Tag: Startup

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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
Startup

This Is Why You Have Brand Haters

It’s a good thing.

“Suck it up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But betting on the future is risky.

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

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

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

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

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

People will hate you for not following the rules.

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

Then it published.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embrace the rollercoaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Understanding Brand Legends Will Make You A Master Marketer

How do you make a legend?

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

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

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

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

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

Ferruccio Lamborghini — A man seriously committed to clapping back.

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, stick to your tractors, son.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone can be a legend.

The very core of a legend originates from certain concepts:

  • Moments of Meaning
  • Bonding Memories
  • Defining a Movement

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

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

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

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

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

 

Moments of Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appropriated LV logo for Supreme products in 2000.

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

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

An ‘aha’ moment is not an Inflection Point.

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

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

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

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

Except for Steve Jobs and Apple.

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

That it all started in a garage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonding Memories

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire, Muscle, Bond, Icon, Rebel.

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

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

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

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

How to measure the bond.

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

Will they miss us if we’re gone?

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

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

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

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

We miss the things that make us feel.

Define A Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borrow the things you cannot own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Brand legends come from action.

It’s your choices that will make you legendary.

It’s the big moves that people remember.

It’s just that simple.

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

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

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

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.

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