At any given time, your brand is communicating two different stories — the spokenstory that you’ve created, and the heardstory that the consumer internalizes — and they’re not the same thing.
The spoken story is under your control.
Your history, legend, consumer touch points, language, brand identity, packaging, user experience and so on are all part of the spoken narrative you’ve created.
The heard story, however, is what the consumer actually hears when your spoken story touches them.
Even though that’s ultimately the story you want to influence, you can’t directly control how the heard story is internalized.
Let’s consider a very literal example.
When I say the phrase “That which cannot be named,” where does your mind go?
Do you hear the spoken story of something nameless, formless, blank and full of positive potential… as was intended by this originally Taoist phrase?
Or do you instead imagine something dark, mysterious, looming and threatening? Something taboo and perhaps evil.
Chances are you heard the second version.
In fact, that heard story is so much stronger than the spoken story, that J.K. Rowling adapted it for the character “He Who Must Not Be Named” a.k.a. the existentially evil Voldemort.
That’s how spoken stories and heard stories work.
The heard story is usually stronger than the spoken one, and it takes into account a lot more than just what you’re saying.
Just because you’re saying it doesn’t mean that’s what’s being heard.
One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is not knowing which heard story they’re communicating.
There are 2 common types of hidden counterstories — heard stories gone awry — that are important for any brand to be aware of.
1. The Silent Kind
For some brands, the heard story is likely the exact opposite of the narrative they want to employ.
This is especially true with brands trying to address a clear pain point.
Sometimes talking about a solution underscores the hopelessness of the problem instead.
Whether you’re a task app highlighting the overwhelm of daily life, or a nonprofit focused on the suffering of the disenfranchised, what people are actually hearing you say may not be what makes them convert.
Is Remember The Milk telling a story about control… or instead chaos?
Is the ASPCA creating a story of hope… or rather hopelessness?
These silent counterstories are deceptive.
You might think, why shouldn’t a brand explain the problem they are solving?
You can explain the problem you are solving, but that’s fool’s gold at best.
People don’t want to know you can fix their problem. They want to know who they can become with your product.
…and who they can become is much bigger than the problem holding them back today.
“Here’s what our product can do” and “Here’s what you can do with our product” sound similar, but they are completely different approaches.
The better version of themselves is the real prize for consumers.
Move past the pain point, or your heard story may backfire.
2. The Tethering Kind
Be wary of any narrative that talks about the “other”.
We see this a lot in politics and the public realm. Notable figures, leaders and sometimes entire nations define themselves as not being the other.
If I mention Israel, you may think Palestine. If I say Aaron Burr you may reflexively respond with Alexander Hamilton (and milk, if you’re an older millennial like me). The thought of Taylor Swift may conjure up Katy Perry.
These are examples of how defining yourself against something will, by definition, wrap that thing into your identity.
Defining yourself as ‘not the other’ will always tie you to whatever that ‘other’ is.
Brands do this all the time.
Anytime a brand is ‘XX% better than’, ‘a newer version of’’, ‘ the most XX’ or ‘not like XX’, it is tethering itself to the very competitor it’s trying to break away from.
You can employ these comparisons to help users make more informed decisions, but they should by no means be your top line message.
Use tethering language very carefully and sparingly, if at all.
When it comes to commodity goods (such as mattresses) this is especially true.
What is left of the Leesa brand if you take away the “other”?
It’s easy to see the Leesa brand has no legs once the shine of “better new” wares off.
When Buzzfeed recently announced the slogan “All the news too lit for print” for their AM to DM show, it was a clear appropriation of The New York Times’ famous slogan “All the news that’s fit to print”.
The threat of lawsuit quickly forced Buzzfeed to take down the phrase, but it may have been for the best considering how tethered the branding was.
If Twitter is any barometer, it was a poorly conceived idea.
After all, how can you build a meaningful counterculture brand that is so reliant on the traditional institutions it claims to supercede?
Tethering stories may work in the short term, but they will not work in the long term.
If you’re looking to create a lifelong brand that sits outside of your competitive set, you have to resist tethering stories.
Once you’re tethered, it’s very hard to get above your competitor’s story. You’re intrinsically tied.
I’ve said before: Better is actually worse. Different is what matters.
Stories that define a different standard rather than a better one will always rise to the top.
Airbnb isn’t about better accommodations or prices — its about belonging.
The emotional concept of belonging is a dramatically different standard, defined by them, that makes any hotel, hostel or traditional B&B suddenly irrelevant.
Airbnb resisted the tethered story, and it served them well.
If you feel your best brand story is the one that tethers, you’re not trying hard enough.
There is always a larger, more significant story that will push you into less crowded territory.
You can make sure your spoken story and heard story are synonymous, or purposely creating tension by working against (or with) each other, but failing to acknowledge the heard story altogether is almost always a fatal mistake.
Start from the beginning. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the blurring line between story and science when it comes to branding, and I’ve noticed something interesting.
Consider these:
Greek myths, western literature, eastern philosophies, childhood fairytales, and any number of narrative “windows into the soul” many times fall in parallel to scientific cognitive biases.
When we quote Tennyson’s poetry and say, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” we are brushing against both Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion in the same breath — a preference to maintain the current baseline, and a preference to avoid losses over acquiring equal gains, respectively.
Pygmalion, who fell so deeply in love with his own carving of a woman that he asked the goddess Aphrodite to give him a living, breathing version of his statue, is reminiscent of the IKEA effect — a cognitive bias where we “place a disproportionately high value on products [we’ve] partially created.”
The tragedy of Shakespeare’sRomeo and Juliet is a blend of confirmation bias —our human tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of our pre-existing assumptions and beliefs — and the related congruence bias — where we fail to consider there may be alternatives we haven’t yet thought of.
The story of the Ugly Duckling (which was heartbreaking for a sensitive kid like me). This story is a demonstration of the in-group bias — where we favor those in our group over others — and more darkly, the essentialism bias — “the view that certain categories (e.g., women, racial groups, etc.) have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly.”
And who can forget Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer? You know why you can’t forget him? Because of the von Restorff effect — where non-homogeneous items are more likely to be remembered.
The stories that define us show the fingerprint of human thinking.
In his incredible Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, Buster Benson decodes and groups the hundreds of cognitive biases in our minds as answers to simple, live-or-die questions:
You don’t need to understand every bias. What you need to understand is how they work in the flow of logic, according to Benson:
1. Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.
2. Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.
3. Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.
4. This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.
Cognitive biases reveal our nature as consumers. We think and decide in non-sensical ways on a granular level, but pull back you’ll see the coping mechanisms that these biases afford us.
Information processing is basically storytelling, and biases are a shortcut to creating meaning.
That’s why your brand strategy is so crucial — it tells the story that facilitates the decision to purchase. It creates the meaning the customer needs in order to buy.
Yes, you can control (or exploit) consumer biases with product, UX and customer service, but none of these touch points can frame a belief before it has even been established.
I’m going to show you how biases can be leveraged through brand story instead.
The story is always what matters.
Without it, we drown as consumers searching for meaning in a pool of meaningless information.
Understand the biases that reveal what your customer wants, and then give them the meaning they’re looking for… before they misinterpret it for themselves.
4 Consumer Biases That Threaten Conversion, and How to Reverse Them
We tend to choose options for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is unknown — even if the unknown option has the potential for better gains.
Thinx is a fascinating case study on what happens when you attack the ambiguity effect head-on.
I was hesitant before buying my first set. They were expensive, unlike anything I had ever bought before, and the real big question was — would they work?
There is no way to understate that last concern. The idea of “period-proof underwear” possibly not working was a non-starter. As it is for nearly every woman, the shame, embarrassment and fear feels insurmountable.
Thinx turned the ambiguous into something concrete by being everything a period brand isn’t.
Instead of demonstrating with blue liquids as so many brands have done for generations, they used blood bags and red colors throughout their advertising.
They resisted using euphemisms and analogies, and instead used language like “This is the story of a girl who bled a river and… it was fine” or “No, they don’t feel like diapers, and it’s not like sitting in your own blood. Boom.”
They resisted generalizations and used real measurements of blood capacity, flow and wearability.
A day in the life of a real menstruating human.
Sure they were more comfortable, more eco-friendly, and safer, but that didn’t matter. When consumers like me suffer from the Ambiguity Effect, the potential for better gains don’t fully register — not when the status quo of pads and tampons are dependable and safe (no matter how uncomfortable or archaic they are).
That’s why Thinx got straight to the heart of the matter. They had to break taboos to get there, but by doing that, they marginalized their competition.
“There are so many ways to go wrong. All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”
There is constant anxiety about the unknown, about getting it wrong and missing the mark… especially in a space where no one has the guts/ permission to say it in plain terms.
If your customers are resisting conversion from a competitor brand because of the Ambiguity Effect, consider finding new ways to tell a story where ambiguity is eliminated and the very DNA of your brand story celebrates a new, known reality free of risk.
Reactive Devaluation: We devalue thoughts and ideas if we believe they originated from an antagonistic figure, even if we may have otherwise found them valuable.
Semmelweis Effect: We have a strong tendency to reflexively reject anything new because it doesn’t match up with our norms, standards or beliefs.
Blu E-Cigarettes was dealing with a lot of shame-based beliefs and mentalities among their intended audience when they launched a few years back. There was a huge cognitive dissonance between what smokers knew (smoking kills) and what they did (smoked).
They understood that presenting their E-Cig product solely as a healthy alternative (which was at the time supposedly deemed 95% safer than smoking regular cigarettes) would only reinforce that dissonance and shame, especially if it was told by a member of the health community (an antagonist) so they had to tell a new story.
They had to tell the story from an insider’s point of view.
And just as importantly, they, had to tap into a different set of secret norms and beliefs.
All you had to do was take it from the rugged, free-thinking Stephen Dorff himself when he said, “I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I want to light up […] We’re all adults here. It’s time we take our freedom back. C’mon guys, rise from the ashes.”
Those are fighting words. Those are words that make it ok to be a smoker… words, I’ll add, that smokers never hear. It flipped the script and said you’re not the bad guy, you’re the victim. You don’t deserve to be vilified.
Blu tapped into a secret belief — that smokers aren’t bad people. It was a very different kind of message that wouldn’t have been heard if it didn’t come from someone on the inside.
If you want to combat Reactive Devaluation and the Semmelweis Effect for a group, create a story of empowerment and tell it from the inside.
Create a new truth that acknowledges peoples’ secret desires.
