9 Ways of Thinking Like a Brand Strategist That Every Changemaker Can Adopt to Be More Effective
Everyone who wants to create change in the world at some point has to get people on board with their vision. Without people who embrace and advance your ideas, nothing happens.
‘Brand’ is a proven powerful mechanism to build long-term relationships with people. And brand strategists understand what it takes to obtain a place of prominence in the lives of the people they want to get on board.
You don’t need a two-year Master in Branding to develop this mindset. Awareness of brand thinking and how it can support work in the impact space can already make you that much more effective.
I’ve trained thousands of changemakers to think more like brand strategists in the past seven years. I see eight traits that changemakers can quickly adopt, which can make all the difference.
1. Make complex things easy to understand
Brand strategists excel in making complex things simple.
Why? In order to get a message through the noise, brand strategists know you can’t make people’s brains work too hard. Not because people are stupid. It’s because people don’t want to spend their time figuring out what it is that you are trying to sell them. They will disconnect.
In my practice as a brand developer and trainer, I meet some amazingly smart and passionate changemakers. Very often, I don’t quite understand what it is they do.
“We are a sustainability crucible for cradle-to-cradle concepts and circle-economy research enabling environmental activists to empower communities.”
“We support social entrepreneurs who are leading and collaborating with changemakers in a team-of-teams model that addresses the fluidity of a rapidly evolving society.”
That’s not strange. Problems like overpopulation, energy, conservation or human rights are complex. Solutions are often innovative, and we don’t always have the right words for them yet.
But if we fail to understand each other, how can we expect change to happen?
To get to simple is really hard. You don’t start at simple: you have to cut through all the noise to get there.
Marine biologist Dr. Ayana Johnnson, whose story I feature in Brand The Change, invests time in making sure her vision for change resonates with the people she seeks to bring on board.
While developing ocean conservation policy for a Caribean Island, she tested her messaging with stakeholders for over a year. Her phrase “Using the ocean without using it up” became key to creating political will, and getting important ocean policy accepted.
2. Meet people where they are
Brand strategists don’t fight reality. Instead, we meet people where they are.
This makes us very different from, for instance, activists. What I admire about activists is that they set a new standard for ethics and behavior. They draw a line and demand people come to their side.
When you think like a brand strategist, you move to where people already are. You try and understand their worldview, their needs, their channels, and their vocabulary, and you meet them in that space.
One sector where organizations often fail on this principle is the family planning space and sexual health space.
To my knowledge, no woman wakes up in the morning thinking about family planning or reproductive rights.
What women do wake up thinking about is that hot guy from work and how to impress him, or that job promotion that could be hers if she postpones a pregnancy.
Yet most organizations in the space keep talking about family planning.
Enter: Love Matters. They approached the issue of family planning through the lens of sex and pleasure. Google any question you might have about how to please your guy/gal, how to stay safe while being sexy, and Love Matters will come up at the top of your results.
Positioning yourself as THE information source on sex and pleasure is an incredibly powerful brand strategy for family planning and sexual health, and it’s a winning one. Love Matters reaches millions of young people in Africa and India each month — many more than conventional family planning organizations.
3. Broaden the tent
When you think like a brand strategist, you will find a way to expand your market (and consequently, your impact).
We tend to market to people who are our natural allies, the people who are already ‘inside the tent’. It’s tempting because we know that group well: we’re often part of it ourselves. But it means we’re merely preaching to the choir. Examples of this are plenty amongst fair trade products, organic food, and wildlife conservation.
Yet the biggest market for growth and impact lies with those who are not yet converted: those who are ‘outside of the tent’. How will we get them in?
It took the plant-based food industry a few decades to figure out that the biggest opportunity for impact is not with vegetarians, but with meat-eaters. And that the best way to convert more people to an animal-friendly and sustainable diet, is to talk about health and taste.
Today, players like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger are changing the way North Americans and Europeans eat.
It’s a playbook that many other sectors can follow.
4. Actively direct how others think and feel about you
A lot of us leave our reputation to chance. Yet reputation (what I know about this person/product/service) is decisive in almost every decision we make in our daily lives: which milk we buy, whose advice we take, where we want to have our wills made, which charity gets a chunk of our end of year bonus…
If you don’t direct how people think and feel about you, they will fill it in for you.
A brand strategist will ensure that all the signs that a brand is sending into the world, from the product itself to a campaign or an encounter with a team member, will build the right perception in the minds of the audience.
5. Understand you always compete with someone for something
I once asked the director of a human rights museum: “Who is your competition?”. The answer: “We have no competition because there’s no other human rights museum in town.”
This response is understandable and quite common: many of us think of competition as all the similar products that are on the same supermarket shelf.
If you think like a brand strategist, you think about the problem you solve for your audience.
Parents with children between the ages between 8 and 16 are probably a good fit for particular museum. The parents are looking for something that is both entertaining and educational to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Who offers a solution to that same need? This could be a nature documentary at the cinema or a visit to the national history museum.
Once you understand who you compete with, it’s much easier to know how you can position yourself in order to draw more people in.
6. Never blend in, always stand out
I teach a group of communication directors at NGOs, who face the herculean task of raising funds through campaigning. The visual below always raises some eyebrows.
How can you be the charity of choice when the average person can’t distinguish one from the other? You will have to differentiate, if not in offer, then at the bare minimum at a visual identity level.
Give Directly is not afraid to stand out. Give Directly’s approach is rooted in the belief that giving directly creates more impact.
They have a radically different approach to brand, visual and verbal identity, and messaging. In everything you see it says: no frills, the money goes straight to the beneficiary.
They stand out, which means that maybe they are not for everyone. But if you try to be everything to everybody you end up being nothing to nobody.
7. Focus your resources
Thinking like a brand strategist has as much to do with limitations as it does with possibilities.
No matter what size of organization, you have a limit to how much time, money, and talent you have to get new audiences on board.
When I am told that a particular product or service is ‘for everyone’, my alarm bell goes off. Targeting ‘everybody’ is like fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. It seems like a great opportunity because it’s an incredibly big space. The problem is that you don’t know where the fish are. You throw out your rod and all you can do is wait to see what bites.
Instead, if you focus on a pond, it is easier to spot the fish, to see what others use for bait, and learn about what works and what doesn’t. Once I learn how to catch the right amount of fish I can move to a bigger pond.
B-Corp outdoor brand Cotopaxi launched its first products on the campus of a university city, learned how to engage its Gen Z audience, and replicated that knowledge to new cities, new states, and the world.
8. Call people to action
For all the talking of WHY, and all the storytelling, we sometimes forget that we need people to take action.
This is a mindset brand people steal from their marketing and advertising colleagues.
You need a clear call to action so people know what to do. Buy this. Sign up. Hire me. Change this behavior, and here is how. Tell your friends. Donate. Play this game.
After putting in all of the hard work, don’t let people hang there. Get them on board with a clear call to action.
9. Make sure people know you
Last but not least: to be unknown is to be unloved. The most important metric for a brand is brand awareness. If people don’t know you, they can’t choose you. So early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
More resources on building brands for change
More on building brands for change
Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.
Brand the Change, the guidebook — your guide to building brands for change, with 13 case studies, 22 tools, the anatomy of a strong brand explained, and 5 guest essays by brand experts with tips and tricks on everything from trademarking to PR.
Brand Thinking Canvas — our go-to-tool to create strong brand frameworks
The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.
My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.
*Thanks, Reinko Hallinga, for encouraging me to unpack this topic!
