.”
The New York Times has taken an interesting turn toward lifestyle recently. True, the news and media company advertises no-nonsense slogans like ‘You’ve read the news, now read the facts’, but take a closer look at their content investments and you’ll see that they’re actually exploring the value of “being human without judgement.”
It’s a compelling concept.
Part of how they underscore this is in two excellent content series: Modern Love and Conception.
Modern Love isn’t about the news. It’s about the non-newsworthy events that define our love lives.
Conception doesn’t include doctors or experts. Just the private voices of parents.
You’ll notice in both of these series, there is no news.
Modern Love is about the non-newsworthy events that define our love lives.
Conception doesn’t include doctors or experts. Just the private voices of parents.
These are avenues toward “being human without judgement”, and for many viewers, a straight path to self-discovery.
You can’t explore that value just anywhere. The New York Times knows explorations like these have to happen at certain points in the user’s life.
You can’t get more human than disappointment in love and heartbreak in parenthood, nor can you find two topics more charged with judgement. The New York Times deliberately chose these moments in our lives because they push the self-discovery conversation forward more quickly and more effectively than any other moments in our day-today.
That demonstrates the simplest definition of what a lifestyle brand truly is: Lifestyle brands insert themselves into the important life moments of their users. Specifically, those life moments that echo the brand’s guiding beliefs and the values they’re working to explore.
The values worth exploring with your users are usually the ones that go unspoken. They’re the paths less traveled our minds, but hard to resist going down once someone shows us the way.
Emulation vs. empowerment.
If we’re moving from self-expression to self-discovery, then we’re also moving from emulation to empowerment.
In other words, purely “aspirational brands” will decline.
Many companies have beautiful and tight visual branding that signals something to aspire to, but not much more than that. We see them everywhere — clothing, food, tech, entertainment — but as consumers, we’re so oversaturated with this kind of two-dimensional branding that it has started to become redundant.
How can many of these brands be deciphered from one another? At what point do I stop caring about the novelty of aspirational brands and start looking for something that will deliver more?
When three major athleisure brands like We Are Handsome, Stellasport and Sweaty Betty become indistinguishable from one another, what is left?
From left: We Are Handsome, Stellasport, Sweaty Betty.
We will eventually reach a point where users won’t care about attaining a prescribed lifestyle nearly as much as they will care about being enabled to create the deeper lifestyle they want.
Aesthetics, while important, are a tactical trap. They are not where lifestyle brands start, but rather where they end.
A simple way to vet your brand is to ask yourself, “Am I encouraging people to emulate this lifestyle, or am I giving them the tools to attain something bigger?”
Notice I said tools, not products. For truly brand-led companies, the product is secondary. You’re not selling your yoga pants in the promise that people will become more athletic — that’s aspirational.
Instead, you’re doing what Outdoor Voices is doing and build a brand around “happiness” while everyone else is building theirs around extreme grit, physical endurance and in the women’s category, sexiness.
The name comes from her childhood, where [Outdoor Voices founder Tyler Haney’s] mom would encourage her to use an indoor voice while the kid in her just wanted to be outside all the time.
“I thought, What if I built a brand around something people loved — a recreational Nike that’s all about staying healthy and being happy doing it?”
The brand empowers happiness in a multitude of ways, including crowdsourcing many of their designs, deliberately focusing on low-impact daily activities instead of extreme sports, and featuring un-retouched ads of women with real bodies and real cellulite.
These are all ways to empower women in being happy.
“OV is about being human, not superhuman.” Haney knows that for the next generation of brands, aspiration is taking a back seat to something more powerful.
It’s why the company grew 800% in 2016 alone and commands huge lines at their NYC sample sales, rivaling the sample sales of most luxury brands I’ve had the chance to queue up for.
The buck has to stop somewhere.
Lifestyle brands need a founder’s face and voice.
Someone needs to take responsibility for everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong.
People need to know that if they are investing in so much intangible brand value and giving themselves over to such a demanding (but rewarding) self-discovery experience, there is someone on the other side of it all that is just as committed.
Unlike B2B and non-lifestyle B2C brands, lifestyle brands across the board need to showcase a real person that’s driving the vision and innovation in the company.
Your consumers don’t need a relationship with the founder specifically, but they need the comfort of knowing they aren’t being cheated by some flashy marketing gimmicks and a savvy art department.
The best companies are the ones led by CEOs who have their own personal brands. They’re influencers in their own realm who are one or two steps ahead of the company brand that they are building.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s personal brand (as exemplified through her life) is like Goop on steroids, and Elon Musk’s personal brand of being a rebel futurist is arguably leagues ahead of Tesla’s.
Elon Musk covering literally everything in his interview with Joe Rogan.
When a founder’s personal brand is further into the future than the company they are building, it demonstrates a real devotion to a larger belief.
It also gives avid users — the ones who spend the most and thirst for deeper engagement — a direction to point their attention in.
You don’t need to be a celebrity CEO, but you do need to be creating spheres of influence through content, social or in your physical network. You need a strong point of view that perhaps would be too heavy handed for your company, but can comfortably be explored by you as an individual.
Take your big idea and use your personal brand to push it further. Don’t be afraid to draw a line in the sand and show which side you fall on.
If you’re the CEO, people need to be able to find you, understand you, and make you part of the story.
The lifestyle consumer is changing. Your brand should, too.
The next generation fo winners in this space already see that we’re moving from Lifestyle 1.0 of graphics and clever taglines to Lifestyle 2.0 of conversation, empowerment and accountability.
As we move from self-expression to self-discovery, you need to be positioned as a brand that can guide users deeper into themselves.
It’s a riskier strategy that will take more time and money. But it’s the only strategy that will win the long game.
You can’t move the market if you don’t know how to read the market.
There’s a big difference between building a brand for today and building a strategic brand for the horizon of your industry.
I meet a lot of branding people who create or consult companies based on two-dimensional principles. That usually sounds something like:
“We’re making health food for the young urban professional that doesn’t have time to cook, but wants to feel good about what’s going into their body.”
“We’re a D2C lifestyle clothing brand for young, single men who aren’t afraid to put some personality in their wardrobes.”
“Our brand is for the millennial yoga mom who wants an electric car that reflects her values.”
“We provide frictionless financial solutions for small businesses and their vendors.”
If any of these sound familiar, then you are building a brand for the here-and-now. It will work for the here-and-now, but there is no strategy for how it will compete in the next few years.
That’s because these brands fail to look at the deep signals that are going to move their markets. Some of the most important of these signals are in culture and definitions, and it takes a keen understanding of markets and mentalities in order to pick up on them.
They are hidden because they haven’t emerged yet, but the groundwork for what they will mean to us as consumers is already being laid.
