Tag: Branding

Mining for your brand’s “big idea” to unlock new markets

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date February 28, 2019
No Comments on Mining for your brand’s “big idea” to unlock new markets

[Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash]

The only rules worth following are the ones you write yourself.

Very few companies understand the big idea behind their brand, if they even have one.

They may know their mission and vision. They may see how they plan to disrupt their space, or have a feel for what the big idea is behind their product, but the big idea behind a brand is something very different.

Your brand’s big idea is a notion or concept that changes the rules for everyone in the space — you, the customer and your competitors.

The rule used to be that food programing on television was a specialty genre. Food shows and channels were niche, much like crafting programs or channels centered around sport.

Then 9/11 happened and suddenly people were looking for comfort.

One of the first places they turned to was The Food Network. There was such a huge influx of viewership, that the company chose to rethink the very concept of their brand.

They quickly understood that food didn’t have to be about food. Food could be about entertainment and safety — a notion that was unthinkable even a few months before that point in history.

That’s a huge change in the rules.

When you change the rules, you change the paradigm. The Food Network’s big idea not only affected them, it affected their customers and perhaps above all, affected their competitors.

Alton Brown recalls that time and what it did for the landscape:

It spawned an entire comfort culture that led to the proliferation of experiential wellness and self-care, ASMR and mukbang videos, and hygge, among other things. All ways to shut off our brains and simply absorb feel-good sensory content.

Changing the rules creates a new lens that hasn’t been considered before by the user.

Very few companies today — even many of the buzziest or well funded — have a big brand idea behind them, and that’s because they’re tapping into a rule set that already exists.

Great Jones makes beautiful, affordable cookware that millennials love, but they’re playing by today’s rules of what it means to be a good host and transitioning to an adult life.

Great Jones, February 27th, 2019.

They, along with others like Year and Day and Misen, have a huge opportunity to redefine the spaces we eat in. After all, gender roles in the kitchen have changed, this is the first time in history when entertaining a dinner party does not have be precluded by marriage and homeownership, and the role of the celebrity chef has altered our relationship to food altogether.

Any of these new millennial-facing cookware brands could capture the latent value of these cultural shifts by creating a narrative or context to understand them in.

They could write new rules around the intimate act of eating in the home or what it means to reclaim the cooking and eating space that was once so politically charged and gendered, but is now up for complete redefinition. There is room for a brand to lead this conversation and create the new rules of engagement around it.

Instead, they’re playing by the old rule book that Le Creuset wrote decades ago: embody the role of a good host, create something beautiful that guests will remember, and have that picture perfect adult life. Basically the same roles and relationships we’ve had to eating and cooking for a very long time now. The same rules our parents and grandparents operated in.

Brands following someone else’s rules leave money on the table.

They can get very far, and perhaps even win, without a big idea propelling them, but let’s be very clear about what’s really happening here — they’re creating a brand for today, playing by today’s rules and today’s values.

Even though Great Jones and Year and Day both have very specific visual styles and motifs, illicit a general feeling very well, and have seemingly figured out product-market fit, there’s more to be had here.

Those that create a brand for tomorrow by defining a new set of rules and pushing users into that unfamiliar future are far more defensible in the long run because they are creating their own authority and their own playing field.

There is no doubt that The Food Network has benefitted tremendously by spearheading a big idea.

It led to celebrity chef franchises (unlike any we had seen before), food and cookware (both chef-driven and private label), and a major event circuit. This is an entire world of market opportunity that didn’t exist before they changed the rules.

It’s risky but when done right, a big idea with new rules means new market opportunities as well.

If you’re building something meaningful, you need to start mining for your brand’s big idea now. Here’s how to know it when you find it, and how to leverage it to create a whole new roadmap.

Your brand’s big idea must create new rules that make old norms obsolete.

This is the first sign of a big brand idea.

You’re not just making things better or more advanced in a way that evolves current norms. When you change the paradigm of an entire space, there simply is no room for old norms to exist anymore. You’re creating a whole new reality.

If you take a look at The Cooking Channel, a graveyard for old food programming and spinoff of The Food Network, you can see that these brands literally live in two different worlds.

Every user touchpoint from the videos to the cookbooks and community either falls into the old or new paradigm. A show on The Cooking Channel such as Cook’s Country is not a passive experience, nor does it trigger the same entertainment signals in your brain.

The community that’s formed around the show does not engage the way that you might see around The Food Network, celebrity chefs have very different relationships to their audiences, and the overall experience is wildly different.

You couldn’t even evolve The Cooking Channel’s programs, non-TV content or community to fit into The Food Network. A Cook’s Country chef isn’t going to show up on an episode of Hot Ones like Alton Brown did.

The brands are on two different planes.

A typical episode of Cook’s Country on The Cooking Channel (PBS).

Big brand ideas are hard for this very reason — you oftentimes have to scrap everything you know and be willing to build from the ground up.

The idea is bigger than the sum of your product and your user. It’s a new lens that changes the way we see (and behave within) the world.

Big ideas are debatable, risky and likely to fail.

Big ideas are not guaranteed to work.

Your audience is always ready to be pushed into the future, but sometimes we push them too hard, too far, or in the wrong direction.

The Food Network’s big idea was highly debatable (especially for its time), risky and likely to fail. But it worked.

Then again, so was Snapchat’s big idea, as I wrote back in 2016:

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

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

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

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

Snapchat and Google both shared a big idea around how we experience life through AR and shared content.

Neither of them could make it work, but rest assured there will be other companies with other attempts, and each time the big idea will be just debatable as it has been.

That doesn’t mean, however, someone can’t figure it out. It only means that we’ve tried to either go too far, too soon, or in the wrong direction.

Big ideas will open new doors that sound crazy (at first).

Hardware sounded crazy for a social network. Private label goods sounded crazy for a television network. But in both cases it was the big idea that revealed those new market opportunities, and once the gates had been opened, it didn’t sound so crazy anymore.

If your big idea leads you into new categories and products, then you’re likely on to something.

You can think of big ideas — and brand strategies by extension — as master filters.

When you’ve nailed down that big strategic idea, you should be able to filter every choice through it and arrive at an on-brand decision.

Everything from product to communications, customer service, UX, partnerships and collaborations, HR and hiring, executive team, sales, operations, business development… everything should be filtered through your big strategic idea to make sure you are arriving on an on-brand decision.

It is a filter for every choice that matters, and the choices that matter the most are the ones that move you forward in your market.

Use your big idea as a filter for your product roadmap and you may find that the obvious choice for your brand is no longer the right one. Big ideas will move you into weird, scary places sometimes, but that is where the true opportunity lies.

Fewer and fewer companies are winning by staying in their lanes.

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Marketing, Product Management, Strategy

The Lifestyle Brand Blueprint For Tomorrow’s Companies

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date February 7, 2019
No Comments on The Lifestyle Brand Blueprint For Tomorrow’s Companies

[Photo by Joel Bengs.]

Lifestyle consumers are changing. Your brand should, too.

Lifestyle brands have existed for a very, very long time. From Pears Soap of the early 1800s, to the Marlboro Man of the 1950s and the Glossiers of today, all of these brands are part of the same lifestyle heritage.

The existence of lifestyle branding hasn’t changed. What has changed, however, is the role that lifestyle brands have played in our lives over time.

Early lifestyle brands were gatekeepers that informed us of our stations in life and how to act within them. You used a certain soap in order to be a good member of society. You shaved your legs if you were an upstanding woman.

This reflected a larger truth about the consumer. We looked to institutions for meaning. Government, marriage, education, class, career — all of these goalposts sorted us among our peers.

From left: Pears Soap prescribing identity, Marlboro promising the life not lived, Glossier creating a likeminded tribe.

In the late 20th century through to today, things took a dramatic shift. Our goal posts began to evaporate and those same institutions (known more commonly as the corporate ladder, the American Dream and the nuclear family, among others) no longer served the same purpose.

Meaning had become democratized and created a fantastic vacuum for companies.

New lifestyle brands like Apple and Nike allowed us to self-organize around ideals of our own choosing, regardless of our lot in life. We could find our tribes and rally around the aspirations that stirred us.

Lifestyle went mainstream and was layered over every vertical, from fashion to finance. As a culture, we moved from interacting with brands as vehicles of self-labeling to vehicles of self-expression.

This is where we are today.

We can stop here and build a lifestyle brand based on this insight, and that would be enough to get your company off the ground.

But the consumer is changing again, and I absolutely do not believe that building a successful brand is about the current market.