“And perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humor. We all think the one we’ve got — or haven’t got — is just about right and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step.”
We tend to take personal credit for our successes by attributing them to our inherent characteristics, yet distance ourselves from our failures by ascribing them to external factors beyond our control.
I was an early adopter of Digit — a lightweight app that siphoned small amounts of money out of my checking account and placed it in a separate savings account in the background. It was a brainless way to save money that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
And I loved it. Eight months of Digit afforded me a trip to London.
But when the company announced they were going to enforce a new $2.99 monthly fee, I disconnected my account.
My Self-Serving Bias was saying, “I can save that money on my own. What do I need to pay $2.99 a month to Digit for?!”
Digit: Always just a money-saving app on top of an algorithm… when it could be so much more.
Even though the fee was small, the “irony of paying money to save money was too much” for some, including me, and I never reconnected my account. Digit failed to spot the bias and just kept sending me innocuous email reminders to update my banking details.
What they missed was a big opportunity to change the story and shift my perspective.
Imagine — what if they had repositioned themselves from a money saving/ money management app to a self-care tool? (stay with me here…)
Digit is a new kind of self-care platform. Every 6–8 months, Digit makes sure you can treat yourself to the vacation, spa weekend, shopping spree, dinner party, home upgrade, or paid off credit card debt you need to live a happy life.
If they had told that story, I would have framed my relationship with the app very differently.
I believe I can save a little money every week if I have to, but a memorable self-care experience every 6–8 months is not something I can do on my own.
“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”
We use objects the way they are traditionally meant to be used. If we need a paperweight, but only have a hammer, we may not think to use the hammer as a paperweight.
Functional Fixedness keeps us from experiencing old things in new ways, and in my experience that goes for any kind of product, not just objects.
About a decade ago, denim was the clothing staple for women everywhere in the US.
For nearly every day-to-day occasion, from daywear to casual evening, jeans anchored a woman’s outfit.
At that point Lululemon had been around for a while, but they began to see a change in the way customers wore their athletic and yoga-inspired clothing.
As a small niche of women increasingly wore Lululemon gear outside of the gym, overall jean sales were starting to decline and Lululemon made a pointed discovery — they were no longer just in the athletic/ gear business. They were in the fashion business.
Their styles evolved into fashion-forward cuts and prints, aesthetic began to take precedence over performance, and their story expanded into a brand-led vision for who the modern, active woman was… all while the new ‘athleisure’ category was beginning to emerge.
Well said.
While it’s unclear where the athleisure name came from, Lululemon took it, owned it, and ran with it. They became the poster child for athlesiure and thereby gave mainstream women a clear signal of when and how to wear their clothing.
If Lululemon had continued to run their company like a pure workout brand in those early days, the mainstream consumer would have kept using it merely as workout clothing — in the gym, for a limited purpose, and clear-cut use case.
That Functional Fixedness Bias was reversed with a refreshed brand story.
People can’t properly discover your new product if they expect it to work like an old standard. After all, our expectations frame our experiences.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”
As I have written before, new languages and narratives that force your customer to engage with your product outside of the typical consideration set can help you get past the bias.
You have to knock users out of their fixed mental boxes in order to come to your product free of preconceived notions.
Only then will they accept the experience you’ve intended.
Our biases are always among us. We are either letting them guide the way, or deliberately working against them.
The key to getting through to your audience is not only to understand what those biases are, but what they reveal about the person who holds them.
“We find comfort among those who agree with us — growth among those who don’t.”
I’ve written in the past that “You dig and dig and dig until a market path is revealed.”
The perfect story, just like strategy, already exists. There is already a compelling, loyalty-building narrative hiding in the DNA of your brand. If you pull apart the floorboards and start shoveling at the dirt underneath, it will be there.
It’s your job to find it and bring it to life.
There’s always money in the banana stand, and there’s always brand equity hiding in the foundational story of your company.
This excavation mindset matters because it pushes you to look in the right direction.
Many CEOs I’ve worked with believed that their brand story was either a shallow retelling of, “I had a need for this, so I created it” or an entirely fictitious story made to fit into a product offering.
While it’s true that a good brand narrative may take some finessing, it’s always far, far bigger than a need or a product.
The brand stories that matter are the ones that usher us into a specific future where we are a more ideal version of ourselves.
Let me be clear, however, that this is not a vision or a mission. Nor is it your ‘why’ or reason for existing.
It has nothing to do with you as a brand, and everything to do with the customer as a human being.
Literally driving into the future in a Tesla.
What would you say Tesla’s story is?
Is it about the future of electric cars? Really? No, I don’t think so and you likely feel the same way. It’s much bigger than that.
Perhaps it’s the story of our planet — one heroic man’s attempt to reverse the environmental damage of so many generations before him…but again, that feels way too small.
Maybe it’s about the cool, mad scientist that dates actresses and builds awesome machines. That guy that proves everyone wrong and looks good doing it. While that may start to feel more exciting, it’s still far too granular.
Tesla’s story is about our very human need to progress.
It’s both our childhood longing to explore the unknown, and our adult compulsion to break our own limits.
It is the story of how our world should be.
Tesla is the company that turned science fiction into reality.
When you look at this deeper story, utility, environmentalism and engineering all fly out the window.
This narrative captures imaginations. It captures hope and possibility. It connects us to a specific future in which we are more ideal versions of ourselves.
That’s much bigger than the product, the need, or the founder could ever be.
Your company, no matter how small or mundane, can have an equally provocative brand story.
You just have to be willing to dig long enough, and in the right spots.
1. Search for: A hidden connection.
SoulCycle is built on the ideals of grit, determination and suffering.
You know how it goes. Dark rooms, front row politics, loud music, a trainer’s screaming encouragement blaring over the speakers.
It’s meant to be a very soulful experience all about you… but also a very hard, consuming, exhausting experience that leaves you a very sweaty, yet hopefully changed person.
Compare SoulCycle to the last exercise craze that was perhaps this sweeping — Jazzercise or Jane Fonda aerobics of the 70’s and 80’s—and you can see it speaks to a very different mentality.
SoulCycle isn’t about exercise. It’s about belonging to an elite tribe. You only get it if you’ve been in that room.
Somewhere in the mid-2000’s, the founders of SoulCycle realized the definition of health was changing for the affluent American woman.
Concepts of healthy mind and body were melding, a subgroup of upper middle-class millennial women were in constant search of a ‘secret’ to health they didn’t feel they could get from traditional medicine or their doctor, and there was a very strong emerging belief that exercise had to be hard. You had to sweat bucketloads for it to count.
That’s why SoulCycle exalted these virtues in their brand story. They could have talked about weight loss or cardiovascular health but they didn’t.
Instead, they talked about a mind-body connection, meditative sport, pain suffering, and ultimate euphoria.
… and that hidden connection proved to be a goldmine.
I find connections between cultural signals, trends, behaviors, political climates, industry movements, subgroups, emerging tastes, innovations, mentalities — a whole world of indicators — and my client companies.
You know what’s amazing? No matter who the client is, there’s always a hidden connection somewhere.
If you’re a founder, you launched your company because on some level, consciously or subconsciously, you sensed a changing tide.
Founders are always taking in ambient information, passively digesting signals from far outside of their industry, and building their companies on that larger scope of understanding.
The connection exists, and if you can find it, you can leverage it in your brand story.
Unpack your thinking and see where it leads you.
2. Search for: The missing hero.
Plenty of industries have stagnant pockets where, even if there is innovation, users are generally disenfranchised and deserve something better.
That was the case before Casper.
To this day, you can walk into mattress stores like this one (although they’re starting to slowly disappear from the landscape) and indulge miles of choice overload:
There was little to no innovation, either in product or business model.
And very little ever changed.
Casper saw an opportunity to not only enter the space with a different mattress and model, they also saw a chance to assume the voice of a hero in the industry.
Casper is the mattress brand that said enough is enough. There is a better way.
Casper website, September 26th, 2017.
From the outset, Casper positioned itself as a hero that advocated for what was right by the consumer.
No other mattress brand had ever come close to assuming that role.
Language and story that put the consumer in a co-creator, co-hero role amplified that perception, and allowed Casper to change the baseline for the consumer.
Casper woke us up to the fact that sleep should be simple.
Casper website, September 26th, 2017.
There are different kinds of hero roles. You can speak truth to power, you can challenge the status quo, or you can even argue for a return to what’s familiar and right.
Heroes all have one thing in common — they stand for something.
If your audience is lacking an advocate that can fight for what’s in their best interests, you can be that hero.
Playing the hero comes with added scrutiny, and requires commitment as well as a high founder profile… but if you can successfully fill that gap, it comes with a powerful brand story.
3. Search for: A retelling of the past.
Where you come from is important, but that story only matters if you’re willing to tell it in the right way.
Your story is not a history.
It‘s not a recounting of what happened. It’s a point of inspiration that will define everything which happens tomorrow.
In my article on Creating Brand Legends, I point out Chanel as a company that has retold their history as a way of connecting the brand to the future.
In these 20 frenetically breathtaking short videos, a new generation of consumers is reacquainted with Chanel’s personal inflection point as a female designer.
The sixth film in the series, titled Mademoiselle, is especially powerful in placing Chanel in the lives and histories of all of us.
You simply cannot watch this film and not feel as though Chanel changed history, and after her, nothing was the same again.
If you watch those pivotal short films, you’ll understand that Coco Chanel’s story was couched in the new lens of modern feminism. It is not a story of the past. It’s a spark point that will forever define the future, and us as women.
You, too, can stitch yesterday to tomorrow, and create a compelling brand story.
A story of the past should be a lens that also provides a glimpse into the future. It is both forward-looking and backward-looking.
The narratives that stir us have to power to reveal who we once were, and who we will become.
Increasingly for brands, story is the strategy and strategy is the story. If you can weave a story arc that shows your vision of the world and how your brand will get us to that future, you will draw consumers to your horizon.
Every industry has a language, and every company can either choose to use that language or create a new one.
In manufacturing, we typically speak a language of ethics. Values, quality, hard work, jobs, output and history all point to an ethical hierarchy in the space.
In cancer medicine it’s a language of conflict, with phrases like ‘the war on cancer’, ‘battling the disease’, ‘ ‘fighting the illness’, ‘staying brave’ and ‘soldiering on’.
In the beauty industry, we used to speak a language of ideals — youth, delicateness, lightness and western definitions of femininity. Today that language is (slowly) evolving to be one of identity instead — body positivity, diversity, strength, resistance, waving your flag and so on.
