CHAPTER 06
WALK THE WALK
Driving the Authentic Brand Behaviors That Fuel Business Growth
In the last chapter, we looked at Brand Purpose as the cause or belief of your organization, thereby highlighting the mega important answer as to why your organization exists and why people should care. Let’s move forward with the process of successful Storyscaping by introducing the next pillar, it covers the how and what. Here we will uncover the means by which your organization satisfies consumer needs, the means by which you operate, the means by which you treat consumers, and the services or products you provide. These simple little words hold big power when you directly connect them. How you operate should always be based on and support your Purpose, in every way, shape, and form. What you offer as a product or service should be a real consequence of your Purpose (why) and how you create and deliver it. This is also demonstrated as the act and share behaviors of operating with a Purpose. Remember? “Think, act, and share” from your Purpose.
Actions speak louder than words; therefore, our actions—what we do and how we behave—contribute disproportionally to our brand perception. Our actions weigh in with much more value than our words do (what we say about ourselves). In fact, you can build an incredibly strong brand without ever doing an ounce of paid advertising. We don’t recommend it, but it can certainly be done. Conversely, you can do a ton of great advertising, but if you have a crap product, provide a poor experience, or behave disingenuously, then your business is doomed. Every interaction with a brand, service, or product is an experience. You cannot separate them and always want to think of your brand positioning (how it delivers) with that experience in mind. The product or service is the functional offer that enables this experience to be what it is. The type of experience, how it meets your functional needs, how it relates to the brand story, and how it is all connected are critical to building a world of immersive experiences. To be effective with Storyscaping connected experiences, we have to understand the role of the brand and its positioning, how functional products and services enable experience, and how the positioning and product must align authentically to your Purpose. After that discussion, we will explore a logical approach to how we can position your product or service as the “gift,” which will help define the Organizing Idea of your Storyscape.
Positioning for Position. Everyone has a story about being overwhelmed by choice. Try ordering a cup of coffee from choices micro-organized by phylum, class, order, family, genus, or species. A consumer today has to make a spectrum of choices before even stepping up to the counter: What size? Is it going to be coffee or a different specialty hot drink? If coffee, which roast? Bold, low acid, mild, rich and lively? How much sweetener? What kind of sweetener? Dairy? Other alternatives? Just a coffee? What about a sweet treat during the coffee or mint for after?
From the movie L.A. Story:
Tom: I’ll have a decaf coffee.
Trudi: I’ll have a decaf espresso.
Morris Frost: I’ll have a double decaf cappuccino.
Ted: Give me decaffeinated coffee ice cream.
Harris: I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon.
Trudi: I’ll have a twist of lemon.
Tom: I’ll have a twist of lemon.
Morris Frost: I’ll have a twist of lemon.
Cynthia: I’ll have a twist of lemon.
This comedic exchange is more than two decades old, but it quite aptly illustrates the dilemma of many modern consumers today. In 1991 it was a hyperbolic exchange to illustrate the ridiculousness of many Los Angelenos’ lives, but today, there is nothing exaggerated about it and it could go on twice as long when it comes to the options. In a world of choice, especially one that is amplified by the marketer’s desire to meet expectations and personalize offerings, the ways in which a brand is positioned (its how) serves as signposts for navigation. This is achieved through the stories we attach to the symbols used by brands for signposting. These stories are either new to the customer and created by the brand, or they are customers’ stories built on past experience and interaction with the brand and its products/services.
It’s almost provincial how simple coffee ordering used to be and how commonplace ridiculousness has become in the consumer journey. Where there is so much choice in the marketplace, brands actually have a greater challenge because there is room for many more stories and, in today’s mode, many more experiences. Our goal is, of course, to remove the risk that consumers will make choices based on a quick game of rock, paper, scissors and respond more emotionally, based on your brand and the stories and experiences that it conjures up. Brands are symbols and can be triggers for stories of the brand and the consumer’s experience with that brand and its products. By reinforcing how a brand is positioned you will earn a direct effect on the story it tells and the experience it inspires.