This is part of thinking like a brand strategist. I’ve written about it in a previous post, but here I want to cut deeper into a certain aspect of what those signals mean and where to find them. Specifically, the more foundational signals we may take for granted but see all around us in the world.
Above all, I want us to explore how to use these signals for your own brand. If you’re creating a brand based on strategy, it’s important to have a curiosity not only for how things are changing, but why, and to apply that ‘why’ to your own business.
You’ll see that these signals can come from any corner of the playing field, and yet can be applied to nearly any business in the landscape.
Signals usually supersede any particular vertical because they’re not about the market itself, but rather the forces that move the market forward.
You can’t move the market if you don’t know how to read the market.
Once you see a signal, you start to understand how it powers much of the activity in our lives.
Signals are codes. They underlie what you see on the surface of a market, and the strongest brands out there have made those codes part of their DNA.
Collective Culture
A strategist has to be something of a cultural anthropologist. You have to see your users as individuals as well as products of their surroundings and part of a greater whole.
Sometimes, a glitch in the cultural system can lead you to the faulty code of a signal. I saw something like this recently in an old story about finance.
The world’s first index fund was founded by John Bogle of The Vanguard Group in 1975. There was nothing like it at the time. You couldn’t simply ‘invest in the market’, and most investors worked with advisors to actually beat the market with their portfolios.
The entire investment paradigm at that time was to perform better by placing your bets in a subset of market stocks.
Bogle, however, noticed something interesting that was starting to emerge in the research of economists like Paul Samuelson and Burton Malkiel.
He saw that oftentimes, if you just invested in a weighted basket of all stocks in the market, you’d be better off than trying to beat the market by predicting with a few key companies. In other words, the average of the market performed better than most investors did with their portfolios… and he had the historical figures to prove it.
That sounds logical, right?
But for many it wasn’t. The concept of an index fund was met with huge resistance in the financial community, as well as its fair share of ridicule.
It was called “un-American” and Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward Johnson was quoted as saying that he “[couldn’t] believe that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied with receiving just average returns”.
An executive from a different firm wrote that all but “a very small minority” believe “index funds are a ‘cop-out’ and a fad that will soon disappear.”
That should draw your attention.
Why would Americans believe, that despite all the logic and proof behind it, an index fund was un-American and destined to fail?
Because there is something about being American that stands in the face of what Bogle’s fund represented.
It’s a sin to be average in America.
Somewhere, deep in our collective psyche, we believe that to be American means to be exceptional, and that cultural quirk revealed itself back in 1975 in this very incident.
Anti-index fund poster distributed by financial research firm Leuthold Group, who later claimed that the posters were in jest.
It’s such a sin to be average in America, that we are willing to ignore facts and figures in order to prove our beliefs.
How to use this signal.
As a brand, you can use this signal for your own benefit.
There are themes of exceptionalism, elitism, superiority, personal potential and self-discovery all wrapped up in this signal. These are strong personal motivators, whether we admit them or not.
That’s why stories like The Ugly Duckling keep recurring over and over again in the canon in modern day versions like John Snow in Game of Thrones and (of course) Harry Potter.
At the root of it, there’s an interesting mentality.
This is about changing your perception of yourself.
We can’t change the story that it’s a sin to be average, but we can change the average.
Changing the context can change user perceptions.
As a business, you can take what is normal about a user and reposition it as something extraordinary.
Brands like Moleskin, Apple and Bulletproof Coffee have all elevated something mundane about their users into something far more valuable.
That change in perceptions is the added value of their brands. When you use their products or buy into their philosophies, you are changing your perception of who you are.
Don’t underestimate the power of this mechanic. When perceptions shift, so does our purchasing.
I’ve written before that peoples’ values rarely change, but the beliefs that sit on top of those values are more fluid and change easily.
Sometimes our very definitions even change.
We carry a big cultural value to eat what is good for us. But the definition of eating good food has evolved from the 1950’s through to today. Some of that was powered by science and government guidance, but a lot of it has been powered by beliefs around ethics, how we gather as a community, and what foods actually provide for our bodies.
The modern health food ‘craze’ as we know it today first took hold in the 80s and 90s, when restaurants like Souplantation and El Pollo Loco were rapidly growing.
Both of them reflected the healthy eating definitions of the time: that fresh food was healthy food. Souplantation had the mile-long buffet filled with trays of colorful produce. El Pollo Loco made open kitchens core to all of their locations and showed your flame broiled chicken being prepared, without microwaves or pre-processed ingredients, right in front of you.
By 2014, El Pollo Loco had taken on considerable debt and losses (despite growth), and since going public in that same year, the stock price has steadily declined by 40%.
By the 2017, Souplantation had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The decline in casual dining and overall declines in the market hit both companies hard. They weren’t mismanaged, but they were relics of a bygone era. Not because we stopped eating healthy, but because our definition of healthy had shifted.
Meanwhile, new salad upstarts like Sweetgreen, Salata, Tender Greens and Chopt are booming because they were smart enough to tap into a new definition of eating healthy.
They saw that it wasn’t just about the food anymore, but about sustainable practices, transparency about where the food comes from and the artisanal craft of preparing and honoring that food.
Sweetgreen made a point of teaching consumers that, unlike places like El Pollo Loco and Souplantation, people should not expect to get the same standard of food in every restaurant location:
“We want people to understand that that’s normal and that’s okay,” [Sweetgreen’s co-founder Nathaniel Ru says. “Something should taste different in a different place.”
That’s a major shift away from traditional fast-food principles, which dictate that customers should be able to walk into any location and get the exact same food and experience. In this realm, each chain is constantly trying to prove it’s more connected to farmers than the other guy. (Fresh&Co even bought its own farm on Long Island, announcing it would provide “hyper-local seasonal” ingredients.)
These brands understood that our definition of eating good went from ‘food that looks fresh’ to ‘food that has a story’.
Tender Greens and Sweetgreen both turning food into a different kind of story.
How to use this signal.
Definitions are a different kind of signal. When definitions change, it’s a reevaluation of our beliefs, but also a recommitment to our values.
Definitions, above all, need to be spelled out.
If, as a brand, you see that your audience is starting to untether themselves from a belief that centers around a core value, that’s a tremendous opportunity to help people define that change.
When consumers start to feel a change in their beliefs, it’s the brands who define those changes that win.
You can help people change the definitions around them, when they’re ready, by giving them a concrete stepping stone for getting there.
We didn’t know that we wanted to play with our makeup until Glossier defined that new relationship for us, although young women were starting to feel it.
We didn’t consciously realize that our cars were turning from self-expressive statements to utilitarian objects, but SUVs got us there. That’s why sedans have started to fade away and SUVs, the fastest growing truck category, have increased in shares to 42%, from 30% in 2010.
If you watch carefully, you will see a changing definition in your own industry (if not a few).
You can help people articulate it and become an important part of your user’s evolution into a new set of beliefs.
