Do the Inner Work
How to Start Thinking of Your Brand Strategy. Step 1 of 5
Building a unique brand that gets noticed and resonates with your customers may sound overwhelming. By following a few key steps, you’ll learn how to attract, engage and delight your customers, giving your business a solid and healthy foundation from which to thrive.
This five-part series explains in detail what you should do, why you should do it and how, and what deliverables you should have at the end. The first five steps are:
Do the inner work
Find your niche
Define your brand personality
Know your audience
Map the customer journey
In this post, we’ll address the very first step: Do the inner brand work.
Do the Inner Work
Verbs are pretty flexible when trying to put action to an abstract concept. A brand can be designed, conceived, built, and other synonyms. This last one — to build — is the verb I believe fits best in this context. As with a building, a brand is something that takes shape bit by bit from millions of little connected pieces. And much like building a house, you need to start with the foundation: you first need to dig and go down before you go up.
Establishing your foundation in a brand and business context is just that — going inwards before going outwards. It is digging through layer after layer until you hit an original, indivisible source of truth — the underlying reason you’re in business.
Purpose, Mission, and Vision are the most debated, defined, and redefined words in corporate jargon. Instead of getting caught up in what they mean and the difference between one and the other, we want to understand how to best use them. While this stage should help you to articulate them clearly, the goal does not lie in the outcome itself but in the process of searching and wrestling with the big questions:
Why? How? What and Who?
In practice, the answers to these questions tend to blend into each other as purpose and mission both answer the question — Why do you exist as a business? Let’s take the Starbucks mission as an example:
To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
You could argue that purpose is included: to inspire and nurture the human spirit, delivered through company-specific means: one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.
Below are a few good questions you can use as a starting point. But first, I’d like to explore the less obvious implications of doing the inner work.
Why You Need to Give It Proper Thought
In a sense, this part of the work is the least exciting. It is the least visible and usually comes at a stage where you are ready to act, so it’s much harder to slow down and ponder. Introspection rarely is exciting, but it is arguably the most important step in creating a thriving business. The quality and outcome of this stage will permeate through every decision going forward and will guide and strengthen the collective, the client relationships, and the community as a whole.
So let me convince you in 4 acts that this stage deserves proper attention.
IT IS A SHAPING FORCE
You need to articulate your why, but you must learn to live by it first.
The biggest mistake you can make here is to delegate your business’ purpose to the marketing department or to keep it somewhere on the wall or website as a nice to have decorative piece. Your purpose and values should be a creed to live by, both internally and externally.
The difference between paying lip service to your company’s ideals and practicing them is profound. If you advocate for high ideals and actions but do not act in line with them, your influence will disintegrate for a lack of proper foundation. To inspire a positive shift in your customers and society at large, you must first embody these ideals in yourself.
Approach branding from the inside out.
The focus here is on strengthening your commitment to your principles and core values and not on influencing others or external events. Work on aligning the internal processes, products, suppliers, raw materials, and collaborators; check where the money is going and where it’s coming from; take responsibility for how your business acts in the world. Done well, the company culture, employee behaviors, and, yes, the outward expression through the marketing strategy will pull in the same direction and create synergistic value.
2. IT IS A CONNECTING FORCE.
It cultivates a community and creates a dialogue.
The industry you’re operating in and your business activity will be the first indication of which long-term goals make sense for you.
Beyond that, your values will help you find your people. When your values become deeply ingrained in your character and company culture, they will flow steadily outward from you. This process from the inside out will enmesh you in a web of healthy relationships. What you choose to prioritize in your business model will send a clear signal both downstream and upstream the production chain and help you plug into the right ecosystem of companies that are working together, from funders, and suppliers, to markets, clients, and future employees.
Great partnerships come from shared values and interests. Your purpose will act like a lighthouse for your clients and future employees. It will help define the kind of people that would like to work for your cause and who will likely share your company’s values.
For any group or organization to function well, its work principles must be aligned with its members’ life principles.” Ray Dalio in Principles: Life and Work.
It is well known that a powerful purpose and mission leads to a motivated and successful team and ultimately to a more profitable business. Employee attraction and retention are improved, and people are genuinely engaged in their work. Clients who subscribe to the same ideals will also start gravitating toward you. Your marketing campaigns won’t have to convince people that your product or service is better or cheaper but will only have to showcase the many ways you’re walking the talk.
