Last week I was planning the creation of an image library for a client who needs a ton of visuals every month.

One of my principles is: never build a brand on stock if you can avoid it.

But as I started compiling our wishlists of photos and illustrations, my enthusiasm waned. The time it would take to create this was overwhelming. Time, and of course, money. Two things that don’t come in abundance in the social impact space.

At that exact moment, an email arrived saying I had been approved to try out DALL•E, one of the first AI image generators out there.

It seems robots can already read my mind.

I had been on the waitlist for a while. So I thought: why not test if I could build the image library with AI? I wasn’t expecting it to be a viable option for years to come.

What I was able to generate through AI astonished me. It was immediately clear.

This changes everything.

It’s astonishing. It’s frightening. And we should talk about both.

Can we already use it?
What would make it better?
Should we use it?
What are the pros and cons?
How might we make AI-generated imagery fair?

At first, it seemed too big to write about. But we must discuss the pros and cons and the bigger implications together.

So let’s go.

What are AI image generators?

DALL·E is an Artificial Intelligence system that can create images from a written description.

DALL•E is created by a company called OpenAI. It’s one of several AI-based image generators that are currently live, like Stable Diffusion or Mid Journey.

You enter a short description of the image you want to create. An armchair in the shape of an avocado. A purple furry monster in a dark room. Within seconds, there it is, no visual skills required.

DALL•E users were posting their results and they were impressive. This particular AI also appeared the most ethical of the options out there (more on this later), so I used DALL•E for my experiment.

My experiment

I wanted to run a test to see if I could create a series of images that were both high quality (as if made by a talented human) and on-brand (a particular look and feel that we are going for).

First, I used keywords to describe the scenes we would need for our content and campaigns.

For instance: “African female entrepreneur working on her laptop”.

Then, I added a style description: photo, oil painting, pixel style, in the style of Miro/Matisse/Vermeer, 3d rendering, or digital art.

As the images popped onto my screen, I felt two big emotions rushing at me at once. It was amazing. It was frightening.

I showed two colleagues. Jaws dropped. As it all sank in, one colleague said: “I don’t know if I want to live in a world where this is possible.”

Some style filters and keywords worked well, others not so much. Still.

I had expected AI to be years away from being a viable option. But at least half of what was generated was usable.

And so the machines have come for us. Not in twenty or thirty years. But today.

Is AI imagery usable?

The photo-realistic images, though impressive, differed in quality per query. The faces of the male entrepreneurs were blurry and twisted. But the virtual women generated by AI were indistinguishable from the real thing.

The 3D renderings were downright awful. With this query, the men came out better than the women.

The illustrations were much more promising. I did not like the illustration styles per se —most were totally off-brand for us. However, I was very impressed with how well DALL•E was able to produce different images in a particular style consistently.

With the technology as it stands today, I could build a small set of images, but it doesn’t yet outperform custom imagery, let alone stock.

But it feels like we’re 90% there. Which surprised me.

What would make it more valuable?

I see AI complementing the creative team only when we can create imagery unique to us.

I would want to train an AI system to create imagery based on our own brand’s unique style parameters.

Current AI generators allow you to create imagery in someone else’s style. That’s no good for a brand. I want to create imagery unique to us. So I would want the ability to work with AI developers to set our own visual style parameters.

My instruction for AI would be, for example: “A woman working on her laptop in [our brand’s] style”. Our ability to generate visuals for content and campaigns that are unique to us would explode.

And within one set of brand parameters, we could define unique sub-styles per campaign.

Should we use it?

Now that we’ve established that, yes, we CAN use it — the question is: SHOULD we? Here are some of my first gut feel pros and cons.

The potential positives

When I saw the images pop up on my screen, the benefits appear to be clear immediately.

For the downsides, hang on a second —those will follow right after.

More people will be able to create imagery.

AI opens up high-quality visual output for those who are not visually gifted. In the same way that Adobe, and later Canva, democratized creative industry tools, AI image generators will do the same, but at a far more fundamental level. At first, it will generate gimmicky stuff. Yes, it’s cool that DALL•E can create a 3D rendering of an armchair shaped like an avocado, but who really needs that? Quickly after, people will find ways to use it more purposefully, for better or for worse.

It’s a game-changer in terms of efficiency.

The logistic side of creation is considerate. Selecting, contracting, shoots, location booking, model release forms, post-production…

No more endless searches for the right creatives or models available at the right time and place. AI models and locations don’t require booking, contracts, or travel. With AI-generated imagery, you skip over logistics and go straight to creation.

With greater efficiency, prices will come down.

Creating and training an AI to generate visuals in our own brand style will most likely be a big upfront expense, but after that initial cost, the cost per image would lower than it is right now.

For creatives, it’s just another playground.

In the hands of great creatives, the gimmicky aspect of AI can be overcome, and everything still depends on a good concept and good execution. AI is just one means to an end.

The potential negatives

The negatives raised by my experiment were equally obvious. And also deeply frightening.

For every positive I mentioned above, there is a tremendous, unpredictable, and potentially devastating negative. Technologist and writer Andy Baio was spot on when he called it a Pandora’s Box.

AI image generators represent the perfect storm of ethical dilemmas.

Human jobs and livelihoods, intellectual property and copyright, social justice, privacy, and more, are at stake.

I am not good at predicting the future. If my opinions on online shoe shopping and selfies in the 2000s were recorded and played back today, I’d be a laughing stock (I said it was all a fad).

But the past 20+ years have taught me something about the progression of tech.

Like most tech, AI comes with tradeoffs, and those are as unpredictable as they are massive.

What’s at stake are jobs, money, and our humanity.

Let’s start with the last.

The previously uniquely human endeavor of visual creativity is at stake.

AI is often described as ‘highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work’.

It doesn’t outperform us purely on its own, though.

AI uses the whole body of human visual creation available on the internet to train itself. Technologist and writer Andy Baio calls this “laundering human creativity”. He asks four fundamental questions:

• Is it ethical to train an AI on a huge corpus of copyrighted creative work, without permission or attribution?
• Is it ethical to allow people to generate new work in the styles of photographers, illustrators, and designers without compensating them?
• Is it ethical to charge money for that service, built on the work of others?
• Is it even legal?

For this article, I want to focus specifically on the impact of AI on the brand space, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s wise to ignore the greater societal impact.

If you want to dive deeper into the dangers of AI to society, Baio unpacks pandora’s box of AI-generated imagery clearly and urgently: deep fakes, copyright infringement, privacy issues, and non-consensual intimate media.

And of course, jobs will disappear.

We know what happens when robots move in. More and more jobs get sucked into the automation machine, and many won’t be replaced by the new markets and services that will emerge.

The creative space can already be a tough route to a decent living. But it was always considered safe from automation.

My experience with DALL•E showed me that the mid and top tier of the creative sector is no longer safe from automation.

Of course, the ‘democratization’ and disruption of the creative industries are not new. The rise of platforms like Squarespace, Canva, Noun Project, and stock photo sites did just that. And they created efficiencies without killing the creative industries.

Those efficiencies made certain roles at the bottom of the creative industry superfluous. But they also lower prices, making more high-quality creative assets available to more people. It’s hard to imagine the blogger, creator or influencer space would have existed without these tools.