There’s always a signal.
I’ve seen that even in the stalest of industries, where it may seem as if there’s no innovation and no change in what consumers are searching for, there is, in fact, a signal.
It may be weak, but it’s there. Nothing in the market is static, and nothing about your audience is set in stone.
If you search for that emerging change, you will find it. Building a strategic brand means digging for those signals and making them a part of your DNA.
You may not realize it but the world can be divided into two kinds of brands: those that ask the questions, and those that answer them.
Leaders are often compelled to create the kind of brands that answer. ‘This is how you should shop. This is the best way to dress. These are the products that will solve all of your problems.’…
But smart brands don’t fall into the answer trap. Instead, they exist to pose the big questions that matter.
Pantone vs. Crayola, Google and Facebook vs. everyone else, Unilever and P&G vs. a world of upstarts – all of these spaces have brands that were shortsighted enough to answer compared to those that were smart enough to ask.
Asking questions leads to a path forward, while answering questions leads to a dead end.
This is an abstract concept, but an extremely important one. I dive into all of these examples and show you exactly how an asking approach differs from one that answers.
Once you see the pattern around you, you’ll understand how to navigate your space in order to create a powerful brand position.
Read the full case study on “Strong Brands Ask, Weak Brands Answer” with examples, here.
We’re living in a time when every brand is rethinking who they are and what they stand for.
That’s because at some point during the Apple revolution, consumers stopped buying products. They stopped buying specs like more horsepower in their cars or greater color options for their shoes. They stopped buying features like cheaper price for electronics or faster delivery of their food.
And at some point, they even started migrating away from benefits like productivity by way of their note taking apps, or the confidence that comes with a whiter smile, or anything that stopped at being aspirational.
What people started buying instead was beliefs, and nearly every new disruptor out there is banking on that insight.
Belief is the new benefit. Users are buying not the product, but rather the larger belief that makes that product necessary.
And for all of you that think you sell more ‘practical’ products immune to this new branding frontier, like toothpaste or moving services or mortgages, I guarantee there is someone plotting to steal your market with a belief, right now.
Yes, even if you sell toothpaste, a brand like Twice is here to eat your lunch.
The Twice story has philanthropy and social good, safe ingredients and even Lenny Kravitz.
But what Twice is really about is turning toothpaste into something much greater. If grooming is now about self-care and wellness, then Twice is about a mood… or rather, elevating your mood to reach that pinnacle of wellness we strive for in every other part of our lives.
Twice embodies the belief that our most intimate rituals are sacred.
It’s a young, newly launched company that still has room to grow on the branding side, but they’re smart enough to know that they’re not here to sell you a product.
They’re here to sell you a new belief you didn’t know you held before.
After all, why shouldn’t we have different toothpastes for day and night, to serve two very different needs? Why shouldn’t we take care of our smiles and bodies and mental states the way we deserve?
Why shouldn’t brushing our teeth — something that marks both the beginning and end of the day, something that prepares us to both fight and to rest, something that signals self respect just as much as it does societal norms and taboos — be treated like a sacred ritual?
Twice goes deeper, like so many other brands I have written about over the years. When you go deeper, you reveal a much richer way to tell your story and capture your audience.
Going deeper transcends nagging consumer concerns like cost or convenience, and lets you play outside of the confines of product.
Your deeper brand is the one that sells a belief. The product is secondary. It’s the belief that people want to consume.
What is a belief?
Many CEOs and and brand executives mistake beliefs for causes.
Let me be clear that causes are not beliefs. They are also not defensible brand strategies. These kinds of causes can certainly serve you in the short term and help align the brand today, but they will not motivate beyond a core group of users in the long term:
Charity
Gender equality
Product safety, anything “natural” or “free of X”
Climate change
Fighting against the system/ any system
Resources for the underserved
Philanthropy
Sustainability, too, is an identity driver that helps us align with a company as a consumer, but it is not a belief that will build a brand.
If you look at a company like Allbirds, it can be tempting to say that their commitment to sustainability, their craftsmanship and promise of ultimate comfort… that all of these things are the immovable pillars of a strong brand.
But that’s not what Allbirds is really selling to the Bay Area VCs, New York lawyers, big city executives, west coast entrepreneurs and greater members of the gig economy that love them.
What Allbirds is selling is the belief and romance of Silicon Valley. They are selling all of the grit, determination, exceptionalism, autonomy and glory that the Silicon Valley myth holds within it.
This is a belief about upgrading yourself to a higher professional level, and Allbirds is the gear that will get you there.
You can see signals of this belief in their genesis. Allbirds, much like a tech-driven design experiment, were designed by the founders to be “the simplest sneaker we could imagine.”
After launching on Kickstarter, they were funded by a stable of name brand investors, their flagship NYC store is nestled among other D2C startup darlings like Casper and Everlane, and journalists and writers continue to say things like “Allbirds might be the closest the world of everyday fashion has come to embracing this ideal of optimized efficiency” or Allbirds are like “an algorithm on my feet.”
Take a look at their interviews and the press they have in business outlets like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, BusinessInsider and TIME. These are all signals sending the same message.
This is not a shoe or a comfort statement. It’s equipment for personal optimization.
If you look at the signals surrounding the brand, you come to understand that wearing Allbirds is like placing yourself within that greater Silicon Valley story.
Pay attention to how they don’t hide the fact that Silicon Valley’s elite is where this whole brand started. Notice how these shoes are part of the VC uniform that also includes Patagonia vests, button down shirts and S’Well bottles — an anecdote that is played up in nearly every mention of the brand.
Whether the brand was consciously seeded in the Silicon Valley scene, or was merely co-opted by its inhabitants, is unclear. But that’s not the only place where we can gather the brand belief that has emerged.
Look at the very people that make up their core audience. These are people who may not have careers in tech or have founded a startup, but work in adjacent industries where such a move might be a very alluring dream. Those same lawyers, creatives, executives, entrepreneurs and gig economy members resonate very strongly with the Silicon Valley belief of autonomy and personal success. Merino wool and the “the world’s most comfortable” design are merely the features to back it up.
A belief, unlike a cause, is a guidebook for understanding the world.
When you buy a belief, you are buying the whole universe of values, codes of conduct and rules that go along with it. That’s more than any benefit could ever do.
Beliefs are more powerful than benefits because they lock in a behavior. A brand led by belief informs your user’s mental model, not just their preferences.
Allbirds aren’t just comfortable shoes. They are a belief about who you are becoming, and inform your ideas about personal potential, drive and perhaps even destiny.
That may sound crazy, but it’s there in the brand. There are other options for eco and ethical footwear that also deliver comfort, but none of them deliver the magic that people really want to buy.
Like I said at the top of this discussion, every brand is rethinking who they are and what they stand for. They are rethinking their centers of meaning.
