Agile Branding

Agile branding is the art of quickly creating and improving your brand positioning so you can iterate and improve your marketing. When you’re starting out on a new venture you may feel the need to map out every step of your go to market strategy in advance. Normal project planning would tell you that a detailed roadmap is a great way to execute a large project. But when it comes to branding and marketing, you are in a constant dance with your customer. And we all know that dancing can be chaotic. There is real value in taking a more iterative and agile approach to building your brand.

The book Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a great reminder of just how powerful the tools of lean thinking, agility and adaptability can be in growing a business. The iterative thinking from the world of product development can also be applied to marketing.

A truly agile brand is user-focused and iterative. Building an agile brand is not about the rituals of agile software development such as sprints, scrums, stand-ups, and retrospectives. Instead, it’s about adopting the customer cantered thinking of the agile mindset into every part of your marketing.

To create an agile brand you will likely still need an agile workflow and processes, but that’s not what will make your brand agile. Brand agility comes from a fundamentally agile and iterative approach.

In a large organisation where you’re looking to bring formal agile methods into the company to speed up the learning cycle for your day-to-day marketing, then the process may be more formalised. But the agile mindset of delivering customer value, testing things quickly and learning from your mistakes will be the same for big and small companies.

Branding all at once

To create an agile brand you are going to move forward on all fronts at once. Parallel processing is an unusual way for a company to create a new brand, but it’s remarkably similar to the way that an individual designer works when they are actually doing the job of designing a new brand. 

I look at a brand as three main elements, the strategy & intent, the copywriting messagingand the visual system design. You can be prototyping, improving and iterating all three of these brand elements at once. To create a new brand quickly you need to address the strategy, messaging and design together.

1. Agile brand strategy

Creating and iterating a strategy is all about creating just enough strategic clarity to be able to make decisions and move forward day by day. Most strategies have so many different elements and so many different components that people spend as much time creating the strategy as they do implementing it. By the time traditional companies have implemented anything, they have to go back and create a new strategy.

There is a saying in the sport of boxing that “Everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face.” Your brand strategy needs to be able to adapt quickly in the face of adverse feedback. To be resilient, an agile brand strategy needs to answer three questions:

  1. Who do you want to serve?
  2. What pain do you solve for your audience?
  3. How do you do it better than your competitors and substitutes?

An agile approach to brand strategy means that the answer to these three questions may change on a week to week basis as you collect customer feedback and monitor the performance of your trial marketing campaigns.

2. Agile brand messaging

Having an agile tagline that is constantly being updated would seem like a weird thing to do, but the way that you describe your brand should be evolving as you learn from your ongoing customer discovery and market research. Therefore, you need to be able to change the way that you describe your business over time. You don’t want to lock too many things in too rigidly into your brand.

The link between strategy and copywriting is the stories that you tell. If you find yourself, on a repeated basis, re-telling particular anecdotes about your brand, then those are a good place to look for copywriting and key messages.

A story is the functional unit of meaning; it is a way of conveying meaning to an audience. You should aim to standardise and modularise your copywriting so that you and the rest of your team can take key elements and recombine them to create collateral and correspondence on the fly.

The next important thing to realise about agile copywriting is the importance of testing:

  • With traditional ad agency copywriting you would rely entirely on market research, intuition and instinct to create pieces of communication that would persuade your audience.
  • With agile approaches to copywriting you can test the effectiveness of different pieces of copy and improve it as you go. This approach draws as much from the direct marketing and direct response school of advertising as it does from ad agency copywriting.

3. Agile brand design

The visual design system can seem like the least agile part of a brand. However, in the age of digital communication, with the right tools you can constantly be improving and iterating your brand’s visual design.

Your visual appearance as a brand can be just as lean, agile and adaptable as any other part of your strategy.

  • The problem is usually that companies are too reluctant to invest in good quality design as a priority and to continue investing in design over time.
  • The other half of the problem is that the providers of design services have been far too willing to sell their wares as one-off batch-and-queue projects instead of fighting for retainers to act as brand stewards.

