Categories
Marketing

How To Create Powerful Brand Messaging: 5 Truths and a Framework

[Photo by Lauren Peng]

The goalpost is different for brand-led companies.

Decisions are 100% emotional.

That’s not hyperbole. It’s scientific fact. Without emotions, we’d have incredible difficulty choosing even the simplest of things, such as what to shoes to wear.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered that fact a few years ago while studying patients with lesions in the area of the brain where emotions are generated. These were people with full control of their logical faculties, but unable to feel emotions.

Fascinatingly, they were normally functioning patients with one very notable exception:

They couldn’t make decisions.

The vast majority of decisions have benefits and drawbacks on both sides. Choosing between blue shoes and red shoes may involve some logic (the blue shoes are more comfortable, the red shoes look cleaner), but when it comes down to it, there’s no one prevailing logic that will get you to the final choice of which shoes to wear.

It takes a non-logical leap to get to the final point of decision-making, and you can’t get to that decision point without emotional input.

So yes, we all use emotion when choosing things, especially as consumers. Not just little things, but big things, too.

Feeling With Dollars

My car was an expensive emotional choice. My entrepreneurial career (no matter how wtf and omg I can’t take this anymore it has been at times) is an emotional choice I make every day.

I bought $85 worth of cosmetics yesterday. They’re good brands, (logic) make me look nice (logic), are high quality (logic) and are necessary for my brand research in the luxury space (logic-ish)… but really, I felt like hot shit walking through Sephora and trying on makeup that was going to transform me into an empowered, beautiful, unstoppable woman (emotion).

You already know what made me drop the cash.

If 100% of decisions are made emotionally, why are we still using logic-driven, pain-point focused messaging frameworks to brand our companies?

The best brands, I mean the:

  • Pay $85 for a brow gel and mascara brands
  • Pre-order an electric car without a guaranteed delivery date brands
  • Spend hours waiting in line on Lafayette Street for Tuesday’s drop kind of brands

… these brands go way beyond logic in their positioning and messaging.

There is no pain point to solve here. There is no real, hard-pressing need. There is, instead, a human intangible that all of them have capitalized on. An emotional need that’s rarely expressed.

Whether that’s to fit into a tribe, realize one’s potential or escape reality, unspoken emotions like these are far more compelling than any pain point.

  • For the mid-management clients of your SaaS product, it might be to get the company recognition they feel they deserve but never receive
  • For the entrepreneurial users of your productivity app, it may be to feel they have real and meaningful jobs just like their 9 to 5 corporate counterparts
  • For the C-level buyers of your enterprise AI product, it may be to make their mark on the company, or even the industry at large

For all of these, there is a very strong emotional need that supersedes a logical one.

That’s not to say that customer pain points and needs shouldn’t be a part of your messaging process, but they shouldn’t be the end point, either.

Controlling The Right Things

As other great branding bloggers have pointed out before, “the goal of marketing is to control perceptions and change behavior.”

Changing behavior and controlling perceptions is especially important for brand-led companies as opposed to branded ones.

In my last post, I discussed the difference between branded and brand-led in the context of strategy, but here’s a quick rundown:

Branded companies have an identity, but consumers truly identify them by their products. When a product supersedes the brand, a company is always at the mercy of the consumer and their needs.
→ Think American Apparel and Old Navy

 

Brand-led companies, in contrast, play the long game and require more investment. The identity of the brand supersedes the product and allows a company to resist certain market forces.
→ Think Nike and Shinola

Brand-led companies clearly have heavy challenges when it comes to messaging and narrative.

They are in the long game of changing behavior, and changing behaviors requires certain ingredients.

 


 

For brand-led companies, anyone will tell you the story should lead the product.

But the story… the real story that most frameworks out there miss, is not very obvious.

I have a simple framework that will get you thinking in the right direction, but first we have to start with basics.

5 Truths of Brand-Led Messaging

1. Change the baseline

You can compete directly with your competitors in the landscape, or change the playing field altogether.

A good, brand-led messaging strategy begins by telling a new story that makes your direct competitors irrelevant to your core audience.

Evernote wasn’t a productivity app. It was a personal world for “Your Life’s Work”.

Yeah, it was weird when they started selling socks, but hey, it was so much more than just a way to keep notes. For a core and enthusiastic group of gig economy users, their “life’s work” couldn’t fit into a lowly to-do list app. Evernote’s messaging changed the baseline.

One of my favorite present-day examples is Moon Juice, which bills itself as “Plant-sourced alchemy to elevate body, beauty and consciousness” and has the Gwyneth Paltrow GOOP seal of approval.

As I’ve said in a previous article, Moon Juice may be riding the celebrity wellness wave, but it knows where to play.

The brand goes after highly motivated, self-care obsessed, information-junkie millennials that want a product to work where traditional medicine may have failed, while dazzling their imagination much like K-beauty does.

Products such as “Brain Dust” for mental flow, “Beauty Dust” for luster and the “Cosmic Provision Collection” of snacks for enzymatically live eating have proven extremely popular as Moon Juice continues to grow.

Whether it is real science or health-tainment is nearly irrelevant.

Moon Juice’s strategy is to literally be the magic potion in a world of medicines — with emphasis on the magic.

Founder Amanda Chantal Bacon is cutting through the extremely cluttered self-care and supplements space by changing the baseline.

And she’s winning.

From packaging and naming, to customer journey and narrative, Moon Juice is not a vitamin or mere health food. It’s a self-care tonic “alchemized to align you with the mighty cosmic flow needed for great achievement.”

No amount of logic can compete with that.

(You can read my full article, “3 Things New Luxury Brands Can Teach Established Marketers” here. Paywalled, sorry.)

2. Create contrast

Nancy Duarte has written some great books on the art of presentation and storytelling, but the biggest takeaway she left me with was the power of juxtaposing ‘what is’ with ‘what could be.

That constant up and down carries people through an emotional narrative.

She calls it the Secret Structure, and it’s compelling not only in presentation, but in brand messaging as well.

There is a harmony to the juxtaposition that resonates with all of us:

  • Today vs. tomorrow
  • The current me vs. the true me
  • The reality I have vs. the reality I deserve
  • Who people see me as now vs. who I really know I can be inside

What’s happening here, however, is more than just rhythm.

Extremes are hard to follow. By connecting the new and unfamiliar with the old and familiar, we’re managing that tension and making it palatable.

Jonah Berger calls it the Goldilocks effect.

“When it comes to new product or service adoption, the outcomes follow the same inverted U-shape curve. If something is too novel, it’s unfamiliar, weird and harder to understand.

But if it’s exactly the same as what is happening already, it’s boring and there’s no reason to change behavior. In between, though, it’s just right.”

Create just enough contrast to spur action. Brands like Under Armour, Slack and Dove have done just that.

3. Signal before changing lanes

If you’ve done your job as a brand-led organization, people will feel like they have jurisdiction over your company. They will feel like the brand itself belongs them, not as consumers, but as owners.

If you think about it, that’s both a very powerful force, and a frightening one.

As a brand, it means you can’t just call the shots. You have to make people believe they call the shots… that every decision you make for the brand is one that they would make themselves.

When Coke changed it’s formula in 1985, consumers lost their minds. Comments like, “Changing Coke is like God making the grass purple” pretty much summed up the sentiment at the time, and forced the company to bring back the original recipe as Coke Classic within 3 months.

Funny thing is, if you considered their campaign and positioning at the time, it made total sense to introduce the new Coke to the American market.

Except for one consideration.

Coke’s president and COO Donald R. Keough said it best himself.

‘’All of the time and money and skill that we poured into consumer research could not reveal the depth of feeling for the original taste of Coca-Cola.”

In other words, the company didn’t really own the brand. The consumer did.

That “depth of feeling” was a clear sense of ownership.

We saw the same thing happen when Netflix split their product tiers and sent stock prices plummeting as 800,000 subscribers left. They eventually weathered the storm, but not without a painfully drawn out comeback effort.

An even more poignant example is Chapstick’s 2011 ad.

People. Lost. Their. Shit.

The 2011 ad that got Chapstick into a lot of trouble.

If you’re a post-boomer woman like me, it might not seem like much. It’s even relatable. I own 15 chapsticks, I just don’t know where they are. And ok, it’s objectifying but I’m used to images like this.

However, when this ad went live, a blogger posted their views on how the ad was sexist and disgusting and the sentiment spread like wildfire.

Let’s remember it was 2011 and brand social media scandals were part of the news cycle, and the reaction was very poorly handled by the company, but nonetheless people were incensed.

It even inspired a Change.org petition to “Remove Ads That Objectify Women and Sexualize Lip Balm!”

… but wait a second, aren’t most heritage women’s brands built on some form of sexualization of women?