Successful brands are built in the future market.

In which case, we need to ask ourselves where lifestyle brands are headed next. And of course we’ll start where we always start: with the user.

There’s no denying the fact that users are becoming more and more sophisticated in the brand vernacular, and more demanding of the brand value they pay a premium for.

Without gatekeepers, institutions and traditional life milestones, users have come to create their own centers of meaning around lifestyle brands that help them signal to the world who they are. I may not have an executive title, but I have a WeWork office because I believe I am a disruptor.

But self-expression opens the door to something much more important on the horizon. Today we want to belong, but tomorrow we will want to matter. Accordingly, the lifestyle realm is undergoing a transition from aspiration to something with more substance.

We’re moving from self-expression to self-discovery.

This is not about design aesthetics or leveraging influencers, or even creating buzz as we see with the bulk of lifestyle brands today. It’s not soothing sans-serif fonts and pastels that make us feel tuned into a trend. And it’s certainly not a USP.

This is about a maturing consumer that’s seeking new centers of meaning in their lives, and accordingly will seek out brands that help them discover who they are in the process.

We’ve gone from macro to micro, outer world to inner world. It’s a much more intimate and personal relationship that adds a layer of intrinsic value to the product.

The successful lifestyle brands of tomorrow will need to follow consumers deeper into themselves in order to resonate.

This is where you start building in the future.

This is where tension comes from. If you can create a brand that pushes your audience to get to where they are going (perhaps when they don’t even realize they are going there themselves), then you will create and capture a special kind of value that will serve your brand for years to come.

With this new perspective, let’s look at some of the elements that should go into your brand blueprint.

Start with the conversation, not the lifestyle.

A lot of brands falter from the very beginning because they don’t understand what a lifestyle brand actually is.

A lifestyle brand is a conversation that happens at specific points in a consumer’s life.

Forget the aesthetics or aspirations. Those are mere tactics. If you want to be a lifestyle brand, you need a rock solid understanding of the values that you want to explore with your consumer.

Keep in mind you can’t effectively explore values like “transparency” or “honesty” or “social responsibility”… the common items listed in company’s mission statement. Those are baseline requirements (self-expression at best, features at worst) that you should be delivering to your consumer anyway.

The values worth exploring are the ones that help your user move down the self-discovery path.

Values sound provocative, revealing, and you either really care or you really don’t because as a consumer, you immediately know if that value will get you to someplace deeper within yourself:

“The thrill of vulnerability in an unforgiving world.”
“The political act of self-love.”
“Freedom of the human soul in nature.” (Check out what Yeti is doing here.)

The New York Times has taken an interesting turn toward lifestyle recently. True, the news and media company advertises no-nonsense slogans like ‘You’ve read the news, now read the facts’, but take a closer look at their content investments and you’ll see that they’re actually exploring the value of “being human without judgement.”

It’s a compelling concept.

Part of how they underscore this is in two excellent content series: Modern Love and Conception.

Modern Love isn’t about the news. It’s about the non-newsworthy events that define our love lives.

Conception doesn’t include doctors or experts. Just the private voices of parents.

You’ll notice in both of these series, there is no news.

Modern Love is about the non-newsworthy events that define our love lives.

Conception doesn’t include doctors or experts. Just the private voices of parents.

These are avenues toward “being human without judgement”, and for many viewers, a straight path to self-discovery.

You can’t explore that value just anywhere. The New York Times knows explorations like these have to happen at certain points in the user’s life.

You can’t get more human than disappointment in love and heartbreak in parenthood, nor can you find two topics more charged with judgement. The New York Times deliberately chose these moments in our lives because they push the self-discovery conversation forward more quickly and more effectively than any other moments in our day-today.

That demonstrates the simplest definition of what a lifestyle brand truly is: Lifestyle brands insert themselves into the important life moments of their users. Specifically, those life moments that echo the brand’s guiding beliefs and the values they’re working to explore.

The values worth exploring with your users are usually the ones that go unspoken. They’re the paths less traveled our minds, but hard to resist going down once someone shows us the way.

Emulation vs. empowerment.

If we’re moving from self-expression to self-discovery, then we’re also moving from emulation to empowerment.

In other words, purely “aspirational brands” will decline.

Many companies have beautiful and tight visual branding that signals something to aspire to, but not much more than that. We see them everywhere — clothing, food, tech, entertainment — but as consumers, we’re so oversaturated with this kind of two-dimensional branding that it has started to become redundant.

How can many of these brands be deciphered from one another? At what point do I stop caring about the novelty of aspirational brands and start looking for something that will deliver more?

When three major athleisure brands like We Are Handsome, Stellasport and Sweaty Betty become indistinguishable from one another, what is left?

From left: We Are Handsome, Stellasport, Sweaty Betty.

We will eventually reach a point where users won’t care about attaining a prescribed lifestyle nearly as much as they will care about being enabled to create the deeper lifestyle they want.

Aesthetics, while important, are a tactical trap. They are not where lifestyle brands start, but rather where they end.

A simple way to vet your brand is to ask yourself, “Am I encouraging people to emulate this lifestyle, or am I giving them the tools to attain something bigger?”

Notice I said tools, not products. For truly brand-led companies, the product is secondary. You’re not selling your yoga pants in the promise that people will become more athletic — that’s aspirational.

Instead, you’re doing what Outdoor Voices is doing and build a brand around “happiness” while everyone else is building theirs around extreme grit, physical endurance and in the women’s category, sexiness.

The name comes from her childhood, where [Outdoor Voices founder Tyler Haney’s] mom would encourage her to use an indoor voice while the kid in her just wanted to be outside all the time.

“I thought, What if I built a brand around something people loved — a recreational Nike that’s all about staying healthy and being happy doing it?”

The brand empowers happiness in a multitude of ways, including crowdsourcing many of their designs, deliberately focusing on low-impact daily activities instead of extreme sports, and featuring un-retouched ads of women with real bodies and real cellulite.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Outdoor Voices (@outdoorvoices)

These are all ways to empower women in being happy.

“OV is about being human, not superhuman.” Haney knows that for the next generation of brands, aspiration is taking a back seat to something more powerful.

It’s why the company grew 800% in 2016 alone and commands huge lines at their NYC sample sales, rivaling the sample sales of most luxury brands I’ve had the chance to queue up for.

The buck has to stop somewhere.

Lifestyle brands need a founder’s face and voice.

Someone needs to take responsibility for everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong.

People need to know that if they are investing in so much intangible brand value and giving themselves over to such a demanding (but rewarding) self-discovery experience, there is someone on the other side of it all that is just as committed.

Unlike B2B and non-lifestyle B2C brands, lifestyle brands across the board need to showcase a real person that’s driving the vision and innovation in the company.

Your consumers don’t need a relationship with the founder specifically, but they need the comfort of knowing they aren’t being cheated by some flashy marketing gimmicks and a savvy art department.

The best companies are the ones led by CEOs who have their own personal brands. They’re influencers in their own realm who are one or two steps ahead of the company brand that they are building.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s personal brand (as exemplified through her life) is like Goop on steroids, and Elon Musk’s personal brand of being a rebel futurist is arguably leagues ahead of Tesla’s.

Elon Musk covering literally everything in his interview with Joe Rogan.

When a founder’s personal brand is further into the future than the company they are building, it demonstrates a real devotion to a larger belief.

It also gives avid users — the ones who spend the most and thirst for deeper engagement — a direction to point their attention in.

You don’t need to be a celebrity CEO, but you do need to be creating spheres of influence through content, social or in your physical network. You need a strong point of view that perhaps would be too heavy handed for your company, but can comfortably be explored by you as an individual.

Take your big idea and use your personal brand to push it further. Don’t be afraid to draw a line in the sand and show which side you fall on.

If you’re the CEO, people need to be able to find you, understand you, and make you part of the story.

The lifestyle consumer is changing. Your brand should, too.

The next generation fo winners in this space already see that we’re moving from Lifestyle 1.0 of graphics and clever taglines to Lifestyle 2.0 of conversation, empowerment and accountability.

As we move from self-expression to self-discovery, you need to be positioned as a brand that can guide users deeper into themselves.

It’s a riskier strategy that will take more time and money. But it’s the only strategy that will win the long game.

Tags Branding, Marketing, Public Relations, Storytelling, Strategy

Startup

These Are The Secret Signals That Lie Beneath Every Successful Brand

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date January 31, 2019
No Comments on These Are The Secret Signals That Lie Beneath Every Successful Brand

[Photo by Hugo Jehanne.]

