Tag: Branding

Categories
Strategy

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

3 moves you need to be making right now.

Brands emerge from choices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A compelling brand takes risks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell the story you don’t want to tell.

There is a way to make it work.

2. Show your face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

Every risk taken is a brand signal sent.

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

Categories
Startup

The California Concept: When a Belief Is Constantly Reborn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

French, German and American ads for travel to California.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that sparkling sense of freedom?

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

California Republic flag.

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

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

California is a belief.

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

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

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

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

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

The Tireless Business of Rebirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And its influence travels far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Jacob Repko.

What It Means To Brand Around A Living & Dying Belief

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

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

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

So what does rebirthing mean exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death and rebirth help unify a brand’s narrative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And relying on products alone is a risky move.

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

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

It’s only new if it feels new.

 

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

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

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

Come to California to witness it.

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

Categories
User Experience

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

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

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

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

All of those labels indicate a state of being.

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

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

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

But today, none of those rules stand.

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

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

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

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

All of these new labels indicate a state of becoming.

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

“I’m writing a novel.”

“I’m trying to get to 5k followers.”

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

“I’m fundraising for my new startup.”

“I just started keto.”

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

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

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

Photo by Les Anderson.

The Step Ladder That Turned Into A Treadmill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The consumer is now the brand.

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

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

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

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

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

But it goes further than that now.

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

Transformation is the new baseline.

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

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

It frustrates luxury brand directors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My answer was no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rent The Runway users. Garvin and Co.

The User Evolution

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

Transformation is:

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

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

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

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

That relationship (or context) comes from meaning.

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

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

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

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

But it’s not impossible.

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

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

“What treadmill are they on?”

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

“Who are they becoming everyday?”

“What evolution are they experiencing right now?”

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

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

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

Instead, they will categorize by mentality.

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

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

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

Amy sounds specific, but Amy could be anybody.

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

Amy isn’t a target in and of herself.

She is representative of a mindset.

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

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

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

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

Categories
Storytelling

The Magical Art of Making People Move with Brand Tension

A pinch of salt can make things sweeter. A dose of discomfort can make your brand stronger.

When Nike first told us to Just Do It in 1988, they weren’t telling us to follow the biggest athletes of the time — the very athletes in their commercials — and plan a life of greatness.

No, they were saying something quite different.

Nike was telling us to stop paying attention to the rules and go against conventional wisdom. Ignore the proven models. Ignore the winners and losers. Ignore if you should or shouldn’t. Ignore the superstars on Nike’s payroll.

Don’t use your brain. Just do it.

Nike was the first major brand that told you to do something without rationally thinking about it.

Do you feel that?

It’s tension. It forces you to stop and make a decision.

It pulls you close to the message or pushes you away from it, but it never lets you stay where you are.

Seth Godin talks a lot about the value of tension in a brand, and I credit him for making the concept a holy grail of modern brand storytelling.

But where does tension come from?

And how do you delicately create tension that pushes your customers to move without pushing them so far that their connection to the brand snaps?

I define brand tension as a sense of discomfort that pushes target customers to convert, and non-targets to walk away.

Tension turns a group of neutral people into die-hard lovers and haters.

It’s the polarizing element that suddenly makes your brand matter.

….and most importantly, it forces action.

Tension happens when something is pulled by opposite forces, and can manifest in many different ways:

  • Uncertainty of the unknown
  • Pushback against the norm
  • Juxtaposition of what is vs. what could be
  • A unique or remarkable opinion

Don’t confuse it with shock value or stunt marketing, which may look and feel like tension, but is instead a form of short term emotional highjacking.

When Kendall Jenner bought the world a Pepsi, it didn’t feel good. Don’t do that. Positive tension is, above all else, genuine and speaks to a larger reality.

In the art of creating tension, there’s just one important truth to keep in mind: If you want to create tension, you have to come to grips with the fact that you must, by definition, not speak to everyone.

Nike may have mass appeal today, but the Just Do It slogan didn’t speak to everyone in the beginning. Moreover, the concept of doing without thinking — which has propelled the widely accepted notion that “thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, interferes with performance” — may not be entirely true.

(Fun fact: it was recently revealed that the phrase was inspired by a murderer’s famous last words. Even the origin has tension.)

However from today’s perspective, Nike is an easy example.

Let’s dig into some more current brands that achieve tension in different ways. Watch this video for an overview, and then continue with the article for even more examples:

You’ll see there’s different paths to getting there and, with some time and observation, you’ll likely start seeing a treasure trove of invisible tension in the branded world around you.

 

Tension Hotspots In Today’s Brand Landscape

Dyson’s Higher Ground: Permission to care about the mundane

Five to ten years ago, Dyson was synonymous with vacuums in America, and for many people, a vacuum is a vacuum.

So when they first started airing dark, moody, near-spiritual ads for their new ball technology, featuring Sir James Dyson, not everyone got it. Certainly not my family, who laughed at the TV every time it came on.

But Dyson wasn’t speaking to them.

They were on the leading edge of a new message that created tension between what is vs. what could be.

This was a vacuum that stood as a remarkable piece of engineering.

There was a science behind it. An inventor. Something so beautiful and noteworthy, that Sir Dyson literally signed his very name to the product like an artist would.

Back then, this wasn’t even really about the vacuum. What we didn’t realize was that it was about the motor inside of it.

As Benedict Evans has recently pointed out:

That means every chance they had, Dyson doubled down on the motor story. They constantly pushed that position until we came to see Dyson not as a vacuum company, but something much, much bigger.

Dyson quickly became a brand that we’d happily pay a steep premium to for everything from air purifiers to electric cars.

They knew motors… and if you need a piece of elite equipment with a motor in it, you go to Dyson.

Tension frees you from the limits of your industry.

The 4-Hour Anything: We’ve been doing it all wrong

From the 4-Hour Workweek, to 4-Hour Chef, 4-Hour Body and now Tribe of Mentors, Tim Ferris’ point of tension comes from the silent narrative that underscores all of hacking culture – “we’ve been doing it all wrong this whole time.”

This story is especially effective today where the disillusioned masses are looking for both a new truth they can believe in, and control in a world where they feel let down by old social systems, cultural constructs, and corporate control.

Just as the world of wellness (Moon Juice, SoulCycle, Goop) has popped up to supplant traditional medicine… the 4-Hour series is the new standard of self-improvement.

The real power of all of these platforms, including Ferris’s, is that they prime the user for a very different kind of experience.

I personally wouldn’t put Ferris’s body of work in the same category as something like Goop, but on a branding level they operate in a similar way— “Forget what you were taught. We’ve discovered the new truth.”

When you come into an experience like that, you leave your old biases at the door and use the product with fresh eyes.

I can tell you that for me personally, the 4-Hour message is what made the 4-Hour Body such a unique and rewarding experience. That inherent tension changed my behavior, and results, from Day 1.

You drop old metrics. You forget past disappointments. Your brain doesn’t even call this a “diet”.

That’s what tension can do for you.

Opencare’s Health Proposition: It was never about the illness

When we started working with Opencare in September of this year, we had an interesting challenge before us.

