Brand and the startup - transcription

Brand and the startup transcription

By Fiona Boyd |

Brand advocate, Michel Hogan from Brandology talks to Fiona Boyd about the difficulties of trying to identify and establish your ‘brand’ at the startup of your new business. This is a transcription of the original videopost entitled “Brand and the startup“.

Fiona: Today I’d like to welcome Michel Hogan from Brandology, who walks and talks brand and knows all there is to know about businesses and brand, I reckon. Thanks for coming in Michel.

Michel: Wow, what an intro, thank you.

Fiona: You’ve been a brand consultant for a long time. Maybe you can tell me exactly what one’s brand actually is. What is it really?

Michel: Sure…well, actually, one of the things that I call myself rather than a consultant is an advocate, and one of the reasons I do that…

Fiona: An advocate’s more involved?

Michel: Well, exactly. Well it’s, and it comes from this idea that I think there’s a lot of judgement around brands for people, for organisations, you know, whenever they’re bringing someone in to advise them around their brand, quite often it’s with this sense of judgement that it’s broken, that it’s already broken, there’s something wrong, it needs to be fixed, it needs to be changed, it needs to be redone. And so I really, that’s a point at which I really diverge from the traditional methodologies and ways of thinking about brand.

Fiona: So what do you do?

Michel: Well, what I really do is I work with organisations to help them understand what it is. Because I really fundamentally believe that any organisation, no matter who they are, their brand has a currency, it has a history, generally there’s a lot of goodwill and passion internally for the brand and if you don’t actually work to understand that and honour that, you can’t actually move it forward, and you really, I think, you might actually do a lot of damage to a brand if you don’t actually, if you don’t do that work in the first place.

And so that’s sort of why I call myself an advocate because I see myself as someone who stands with the brand rather than someone who stands judging it. And that sort of speaks very much to how I believe, what I believe brands are about, because, you know, brand is what you believe, what you truly believe, and what your actions show. And it’s the result of those two things, and so, when I’m looking at a brand, that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a good strong set of core beliefs, core values, and a good strong promise of what the organisation exists for, why are we here?

And I’m also looking for a strong sense of positioning, answering those questions, you know, what do we do, why do we do it, how do we do it? You know, that simple stuff that really gives an organisation a framework to act within.

Fiona: Michel, when you’re in the early days of a business, in a start up, everyone talks a lot about marketing, and they talk a lot about brand, and they probably talk more about it then than later. However…

Michel: Sad but true…

Fiona: However, in your last session you mentioned that it’s almost impossible to get your brand right at the outset because you’re really just coming to know what your business is about. You work a lot with start ups. What do you do with them if it’s impossible to know exactly what the brand is when you’re starting out.

Michel: The way I work with start ups is actually to build what I call a charter or a foundation for their brand. You can’t have a brand out of the gate, no, but what you can do it put some of, is be deliberate about putting some of the pieces in place, so that as you go forward you’ve got something to work with, you’ve got something to work against, you’re not sort of totally at sea.

So we look at, you know this idea of, you know, as we talked about in the last session, aspirational belief, of like, this is our intent, this is what we’d like to be. And articulate what those things are. And we look at this sense of postioning, as I said, the what, why, how stuff, which is very much about where you are now in your life, it’s the piece that actually keeps the brain fresh and helps you evolve because it moves and changes with your environment. And so as a start up out of the gate, what your positioning is, might be quite different in three to five years. And ten years, and twenty years…

Fiona: …well, hopefully…

Michel: Well if it’s not you’re dead.

Fiona: Yeah.

Michel: So, you know, and so that’s the piece that helps brands to evolve and stay fresh and actually give them that market currency that so many people talk about with brand but they miss the point that if you just have that piece without having anything stable to anchor it to, you’re just at the whim of the sort of market tides, I guess. You know, you’re tossed around. Yeah.

Fiona: You know, in terms of start ups, often you’ve got a number of founders…

Michel: …yeah…

Fiona: …and often core values aren’t consolidated at the outset because everyone has a set of beliefs and almost you’re sort of, you know, wriggling around each other’s belief systems and not really stating clearly what the real outcomes are that you want for the business. How do you get around that? You must have to work with everyone’s different belief systems and try and get them to actually commit and put some of this on paper. Is that how you have to do it?

Michel: Yeah, pretty much. As…working with groups like that, what I’ve found is, there is usually a core set of things that they can agree on, even if they’re coming from very different places. There’s still usually this set of intersecting points that you can then use as that base. And the challenge when I go in is helping them find those things. And the thing that’s really, that I always find interesting, working with those groups is, it’s incredibly easy to figure out how we’re different, it’s obvious, it’s always out there. What is much harder is finding where we’re the same.

Fiona: Correct, because it might not be obvious…or it isn’t obvious.

Michel: It often isn’t obvious, and so that’s the work, is finding where we’re the same. Because that’s the reason we’re in this together, you know, there’s a reason why we’ve come together to start this organisation, you know, and so one would hope – and I won’t say it’s always true, but most of the time, most of the time it’s true that you can find probably three to five things, and that’s about as many things as you ever want anyway. Have more than that and it’s impossible.

Fiona: It’s also about attention, isn’t it? When you’ve got a bunch of people you’ve got to focus your attention, and you know, two or three things is about all you can keep a bunch of people focused on.

Michel: I mean, three is, I always, I really recommend that organisations do not try and go for any more than about three to five, five max, absolutely max. Three, any less than three you’re probably missing some stuff, more than five you’re putting things in there that aren’t really, that aren’t things that you truly intersect on. And once you get those things in place it’s then just a matter of working with them and using them honestly in the day to day. You know, it only becomes meaning, it only has meaning when you actually work and act it, otherwise it’s just stuff on paper.

Fiona: Michel, what one piece of advice would you give to any new business about brand? One thing that you think is key and is essential?

Michel: I think the key essential thing for brand, for an organisation, is to actually bring a sense of consciousness to what they’re doing, and to own what they’re doing. And not to outsource it to everyone who comes along. I see so many organisations who outsource their brands. And by that I mean they hand them over to marketing, advertising groups, designers, you know, anyone who can swing a bat, and call themselves a brand expert…

Fiona: …and take a fee!

Michel: …and take a fee, you know, this is what your brand should be and this is what your brand should be and this is what your brand should be and I think that’s incredibly dangerous, because you have…unless you own it, unless you actually really own it as an organisation, you’re not going to be willing to defend it. And unless you’re willing to defend it, it will never have any kind of currency in the marketplace. And so that would probably be the number one thing, that from the outset you’ve got to own it.

Fiona: Thank you for talking with me today, Michel.

Michel: My pleasure, thanks so much, Fiona.

Fiona: I’ve been speaking to Michel Hogan, from Brandology, and we’ll join you again in a few weeks to talk more about brand matters.

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