Tag: Marketing

Categories
Storytelling

How To Tell A Story People Will Never Forget

[Photo by Very Quiet.]

5 rules for deep storytelling that go beyond the obvious.

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

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

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

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

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

Memorable stories also follow some common patterns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

1. Make the first sacrifice.

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

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

Your first words are the invitation to an intimate trade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full post (highly recommended) here.

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

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

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

The first sacrifice works because it operates on persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

Similarly, storytelling is a negotiation for time and attention.

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

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

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

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

2. Trade the lesson for a theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Create pockets of emotional contrast.

We remember moments of heightened emotion more than other memories.

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

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

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

Emotion is created in the contrasts.

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

This goes for brand stories as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Don’t give them a chance to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Gossipy indulgence aside… why was it so good?

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

Howard Stern, not Franco, made the story emerge.

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

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

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

Memorable stories anticipate the things we will be curious about.

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

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

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

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

5. Make your claim, then explain it.

Most people do this in the reverse order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

Make them take a side.

Force them to reconcile something in their heads.

Change their worldview (no matter how slightly).

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

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

Categories
Strategy

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

3 moves you need to be making right now.

Brands emerge from choices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A compelling brand takes risks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell the story you don’t want to tell.

There is a way to make it work.

2. Show your face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

Every risk taken is a brand signal sent.

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

Categories
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
Strategy

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

[Photo by frankie cordoba.]

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

Stories change a lot more than we realize.

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

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

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

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

With every new cultural narrative comes a new human experience.

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

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

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

Brands that matter place bets on the future.

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

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

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

You start by looking for patterns.

 

Building The Emergent Story Arc

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

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

It’s called the Chocolate Happiness Bar.

Imagine Snickers, if Snickers doubled as a vitamin.

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

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

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

© Jasmine Bina 2018. Please contact for publication use.

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

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

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

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

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

© Jasmine Bina 2018. Please contact for publication use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snacking is a largely private event.

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

Image by Jasmine Bina.

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

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

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

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

© Jasmine Bina 2018. Please contact for publication use.

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

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

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

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

Because snacking is a sacred ritual.

That POV is a strong brand position to come from.

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

From here, we can start to build something interesting.

Image by © Jasmine Bina.

The Emergent Story Arc will tell you what decisions to make

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

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

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

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

Product decisions must also reflect brand decisions.

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

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

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

Image by © Jasmine Bina.

Every story changes.

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

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

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

Look for signals and win the war.

See where your competitors are going.

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

There is always a higher path to pursue.

Image by Jasmine Bina.

The Inputs Always Matter

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

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

 

Build Something That Takes Us Somewhere

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

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

– Elon Musk

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

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

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

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
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.

Think With Us:

Strategy In Your Inbox

Join over 20,000 strategic thinkers.