The reality is, consumers are savvy. They are more informed about the very nature of buying—what to look for, where to research, and whom to ask when buying a product. The consequence? A vast array of content and information from which to construct these stories that all have their needs at the center. Remember, the customer is the hero. Which means the brand positioning needs to directly define the product or service as a gift that helps or enables the hero in some way. Beyond the functional aspects, effectively achieving this will enable the brand and product to play a meaningful role in the consumer’s story, which can serve as a whopping big signpost from which to navigate.
The Consequence of Expectation. People no longer narrow-mindedly focus on just the brand name as they once did. They care more about their holistic experiences with the products and services as dimensions of the brand. The expectation of universal satisfaction has created a more empowered consumer stance. For example, if Molly thinks Bombshell Blonde really turned her hair Brassy Bimbo, she now has the ability to influence all her friends about it, with emotional words, photos, and/or video! With every bit the expertise reserved for TV pundits, your neighbor Molly can influence her entire neighborhood and beyond. Her social media friends and followers have the ability to promote her experience by simple clicks and shares, and before you know it Bombshell Blonde hits the bargain bin.
Constantly growing expectations among diverse audiences who are empowered to have what they want leads to a simple marketing directive, give the consumer what they desire; give them choice. The ability to satisfy a diverse audience who has high expectations is to offer choice. This is a marketing fundamental that was born out of consumer research, which tells us to establish what the consumer wants and then satisfy his or her needs. When we do this, the marketing outcome is greater range–the ability to target more specific consumer needs. The consumer outcome is choice, which satisfies the consumer’s need. It all works together. In this mind space, we need to proceed with caution so that we do not create consumer bewilderment—too much choice—making it even more difficult to build a position for consumers to navigate. In fact, it can counter our goal of building a meaningful connection through shared experiences and shared values. A second pitfall is that you run the risk of providing more than what a consumer is willing to pay for or finds valuable—too much entitlement. That’s why the additive value of story is so important. There is nothing wrong with having a range of products where it is relevant, as long as you ensure that your brand has a clear means for how it delivers. You need to have a clear and distinct brand story that consumers can build into their story. And as you expand your business, think long and hard about how that expansion will be based on your Purpose and connected to your brand story. By doing so, you can create choice without creating confusion or bewilderment.
A Functional Solution to Experience Differentiation. For decades, maybe even centuries, most marketing started with the product or service differentiator. What is unique about our product or service? Knowing that, we can communicate it far and wide. With good creative, we will cut through the clutter and leverage the emotional value of our brand and then we won’t be able to keep the shelves stocked. Sound familiar? In simplistic terms, this, along with a good understanding of the 4 Ps, has served many businesses well. In fact, today plenty of businesses still tackle marketing this way, which sets things up pretty well for a while. However, that “while” may only be fleeting, and soon you may find it difficult to scale or increase margins. You may even form a drug-like dependency on advertising. Increased competition, mass distribution, and social network connection are all things that can put a dent in this simple approach fairly quickly, too. That said, in the same way we believe in retaining and leveraging the traditional knowledge of storytelling, we believe some of the fundamentals of classic marketing should still serve a role. It is the way we use them that needs a new approach.