But AI doesn’t nibble: it swallows whole.

The disruption that AI will bring to the creative industries is unfathomable. This is democratization and disruption at hyperspeed. It will affect designers photographers, illustrators first and foremost, and all the creative jobs connected to those.

I suspect the first to be struck by the rise of AI-generated imagery are not individual creatives, but the free and low-cost stock photo and illustration sites.

When AI can generate unique imagery that equals or passes the minimum quality baseline of generic stock, why bother with it?

The creatives currently feeding those stock sites will be hit hard by extension — if these platforms were ever a sustainable source of income for them.

But surely a counter-movement for things ‘human-crafted’ will emerge?

When everyone zigs, a percentage of people will always zag. Custom bespoke work will be commissioned by those who consciously want something human-crafted. It should appear human crafted because that’s what people will want to show off.

But let’s be clear.

This tiny niche won’t fill the gaping hole left by AI.

Big Tech will get even bigger and more powerful.

When creative industry jobs disappear due to AI, money will flow to tech companies instead.

The first AI image generators run on a freemium or subscription model. They are the stock sites, illustrators, photographers, and designers of the future. And in a way, that isn’t a bad thing. AI running on a Facebook-like business model that is free to use but makes its money through data extraction is too frightening to comprehend right now.

But…

the value of the AI business model simply cannot only accrue to tech companies alone — it needs to be shared with the creatives it depends on.

I want to argue for the survival of human creativity purely for its own sake, without needing to resort to arguments of its economic value. But I know this argument never works with tech evangelists. It gets a predictable retort:

Should we have kept piano tuners and cotton weavers in a job forever?

“You can’t stop progress” is an end-of-the-road argument to halt all discussions of the ethics of tech and its impact on human society.

And no, you can’t keep people in jobs that no one needs. But maybe it shouldn’t get that far.

Current inequalities could be exacerbated.

My experiment left me with the question if AI will exacerbate racism, gender issues, and global equality.

Our global digital image body is built by those with access to digital media. That creates a geographic and economic divide. The global north decides what the global south looks like online.

Brand managers like me are already responsible for the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of people across income levels, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

The white gaze (or in non-European/NorthAmerican countries, the upper-class gaze) in brand image libraries is deeply problematic. Brands depict our hopes and aspirations. Who we cast as the heroes of the stories we tell, and what we require them to look like, is deeply biased.

Because AI trains on existing body of images, the human biases already existing could bias the future output.

The DALL•E team seems deeply aware of these ethical issues, but other AI companies seem less concerned.

How might we make AI-generated imagery fair?

We need policy makers and legislators to step in quickly

Currently, AI trains on the global body of human imagery online without asking the creators for permission, let alone compensation.

In a world where intellectual property rights and copyright protects creators, this seems highly dubious.

I’d ask:

Shouldn’t human creatives be asked to opt-IN to their images being used to train AI?

And if so, shouldn’t they be rewarded for their role in automation?

Recent history tells us however that you can’t expect these companies to do the right thing on their own without pressure from citizens and action from lawmakers.

The perfect storm of legal issues and the complexity of a global permission and reward system will delay the public and government response.

A delay that tech companies will use to roll out their product further until we all depend on it, and alternatives are no longer available.

The sooner we put pressure on tech companies and legislators to do this ethically — the better.

There will be new AI-related creative roles.

Is there a win-win for creatives in the brand space? AI-generated imagery is here to stay, and this is only the beginning.

We can’t just sit and wait for how this is going to shape the creative industries. We have to start thinking of ways that human creatives can harness this technology.

As a brand director, I imagine it will be my role to oversee the training of an AI.

It will be like creating brand guidelines on speed. You can’t (yet) get AI to develop a unique set of brand principles, so this will remain the domain of humans.

I imagine working with a creative team that is amazing at its craft, as well as skilled at the translation to an AI learning system.

In the boutique design space, there are already fashion designers designing purely digital fashion, venues, public spaces and products, but that’s in a way a digital version of the same craftsmanship.

AI takes that up a level.

We will need people who are highly skilled at painting a picture with words.

It’s not our ability to craft the scenes we envision, but our ability to describe the best scenes.

Visual arts will become verbal arts.

The winner of the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition that caused such a ruckus last week, Jason M. Allen, is an example of this shift of skills.

Creatives will need new pricing strategies.

I envision there would be the need for an economic model on two levels: both for the passive use and active use of human creativity.

Passive use is the AI learning from the entire body of human creative work.

For active use of human creativity, creatives will need new ways of pricing their work. Some of these might be entirely new, and some could build on existing models like royalties.

Imagine the style of a particular creative (or team) is used to create an AI system or an AI filter. Remember the ‘oil painting of an entrepreneur in the style of Matisse’ from my experiment? Let’s say I’ve trained an AI system to generate work in my style: ‘Line drawing of an entrepreneur in the style of Anne Miltenburg’.

Instead of traditional pricing per illustration or per hour, I should now charge for the value of the AI system’s ability to endlessly generate images in my style.

This could be an upfront fee, or some sort of loyalty or licensing agreement. For instance, a royalty per item created by their system, or by the period of use.

There is a caveat though. Business models like Spotify’s have proven that only the highest performing global artists would be able to generate significant returns on this.

Agents and associations of creatives should be hard at work experimenting with pricing models now.

The only thing that’s certain is that we will be conflicted.

DALL•E clearly offers an entirely new playground for brands.

As a brand director, it’s a big part of my role to create amazing creative work that’s on brand throughout the year. AI could be a huge asset for me.

But creative collaborations with humans are our life’s blood and a source of joy. And there is no denying that for all the positives of AI, huge negatives will come in to play — and humans, not AI, will suffer.

I already said I’m not a good predictor of the future. But I am 100% sure I will spend the next decade being deeply morally conflicted about the options we face.

Are you a creative professional in the brand space?

Tell me what you think and feel about AI-generated imagery. What excites you? What frightens you? How do you think it will impact you? Leave a comment below and it’s possible I will get in touch to ask you some follow up questions for a next article.

More on building brands for change

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

Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.

While we were watching the Wimbledon finals this Sunday, my husband pointed out the commercial for a brand called Ballsy, which he had been seeing all week.

He knows I’m always looking for examples of interesting brand expressions (or was he dropping hints for his upcoming birthday?).

It’s a men’s grooming brand focused on balls. Not tennis balls.

Men’s balls.

Tennis balls for men? No. Testicles. Private parts.

We had a good laugh about the commercial.

Giggles aside, there are some profound lessons to learn for changemakers who want to bust taboos.

1. It’s proof that niche works: in an e-commerce world, niching down works! Conventional brands like Philips will never be able to pull this off. They can follow the hipster vibe — but explicitly naming balls is taking it a bit far.

Lesson: niching down to a specific topic is no longer the risk it once was. See also my previous post on differentiating through niche with Charity: Water.

2. No more taboos: this is more proof that taboos are ready to be broken, and the brands that do can win big. Ballsy takes this taboo on full-frontal (no pun intended).

Lesson: People might be more ready than you think.

