#77: Why the Devil Needs Brand Strategy
Ever hear the term “brand strategy” and think - I’ll get to that when I have time..
But have you ever considered what you think might be holding you back from reaching your goals might not actually be what you think it is?
I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to see behind the scenes of what keeps successful founders from being able to scale past themselves.
And this experience provided an extremely helpful level of insight that I want to share with you in today's podcast. I’ll show you how you can lean into your brand to explore your best opportunities yet!
Tune in to hear why the devil (and maybe you) needs brand strategy!
Check out my free new training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
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Laura (00:00)
In between the time which I was owning a brick and mortar chain and the role I played today as an online marketing consultant, I worked for a short period of time in private equity. I really enjoyed this challenge. It gave me insight on why a company would stop growing when an investor would actually put money into a company to keep it growing, and what keeps a founder from being able to scale past themselves. While this was not necessarily where I wanted to stay in the long run, it provided a very helpful level of insight that I want to share with you today in today's podcast.
So many founders grow their company because of their incredible talent, their ability to connect with their audience, intuitively understand what it is that they need, and communicate in a way that is inspiring and drives people into action. Many influencers and experts and thought leaders are simply gifted or have taken the long road to honing their craft. They're prolific writers and exceptional communicators. They saw an opportunity in the market and they went for it and it worked. They personally built strategic relationships with key partners around them. They connected with a publisher who believed in them, and their dreams came alive. Something clicked with themselves or their audience, or they just had good old fashioned favor and some hearts, some gusts, some luck, and some smarts. But what happens is, is that overtime, the company has to grow past the ability for the influencer to have a handle on every piece of communication that's going out the door and instilling culture and values within the team gets more challenging on the path to growth.
The hilarious film The Devil Wears Prada stars Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a powerful fashion magazine editor, and Anne Hathaway as Andrea "Andy" Sachs, a college graduate who goes to New York City and lands a job as Priestley’s co-assistant. The villain who was famously modeled after, Anna Wintour, the longtime editor in chief of Vogue. Miranda is the classic nightmare micromanager. She reviews every detail of everything that goes out the door. Nothing is ever right, and everything is wrong. Joanna Coles, the editor of the U.S. edition of Marie Claire, stated later on that this film was remarkably accurate in its understanding of the relationship between the an editor-in-chief and their teams, leaving this film’s reputation as more as a film based on a historical adaption and less of a fictional comedy.
As the film unfolds, you see how Miranda is driving herself insane at the expense of others. What I wished I could have told Anne Hathaway during this movie is maybe the devil just really needed a brand strategy. Because if you look at it from an empathetic standpoint, Miranda has a tremendous reputation on the line. She had gotten to where she was for good reason, and it wasn't by slacking or letting bad designs go out the door. She had an intuitive sense of things. One bad issue could ruin her long standing reputation and she wasn't going to let some young intern ruin it. In a lot of ways, I can understand this concern, having been there myself.
Watching a founder let go of some of the reigns on the very thing that got them to this point is not easy for anybody. I've often heard team members say, "The founder just needs to let go of control. The founder just needs to release it and trust the people that they hired." And what I tried to explain, and albeit sometimes not successfully (which as a sidenote would explain why I'm no longer in private equity) is that the founder’s idea of what would work in the marketplace is why we're all here today, so it's important to respect and understand that. And it's probably also very reasonable to think that any other people in the organization are not going to have that same incredible finesse.
So what's a founder to do? This is a really challenging time for so many as they are scaling. Which is why one of the very first things that I would implement for a company when I came into private equity is to work on a brand strategy together. This is beyond colors and visual identification. At a sophisticated level of business, those things have already been taken care of. They're probably well documented by a talented designer who, at one point along the way, said, "Hey, we really need to have all of your brand standards in a document for brand consistency with your visuals." And to which the team said, "Great idea." And from there it was done, checked off the box and moved on. But that's actually the tiniest part of brand strategy. And honestly, when done well actually comes as the very last step. At its core, establishing your brand is so much more (and honestly worth your time so your team can nail down what will actually resonate with your audience!)
The first part is simply reiterating the mission and the vision and the primary values of the company. And while every founder I've ever met is walking around saying, "How do they not know? I talk about it all the time? Are they not listening?" Sometimes as founders, we often forget how much of the most impactful part of our business still lives in our head. And I've also seen, even at the multimillion dollar mark, how many teams are actually surprised by what it is that the entrepreneur said that they stand for. They thought to themselves, "Oh, that's right. I guess that is part of who we are, but it's not something we talk about all the time, so I didn't really think about it that way." And it opens up some really powerful conversation. This is also when incongruence can show up. So let's say that we're talking about our mission or vision, but it's not what's actually happening in the day to day. That's an opportunity to talk about how it can be a reality, so everybody can operate from the same foundation.
