Chapter 1

THE BRAND BEHIND THE MEGAPHONE

Is digital marketing really that complex? Just start a Facebook page. Publish a blog. Record a podcast. Share photos on Instagram. What’s the big deal? We can do all of that in about an hour? Why are we making a fuss about how hard all of this is?

That’s the siren call of Shiny New Things. Sure, it’s easier than ever to start. The tools and technologies that can help you be a better marketer are deceptively simple to employ. However, when you take a step back and consider the Scrappy Mindset—putting brains before budget, marketing like a mousetrap, and seeing ideas everywhere—you know that you can do better. You have to do better.

That’s why the first step in getting scrappy is getting smart. Putting strategy first and ensuring that you know what it is you’re trying to do in the first place. This not only leads to better marketing out of the gate, it also helps you measure what matters so that you can optimize your work for the long haul.

Sounds pretty logical, right? And yet, too many marketers are quick to rush in and start marketing without a plan in place. That’s why we’re beginning our journey with three critical smart steps you can’t skip. Here in Chapter 1, you’ll discover that although marketing has changed significantly in recent years, what’s behind it has not. The tactics may have changed but the underlying strategy remains. You still need to build a strong brand with something to say. This is easier said than done. Along the way, we’ll unpack a simple five-step blueprint you can use to help you define your brand.

In Chapter 2, you’ll throw stuffy strategies out the window and instead map a path to marketing success. With a brand packed up and a journey plotted, you can start selecting the social media and digital marketing tools that will take you to your destination. Once again, Shiny New Things distract. That’s why you’ll need the digital compass presented in Chapter 3. This compass will help you find your way and determine what digital channels work best when.

As you build a smart, scrappy foundation, you need some context to understand how we got here.

THE CHANGING MARKETING MEGAPHONE

Why is marketing so different today? As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says in explaining a simple little topic like the universe, “Knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you’re going.”¹ Marketing has always been a tool for helping people and organizations share their wares with the hopes of producing profitable exchanges. Marketing communication has essentially been a megaphone for gaining attention.

But that marketing megaphone has changed a bit over the past several centuries. You could say that new media was born in Germany in the 1400s when Gutenberg revolutionized printing technology, enabling the first form of mass communication. And for the next 400 years, marketing was driven by print, from posters and newspapers to magazines and catalogs. There probably weren’t as many books about navigating media shifts as several centuries passed without any major shifts!

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that we had our senses of sound and sight awoken by radio, television, and the birth of broadcast media. This new media shift had an easy-to-understand dynamic. As there were only a few ways to reach the masses, more radio and TV ads sold more products and got companies more shelf space, which they could use to buy even more ads. Bigger was better, making this the birth of the Myth of Big as well. Only big brands with big budgets could do truly big things.

While we didn’t go hundreds of years before the next media shift, broadcast advertising ruled most of the 20th century. In addition to bringing us Nirvana and 90210, the ’90s also brought the first widespread use of the Internet. And with it, the most rapidly evolving form of media. From email marketing (still a formidable force which we’ll discuss later in the book) to this past decade’s Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, each new digital innovation has quickly found its way onto the radars of marketers.

It’s easy to look at this timeline and think only of the rapid rate of change—the chaos that has disrupted the slow and steady climb of traditional, bigger-is-better media. However, we can’t lose sight of the baseline. The common denominator. All of these tools help us build better brands. Now we have even more tools to do this. But to fully leverage this new marketing megaphone we first have to ensure that there’s something behind it.

We have to take a look at the brand behind the megaphone.

DO WE REALLY HAVE TO TALK ABOUT BRANDING?

Branding? Really?? Yes, really.

Like the Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers Weekend Update bit from Saturday Night Live, we really do have to talk about branding. (I said these were steps you can’t skip.) Some roll their eyes at the very mention of branding. To some it’s a dated construct. For others it’s esoteric, touchy-feely homework that seems disconnected from bottom-line impact. Marketers may even view branding as yet another obstacle standing in the way as they launch their new digital efforts.

Even in today’s fragmented culture, brands still matter. We’re constantly reminded of the climbing user rates on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, yet another metric often falls through the cracks—something called “brand-following behavior,” a measure of the rate at which individuals follow brands on social networks. In recent years, along with increases in engagement on social networks, brand-following behavior has doubled according to The Social Habit study conducted by Edison Research.² In their more comprehensive Infinite Dial study, Edison and partner Triton Digital found that one third of Americans age 12 and up knowingly follow brands on social media.³

Combine this with the fact that people by and large enjoy interacting on social media, and the opportunity for brands is clear. (When was the last time data reported high engagement levels with billboards and press releases? Has your brand-following behavior doubled for print ads?)

