Author: Jasmine Bina

Categories
Strategy

The Defensibility Fallacy: Product vs. Brand

[Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN]

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.

One of countless copycat callouts on Diet Prada’s feed.

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.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/style/cambridge-analytica-fashion-data.html

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.

Categories
User Experience

How Brand Thresholds Push Users Forward

[Photo by Marco Bianchetti.]

Make people go deeper into your world.

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.

The Great Torii of Itsukushima Shrine

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. What emotional change or arc are we capable of creating in our users? What emotional arc is best aligned with our brand?
  2. 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?
  3. What theme or message needs to be integral to the experience in order to communicate our brand identity?
  4. Where are our users looking for more meaning in the brand experience?
  5. 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.

Categories
Brand Strategy Video

One Interesting Thing

insights in culture

One Interesting Thing

War Stories

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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.

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Jasmine Bina​

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Categories
Brand Strategy

How To Think Like A Brand Strategist

[Photo by Jon Moore.]

Nothing sacred. Nothing immovable. Always in the future.

I was speaking with a friend in Paris last year who comes from the luxury industry. We were talking about the future of the high end automotive space, and how the consumer mindset was starting to change with new technologies.

“What is the single most branded element of a company like Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini or Maserati?” he asked me.

Admittedly I did not know.

“It’s the roar of the engine! It’s that sound. It’s all of the feelings and emotions that come with that auditory trigger. That roar is everything.”

He was right. These brands have spent over a century celebrating and venerating that very sound. Countless articles, discussion threads, car shows and marketing campaigns have worshipped the sound that makes these cars what they are.

Lamborghini recently worked with artist Kaj Niegmann to have the sound wave turned into a sculpture for prospective buyers. Porsche employs acoustics experts at their Weissach Development Center to “compose the right melodies for new models… create[ing] individual sound concepts for every generation of engines.”

BMW uses what they call Active Sound Design to “deliver recorded engine noises through the car’s stereo speakers, synced up with engine speed and other variables.” It’s a controversial feature that makes the engines of many of their models sound bigger than they actually are, including the M5 and 3, 4, and 5 Series cars.

And there was the 2008 Hiscox study that claimed women had a measurable biological response “indicative of a stirred libido” when hearing a Maserati engine — similar to the same testosterone response men have when hearing a Lamborghini.

The Lamborghini sound wave sculpture: an artistic rendering of the iconic engine sound.

The point of all of this reverence is to create a protective layer around the brand. Just like how a Samsung store may feel like a weird version of an Apple Store, or eating off-brand sandwich cookies makes you wish for Oreos, luxury automakers want it to feel wrong when that roar doesn’t sound quite right.

That sense of right and wrong — that feeling when the roar rings true to the ears — was what my friend was referring to.

“What happens, then, when the sound is suddenly gone? What does that world look like?” he asked.

He was referring, of course, to Tesla.

In 2014, Tesla released the Model S P85D, which was essentially described as a revolutionary Porsche killer. Then in Motor Trend’s 2017 World’s Greatest Drag Race, the Tesla Model S P100D blew away some of the fastest cars in the world, including the Ferrari 488 GTB, Aston Martin DB11 and Mercedes Benz AMG GTR in a quarter mile race.

All the while, a fervent fanbase of newly speed-addicted luxury car consumers was being bred under Tesla’s wing.

And there was no engine involved in any of this mania. There was no heritage of sound to design, make sculptures out of, or to ‘stir the libidos’ of men and women. Even though many of these luxury sports car makers are making their own inroads into electric vehicles, there is no denying that Tesla singlehandedly tore through the brand layer that once protected many of them, with a silent car.

The roar had lost its meaning as a metric among this new audience because Tesla made it irrelevant. They knew they’d never be able to compete on engine sound, so they redefined what luxury automotive cars were altogether. (I talk more about Tesla’s brand magic here.)

But what struck me most about my friend’s words was what they revealed about his thought process.

A great strategist like him doesn’t hold anything sacred. He doesn’t assign ‘good’ or ‘bad’ qualities to a shifting landscape. (Ask many auto industry insiders and they will tell you it’s a travesty that the ‘sound’ is fading, and that blinds them to the larger picture).

He asks the question, “What if?” because he’s playing in the 5–10 year horizon, which is usually where major consumer shifts take place. Talking to him felt like taking a walk in the future because he was changing the rules of the game, not merely moving the players on the field.

Great strategists don’t ask who will win. They ask what the world will look like when the truths of today are false tomorrow.

If he’d asked, like many do, “What happens when Tesla wins?” we’d be having a conversation about competition.

But because he asked “What if the sound of the engine suddenly becomes irrelevant?” we were having a discussion about so much more — the market, cultural shifts, industry mindset, perceived value, band narratives, technology, future investment and so on. It’s only from that macro view that you can start to see where the future may go.

Once you change the truths, the winners will reveal themselves. Not the other way around.

I get excited when I speak to people like this because it’s a lot easier to walk in the future when someone else is there to walk with you.

I’m always asking myself how to think more like a great strategist and in my work I’ve found a few principles that get me in the right mindset. They’ve become second nature to me now, and if you’re interested in taking on a more strategic mindset in your business, they will help you, too.

In fact, many of our clients start to think like strategists about halfway through our engagements because we’ve deliberately structured our processes to shift the mindset first, arrive at answers second. The order matters.

That’s also how you should try to internalize these following points. Let them shift your perspective and trust that the solutions will follow.

Look for the emergence of common ‘truths’

I put ‘truths’ in quotes because truths change, but that’s not what matters. What matters is when they change.

Truths start to change in waves across different industries and audiences, but stay under the radar until they reach a critical mass of adoption. You need to spot that wave before it’s fully visible.

Transformation travel, D2C brands like SmileDirectClub and Hims, the new adoption of marijuana, newly developed utopian living communities — these are some of today’s seemingly random truths.

But if you pay attention, you’ll see they’re all telling the same story: Health no longer comes from old institutions of authority.

The emergence of this common truth is pushing us into a future where the doctor is far less relevant. If you’re in healthcare, food, medicine, personal care or beauty, this is something you should be thinking about.

Truths come in increments and over time.

But you don’t just need to look at the truths of industry. There are those of culture, too.

The sharp decline of enrollees in Boy Scouts and kids baseball leagues, the huge push into STEM studies, the celebrity status of lone wolf entrepreneurs and the transcendence of the sports star over the team — again, there is something happening underneath all of these.

We have adopted a new truth that says individual pursuits are more virtuous than those of the group.

That has profound implications for the future of education, local communities and any organized body such as government or corporations.

Truths are always evolving and if you pay attention to the early signals, they’ll start to tell you what the future might look like.

They’ll give you a good starting point for the “What if?” questions you’re searching for.

Learn to spot master keys

I often say that good strategy solves five problems with five solutions. Great strategy, however, solves five problems with one solution.

This was a random sign I saw in an office building, but it stopped me dead in my tracks. Accidental philosophy, right there.

Costco uses a master key to solve a few brand problems at once.

The fact is that they are a physical retailer living in a world where online marketplaces like Amazon have taken over in both selection and last mile delivery, and yet Costco keeps growing.

Brick and mortar has all but been pronounced dead, and yet Costco continues to gain traction with elusive millennials — the one segment that no one can figure out in the space.

Once lumped in with Walmart, Sam’s Club and Target, Costco has somehow managed to develop a brand image that resists discounter stereotypes, compels people to make long and inconvenient pilgrimages to it’s locations, and all without spending money on a PR or traditional marketing.

They solve all of these problems with one choice — to position their brand as a pillar of honesty.

It’s doesn’t matter that Costco refers to itself as a big box discount store. The fact is that every choice they make is a very deliberate signal of the brand.

Retired CEO Jim Sinegal once said, “We try to create an image of a warehouse type of an environment […] I once joked it costs a lot of money to make these places look cheap. But we spend a lot of time and energy in trying to create that image.”

Costco spends significant money to create a raw, unfiltered, un-marketed experience. When you shop there, you get the distinct feeling that you have behind-the-scenes access without the selling layer. It’s been engineered to feel like an honest experience.

There are no point of sale ads, no finished floors or ceilings, and product is sold on the same crates it’s shipped on.

Even though they force consumers to buy huge quantities, they make no secret of the fact they they markup prices by no more than 15%. They choose to keep very little mystery behind their business practices.

Every year around the holidays you will hear provocative stories about Amazon’s poor worker conditions and failure to treat temp workers with basic respect.

But every year, you will also hear stories about Costco’s incredible work policies, high pay hovering around $20 per hour for a floor worker, and the fact they remain closed on major holiday money makers like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter because they believe in respecting their employees.

These news stories and business choices are no coincidence.

These are brand-building moves that indicate the pillar of honesty Costco wants to be perceived as in the space — something wildly different than what other large value chains are known for — and something that helps them grow despite the multitude of problems that plague their competitors.

The perception/ position of honesty is Costco’s master key, and it solves many problems at once.

Finding master keys isn’t easy. It takes practice. But if you’ve done your due diligence and know all of the questions, problems and promises that your brand needs to answer for, a master key will eventually appear.

Master keys create strong, unified brands.

The fastest way to spot them is to practice. Look at successful brands like Costco, and try to figure out the one master key that unlocks all doors — both in brand and in business.

They’ll help you understand how master keys work, and how they can give you the escape velocity needed to transcend your industry’s drawbacks.

