Howdy fellow marketer,
Today, for the 80th edition of this newsletter, I have updated and rewritten two of the most well received articles of The Growth Report.
Namely, the 4Cs of Modern Brands and my own essay On Finishing Things.
While updating the articles, I realized that both are as true today as when they were written pre-pandemic 2.5 years ago.
Which made me smile, because to me it was always important that this publication writes about timeless principles that stand the test of time.
And this week I am also pretty pumped about the articles and tools shared in the resources section, so don’t forget to check those out as well.
But now without further ado…
...Today's topics
📈 Branding Strategy:
The 4Cs of the Modern Brand
🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers
⛑️ Reflections from the Trenches:
On Finishing Things: Why the last 20% are the hardest
📈 Branding Strategy
The 4Cs of the Modern Brand
No matter if you are selling to businesses or directly to consumers, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your branding.
For many marketers, this is a painful topic since it's hard to measure and the results mostly become visible only in the mid- to long-term. From the outside it’s often obvious which companies have taken the time to invest in their brands and built a loyal community of customers around them.
Branding is a competitive advantage and it's at least worth exploring how you can strengthen yours. I always look at the brand of a company like a person. Is this somebody I would like to meet or hang out with? And if you don't specify what you stand for and what your opinion is, this makes it very hard for your customers to get to know and trust you.
Ana Andjelic, one of Forbes' upcoming CMOs and PhD in Sociology, beautifully summarizes it this way:
Radical individualism is out, social connection is in. Brand focus is not on the end customer, but on the communities, they belong to. Just as personas made individual consumers visible, the new brand methodology makes visible consumer communities and their co-dependencies and influences. The new focus of engagement plans is not just on the brand actions, but on their secondary effects. The pre-pandemic consumer-centric brand strategy is now a society-centric strategy.
Against this new backdrop, there are 4Cs that emerged for the modern brand:
Community
Content
Curation
Collaboration
Let's quickly dive into each of those:
Community
Just like what content went through ten years ago, communities are rapidly moving from a "nice to have" to a "must-have". It doesn't matter what category your brand is in. If you want to build one yourself, you have to find a way to put forward your social mission and values, which are the glue for any community to form.
Ana goes on:
The key here is for brands to stop thinking about their community just as top-of-the-funnel tactic, and consider it as a long-term, bottom-of-the-funnel strategy (bonding, advocacy, loyalty). Next step is to define and focus on the most valuable customer communities. Community management overall has to be more personal. For example, high-standard of customer service in physical retail stores can translate in the equally high standard customer service via WhatsApp, Zoom, and chat.
Content
For most companies content has become a major part of their marketing and branding strategy already, but there are some changes underway in terms of formats and channels.
Across categories, brands have been pivoting to live stream en masse. Spurred by Instagram Live, every brand these days is in the business of enriching our lives - through recipes, daily meditations, virtual exercises, design hacks to fix our living quarters, life coaching, movie lists, poetry reading, puppy photos, and DIY crafts.
While situational, these calls to action open up agile content opportunities post-crisis. There’s also a welcome content shift towards live programming and away from polished campaign imagery.
Ana weighs in once again:
Brands will hopefully embrace this lo-fi approach, and put forward scrappy, live, and real content focused on communal watching and socializing. Community-oriented content tends to do better at the moment (versus the polished influencer one), as the currently predominant memes and aesthetic language demonstrate.While it may feel overwhelming at times, this lifestyle content pivot is a good thing: it moves the brands away from product marketing and forces them to explore, define, and capitalize on their cultural and social role.
Curation
In an endless sea of blog posts, product announcements and daily news, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate what's relevant and worthy of our time and what's not. So your brand, and your company can act as the filter or curator of all things noteworthy for your customers.
It doesn't all need to be your own content, curate the articles, opinion pieces, products, newsletters and books that fit your brand and you know your customers are going to enjoy.
You can certainly also dig in your product or content archives and resurface old but contextually relevant pieces of content that way. Or if you have an existing community, do a roundup of stuff that they are sharing. It's likely that other members are going to find value there as well.
Think of yourself as the curator, just like that one friend who sends you timely and relevant links, because she knows you well. Be that friend.
Collaborations
Of course, partnerships have been part of companies' marketing playbooks for decades. But especially in these times, show that you are part of an ecosystem. Partner with companies that reflect your values and have relevance for your audience as well. Collaborate on webinars, new product development, and charitable causes.
Not only are you going to profit from getting introduced to each other's customers, but you also show that you are not a lone wolf fighting only for yourself. Just like in real life, go out and make friends and find ways of working together.
The network effect and positive externalities on your brand will be invaluable over time. Especially if you collaborate consistently, you are going to be seen as the opinion leader and influencer in your niche who brings people and companies together.
Conclusion
Ana closes her 4Cs of Modern Brands rant with the following words:
This crisis is not a short-term acute emergency. It is a call to action for companies to pivot and hit a hard reset on the way they do business. The jobs to be done for a brand, going forward, are communal and social, and the business success is defined through how much a company supports other companies, how much it improves the lives of their customers, how much good it does to its community, and what kind of society it reflects. Coronavirus didn’t kill brands. Complacency did.