You can’t move the market if you don’t know how to read the market.

There’s a big difference between building a brand for today and building a strategic brand for the horizon of your industry.

I meet a lot of branding people who create or consult companies based on two-dimensional principles. That usually sounds something like:

“We’re making health food for the young urban professional that doesn’t have time to cook, but wants to feel good about what’s going into their body.”
“We’re a D2C lifestyle clothing brand for young, single men who aren’t afraid to put some personality in their wardrobes.”
“Our brand is for the millennial yoga mom who wants an electric car that reflects her values.”
“We provide frictionless financial solutions for small businesses and their vendors.”

If any of these sound familiar, then you are building a brand for the here-and-now. It will work for the here-and-now, but there is no strategy for how it will compete in the next few years.

That’s because these brands fail to look at the deep signals that are going to move their markets. Some of the most important of these signals are in culture and definitions, and it takes a keen understanding of markets and mentalities in order to pick up on them.

They are hidden because they haven’t emerged yet, but the groundwork for what they will mean to us as consumers is already being laid.

This is part of thinking like a brand strategist. I’ve written about it in a previous post, but here I want to cut deeper into a certain aspect of what those signals mean and where to find them. Specifically, the more foundational signals we may take for granted but see all around us in the world.

Above all, I want us to explore how to use these signals for your own brand. If you’re creating a brand based on strategy, it’s important to have a curiosity not only for how things are changing, but why, and to apply that ‘why’ to your own business.

You’ll see that these signals can come from any corner of the playing field, and yet can be applied to nearly any business in the landscape.

Signals usually supersede any particular vertical because they’re not about the market itself, but rather the forces that move the market forward.

You can’t move the market if you don’t know how to read the market.

Once you see a signal, you start to understand how it powers much of the activity in our lives.

Signals are codes. They underlie what you see on the surface of a market, and the strongest brands out there have made those codes part of their DNA.

Collective Culture

A strategist has to be something of a cultural anthropologist. You have to see your users as individuals as well as products of their surroundings and part of a greater whole.

Sometimes, a glitch in the cultural system can lead you to the faulty code of a signal. I saw something like this recently in an old story about finance.

The world’s first index fund was founded by John Bogle of The Vanguard Group in 1975. There was nothing like it at the time. You couldn’t simply ‘invest in the market’, and most investors worked with advisors to actually beat the market with their portfolios.

The entire investment paradigm at that time was to perform better by placing your bets in a subset of market stocks.

Bogle, however, noticed something interesting that was starting to emerge in the research of economists like Paul Samuelson and Burton Malkiel.

He saw that oftentimes, if you just invested in a weighted basket of all stocks in the market, you’d be better off than trying to beat the market by predicting with a few key companies. In other words, the average of the market performed better than most investors did with their portfolios… and he had the historical figures to prove it.

That sounds logical, right?

But for many it wasn’t. The concept of an index fund was met with huge resistance in the financial community, as well as its fair share of ridicule.

It was called “un-American” and Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward Johnson was quoted as saying that he “[couldn’t] believe that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied with receiving just average returns”.

An executive from a different firm wrote that all but “a very small minority” believe “index funds are a ‘cop-out’ and a fad that will soon disappear.”

That should draw your attention.

Why would Americans believe, that despite all the logic and proof behind it, an index fund was un-American and destined to fail?

Because there is something about being American that stands in the face of what Bogle’s fund represented.

It’s a sin to be average in America.

Somewhere, deep in our collective psyche, we believe that to be American means to be exceptional, and that cultural quirk revealed itself back in 1975 in this very incident.

Anti-index fund poster distributed by financial research firm Leuthold Group, who later claimed that the posters were in jest.

It’s such a sin to be average in America, that we are willing to ignore facts and figures in order to prove our beliefs.

How to use this signal.

As a brand, you can use this signal for your own benefit.

There are themes of exceptionalism, elitism, superiority, personal potential and self-discovery all wrapped up in this signal. These are strong personal motivators, whether we admit them or not.

That’s why stories like The Ugly Duckling keep recurring over and over again in the canon in modern day versions like John Snow in Game of Thrones and (of course) Harry Potter.

At the root of it, there’s an interesting mentality.

This is about changing your perception of yourself.

We can’t change the story that it’s a sin to be average, but we can change the average.

Changing the context can change user perceptions.

As a business, you can take what is normal about a user and reposition it as something extraordinary.

Brands like Moleskin, Apple and Bulletproof Coffee have all elevated something mundane about their users into something far more valuable.

That change in perceptions is the added value of their brands. When you use their products or buy into their philosophies, you are changing your perception of who you are.

Don’t underestimate the power of this mechanic. When perceptions shift, so does our purchasing.

[You can uncover other cultural signals using The Emergent Story Arc here.]

Changing Definitions

I’ve written before that peoples’ values rarely change, but the beliefs that sit on top of those values are more fluid and change easily.

Sometimes our very definitions even change.

We carry a big cultural value to eat what is good for us. But the definition of eating good food has evolved from the 1950’s through to today. Some of that was powered by science and government guidance, but a lot of it has been powered by beliefs around ethics, how we gather as a community, and what foods actually provide for our bodies.

The modern health food ‘craze’ as we know it today first took hold in the 80s and 90s, when restaurants like Souplantation and El Pollo Loco were rapidly growing.

Both of them reflected the healthy eating definitions of the time: that fresh food was healthy food. Souplantation had the mile-long buffet filled with trays of colorful produce. El Pollo Loco made open kitchens core to all of their locations and showed your flame broiled chicken being prepared, without microwaves or pre-processed ingredients, right in front of you.

By 2014, El Pollo Loco had taken on considerable debt and losses (despite growth), and since going public in that same year, the stock price has steadily declined by 40%.

By the 2017, Souplantation had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The decline in casual dining and overall declines in the market hit both companies hard. They weren’t mismanaged, but they were relics of a bygone era. Not because we stopped eating healthy, but because our definition of healthy had shifted.

Meanwhile, new salad upstarts like Sweetgreen, Salata, Tender Greens and Chopt are booming because they were smart enough to tap into a new definition of eating healthy.

They saw that it wasn’t just about the food anymore, but about sustainable practices, transparency about where the food comes from and the artisanal craft of preparing and honoring that food.

Sweetgreen made a point of teaching consumers that, unlike places like El Pollo Loco and Souplantation, people should not expect to get the same standard of food in every restaurant location:

“We want people to understand that that’s normal and that’s okay,” [Sweetgreen’s co-founder Nathaniel Ru says. “Something should taste different in a different place.”

That’s a major shift away from traditional fast-food principles, which dictate that customers should be able to walk into any location and get the exact same food and experience. In this realm, each chain is constantly trying to prove it’s more connected to farmers than the other guy. (Fresh&Co even bought its own farm on Long Island, announcing it would provide “hyper-local seasonal” ingredients.)

These brands understood that our definition of eating good went from ‘food that looks fresh’ to ‘food that has a story’.

Tender Greens and Sweetgreen both turning food into a different kind of story.

How to use this signal.

Definitions are a different kind of signal. When definitions change, it’s a reevaluation of our beliefs, but also a recommitment to our values.

Definitions, above all, need to be spelled out.

If, as a brand, you see that your audience is starting to untether themselves from a belief that centers around a core value, that’s a tremendous opportunity to help people define that change.

When consumers start to feel a change in their beliefs, it’s the brands who define those changes that win.

You can help people change the definitions around them, when they’re ready, by giving them a concrete stepping stone for getting there.

We didn’t know that we wanted to play with our makeup until Glossier defined that new relationship for us, although young women were starting to feel it.

We didn’t consciously realize that our cars were turning from self-expressive statements to utilitarian objects, but SUVs got us there. That’s why sedans have started to fade away and SUVs, the fastest growing truck category, have increased in shares to 42%, from 30% in 2010.

If you watch carefully, you will see a changing definition in your own industry (if not a few).

You can help people articulate it and become an important part of your user’s evolution into a new set of beliefs.

There’s always a signal.

I’ve seen that even in the stalest of industries, where it may seem as if there’s no innovation and no change in what consumers are searching for, there is, in fact, a signal.

It may be weak, but it’s there. Nothing in the market is static, and nothing about your audience is set in stone.

If you search for that emerging change, you will find it. Building a strategic brand means digging for those signals and making them a part of your DNA.