Find evidence in actions

Pay attention to what people want, not what they need. People will always find the reasons — and the money — for what they truly want.

Instead of paying attention to what people say, watch where people are spending their time, money and attention. People will always vote with these three things.

Moreover, as I’ve written before, income doesn’t really mean anything. There is always money for the things we believe we need (iPhones, meal kit delivery, juice cleanses, sports car leases, etc.)

Where people spend their time and attention is perhaps even more important than where they spend their money, because time and attention are the most precious things we have and can never be earned the way another dollar can.

When we were working with a premium parenting brand, we couldn’t arrive at a good reason why people would pay more for a high-end diaper. The diaper itself was superior and cost significantly more to manufacture, with far better materials and design, but ask a mom if she needs a better diaper at a higher price point and she’ll likely say no. Diapers, especially with so many new ‘natural’ brands, are good enough the way they are.

That was what the moms were telling us. But it wasn’t how they were acting.

These same women were spending fortunes on midwives, organic baby food, designer baby clothes, alternative preschools and Mommy & Me Yoga.

Where they spent their time was even more telling. The time it takes to take your baby to a music festival like Coachella, from all the things involved in traveling to a dirt patch in the desert with an infant to time and money spent on extra purchases like baby noise canceling headphones, cannot be underestimated. Same goes for conferences and overseas trips.

And yet that’s exactly where many of these moms took their little ones.

Mothers were spending their time, money and attention on experiences.

It was the shared experience that mothers needed. Even more than comfort, convenience or dependability — which, as we know, are the typical hallmarks of every diaper ad.

And that’s how we knew where to build the brand. Around the shared experience of a rich and eventful early life.

Once we understood that, the brand became exponentially more than the product. It became a belief that huge groups of consumers quickly rallied around.

The proof of who we really are is in our actions.

You need evidence to form your thinking. You should look for it by watching where people spend their most precious resources.

 

The day-to-day of strategy

College students often ask me what resources I read to stay on top of my game. I’m a news and info junkie (a leftover from my days as a PR agency CEO) and it’s served me well.

You can’t do any of the things I’ve outlined above if you’re not consuming large amounts of content. I read anywhere between 2–4 hours every day, and below are some of my favorite sources for material.

You may be surprised that I don’t really read strategy texts… at least not anymore. There’s only a finite number of good books in that field, and all they will teach you is a handful of smart approaches.

At some point, you’ll need to stop reading what other strategists say, and start developing your own beliefs, your own frameworks, your own processes and systems.

That leap only comes when you’ve gained enough confidence in your understanding of the world, to the point where you can have your own opinions.

If you read enough and stay committed to being open-minded, you can’t help but start having some serious opinions about where the future is headed.

Here’s some of what I read. I’ll skim the headlines to know what’s going on, and if something piques my interest, I’ll click through to the article:

  • I subscribe to both Luxury Daily and Business of Fashion because I have an interest in luxury and fashion, and find that they are extremely correlated with other industries (BoF has especially good analysis)
  • Watch a lot of Vox, Vice and i-D videos to get a handle on subcultures and hear some of the more controversial viewpoints that are entering the larger discussion
  • I use IFTTT to get real-time headlines from Mashable for a dose of pop/ internet culture, and TechCrunch for tech culture (because tech culture influences everything and everyone around the world)
  • I get the Wall Street Journal and New York Times daily news digests for the official record, and also because they sometimes have smart articles on behavior
  • I use Pocket to track everything I read, and then sign up for their weekly newsletter where they make excellent reading recommendations based on their recommendation engine
  • I get the a16z newsletter, as well as Benedict Evans’ newsletter for more of a macro view on the future of markets
  • I also sign up for relevant newsletters from Quartz, the Atlantic, the Guardian and the New Yorker because somehow they capture the stories others miss — somewhere between subculture and mass culture
  • Listen to podcasts (I go through periods) like Hidden Brain and Reply All… and Sam Harris when my husband puts it on, because they either stretch my understanding or deepen my appreciation for human behavior
  • Follow any company or influencer I want to study on Instagram. Taking in a brand visually can be a lot more powerful than anything you read about them.
  • I also try to make sure I’m not stuck in too much of an echo chamber in my social networks and follow old classmates that have wildly different political and social views than me. It’s important for me to understand how they think and how they validate their choices, just as we all do.

Here are a few things I do to complement my reading:

  • Play around with frameworks. This is not an easy thing and I maybe come up with a new one every six months, but it forces me to reconsider how we approach our work.
  • Take the occasional call from a reader, my schedule permitting. Have conversations with random people (especially overseas). I’ve learned invaluable things about foreign mindsets, market movements and new trends just by talking to people that may not be in my field. I especially love talking to other strategists doing interesting things at other agencies.
  • Expose myself to lots of different ideas, especially in the arts. I regularly attend Creative Mornings and PopUp Magazine and visit museums.
  • Have thought experiments with my partner, always asking ourselves, ‘Why did a brand/ public figure/ entity do that?”
  • Write and write and write. If you’re like me, you may not fully understand how your own brain works. Writing these articles helps me discover exactly that.

Remember that everything changes. Everything we believe and do is fluid.

That’s what makes strategy possible. The future is never entirely unknown because it’s already revealing itself under the noise of daily life.

You just have to listen for the subtext and you’ll get the signals you’re searching for.

Categories
Public Relations

Strong Brands Ask. Weak Brands Answer.

Don’t underestimate the power of a question-led narrative. Whether the brand is your company or yourself, it matters which side of the equation you’re on.

If you ever want to know who is controlling the narrative in a space, just look at who is asking the questions.

Pantone is asking the questions in the design industry.

Every Pantone chip, mug, makeup palette and Color Of The Year announcement asks the question, “What can color mean to us?”

Asking questions leads to a path forward.
Answering questions leads to a dead end.

Crayola, perhaps the only other ubiquitous color brand, has chosen to answer instead of ask. Their recent moves, including an iPad app launch and new crayon color announcement, are part of an effort to stay relevant with tech-first kids.

Their answer is, “This is what color should mean to you.”

Just like Pantone they, too, own a finite set of colors upon which all of their products are based. Just like Pantone, they’ve experienced an influx of new competitors, lower barriers to entry and a rapidly changing user.

But unlike Pantone, they’ve moved down a path of narrative dead ends.

A Storyteller’s Advice: Don’t answer when you can ask.

The best apples-to-apples comparison between these two brands is how they approach their biggest color events.

Pantone’s Color Of The Year has been described (and received) very differently than Crayola’s announcement of a new crayon color.

Here’s a telling excerpt from Pantone’s press release for 2018’s Color Of The Year, Ultra Violet:

We are living in a time that requires intensiveness and imagination. It is this kind of creative inspiration that is indigenous to PANTONE 18–3838 Ultra Violet, a blue-based purple that takes our awareness and potential to a higher level. From exploring new technologies and the greater galaxy, to artistic expression and spiritual reflection, intuitive Ultra Violet lights the way to what is yet to come.

Here’s an excerpt from Crayola’s press release announcing the new Bluetiful crayon to replace Dandelion Yellow:

“Four months ago, we invited North America to be a part of Crayola history and help us name our new blue crayon color, and today, that became a reality,” said Melanie Boulden, Senior Vice President of U.S. and Global Marketing at Crayola. “Thanks to our fans’ passion and creativity, our new blue has an awesome new name. The name Bluetiful exudes creativity and originality. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome new Bluetiful to the Crayola color family.”

Crayola’s new crayon fails to mean anything because it there is no larger question behind it.

Pantone’s Color of The Year means something to us because the question behind it helps us discover something about ourselves. That’s what questions do.

Questions offer the promise of new knowledge.
Answers make knowledge finite.

We won’t wait for the next Crayola crayon, but we will definitely wait for the Pantone color of 2019.

More specifically, we will wait for the color of 2019 to reveal something — and questions tend to reveal a lot more than answers.

These two brands have very different audiences, but you can still reveal something about children (or the child in every adult) to themselves. Lego and Disney have demonstrated this masterfully.

Questions are important because they not only give you movement, but latitude as well.

Pantone has successfully leapt product categories, consumer groups and cultural boundaries in ways that Crayola hasn’t been able to because they were following a question as their North Star. When we experience the Pantone brand, we encounter that question, and discover a bit more about what color can mean to us.

It’s easy to trap yourself with an answer. Answers deliver value… but questions deliver meaning.

I tell stories for our brands in the same way — by inspiring curiosity, and then chasing that curiosity into powerful brand identity, positioning, defensible market moves, communication strategies, product launches and organizational focus.

When you find the right question, trust that it will take you where you need to go.

A Publicist’s Advice: Never let someone ask you the wrong question.

Before my company Concept Bureau was a brand strategy agency, we were a PR agency called J.B. Communications.

While we still do PR strategy for our clients, I’m not on the ground managing media anymore. But back when I was, there was one red flag that I trained all clients to watch out for.

Never let someone ask you the wrong question.

If you ever get that terrible feeling that you’re in a position of weakness when someone asks you something, or if you know there is no good way to answer a question without the other person gaining an upper hand, it’s likely because you’re being asked the wrong question to begin with.

That’s happened to me twice recently.

The first time, I was able to successfully reverse the situation. The second time, I slipped and lost control of the narrative, but I know exactly what I should have done differently.