Designing a new corporate logo has become something that is so mystified and sacrosanct that it is impossible to imagine quick, small, agile improvements to a company’s logo over time. But if you step back and look at Shell’s logo over the years or Pepsi or Coke (or any great brand taken from a far enough viewpoint), they have all iterated and improved their logos significantly over the years.

The challenge for a startup is simply to accelerate this process and to be willing to make changes faster to improve the brand. The unspoken restraint here is that startups are unwilling to invest in good visual design. It makes perfect sense for a startup to hire a developer and to be continually improving their product, yet somehow it seems self-indulgent for them to hire a graphic designer and to be continually improving their brand. This is because most startups misunderstand what design really is.

Good design doesn’t just make a product look good; good design makes a product work better for the user. Good design is user-centred design and that type of design is always going to be lean and agile, practical and grounded.

Clarity of strategy, message and design

Clarity is the key to agile branding. The way to create a brand that can survive rapid iteration is to increase the amount of clarity across strategy, messaging and design.

  • A clear strategy will be repeatable and articulable to all of your team members. It will help guide all aspects of your decision making in marketing, product and customer experience.
  • A clear set of messages to describe your brand and to persuade your audience will be more likely to be useful to the rest of your team and therefore more likely to be actively used.
  • Clear visual identity, through colours, fonts and shapes, increases the chances that your brand will be applied by the team members in a consistent and high-quality way.

An agile brand has a clear strategy, a clear message, and a clear look and feel.

Growth Hacking in New Zealand

Growth hacking is the application of the mindsets and tools of a computer hacker to the challenge of growing a company. Basically, growth hacking is what happens when software developers try to do marketing. The essence of the growth hacking mindset is the scientific method and an iterative rapid prototyping approach to marketing. This type of marketing can be faster, cheaper and more effective than traditional marketing so growth hacking is becoming popular in many industries.

New Zealand has normally been pretty slow to adopt global trends in sales, marketing and design. As far as I can tell, there are still only a small number of New Zealand companies such as Vend, TradeMe and 90 Seconds TV that are applying growth hacking techniques to rapidly expand their businesses. I’m hoping to find more people doing growth hacking in Auckland and the rest of New Zealand to swap stories and share lessons learned.
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Creating a new product category

Creating a new category is the aspiration of every enthusiastic entrepreneur. Most business people would love to have a whole category all to themselves. The dream is that if you could be the “only” player in your category, then you could charge whatever you liked and sell an unlimited volume.

In practice, creating a new category is incredibly hard. In fact, it may be the hardest form of branding that any company can undertake. For most companies, it’s hard enough to explain what your product does (and how it’s different to your competitors’). The task of explaining the entire function of a new product category can be too much for many companies to bear.

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Brand strategy for startups

Brand strategy is the foundation of all good marketing, advertising and PR. A good brand will help you win customers, raise capital and attract co-founders. You need a minimum viable level of clarity to move fast and adapt your brand as your startup evolves.

Recently I’ve been helping more startups and entrepreneurs with their initial brand creation. What I’ve found is that the challenges that you face starting your own brand are surprisingly similar to the work that I do rebranding multinational companies. A few years back, I put together a new framework for creating a brand strategy. It’s called the Brand Bowtie because it puts together an internal brand architecture pyramid with an external communications pyramid.

Brand strategy for entrepenuers
A fashion entrepreneur faces many of the same branding challenges as a multinational company.

The elements of a successful brand are a vision, values, attributes, tagline, stories and key messages. The internal brand architecture is your little secret, but it will inform everything that you do. The external communications framework is an external tool that you can pick and mix from to build websites, social media and marketing collateral.

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The future of customer experience

We are in the middle of one the biggest economic shifts since the Industrial Revolution. The Information Age is rapidly being replaced by the Relationship Age a new era grounded in technology but focused on people. And it’s happening too fast for anyone to see.