Why did Chapstick get chastised while others like Calvin Klein and Bulgari crossed the same line on a regular basis?

It’s because people like me didn’t own the brand.

In 2011, the consumers who owned Chapstick were our moms and grandmothers. They were the moral, price-sensitive American women who saw Chapstick as a utility for chapped lips and not a beauty product associated with feminine sexuality.

They’re the women who grew up watching these kinds of Chapstick ads in the 1970’s (and likely the older demographic that Chapstick was trying to move away from):

‘Where Do Lost Chapsticks Go’ was too much of a break from the current messaging and people felt betrayed.

If you’re going to change lanes, signal first. Otherwise you’re going to crash.

4. Know which ‘why’ you’re answering

I’ve talked about the ‘why’ before, and if you didn’t hear it from me, you probably heard it from someone else lauding Simon Sinek (as they should).

But what the ‘why’ actually is seems to be debatable.

I’ve seen the ‘why’ made synonymous with the ‘vision’ of a company countless times in branding articles.

But I disagree.

The why is not your vision.

It’s your reason for existing, and it answers the question, “Why should I care?”

Filmmaker Andrew Stanton drives this point home in his talk on storytelling for film and media.

It’s your job, as a brand, to make the consumer care.

  • Lego’s why is because wholesome play should happen at every age
  • Andreessen Horowitz’s why is because systems will change humanity
  • Chipotle’s why is because eating right can heal the planet

None of these are company visions, but it’s easy to see how the vision was derived from the why.

When you can answer the question, “why should I care?” you’re going to force a reaction, and a reaction is the marker of a strong brand-led message.

5. Earn respect, don’t demand it

This truth is a product of the current climate. Markets are extremely fragmented, information is cheap and barriers to entry (both on the supply side and demand side) have crumbled.

Luxury brands, heritage brands, exotic brands and limited-access brands that once exerted authority are quickly losing power.

You can say you’re #1, best-in-class or world-renowned, but those aren’t differentiating markers anymore. There are just too many choices and too many alternatives… and in general, post-boomer consumers are too self-empowered to take a brand at face value.

Talk is cheap. Actions are the new currency.

When a brand takes bold risks to resonate clearly with their core audience, perhaps even alienating non-core users, consumers take notice.

Bold risks don’t have to be huge. They just have to be deliberate.

One of my favorite music secrets is the W Hotels app.

W Hotels app (Home Screen → Music Screen → Mix Loading)

Everything from the homepage to the top level menu and content revolves around music. And not just any music — tons of custom mixes by amazing DJs you’ll never find anywhere else.

Why a music-centric app? Because the W experience is never about the room. It’s about the tribe.

I’ve spent countless nights at Ws across the world but I’ve only ever slept in a W room once.

I, like most people, go there for coffee meetings, dinner meetings and parties. It’s where you gather, and no matter where you are in the hotel, incredible music is pulsing through the air.

W knows that music can transport you. Music is the experience and if they can own the experience of discovering, consuming and feeling music, then they own the in-app relationship.

That’s why music is organized by common areas in the hotel, so you can move through the music the way you’d move through a party or night out with friends.

It was a bold move that de-emphasized room bookings (like most other hotel apps) and elevated a sense of discovery and belonging instead.

In fact, the only place you won’t hear music at a W is in the actual room you’re sleeping in.

 


A Framework For Getting Started

Good brand messaging solves multiple problems at once.

A strong story can make issues around user behavior, trust, retention and competitive forces disappear. Just look at Airbnb and their brilliant “Belong Anywhere” positioning.

It also takes the complex and makes it simple.

The framework below is designed to get you thinking in the right direction. It asks hard questions that combine user psychographics with needs and patterns.

The point is to go past the obvious and find the powerful subtext that you can incorporate into your brand.

Remember, branded messaging usually addresses the pain point, but brand-led messaging addresses the reward.

Use this framework to move from surface-level pain points to soul-level desires.

This framework is not an ending point, but rather a starting point to help you:

  1. Empathize with your customer and see the world through their POV
  2. Ask questions that get to the subconscious truth, not the conscious answer
  3. See the invisible matrix that controls your user’s beliefs, behaviors and perceptions
An emotion-driven framework to help uncover the stories and language necessary for strategic messaging.

You can see there are a lot of heavy questions here, but all of them tie back to two things: messaging opportunities within a user persona, and patterns between personas.

Using this framework takes time and some digging, so let’s look at examples two ways.

Patterns

Let’s assume we’re developing messaging for a food tech startup that’s developed a vegetarian meat alternative that tastes and looks like the real thing.

Their strategy is to go after an untapped market in the millennial male, beef-eating, middle America, steak-and-potatoes audience who grew up with a strong narrative about eating meat as part of a healthy diet.

It’s counterintuitive and seems like a difficult demo to capture, but if they can get it right, there’s tremendous opportunity.

I want to be clear that this is not researched, focus-grouped or based in any hard findings. This is a shallow set of personas made up for a fictional company, but it makes a point about finding patterns between personas:

Three patterns are already apparent:

  1. Strong themes of personal excellence.
  2. All 3 personas are seeking some sort of optimization (emotionally or physically).
  3. All 3 have a strong sense of autonomy. Seeking a sense of control.

We know that this needs to be about the customer experience, and we know that our product must lend itself to that experience.

Thus a plausible idea would be to make our product about performance.

This is a meat alternative made to perform better than meat. It’s not a substitute, it’s an improvement. It’s also about the internal, physical and emotional performance of our users.

Better performance of the body + better performance of the soul.

Already we see the message is not about health. It’s about reaching your personal best.

That’s a very unique message that resonates with our three personas, differentiates among other heath- or planet-driven players in the market, and raises the baseline.

Messaging Opportunities

Now let’s look at messaging opportunities within the Dave persona.

We immediately see a few messaging opportunities. Keep in mind these aren’t necessarily the words you’d use in your messaging, but they are threads to follow and see if they create a compelling brand.

  • Internal Qualifiers show Dave is looking to reach the next level within himself. A message around a new level of mind/ body strength, no matter how subtle, will matter to him.
  • External Qualifiers are interesting. If we gave Dave a new narrative around his identity, he may find the freedom and flexibility he’s looking for in not just a product, but his lifestyle.
  • Behaviors are interesting, too. We know Dave appreciates premium, upmarket offerings. He’s extremely intelligent and empowered in his personal lifestyle products and realizes you get what you pay for. Messaging around a personal health journey fits well into his life story.

The beauty of this matrix is the interconnectedness of messaging. The three concepts within Dave above harmonize with our observed pattern across Dave, Mike and John.

 


Best Practices

  • Always be customer centric. Your ‘why’, your ‘what’ and your ‘how’ should be about them, not you.
  • Separate the product from the brand. They can be closely linked in the end, but ultimately a brand-led company is not promising a product experience. It’s promising a human experience.
  • Look for cultural trends and constructs all around you in daily life. For example, significant trends around self-care and wellness, personal transformation, redefined parenthood and decentralized luxury are all front and center for the millennial generation right now.
  • As Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit”. A framework will tell you all of the boxes you have to tick off, but finding a single message (or handful of messages) to meet all those requirements is difficult. This is the art of brand strategy and strategic messaging. Don’t give up. Just keep pushing yourself. When you get it, you know it.
  • Fill out this framework and then leave it alone. The hidden truths you uncover will germinate in your mind and eventually find a path to the right message.

 


 

Ah, messaging. So simple, yet so convoluted.

The next time you hear a brand message that stirs your soul, pay attention to how it works. I guarantee it’s working on multiple levels, solving multiple problems, with one eloquent solution.

The stories we tell ourselves shape our life experience. As a brand, you can insert yourself as an instrumental part of that life experience, but only if you truly understand what that experience is in the first place.

Take the time to do your messaging right. Your customers deserve it.

Categories
Brand Strategy

The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy

“This looks like a comfy spot in the landscape.” [Photo by Martin Reisch]

Brand strategy is a moving target and no matter how many strategies I create for clients big or small, new or established, I always get nervous at the beginning of the process.

Finding the hidden truth — that one giant opportunity in the landscape — that also speaks to the DNA of the company is what brand strategy is all about.

Connecting consumer behaviors, beliefs, trends and time to your company’s core competencies while making competitors irrelevant feels like fitting a key into a lock. Finding that key is rarely an easy process.

 


Branded vs. Brand-Led

The difference matters.

Branded companies have an identity, but consumers truly identify them by their products. When a product supersedes the brand, a company is always at the mercy of the consumer and their needs.

American Apparel and Old Navy are branded companies. They have an identity, but if the market demands lower prices or generic styles, American Apparel and Old Navy are forced to follow.

This principle holds true in all spaces, from tech to food to consumer packaged goods.

