We’re all Francesca now
Last week, Revved., a leading event and media agency, the brand behind the premier business event Revved. Summit, clients and friends of this firm sent an email to thousands of New Zealand's most capable leaders and influential thinkers.
Instead of "Hi [First Name]", it went out as "Hi Francesca."
That's their GM.
Plenty of people mess up and respond in fun ways. But the key is to do it in a way that is consistent with who you are and your values.
Their response: a warm mea culpa, T-shirts printed with Francesca’s name, and multiple LinkedIn posts (including a janky selfie that I took and posted) that cut through more than more polished content ever will.
We’re all Francesca now
The mistake probably did more for their brand than a flawless send could have. Because it showed a team that knows who they are, and how to behave when things go sideways.
What you do when something goes wrong is the clearest signal of what your brand actually is.
You have a brand, whether you're building it or not. The only question is who's shaping it.
Kerry Milne was on our podcast Slideshow with Dave Hayward recently. She told a story about her Dad that really got me at the time, and stayed with me ever since.
Her father, Kevin, was a bank manager in Western Australia in the 1980s. He never called it “brand” or “personal branding”.
He called it reputation. He reckoned that:
“Reputation is what people say about you when you're not in the room.”
That’s not terribly far from how brand savant, Marty Neumeier, famously put it:
“Brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”
Often quoted, but that’s because it’s so apt
It applies just as much to organisations as it does to people. The Francesca moment didn't just say something about Revved. It said something about Revved. and the people who work there. Personal and organisational brand, intertwined and working together.
How to get to who you are
Most businesses know what they do. What they haven't found yet is the language that carries it: the words that describe not just the problem they solve, but the feeling they create and the change they leave behind. What makes them different to other organisations with similar solutions?
That's the work. But how? You don’t need to know me for very long to know that I like a simple solution to complex situations, and it just so happens that there is one framework that is a great place to start.
Is your brand known? And is your target audience sufficiently aware of the problem you solve?
The diagnostic that cuts through this is simply asking three connected questions.
How well does your market understand the problem they have (or that they even have a problem)?
Do they recognise your brand?
Do they connect your brand to solving their problem?
Where you sit on those two axes tells you more about your marketing priorities than any channel review will. Low problem awareness: your job is to educate, not sell. High problem awareness, low brand recognition: you're in the inertia zone. Buyers know something isn't working. They're just not thinking of you yet. That's a brand job, not a sales or promotional/advertising job.
Profound lasting change
One of the people we did this type of positioning work with was Laz Csite, CEO of 360tuned and his team, which does digital transformation for not-for-profits and purpose-led organisations. Strong offering, no language that captured it.
We landed on Profound lasting change. Three words that do the work before a sales conversation, before a pitch, before anything. That's what brand positioning does: it gives your reputation a shape before someone else shapes it for you. It doesn’t need to be explicit, a strapline. Often, it's more powerful when it’s implicit.
It can be that you and your organisation know it, and that’s it. How you embody it does the rest.
The key is this: it has to be real. If it’s too ridiculous or too unconnected with who you are, and what other people think you are, it’s a meaningless slogan.
The brand behind brands
Dave Clark’s designs became one of the world’s most iconic sports symbols
A mentor of mine, Dave Clark, spent his career building brands that lasted, including designing the All Blacks silver fern, one of the most recognised symbols in world sport.
Dave led an extraordinary life. He did all sorts of things, including a career as a stunt performer, “being blown up” by some of the very best Hollywood studios, but most notably founding and leading Dave Clark, the brand, product, and digital agency that spans Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. I worked there, and they’re amazing (those two things aren't necessarily connected!).
At his funeral recently, the stories were so good, the laughter so real alongside the grief. I felt almost guilty about how much I enjoyed it. But that is because Dave was a great man.
His philosophies were also simple but powerful. I know Dave Clark (the agency) still lives by them, and so do we here at Europa Creative Partners: “Always forward.” “Great service and great work.” (I may have accidentally got those phrases a little wrong, but the spirit is right).
His brand and the brands he made live on.
3 simple ways to get started
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I really need to get onto this, but I don’t know where to start”, don’t worry, we've got you.
What is your brand already saying? Not what you intend or what you want to be. Ask a recent client to describe you in one sentence. What comes back?
Where do you sit on the awareness map? Do your buyers understand the problem they have? Do they connect your brand to solving it? Your answers tell you where your next investment should go: education, visibility, or trust.
Can you find the language? Can you describe what you do at its best, for the people it matters most to, in one sentence? If you can't say it clearly, your market can't repeat it.
Laz and I go deep on how he embodies Profound lasting change on the latest Slideshow. He has a philosopher's soul. It's not what you'd expect from a digital transformation conversation. Check it out:
Revved Summit is back on 6 August at the Viaduct Events Centre, Auckland. Early-bird pricing closes Wednesday, 30 April: $695 for an individual or just $232 with the pay-in-3 option.
Always forward.
Dave