How do you get healthy millennials to understand the value of preventative care, and prime them for a very different kind of experience, with a very different kind of doctor?

We realized that there was a hidden bias sitting on top of an interesting tension point.

We invincible millennials believe that doctors are only for bringing us back to a baseline in times of illness. Doctors aren’t there to make us stronger or superhuman. They’re there to stop making us feel sick.

Because Opencare Activated Doctors are specially enabled to make patients feel better than they ever have before (from the moment they make an appointment to years later when they’re living an elevated life), we knew we had to put pressure on that tension point in a simple and eloquent way.

Thus came the concept of:

“Doctors that see your true health potential.”

Opencare’s target market rarely realizes just how powerful the right doctor can be — not merely in treating illness, but rather as a partner for life.

It was a drastic departure from the current health narrative that surrounds us, and created a valuable tension that forced consumers to move. Health was no longer about loss prevention. Now it was about value creation.

As rollout begins with Opencare’s dental vertical, we’re seeing the tension-driven position already start to change the way people engage with the platform.

Which would you rather do? See a doctor when you feel sick, or collaborate with a doctor who can design a new level of health you never imagined before?

Tension changes the story.

 

The Truth Of Tension

You know a tension-driving message when you hear one. They tend to be simple. They tend to be big. They will always cause movement in the consumer.

…and they have a special super power where they can live and evolve in meaning over time, without necessarily changing in language.

Nike could have just copy+pasted their original positioning into the Chinese market, but they were very smart not to. The Just Do It that we are familiar with would not have resonated with young Chinese consumers who define themselves within a very different cultural construct than Americans.

For China, they took a subtly (but powerfully) different approach:

Just Do It, as introduced to the Chinese market.

As Helen Wang has pointed out, Nike took the same words and imbued them with an alternate meaning:

The ad seems to be about sports. But it is more than that. It addresses the internal tension that the Chinese are experiencing everyday.

In a society of Confucius tradition, young people are expected to “glorify” their families with academic advancement and financial success. They are constantly under pressure to fulfill family and society’s expectations. In addition, Chinese culture is very collective. People tend to do what their peers think is cool and trendy.

The lyrics of the video inspires a defiant attitude toward conventional wisdom. “You don’t have to do it for the glory. You don’t have to do it to be famous… You don’t have to do it to be like others…. You don’t have to do it this way or that way.” As it turns out, there isn’t a right way to do any of it at all. All you need is to “Just Do It.”

Similarly, Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour brand has grown beyond the concept of work to include food, diet, leadership and life hacks.

The 4-Hour language may not perfectly map on the surface — apparent in something like the title of his book The 4-Hour Body — but on a deeper level it actually does.

If you engage with his master brand you quickly understand that 4 hours is not about linear time. It’s about shifting one’s focus so that time becomes less and less relevant.

That concept can grow to cover just about anything. If Ferris wanted to release the 4-Hour Relationship, it would still work.

 

 

The Connections We Feel But Don’t See

Here are some questions to ask yourself, which can help guide you toward a good point of tension in your brand:

  1. What truths or realities are my consumers internally struggling with? What new truth does my product reveal to them?
  2. If my product is the hero, who (or what) is the enemy?
  3. What immovable rules do my target customers abide by every day?
  4. Is there an ‘aha’ moment in the customer experience that changes them internally?
  5. What other experiences or products create a good tension for my users?

Most importantly, pay attention to the signals around you and see where you begin to feel an interesting unease. Sometimes someone else’s model for tension can inspire something in your own endeavor.

 

 

The concept of tension reminds me of an Isaac Asimov quote:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’

People want solutions. That’s important. But when you force them to make a new connection on a deeper level, that takes them somewhere interesting.

That tension forces them to see something that they either didn’t want to see, or were unable to see before. It’s a moment that makes them stop and consider what they took to be true.

If you can be the brand that gives them that moment, you‘ll be the one that matters.

You can watch a video where I go deeper into the topic of tension, here.

Categories
Brand Strategy

These Are The Hidden Counterstories That Will Undermine Your Brand

What‘s said vs. what‘s heard.

At any given time, your brand is communicating two different stories — the spoken story that you’ve created, and the heard story that the consumer internalizes — and they’re not the same thing.

The spoken story is under your control.

Your history, legend, consumer touch points, language, brand identity, packaging, user experience and so on are all part of the spoken narrative you’ve created.

The heard story, however, is what the consumer actually hears when your spoken story touches them.

Even though that’s ultimately the story you want to influence, you can’t directly control how the heard story is internalized.

Let’s consider a very literal example.

When I say the phrase “That which cannot be named,” where does your mind go?

Do you hear the spoken story of something nameless, formless, blank and full of positive potential… as was intended by this originally Taoist phrase?

Or do you instead imagine something dark, mysterious, looming and threatening? Something taboo and perhaps evil.

Chances are you heard the second version.

In fact, that heard story is so much stronger than the spoken story, that J.K. Rowling adapted it for the character “He Who Must Not Be Named” a.k.a. the existentially evil Voldemort.

That’s how spoken stories and heard stories work.

The heard story is usually stronger than the spoken one, and it takes into account a lot more than just what you’re saying.

Just because you’re saying it doesn’t mean that’s what’s being heard.

One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is not knowing which heard story they’re communicating.

There are 2 common types of hidden counterstories — heard stories gone awry — that are important for any brand to be aware of.

 

1. The Silent Kind

For some brands, the heard story is likely the exact opposite of the narrative they want to employ.

This is especially true with brands trying to address a clear pain point.

Sometimes talking about a solution underscores the hopelessness of the problem instead.

Whether you’re a task app highlighting the overwhelm of daily life, or a nonprofit focused on the suffering of the disenfranchised, what people are actually hearing you say may not be what makes them convert.

Is Remember The Milk telling a story about control… or instead chaos?
Is the ASPCA creating a story of hope… or rather hopelessness?

These silent counterstories are deceptive.

You might think, why shouldn’t a brand explain the problem they are solving?

You can explain the problem you are solving, but that’s fool’s gold at best.

People don’t want to know you can fix their problem. They want to know who they can become with your product.

…and who they can become is much bigger than the problem holding them back today.

The better version of themselves is the real prize for consumers.

Move past the pain point, or your heard story may backfire.

2. The Tethering Kind

Be wary of any narrative that talks about the “other”.

We see this a lot in politics and the public realm. Notable figures, leaders and sometimes entire nations define themselves as not being the other.

If I mention Israel, you may think Palestine. If I say Aaron Burr you may reflexively respond with Alexander Hamilton (and milk, if you’re an older millennial like me). The thought of Taylor Swift may conjure up Katy Perry.

These are examples of how defining yourself against something will, by definition, wrap that thing into your identity.

Defining yourself as ‘not the other’ will always tie you to whatever that ‘other’ is.

Brands do this all the time.

Anytime a brand is ‘XX% better than’, ‘a newer version of’’, ‘ the most XX’ or ‘not like XX’, it is tethering itself to the very competitor it’s trying to break away from.

You can employ these comparisons to help users make more informed decisions, but they should by no means be your top line message.

Use tethering language very carefully and sparingly, if at all.