3. Based on customer insights: from the brand name to the voice-over, I’m spotting lots of consumer insights. Guys have to take on weird poses and angles, it’s hard to do a good job, it hurts, if you use your gear below first and then move up you get ball smell on your face, etc., etc. Lots of good reasons to stop multi-tasking with your beard trimmer.

Lesson: If you want to bust a taboo — start with the problem you are solving for your audience.

4. Creative ad placement: the mash-up between tennis balls and men’s balls is pretty fun. It creates an extra giggle. The contrast between the posh and decidedly un-humourous brand of Wimbledon and a ball shaver commercial enhances the impact and makes Ballsy stand out even more.

Lesson: It’s not just what you talk about, it’s where you choose to discuss it. Explore spaces outside your natural environment as a brand.

With Ballsy advertising running for several days of Wimbledon, the brand achieved brand recognition and recall with 100% of my polling audience (my husband).

I’m guessing this score will be consistent with the wider viewership of Wimbledon too.

More on building brands for change

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

Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.

Especially for people who are finding new ways to create change, there isn’t one title that accurately captures our work.

I host brand thinking programs for changemakers, so we run into this problem all the time. I’ve often wished there was a Job Title Designer I could bring along with me.

The words to describe what we do either don’t exist yet, or they don’t cover the richness of our work, they convey the wrong connotations, or they are so new, that no one knows what they mean (yet).

Why are titles so important?

‘Start with WHY’ may be all the rage, but other people still need to understand your WHAT in order to hire you, fund you, support you, or buy from you.

Without a clear answer to ‘what do you do?’, you waste a lot of time explaining yourself. People misinterpret and misrepresent your work. You lose opportunities.

It’s more than a communication problem: having a clear label for what we do is existential to our sense of worth and wellbeing.

During one memorable training session a few years ago, a young woman took the full eight minutes of her personal brand pitch to try and describe what she does. Her insecurity and frustration were evident. She never even got to her ask. She was clearly crushed when the buzzer cut her short.

“So you’re a community curator”, I summarised for her. She looked stunned and almost burst into tears. The good kind, I was later assured when we spoke one-on-one. Finding a better way to describe her work was fundamental to how she saw herself, and the value of her work.

Looking for a formula to crafting better titles

Though I was nudged by trainees to come up with a clever formula for the perfect title, I never did find it.

This weekend I was figuring out which talks I wanted to hear at TED 2022, happening right now in Vancouver. I scanned the speakers' list. I was immediately struck by the speakers’ crisp and clear 2 to 3-word titles.

Poverty fighter.
Philanthropy disruptor.
Urban revitalizer.
Meditation advocate.

Clearly, TED put time and effort into this.

TED knows like no other what it takes to spread ideas. If they invest the time to create strong, simple titles with their speakers, we should take note.

I intuitively started taking screenshots of all the examples that I thought would be useful for my trainees.

Once I put them all next to each other, a formula seemed to emerge.

All the titles that caught my eye consisted of two parts:

1. a role (designer, disruptor, advocate, enthusiast, leader, investigator, bug scientist)
2. a topic (space, meditation, sexual wellness, climate, poverty)

Nuclear Energy Influencer.
Space Architect.
Biomaterials investigator.
Resilience designer.

A clever, contrasting adjective to a conventional title creates a new spin, hinting at the way these people are changing their industries. Digital Public Servant. Artistic entomologist.

Not all of the 2022 speakers’ titles enlighten me entirely. Nor do they all work for the everyman. And yet.

Here were the clues I had been looking for.

By combining concepts we know with concepts we might not yet know, these titles send rich clues. It conjures up an image of the speaker’s field of expertise and their mission for change. They generate curiosity.

My watch list started to get really long.

This week will be the first time that I will hear the story of an Urban Revitalizer or Nuclear Energy Influencer.

Let’s see if it works for you as well as it does for TED.

Next time I run a training session, I will prototype a new exercise: create your max 3-word TED speaker title.

Step 1. Team up with a peer to write each other’s TED speaker titles.
Step 2. Open brainstorm on words that describe roles — aim for at least twenty, and write them each on one sticky.
Step 3. Same for topics (thought this list might be shorter).
Step 4. Mix and Match. Capture your favorite combos.
Step 5. Present to the group and ask everyone to say what they think the job title entails.
Step 6. Check if the associations are on point, tune, and test again.

Let’s see if we can create some magic with this formula. I will report back.

I wish you the job title you deserve!

More on building brands for change

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

Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.

Last Friday, I joined Carlos and Laurence of the Happy Startup School for a fireside chat on how to build a personal brand, the non-icky way. Lately, almost every conversation I’ve had on personal branding quickly veers towards the pursuit of authenticity. This conversation was no different.

Many of us are deeply uncomfortable with selling ourselves, and at first glance, authenticity seems the escape hatch out of that discomfort zone.

Why is authenticity so popular right now?

We’ve become savvy consumers of information

The common wisdom seems to be: H2H (human to human) works to get customers. Be your full self, and people will respond to it. Erase the boundaries between the professional and the personal. Be vulnerable, don’t be afraid to openly admit fears, failures, and setbacks.

Yet, judging by the questions I get lately, the escape hatch seems to feel a lot more like a trap door. And it’s causing a lot of anxiety and stress.

People feel like they are held at ransom: “Pay up with your private life, and you will get your professional success.”

After leaving the chat with Carlos and Laurence, I wondered, is authenticity still making us feel less icky? And is it getting us the customers that popular wisdom tells us it will?

To turn my work brain off, I went online to search for some inspiration for a weekend workout. Yet even there I could not escape the tyranny of authenticity. I ran into Wim Hof.

If you look up ‘authentic’ in the dictionary, there is a picture of Wim Hof.

For those of you who don’t know Wim: he is a Dutch athlete and wellness guru also known as the Ice-Man. He has been building his body of work for decades, became a minor celebrity in Holland, and recently took off globally through an appearance on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix show Goop Lab.

Wim doesn’t do styling. Wim doesn’t do de-cluttering. Wim doesn’t change his vocabulary.

And yet… Wim is a global phenomenon.

While watching his video mini-course, I was having fun imagining what it must be like to be Wim’s marketing manager.

Wim, maybe we want to put the plastic crocodiles away? Wim, could we clear the breakfast off the counter? Hmm… should we really shoot this in Wim’s kitchen? Does the fake grotto background kinda distract?

I can’t help but love Wim for being totally, unapologetically himself. And his marketing team must be keenly aware of Wim’s effect on people and decided to leverage his authenticity.

Wim’s example adds to the anecdotal evidence that putting your full self in the window display is a sure strategy for professional success.

Is Wim’s success more proof that authenticity works, and could work for anyone?

Over the weekend, I mulled over the conversation with the Happy Startup School community and my Wim Hoff encounter.

I work with many talented professionals who already find it hard enough to sell themselves well, and I don’t like to see more anxiety piling on for all the wrong reasons.

Before you put all of your eggs in the authenticity basket, it’s worth clearing up some of the misunderstandings around the concept.

Being authentic doesn’t work for everyone at every stage

If you pursue authenticity as a means to get customers, you should consider more than anecdotal evidence of its success.

Does authenticity really help you to get customers?