Left to right: Market on the Green, a grocery store run by ProMedica (WSJ), Local beers on tap at “The Parlor” at Whole Foods (Vox), Spacious turns restaurants like the Milling Room into co-working spaces during the day (NYT).
These companies have started to ask themselves who they are in a user’s life, what role they play and what they are actually offering.
When they did that, they realized they were not selling goods and services. They were selling much larger beliefs that touched on peoples’ lives in many more areas than previously thought.
When a healthcare company like ProMedica opens up a grocery store so that their doctors can prescribe both medicine and food to the patient, it’s because they understand their role as a guardian of health, not merely a hospital.
The same mechanics are at play when Whole Foods creates gathering spaces around in-store bars, or Spacious turns restaurants into co-working spaces during off peak hours. They looked at where they created meaning in a user’s life, not what they created as a product, and that is where they built their brands.
But what is most important here is the brave steps they took in having the brand strategy and belief direct the business strategy. They boldly started with the belief and meaning first, and then looked at the business. Most companies do it the other way around.
Yes, when you take an honest look at the centers of meaning that you are creating for your users and the beliefs that surround them, you will find that your business model may change.
You can decide to take the leap or play in your current comfort zone, but be assured that no one is safe from this tectonic shift. Not even major brands like Mastercard.
Apple, Nike, Target — these are all major brands with logos that omit the name. Starbucks dropped the word “coffee” from their logo a long time ago, and now that Mastercard (perhaps a less fervently admired consumer brand) has followed suit, it’s worth understanding why.
For Mastercard, the word “card” referred to a bygone relic of finance that no longer mattered. It tethered them to an archaic past.
The future of money is digital and Mastercard had to not only reassess the role it played in people’s metaphorical wallets, but how they could create meaning around money in general.
That meaning no longer revolved around a piece of plastic.
Dunkin’ has deleted the Donuts from its name because the product is incredibly limiting (especially in foreign markets where they have struggled) and because the product is no longer the brand.
Weight Watchers, which is now simply WW, has realized that they live in the sphere of wellness, not specifically weight management. That has caused them to revamp everything from the sourcing of their ingredients to the packaging of the program itself.
What we’re really left with in all of these cases is logos without names. Core images and icons.
It makes perfect sense: images and icons are the most primal ways to convey a belief.
You can see Jesus written in the sand, but you will feel the image of that cross on a hill. You can read a danger warning on a dumpster, but nothing strikes fear in your heart like a the spiky swirls of a biohazard symbol.
Excellent video on how to design fear into a perfect warning symbol.
Logos, name changes, new business verticals, subtext… they all point toward the larger movement that’s happening in branding right now. We’re in the next phase of how consumers and companies come to interact with one another.
When you truly hit on a resonant belief for your audience, the product and everything else around it falls away. That’s not to say that the product and every other part of the user experience don’t matter.
It’s to say that they are there to support the belief that holds them.
Understand your place in the user’s life.
This is the time to rethink what you’re actually selling. Your product and its features and benefits may have been the start, but they shouldn’t be the end of your brand journey.
For many founders, the belief is already there. They just have to stretch themselves to unearth it. Chances are you started your business because you had an important belief about the world or the future, but didn’t consciously realize it.
For others, they may have started with a product gap in the marketplace, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a belief to be found. Consumer rush in to fill those gaps when they are given the opportunity because they have tapped into a larger, silent belief that hasn’t been articulated yet. Look at your user to see what it is.
Branding never stops.
Honor your work as a company by giving it the context most likely to matter to the user. Give people the meaning that will make them understand why you exist in the first place.
There are two deceptively simple questions that will reveal a world of strategic opportunity for your brand.
They actually reveal a tremendous amount of information about the mindset of a company’s leadership team while posing a much more difficult challenge than most people realize.
Taken together, I like to call them the Perception Queries, and everyone can benefit from answering them.
You can use these queries to get laser focus on the direction of your brand strategy from the point you’re at today to where you need to be in 1, 3 and 5 years from now. I will show you the right and wrong way to answer the queries, how to best leverage these answers in your work, and how to unlock their deeper power.
Most importantly, they will prove valuable at every juncture in your company’s trajectory, especially when easy short term growth opportunities gently nudge you away from your ultimate long term vision.
Read the full case study on the Perception Queries, with examples, here.
Distinct brand challenges are emerging across every market, and they reveal untapped opportunities for the players that are willing to solve them.
People aren’t buying products anymore. They’re buying brands. That should make you think long and hard about what you’re actually selling.
Even the most mundane of companies — from those that sell toothpaste to those who hawk discount furniture assembly — realize that we are no longer selling goods, features or mere solutions for jobs to be done. We’re selling a story that sparks change in the consumer today, by showing them our brand vision for what the future can be tomorrow.
Some industries have moved forward faster on this than others. Hygiene, beauty, consumer technology and travel have seen huge steps forward in brand ideology. Finance, education and housing, not so much.
On top of these staggered gains hovers a cloud of rapidly changing user behaviors and perceptions.
In beauty, savvy consumers have dramatically shifted from single-brand loyalty to mixing and matching premium names with indie brands. A big part of the beauty experience is now about concocting your own Google-driven regimens.
In finance, peoples’ spending behavior has changed, but new values that pit immediate gratification against future uncertainty have created a tension we haven’t seen before. Brands in this space have done little, if anything, to ease that tension and create a new story around money (which is really a story around success and self worth — two deeply emotional themes).
Even if your brand-leading CPG company has gripped the attention of a lucrative audience, there’s a very good chance you may have educated your consumer past your product.
Specialty diet brands in niches like keto and paleo focus on content in order to build a cult following, but then that content creates a demanding consumer whose tastes quickly evolve out of the brands that sparked them in the first place.
Bulletproof may have opened your eyes to a new narrative around health, but soon enough MCT oils lead to adaptogens and nootropics, and a whole world of possibility that lives outside of the Bulletproof product mix.
Both rudimentary brands and evolved brands face the same problem — the world will not look the same in the near future.
It doesn’t matter how evolved a space is or isn’t. Every category is facing major brand challenges, and these challenges are market-making opportunities for the companies that are willing to solve them.
Below is a high-level rundown of what our agency is seeing in just a few category hotspots. There is a treasure trove of untapped opportunity here.
You may not see your industry on this list, but keep an open mind. Some of the greatest brand innovations have been inspired by outside industries.
You may not be in finance, but perhaps you’re in a space that hits on some of the same emotional triggers. You might not be selling a wellness product, but maybe a wellness story is exactly what can make people more open to trying your product in the first place.
This is not a comprehensive list by any means, but it does cover some of the biggest brand challenges (slash opportunities) we see emerging in the next 2–5 years.
If you move your brand in a direction that solves these challenges, you’ll be poised for major payoff.