One of the reasons some of the core principles remain effective is simply because consumers still have functional needs. That’s a simple fact–a fact that we can’t ignore and could instead leverage in our creation of powerful and meaningful shared experiences. A shared experience is derived from a need being satisfied or solved by a product or service that a company provides. The interaction itself creates the shared experience. Through Storyscaping, our goal is to create worlds where immersive experiences are shared between brand and consumer in several ways. This is why it is so important to understand and leverage the value of products/services and their delivery—so that we can truly maximize these experiences. Doing this, while keeping in line with the Brand Purpose, helps support the bridge to emotional connection, because you can’t separate emotional from functional in real terms. If a product fails or is delivered in a substandard way, the positive emotion a consumer has for a brand becomes bruised. An honest mistake may get a pass once, maybe even twice, but eventually, poor performance of any kind will destroy the connection and will also create a negative consumer out of your potential ambassador. And it certainly does not build new customers to replace the lost ones. Imagine dining with some friends in a new restaurant. This restaurant received rave reviews from food critics. It has a cool website that books reservations by table location and is promoted on UrbanDaddy e-mails.1 Your expectations are high, and anticipation is palpable. You arrive. The décor isn’t really your style, but it’s appropriate; the ambience is fine, and the food is great. However, the waiter is a little arrogant, and you feel it every time you ask for something. He does the job, asks the right questions, and doesn’t drop your food—he delivers. Yet, you still feel an energy that puts you on edge, not allowing you to fully immerse yourself into the experience. You exit with that underthrilled feeling. This new restaurant missed the mark; it was not a great a dinner. Your real-life experience did not match the emotional connection you had built before arriving.
We have all had this sort of experience, and most likely, if someone were to ask you for your opinion on this restaurant, you would probably say the food was good and the service was crap, even though you may not be able to rationalize why in fine detail; you just don’t feel right recommending it. You don’t really want it to become part of your world. You feel disappointed and disconnected from how you felt—your emotional connection—in the beginning based on the restaurant’s communication and online experience. The point is, that although the product (food and environment) and the marketing experience (communication and website) were good, even great, other factors contributed to the experience. A crack in that experience can sever the emotional connection. As such, we need to always think of products and services as enablers for an experience. They must remain connected throughout the Experience Space bound to all other channels, such as digital interactions and social conversations.
We often are asked to consult on helping chief marketing officers re shape their marketing departments. The common questions tend to be mostly about organizational design or “tell us what kind of people and skills we should hire,” and so on. We often uncover that the issue does not lie in lack of skills; often it’s the team’s perspective that is broken. We point to the travel and hospitality industry as a better (not perfect) model because these organizations often guide themselves with the compass of guest experience. This is an effective perspective, which puts the customer clearly in the heart of the story and drives a ton of good organizational behaviors. Although a lot of marketing investment and focus zeros in on building emotional connection, we believe that getting the functional side (especially the service side) of the house in line is also critical. To do that, we need to consider even a functional solution as an experience enabler. In fact, that is the foundation of the experience because consumers always seek to solve a need. Meeting their need with a solution is the very basis for a shared experience. And we know that telling a brand story without an experience is only one-third of the equation.
Beyond the service world of restaurants, the same applies in our relationship with everyday needs and products. We wake up every morning, and whether we are conscious of it or not, we need to breathe. It’s a simple biological need—inhaling a breath of air with around 21 percent oxygen.2 It’s so functional that it’s purely instinctive. Imperative as this oxygen is, unless you’re deprived of it, the act of breathing isn’t very emotional; therefore, you probably wouldn’t consider it an experience. But look again. A need (to breathe) is being solved by a product (air), with an action or behavior (inhaling), which enables a positive experience (life).
From there, we evolve our functional needs. It might be to have clean teeth (for simplicity, the following assumptions are based on a male). So, we head off to the bathroom and are confronted by the toothpaste, toothbrush, soaps, moisturizers, shave cream, deodorant, mouthwash, aftershave, razor blades, sunscreen, hair product, brush/comb, and so on. All these are within steps of our slumber. Each product shapes, forms, or satisfies a need we have—fresh breath or tamed hair. It’s all working to satisfy a need (functional and emotional). How we interact with each of these products and the brands they embody is an experience in and of itself. A behavior occurs, we use the product, we have an experience of how it delivers, how it feels, how it smells, how it looks, and so on, all of which connect us to how we feel about that product, the brand, and ourselves. Although it may seem dramatized here, it all counts when you’re building a brand and growing a business. We can no longer think of products from just a design perspective; we should look deeply from the experience perspective. Doing so will unlock a new dimension for product differentiation in a very competitive landscape.