Hiring practices at big firms in the US give us some interesting clues. Though it’s not a 1:1 fit, the psychology of hiring employees is very similar to the psychology involved in hiring an independent consultant or contractor.

Research* has shown that during job interviews, only the top 10% of job applicants benefit from the display of authenticity and vulnerability.

Or to put it plainly,

being authentic and vulnerable gives you an extra edge once your expertise is established.

If you were part of the other 90%, your authenticity might make you more memorable, but it won’t get you hired.

This might be helpful to keep in mind when you are at the start of your career, you’ve just started your business, or if you are making the switch into a new professional field.

Authenticity can muddle your profile

The point of building a personal brand is to establish yourself in the minds of your audience as THE professional to help them solve a particular problem in their life or work.

But while all of us are so busy trying to show our full selves, we can forget about the perception that we are actually building in the minds of our audience.

A case in point from my own experience: I regularly need great brand copywriters. I follow a number of potential collaborators on Linkedin. Some are great in helping me understand what type of work they would be the perfect fit for through thoughtful posts that reflect on their work, philosophy and lessons learned.

Then there is one person who clearly follows the authenticity playbook, and is constantly busy being her full ‘authentic’ self, with posts stretching way into the personal sphere. I actually had forgotten she was a copywriter, to begin with.

Authenticity might help people build a fuller picture of you as a person (which can help build trust and preference), but it’s worth checking if that fuller picture isn’t obscuring what people might hire you for.

At the end of the day, having fans is nice, but having customers is crucial.

If authenticity equals ‘me, me, me’, it can turn people off

While the pressure is constantly on us to be our authentic selves, it’s easy to lose sight of the other.

No one likes a narcissist.

I have actually grown some resentment towards the above-mentioned copywriter: although her resume suggests that she is open to my business, she clearly has no space for me in her work-life.

She gives me no clues that she understands nor cares for the copywriting challenges that I face. As a matter of fact, I get the impression that she’d rather be something else than a copywriter. I certainly don’t get the impression that she would give her full self to my projects.

And maybe that makes me old-fashioned, but I still like to hire people who I think will do a great job for me.

Your authenticity only works for your business if it works for your customers.

Authenticity isn’t an escape hatch from the discomfort of selling yourself

We all find it humiliating to have to ask for business. We hope our product is so great, it will sell itself (fingers crossed it goes viral). We pray others will do the selling for us (hurrah for brand ambassadors!).

The authenticity trend seemingly offers us a way around the icky side of promoting our work: wrap the sales pitch in a personal story and it won’t feel like we’re selling ourselves.

It’s a little mind trick that allows us to fool ourselves into thinking we’re not really being icky.

But…

what originated as the simple notion that marketing is more effective and enjoyable when it is less manipulative and more human, is starting to feel very manipulative indeed.

Getting up in the morning and planning how we can come across as authentic as possible that day is pretty much the antithesis of authenticity.

When we reluctantly trade in our privacy and show off our full selves, our families, our love lives, our failures, our successes and our mental and physical health for marketing success, that’s next level icky.

Authenticity is NOT actually a brand strategy

When so much of our focus is on authenticity, we almost forget that it is not a strategy on its own.

Authenticity is merely a quality, or condition, of your expression.

A good brand strategy outlines what you will do and say to get your ideal clients or customers on board.

Being original and personable in how you execute that strategy can certainly help, but don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that being your authentic self is a solid plan to grow your business.

Let’s go back to the example of Wim Hof. I don’t think he is proof that authenticity works and could work for everyone.

Rather, I think he is an example of Wim authenticity done right.

Wim has earned his authenticity. It adds credibility to his expertise. He shows sincere care for people like me who want to be healthier.

Other than that, his brand/marketing department uses a pretty conventional playbook, which seems pretty non-icky to me as a customer. He understands that to make a difference in people’s lives, he needs to sell courses. No smoke and mirrors.

If the quest for authenticity is causing you sleepless nights, please take heart that it’s not the silver bullet popular culture makes it out to be. You don’t have to trade in your private world for your professional success.

Create a good brand strategy for yourself. Get to know your customers. Talk about what you do and who you do it with, with all the joy and passion that you feel for your work and the people you serve.

Chances are, people will love you for it, and you will be the first on the list when they next need an expert.

*As documented by organizational psychologist Adam Grant in his WorkLife Podcast episode ‘Authenticity is a double-edged sword’. An amazing information source that offers up many more science-backed arguments against authenticity as a silver bullet.

More on building brands for change

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

Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.

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!

We need to shatter the myth of the ‘Lone Brand Genius’ if we want to get brands for change off the ground.

There is this myth that it only takes one person to build a strong brand. Some visionary who knows it all, controls it all, and ignores everyone else, emerging one day with some mind-blowing, uncompromising brand created out of thin air.

The truth is that for 99.9% of us, it takes a village. Someone to come up with the idea, someone who can pitch it, someone who can bring it to life with great design, someone who captures the essence in great photos. Customers who give input, marketeers who go out and test in the field. Team members creating culture together.

And yet so many of us go at it on our own.

In a world that glorifies lone geniuses and self-starters, we expect ourselves to master every single skill needed to build companies, movements, or careers.

While many of us are deeply intertwined with what we are building, we somehow hope to retain the clarity of an outsider's perspective, so crucial in building brands that resonate with our audiences.

Or we perform to the best of our abilities, constantly curious how someone else would approach the same challenge, but never reach out.

The individualistic and self-starting approach can be effective, but if you end up feeling ineffective, inadequate or flatlining your learning curve, it might be a sign you are ready for a community-minded approach to building your brand.

I know this because I’ve been there myself, and have to actively suppress my own inclinations. And because I have a support group of hundreds of people around me who prove to me every day that this is the way to go.

Co-creation is a cornerstone of the Brand The Change method, and community is at the heart of all the learning experiences we develop. The interactions with participants, the peer coaching and matchmaking within our network, are never what people come to us for, but by the time they graduate a programme, they rate it the most valuable part of the experience.

One participant teamed up with another to create a deck to convince their leadership teams to invest more resources in their constantly underfunded brand building effort.

A community member gets up at 2am her time for a peer coaching session with another member who is about to deliver her first big solo pitch.

It’s no coincidence that the most popular meetup format in the Brand the Change lineup is “Analyse My Brand”: it puts founders in front of an audience to get the feedback they need. The format, designed by Maja Grcic, continues to energize crowds in a city that has become spoilt for choice.

All these experiences have shown me how isolated we actually often are — whether caught in a pandemic or not.

If you have been going at it all by yourself, while longing for exchange, support and deep insights, you are invited to join the Brand The Change community.

We all recognize that even the best soloist needs a support team. We celebrate our fellow villagers and don’t hold back when we have gifts to give and to receive.

More support for brand-building changemakers

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.

Here is the guideline I wish I’d had eight years ago.

We have been running online brand workshops for individuals and groups for years. I personally still prefer in-person sessions, because remote workshops predictably add physical and emotional distance and can make it harder to manage complex conversations, especially with multiple people.

But there are obvious benefits beyond the now unavoidable social distancing: more effective use of time, easier documentation, an equal playing field for all participants, no wasteful printing and notes, and many more.

