Brand-OH!

4 emotion-driven principles to take your brand from oh to OH!

NishRocks
13 min readNov 15, 2017

Nish Nadaraja was the 6th employee at Yelp, where he led branding and community from 2005–2010. He’s currently advises and consults on a range of start-ups, start-downs and big brands. Christina A. Brodbeck was the First Designer at YouTube. She is a seasoned angel investor, and now is a Founding Partner at Rivet Ventures.

Earlier this year, my good friend and colleague Christina Brodbeck and I were asked to speak at Big Omaha. The conference included a range of “big” ideas and inspirational talks, but for our contribution, we decided to dive deep into the branding waters to discuss what can make one company more meaningful — maybe even more soulful — than another.

Emotions, authenticity and the human condition were at the heart of our conversation, rather than growth, scale, and product market fit (our reasoning remains that the latter comes a lot faster and easier when it’s authentic).

Christina’s the one not drinking Coke.

What we presented was a series of brand exercises and considerations that every company and organization, from garage start-up to established brands, could gain insight from (and revisit often). These exercises can help brand anything from a company, to a new product, to a new feature, to a person. Indeed, over the years we both have used versions of them (some borrowed and modified, some our own original) to much success with our own clients and portfolio companies. Collectively, we called them Brand OH! and for the sake of your attention, they fall into 4 actionable principles:

  1. Know Yourself (Brand Self-Help);
  2. Have A Damn Good Story;
  3. Be Human; and
  4. Create a Cult.

A good brand is consistent across the board, and it shapes all areas of a company — from the office culture to the design and images used on the website and in emails. A good brand creates a desire for more.

Christina: It’s a red flag for me when in-house designers are only hired after the initial “branding” has been worked on externally. Designers are necessary from the beginning of the brand identity process, so bringing them in early in the process makes sure that a consistent design foundation (everything from the logo to fonts and colors are not just afterthoughts).

  1. Know Yourself (Brand Self-Help)

If a brand (and the people who work for it) doesn’t know itself, how will its customers? This was the challenge we all faced at YouTube and Yelp, making brands out of nothing at all.

Nish: When I first started at Yelp back in 2005, we were still part of Max Levchin’s incubator, and hadn’t quite solidified what we were fighting for (or against). I remember doing a lot of research on social networks like MySpace and Friendster (Facebook had just launched and Twitter did not even exist), meeting with social engagement experts and even talking to competitors like CitySearch and Zagat.

I also read a good amount, but not just from the usual suspects in the business section. I recall meandering through the “Self-Help” aisle (this was when people actually browsed physical bookstores) and seeing titles like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Who Moved My Cheese?, and wondering why no one had really applied the ideas of betterment and getting to know your inner self to brands. Self-help books help people define who they are and where they want to go. To me, it was clear that a brand was just like a person, reputation, desires, growth, and all.

I came up with some admittedly hokey exercises that were meant to provoke and stretch our imaginations, to make us smile and not take ourselves so seriously. In essence, they were lessons in anthropomorphism, under the notion that the brands I admired the most (Nike, Coke, Wegmans) all had actual human and personal relationships with their customers. I wanted Yelp to be your next BFF… a brand friend forever. Just like inward journeys of self-help, these exercises help define what you (the brand) do and don’t stand for.

Exercise A. Would you date your brand?

Imagine your brand walking into a bar… Is it the serious or demure type, the one buying the rounds, that guy who ends up standing on the bar? What’s your brand’s best pick-up line? What turns your brand on (or perhaps more importantly, who do you think shouldn’t be able to resist your brand’s suave moves?). Think about it: isn’t a product referral not much different than a blind date?

Christina: Some of my teams have gone so far as to create fake dating profiles for their brand word-for-word, profile pics and all.

Nish: Looking over a profile, so much of what someone lists is really just about branding oneself. Your favorite book, your favorite film and your favorite cocktail are the equivalents of glancing over a date’s CD or book shelf. Come on, is The Alchemist really your favorite novel?

Exercise B: How do others see you? No, really.

We are hoping that you, dear reader, are old enough to have seen The Breakfast Club. The basic concept puts five hardened high school archetypes — the rebel, the princess, the nerd, the outcast and the jock — in detention together, and each slowly reveals their story. Biases are broken, new perspectives are shared, it’s classic John Hughes cinema. And just like the kids in the film, brands are about perception and preconceived notions. You can only control so much of your brand before it takes on a social nature of its own (ask Uber, Trump or Guy Fieri).

Don’t You Forget About Me…

For this exercise, you need to get out there and ask people what they think of you (customer support emails, social media, and talking to people on the street are a good start). Think about what your brand claims to champion. Does it jive with the outside reality? Be honest.