A service provider I had a verbal work-trade agreement with recently sold her practice and left me with a high balance of hours I had no way of recouping… something I only learned of when I inquired about it a few weeks later.

Her response was that although she could no longer provide the original service hours she owed me, she would be glad to work out whatever agreement I thought was fair.

Sounds reasonable.

But think about that for a moment… that’s not an answer. That’s a question asking me what do you want to do about it?

That question put me in a position of weakness because it required me to find the solution to a problem that 1) I hadn’t created, and 2) would never have all of the information for.

How could I know what a good agreement would look like when she’s the only one who knows what she can truly offer me?

She was trying to ask me the wrong question.

The correct conversation for this situation was not about how I could find a solution. It was about how she could find it… and so my response to her was, “What options do we have?”

Even if her response was to lowball me, I would be able to negotiate something from a position of power.

The person, brand or entity asking the questions is the one in charge because they dictate the possible range of answers.

You don’t shape a conversation by providing the words. You shape it by creating the context.

Sometimes people want to have the same conversation as you, but they’re just starting in the wrong place.

Other times, however, they want to pin you down in an unfavorable situation.

When my husband told me we could go on a free helicopter ride this past weekend, I was excited. But there was one catch — it was part of a sales ploy and we’d have to sit through a 90-minute timeshare presentation by Hyatt Residences first.

We were on vacation for his birthday, so after resisting for a good bit (and considering my husband’s argument that as bad as a timeshare sales presentation may be, it‘s’ one of those wonderfully terrible cultural experiences everyone should live through at least once), I agreed.

At the very end of our conversation with the timeshare sales agent, after nearly and hour and a half of dodgy explanations and complicated point systems, the discussion came to an interesting point.

As she ‘calculated’ our ROI, she asked us how long we expect to travel.

Me: “Let’s do it over an 8 year horizon and see what that looks like.”

Agent (tone suddenly condescending): “8 years? So you’re just gonna burn all of your luggage after that and stay at home forever?

Me: “No… I mean we’ll still travel… I just kinda wanna know what it might look like after 8 years. It would be good to know if we do this for 8 years, what kind of situation we’d be in. Of course we’d still keep traveling, though…”

No. Wrong response.

What I should have done was refuse to let her ask me the wrong question.

A strong response from me would have been the counter question, “Will I need to wait more than 8 years before this is even worth my money?”

When I answered her question the way I originally did, I let her make the conversation about whether I was qualified for a timeshare, instead of changing the context altogether to ask if her timeshare product was worth my time.

If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Let other people sell to you. Don’t let them make you sell.

It’s ok, though. We finally got the free helicopter ride.

 

 

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A post shared by Jasmine Bina (@triplejas)

 

Finding ways to ask at the right time is crucial.

Just as important, however, is asking the right questions to begin with.

A Strategist’s Advice: Make the conversation bigger.

As a brand strategist, I’m always looking for the conversation that can’t be leapfrogged. Great brands have that one huge question that can’t go unanswered.

Strategic storytelling takes that question and pushes it forward.

Branding, accordingly, happens between the lines. Brands effectively ask questions through their actions, their decisions and their perspectives.

When you or your brand are faced with a narrative that serves someone other than yourself, take that narrative and make it bigger.

Upstart food, beauty, health and consumer brands that lived in ecosystems run by the P&Gs and Unilevers of the world did exactly that by starting the ‘X-free’ conversation: gluten-free, dairy-free, sulfate-free, chemical-free, cruelty-free, conflict-free.

They asked, “What are we putting in our bodies? What are we doing to the world?” and forced major brands to answer for the first time ever.

Those are questions much bigger than “How established is your brand?”

Questions, unlike answers, are less threatening and prescriptive. It’s akin to the difference between Do it this way or instead Wouldn’t it be nice to do it this way?

When we ask, we untether the conversation from ourselves and make it instead about the larger progression of an idea.

LPT: An argument is when you are trying to determine WHO is right, a conversation is when you are trying to determine WHAT is right.

u/Edenspawn

Answering, of course, does have its place. But there are really only two people you need to ever answer to: the consumer and yourself.

Amazon, Facebook and Google know that. They don’t even answer to the government.

They get away with it because they’ve successfully asked the big questions for so long, that at some point we began to trust them more than our own institutions. Public backlashes may come and go, but every day that we log into our Amazon, Facebook and Google accounts, we are voting for the askers.

Google I/O, iPhone launches and Facebook developer events are annual pilgrimages to hear the big questions being asked.

CES is where everyone else tries to answer them.

Watch me break down this concept and dig into these examples in the video below:

 

 

Making the equation work for you.

Ask yourself if you’re on the right side of the conversational equation:

  • Are you asking the big questions in your industry, or are you answering your competitor’s questions?
  • Do your tactical and marketing strategies explore a bigger idea?
  • Is your product strategy dictated by your brand strategy, or the other way around?
  • Does your brand’s narrative also reveal a clear market path?
  • Can you move into new categories and new consumer psychographics without compromising the integrity of your brand?

Asking can be very powerful and illuminating.

Those that are brave enough to follow that path are also the ones that commit to constant exploration. There is more value in moving the conversation forward than in merely satisfying it today.

Consumers know that, too, and that is why they reward those brands that continuously inquire.

You can always flip the script for your brand.

It all starts with a question.

Categories
Storytelling

How To Tell A Story People Will Never Forget

[Photo by Very Quiet.]

5 rules for deep storytelling that go beyond the obvious.

I already write a lot about what makes a good story. Equally as important, however, is how you tell it.

If you’ve ever told a good story but failed to get an engaged response, it’s likely because you weren’t opening the world of that story wide enough so that the audience could step inside of it.

The stories we carry with us are carefully wrapped and sealed memories in our minds. We create mental frameworks and language structures around them in order to preserve what’s inside.

But if you want others to experience that story the way you did, you’ll need to pry away some of those layers in order to let them in.

The stories people remember — whether they are brand stories, personal tales or cultural narratives — are the ones that reveal something about the listener, and you can’t do that if you‘re stuck in the perspective of the teller.

Memorable stories also follow some common patterns:

  • Repetition: Themes, poetry, recurring feeling… these are the things we are often left with in a good story. If you ever read Love You Forever as a child (or parent), I guarantee the repetition of that book stayed with you for years later into life.
  • Surprises: Emotional or otherwise. The surprise character, the surprise twist, the surprise ending… but nothing comes close to the surprise realization. Think of the epiphany you experienced watching The Matrix, Jurassic Park, Philadelphia or Super Size Me for the first time. We all walked into the theater one person, and out another.
  • Proof: The proof is in the delivery. If the story tells me something, then the delivery demonstrates its validity. Whether it’s the simplicity, passion, poeticism, authority or conviction of that delivery, it’s how it’s told that matters. Look at any popular TED Talk and you’ll see why.

From these patterns come 5 rules for deep storytelling that we’ll dive into in the next section:

1. Make the first sacrifice.
2. Trade the lesson for the theme.
3. Create pockets of emotional contrast.
4. Don’t give them a chance to ask.
5. Make your claim, then explain it.

As you read, you’ll notice they’re not so much about communicating a story to your audience, but rather creating a shared experience with them.

That shared experience dissolves the separation between you and the listener/ reader/ spectator, so that they may be able to walk inside the same universe you’re revisiting.

If done right, you will cause a small change in others, just as the story created a change within you.

Effective stories leave both you and the audience as different people by the end.

Know where that end point is, and then use these principles to help get them there.

 

1. Make the first sacrifice.

Storytelling is an exchange where one offers something, and asks the other for their attention in return.

It‘s a clear give and take, just as you might feel in a conversation with a stranger on the subway or a sales clerk — through their intonations and reactions, you will quickly know just how willing they are to exchange with you.

Your first words are the invitation to an intimate trade.

The sooner you can sense the willingness coming (or not coming) from the other side, the sooner you’ll be able to control how the trade plays out.

Conventional wisdom says to open with a personal anecdote in order to create a connection with your audience, but that’s not good advice.

We all have anecdotes, and just because they are personal doesn’t mean the audience will care.

What people do care about, however, is the gesture of sacrifice.

A sacrifice is an intimate piece of yourself that reveals how you view the world.

Scott Galloway consistently makes the first sacrifice in his No Mercy/ No Malice blog. Each post masterfully raises the stakes at the top of the exchange.

In the opening for his recent post ‘What Is Heaven?’, he surfaces an unmistakable emotional fingerprint:

Read the full post (highly recommended) here.

This could have easily been a two-dimensional personal anecdote, but instead, he ventured into personal thoughts that expose his view of the world as it was formed. We were actually given something beneath the surface of the story, and that gesture compelled us to move deeper.

In such a moment of vulnerability, you’re offering something of true value — your emotional fingerprint and unique context that signals where the exchange may go.

It is this gesture, not the story or personal anecdote, that communicates your willingness to trade. Your audience can either rise to meet your willingness or shy away from it, but the one thing they cannot do is remain indifferent.

The first sacrifice works because it operates on persuasion.

A recent study by a team of research psychologists in Texas found that when it comes to persuasive communication, framing your relationship with the other party can be enough to sway someone to your will.

A group of dating couples was recruited in order to see if different communication styles yielded different results in relationship negotiation.

The act of framing the relationship worked significantly better than coercion or even rationalization.

