How to shift your brand's power from your products to your community
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In this week’s newsletter, we’ll cover a summary of Brand Flip, Marty Neumeier’s powerful book about creating community-driven brands that are not about extracting the most out of your audience but about helping them become who they want to be. I’ll summarise 4 of his most interesting ideas about how to:
Align your organisation’s brand with your tribe
Come up with your brand’s touchpoints
Turn your touchpoints into reality
Measure and optimise your brand’s success
Read-time: 18 minutes
Branding can be a confusing concept. We often think of it as a logo. But brands and logos are not the same thing.
And that leads to many people spending too much time arguing about how they look as opposed to thinking about what they say and stand for.
In fact, you can see very successful brands with terrible logos. What does a penguin have to do with open source computing?
Or a mermaid with coffee?
And yet, we know what these symbols stand for. Logos are trivial, even if having nice ones is worth it. But what matters is the way we think about the promise you make and what people expect from it.
A brand is a result. It’s a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organisation. It’s not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. A brand is your reputation.
And why is this important?
Because if you’re into building communities or open source projects, even if this also extends to any other product, your goal should be to help your users become the people they want to be, rather than demand what you offer and extract the most you can possibly get from them.
In his book, The Brand Flip, Marty Neumeier, explains the steps he takes to turn brands into mini-movements where an organisation empowers its users to co-create, grow and mutually benefit each other.
The lesson is this: instead of thinking about how to improve and position your products and make people dependent on what you do, think about how to improve and position your customers. They’re the ones who will fight for your success.
Truly successful innovations generate wealth for their users, not just their creators.
Wealth is not only financial. It can be social, educational, physical, spiritual or temporal—any good that people get out of a product or service.
The primary good that an organisation can offer its customers is empowerment. The best brand builders see greatness in their customers, and figure out ways to enable it.
But how do you segment a market that doesn’t exist yet? Or a quickly changing market where customers are moving targets? Or a market in which every customer wants to be his or her own segment?
Marty Neumeier argues that you have to flip your thinking. Instead of division, you need multiplication. Start with a small market and scale it up with social media.
What is a tribe?
A tribe is any group of people who share not only interests, but also information. They talk to each other. They identify with their tribes. I’m a maker. I’m a gamer. I’m a frog person.
They also identify with brands. I’m a Mini person. I’m an Ubuntu person. I’m an Atletico de Madrid fan. I’m a Stranger Things groupie. Since tribes can form quickly and organically, they’re tailor-made for growing brands.
You don’t target or own a tribe. You support it. Grow it. Partner with it. Organise it.
Leaders often spend too much time organising their employees and not enough time organising their customers and supporters—the group with the real power.
By empowering and growing the tribe, you increase its strength against competing brands, which in turn increases your ability to support the tribe.
How do you build a tribe? The trick is seeking out the truest possible fans.
To manage these relationships, you need to master the complex machinery of brand building, but keep it simple.
Start with a document that maps out the basic contract between you and your customer.
Then build it out, element by element, move by move.
With each new element or move, go back to the original contract and make sure you haven’t violated its terms.
If your brand effort gets off course (and it probably will), go right back to the basics.
Let’s look at a few tools that Marty Neumeier has put together to do this:
1. Align Your Brand To Your Tribe
First, consider who your members are, and then build an organisation brand that mirrors their identity, goals and habits, not the other way around.
For that, Marty Neumeier uses the Brand Commitment Matrix:
To fill out your customer column, here are the questions you should consider:
Identity: Who are they, and who do they want to become?
Aims: What do they want?
Tribe’s Mores: How do they belong? What do they feel is right, and what’s wrong? Are they tech-savvy, or do they prefer to meet in person? Are they socially active? What do they have strong opinions about related to your topic? Who do they share these opinions with?
Once you’re done with this, it’s time to fill your organisation’s column:
Organisation
Purpose: What’s the reason you’re in business beyond making money? Why did you start this project?
Onlyness: To avoid competition, you need to focus on differentiation.
Here’s a simple (but headache-producing) test.
Complete the following sentence: “Our brand is the only ____ that ____.”
In the first blank, put the name of your category (electronics company, school, restaurant).In the second blank, put your key differentiator (sells guaranteed for life knives, turns you into an engineer, caters to vegans).
For example:
- Wikipedia is the only open encyclopedia that gathers most of the world’s information
- Open Street Maps is the only open source mapping service
- Doughnut Economics is the only book on developing economics that don’t go beyond our ecological limits, or below our social needs.As you condense your unique positioning into a short statement, it becomes much easier to see what you have.
Beware of “ands” or commas—they’re very likely diluting your difference away.Values: What are your values? What’s moving you to take action?