In our online Brand Facilitation Course I always recommend starting with physical workshops and going remote once you’ve ironed out your facilitation challenges in the physical space.

But desperate times, etc. so let’s just jump right in. As with all digital habits, our brains are made to evolve and adapt to new circumstances and do so at amazing speed.

Here is the guideline for online brand workshops I wish I’d had five years ago.

We use the Brand Thinking Canvas as the main tool

We use our Brand Thinking Canvas as the main tool for remote brand workshops. It’s the best tool we have for creating strong brand frameworks.

The best platforms for remote workshops

Whichever platforms you are using, the tech is just a means to an end, but the smoother that means, the better. I use two tools simultaneously:

• one platform for live work on the canvas. I love Miro.
• an online audio+video conference platform. I use Zoom, but any phone app can do the trick.

Why not use the video chat feature in Miro?

If you are collaborating as a team, and you all want to be able to contribute to the canvas and paste your own stickies, you can choose to use the video chat feature on Miro so you have everything in one place and don’t need Zoom.

However… When working as a facilitator or consultant to help others create their own Brand Thinking Canvas, I restrict people’s access to paste to the canvas as they please.

I realize this sounds contradictory, but in my experience, in order for people to collaborate as a team, you have to restrict their ability to contribute individually.

The risk of giving everyone the power to paste notes is that people start writing away on their own, and you actually are not processing thoughts and aligning as a team. The result can be a canvas full of stickies and no coherent brand framework. Team members who disagree can just keep adding their own line of thinking.

During physical workshops with a group of people, I also hold the marker and the stickies and help team members to capture and align their thoughts before putting them on the canvas. I don’t change that approach when I do an online session.

More facilitation tips follow below under ‘Online Creative Facilitation Tips’.

Setting up your remote workshop space

• Create a Miro account (for free!) and start a board.
• Import the Brand Thinking Canvas PDF onto the board.
• Start your Zoom meeting and share the screen, or: give the participant access to the board on Miro
• Place your stickies, move them around as you want.
• Save the board so you can come back time and time again.
• Download the work as a pdf to share with the client as documentation of results

Making the most of digital

There are a ton of benefits to working with the canvas digitally.

You have endless space for note-keeping for whatever comes up that doesn’t fit the canvas. We’ve turned first ideas from the canvas workshops into extra sessions to co-create a brand manifesto.

You can create collages on the side if more visual thinking is needed.

It is much easier to change and organize a canvas. You can color code the different elements so you keep a clear overview. This is challenging in paper workshops, because you might switch a canvas to a new spot, and will have to copy it to another color note.

Gone are the days of staring at a sticky note, wondering what genius thought you will have lost forever through your poor handwriting.

At the end of your sessions, you have the canvas results right there to download as a pdf, no transcribing necessary.

Recording the session on video in Zoom is a great way to go back and find comments that you might have missed.

We do follow-up sessions, six months to a year after the first series. We simply open up the existing Miro file and update it as needed, creating a living brand document.

Online creative facilitation tips

The beauty of a remote workshop is that you can bridge geographical and physical limitations, but as any newcomer will find, online facilitation is not easy.

Here are some of my main tips on online facilitation:

Do: set the scene, and exit on an actionable note
The golden rules of facilitation apply online as much as offline. I use the goal-setting tool from Brand The Change, the guidebook, to kick-off sessions. This helps everyone on the team to understand what the business and impact goals are in the next few years, that the brand needs to support. I use the action ranking tool from the book at the end of the session, to ensure we understand which ideas will probably be the best use of our time and resources.

Do: ask people to be present for the session in the same way as they would be if you were together in person!
That means: be on time and ready to start, be in a quiet space, turn off phones, close any chat or email programs, close any other browser windows. I send the request for people to be truly present before the session starts, in an email with the goals and agenda of the session.

Do: ask everyone to come on video, if bandwidth allows for it. It is much easier to mentally check out of the session (or send an urgent email, or go get a coffee) if no one can see you, so keeping an eye on people to see if they are engaged is easiest by seeing their faces.

Don’t: combine online and offline members into one session, if it can be prevented. This division makes it really hard for those online to follow the conversation, and it’s much easier to ‘tune out’. If a team is just not able to meet in the same physical space, it is easier to bring everyone online — this levels the playing field!

Do: disable people’s ability to use an individual chat window, if possible. Team workshops can be very effective to get team members aligned and to get possible objections or conflicts out in the open and resolved. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of ways online workshops can go wrong. In one memorable session, I had two individuals from a team of five who were clearly having private conversations in a separate chat window to ‘team-up’ against others, in a way they could not have done when present in the same space.

Do: run icebreakers and energizers in the same way as you would a physical workshop
An online workshop can be even harder to warm up for than a physical one, so don’t forget to do group exercises to break the ice and get your creative juices flowing. We share lots of facilitation tips and tricks on our Brand The Change community and in our Brand Thinking Canvas on-demand facilitation course.

If the tips above do as much to highlight the challenges as the opportunities before you: don’t hesitate, just jump in! Trial and error will help you find the facilitation style and process that works for you. The extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in probably make your audience a lot more forgiving.

Let me know how you get on and feel free to share any questions in the comments and I will answer them as best I can!

More brand workshop and facilitation resources

Do you want to take your facilitation skills to a higher level? Take our online Facilitation Course.

The Brand Thinking Canvas is a part of a full brand development process documented in my book: Brand the Change: the branding guide for social entrepreneurs, disruptors, not-for-profits, and corporate troublemakers.

PS: Miro recently posted an excellent roundup of their remote working and online facilitation resources.

The Brand Thinking Canvas is not a complicated model. Several rings, a few sub-compartments, two pages with simple questions: ‘who are you?”, and “who is your audience?”. But it took me ten years to understand how to draw it*.

That’s because it’s not just a model: it’s also a process of co-creation and ideation, and a compass for implementation. It answers three major issues I struggled with throughout my early career:

How can we bridge the gap between strategy and design?
How can we close the divide between agency and client, theory and application?
How can we promote the idea of brand as a holistic driving force behind both action and communication, instead of mere cosmetic surgery?

Answering those questions took ten years of experimentation, failure, and smaller and bigger successes hard-won. It tested my love for my profession, my relationship with both designers, strategists, and clients, and my sense of identity.

This is the story of how the canvas came to be, in six acts.

Act One: the (mis)education of a designer

Within a year of landing my first job as a designer at a renowned brand agency in 2005, there was a generational shift. At twenty-five, I found myself in the unexpected position of leading a team of designers through the re-branding of one of the largest companies in the Netherlands.

Overnight, I became the sparring partner for the company’s head of brand, a young-ish business talent in immaculate pin-striped suits, who spoke in marketing jargon and thought in models. I was now the designated person to translate his strategies to tangible design.

I could not have been less prepared.

The piles of documents on my desk grew. There were 140-page customer insights reports and various brand models with missions, values and USPs, brand keys with insights, and brand proposition charts. “You will use these to brief the team?” my client asked optimistically.

I knew my team and I knew myself, and it was clear those models were not going to fly.