The beauty and personal care space alone, which includes those products that are “needs” surrounding your first step of the day, makes up approximately $68 billion in the United States. From a marketing investment perspective, brands spent around $6.8 billion on advertising.3 Multiply that across the globe, and that’s some significant investment. And those dollars do not include what is used to enable physical experiences (from websites to product form), which, in our view should be a lot. With keen focus on the experience, we can see that every aspect of interaction with these products is part of the experience. How the products are developed, packaged, sold, distributed, and supported all matters. Why? They solve for a need; there is great importance on how the products taste, feel, look, work; and so on. Functional characteristics contribute to how we experience a product. At the same time, this (like the restaurant example) is also framed based on your expectations and connection to the category and brand, which are often established through communication and other brand interactions. For example, if a product has a faulty closure and the consumer calls customer service about it, the way he or she is treated during that communication also counts toward or against the product and experience with the brand. Where you buy these products is relevant, too. “Are they at my regular store, in stock, in my preferred flavor?” All this is functional, so the functional reality of marketing remains true. It remains a core characteristic of product and service delivery. The way we leverage this as part of an immersive experience within the brand world equals the new opportunity. Aligning the product or service, the offer, the distribution, and so on, to the Brand Purpose constitutes how we deliver, and it is critical to success.
Walking the Walk. How your business performs its every day tasks, how it treats people, and how your products solve everyday needs are paramount when delivering on your Purpose. This is the way brands and companies build the connection beyond functional solutions, even though the service or product provides a functional solution as described earlier. The relevance and effect of how you act actually builds the shared experience. This is why, in our hyperconnected world, where consumers have amazing power, you have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. You have to be true to your Purpose. You have to be authentic, and you have to be transparent. Masking reality by blasting overstated marketing messages through mass communication no longer works. If you look at the way many great brands have grown, you will see they are very authentic in their approach, their actions, their behaviors, and the experiences they create.
Transparency Is Fashionable. “Transparency, inside and out. Too much focus is on what is being said by a brand versus what a brand/company actually does—brands need authenticity,” Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer and activist, smartly stated. Dame Westwood is an icon in her own right and is renowned for many things, including the success and longevity of her fashion brand. From the days of punk rock to now, her brand has challenged the world with honesty and a forthright expression of her perspectives. This authenticity has been a cornerstone of her brand, as have the experiences she creates through her designs, not to mention the experiences created because of them4. We have had various discussions with Dame Westwood; we studied her brand, her activism, and her work, and each provided insight into how stories can create movements—through authenticity—over a long period of time. The mere fact that Dame Westwood continues her success well beyond her origin in the punk movement is a testament to being flexible and staying relevant. Additionally, her story succeeds a time of great innovation that has changed much of the way we connect, communicate, share, and tell stories. Her story truly reflects the power of the same and highlights the importance of transparency and authenticity, no matter the cause or Purpose: “When I design clothes I have to like them and the clothes have always got a story, but you put those clothes on different people, that is, people wear them, and that story becomes part of their personal story as well.” Dame Westwood also shares the story of when Paloma Picasso was thanking Yves Saint Laurent for his designs just before he passed away. “She said thank you Yves, for making me more Spanish, more 40 years old, more Paloma, more dramatic. . . . what she was saying was, you gave me myself and all the facets of me that I discovered through wearing your clothes.”
These are stories for how design can be created by using authenticity as a core foundation. These authentically formulated designs create experiences for the wearer, which ultimately become part of the wearer’s story. So, although not all brands are from Yves Saint Laurent or Vivienne Westwood, they exemplify the value of being authentic to your Purpose and how it serves more meaningful connections and experiences with your consumer.