Use this as your treasure map.
Cannabis
[Also important for brands that face cultural bias, speak to users that are seeking ‘permission’ to consume/ engage, or are pushing up into new premium levels.]
Brands in the cannabis space, even the great ones like MedMen, are killing it with narratives related to relaxation, stress management and premium fun. But these are the industry’s 1.0 version of benefits.
As cannabis quickly grows up, we won’t be rewarding brands that sell us on benefits. We’ll reward the brand(s) that create a lifestyle.
There is no lifestyle in the cannabis industry right now, save for old cliched relics like the beach bum stoner or high school dropout.
A lifestyle is about values and belief systems, and that matters for the industry because creating a values-driven lifestyle around a product is the fastest way to circumvent cultural biases and fears (of which cannabis will have to contend with as it spreads from early adopters to the masses).
Our parents and neighbors will soon have access to CBD infused drinks, marijuana-laden dishes at restaurants and THC bath bombs, but without a lifestyle narrative, they will not know how to integrate these products into their lives with meaning.
Any brand can convince people to try a CBD drink or pot cookie once. But a very, very tiny fraction will figure out how to make the discerning consumption of these products a lifestyle marker.
The goal isn’t to get your mom to smoke a joint and relax. It’s to make her become a cannabis tastemaker.
(You can read more about the DNA of a lifestyle brand here.)
Healthcare
[Pay attention to this space if your brand is related to wellness or self-care, relies on scientific claims, or stands in the crosshairs between institutions and disruptors.]
Healthcare’s brand is caught between the truth and a lie.
Consumers are exhibiting a growing distrust of old institutions, “disease awareness campaigns” are turning benign conditions like excessive sweating into profitable medical maladies, peer reviewed journals are coming under fire for dubious content, and people like Gwyneth Paltrow and the Medical Medium, for all of their dissenters and critics, are still among the very few voices speaking to fatigued patients with empathy and compassion.
In all of these interactions, our health is constantly being pushed top of mind.
The Medical Medium’s unique style of empathetic nutrition is resonating with millions of people who are willing to turn a blind eye to science in search of something more human. There is a network of trust here that you’d be hard pressed to find in other health communities.
Its spilling into many other parts of our lives as well. No longer is it just under the purview of doctors, hospitals and researchers, but also our personal trainers, our phone apps, our grocery stores, and our Walmarts. It laces the fabric of countless consumer stories.
But all of that information is creating a unique problem.
When people see huge medical advancements on the horizon promising to treat cancer, yet somehow can’t figure out how to turn the results of their gut health testing kit into actionable, measurable lifestyle improvements, the system suffers a significant loss in trust.
All of that frustration and friction is eroding greater brand value.
‘If we’re so close to a cure for cancer, why can’t I make sense of my gut bacteria?’ What many don’t understand is that the perceived failure of that gut health kit is amplified 10-fold by the cure-for-cancer story that’s in the back of a user’s mind.
The fact is that health brands don’t just have to answer to the stories and expectations of their own niche, but those of the larger space as well.
In this case, the expectation isn’t about gut health, it’s about the modern miracles of science. That is the expectation that needs to be addressed and managed.
Even if you’re selling a simple product in this space, remember that it is not only your brand narrative that people are layering over their product experience, but any larger notions they have about healthcare as well.
Startups and old guards need to be far more diligent in mapping expectations and beliefs to actual experience, and to frame those experiences in an empathetic conversation that balances the promise of reaching the pinnacle of medicine with the opacity of how we will actually get there.
Wellness & Self-Care
[Also any brand that relies heavily on consumer education, or is going from niche to mainstream.]
There are a million different messages in wellness and self-care, but the strongest brands have done an excellent job of educating their early cohorts. Most narratives fall in two different camps — those that are empowering and mobilizing, or those that are disempowering and creating fear — and both have engendered sophisticated buyers as a result.
There are brands that heal from toxins, scary environmental threats, encourage restoration and retreating to a safe space. These brands are about getting from -1 to 0.
Then there are those that urge users to reach new levels of ability and productivity, to fight against the accepted norm and unlock hidden human potential. These brands are about getting from 0 to +1.
In wellness you are either healing or fighting. And on either side, information drives behavior.
That creates a problem for the masses of new consumers coming into the fold. There is a growing disconnect between early consumers who have been well educated and the wider masses that have a lot of catching up to do.
Because early adopters in this space are so regionally and demographically concentrated, every rising star wellness brand will have to start reaching downwards into the mainstream whether they like it or not. That means connecting a very sophisticated message with a more entry-level one.
The challenge will be figuring out how to connect these two very different groups and the spectrum of users that lies between them.
Perhaps in no other space will it be this critical to thread together different messages with one strong and resonant belief because in wellness, a consumer’s level of education defines the depth of their consumption.
Finance
[Look here if your brand is facing divergent value systems among consumers and institutions, or if old sources of meaning are starting to evaporate.]
Everything about money is emotional.
The vast majority of finance companies, both incumbents and startups, still think it’s about value and wealth. It’s not.
Money is about how we value and respect ourselves as individuals, what we believe we can accomplish, and most importantly, what we believe we deserve.
Someone who treats money like a scarcity is in a very different mental paradigm than someone who treats money like a game.
Today, most of finance is predominantly about a future reward. Savings, 401ks, estate planning, life insurance, portfolio trading… these are all about delayed gratification and value. Delayed gratification and value were also hallmarks of the Baby Boomer generation.
Gen X and millennial value systems, however, have become very present.
Lives, careers, families and identities have become very fluid, and perhaps even more personal and emotional as uncertainty has taken hold around us. We’re starting to see a huge divergence between the fluidity of our emotional value systems and the fixed rigidity of our utilitarian money stories.
The immediate challenge for companies in this space is to bring these financial instruments and services into the present value system of our daily lives. If I don’t know who I’m going to be in 5 years, how can I plan for the next 30?
What does retirement even mean anymore? What is the goal? And if we’re not clear on the goal, how can we write the story around it?
There is a long distance to cover between what money has historically meant, and the meaning it now holds in people’s hearts and minds.
Once you cover that distance, you have to strip it out of the ambiguous future and bring it into the tangible reality of today.
Housing
[Any brand in an old space with a story that refuses to die.]
The American Dream is a very deeply entrenched cultural narrative that connects homeownership with identity.
Even if we understand that the dream has become less and less attainable and perhaps needs to be replaced as a cultural narrative altogether, we still find ourselves lamenting its death. There remains a strong attachment to the idea that our homes mean something important about us as people.
But as with any major economic shift, there is a slew of young companies rushing in to create a new norm.