…there was a third set of communicators who employed a breathtakingly simple and successful procedure that we term the relationship-raising approach. Before making a request for change from their partner, they merely made mention of their existing relationship.

They might say, “You know, we’ve been together for a while now” or “We’re a couple; we share the same goals.” Then, they’d deliver their appeal: “So, I’d appreciate it if you could find a way to change your stand on this one.” Or, in the most streamlined version of the relationship-raising approach, these individuals simply incorporated the pronouns “we,” “our,” and “us” into their request.

Similarly, storytelling is a negotiation for time and attention.

Framing it in the context of a human relationship can tip the negotiation in your favor… and there is nothing more human than a revealing gesture or intimate offering.

When Galloway says he’s “pretty sure she’s standing in a corner in hell”, he is framing our relationship in a common empathy. Yes, we agree with his worldview, and we want more.

Saying you had a bad early experience with religion is a common refrain with little to offer. Describing how that early experience changed your childhood, your view of your mother in the corporate world, and your relationship with your own children is a true offering.

You can’t just tell the story. You have to give it.

2. Trade the lesson for a theme.

Most people don’t understand how a theme can transform a story, but look no further than some of our favorite cultural narratives and the effect is undeniable.

If we look at recent Pulitzer Prize winning novels and ask ourselves, “what was the point of this story?” it might be hard to immediately say. There may have been no real point or moral to the story to begin with.

If, however, we asked for themes, then the answers jump right out.

Narrative themes come from undeniable human truths that drive every outcome to the same place.

To give your story a theme is to give it an irresistible human depth. Themes reveal themselves over and over again, in different forms, but always constant.

We internalize themes more readily than lessons or morals to the story because instead of learning them, we rediscover them.

Narrative themes are a device we see a lot in television, too.

Have you ever noticed that some of your favorite episodes show different character arcs all revolving around the same thematic message?

In the Parks and Recreations episode End of the World (S4 E6), every character is living out the undeniable life theme of “having to let go of the past in order to move into the future”.

 

 

Leslie and Ben finally confront the reality of their breakup as Shauna Malwae-Tweep begins to enter the picture, Tom and Jean-Ralphio shutter their entertainment startup with a massive party where Tom gets closure with an ex, April and Andy finish off Andy’s bucket list as a newly wed couple, and it’s all couched in the story of the Reasonabilists — a cult that is celebrating the end of the world in a Pawnee park.

Everyone is exploring the same theme, but in different ways.

There may be no lesson or point, but the show’s story moves forward in a deeply satisfying way.

The same thing happened in most episodes of The Office, as it does each Sunday night in Westworld.

Themes thread a story together. They create a rich bedrock of feeling that everything else is built upon.

Even when we can’t remember the details of a good story, the theme helps us remember how we felt when we heard it.

3. Create pockets of emotional contrast.

We remember moments of heightened emotion more than other memories.

That’s why stories that compel an emotional response are the ones we tend to remember and repeat. It’s because scientifically speaking, emotion helps encode the story in our brains.

But other than following the conventional advice to communicate with passion and use strings of emotive words, how do we effectively draw out emotion in our audience?

By focusing on the distance between emotional states in the progression of a story.

Emotion is created in the contrasts.

Emotional responses are relative, and you can craft your story in a way that highlights the emotional fluctuations of your narrative as it moves forward.

In his 2014 speech to the graduating class of Maharishi University of Management, Jim Carrey created great distance between emotional highs and lows, one after another, in quick succession.

 

 

When he begins to tell his personal story about halfway through the speech, Carrey steadfastly traverses loss, glee, fear, silliness, irreverence, pride and sobering vulnerability without losing a beat.

He deliberately paired together contrasting emotions to create deep pockets of contrast.

Any time the emotion changes in a story, you can create a pocket that invites the audience in.

This goes for brand stories as well.

D2C (Direct to Consumer) brands have to be especially smart in how they position their stories because it’s often the story, not the product, that they’re actually selling.

Biossance, like many upstart beauty brands, has a social cause tied into their business model. But unlike most other brands, they turned that do-good message into an effective emotional spark point:

“A world changed” isn’t about doing good or donating to a cause. It’s about a very tangible epiphany. A new truth.

Brand-led companies like this have a specific point of view, and their stories demonstrate their commitment to it.

Others create emotional contrast through similar ‘aha’ moments — where once life was one way, and now it’s not.

Hims has a very lighthearted story and tone, but their ‘aha’ moment is quite evocative:

“We call bullshit” reverses generations of harmful gendered stereotypes.

You can move the pivot points of your story forward by using ‘aha’ moments, epiphanies and pockets of emotional contrast.

These are great devices for creating the spark that makes a story stick in peoples’ minds.

4. Don’t give them a chance to ask.

One of the most important principles we work into our branding and sales strategies for clients at Concept Bureau is to answer the question before it’s been asked.

Any time you’re telling a story — whether it’s regaling friends at a party, pitching a client, winning team buy-in or soft selling an idea — it’s imperative to anticipate the needs of your audience so that no questions arise.

If you give your listener a chance to ask, “wait, how did that happen?” or “hold on, didn’t you feel scared?”, you’ve lost control of your narrative.

And chances are you won’t even be able to answer the questions in the first place. Most people ask in their heads, but never out loud. Then they zone out and you have no chance at owning their interest again.

I listened to Howard Stern during a year of free Sirius XM that came with my new car, and despite my ambivalent feelings on the nature of his content, I couldn’t deny just how masterful an interviewer he was.

There was one interview so good, I sat in my parked car for 20 minutes after my bootcamp class had started, and nearly missed my session altogether:

 

 

Gossipy indulgence aside… why was it so good?

Because Howard Stern pushed Franco to answer the burning questions in our minds when he sensed Franco wasn’t giving them to us.

Howard Stern, not Franco, made the story emerge.

He gently guided the conversion so that no question lingered in our minds for more than a moment.

We’ve all been on the other side of that conversation where someone may be talking in detail, but fails to anticipate the things we are curious about. That makes for a frustrating and un-memorable experience.

You can certainly build tension with the plot of your story, but don’t create tension with the details.

Memorable stories anticipate the things we will be curious about.

There’s an old political adage that says “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” That’s basically all you need to know on this point.

If there is a lingering question, you’ve created distance between you and your listener.

Even if your story is written or presented asynchronously with your audience, imagine your listeners are in the room with you. Let them interrupt you and guide how to move forward.

When there is nothing to ask, people can give themselves fully to the narrative.

5. Make your claim, then explain it.

Most people do this in the reverse order.

We often explain and explain until we finally arrive at our point.

Confident people make their bold point up front and then follow with an explanation. It’s not only more satisfying for the listener, it’s also an effective way to convey authority.

Making your claim first is like putting your flag on a map.

It’s like saying, ‘This is where I am taking you. Now let me show you how we will get there.’ If you reverse that sentiment, it loses all of its power.

Warby Parker does exactly this with their About page (red underline added):

The story first plots each point with conviction, and then explains how they arrived at that point.

Although it may seem a bit stilted and counterintuitive in practice, writing a story this way creates an authoritative voice that much easier to trust and follow.

Compare that to the story of the Australian eyewear label Pared:

This is just as true a story as Warby Parker’s, but notice how different this chronological telling is when there is no mapping of strong points for the audience to tether themselves to.

Not only is there no structure, but there is no memorable anchor to internalize. If there are meaningful points, they are buried in a stream of consciousness.

To tell a strong story, lay out your claims at the top of each arc.

 

 

Many of the keys to being a good storyteller are the same things that make you a good communicator.

Unforgettable stories are the ones that make people realize something about themselves.

Make them take a side.

Force them to reconcile something in their heads.

Change their worldview (no matter how slightly).

Stepping outside of yourself, making the memory come alive and creating a shared experience with your audience are, more simply put, just ways to lower the barrier between you and another person.

If you have a great story to share, make sure you’re sharing it in a way people can truly experience.

Categories
Strategy

If You’re Not Taking These Risks, You’re Not Building A Brand

3 moves you need to be making right now.

Brands emerge from choices.

A brand isn’t your website or tagline. It’s every decision and action you take, and the meaning that emerges from those activities.

Brands occur between the lines. When you consistently make on-brand decisions about your sales, operations, communications, UX, product development, CSR, partnerships, new markets and new hires, you are demonstrating a commitment to a larger belief.

If people can find a common and compelling thread among those choices, then you’ve successfully brought a brand to life.

But the kind of brand you are creating is a different story.

There may be a common thread, but if the thread is mundane or unimportant, it won’t travel far.

The Italian coffee shop at the airport is highly branded with a voice, set of service principles and beautiful aesthetic, but I will still pay more for inferior coffee at Starbucks because the Starbucks brand taps into a larger belief about work and connection.

A compelling brand takes risks.

Risks are decisions just like anything else you can spend your resources on at your company, but I would argue that taking risks is one of the most important things you can do.

I recently took an Instagram poll asking people to choose from topics in the world of branding that they’d like some discussion on… and risk taking was the clear winner (follow me on Instagram to be a part of the next poll.)

I’ve written about brand risks extensively, from having a POV on the future and resisting the temptation to be better, to alienating non-targets and creating tension.

There’s an infinite world of calculated risk out there for any company to navigate, but there are a handful of decisions that most companies would benefit from making right now.

