When you’re looking to have work done on your brand – whether it’s a full rebrand or a brand refresh – you want to be bold and decisive, all the better to stake your position in the marketplace and gain that all-important brand advantage.
A brand agency or individual expert can help you make sense of everything that goes into making your organisation what it is and determine a strategic course to support your brand.
But, and this is where it can get confusing…why is it that no matter who you go to, be it consultant or agency, each and every one puts forward a different approach? And it always comes complete with its own terminology and (buzz)words or, worse still, uses the same words in different ways.
Getting clear on your positioning is fundamental to the success of any branding work that you undertake. If you’re thinking of turning to books for advice on positioning you may well find that a lot of it won’t feel relevant – that’s because this is a subject that’s often written about from an advertising and FMCG angle.
So, to redress the balance, this post outlines my approach – a very specific take on what clients coming to me can expect to receive from my brand strategy process.
It’s a process that, as you go through it, informs not only the creative expression and marketing activity of your brand, but also its operations and human resources. In fact, I believe that brand strategy should be as intertwined with the overall strategic plan of a business as it is with the creative expression of the brand identity, with each informing the other.
While most people think of positioning as a marketing concept, a shift in positioning feels more like a shift in business strategy. Every department inside the company is likely to be impacted over time.
April Dunford, Startup Executive
My focus here is squarely on service-based organisations (primarily third sector, and the tech and creative sectors). These organisations look to build the awareness and reputation of their brands. They rarely have massive advertising or marketing budgets and, as such, look for brand-building advice that will serve them in the long-term. Any decisions they make need to be strongly evidence-based with actions being easily implementable.
The approach I detail will help you develop a strategy that is far more than just words on a deck. You’ll have direction, advice and recommendations that you can take forward and use across your teams as well as in your creative.
Brand positioning is essentially a compelling promise that organisations need to convey to win their audiences’ minds and hearts. You’ll sometimes hear ‘positioning’ described as a singular tagline like Apple’s ‘Think Different’. Just two words, but behind them is a well-researched and thoroughly documented strategy – you can’t just land on words without putting in the research and collaborative thinking.
In this post, when I refer to brand positioning, I’m referring to a brand positioning strategy, one that considers, ‘where you play’, ‘what your audience cares about’ and ‘what you care about’.
Foundational to this are what I call, positioning pillars – a single point or more commonly two to three points you want your audience to know and remember about you. These position points can be soft/emotional (heart) and hard/factual (head) but when combined they resonate and provoke action (hands), prompting people to reach for the phone, click a fundraising link, submit a job application or more likely, just take notice, building brand awareness so that when the time comes for a decision to be made, your brand is the one that’s front of mind for your audience.
For example, when I think of the Samaritans I think of someone always being available at the end of the phone 24/7, 365 days of the year, ready to help in a crisis – the last line of defence: that’s the ‘head’ positioning. I also think of non-judgemental listening – the ‘heart’. Those two flags have been planted in my mind, probably a very long time ago. That is the power of clear positioning. I don’t recall their brand positioning line or the strategy behind it but I believe most people will recall the same promises as I do; promises of access and empathy.
Brand positioning is like staking a claim and planting a flag on a hill – it marks a clear spot in your audience’s mind (and heart), conveying why they should care about you and highlighting your unique value. Put simply, brand positioning helps your audience navigate choice.
There is genuine commercial danger in getting positioning wrong. Any consultants or agencies that you work with have to recognise that there’s an ethical dimension to any advice they give. In setting out my position on positioning and illustrating what I believe to be the best approach and in doing so am also demonstrating that there’s a right way and a lite way.
There are numerous elements involved in arriving at your brand positioning – planting that flag on a hill. I like to think of them as jigsaw pieces and, just like with a jigsaw puzzle, if you miss a piece, you end up with an incomplete picture – frustrating and underwhelming in equal measure.
Of course it might be tempting to take some shortcuts but, particularly for service-based third sector and purpose-led organisations, I believe you need to be using all the pieces in the positioning jigsaw puzzle, interrogating each and every one of the areas and elements listed below.
No one answer, however rigorous the response might be, will get you to where you need to be – there are no shortcuts if you want to have the full brand positioning picture!
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? A senior leader defining your brand positioning throws up the issue of selective attention. All humans benefit, as well as suffer, from this. Selective attention may give the organisational leader the benefit of laser-sharp focus but it also comes with blind spots – they may not be able to see the wood for the trees. The other danger is that without team engagement, you get no team buy-in.
Of course, taking the senior leader’s viewpoint (their insights and hypotheses) into consideration is vital, in fact the whole brand positioning process may derail without it:
Positioning is a business strategy exercise – the person who owns the business strategy needs to fully support the positioning, or it’s unlikely to be adopted.
April Dunford, Startup Executive
However, it’s something that should be the first step, not your only step.
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? The problem of only using audience research to define your brand positioning is that brands don’t exist in a vacuum. True understanding of positioning comes from knowing the market, alternative providers, i.e. the competition, and the business objectives of your organisation.
You have to listen to your stakeholders, both internal and external, and wherever possible introduce research into the process as early as possible, but their insights should sit in the round with all the other pieces of the puzzle. And it’s also essential to remember that not everything they tell you will be relevant.
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? Data alone won’t engage your audience. Brand positioning only becomes effective when audience heads and hearts are engaged. Take data into consideration but recognise that it can only ever be one piece of the puzzle.
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? The problem of defining your brand positioning from a team workshop/series of workshops (even if you bring in an outside consultant) is that it will only give you the insiders’ perspective. Informative and essential, you’ll undoubtedly uncover some gems but you need to be doing more than just looking inward.
Surely, a creative is all you need – a brand writer or intuitive designer to look at what you’re currently saying and how you’re presenting yourself, do a little desk research and then come up with the brand positioning answer?
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? A creative, working in isolation can only offer a very one-sided view. They’ll come up with something based on what they know. In the absence of their having an understanding of your world, its challenges and how you’re perceived, their biases, assumptions and preferences will inform their choices. You may get something clever and snappy but it won’t be a true reflection of your organisation.
Creative talent is important and will bring your positioning to life, but this part of the puzzle only comes into play once your brand strategy has been defined.
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? The problem with defining brand positioning from a brainstorming session is that the loudest, most confident people in the room end up asserting themselves which leads to an outcome that reflects only their views – a group-think mentality sets in.
You can incorporate brainstorms by all means, but these do need to be managed carefully. You need to make sure that the environment is a safe one, that everyone gets heard and that those who maybe aren’t able to respond as fast in this sort of session can input ideas at their own pace.
The short answer is ‘no’.