  1. How would your friends (read: customers) describe you? How about your enemies?
  2. What do you stand for? What are you against?
  3. What do you do excel at? What is your weakness?
  4. How will you be remembered? As the song says, “Don’t you forget about me…”

Christina: I’ve led some teams in a fashionable variation of this, sometimes even creating a Pinterest board or cutting out magazine images. What’s your brand’s sense of style? Where would it shop for clothes? Fitted or casual? T-shirt or button-down? Street or couture? You start to visualize personas in a very visual sense this way! It’s also interesting to note that your brand might not necessarily dress the same way that your customer does, but every brand has a uniform, whether it’s a literal one or not.

Exercise C. “If I had a million dollars…”

Everybody watches the Superbowl for the commercials, right? What if suddenly you were handed a budget to fill a $1M ad spend during the big game? What would the ad be about? If you had a celebrity spokesperson, who would rep your product or service? Is Matthew McConaughey your new face? George Clooney? Venus Williams? Kristen Wiig? To that extent, where else might you spend an unlimited advertising budget? Cheeky print ads in Vanity Fair? Model glam shots in Vogue? Product placement in the next Bond film or Netflix original? So much of how we view big brands is aspirational and associative. Understanding who your dream celebrity endorsement would be is about thinking big and working backwards.

“Sometimes you got to go back… to actually move forward…”

Christina: I’ll never forget the first time Nish presented these to one of my portfolio companies. At first, they almost seemed too fun(ny) to actually make a difference. Yet with each team that I’ve since presented these to, each one has left the activity renewed, energized, and with a clearer direction and vision. Nish has been a great reminder to me that if you’re not enthusiastically having fun with your brand, no one else will either.

2. Have A Damn Good Story.

Almost from birth, we grow up listening to stories. Tall tales, fables, both verbal and visual. It’s part of the human condition to respond to stories and anecdotes; in fact it’s how we know we are human.

We have spent numerous hours talking to startups about the importance of a having a good story, one with heroes (and often enemies), strong characters, a compelling narrative, and of course emotional anchors. A good story makes you feel something and is universal. Brands need to inject this magic of storytelling, not just on their website and at ra-ra staff retreats but into every aspect of how that brand comes into contact with customers and potential ones.

What’s your story? We often encourage companies to outline their narrative. It’s a useful exercise that stretches the imagination but also helps you find plot holes and inconsistencies in your messaging.

Every Batman Tells A Different Story

Here are some questions we’ve used, just to get you started:

  1. What’s your origin story? Why do you exist? Would anyone else find this compelling (not everything has to be a bestseller but it’s not a bad consideration!)?
  2. What’s the genre? If you’re a Batman fan, there’s a big difference between The Dark Knight Rises and The Lego Batman Movie. (Be careful, for when things go wrong in a Juicero sort of way, you could end up unintentionally with Batman & Robin).
  3. Who are your main characters? Your founders, of course, but at Yelp and YouTube, the actual members became stars themselves. Anyone else? How about your customers?
  4. Who would be your dream cast? Not everyone gets a Social Network, but understanding how you might be perceived one day is worth thinking about right now.
  5. What is the conflict? In Silicon Valley terms, what are you (ugh) disrupting? What are you against? Who are you saving…and from what?
  6. What does the “ending” feel like? Is there a sequel or a tease of more to come?
  7. Any deleted scenes? What are the fumbles and features left on the cutting room floor?
  8. What will they say on Rotten Tomatoes? Your story will be made up of facts, feelings and interpretations, which means that part of your story won’t even be told by you. In fact, these days a lot of your story will unfold on social media, beyond your control.
A great nemesis can defines what you’re for and against.

If you don’t have a good story, you might as well be a commodity. In fact, when we think about Coke vs. Pepsi or Uber vs. Lyft or Trump vs. Fake News!, we’re essentially deciding on which story we can better relate to and meshes with our own story. At its finest, a great brand makes you want to root for it to win.

Christina: “What are your superpowers?” and “Who are you saving (and why do they need saving in the first place?)” are the main questions we challenge our companies to really embrace. Essentially, they ask what you do, and why does someone really need you in their life.

Nish: A great variation on the story concept is Amazon’s Future Press Release, which forces all parties to have an honest perspective on what you’re launching or hoping people care about. If this mock release isn’t truly compelling, then why build it? Every so-called Yelp killer that I’ve been pitched by has failed this bombastically.

3. Be Human.

IDEO put forward the idea of human-centered design decades ago, yet it still amazes us how many companies and organizations we see make product and marketing decisions without consulting real, non-cyborg humans. It doesn’t matter if you’re B2C or B2B; you’re selling to a genuine not-bot person on the other end. Think about almost every app you love and we’ll bet that the last mile of the experience is very much a human touch.

In this regard, branding is essentially a feeling. People don’t buy something because they go through the features and benefits. They buy from you and tell others about you because of the feeling you give them, which is another way of saying how you made them feel about themselves. Welcome to the new EGOsystem.