Brand-led companies, in contrast, play the long game and require more investment. The identity of the brand supersedes the product and allows a company to resist certain market forces.

Nike and Shinola are brand-led companies that can release distinct new product categories and occupy different price levels. The brand vision, not mass consumer pressures, dictate growth.

Only One Wrong Choice

Know what you’re doing.

Brand-led may sound better than Branded, or the other way around, but there is no right or wrong option here.

Each has pros and cons.

Branded companies tend to grow quickly and extract a lot of market value early on. Brand-led companies create movements and have more market authority once they find their ideal positioning.

The only wrong option is to not make a conscious decision about which kind of company you are. I meet many founders who fail to ask themselves what kind of brand strategy they want to employ, and as a result default into the Branded category… when they want to be Brand-led.

The list below can work as a cheat sheet for anyone, but it’s focused for Brand-led startups that want to define a clear, defensible strategy.

If nothing else, remember that if you want your Brand-led company to attract more upmarket customers, it’s critical to maintain a specific point of view — a key differentiator between Branded and Brand-led.

While product is at the heart of any business, you’re building a strong, compelling narrative that lives outside of it.

 


16 Rules To Guide You

If you’re developing your strategy, use this list to guide you. If you already have one in place, use this list to test it.

Most importantly, read this through a brand lens. When I mention companies below, measure them by their brand identities, not their product offerings.

1. Don’t play in someone else’s backyard.

Strong brands are unique. They say and do something different than other brands. They take a unique tone, follow a controversial belief or see the future through a different lens.

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.

2. Be specific.

This is truer than ever. In such fragmented and noisy markets, you can either speak loudest (a huge marketing budget) or be the most resonant (the right message for the right audience.) For 99% of companies, being the loudest is not a viable option.

Specific wins hearts and minds. [I get deeper into the matter of specificity here: Two Questions At The Heart Of Every Great Brand Strategy.]

3. Lead with the story, not the product.

Even when it’s about the product there needs to be an emotional narrative. Otherwise you’re just another branded company with a smart product, but no real brand vision.

Even tax software can give you the feels.

4. Answer the why.

Simon Sinek pioneered the concept of answering the ‘why’ and it’s worth your time to watch.

This will seem deceptively simple, but once you get it, you’ll see branding very differently.

I’ll admit even I brushed this off as overly obvious marketing jargon when I first watched it, but there’s a great deal of depth to this simple concept.

The why is not your vision, not your mission, and not your promise. It’s your reason for existing, and it answers the question, “Why should I care?”

5. Look for triggers. Speak to the subtext.

What your consumers say and what they mean are oftentimes two different things. Pay attention to what’s really being said. Margo Aaron captures this idea brilliantly in her discussion of how the best marketers read minds:

She says: “I try to cook 3x a week. I just don’t have time.”

Untrained ear hears: “She’s busy. She really wants to be healthier. We need to emphasize convenience and low-cal in our marketing!”

Trained ears hear: “She wants to cook because she thinks she should, but honestly she doesn’t give AF. It’s not a priority for her. She just feels guilty about how much she orders take out. She’d be happier if she allowed herself to not feel like shit about how much she orders out.”

6. Easing cognitive dissonance is good. Cheating cognitive dissonance is better.

Cognitive dissonance occurs “when your ideas, beliefs, or behaviors contradict each other.” If you think you’re financially responsible but then feel guilty spending $400 on a new pair of shoes, you’re experiencing the weight of cognitive dissonance.

If you can find ways to ease cognitive dissonance with your product, great. But if you can find ways to cheat it through your brand narrative, it can be incredibly powerful. P.S., that’s exactly the mechanism at play in the example for rule #5 above.

I dive into cheating cognitive dissonance here: The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands.

7. Spotlight the customer, not the company.

This is an iteration of the age-old best practice, “benefits not features.” When looking at user experience, content, packaging, even homepage menus, you should position language not only to speak to the benefits, but benefits that spotlight the customer. Marie Forleo gives a quick overview of it here.

8. Don’t define against a competitor.

As long as you define yourself against a competitor, your identity is tethered to theirs and will always be limited. People make this mistake in a variety of different ways: creating nearly identical (but perhaps “better”) website experiences, referencing competitors in content or mimicking sales strategies.

If you’re truly a brand-led company, you need to send the signal that those other players don’t even register on your radar.

9. Speak your secret language.

Strong brands have their own secret language. One of my favorite examples is Milk Makeup, where I’ve had my own secret language experience as a consumer:

In a sea of gold black and red, you will always be able to spot the sterile white Milk Makeup kiosk in Sephora. In fact, you’ll be drawn to it. Models faces are captured at odd angles, whose looks range from androgynous to tomboyish to ultra feminine.

This isn’t just good point of sale marketing. This is a conversation. You’re immediately forced to identify or dis-identify with the brand and its subjects.

Milk’s visual language is so specific, that you either get it or you don’t. And when you get it, you fully realize that the 10 girls behind you didn’t. You speak a language that others aren’t privy to.

Another great example that I love is Atlassian’s outdoor billboards:

It’s clear their secret language creates a private moment between the brand and those who “get it.”

10. Make your future bet.

Have a hypothesis about where the world will be in 2, 5 or 10 years and place your bets on that vision. Solving a problem that exists today completely ignores the fact that your consumers are dynamic and always changing. Cultures, beliefs and behaviors are evolving faster than ever.

Your brand strategy needs to look into the future, and what you see there should be informing your approach today.

11. Take bold risks.

If you’re placing your bet on a specific future vision, then you’re taking a risk. Placing bets on the future should feel risky.

But risk cuts another way, too. Old brands demand authority among consumers… and they’re quickly losing marketshare because that’s an old model that simply doesn’t work today. Most founders already realize that.

What they don’t always get is that new and emerging brands must earn authority by taking bold risks. This is especially evident in luxury (which is basically an exercise in pure brand strategy).

12. Force hard decisions.

A good brand strategy will force you to make difficult decisions. Having a point of view means you won’t please everyone. It also means you’ll be pushing your core consumers to continuously walk into the future before they’re 100% ready.

Snap’s Spectacles, Tesla’s pre-orders, 23andMe’s story of human connection — all of these brands had heavy narratives that pushed consumers to take a leap forward. They were hard decisions for both the company and the customer.

13. Create tension.

Tension earns attention. Being specific, taking bold risks, speaking your secret language… all of these things create tension. They captivate your core audience and keep secondary audiences on the sidelines.

No one explains this better than Seth Godin. Different brand narratives create different levels of tension and engagement:

The tension of how it might turn out.
The tension of possibility.
The tension of change.
[…]
Stories work because we’re not sure. We’re half there, half not.
This might work.
This might not work.
The tension of maybe.

Tension comes from juxtaposing what is, with what could be.

14. Empathize with your customer.

One of my favorite quotes is, “Everyone is a hero in their own story.” Your customer is trying to be the best version of themselves that they can. You must empathize with them if you expect to uncover the triggers, behaviors and beliefs that will underlie your brand strategy.

Sound obvious? Yeah, I think so too, but plenty of founders fail to do this.

15. Relief beats guilt. Reward beats fear.

You will always have the choice to go positive or negative in your strategy. Tell the scary, shame-based story or the positive, goal-oriented story. Neither is inherently wrong, but some do work better than others.

Charity, global warming, war — why do none of these narratives work to permanently move people? Because they’re shame based. They inspire guilt. They create a feeling that may motivate in the short term, but most people want to avoid and escape in the long term.

Brands like Do Something, Teach for America, and Habitat for Humanity reverse the negative story and move in a positive direction.

16. The opposite must also be a strategy.

Roger L. Martin’s simple strategy test asks, “Is the opposite of our strategy also a strategy?”

The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you.

If you’re a wealth management company looking to “target wealthy individuals who want and are willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services […by] providing great customer service across the breadth of wealth management needs”, you’re not really saying anything.

The opposite would be to target poor individuals who don’t want to pay for your services, with crappy customer service across a narrow set of tools. No one would go for this opposite strategy… so it’s safe to say you’re basically going after the same thing everyone else is.

That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors and the only way you will make a decent return is if the industry currently happens to be highly attractive structurally.

Don’t fall into the trap of being indistinguishable.

 


 

I often tell people brand strategy feels like an excavation. You dig and dig and dig until you arrive at what the core of the company is about, and then suddenly, a market path is revealed.

Challenge yourself to dig deeper. Go past the obvious and discover an approach that excites you just as much as it scares you.

That’s the feeling of good brand strategy.

 

This is a companion piece to The 14 Rules of Identity.

Categories
Startup

The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands

 

Smart brands convey a strong, overt benefit that lines up with people’s actions and beliefs. Great brands, however, are smart enough to see the gap between people’s actions and beliefs, and leverage it for greater opportunity — and they do it without you realizing.

