Brand strategy lessons from Tamagotchi
How to keep your brand alive and kicking
Nineties-led nostalgia seems to be everywhere, so much so that Tamagotchi has been making a bit of a comeback in recent years. (In case it was before or after your time, Tamagotchi is a handheld digital pet that needs ongoing virtual care and feeding and playing with to keep it happy and healthy.)
And so, as in life, so in branding – the attention you need to give your Tamagotchi to help it thrive makes an excellent metaphor for how you should approach looking after your brand.
Your brand – it’s never ‘one and done’
Many of my clients come to me for help because they’re aware that their brand, and how it shows up in the world, doesn’t reflect the current realities of the business and/or sector it operates in. I work with them collaboratively – first, defining a brand strategy, then bringing in my Co-Foundry collaborators to develop a visual and verbal identity and website that reflects this redefined brand positioning and strategic underpinning.
But branding is never a ‘one and done’ event, it’s an ongoing process of monitoring, nurturing and evolution – and that’s where the Tamagotchi metaphor comes into its own.
Brands are in the memory-making business
Your box-fresh brand, brand refresh or rebrand needs to carry on telling that single, strong story long after it’s launched into the world.
A consistent narrative that is also able to flex to how your business and markets are evolving is how you stake your place in your audiences’ minds. Whatever business you’re in, your brand has to be in the business of creating memories, ensuring your target audiences remember you when the time comes for them to buy. And building this mental availability in audiences’ minds takes time.
The 95:5 rule
Up to 95% of B2B clients are not in the market for buying services at any one time.
This 95:5 Rule, researched and developed by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, is typically applied to marketing, specifically advertising, but the principle is easily applied to the experience of third sector and service-based business brands too.
Being consistent over the long term and proactively monitoring brand effectiveness is key to creating brand success. You need to stay relevant and continually engage and resonate with your audience.
After all, the brand that gets remembered, is the brand that gets bought.
The ‘Tamagotchi approach’
Thinking of your brand as a Tamagotchi means that you don’t allow your brand identity, positioning and newly defined brand DNA to gather dust. A ‘Tamagotchi approach’ means treating your brand strategy as a living strategy, not a once-in-a-while strategy. It’s a sure-fire means of keeping your brand alive and protecting your investment and reputation.
Reputations are delicate. A good one can keep a brand healthy, a bad one can kill it. It can be an infection you hardly notice with a slow and painful death, or one that kills you so fast people will forget you ever existed.
Michael Wolf, Wolff Olins
In this post I look at why brands might, over time, lose direction and unravel as well as demonstrating how you can monitor this, maintain that all-important brand momentum and fix areas of concern.
Here’s to channelling that nurturing Tamagotchi-owning mindset and being on the lookout for potential distress signals!
How brands unravel (and how they can be fixed)
They lose the narrative
The temptation to press ‘publish’ and be done with it is always lurking in the background. So much energy and effort goes into defining and developing a brand identity that the focus, once the work is done, can shift too quickly to tactics. This might mean that the brand foundations (the thinking behind the brand) aren’t fully communicated across your organisation. The danger here is that if the thinking isn’t adequately embedded, tactical decisions might take you off in all sorts of (off-brand) directions.
Sit, walk or run but don’t wobble.
– Zen proverb
A brand will only ever be consistent and come across as confident if the team understands why decisions have been made. Hopefully, you’ll have involved them at various stages of the brand development process but rolling out the rationale behind the final decisions is as important as rolling out the new branding or messaging.
“Throughout the design process, we consulted widely and established a project board comprising key representatives from across the organisation and its regions. We hosted a series of Brand Engagement sessions to take staff on the journey and explain the rationale behind our decisions, ensuring ample opportunities for internal feedback to guide us. The Brand Team was available to address any questions throughout the project, and we worked closely with Internal Communications to maintain regular engagement, which ramped up as we approached the launch. Continuing the Brand Engagement sessions post-launch meant that we didn’t let internal engagement drop off a cliff; instead, we ensured ongoing immersion in the process. We have also maintained regular internal communications since launch to remind staff of the guidelines and keep them updated on the latest refreshed assets available in our online brand centre.”
– Helen Thorpe, Head of Brand and Digital, WithYou
Brand guidelines are often seen simply as a rule book. If however, you make them more into a set of guiding principles – a brand book – and place brand statements front and centre to remind internal team members and third party creatives of the why, what and how behind the branding and messaging, they become an altogether more powerful tool.
A brand narrative explainer is an accessible and easily digestible way to launch your new brand narrative. Here’s an example from a recent Co-Foundry client rebrand – the explainer communicates the why, how and what of the brand, and also introduces the visual metaphors and meaning used in the branding:
Another important element that helps keep a tight rein on your narrative is embedding your brand strategy in your marketing and content marketing plans and ensuring that your brand positioning points align with your content pillars (your content marketing themes). You might also want to consider coaching the writers and speakers within your organisation on the best ways to draw out those key brand themes.