If you need further proof, The Social Habit also shows that even among a large national sample, when asked “which brand stands out on social media,” we see it’s a list of the usual suspects: Nike, Apple, Starbucks. At a glance, you could think that this just confirms the Myth of Big. A closer look reveals that these mega brands with millions of dollars and several decades of marketing muscle behind them all only rank in the single digits.

What does this mean for us? It means that these new forms of digital media have the potential to be a great brand equalizer. Scrappy marketers might not expect to fare well on a poll of who’s the most dominant TV advertiser, but new media levels the playing field in ways that we’ve never seen in the history of marketing.

It’s only fitting that Lee Clow, the adman responsible for some of broadcast media’s most prolific work, including Apple’s 1984 and iconic iPod ads, would issue the best caution to marketers too quick to jump into the next big thing without first defining their brand. “The reality of the new media world is that if your brand does not have a belief, if it does not have a soul and does not correctly architect its messages everywhere it touches consumers, it can become irrelevant. It can be ignored, or even become a focal point for online contempt.”⁴ In short, you have to be something before you can build something.

The marketing megaphone may have changed, but making sure there’s something behind it matters more than ever. That’s why the critical first step in getting scrappy with your marketing is making sure your brand is clearly defined. As long as we’re defining things, let’s consider the definition of a brand.

SO, WHAT IS A BRAND?

Any good semantic exploration should start in a dictionary with a basic understanding of the word. Surprisingly, in a number of dictionaries our modern business-focused definition has overtaken the word’s earliest meaning, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “a piece of wood that is or has been burning on a hearth.”⁵ The American Heritage Dictionary shows as its first (not earliest) definition: “A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product, service, or organization.”⁶ This sense is also first in the Random House Unabridged (dictionary.reference.com).

Not a bad definition, but instead of relying on a dictionary, let’s use the definition I employ when working with clients and speaking with businesses big and small:

A brand can be any noun (person, place, or thing) that needs another party to take action (purchase, promote, advocate, and so on). A brand does this by creating a series of ideas and touch points that build a larger message which draws the desired audience close, engages them emotionally, and inspires them to take action.

Any brand can get scrappy, which is why it’s important to make sure we have a broad definition of what a brand is. Using this definition we can apply these insights and those that follow to any personal, professional, organizational, or product brand.

A brand can be a . . .

– Business: Nike, Apple, Starbucks

– Product: Air Max, Apple Watch, Verisimo

– Organization/institution: Humane Society, Planned Parenthood, Harvard

– Person: Professionals, politicians, and celebrities such as Tony Robbins, Barack Obama, and Taylor Swift

– Place: Communities, cities, or countries such as North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Chicago, the United States

– Something undefinable: Things that fall in the spaces between but still need others to rally around them, like our landmarks and special causes

It’s not a stretch to say that really anything in this day and age can be a brand. It doesn’t matter if you’re a solo entrepreneur, a corporate marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company, or a communications manager for a town of 500. We’re all in the brand-building business.

Now that we have established the comforting fact that we’re all brands, let’s take a look at some of the misappropriations of this construct as we look for a smart solution for defining your brand.

Your brand is not just . . .

– Your logo

– Your slogan, mission statement, or whatever that nice copy under your logo says

– What your website says

– What’s on your business cards

– How your employees engage customers and prospects online and off

– What others say about you

– What you do on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, or the latest greatest social network

Can these items be a part of your brand? Of course. All of these items working in concert help create your brand. However, to correctly inform all of these touch points, you need a solid understanding of your brand’s identity. You can’t simply say that your brand is your logo or the new branding PowerPoint that your agency made for you. Many marketers grab hold of these brand fragments as it’s an easy way to check that “branding thing” off the list without doing the work to ensure that, as Clow said, your brand has a belief and a soul so that you can correctly architect your messages across all forms of media.

But where do you start with this?

YOUR BRAND’S BLUEPRINT

When we were discussing the topic of branding on my podcast, Patrick Hanlon, one of the leading brand practitioners in the world and author of the books Primal Branding and The Social Code, quipped that, “Conversations about branding used to be like molding fog.”⁷ How can we bring this sprawling topic down to earth? We need a more systematic approach for defining our brands.