Startups ranging from those that rethink financing and sales, to those that redefine the mechanics of rentals and co-ownership stand a good chance of replacing the usual American Dream story with something more attuned to reality.
a16z partner partner Alex Rampell explains how as consumers get used to less friction and more transparency in the age of mobile, software is finally beginning to disrupt buying a home.
Companies like Divvy, which turn your monthly rent into a down payment on the home you’re living in over time, are accompanied by others like Point (which let’s you sell part of your house), Homeshare, HubHaus, Bungalow (all of which are creating some form of ‘WeWork for housing’), Flyhomes and Opendoor (focused on non-traditional solutions for buying and selling) and many others.
When companies like these create new formats for housing, they also change the way we live in and inhabit our homes.
Our relationship to the home is beginning to significantly change, in no small part because of companies like these. But any time there’s a big shift such this one, we need a strong, new story to effectively frame our experience as consumers. A story that tells us where we are in life, and the meaning that our home is to give us. A story that essentially tells us how to relate to this new living format.
And in this case, the American Dream story simply will not fit.
For brands in this space, there is a huge opportunity to create both a new narrative and a new vocabulary around who a person is through their relationship with the spaces they live in.
As traditional homeownership morphs into something else, consumers will be primed for a new perspective that validates both their homes and their station in life. They will be ready to feel the same pride and sense of accomplishment, but in a different kind of relationship with their living spaces.
We will need brands that can give us that perspective.
This isn’t about a space to live in. This is about what it means to live in these new spaces.
Travel
[If you’re a brand with an audience that’s evolving very rapidly, or in a category that has recently been fragmented.]
Travel and recreation culture, as it started in the US in the 1950s after soldiers returned home from war, was primarily focused on external values. With newfound time and money, and a newly expanded palate they had cultured overseas, men and their families wholeheartedly bought into this new consumerist category.
But from the beginning, travel and recreation was about an external set of values. It was about leisure time, entertainment, casual fun and of course, middle-class social status.
Today we’ve shifted to a much more internal set of values.
‘Travel and recreation’ has been replaced by ‘travel and experience’. We travel for self-discovery, wellness, personal identity and to find our place in the world. Travel is meant to reveal some deep truth within ourselves.
This is far more of an essential need than a nice-to-have, and with this new function of travel comes a new purpose. Travel is not about holidays, but about daily life.
People have evolved to value travel as a continuous necessity, but brands still treat it like a luxury.
Some people may find ways to actually travel more often, and some will not, but that almost doesn’t matter.
There’s an opportunity to build a brand world that matches this newly emerging consumer belief. Even Airbnb, one of my favorite brands which I’ve written about many times, doesn’t yet go this extra step.
What would the world look like if we talked about travel as a given requirement to everyday life? What if we gently shifted the conversation from travel as a major life event or rite of passage to travel as part of the American experience?
People are already having this conversation with themselves in their heads. They’re ready for a brand story that legitimizes that conversation in the world.
(I talk more about users, their internal dialogues, and how these dialogues shape their identities here.)
Use these challenges as conversation starters in your own company.
I promise that on the other side of each of these problems lies a huge opportunity to not only lead change in your space, but to redefine your goals and future direction as a brand.
Future challenges, in many ways, are just levers for creating a powerful brand.
Defensible products do not make defensible brands, although it can be easy to confuse the two.
What makes a brand defensible?
The world talks a lot about product defensibility, but brand defensibility seems to be a far more abstract subject. How do you build a brand that not only triggers users to act, but also puts competitors in a natural position of weakness?
Defensibility itself is an inherent trait or quality that puts your company in a role that’s hard to challenge. It is an advantage in your DNA that places you in a white spot of the landscape, and often gets stronger with time.
Defensibility is the ultimate goal of brand strategy.
Anyone can make a brand. Very few can make a brand that naturally undermines the value of others in the space just by existing.
But if I ask CEOs, leaders and other strategists what brand defensibility actually is, they’ll usually confuse it with product defensibility.
When it comes to product, defensibility looks like:
Data Moats
Ecosystems
Network Effects
Intellectual Property (sometimes)
These are locking mechanisms. They lock people into an escalating commitment over time.
When people make the decision to switch from Apple’s iPhone ecosystem to Google’s Android ecosystem, they are running an equation in their heads: what is the cost/ pain of leaving a walled garden vs. the benefit/ reward of an open platform?
A similar locking mechanism is at play when someone considers using an alternative to Google Maps (data moats) or investing their personal lives in Instagram vs. Snapchat (network effects). The more you have invested, the harder it is to jump ship.
Product defensibility is really easy to spot, and for many, it can be easy to confuse it with brand defensibility. You may think Google’s trustworthy brand is borne of their data and ecosystems, but it’s not.
Brand defensibility looks very different than product defensibility:
Protected Narratives: Stories and storytelling devices that are fundamentally unavailable to your competitors. (I talk more about this here.)
Identity Validation: Validating a user, subculture or group that’s primed to be acknowledged. (Strategist Ana Andjelic does a great job of describing it here).
New Truth/ Worldview: A vision of the future that no one else can afford to tell. (I go deep into this topic here.)
Brand Perception: The trust, perceived sense of autonomy, and sense of “what this brand says about me”. (I explore a specific case study here.)
These are belief models. They are a highly personal logic that explains how something works in the real world, and they operate very differently than locking mechanisms.
Snapchat may have had strong network effects early on that caused people to join its platform, but it was Instagram’s belief model of Identity Validation and New Truth that said “A beautiful life on display is the only life worth living” which ultimately won out and made many of those same Snapchatters move their life investments over to Instagram.
When Instagram copied Snapchat’s ephemeral content with Stories, they erased any product advantage. But what caused the migration was their brand.
In other words, Instagram’s brand defensibility around identity and belief won over Snapchat’s product defensibility of network effects.
That dynamic underscores a critical point in product vs. brand:
Locking mechanisms force a decision based on short-term need.
Belief models create a behavior based on long-term desires.
I can tell you right now that behaviors based on long-term desires ultimately beat out decisions based on short-term needs, and we’re seeing that happen more and more in business every day.
Belief models move markets and make markets.
Food and beverage, travel, luxury, wellness, beauty — these are all markets based on belief models.
There’s very little IP or inherent product defensibility in these verticals. They rely on belief models in order to move product. You might even say that those belief models are the actual product themselves.
A belief model can easily move a market. But more importantly, it can launch entirely new markets and spaces that never existed before.
Many of you reading this will likely already have adopted a new belief model around functional ingredients.
This is a new slew of ingredients like CBD, adaptogens, nootropics, CoQ10, Vitamin C, turmeric, moringa oil, collagen and so on that are promising to change our lives. They’re finding their way into everything from makeup and ingestible beauty to infused drinks and functional foods.
They tell the intoxicating story of “inside out” potential — the belief model that anything can be cured or optimized with the right functional ingredient. Find the right ingredient, and you can unlock something amazing within yourself.