Regardless of the industry, a specific language exists… and that language matters.
Language is a crucial element in your brand strategy because it frames the entire user experience for your customers.
When you choose to adopt a certain vernacular, you’re creating the foundation on which customers will build their perceptions.
The Power Of An Educated Customer
Language educates and influences your customer in three important ways:
Changed behaviors: How, when or where to use it. This is especially important in new categories, or when there’s very limited time to educate (such as mobile app on-boarding experiences).
Changed expectations: The value of using it. Important if the value is intangible or mundane (like money-saving or insurance).
Changed beliefs: Why you’re better. Critical, especially for challenger brands or new entrants that need to migrate users from competitors, or when the perceived cost of migration is high.
There’s no greater power than that of an educated customer. When your user really understands how to use you, how using you creates value for them, and why there’s no one else that can do it better than you, then the playing field shifts in your favor.
There are some great examples of how companies in very different industries have leveraged language to their advantage.
Here are three ways to control the conversation.
1. The language of identifiers.
We’re often inclined to compare apples to apples when qualifying a purchase as customers. We may look at one platform compared to another and try to see which is lacking in comparable features.
But sometimes, comparing apples to apples can hide important, hard-to-describe details that make one option far more superior to another.
Think Slack channels, Lululemon’s athleisure category or Ikea’s flat-packed furniture. All of these identifiers gave us subtle clues for how something should be used or compared. They revealed a hidden value or use case we may not have otherwise understood before purchase.
The same mechanic works for more abstract, experience-driven identifiers as well.
We all know Starbucks isn’t a brand powerhouse because of its superior coffee or fair prices. Starbucks, more than anything else, is a deeply comfortable space akin to home.
Whether you need to meet a colleague, find a place to relax and read, need a power outlet to charge up your phone, are desperately seeking a free cup of cold water in a foreign city, or have to get some work done, you understand that Starbucks is the only place to go… every time.
So how did we come to know that?
Because Starbucks gave it a new name.
Early in their brand messaging, they were smart to insert subtle references to The Third Place — where “all the comforts of your home and office” are available to you, without judgement and without limit.
It was an identifier that didn’t exist before, and once it did, we suddenly understood where Starbucks fit into our daily lives and hearts. We understood how, when and why to use it.
Naming it The Third Place allowed us to understand its value in a way that couldn’t be explained through words otherwise.
Creating new identifiers forces your audience to be open to an entirely new kind of experience, belief or expectation.
Plenty of brands try to communicate a home or work environment, but no one else has been able to make us inherently understand it the way Starbucks has.
If they simply called it a ‘workspace’ or ‘your second home’, we would have still failed to understand the true depth of value this Third Space afforded us as consumers.
The new identifier forced us to erase any preconceived notions or expectations, and be open to a different kind of coffee house experience.
2. The language of metrics.
Oftentimes, the biggest player in the room dictates the metrics we all go by.
Whether it’s number of features, size and number of customers, revenue, amount of licenses sold, being named “Top Company” XX years in a row, number of countries launched, company size, growth or anything else, those metrics work for them, but they may not work for you.
So why do we aspire to meet or exceed those same measures (and usually fail)? Because we let another company dictate the language of metrics.
Any metric that somehow quantifies value to the customer, with hard numbers or soft descriptions, falls into the language of metrics and should be carefully considered before blindly followed.
In the big data industry, the language of metrics has taken an especially unremarkable turn.
A quick survey of some major players shows the same metrics over and over again:
Hortonworks
Three generic measures meant to help the customer make a decision.
IBM Analytics
Different, but not really.
New Relic
Remarkably similar.
Iguazio
A promising newcomer in the space that still sounds the same.
This list could go on and on.
When you use the same metrics as everyone else, all you’re saying is (surprise!) you’re like everyone else.
If you’ve read any of my writing, you know that the golden rule of brand strategy is to be different, not better — and certainly not the same.
Many spaces with two major players fall into a “better” trap. Box’s brand is a better version of Dropbox, but that does nothing to differentiate them. Better is actually worse. Different is what matters.
MapR seems to get that.
They don’t use the same metrics as everyone else, and it makes the customer think differently about how to compare their platform to others:
Agility and engines.
That’s different.
It’s a different language to measure by, and a set of parameters that puts MapR in a better position than if they had just repeated the same metrics of scalability, number of customers, speed and security as others.
When you change the metrics, you move the goalpost closer to your brand and farther away from your competitors.
Check your language and see if there isn’t another set of metrics that matters more to your customers, while sidelining your opponents.
3. The language of vocabulary.
Your day-to-day vocabulary matters. It’s another form of language that signals what people can expect from your brand. It also dictates CTAs and consumer behavior.
And it’s easy to see in a place like the nonprofit sector.
In charity, we often speak in complementary tones of lack and pride. Themes of needing, scarcity and suffering are meant to inspire guilt and short-term action… while language that congratulates us for pulling through and saving, rescuing, or collaborating delivers the quick relief we need from that guilt.
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Speaking in a vocabulary that people expect from your brand can be a good thing.
After all, if you’re looking for something purely utilitarian, like car tires for example, you’re not looking for anything aspirational. You just want to know that the tires work, right?
Maybe, but Falken Tires decided to challenge that thinking.
In a space where much older and more established tire makers already owned huge market share, they had to create a new conversation that put them at an advantage.
In 2016, they changed their tagline from Falken High Performance Tires to something very different with On The Pulse.
“Competitors are all communicating on quality, reliability and safety but for a challenger brand like Falken we don’t have 50 years to build a reputation,” according to their Head of Marketing in Europe, Stephan Cimbal — and he’s right.
On The Pulse is human-centered language that shifts the discussion away from reputation and toward Falken’s core strength: a youthful, adrenaline-fueled experience that ties into their connection with motorsports, soccer, and events like Red Bull’s air race.
They saw “an area of communication that’s not used by competitors” and took advantage of that in order to be “something like the Red Bull of the tire industry: younger, dynamic, quicker and not so ‘business as usual’ like the others”.
This is a challenger tire brand that revolves around excitement, while others are tethered to heritage. Suddenly, the consumer’s field of perception widens and Falken falls into the consideration set.
By changing the language, they shifted the playing field.
You can do the same.
Your language is choice. An important one.
So many brands default into whatever has already been defined by another company— usually the oldest (or the biggest) player in the space — and not only play by someone else’s rules, but miss a huge opportunity to create a new set of rules that benefit themselves.
A new language can unlock audiences that simply couldn’t hear you before.
The goalpost is different for brand-led companies.
Decisions are 100% emotional.
That’s not hyperbole. It’s scientific fact. Without emotions, we’d have incredible difficulty choosing even the simplest of things, such as what to shoes to wear.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered that fact a few years ago while studying patients with lesions in the area of the brain where emotions are generated. These were people with full control of their logical faculties, but unable to feel emotions.
Fascinatingly, they were normally functioning patients with one very notable exception:
They couldn’t make decisions.
The vast majority of decisions have benefits and drawbacks on both sides. Choosing between blue shoes and red shoes may involve some logic (the blue shoes are more comfortable, the red shoes look cleaner), but when it comes down to it, there’s no one prevailing logic that will get you to the final choice of which shoes to wear.
It takes a non-logical leap to get to the final point of decision-making, and you can’t get to that decision point without emotional input.
So yes, we all use emotion when choosing things, especially as consumers. Not just little things, but big things, too.
Feeling With Dollars
My car was an expensive emotional choice. My entrepreneurial career (no matter how wtf and omg I can’t take this anymore it has been at times) is an emotional choice I make every day.
I bought $85 worth of cosmetics yesterday. They’re good brands, (logic) make me look nice (logic), are high quality (logic) and are necessary for my brand research in the luxury space (logic-ish)… but really, I felt like hot shit walking through Sephora and trying on makeup that was going to transform me into an empowered, beautiful, unstoppable woman (emotion).
You already know what made me drop the cash.
If 100% of decisions are made emotionally, why are we still using logic-driven, pain-point focused messaging frameworks to brand our companies?
The best brands, I mean the:
Pay $85 for a brow gel and mascara brands
Pre-order an electric car without a guaranteed delivery date brands
Spend hours waiting in line on Lafayette Street for Tuesday’s drop kind of brands
… these brands go way beyond logic in their positioning and messaging.
There is no pain point to solve here. There is no real, hard-pressing need. There is, instead, a human intangible that all of them have capitalized on. An emotional need that’s rarely expressed.
Whether that’s to fit into a tribe, realize one’s potential or escape reality, unspoken emotions like these are far more compelling than any pain point.
For the mid-management clients of your SaaS product, it might be to get the company recognition they feel they deserve but never receive
For the entrepreneurial users of your productivity app, it may be to feel they have real and meaningful jobs just like their 9 to 5 corporate counterparts
For the C-level buyers of your enterprise AI product, it may be to make their mark on the company, or even the industry at large
For all of these, there is a very strong emotional need that supersedes a logical one.
That’s not to say that customer pain points and needs shouldn’t be a part of your messaging process, but they shouldn’t be the end point, either.
Changing behavior and controlling perceptions is especially important for brand-led companies as opposed to branded ones.
In my last post, I discussed the difference between branded and brand-led in the context of strategy, but here’s a quick rundown:
Branded companies have an identity, but consumers truly identify them by their products. When a product supersedes the brand, a company is always at the mercy of the consumer and their needs. → Think American Apparel and Old Navy
Brand-led companies, in contrast, play the long game and require more investment. The identity of the brand supersedes the product and allows a company to resist certain market forces. → Think Nike and Shinola
Brand-led companies clearly have heavy challenges when it comes to messaging and narrative.
They are in the long game of changing behavior, and changing behaviors requires certain ingredients.
But the story… the real story that most frameworks out there miss, is not very obvious.
I have a simple framework that will get you thinking in the right direction, but first we have to start with basics.
5 Truths of Brand-Led Messaging
1. Change the baseline
You can compete directly with your competitors in the landscape, or change the playing field altogether.
A good, brand-led messaging strategy begins by telling a new story that makes your direct competitors irrelevant to your core audience.
Evernote wasn’t a productivity app. It was a personal world for “Your Life’s Work”.
Yeah, it was weird when they started selling socks, but hey, it was so much more than just a way to keep notes. For a core and enthusiastic group of gig economy users, their “life’s work” couldn’t fit into a lowly to-do list app. Evernote’s messaging changed the baseline.