Market positioning is also a really important part of brand strategy. In fact, for some national companies I've consulted for in the past, we've pulled it out as a single standalone two day intensive because it's that important. The important thing to note about market positioning is that when a big influencer got started, it was possible that they were the only person teaching their subject expertise or specialized knowledge. Maybe they were one of the only people who were actually teaching how to develop courses or memberships and now, dozens of people teach it. Maybe some of the newer up and comers have their own system, style or flare. Maybe they've carved out a niche for themselves and they've taken market share by being more relevant to a certain group of audiences.
This is why market positioning is important to review every few years. Well done market positioning is a combination of understanding your points of differentiation, as well as having clarity around where in the market you stack up against your competitors, how much market share you own, how much do they own, and some pretty clear ways in which you could get more of your competitors' customers.
Now, listen, I don't necessarily think that worrying about your competition is the path to success, particularly for influencers who have already demonstrated an ability to stand out in an incredible way and grow something special. But what it will do is it'll let you know how you can shift your messaging to highlight the unique differences that you bring to the table so that it's crystal clear to anybody who interacts with you, who you help, how you help them, the transformation that your company consistently provides and why that's so much different, better or more unique than what anybody else is doing.
The next stage of brand strategy is core messages. This is your battle cry. What you say again and again and again. And a simple messaging exercise that I bring people through can help people and help influencers identify, what are those things that I want to clearly communicate to inspire my audience into action? What are the social media posts, the nurture email, the YouTube video, the Instagram posts that can be created, and the person who's creating it is totally confident that we're on brand because it's a piece of one of the five to seven things that I fundamentally stand for? Your brand pillars should be the kind of thing where you could say it a hundred different ways, just worded differently each time. Come at it from a different angle. Approach it with a different hook. Attach it to a news story that is popular this week. Play off of something that already happened with your own twist or spin.
Many influencers often get sick of hearing themselves say the same thing over and over again. But when you look at the really, really successful influencers, the ones who have scaled to tens and millions, they pretty much say the same thing over and over again. Because the truth is, it's a really, really noisy world out there, and consistency will give you clarity every single time. People enter your ecosystem every day and may not see the content from a year or two years ago. Within those pillars we start looking at some of those deeper points of differentiation, your primary, secondary, and tertiary core messages, as well as your tone and dialect. And then finally, the actual visual ID.
Brand strategy is sometimes difficult to explain to busy entrepreneurs, because it is not what I would call a fire extinguisher. So many clients come to me a lot of times with an immediate problem that they want solved. They are struggling with something either not working the way that they were hoping, or it didn't work as well as it used to, or they have a vision for something and they don't know how to execute on it, and they want a quick win. And let’s be honest - every scaling entrepreneur has their hair on fire about something.
And honestly, I thrive off of that stuff. I love to figure out particularly challenging problems. And I love the aha moment that happens when I give them a different perspective on something that they've been struggling with for six months or a year. It's a pretty awesome feeling. And the truth is, is that that is the fire extinguisher. That's the thing that's going to help them sleep better at night, that's going to give them a path to success in terms of scaling their revenue in a way that feels aligned with their lives and doesn't cost them precious time with the people that they value the most.
But over time, having a brand strategy in place, particularly the market position and differentiation, is really one of the primary reasons why companies would break through a plateau or prevent moving backwards. Brand strategy comes into play either because the entrepreneur is the bottleneck, feeling like they have to review everything, because there isn't a standard foundation for the brand from which all communication is created, or it's because the market positioning has slipped. The team is no longer clear on exactly why somebody would buy - or when asked every team member provides a different answer. The influencer has slipped into a place where they are too general, too broad, not specific enough. The offers that they have don't make sense together. And it's no longer relevant to their ideal client. Or maybe they're taking too many people who are not their ideal client, because it's missing that foundational strategy of who their offer is for and how exactly it provides a transformation.
A great brand strategy helps to ensure that you have the right people coming into the programs so that you can develop a reputation for yourself as the kind of person that helps with a specific transformation. Where you have consistency in output, natural ascension into other programs and the ability to skyrocket the amount of internal affiliates (referrals) that you can develop from your core program.
And that's why, while it's traditionally not an entrepreneur's 5am fire, brand strategy truly is the key to reaching those new heights in business, creating aligned growth with the company's culture and values and impacting exactly who needs to hear your message with consistency and relevance.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.