Trying it on
Taking one for the team is usually a selfless act of sacrifice. However, as things revved up on a recent project, I heard a story where taking one for the team wasn’t selfless, it was self-defeating. It made me sad.
I learned that the person who had taken one for the team was none other than the client CEO. That sounds noble without any context. You might think, wow, what a healthy, non-hierarchical culture. Oh my God, a company with meaningful values and a CEO who models them through their actions. How rare is that? And you might think it sounds great if I hadn’t already told you it wasn’t.
The sorry tale came to light because of this project.
It was a great gig for me. The client company was enjoying a meteoric rise on the back of great products and a quirky brand that looked from the outside like an easy, natural projection of the culture.
Small company telepathy doesn’t work at scale.
The brand had grown very big very quickly. Now it was time to draw breath and take stock. It was time for all kinds of process, operations, and culture things to catch up, by which I mean grow up. For a while as they scaled up everyone had an intuitive understanding of the brand, and a sixth sense for right and wrong. The brand guidelines were unwritten and existed only in the ether. It was all fluid and fast and fun. And it was working. But small-company telepathy doesn’t work at scale. The informal, anecdotal approach that got them this far wasn’t going to get them any further.
Newcomers to marketing were being left in the dark and left to their own devices. Brand communication, once so tightly bound to the culture, was suddenly all over the place. A classic case of a brand losing its voice. Eventually they decided enough was enough.
When your team gets ten or twenty times bigger you can’t continue without some kind of process and structure. There comes a point when, rather than getting in the way, a little bureaucracy actually helps to get things done.
In my line of work, bureaucracy takes the form of brand definition, brand guidelines, and sometimes a playbook.
And that was my job: bottle up all the good stuff and write it down. They called it “codifying”.
You start these gigs by taking stock. The brand had an idea, expressed in a slogan, that it used everywhere. The line was front and centre on the website, at the bottom of every ad, and all over social media. It was big and bold on their packaging. It had a tattoo-like permanence to it. It was thoroughly embedded, making it messy and painful to remove. I assumed they loved it and would be planning to keep it anyway. Nonetheless I asked the question.
It turns out that the CEO hated the line. It had been a daily, in-their-face source of disappointment. They’d served a several-year stretch of reticent irritation; getting a sinking feeling from their own train set.
This project allowed the CEO to finally come clean. The line would be the first brand asset against the wall. No blindfold. No last requests. It was an affront to their sensibilities.
Going with the line against their better judgement was how the CEO took one for the team. Everyone else loved it and they’d sold it in hard.
What do you do? You’re a good leader who hires good people and wants to be challenged by them. And what’s the point of experts if you don’t listen to them? Your instinct is to trust their advice and take their recommendation. But your instinct is also telling you that the brand you created deserves better.
It’s a good sign that the marketing people felt comfortable going out on a limb for an idea they loved. It’s also laudable that the CEO parked their concerns and backed their team. But these decisions have consequences.
The CEO needs to try the brand on for style and they have to like it.
From that point on the CEO was a half-hearted supporter of the brand idea at best. They’d find ways not to say the brand line in investor meetings or staff presentations, and they’d leave the slogan off their slides for keynote presentations. As a result the brand was misfiring in important situations. But the CEO kept their feelings to themself. No one knew. It was a sad and bad state of affairs.
It’s part of a CEO’s job to wear their brand on their sleeve. So it’s part of a brand strategist’s job to make sure that the CEO is happy with what they’re wearing. The CEO needs to try the brand on for style, and they have to like it. The strategy has to suit them. They should be talking up the positioning at every opportunity. They should be barely able to contain their excitement about the brand idea.
It’s especially important that the CEO is happy to preach the brand when I work with b2b/service businesses.
And it’s absolutely imperative that the CEO is on board for Strategic Narrative work.
I sometimes write a script version of brand strategy as if the CEO were presenting it at a staff conference. I literally put words in their mouth. It helps them to imagine how it will feel to be a high-profile ambassador for their brand. It works. When you put the strategy in quotation marks over a picture of them on stage, it suddenly gets real, and you have their full attention. A projective technique like this flushes out any concerns that might curb their enthusiasm later.
CEO enthusiasm is an important outcome for a brand strategy project. If enthusiasm weren’t such a nebulous concept it could even be a project deliverable. It definitely warrants a conversation:
“As part of this process, you’ll be trying this brand strategy on for style. And we’ll let it out here, take it in there, and add bespoke finishing touches to make sure that you love going out in it.”
Maybe try this too: Doing work that never sees the light of day