Cognitive dissonance occurs “when your ideas, beliefs, or behaviors contradict each other.” If you think you’re financially responsible but then feel guilty spending $400 on a new pair of shoes, you’re experiencing the weight of cognitive dissonance. When you buy a new computer but look up reviews and prices afterward to convince yourself it was a smart purchase, the stress of cognitive dissonance is driving your behavior. It’s a landmark theory pioneered by social psychologist Leon Festinger that has impacted the way we view behavior and culture ever since it was introduced in 1957.

As a brand strategist, I search for the clues that underly what people think and how they act. Here, we’ll dig deeper into the principles and ideas that turn this concept into a powerful tool:

  1. What cognitive dissonance is in a human context, as well as a brand context
  2. How to spot the gap, and a look at companies who are leveraging cognitive dissonance to better serve and sway their customers (usually under the radar)
  3. How to employ the concept in your own company for better product design, branding, engagement and loyalty

That Feeling When

You can return the $400 pair of shoes, or you can keep them and tell yourself they’re handmade in Italy and will be a wardrobe staple for years to come. You can search and search until you find a better computer at a better price, or instead comfort yourself in the changed belief that it was a good investment and what really matters is that you no longer have to worry about your programs constantly crashing.

If you’ve ever bought an expensive luxury item or untested piece of hardware, you’ll agree that none of those options ever feels quite right. Either by lack of information or lack of self-control, there is a measurable discomfort we feel when what we believe is not synonymous with what we do.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory explains how that mismatch drives our behavior… the urge to pacify and rectify ourselves, even when no one is watching.

It’s easy to see that the greater the gap between your actions and beliefs, the greater the tension that is experienced… and the greater our urge to do something about it. We have three choices in dealing with that tangible tension:

  1. Change our beliefs
  2. Change our actions
  3. Change the way we perceive our actions

Depending on the situation, you’ll go for one, two or all three of those options in relieving your state of cognitive dissonance.

eLearning Industry, July 22nd, 2016

Most of us think we’re honest, but call it a “fib” instead of a lie when we act dishonest in an awkward situation. Calling it a fib lowers the tension between believing we are good, honest people, and the fact that we failed to tell the truth.

Cognitive dissonance plays many roles in our lives, ranging from self-denial to simply getting through the day.

Can’t Escape It

By the way, it’s everywhere.

We have all kinds of conflicting desires and beliefs, not to mention outside influences, internal biases, and the fact that the expectations and restrictions placed upon us change in different environments.

For example, most people think that climate change will harm Americans, but they don’t think it will harm them personally:

New York Times, March 21, 2017

…and we know it’s important to wash our hands, but not so much if nobody’s watching:

PR Newswire, February 7th, 2017 | Bradley Corp., December 12–15, 2016

…and of course we believe in religious freedoms, but the expressions of those religious freedoms by others can make us uncomfortable:

Washington Post, November 17th, 2015 (but note the PRRI study is from 2011)

From the time we’re kids believing (but not really believing, but maybe kinda believing) in Santa Claus, to being teenagers who convinced ourselves we “like, omg, really loved prom” even though it sucked and was nothing like the movies we grew up with, to being adults who cheat on our diets because we can always jog for an extra 30 minutes tomorrow… it’s a part of life.

Cognitive dissonance reveals our human nature by exposing:

  • What we want to believe about ourselves
  • How we truly view the world
  • How we want to be perceived by others
  • What we desire
  • What we feel can’t be said
  • What we fear, what we hope

A good brand will address subconscious drivers like these, and any company that makes it easy for a consumer to narrow the gap between what they believe and what they do will tap into a viable market opportunity.

They will create a product that makes it easy to change your behavior (Any.do, Wunderlist), or a story that makes it easy to change your beliefs (Starbucks, Supreme). Either way, your actions will match your words.

…but there are some brands that let you have your cake and eat it, too. They covertly allow you to maintain your current behaviors, but reap the rewards of lowered cognitive dissonance. These are the brands I find the most interesting.

Coddle Your Brain

A lot of startups have tried to solve the personal finance problem. Companies like Mint and LearnVest help you manage your budget by hooking up to your bank accounts and giving you transparency into your spending habits. The more you know, the more empowered you are to maintain and follow a plan that will turn you into the financially responsible person you believe you are.

The cognitive dissonance here is that many people want to believe they are smart with money, but oftentimes their actions prove otherwise. It can be a very emotionally taxing dissonance for some, so Mint and LearnVest have created products that change the behavior to be closer to the belief.

Digit, however, realized that for a lot of people, transparency wasn’t the issue. It was the behavior itself. Changing that action is incredibly difficult for most people because they overspend for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with transparency, including overwhelm, emotional spending and personal attitudes toward money.

Digit silently siphons money from your checking and savings balances every week into a separate account for safekeeping. You can “save money without thinking about it” because Digit sets aside money “in a way that you won’t notice.” In six months, you can be surprised to find out you have enough cash to take a trip to Europe or put a down payment on a car.

You maintain your spending behaviors, and still reap the rewards of lowered cognitive dissonance… a very attractive promise that Mint and LearnVest fail to offer.

Instead of a changed action, you have an adapted one that is far easier in practice.

Let’s think about another strong point of dissonance — charity. I’m not convinced anyone has permanently cracked this nut, but there have been a handful of brands who hacked cognitive dissonance in order to make charity happen where it might otherwise not have.

The gap is a) we believe ourselves to be charitable, kind, generous people, but b) we rarely give to charity. Standard practice here is to change our beliefs.

Can you really trust a charity to not be corrupt? Is there a charity for a cause that I’m truly passionate about? Will my $5 even make a difference?

It’s not that giving money isn’t easy or painless. Think of the last time you were at a grocery register and the checkout person asked you, “Would you like to donate $1 today to [insert charity here]?”

It’s a dollar, and it’s a yes or no answer. Dead simple with virtually no significant cost to you. But you likely said no.

You might be the same person, however, who said said yes to a “Buy One, Give One” brand like TOMS or Warby Parker (although Warby Parker takes a slightly different take on the concept.) Although it was far more trendy just a little while ago, Buy One, Give One is still a huge force and was woven into the very fabric of a brand like TOMS.

We tend to behave selfishly. It’s hard to give without getting something in return. TOMS let’s us give in the name of receiving every time we buy a pair of shoes.

You maintain your self-centered behavior, and still reap the reward of lowered cognitive dissonance… another very attractive promise that your checkout attendant simply can’t give you.

Brands like these relieve you of lower feelings such as guilt, worry and even shame, without ever saying it out loud. That’s why they have the potential to be so powerful.

It can be your product, your story or your user experience — all touch points are levers for easing the discomfort and helping people reinforce their view of who they are in the world.

We’re All Adults Here

When Stephen Dorff created a national wtf moment with his blu e-Cigs commercials, he was enacting a very deliberate campaign to reduce the huge cognitive dissonance existing in the minds of most smokers.

With stakes that high, a brand has to work on multiple fronts. When a behavior and belief stand in such opposition to each other, amplified by immeasurable public pressure and negative stereotypes, there is huge opportunity to reduce cognitive dissonance for your core audience.

blu could have just conveyed a more socially acceptable product, which was at the time supposedly deemed 95% safer than smoking regular cigarettes and posed far less risk to others through secondhand smoke. In fact, according to the brand, it allowed people to “enjoy smoking without letting it effect the people around me.” That would have been enough to adapt the action for many smokers. It gave you permission to smoke, and not feel so bad about it.

But the behavior of smoking itself has such a deeply ingrained stigma, they knew they had to take it one step further and change the action perception as well.

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

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

A new behavior coupled with a new narrative can be very strong, especially with marginalized groups. blu understood that and eased the intense cognitive dissonance smokers feel every day — something that would resonate with both casual smokers and life long addicts.

Please and Thank You

Brands that play cognitive dissonance often channel it as ‘permission’. They make it ok to stay the way you are, while reducing the emotional friction.

You can use it for good (finance, charity) or not so good (cigarettes). What’s worth noting is that generally speaking, different levels of dissonance create different factors.

Common overspending is often a punchline or the subject of a meme, while smoking doesn’t afford such light discourse. Political and religious ideals often require us to hold steadfast to one-sided arguments in order to resolve factual disconnects, but sneaking a slice of cake and moving your diet start date to tomorrow doesn’t summon the same sense of urgency.

Of course, there are some caveats to this, including the fact that different people feel different levels of dissonance on the same topics. It’s been found that extroverts are less likely to feel negative tension and less likely to change their minds than introverts are. We also have to keep in mind that different cultural backgrounds, genders and socio-economic status play a role, too.