1. Tell the story you don’t want to tell.

Every entrepreneur I meet has two versions of their story — the version they tell, and the version they hide. The job of brand strategy isn’t to bury the less glossy story (or what some may call the truth).

Good brand strategy takes the whole story and makes meaning out of it.

I was in Tokyo recently where I met a fantastic Chinese fashion startup, and although they had created a phenomenal product with a phenomenal team and bold ideas about the future, they were conflicted on what to do with the fact that their materials were created in China.

Although they took great pride in the heritage and quality of their textile facilities, the origin story troubled them.

I could understand. Chinese manufacturing, especially in high-end fashion, has very clear and negative connotations in markets like the US.

My recommendation was to turn around that Made In China stereotype and actively own it. Define a new wave of manufacturing in the country that was emerging from the ruins of the old guard, and use PR and content to position the fashion brand as the figurehead for a fascinating textile manufacturing renaissance that was just emerging in pockets throughout the country — including their own plants.

I’ll admit, that wasn’t easy advice to take.

It’s a huge risk for any brand to try and overcome and reverse decades of belief about its country.

But it was the right risk, and the only risk worth taking. In some regards Ikea has done it. Samsung did it before them. Not taking that risk is a bigger potential pitfall than taking it.

Another consultant the company had spoken to suggested they avoid the Made In China fact, citing the cultural difference between America and China. It was her belief that the two countries have different value systems, and making one care about the other’s was an impossible task.

First off, no. A smart brand willing to take a risk can make people care. That is what brand strategy, at it’s most basic level, is supposed to do.

This is what I do for a living, and I can tell you that the craft of changing consumers’ hearts and minds is no different for big challenges as it is for small small challenges — you change the story in order to own it.

Secondly, if you don’t own your entire story, then someone will use it against you.

Even worse, someone else will turn Made In China into a valuable asset, and that opportunity will be lost for your brand.

Every time you are faced with a liability, find a way to turn it into an asset.

Tell the story you don’t want to tell.

There is a way to make it work.

2. Show your face.

If you’re a CEO, you don’t need to be the face of your brand, but you do need to show your face (figuratively, not literally).

Accountability, transparency and humanity aren’t features anymore. They’re baseline expectations. At the very least, you‘re expected to make your brand honest.

Honesty means a lot of things, from customer support best practices to checks and balances in the value chain.

But nothing signals honesty the way an accessible leader can. To hide behind a brand name and pretend the CEO is not a public figure is a copout.

As I’ve said, every decision is a building block in the foundation of your brand, and the decision to not show your face as the founder or CEO is to say that the brand doesn’t have a human behind it.

Customers need to understand that the buck stops somewhere. That there is a person who is willing to be accountable.

Showing your face means you have the guts to stand behind what you’ve created.

It’s a risk. Of course it is. When shit goes sideways (which it will) your face is the one people will be coming after.

As a leader, that’s the job you signed up for.

But taking ownership of the company, good or bad, always pays off. I have seen this time and time again, no matter the size, stage or industry of our clients.

Tell your individual story as it relates to the brand, personally seek out feedback from customers, blog about your beliefs and steps forward in the industry, and be willing to engage in public conversations with other stakeholders from time to time.

If you’re shy, if you’re modest, or if you’re like many of my clients and are just uncomfortable with the idea of being known, I’d encourage you to do some soul searching.

You started your company for a reason. There’s nothing wrong in taking ownership.

People want to know exactly what (and who) they are putting their trust in.

3. Find a white space for the brand, not just the product.

Ah, the landscape axes. A fundmanetal slide in every pitch deck.

Love ’em or hate ’em, if you’re actually honest about those axes, they can reveal some powerful opportunities.

I find many entrepreneurs create them for their products, but very few actually look at the landscape for their brand identities as well.

Your product sits against a set of feature/ benefit axes, but your brand sits against narrative axes: the stories that are being told in the product playing field.

Just as with product, the axes you choose will drastically effect the placement of you and other relevant players. That’s why it’s important that you choose wisely.

When looking at which brand axes to plot against, ask yourself these questions:

  • Where do the prevalent stories in the space start to diverge from the behaviors of our users?
  • Which narratives do we take for granted? Which narratives are ready to be challenged?
  • Which stories are so entrenched that they go unquestioned in the space?
  • What stories have become so big that the competitors who tell them will have a hard time straying away from them?
  • What stories can our competitors not tell?

The story you tell should be defensible and difficult for your competitors to follow or co-opt. That’s exactly what this set of questions is designed to uncover.

It can feel risky to look at your brand in a competitive environment, because for the humble founder it’s oftentimes hard to see the brand as more than just the sum of it’s products and features. But that’s a mental trap.

Your brand should measure up to more than just the sum of your products and features.

If products + features was enough, Starbucks wouldn’t be beating that Italian coffee shop at the airport.

 

 

If actions speak louder than words, then every move your company makes is a brand signal.

One of the most important signals you can send is that you are willing to take risks. Risk is rewarded in the consumer market, and the most important risks lay in the bedrock of your brand identity.

Every risk taken is a brand signal sent.

Be bold and show people that what you say is almost as important as what you do.

Categories
Startup

The California Concept: When a Belief Is Constantly Reborn

Creating an immortal brand, no matter how many times it has to die in the process.

California has always intrigued me as a brand, and it’s not because I was born here.

It wasn’t until I left America that I fully understood the magnitude of everything that is the golden state. This is a brand that lives and morphs independently of its borders, in ways that are hard to appreciate until you take a flight out.

I’ve lived and traveled abroad over many years, but my six-month journey across Europe and Asia this past year forced me to see California the way others see it — a giant, amorphous bastion of freedom that can mean anything to anyone.

Not very specific as far as brands go, but surprisingly very powerful.

Whether it’s Designed In California, the hippie movement, the movie industry, a burgeoning technology sector, the countercultures of mind-expanding drugs, biker gangs and communal living, or picturesque beaches laid alongside snowy mountains, people perceive California as both uncontrollably alive and deeply exciting.

Decades of policy and planning, and a rich natural geography have lent themselves to that strong identity, but there’s something much bigger to recon with.

It is the vast mental geography that California represents in peoples’ minds — the constantly growing narrative of free opportunity — that’s fascinating from a branding perspective.

Somehow, despite America’s clearly declining brand in the international community (of which I got an anti-American earful in many cafes and Uber rides), the California brand continues to capture the hearts and minds of people who have never stepped foot in the state.

French, German and American ads for travel to California.

Noting a difference in reception a long time ago, I stopped introducing myself as from America, and instead defaulted to being a California native.

It’s one thing to tell people that you come from America. It’s quite a different thing to tell them you’re a Californian.

I’ll never forget a sales clerk in London who once said to me with complete sincerity, “You’re from California! Why did you come here?”

I get responses like this in wealthy countries, not-so-wealthy countries, westernized countries and non-westernized ones. I get it from people of all ages and backgrounds, each one taking a markedly different angle on what California means to them.

It’s worth asking ourselves why this brand works in ways that others don’t.

How has it implanted itself into the psyches of people so vastly different across mentality, lifestyle and age?

How has the California brand traveled so far, while meaning so many things to so many people at once?

… especially since the truth behind California isn’t always synonymous with the myth.

The road system is in the greatest state of disrepair it has ever been in, critical gridlock wastes immeasurable money and man hours, and the beaches you see in postcards are covered in litter.

Our homeless population is growing at alarming double-digit rate and the funds to help fix the situation are tied up in the court system. Hate crimes have jumped nearly as much as homelessness, all while prohibitive tax laws continue to cause valuable businesses (and their jobs) to leave.

And that sparkling sense of freedom?

It’s been complicated by a profoundly corrupt justice system, persistent gender inequality, continuously surprising/ unsurprising forms of racism and an economic reality that’s making it harder and harder to live here.

California Republic flag.

I could have told all of this to the sales clerk in London, but it wouldn’t have tarnished the California brand in her mind.

That’s because California isn’t really a place or an entity.

California is a belief.

And how does a belief persist for so long, despite inconvenient truths and lack of proof or experience? When that belief is reborn over and over again.

California has a way of dying, resurrecting, and regenerating itself. Our faith in it is continuously lost and then found. We forget and then remember ourselves once more.

That cycle is especially compelling from a distance, where a state that is reconciling its unappealing idiosyncrasies looks more like a brand that is rising to meet whatever need the viewer may have in his or her heart.

There is always the promise that California will become something new.

To be honest, it does look like this in real life. [Photo by Ev.]

The Tireless Business of Rebirth

Being a bastion of freedom is a heavy brand pillar to carry.

Freedom isn’t concrete. It’s a belief with many definitions, and every definition is personal.

The vision of the ‘overnight success’, a clear sub-brand of freedom, has been reborn over and over again in this state:

  • The rags to riches ideal of the Gold Rush starting in the late 1840s
  • The 1930s golden age of Hollywood stars being born
  • The wunderkind, college dropout millionaire of Silicon Valley today

Each one of these eras represents the emergence, death and rebirth of the ‘overnight success’ phenomenon, and thus a regenerated freedom belief anew.

Freedom, like every other belief, stays strong when it is kept alive… no matter how many times it has to die in the process.

We see another sub-brand of freedom in the vision of ‘self-discovery’.

