The Standards: Brand Strategy
Callum on making brand strategy more than just talk.
How to unlock the black box of strategy.
Every agency in town will tell you about the importance of brand strategy, about how it allows you to find your “why”. About how it is best expressed through diagrams that look like inter-linked circles, onions or pyramids. Yet, very few have a falsifiable explanation for what it does or how to create one. As far as the “black box of creativity” goes, brand strategy is often at the very bottom in the very darkest corner. But when your brand only has seven seconds to make a first impression, you deserve to know the process for making them count. This is the Standard for Brand Strategy.
At Love + Money we created The Standards as a manual on creating exceptional work that works, every time. It’s a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
At Love + Money we’re firm believers that brands are memes. Yes, those memes. Beneath a seemingly stupid premise, lies the method for articulating brands in a way both a CEO and an 8 year old could understand. In the creative industry it’s easy to talk about a brand as some nebulous, all-encompassing concept. But that doesn’t say much. And it says a lot less to your client. By calling a brand a meme, we’re just acknowledging that a brand is really just a big idea: to be memorable amidst a highly-competitive market, a brand has to be more than the sum of its products. To be successful, a brand has to condense a vague web of products, propositions and people into a single idea that someone can understand in the time it takes them to scroll from one post to the next. So, what makes an idea stick?
In a competitive market, people are only going to notice and engage with certain ideas. That idea needs to express something that potential customers care about, can hear correctly amidst the noise of competitors, and see enough of themselves in it to share it with others. So how do you find out what exactly that meme needs to be? Like everything at Love + Money, brand strategy comes from a disciplined process of research, synthesis, design and delivery.
Research:
If we’re going to introduce a new idea into a market, we need to make sure it’s understandable. As outsiders looking into our client’s industry, ensuring we’re creating something coherent means we need to first read the room and capture the context. And the room is big.
To hit the ground running in our first workshop, we send out some homework for the client to complete a few days in advance. These questions directly correspond to the structure of the two main workshops we run, giving us a clear indication on where the biggest weaknesses currently are and where we should spend the most time in those meetings. Establishing a shared content repository for us to sift through and refine, this homework asks clients to articulate their USP in three levels of complexity, provide the context on their target audience and market competitors, and confirm the exact specs for our deliverables. In doing so, we immediately get a clear indication on the biggest ideas within the business already.
Then, we invite them into the first of many workshops, known as the Engagement Workshop. Here, we’re aiming to set our shared business objectives and measures of success. Engagement Workshops have a real spread of stakeholders, designers, developers, marketers and occasionally scientists. As our first real opportunity to build rapport between both teams, we leverage a gamified structure to capture project requirements and discuss brand equity in a way everyone can weigh in on. Often a highlight of the session, one activity gets clients to imagine they’re writing a breakup letter to their brand: while the activity itself is tongue-in-cheek, it serves a very real function by framing the loss of brand equity in a language everyone understands. In doing so, we invite the entire client team to feel comfortable talking about topics usually reserved for the Marketing or Design departments, best signalling the brand’s shortcomings across all use-cases.
With a clearer understanding on the client’s business, we increase the fidelity on everything around them through our Encyclopaedia Workshop. Here, the focus is on clarifying their category, consumers and competitors. Providing a more in-depth discussion on memetic branding, we scrutinise what they’re passionate about, are (actually) the best at and can make a dollar from. The aim is to understand these three things deeply, select a user to go after and understand the existing memes in market. With a shared understanding of this, we have a clear criteria for how our work should be measured well before we get into design.
Synthesis:
We often say that if we’re doing our jobs right we’ll be able to re-articulate everything we’ve just heard into a single idea, rich with creative potential. As we approach the end of the workshops, we regularly invoke Richard Feynman to do just that, attempting to explain our understanding of our client and their context back to them as simply as we can. Importantly, we pay attention to what’s difficult to articulate. That difficulty is where the complexity lies and is exactly what a strong meme needs to articulate effortlessly. By using this as a forcing function for our understanding, we can confirm whether we’ve accurately captured the most important pieces, or need to tweak the focus still.
Now with clarity on our client and their context, we distil all the research, workshop summaries and insights into a single meme and a couple of slides. In reducing everything down to its purest expression, we can take action and use that idea to be as expansive as possible. Intended to be used by our team and theirs, this provides us with a succinct articulation of their meme and context, indicating the core design principles required to manifest this visually. This is also the last stage where brand strategy happens independently from the design process. This is why we do synthesis as a team. Drawing on all disciplines provides a space for multiple perspectives and contentions, allowing us to measure the best ideas by their potential for virality and expression. When approved, this gives the designers all they need to know and the green light to move ahead.
Design And Beyond:
To convert bark into bite, we begin the process of design exploration through our Creative Sprints. While we’ll be covering exactly what these are in greater detail over the following weeks, they are responsible for translating the brand’s meme into something visual to truly test its strength. While there shouldn’t be any workshop decks littering these areas, it is crucial that the designers are given a succinct articulation of the context to direct their efforts. Leveraging the distilled slides mentioned above, the designers are informed of (in as few words as possible) who the client is, their meme, their context and any relevant guidance on the visual expression to kickstart their exploration.
While our clients have real-time access to our files to see the work evolve day-by-day, we still need to make the depth of these ideas intelligible through explanation. Showcasing the beginnings of the system in ye olde 1920 x 1080 Creative Direction presentation, we get to present the most polished version of the brand meme across word and image. While the Creative Sprints allow us to explore a broad territory rapidly, Creative Direction presentations allow us to hone this down into a singular interpretation of the meme at its highest fidelity. Care is taken to express the brand in executions that are deeply grounded in their strategy, from bumper stickers on a Ford Raptor to trade show wayfinding. In doing so, the brand meme becomes not just tangible, but seemingly obvious at a moment’s glance. Here, the ultimate test of how effective our brand strategy is, and the meme that it’s created, is by how much we can now shut up and let everyone else continue the conversation.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles on what some of these Standards are and how they help us Make Room For Magic. If you like what you’ve heard and want to see us in action with your next project, you can book a time with Joe (South Hemisphere) via this link or Adnaan (North Hemisphere) via this link.
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