Look Over Here

The funny thing about cognitive dissonance is that it feeds into itself. Here’s an example put forth by Dr. John M. Grohol…

Say you’re a student applying to two different universities and you rate each one before sending in your applications. You’re accepted to both schools and after some deliberation, choose the right one for you.

If you were asked to rate those same schools again after making your choice, you’d be likely to give a higher rating to the one you chose, even though nothing about that school has changed. We have a strong compulsion to prove to ourselves that we make good decisions. Even after the fact, we will continue to search for proof that we were right.

Many brands facilitate your ‘proof-searching’ so you can feel good about the purchase and feed the positive cycle.

  • Amazon’s weekly emails to Alexa users not only keeps them informed of Alexa’s new skills, but also protects against buyer’s remorse when users fail to immediately find the skills that would make it most useful to them.
  • Washio (R.I.P.) used to pacify my guilt with a special reward. Every time someone would come and pick up my laundry, they’d give me a tiny sample pack of the most heavenly dessert from DeLuscious. I’m not joking, it was unreal. I looked up their brownies to buy some for a party and they cost over $60 a dozen (!) Needless to say I didn’t make the purchase, but I can tell you that my crippling guilt over wasted money on laundry (that I really should have been doing myself) washed away when I got that brownie.
  • Gusto sends business owners a hearty congratulations every time payroll has been paid or tax forms have been filed. Keep in mind that a business owner isn’t actually doing that work. Gusto has automated both of those processes, but deliberately gives the pleasure of a reduced cognitive dissonance to the customer.

The message is always clear — “Relax, you made the right choice.”

You Are Here

Cognitive dissonance isn’t behind every brand, and it won’t apply to every founder or executive, but you will run across it at some point, whether it’s in marketing, user experience or attracting new demographics.

If it does apply, here’s how to start using these principles for your own company.

Start with yourself

If you want to be good at spotting it for your brand or product, look to yourself first. Cognitive dissonance can be easy to miss. It’s subtle and insidious by nature, and can take many forms. It’s easy to mistake it as ‘friction’ or a ‘pain point’.

In fact, I was inspired to write this piece because something strange happens to me when I travel. I find myself in heated political discussions with people in other countries, and have a near out of body experience when I suddenly realize that I’m defending a point of view that I wouldn’t normally hold in the United States — especially if the other party is being critical of America, American values, or its citizens.

If someone says, “Americans have really lost their way. The state of the country is shameful,” my normal response would be, “I understand where you’re coming from.” But when I’m overseas, I get defensive. Instead I’ll say something more like, “Well hold on, it’s not as simple as that. There’s a lot of fear and misinformation plaguing the country right now…”

Some of that is an immature, knee-jerk reaction to feeling personally attacked. Some of it is my desperate need to move away from divisive, anxiety-inducing language to something more constructive and less apocalyptic. But a lot of it, I’m realizing, is actually cognitive dissonance. There is a measurable difference between my conflicting beliefs, and it plays out in my actions.

Start by examining yourself and the people around you for a few weeks. See if you can surface dissonance in their actions and ideas, and figure out where the tension is coming from.

Ask the right questions

When you’re ready to apply it to your own customers and user base, begin with smart questions that dig a little deeper than the usual problem-solution statement.

  1. What secret beliefs do my users hold?
  2. What makes my users nervous?
  3. Is there a driving emotion underneath each pain point?

Look for the gap that shows a misalignment. That gap will lead you to the core of your brand.

Choose your approach

Ask yourself: Can I change the story? Can I change the behavior? Or can I adapt/ “cheat” the behavior?

Nabisco couldn’t turn their sugary snacks into a diet food, but they could cheat the concept with 100 calorie packs that let people think they were changing a behavior to match their beliefs, relieving them of the cognitive dissonance… even though they weren’t entirely practicing healthy eating like an actual health food would require.

That was bolstered with carefully balanced marketing that promoted the changed belief that portion control is all it takes to make Oreos or Chips Ahoy! part of your diet.

This is where the artistry and science of brand strategy comes in. Depending on your approach, you’ll have to adapt your product development, brand narrative and any number of factors to beneficially leverage the dissonance for your consumers. A good place to start is to look at other brands (much like the ones I’ve outlined in this piece). See how they’ve done it and how you can apply the same approach to your brand challenge.

That Felt Good

In the larger scheme of things, we already know it’s important to give our customers a sense of agency. We know that reducing friction (experiential, emotional or otherwise) is crucial. And we know, above all else, a successful brand makes people feel good.

If you really want to hit the emotional triggers that make people trust and value a brand, you have to go deeper than the problem on the surface. You have to dig until you find the discrepancy — the gap that needs to be fixed — and resolve the tension.

That silent relief is the hidden key to winning your target.

Categories
Brand Strategy

Two Questions At The Heart Of Every Great Brand Strategy

 

[Update: This article has been updated here, along with a 5-minute video covering the major principles discussed in this piece, here.]

I like to start every brand strategy for a new client with two simple questions. They may seem easy enough, but they actually reveal a tremendous amount of information about the mindset of a company’s leadership team while posing a much more difficult challenge than most people realize.

1. How is your brand perceived today?

2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future?

Before you write those off as simple questions, consider the fact that your answers can literally change the course of your business. Taken together, I like to call them the Perception Queries, and everyone can benefit from answering them.

Take a moment to answer them for yourself. Without expectation or marketing jargon, write down your own responses as sincerely as possible.

These are actually loaded questions that you can use to get laser focus on the direction of your brand strategy from the point you’re at today to where you need to be in 1, 3 and 5 years from now. They will prove valuable at every juncture in your company’s trajectory, especially when easy short term growth opportunities gently nudge you away from your ultimate long term vision.

 


How You Answer Matters

The smartest founders I’ve ever met have struggled with this question in our first meeting. That’s because they understand that the Perception Queries force them to predict the future of their industries, fully embracing the distance between where they are now and where they need to be — all without any guarantees that the world will look how they expect it to later on down the line. The very premise and viability of their businesses are tied up in these answers.

The responses I get usually fall into 1 of 3 categories:

  1. The Vision/ Mission Response — “Our company builds the best widgets for the modern widget-using consumer who needs speed, quality and dependability.” No, this is not how a company is perceived. When I get some version of the company vision or mission as an answer, it often means that they haven’t stopped to empathize with the user. The Perception Queries force you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and feel what their relationship to your brand truly is… and it’s not a marketing line.
  2. The Goal/ Model Response — “We want to be perceived as the #1 widget-maker in the US market within four years…” or “We’re the Uber for widgets…”. Of course everyone wants to own their market or adopt a proven model, but heres the thing — if the opposite of your strategy is not also a strategy, then you don’t have a strategy to begin with. Nor do you have an answer to the Perception Queries. People who answer with a Goal/ Model response usually haven’t stopped to develop a clear hypothesis of the future they’re creating for.
  3. The Characterizing Response — “We‘re perceived as fun, unique, nimble, creative, growing and smart today… but we want to be perceived as large, institutional, trustworthy and influential in the future.” If you’re answering with adjectives, you’re on the right track. Perception is a point of view, and when users take a specific view of your company, they characterize your brand in a similar way. But a long list of general adjectives like this can still lead you astray. The specificity and deliberate choosing of those characteristics is what matters.

Regardless of your answer, we can test and refine it by considering the world of the future, specifically the unique world you envision for your business.

Your Hypothesis Of The Future

I’ve talked about this before in my workshops because it’s fundamental to a strong brand identity. Your hypothesis of the future is how you see the world changing at a later point. The way you see the world in 3–5 years is at best an educated guess, and I often call this ‘making your bet’.

If you imagine the future to be an endless set of possibilities as represented by a circle (or perhaps more accurately, a sphere), then your hypothesis is the small sliver of possibilities that will actually come to fruition.

If you’re Uber, your vision of the future isn’t that we will all be getting around in self-driving cars, but rather that manually operating your own car will become an outdated, dangerous, archaic activity that the public collectively rejects.

 

 

Once you have your vision of the future, your competitive set will shift. The people who are really in your way aren’t those that are making similar products with similar features today, but rather those who are making the same prediction of the future.

 

 

Snapchat was a social platform on par with Instagram and Facebook, but their vision of the future wasn’t about an app. It was about how we create and consume content. That’s why they created Snap Spectacles and suddenly became a hardware competitor in line with Apple. Anyone who paid attention to their hypothesis would have seen that coming.

Just like Snap Inc. and Apple, a clear vision of the future will likely put you in interesting company.

Once you have your hypothesis and competitive set, every step of your brand strategy needs to project you past all other players to a defensible, forward-looking position.

 

If you want to get deeper into this landscape/ hypothesis exercise, go here.

Now we can return to our original two questions. Once you know your hypothesis and what you need to project yourself past others in your space, consider the Perception Queries again.