Why? As it only presents what you and your team likes and dislikes, a moodboard is never going to be an adequate tool for a fully defined positioning. Moodboards can’t tell you what your audience cares about or what else is happening in your market or in the wider world.
A moodboard represents a jumping ahead in the process. You can incorporate moodboards and co-creation but they’re never a good place to start.
The short answer is ‘no’ – the longer answer is, ‘in part, yes’.
Why? Merely looking and sounding different is an ‘easy’ fix that, without the other pieces of the puzzle in play, can only ever offer a superficial positioning answer, creating a position that will be difficult to ‘defend’.
Researching your market category, considering whether you want to go for parity or difference (sometimes parity is stronger than difference) means that this piece is then able to add weight to the overall picture you’re putting together.
The short answer is ‘yes’. But the long answer is heavily caveated.
Why? The problem with defining your brand positioning with a tagline is that it won’t be useful to those working in the organisation: operations, human resources, front desk… It may be tempting to jump to a concise, clear brand message but your team/s need to understand the thinking behind the words. This is where a strategy document comes into its own as it includes not only brand statements like mission, vision and values but also provides your team with evidence, guidance and direction.
A brand positioning exercise is something that’s grounded in current reality but ambitious enough to explore and define future aspirations.
A well-rounded approach gives the people in your service-centred business, (people who work hard to serve their clients and customers) the space to be heard and to think, and adequate time to be creative.
In the words of Alina Wheeler – from her seminal book, Designing Brand Identity, “The best positioning builds on a deep understanding of customer needs and aspirations, the competition, the strengths and weaknesses of a brand, changes in demographics, technology, and trends.”
A process of scoping, gathering and defining will ensure that all bases are covered and no stone is left unturned. Effective brands are effective precisely because they listen to different perspectives and are able to look outwards as well as inwards and all around.
Once you’ve defined your points of difference and your brand promise, the work of establishing a belief about your brand in people’s minds begins – it’s time to bring it to life. Start to create your visual and verbal brand identity and your marketing strategy. And build your operations and talent around it.
Don’t take shortcuts, use every piece of the puzzle to present a whole-picture position for your brand, ensuring it is:
Relevant to your audience – focusing on something they care about
Specific – highlighting what you bring to the table and not falling back on lazy superlatives or vague generalisations
Impactful – solving the need or desire of your target audience
Credible – making a promise and proving you can keep it
Distinct and defendable – putting you in control of your niche with clear water between you and your competition
Spirited – sparking chemistry and connection
There are organizations that love the fun part of coming up with a beautiful, bold promise, but shy away from the dirty, difficult task of working out how exactly that’s going to be delivered, to whom, and how. There are also organizations that create intricate brand onions, wheels, bridges, or platforms, but are utterly bereft of a creative expression that people can actually care about and believe in.
Nick Liddell, Brand Strategist
Getting clear on your positioning is a superpower but only if, once you’ve settled on it, you stick to it. Don’t chop and change. Your audience won’t remember your brand if you say it or they see it only once. Consistency of approach is key as it builds memory and mental availability when the time comes for action.
And if you need further proof of how clear, easily-defendable positioning has the potential to break through in a noisy world where we’re all constantly being overwhelmed with choice – check out this post which runs through the very real business rewards of doubling down on your positioning.
And, in the words of and following the example of the great Dolly Parton…
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
Recent years have seen increasing numbers of clients bringing their design execution in-house. This can mean anything, from large organisations building their own internal agencies of highly skilled team members, well versed in using industry standard software and overseen by a brand manager, to lone marketing managers using subscription software like Canva to produce their brand’s day-to-day marketing and comms. And it’s a trend that’s not going away any time soon.
Typically, the trend to build in-house resources goes in waves, driven by the state of the economy. When budgets are tight – resources, quite unsurprisingly, are brought in-house. As the economy bounces back, external agencies come back into play. But nowadays, with drag-and-drop online software and AI tools, that move in-house looks set to stick.
You could call it the democratisation of design. So much more can now be achieved with far less; for example, you don’t necessarily need knowledge around, say, typography or layout principles, something that used to be the sole preserve of designers, in order to create serviceable social media content templates.
As much as it creates opportunities, this sort of democracy also brings with it a number of challenges for both client and external agency. Needless to say, the quality of experiences and outputs will vary depending on an organisation’s attitude, structure, expertise and culture. To generalise…
Flexibility and immediate access to resources.
Insider-advantage – knowledge of the sector and competition as well as the internal machinations of the organisation.
Lower costs
Overwhelm – too much work for too little resource. In-house teams are likely to be pulled in a number of different directions, carrying responsibility for skill sets other than design (such as marketing and copywriting).
Less authority – sadly, it’s a fact that an external specialist often garners more respect with senior leadership than a more junior internal team member.
Limited perspective – in-house teams, by their very nature and insider status, struggle with being able to effectively step back and see the wood for the trees.
Less expertise – external agencies tend to laser focus on their specialisms which means they have the advantage of staying up to speed with the latest innovations and trends in their particular area.
The challenges listed above (by no means an exhaustive list) should confirm that in developing an in-house resource you should never close the door on bringing in outsiders, i.e. external agencies and specialists. An external perspective can complement and enhance in-house capabilities, meaning you’ll benefit from:
Experience of selling change in – specialists, in particular senior specialists, are experienced in providing evidence for change, articulating and defending a rationale, and responding to objections.
An objective viewpoint – an internal brand or marketing manager may have a hypothesis or gut feeling but will not have the time, nor access to the methods and tools, to test that theory in a truly objective manner.
A wider lens perspective – external advisers will have encountered similar patterns and trends from working on comparable client challenges. They can apply these experiences alongside their facility for having that ‘big picture’ whole-of-market view.
In short, they leverage their specialist expertise for strategic impact.
The obvious time to bring in specialists is to bridge skills gaps or to inject a creative spark into brand campaigns, rebrands and refreshes. But time is of the essence. If there’s change afoot – if you’re looking to evolve your positioning or fully reposition your brand – don’t get too far into the process before calling those specialists in.
I’d argue that the best time to bring external help in is when you have an unscientific hunch that things aren’t working. The outsider can propose the best method to objectively test your hypothesis – introducing rigorous research methods, moving away from those knee-jerk, solely emotional responses and casting a wider lens over the entire project. It’s one action that will, in the long run, save you time, money and unproductive brand soul-searching.
For your brand to thrive and prosper, your facility for accessing external specialists shouldn’t be limited to crisis or special case scenarios. Building ongoing relationships means that both sides will be able to get the most out of their connection and the client will benefit from being able to address issues before they become problems.
That external perspective can be invaluable, for instance, when you find your brand going a little off-piste. This can sometimes be down to the people on your team changing. Having an external brand champion to call on means you’ll be able to right things by running a refresher on the whys and wherefores of your brand strategy, ensuring that the concept and thinking behind the brand doesn’t ‘leave the room’ when your staff move on.
