Launching GoodLove: How We Found Our Own Brand Idea
It took us quite a while to figure out our own brand idea.
It’s always so much easier doing work for clients than it is for yourself.
But we got there in the end.
After eighteen months of business planning, tinkering, and general muddling through a global pandemic, we finally launched GoodLove to market two weeks ago.
As a creative brand consultancy you’re (rightly) going to be judged on appearance.
I wanted us to go to market with something that we could all be really proud of and, I have to say, I think our design team has nailed the brief we set for ourselves.
At the core of our brand launch is the idea of helping clients to ‘scale belief’.
Looking back I realise we inadvertently ended up following our own advice and process to get to this idea (well what d’ya know, it actually works).
I thought it might be worth sharing how we got there here.
It starts with focus
We decided early on that we wanted GoodLove to have a tightly focused proposition.
Focus would mean we could develop true expertise over time. And, in our game, expertise is the differentiator that matters most.
From day one Joe (GoodLove’s other founding partner) and I knew we wanted to do highly-creative, highly-impactful work for our clients. Work that fundamentally shifts the thinking and opens up opportunities for growth.
We also knew we wanted to work with clients who are smart, energised and ambitious.
We wanted the work to matter and we wanted to have fun doing it (because if you’re not having fun, what’s the point?)
We’d figured out a lot of what we wanted but we didn’t know who we were going to be for.
So with the above in mind (and against the advice of our mentors), we started looking at startups as a possible focus. We quickly realised our model wasn’t going to be a good fit for most early stage startups (Money. Strategic Priorities. Likelihood of Pivots. etc)
But we stuck with our instincts and moved along the typical startup journey to see if there might be a fit further down the line.
We soon realised that we could create massive value for businesses that have achieved product-market fit. Companies that are moving into the scale up phase — typically around, or just after, Series A funding.
This is exactly the point where it makes sense for a business to invest properly in brand.
We could equip businesses with the tools they need to expand significantly and effectively.
We could play an important role in helping to create the magnetism, energy, and confidence needed for increased traction, growth, and success.
We could energise teams and give founders control of their own narratives.
Plus, it’s better to craft a seriously compelling brand before going to market in a big way, rather than realising what you’ve got isn’t up to the job once you’re out there.
We knew we couldn’t be right for everyone but in scale ups it felt like we might have a fit, we’d found our focus.
The lesson here is that focus is a necessary first step in the process of figuring out your brand idea. You can’t be all things to all people. You have to put a stake in the ground. Answer the question: who are you really for? It doesn’t mean you’re never going to do anything for anyone else.
An idea you can believe in
Next we needed a fresh way of talking about what we do.
Joe and I both knew we had a challenge: talking about ‘branding’ is difficult and confusing (and, worse, runs the risk of being boring).
‘Branding’ is vague, abstract and widely misunderstood.
On top of that most people don’t know (or really care) what ‘brand positioning’ is and usually think of ‘brand’ as the logo. This type of reductionism entirely misses the point and the potential but it’s the reality so it’s best to face up to it.
We toyed with ‘storytelling’ or ‘creating experiences’ but, though accurate, they felt imitative and played out — every brand/advertising/comms company in the world seems to be in the ‘creating customer experiences’ game these days.
It took us a while to realise that we needed to shift our focus: finding a concept to describe what we do was proving tricky, so why not skip past that to the value created by what we do?
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The idea we arrived at is pretty simple. Great branding makes people believe.
Simple? Tick. But is the idea of belief powerful? Excuse my French but does a bear shit in the woods?
We stroked our chins and thought impressive-sounding thoughts like ‘the need to believe, in all its irrationality, is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.’
Yes, belief is a big idea. And, looking around at the world today, it’s clearer than ever that belief, for better or worse, is as powerful a force as it’s ever been.
As well as being a simple, powerful idea, belief also happens to be a great way of talking about ‘what branding can do’ without ever having to mention the word ‘branding’.
If you’re looking for a core brand idea make sure it’s big but make sure it’s simple too.
Make it more relevant
Finding, and dialling up, the tension in an idea is one of the best ways to make it feel more relevant to a specific audience.
We saw straight away that there’s already tension in talking about ‘belief’ in the context of the startup world.
Belief feels irrational, emotional, intangible, unquantifiable.
It’s near blasphemy to talk about ideas like this in the ultra-rational world of tech startups, where logic, data and quantifiable metrics are the safe, accepted orthodoxy.
We also thought about where founders are in the journey when they reach the scale up phase.
The stakes suddenly become so much higher; money, livelihoods, potential, and reputations are all on the line. The commitment to proving a business idea can ‘scale’ morphs into an obsession.
It’s daunting. Belief has been inherent from the start and now founders reach this place where their small team of people on a mission is no longer enough.
If they’re going to scale successfully they’re going to need to make a whole lot more people believe.
We realised that a lot of founders in this position probably have dangerous blind spots — they’re purely thinking about how to scale the business from a product and operations perspective but don’t know where (or how) to start when it comes to scaling belief.
We had our core idea. GoodLove helps businesses to Scale Belief.
The takeaway here? If you want your brand idea to resonate it has to feel relevant (to your target audience) and if you want it to stand out and be memorable it’s a good idea to find and dial up the tension (specifically for your target audience).
Tell a great story
A nice idea is just that… a nice idea.
In order to build something bigger we knew we’d need to be clear on the wider narrative.
Probably the best (and oldest) way of getting an idea across well is to tell a story around it.
So that’s exactly what we did.
We decided to write the story of why scaling belief is important and how we can help businesses to do it.
We needed it to feel like a story but also like something we’d be comfortable saying to people who are interested in how we can help.
We started out by trying to put ourselves in our audiences’ shoes, we know a good few founders of tech startups so we were able to channel what they’ve told us into our narrative.
We made sure that our story had the right structure and elements needed to pull people in and carry them along — attention grabbing, humanity, high stakes etc.
The formula we used for the story on our website is actually the same one that great storytellers — from Hans Christian Andersen to Pixar — use to structure most of their stories.
We’re in the business of storytelling for our clients — here was an opportunity to showcase our capabilities through our own presence, it seems to make total sense.
The lesson here is clear too: if you want people to believe in you, you’d best get good at telling stories.
At the end of the process of finding our own brand idea we’ve got something that feels entirely different to what a lot of other brand companies out there are doing.
It feels uniquely us. We hope it conveys what we’re about and the value we can create.
Will it work? Time will tell. Will everyone like it? Probably not, but that’s ok. This is where the real work starts — we need to get busy delivering on our promise.
I look forward to hearing what you think.
