Marc Gutman uncovers Wildstory's 8 poignant, yet quite simple questions that help clients articulate their brand.
This is part 9 of a 13 part series identifying who Wildstory is, what the intricacies of branding are, and how this can all benefit you.
Video Transcript
Keith Roberts 0:05
I won't work again, I'm so like, I need brand help with, you know, I mean, even going back 23 years, I wish I'd had this exit man, you are everything's evolved so much. But, you know, oh, you know, my new company would be amazing how if I wanted to work with you, you know, what do I get? What's the value takeaways, deliverables outcome? What is what's the process of working with Wildstory?
Marc Gutman 0:28
Yeah, the process is we're—I am very big on co-creation. And so there's some agencies that just, you know, you get an intake form, they go away, they come back, and they say, here's your brand. And that's not really how I work. You know, it's really about co-creation, we have multi day work sessions, where we're working with leadership teams to really suss out the essence of the brand. But the outcome, in a weird way is the thinking like, because that's the really hard stuff, you know, and the deliverable becomes this articulation of your brand, which is typically found in answering eight really simple questions. So this is like where it's like a little bit deceiving, because I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through these questions. And they're not hard questions, but they're hard to answer sometimes.
And so, in no particular order, you know, the eight questions number one is, who are we here for? So like, who do you serve? Who's your customer? Really getting clear on that? Why are we here? You know, what is your purpose? What are you here to do beyond making $1? What do we do? which is usually typically easy, hey, we are a branding firm, we sell alarm clocks, we sell water bottles, and how do we do it? What is our process? So, you know, you with the journal, like, you know, like, how do you how is your journal different than, than another journal? Because you have a different process? You know, what's our backstory, I find out so much in so much about a company, when they share their backstory, often, there's three reasons why a company has been founded. It's either inspiration, desperation, or frustration. And why was this business started? What's our vision? So people buy today with a shared vision of the future? Tomorrow, right? Or that people buy today? A positive shared vision? And so what? What's the vision? You know, what's the vision of the business? What makes us different?
Okay, got to be unique. It's got to be something different. Why do I buy a journal versus another journal? What do we value the most these, this becomes about core values, your beliefs, what do you stand for? And then what's our personality? So what's the personality of the brand? Because brands are like people, they have personalities, they need to live and oh, my gosh, in today's you know, content-driven brand landscape, if you don't have a personality, you're really, really in trouble. People expect that no longer do people want like, IBM, right? You know, let me back off that statement.
Some people do want IBM, but a business doesn't have to be super corporate all the time, it should have a personality, especially in my space, you know, where I'm working with brands that connect. And I think that's something really to understand like, and that comes back to, you know, number one, who's our customer, what do they expect? Do they want corporate a lot of times in your bank, you do. But you know, there's a lot of new banks that so fi comes to mind. And some other ones that are trying to you know, attract a younger, hipper demographic. And so they're much different or like progressive and flow is like the cool insurance company.
Prudential is the rock and they're the serious company, they still do the same thing. And it's really about branding. And so these are the inputs. These are the eight questions, pretty easy questions, you think, right? But they take time. They're deceptively simple. And so when we take this, we're able to take these inputs, and then ladder them up, you know, use them as the lens for, you know, creating the story about the brand ongoing messaging, and this becomes the foundational strategy and you can see why it's strategy. It's like, core customers, lots of big strategic decision. That's a business decision. That's not a color decision. You know, why are we here? Big, big stuff, you know, what's our vision for the future where we going with this brand? You know, what makes us different? These are all like big strategic business questions. These are not logo questions.