My education as a designer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, just completed the previous year, had consisted of courses on color grammar, user advocacy, and visual literacy. We discussed the work of Carel Fabritius, Stefan Sagmeister, and Anton Beeke.

We studied with master practitioners who pushed our design skills, training us in the best tradition of Dutch graphic design. I spent two years drawing letters by hand for a specialization in typography. Steve Jobs made the case for this skill years later, but in 2001, anyone beyond our school bubble would have thought it positively medieval.

Brand strategy, effective communication, and marketing were not on our radar, and if they came up, they were certainly not positive blips. My graduation professor Gert Dumbar used to stand up from his chair and announce after a dramatic pause that marketing was the devil, and sit back down.

It was a wonderfully eccentric education towards our faculty’s vision: designers who deserved a seat at the table. It left us students with the task of acquiring all the grown-up stuff ourselves: business skills, professionalism, and knowledge of the real world in which our lofty design work would need to exist.

Fast forward to 2005 and here I was: the sparring partner of one of the most prominent brand managers in my country. I had my seat at the table and no idea what to do with it.

Though the brand and marketing jargon the manager sent my way set off all the alerts my education had instilled in me, the models were fascinating. There was clarity and intelligence that appealed to me. Little did I know I would one day be making brand models and methodology for a living.

Act Two: attempting to bridge the gap

I knew I could not take these documents back to the team as they were, and some intermediary step was needed.

Luckily, we found a practical project within the vast rebranding process that was ideal in bringing the strategic documents to life: the redesign of the brand’s stores, where customers would need to experience all of that mission-vision-values stuff in real life.

Together with an older colleague specialized in typography for wayfinding (yes, that’s a thing), we drew a new model that tried to bridge the world of strategy and design. We jokingly referred to it as the ‘pudding model’, for its three layers and plumpy compartments.

My colleague and I were proud and giddy. We could do this strategy thing too!

At the top were the elements from their brand key model, then came the visual and verbal identity layer that we would provide, and at the bottom were the elements of the store experience.

Our giddiness was quickly quelled.

We had naively expected that the strategic brand elements, such as values, would extend to the actual products and the store experience. We had expected for instance, that the value ‘transparency’ could be translated to clear product price labels that compared product features on equal terms, like oranges to oranges. We envisioned the value ‘personal’ to mean a host would greet you at the entrance, instead of customers pulling a ticket from a machine.

But the brand manager quickly made it clear those interventions were not within his mandate. Our place to play was communication, marketing and interior design. The value ‘personal’, he suggested, could become a photo of a smiling family on the store window.

Now here was a lesson.

The models thought up in the board room wouldn’t always trickle down to all departments. A brand manager could only touch the communications side, not the product. And designers had to stay in their box.

In the next years, the separation of ‘brand’ and product became an ongoing frustration. It was the age where every client walked in asking us to make them the next Apple, but no one knew what it took to be Steve Jobs.

The constant effort to bridge the gap between the client’s strategies and the creative team’s designs, and a constant sense of disappointing both sides, left me in an identity crisis. I wasn’t singular enough to be a designer, and I wasn’t educated to play with the big strategy boys either.

In the first of a series of unsatisfying job switches, I made the leap to another brand agency, where the CEO invented the title ‘creative strategist’ for me. We all had to figure out what that meant.

Act three: a designer changes her stripes

By 2009, ‘strategy’ was becoming more and more important in the world of Dutch design. Dozens of great new brand agencies were popping up, and it was no longer good enough to be great at design: you needed to have the brains too.

At my new agency, as with most design focussed brand agencies, the visual identity processes had always run in a fairly straightforward way: 2 or 3 concept directions, one final concept fully developed, a brand manual to document, and some role in implementation. In this new stage, we started to play with what could come before it: the big idea.

This first phase became the domain of the ‘creative strategist’.

We would define the principles at the core of the brand and find lots of creative ways we could help clients grow and deliver on their mission. We could help clients to see branding as a more holistic concept that includes the product or service.

This new ‘creative strategy’-phase proved to be a great improvement, however, it had several clear downsides. The consultancy format was not a good fit for this type of work.

A client would come in and brief us, we’d sit and think hard for a few weeks, and then we would present back to them what the major principles would be that would drive their organization.

We worked for clients in a crazy wide range of sectors, and always on modest budgets.

Exceeding a clients’ knowledge of his own company and market from the outside in a matter of days was a herculean task that left us drained.

It will not be a surprise to you that our presentations were not always the smoothest of conversations, or that many of the ideas were lauded for creativity, but shelved as impractical.

The outside-in consultancy work, even if applauded by the client, would rarely be adopted in practice. Manuals and brand books were quickly forgotten or cast aside.

Things were not going so great in the team either. With these new ‘creative strategists’ on the team, the old guard of designers understandably felt pushed into the role of visual executors.

I felt defeated and, once again, out of place.

Act four: cleaning the slate

While all of this was going on in my agency life, I had started teaching at the world-renown Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2008. Cheered on by the visionary heads of department Garech and Declan Stone, I was able to create assignments that seamlessly combined strategy and design.

The financial crisis and the Arab Spring were in the air, and these societal issues made for the perfect backdrop of assignments for a socially engaged generation of students.

I crafted assignments that challenged students to design a revolution, to design the new bank, and to design their career.

One student developed a concept for a crowdfunding platform for revolutions and built the funding model, brand identity and online platform in a matter of weeks. Another designed a green banking model, the brand, and a two-minute explainer video that was picked up by local media as the real thing.

I had always loved Marti Neumeyer’s five questions approach to brand, which became my teaching mantra. To this day, if I meet a former student, they tease me with it: who are you, what do you do, why does it matter, who needs to know, and how will they find out?

Students seemed to have no problem combining strategy and design, and I could see they were not bothered or conflicted by the old dichotomy as I was.

Yet how could I teach students to believe they could shape the action AND the communication of brands if I could not get that done in my own working life? I did not want to set up my students for the same disillusionment that I had experienced.

Act Five: if you can’t beat them, join them

My last try at touching both strategy and design, action and communication, within the agency world, came in the shape of a new role as Creative Director at a large international brand agency.

Their commercial business mindset and strategy heavy, pre-defined process meant that where I was previously pegged as the buttoned-up strategist at design agencies, I was undoubtedly the free-thinking designer in this new context.

The company had an impressive array of strategic tools and methodologies and an amazingly talented team of mostly left-brainers.

Whereas at my previous agency, the strategy-to-design ratio of a process was 20/80, the projects here were the opposite.

Now it was my turn to feel like a mere executor of the strategists. The imbalance between the months, sometimes even years invested in strategy, compared to the few weeks I had to capture and translate all of that work with best-of-breed design and innovative experiences, felt out of balance, to say the least.

200-page documents that were endlessly picked apart word by word for months in meetings with a dozen top executives and high ranking externals, served as briefings for a mere six-week process with a tiny creative team.

Any strategic talent that I had displayed previously seemed to evaporate under the pressure, and it turned out I had no brain for commercial B2C brands. I simply wasn’t able or willing to come up with a reason why a customer should choose one drugstore over another drugstore, with the same product at the same price, if my client didn’t know that reason either.

I was at an all-time low in every way.