Brand building, like building anything, starts with a blueprint. Just as an architectural blueprint defines structure through design and dimensions, a brand blueprint defines who your brand is and how you tell your story. Like the girders of a skyscraper, you can’t always see your brand but it’s what the rest of your work stands on.

Your brand blueprint is made up of five critical elements:

– Spark: The spark that ignites everything your brand does, usually a single keyword such as helping or innovation. This is not a public-facing piece of your branding. Rather it’s an internal keystone that anchors everything.

– Promise: More than a slogan, tagline, or mission statement artfully placed under your logo, a brand promise defines your ethos. Instead of being a message about you, it’s a promise of what you’ll do for whom.

– Story: From Thomas Jefferson (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) to Apple (thinner, lighter, and faster), great communicators tell their stories with three key ideas.

– Voice: Whether it’s a 140-character tweet or a 140-page e-book, words matter more than ever in marketing today. What does your brand voice sound like?

– Visuals: Beyond your logo, these include icons, colors, visual movement, patterns, and more.

Let’s take a look at each of piece of your brand’s blueprint.

The Spark That Sets Your Story in Motion

What does your brand stand for?

Branding can fall prey to checklists. You can get so consumed checking all of the identity items off your list (Business cards? Check. Letterhead? Check.) that you can forget to answer this simple question. And yet making a clear statement about what you stand for is the difference between a Mac and a PC, a Ben and Jerry’s and a Häagen-Dazs, or a Nike and a Reebok. Knowing what you stand for infuses your brand with soul.

Your brand spark is the catalyst that starts this fire, not the fire itself. It activates and stimulates. It’s the inspiration behind everything. Ben and Jerry’s spark is social justice; it informs everything about their ice cream. Defining the intersection of technology and liberal arts is the spark that started Apple. Note that neither of these focuses solely on their product offerings of ice cream and technology. Instead, these sparks speak to bigger issues that bring these brands to life.

If you are an entrepreneur or the owner of your business, you probably have a good idea of why you got into the game. However, it may be hiding as you have every other aspect of your business from payroll to logistics on your mind. In any case, grab a legal pad— longhand is best for an exploration like this—and take a moment to write out your brand’s creation story. Underline or capitalize keywords that could be your spark in hiding.

But what if you didn’t start the business? If possible, find the founder or someone close to him or her and repeat the exercise above in an interview format. If you don’t have access to these people, take a look at your organization and assemble a group of trusted team members who best embody your brand. Once gathered, work through defining why your brand is in business.

In the end, you should be left with a simple word (or two) that exemplifies your brand’s purpose and passion such as helping, innovation, or social justice. Remember, it’s your brand’s fire. Only you know what kind of spark it requires.

A Promise Is More Than Pretty Words Below Your Logo

As clever as we marketers are, it’s ironic that our industry words suck as much as they do. Nowhere is this more evident than in the tired phrases we use to describe those words that sit under our logos. Is it a tagline or a slogan? Or are you more of a mission statement type?

Slogans and taglines are predominantly promotional constructs. At best they are campaign themes or something you roll out with a new look. A mission statement gets us closer to your brand promise as it relates to what you do and how you do it. However, each is burdened with excess baggage.

Slogans and taglines tend to focus on form over function. How does the proposed line sound? Is it “catchy” enough? And what does it look like with the new logo? And mission statements often get lost in the tall grass of intellectualism—We work to foster the ability to better understand the importance of XYZ and how the people of X and Y including but not limited to Z are impacted. Furthermore . . . You can imagine where it goes from here.

In order to create a brand that stands for something, you need a clearly distilled statement of purpose to rally your troops. The idea of a brand promise works for many reasons. Rather than the carelessness implied with a tagline or slogan, a promise endows your words with greater purpose. Who is this a promise between? Your brand and those you serve. The power of the word “promise” is that it brings the most important player to the forefront—your customers. To build a brand, you must make a solemn promise to those you serve. If the paying customers aren’t at the end of what you’re doing at every level, then you’re spinning your wheels.

Brand strategist Justin Foster, who has authored two books on creating engaging brands—Human Bacon: A Man’s Guide to Creating an Awesome Personal Brand and Oatmeal v. Bacon: How to Differentiate in a Generic World—has a simple definition of a brand promise, “It’s the leadership team’s promise for how they’ll treat the people that touch their brands.”⁸ That’s why a brand promise comes with a formula. Your brand promise is what you do for whom. This takes the bold catchiness from the tagline school of thought and reinforces it with the essence of a mission. You can wordsmith it all you want, but most can fill in the blanks of this very basic formula.