When it comes to commodity goods (such as mattresses) this is especially true.

What is left of the Leesa brand if you take away the “other”?

It’s easy to see the Leesa brand has no legs once the shine of “better new” wares off.

When Buzzfeed recently announced the slogan “All the news too lit for print” for their AM to DM show, it was a clear appropriation of The New York Times’ famous slogan “All the news that’s fit to print”.

The threat of lawsuit quickly forced Buzzfeed to take down the phrase, but it may have been for the best considering how tethered the branding was.

If Twitter is any barometer, it was a poorly conceived idea.

After all, how can you build a meaningful counterculture brand that is so reliant on the traditional institutions it claims to supercede?

Tethering stories may work in the short term, but they will not work in the long term.

If you’re looking to create a lifelong brand that sits outside of your competitive set, you have to resist tethering stories.

Once you’re tethered, it’s very hard to get above your competitor’s story. You’re intrinsically tied.

I’ve said before: Better is actually worse. Different is what matters.

Stories that define a different standard rather than a better one will always rise to the top.

Airbnb isn’t about better accommodations or prices — its about belonging.

The emotional concept of belonging is a dramatically different standard, defined by them, that makes any hotel, hostel or traditional B&B suddenly irrelevant.

Airbnb resisted the tethered story, and it served them well.

If you feel your best brand story is the one that tethers, you’re not trying hard enough.

There is always a larger, more significant story that will push you into less crowded territory.

 

 

You can make sure your spoken story and heard story are synonymous, or purposely creating tension by working against (or with) each other, but failing to acknowledge the heard story altogether is almost always a fatal mistake.

What is heard is what matters.

Create the story that you actually mean to tell.

Categories
Psychology

How To Reverse 4 of the Most Dangerous Consumer Biases With Your Brand

Start from the beginning. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the blurring line between story and science when it comes to branding, and I’ve noticed something interesting.

Consider these:

Greek myths, western literature, eastern philosophies, childhood fairytales, and any number of narrative “windows into the soul” many times fall in parallel to scientific cognitive biases.

    • When we quote Tennyson’s poetry and say, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” we are brushing against both Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion in the same breath — a preference to maintain the current baseline, and a preference to avoid losses over acquiring equal gains, respectively.
    • Pygmalion, who fell so deeply in love with his own carving of a woman that he asked the goddess Aphrodite to give him a living, breathing version of his statue, is reminiscent of the IKEA effect — a cognitive bias where we “place a disproportionately high value on products [we’ve] partially created.”
    • The tragedy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a blend of confirmation bias —our human tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of our pre-existing assumptions and beliefs — and the related congruence bias — where we fail to consider there may be alternatives we haven’t yet thought of.
    • The story of the Ugly Duckling (which was heartbreaking for a sensitive kid like me). This story is a demonstration of the in-group bias — where we favor those in our group over others — and more darkly, the essentialism bias — “the view that certain categories (e.g., women, racial groups, etc.) have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly.”
    • And who can forget Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer? You know why you can’t forget him? Because of the von Restorff effect — where non-homogeneous items are more likely to be remembered.

The stories that define us show the fingerprint of human thinking.

In his incredible Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, Buster Benson decodes and groups the hundreds of cognitive biases in our minds as answers to simple, live-or-die questions:

The amazing Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, by Buster Benson, codex designed by John Manoogian III. I highly recommend you read the full article.
You don’t need to understand every bias. What you need to understand is how they work in the flow of logic, according to Benson:

1. Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.

2. Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.

3. Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.

4. This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.

Cognitive biases reveal our nature as consumers. We think and decide in non-sensical ways on a granular level, but pull back you’ll see the coping mechanisms that these biases afford us.

Information processing is basically storytelling, and biases are a shortcut to creating meaning.

That’s why your brand strategy is so crucial — it tells the story that facilitates the decision to purchase. It creates the meaning the customer needs in order to buy.

Yes, you can control (or exploit) consumer biases with product, UX and customer service, but none of these touch points can frame a belief before it has even been established.

I’m going to show you how biases can be leveraged through brand story instead.

The story is always what matters.

Without it, we drown as consumers searching for meaning in a pool of meaningless information.

Understand the biases that reveal what your customer wants, and then give them the meaning they’re looking for… before they misinterpret it for themselves.

4 Consumer Biases That Threaten Conversion, and How to Reverse Them

1. Ambiguity Effect

We tend to choose options for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is unknown — even if the unknown option has the potential for better gains.

Thinx is a fascinating case study on what happens when you attack the ambiguity effect head-on.

I was hesitant before buying my first set. They were expensive, unlike anything I had ever bought before, and the real big question was — would they work?

There is no way to understate that last concern. The idea of “period-proof underwear” possibly not working was a non-starter. As it is for nearly every woman, the shame, embarrassment and fear feels insurmountable.

Thinx turned the ambiguous into something concrete by being everything a period brand isn’t.

  • Instead of demonstrating with blue liquids as so many brands have done for generations, they used blood bags and red colors throughout their advertising.
  • They resisted using euphemisms and analogies, and instead used language like “This is the story of a girl who bled a river and… it was fine” or “No, they don’t feel like diapers, and it’s not like sitting in your own blood. Boom.”
  • They resisted generalizations and used real measurements of blood capacity, flow and wearability.

A day in the life of a real menstruating human.

Sure they were more comfortable, more eco-friendly, and safer, but that didn’t matter. When consumers like me suffer from the Ambiguity Effect, the potential for better gains don’t fully register — not when the status quo of pads and tampons are dependable and safe (no matter how uncomfortable or archaic they are).

That’s why Thinx got straight to the heart of the matter. They had to break taboos to get there, but by doing that, they marginalized their competition.

“There are so many ways to go wrong. All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”

― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

There is constant anxiety about the unknown, about getting it wrong and missing the mark… especially in a space where no one has the guts/ permission to say it in plain terms.

If your customers are resisting conversion from a competitor brand because of the Ambiguity Effect, consider finding new ways to tell a story where ambiguity is eliminated and the very DNA of your brand story celebrates a new, known reality free of risk.

2. Reactive Devaluation Bias and Semmelweis Effect

Reactive Devaluation: We devalue thoughts and ideas if we believe they originated from an antagonistic figure, even if we may have otherwise found them valuable.

Semmelweis Effect: We have a strong tendency to reflexively reject anything new because it doesn’t match up with our norms, standards or beliefs.

Blu E-Cigarettes was dealing with a lot of shame-based beliefs and mentalities among their intended audience when they launched a few years back. There was a huge cognitive dissonance between what smokers knew (smoking kills) and what they did (smoked).

They understood that presenting their E-Cig product solely as a healthy alternative (which was at the time supposedly deemed 95% safer than smoking regular cigarettes) would only reinforce that dissonance and shame, especially if it was told by a member of the health community (an antagonist) so they had to tell a new story.

They had to tell the story from an insider’s point of view.

And just as importantly, they, had to tap into a different set of secret norms and beliefs.

Stephen Dorff flips the script.

As I wrote in my article on The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands:

All you had to do was take it from the rugged, free-thinking Stephen Dorff himself when he said, “I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I want to light up […] We’re all adults here. It’s time we take our freedom back. C’mon guys, rise from the ashes.”