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Marketing, Startup, Strategy

Marketing

Belief Is The New Benefit: Why you need to find your deeper brand

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date January 17, 2019
No Comments on Belief Is The New Benefit: Why you need to find your deeper brand

Photo by Scott Webb.

Time to rethink what you’re selling.

We’re living in a time when every brand is rethinking who they are and what they stand for.

That’s because at some point during the Apple revolution, consumers stopped buying products. They stopped buying specs like more horsepower in their cars or greater color options for their shoes. They stopped buying features like cheaper price for electronics or faster delivery of their food.

And at some point, they even started migrating away from benefits like productivity by way of their note taking apps, or the confidence that comes with a whiter smile, or anything that stopped at being aspirational.

What people started buying instead was beliefs, and nearly every new disruptor out there is banking on that insight.

Belief is the new benefit. Users are buying not the product, but rather the larger belief that makes that product necessary.

And for all of you that think you sell more ‘practical’ products immune to this new branding frontier, like toothpaste or moving services or mortgages, I guarantee there is someone plotting to steal your market with a belief, right now.

Yes, even if you sell toothpaste, a brand like Twice is here to eat your lunch.

Twice website Jan. 16, 2019

The Twice story has philanthropy and social good, safe ingredients and even Lenny Kravitz.

But what Twice is really about is turning toothpaste into something much greater. If grooming is now about self-care and wellness, then Twice is about a mood… or rather, elevating your mood to reach that pinnacle of wellness we strive for in every other part of our lives.

Twice embodies the belief that our most intimate rituals are sacred.

It’s a young, newly launched company that still has room to grow on the branding side, but they’re smart enough to know that they’re not here to sell you a product.

They’re here to sell you a new belief you didn’t know you held before.

After all, why shouldn’t we have different toothpastes for day and night, to serve two very different needs? Why shouldn’t we take care of our smiles and bodies and mental states the way we deserve?

Why shouldn’t brushing our teeth — something that marks both the beginning and end of the day, something that prepares us to both fight and to rest, something that signals self respect just as much as it does societal norms and taboos — be treated like a sacred ritual?

Twice goes deeper, like so many other brands I have written about over the years. When you go deeper, you reveal a much richer way to tell your story and capture your audience.

Going deeper transcends nagging consumer concerns like cost or convenience, and lets you play outside of the confines of product.

Your deeper brand is the one that sells a belief. The product is secondary. It’s the belief that people want to consume.

What is a belief?

Many CEOs and and brand executives mistake beliefs for causes.

Let me be clear that causes are not beliefs. They are also not defensible brand strategies. These kinds of causes can certainly serve you in the short term and help align the brand today, but they will not motivate beyond a core group of users in the long term:

Charity
Gender equality
Product safety, anything “natural” or “free of X”
Climate change
Fighting against the system/ any system
Resources for the underserved
Philanthropy

Sustainability, too, is an identity driver that helps us align with a company as a consumer, but it is not a belief that will build a brand.

If you look at a company like Allbirds, it can be tempting to say that their commitment to sustainability, their craftsmanship and promise of ultimate comfort… that all of these things are the immovable pillars of a strong brand.

Allbirds website Jan. 16, 2019

But that’s not what Allbirds is really selling to the Bay Area VCs, New York lawyers, big city executives, west coast entrepreneurs and greater members of the gig economy that love them.

What Allbirds is selling is the belief and romance of Silicon Valley. They are selling all of the grit, determination, exceptionalism, autonomy and glory that the Silicon Valley myth holds within it.

This is a belief about upgrading yourself to a higher professional level, and Allbirds is the gear that will get you there.

You can see signals of this belief in their genesis. Allbirds, much like a tech-driven design experiment, were designed by the founders to be “the simplest sneaker we could imagine.”

After launching on Kickstarter, they were funded by a stable of name brand investors, their flagship NYC store is nestled among other D2C startup darlings like Casper and Everlane, and journalists and writers continue to say things like “Allbirds might be the closest the world of everyday fashion has come to embracing this ideal of optimized efficiency” or Allbirds are like “an algorithm on my feet.”

Take a look at their interviews and the press they have in business outlets like The Wall Street Journal, CNN, BusinessInsider and TIME. These are all signals sending the same message.

This is not a shoe or a comfort statement. It’s equipment for personal optimization.

If you look at the signals surrounding the brand, you come to understand that wearing Allbirds is like placing yourself within that greater Silicon Valley story.

Pay attention to how they don’t hide the fact that Silicon Valley’s elite is where this whole brand started. Notice how these shoes are part of the VC uniform that also includes Patagonia vests, button down shirts and S’Well bottles — an anecdote that is played up in nearly every mention of the brand.

Whether the brand was consciously seeded in the Silicon Valley scene, or was merely co-opted by its inhabitants, is unclear. But that’s not the only place where we can gather the brand belief that has emerged.

Look at the very people that make up their core audience. These are people who may not have careers in tech or have founded a startup, but work in adjacent industries where such a move might be a very alluring dream. Those same lawyers, creatives, executives, entrepreneurs and gig economy members resonate very strongly with the Silicon Valley belief of autonomy and personal success. Merino wool and the “the world’s most comfortable” design are merely the features to back it up.

A belief, unlike a cause, is a guidebook for understanding the world.

When you buy a belief, you are buying the whole universe of values, codes of conduct and rules that go along with it. That’s more than any benefit could ever do.

Beliefs are more powerful than benefits because they lock in a behavior. A brand led by belief informs your user’s mental model, not just their preferences.

Allbirds aren’t just comfortable shoes. They are a belief about who you are becoming, and inform your ideas about personal potential, drive and perhaps even destiny.

That may sound crazy, but it’s there in the brand. There are other options for eco and ethical footwear that also deliver comfort, but none of them deliver the magic that people really want to buy.

Centers of meaning.

Hospitals are becoming supermarkets. Supermarkets are becoming bars and restaurants. Bars and restaurants are becoming workspaces.

Like I said at the top of this discussion, every brand is rethinking who they are and what they stand for. They are rethinking their centers of meaning.

Left to right: Market on the Green, a grocery store run by ProMedica (WSJ), Local beers on tap at “The Parlor” at Whole Foods (Vox), Spacious turns restaurants like the Milling Room into co-working spaces during the day (NYT).

These companies have started to ask themselves who they are in a user’s life, what role they play and what they are actually offering.

When they did that, they realized they were not selling goods and services. They were selling much larger beliefs that touched on peoples’ lives in many more areas than previously thought.

When a healthcare company like ProMedica opens up a grocery store so that their doctors can prescribe both medicine and food to the patient, it’s because they understand their role as a guardian of health, not merely a hospital.

The same mechanics are at play when Whole Foods creates gathering spaces around in-store bars, or Spacious turns restaurants into co-working spaces during off peak hours. They looked at where they created meaning in a user’s life, not what they created as a product, and that is where they built their brands.

But what is most important here is the brave steps they took in having the brand strategy and belief direct the business strategy. They boldly started with the belief and meaning first, and then looked at the business. Most companies do it the other way around.

Yes, when you take an honest look at the centers of meaning that you are creating for your users and the beliefs that surround them, you will find that your business model may change.

You can decide to take the leap or play in your current comfort zone, but be assured that no one is safe from this tectonic shift. Not even major brands like Mastercard.

Apple, Nike, Target — these are all major brands with logos that omit the name. Starbucks dropped the word “coffee” from their logo a long time ago, and now that Mastercard (perhaps a less fervently admired consumer brand) has followed suit, it’s worth understanding why.

For Mastercard, the word “card” referred to a bygone relic of finance that no longer mattered. It tethered them to an archaic past.

The future of money is digital and Mastercard had to not only reassess the role it played in people’s metaphorical wallets, but how they could create meaning around money in general.

That meaning no longer revolved around a piece of plastic.

Dunkin’ has deleted the Donuts from its name because the product is incredibly limiting (especially in foreign markets where they have struggled) and because the product is no longer the brand.

Weight Watchers, which is now simply WW, has realized that they live in the sphere of wellness, not specifically weight management. That has caused them to revamp everything from the sourcing of their ingredients to the packaging of the program itself.

What we’re really left with in all of these cases is logos without names. Core images and icons.

It makes perfect sense: images and icons are the most primal ways to convey a belief.

You can see Jesus written in the sand, but you will feel the image of that cross on a hill. You can read a danger warning on a dumpster, but nothing strikes fear in your heart like a the spiky swirls of a biohazard symbol.