I was either going to accept that I did not belong anywhere and re-train for a new profession, or I would have to craft my own way. I chose the latter, quit my job, and went independent.

Act Six: pave your own road

For nine years I had experienced what didn’t work for me or my collaborators. Now I was on my own with no one to pull me one way or the other, I wanted to develop a process that would work for everyone.

A brand development process where the strategist, the entrepreneur and the creative could collaborate.

Where we would shape the core of the brand, and translate it to an identity that would fit like a glove.

Where we could think up all the ways to bring the brand to life through great experiences. Experiences the entrepreneur or leadership and her team would love to bring to life.

That left everyone feeling like they owned the brand and had a firm grasp on how to live it every day.

In 2011, I started experimenting with different co-creation processes and self-made models. My first guinea pigs walked through a 30-page paper prototype workbook which helped them answer Marty’s five questions: Who are you, What do you do, Why does it matter, Who needs to know, How will they find out?

I quickly realized, thirty pages are too much. More sessions with other entrepreneurs followed, through which I distilled all those pages back down to one model.

After several iterations of interlocking circles that visualized how core, identity, and experiences were corresponding vessels (a big improvement on my pudding model from 2004), I was ready to test what would become the Brand Thinking Canvas, at THNK, a creative leadership school, in 2014.

Within the first session, I realized: this is not a model to create on your own, this is a co-creation model, and a workshop format is a perfect format to deliver it.

Using a ‘canvas’ in this way was nothing new, as the Business Model Canvas had shown. But it was new to me and my context, and the elated responses from others quickly confirmed I was onto something.

The beginning

I’ve since worked with over 2,000 individuals and companies with the Brand Thinking Canvas.

It’s been translated to Arabic, German, Korean, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

I’ve witnessed small miracles, big eye-opening moments, and equally big fights between founders. I still swear by the tool to this day.

I realize I must have looked pretty lost to anyone following my career.

And in a way, this is a letter of thanks to everyone who had patience with me while I tried to figure all of this out, and to my 25-year-old self: everything will all be ok.

I spent ten years and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears crafting my own place in the world of branding.

I did not know it then, but the deep sense of not belonging, the failures and the embarrassing experiences were needed to get to where I am now. They were crucial in shaping the company I run today, and the tools and brand development methodology at the heart of it.

The best thing to have come out of this all is that I’ve found there are thousands of others like me out there: entrepreneurs who think like brand strategists, brand strategists who love to get into the design domain, and designers with a talent for strategy. The Brand Thinking Canvas is here for them all.

Do you share the challenges I’ve faced? Do you have tips, suggestions or questions! I’d love to hear from you.

*This opening line is inspired by the brilliant designer Paula Scher, who famously said: “It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

More on the Brand Thinking Canvas

Try the Brand Thinking Canvas yourself.

Do you want to help others build stronger brands with this powerful tool? I unpack all my lessons learned in our online Brand Thinking Canvas Facilitation Course.

The Brand Thinking Canvas is the main tool of 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 the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.

Yesterday it was Gillette and Nike. Today, it’s Lego. We find ourselves enveloped in a trend that shows no signs of slowing down: ‘Purpose’ is on everyone’s lips, and every day a new company jumps on the bandwagon with a campaign that gets our tongues wagging.

Almost every week for the past five years, people ask me what I think of this trend. Is it good, or is it bad?

My answer often takes people by surprise: sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, mostly depending on your own value system and political views.

The fact that the debate reoccurs time and time again, is because it is ‘impossible in one sense, and unavoidable in another’*.

The debate is so compelling because we have to consider fundamental definitions of justice that the likes of Aristotle, Kant, Stuart Mill, and Bentham never agreed on. It is so complex because it is tied into the discussion of the virtues and evils of capitalism.

The debate is also of every age: we might think of purpose-marketing as a recent trend, but actually, it goes back decades, and so too does the controversy.

The purpose-marketing debate is not new

Back in the 1990s, the Italian clothing company Benetton gave creative director Oliviero Toscani a carte blanche for its advertising campaigns, which he used to raise awareness of discrimination, AIDS, and cultural and religious intolerance.

None of these topics had any connection to Benetton’s actual product or the way the company operated. Fans of the approach called it the most effective way to spread a message and lauded its impact. Foes were outraged that human suffering was used to sell clothes. It became a decade-long controversial strategy, but it paid off: Benetton became one of the most successful fashion brands of the era.

Twenty-five years later, the arguments for and against brands taking a stand on social issues have not changed much.

So, ‘Is purpose marketing a good or a bad thing?’

In order to answer this question, we first need to get our definition of purpose marketing right.

First, let’s separate purpose-marketing from purpose-led brands

Once we are clear on which of the two we are actually talking about, the debate becomes a little easier to grasp.

Let’s not confuse a single ‘purpose-driven’ ad campaign, focused on a single social issue and running for a couple of weeks, with a brand whose product, supply chain, production process, HR policies, finances, partnerships, and communications are all lead by a social and environmentally sustainable purpose.

When we focus on the first category, purpose marketing, we can look at that category’s prime examples and use them to consider the ethical dilemmas at stake.

Sometimes it’s good…

If you believe that the consequences of one’s conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct, you could argue that the overall positive impact of a purpose-marketing campaign in changing hearts and minds outweighs the ulterior, self-serving motives of a company.

Brands can put their money and distribution power behind social justice issues and amplify them at a level and reach seldom acquired by non-commercial entities.

You could argue that KLM might benefit from a temporary increase in sales (and therefore flights) from their ‘Fly responsibly’ campaign, but that as long as the result is that the broader population is aware that flying is unsustainable and that this will lead to more people flying less or taking alternative transport options, that the end justifies the means.

In this line of reasoning, purpose-marketing can be morally just, when the benefit to society is greater than, or at least equal to the benefit of the company. It logically follows that a campaign based on a social justice issue that only benefits the brand rather than the people it claims to benefit is in itself an act of injustice.

Unfortunately, the beneficial impact of purpose-marketing is seldom backed up by scientific study. There are no baselines, no control groups, and it is very hard to isolate and attribute any change of mind, let alone behavior, to a single ad campaign.

Take the decade long efforts by Benetton. Whether it had an equally large impact in changing hearts and minds about the social justice issues the campaigns raised, as it had on sales has, as far as I can discover, never been the subject of rigorous study. (If anyone has data on this topic, I’d love to hear from you)

What is far easier to prove, is how successful these campaigns are for a company’s brand recognition, brand perception, social media clout, and bottom line.

I would argue that if we claim that the end justifies the means, we first have to turn to science and data to find out that the end actually is as good as some of us assume it is.

If companies are sincere about impact, they can hire Impact Measurement Experts to help them define the Impact Indicators they are looking to hit, how to measure them, design campaigns accordingly, to measure impact afterwards, and to treat the results as at least half of the criteria for success.

Sometimes it’s bad

If we judge conduct by the degree to which ideals are put into action, you could argue that purpose-marketing is morally justifiable if companies walk their talk.

The Nike ‘Dream Crazy’ campaign with Colin Kaepernick, in my view, created a well deserved and highly visible platform for an athlete fighting for social justice. Points for Nike, but most points for Kaepernick who walks his talk, and then some. But while Nike talks social justice, they don’t turn it into significant action, even where they directly hold the power to do so. This shifts the balance of how we can judge the company’s actions.