Those are fighting words. Those are words that make it ok to be a smoker… words, I’ll add, that smokers never hear. It flipped the script and said you’re not the bad guy, you’re the victim. You don’t deserve to be vilified.

Blu tapped into a secret belief — that smokers aren’t bad people. It was a very different kind of message that wouldn’t have been heard if it didn’t come from someone on the inside.

If you want to combat Reactive Devaluation and the Semmelweis Effect for a group, create a story of empowerment and tell it from the inside.

Create a new truth that acknowledges peoples’ secret desires.

“And perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humor. We all think the one we’ve got — or haven’t got — is just about right and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step.”

— Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of

The Blu story changed the behavior by acknowledging an unspoken belief.

[Read more about cognitive dissonance and easing the customer’s tension here.]

3. Self-Serving Bias

We tend to take personal credit for our successes by attributing them to our inherent characteristics, yet distance ourselves from our failures by ascribing them to external factors beyond our control.

I was an early adopter of Digit — a lightweight app that siphoned small amounts of money out of my checking account and placed it in a separate savings account in the background. It was a brainless way to save money that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

And I loved it. Eight months of Digit afforded me a trip to London.

But when the company announced they were going to enforce a new $2.99 monthly fee, I disconnected my account.

My Self-Serving Bias was saying, “I can save that money on my own. What do I need to pay $2.99 a month to Digit for?!”

Digit: Always just a money-saving app on top of an algorithm… when it could be so much more.

Even though the fee was small, the “irony of paying money to save money was too much” for some, including me, and I never reconnected my account. Digit failed to spot the bias and just kept sending me innocuous email reminders to update my banking details.

What they missed was a big opportunity to change the story and shift my perspective.

Imagine — what if they had repositioned themselves from a money saving/ money management app to a self-care tool? (stay with me here…)

Digit is a new kind of self-care platform. Every 6–8 months, Digit makes sure you can treat yourself to the vacation, spa weekend, shopping spree, dinner party, home upgrade, or paid off credit card debt you need to live a happy life.

If they had told that story, I would have framed my relationship with the app very differently.

I believe I can save a little money every week if I have to, but a memorable self-care experience every 6–8 months is not something I can do on my own.

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”

 

― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This new story would have forced me to bear witness to what was truly gained when I had the app, and then lost when I gave it up.

4. Functional Fixedness Bias

We use objects the way they are traditionally meant to be used. If we need a paperweight, but only have a hammer, we may not think to use the hammer as a paperweight.

Functional Fixedness keeps us from experiencing old things in new ways, and in my experience that goes for any kind of product, not just objects.

About a decade ago, denim was the clothing staple for women everywhere in the US.

For nearly every day-to-day occasion, from daywear to casual evening, jeans anchored a woman’s outfit.

At that point Lululemon had been around for a while, but they began to see a change in the way customers wore their athletic and yoga-inspired clothing.

As a small niche of women increasingly wore Lululemon gear outside of the gym, overall jean sales were starting to decline and Lululemon made a pointed discovery — they were no longer just in the athletic/ gear business. They were in the fashion business.

Their styles evolved into fashion-forward cuts and prints, aesthetic began to take precedence over performance, and their story expanded into a brand-led vision for who the modern, active woman was… all while the new ‘athleisure’ category was beginning to emerge.

Well said.

While it’s unclear where the athleisure name came from, Lululemon took it, owned it, and ran with it. They became the poster child for athlesiure and thereby gave mainstream women a clear signal of when and how to wear their clothing.

If Lululemon had continued to run their company like a pure workout brand in those early days, the mainstream consumer would have kept using it merely as workout clothing — in the gym, for a limited purpose, and clear-cut use case.

That Functional Fixedness Bias was reversed with a refreshed brand story.

People can’t properly discover your new product if they expect it to work like an old standard. After all, our expectations frame our experiences.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

As I have written before, new languages and narratives that force your customer to engage with your product outside of the typical consideration set can help you get past the bias.

You have to knock users out of their fixed mental boxes in order to come to your product free of preconceived notions.

Only then will they accept the experience you’ve intended.

 

 

Our biases are always among us. We are either letting them guide the way, or deliberately working against them.

The key to getting through to your audience is not only to understand what those biases are, but what they reveal about the person who holds them.

“We find comfort among those who agree with us — growth among those who don’t.”

― Frank Clark

Whichever side of that equation you’re on, make it count for your customer.

Categories
Startup

Dig Deeper: The Secret To Gripping Brand Narratives

3 secret places.

Brand strategy is an excavation.

I’ve written in the past that “You dig and dig and dig until a market path is revealed.”

The perfect story, just like strategy, already exists. There is already a compelling, loyalty-building narrative hiding in the DNA of your brand. If you pull apart the floorboards and start shoveling at the dirt underneath, it will be there.

It’s your job to find it and bring it to life.

There’s always money in the banana stand, and there’s always brand equity hiding in the foundational story of your company.

This excavation mindset matters because it pushes you to look in the right direction.

Many CEOs I’ve worked with believed that their brand story was either a shallow retelling of, “I had a need for this, so I created it” or an entirely fictitious story made to fit into a product offering.

While it’s true that a good brand narrative may take some finessing, it’s always far, far bigger than a need or a product.

The brand stories that matter are the ones that usher us into a specific future where we are a more ideal version of ourselves.

Let me be clear, however, that this is not a vision or a mission. Nor is it your ‘why’ or reason for existing.

It has nothing to do with you as a brand, and everything to do with the customer as a human being.

Literally driving into the future in a Tesla.

What would you say Tesla’s story is?

Is it about the future of electric cars? Really? No, I don’t think so and you likely feel the same way. It’s much bigger than that.

Perhaps it’s the story of our planet — one heroic man’s attempt to reverse the environmental damage of so many generations before him…but again, that feels way too small.

Maybe it’s about the cool, mad scientist that dates actresses and builds awesome machines. That guy that proves everyone wrong and looks good doing it. While that may start to feel more exciting, it’s still far too granular.

Tesla’s story is about our very human need to progress.

It’s both our childhood longing to explore the unknown, and our adult compulsion to break our own limits.

It is the story of how our world should be.

Tesla is the company that turned science fiction into reality.

When you look at this deeper story, utility, environmentalism and engineering all fly out the window.

This narrative captures imaginations. It captures hope and possibility. It connects us to a specific future in which we are more ideal versions of ourselves.

That’s much bigger than the product, the need, or the founder could ever be.

 

 

Your company, no matter how small or mundane, can have an equally provocative brand story.

You just have to be willing to dig long enough, and in the right spots.

1. Search for: A hidden connection.

SoulCycle is built on the ideals of grit, determination and suffering.

You know how it goes. Dark rooms, front row politics, loud music, a trainer’s screaming encouragement blaring over the speakers.

It’s meant to be a very soulful experience all about you… but also a very hard, consuming, exhausting experience that leaves you a very sweaty, yet hopefully changed person.

