Tag: Startup

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Startup

The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands

 

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

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

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

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

That Feeling When

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

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

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

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

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

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

eLearning Industry, July 22nd, 2016

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

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

Can’t Escape It

By the way, it’s everywhere.

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

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

New York Times, March 21, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

Cognitive dissonance reveals our human nature by exposing:

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

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

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

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

Coddle Your Brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re All Adults Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please and Thank You

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

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

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

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

Look Over Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Are Here

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

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

Start with yourself

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

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

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

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

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

Ask the right questions

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

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

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

Choose your approach

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

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

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

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

That Felt Good

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

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

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

Categories
Brand Strategy

The Brand Perception Queries

Photo by Mathieu Stern.

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

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

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

1. How is your brand perceived today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

TLDR Strategy: The Perception Queries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we can return to our original two questions.

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

1. How is your brand perceived today?

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

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

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

Startup
Risky
Novel
Niche
Techie
Confusing
Fun

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

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

Future Perception A

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

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

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

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

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

Future Perception B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Categories
Brand Strategy

Two Questions At The Heart Of Every Great Brand Strategy

 

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

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

1. How is your brand perceived today?

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

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

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

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

 

How You Answer Matters

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

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

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

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

Your Hypothesis Of The Future

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

1. How is your brand perceived today?

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

Be Bold & Get Specific

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

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

Startup
Risky
Novel
Niche
Techie
Confusing
Fun

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

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

Future Perception A

 

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

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

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

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

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

Future Perception B

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

Categories
Brand Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

1. Create a movement, not a cause

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Make self-identification easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Map the consideration set

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Work Up A Sweat: Exercises To Get Your Brain Going

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

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

Brand Deck

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

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

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

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

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

Free Association

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

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

This is a small sampling of our free association:

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

Full Survey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some more places where you can go digging:

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

 

What Words Mean: Collected Best Practices From Near and Far

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

Here are some accepted standards almost everyone agrees on:

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

If you really wanna get deep…

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Brand Strategy

5 Signs of Killer Business Strategy

 

The best business strategies — I mean the ones that can truly change the game forever — all have a handful of qualities in common.

You should already have the basics of a good strategy down. Eric Jorgenson recently published a great roundup of strategy frameworks for Evergreen (I recommend reading) and it got me thinking about the lesser discussed, more qualitative factors that separate good strategy from killer strategy.

Good strategies make the most out of the playing field. Killer strategies change the field altogether. If your business or technology has the potential to redefine the norm, then check your strategy against these five factors to see if you’re pushing your framework far enough.

1. Killer strategies place bets

Visionary founders have a hypothesis about where the world will be in 5, 10 or 20 years and place their bets on that vision. You can solve a problem that exists today, but that doesn’t take into account the fact that your target audience is dynamic and always changing. Our cultures and beliefs are evolving with increasing momentum, and great businesses are built around a forward-looking point of view.

That means inherent risks are involved. Placing bets on the future should feel risky. WeWork has made huge bets on the future of how we define our work lives, where in the world we will be working, how we much we will be willing to pay to work the way we want, and how fragmented the workforce will become as the gig economy continues to replace corporate careers. They’ve even expanded that hypothesis to WeLive.

Ask yourself if your brand strategy dares to look into the future, and if what you see there is informing your approach today.

2. Killer strategies create pressure

Your strategy is often your story. For Snapchat (excuse me, Snap Inc.) the story and strategy are synonymous.

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

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

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

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

3. Killer strategies create unexpected friends (and enemies)

Apple was the first to borrow luxury marketing principles to sell electronics. That’s why it makes perfect sense for Angela Ahrendts to be where she is today.

By the same token, Snap Inc.’s Spectacle has the potential to unbind the chat platform from smartphones. That places them in a very different competitive set, namely against Apple. Look around and the examples are abundant — Uber and car makers, Netflix and content studios, Amazon and grocers, and so on.

If your strategy is disruptive, then you should already be seeing peripheral industries your brand may be moving into.

4. Killer strategies do not confuse strategy for tactics

A strategy is a lens through which to see the world. It’s an approach that defines your actions, processes and decisions. It is not actions, decisions or practices in and of themselves. Those things are called tactics, and I’ve seen far too many companies confuse the two.

Even the big names make that mistake. Four years ago, analyst Patrick Moorhead wrote his reactions to a Yahoo! earnings call where CEO Scott Thompson outlined a 6-point plan to get the company back on track. “When I looked at the list, they all made sense as operational principles or even action items… unfortunately, operating principles or action items aren’t a strategy.”

For Moorhead, the big question behind strategy is Where does a company intend to win? “Yahoo! needs to lean into something.”

You, too, need to lean into something. Look at your tactical plan and see if you can identify the guiding principle, the North Star that ties every action together. There should be a strong and unique assumption behind those decisions.

5. Killer strategies solve many business problems with a few solutions

Your strategy shouldn’t be reactive. Killer strategy is not about spotting a group of problems and finding individual solutions for each within your product. That’s ultimately shortsighted, and often a loser’s game.

You have to get your head out of the current construct and see things from a new vantage point. Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them,” and that’s a perfect way to encapsulate how bright founders mold big ideas.

If you have a clear hypothesis of how the future will be different, then your business should be creating the new playing field in which you will operate. It’s not just about developing a new market. It’s about changing the rules so that things that were once business problems are no longer problems in your new context.

When Airbnb came out with a new visual mark and identity two years ago, they simultaneously launched their “Belong Anywhere” campaign. Despite the jokes and drama, it worked. It worked because it was more than a mere marketing push. It solved a host of challenges for the brand.

 

Airbnb’s new “Belong Anywhere” branding push also includes a video series and host-generated content.

 

A compelling narrative like “Belong Anywhere” immediately mobilized local communities. In NYC, especially, Airbnb has reached out to hosts in grassroots efforts to help push back on impending hotel taxes. The money and resources Airbnb spends on dealing with resistant local governments is a significant business problem, and a new story helped favorably frame the fight in the company’s favor among pivotal communities.

With major investor pressure to rapidly grow to mainstream scale, Airbnb can’t afford to be a niche product that rich millennials use. This new identity succinctly speaks to both would-be hosts and guests. It communicates the brand experience and sets a very clear expectation that a mainstream traveler can understand without alienating their core audience.

Perhaps most importantly, “Belong Anywhere” immediately sidelines every competing hotel. In this story, there‘s no comparison between the products. Hotels are a place to stay. Airbnbs are a place to live out special moments. Cost, convenience and technology aside, these are suddenly two very different offerings.

Airbnb forces the user to define travel along an entirely different set of metrics that hotels have no hope of adhering to. Citizen M can have amazing, inviting common spaces that you never want to leave, but I’ll never book a room there when I go on my longer personal travels. Airbnb holds the promise of understanding new worlds. Hotels can only talk about amenities.

Your strategy must also move you above and beyond the obvious players, into a new territory where incumbents can’t follow. That’s the most effective way to solve many business challenges with a handful of smart, resourceful solutions.

 

 

I don’t think strategies or identities, or even brand stories are made up… meaning it’s not a creative process where you tie disjointed concepts together. I think the bones of a killer strategy are already there. It’s our job to dig and dig into the space until we unearth it.

Like George said, “There’s always money in the banana stand.” If you pay attention and doggedly search for the true elements, you’ll find them. The process, if done right, always feels like a discovery at the end of a long excavation. The pieces fit together as if designed that way.

Keep digging until you find it.

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