  • The health resort/ sanitarium movement of the 1870s (which has parlayed into a popular culture best demonstrated by the Rehab Riviera of today)
  • The free love hippie movement of 1960s, which overlapped with the LSD and drug movement of the 1970s, and corresponding lifestyle communes we still see being developed in different regions
  • The self-empowered food movements of recent history — such as Norman W. Walker’s juicing trend, the brain-powering Bulletproof coffee craze and the curious Moon Juice powders for everything from good sex to clear mindedness— all of which originated in California

We also see it in the notion of ‘escape’, or the freedom to leave, move and go wherever one pleases:

  • The western frontier, which has penetrated the American consciousness from the very first settlers to risk their lives on the Oregon Trail, to the pioneers who took us to the moon, and the explorers of today in the world of tech
  • The highly romanticized image of hitting the road on Route ’66 throughout multiple generations
  • The emerging trends of international citizenship, digital nomads, and experiential travel

Again, each passing era is a birth, death and subsequent rebirth — only in a different form as a different phenomenon.

Designed In California is an interesting sub-brand to to consider as well: think typography, stylistic representations of everything from surf culture to to California fashion, personal computers, smartphones and social media.

As the Design Museum of London noted in their recent California exhibition:

“California design is shaping the nature of the 21st century.”

That’s a big statement that underscores a simple fact: California has an outsized influence on the world.

And its influence travels far.

That ubiquitous California seal t-shirt you see everywhere? It’s huge overseas.

It perhaps means something even greater to someone who lives in a different country.

The allure of the California brand overseas: Japanese Influencer Hiromi from Nadia Harajuku wearing a Vans California t-shirt (via Tokyo Fashion), Italian blogger and influencer Chiara Ferragni wearing a vintage inspired California tank, South Korean actor and singer Lee Min-ho on set of Heirs/ The Inheritors wearing an ‘I Heart California’ shirt.

UC Davis professor of architecture and urban history Simon Sadler, describes it as (surprise) a promise of freedom and opportunity:

“California design promises to do something, to enable its subjects to attain a better and more replete future. Over-wrought though that might seem, the beautiful (Apple) boxes shipping from California contain this covenant, illusory or real.”

To wear a California shirt as a Japanese person in Japan, or Korean person in Korea, is to make a statement about your beliefs and attitudes.

And I guarantee each person wears it for a different reason.

Through whichever death and rebirth of whichever sub-brand of freedom, they found a space somewhere in the narrative to fit themselves in.

… and that is what I call the California Concept: the constant rebirth of a belief that keeps a brand coherent, but at the same creates enough latitude for a whole spectrum of meaning.

No two people I have ever met abroad have described their love of California to me in the same way.

Whether they fawn over the food culture, weather without cold seasons, surfing community, startup scene or lavish middle class living, one thing stays consistent — their belief in California’s freedom. A freedom they may feel is lacking in their own lives.

The location of the belief moves, but the belief itself remains.

Photo by Jacob Repko.

What It Means To Brand Around A Living & Dying Belief

A state is very different than a CPG company or tech startup, but there are some truths here that can help us reframe branding in a forward-thinking way.

When a belief is constantly reborn, it feels new and relevant to an audience. Every generation and/ or group is able to be a part of its creation. They develop a sense of ownership and connection.

They experience a genesis that isn’t tethered to a time or place. That is why when a belief is constantly reborn, its ideas can spread further and faster.

So what does rebirthing mean exactly?

As far as the California Concept is concerned, it means a few things.

If you follow my writing, you know that I like to stick to examples of companies that do it right, rather than companies that do it wrong. It’s a lot harder to write that way, but a lot more useful.

That being said, I don’t really see a true rebirthing in any corporate brands today, and so these examples below are to help start a discussion of how the California Concept can be used in branding going forward.

1. Always keep the cycle going. Letting something emerge and form — and once it dies, letting it stay in the past — can be difficult. But that’s exactly why California works the way it does.

It’s been a trend for many brands to go back to their roots and resurrect an original (read: retro) version of themselves. That’s a strategy, and given the current consumer need for authenticity, it has oftentimes worked.

But that’s just one cycle. It can’t last forever or simply work on its own.

The belief behind the brand of Pabst Blue Ribbon is ‘autonomy’. It was an under-the-radar, independently-minded, small brewing company that, in the late 2000-aughts, stood in stark contrast to the amped up, collectivist bro culture touted by brands like Budweiser and Coors.

They were extremely smart in tapping into the hipster counterculture that most aligned with their autonomy ideal, and seeded the brand among bike messenger communities that they knew would help spread that belief to the right people.

In that strategy, Pabst’s marketers created the perfect conditions for a huge spark around the ‘autonomy’ ideal. If you lived in San Francisco at the time like I did, you likely remember the Pabst renaissance happening in every hipster bar.

They were smart in rebirthing the belief, but when it died as we reached peak PBR and the once autonomous brand was now perceived as mainstream (being consumed by yuppies and middle class parents as much as it was by counterculturists), they had done nothing to rebirth it in a new form.

That belief was contained in one moment in time and place.

Instead of being resurrected in something new, it was extended in something old.

Pabst worked hard to lengthen the cycle, but it ended up hurting the brand. Had it been reborn in another form, it would have traveled even further without being perceived as mainstream in the same way.

The rebirth of the belief creates a tight narrative, but provides room for different meanings among different people.

2. Let things die. If they won’t die, kill them. Sometimes the best way to kill something is to push something new into its place (much like romantic relationships and songs that get stuck in your head).

UC Berkeley has had a hard time rebirthing its belief around ‘human potential’, not because the school hasn’t moved into new story cycles, but because an old and very persistent cycle hasn’t properly died.

When most people think of the Berkeley brand, they think of flower child hippies in the streets, the civil rights movement, citizen activism and open-minded creativity. Put another way, they think liberal arts.

But Berkeley isn’t a liberal arts school, and it hasn’t been for a very long time.

For decades now, Berkeley has prioritized heavy investments in science, mathematics and engineering, and in 2015 it announced the launch of a $250 million fund to invest in startups are borne of UC research.

When I was there completing my undergraduate degree in Literature over 15 years ago, I wasn’t aware of this new rebirth via STEM. STEM wasn’t even in my vocabulary.

Instead, I was caught up in the old cycle of the university’s yesteryears.

Berkeley’s old reputation had been heavily communicated to me and many of my peers through music, film, media and pop culture. If you head up to Berkeley now, you’ll still find vestiges of hippie art, 1960’s inspired storefronts, and altars to its related movements.

The school hadn’t done enough to signal to people like me that this was now a time of rebirth.

I resentfully watched for 4 years as new buildings and facilities were being erected on the science campuses, while my dark and moldy literature classrooms didn’t even have enough functioning desks.

That lack of signaling created a misalignment of expectations for many students, and colored a very significant experience in our lives.

Little did we know that we weren’t really where we thought we were.

If Berkeley had killed that old story during the time of its rebirth, it would have enjoyed a much stronger and unified reputation as a school that existed around the ‘human potential’ belief, rather than a school existing around the fighting notions of science and art.

Death and rebirth help unify a brand’s narrative.

3. It’s only a rebirth if the user experiences a total change. You can’t take something old, add a veneer, and call it new.

Every rebirth must take a different form if the user is to re-commit their belief in your brand.

I hate to say this, especially given the tremendous value Apple has added to the California identity, but the company is at risk of undermining their brand belief of ‘thinking different’ if they don’t find a new way to reintroduce it to the world.

Over the past decade, the company has relied on a slew of impressive product releases to uphold the belief.

But before that, Apple used design elements (UI, iconography, typography), message-driven content in the form of compelling ads, and the bold moves of its CEO to keep the belief alive after many deaths.

Through Jony Ive’s highly publicized design vision and Angela Ahrendts’ push to turn Apple Stores into community hubs, they’ve tried to complement their product launches with other belief-building activities in this new age of Apple.

But for the consumer (especially one that is shelling out more and more cash), there is little to no new experience to be had here.

As peripheral efforts fail to live up to their potential, all that is left is the latest new device.

And relying on products alone is a risky move.

Many will agree that the experience of upgrading from an iPhone 5 to a 7 Plus felt like an exciting and meaningful change both outwardly and inwardly, but going from a 7 Plus to an iPhone X paled in comparison. Not because the feature jump was any less impressive, but because the experience of that change is no longer new to us.

The stories of design and commerce aren’t new. They’re actually quite old to the Apple DNA and very valuable tenets of heritage, but without a new cycle to resurrect the belief in a measurably new way, customers will begin to stray.

It’s only new if it feels new.

 

Life and death is an interesting lens to look at brand building through. We’re forced to part with the things we love before we’re ready, and embark on new paths before we even know what they are.

The greatest brands are living things that respect their own life and death cycles.

That is the magic of California, and the magic of creating something that lives outside of any borders, features or definitions you may give it.

Come to California to witness it.

Or better yet, fly out of the country to really feel it for yourself 😉

Categories
User Experience

In the Transformational Economy, ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’ Have Started To Merge

The old brand model started at customer personas. The new model now begins at user evolution.

We’re seeing a change in the modern consumer that our current brand frameworks aren’t capable of addressing.

What best defines your brand’s target market isn’t demographics, income level, hobbies, social circle, attitudes, political leanings, past purchases or other traditional qualifiers of the ubiquitous customer persona framework.

All of those labels indicate a state of being.

They are static in place and time. They are two-dimensional labels that, while helpful in adding context to outline your user within, fall short of providing the real depth your brand needs to get to — the ‘user evolution’.