Compare SoulCycle to the last exercise craze that was perhaps this sweeping — Jazzercise or Jane Fonda aerobics of the 70’s and 80’s—and you can see it speaks to a very different mentality.

SoulCycle isn’t about exercise. It’s about belonging to an elite tribe. You only get it if you’ve been in that room.

Source: New York Times

This didn’t just happen spontaneously.

Somewhere in the mid-2000’s, the founders of SoulCycle realized the definition of health was changing for the affluent American woman.

Concepts of healthy mind and body were melding, a subgroup of upper middle-class millennial women were in constant search of a ‘secret’ to health they didn’t feel they could get from traditional medicine or their doctor, and there was a very strong emerging belief that exercise had to be hard. You had to sweat bucketloads for it to count.

Source: Daily Mail

That’s why SoulCycle exalted these virtues in their brand story. They could have talked about weight loss or cardiovascular health but they didn’t.

Instead, they talked about a mind-body connection, meditative sport, pain suffering, and ultimate euphoria.

… and that hidden connection proved to be a goldmine.

I find connections between cultural signals, trends, behaviors, political climates, industry movements, subgroups, emerging tastes, innovations, mentalities — a whole world of indicators — and my client companies.

You know what’s amazing? No matter who the client is, there’s always a hidden connection somewhere.

If you’re a founder, you launched your company because on some level, consciously or subconsciously, you sensed a changing tide.

Founders are always taking in ambient information, passively digesting signals from far outside of their industry, and building their companies on that larger scope of understanding.

The connection exists, and if you can find it, you can leverage it in your brand story.

Unpack your thinking and see where it leads you.

2. Search for: The missing hero.

Plenty of industries have stagnant pockets where, even if there is innovation, users are generally disenfranchised and deserve something better.

That was the case before Casper.

To this day, you can walk into mattress stores like this one (although they’re starting to slowly disappear from the landscape) and indulge miles of choice overload:

Miles of mattresses. Source: Daily Republic.

There was little to no innovation, either in product or business model.

And very little ever changed.

Casper saw an opportunity to not only enter the space with a different mattress and model, they also saw a chance to assume the voice of a hero in the industry.

Casper is the mattress brand that said enough is enough. There is a better way.

Casper website, September 26th, 2017.

From the outset, Casper positioned itself as a hero that advocated for what was right by the consumer.

No other mattress brand had ever come close to assuming that role.

Language and story that put the consumer in a co-creator, co-hero role amplified that perception, and allowed Casper to change the baseline for the consumer.

Casper woke us up to the fact that sleep should be simple.

Casper website, September 26th, 2017.

There are different kinds of hero roles. You can speak truth to power, you can challenge the status quo, or you can even argue for a return to what’s familiar and right.

Heroes all have one thing in common — they stand for something.

If your audience is lacking an advocate that can fight for what’s in their best interests, you can be that hero.

Playing the hero comes with added scrutiny, and requires commitment as well as a high founder profile… but if you can successfully fill that gap, it comes with a powerful brand story.

3. Search for: A retelling of the past.

Where you come from is important, but that story only matters if you’re willing to tell it in the right way.

Your story is not a history.

It‘s not a recounting of what happened. It’s a point of inspiration that will define everything which happens tomorrow.

In my article on Creating Brand Legends, I point out Chanel as a company that has retold their history as a way of connecting the brand to the future.

Chanel has done a great job of managing their legend, most recently through the Gabrielle Chanel short film series.

In these 20 frenetically breathtaking short videos, a new generation of consumers is reacquainted with Chanel’s personal inflection point as a female designer.

The sixth film in the series, titled Mademoiselle, is especially powerful in placing Chanel in the lives and histories of all of us.

You simply cannot watch this film and not feel as though Chanel changed history, and after her, nothing was the same again.

If you watch those pivotal short films, you’ll understand that Coco Chanel’s story was couched in the new lens of modern feminism. It is not a story of the past. It’s a spark point that will forever define the future, and us as women.

You, too, can stitch yesterday to tomorrow, and create a compelling brand story.

A story of the past should be a lens that also provides a glimpse into the future. It is both forward-looking and backward-looking.

The narratives that stir us have to power to reveal who we once were, and who we will become.

 

 

Increasingly for brands, story is the strategy and strategy is the story. If you can weave a story arc that shows your vision of the world and how your brand will get us to that future, you will draw consumers to your horizon.

Show them who they can become.

Categories
Marketing

These 3 Brand Languages Will Change The Playing Field For Your Company

Own the language, own the customer.

Every industry has a language, and every company can either choose to use that language or create a new one.

In manufacturing, we typically speak a language of ethics. Values, quality, hard work, jobs, output and history all point to an ethical hierarchy in the space.

In cancer medicine it’s a language of conflict, with phrases like ‘the war on cancer’, ‘battling the disease’, ‘ ‘fighting the illness’, ‘staying brave’ and ‘soldiering on’.

In the beauty industry, we used to speak a language of ideals — youth, delicateness, lightness and western definitions of femininity. Today that language is (slowly) evolving to be one of identity instead — body positivity, diversity, strength, resistance, waving your flag and so on.

Regardless of the industry, a specific language exists… and that language matters.

Language is a crucial element in your brand strategy because it frames the entire user experience for your customers.

When you choose to adopt a certain vernacular, you’re creating the foundation on which customers will build their perceptions.

The Power Of An Educated Customer

Language educates and influences your customer in three important ways:

  1. Changed behaviors: How, when or where to use it. This is especially important in new categories, or when there’s very limited time to educate (such as mobile app on-boarding experiences).
  2. Changed expectations: The value of using it. Important if the value is intangible or mundane (like money-saving or insurance).
  3. Changed beliefs: Why you’re better. Critical, especially for challenger brands or new entrants that need to migrate users from competitors, or when the perceived cost of migration is high.

There’s no greater power than that of an educated customer. When your user really understands how to use you, how using you creates value for them, and why there’s no one else that can do it better than you, then the playing field shifts in your favor.

There are some great examples of how companies in very different industries have leveraged language to their advantage.

Here are three ways to control the conversation.

1. The language of identifiers.

We’re often inclined to compare apples to apples when qualifying a purchase as customers. We may look at one platform compared to another and try to see which is lacking in comparable features.

But sometimes, comparing apples to apples can hide important, hard-to-describe details that make one option far more superior to another.

Think Slack channels, Lululemon’s athleisure category or Ikea’s flat-packed furniture. All of these identifiers gave us subtle clues for how something should be used or compared. They revealed a hidden value or use case we may not have otherwise understood before purchase.

The same mechanic works for more abstract, experience-driven identifiers as well.

We all know Starbucks isn’t a brand powerhouse because of its superior coffee or fair prices. Starbucks, more than anything else, is a deeply comfortable space akin to home.

Whether you need to meet a colleague, find a place to relax and read, need a power outlet to charge up your phone, are desperately seeking a free cup of cold water in a foreign city, or have to get some work done, you understand that Starbucks is the only place to go… every time.

So how did we come to know that?

Because Starbucks gave it a new name.

Early in their brand messaging, they were smart to insert subtle references to The Third Place — where “all the comforts of your home and office” are available to you, without judgement and without limit.