This belief model, although very new, has already had huge impact in consumer markets.
If you pay close attention, you’ll see that it not only moved many markets like food, beverage, beauty and luxury, but also created new ones in personal development, productivity and medicine.
… and it all came from a market progression that already existed. In beauty alone, the story is clear:
The “all natural” movement of the 1980s and 1990s: Natural, clean, unscented — ingredients were about purity, and we centered our values around that belief. Brands like Jergen’s All Natural came on the scene, Dove introduced their unscented bar, Burt’s Bees graduated from its cult following.
The “actives” obsession of the 2000s: People begin to believe in immediate results and visible change. Botox, limp plumpers, tooth whitening kits, eyelash serums and new plastic surgery procedures all become popularized.
The “functional” frontier of today: Charcoal, ginseng, adaptogens, CBD, hemp and special supplements all reflect the belief that we can unlock something within ourselves with the right functional ingredients. Brands like Moon Juice, Vital Proteins, Ambika Herbals, Dirty Lemon and Kalumi Beauty are a tiny fraction of the companies that have rushed in to fill the new demand based on this belief model.
Don’t forget the emerging authority of functional medicine, gut health and alternative medicine, too.
More and more, we are driven by our belief models over our logical short-term needs.
The way we choose to understand the world is driving our purchase decisions. The evidence is right here in front of us.
Defensible brands can survive without defensible products, but not vice versa.
You can’t win the war with only a defensible product.
The moment someone comes in and layers a compelling, defensible brand on top of a similar product, you’ll lose.
The opposite — a defensible brand without a defensible product — can actually win.
A perfect place to see this happening is in fashion.
Defensible product is almost unheard of in fashion. Spend some time on Diet Prada’s feed and you’ll see why. Not only do all brands constantly steal ideas from each other, but everyone is pretty much helpless in safeguarding their designs, looks or processes from a competing label.
There is no IP in fashion. There are no data moats, ecosystems or network effects.
And when you take away all of those product protections, all that is left is brand. That brand is a story. It’s a story that heavily employs Identity Validation and Brand Perceptions.
If you try to dissect a company like Prada, Michael Kors or Burberry, you’ll see that under that story there is not much else. The clothes themselves are interchangeable and meaningless. The actual product is irrelevant.
It is our beliefs about that clothing brand, and what that brand says about us when we wear it, that drives our purchases.
We do not buy to clothe ourselves for comfort against the elements. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves by way of the brands we wear.
Never has this been proven so true than when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had used fashion tastes to identify right-wing voters at Business of Fashion’s 2018 conference.
‘”Preferences in clothing and music are the leading indicators of political leaning,” said Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower.
Clothing serves as such a strong belief model that we can, with great accuracy, determine a population’s political leanings based on it:
The narratives of the great American brands, which play on the myths of the West and the (mostly male) frontier are also the narratives of the Republican right. Those who choose to spend on the former are susceptible to the latter. He mentioned Wrangler and L.L. Bean in particular as brands that Cambridge Analytica aligned with conservative traits.
(Kenzo, by contrast, which is designed by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, the avant-garde duo behind the retail store Opening Ceremony, appealed to liberals, he suggested.)
This is a tremendous example of how defensible products (and the locking mechanisms behind them) operate very differently than defensible brands (and the belief models they employ.)
Locking mechanisms are logical levers that can be reduced to pros and cons, but belief models are far more flexible representations of the relationship between things.
Belief models are a combination of our knowledge, experiences and intuition, and they can easily cause us to replace black-and-white reasoning with more colorful ideology — such as with fashion.
The fact is you can’t fight ideology with logic.
Once we believe the world works a certain way, we bend logic into that framework.
The more an audience is bombarded with choice, fragmentation and competing truths like we are today, the more valuable these ideologies become. They’re crucial frameworks for our behaviors.
We’re living in an age when those ideologies have become everything.
Belief models for the future.
Nothing is defensible eternally — product, brand or otherwise. But focusing on brand defensibility in the first 2–5 years of your venture can set your company up for a decade of dominance.
I believe that no matter your industry, whether you are B2B or B2C, the brand is what you are selling. In which case, you need to do everything possible to make sure that brand is defensible.
Brands, just like products, have to evolve over time with their customers. Belief models, no matter how strong they are today, will be supplanted by new ones in coming years and generations.
Pay attention to the ideologies that are growing within your audiences. They will always lead you into the future of where your brand needs to be.
We all carry symbols within us. Symbols like parenthood, gender, blue collars, a country’s flag, a cross on a hill or a grad school pin.
These are symbols that, regardless of place or context, will make us feel something when we encounter them.
In some cases those symbols alter our mental state. There is a measurable change between the person we were before we encountered the symbol, and the person we became after it.
When symbols change us emotionally, they become powerful thresholds.
One of the symbolic thresholds that has always had a profound effect on me is the Japanese torii.
A torii is a freestanding gate that symbolizes transition — from human to sacred, from the known world to the secret world. It is a border between the visible and invisible, and for all of its simplicity and detachment, it carries a gravity that I haven’t experienced in any other symbolic threshold in my work.
When I first learned about torii in an art history course over a decade ago, it wasn’t the structure itself that struck me but rather the power it carried outside of place or time.
While torii are typically placed at the entrance of Shinto shrines, they also appear in completely secluded locales. You may see one in an empty field, a forest, or outside of Japan altogether, but no matter where it is, it’s meant to mark a path for transition.
That is the significance that was imputed on this structure. It is created over and over again to exist outside of any specific time or place, and there are very few other symbols that operate in the same way.
It is not the space that makes the torii meaningful, it is the torii that makes the space meaningful.
Thresholds change the context around them.
I’ve seen them in Japan, in French museums, and standing tall in barren cattle ranches in southern California… and in all of these places, the torii created an emotional threshold that framed my experience of the world around me.
There is a lesson here in how thresholds mold the human experience and how they are different from every other kind of touch point we experience in our lives as users.
For brands, a threshold is an opportunity to create meaning where there once was none.
What It Means To Create A Brand Threshold
A $2.6 billion industry has popped up around subscription products, and 55% of that growth is attributed to a newly popularized brand threshold we’re all familiar with by now: unboxing.
There are now 3,500 subscription box offerings in the US market, all with markedly different business models.
Some, like Birchbox, use the subscription box as an upsell to full sized products on their website.
Ipsy takes a different route and uses beauty and lifestyle influencers to create content that generates ad revenue on top of the actual product.
FabFitFun makes a healthy margin off of sponsored products, and Sephora blends the sponsored model with straightforward sales.
Ipsy Glambag Plus unboxing by Madison Miller
It is not the convenience, the price point or the novelty that has propelled these brands to success. In fact, many boxes have wildly different price points irrespective of value-for-price, many do not allow customization, and at this point, what novelty can be left?