3. IT IS A CLARIFYING FORCE.
It offers perspective and helps with decision-making.
If you focus too much on the product, you will miss the big picture. Establishing your foundation forces you to think about why you do what you do, for whom, and to what end. It helps you create a flexible strategy that will serve your purpose and allow you to find needs and opportunities that you can pursue.
Increasingly, companies are forced to react to the world’s big political, economic, and social shifts. Just this year, in the light of the Russia — Ukraine war, companies have had to consider their position, and many of them decided to withdraw from the Russian market. The decision to do so came at a substantial loss of profit in the short term but consolidated the trust and support for the rest of the global customer base in the long term.
It can be tricky and time-consuming to make decisions when you start weighing profit, PR, loss of opportunity, or angering your customer base, employees, or shareholders. But when everyone is aligned behind the same ideal, it becomes an easy call. Standing for or against a cause will be a natural progression of the values that you, your employees, stakeholders, and clients already subscribe to.
One recent example that caught my attention is Patagonia’s decision to support the pro-choice cause in the States and post bail for any employees arrested in abortion protests. As an outdoor gear and clothing company, you would think that this cause is a far stretch for them. But if Activism is one of the main ways they engage the world, this decision is completely aligned with the brand and the company’s core values.
A brand takes shape and becomes real with every decision. Your brand strategy is just that — a coordinated collection of decisions. Sometimes it’s about what packaging to use, and sometimes it’s about what causes to support. And when you know what you stand for, those decisions become a no-brainer.
4. IT SHAPES YOUR STORY.
It is the message you communicate.
And finally, we reach the most outward expression of your purpose. What you find at this stage lays the foundation for future messaging and storytelling. You can’t communicate well if you don’t know what to say. But there’s only so much you can talk about your product or service before you lose your audience.
Stories are the most powerful tool we have to organize and transmit information. By clarifying the ultimate benefits of your products and services and the higher purpose they serve — i.e., To inspire and nurture the human spirit — you can create a narrative that will connect to your customer’s ideals and aspirations.
Donald Miller puts it bluntly in his book Building a StoryBrand:
“All great stories are about survival — either physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual. A story about anything else won’t work to captivate an audience. Nobody’s interested.”
I tend to agree.
How to Go About It
This is where you ask the big questions. Think back to when you decided to start your business and take some time to consider what you want to achieve through this big project you’ve brought into being.
Ultimately, this is a reflective exercise and can be done alone with a piece of paper. But I suggest you work with a partner, close friend, or consultant to help you express your story verbally. Pay attention to the parts that energize you when you speak, and follow that thread to its conclusion. Ask Why? several times (3 to 5 times) to get to the underlying reasons.
Ask yourself:
Why do you exist beyond making money?
What makes you happy to serve others?
What inspires you to do what you do as a business?
What are you willing to struggle for?
What are you trying to achieve, and how will you get there?
Why should people care? What change are you trying to bring in them?
At the end of this stage, you should have:
1. A Vision and Mission Statement — your answer to Why?
This is where you think big and long term. This is the big daring goal or vision of the future. What is the ultimate impact you want to make in the world? Write 1–3 sentences capturing that.
2. A set of core values — your answer to How?
While you might connect to all the good values out there, try to focus on the most important ones. Try to avoid vague, lofty words and instead clearly spell out principles and values that you should strive to operate by consistently.
A short, bullet point list of 3 to 5 values specific to you and your business will make it easy to remember and carry these in everyday decisions and interactions.
3. A Brand Positioning Statement — your answer to What?
This is the promise you’re making to your customers. Think about what your brand does, for whom, and how, and write 1–3 statements to capture that essence.
For this exercise to work well, you must incorporate your knowledge about the market, industry, and competition when answering these questions. Make sure you do your research first.
4. A clear sense of purpose.
The work you do at this stage should last you for a lifetime, or at the very least for as long as you’re in business. Your values are steady, regardless of market trends or your most recent product mix. Strategies will need to be updated, but this will always start from this stable foundation.
That being said, your business will grow and develop as you will as well alongside it. What seemed important at one stage of our lives may not feel so central now, and that’s a normal and expected part of growth. Make sure that your values are still reflecting the core of your business, but don’t feel compelled to update them regularly.
In the following post, we’ll address finding your niche. A step that is difficult to make, but that will make your job so much easier going forward.