You might also consider using an agency or individual to provide ongoing creative direction or mentoring. This approach will help you develop your skills, adding to your in-house capabilities, and ensuring you’re on the case, retaining and building that all-important brand salience (i.e. knowing when to pull in the reins when there’s an appetite to gallop off in a new direction!).
From an agency perspective, the tide of in-housing creative and design resources isn’t going out again any time soon. In fact, according to the 2024 DBA report What Clients Think, 22% of clients without an in-house creative resource stated that their company was currently considering developing this capacity.
Nervous agencies can, and should, embrace this change because, on the other side of the coin, a whopping 80% of clients with in-house creative resources would like to see a greater level of collaboration with external agencies.
This should be music to agency ears. Designers, even when they have completed and signed off a project, care and carry on caring how the brand identity they’ve created, will fare ‘in the wild’. They’re seldom happy to just walk away from the project launch fanfare with some smart visuals and a case study for their own website. Call it control freakery, but what they fear most when they complete a rebrand or brand refresh and pass the brand assets over to the client’s in-house team to manage, is that their concept, the Big Idea will be diluted or damaged through poor execution.
And this, of course, is a valid concern but, it doesn’t have to be this way. In-house and external resources need to find ways to play to their strengths, create symbiotic loops between them, learn from each other and grow as a result.
The in-house team can share their industry insights and join the creative journey through points of co-creation. External specialists can share their knowledge of trends and skills as well as helping to build the in-house team’s capability and confidence for selling design and strategy into senior leadership and stakeholders.
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.
Babe Ruth
Further evidence, should it be needed that, despite the rise of the in-house resource, design agencies are still very much valued comes from What Clients Think. Their findings reveal that 95% of clients with an in-house creative resource still see the value in using external agencies for particular challenges, typically for bigger, more strategic projects or where a fresh perspective is particularly called for.
It seems that we’ve reached a point where it’s not an either/or situation where in-housing and outsourcing come and go in cycles. The most impactful branding will be born from embracing the synergy between in-house and external specialists and ensuring we all become excellent collaborators.
Almost three years ago I did something to my own business that is usually reserved for my clients. I repositioned, renamed and rebranded my offering – going from being an agency business to a brand consultancy, supported by a team of freelance specialist collaborators.
Sitting on the ‘other side’ of the table proved to be both interesting and a little daunting. It was definitely a good thing to do because I now have some idea of how it feels to be my client! One of the most important things I did during this process was define my market – who I was a good fit for. In The Co-Foundry’s case, it’s mission-led organisations – founder-led, privately-owned tech and creative businesses, and third sector organisations.
And the first lesson I learnt? As I wrote back in the summer of 2021, defining the ‘who’ makes you much better able to articulate your ‘why’ because both you and your ideal clients care about the same things.
Looking back, I can also see that the connection with founders goes deeper than the discovery stage of my own rebrand. Although I’d never really connected the dots before, I come from an entrepreneurial family, from a grandfather who was a tomato-grower on Guernsey to a father who started his own business in his 40s, not to mention the years I spent running my design agency. I guess you could say that I get it – that need to establish and run a business to your own special recipe.
I can’t deny that working directly with founders offers some significant and immediate advantages – you get to sit shoulder to shoulder with the decision-makers, you can be pretty sure that your creative won’t be subject to the dreaded design by committee revisions and, because you already know they’re not averse to risk, a bold design approach, when appropriate, is more likely to be embraced.
But more than that, their having ‘skin in the game’ and being so focused on the longer-term means there’s something very special about working with founders. Perhaps it’s similar to the difference an architect or designer encounters when they work with someone who’s after creating their dream home rather than just an investment vehicle.
I love what I do. For me, it’s not just work but a driving passion and so it’s no wonder that I relate to others who love and care for their businesses too. These are people who want to get it right, who recognise they can’t do it all themselves and so build a team and a culture, and through that a future that demonstrates these wider ambitions.
The mission-led businesses I work with embody their founders’ singular vision. They’ve developed something that meets a need or solves a problem in a way that delights their customers. It’s something they keep top of mind but may have trouble articulating and reflecting in their branding. But of course, that’s where a good brand consultant comes in…
Design is easily identified as being part of the creative economy but, to my mind, entrepreneurship and being a founder is (no matter what field you’re in) a profoundly creative act.
As Bernie Goldhirsh, founder of Inc magazine said, creating a business from nothing is ‘a kind of artistry…based on an ability to see what everyone else is missing.’ He also believed that entrepreneurial management required far more creativity from a founder than the grounding in rational skills that traditional management courses teach.
I found that reading Bo Burlingham’s book, Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great instead of Big really chimed with my thinking. In the same way that I see the founder-led companies I’m lucky enough to work with, Burlingham identified the ‘small giants’ in his book, as working to more than just financial objectives, ‘They were also interested in being great at what they did, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they lived and worked in, and finding great ways to lead their lives.’
All of this drive, enthusiasm and purpose means founder-led companies have a buzz about them, something that the book refers to as a state of being ‘totally in sync with [your] market, with the world around [you] and with each other.’ Getting your branding and values aligned is vital in maintaining this consistent emotional connection with your customers, team and community. It’s why our Values in Action workshops are so popular with the founders and third sector organisations we work with. The workshops ensure that branding is more than skin-deep – it becomes a code of conduct that’s embedded and lived by.
It seems that founders have quite a few things in common with branding consultants: They understand the importance of having a perspective or point of view on their market and a value proposition they believe in.
As Danny Meyer of now, not so ‘small giant’, Union Square Hospitality Group, points out, ‘At first, [your value proposition] is a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation. Like breaking in a baseball glove. You can’t will a baseball glove to be broken in; you have to use it. Well, you have to use a new business, too. You have to break it in. If you move on to the next thing too quickly, it will never develop its soul.’
They may be driven to succeed, but founders understand that brands take time to bed in – that brand-building is a long-term strategy – because they’re in it for the long term too. This makes working with them hugely rewarding, not least when you see how a rebrand revitalises a business or helps take it in a new direction.
Our collaborative approach to working with our clients is in our name. As The Co-Foundry we work closely alongside our clients because we believe that branding is never something that is imposed or done ‘to you’. Our process is comprehensive and thorough and, as we’re reliably informed, time and again, great fun – with the workshop stages offering a chance for teams to bond and remind themselves of why they do what they do.
The clients we’ve worked with put it much better than I ever could (or should!):
Our new branding and messaging communicated that providing an ongoing, long-term relationship was central to how we work and this made what we offer different to what he’d get from another recruitment company. And that is exactly what we’d wanted to portray. I feel confident we’ll get a tenfold return on our investment over three years and, in addition it’ll stop us losing business.