1. How is your brand perceived today?

2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future

Be Bold & Get Specific

A characterizing answer is on the right track, but I often push people to get specific with their perceptions. Let’s imagine a young company that has recently entered the incredibly crowded travel booking space.

How is the brand perceived today? Well it’s new, so the perception is broad. Travel booking involves a lot of trust, especially in the face of legacy companies, so people will be hesitant and struggling to understand how the offering fits into their consideration set:

Startup
Risky
Novel
Niche
Techie
Confusing
Fun

I want to note here that it’s ok if peoples’ perception of you company today is broad. It’s not the best place to be, but that’s exactly what we’re going to fix in the near future. What isn’t ok is if your future perception is still very broad.

If a company knows how their brand is perceived today, the temptation is often to ‘fix’ the negative characterizations for their perception tomorrow:

Future Perception A

 

But having a positive future image is the booby prize. Positive doesn’t mean unique, and it certainly doesn’t mean differentiated. It may seem like a good decision, but it leaves money on the table.

Most importantly, it creates a very broad perception that can be confused with any other travel booking company out there. There is no specific assumption about the future of travel here. This is a perception that many brands embody today and as time goes on, will only become a baseline of expectation for travelers.

Let’s narrow our focus and really dig to see what is under the modern travel experience. We want to see what the future (and our future perception) might look like.

Travel is increasingly becoming a very personal experience. We travel to find ourselves, to discover who we are, to understand why we’re here and where we belong in the world. It’s why industries like adventure travel and eco tourism are flourishing.

If we venture to create a more narrow perception with even just this little bit of information, we get something very different:

Future Perception B

Note that this narrow perception doesn’t mean you can’t still be trustworthy, established and offering a clear benefit. It simply means that you are willing to take a bolder stance, to be a far more specific brand that resonates with users who are seeking that same brand experience. It runs in parallel with what every marketer, salesperson and founder already knows — it’s about benefits, not features.

What we have here is already more familiar than you might realize. In the mid- to late-2000’s, a proliferation of travel startups had entered the space. Every week there seemed to be another company trying to disrupt the industry, and every single one of them could be described as startup, risky, novel, niche, techie, confusing, and fun.

However, two major companies made it through the tumult. HomeAway and Airbnb evolved their brands for the future, but one of them took the bold risk of defining a narrow perception, and is the clear winner today:

 

 

Your second answer to the Perception Queries is the one that really matters. You can start from anywhere, even if it’s the same place as your competitors, but you need to know where you’re going if you want to stop playing in someone else’s backyard.

 


 

Brand strategy requires tough decisions that will touch every aspect of your business. Asking the right questions up front is crucial.

If you’re a founder, I’d recommend asking your team the very same things as well. Their responses may surprise you.

The Perception Queries are important for an entire team because they go beyond a Vision or Mission. They aren’t marketing sound bytes. They’re a pact — an agreement that everyone is moving in the same direction — and that’s something worth knowing.

Categories
Brand Strategy

The Brand Perception Queries

Photo by Mathieu Stern.

Two deceptively simple questions that will reveal a world of strategic opportunity for your brand.

(From the Archives: A version of this article was previously published as Two Questions At The Heart Of Every Great Brand Strategy)

I like to start every brand strategy for a new client with two simple questions. They may seem easy enough, but they actually reveal a tremendous amount of information about the mindset of a company’s leadership team while posing a much more difficult challenge than most people realize.

1. How is your brand perceived today?

2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future?

Before you write those off as simple questions, consider the fact that your answers can literally change the course of your business. Taken together, I like to call them the Perception Queries, and everyone can benefit from answering them.

Take a moment to answer them for yourself. Without expectation or marketing jargon, write down your own responses as sincerely as possible.

These are actually loaded questions that you can use to get laser focus on the direction of your brand strategy from the point you’re at today to where you need to be in 1, 3 and 5 years from now.

They will prove valuable at every juncture in your company’s trajectory, especially when easy short term growth opportunities gently nudge you away from your ultimate long term vision.

(Before reading the rest of this case study, you can watch my 5-minute primer below to get the most out of this exercise.)

TLDR Strategy: The Perception Queries

The smartest founders I’ve ever met have struggled with this question in our first meeting. That’s because they understand that the Perception Queries force them to predict the future of their industries, fully embracing the distance between where they are now and where they need to be — all without any guarantees that the world will look how they expect it to later on down the line. The very premise and viability of their businesses are tied up in these answers.

The responses I get usually fall into 1 of 3 categories:

  1. The Vision/ Mission Response — “Our company builds the best widgets for the modern widget-using consumer who needs speed, quality and dependability.” No, this is not how a company is perceived. When I get some version of the company vision or mission as an answer, it often means that they haven’t stopped to empathize with the user. The Perception Queries force you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and feel what their relationship to your brand truly is… and it’s not a marketing line.
  2. The Goal/ Model Response — “We want to be perceived as the #1 widget-maker in the US market within four years…” or “We’re the Uber for widgets…”. Of course everyone wants to own their market or adopt a proven model, but here’s the thing — if the opposite of your strategy is not also a strategy, then you don’t have a strategy to begin with. Nor do you have an answer to the Perception Queries. People who answer with a Goal/ Model response usually haven’t stopped to develop a clear hypothesis of the future they’re creating for.
  3. The Characterizing Response — “We‘re perceived as fun, unique, nimble, creative, growing and smart today… but we want to be perceived as large, institutional, trustworthy and influential in the future.” If you’re answering with adjectives, you’re on the right track. Perception is a point of view, and when users take a specific view of your company, they characterize your brand in a similar way. But a long list of general adjectives like this can still lead you astray. The specificity and deliberate choosing of those characteristics is what matters.

Regardless of your answer, we can test and refine it by considering the world of the future, specifically the unique world you envision for your business.

I’ve talked about this before in my workshops because it’s fundamental to a strong brand identity. Your hypothesis of the future is how you see the world changing at a later point. The way you see the world in 2–5 years is at best an educated guess, and I often call this ‘making your bet’.

The best brands make their bet on the future, and then work to make that bet a reality.

If you imagine the future to be an endless set of possibilities as represented by a circle (or perhaps more accurately, a sphere), then your hypothesis is the small sliver of possibilities that will actually come to fruition.

If you’re Uber, your vision of the future isn’t that we will all be getting around in self-driving cars, but rather that manually operating your own car will become an outdated, dangerous, archaic activity that the public collectively rejects.

Once you have your vision of the future, your competitive set will shift.

The people who are really in your way aren’t those that are making similar products with similar features today, but rather those who are making the same prediction of the future.

Your competitors aren’t necessarily the ones making the same products. They’re the ones imagining the same future.

Snapchat was a social platform on par with Instagram and Facebook, but their vision of the future wasn’t about an app. It was about how we create and consume content. That’s why they created Snap Spectacles and suddenly became a hardware competitor in line with Apple. Anyone who paid attention to their hypothesis would have seen that coming.

Just like Snap Inc. and Apple, a clear vision of the future will likely put you in interesting company.

Once you have your hypothesis and competitive set, every step of your brand strategy needs to project you past all other players to a defensible, forward-looking position.

If you want to get deeper into this landscape/ hypothesis exercise, go here.

Now we can return to our original two questions.

Once you know your hypothesis and what you need to project yourself past others in your space, consider the Perception Queries again.

1. How is your brand perceived today?

2. How do you want it to be perceived in the future

A characterizing answer is on the right track, but I often push people to get specific with their perceptions. Let’s imagine a young company that has recently entered the incredibly crowded travel booking space.

How is the brand perceived today? Well it’s new, so the perception is broad. Travel booking involves a lot of trust, especially in the face of legacy companies, so people will be hesitant and struggling to understand how the offering fits into their consideration set:

Startup
Risky
Novel
Niche
Techie
Confusing
Fun

I want to note here that it’s ok if peoples’ perception of you company today is broad. It’s not the best place to be, but that’s exactly what we’re going to fix in the near future. What isn’t ok is if your future perception is still very broad.

If a company knows how their brand is perceived today, the temptation is often to ‘fix’ the negative characterizations for their perception tomorrow:

Future Perception A

But having a positive future image is the booby prize. Positive doesn’t mean unique, and it certainly doesn’t mean differentiated. It may seem like a good decision, but it leaves money on the table.

Most importantly, it creates a very broad perception that can be confused with any other travel booking company out there. There is no specific assumption about the future of travel here. This is a perception that many brands embody today and as time goes on, will only become a baseline of expectation for travelers.

Let’s narrow our focus and really dig to see what is under the modern travel experience. We want to see what the future (and our future perception) might look like.

As I’ve written in the past, travel is increasingly becoming a very personal experience. We travel to find ourselves, to discover who we are, to understand why we’re here and where we belong in the world. It’s why industries like adventure travel and eco-tourism are flourishing.

