No labels, no confusion

It’s 10.33am and I just challenged myself to write a post in ten minutes (because of this twitter thread). This one is a simple piece of advice for founders and marketing teams to put an end to painful, inefficient discussions around defining your brand strategy.

It’s this: Remove the labels.

Banish the phrases “brand strategy”, “brand purpose”, “brand proposition”, “brand vision”, “brand positioning”, brand ANYTHING from the conversation.

There are so many of these terms and so many different interpretations of what they mean that it becomes paralysing for people. You’ll spend most of the meeting debating what they mean — to the point that they won’t mean anything. You’ll end up with a long list of very similar concepts and statements and won’t know what to do with them.

By removing the labels — and I mean removing ALL labels, not replacing them with other labels—you’ll force yourselves to speak like actual people.

You can now start asking real questions, like:

• Do we know what matters to our customers?
• Are we clear on what makes us different/distinct/better?
• Has this brought us to an idea we could stand for?
• Do we have the right words that capture this?
• How can this flex to different situations and needs?

Instead of asking “what’s our brand purpose?” — which sounds like something you might ask a fortune cookie in a moment of desperation—you can ask “What are we trying to help our customers do?”

You get the idea.

Another great byproduct of this is it’s a great way to sniff out charlatan consultants. They tend to hide behind those labels as though it’s a magic shopping list and they are the wizards who can decode it for you. Real brand experts can break things down into simple terms and discuss what’s going on underneath.

You can always give these things labels later in the process (and from my experience, even these choices depend on the brand and culture of the company). But the important thing is that you were able to speak without them.

10.45am. 12 minutes. That’ll do.

Andy Whitlock, Chief Simplifier at The Human Half.