It takes a lot of excavating to find a clear brand delivery, and once it's found, it's even harder to make it succinct. Marc Gutman explains just what the difficulties of branding are.
This is part 10 of a 13 part series identifying who Wildstory is, what the intricacies of branding are, and how this can all benefit you.
Video Transcripts
Marc Gutman 0:05
I mean, you laid it out like it was simple. But I have a feeling there's something tricky about all this. I mean, all these individual concepts make sense, but it doesn't sound simple. Yeah, in some ways it is, you know, in some ways, it's not. I mean, we're complex people. And what I can say is, when I work with every brand, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of excavating a lot of unearthing of all this information, to get down to something really clear and concrete. One of my, you know, I, I love quotes, you know, one of my other favorite quote is attributed Mark Twain, although I've recently done some research, and it may not be Mark Twain, but and it's famous, where he says, If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. And so the idea that it's really hard to be succinct, and simple. And so what's tricky about this is less is more.
So how do we take everything about a brand? How do we take everything about a company? All those eight questions that I just outlined? And how do we succinctly communicate that because less is truly more, and I will argue, it's way easier to create a 60-page brand book that takes time, right? Like it's just labor, than it is to create a concise one page brief, that communicates everything you need to know about a brand. And, you know, marketing teams, they have time for a 60 page brand book, but everyone else in the organization, who, by the way, branding is the responsibility of everybody. Right?
The CEO should own it, in my opinion, or a chief brand officer, like is it his business strategy, but the actual telling of the story, the actual goals, because this is business strategy, is the responsibility of everybody in the organization. And everybody on the leadership team has ownership of a component of the brand, and on how that brand affects the business. And so they need, like a one-sheet, a two-sheet, three sheet kind of thing, right? Like, that's all they have the aptitude for. And that is not easy. That is that is that is hard. And so what's tricky is that this is sort of like the fuzzy stuff.
This is the stuff that is sometimes hard to quantify, this is the stuff that is like, you know, takes time to unearth, This is the blocks we have this is the little bit of the psychiatry and the cultural anthropology and so excavating that unearthing that, just like anything we do in our business, is a little tricky than it usually just helps to have a professional, someone who's done it a lot a facilitator who can also keep you moving, right, like half my job when I facilitate work sessions is just keeping people moving. Because we could get stuck on one of those questions for days, weeks, months, we'd like to talk about it. It's big stuff. We feel passionate about it. And we got to keep it moving. And it's a lot of times my job to recognize where the nuggets are coming from what's relevant and what's not.