Authenticity alone does not engender an experience. It should define the relationship between Brand Purpose and experience, but it will not create a movement. A movement requires inspiration and experience. The key to driving authenticity is a universal and constant commitment to your Purpose. When you waiver from your cause and belief, you will typically lose connection with what is real to your spirit and culture. Great leaders in all levels of business (not just chief executive officers) are easily recognized as those who are rich in the culture of the brand and true to its Purpose. Think about whom in your organization exemplifies this. In what ways can you further engender authenticity and Purpose into how you act every day and what you produce or do for people through your products and services?
Being able to achieve this for a service, a product, or a combination (service product) of these demands that you truly understand the expectations of consumers. Before we get to that (we discuss the needs and desires of consumers in Chapters 7 and 8), and with the understanding that product and service function in authentic Purpose-driven ways in order to create experiences, we can now explore how we position the brand and product/service as a pillar for an Organizing Idea.
The Gift of Function. As we discussed earlier, there are long-term benefits earned from story and experience differentiation. To achieve this, we believe that your brand needs an Organizing Idea, an idea that helps inspire the type of experiences you have through the brand’s Storyscape. How the product or service is positioned represents one of the pillars for the Organizing Idea. The job of the Organizing Idea is to organize experiences that relate to how your product or service is positioned. This ensures relevance and connection to the functional consumer needs that it solves, therefore bringing to life the shared experiences that enable participation in the brand story.
Over the years, many models and approaches have aimed to define positioning: single-minded propositions (SMPs), value statements, the 5 Ws & H approach, brand essence, brand archetype, and so on. Each can provide value and play a part based on your preferences, beliefs, approaches, and needs. In fact, if you are looking to gain funding for a start-up, a value proposition is essential. However, if you are building a world or creating an experience, these won’t help. Here we need to evolve and push forward to the experience dimension that connects to the brand story through an Organizing Idea. We believe this new dimension is more relevant to the positioning for shared experiences and Organizing Ideas. Remember, you define your product or service in terms of its role as the gift, allowing your brand to play the role of mentor and enabling the consumer to connect with the experience and story as the hero.
Step Up Your Walk. Let’s break that down one more layer as it relates to our Storyscaping approach. First, our hero has emotional desires and thus is on a quest for satisfaction of those desires. The brand, through its Purpose (belief and cause), aligns itself, like a good mentor does, to the hero’s desire, thereby emotionally supporting and encouraging the hero’s quest. This creates a sharing of values between hero and mentor. Look alive. This quest isn’t fictional; it’s real. The hero travels a path of behaviors to solve his or her quest. Along that path the mentor helps the hero by providing a magical gift (product or service) that satisfies the hero’s desires and creates a shared journey (experience). The plot of this tale is written directly from the Organizing Idea.
Here’s a fun exercise to bring these concepts closer to home. Complete the following story line using your organization:
On the hero’s journey to satisfy ___________________ [insert consumer need], we, as the mentor, provide a gift of _______________ [insert product / service] that magically _____________ [insert offer, single-minded differentiator, value proposition], thereby creating a journey that ___________________ (describe experience benefit).
Let’s explore a few ways this could look:
On the hero’s journey to become a fit and healthier person, we, as the mentor, provide a gift of the new fuel band wearable activity monitor that magically enables them to monitor and share their daily activity, thereby creating a journey that inspires shared participation in increased physical activity.
On the hero’s journey to fight boredom, we, as the mentor, provide a gift of Vitaminwater that magically makes boring brilliant, thereby creating a journey that makes you part of a less boring world.
On the hero’s journey to zip around town, we, as the mentor, provide a gift of the Fiat 500 that magically gives you style inside and out, thereby creating a journey that elevates your “presence,” not your car size.
Based on this logic, you can define the positioning and role of product as a pillar for the Organizing Idea. It will, in turn, inform the Story System and shape your Storyscape. And remember, this must be in relation to your understanding of the consumer for relevance and meaning.