133. Obsessed 😍

Notes on brand strategy from Emily Heyward of Red Antler

Aug 17, 2020

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Hi there 👋

Over the past few days, I’ve been poring over Emily Heyward’s new book Obsessed. Emily is the co-founder of Red Antler, one of the world’s best branding agencies, and she has worked on brand strategy for the likes of Casper, Away, Burrow, and more.

The book is fascinating. I took a ton of notes. And I’m happy to share some of my main takeaways below.

If you end up grabbing a copy of the book, I’d love to know what you think, too.

Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan

P.S. Emily is headlining a major new event for us at Buffer — an online, audio-first conference all about brand-building, and it’s taking place this week. 🎉

Obsessed by Emily Heyward

The blueprint: Red Antler’s brand strategy document

Coming out of our conversation with founders, we first deliver the brand strategy, which is a document that outlines a vision for what the brand stands for, and we are usually creating it before the business has even launched. At the heart of this document are three critical pieces:
The mindset of our target audience, meaning, who are the people this business is most for? This section is less about identifying an exact demographic (e.g., women in their midthirties living in major urban areas) and more about identifying the attitudes and behaviors that define the people who will care about this brand the most. It’s meant to paint a vivid picture of the “brand champion,” the person who will be first to love the brand and will then spread the word.
The key problem for that audience, i.e., what’s missing from their lives. Of everything we know about them, what’s the most salient problem that this business can solve?
The brand idea, which shows how the brand is going to be the answer to this specific problem.

One of the strongest perspectives in the book is that amazing brands are built on a foundation of customer focus. You can’t have a brand that people are obsessed with unless you are obsessed with your customers. So I love that the Red Antler brand strategy starts from that place of the target audience and the target audience’s problem.

This is in line with one of the ways that we like to approach brand at Buffer, through an exercise called the Big Ideal, which seeks to find the intersection between a cultural tension and the brand’s best self.

The Venn diagram of the Big Ideal

The single most important question you can ask

The single most important question we ask in our first conversation with founders is not how their business works, or who their competition is, but what the problem is that they are solving for people.
Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, they don’t answer with the problem they’re solving—they answer with a description of their business and its benefit. Someone launching a new gym concept will answer, “Getting consistent quality training at an affordable price.” Or someone launching a platform for small-business owners will say, “Visibility and ownership of their data.” Notice these are not problems, these are solutions.

Another key element of amazing brands is that they are based on remarkable products. Again, there’s a strong customer ingredient here — what problem are you solving for people? I’ve also heard this phrased as “why do you exist.”

quote from Emily Heyward, Obsessed

Before you can have a conversation about the emotional resonance of a brand, you have to start with the product itself. With very few exceptions, the product needs to have meaningful differentiation in order to build a brand that people love.
Great branding needs to start from the inside and work its way out. You need to understand what’s special about the business and then figure out how to take what’s special and elevate it to a story with emotional resonance.

The Why Test

The Red Antler team likes to go through this exercise when helping clients get to the core problem and emotional need their product is solving for customers. Here’s an example (a fictional one that Henry Ford might’ve loved):

Why does it matter to people that their horses are slow?
“It takes me too long to get places and I can’t travel very far.”
And why does that matter?
“I spend more time getting myself places than enjoying my life and accomplishing things.”
And why does that matter?
“Because I’m going to die pretty soon and I have so much I need to achieve first! I can’t waste my short life on the back of this horse!”
And there you go.
The why test always ends with fear of death! Fear of death is the indicator that you’ve reached the end of the “why” chain. That’s because everything we do as humans, whether we know it or not, is ultimately motivated by knowledge of our own mortality.

On the importance of focus

Amid the fall of monoculture and the rise of e-commerce, the significance of brands that we all know, and more important love, hasn’t gone away. It’s just that brands today need to find a different path to growth, and it starts with focus.
It’s actually more work up front for the brand to zero in on a vision from day one, forcing a hierarchy of benefits instead of trying to say everything at once.

I was particularly taken by this passage: “To drive obsession, brands need to be comfortable leaving some sets of consumers and opportunities behind.” That’s not easy to do! Especially when you’re looking for product-market fit early on, you are tempted to take any and every customer that might come your way.

Remember: Do the hard work of figuring out not just who you are, but who you’re not.

Your brand’s personality: Can you find a tension and a contrast?

I’ll be honest: I kind of thought that tension and contrast within a brand’s personality would be a poor idea. But Emily shows that tension is what makes for an engaging, unique, and original brand.

We try to find terms that contrast with each other, creating combinations that have never existed before. This is how we ensure richness and nuance within the brand. Casper, for example, is both pioneering and lovable.
SoulCycle is luxury versus inclusivity. At thirty-six dollars for a single class, there’s no question that SoulCycle is a luxury brand. Regular classes can quickly become way more expensive than a high-end gym membership. There’s also an aura of scarcity,
... inclusivity. Wherever you are on your journey, you are welcomed. The front desk is always well staffed, with friendly faces greeting regulars by name and helping newcomers get set up. Philosophically, it’s not a place that’s only for the superfit or superthin; it “embraces every soul,” as it says on its website.
… earnestness versus toughness. SoulCycle’s brand is so earnest and open about its philosophy, it can almost feel dogmatic to an outsider. It describes itself as a “sanctuary,” a “safe space to ride through whatever you’re facing.” There are mantras on the walls of its studios, with expressions like “we inhale intention and exhale expectation.”

One of the tensions I think we ended up creating early on with Buffer is that we were “knowledgeable but never certain.” Often times, you expect someone with knowledge to speak authoritatively. But with social media, today’s best practice could be tomorrow’s tired tactic.

One of the most fun examples I came across with Red Antler’s brand strategy was with Burrow (a direct-to-consumer furniture brand), and these fun ads in particular:

What it takes to be a brand that thrives on social media

People engage with the brands they love on social media because it gives them a new, closer kind of access. Brands succeed now not by sticking out through glossy marketing, but by becoming part of the conversation. More and more, joining the conversation requires embracing imperfection, revealing a different and truer side of a brand’s universe and its audience.
If you know exactly what a brand is going to say next, why should you keep listening? Instead, brands create obsession by inviting their audience on a journey that has twists and turns, even cracks in the road, and it’s a whole lot more exciting.

On brand being a constant, evolving focus

You don’t ever “ship” a brand and then move on. It is a continuous process of applying, evolving, and adapting. This is a great thing to remember for young companies who are looking to invest in brands or more established teams that are building out brand functions: Brand is an ongoing investment.

The most common misconception that I encounter is the idea that a “brand” is something you create, and then you move on. Brand is a living, breathing thing. It’s the culture you continue to build among your internal team as you scale, it’s all the ways you appear and behave, and it’s how you evolve your story and offering as the world changes around you.
Even after you’ve done the hard work of figuring out what you stand for and why it matters, there’s an incredible amount of art and skill involved in translating those ideas into your consumer-facing expression, and keeping that expression fresh.

Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!

— Kevan

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Kevan Lee