Why and how you should user-test your brand attributes

Andy Whitlock
3 min readMar 18, 2022

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When deciding how to position your brand you should - to paraphrase Mark Ritson - “choose the three things you’d like people to think about it.” People are, of course, unlikely to think about your brand much at all, so it’s best to keep things simple. And there’s a second reason to keep things simple too: so your teams find it easy to make decisions that actually build these associations.

For the sake of this post, we’ll skip the complexities of strategic positioning and get right to those three ideas, which you might call brand attributes, characteristics, values or even behaviours:

Let’s use some imaginary examples. You could perhaps end up with attributes like ‘Understated’, ‘Quality’ and ‘Playful’. Or ‘Bashful’, ‘Sleepy’ and ‘Grumpy’. Whatever three things you do settle on (yes, three — two is too few and four is too many), these will become decision-making guides for every person in your company. Why? Because every action a business takes will either reinforce or detract from these desired associations.

What most businesses miss, is that this is a tool and tools should be user-tested to make sure they work. It’s all very well saying ‘everything we do and say must reinforce these three associations in people’s minds’. But what about the people in your teams who are doing and saying these things on behalf of the brand? What if they have different ideas about what those words mean in relation to the work they do? Or worse: what if they just don’t care because they don’t really get it. Or think it’s just ‘marketing fluff’?

What I do with every client that lets me, is stress-test the wording around these concepts in workshops with different teams. Not stress-test the strategic thinking — that’s been done already—but make sure the wording will lead to good decisions every day in every department. I did this recently with Farewill, running hour-long workshops with seven different teams (including the legal team!). And it led to useful comments like: “You’ve used this word but that might lead to bad UX.” And “If we phrased it like this that would positively the way we approach customer service.” And so on.

Collectively, we spent over seven hours discussing and pulling apart three words and the six short sentences that explained them. I summarised it all, connecting dots across teams and optimising the language, before speaking again with key members from each team for final feedback and high-fiving. The result was a tighter, more applicable set of words that remained faithful to the strategy but would now be WAY more effective.

But possibly the most important thing of all was that almost half the company had been part of the process—shaping their own tools, deepening their understanding of them and becoming personally invested in the result. Don’t underestimate the power of feeling involved. This was not something thrown over the wall that they were expected to use without proper context (which is how it often works). Or something delivered by people disconnected from the business. This was a collaborative effort: I brought my expertise to the table (this is how we should position the brand, and why), and they brought theirs (this is what our daily jobs look like, how we can help and what we need help with).

Bulb’s VP of Marketing, Russell Davies recently used a football (soccer) metaphor to talk about the difference between doing things that sound good and doing things that actually make stuff happen. Lots of strategists do ‘step-overs’, he says. Which look good but doesn’t move things forward. What the team might need is a ‘cross-field pass’. This is that. Because a strategy is only as valuable as your team’s ability to convert it. Strategy might start in your brain, but it ends up in other people’s hands. So give them tools they want to work with.

Andy Whitlock is Chief Simplifier at The Human Half.

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