One of my favorite present-day examples is Moon Juice, which bills itself as “Plant-sourced alchemy to elevate body, beauty and consciousness” and has the Gwyneth Paltrow GOOP seal of approval.
As I’ve said in a previous article, Moon Juice may be riding the celebrity wellness wave, but it knows where to play.
The brand goes after highly motivated, self-care obsessed, information-junkie millennials that want a product to work where traditional medicine may have failed, while dazzling their imagination much like K-beauty does.
Products such as “Brain Dust” for mental flow, “Beauty Dust” for luster and the “Cosmic Provision Collection” of snacks for enzymatically live eating have proven extremely popular as Moon Juice continues to grow.
Whether it is real science or health-tainment is nearly irrelevant.
Moon Juice’s strategy is to literally be the magic potion in a world of medicines — with emphasis on the magic.
Founder Amanda Chantal Bacon is cutting through the extremely cluttered self-care and supplements space by changing the baseline.
And she’s winning.
From packaging and naming, to customer journey and narrative, Moon Juice is not a vitamin or mere health food. It’s a self-care tonic “alchemized to align you with the mighty cosmic flow needed for great achievement.”
No amount of logic can compete with that.
(You can read my full article, “3 Things New Luxury Brands Can Teach Established Marketers” here. Paywalled, sorry.)
2. Create contrast
Nancy Duarte has written some great books on the art of presentation and storytelling, but the biggest takeaway she left me with was the power of juxtaposing ‘what is’ with ‘what could be.
That constant up and down carries people through an emotional narrative.
She calls it the Secret Structure, and it’s compelling not only in presentation, but in brand messaging as well.
There is a harmony to the juxtaposition that resonates with all of us:
Today vs. tomorrow
The current me vs. the true me
The reality I have vs. the reality I deserve
Who people see me as now vs. who I really know I can be inside
What’s happening here, however, is more than just rhythm.
Extremes are hard to follow. By connecting the new and unfamiliar with the old and familiar, we’re managing that tension and making it palatable.
“When it comes to new product or service adoption, the outcomes follow the same inverted U-shape curve. If something is too novel, it’s unfamiliar, weird and harder to understand.
But if it’s exactly the same as what is happening already, it’s boring and there’s no reason to change behavior. In between, though, it’s just right.”
Create just enough contrast to spur action. Brands like Under Armour, Slack and Dove have done just that.
3. Signal before changing lanes
If you’ve done your job as a brand-led organization, people will feel like they have jurisdiction over your company. They will feel like the brand itself belongs them, not as consumers, but as owners.
If you think about it, that’s both a very powerful force, and a frightening one.
As a brand, it means you can’t just call the shots. You have to make people believe they call the shots… that every decision you make for the brand is one that they would make themselves.
When Coke changed it’s formula in 1985, consumers lost their minds. Comments like, “Changing Coke is like God making the grass purple” pretty much summed up the sentiment at the time, and forced the company to bring back the original recipe as Coke Classic within 3 months.
Funny thing is, if you considered their campaign and positioning at the time, it made total sense to introduce the new Coke to the American market.
Except for one consideration.
Coke’s president and COO Donald R. Keough said it best himself.
‘’All of the time and money and skill that we poured into consumer research could not reveal the depth of feeling for the original taste of Coca-Cola.”
In other words, the company didn’t really own the brand. The consumer did.
That “depth of feeling” was a clear sense of ownership.
We saw the same thing happen when Netflix split their product tiers and sent stock prices plummeting as 800,000 subscribers left. They eventually weathered the storm, but not without a painfully drawn out comeback effort.
An even more poignant example is Chapstick’s 2011 ad.
The 2011 ad that got Chapstick into a lot of trouble.
If you’re a post-boomer woman like me, it might not seem like much. It’s even relatable. I own 15 chapsticks, I just don’t know where they are. And ok, it’s objectifying but I’m used to images like this.
However, when this ad went live, a blogger posted their views on how the ad was sexist and disgusting and the sentiment spread like wildfire.
Let’s remember it was 2011 and brand social media scandals were part of the news cycle, and the reaction was very poorly handled by the company, but nonetheless people were incensed.
It even inspired a Change.org petition to “Remove Ads That Objectify Women and Sexualize Lip Balm!”
… but wait a second, aren’t most heritage women’s brands built on some form of sexualization of women?
Why did Chapstick get chastised while others like Calvin Klein and Bulgari crossed the same line on a regular basis?
It’s because people like me didn’t own the brand.
In 2011, the consumers who owned Chapstick were our moms and grandmothers. They were the moral, price-sensitive American women who saw Chapstick as a utility for chapped lips and not a beauty product associated with feminine sexuality.
They’re the women who grew up watching these kinds of Chapstick ads in the 1970’s (and likely the older demographic that Chapstick was trying to move away from):
‘Where Do Lost Chapsticks Go’ was too much of a break from the current messaging and people felt betrayed.
If you’re going to change lanes, signal first. Otherwise you’re going to crash.
4. Know which ‘why’ you’re answering
I’ve talked about the ‘why’ before, and if you didn’t hear it from me, you probably heard it from someone else lauding Simon Sinek (as they should).
But what the ‘why’ actually is seems to be debatable.
I’ve seen the ‘why’ made synonymous with the ‘vision’ of a company countless times in branding articles.
But I disagree.
The why is not your vision.
It’s your reason for existing, and it answers the question, “Why should I care?”
Filmmaker Andrew Stanton drives this point home in his talk on storytelling for film and media.
It’s your job, as a brand, to make the consumer care.
Lego’s why is because wholesomeplay should happen at every age
Andreessen Horowitz’s why is because systems will change humanity
Chipotle’s why is because eating right can heal the planet
None of these are company visions, but it’s easy to see how the vision was derived from the why.
When you can answer the question, “why should I care?” you’re going to force a reaction, and a reaction is the marker of a strong brand-led message.
5. Earn respect, don’t demand it
This truth is a product of the current climate. Markets are extremely fragmented, information is cheap and barriers to entry (both on the supply side and demand side) have crumbled.
Luxury brands, heritage brands, exotic brands and limited-access brands that once exerted authority are quickly losing power.
You can say you’re #1, best-in-class or world-renowned, but those aren’t differentiating markers anymore. There are just too many choices and too many alternatives… and in general, post-boomer consumers are too self-empowered to take a brand at face value.
Talk is cheap. Actions are the new currency.
When a brand takes bold risks to resonate clearly with their core audience, perhaps even alienating non-core users, consumers take notice.
Bold risks don’t have to be huge. They just have to be deliberate.
One of my favorite music secrets is the W Hotels app.
W Hotels app (Home Screen → Music Screen → Mix Loading)
Everything from the homepage to the top level menu and content revolves around music. And not just any music — tons of custom mixes by amazing DJs you’ll never find anywhere else.
Why a music-centric app? Because the W experience is never about the room. It’s about the tribe.
I’ve spent countless nights at Ws across the world but I’ve only ever slept in a W room once.
I, like most people, go there for coffee meetings, dinner meetings and parties. It’s where you gather, and no matter where you are in the hotel, incredible music is pulsing through the air.
W knows that music can transport you. Music is the experience and if they can own the experience of discovering, consuming and feeling music, then they own the in-app relationship.
That’s why music is organized by common areas in the hotel, so you can move through the music the way you’d move through a party or night out with friends.
It was a bold move that de-emphasized room bookings (like most other hotel apps) and elevated a sense of discovery and belonging instead.
In fact, the only place you won’t hear music at a W is in the actual room you’re sleeping in.
A Framework For Getting Started
Good brand messaging solves multiple problems at once.
A strong story can make issues around user behavior, trust, retention and competitive forces disappear. Just look at Airbnb and their brilliant “Belong Anywhere” positioning.
It also takes the complex and makes it simple.
The framework below is designed to get you thinking in the right direction. It asks hard questions that combine user psychographics with needs and patterns.
The point is to go past the obvious and find the powerful subtext that you can incorporate into your brand.
Remember, branded messaging usually addresses the pain point, but brand-led messaging addresses the reward.
Use this framework to move from surface-level pain points to soul-level desires.
This framework is not an ending point, but rather a starting point to help you:
Empathize with your customer and see the world through their POV
Ask questions that get to the subconscious truth, not the conscious answer
See the invisible matrix that controls your user’s beliefs, behaviors and perceptions
An emotion-driven framework to help uncover the stories and language necessary for strategic messaging.
You can see there are a lot of heavy questions here, but all of them tie back to two things: messaging opportunities within a user persona, and patterns between personas.
Using this framework takes time and some digging, so let’s look at examples two ways.
Patterns
Let’s assume we’re developing messaging for a food tech startup that’s developed a vegetarian meat alternative that tastes and looks like the real thing.
Their strategy is to go after an untapped market in the millennial male, beef-eating, middle America, steak-and-potatoes audience who grew up with a strong narrative about eating meat as part of a healthy diet.
It’s counterintuitive and seems like a difficult demo to capture, but if they can get it right, there’s tremendous opportunity.
I want to be clear that this is not researched, focus-grouped or based in any hard findings. This is a shallow set of personas made up for a fictional company, but it makes a point about finding patterns between personas:
Three patterns are already apparent:
Strong themes of personal excellence.
All 3 personas are seeking some sort of optimization (emotionally or physically).
All 3 have a strong sense of autonomy. Seeking a sense of control.
We know that this needs to be about the customer experience, and we know that our product must lend itself to that experience.
Thus a plausible idea would be to make our product about performance.
This is a meat alternative made to perform better than meat. It’s not a substitute, it’s an improvement. It’s also about the internal, physical and emotional performance of our users.
Better performance of the body + better performance of the soul.
Already we see the message is not about health. It’s about reaching your personal best.
That’s a very unique message that resonates with our three personas, differentiates among other heath- or planet-driven players in the market, and raises the baseline.
Messaging Opportunities
Now let’s look at messaging opportunities within the Dave persona.
We immediately see a few messaging opportunities. Keep in mind these aren’t necessarily the words you’d use in your messaging, but they are threads to follow and see if they create a compelling brand.
Internal Qualifiers show Dave is looking to reach the next level within himself. A message around a new level of mind/ body strength, no matter how subtle, will matter to him.
External Qualifiers are interesting. If we gave Dave a new narrative around his identity, he may find the freedom and flexibility he’s looking for in not just a product, but his lifestyle.
Behaviors are interesting, too. We know Dave appreciates premium, upmarket offerings. He’s extremely intelligent and empowered in his personal lifestyle products and realizes you get what you pay for. Messaging around a personal health journey fits well into his life story.