It was an identifier that didn’t exist before, and once it did, we suddenly understood where Starbucks fit into our daily lives and hearts. We understood how, when and why to use it.

Naming it The Third Place allowed us to understand its value in a way that couldn’t be explained through words otherwise.

Creating new identifiers forces your audience to be open to an entirely new kind of experience, belief or expectation.

Plenty of brands try to communicate a home or work environment, but no one else has been able to make us inherently understand it the way Starbucks has.

If they simply called it a ‘workspace’ or ‘your second home’, we would have still failed to understand the true depth of value this Third Space afforded us as consumers.

The new identifier forced us to erase any preconceived notions or expectations, and be open to a different kind of coffee house experience.

2. The language of metrics.

Oftentimes, the biggest player in the room dictates the metrics we all go by.

Whether it’s number of features, size and number of customers, revenue, amount of licenses sold, being named “Top Company” XX years in a row, number of countries launched, company size, growth or anything else, those metrics work for them, but they may not work for you.

So why do we aspire to meet or exceed those same measures (and usually fail)? Because we let another company dictate the language of metrics.

Any metric that somehow quantifies value to the customer, with hard numbers or soft descriptions, falls into the language of metrics and should be carefully considered before blindly followed.

In the big data industry, the language of metrics has taken an especially unremarkable turn.

A quick survey of some major players shows the same metrics over and over again:

Hortonworks

Three generic measures meant to help the customer make a decision.

IBM Analytics

Different, but not really.

New Relic

Remarkably similar.

Iguazio

A promising newcomer in the space that still sounds the same.

This list could go on and on.

When you use the same metrics as everyone else, all you’re saying is (surprise!) you’re like everyone else.

If you’ve read any of my writing, you know that the golden rule of brand strategy is to be different, not better — and certainly not the same.

In The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy, I wrote:

Don’t play in someone else’s backyard.

Many spaces with two major players fall into a “better” trap. Box’s brand is a better version of Dropbox, but that does nothing to differentiate them. Better is actually worse. Different is what matters.

MapR seems to get that.

They don’t use the same metrics as everyone else, and it makes the customer think differently about how to compare their platform to others:

Agility and engines.

That’s different.

It’s a different language to measure by, and a set of parameters that puts MapR in a better position than if they had just repeated the same metrics of scalability, number of customers, speed and security as others.

When you change the metrics, you move the goalpost closer to your brand and farther away from your competitors.

Check your language and see if there isn’t another set of metrics that matters more to your customers, while sidelining your opponents.

3. The language of vocabulary.

Your day-to-day vocabulary matters. It’s another form of language that signals what people can expect from your brand. It also dictates CTAs and consumer behavior.

And it’s easy to see in a place like the nonprofit sector.

In charity, we often speak in complementary tones of lack and pride. Themes of needing, scarcity and suffering are meant to inspire guilt and short-term action… while language that congratulates us for pulling through and saving, rescuing, or collaborating delivers the quick relief we need from that guilt.

Advertisement: Red Cross Belgium
Advertisement: Red Cross Paraguay
Advertisement: Red Cross Brazil

Speaking in a vocabulary that people expect from your brand can be a good thing.

After all, if you’re looking for something purely utilitarian, like car tires for example, you’re not looking for anything aspirational. You just want to know that the tires work, right?

Maybe, but Falken Tires decided to challenge that thinking.

In a space where much older and more established tire makers already owned huge market share, they had to create a new conversation that put them at an advantage.

In 2016, they changed their tagline from Falken High Performance Tires to something very different with On The Pulse.

 

“Competitors are all communicating on quality, reliability and safety but for a challenger brand like Falken we don’t have 50 years to build a reputation,” according to their Head of Marketing in Europe, Stephan Cimbal — and he’s right.

On The Pulse is human-centered language that shifts the discussion away from reputation and toward Falken’s core strength: a youthful, adrenaline-fueled experience that ties into their connection with motorsports, soccer, and events like Red Bull’s air race.

They saw “an area of communication that’s not used by competitors” and took advantage of that in order to be “something like the Red Bull of the tire industry: younger, dynamic, quicker and not so ‘business as usual’ like the others”.

This is a challenger tire brand that revolves around excitement, while others are tethered to heritage. Suddenly, the consumer’s field of perception widens and Falken falls into the consideration set.

By changing the language, they shifted the playing field.

You can do the same.

 

 

Your language is choice. An important one.

So many brands default into whatever has already been defined by another company— usually the oldest (or the biggest) player in the space — and not only play by someone else’s rules, but miss a huge opportunity to create a new set of rules that benefit themselves.

A new language can unlock audiences that simply couldn’t hear you before.

Whoever owns the language, owns the customer.

Choose your words carefully.

Categories
Startup

This Is Why You Have Brand Haters

It’s a good thing.

“Suck it up.”

That was often the tone of my response to our PR clients when Concept Bureau was a communications agency in the early years.

A CEO would complain about negative comments readers were leaving on a recent article… or worse yet, a journalist that had included a negative remark in an otherwise good piece.

It never feels good, but here’s the thing — brand haters are usually a sign that you’re doing something right.

If you’re pushing the boundaries of your brand strategy, making bold moves and actually moving the needle, you will inevitably get brand haters.

When people care enough to have an opinion about what you’re doing, that’s a good thing.

When you’re saying something that matters, people will have a reaction.

When you make the effort to create a family of lovers, you will, by definition, create a family of haters.

That’s because saying or doing something new will always be met with resistance. Just as with any revolution, people will resist and fight back. They’ll tell you it’s against the ‘rules’ to do what you’re doing or that you have no right to do it.

But it’s the people who refuse to give power to the rules that always make the biggest difference.

Amazon, Uber, Facebook — these brands didn’t follow the rules. They created them. You can try please everyone by following the rules that will limit you, or you can get comfortable with the fact that you will not please everyone, and instead write new rules that will take your brand to new heights.

Speaking at GSOFT in Montreal about how building a real family of lovers means building a family of haters, too.

Every visionary founder has ignored the rules and looked for patterns instead… but for many of us, rules are inescapable unless you’re willing to take a step back and see how you live within them.

Here’s a short list of rules the vast majority of us blindly follow:

  1. You can’t fight City Hall (…unless you’re Uber)
  2. You can’t have a store without inventory (…unless you’re Amazon)
  3. You can’t act like a president (…unless you’re Facebook)
  4. You can’t have a ‘scandalous’ past and become a role model for young girls (…unless you’re Kim Kardashian, Angelina Jolie or Miley Cyrus)
  5. You can’t create a new category of clothing (unless you’re Lululemon)
  6. Plus nearly every other rule you can think of…

Rules are a list of cultural do’s and don’ts, but patterns are those giant trends hiding just under the surface of a society, that point toward where society is really headed. Patterns converge toward the future and tell us what new rules people will be open to adopting.

Beware of rules. Rules usually don’t give you the answer. They hide the answer.

Uber, Facebook, Amazon, Lululemon— all of these companies saw underlying patterns about where the future was headed and just how much change society was willing to endure if given the chance and right incentive.

But betting on the future is risky.