If we venture to create a more narrow perception with even just this little bit of information, we get something very different:

Future Perception B

Note that this narrow perception doesn’t mean you can’t still be trustworthy, established and offering a clear benefit.

It simply means that you are willing to take a bolder stance, to be a far more specific brand that resonates with users who are seeking that same brand experience. It runs in parallel with what every marketer, salesperson and founder already knows — it’s about benefits, not features.

What we have here is already more familiar than you might realize. In the mid- to late-2000’s, a proliferation of travel startups had entered the space. Every week there seemed to be another company trying to disrupt the industry, and every single one of them could be described as startup, risky, novel, niche, techie, confusing, and fun.

However, two major companies made it through the tumult. HomeAway and Airbnb evolved their brands for the future, but one of them took the bold risk of defining a narrow perception, and is the clear winner today:

Your second answer to the Perception Queries is the one that really matters.

You can start from anywhere, even if it’s the same place as your competitors, but you need to know where you’re going if you want to stop playing in someone else’s backyard.

Brand strategy requires tough decisions that will touch every aspect of your business. Asking the right questions up front is crucial.

More important than the right answers, are the right questions.

If you’re a founder, I’d recommend asking your team the very same things as well. Their responses may surprise you.

The Perception Queries are important for an entire team because they go beyond a Vision or Mission. They aren’t marketing soundbytes.

They’re a pact — an agreement that everyone is moving in the same direction — and that’s something worth knowing.

 

Originally published at artplusmarketing.com on January 15, 2017.

Categories
Brand Strategy

How To Find The Perfect Brand Name — Being Original Without Being Stupid

I have stage fright. I love the high of public speaking but every speech is preceded with heavy anxiety.

That’s why, when the talk is over, I can lose focus during the audience Q&A afterward. With the stress of the presentation behind me, I’m a little less than present in answering the questions people ask while I’m still on stage.

“Damn, I had a better answer than that.” Invariably, this thought runs through my head on the drive home, and a recent talk I gave on brand strategy is no exception.

An audience member asked me how to name a brand, especially in crowded markets where it seems like every name, from viable to ridiculous, has been taken. My answer started with, “I’m not a naming expert but…”

…but that’s not true. Naming is simply another brand challenge that can be approached with smart frameworks, and is in fact a challenge I have solved for many clients.

The right name can be the first step in creating an entire market or, as I mention below, the beginning of a powerful brand narrative that changes the behaviors of your target consumers.

A name is more than a brand. It’s a signal. It’s the first declaration you make as a company, and what you say in that declaration will set every consumer expectation and belief that comes after it. If you’re going to start that conversation, you’d better have a strategy for guiding it in the right direction. Brand strategy and naming strategy need to amplify one another.

As more and more people ask me this specific naming question — how to create a unique name that stands apart without losing value.

I’d like to offer clear best practices that can guide anyone at any stage.

  1. The first section describes my thoughts for successful, original naming
  2. The second section goes into the exercises that worked for me personally as we rebranded our company from J.B. Communications to Concept Bureau
  3. …and the third provides a long list of best practices I’ve found in my research (with the generous help of Jean-Louis Rawlence, CSO of Concept Bureau.)

It’s by no means comprehensive, so if you have any published research or thinking to add, hit me up.

 


One Of These Names Is Not Like The Others: 3 Paths to Originality

Being original in your name without breaking an authentic connection with your audience is perhaps the biggest brand naming challenge founders face today. If you want to be original, you have to think strategically.

Cheap tricks like removing vowels or focusing on phonetics are dated and don’t always work, especially if you’re trying to disrupt old, trust-based institutions like finance, insurance or housing.

That goes double for CPG brands that are asking consumers to change vital human behaviors like the way we eat with food tech, or how we medicate with health tech.

1. Create a movement, not a cause

People have to rally around an ideal that forces them to act. This point is especially true for non-profits and charities.

A cause is a feature. A cause is to plant more trees, end poverty or feed children. It’s a voting platform, better coffee or any number of characteristics that are a means to an end or a relief to a pain point. Causes sound like Save The Children, Alzheimer’s Association, Disabled American Veterans and Big Cat Rescue.

The problem with causes, especially in the non-profit sector, is that they often operate on guilt stories — and guilt stories don’t create lasting behavioral change or loyalty among millennials.

Movements, on the other hand, invite you to imagine an alternative future. Think Do Something, Doctors Without Borders, Habitat for Humanity and Teach For America.

The future vision is a compelling benefit. In these specific cases, the benefit is not only a new world reality, but a chance to belong to something much bigger than yourself.

Causes promise immediate solutions (at best). Movements promise a tectonic shift.

2. Make self-identification easy

Think of your audience and what beliefs or perceptions they identify with. What principles define them? What kind of movement or name would they be proud to belong to?

Your name should be something they can align with, either literally or figuratively. The name should echo a larger story that gives your audience meaning.

Keeping with the non-profit thread, Hands Across America was a narrative about acceptance. To say you were a part of that was to own a piece of the legend. Same goes for Make A Wish Foundation and Human Rights Watch.

Startups like Product Hunt and WeWork follow the same path. These are calls to action that begin a larger story and give target audiences a narrative they can align themselves with.

Even a name like LendUp, which is basically alternative payday loans for people with poor credit, tells an enlightened, positively spun story about financial empowerment for young people who may be in a tight spot now, but are still optimistic about their financial future.

Names that create easy self-identification give people a mental hook they can latch onto. It’s an extension of the benefit that compels them to act.

3. Map the consideration set

Once you have a shortlist of names, you can sense-check them against relevant consideration sets. What groups of competitors and substitutes will potential customers compare you against when they make a decision?

Let’s go from hypothetical to real-world here. Below is the map we created when my former agency, J.B. Communications, was looking to rebrand with a new name.

As a brand strategy agency, we looked at the many groups that either competed with, or substituted as, our company offering. We looked at extremes — huge companies that we’d love to one day be competing against, and smaller ones showing up in our territory right now— and listed them along a continuum.

Consideration sets are important because they hearken the familiar and provide context that will inform your potential customer, but they also risk lumping you in with others, providing little or no differentiation.

What’s important with consideration sets is that you want to be able to stand up to them in name. We knew that target clients would also be considering young creative agencies and/ or older consulting and communications firms when looking for brand strategy support.

Not all of these companies are direct competitors, but all of them easily migrate into strategy for their clients.

Not all names will fit perfectly, but you can generally lump them together and look for patterns. In our case, younger creative agencies had more tongue-in-cheek names formed from one or two nouns, while older communications firms went the namesake route.

Our name had to be able to stand apart from both groups, and at the same time stand up to each one. You can see some of our other shortlisted names in red that steered too far in one direction and risked losing uniqueness.

With this map, we could see that Concept Bureau was different enough from each group while being able to hold its ground against any individual name on either side.

You, too, will have consideration sets (oftentimes more than two), and a strong name will be able to fit into each while also being unmistakably distinct.

Find patterns you can break. Keep patterns you want to leverage.

 


Work Up A Sweat: Exercises To Get Your Brain Going

Exercises are great little hacks for getting your mind working in the right direction, but don’t expect them to directly lead you to your final name.

In our case, as I explain below, these exercises helped me very clearly realize what we are not, so that when I finally stumbled upon the right name, I knew it perfectly represented what we are.

Brand Deck

We used a brand deck to help us narrow in on who we were and what that meant for our name. It’s a simple deck with a brand attribute written on each side. So, for example, a card may say “refined” on one side and “precise” on the other.

You choose an attribute and put it in a pile for You Are, Your Are Not, or Does Not Apply. I’ve always said that good brands are specific, and this is an easy exercise that forces you to make some of those harder brand decisions.

For us, certain choices like “idealistic” vs. “realistic” or “welcoming” vs. “assertive” were surprisingly difficult and made us think.

Use a brand deck or make your own. Just make sure the characteristic pairs are forcing you to make tough decisions. Tough = strategic.

What I also like about this exercise was that it made us commit. Once we chose a card, we collectively devoted ourselves to that attribute… and each commitment gave us a clearer pathway to the name we were searching for.

Free Association

You’ll quickly begin circling certain attributes that embody your brand, either through the brand deck, group discussion or by way of a larger brand strategy for the marketplace.

You can narrow down some of those words and then begin doing some free association around them. I did ours on a conference call with the team during a long drive home. It certainly doesn’t need to be focused thought. In fact, a small distracting task (like driving or cleaning) can help free up your subconscious a bit.

This is a small sampling of our free association:

We also associated for words like manicure, fruit and sweetness just to see where they’d lead. All of them were valuable and got us thinking outside the box.