The beauty of this matrix is the interconnectedness of messaging. The three concepts within Dave above harmonize with our observed pattern across Dave, Mike and John.
Best Practices
Always be customer centric. Your ‘why’, your ‘what’ and your ‘how’ should be about them, not you.
Separate the product from the brand. They can be closely linked in the end, but ultimately a brand-led company is not promising a product experience. It’s promising a human experience.
Look for cultural trends and constructs all around you in daily life. For example, significant trends around self-care and wellness, personal transformation, redefined parenthood and decentralized luxury are all front and center for the millennial generation right now.
As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit”. A framework will tell you all of the boxes you have to tick off, but finding a single message (or handful of messages) to meet all those requirements is difficult. This is the art of brand strategy and strategic messaging. Don’t give up. Just keep pushing yourself. When you get it, you know it.
Fill out this framework and then leave it alone. The hidden truths you uncover will germinate in your mind and eventually find a path to the right message.
Ah, messaging. So simple, yet so convoluted.
The next time you hear a brand message that stirs your soul, pay attention to how it works. I guarantee it’s working on multiple levels, solving multiple problems, with one eloquent solution.
The stories we tell ourselves shape our life experience. As a brand, you can insert yourself as an instrumental part of that life experience, but only if you truly understand what that experience is in the first place.
Take the time to do your messaging right. Your customers deserve it.
Smart brands convey a strong, overt benefit that lines up with people’s actions and beliefs. Great brands, however, are smart enough to see the gap between people’s actions and beliefs, and leverage it for greater opportunity — and they do it without you realizing.
Cognitive dissonance occurs “when your ideas, beliefs, or behaviors contradict each other.” If you think you’re financially responsible but then feel guilty spending $400 on a new pair of shoes, you’re experiencing the weight of cognitive dissonance. When you buy a new computer but look up reviews and prices afterward to convince yourself it was a smart purchase, the stress of cognitive dissonance is driving your behavior. It’s a landmark theory pioneered by social psychologist Leon Festinger that has impacted the way we view behavior and culture ever since it was introduced in 1957.
As a brand strategist, I search for the clues that underly what people think and how they act. Here, we’ll dig deeper into the principles and ideas that turn this concept into a powerful tool:
What cognitive dissonance is in a human context, as well as a brand context
How to spot the gap, and a look at companies who are leveraging cognitive dissonance to better serve and sway their customers (usually under the radar)
How to employ the concept in your own company for better product design, branding, engagement and loyalty
That Feeling When
You can return the $400 pair of shoes, or you can keep them and tell yourself they’re handmade in Italy and will be a wardrobe staple for years to come. You can search and search until you find a better computer at a better price, or instead comfort yourself in the changed belief that it was a good investment and what really matters is that you no longer have to worry about your programs constantly crashing.
If you’ve ever bought an expensive luxury item or untested piece of hardware, you’ll agree that none of those options ever feels quite right. Either by lack of information or lack of self-control, there is a measurable discomfort we feel when what we believe is not synonymous with what we do.
Cognitive Dissonance Theory explains how that mismatch drives our behavior… the urge to pacify and rectify ourselves, even when no one is watching.
It’s easy to see that the greater the gap between your actions and beliefs, the greater the tension that is experienced… and the greater our urge to do something about it. We have three choices in dealing with that tangible tension:
Change our beliefs
Change our actions
Change the way we perceive our actions
Depending on the situation, you’ll go for one, two or all three of those options in relieving your state of cognitive dissonance.
Most of us think we’re honest, but call it a “fib” instead of a lie when we act dishonest in an awkward situation. Calling it a fib lowers the tension between believing we are good, honest people, and the fact that we failed to tell the truth.
Cognitive dissonance plays many roles in our lives, ranging from self-denial to simply getting through the day.
Can’t Escape It
By the way, it’s everywhere.
We have all kinds of conflicting desires and beliefs, not to mention outside influences, internal biases, and the fact that the expectations and restrictions placed upon us change in different environments.
For example, most people think that climate change will harm Americans, but they don’t think it will harm them personally:
…and of course we believe in religious freedoms, but the expressions of those religious freedoms by others can make us uncomfortable:
Washington Post, November 17th, 2015 (but note the PRRI study is from 2011)
From the time we’re kids believing (but not really believing, but maybe kinda believing) in Santa Claus, to being teenagers who convinced ourselves we “like, omg, really loved prom” even though it sucked and was nothing like the movies we grew up with, to being adults who cheat on our diets because we can always jog for an extra 30 minutes tomorrow… it’s a part of life.
Cognitive dissonance reveals our human nature by exposing:
What we want to believe about ourselves
How we truly view the world
How we want to be perceived by others
What we desire
What we feel can’t be said
What we fear, what we hope
A good brand will address subconscious drivers like these, and any company that makes it easy for a consumer to narrow the gap between what they believe and what they do will tap into a viable market opportunity.
They will create a product that makes it easy to change your behavior (Any.do, Wunderlist), or a story that makes it easy to change your beliefs (Starbucks, Supreme). Either way, your actions will match your words.
…but there are some brands that let you have your cake and eat it, too. They covertly allow you to maintain your current behaviors, but reap the rewards of lowered cognitive dissonance. These are the brands I find the most interesting.
Coddle Your Brain
A lot of startups have tried to solve the personal finance problem. Companies like Mint and LearnVest help you manage your budget by hooking up to your bank accounts and giving you transparency into your spending habits. The more you know, the more empowered you are to maintain and follow a plan that will turn you into the financially responsible person you believe you are.
The cognitive dissonance here is that many people want to believe they are smart with money, but oftentimes their actions prove otherwise. It can be a very emotionally taxing dissonance for some, so Mint and LearnVest have created products that change the behavior to be closer to the belief.
Digit, however, realized that for a lot of people, transparency wasn’t the issue. It was the behavior itself. Changing that action is incredibly difficult for most people because they overspend for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with transparency, including overwhelm, emotional spending and personal attitudes toward money.
Digit silently siphons money from your checking and savings balances every week into a separate account for safekeeping. You can “save money without thinking about it” because Digit sets aside money “in a way that you won’t notice.” In six months, you can be surprised to find out you have enough cash to take a trip to Europe or put a down payment on a car.
You maintain your spending behaviors, and still reap the rewards of lowered cognitive dissonance… a very attractive promise that Mint and LearnVest fail to offer.
Instead of a changed action, you have an adapted one that is far easier in practice.
Let’s think about another strong point of dissonance — charity. I’m not convinced anyone has permanently cracked this nut, but there have been a handful of brands who hacked cognitive dissonance in order to make charity happen where it might otherwise not have.
The gap is a) we believe ourselves to be charitable, kind, generous people, but b) we rarely give to charity. Standard practice here is to change our beliefs.
Can you really trust a charity to not be corrupt? Is there a charity for a cause that I’m truly passionate about? Will my $5 even make a difference?
It’s not that giving money isn’t easy or painless. Think of the last time you were at a grocery register and the checkout person asked you, “Would you like to donate $1 today to [insert charity here]?”
It’s a dollar, and it’s a yes or no answer. Dead simple with virtually no significant cost to you. But you likely said no.
You might be the same person, however, who said said yes to a “Buy One, Give One” brand like TOMS or Warby Parker (although Warby Parker takes a slightly different take on the concept.) Although it was far more trendy just a little while ago, Buy One, Give One is still a huge force and was woven into the very fabric of a brand like TOMS.
We tend to behave selfishly. It’s hard to give without getting something in return. TOMS let’s us give in the name of receiving every time we buy a pair of shoes.
You maintain your self-centered behavior, and still reap the reward of lowered cognitive dissonance… another very attractive promise that your checkout attendant simply can’t give you.
Brands like these relieve you of lower feelings such as guilt, worry and even shame, without ever saying it out loud. That’s why they have the potential to be so powerful.
It can be your product, your story or your user experience — all touch points are levers for easing the discomfort and helping people reinforce their view of who they are in the world.
We’re All Adults Here
When Stephen Dorff created a national wtf moment with his blu e-Cigs commercials, he was enacting a very deliberate campaign to reduce the huge cognitive dissonance existing in the minds of most smokers.
With stakes that high, a brand has to work on multiple fronts. When a behavior and belief stand in such opposition to each other, amplified by immeasurable public pressure and negative stereotypes, there is huge opportunity to reduce cognitive dissonance for your core audience.
blu could have just conveyed a more socially acceptable product, which was at the time supposedly deemed 95% safer than smoking regular cigarettes and posed far less risk to others through secondhand smoke. In fact, according to the brand, it allowed people to “enjoy smoking without letting it effect the people around me.” That would have been enough to adapt the action for many smokers. It gave you permission to smoke, and not feel so bad about it.
But the behavior of smoking itself has such a deeply ingrained stigma, they knew they had to take it one step further and change the action perception as well.
All you had to do was take it from the rugged, free-thinking, leather jacket wearing Stephen Dorff himself when he said, “I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I want to light up […] We’re all adults here. It’s time we take our freedom back. C’mon guys, rise from the ashes.”
Those are fighting words. Those are words that make it ok to be a smoker… words, I’ll add, that smokers never hear. It flipped the script and said you’re not the bad buy, you’re the victim. You don’t deserve to be vilified.
A new behavior coupled with a new narrative can be very strong, especially with marginalized groups. blu understood that and eased the intense cognitive dissonance smokers feel every day — something that would resonate with both casual smokers and life long addicts.
Please and Thank You
Brands that play cognitive dissonance often channel it as ‘permission’. They make it ok to stay the way you are, while reducing the emotional friction.
You can use it for good (finance, charity) or not so good (cigarettes). What’s worth noting is that generally speaking, different levels of dissonance create different factors.
Common overspending is often a punchline or the subject of a meme, while smoking doesn’t afford such light discourse. Political and religious ideals often require us to hold steadfast to one-sided arguments in order to resolve factual disconnects, but sneaking a slice of cake and moving your diet start date to tomorrow doesn’t summon the same sense of urgency.
Of course, there are some caveats to this, including the fact that different people feel different levels of dissonance on the same topics. It’s been found that extroverts are less likely to feel negative tension and less likely to change their minds than introverts are. We also have to keep in mind that different cultural backgrounds, genders and socio-economic status play a role, too.
Look Over Here
The funny thing about cognitive dissonance is that it feeds into itself. Here’s an example put forth by Dr. John M. Grohol…
Say you’re a student applying to two different universities and you rate each one before sending in your applications. You’re accepted to both schools and after some deliberation, choose the right one for you.