Alan Furley, ISL Talent
We have true standout now. Before, we looked and sounded like any other web dev company – we needed to be bold, express our opinion and demonstrate our personality. we’ve got that now and it’s really getting us traction.
Simon Best, CEO, BaseKit
Together we were able to bring some much-needed clarity to our positioning and identity. I’m thrilled with the results and can’t wait to continue growing the business from the solid base they have helped us build.
Harry Cobbold, Unfold (digital agency)
As the saying goes, you can’t be all things to all people. Finding ‘my people’ – the clients I most enjoyed working with, that I could bring the most value to, has been the most liberating of the changes I made when I went from design agency to brand consultant.
Niching down and targeting founders (as well as mission-led third sector organisations) has not only increased my job satisfaction, it’s also helped me refine my processes and make more of my voice in the industry. And for those who might think that working with the same type of people is repetitive…?
Every client is different and so requires a carefully tailored approach. What your clients do all get to benefit from, when you niche down, is someone who truly understands their concerns and issues, and the values that are important to them. The patterns I see emerging add greater depth and meaning to the work we’re able to do with our clients, and so make for better branding all round.
Hope, about the state of the world in general, is not easy to find at the moment. So, it was inspiring, energising and enlightening to read ‘Citizens’, a book that is full of hope for a future that we can all have a hand in creating.
The last seven years since the 2016 Brexit vote, have seen me, along with so many others, resort to feelings of what has been dubbed, ‘learned helplessness’: That despite our best efforts, we’re too small and insignificant to make a difference and that any change has to come from ‘the powers that be’.
It’s difficult to see how a single vote once every four or five years can address the myriad of real and pressing concerns that require long-term solutions. It’s also ironic how, despite localism being firmly on the agenda for over a decade, local government now seems less relevant than ever.
And, as a business owner, living in this era of climate emergency and feeling it incumbent on me to make changes and operate as sustainably as possible, I’ve been questioning the very concept of growth for growth’s sake for quite some time.
A sense of disquiet, disenfranchisement and disappointment is growing. We’re realising that taking to the streets to protest doesn’t seem to make much difference and voting with our wallets changes little.
My daughter and her friend protesting against Brexit ©New York Times
And that is ‘Citizens’’ jumping off point: The source code that our society has been built on for more than one hundred years – the Consumer Story – is broken.
‘Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us’ by Jon Alexander with Ariane Conrad sets out an alternative narrative – the Citizen Story.
It’s also a rallying call urging us not to permit turbulent times and uncertainty to drag us back in time and allow the Subject Story to gain ascendance. (Although it’s also acknowledged that that idea of accepting a “Strong Man” leader has unfortunately seen some resurgence in recent years, eg Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi etc.)
The stories imprinted on the collective consciousness of societies are important because they influence how we understand ourselves on a very fundamental level. They ‘shape our beliefs, our morality, guiding our behaviour and even constraining the possibilities we can imagine’.
In the Consumer Story, those in positions of power, whether they’re corporates or governments, regard individuals purely as passive consumers. They do the important work of sorting challenges for us while we ‘go shopping’. This consumer logic extends into every aspect of society. Self-interested, self-reliant and atomised, we’ve been led to believe that the solution lies with merely choosing the ‘right’ ethical brand:
The story that promised our liberation has become our prison – we are depleted, the world is depleted
That so-called power to choose with our wallets ignores the fact that real power lies in being able to shape the choices on offer.
The book delves deep into a diverse range of Citizen Story-led projects from around the world that are already making a difference. The transformative potential of seeing ourselves, alongside businesses and third sector organisations, as participatory entities is powerful. Whether it’s contributing to product development, or recasting donors or members as active participants in delivering an organisation’s purpose, it forces us away from the passive and towards a can-do, active citizen mindset, with the resulting benefits and shared value accruing across all stakeholder groups.
I’m pretty sure it’ll prompt you to join the dots and get better at recognising not just the Citizen Story examples you come across in your own life but also make you realise you’re doing better than you think. For example, I can now trace how The Co-Foundry’s collaborative ‘brand design strategy developed with you and not done to you’ mission has seen me evolving towards developing ever-more inclusive design practices.
As a brand design consultant, what struck me most about the Citizen Story was how its adoption demands far more from the sometimes over-used and often wrongly-used word, ‘purpose’.
The world of brand strategy itself throws up many debates around brand purpose – never more so than when for-profit organisations indulge in a spot of purpose-washing. This book calls for purpose to become a true organising principle, embedded in the meaningful context of businesses, organisations and governments building platforms from which to deliver the resulting shared value:
‘…it’s about creating structured opportunities for people not just to buy products and services from the business, but to buy into what the business is trying to do in the world. It’s only when this happens on a widespread basis that the story that businesses are telling will truly change.’
In the Citizen Story, purpose is fuelled by involving audiences who, through their involvement, become participatory stakeholders. This very idea of greater stakeholder involvement is something that I’m keen to keep building into my processes.
Big on detail, ‘Citizens’ sets out seven steps that will help in building those effective platforms from which to deliver this new way of doing business. It also expands this idea out of the corporate and organisational sphere to ensure that the Citizen Story changes government itself – where people aren’t just subjects or consumers but capable, resourceful and responsible individuals who organise to come together and have opportunities to shape our communities and how we live.
There are reasons to be hopeful already because so many Citizen projects – across the third sector, business and government – are changing things and proving their worth. The capability is undeniably there but what’s needed now is a push towards creating the conditions and adopting the stories that’ll bring about a more systemic change.
‘Citizens’ offers a clear path out of that awful, soul-sapping ‘this is just the way things are’ feeling of impotence. Having read and returned to it more than once, I feel I’m better equipped to underpin my business processes with Citizen Story thinking.
Read it, share it and talk about it! We need to put a stop to reacting to today’s challenges with 20th century, buy–your-way-out-of-trouble Consumer Story answers (eg Eat Out to Help Out) and make the Citizen Story the dominant code of the 21st Century.
While gathering material to write up some recently completed client projects as case studies, I was struck by two things, broadly based around creativity and productivity:
Firstly, by the many, varied, sometimes counter-intuitive and often unexpected influences that sparked the eventual brand identities.
And secondly, by how much we’ve actually achieved – something that can all too easily be overlooked when you’re caught up in the everyday and deeply immersed in doing the work.
Those themes of creativity and productivity feed into the big story which seems to never be more than a scroll away – AI and its consequences in general, and Chat GPT, in particular. It’s something I’ve been wanting to write about for ages, hoping I could alight on a definite perspective but I’m finding that I keep coming up with (or generating) more and more questions on this massive topic.