Zappos was built on founder Tony Hseih’s desire to deliver happiness, as his book of the same title states. This philosophy anchors all of Zappos’ brand communications with the promise that they are Powered by Service. Their brand promise is one of service, not shoes.

A well-crafted brand promise can embolden brand ambassadors both internally and externally. Remember, your brand isn’t what you sell, say, or do. It’s what you believe. The best way to unite your community around what your brand believes is to make them a promise. In addition to building your brand, this is also a key step in establishing trust, which is critical in strengthening relationships both online and off.

Tell Your Story in Three Parts

With a better understanding of what your brand is and what you stand for, it’s time to tell your story. But before you prepare to write your organization’s answer to War and Peace, get ready for a big constraint.

You only get three words to do this. And three words are all you need in most cases. In ancient times, Latin scholars decreed, Omne trium perfectum—everything that comes in threes is perfect, or, every set of three is complete—more commonly known as the rule of three.⁹ You’ll find this pattern throughout history from great political leaders and business pioneers alike. Thomas Jefferson’s work of declaring independence was made easier by stating that we should all have the right to three things, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” rather than a rambling off a list of 37 grievances.

Steve Jobs famously (and obsessively) found sets of threes compelling. Most new Macs, iPhones, and iPads are still released with three different levels and often with three core benefits such as “thinner, lighter, and faster.” Add to this the fact that we’re now exposed to thousands of marketing messages each day and it’s easy to see that we could all enhance our communication by simplifying.

When it comes to your brand, what three things can you use to tell your story? Here are—you guessed it—three different options.

– Story Arc: All stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Does your audience’s interaction with you follow an arc that you can zero in on? For example, a consulting firm might use the stages of a typical client engagement—identify, implement, integrate.

– Benefits: We aren’t here to talk about features, right? Instead, we focus on benefits. What are three ways that you make your customers’ lives better? A breakfast bar might be convenient, low-fat, and energy-packed.

– Philosophy: In a more complex, service-based business or a nonprofit, your story and benefits might not be as concrete. In this situation, focus on three core philosophies that guide your organization. For example, a local homeless shelter might provide help, healing, and hope.

You’ll notice that alliteration was used in a couple of the examples. If an alliterative word choice is just as descriptive as your other options, use it to tie your three words together. This is recommended for one simple reason: it’s easy to remember for both your customers and your employees. Rhyming helps for the same reason. As best-selling author Daniel Pink writes in To Sell Is Human, “Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.”¹⁰ All of this helps increase processing fluency, or how easily our audience can understand what we’ve just told them.

As we’ll discuss in the chapters ahead, new marketing channels such as Facebook and Twitter provide opportunities for people at all levels of your organization to be brand ambassadors. It’s our job as marketers to arm them with easy-to-recall tools they can use to represent the brand. They need to be familiar with your story but they also need to know how your brand’s voice sounds.

Finding Your Brand Voice

By now you may have noted that the spark isn’t public-facing, the promise is a simple phrase, and the story is a boiled-down list of three words. Now what? These three elements provide a framework or foundation you can use to build your brand. From here, your brand is built primarily through the voice and visuals you use.

Brand voice is no longer the sole domain of your advertising copywriter. Everyone who is customer-facing (either online or off) should understand not only the tone of your brand’s voice (casual, positive, assertive, technical) but also the vocabulary and keywords that are the building blocks of your brand’s lexicon.

These keywords can serve a marketing purpose in planning and optimizing your content but they are also your brand’s “sacred words,” as described by Patrick Hanlon in his book Primal Branding.¹¹ When we go to Starbucks we don’t order a small, medium, or large. We order a tall, grande, or venti. They’ve established a brand voice so strong, with such a unique vocabulary, that we’ve adopted it as part of our own vernacular.

While speaking at an entrepreneur expo, I met the owner and founder of the Holden Family Farm. Hailing from the small town of Scranton, Iowa, the Holden Family raises hormone-free beef. Instead of leading with this descriptive yet bland copy, they talk about their commitment to their cattle by saying that they’re involved from “Conception to Consumption.” Say what you will but that’s a business card you don’t forget. It’s okay to laugh at this. The Holden Family does it with a big smile when they tell you about their brand.

Beyond specific words, your brand voice also directs how conversations are framed. If yours is a people-focused brand, you might remind those speaking on behalf of your brand that they should humanize things whenever possible and talk about “our team” or “our people” or “the people we serve.” Some brands are more formal in voice while others, such as Chipotle and Old Spice, embrace humor and wit.