Excellent video on how to design fear into a perfect warning symbol.

Logos, name changes, new business verticals, subtext… they all point toward the larger movement that’s happening in branding right now. We’re in the next phase of how consumers and companies come to interact with one another.

When you truly hit on a resonant belief for your audience, the product and everything else around it falls away. That’s not to say that the product and every other part of the user experience don’t matter.

It’s to say that they are there to support the belief that holds them.

Understand your place in the user’s life.

This is the time to rethink what you’re actually selling. Your product and its features and benefits may have been the start, but they shouldn’t be the end of your brand journey.

For many founders, the belief is already there. They just have to stretch themselves to unearth it. Chances are you started your business because you had an important belief about the world or the future, but didn’t consciously realize it.

For others, they may have started with a product gap in the marketplace, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a belief to be found. Consumer rush in to fill those gaps when they are given the opportunity because they have tapped into a larger, silent belief that hasn’t been articulated yet. Look at your user to see what it is.

Branding never stops.

Honor your work as a company by giving it the context most likely to matter to the user. Give people the meaning that will make them understand why you exist in the first place.

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Marketing, Public Relations, Strategy

Startup

Where to push your brand forward in the next 2–5 years: An Industry Guide

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date January 3, 2019
No Comments on Where to push your brand forward in the next 2–5 years: An Industry Guide

Distinct brand challenges are emerging across every market, and they reveal untapped opportunities for the players that are willing to solve them.

People aren’t buying products anymore. They’re buying brands. That should make you think long and hard about what you’re actually selling.

Even the most mundane of companies — from those that sell toothpaste to those who hawk discount furniture assembly — realize that we are no longer selling goods, features or mere solutions for jobs to be done. We’re selling a story that sparks change in the consumer today, by showing them our brand vision for what the future can be tomorrow.

Some industries have moved forward faster on this than others. Hygiene, beauty, consumer technology and travel have seen huge steps forward in brand ideology. Finance, education and housing, not so much.

On top of these staggered gains hovers a cloud of rapidly changing user behaviors and perceptions.

In beauty, savvy consumers have dramatically shifted from single-brand loyalty to mixing and matching premium names with indie brands. A big part of the beauty experience is now about concocting your own Google-driven regimens.

In finance, peoples’ spending behavior has changed, but new values that pit immediate gratification against future uncertainty have created a tension we haven’t seen before. Brands in this space have done little, if anything, to ease that tension and create a new story around money (which is really a story around success and self worth — two deeply emotional themes).

Even if your brand-leading CPG company has gripped the attention of a lucrative audience, there’s a very good chance you may have educated your consumer past your product.

Specialty diet brands in niches like keto and paleo focus on content in order to build a cult following, but then that content creates a demanding consumer whose tastes quickly evolve out of the brands that sparked them in the first place.

Bulletproof may have opened your eyes to a new narrative around health, but soon enough MCT oils lead to adaptogens and nootropics, and a whole world of possibility that lives outside of the Bulletproof product mix.

Both rudimentary brands and evolved brands face the same problem — the world will not look the same in the near future.

It doesn’t matter how evolved a space is or isn’t. Every category is facing major brand challenges, and these challenges are market-making opportunities for the companies that are willing to solve them.

Below is a high-level rundown of what our agency is seeing in just a few category hotspots. There is a treasure trove of untapped opportunity here.

You may not see your industry on this list, but keep an open mind. Some of the greatest brand innovations have been inspired by outside industries.

You may not be in finance, but perhaps you’re in a space that hits on some of the same emotional triggers. You might not be selling a wellness product, but maybe a wellness story is exactly what can make people more open to trying your product in the first place.

This is not a comprehensive list by any means, but it does cover some of the biggest brand challenges (slash opportunities) we see emerging in the next 2–5 years.

If you move your brand in a direction that solves these challenges, you’ll be poised for major payoff.

Use this as your treasure map.

Cannabis

[Also important for brands that face cultural bias, speak to users that are seeking ‘permission’ to consume/ engage, or are pushing up into new premium levels.]

Brands in the cannabis space, even the great ones like MedMen, are killing it with narratives related to relaxation, stress management and premium fun. But these are the industry’s 1.0 version of benefits.

As cannabis quickly grows up, we won’t be rewarding brands that sell us on benefits. We’ll reward the brand(s) that create a lifestyle.

There is no lifestyle in the cannabis industry right now, save for old cliched relics like the beach bum stoner or high school dropout.

A lifestyle is about values and belief systems, and that matters for the industry because creating a values-driven lifestyle around a product is the fastest way to circumvent cultural biases and fears (of which cannabis will have to contend with as it spreads from early adopters to the masses).

Our parents and neighbors will soon have access to CBD infused drinks, marijuana-laden dishes at restaurants and THC bath bombs, but without a lifestyle narrative, they will not know how to integrate these products into their lives with meaning.

Any brand can convince people to try a CBD drink or pot cookie once. But a very, very tiny fraction will figure out how to make the discerning consumption of these products a lifestyle marker.

The goal isn’t to get your mom to smoke a joint and relax. It’s to make her become a cannabis tastemaker.

(You can read more about the DNA of a lifestyle brand here.)

Healthcare

[Pay attention to this space if your brand is related to wellness or self-care, relies on scientific claims, or stands in the crosshairs between institutions and disruptors.]

Healthcare’s brand is caught between the truth and a lie.

Consumers are exhibiting a growing distrust of old institutions, “disease awareness campaigns” are turning benign conditions like excessive sweating into profitable medical maladies, peer reviewed journals are coming under fire for dubious content, and people like Gwyneth Paltrow and the Medical Medium, for all of their dissenters and critics, are still among the very few voices speaking to fatigued patients with empathy and compassion.

In all of these interactions, our health is constantly being pushed top of mind.

The Medical Medium’s unique style of empathetic nutrition is resonating with millions of people who are willing to turn a blind eye to science in search of something more human. There is a network of trust here that you’d be hard pressed to find in other health communities.

Its spilling into many other parts of our lives as well. No longer is it just under the purview of doctors, hospitals and researchers, but also our personal trainers, our phone apps, our grocery stores, and our Walmarts. It laces the fabric of countless consumer stories.

But all of that information is creating a unique problem.

When people see huge medical advancements on the horizon promising to treat cancer, yet somehow can’t figure out how to turn the results of their gut health testing kit into actionable, measurable lifestyle improvements, the system suffers a significant loss in trust.

All of that frustration and friction is eroding greater brand value.

‘If we’re so close to a cure for cancer, why can’t I make sense of my gut bacteria?’ What many don’t understand is that the perceived failure of that gut health kit is amplified 10-fold by the cure-for-cancer story that’s in the back of a user’s mind.

The fact is that health brands don’t just have to answer to the stories and expectations of their own niche, but those of the larger space as well.

In this case, the expectation isn’t about gut health, it’s about the modern miracles of science. That is the expectation that needs to be addressed and managed.

Even if you’re selling a simple product in this space, remember that it is not only your brand narrative that people are layering over their product experience, but any larger notions they have about healthcare as well.

Startups and old guards need to be far more diligent in mapping expectations and beliefs to actual experience, and to frame those experiences in an empathetic conversation that balances the promise of reaching the pinnacle of medicine with the opacity of how we will actually get there.

Wellness & Self-Care

[Also any brand that relies heavily on consumer education, or is going from niche to mainstream.]

There are a million different messages in wellness and self-care, but the strongest brands have done an excellent job of educating their early cohorts. Most narratives fall in two different camps — those that are empowering and mobilizing, or those that are disempowering and creating fear — and both have engendered sophisticated buyers as a result.

There are brands that heal from toxins, scary environmental threats, encourage restoration and retreating to a safe space. These brands are about getting from -1 to 0.

Then there are those that urge users to reach new levels of ability and productivity, to fight against the accepted norm and unlock hidden human potential. These brands are about getting from 0 to +1.

In wellness you are either healing or fighting. And on either side, information drives behavior.

That creates a problem for the masses of new consumers coming into the fold. There is a growing disconnect between early consumers who have been well educated and the wider masses that have a lot of catching up to do.

Because early adopters in this space are so regionally and demographically concentrated, every rising star wellness brand will have to start reaching downwards into the mainstream whether they like it or not. That means connecting a very sophisticated message with a more entry-level one.

The challenge will be figuring out how to connect these two very different groups and the spectrum of users that lies between them.

Perhaps in no other space will it be this critical to thread together different messages with one strong and resonant belief because in wellness, a consumer’s level of education defines the depth of their consumption.