Nish: At Yelp, where community was the product, features were built to encourage interaction, with LIKE-ability being a key metric. Years after leaving the company, I still get thrills when Jeremy Stoppelman likes one of my reviews or photos.

A yelp promo we unfortunately never printed.

How many companies can you think of where you can actually message the CEO? We’re all in the business of customer service, where the only ROI is delight. We live in a time of instant responses and 111% accountability and transparency. Just look at Joshie the Giraffe and you’ll get it.

Joshie gets the start treatment at the Ritz Carlton.

No exercises this time, just some key tenets to post to your forehead or someplace you won’t forget:

  1. Listen, then keep listening. Your customers are already talking, so just as we used to tell businesses at Yelp, “join the conversation.”
  2. Be LIKEable. Are your social posts and interactions engaging, funny, useful? Would you click on them yourself? Do they reflect your brand’s personality?
  3. Respond to everyone. Be approachable. One huge pet peeve of ours is getting a “letter from the founder” and then finding out you can’t really reply to them. Do not fake being human; the cyborgs have not won yet.
  4. Don’t be a douchebag. It’s not that the customer is always right, but that they deserve a real answer, and not one that feels automated and/or inflexible. Your emails, comments and posts should all be said with a smile on your face.
  5. Empower your employees to feel ownership and pride over the brand. Your employees are real people, with real lives and are going to talk about their experience with your company whether you like it or not. Make them feel like they have the power to represent your brand versus being afraid that only the top-folks with media training can talk about what goes on there. The more in-the-loop they feel, the more they will be ambassadors and evangelists.

Christina: One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is having their funding rounds be the leads on their PR stories. Alert: most people, and especially your consumers, don’t care how much money you have raised. Instead, be human and try to center your stories on things that involve people — like how many people your service has helped etc. Always remember, your founding story is probably a lot better — and more relatable to the majority of people — than your funding story.

4. Create a Cult.

Nish: When I was first researching the original ideas around what the Yelp Elite Squad could become, I dove into cults. Not Scientology, thankfully, but cult brands like Apple, The Grateful Dead and (the old) Virgin. I wanted to understand what would breed such loyalty and fervor that they’d shave a logo into their scalp or wait in line for hours for a product lease. How could a brand find religion and inspire its customers to become evangelists?

The quick answer is to create a product or service that people actually want and then can’t live without. That becomes habitual. This has nothing to do with growth. Or hacking. This is a long road of nurturing and building and interacting.

Whatever happened to the innocent tramp stamp?

But let’s make sure this is very clear: you can’t just wake up one day and say, “[Your start-up’s name] has achieved cult status.” That has to be earned.

Here’s a running check-list to move toward culthood:

  1. Is your brand a lifestyle? At Yelp, we started with the notion that we wanted yelp to be a noun, verb and adjective, to become a household name. To that extent, we immersed ourselves in the details, from coveted promotional items that were not just slapped together to a semi-secret “club” for our best members.
  2. Is there a culture of happiness internally? You can’t spell culture without CULT, so give your employees reasons to believe (Pro tip: craft IPA in the kegerator and ping-pong don’t count as culture).
  3. Is there a true community that exists without too much management? Build physical or virtual communities around brands that allow people to identify themselves as intensely loyal fans or enthusiasts. Share brand experiences, identify information and resources, and partake in hobbies or interests related to the brand. Events are a great way to encapsulate and showcase why your community matters, and this was a primary focal point for the most prolific members of the Yelp community.
  4. Create brand rituals for both internal (employee) and external (consumer) audiences that convey added value and importance to the brand, plus a heightened sense of being part of an exclusive club or family. The onboarding of a new employee should be the perfect time to set the tone at a company, yet most companies barely go beyond a team lunch.
An assortment of early days Yelp-branded swag.

5. Do your early adopters feel like they are part of a movement? A good cult has developed its own language, its own way of speaking about themselves, what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for.

6. Does your brand (and being associated with your brand) deliver extraordinary and exclusive benefits?

7. Create loyalty, not referral programs.

Christina: In the early days, someone didn’t just use YouTube, nor were they just “on” YouTube. Instead, they identified as a YouTuber. They didn’t just use YouTube, they were YouTube.

Nish: When you think cult, don’t just think Charles Manson and Jimmy Buffett, think Jesus and Warren Buffet. Think about Harley Davidson, Elvis, Trekkies and the Yelp Elite.

You got all that? There’s obviously a lot in here, probably just as much as what we left out. That’s the thing, though, about brands. Just like humans, they can be more complex than computers, with each interaction and communication evolving and revealing. When you think about it (at least from a marketing and design perspective), the greatest brands aren’t just for us, they ARE us.

Thanks for reading!

Christina and Nish

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