Setting your brand strategy — Alex Chrisman // Alta

Quotes

• “When you’re talking about brand you often get focused on visual assets and the way you described the role of creative in brands is essentially it’s the tires in a race car. You could be focused on building a superpower engine within your organization but without tires on it, you’re not going anywhere.” -Alex “Brand really is the interface to the customer. It drives the perception of the product and everything else that you’re doing.” -Alex“The easiest definition for a strategy I could think of is that you have to have a knowledge of your context, a goal that you are trying to get to, and a plan to get you there. So when you’re talking about putting a brand strategy together you also have to think about different time horizons.” -Alex“That’s where alot of brand strategy comes into play. We have some immediately actionable things that we are doing, yes. But if we look one step beyond that we can start to say that the way a brand comes to life is to say, ‘This has been the trajectory that we’ve been on. This is what our long-term goals look like.’ The place where a brand really shines is the unknown unknowns. It’s the stuff that exists so far beyond the horizon that you can’t prepare for it.” -Alex“If you’ve set values for your company then you knowhow you’re going to respond in the face of the unknown uncertainties.” -Alex“Part of building a brand is getting this very innate, very core set of norms and behaviors of a company. Almost like a culture that starts to shape the way that you create your deliverables. Brand is the precipitative to action. There is no single deliverable with the brand. It’s not your logo. It’s the precipitative of every single choice you make across the company.” -Alex“This is what scares founders from investing in brand consultancy. The term that comes to mind is, it sounds a little wishy-washy. The reason why I say that, and it’s not is defining a culture is something that can be very difficult to do and there’s a difference between how much white space goes around a logo and have it be a specific measurement.” -Ben “There’s a balance because to your point, if you don’t have something that immediately operationalizes it, you haven’t actually done anything. Strategy without implementation is just advice. So what we really do is we look at the long time horizon and we set that long, softer, more psychological, values-driven statements about what the brand is and where it is headed and we immediately say, this is how it is going to play. Often it is tailored to the type of problem that a particular customer has, either a product problem or a creative problem.” -Alex“If you’re looking at the balance between the two, it’s not an either-or question. It’s both. To the point about it being wishy-washy, I think the entire business industry struggles with this because not a lot of people in leadership positions have creative backgrounds. A lot of them come from finance or economics but they haven’t spend a lot of time working through a creative process.” -Alex“Finance has behavioral finance, economics has behavioral economics. All of a sudden there has been this big widespread embracing of how people make decisions emotionally They don’t make them just very rationally with perfect information. So while all these may sound inconcrete, they really drive results.” -Alex“I think of the development of brand being equivalent to doing emergency planning when you’re moving into a new house. It is the, ‘how are we going to handle any situation that could arise, any conflict that we’re going to see like the macro landscape is going to shift over time. Your competition is going to pivot and change, new competitors will arise, new marketing channels are going to happen, there might be new opportunities ahead of you and defining who you are as an organization, what your beliefs and values are, not just help you how to create your Facebook ads, it colors the decision-making process, that you set.” -Ben “The fundamental part of understanding who you are as an organization, understanding who your customers are, figuring out that overlap, defining it, and then articulating it to the entire organization, it is meant to be a structure that helps you with your decision-making process not just in marketing or in creative production but really through every facet of your business.” -Ben