Finance

[Look here if your brand is facing divergent value systems among consumers and institutions, or if old sources of meaning are starting to evaporate.]

Everything about money is emotional.

The vast majority of finance companies, both incumbents and startups, still think it’s about value and wealth. It’s not.

Money is about how we value and respect ourselves as individuals, what we believe we can accomplish, and most importantly, what we believe we deserve.

Someone who treats money like a scarcity is in a very different mental paradigm than someone who treats money like a game.

Today, most of finance is predominantly about a future reward. Savings, 401ks, estate planning, life insurance, portfolio trading… these are all about delayed gratification and value. Delayed gratification and value were also hallmarks of the Baby Boomer generation.

Gen X and millennial value systems, however, have become very present.

Lives, careers, families and identities have become very fluid, and perhaps even more personal and emotional as uncertainty has taken hold around us. We’re starting to see a huge divergence between the fluidity of our emotional value systems and the fixed rigidity of our utilitarian money stories.

The immediate challenge for companies in this space is to bring these financial instruments and services into the present value system of our daily lives. If I don’t know who I’m going to be in 5 years, how can I plan for the next 30?

What does retirement even mean anymore? What is the goal? And if we’re not clear on the goal, how can we write the story around it?

There is a long distance to cover between what money has historically meant, and the meaning it now holds in people’s hearts and minds.

Once you cover that distance, you have to strip it out of the ambiguous future and bring it into the tangible reality of today.

Housing

[Any brand in an old space with a story that refuses to die.]

The American Dream is a very deeply entrenched cultural narrative that connects homeownership with identity.

Even if we understand that the dream has become less and less attainable and perhaps needs to be replaced as a cultural narrative altogether, we still find ourselves lamenting its death. There remains a strong attachment to the idea that our homes mean something important about us as people.

But as with any major economic shift, there is a slew of young companies rushing in to create a new norm.

Startups ranging from those that rethink financing and sales, to those that redefine the mechanics of rentals and co-ownership stand a good chance of replacing the usual American Dream story with something more attuned to reality.

a16z partner partner Alex Rampell explains how as consumers get used to less friction and more transparency in the age of mobile, software is finally beginning to disrupt buying a home.

Companies like Divvy, which turn your monthly rent into a down payment on the home you’re living in over time, are accompanied by others like Point (which let’s you sell part of your house), Homeshare, HubHaus, Bungalow (all of which are creating some form of ‘WeWork for housing’), Flyhomes and Opendoor (focused on non-traditional solutions for buying and selling) and many others.

When companies like these create new formats for housing, they also change the way we live in and inhabit our homes.

Our relationship to the home is beginning to significantly change, in no small part because of companies like these. But any time there’s a big shift such this one, we need a strong, new story to effectively frame our experience as consumers. A story that tells us where we are in life, and the meaning that our home is to give us. A story that essentially tells us how to relate to this new living format.

And in this case, the American Dream story simply will not fit.

For brands in this space, there is a huge opportunity to create both a new narrative and a new vocabulary around who a person is through their relationship with the spaces they live in.

As traditional homeownership morphs into something else, consumers will be primed for a new perspective that validates both their homes and their station in life. They will be ready to feel the same pride and sense of accomplishment, but in a different kind of relationship with their living spaces.

We will need brands that can give us that perspective.

This isn’t about a space to live in. This is about what it means to live in these new spaces.

Travel

[If you’re a brand with an audience that’s evolving very rapidly, or in a category that has recently been fragmented.]

Travel and recreation culture, as it started in the US in the 1950s after soldiers returned home from war, was primarily focused on external values. With newfound time and money, and a newly expanded palate they had cultured overseas, men and their families wholeheartedly bought into this new consumerist category.

But from the beginning, travel and recreation was about an external set of values. It was about leisure time, entertainment, casual fun and of course, middle-class social status.

Today we’ve shifted to a much more internal set of values.

‘Travel and recreation’ has been replaced by ‘travel and experience’. We travel for self-discovery, wellness, personal identity and to find our place in the world. Travel is meant to reveal some deep truth within ourselves.

This is far more of an essential need than a nice-to-have, and with this new function of travel comes a new purpose. Travel is not about holidays, but about daily life.

People have evolved to value travel as a continuous necessity, but brands still treat it like a luxury.

Some people may find ways to actually travel more often, and some will not, but that almost doesn’t matter.

There’s an opportunity to build a brand world that matches this newly emerging consumer belief. Even Airbnb, one of my favorite brands which I’ve written about many times, doesn’t yet go this extra step.

What would the world look like if we talked about travel as a given requirement to everyday life? What if we gently shifted the conversation from travel as a major life event or rite of passage to travel as part of the American experience?

People are already having this conversation with themselves in their heads. They’re ready for a brand story that legitimizes that conversation in the world.

(I talk more about users, their internal dialogues, and how these dialogues shape their identities here.)

Use these challenges as conversation starters in your own company.

I promise that on the other side of each of these problems lies a huge opportunity to not only lead change in your space, but to redefine your goals and future direction as a brand.

Future challenges, in many ways, are just levers for creating a powerful brand.

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Marketing, Startup, Storytelling

Strategy

The Defensibility Fallacy: Product vs. Brand

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date December 7, 2018
No Comments on The Defensibility Fallacy: Product vs. Brand

[Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN]

Defensible products do not make defensible brands, although it can be easy to confuse the two.

What makes a brand defensible?

The world talks a lot about product defensibility, but brand defensibility seems to be a far more abstract subject. How do you build a brand that not only triggers users to act, but also puts competitors in a natural position of weakness?

Defensibility itself is an inherent trait or quality that puts your company in a role that’s hard to challenge. It is an advantage in your DNA that places you in a white spot of the landscape, and often gets stronger with time.

Defensibility is the ultimate goal of brand strategy.

Anyone can make a brand. Very few can make a brand that naturally undermines the value of others in the space just by existing.

But if I ask CEOs, leaders and other strategists what brand defensibility actually is, they’ll usually confuse it with product defensibility.

When it comes to product, defensibility looks like:

Data Moats
Ecosystems
Network Effects
Intellectual Property (sometimes)

These are locking mechanisms. They lock people into an escalating commitment over time.

When people make the decision to switch from Apple’s iPhone ecosystem to Google’s Android ecosystem, they are running an equation in their heads: what is the cost/ pain of leaving a walled garden vs. the benefit/ reward of an open platform?

A similar locking mechanism is at play when someone considers using an alternative to Google Maps (data moats) or investing their personal lives in Instagram vs. Snapchat (network effects). The more you have invested, the harder it is to jump ship.

Product defensibility is really easy to spot, and for many, it can be easy to confuse it with brand defensibility. You may think Google’s trustworthy brand is borne of their data and ecosystems, but it’s not.

Brand defensibility looks very different than product defensibility:

Protected Narratives: Stories and storytelling devices that are fundamentally unavailable to your competitors. (I talk more about this here.)
Identity Validation: Validating a user, subculture or group that’s primed to be acknowledged. (Strategist Ana Andjelic does a great job of describing it here).
New Truth/ Worldview: A vision of the future that no one else can afford to tell. (I go deep into this topic here.)
Brand Perception: The trust, perceived sense of autonomy, and sense of “what this brand says about me”. (I explore a specific case study here.)

These are belief models. They are a highly personal logic that explains how something works in the real world, and they operate very differently than locking mechanisms.

Snapchat may have had strong network effects early on that caused people to join its platform, but it was Instagram’s belief model of Identity Validation and New Truth that said “A beautiful life on display is the only life worth living” which ultimately won out and made many of those same Snapchatters move their life investments over to Instagram.

When Instagram copied Snapchat’s ephemeral content with Stories, they erased any product advantage. But what caused the migration was their brand.

In other words, Instagram’s brand defensibility around identity and belief won over Snapchat’s product defensibility of network effects.

That dynamic underscores a critical point in product vs. brand:

Locking mechanisms force a decision based on short-term need.

Belief models create a behavior based on long-term desires.

I can tell you right now that behaviors based on long-term desires ultimately beat out decisions based on short-term needs, and we’re seeing that happen more and more in business every day.

Belief models move markets and make markets.

Food and beverage, travel, luxury, wellness, beauty — these are all markets based on belief models.

There’s very little IP or inherent product defensibility in these verticals. They rely on belief models in order to move product. You might even say that those belief models are the actual product themselves.