The evangelists would have us believe that anything that removes friction and saves us time has to be positive. But in my area of brand consulting (strategy and identity) – it’s taking time, asking lots of questions, acquiring a thorough understanding of what we’re trying to achieve and engaging collaboratively in a co-creation process – that yields the results our clients are looking for; namely, brand identities that can play a key role in driving their businesses forward.
It’s an approach that also plays into why me and my collaborators – the content strategists, copywriters, designers, animators, developers and photographers – who make up The Co-Foundry, do what we do. Pursuing the careers we love, in a way that everyone enjoys and gets satisfaction from, sustains us and I believe, contributes to the success of what we produce for, and with, our clients.
In short, how we create something matters and affects the outcome.
Technology has long been promoted for its time-saving aspects, as if saving time is a universal good and the only marker of progress. But faster and with zero friction isn’t always better. And then there’s also the question – what are we saving all this time for? (More on that later.)
The strategic intention, range of information, diversity of perspectives and lived experience that us humans bring to the creative process are instrumental to successful branding. These elements are not easily reduced to an algorithm and even if they were, AI would still treat these ‘data points’ in a value-neutral way – something which explains why ChatGPT text can end up sounding flat or slightly off.
Our human brains may not be able to come up with ideas instantly on command but, as the illustrator Rob Biddulph says, ‘Pressing a button to generate something is not a creative process’. Not knowing how you’re going to do something and working things out as you go along is an essential stage in the creative process. Even Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine (in a recent conversation with Tyler Cowan) says that when he sits down to write something, the very act of writing reveals what he thinks about it.
Getting stuck and struggling is also part of the process – one that may not get the airtime it deserves. Being stumped may be uncomfortable because it represents a point of friction but it’s also essential because it forces us to slow down and/or step away which is very often when the seeds of a solution present themselves.
AI, by contrast, isn’t built to take time out, go for a walk or get annoyed with itself and interrogate what it’s doing so it can gain a better understanding of what it’s looking to achieve.
When we’re stuck, it might feel good to know there’s something to hand that could make the problem we’re trying to solve, melt away. But the struggle for an answer, the process – considering possibilities rather than just scanning probabilities is what being human is all about.
Quoting the words of the great Rick Rubin, creativity is ultimately an act of noticing and choosing what we pay attention to. In his recently published book, The Creative Act, A Way of Being, Rubin makes a timely case in this age of accelerating technological capabilities for broadening our practice of awareness:
there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, [so] we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in.
It’s these very choices and intentionality that distinguishes human output from AI whose efficiency doesn’t give nuance a look-in. Human creativity – be it in brand design, art or writing takes a point of view – an element that injects soul into the finished work giving it meaning and elevating it beyond the merely decorative.
There are a multitude of voices and a somewhat controversial letter (‘Pause Giant AI Experiments’ from the Future of Life Institute) calling time on untrammelled AI development and urging us to consider the sort of world we want to be shaping. Do we want to be enslaved by machines that we initially created?
US tech expert and law professor, Tim Wu warns of the risks already posed by AI, cautioning against building a future where ‘a tyranny of tiny tasks, individually simple but collectively oppressive’ sees us using the time we’ve ‘freed up’ to do more of the same, ultimately unsatisfying work. A future where convenience technologies (offering predictable results from minimal human effort) do the work for us rather than work with us. Wu calls for the intentional development of ‘demanding technologies’ that ask something of us – technologies that take time and skill to master and can both challenge and occupy us.
It seems there is no neat answer, just more questions: What will happen to AI if we increasingly keep turning to it for answers? How will that, in time, affect the quality of the inputs it’s receiving and learning from? Having initially learnt from human-originated databases, how soon will it get to a situation where it’s cannibalising itself, combing and then mashing up its own source material? How can its outputs keep pace with any sort of quality control if all they’re learning from and recycling is their own material?
This quote, from Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book on Laughter and Forgetting (from 1979 but wonderfully prescient) sums up the dilemma we may encounter, and it wouldn’t be good news for the creative industries, ‘One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will ensue.’
A rebrand is a major undertaking – expensive, not without risk, yet totally transformative if you get it right. A successful rebrand gets to the essence of who you really are as a business and sends the right message out, the catalyst to help you attract the right people, reach new audiences, and leap confidently forward as an organisation, increasing the impact you make as a result.
The world is changing fast and we know that many CEOs and marketing leads will be reviewing their brand and positioning this year. So, what’s the secret ingredient to getting your rebrand project right? And what elements are missing from the typical process?
Brand strategist Sue Bush and I have worked together on some fascinating rebrand projects recently, and as we head into 2023, we’ve been reflecting.
We think there’s one major underplayed factor that affects the success of any rebrand. With the benefit of experience, here’s what can go wrong and the special ingredient needed to get your project just right.
Two common reasons why rebrands go pear shapedWe’ve all seen rebrands that bomb, with stressed out project teams and an end result that disappoints. But why?
Too much time looking inwards. Where the project might spend a little time reviewing the competition but what the audience cares about gets a cursory review at best. The result? Inward-looking ‘me, me, me’ messaging and a brand, website and comms that fall flat when released into the wild.
Rotten tomato syndromeInternal disagreement. Where somebody important hurls doubt – rotten tomatoes – at the creative brand idea late in the day, knocking it down, leading to lots of infighting and a watered down, ‘meh’ type of brand results.
So, how do we avoid this?
If you want a successful rebrand that gets to the heart of your message, it’s important to engage widely – not just internally but externally too.
As with much in life, it’s that so-called soft stuff that is the hardest to do right and with a rebrand it’s the key ingredient that makes all the difference between success and failure.
Continual, wide engagement is essential for a successful rebrand.
Internal listening and discovery is vital. It’s so important that people inside the organisation have their say, that you understand what they care about and harvest their ideas. And you need to set the rebrand in context and conduct research into your market and competition. Both of these elements are key to disovery.
But the bit that’s often missed in a rebrand process is external listening – spending time gathering the views of outside stakeholders – clients, partners, referrers, people who use your services. This external engagement is rare.
External research holds a mirror up to your organisation – it helps you see who you are and what you do from the outside in. And that’s massively valuable, because people on the outside can always see things more clearly. As David C. Baker wisely says, when you’re inside your own jar, you can’t read the label.
Spend time talking to them and you’ll learn where your true value lies.
Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
This outside perspective is so key if you want a relevant, powerful brand that connects – one that’s more ‘you, you, you’ than ‘we, we, we’ – their words, not yours reflected back.
Bringing in these external voices to the process puts a stop to rotten tomato syndrome too. It’s hard to argue with the views of external stakeholders, engaging everyone in a strong brand idea that’s rooted in evidence.