And it should feel risky! There are innumerable unknowns. You face immeasurable hazard. The future literally could look like anything, and even though you can see the pattern, you may not always be certain of where it will end.

Heck, even choosing to have a specific, brand-led strategy is a risk.

I’m not crying, it’s just a risk headache.

But when you choose to embrace that risk and place your bet on your vision of the future, it will bother other people.

Whether it comes in the form of a customer service complaint, hate mail, a rude tweet, or a nasty comment on an article, it all stems from the same mentality —

People will hate you for not following the rules.

Haters take it upon themselves to tell you when you’re breaking the rules, and that’s a good thing.

Lean into it, because if you’re doing things right, the arrival of haters should also herald the arrival of lovers.

Provided you’re running your business ethically, sense-checking major decisions and following your true north as a brand, haters are a strong indicator that you’re on the right track, and lovers are a confirmation of it.

You need both lovers and haters to ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

 

 

I’ll admit, “Suck it up” was tough advice, but I never appreciated just how hard it was until I had to take a dose of my own medicine.

I had written an article for a major fashion industry website, and I wasn’t sure if I should publish it. It was bold considering other writing in the space, and it had a strong message that I felt the industry needed to hear.

It was my vision for the future, and my best advice for people who wanted to head in that direction.

I knew some people might resist at first, but hey, no risk, no reward.

Then it published.

Soon enough it was being shared everywhere and while some comments on the article came in as positive, there were definitely haters that started to voice their opinions.

“This article is so off-point and literally a disgrace […] There’s absolutely nothing insightful about this article, except that maybe BOF should raise their standards.”

“This article is everything that is wrong with marketing…”

“This is SUCH a ‘Millennial’, egocentric, self centered and self involved perspective.”

I can tell you that it was hard to ‘suck it up’ in that moment.

Let me be clear — I stand by my opinions but I am always open to expanding them. I took each comment to heart and really considered the opposite perspective, and I’m sure if given the chance to have a conversation with these commenters, we may have come to a common ground or I may have reshaped some of my thinking.

But these haters weren’t the only feedback I got.

Chanel, Brioni, Harvey Nichols — these are just some of the major fashion brands that reached out after reading that piece, eager to share how they related to the article in their own experiences.

Yeah I got some haters, but the people who really mattered — the ones I was really talking to — they turned out to be lovers.

You can’t have only lovers, and you certainly can’t have only haters. You need both to help guide you down the right path.

Embrace the rollercoaster.

Scott Galloway recently wrote that regression to the mean is the strongest force in the universe.

He’s right. People will always be pushing you to be unremarkable. Competitors, customers, critics, shareholders and investors — they will find reasons to make you follow the rules.

If you’re going to build a great brand, then you need to resist.

Haters can come from anywhere. Even people who were once friends may gently remind you to follow the rules or pay the price. They may grow resentful of your risk taking. They may provide fear-based thinking disguised as sound advice.

It’s ok. Everyone is doing the best they know how in a world of unknowns. You just happen to know better.

Congratulations, you have haters. That’s a good thing.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Understanding Brand Legends Will Make You A Master Marketer

How do you make a legend?

Yes, you can decode the power of a brand legend.

But first, let’s start by defining what a brand legend is not, because a lot of people tend to confuse the matter.

A brand legend is not heritage. It’s not history. It’s not fiction. It’s not a good story you tell others or yourself.

A brand legend, as I define it, is a narrative that makes people see their own lives differently.

Yes, history, heritage, a little creative license and a good story help, but they are not defining factors.

Ferruccio Lamborghini — A man seriously committed to clapping back.

Ferruccio Lamborghini was the founder of a tractor factory that brought him huge financial success after WWII. By his 60’s, he was a rich, happy man, and like other rich and happy men of the time, he owned a Ferrari.

You’d think a luxury car would be engineered with custom parts, but Lamborghini, a mechanic himself, realized that his Ferrari 250 GT was in fact made with many of the same basic parts as his tractors — and it was part of the reason why he was often forced to take his car in for repairs.

Cheap materials in luxury vehicles confounded him, so when he met Enzo Ferrari, founder and creator of Ferrari sports cars, he naturally brought up the issue.

Two successful men talking over sports cars should have a respectable exchange, but legend has it that Enzo Ferrari, a race car driver turned manufacturer, responded with little humility, saying:

“The problem is not with the car but with driver.”

In other words, stick to your tractors, son.

It must have been a real moment, because that spectacular Italian insult changed automotive history forever.

In less than 6 months, Lamborghini bought land just outside the racing city of Bologna, built a modern manufacturing plant on it, created the first Lamborghini 350 GTV luxury sports car, and took Ferrari head on in what may have been the greatest clap back ever.

So who’s the real legend here? A race car driver whose love of fast cars pulsed through his blood?… or the self-made mechanic who showed that racer what real sports cars were about?

You can call yourself a legend, or you can make legendary moves. Lamborghini didn’t build a car. He took it upon himself to correct the course of the sports car industry.

But even more importantly, he built a brand on his belief of what it means to be an entrepreneur.

Lamborghini gives people permission to say f-you to the haters.

Lots of brands give people meaning to their purchases or a fresh lens on the world, but very few actually compel consumers to redefine their own lives by a certain standard like Lamborghini does.

Anyone can be a legend.

The very core of a legend originates from certain concepts:

  • Moments of Meaning
  • Bonding Memories
  • Defining a Movement

We’re about to dig into all of these, but it’s important to note that legends come from action.

That means any brand, young or old, can lay the foundation for a legend that it strategically builds upon over time.

Heritage, history, content — all of those things can reinforce a legend, but they do not create one.

Like most good brand strategies, it requires a healthy dose of risk and correctly forecasting your position in a world of unknowns.

That’s not easy by any measure, but understanding how legends germinate will significantly shape your understanding of marketing forever.

 

Moments of Meaning

Legends have two kinds of events that thread through their brand narratives over time. The Inflection Point and Spark Moments.

— The Inflection Point is the origin story where something happened and nothing was ever the same again.

It basically says, “Something happened here, and it changed the world.”

If you look at Supreme’s legend, there is a clear inflection point where music and skate culture came together with the original mid-‘90s crew that owned the Lafayette scene in New York.

It was a critical mass of new fashion with new sport, and from that moment on, everything changed. A subculture was born, as well as a new mindset.

Today, you can see that subculture’s huge influence on modern pop culture, and it all threads back to that original inflection point in NYC.

The original crew of skaters, their love for hip hop during it’s golden era, and the immortalized stories of the Lafayette scene that played out during those years, all describe a moment where culture inflected.

— Spark Moments are definitive moments which follow the Inflection Point and cement the brand in its reputation.

These are moments where a brand overcomes challenges, pivots direction, expands to new territories (both literally and metaphorically) and so on.

Spark Moments typically pose a risk. They force your fans to either double down on their love for your brand, or dissent and walk away. They also open you up to the possibility of new audiences.

That’s exactly what happened when Supreme collaborated with Louis Vuitton. Some fans deepened their connection and shelled out more than ever to own a piece of the legend, while others declared it a sell out.