The user evolution refers to the transformation that your customer is undergoing.

One or two generations ago, transformation had a time and place. A job promotion, salary raise, first child, first home or becoming an empty nester were finite moments of transformation that changed the customer’s buying habits and brand loyalties.

But today, none of those rules stand.

Today, we work in ever-evolving co-working meccas where the people sitting around us are different from the beginning of the week through the end. Today, we combine 23andMe results with customized supplement stacks for daily experiments in cognition and output.

Today, we reveal ourselves in the micro-content we publish on an hourly basis, increasingly create our own job titles, and regularly move between diets and juice cleanses.

We walk into a SoulCycle, Crossfit, Anger Room or bootcamp one person, only to emerge a spiritually uplifted human being an hour later.

If you had to take a second look at what truly defines us as consumers, it’s clear that we are experimenting, testing, pushing, changing, discovering, formulating, creating and effecting. It is the level and type of transformation that defines us more than anything else.

All of these new labels indicate a state of becoming.

As I spent the last year traveling the world, speaking to millennial consumers and the brands that court them, I kept hearing the same thing over and over from people when I asked them to tell me a little about themselves.

“I’m writing a novel.”

“I’m trying to get to 5k followers.”

“I’ll be blogging from Australia next year.”

“I’m fundraising for my new startup.”

“I just started keto.”

Whether it was Zurich, London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong or Tokyo — people didn’t tell me who they were. They told me who they were turning into.

Your user today is constantly growing into someone new, in every moment of every day.

Our new state of being is actually a state of transformation, and we need to understand how the user got here in order to understand how to speak to them.

Photo by Les Anderson.

The Step Ladder That Turned Into A Treadmill

I remember being in graduate school eight years ago and learning about life cycle marketing for the first time.

Created in the 1960s by Wells and Gruber, it asserts the notion that people are more likely to try and change brands during major life pivots and milestones.

People advance through a family life cycle over the course of a lifetime. Their needs change as they pass through these different stages.

Thus, a bachelor is likely to be more interested in some kinds of purchases than a married woman would be. Practitioners of the life cycle marketing approach take these differences into account.

Even then, the concept felt like a revelation, but at the same time, like the artifact of a bygone 1960s era.

As general wealth spread through the US and more and more individuals moved up the hierarchy of needs, our relationship to the world around us started to change.

As I’ve written about before, the major milestones of marriage, homeownership and child raising have either moved or dissolved altogether for millennials.

Moreover, the institutions we once outsourced our decision-making to, like college, the corporate ladder and government, have started to crumble.

So what happens when the reputations of these once unchanging, external brands start to weaken?

The consumer becomes the expert. The consumer becomes the authority. The consumer becomes the agent of change.

The consumer is now the brand.

… and the products and services he or she consumes turn into vehicles for supporting that personal brand.

Enter the Experience Economy — the exciting predecessor to the even more exciting Transformation Economy.

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore first wrote about the Experience Economy in 1998 (a concept now widely known as the shift away from a service-based economy to one where customers seek enjoyable experiences over products… and published far ahead of it’s time).

They later introduced the subsequent Transformation economy —an economy where experiences are elevated from mere enjoyment to actual personal transformation — and the age in which we are living in now.

We seek those transformative experiences around us, through brand activations like Nike’s personalized sport, apps like Headspace or health and wellness cruises like Celebrity Cruises’ “Mindful Dreams” voyages.

But it goes further than that now.

It’s been my observation that we’ve come to internalize the transformative experience so deeply, it is now an ever present existence in our hearts and minds.

Transformation is the new baseline.

It’s why a runaway hit brand like The Ordinary doesn’t just sell beauty formulations, it practically (and literally) forces you to turn into an amateur dermatologist in the process.

When the transformation economy takes hold, old rules around selling become meaningless.

It frustrates luxury brand directors.

It frustrates premium tech, CPG, commodity and B2B brands, too.

I found myself on stage in New York recently, speaking to a group of such executives at Luxury Daily’s First Look trends conference for 2018.

The very last question posed to me on my panel — the one that I hoped wouldn’t be asked, because I knew people wouldn’t like my answer — came from someone in the front row who said,

“Shouldn’t premium and luxury brands reclaim the exclusivity and rarity they’ve lost to social media and other forms of over-exposure, and pull back?

Wouldn’t you agree that many luxury brands have lost their edge because they’ve made themselves too accessible? Too available to the public?”

In other words, she was asking me if the luxury consumer persona was longing for a return to good old luxury values.

My answer was no.

Not only was that sentiment incorrect, it was posing the wrong question altogether.

The real question is, “where does authority come from in a Transformation Economy?”

It comes from within the consumer. Where they once looked outward for authority, they now look within themselves.

Transformation, ultimately, comes from within. So does the authority to dictate the terms of that transformation.

That’s why users rely on brands (especially luxury brands) less and less to tell them what the true luxury experience should be.

It’s why we have high-low fashion taking hold for the first time, and premium sharing economies like Rent The Runway making that transformative experience available well outside the confines of old socio-fiscal rules.

The step ladder of social progression has now turned into a treadmill.

In the 1960s world of Wells and Gruber, social and economic classes had clear steps between them, divided with plateaus and vertical climbs, and leading to a final ascent. You got a job, got a raise, got new access, and then repeated the process.

But to experience the consumer world of today feels more like a treadmill. No plateaus, just the constant feeling of ascent which may or may not need to lead anywhere.

The step ladder is easy to brand for. The treadmill requires more dexterity.

When we move from the step ladder to a treadmill, we move from being to becoming, from customers to users, and from personas to evolutions.

Rent The Runway users. Garvin and Co.

The User Evolution

Transformation is different from a typical experience because it is usually tailored to the individual, and leaves the individual perceptibly changed afterward.

Transformation is:

  • The thrill of growth
  • Personal achievement
  • The experience of change
  • Being able to look back at a different version of oneself

All of these can exist on grand and lofty scales (like Airbnb), or in small and mundane moments (like Harry’s disposable razors).

As noted by Mark Bonchek and Vivek Bapat, the smartest direct-to-consumer brands have already figured out that customers may buy things, but users experience things on a deeper level… and that comes from how a brand creates context within the user’s life.

We suspect that the nature of their products, culture, and business model leads them to more of a usage mentality. They think of customers less as one-time buyers and more as users or members with an ongoing relationship.

That relationship (or context) comes from meaning.

Users impute meaning onto a successful brand because they share a transformative belief.

  • Harry’s razors has a transformative belief not about shaving, but about what it means to be a man
  • The Ordinary has a transformative belief not about beauty, but about who has the right to be a beauty expert
  • Airbnb has a transformative belief not about travel, but about belonging in this world

Personas are static. They’re filled with descriptive labels that fail to tell us what really makes a user tick.

The deeper beliefs we’re looking for are very hard to find in a typical persona framework.

But it’s not impossible.

Instead of a snapshot of a person, we need to understand their constant evolution.

A simple way to hit at the heart of what matters is to simply ask ourselves, “What transformation is our user going through/ wanting to go through/ starting to go through?”

“What treadmill are they on?”

“What is the constant transformative feeling they are looking to create in their lives?”

“Who are they becoming everyday?”

“What evolution are they experiencing right now?”

“How do they use our products during the evolution experience?”

If you really push yourself to answer those questions, you’re going to find something very interesting.

Your personas won’t neatly categorize by gender, age, income or any other typical bucket anymore.

Instead, they will categorize by mentality.

Rent The Runway is speaking to Amy. Amy is of the mentality that being a strong woman means showing every side of yourself, whether it’s the playful 20-something at brunch with friends, the serious entrepreneur at WeWork, or the flower child at Coachella.

She is going through the evolution of embodying all of her selves… and believes in the authority she has to move between identities and to transform into who she wants, whenever she wants.

She’s 29 years old, just quit her 9 to 5 job to start her own company, and lives in a metropolitan area.

Amy sounds specific, but Amy could be anybody.

Amy is me (a 36-year old woman rediscovering the many sides of herself as she becomes more comfortable in her identity), she is my mother (the 59-year old schoolteacher whose many sides have blossomed with maturity), and she is my male cousin (whose many sides have only become socially acceptable in the new age of the metrosexual man…if Rent The Runway ever decides to release a men’s offering).

Amy isn’t a target in and of herself.

She is representative of a mindset.

She is a symbol of the human evolution that the brand is speaking to, and an authoritative mindset that the brand fits within.

The mentality is a much stronger signal than any demographic could be.

When you understand the mentality, you understand where the user evolution needs to go.

… and that is a very good place to start your brand strategy.

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Strategy

The Emergent Story Arc of Food: How to Win the Brand War (In Any Industry)

[Photo by frankie cordoba.]

Every brand has a chance to bend the consumer path away from competitors and toward itself in a new future. This is how.

Stories change a lot more than we realize.

Between decades and generations, our collective ideals around basic desires — money, happiness, health, family, food, technology, you name it — radically evolve.

But like a frog in hot water (supposedly), even radical changes are imperceptible to us while they’re happening.