Engagement shouldn’t just end on completion of the discovery phase. It’s also vital to keep people engaged when you get into the creative, involving a wide cross section of people from across the organisation into co-creation sessions. Creatives don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.
I think as designers, we’re addicted to the ‘jazz hands’, the big reveal, but creatives don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. Bring people in on it through co-creation.
Sue Bush, The Co-Foundry
We’ve talked about research, we’ve talked about creative; you’ve delivered the brand guidelines, the tone of voice is written. How can you continue to engage people?
After the rebrand, the first major touchpoint is usually the website, and it’s the content side that often slows this down. It’s a big job, and the expertise and ideas you need to communicate on the site are found inside your organisation. You can’t leave this to an external copywriter alone – it’s important to engage your internal experts to help you write the content you need. It can be a really fulfilling process for people, if you engage them in this process in the right way.
Once you have delivered the brand, you’ve delivered that website, you’ve got to keep everyone on board. It depends on the size of the organisation – if it is very small, then it’s an easy thing to communicate and manage. But the bigger the organisation, the more of that engagement you need to do in terms of embedding values, communicating your vision, your mission, etc. So there’s still work that has to be done there.
Engagement never really stops. You mustn’t then retreat back into your shell and stop engaging and communicating in that way.
The secret to a successful rebrand isn’t just great creative or top down. It’s a people thing – it’s engagement, the soft fluffy stuff that is the hardest thing of all and exactly the kind stuff that makes a project succeed or fail.
Get the engagement right and your rebrand has a far better chance of landing with your audiences – inside and out. You’ll get a message that everyone gets behind because you’ve brought in people’s voices from the outside as well as within. You’ll get a project that they’ve enjoyed, one they remember for all the right reasons. And you’ll get a brand that propels your organisation forward, so you can make an even bigger impact.
If you have a rebrand project on the cards this year, the one thing you can take away from this is the importance of a high level of engagement throughout.
Author: Sonja Nisson
A recession inevitably conjures up the idea of cutting costs, treading carefully, thinking short-term and minimising risks. But is carrying the behaviours that might serve us well in our domestic and personal lives over to our businesses the best way to meet the challenges of a recession? And will caution, hunkering down and waiting for the downturn to pass help us emerge from a recession stronger?
The world doesn’t stop in a recession, things get harder for sure, but life goes on. If we take our foot off the pedal and go into preservation mode, it’ll feel like we’re standing on one of those interminably slow-moving airport travelators while our competitors, just by maintaining their own forward momentum, stride past, leaving us far behind.
Having survived and thrived through several downturns, I know that there is a better way of approaching a recession and it comes with plenty of evidence to support it. As Mark Ritson (Marketing Week) says, “Provided you accept that we aren’t living in a paradigmatically different era of marketing in which history means nothing”, you’ll be better off ditching the ‘wait it out’ response.
A significant amount of data from previous recessions demonstrates that brands which indiscriminately reduce spending or go dark, experience protracted and costly recoveries while those that maintain spend which keeps them front of mind, remain relevant and enjoy future sales growth.
Going from a loss avoidance mindset to one where you focus on building resilience and creating continuous improvement is something your brand strategy will play a pivotal role in.
Brand is, in itself, a long-term strategy. It’s an identity – strategic, visual and written that makes up the entire ecosystem around your business and leaves no doubt in your audiences’ minds about your position in the market.
It’s worth remembering that during a recession sales slow down not because your customers are unwilling to buy but because they’re unable to. Being reactive (eg slashing prices) and not taking a long view on brand building is at best, inefficient and at worst, limiting – reducing your brand’s future potential. Defending your market position and ensuring your brand stays front of mind isn’t just so that when the economic situation eases you’re positioned to take advantage of it, there’s also a significant case to be made for being able to increase your share of voice (SOV) in your market during this time simply because, “everyone else is investing relatively less.” (Mark Ritson)
Making like Samsung* and doubling down on your value proposition and refining your positioning will not only benefit you in the short term, boosting agility and helping you find wins in the here and now, but will also lay the foundations for doing better once the downturn is over: You’ll be riding the upward trajectory of the wave as it breaks through the end of the recession, seeing you ‘surf in’ further up the beach!
If you’ve ever been in a presentation or scoping meeting with me there’s a good chance I would have presented my ‘brand essence’ Venn diagram. This is the sum that feeds the strategy for your brand. If ever there’s a time to revisit this, it’s now – all three circles will be shifting – be that your audience’s focus, your focus or that of the market around you.
What your audience cares about – How is the recession affecting them? Have their needs and resources changed? What they feel about the service you’re providing matters now, more than ever – NPS scores and online surveys can only do so much. Tip: Put together some structured interview questions to ask people how they’re feeling directly. Real insight comes from human-to-human conversations as people are more likely to open up, particularly if the person conducting the interview is independent.
What you care about – If you aren’t 100% clear on your purpose or vision you and your team will lose motivation fast in challenging times. Similarly, not having absolute clarity on your values means your team and customers will recognise that lack of a principled approach to delivering on your promise. Tip: Get out of the office and run an away day – stepping out of the day-to-day helps you find your va-va-voom.
Where you play – Where are the new threats in your marketplace coming from? Who is sharpening their value proposition? Who has left the market? Is your positioning sufficiently distinctive? Tip: Run some competitor research. See if you can niche your offer by reviewing the value of your best services and sectors as well as considering who will be affected most by the recession. Test whether your positioning is robust and clear with this position matrix tool.
By taking a holistic approach to reviewing your brand strategy and understanding your positioning, you’ll be making sure that you invest in the right places, improving your offering and building resilience into your business. This won’t necessarily mean you need to rebrand your entire business but be open to recognising that your findings may prompt you to refine and refresh what you have, tightening your messaging, sprucing up your visual touchpoints and refocusing your marketing plan.
By the time the data declares that we’re in recession (defined by having had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth) we’ll have lived through and survived six months of it already. When the world feels bleak, it pays to remember that this is a time like any other – it won’t last forever and it’s often followed by a period of higher economic growth. Take your team with you and allow yourself, amid all the worry and concern, to still love what you do, recognising the positive impact it has on the people you do it for.
(Harvard Business Review has analysed a number of recessions – those in the 1980s, 1990-91, 2000–2002 and 2008–9, studying almost 5000 companies from the lead-up through to the aftermath of recession. The 9% that flourished post-recession, outperforming rivals by at least 10% in sales and profit growth had all trodden a delicate balance – focusing on “greater operational efficiency along with investing relatively comprehensively in the future by spending on marketing, R&D and new assets.”