If you were asked to rate those same schools again after making your choice, you’d be likely to give a higher rating to the one you chose, even though nothing about that school has changed. We have a strong compulsion to prove to ourselves that we make good decisions. Even after the fact, we will continue to search for proof that we were right.
Many brands facilitate your ‘proof-searching’ so you can feel good about the purchase and feed the positive cycle.
Amazon’s weekly emails to Alexa users not only keeps them informed of Alexa’s new skills, but also protects against buyer’s remorse when users fail to immediately find the skills that would make it most useful to them.
Washio (R.I.P.) used to pacify my guilt with a special reward. Every time someone would come and pick up my laundry, they’d give me a tiny sample pack of the most heavenly dessert from DeLuscious. I’m not joking, it was unreal. I looked up their brownies to buy some for a party and they cost over $60 a dozen (!) Needless to say I didn’t make the purchase, but I can tell you that my crippling guilt over wasted money on laundry (that I really should have been doing myself) washed away when I got that brownie.
Gusto sends business owners a hearty congratulations every time payroll has been paid or tax forms have been filed. Keep in mind that a business owner isn’t actually doing that work. Gusto has automated both of those processes, but deliberately gives the pleasure of a reduced cognitive dissonance to the customer.
The message is always clear — “Relax, you made the right choice.”
You Are Here
Cognitive dissonance isn’t behind every brand, and it won’t apply to every founder or executive, but you will run across it at some point, whether it’s in marketing, user experience or attracting new demographics.
If it does apply, here’s how to start using these principles for your own company.
Start with yourself
If you want to be good at spotting it for your brand or product, look to yourself first. Cognitive dissonance can be easy to miss. It’s subtle and insidious by nature, and can take many forms. It’s easy to mistake it as ‘friction’ or a ‘pain point’.
In fact, I was inspired to write this piece because something strange happens to me when I travel. I find myself in heated political discussions with people in other countries, and have a near out of body experience when I suddenly realize that I’m defending a point of view that I wouldn’t normally hold in the United States — especially if the other party is being critical of America, American values, or its citizens.
If someone says, “Americans have really lost their way. The state of the country is shameful,” my normal response would be, “I understand where you’re coming from.” But when I’m overseas, I get defensive. Instead I’ll say something more like, “Well hold on, it’s not as simple as that. There’s a lot of fear and misinformation plaguing the country right now…”
Some of that is an immature, knee-jerk reaction to feeling personally attacked. Some of it is my desperate need to move away from divisive, anxiety-inducing language to something more constructive and less apocalyptic. But a lot of it, I’m realizing, is actually cognitive dissonance. There is a measurable difference between my conflicting beliefs, and it plays out in my actions.
Start by examining yourself and the people around you for a few weeks. See if you can surface dissonance in their actions and ideas, and figure out where the tension is coming from.
Ask the right questions
When you’re ready to apply it to your own customers and user base, begin with smart questions that dig a little deeper than the usual problem-solution statement.
What secret beliefs do my users hold?
What makes my users nervous?
Is there a driving emotion underneath each pain point?
Look for the gap that shows a misalignment. That gap will lead you to the core of your brand.
Choose your approach
Ask yourself: Can I change the story? Can I change the behavior? Or can I adapt/ “cheat” the behavior?
Nabisco couldn’t turn their sugary snacks into a diet food, but they could cheat the concept with 100 calorie packs that let people think they were changing a behavior to match their beliefs, relieving them of the cognitive dissonance… even though they weren’t entirely practicing healthy eating like an actual health food would require.
That was bolstered with carefully balanced marketing that promoted the changed belief that portion control is all it takes to make Oreos or Chips Ahoy! part of your diet.
This is where the artistry and science of brand strategy comes in. Depending on your approach, you’ll have to adapt your product development, brand narrative and any number of factors to beneficially leverage the dissonance for your consumers. A good place to start is to look at other brands (much like the ones I’ve outlined in this piece). See how they’ve done it and how you can apply the same approach to your brand challenge.
That Felt Good
In the larger scheme of things, we already know it’s important to give our customers a sense of agency. We know that reducing friction (experiential, emotional or otherwise) is crucial. And we know, above all else, a successful brand makes people feel good.
If you really want to hit the emotional triggers that make people trust and value a brand, you have to go deeper than the problem on the surface. You have to dig until you find the discrepancy — the gap that needs to be fixed — and resolve the tension.
That silent relief is the hidden key to winning your target.
I like to start every brand strategy for a new client with two simple questions. They may seem easy enough, but they actually reveal a tremendous amount of information about the mindset of a company’s leadership team while posing a much more difficult challenge than most people realize.
1. How is your brand perceived today?
2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future?
Before you write those off as simple questions, consider the fact that your answers can literally change the course of your business. Taken together, I like to call them the Perception Queries, and everyone can benefit from answering them.
Take a moment to answer them for yourself. Without expectation or marketing jargon, write down your own responses as sincerely as possible.
These are actually loaded questions that you can use to get laser focus on the direction of your brand strategy from the point you’re at today to where you need to be in 1, 3 and 5 years from now.
They will prove valuable at every juncture in your company’s trajectory, especially when easy short term growth opportunities gently nudge you away from your ultimate long term vision.
(Before reading the rest of this case study, you can watch my 5-minute primer below to get the most out of this exercise.)
TLDR Strategy: The Perception Queries
The smartest founders I’ve ever met have struggled with this question in our first meeting. That’s because they understand that the Perception Queries force them to predict the future of their industries, fully embracing the distance between where they are now and where they need to be — all without any guarantees that the world will look how they expect it to later on down the line. The very premise and viability of their businesses are tied up in these answers.
The responses I get usually fall into 1 of 3 categories:
The Vision/ Mission Response — “Our company builds the best widgets for the modern widget-using consumer who needs speed, quality and dependability.” No, this is not how a company is perceived. When I get some version of the company vision or mission as an answer, it often means that they haven’t stopped to empathize with the user. The Perception Queries force you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and feel what their relationship to your brand truly is… and it’s not a marketing line.
The Goal/ Model Response — “We want to be perceived as the #1 widget-maker in the US market within four years…” or “We’re the Uber for widgets…”. Of course everyone wants to own their market or adopt a proven model, but here’s the thing — if the opposite of your strategy is not also a strategy, then you don’t have a strategy to begin with. Nor do you have an answer to the Perception Queries. People who answer with a Goal/ Model response usually haven’t stopped to develop a clear hypothesis of the future they’re creating for.
The Characterizing Response — “We‘re perceived as fun, unique, nimble, creative, growing and smart today… but we want to be perceived as large, institutional, trustworthy and influential in the future.” If you’re answering with adjectives, you’re on the right track. Perception is a point of view, and when users take a specific view of your company, they characterize your brand in a similar way. But a long list of general adjectives like this can still lead you astray. The specificity and deliberate choosing of those characteristics is what matters.
Regardless of your answer, we can test and refine it by considering the world of the future, specifically the unique world you envision for your business.
I’ve talked about this before in my workshops because it’s fundamental to a strong brand identity. Your hypothesis of the future is how you see the world changing at a later point. The way you see the world in 2–5 years is at best an educated guess, and I often call this ‘making your bet’.
The best brands make their bet on the future, and then work to make that bet a reality.
If you imagine the future to be an endless set of possibilities as represented by a circle (or perhaps more accurately, a sphere), then your hypothesis is the small sliver of possibilities that will actually come to fruition.
If you’re Uber, your vision of the future isn’t that we will all be getting around in self-driving cars, but rather that manually operating your own car will become an outdated, dangerous, archaic activity that the public collectively rejects.
Once you have your vision of the future, your competitive set will shift.
The people who are really in your way aren’t those that are making similar products with similar features today, but rather those who are making the same prediction of the future.
Your competitors aren’t necessarily the ones making the same products. They’re the ones imagining the same future.
Snapchat was a social platform on par with Instagram and Facebook, but their vision of the future wasn’t about an app. It was about how we create and consume content. That’s why they created Snap Spectacles and suddenly became a hardware competitor in line with Apple. Anyone who paid attention to their hypothesis would have seen that coming.
Once you have your hypothesis and competitive set, every step of your brand strategy needs to project you past all other players to a defensible, forward-looking position.
If you want to get deeper into this landscape/ hypothesis exercise, go here.
Now we can return to our original two questions.
Once you know your hypothesis and what you need to project yourself past others in your space, consider the Perception Queries again.
1. How is your brand perceived today?
2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future
A characterizing answer is on the right track, but I often push people to get specific with their perceptions. Let’s imagine a young company that has recently entered the incredibly crowded travel booking space.
How is the brand perceived today? Well it’s new, so the perception is broad. Travel booking involves a lot of trust, especially in the face of legacy companies, so people will be hesitant and struggling to understand how the offering fits into their consideration set:
Startup Risky Novel Niche Techie Confusing Fun
I want to note here that it’s ok if peoples’ perception of you company today is broad. It’s not the best place to be, but that’s exactly what we’re going to fix in the near future. What isn’t ok is if your future perception is still very broad.
If a company knows how their brand is perceived today, the temptation is often to ‘fix’ the negative characterizations for their perception tomorrow:
Future Perception A
But having a positive future image is the booby prize. Positive doesn’t mean unique, and it certainly doesn’t mean differentiated. It may seem like a good decision, but it leaves money on the table.
Most importantly, it creates a very broad perception that can be confused with any other travel booking company out there. There is no specific assumption about the future of travel here. This is a perception that many brands embody today and as time goes on, will only become a baseline of expectation for travelers.
Let’s narrow our focus and really dig to see what is under the modern travel experience. We want to see what the future (and our future perception) might look like.
As I’ve written in the past, travel is increasingly becoming a very personal experience. We travel to find ourselves, to discover who we are, to understand why we’re here and where we belong in the world. It’s why industries like adventure travel and eco-tourism are flourishing.
If we venture to create a more narrow perception with even just this little bit of information, we get something very different:
Future Perception B
Note that this narrow perception doesn’t mean you can’t still be trustworthy, established and offering a clear benefit.
It simply means that you are willing to take a bolder stance, to be a far more specific brand that resonates with users who are seeking that same brand experience. It runs in parallel with what every marketer, salesperson and founder already knows — it’s about benefits, not features.