  • ‘Marriage to survive’ becomes ’Marriage for love’: Dating in America is only about 100 years old. Before that, marriage was a socioeconomic means to survive. As civil institutions proliferated to create mass economic security across the U.S., the notion of marriage came to be newly infused with the concept of romantic love.
  • ‘Cold hard cash’ is suddenly ‘The abstract money concept’: 1950s consumers couldn’t dream of today’s norms — paying with cards, borrowing freely, a new crypto currency frontier — because money had inextricable rules that dictated how and when you spent. Money was in the purview of the government, not outside of it.
  • From ‘Working life’ to ‘Life’s work’: As recent as the late 20th century, jobs used to be something you did outside of real life. Today, we live within the cultural construct of the ‘career’, and your career is your waking identity. Even the lifelong mono-career spent climbing the corporate ladder at a single company is being supplanted by a new hyphenated, multi-part career ushered in by the creative class.
Image by Jasmine Bina.

It’s not just the systems that change, but our engagement with those systems as well.

With every new cultural narrative comes a new human experience.

When stories change, so does our reality… and this has happened over and over and over again since the beginning of humankind.

Collectively, we call these different eras of thought and belief the Emergent Story Arc.

Your brand can be a part of the Emergent Story Arc, or work against it, but every single smart brand poised for success is making a very clear and risky bet on where the trajectory of the story arc is going.

Brands that matter place bets on the future.

… and they use their brands as signals to push consumers toward that specific future path.

(I talk more about placing your brand bets here and here.)

So how do you draw out the Emergent Story Arc, learn from it, and bend it to your brand’s advantage?

You start by looking for patterns.

 

Building The Emergent Story Arc

Let’s look at a very basic story that affects all of us — food.

Let’s also assume we are a food startup that has created a chocolate candy bar that’s actually fortified with 50% of your daily vitamins and minerals.

It’s called the Chocolate Happiness Bar.

Imagine Snickers, if Snickers doubled as a vitamin.

The questions we must then ask ourselves stem from the concept of food, snacks and health in everyday life, such as:

  • What is the story of food and snacks in America? How do we define it today, yesterday, and likely tomorrow?
  • Over time, how has our cultural understanding of food changed not only how we think about it, but also how we consume it, package it, talk about it and gather around it?
  • How has our understanding of health changed over time, and how have food and snacks adapted to the health ideal?
  • What role does food play in our lives? What stories do we tell ourselves about it?
  • What major brands, advancements and beliefs have shaped those stories?

If we looked over all of these considerations over the past few decades and created a 3-part Emergent Story Arc, this is what the first iteration would look like:

© Jasmine Bina 2018. Please contact for publication use.

In each era, we see that beliefs, attitudes and behaviors changed.

Sometimes brands created those changes. Other times, they were reacting and adapting.

If you go through the points in each era, you can start to see how the overall perception of food, snacks and health have evolved — and how all of those evolutions are interconnected.

It’s in the connections between consumer eras that we start to understand what makes an industry move forward.

If we zoom out and take a look at what all of these data points are telling us, we start to see some extremes emerge… and between those extremes, some very important patterns.

© Jasmine Bina 2018. Please contact for publication use.

Food, snacking and health have all gone from external activities and beliefs, to internal ones.

This second iteration of our Emergent Story Arc show us what is buried in the details.

The emergent story of food is increasingly within us. It is inward facing. It is personal, it is private, it is intimate.

Food has gone from a relationship we had with our peers and communities, to a relationship that we have with ourselves.

Our beliefs around consumer advocacy, personal health, and the ‘buyer beware’ mentality that causes each of us to spend hundreds of hours reading ingredient lists and pop health articles all support this.

You may have come across a perfect culmination of this mental shift last Thanksgiving when a frustrated host sent a letter to New York Times columnist by Aaron E. Carroll:

“Welcome to the United States of Divided Dinner Tables” (Vox: This woman’s Thanksgiving plight perfectly captures America’s fraught food culture)

This Thanksgiving wasn’t defined by external societal standards. It was defined by internal, personal beliefs — both emotional and logical.

This change in perspective also underscores the surge in snacking over the decades.

Meals are something we expect to do with others. Snacking is something often done alone, between places and events.

Snacking is a largely private event.

As our attitudes about food have moved inwards, so have our habits around it.

Image by Jasmine Bina.

Knowing all of this, we reach the final iteration of the arc where we outline the pervading stories of each era, and then plot our competitors along the future arc to find opportunities for our own brand.

Let’s return to our Chocolate Happiness Bar and see what this new chart looks like.

You can define your competitors however you like, but in this example, we will define it as any single-serving chocolate flavored snack that can be found at the common grocery store — including those that compete with us along the health metric (protein bars, diet bars, fiber bars, etc.).

Here we ask ourselves, what is the dominant story in each time period, and what new stories are on the horizon today and into the future?

© Jasmine Bina 2018. Please contact for publication use.

You’ll notice a few things about this final iteration of the Emergent Story Arc:

  1. The future story splits into three different narratives. That’s because we’re living it, and the dominant narrative hasn’t been written yet.
  2. You’ll notice something very interesting happening here. Both the Guilt Story and the Regressive story actually originate from previous eras of consumer thinking that are no longer prevalent (!) This shows the lack of smart branding innovations in the space, but also highlights something very important for any company: You may find that some of your competitors today don’t really seem to have a POV on the future, in which case you may want to reconsider if they are even competitors. Having a POV on the future is making a risky bet, and like I said at the top of this article, every single smart brand poised for success is making a very clear and risky bet on where the trajectory of the story arc is going.
  3. The further your story arc diverges from another competitor, the more tension you are creating… and that is a good thing. I’ll explain in a moment.

The real beauty of this arc is that it tells us how to position ourselves in order to be different, not better (because if you’ve read my work, you’ll know better is a losing game.)

Your positioning should answer the consumer question, Why should I care?

Because snacking is a sacred ritual.

That POV is a strong brand position to come from.

You can see from the arc that it diverges from the rest of the pack, while directly speaking to future forces like the decline of family meals, the inward nature of modern food habits, food as healing, and the growing abandonment of old rules.

From here, we can start to build something interesting.

Image by © Jasmine Bina.

The Emergent Story Arc will tell you what decisions to make

For me personally, building a full arc for a category can feel like being lost in the woods. But once it’s built and the full forest is in view, I can hear it whispering to me.

The arc will reveal opportunities you can’t see when you’re on the ground.

In this example, even though high-level, we are already getting some strong messages from the arc:

  • We need to elevate snacking to be the sacred ritual we believe it is. That can come across in our branded language, in our customer engagement experiences, and in our partnerships.
  • We need to think about where we sell. We have the most tension with the most outdated narrative — that of traditional and masstige candies you usually see in the checkout lane, and it may be a strong strategy to place our products there instead of the health food section.
  • We shouldn’t describe our vitamins using dated language like fortified or daily allowance. Not only are these words connected to an old narrative, but they also echo the language of the very institutions the public has become wary of. Instead, we should consider reframing our benefits as restorative, healing and balancing.
  • Create a new category outside of candy, medicine or health. All of these spaces and stories are incredibly crowded — and to fall into them would be to lose our own story.

Product decisions must also reflect brand decisions.

If we truly are an internally-facing brand that creates triggers around sacred moments, then an extension of our product line may look like this:

  • The ‘Eat Me Before Bed’ Chocolate Happiness Bar: with vitamins and supplements to enhance the sacred ritual of sleep
  • The ‘Eat Me Before The Meeting’ Chocolate Happiness Bar: with vitamins and supplements to enhance focus during the sacred ritual of work
  • The ‘Eat Me On The Way To Work’ Chocolate Happiness Bar: with vitamins and supplements to increase energy during the sacred ritual of travel

Again, referencing the future trajectory of the consumer mindset, we know that customization, functionalization, and internalization can be creatively applied here in a candy format in order to place our bets on the future.

Image by © Jasmine Bina.

Every story changes.

You will find an emergent story arc in everything from the nuclear family and higher education to gender norms and beauty.

We are seeing every institution around us morph into something quite different, and at a faster and faster rate.

…but that presents a wealth of new opportunities — especially when it comes to your competition.

Look for signals and win the war.

See where your competitors are going.

The more they invest in a direction, the harder it will be for them to change it. That’s your advantage.

There is always a higher path to pursue.

Image by Jasmine Bina.

The Inputs Always Matter

The inputs for any framework matter. Here are some best practices for this one, that will help guide you in the right direction:

  • Go as far back as it matters. I like to cover the formative decades of every living generation, but you may want to go back centuries if you feel it will reveal something even deeper in the human psyche.
  • Remove all judgement. What may have once seemed backwards may now seem right-side-up. If you judge people’s behaviors, you won’t be able to learn from them.
  • You can (and should) go back to that first iteration and find new patterns. You can rebuild this and it will create a different story arc for the same space, and every version is important. Note that I’ve excluded medicinal competitors like vitamin gummies, but if this were a larger arc with more layers, they would be included.
  • Pay attention to which things have carried throughout the length of the arc, and which have emerged and disappeared as fads (…100-calorie packs are decidedly on their way out).

 

Build Something That Takes Us Somewhere

You have to start at the mouth of the river in order to understand where it’s going, how fast it’s going, and how likely it is to overflow and change direction.

“I see the future as a series of branching probability streams. So you have to ask, what are we doing to move down the good stream?”

– Elon Musk

You’re building a company around a theory that will take us into the future.

Theories come from observation of patterns. I hope this framework gives you the tools to surface those patterns and act on them.

We will always follow those people who can imagine a future so vividly, that they practically guide us there from the here-and-now.

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