Defining your brand — Alex Chrisman // Alta

Quotes

• “The interesting thing about working in wine is that it’s an un-differentiated that you have to learn how to appreciate past a certain price point and it’s the reason why I was kind of being lampooned as to why you can’t tell the difference between one bottle at 10X the price point and that’s because it’s not for everybody.” -Alex“It’s like fine art where you could look at a Jackson Pollock and say, sure my kid could do that tripping paint but the point was it didn’t. At the time Jackson Pollock got it made, it was revolutionary. These wines are collected the same way. You are buying a story, a process, you’re buying all these other things that go into it that when you pull the cork in that bottle, floods of experience come back and storytelling and significance.” -Alex “It’s why people like opening bottles from 1945 because there’s something so cool about drinking a bottle that had to be hid during World War II so the Nazis didn’t take it. It doesn’t make it taste better but it makes it much more enjoyable.” -Alex“Rory Sutherland had a great bit about this. He talked about, ‘If you have a three Michelin star restaurant that smells of shit, you’re not gonna enjoy the food very well. You shouldn’t keep trying to improve the food, you hire a janitor.’ So at some point, it’s like you can keep pouring money into a product but changing reality is hard. Changing a perception is something a lot of people don’t pay attention to.” -Alex“Most founders already know. They have a hard time separating what’s special with their company from what needs to happen to their company for it to be functional or aspirations that have to do with beliefs, vision, and values, things that are really at the core of brand that drive both company and culture from things like monetary success at scale.” -Alex“There’s a 360 process questionnaire that we go through at the very beginning of every engagement and that’s essentially interviewing the CEO down to the front desk secretary asking them all the same questions. It’s really about getting the snapshot of where the company sits and then comparing all of those answers to each other and figuring out where is the greatest consensus.” -Alex“If they’re excited about the same thing as the CEO of the company then you’ve got this massive alignment throughout the entire org chart and that tells you there is something special there and that reflects also on the customer side.” -Alex“So this is the part that I stole from you in my consultancy. I looked at the way that you ask questions of the organizations that I was working in didn’t just ask the CEO but really took an impression from the entire organization or at least the relevant stakeholders.” -Ben“The way that I think about it is like a Venn diagram with ten circles. What you’re looking for is the overlapping portion that is most common. The darkest color on that map and that really helps define what brand or which organization truly believe about themselves.” -Ben “The second process that I took from you was this process of seeing what prospective customers or existing customers think about the organization as well, taking their temperature and overlapping that on top of what you learned about the company and when you get that overlap what people feel is true about the company and then what the prospectivecustomers or target market thinks is true, that’s really where your brand lives.” -Ben“I always rewind all the way back to definitions because I find that a lot of people who are asking after the brand are focused on deliverables rather than the act of process. The important thing about a brand is really it is a synchronization problem. I think of it as the red thread between everything.” -Alex“What you’re looking for is not just, how do this end in messaging and visual assets and creatives. It should also be touching what products are you making and why. It should be a foundational exercise that synchronizes everybody’s activities across the company.” -Alex