What we have here is already more familiar than you might realize. In the mid- to late-2000’s, a proliferation of travel startups had entered the space. Every week there seemed to be another company trying to disrupt the industry, and every single one of them could be described as startup, risky, novel, niche, techie, confusing, and fun.
However, two major companies made it through the tumult. HomeAway and Airbnb evolved their brands for the future, but one of them took the bold risk of defining a narrow perception, and is the clear winner today:
Your second answer to the Perception Queries is the one that really matters.
You can start from anywhere, even if it’s the same place as your competitors, but you need to know where you’re going if you want to stop playing in someone else’s backyard.
Brand strategy requires tough decisions that will touch every aspect of your business. Asking the right questions up front is crucial.
More important than the right answers, are the right questions.
If you’re a founder, I’d recommend asking your team the very same things as well. Their responses may surprise you.
The Perception Queries are important for an entire team because they go beyond a Vision or Mission. They aren’t marketing soundbytes.
They’re a pact — an agreement that everyone is moving in the same direction — and that’s something worth knowing.
[Update: This article has been updated here, along with a 5-minute video covering the major principles discussed in this piece, here.]
I like to start every brand strategy for a new client with two simple questions. They may seem easy enough, but they actually reveal a tremendous amount of information about the mindset of a company’s leadership team while posing a much more difficult challenge than most people realize.
1. How is your brand perceived today?
2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future?
Before you write those off as simple questions, consider the fact that your answers can literally change the course of your business. Taken together, I like to call them the Perception Queries, and everyone can benefit from answering them.
Take a moment to answer them for yourself. Without expectation or marketing jargon, write down your own responses as sincerely as possible.
These are actually loaded questions that you can use to get laser focus on the direction of your brand strategy from the point you’re at today to where you need to be in 1, 3 and 5 years from now. They will prove valuable at every juncture in your company’s trajectory, especially when easy short term growth opportunities gently nudge you away from your ultimate long term vision.
How You Answer Matters
The smartest founders I’ve ever met have struggled with this question in our first meeting. That’s because they understand that the Perception Queries force them to predict the future of their industries, fully embracing the distance between where they are now and where they need to be — all without any guarantees that the world will look how they expect it to later on down the line. The very premise and viability of their businesses are tied up in these answers.
The responses I get usually fall into 1 of 3 categories:
The Vision/ Mission Response — “Our company builds the best widgets for the modern widget-using consumer who needs speed, quality and dependability.” No, this is not how a company is perceived. When I get some version of the company vision or mission as an answer, it often means that they haven’t stopped to empathize with the user. The Perception Queries force you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and feel what their relationship to your brand truly is… and it’s not a marketing line.
The Goal/ Model Response — “We want to be perceived as the #1 widget-maker in the US market within four years…” or “We’re the Uber for widgets…”. Of course everyone wants to own their market or adopt a proven model, but heres the thing — if the opposite of your strategy is not also a strategy, then you don’t have a strategy to begin with. Nor do you have an answer to the Perception Queries. People who answer with a Goal/ Model response usually haven’t stopped to develop a clear hypothesis of the future they’re creating for.
The Characterizing Response — “We‘re perceived as fun, unique, nimble, creative, growing and smart today… but we want to be perceived as large, institutional, trustworthy and influential in the future.” If you’re answering with adjectives, you’re on the right track. Perception is a point of view, and when users take a specific view of your company, they characterize your brand in a similar way. But a long list of general adjectives like this can still lead you astray. The specificity and deliberate choosing of those characteristics is what matters.
Regardless of your answer, we can test and refine it by considering the world of the future, specifically the unique world you envision for your business.
Your Hypothesis Of The Future
I’ve talked about this before in my workshops because it’s fundamental to a strong brand identity. Your hypothesis of the future is how you see the world changing at a later point. The way you see the world in 3–5 years is at best an educated guess, and I often call this ‘making your bet’.
If you imagine the future to be an endless set of possibilities as represented by a circle (or perhaps more accurately, a sphere), then your hypothesis is the small sliver of possibilities that will actually come to fruition.
If you’re Uber, your vision of the future isn’t that we will all be getting around in self-driving cars, but rather that manually operating your own car will become an outdated, dangerous, archaic activity that the public collectively rejects.
Once you have your vision of the future, your competitive set will shift. The people who are really in your way aren’t those that are making similar products with similar features today, but rather those who are making the same prediction of the future.
Snapchat was a social platform on par with Instagram and Facebook, but their vision of the future wasn’t about an app. It was about how we create and consume content. That’s why they created Snap Spectacles and suddenly became a hardware competitor in line with Apple. Anyone who paid attention to their hypothesis would have seen that coming.
Once you have your hypothesis and competitive set, every step of your brand strategy needs to project you past all other players to a defensible, forward-looking position.
If you want to get deeper into this landscape/ hypothesis exercise, go here.
Now we can return to our original two questions. Once you know your hypothesis and what you need to project yourself past others in your space, consider the Perception Queries again.
1. How is your brand perceived today?
2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future
Be Bold & Get Specific
A characterizing answer is on the right track, but I often push people to get specific with their perceptions. Let’s imagine a young company that has recently entered the incredibly crowded travel booking space.
How is the brand perceived today? Well it’s new, so the perception is broad. Travel booking involves a lot of trust, especially in the face of legacy companies, so people will be hesitant and struggling to understand how the offering fits into their consideration set:
Startup Risky Novel Niche Techie Confusing Fun
I want to note here that it’s ok if peoples’ perception of you company today is broad. It’s not the best place to be, but that’s exactly what we’re going to fix in the near future. What isn’t ok is if your future perception is still very broad.
If a company knows how their brand is perceived today, the temptation is often to ‘fix’ the negative characterizations for their perception tomorrow:
Future Perception A
But having a positive future image is the booby prize. Positive doesn’t mean unique, and it certainly doesn’t mean differentiated. It may seem like a good decision, but it leaves money on the table.
Most importantly, it creates a very broad perception that can be confused with any other travel booking company out there. There is no specific assumption about the future of travel here. This is a perception that many brands embody today and as time goes on, will only become a baseline of expectation for travelers.
Let’s narrow our focus and really dig to see what is under the modern travel experience. We want to see what the future (and our future perception) might look like.
Travel is increasingly becoming a very personal experience. We travel to find ourselves, to discover who we are, to understand why we’re here and where we belong in the world. It’s why industries like adventure travel and eco tourism are flourishing.
If we venture to create a more narrow perception with even just this little bit of information, we get something very different:
Future Perception B
Note that this narrow perception doesn’t mean you can’t still be trustworthy, established and offering a clear benefit. It simply means that you are willing to take a bolder stance, to be a far more specific brand that resonates with users who are seeking that same brand experience. It runs in parallel with what every marketer, salesperson and founder already knows — it’s about benefits, not features.
What we have here is already more familiar than you might realize. In the mid- to late-2000’s, a proliferation of travel startups had entered the space. Every week there seemed to be another company trying to disrupt the industry, and every single one of them could be described as startup, risky, novel, niche, techie, confusing, and fun.
However, two major companies made it through the tumult. HomeAway and Airbnb evolved their brands for the future, but one of them took the bold risk of defining a narrow perception, and is the clear winner today:
Your second answer to the Perception Queries is the one that really matters. You can start from anywhere, even if it’s the same place as your competitors, but you need to know where you’re going if you want to stop playing in someone else’s backyard.
Brand strategy requires tough decisions that will touch every aspect of your business. Asking the right questions up front is crucial.
If you’re a founder, I’d recommend asking your team the very same things as well. Their responses may surprise you.
The Perception Queries are important for an entire team because they go beyond a Vision or Mission. They aren’t marketing sound bytes. They’re a pact — an agreement that everyone is moving in the same direction — and that’s something worth knowing.
[Click here to download the full deck of slides and watch the accompanying video recording where I walk you through my framework.]
A lot has changed in the world of brand storytelling, especially in the last 5–10 years, but the frameworks we use to develop our brand narratives remain dated. We’re essentially using old tools to reach new audiences in new markets, and it doesn’t make sense. The challenge is twofold:
Aggressive Evolution. We’re living in incredibly dynamic landscapes. Regardless of the market you’re in, change is happening at an ever-increasing rate. New entrants, bandwidth technologies, legal policy, generational personnel, emerging territories — this is not the industry or climate our parents grew up in. It is certainly not the climate that our familiar brand frameworks were once created to address.
Inconsistent Behaviors. Where once you could count on the major behaviors of a generation to be consistent across age, time and psychographics, we now see a proliferation of sub-cultures and idiosyncrasies with millennials. Geek chic, bro culture, riot grrrls, foodies and hipsters are just the tip of the iceberg. Behaviors have fractured across all dimensions, and what remains is the overarching ambitions and mentality that begat them.
Taken together, these two factors necessitate a new framework, not just for brand storytelling among millennials, but any brand strategy that will resonate with an increasingly informed and empowered audience.
Watch a recording of my workshop and an in-depth look at the Active Story Framework for your own brand here.
My work with startups, established brands and B2C companies reaching millennial audiences allowed me to develop a new approach for decoding the fabric of a brand, and I was recently fortunate enough to share it during a workshop.
You can watch the video and get access to the full deck here .
The Active Story Framework
I call this the Active Story Framework because that’s exactly what it is — active. Each of the three elements propels you into the next and forces movement.
Build A Defensible Territory: Building a defensible territory as part of your brand story will 1) take you to a part of the landscape where your competitors will be unable to follow, 2) allow you to sing your siren song clearly, reaching the very target audience that is crucial to your success, and 3) allow you to be specific… because you can’t be a generalist today. If you’re not specific, you’re not valuable.
Create Meaningful Tension: There is a push and pull action that drives conversion. You ‘push’ your audience by tapping into existing (but often hidden) behaviors and either align or oppose their collective belief systems. You ‘pull’ by leveraging macro movements that resonate with those core beliefs.
Change Hearts and Minds: Your voice is key, but voice is not marketing channels or tone. Voice is tactics. Voice is gestures. Voice is actions, because when it comes to millennials, actions will always speak louder than words. Through your secret language, you have the one-on-one conversations that audiences demand in a such a noisy, static-filled environment.
All three of these elements together force movement.
They force you to make the hard brand decisions key to your success in a crowded, hostile market.
They force you to always land on the right side of the line between core market and mass market — regardless of what stage your company is in or which market you need to reach.
And most importantly, they force your audience to react, decide and convert.