A belief model can easily move a market. But more importantly, it can launch entirely new markets and spaces that never existed before.

Many of you reading this will likely already have adopted a new belief model around functional ingredients.

This is a new slew of ingredients like CBD, adaptogens, nootropics, CoQ10, Vitamin C, turmeric, moringa oil, collagen and so on that are promising to change our lives. They’re finding their way into everything from makeup and ingestible beauty to infused drinks and functional foods.

They tell the intoxicating story of “inside out” potential — the belief model that anything can be cured or optimized with the right functional ingredient. Find the right ingredient, and you can unlock something amazing within yourself.

This belief model, although very new, has already had huge impact in consumer markets.

If you pay close attention, you’ll see that it not only moved many markets like food, beverage, beauty and luxury, but also created new ones in personal development, productivity and medicine.

… and it all came from a market progression that already existed. In beauty alone, the story is clear:

The “all natural” movement of the 1980s and 1990s: Natural, clean, unscented — ingredients were about purity, and we centered our values around that belief. Brands like Jergen’s All Natural came on the scene, Dove introduced their unscented bar, Burt’s Bees graduated from its cult following.
The “actives” obsession of the 2000s: People begin to believe in immediate results and visible change. Botox, limp plumpers, tooth whitening kits, eyelash serums and new plastic surgery procedures all become popularized.
The “functional” frontier of today: Charcoal, ginseng, adaptogens, CBD, hemp and special supplements all reflect the belief that we can unlock something within ourselves with the right functional ingredients. Brands like Moon Juice, Vital Proteins, Ambika Herbals, Dirty Lemon and Kalumi Beauty are a tiny fraction of the companies that have rushed in to fill the new demand based on this belief model.

Don’t forget the emerging authority of functional medicine, gut health and alternative medicine, too.

More and more, we are driven by our belief models over our logical short-term needs.

The way we choose to understand the world is driving our purchase decisions. The evidence is right here in front of us.

Defensible brands can survive without defensible products, but not vice versa.

You can’t win the war with only a defensible product.

The moment someone comes in and layers a compelling, defensible brand on top of a similar product, you’ll lose.

The opposite — a defensible brand without a defensible product — can actually win.

A perfect place to see this happening is in fashion.

Defensible product is almost unheard of in fashion. Spend some time on Diet Prada’s feed and you’ll see why. Not only do all brands constantly steal ideas from each other, but everyone is pretty much helpless in safeguarding their designs, looks or processes from a competing label.

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

There is no IP in fashion. There are no data moats, ecosystems or network effects.

And when you take away all of those product protections, all that is left is brand. That brand is a story. It’s a story that heavily employs Identity Validation and Brand Perceptions.

If you try to dissect a company like Prada, Michael Kors or Burberry, you’ll see that under that story there is not much else. The clothes themselves are interchangeable and meaningless. The actual product is irrelevant.

It is our beliefs about that clothing brand, and what that brand says about us when we wear it, that drives our purchases.

We do not buy to clothe ourselves for comfort against the elements. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves by way of the brands we wear.

Never has this been proven so true than when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had used fashion tastes to identify right-wing voters at Business of Fashion’s 2018 conference.

‘”Preferences in clothing and music are the leading indicators of political leaning,” said Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower.

Clothing serves as such a strong belief model that we can, with great accuracy, determine a population’s political leanings based on it:

The narratives of the great American brands, which play on the myths of the West and the (mostly male) frontier are also the narratives of the Republican right. Those who choose to spend on the former are susceptible to the latter. He mentioned Wrangler and L.L. Bean in particular as brands that Cambridge Analytica aligned with conservative traits.

(Kenzo, by contrast, which is designed by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, the avant-garde duo behind the retail store Opening Ceremony, appealed to liberals, he suggested.)

This is a tremendous example of how defensible products (and the locking mechanisms behind them) operate very differently than defensible brands (and the belief models they employ.)

Locking mechanisms are logical levers that can be reduced to pros and cons, but belief models are far more flexible representations of the relationship between things.

Belief models are a combination of our knowledge, experiences and intuition, and they can easily cause us to replace black-and-white reasoning with more colorful ideology — such as with fashion.

The fact is you can’t fight ideology with logic.

Once we believe the world works a certain way, we bend logic into that framework.

The more an audience is bombarded with choice, fragmentation and competing truths like we are today, the more valuable these ideologies become. They’re crucial frameworks for our behaviors.

We’re living in an age when those ideologies have become everything.

Belief models for the future.

Nothing is defensible eternally — product, brand or otherwise. But focusing on brand defensibility in the first 2–5 years of your venture can set your company up for a decade of dominance.

I believe that no matter your industry, whether you are B2B or B2C, the brand is what you are selling. In which case, you need to do everything possible to make sure that brand is defensible.

Brands, just like products, have to evolve over time with their customers. Belief models, no matter how strong they are today, will be supplanted by new ones in coming years and generations.

Pay attention to the ideologies that are growing within your audiences. They will always lead you into the future of where your brand needs to be.

Tags Branding, Marketing, Product, Startup, Strategy

User Experience

How Brand Thresholds Push Users Forward

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date November 16, 2018
No Comments on How Brand Thresholds Push Users Forward

[Photo by Marco Bianchetti.]

Make people go deeper into your world.

We all carry symbols within us. Symbols like parenthood, gender, blue collars, a country’s flag, a cross on a hill or a grad school pin.

These are symbols that, regardless of place or context, will make us feel something when we encounter them.

In some cases those symbols alter our mental state. There is a measurable change between the person we were before we encountered the symbol, and the person we became after it.

When symbols change us emotionally, they become powerful thresholds.

One of the symbolic thresholds that has always had a profound effect on me is the Japanese torii.

A torii is a freestanding gate that symbolizes transition — from human to sacred, from the known world to the secret world. It is a border between the visible and invisible, and for all of its simplicity and detachment, it carries a gravity that I haven’t experienced in any other symbolic threshold in my work.

The Great Torii of Itsukushima Shrine

When I first learned about torii in an art history course over a decade ago, it wasn’t the structure itself that struck me but rather the power it carried outside of place or time.

While torii are typically placed at the entrance of Shinto shrines, they also appear in completely secluded locales. You may see one in an empty field, a forest, or outside of Japan altogether, but no matter where it is, it’s meant to mark a path for transition.

That is the significance that was imputed on this structure. It is created over and over again to exist outside of any specific time or place, and there are very few other symbols that operate in the same way.

It is not the space that makes the torii meaningful, it is the torii that makes the space meaningful.

Thresholds change the context around them.

I’ve seen them in Japan, in French museums, and standing tall in barren cattle ranches in southern California… and in all of these places, the torii created an emotional threshold that framed my experience of the world around me.

There is a lesson here in how thresholds mold the human experience and how they are different from every other kind of touch point we experience in our lives as users.

For brands, a threshold is an opportunity to create meaning where there once was none.

What It Means To Create A Brand Threshold

A $2.6 billion industry has popped up around subscription products, and 55% of that growth is attributed to a newly popularized brand threshold we’re all familiar with by now: unboxing.

There are now 3,500 subscription box offerings in the US market, all with markedly different business models.

Some, like Birchbox, use the subscription box as an upsell to full sized products on their website.

Ipsy takes a different route and uses beauty and lifestyle influencers to create content that generates ad revenue on top of the actual product.

FabFitFun makes a healthy margin off of sponsored products, and Sephora blends the sponsored model with straightforward sales.

Ipsy Glambag Plus unboxing by Madison Miller

It is not the convenience, the price point or the novelty that has propelled these brands to success. In fact, many boxes have wildly different price points irrespective of value-for-price, many do not allow customization, and at this point, what novelty can be left?

It is the emotional threshold of unboxing that has moved the subscription box industry into the mainstream.

As Elizabeth Segran of Fast Company puts it, “It hinges on a business model that goes beyond making money on the box itself, and investing in content that makes the unboxing experience exciting every single time.” [Emphasis added.]

Unboxing is an emotional threshold that has been iterated, perfected and monetized for maximum effect. A good unboxing creates a clear transition from before the event to after. People feel changed after an unboxing.

Every time your brand compels a user to increase their engagement in order to receive an emotional reward, you are creating a threshold.

Emotional brand thresholds promise a changed user on the other side.

