A positioning statement answers three main questions:

No need to make our lives any more complicated (this is Lean Branding, remember?). Geoffrey Moore Consulting created a very effective template to create your positioning statement that has been used by companies everywhere:

Fill it out. Done. Use it, use it, and abuse it. You can’t go wrong.

Look out for data on your buyers from magazines, databases (if you have access to any), newspapers, industry white papers, and reputable sources that you can trust. This will give you a broad sense of how the market is doing and general trends to keep in mind as you observe your buyers.

Sit down with as many potential buyers as you can and ask them as many questions as you need to start discovering patterns among them. There are some very specific items we are looking for, and you will find a list of sample questions later in the chapter. Some people suggest you should also interview existing customers who both love and hate your product. In case you are just getting started, and you have no customers to conduct these with, arrange for interviews with potential customers. In Chapter 6, we will come back to this and apply it with existing customers.

Interviews were a vital part of the Apps.co entrepreneurship program in Colombia. Since teams were expected to go from idea to minimum viable product in eight weeks, the program demanded that a number of interviews be conducted during the first few weeks. These interviews would guide the development of the product and the brand that would project it into the world.

In an outstanding case of customer discovery, a mobile app called Bites pivoted from a food delivery intermediary into a tool to improve the on-site restaurant experience. After dozens of interviews with potential customers, the team realized that their market felt fascinated and moved by authentic food photography. They were eager to see pictures taken by other “foodies” and were more comfortable trusting their peers for restaurant recommendations. Perhaps repeating this exercise somewhere else on Earth would reveal different insights. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole point behind conducting interviews while you are building your brand: going beyond your own assumptions.

I absolutely love this method. Picture a fly on the wall. That’s pretty much what you’ll be. This type of observation consists of becoming a part of any given environment for a few hours. You are trying to understand your buyers’ context: what threats and opportunities can you spot? If you’re interested in teachers, for example, visit a school for a given number of hours and record as many details as you can about the school day.

In 2012, my agency was hired to build a local politician’s online brand presence. She had already been elected but was having trouble empathizing with the citizens who hadn’t voted for her. During a brainstorming session, we decided to use expressions from citizens themselves to communicate her brand message. We would address naysayers and continue appealing to sympathizers by using their own terms and language.

To do so, we followed the politician in every single public event for four months. We did not intervene or ask any questions during this time. Our team was just present, taking notes and analyzing what came out of citizens’ mouths. Later, we would synthesize these insights and come up with messages that reflected the citizens’ own concerns and satisfactions. Our social media engagement skyrocketed, and the conversation (which had remained stagnant for months) activated around the topics that citizens were actually interested in hearing.

Here’s a classy term for some serious stalking activity—except you will formally approach someone to ask his permission to stick with him for a couple of hours. The idea here is to get a sense of what his particular routine is like, what are some needs and aspirations he might not be willing or able to declare verbally but are visible to you, and what channels would work best to reach him, among others. You must remain unnoticed and avoid disturbing his routine. This is academic stalking.

Take a few minutes to imagine the aspiration that your brand is here to facilitate. Are you trying to make it easier for customers with a fast-paced lifestyle to share their files? Are you trying to provide a healthy or environmentally friendly option in the midst of a toxic marketplace? Are you building an app to optimize the way I spend my time? Are you a political brand offering to bring prosperity and education? This answer is a vital starting point for the observations that you will take note of while shadowing a subject.

For Procter & Gamble, this answer was once “we are trying to offer a better way to clean a floor.”^[26] In 1994, the company hired an innovation and design consultancy called Continuum to figure out a way to reinvent the act of cleaning floors. To do so, researchers followed individual people as they cleaned their own kitchen floors. They found out, among others, that “mops worked mostly by the adhesion of dirt to the mop and people seemed to spend almost as much time rinsing their mop as they did cleaning the floor.” To solve it, they designed a new product that would bring their newfound idea of “Fast Clean” to life. The rest is Swiffer history.

As you follow your potential or existing customers, take note of the activities, environment, interactions, objects, and users involved in their routine. These five types of observations belong to a framework called AEIOU (after their initials) that was developed by a group of researchers at the Doblin Group in 1991 to make ethnography easier to record.^[27]

Here is what some sample, raw shadowing observations might look like, as coded with the AEIOU framework. You can also use this framework to record your fly-on-the-wall observations:

After following John for a couple of hours, you already have an interesting set of brand-related questions to continue validating:

Some general guidelines are to make sure that you select the right people, prepare your interview questions beforehand (but be sensitive to open up to others), fill out a reasonably organized field guide, and keep your eye open for behaviors that deviate from the standard. Also, even if you’re researching buyer personas for a very specific product, make sure that you look at the whole experience. You never know what new ideas may come up.

As promised, next is a sample field guide. Miscellaneous questions like “favorite social media platform,” “car make,” and “hair color” might make sense in specific cases (with car or shampoo brands, for example). Take this guide with you, be efficiently creative, and feel free to edit or add questions as needed.

Now that you’ve interviewed and observed a considerable amount of potential buyers, summarize the patterns you have uncovered in—you guessed it—your first buyer personas. The main characters in your story. Also known as the people we’re going after.

Use the following template to summarize your information:

A useful way to visualize your product experience is to use a Customer Journey Map. These maps display the complete adventure that customers jump on the minute they consume your product. It is important to remember that consumption involves pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages, and consumers will be looking for you all along. A complete Journey Map includes these three stages. The main idea here is that customers are not just looking for value on the spot. These stages are all brand touchpoints in which you can add value, and it is essential to recognize what and where they are and how you’ll respond to consumers during each of them. Think about a few stages that your own customer would go through as he consumes your product:

Back in Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of understanding that brand and product don’t compete. Brand is product, and everything else conforming to the unique story that consumers create when they think of you. Therefore, we can now think of your product experience in terms of all the brand elements that must come together when someone consumes your offer. To make this easier for you, the following Brand Journey Map template includes a series of stages and boxes to fill out as you design the experience that you are trying to offer.

Mapping the brand journey makes visualizing this process easier. I urge you to take a few minutes to draw your own path to identify where and how your brand story will be told.

In each step, try to picture what aspect of your brand experience is interacting with your customer. I understand this might be a little abstract, but check out the next “Inspiration Hack” sidebar to find a few examples of journey steps that would work for a web-based solution.