Full Survey

There’s a world of name types out there, and getting yourself familiar with them can easily inspire a new naming thread.

Here’s a high-level rundown that I pulled from Wikipedia, but it’s pretty comprehensive. You’ll already understand most of these, although you may not have stopped to consider them.

Pay attention to brands in your day to day life and begin categorizing them to see how they work and what effect they have on you as a consumer.

  • Acronyms (IBM) — Each letter representing a word
  • Amalgam (Nabisco) — Combination of word components
  • Alliteration and Rhyme (Youtube) — Pleasing to say
  • Appropriation (Caterpillar) — Borrowing a word for a different application
  • Descriptive (General Motors) — Simply describing the product or characteristic
  • Clever Statement — (Seven For All Mankind) — An expression
  • Evocative (London Fog) — Vivid image
  • Founders’ Names (Hewlett-Packard) — A combination of names
  • Geography (Cisco) — Location or term for a location
  • Humor/Slang or HomeNON — (Yahoo!) — A name with strong personality
  • Ingredients (Clorox) — Based on components
  • Mimetics (Krispy Kreme) — Alternative spellings for common sounds
  • Nickname (Adidas) —A founder’s nickname
  • Neologism (Kodak) — Made up word
  • Onomatopoeia (Twitter) — Associated sound
  • Personification (Green Giant) — Character
  • Portmanteau (Pinterest) — Word combination
Anything But A Dictionary

Don’t open a dictionary. Don’t flip through the pages of a thesaurus and randomly place your finger on words. It will lead you astray. You’ll get hung up on meanings and etymologies, and things that sound cool will rarely feel right.

I find that words in books can be helpful when they come in context. After we did a lot of brainstorming and strategizing (and perhaps even some soul searching — rebranding can be a little emotionally taxing, after all) I was confident I’d know the name once I saw it. It was just a matter of digging at that point.

Our name ultimately came from the pages of a Pharrell’s book, Places and Spaces I’ve Been. It wasn’t “Concept Bureau” in the book, but the words emerged from the pages and I put them together.

Here are some more places where you can go digging:

  • Coffee table books, comic books, cookbooks, manuals, novels, old notebooks
  • Visit museums, art shows, galleries, exhibitions
  • Song lyrics, album covers, liner notes
  • There’s an ironic name generator for everything — brands, hipster co’s, startups, character names, fantasy names, team names, Wu Tang Clan Names, pirate names— have fun with them and see if they inspire something
  • Maps, almanacs
  • Comment boards and threads where your audience gathers
  • Old speeches, transcripts and movie scripts
  • If you’re looking to go the Neologism route, you can use this great tool for creating new words based on the quality, number of letters, and fragments you’d like to include
  • You can also invent a word using prefixes, suffixes and core phrases
  • …or use this site for a number of word builder tools

 


What Words Mean: Collected Best Practices From Near and Far

Naming best practices can get tricky. I’d recommend using them to narrow down certain trains of thought, but don’t use them as end-all qualifiers.

Here are some accepted standards almost everyone agrees on:

  • Keep it short, under 10 letters and 4 syllables
  • “Names that display a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, like Gatorade, Lipitor, and Amazon, are often easiest to say, since these sorts of letter combinations are among the first that infants learn in any language”
  • Alliteration and assonance can be pleasant to a consumer’s ears, but don’t get too hung up on them
  • Find the word(s) that evoke the story your consumer wants to hear
  • “c,” “v,” and “p” convey liveliness and vigor

If you really wanna get deep

  • Fricatives (consonants produced by forcing air through the narrow channel between tongue and front teeth or tongue and upper palate or tongue and molars: f, s, v, z) convey “faster” and “smaller” — as do vowels that are voiced near the front of the mouth, like the a in “bat” or the i in “hid”
  • Plosives (stops or consonants in which the air flow is blocked: b, d, p, t) convey “slower” and “bigger” — as do vowels that are voiced at the back of the throat, like the o in “token” or the double o’s in “food”
  • Voiceless stops (such as k, p, and t) are more alive and daring but emote less luxury than voiced stops like b, d and g, which emote more luxury
  • … of course all of this depends on context, use and situation, so proceed with caution

The Minimum Viable Name Framework is a way to categorize your name ideas to see where they fall in a spectrum ranging from Benefits and Features to Functional and Emotional.

Each quadrant has benefits, implications and drawbacks. Mapping your competitors and substitutes in each category will provide clarity as well.

Lexicon’s Branding’s Blog is a bit dry, but they have some good articles that make sense of successful names. They’ve named the big name brands out there, and I’d recommend reading this one on how spelling reveals character, and this one about how the sharing economy is affecting naming. Here’s a bonus NYT article on Lexicon itself and the stories behind how they named some of the best known brands out there.

P.S. They’re the researchers behind the insights relating to fricatives, plosives and so on above.

Categories
Strategy

The Business Of Storytelling

A framework for developing compelling brand narratives

[Abridged] Concept Bureau Storytelling Presentation from Jasmine Bina

[Click here to download the full deck of slides and watch the accompanying video recording where I walk you through my framework.]

A lot has changed in the world of brand storytelling, especially in the last 5–10 years, but the frameworks we use to develop our brand narratives remain dated. We’re essentially using old tools to reach new audiences in new markets, and it doesn’t make sense. The challenge is twofold:

  1. Aggressive Evolution. We’re living in incredibly dynamic landscapes. Regardless of the market you’re in, change is happening at an ever-increasing rate. New entrants, bandwidth technologies, legal policy, generational personnel, emerging territories — this is not the industry or climate our parents grew up in. It is certainly not the climate that our familiar brand frameworks were once created to address.
  2. Inconsistent Behaviors. Where once you could count on the major behaviors of a generation to be consistent across age, time and psychographics, we now see a proliferation of sub-cultures and idiosyncrasies with millennials. Geek chic, bro culture, riot grrrls, foodies and hipsters are just the tip of the iceberg. Behaviors have fractured across all dimensions, and what remains is the overarching ambitions and mentality that begat them.

Taken together, these two factors necessitate a new framework, not just for brand storytelling among millennials, but any brand strategy that will resonate with an increasingly informed and empowered audience.

Watch a recording of my workshop and an in-depth look at the Active Story Framework for your own brand here.

My work with startups, established brands and B2C companies reaching millennial audiences allowed me to develop a new approach for decoding the fabric of a brand, and I was recently fortunate enough to share it during a workshop.

You can watch the video and get access to the full deck here .

The Active Story Framework

I call this the Active Story Framework because that’s exactly what it is — active. Each of the three elements propels you into the next and forces movement.

Build A Defensible Territory: Building a defensible territory as part of your brand story will 1) take you to a part of the landscape where your competitors will be unable to follow, 2) allow you to sing your siren song clearly, reaching the very target audience that is crucial to your success, and 3) allow you to be specific… because you can’t be a generalist today. If you’re not specific, you’re not valuable.

Create Meaningful Tension: There is a push and pull action that drives conversion. You ‘push’ your audience by tapping into existing (but often hidden) behaviors and either align or oppose their collective belief systems. You ‘pull’ by leveraging macro movements that resonate with those core beliefs.

Change Hearts and Minds: Your voice is key, but voice is not marketing channels or tone. Voice is tactics. Voice is gestures. Voice is actions, because when it comes to millennials, actions will always speak louder than words. Through your secret language, you have the one-on-one conversations that audiences demand in a such a noisy, static-filled environment.

All three of these elements together force movement.

They force you to make the hard brand decisions key to your success in a crowded, hostile market.

They force you to always land on the right side of the line between core market and mass market — regardless of what stage your company is in or which market you need to reach.

And most importantly, they force your audience to react, decide and convert.

What powerful brand strategy does

Think of this as a tapestry. When you look closely at the individual elements of a brand strategy, it’s hard to see what you’re really creating. But when you pull back and look at all pieces collectively, an image emerges. That image is the brand identity that your followers are looking for. A strong brand strategy gives that image resolution.

But what matters even more than that, at least in practical terms, is the power to solve problems with a strong strategy. A decent brand strategy will take 3 problems and solve them with 3 solutions. A powerful brand strategy takes those 3 problems and solves them with 1.

Don’t miswrite your own story

You can’t live outside of the story framework. You can fit into a current cultural narrative or oppose it, but you cannot exist outside its realm. We are all human, and we are all looking to make sense of the options presented to us in the marketplace. Stories help us do that.

Whether you’re an incumbent CEO or a startup founder, the worst thing you can do is miss the great story that’s sitting right under your nose.

Your hunch led you to a product. It wasn’t just a need. It wasn’t merely good product-market fit. Most leaders and entrepreneurs subconsciously see something bigger when they take the reigns of a company, and under that subconscious draw is a story. The real story. The story that wins.

Use this framework to find it.

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