Tag: Storytelling

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
Brand Strategy

The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy

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

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

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

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

 

Branded vs. Brand-Led

The difference matters.

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

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

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

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

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

Only One Wrong Choice

Know what you’re doing.

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

Each has pros and cons.

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

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

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

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

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

 

16 Rules To Guide You

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

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

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

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

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

2. Be specific.

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

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

3. Lead with the story, not the product.

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

Even tax software can give you the feels.

4. Answer the why.

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

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

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

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

5. Look for triggers. Speak to the subtext.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Spotlight the customer, not the company.

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

8. Don’t define against a competitor.

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

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

9. Speak your secret language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Make your future bet.

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

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

11. Take bold risks.

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

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

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

12. Force hard decisions.

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

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

13. Create tension.

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

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

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

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

14. Empathize with your customer.

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

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

15. Relief beats guilt. Reward beats fear.

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

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

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

16. The opposite must also be a strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t fall into the trap of being indistinguishable.

 

 

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

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

That’s the feeling of good brand strategy.

 

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

Categories
Brand Strategy

3 Stories We Tell Ourselves: Pain, Villains and Fuck You Money

(Photo credit to the awesome Craig Cameron Olsen) 

The stories we tell ourselves, both as a group and as individuals, have immeasurable impact on our beliefs and behaviors. Brands trying to reach millennials should know who they’re talking to in this regard.

Every generation has its stories. There was the brave selflessness of the Greatest Generation spanning 1910–1925 (just ask Tom Brokaw, he’ll tell you, but don’t ask 2 Dope Queens), the cautious optimism of the Baby Boomers and the idealistic “just do it” consumerism of Gen X. Millennials, however, stand apart.

Not only do we tell ourselves a greater number of collective stories, but our narratives have become more fragmented as today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings find themselves moving through the in-between spaces of the gig economy, non-marriage and a changing American Dream.

The cemented goal posts of our parents are moving for the first time, and we spend more of our lives between jobs, between adolescence and adulthood, between impermanence and permanence than ever before.

It’s from within those ‘in-between’ spaces that some of our most compelling generational stories have emerged.

Three of those stories — pain, villainy and fuck you money — are actually old stories (even that last one), but perhaps for the first time shattered and put back together in a new form. They matter because they shape us, and since a story reveals just as much about the storyteller as it does about the world, we need to ask ourselves why we created them in the first place.

Perhaps even more importantly, there is no right or wrong. All cultures have a framework for viewing life experiences. These are ours.

Let’s start with the easy one.

Pain — To suffer is to succeed

Familiar with this one? Yeah, me too.

If you’re not suffering, you’re not doing it right. If you’re not working 12-hour days and burned out by Wednesday, you’re not living up to your potential. You’re not doing something worth doing.

Although we may think this is a newly popularized ideal stemming from the sudden rise of entrepreneurship, our Zuckerberg-esque heroes and the glamorization of the hustle we see in movies and content, it’s actually much older than that.

It comes from our puritanical pilgrim roots as Americans, and it was a lot more hardcore back then. It was life-and-death — a somewhat severe focus of Protestant work ethic that neatly parlayed into the pervasive “Manifest Destiny” that shaped so much of who we are as Americans today.

The ideas of pure intention, complete self-sacrifice to one’s service and a god-given edict to tame the land that threatened our lives daily, were all strong forces that never left the American identity. Each of us has played Oregon Trail and watched movies like The Witch. We don’t just get it, we revel in it.

So deep is a story like this, that I’d argue there’s no way to escape it without changing the very fabric of Americanism itself… and that’s not happening. What we have instead is a modern incarnation that every generation before us has morphed into their own, and now we have ours.

Pain happens in the extremes, so let’s look at the extremes to see how we continually perpetuate the pain story.

SoulCycle is about perseverance and suffering, all in the name of getting to the front row. It’s a cult-like, pain-centric movement that mirrors other new, extreme fitness faiths like CrossFit and ultra marathoning.

Elements of bro culture and startup culture overlap with the romanticization of all-nighters and impossible deadlines. WeWork stocks bathrooms and front desks with mouthwash, toothpaste and toiletries while Silicon Valley execs get caught (and sometimes die) using illicit drugs to keep up.

Arianna Huffington has built a profitable Sleep Revolution platform that “sounds the alarm on our worldwide sleep crisis”, and in my opinion, further canonizes the story of pain. Every great phenomenon has its high profile detractors, after all.

But these are all obvious.

There are still different forms of pain to consider. Look at the self-deprivation of The Minimalists and the popularity of Soylent — smart guys telling you how cool it is to give up the comforts of life.

Anytime you see celebs and CEOs relaxing on vacation, it’s simply the other end of the same spectrum. Work hard, play hard. The higher the stakes on one side, the higher they become on the other.

There’s a pattern here. When it’s no longer the elements that threaten us, we seek to develop power of will through extremes. Without a physical frontier to roil against, we create mental ones.

Call it the virtue of turmoil. Nobody likes the love stories that didn’t almost end in heartbreak. I’ve never seen that movie.

The opposite also rings true — it doesn’t count if it’s easy. That’s because we measure ourselves in experiences.

Our self-worth and identity is gauged by what we’ve been through. For millennials, those trials and tribulations are markers of suffering that go beyond what we’ve seen in previous generations. Less from the outside and increasingly from within.