Bain & Co’s 2019 worldwide report on the last recession, found that those companies that maintained marketing while competitors cut back were able to maintain growth during and after the recession. They cite the example of Samsung* which maintained marketing investment in 2008–9 and focused on rebranding itself as an innovative company during that time, seeing itself go from No 21 in brand value among Interbrand’s global list in 2008 to No 6 in 2019.)
What’s your appetite for risk?
Perhaps it’s a bit of a strange question coming from a brand design consultant but bear with me…
Let’s say you’re thinking about embarking on a rebrand or brand refresh and you see the phrase, ‘brand discovery’ or ‘brand immersion’ as the first in a series of steps an agency has in mind for you.
Do you know what it means? And will you be taking a chance on it? (The agency knows what it’s doing, right?) Or, as you’re pretty sure you know what you want from the design process, maybe you’ll see if you can skip anything with a whiff of workshop about it.
In truth, brand discovery (that’s what I call it!) is integral to any rebrand or brand refresh. It sits at the heart of a project, and is far more than that initial, ‘getting to know you’ discovery call a client and agency have by way of introduction to each other. It’s what needs to happen before anyone starts doing any of the creative work as it is what informs the brand strategy.
So, rather than being a question of, “Do I need this?” it’s more about, “How deep do we need to go?”
A helpful way to look at it is as a see-saw or sliding scale – the bigger the brand overhaul, the riskier it gets and so there’s a greater need to invest in really thorough research. It’s a way of mitigating the risks that any change such as rebranding brings:
After all, you just want to get it right. So, if you’ve been in business for a while and it feels like your brand identity hasn’t kept pace with where you are and where you’re headed, then go in deep, looking at your brand from all manner of perspectives.
Use brand discovery to acquire absolute clarity on the what, how (character and personality) and why of your business, involve and listen to your team, and then take the discovery process beyond your organisation. Look outwards – examine how your customer sees you, understand what they care about and challenge yourself to look at your marketplace and the wider context you operate in (remembering that not all your competitors will sit in the same space as you). All of this will help you mitigate risk and create a brand that’s more empathic and finely focused on the value you provide.
Brand discovery, immersion or 360° – let them call it what they like, but do make sure you do it.
Life is a series of seasons and stages, a journey of and through change. How we respond to the changes that come our way determines our future. Even though we may sometimes get stuck, human instinct programmes us to problem-solve, let the light in and find ways to improve things.
When we’re working with clients, the blockages we come up against might be organisational, professional or personal. Frequently, particularly with purpose- or founder-led companies, it’s a mixture of all three, in varying degrees. We help our clients overcome these blockages and move on by, firstly and most importantly, discovering what has caused them to get stuck and from that, understanding what’s motivating them towards wanting to make a change.
Of course, as a brand consultant, my focus is very much on helping bring about the transformation that will make all the difference. Having the right strategy, great design or spot-on copywriting are just some of the ways that brands can arrive at a place of clarity where they really resonate with their target audience. But what I find equally fascinating is doubling down on discovering what is driving that need for change in the first place:
So, what is it that motivates people to always be looking for improvements in themselves and their teams, all the better to serve the people they have an impact on? I wanted to take a closer look at this area and set myself the task of gathering and analysing the answers to one question that I recently asked my clients and collaborators:
I chose to ask this now because just over a year ago, I underwent my own transformational rebrand (I wrote about it here) and became The Co-Foundry. The last year seemed like a good time frame to give people, particularly as it coincided with the UK reopening its economy after the pandemic lockdowns.
The question was deliberately left open, allowing respondents to reply without being led and discouraging closed one-word answers. As our client Fiona Remnant from Causal Map says, “a good open question elicits a story of change”. In fact, when Fiona saw the question come into her inbox she immediately replied with an offer to use their Causal Map app to analyse the survey results. The results you get from Causal Map are so much better than any word cloud visual because the app is able to highlight cause and effect in the answers.
Initially developed by a team from the University of Bath to help charities evaluate the impact of social change initiatives, Causal Map is a new online research tool – a way to aggregate, analyse, code and visually present information, making sense of what interviewees are telling you and finding links between causal factors – uncovering what causes what.
The answers, quite naturally, were varied but definite themes emerged. It was pleasing to see a thread appear in which several respondents cited The Co-Foundry as contributing to their business growth through the repositioning work we’d done with them.
But the intention behind the question had always been about so much more and by far the strongest causal theme in the responses given was a desire to get out into nature more regularly with the resulting effects that would have on improving family dynamics and work focus. As one respondent put it:
So mostly simple, intentional things … I need to do to maintain some level of basic fitness and wellbeing and to get it done and out of the way before I set off for a day planted in front of a computer screen with seemingly little or no ability to prise myself away once begun. The main idea with this is to get some early morning daylight whilst physically outside and not wearing sunglasses.
And another…
The pandemic brought about remote working, and this made it harder to switch off and maintain a healthy work / life balance. What works for me is to do something drastically different to flip me out of work mode. This could be getting out in the open air with my kids, playing football, goofing around with them, taking the dogs for a walk, or going to the gym.
What really struck me though was not so much what people said, but how personally they chose to respond – the openness and intimacy of their answers. I do believe that despite all the terrible effects of the pandemic, this ease with being far more open reflects something positive that has come out of that time. The past couple of years have undoubtedly changed how we interact, particularly at work. Whether it’s between clients or among colleagues, it seems like that professional guard has been dropped in favour of something altogether more human. Although the spark may have been the collective shock of the events and repercussions of the pandemic as it unfolded, this increased openness was also down to being ‘invited’ into people’s hastily assembled home workspaces and seeing them in less traditional working environments, amid their everyday domestic lives.
When we work on rebranding projects, it’s that opening up, where people feel able to talk and share freely, that yields the most valuable material; when personal stories and experiences start filtering through during our collaborative discovery process. After all, as marketing strategy consultant, educator and author, Mark Schaefer said in his 2019 book, Marketing Rebellion, “the most human brand wins”.
As human beings, we engage best when we have a clear and concrete sense of detail. Personal responses and lived experiences offer that specificity which leads to connection because they open the door on the universal truths we all share and can identify with.
And of course, rebranding itself, particularly for The Co-Foundry’s client base of founders and creatives, and purpose-driven charities, is invariably a highly personal thing, which is why we always look to bring the teams of the companies we work with on the brand transformation journey.
When you’re in the research phase, asking open questions and gathering ideas, there’s always a temptation to keep going. It would have been interesting to have gone back further to uncover the underlying causes motivating my clients and collaborators to seek change. Was it burnout arising from that first pandemic year of lockdowns or was it a deeper-seated shift in values that the pandemic brought to the fore?