Do you care about making things repairable? Avoiding waste? Breaking the status quo? Creating work that makes things easier for beginners and professionals?
Now that you have completed both columns, ask yourself,
Does your purpose fit your users’ identities and what they want to become?
Does your “onlyness” fit what your users want and need?
Do your members and users care about the same things? Do they live by the same set of values?
If not, instead of reinventing your answers to fit their needs, you might need to realign your organisation with other groups that might want or believe the same things you do.
If you can create a connection at this level, your brand stands a better chance of developing a trusting long-term relationship with your users, and they will be excited to tell others about you and what you stand for, because it’s also a way for them to communicate who they are and what they value.
The most important part here is finding audiences that naturally fit your work, rather than forcing your organisation to fit an identity that’s not true to who you or your team are, which will hurt your brand in the long term.
Being Trustworthy Through Authenticity
For your users to start trusting you, you’ll have to begin by being authentic with your purpose.
An organisation’s purpose, simply stated, is the reason it’s in business beyond making money. Your purpose should be aimed squarely at your members, now and forever.
Here’s the Brand Flip’s scorecard to ensure you and your team are true to your mission and in service to your customers and providers, and not the other way around.
Here are some other qualities of an authentic organisation:
It cares and has the courage and confidence to listen without defensiveness
(e.g., when GitLab backed down on forced tracking.)It is sincere in showing its need and appreciation for its customers
(e.g., when Arduino showcases its main creators.)It is so clear about its integrity that it shows it openly and unashamedly
(e.g. Prusa 3D showing the behind-the-scenes of how they manufacture their 3D printers or Gitlab when they transparently shared that they had lost substantial amounts of user data and got their community involved.)It has distinct personality and community
(e.g. Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy this jacket” campaign.)
As long as you remain authentic to your purpose and expose vulnerably how you are working towards it, you’ll build the trust and support necessary with the tribe aligned with it.
2. Coming Up With Your Brand Touchpoints
Now that you know what your brand stands for and promises, it’s time to plan how your community will experience it.
Think of brand experiences as “fractals” of the overall brand. Each experience is a representative sample of what your members understand about the organisation and its offerings.
If you find that a particular experience doesn’t reflect your overall brand, pull it out.
Every experience, every touchpoint, should illustrate the meaning of the brand and offer another way for your users to become who they want to be.
In practice, you should keep the most telling touchpoints and have as few as possible.
The more touchpoints you create, the more complexity and cost you introduce into the business, while keeping in mind that you want to give members as much access to your brand as possible, anytime and anywhere.
To develop your touchpoints, you can follow these two steps:
Draw up a list of all the touchpoints that make sense for your brand. You can choose from the Touchpoint Menu below, then add others that are specific to your brand.
Grade each touchpoint from one to five points. One being the least cost-effective opportunities, and five being the opportunities that might produce delightful customer experiences that are hard to copy by others.
Your customers will be able to encounter a range of experiences on their journey from awareness to commitment.
The bottom right quadrant experiences are where your tribe can start building the identity they seek and get others involved to turn into a mini-movement.
Avoid The Risks of Joining: From Punishment to Protection
Organisations that punish their customers or members are fair game for brands that are in service to their members. Wordpress, Prusa 3D or Gitlab, and others have taken full advantage of the 80/80 rule (80 percent of business is service, and 80 percent of customers report bad service) by breaking it.
Users want five things when they buy something or donate to a cause:
To feel more in control
To reduce the fear of making a mistake
To simplify the decision-making process
To offer clear and immediate emotional benefits
To be free of obstacles
How can you avoid the wrath of Members? By going from punishment to protection.
Remove your brand’s negative touchpoints. Start by listing the possible hidden costs, risks, irritations, anxieties, and points of confusion in your members interactions.
What keeps them from buying or donating?
One tool you can apply is forgiveness.
A forgiving format is one that accepts various kinds of user input and lets the system sort it out.
Wordpress or Ghost employ forgiveness to create members’ happiness by committing to open source or letting their users easily export their posts. It’s ultra simple for users to quit the service without a penalty. If the exit door is well marked, subscribers will be more likely to commit in the first place or, if they leave, to come back.
What can you fix?
Is the product hard to find or buy?
Are there unseen costs that users must incur?
What are the hidden risks or obstacles?
Are there features that cause anxiety or confusion?
Can you deliver the product or service better?
Can you save the customer some time?
Does your store or business have easy parking?
Is checkout fast and friendly?
Can you make the product easier to understand?
Is your instruction manual too long or hard to recycle?
Can you make users feel better?
Is the product or packaging easy to recycle?
Are there opportunities to produce savings?