Villains —When heroes become unfamiliar

Think Dexter’s Dexter Morgan, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, or The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano. We didn’t just love them, we identified with them. People mourned Walter’s death with mock obituaries and funerals. It got real.

We wanted them to win. Despite all our cringing and gasping, it felt good when they got away with murder. No matter how conflicted we felt, we quickly resumed rooting for them by the next episode.

These aren’t anti-heroes who lack traditional qualities of valor and moral ascendancy. Nor are they good guys who sometimes do bad things. They’re consistently heartless characters that cause chaos and destruction.

Although there’s discussion on what truly separates a hero from an anti-hero or flawed protagonist in media, it seems we’ve actually started to glorify villain protagonists.

The generation before us had Hitchcock, who deliberately created complex heroes that were hard to love, but that’s as far as it went. Meant to be disorienting and uneasy, Hitchcock’s characters pushed the boundaries, but they never crossed them.

Our millennial characters are different. These are clear villains with harmful tendencies, but if you dig down deep, you see their original motivations are very human and relatable. Walter was the humble, under-appreciated middle class parent trying to make a living. Tony, also a family man, just playing out the only life he ever knew. Dexter living with uncontrollable urges, which he offset by killing bad people.

Our total embracing of these characters creates a new kind of obsessive fandom. These are stories of misunderstanding and gray moral code. Stories of standing on the slippery slope between right and fair. Stories about how, as a post-Hitchcock generation, we’ve learned to make peace with the messy discomfort in this in-between space.

There’s a lot to be said about how socio-economic inequality, eroding faith in public institutions, or a general millennial malaise have created paths to this new character… but there’s more to it.

Every generation has the power to choose what they see in themselves. Baby Boomers saw Superman, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee — a somewhat mixed backlash to the whitewashed, suburban idealism of their parents.

Millennials continue that shift to a further degree. Heroes, in the traditional sense, stand guard between right and wrong. That kind of black and white life view no longer rings true for us.

I’d argue that a clear right and wrong, at this point, even feels uncomfortable.

We live in the gray area. It’s complicated. It’s polarizing. And it doesn’t form a consensus.

Our heroes are an embodiment of the world we see ourselves in. Not right or wrong, but somewhere in the middle.

Fuck You Money — The formidable task of finding your passion

The most significant story on this list is the quest to find oneself. This one’s a biggie, and I think most of us live within it.

Fuck you money, for those who are unfamiliar, is having enough success and cash to be able to (metaphorically) say “fuck you” to the people who failed, hurt or ignored you along the way.

Up until this generation, success was seen as largely formulaic. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant. The fact is that there were rules and structures that once existed, and people believed in them. Things like graduate school, babies, the corporate ladder and buying property were inherent truths in and of themselves.

What happens when those things move around or disappear? You get a new story.

For years I fought with my parents about my career ambitions. My father wanted me to become an artist, my mother just wanted me to stop stressing out, but I wanted to be a successful business owner. I went to college, then grad school, then set up my first LLC.

Looking back, that formula was not the best one, nor the fastest, nor the smartest. Definitely not the easiest (and absolutely not the cheapest).

But my career was my life. It was me. When my parents questioned my decision, I felt it to be a deeply personal attack on my identity.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that for my parents, and the parents of most millennials, a career didn’t mean the same thing. Granted my parents are immigrants, but for them, work was a means to an end.

Yes, they wanted to be successful as well, but their jobs had a lot less bearing on their perceived self-worth than it did on me. Work, for them, was something they had to do in order to live their real lives outside the office.

Millennials like me have chosen a different story entirely. Work is synonymous with identity because we believe in a financially post-apocalyptic world that decided to change right before we got here.

Our story is a dramatic, self-important reinvention from the ashes that remain. A survivor story. I believe this too. It frames my good times and my bad times, and lays the groundwork for single-minded career ambitions.

Now that leaves us in a tough position.

Finding yourself and finding your passion are inextricably tied. The pressure to find one’s passion is immense, even though there’s no guarantee this meshing of life and career will make us happier. For many, it can feel like a burden.

It perpetuates the belief that passion already exists within and it’s our job to follow it — a belief that Cal Newport and others have already started questioning.

It’s go big or go home. It’s backpack through Europe to discover your destiny, then come back to America to change the world. It’s do it on your own, like that suffering, solitary hero trying to navigate troubled waters.

I’ve heard enough entrepreneurs and CEOs daydream out loud about fuck you money to realize that for many, this quest is underscored by a sense of comeuppance.

We may not believe that right or wrong exist, or that fairness is a reality, but we do believe in our right to enforce that balance when our turn is up.

Just like the superheroes we created, we deserve to set things straight in our own, deviant way.

 

 

The trifecta here, incase you haven’t already seen it, is that all three of these stories fit snugly together. They reinforce each other, and over time become stronger. The virtue of suffering, the villain’s misunderstood journey and the ultimate reward/ retribution flow into each other. Take one piece out and the other two become weaker.

As brands and communities work to engage millennials from the outside, they have to first reconstruct the millennial mindset from the center. What are the stories that make sense of the world we live in? What notions help propel us forward?

Stories help connect the dots, and it’s fascinating to see what narratives emerge when those dots suddenly become mutable. The narratives we tell ourselves today have to wrangle a huge psychographic spread, especially as we mature into the next stage of adulthood.

“Everyone is a hero in their own story”.

That’s one of my favorite quotes. If you consider it from that point of view, everyone makes sense, regardless of age, time or country.

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