And again, you can apply community, content, curation and collaborations to your brand no matter the product category. For B2B companies it might not be as obvious, but the same principles apply.
And if you are still not convinced, one thing is for sure: If your competitor does a good job on the above and you don't, you lose in the long-run. Big time. And vice versa.
🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers
💬 The Secret of Genius
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.” – Aldous Huxley
👨🎓 Marketing & Leadership Education
Media Strategies Aren’t as Crazy as They Seem - As content marketing grows more competitive, companies are incentivized to think on longer time horizons, giving away more value now in exchange for payoffs that are deferred further and further into the future.
5 ways to level-up lazy listicle blog posts - Listicles are an excellent way to create engaging, helpful content. But as Ryan Law describes in this piece, they are often lazy. These are good tips—and the piece itself is a good example of a listicle done properly.
🤩 Brands and (digital) Products that caught my eye
Surfer - SEO Surfer is a great tool for those looking for an affordable tool to track and optimize their content based on keywords.
Monogram - A cool looking series of modular hardware consoles that help you with creative workflows in photo editing and retouching, video editing, color grading, virtual production, and audio/music production.
Tango - If you do a lot of documenting processes and workflows, this super handy tool will be a life-saver. For creating product guides, customer walkthroughs, team playbooks and team member onboarding.
📚 Interesting reads
Techno-optimism for 2022 - A deep dive of all the new technologies currently in the making, that give us reason for hope (for ourselves, our kids and human civilization as a whole).
Stop trying to be nice all the time (Video) - Nearly all of us wish to be known as ‘nice’ people. Yet our happiness may depend on a willingness to be — at points — strategically selfish.
⛑️ Reflections From the Trenches
On Finishing Things: Why the last 20% are the hardest
For me finishing important projects is hard.
To start things off, Taylor Pearson got a really good cooking analogy for not finishing projects 🦃
Even if your Turkey isn't going to come out quite like you hoped, you should at the least make sure it is cooked all the way through. After all, most turkey cooks often find that they are a bit harder on themselves than anyone else is. A mediocre turkey covered in stuffing, dressing and cranberry sauce is still delicious. And, most people are two drinks deep by the time the food is served and won’t notice. So, the worst mistake you can make when cooking a turkey is not taking it out of the oven. Even if it was a little overcooked or under-seasoned or whatever, you should always finish cooking it and take the turkey out of the oven.
Most of us really only have 2-3 big projects per year that move the needle and actually make a difference. And those are the ones for me that are the hardest to finish.
The worst mistake that we make with most projects is that we get about 80% of the way done and realize that it didn’t turn out quite as we hoped. Then, we leave it in the metaphorical oven, an 80% done project with little raw bits in the middle.
Why do we struggle at the finishing line?
If you are anything like me, as a project that means something to us approaches its finishing touches we start to think about what other people will say about our work. You know, that little voice that tells us we are not good enough. Well, this voice is usually screaming in my ear just before I ship, release or publish any important work.
And that's totally okay. It happens to most of us. It's the natural way of our brain to avoid danger and potential social fallout. The only problem is that it confuses our imperfect projects with wild saber tooth tigers chasing us through the savannah. 🦁
A then the second thing that usually happens, is that we learn new things as we work on a longer project. Pretty much everyone I know who has launched a business, released an important feature, or worked on a massive marketing campaign is always kind of unhappy with the finished product. They learned so much working on it that they now see all these things they would do differently if they started again from scratch.
And you know what? That's an unsolvable problem. If we start a project we will inevitably learn something new, but in this moment we must be vigilant and focus on finishing what we started. We can always get to the new thing later (that paragraph is me speaking to myself btw.).
Because as Leonardo da Vinci famously said:
"Projects are never finished, only abandoned"
Why it's so crucial to finish things
Maybe a few of the early parts of the project being completed create some work that could be used somewhere else - an almost done book can be turned into a few blog posts - but the vast majority of the value is realized at the end.
This following paragraph from Sebastian Marshall, is what sparked this article:
Getting 80% of the way done and quitting usually means you did 80% of the work and only got 10-20% of the value.
An "almost done" project is precisely about as valuable as an almost done turkey.
An hour or two of polish and delivery while we got the entire problem space loaded in our head becomes 3-5 hours after we've forgotten it. Even worse, it becomes 20-30 hours if in the meantime we get a key person change on a project or request for a changed scope from a collaborator or client.
It means we don't get the joyful feeling of completion and momentum.
If it was a paid project, it pushes back getting paid, keeps our accounts receivable worse, and screws up our cashflow.
Even if it’s not as much value as we'd hoped when starting the project, it’s still silly not to get across the finish line. The worst thing we can do is get a project to "almost done" and quit.
So let's take that Turkey out of the oven. Let’s crawl and drag ourselves over the finish we have to.
Our future selves will be happy we did.
That's it for this week.
Talk soon,
Sandro