Think back on the last time you told your brand’s story. What words stood out? How was the conversation framed? Start a list to formalize these words and distribute it internally. If your team understands why these words are important, they’ll be more likely to integrate them into their own voice as well.

Choose Visuals That Tell Your Story

You’ll notice that the visuals have been deliberately left to the end of our scrappy brand blueprint. That’s not to say that visuals aren’t important. Rather, this sequencing is essential because it’s important to define who you are and what your core beliefs are before you start assigning visuals.

Your visuals start with a strong foundation—a solid logo and corporate identity. However, more than making sure that your letterhead and business cards match, in this new digital world you need to ensure that you have typography that can transcend platforms and a lexicon of app-friendly iconography as well. You also need to consider how your brand can flourish in a controlled ecosystem like your website as well as on off-site platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.

Like your brand voice, your visuals may be prescriptive and thematic. If your brand is product-focused, you’ll want to build a library of high-resolution art for sharing across various channels. If your business is technical, your library will likely be composed of process graphics. If you’re in the service industry or you’re a nonprofit, you might want to reinforce human aspects and emotional triggers with images of people.

The point here is to have a visual bedrock in place to avoid situations where you need a Facebook cover photo or an intro slide for a YouTube video and someone just grabs a random picture. These online spaces are all opportunities that help reinforce your brand.

Your brand visuals checklist should include:

– Branding: Your logo plus general identity style guidelines.

– Color considerations: Many online platforms allow you to customize your design and colors; be prescriptive with what’s on-brand and what’s not.

– Photo recommendations: If you have original photos that should be used or preferred stock resources, point to them.

– Technical considerations: If your brand can be nothing more than a small, square avatar, what should it be? If you layer cover photos and avatars, as Facebook and Twitter allow, what should that combination look like?

– Narrative considerations: How is your brand’s story depicted throughout your communications? Work on developing unique visuals that help you relay your brand’s sacred words.

An off-brand visual may seem trivial. But remember, your brand is a gestalt created in your customer’s mind through all of your touch points working together in concert. You can’t afford to miss a single branding opportunity in today’s complex digital marketplace.

UNSHARED BLUEPRINTS
WON’T GET THE JOB DONE

With a blueprint in place, what happens next? If you follow the metaphor through to its logical conclusion, it’s time to start building. Unshared schematics won’t get the job done. This scrappy brand blueprint is purposefully simple. In addition to being easy for you to sketch out, it should be something that’s easy for you to share with the rest of your team. You’ll find that these two themes persist throughout this book. Scrappy marketing and the plans we make in support of it should be easy for you to both create and share. The latter—sharing with the rest of your team—is essential if you want to do more with less.

Unless you’re an award-winning animation studio, you might think that there’s little that you have in common with Pixar. But in the scrappy spirit of seeing ideas everywhere, consider how Pixar fosters creativity and consistency in their brand and the products they create. As outlined by co-founder Ed Catmull in his book Creativity, Inc., Pixar has a “brain trust” of directors, producers, and writers who serve as an advisory council, offering candor, criticism, and essentially insight on what’s on-brand for the studio and its films.¹² Could you implement a brand brain trust? McDonald’s has.

Steve Levigne, vice president of U.S. strategy and insights at McDonalds USA, told me about their own brain trust. “We have a partnership between the marketing and strategy departments and our agency partners.” This cross-functional team oversees all aspects of the brand with each group taking ownership and running point on different areas as needed. “We have a saying—freedom within a framework. We have frameworks that we can apply to a variety of situations.”¹³ You can’t build your brand alone. You need flexible frameworks that you can share with your own brain trust to help you get the job done. The blueprint you develop plays that role.

To employ today’s digital marketing tools, you need to think before going out of the gate. To build better brands online you need to first know who you are. As our marketing megaphone continues to change at an unprecedented rate, you need to make sure you have something solid behind it. You need to know who you are in order to determine how your story is told.

Who is only the first in a series of questions you need to answer before you dive in. The other questions—why and what—are addressed in the next two chapters as we map a path to marketing success guided by our digital compass.

Create your brand blueprint now. Use the following questions to get you started.

– Think about your brand spark. Who are you and what does your brand stand for?

– What’s your brand promise? What do you do for whom?

– What three words are most important for your brand’s story?

– How would you describe your brand voice?

– Apart from your logo, what other visuals are an important part of your brand? How can you better incorporate them both online and off?

– How can you share this blueprint with the rest of your team? Who should be a part of your brand’s brain trust?