A perspective on brand
At the end of the day, your brand is your business
We’re taking a short break from regular programming for “from Our Perspectives” – essays from internal team members that share a personal perspective on topics from branding to operations. This week, we’re featuring a perspective from Evi on brand strategy.
If your brand were a color, what would it look like?
If your brand were a vegetable, what would it taste like?
If your brand were a sound, what noise would it make?
And now, what does the color, vegetable, or sound, feel like?
These are the first questions I ask founders and teams who are looking to elevate their brand.
This initial exercise is reminiscent of gathering user requirements for building new products, introducing new features, or optimizing existing ones. The role of product people is to seek to understand the root issues from stakeholders, synthesizing feedback to identify the best ways to support cross-functional efforts, and if those issues are aligned with overarching business goals.
Brand strategy is a similar process of gathering stakeholder feedback to get to the core of what is trying to be achieved, and finding the best ways to drive customer acquisition, customer retention, and ultimately, topline revenue. Brand strategy, like product development, requires a wide view, since it touches every aspect of a business from how it looks to what it does for end users.
While these questions may seem too meta to get to the meat of what a brand is, as generalists our job is to connect the dots and understand the mindset of the person or team we are supporting. These types of questions allow us to think fresh and the result is uncovering aspects of a brand that may not have been previously explored. If you're building a new product or coming up with a tagline for a mission statement, you first need to understand where your stakeholders are coming from. The vibe of a brand becomes just as important as the goal the company aims to accomplish.
If the outcome is a brand name and a brand identity then the pathway to defining what makes that brand must be found in unpacking what the brand tastes like, sounds like, and what it makes us feel inside. It’s a collaborative process with a founder to gather feedback on what they want their brand to do and synthesize the feedback by going back to them with ample options to move through the process from brand ideation to brand definition. It is not a process that can be entirely handed off to a third party (i.e. a brand agency) or a consultant to work independently and solve for. The work here is teamwork.
Senses evoke emotions that produce a response: for the target audience to engage with your brand or look elsewhere. To put it another way, a founder must set the direction for the ingredients of the brand so that the internal team and fractional third-party talent can execute the best way to make the best dish with the must-have ingredients vs. the nice-to-have ingredients.
Real talk, generalists are operators who execute with many unknowns. Our job is just as much about execution as it is about finding the most successful pathway to guide execution quickly. Too often companies have a tactical goal - launch a website for the company - not realizing that the only way to successfully launch a website that draws more traffic, and more sales is by spending ample time exploring the strategy of why the brand needs to exist in the first place.
What does the brand do for your target audience? How does that help a potential customer see why your brand offerings are better than other options?
The reaction of a founder or the leader of a team to this brand strategy exercise is telling. Those who recognize its significance see the fruits of that strategy work pay off in dividends because of how fast later stages of defining a brand get sped up by carving out the time and space to first explore what the brand is.
It requires taking a big step back and getting out of the day-to-day of running a business. At the end of the day, your brand is your business. It's the first touchpoint a person has to the services or products you offer.
Taking the time to define a brand strategy is also a place to come back to at times when the brand must make big decisions about where it's going or looking back on its progress. Is it staying true to the feelings and mission of what the company set out to achieve? Did a project that seemed promising get off track because some part of the initiative lost sight of the brand's ethos?
In reflection, the definition of a brand helps steer a company back to its roots at times when it may feel like it went down a path that turned out not to be fruitful. It's an exercise with a goal of direction and purpose discovery. It requires looking at the language being used by your brand today, looking at how your competition describes what they do, how they present what they do, and how you differentiate your brand from what already exists.
This helps a generalist get closer to an organization faster and allows us to get into the psyche of our stakeholders. In other words, as Susie Stubb writes about in the substack article, "What's in a name? Everything," "it pays to fall down linguistic rabbit holes."
If we come up a level in brand strategy, we can take this sentiment even further. It simply pays to fall down rabbit holes as you explore what your brand is. And the truth is, it doesn't have to take that long. Particularly if the direction and beat of a company is already well on its way, but it just hasn't yet found its voice in the right language. And for brands that are not far along in this process, or simply 'don't yet know', a few strategy brainstorm sessions can be illuminating to help an organization identify the root themes of what they are trying to do and what they have already done.
It's also important to enjoy the process of brand strategy. It is not a set and static thing. It evolves over time as business goals change and a company scales. Stef Hamerlinck hits home on this point in "The 7 levels of brand engagement." It's a helpful reminder that the process of evolving a brand is equally as important as the first step of creating the brand's name and logo. As a company learns more about itself, gets new clients, pilots new initiatives, so too, does it see how its branding reflects those outcomes. We need to think about a brand identity just as much as we need to figure out how to create a revenue-generating business. One leads to the other.
No company has ever scaled without a compelling brand strategy. The brand strategy work dictates the future success of any company. Ultimately, the highest business goal is getting to a place where a brand is so recognizable, and so identified with solving X problem, that we use the brand name as an example of what we want to achieve in competitive analysis. It supports every vein of the business as it grows, from raising capital to articulating what white space your company is solving for and how it can positively change the world.
In short, spend time daydreaming about your brand. Engage your clients with these thought-provoking questions, and do the same with your employees. Does the way you and your team perceive the brand align with the expectations and experiences of those who benefit from it—or those who contribute to it?
There are nuggets of gold in spending time brainstorming what your brand is, from the language used, to the design of its logo, to the content on the website, to your sales pitch, and even to your internal team.
And the best part? It’s not just a productive opportunity to accelerate your business goals, it's also really fun.
Writer: Evi
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