It was a clear risk, prompting Supreme to issue a statement saying, “Throughout the history of the brand, we’ve seen our customers have apprehensions whenever we do something unexpected. However, we have always stayed true to the culture from which we came.”

But for true fans, what made this Spark Moment even more meaningful was the fact that that Louis Vuitton actually sued Supreme eight years earlier back in 2000 for unlawfully using their logo on skate decks and other Supreme products.

Appropriated LV logo for Supreme products in 2000.

Supreme, the irreverent, free minded brand that has always made bold moves, seemed to come full circle with a hyped Louis Vuitton collab seven years later.

(You can read more about fashion narratives like this in my article here. Paywalled, sorry.)

An ‘aha’ moment is not an Inflection Point.

The storied Silicon Valley ‘aha’ moment isn’t a true inflection point. It can be a part of a legend, but it doesn’t create a legend on its own.

The vast majority of tech founders tell their story as “I had pain point X, and that’s when I decided to fix it by inventing Y.”

While that may be true, it still falls short. Looking at the chart below, we see that ‘aha’ moments fail to capture the imagination of an audience — while these are all great brands, none of them embody a legend.

None of these stories have an inflection point. There is no exciting narrative that tells us “nothing was ever the same again.”

Except for Steve Jobs and Apple.

Jobs’ ‘aha’ moment may have been wanting a computer interface as pretty as the calligraphy on his college campus posters, as the chart above says, but what’s the one thing everyone in the world knows about the Apple legend?

That it all started in a garage.

Two oddly brilliant men, Jobs and Wozniak, not only saw the world differently, but built a new world to match that vision.

Now, the fact that the garage story is highly romanticized and amounts to little more than a myth, doesn’t deviate from it’s purpose as an Inflection Point in the legend’s narrative.

We can point to a time and a place, see it in our mind’s eye, and say “Something happened here, and it changed the world forever.”

It’s not merely about the location or the pain point. It’s the immortalization of a moment that pushed us into the future.

There is a clear before and after — one looking very different than the other.

Our perspective of the world was shifted… and keep in mind this isn’t really about the product. It’s about how the story is told.

Every major Spark Moment after that Inflection Point either forced Apple fans to double down on their love for the brand, or dissent and walk away.

Bonding Memories

Bonding memories weave a brand’s past into a consumer’s past, and Harley Davidson knows that.

From epic cross country rides to local motorcycle clubs and rallies, Harley Davidson makes sure owners not only feel a sense of tribal belonging, but also collect a series of life-defining moments for the soul.

It’s not the size and scope of these events that matters (with some rides attracting more than 10,000 bikers) so much as the commitment that‘s involved.

There’s some science to that, too. Shared experiences create a special bond among people, especially if those experiences are novel, engaging, and challenging.

Many companies try to cheat shared experiences with costly, short-lived, gimmicky experiential campaigns, but a branded experience will not create the same memories as a bonding one.

Harley Davidson knows it’s an emotional brand that supersedes the sub-par quality of the machines it makes, and that’s why they’ve chosen very unique and somewhat abstract brand pillars by which to define themselves.

Fire, Muscle, Bond, Icon, Rebel.

Pillars like this give a brand enough latitude in order for a consumer to find their own identity within the company.

These five words can mean so many things to different people, but are still unmistakably specific.

It’s why Harley Davidson is one of the most tattooed logos in North America.

You don’t need to host pricey events or put on big spectacles, but creating forms of initiation, belonging and life passage are all very effective markers for Bonding Memories.

How to measure the bond.

Seth Godin offers a really simple and effective way to measure how bonded people are to your brand.

Will they miss us if we’re gone?

Answering that question is easy, and a strong indicator of your brand’s bond with your audience.

If you’re a founder with an even moderate amount of success, you’ll know whether the answer is yes or no… and you’ll quickly realize that commercial success doesn’t necessarily mean people will miss if you’re gone.

You can bet Dave in Ohio with the Harley logo tattooed on his arm will miss the company if it disappeared tomorrow.

No one will miss you if you’re not willing to make some bold moves.

We miss the things that make us feel.

Define A Movement

Chanel has done a great job of managing their legend, most recently through the Gabrielle Chanel short film series.

You can watch the whole series, from beginning to end, here:

http://inside.chanel.com/en/quest-for-freedom

In these 20 frenetically breathtaking short videos, a new generation of consumers was reacquainted with Chanel’s personal inflection point as a female designer, as well as spark moments that forced the brand to further define itself after that.

The sixth film in the series, titled Mademoiselle, is especially powerful in placing Chanel in the lives and histories of all of us.

You simply cannot watch this film and not feel as though Chanel changed history, and after her, nothing was the same again.

Don’t be fooled into thinking Gabrielle Chanel was simply the embodiment of a fashion brand.

This is the story of a woman who defined a movement around femininity.

It is her hope and heartbreak, experienced against a very specific historical background that creates the initial jolt for the brand.

Something happened to Gabrielle, and to all women, in that time and place. Chanel is that moment, reforming and traveling through the here-and-now.

Legends aren’t just subjects of good stories, they are the story themselves. When a new brand defines a movement, concept or category, they make a move toward permanence.

You can create something new, or recreate something already done, but every brand from Apple to Nike has created their space and/ or recreated a space ready for change.

Chanel’s story is quickly revealed as a feminist movement.

Marriage, class, equality, gender roles and sexuality are top line issues punctuated throughout the brand’s legend.

That applies just as much today as it did decades ago.

That’s the beauty of a legend that defines a movement. It can be reinvented and couched in an updated context from generation to generation.

Borrow the things you cannot own.

Shinola is no Chanel, but they’ve found a way to borrow the history of a town in order to ‘cheat’ a certain kind of heritage.

In the article The Real History of America’s Most Authentic Fake Brand, journalist Stacy Perman describes a brand that has borrowed American history to create a bond.

With Shinola, Kartsotis has performed a near magical marketing act — creating an artificial heritage brand by co-opting others’ rich American histories…

If the Shinola name feels vintage, that’s because it is. In 2010, his outfit reportedly spent some $1 million to buy the name of the long-defunct American shoe polish remembered today for being part of a World War II-era insult — “You don’t know shit from Shinola” — and reani­mated it with a new narrative…

Most important, by hatching the brand in Detroit — a city emblematic of American hardship, resilience, and craftsmanship — the brand is selling more than watches; it’s selling a comeback.

For those in the know, the brand can feel contrived, but for many others it’s the real deal worth buying.

You don’t need to co-op heritage to the degree that Shinola has, but if you’re a new brand, you can find ways to tap into a story bigger than yourself.

Shinola found a hidden story (Detroit’s resilience), dusted it off, and told it properly.

You can claim your part of a larger story as well.

 

Brand legends come from action.

It’s your choices that will make you legendary.

It’s the big moves that people remember.

It’s just that simple.

Any brand in any category can be a legend, so long as you build the right story from the ground up and nurture that story with constant reinforcement.

Yes, it does take a good deal of luck and an even greater deal of restraint to stay the course, especially if you’re a marketer tasked with short-term growth… but brand strategy is often a longer-term game.

Take deliberate action and build a brand that makes people see their lives differently.

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