Five ways to build a powerhouse brand
If your brand communications hit all the marks—they’re clear, meaningful and on message—you rock. But you could rock even harder if your enterprise is willing to show off its human side and maybe even stick its neck out a little. Try any of the following five differentiators, and you’ll be on your way to building a powerhouse brand.
1. Amp up the personality
Differentiation is a challenge in well-developed sectors where products and services are commodified. A strong environmental or social story can give you a favorability boost, but a distinctive brand voice—one that’s yours alone—will make you memorable.
Let your freak flag fly. Or at least sound like your company is run by real people your customers might want to meet. If you don’t sound like the typical whatever, that’s the point: In a crowded marketplace, companies with personality stand out.
To cite two well-known examples, consider how Progressive Insurance and Geico have been able to build powerhouse brands even though they’re not all that different from their competitors.
2. Be provocative
One proven way to raise your brand profile is to develop a thought leadership position—and success with that strategy requires standing out from the sea of generic content, which rises higher daily as AI slop proliferates. Articles, talks and interviews that challenge received wisdom or make a compelling case for a radically different course can create buzz and show that you really are thinking.
A few tips on making this approach work:
- Always support your claims.
- Balance the negative with the positive. Valid critiques are a useful contribution; if you’re just a downer, people will tune you out.
- Make sure it matters. Provocation for its own sake will read as a cheap ploy. But if you have strong support for a controversial position on a meaningful issue, raising hackles is justified.
3. Invest in a compelling brand story
How much is a ceramic cat painted with a red chili pattern worth?
Fifty cents if you buy it from a thrift store; $22.72 if auctioned on eBay with a story by novelist Lydia Millet.
The chili cat was part of the Significant Objects Project, a multiphase experiment designed to test the hypothesis that talented creative writers could invest an object with value that it did not previously have. The result: project curators Rob Walker and Josh Glenn sold $128 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,612.
This clever demonstration is a real lesson for brand builders: Much of the value we ascribe to things and experiences stems from the stories surrounding them. A story is often the X factor that inspires an intense desire to have the thing that’s on offer—yet companies often stint on brand story development, settling for a generic About page and a few bullets in a sales deck.
A compelling brand story is worth the investment: It can support premium pricing, create employee evangelists and get you better media coverage.
4. Aim for a nerve
Marketing gurus often talk about speaking to your audience’s “pain” and showing how you can make it go away. That advice draws on a larger principle: When you hit a nerve, you get attention.
That’s true whether you target pains, desires or aspirations. There’s a reason sex and lifestyle sell products: Communications that generate an emotional response put people in a frame of mind to listen to your rational case (or abandon the need for one). One example: New Resource Bank (now merged with Amalgamated) got people to move their money by asking the question, “Do you know where your money sleeps at night?”—an evocative way to open a discussion about what other banks do with our money while we’re not paying attention.
The key to hitting a nerve is truly knowing your audience: not just their practical wants and needs, but what activates their feelings and values.
5. Take a stand
Businesses often shy away from taking stands on public issues, choosing to leave advocacy to advocacy organizations. That’s understandable, because a strong, clear position sets you apart from the waffling crowd—and is often expected of companies that tout their environmental or social impact.
You do risk alienating some people, but values alignment can create devoted fans, so as long as the positions you take are consistent with your brand values and actions, there’s a good chance the upside of speaking out is larger than the downside. That’s true not only for your business, but also for the communities you serve: Business voices can be extremely influential, so you have a real opportunity to move the needle on a public debate.
There are plenty of ways to take a stand, from signing onto group declarations (safety in numbers) or partnering with a nonprofit advocacy group to building your own advocacy platform (a la Ben & Jerry’s) or supporting executive activism. You can be relatively low-key about it—your CEO doesn’t have to get arrested protesting in front of Congress—but you do have to put a real stake in the ground. “We love kittens” won’t earn you any stand-up points.
Taking public positions or making core values part of your marketing may feel (or be) risky, but it can also be a liberating way to build a powerhouse brand.