I definitely got the sense that the answers I received from the relatively small sample of people I asked my question to are reflective of the Great Re-evaluation we’re hearing so much about, “It isn’t so much that people have less ambition, but that their ambition is changing – from being about career success first, to work-life balance,” (Julia Hobsbawm OBE, entrepreneur, consultant and author of The Nowhere Office).
The upheaval prompted by the pandemic revealed how precarious the world, as we thought we knew it, was. The realisation that ‘all bets were off’ forced us to change our priorities and be more vocal about what was really important – relationships, family, health, hobbies and our communities. For many, work and ways of working revealed themselves to be far more flexible than we could have ever envisaged, pre-pandemic. One of the answers I received certainly backed up this up, “I definitely used to think every element of my life had to be calculated and I always had to know what my next move was going to be – but since letting go of that and being brave enough to live in the moment, I’m a lot happier!”
And it’s this sort of spirit that will undoubtedly find its way into how brands reposition and reimagine themselves in the future – letting more of their ‘human’ element in – all the better to appeal to the people who matter most to them.
Many thanks to Causal Map for their help in putting together this blog post and my research findings: Whether you’re working on strategy, researching a project, wanting to evaluate an initiative or visualise stakeholders’ experiences, Causal Map has the power to not only help you gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, but also to be able to present those findings in a visual and compelling way.
This time last year, I was on the brink of climbing out from behind my very comfortable rock and announcing a big change.
Rebranding and going from agency to consultant felt scary and exciting in equal measure. And the result? (Spoiler alert) It’s positively sunny out here in the open – so much so that I wanted to share the standout lessons I learnt on my journey.
By way of background, my career had seen me co-own an agency in London and found a smaller agency (Touchpoint Design) in my current home base in the West of England. One year on from repositioning and rebranding – going from having a team of full-time employees to becoming a consultant, working with independent specialist collaborators – it’s proved to be the best thing I’ve done in my 30-year career. No offence intended to anyone I ever employed or worked with in previous incarnations – becoming The Co-Foundry was centred on what I needed from my professional life moving forward.
As The Co-Foundry, the work we’ve produced in the last year has been some of the most rewarding of my career. And it is very definitely a ‘we’ – the team of trusted experts that I’ve brought in around me who are clever, creative, supportive and just plain wonderful.
Numerous benefits came out of the process of challenging myself to take the plunge and make that change. To name just a few: I gained a greater understanding of my clients and what they value, I found (and was able to concentrate on developing) my voice and I refined my process (something which is ongoing and will never stop). But the absolute standout benefit was discovering that with the change and rebrand, the prospective clients we now attracted as The Co-Foundry were the right people for us: People who understand how we’re different in what we offer and who, even more importantly, value us for precisely that. We’re not for everyone and that’s okay.
The main thing with positioning is to use it to first of all, find your sweet spot and then, communicate it. Being specific and not trying to be all things to everyone is vital.
When you’ve worked out what you love doing, what you’re good at and who you love doing it for, you’ll be putting yourself in a position of control which is also a position from which you’re able to say ‘no’.
The act of nailing your positioning doesn’t always have to be about niching, although that was what it was about for me. In my case, going from being a catch-all agency offering multiple services (digital, graphic and branding) for a wide range of clients (from startups, to museums and everything in between) to being specific about what I did and who I did it for, proved THE most liberating change. The Co-Foundry is positioned to focus on providing brand strategy and advice for a defined audience: creative and tech, founder-led companies.
Being clear about who you want to attract and what you want to do makes you more attractive to the audiences you want to serve.
Being clear about who you want to attract and what you want to do makes you more attractive to the audiences you want to serve.
Good positioning is about saying yes to the right people and no to the ones that don’t fit.
But maybe the idea of saying ‘no’ makes you uncomfortable and you can’t help having that nagging feeling that you’ll be missing out on opportunities? It’s certainly what held me back from making my move sooner – the perceived risk that the pipeline would dry up, that there wouldn’t be enough prospects out there wanting our narrower value proposition. And there was also the fear that the creative work would end up being repetitive – doing the same thing for the same type of client – and where would the fun be in that?
When you’re defining your position, you’re not of course, just putting your finger in the air and picking out a random niche. Positioning comes from your existing professional experience and understanding of the marketplace. The size of the market for what you offer will relate to the goals you set for yourself.
My concerns around the creative aspects of the work I’d be doing proved unfounded. Talking more generally, the deeper you get into any niche, the more patterns you’ll see. But patterns don’t mean that the solutions you come up with will repeat themselves. If anything, a deep level of understanding and familiarity with a particular area means you’ll be able to be more targeted, bringing more nuance to bear and being able to quickly discount ideas you know won’t work.
Narrowing what we do and who we do it for means we’ve been able to propose the right strategies and develop identities more effectively than if we were approaching the work from a more generalised position. This gives us more time and space to ask questions and then listen and understand the answers before making recommendations and designing solutions.
Having a narrow niche means that we’re continually refining and learning. Not in terms of learning new skills on the client’s time but building on experience that we can then draw on time and again.
I’d go so far as to say that we’ve done some of our most creative work in the last 12 months because it’s come from that place of having deeply focused positioning and so, fewer distractions.
Nailing your positioning doesn’t mean you can sit back and enjoy the ride knowing all the hard work has been done.
Refining your offer and the process that goes with it is something that doesn’t ever stop or stand still. For example, working on several brand strategy projects in the past year I’ve learnt that I love working with client teams, bringing everyone in on the task in hand. Although any project always starts with the founder, a good brand refresh or rebrand can’t get off the ground without the team understanding the strategy, believing in it and getting fully behind it. Over the course of the last few months, I’ve developed extra steps in my process to accommodate for that new realisation. Prospects that would rather not involve their team are not right for The Co-Foundry – another instance in which we’re learning to say ‘no’.
However firmly set it may be, The Co-Foundry’s positioning remains a work in progress. And maybe that’s the point. There is no fixed end destination – it’s a journey and one I’m determined to keep going on.
I’ll end with some words of wisdom from others. Their thoughts helped me resolve to take the plunge when I was thinking of starting out on my own rebrand:
This quote from David C Baker whose book, ‘The Business of Expertise’, helped crystallise what good positioning is:
What we consider to be distinguishing factors that set our firm apart are not that distinct at all. They might very well be true, but they are not uniquely true, and that’s the fundamental challenge of positioning: how to be less interchangeable or how to be uniquely true rather than just true.
And Jim Collins’ ‘Hedgehog Concept’, helped confirm in my mind how it’s better to focus on doing one thing well than to spread your efforts across a wide range of things. This way of presenting the idea that organisations should focus on something they’re good at, deeply passionate about and which is good for the health of their business drew on Isaiah Berlin’s, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox,’ which divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable:
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