Can you eliminate negative social consequences?
Is it possible to offer 24-hour service?
3. Turning the Touchpoints into Reality
Time to Start Designing
Start by focusing on the SHALLOW/GENERAL quadrant of the Brand Experience Map: Name, trademark, packaging and website
To come up with a good brand name, take it through these seven tests:
Distinctiveness (does it stand out?)
Brevity (does it have four syllables or fewer?)
Appropriateness (does it fit the brand?)
Easy Pronunciation (is it easy to say?)
Likability? (do you want to say it?)
Extendability (does it lend itself to brand play?)
and Protectability (can we trademark it?)
Once you have a name, start sketching logos and packaging or website ideas, and keep developing what your other touchpoints will look like in action.
From name to character to logo to package to website, you can skip across various touchpoints, going back with others for occasional validation, feedback, or inspiration.
In the process of exploration, you might come up with new ideas for other touchpoints like courses, product or programme extensions, or tribes to involve.
The goal of going through the touchpoint menu is to make sure you have enough great touchpoints so that members can find their way from a passing interest in the brand to a rich engagement with it. When you get to the bottom-right quadrant, where you turn control over to the members, think about how you can:
help them find special jobs in the context of the tribe-jobs that let them express their personalities,
add social capital to their lives,
help them build their skills,
make a difference,
or even make money.
Start Experimenting
Once you’ve sketched out some designs for your touchpoints, it’s time to come up with hypotheses, and create testable prototypes that will validate them and teach you what your members really need.
To succeed in a dynamic market, Marty Neumeier argues you have to flip your approach from planning to experimenting:
Learn offstage so you can triumph onstage. “Innovation amateurs talk good ideas. Innovation experts talk testable hypotheses.”
A hypothesis embodied as a prototype, beats market research because it can be tested.
The secret to great prototypes is to design them quickly and cheaply.
You have to try out various elements and make improvements as you go. Same with a product or a business model. The quicker and cheaper, the better.
So to start designing your prototypes, think with your hands:
Start with a scribble.
See what’s missing, what could be improved, and what else it reminds you of.
Make more scribbles.
Work the best scribbles into low-fidelity prototypes—limited-function mockups, models, or experiences that you can test in the real world.
The goal isn’t to impress your members, but to let them impress you with their reactions, knowledge, and insights. Think of a design as a rich conversation that brings you closer to the truth of your brand.
Once you produce a number of prototypes ready to test, like versions of the name, logo, package, and website, you can set up Zoom calls with 25 potential members to gather feedback and help narrow the field to the most promising and get small improvement suggestions that could make a big difference to the overall member experience.
Don’t Fall Into The Seven Enemies Of Simplicity
The deluge of overchoice and complexity is an opportunity.
Arduino was created as a response to the extreme difficulty of dealing with electronics. Prusa 3D is working to create a 3D printer as easy to use as a Thermomix. Ghost was a response to simplify the increasingly complex Wordpress solution.
The same technologies that create customer choice can be used to simplify it.
Smart companies are now following suit. They’re using design to remove clutter and give people back their lives.
But why do organisations create clutter in the first place? Why not start simple, like Google, and just keep it simple?
Because it takes great clarity, courage and discipline to vanquish them and fight the seven enemies of simplicity:
The urge to add. Instead of asking what features, services or variations we can add, we should ask first: what can we remove?
The desire to make a mark. There is a strong desire to create things we can name and point to with pride.
The need to grow revenues. Selling more stuff leads to higher profits, doesn’t it? It’s a common perception, but not always true.
The lure of competition. It’s easier to play an existing game, so we might lean into our tendency to outdo our competition.
The fear of falling behind. If another organisation adds a hot new feature (AI, blockchain, smart-something!) we might panic and we’ll feel the need to match that feature, while forgetting to substract previous ones.
The expediency of extension. Adding new variations to our brand to increase short term profits creates the risk of defocusing the brand.
The masking of weak design. It’s easy to obscure a poor design with more details. Instead, work to make the fewest number of details count.
Making Your Brand Liquid
Creating a brand that helps your members become who they want to be will involve “phase changes” as they themselves evolve.
Instead of having a “solid” brand, you can think of it as changing into a liquid with the ability to flow, to find new ways forward, to adapt to changing circumstances, and to touch everyone and everything on its path.
A flipped brand can course forward across platforms, through channels, over boundaries, and into touchpoints.
It can branch out to adjacent markets and braid itself into larger revenue streams.
Instead of a once-and-done exercise, a way of building community-driven brands is to create a continuing story told by both the organisation and its users.
It’s not a checklist but an endless storyboard. While well-defined plans are still necessary, they need to be rolling plans, subject to change as the game unfolds.