Your user has to make a choice to move through that threshold and experience the change. It is in these critical mass moments that people move deeper into the brand, and they operate on 3 principles:

Investment. Thresholds always come with an upfront cost of time, money or effort on behalf of the user and the brand. For an Ipsy box, all of these investments come into play.
Change. There needs to be a before-and-after change in emotional state. Unboxing isn’t about the products you get, it’s about the anticipation of the reveal, the payoff and the euphoria afterward. In this case, it is also about the promise of who you will become with this new arsenal of goods.
Message. A strong threshold is a very powerful branding moment. It communicates the brand position in action, not words. There needs to be a message that comes through, and in Ipsy’s case, it’s a message about playing with beauty.

These rules can help you turn certain touch points into positive thresholds. They also mean that not all customer touch points are thresholds to begin with.

Sponsored gift bags at an event, for example, are not thresholds. There is no directly related upfront cost for the user, and no unified message.

Customer service, thank you emails, subscription pages, POS gimmicks, videos and content usually aren’t thresholds either. They may employ one of the principles above, but not all three.

Touch points are simply a time and place when your brand touches the consumer, wherever they are.

Thresholds are an occasion where you and the user both agree to meet someplace new, and to leave in an altered state.

Different Portals For Different Needs

The Ordinary skincare brand, for all of its drama and troubles, has been extremely clever in creating thresholds that move users deeper and deeper into their brand world. Fans have to travel through a series of costly portals in order to get the emotional reward they are seeking.

One of these thresholds is their extremely active and engaged Facebook group managed by users. It’s a private group that you actually have to apply to get into by answering some questions about yourself.

Once you’re in, you’re thrust into a world of acronyms, coded language, intimately revealing skin photographs, excel spreadsheets for experimenting with different regimens, documents and fervent followers that will push you even further out of your comfort zone and demand an increased investment in time and effort. This is a new space that both you and the brand are agreeing to meet in.

If you want to learn about skincare like a dermatologist, you have to educate yourself in The Ordinary’s world. And if you don’t, you’re not welcome here.

It’s a steep price to pay, but believe me, once you successfully pass that threshold you are a changed person with a changed relationship to their skin.

For the frustrated legions of women who have tried everything to get their skin better, it is an emotional reward they are willing to pay upfront for.

And it is that stretch between the investment and the reward/ change that leaves users wide open to the brand’s message — ‘The beauty industry is ugly. We’ve found a new way.’

Thresholds force us to suspend our biases and be open to a new message. They’re moments of change that allow us to accept fresh ideas in place of old ones.

One of the best times to have your brand message heard is when your user is going through a transition.

Everything about The Ordinary’s threshold creates a sacred space with promise and evolution… and that’s the best time to form new beliefs. That is precisely when the message comes through.

A threshold happens when both the brand and user are drawn closer together because both have opted to take a voluntary step toward each other. The user invests their time/ money/ attention, while the brand invests in a sort of wall, where not everyone is let through, but those who are get that emotional change.

You can look at it as a test, a boundary, a wall or a step. It can take many forms. What is consistent across all of them, however, is that not everyone will pass. Those who do will be changed on the other side.

Places Where Thresholds Can Appear

If you’re hard pressed to find examples of thresholds in your own brand or others’, you’re right. Brands are starting to understand the significance of these moments and it’s a tactical device that has been historically underutilized.

Many things come close to being a threshold, but don’t quite get there. Traditions like the Jeep Wave in the US or John Lewis’ holiday ads and the Coca Cola Truck in the UK, tribal gatherings like SoulCycle and Tracy Anderson cults, or any other number of unofficial events we care about as consumers.

But with the right thinking and perspective, there are a few key touch points that could be turned into thresholds:

Store Entrances: Literally the physical threshold that users pass through every day. The best, most experiential storefronts get the message right, and can affect at least somewhat of an emotional change, but almost none can balance it with some sort of upfront investment for the user. Popups are perhaps the only thing that come close.
Product Drops: Yes there is an investment, but the message and emotional change usually fall short. At best, you have brands like Supreme that create a flex-focused brotherhood, but it’s more akin to a game than an exchange.
Events and Pilgrimages: Everyone understands how to create an immersive, on-brand experience. And of course there is the cost of traveling and attending, but what is really missing is the emotional change. Many brands create an experience for the sake of experience — delight, fun, indulgence — but can they really say that their users leave as changed people?
Announcements and Product Discovery: Again, do brands balance all three principles when it comes to announcing a product or creating a sense of discovery around their new offerings? There is no upfront investment before the actual cost of the product itself. The message may be there, but there likely won’t be a before-and-after emotional state for the user.

Thresholds are not easy to create.

They require a totally different lens through which to see your users interactions with your brand. But when they do appear, they are powerful engagement machines.

Questions To Ask Yourself

With the right thinking, mundane touch points can be turned into thresholds that follow the three main principles that all thresholds follow.

Start by asking yourself the kinds of questions that will lead you to that critical user interaction:

What emotional change or arc are we capable of creating in our users? What emotional arc is best aligned with our brand?
How can we create an upfront cost in those touch points that will a) only draw committed users, and b) amplify the value of the reward?
What theme or message needs to be integral to the experience in order to communicate our brand identity?
Where are our users looking for more meaning in the brand experience?
What are the emotional ups and downs they go through in the overall UX, and how can we turn those points into thresholds?

Remember, the point is to gently push users deeper into your world with every gate that they have to pass through. If those gates are solid, they will begin to take on a life of their own and hold a meaning that is as big as your brand.

Crossing a threshold is about taking a risk and accepting the change that lies on the other side. Just like any relationship, the one that your user makes with your brand is strengthened by these moments.

Use them wisely. Sometimes creating a boundary around your world helps ensure that your true users can find a meaningful way in.

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Marketing, Storytelling, User Experience

Brand Strategy

How To Think Like A Brand Strategist

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date October 5, 2018
No Comments on How To Think Like A Brand Strategist

[Photo by Jon Moore.]

Nothing sacred. Nothing immovable. Always in the future.

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

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

Admittedly I did not know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was referring, of course, to Tesla.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look for the emergence of common ‘truths’

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

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

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

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

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

Truths come in increments and over time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn to spot master keys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These news stories and business choices are no coincidence.

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

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

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

Master keys create strong, unified brands.

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

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

Find evidence in actions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The day-to-day of strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Competition, Innovation, Marketing

Public Relations

Strong Brands Ask. Weak Brands Answer.

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date August 15, 2018
No Comments on Strong Brands Ask. Weak Brands Answer.

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

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

Pantone is asking the questions in the design industry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never let someone ask you the wrong question.

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

That’s happened to me twice recently.

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

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

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

Sounds reasonable.

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

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

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

She was trying to ask me the wrong question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. Wrong response.

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

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

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

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

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

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A post shared by Jasmine Bina (@triplejas)

Finding ways to ask at the right time is crucial.

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

A Strategist’s Advice: Make the conversation bigger.

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

Strategic storytelling takes that question and pushes it forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

u/Edenspawn

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

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

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

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

CES is where everyone else tries to answer them.

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

Making the equation work for you.

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

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

Asking can be very powerful and illuminating.

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

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

You can always flip the script for your brand.

It all starts with a question.

Tags Brand Strategy, Branding, Branding Strategy, Marketing, Public Relations

Storytelling

How To Tell A Story People Will Never Forget

Post author By Jasmine Bina
Post date June 7, 2018
No Comments on How To Tell A Story People Will Never Forget

[Photo by Very Quiet.]

5 rules for deep storytelling that go beyond the obvious.

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

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

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

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

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

Memorable stories also follow some common patterns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Make the first sacrifice.

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

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

Your first words are the invitation to an intimate trade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full post (highly recommended) here.

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

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

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

The first sacrifice works because it operates on persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

Similarly, storytelling is a negotiation for time and attention.

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

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

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

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

2. Trade the lesson for a theme.

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

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

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

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: The unrelenting yet quiet assault of time on our lives
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: The inevitability of ill-fated love
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: The beauty and complexity of even the most mundane lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Create pockets of emotional contrast.

We remember moments of heightened emotion more than other memories.

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

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

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

Emotion is created in the contrasts.

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

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

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

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

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

This goes for brand stories as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Don’t give them a chance to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gossipy indulgence aside… why was it so good?

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

Howard Stern, not Franco, made the story emerge.

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

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

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

Memorable stories anticipate the things we will be curious about.

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

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

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

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

5. Make your claim, then explain it.

Most people do this in the reverse order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make them take a side.

Force them to reconcile something in their heads.

Change their worldview (no matter how slightly).

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

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

Tags Branding, Business, Marketing, Startup, Storytelling