What powerful brand strategy does
Think of this as a tapestry. When you look closely at the individual elements of a brand strategy, it’s hard to see what you’re really creating. But when you pull back and look at all pieces collectively, an image emerges. That image is the brand identity that your followers are looking for. A strong brand strategy gives that image resolution.
But what matters even more than that, at least in practical terms, is the power to solve problems with a strong strategy. A decent brand strategy will take 3 problems and solve them with 3 solutions. A powerful brand strategy takes those 3 problems and solves them with 1.
Don’t miswrite your own story
You can’t live outside of the story framework. You can fit into a current cultural narrative or oppose it, but you cannot exist outside its realm. We are all human, and we are all looking to make sense of the options presented to us in the marketplace. Stories help us do that.
Whether you’re an incumbent CEO or a startup founder, the worst thing you can do is miss the great story that’s sitting right under your nose.
Your hunch led you to a product. It wasn’t just a need. It wasn’t merely good product-market fit. Most leaders and entrepreneurs subconsciously see something bigger when they take the reigns of a company, and under that subconscious draw is a story. The real story. The story that wins.
The stories we tell ourselves, both as a group and as individuals, have immeasurable impact on our beliefs and behaviors. Brands trying to reach millennials should know who they’re talking to in this regard.
Every generation has its stories. There was the brave selflessness of the Greatest Generation spanning 1910–1925 (just ask Tom Brokaw, he’ll tell you, but don’t ask 2 Dope Queens), the cautious optimism of the Baby Boomers and the idealistic “just do it” consumerism of Gen X. Millennials, however, stand apart.
Not only do we tell ourselves a greater number of collective stories, but our narratives have become more fragmented as today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings find themselves moving through the in-between spaces of the gig economy, non-marriage and a changing American Dream.
The cemented goal posts of our parents are moving for the first time, and we spend more of our lives between jobs, between adolescence and adulthood, between impermanence and permanence than ever before.
It’s from within those ‘in-between’ spaces that some of our most compelling generational stories have emerged.
Three of those stories — pain, villainy and fuck you money — are actually old stories (even that last one), but perhaps for the first time shattered and put back together in a new form. They matter because they shape us, and since a story reveals just as much about the storyteller as it does about the world, we need to ask ourselves why we created them in the first place.
Perhaps even more importantly, there is no right or wrong. All cultures have a framework for viewing life experiences. These are ours.
Let’s start with the easy one.
Pain — To suffer is to succeed
Familiar with this one? Yeah, me too.
If you’re not suffering, you’re not doing it right. If you’re not working 12-hour days and burned out by Wednesday, you’re not living up to your potential. You’re not doing something worth doing.
Although we may think this is a newly popularized ideal stemming from the sudden rise of entrepreneurship, our Zuckerberg-esque heroes and the glamorization of the hustle we see in movies and content, it’s actually much older than that.
It comes from our puritanical pilgrim roots as Americans, and it was a lot more hardcore back then. It was life-and-death — a somewhat severe focus of Protestant work ethic that neatly parlayed into the pervasive “Manifest Destiny” that shaped so much of who we are as Americans today.
The ideas of pure intention, complete self-sacrifice to one’s service and a god-given edict to tame the land that threatened our lives daily, were all strong forces that never left the American identity. Each of us has played Oregon Trail and watched movies like The Witch. We don’t just get it, we revel in it.
So deep is a story like this, that I’d argue there’s no way to escape it without changing the very fabric of Americanism itself… and that’s not happening. What we have instead is a modern incarnation that every generation before us has morphed into their own, and now we have ours.
Pain happens in the extremes, so let’s look at the extremes to see how we continually perpetuate the pain story.
SoulCycle is about perseverance and suffering, all in the name of getting to the front row. It’s a cult-like, pain-centric movement that mirrors other new, extreme fitness faiths like CrossFit and ultra marathoning.
Elements of bro culture and startup culture overlap with the romanticization of all-nighters and impossible deadlines. WeWork stocks bathrooms and front desks with mouthwash, toothpaste and toiletries while Silicon Valley execs get caught (and sometimes die) using illicit drugs to keep up.
Arianna Huffington has built a profitable Sleep Revolution platform that “sounds the alarm on our worldwide sleep crisis”, and in my opinion, further canonizes the story of pain. Every great phenomenon has its high profile detractors, after all.
But these are all obvious.
There are still different forms of pain to consider. Look at the self-deprivation of The Minimalists and the popularity of Soylent — smart guys telling you how cool it is to give up the comforts of life.
Anytime you see celebs and CEOs relaxing on vacation, it’s simply the other end of the same spectrum. Work hard, play hard. The higher the stakes on one side, the higher they become on the other.
There’s a pattern here. When it’s no longer the elements that threaten us, we seek to develop power of will through extremes. Without a physical frontier to roil against, we create mental ones.
Call it the virtue of turmoil. Nobody likes the love stories that didn’t almost end in heartbreak. I’ve never seen that movie.
The opposite also rings true — it doesn’t count if it’s easy. That’s because we measure ourselves in experiences.
Our self-worth and identity is gauged by what we’ve been through. For millennials, those trials and tribulations are markers of suffering that go beyond what we’ve seen in previous generations. Less from the outside and increasingly from within.
Villains —When heroes become unfamiliar
Think Dexter’s Dexter Morgan, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, or The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano. We didn’t just love them, we identified with them. People mourned Walter’s death with mock obituaries and funerals. It got real.
We wanted them to win. Despite all our cringing and gasping, it felt good when they got away with murder. No matter how conflicted we felt, we quickly resumed rooting for them by the next episode.
These aren’t anti-heroes who lack traditional qualities of valor and moral ascendancy. Nor are they good guys who sometimes do bad things. They’re consistently heartless characters that cause chaos and destruction.
Although there’s discussion on what truly separates a hero from an anti-hero or flawed protagonist in media, it seems we’ve actually started to glorify villain protagonists.
The generation before us had Hitchcock, who deliberately created complex heroes that were hard to love, but that’s as far as it went. Meant to be disorienting and uneasy, Hitchcock’s characters pushed the boundaries, but they never crossed them.
Our millennial characters are different. These are clear villains with harmful tendencies, but if you dig down deep, you see their original motivations are very human and relatable. Walter was the humble, under-appreciated middle class parent trying to make a living. Tony, also a family man, just playing out the only life he ever knew. Dexter living with uncontrollable urges, which he offset by killing bad people.
Our total embracing of these characters creates a new kind of obsessive fandom. These are stories of misunderstanding and gray moral code. Stories of standing on the slippery slope between right and fair. Stories about how, as a post-Hitchcock generation, we’ve learned to make peace with the messy discomfort in this in-between space.
There’s a lot to be said about how socio-economic inequality, eroding faith in public institutions, or a general millennial malaise have created paths to this new character… but there’s more to it.
Every generation has the power to choose what they see in themselves. Baby Boomers saw Superman, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee — a somewhat mixed backlash to the whitewashed, suburban idealism of their parents.
Millennials continue that shift to a further degree. Heroes, in the traditional sense, stand guard between right and wrong. That kind of black and white life view no longer rings true for us.
I’d argue that a clear right and wrong, at this point, even feels uncomfortable.
We live in the gray area. It’s complicated. It’s polarizing. And it doesn’t form a consensus.
Our heroes are an embodiment of the world we see ourselves in. Not right or wrong, but somewhere in the middle.
Fuck You Money — The formidable task of finding your passion
The most significant story on this list is the quest to find oneself. This one’s a biggie, and I think most of us live within it.
Fuck you money, for those who are unfamiliar, is having enough success and cash to be able to (metaphorically) say “fuck you” to the people who failed, hurt or ignored you along the way.
Up until this generation, success was seen as largely formulaic. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant. The fact is that there were rules and structures that once existed, and people believed in them. Things like graduate school, babies, the corporate ladder and buying property were inherent truths in and of themselves.
What happens when those things move around or disappear? You get a new story.
For years I fought with my parents about my career ambitions. My father wanted me to become an artist, my mother just wanted me to stop stressing out, but I wanted to be a successful business owner. I went to college, then grad school, then set up my first LLC.
Looking back, that formula was not the best one, nor the fastest, nor the smartest. Definitely not the easiest (and absolutely not the cheapest).
But my career was my life. It was me. When my parents questioned my decision, I felt it to be a deeply personal attack on my identity.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that for my parents, and the parents of most millennials, a career didn’t mean the same thing. Granted my parents are immigrants, but for them, work was a means to an end.
Yes, they wanted to be successful as well, but their jobs had a lot less bearing on their perceived self-worth than it did on me. Work, for them, was something they had to do in order to live their real lives outside the office.
Millennials like me have chosen a different story entirely. Work is synonymous with identity because we believe in a financially post-apocalyptic world that decided to change right before we got here.
Our story is a dramatic, self-important reinvention from the ashes that remain. A survivor story. I believe this too. It frames my good times and my bad times, and lays the groundwork for single-minded career ambitions.
Now that leaves us in a tough position.
Finding yourself and finding your passion are inextricably tied. The pressure to find one’s passion is immense, even though there’s no guarantee this meshing of life and career will make us happier. For many, it can feel like a burden.
It perpetuates the belief that passion already exists within and it’s our job to follow it — a belief that Cal Newport and others have already started questioning.
It’s go big or go home. It’s backpack through Europe to discover your destiny, then come back to America to change the world. It’s do it on your own, like that suffering, solitary hero trying to navigate troubled waters.
I’ve heard enough entrepreneurs and CEOs daydream out loud about fuck you money to realize that for many, this quest is underscored by a sense of comeuppance.
We may not believe that right or wrong exist, or that fairness is a reality, but we do believe in our right to enforce that balance when our turn is up.
Just like the superheroes we created, we deserve to set things straight in our own, deviant way.
The trifecta here, incase you haven’t already seen it, is that all three of these stories fit snugly together. They reinforce each other, and over time become stronger. The virtue of suffering, the villain’s misunderstood journey and the ultimate reward/ retribution flow into each other. Take one piece out and the other two become weaker.
As brands and communities work to engage millennials from the outside, they have to first reconstruct the millennial mindset from the center. What are the stories that make sense of the world we live in? What notions help propel us forward?
Stories help connect the dots, and it’s fascinating to see what narratives emerge when those dots suddenly become mutable. The narratives we tell ourselves today have to wrangle a huge psychographic spread, especially as we mature into the next stage of adulthood.
“Everyone is a hero in their own story”.
That’s one of my favorite quotes. If you consider it from that point of view, everyone makes sense, regardless of age, time or country.