Instead of holding annual strategy summits, keep monthly meetings to keep learning and course-correcting.
To turn vision into reality, think of how your brand and touchpoints can evolve over the next five years, place these milestones and others, and regularly come back to them to see how they evolve and how they may change.
Plan the work, then work your plan.
This is what Marty Neumeier calls branching, the art of sequencing markets. Below is an example of how a tea brand and its touchpoints could evolve over time.
Check to see if each step can generate enough profits or cash to support the next, and that each step is modest, logical, and well aligned with the Purpose, Onlyness and Values of your Brand Commitment Matrix.
Each quarter, update the timeline to reflect changes in the organisation’s ongoing narrative.
But what about the Identity, Aims and Mores sides of the matrix? What stories will your members tell?
Story framing
Since the advent of social media, we’ve all gotten used to living in a participatory theatre in which we can both passively watch a performance and simultaneously want to go backstage to discover the story behind the story.
Before, a brand could tell it’s own story like a book, but as brands work with their communities, narration becomes more like a jigsaw puzzle put together by making connections and recognising patterns.
And as users long to be heroes of their own journeys, marketers need to pull back on storytelling and focus on story framing.
So story framing is about building a structure that lets members create their own narratives. It provides the boundaries that keep the story contained, like the edges of a jigsaw puzzle.
The basic framework includes the purpose, onlyness, and values of the organisation, as well as the personal identity, customer aims, and tribal mores of the tribe.
Out of the framework comes a range of encounters, or touchpoints, through which members can find personal meaning and growth. The job of the organistaion is to keep the framework alive while encouraging and applauding its users.
Every story has an arc.
In branding, the arc is the customer’s journey from a first awareness of the product to, in the best outcome, an authentic commitment to the brand. When the arcs of all users are taken together, they add up to an overall arc.
To understand what this looks like in action, FreeCodeCamp is a great example of how an open source course invites its community to create most of its course content, but also to create and edit content for its news, youtube and podcast channels.
FreeCodeCamp’s arc is about taking students from learning how to become developers until its final climax: finding a job in tech.
4. Measuring your Brand’s success
Replacing your Marketing Funnel with a Brand Ladder
Traditionally, marketers use the funnel image to measure their marketing campaigns. But it is wrong from a community-driven perspective.
Instead of stuffing people into a funnel to squeeze out profits, companies should be empowering members so they can help build the brand because it’s mutually beneficial.
This is not to say that monthly and quarterly revenues are not important. Just that monthly and quarterly revenues are larger, more profitable, and more reliable when you focus on long-term relationships instead of short-term revenues.
To replace the classic Marketing Funnel, Marty Neumeier offers to replace it with the Brand Commitment Scale (BCS), or customer ladder:
It’s a simple tool for measuring the progress of a brand from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment:
“The bottom rung represents Customer satisfaction. This is where trust begins. The customer has tried the product or service and found it to be as advertised. This may be a function of selling a good product, setting modest expectations, or both.
The next rung is Customer delight. Here’s where trust really catches fire. If you can surprise your customer with something more than baseline satisfaction, you’ll spark the kind of emotion that leads to loyalty and leads to recommendations.
This is the realm of great customer experience.One level higher is Customer engagement. When a customer is truly engaged with a brand, he or she enrolls in the tribe. With membership comes increasing loyalty, scaling repurchase habits and an emotional attachment that goes far beyond patronage.
On the top rung is Customer empowerment. At this level, members incorporate your brand into the deepest part of their lives. They may depend on it for emotional support, social status, personal growth, or even business success. They would no more switch to another brand than swap their right leg for a wooden peg. Empowered members will do anything to ensure your success, happily attracting others to the tribe with their magnetic sense of commitment.”
To measure each level, you can use the Brand Commitment Scale (BCS), an easy-to-use survey that yields a number from 20-100.
If conducted annually, the BCS can highlight your gains (or losses), suggesting where you need to invest more. It can also let you compare scores at each rung of the ladder for each of the eight questions.
The power of this survey lies in its simplicity. All it takes is a service like Framaforms or Typeform, and a little of your users’ time.
A sample of 1,000 surveys should be enough for most companies to get a useful reading.
And that’s a wrap for this summary! If you found this interesting, consider buying the Brand Flip book; it’s a quick read, and it’s filled with lots of examples and practical applications of these ideas.
Nice logos are a good thing to have, so if you can, why not invest in making it look good? But it’s not your brand, and investing in the experiences has a much bigger impact.
Over to you: What’s a brand you love and have high expectations for that has a terrible logo, and how did they make you trust and care about them? Why do you invest in them or contribute to the brand?