Changes at the top
The chief exec and senior management are, invariably, strong brand advocates. When these people move on and say, leave the organisation, that commitment to the brand narrative and values can get lost or diluted.
Trustees or board members have a vital role to play here as they are ideally placed to hand the baton to the new guard. For that to work well though, the trustees or board members need to have been involved in the brand development work, or at the very least, have engaged with the strategy at the point of application. As with the rest of the team and any volunteers who join your organisation, use the interview and induction process as an opportunity to introduce the brand’s narrative and design rationale.
And if your rebrand has meant there were large numbers of changes, running some Values in Action sessions will help embed the redefined brand values and bring everyone in your teams up to speed.
Siloed strategies
Brand strategies and business strategies should always overlap and inform each other.
In reality, they often sit in different and very separate places. This may result in a situation where you end up with two mission or vision statements (one for the business and one for the brand and marketing team). If this happens, look for ways to combine them into one overriding business brand strategy. This may require a fundamental culture change in your organisation but will result in a far more effective, single source of truth for your organisation.
Failure to flex
During the brand strategy development phase you will have agreed on key position points – those key things you want people to remember about you and how you want them to feel about you. These position points are never defined in a vacuum – they take everything in and around your organisation into account – the competition, the cultural environment, company attributes and specialisms, and customer and stakeholder concerns and desires.
Should any one of those four ‘forces’ change down the line you may need to recalibrate. Strategy is, after all, an unfolding network of associations and a brand is always in motion. Be vigilant, establish a routine of carrying out regular positioning audits to see if your narrative needs any tweaks or, indeed something more fundamental is required.
And if you’re planning to introduce new products or initiatives – check how they fit in with the bigger picture and how they sit within the architecture of the overarching brand.
Random acts of branding
It’s easy to get bored. We look at our own branding and messaging day in and day out so the urge to change things up can become strong. But, thinking back to the 95:5 rule – showing up consistently with your brand coherence intact is essential when it comes to your audience being able to build those all-important associations – and make brand memories.
The thing is not to leave things be for the sake of consistency alone but rather to get into the habit of checking in regularly with your branding and messaging output. Depending on the extent of your output, this exercise can be as simple as collating recent social media posts and marketing comms and assessing them for quality and consistency or it might require a more formal brand audit.
And with prevention being better than cure…Stop random acts of branding at source by making sure that the brand system and brand guidelines you come out with at the end of the branding process give you enough freedom to develop distinct campaigns and engaging marketing without losing that core brand DNA.
Lose sight of who they’re for
Brands are not just how we look, how we talk, how we behave or what we say. They’re also very much about the experience we provide. Your primary touchpoint, your website is the portal to accessing your service and experiencing your brand. In an ideal world you will have considered the user experience, tested it, planned the content around the main narrative themes and checked the site for accessibility compliance.
Nevertheless, the website experience remains a strand that can unravel fast. With different administrators and authors creating content it’s all too easy to find that user journeys become increasingly convoluted and stray from the core strategic narrative. Referring back to your content marketing strategy and running regular user testing will help combat this potential pitfall.
Your stakeholders will be the best judges of how things are working for them and will help you avoid making decisions based on personal bias. After all, not everyone thinks or acts like you and you may not even be a member of your target audience!
“Making decisions based on assumption is a dangerous route to take – you can end up designing for yourself, or just because the CEO thinks it’s the “right” thing to do, and ultimately the experience won’t then serve your users. I like to remind my clients “you are not your user”, even if you feel you know and understand them well. Despite being a researcher, I don’t feel you have to do a ton of research before doing any work on your website, that just isn’t practical. Simply build user-testing into your ongoing project processes – you could test your current website to help you understand what’s wrong, or, test your new website prototype. The input from users at this stage can be absolute gold. It enables you to iterate early and refine those user journeys, before you move into development where it suddenly becomes very costly to make any amends.”
Becky Taylor, UX Consultant at Deckchair
Keeping your brand happy
Brands – the constructs around which trust is formed – have never been so central to businesses … It is no longer enough to have a static business and brand offering … the world’s most successful companies start not with product, but with brand – as their critical growth asset and engine.
(Interbrand Best Global Brands 2022 Report)
Just like the ’90s digital pet that needs care and attention, brands are living things that serve your business so much better when they’re checked in on, nurtured and given the room to grow and adapt alongside your business.
That freshly minted brand strategy shouldn’t be left to fall by the wayside – the thinking behind it needs to be firmly embedded in your organisation before you press ‘play’ on any tactics. There’s a strong case for saying that the role of the external brand consultants you bring in, shouldn’t end with the brand launch but move into an altogether new phase.
It’s something I’ve been trialling at The Co-Foundry, introducing a Brand Champion service last year. In keeping with the theme of this piece, it’s a work in progress that’s being collaboratively developed with clients and collaborators alike. If you have any thoughts or ideas on what support you’d find useful, do get in touch – I’d love to hear from you.
Tamagotchi photo by COSMOH LOVE on Unsplash