It is the emotional threshold of unboxing that has moved the subscription box industry into the mainstream.
As Elizabeth Segran of Fast Company puts it, “It hinges on a business model that goes beyond making money on the box itself, and investing in content that makes the unboxing experience exciting every single time.” [Emphasis added.]
Unboxing is an emotional threshold that has been iterated, perfected and monetized for maximum effect. A good unboxing creates a clear transition from before the event to after. People feel changed after an unboxing.
Every time your brand compels a user to increase their engagement in order to receive an emotional reward, you are creating a threshold.
Emotional brand thresholds promise a changed user on the other side.
Your user has to make a choice to move through that threshold and experience the change. It is in these critical mass moments that people move deeper into the brand, and they operate on 3 principles:
Investment. Thresholds always come with an upfront cost of time, money or effort on behalf of the user and the brand. For an Ipsy box, all of these investments come into play.
Change. There needs to be a before-and-after change in emotional state. Unboxing isn’t about the products you get, it’s about the anticipation of the reveal, the payoff and the euphoria afterward. In this case, it is also about the promise of who you will become with this new arsenal of goods.
Message. A strong threshold is a very powerful branding moment. It communicates the brand position in action, not words. There needs to be a message that comes through, and in Ipsy’s case, it’s a message about playing with beauty.
These rules can help you turn certain touch points into positive thresholds. They also mean that not all customer touch points are thresholds to begin with.
Sponsored gift bags at an event, for example, are not thresholds. There is no directly related upfront cost for the user, and no unified message.
Customer service, thank you emails, subscription pages, POS gimmicks, videos and content usually aren’t thresholds either. They may employ one of the principles above, but not all three.
Touch points are simply a time and place when your brand touches the consumer, wherever they are.
Thresholds are an occasion where you and the user both agree to meet someplace new, and to leave in an altered state.
Different Portals For Different Needs
The Ordinary skincare brand, for all of its drama and troubles, has been extremely clever in creating thresholds that move users deeper and deeper into their brand world. Fans have to travel through a series of costly portals in order to get the emotional reward they are seeking.
One of these thresholds is their extremely active and engaged Facebook group managed by users. It’s a private group that you actually have to apply to get into by answering some questions about yourself.
Once you’re in, you’re thrust into a world of acronyms, coded language, intimately revealing skin photographs, excel spreadsheets for experimenting with different regimens, documents and fervent followers that will push you even further out of your comfort zone and demand an increased investment in time and effort. This is a new space that both you and the brand are agreeing to meet in.
If you want to learn about skincare like a dermatologist, you have to educate yourself in The Ordinary’s world. And if you don’t, you’re not welcome here.
It’s a steep price to pay, but believe me, once you successfully pass that threshold you are a changed person with a changed relationship to their skin.
For the frustrated legions of women who have tried everything to get their skin better, it is an emotional reward they are willing to pay upfront for.
And it is that stretch between the investment and the reward/ change that leaves users wide open to the brand’s message — ‘The beauty industry is ugly. We’ve found a new way.’
Thresholds force us to suspend our biases and be open to a new message. They’re moments of change that allow us to accept fresh ideas in place of old ones.
One of the best times to have your brand message heard is when your user is going through a transition.
Everything about The Ordinary’s threshold creates a sacred space with promise and evolution… and that’s the best time to form new beliefs. That is precisely when the message comes through.
A threshold happens when both the brand and user are drawn closer together because both have opted to take a voluntary step toward each other. The user invests their time/ money/ attention, while the brand invests in a sort of wall, where not everyone is let through, but those who are get that emotional change.
You can look at it as a test, a boundary, a wall or a step. It can take many forms. What is consistent across all of them, however, is that not everyone will pass. Those who do will be changed on the other side.
Places Where Thresholds Can Appear
If you’re hard pressed to find examples of thresholds in your own brand or others’, you’re right. Brands are starting to understand the significance of these moments and it’s a tactical device that has been historically underutilized.
Many things come close to being a threshold, but don’t quite get there. Traditions like the Jeep Wave in the US or John Lewis’ holiday ads and the Coca Cola Truck in the UK, tribal gatherings like SoulCycle and Tracy Anderson cults, or any other number of unofficial events we care about as consumers.
But with the right thinking and perspective, there are a few key touch points that could be turned into thresholds:
Store Entrances: Literally the physical threshold that users pass through every day. The best, most experiential storefronts get the message right, and can affect at least somewhat of an emotional change, but almost none can balance it with some sort of upfront investment for the user. Popups are perhaps the only thing that come close.
Product Drops: Yes there is an investment, but the message and emotional change usually fall short. At best, you have brands like Supreme that create a flex-focused brotherhood, but it’s more akin to a game than an exchange.
Events and Pilgrimages: Everyone understands how to create an immersive, on-brand experience. And of course there is the cost of traveling and attending, but what is really missing is the emotional change. Many brands create an experience for the sake of experience — delight, fun, indulgence — but can they really say that their users leave as changed people?
Announcements and Product Discovery: Again, do brands balance all three principles when it comes to announcing a product or creating a sense of discovery around their new offerings? There is no upfront investment before the actual cost of the product itself. The message may be there, but there likely won’t be a before-and-after emotional state for the user.
Thresholds are not easy to create.
They require a totally different lens through which to see your users interactions with your brand. But when they do appear, they are powerful engagement machines.
Questions To Ask Yourself
With the right thinking, mundane touch points can be turned into thresholds that follow the three main principles that all thresholds follow.
Start by asking yourself the kinds of questions that will lead you to that critical user interaction:
What emotional change or arc are we capable of creating in our users? What emotional arc is best aligned with our brand?
How can we create an upfront cost in those touch points that will a) only draw committed users, and b) amplify the value of the reward?
What theme or message needs to be integral to the experience in order to communicate our brand identity?
Where are our users looking for more meaning in the brand experience?
What are the emotional ups and downs they go through in the overall UX, and how can we turn those points into thresholds?
Remember, the point is to gently push users deeper into your world with every gate that they have to pass through. If those gates are solid, they will begin to take on a life of their own and hold a meaning that is as big as your brand.
Crossing a threshold is about taking a risk and accepting the change that lies on the other side. Just like any relationship, the one that your user makes with your brand is strengthened by these moments.
Use them wisely. Sometimes creating a boundary around your world helps ensure that your true users can find a meaningful way in.
War stories have always had a special place in American culture – the War on Cancer, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, the Battle of the Sexes, Fight Against Climate Change… the list goes on and on.
How has all of this war rhetoric, much of it false, shaped our thinking? Where did these stories even come from, and most importantly, where will they take us?
Jasmine Bina, CEO of Concept Bureau, shares her thoughts on how these stories have taken root in American culture and why they will likely never go away.