The relationship age
If tills are replaced with self-scanning then staff can spend time helping customers and building relationships.

I call this new era the Relationship Age because we will see businesses that nurture their relationships thrive and those that don’t die off. What look like changes in technology today are actually changes in human behaviour.

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What does a strategist do?

It took me a while to figure out the difference between a planner, strategist and consultant. I asked some friends for advice about what a strategist is and what makes a good strategist.

What does an advertising planner do?
What’s the difference between a Design Strategist, a Brand Strategist and an Innovation Strategist?

What does a strategist actually do?

A couple of interesting comments and additions have filtered in that add to the conversation from the last post on what is a strategist. I’ve included them below:

A strategist cuts through the ‘noise’ to realise true value.

– Dorenda Britten, Managing Director

A strategists develops “strategies”. Which implies taking both broader scope and longer time than most functional or operational decision-making and analysis does. A strategists identifies the gaps from the current situation to the desired long-term outcomes, and defines the key levers of change. They then recommend appropriate ‘settings’ for these levers, prioritising them. A key component of strategy is what is excluded, what doesn’t fit with the recommended approach.

– George Arnold, Programme Manager

A strategist is akin to acting as an internal management consultant – but in the real world.

– Simon Leitch, Head of Sales

A strategist sets the trajectory of an idea and puts a blueprint for its delivery is motion.

– Louis Gordon-Latty, Project Manager

A strategist is like a doctor, we need to understand your symptoms, which we then use to build a picture of what you need to do to get where you want to go. And like Doctors, we learn about the typical illnesses and how to troubleshoot unknown causes through experience & research.

– Ben Young, Marketing Director

What makes a good strategist?

A good strategist, like a good doctor, can often reach a conclusion very quickly, even with very little information.

– Ben Young, Marketing Director

A good strategist is fluent in the craft of envisioning, architecting and executing future outcomes, while simultaneously being able to deliver tangible demonstrative methods, interventions and way-finding systems that achieve the shaped intentionality.

– Nicolae Halmaghi, Creativity Curator

What is a strategist?

The word strategist almost always applied as an adjective to another role, as in Brand Strategist, Design Strategist, Social Media Strategist or Plumbing Strategist. I’ve always loved strategy so I’ve enjoyed several of these types of jobs in my career. Building great businesses may be a team sport. But at some point in the creative process, someone has to go away after the brainstorming is done and turn all the ideas into something real that can be communicated, tested and executed. That person is a strategist.

Brand strategy, design strategy and innovation
Asking professional strategists to define what a strategist is seemed a bit circular, but it’s as good a place to start as any other.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what makes a Strategist different to an Account Manager, a Copywriter or a Planner. I wanted to focus in on the role of a person who is referred to as a Strategist in a business, rather than the larger question  of “What is strategy?”

Continue reading What is a strategist?

How to choose a tagline for a startup

Choosing a tagline looks easy, but choosing a tagline that works well for a technology startup is surprisingly hard. There are several common mistakes that new startup team make when choosing their tagline. These are easily avoidable if you know what to look out for.

Meaningless Company Name with No Tagline
If your company name doesn’t mean anything, then you will need a good tagline.

I’ve been helping a software startup recently with their search for a new tagline. Like many bootstrapped startups, they don’t have enough cash for a full brand strategy project. Even so, to create a tagline that works you still need more strategic thinking than just jumping straight to the whiteboard by yourself to pull a tagline out of your a__.

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Understanding your customer’s self-image

In brand strategy we are always looking for real human insights to drive the creation of a real point of difference. The most powerful place to find a point of difference is in the audience’s own behaviour and sense of identity.

Consumer Behaviour
What are the secret motivations for buying premium products?

When was the last time that you spent more on something than you should have? The chances are it indirectly had something to do with your self image. Or the self image that you want to create.

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