Although they have cleaned up their act from the sweatshop days back in the 1980 and 1990s, the company still does not extend the high ethics they so proudly display in their campaign to the people in their supply- and production chain (more details in this report). A supply and production chain that is mostly staffed with: people of color.

Though it is creating programs for kids in sports, and has several other CSR projects, Nike shows few signs it is making radical, risky changes to how it does business in order to address our climate crisis. A crisis which will disproportionately affect the global south and, again…people of color.

And yet, that is what they are asking us to do: ‘Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.’ Nike would do good by living up to their own lofty punchline.

Even if we assume the company is sincere in its advocacy of social justice, the balance between wanting to be seen to do so in order to win love and loyalty, while not living up to the high moral standards they encourage in others, is off.

Socrates said it best: “The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”

So what, you might argue, there are no real victims here. That remains to be seen. When social justice is all talk, there is a risk, and there can be victims, because:

Purpose-marketing is only effective when it is controversial, a dangerous strategy in already polarized societies.

Twitter doesn’t blow up when an airline champions the work of UNICEF in a marketing campaign. That’s safe territory. No one will disagree with feeding malnourished children. It won’t get us talking, and therefore it won’t help the company’s bottom line, so we won’t see big marketing budgets thrown at that type of campaign right now. But an airline that tells people to fly less, now that will get some eyeballs!

The recent Coca Cola ‘Love is Love’ campaign in Slovakia drew a heavy backlash. Gillette’s ‘Toxic Masculinity’ campaign certainly didn’t receive only kindness. But that’s not a bad outcome for brands, quite the opposite. It’s the polarising effect that makes purpose-marketing campaigns a success.

While purpose-marketing might be effective in bringing more people of one side of the fence together around a certain topic, I suspect it will alienate just as many on the other side. (If anyone has data on this topic, I’d love to hear from you)

That means we have another channel to add fuel to the fire of polarization we are seeing in society today, potentially getting in the way of progress on topics that require immediate action and collaboration, such as the climate crisis.

Which leads me to why the entire debate — if purpose-marketing is good or bad — is impossible.

Whether we believe purpose-marketing is a good or bad development mostly depends on our own value system and political views

Around the time President Trump was elected I received a message from a FastCompany reporter, asking me if I thought all companies should have a social purpose. I was out in the field with very little connectivity, and replied quickly: “Yes, but only if they are aligned with my own political beliefs.”, and told her to give me a call. She never did.

Whether my cheekiness misfired, or if the message got stuck in the pipeline, I will never know.

When we say: “All things considered, when we can get big brands to advance social justice topics in their campaigns, surely that’s a good thing.”, we are making one major assumption. That their vision of social justice fits our own vision of social justice.

What is justice, and what is good and bad, is all in the eye of the beholder.

Let’s look at the examples I’ve used in this article: Nike, Benetton, KLM, Gillette: they are all championing issues that traditionally fall to the left of the political spectrum. I personally subscribe to that side of the fence, so I would be very likely to say that yes, it’s a positive development that companies get involved in social issues. It makes sense: they are fighting in my corner.

For people on the other side of the political spectrum, it is far more likely to believe companies need to stay out of the social and political sphere. My heart grew heavy this week when I was scrolling through Ben & Jerry’s German Instagram account (a purpose-driven brand that walks their talk, decades before anyone else caught on to the trend). Posts about their anti-Trump, pro-refugee ‘Resist’ campaign drew comments of such dismissive anger that it took my breath away.

Which got me thinking: how would I respond if Starbucks would launch a ‘Guns Welcome’ campaign? How would I feel if IKEA started a ‘Families First’ campaign to support the anti-abortion movement?

An aggressive Instagram post would probably be the kindest of my responses.

When we defend or condemn purpose-marketing, we are so deeply buried in our own bubble, that we forget that we are looking at the trend through our own biased lenses.

If we argue that the trend of companies getting involved in social issues is fundamentally a good thing, we are overlooking the fact that the ‘we’ in this case is our own tribe of like-minded people: people who think alike, who vote alike, who follow the same news channels and buy the same stuff from the same brands.

It would not be a risky prediction that pretty soon, a major company will launch a purpose-marketing campaign that people with my value system will not be happy with.

Or perhaps, these campaigns are already here, but we are simply not defining them that way?

Certainly, no one can refute that the N.R.A. (the American National Rifle Association) is a purpose-driven brand with some pretty strong purpose-marketing campaigns, yet I’ve never seen anyone use them as an example that extols the merits of the trend.

As a matter of fact, how we interpret brand purpose, and how we measure its success, is pretty biased, as Richard Shotton points out.

Where do we go from here?

Is purpose-marketing a good or a bad development? Sometimes good, if proven to make a difference for a cause you support, sometimes bad, if ineffective or counter-effective in advancing your beliefs.

Why will we never resolve the debate? It’s impossible. Why do we keep talking? It’s unavoidable.

A pretty cynical position to take. Does that mean we should drop the discussion?

No: the recurring debate is a tool for change itself.

If we want big companies to truly make an impact on social and environmental justice, we have to hold them accountable. If they enter the arena of social impact, they have to be willing to be scrutinized. Public scrutiny is an amazing motivator to do better and be better. But we don’t have to stop there.

As consumers, we need to reach out to these brands and question how they walk their talk. We need to vote with our wallets. Consumer trends are major driver of change. We can sidestep brands which only pursue purpose for the sake of marketing, and choose great alternative brands where impact is built into every aspect of their business.

We need science to get involved for more independent research, the methodologies opened up, and the results shared.

As brand managers working inside companies, we are in a position to make the case for the integration of social impact in every aspect of how we do business, and to prove that truly purpose-driven brands perform better over the long run, and offer a far greater ROI than a short term purpose-marketing campaign.

As professionals in branding, marketing and advertising, we have a responsibility to not just bring a polarising message that speaks to the already converted but to try and reach people on both sides of the fence.

* I borrowed this brilliant line from Prof. Michael J. Sandel ‘s book: Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

Let’s discuss!

I’d love to hear what you think. And I’d love to have more sources of reliable data. Do you have data on the social impact of brands changing minds through purpose-marketing campaigns? Are there examples of purpose-marketing or ‘purpose-driven’ brands on the right side of the political spectrum? Do you know a brand that is publicly espousing conservative social issues with campaigns or other branding or marketing mechanisms? Let me know in a comment, I really appreciate it.

Thank you

A big thanks to the members of our Brand The Change network for reading the first draft of this article and providing valuable feedback and input, in particular: Anya Liddiard, Marieke Griffioen, David Hoogland, Anne Fenn, Kristin Leitch, Carlos Arturo Aguilar, Claudia Chow, Sandra de Jong and Nasuha Suhali.

More on building brands for change

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

Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.

As products and services for social and environmental change are becoming more common, impact brands can’t rely on their purpose to stand out. They will have to differentiate on other factors. Which differentiators could work?

First, let’s unpack what a differentiator is. Differentiators can either be aspects of your product or service, that benefit your customer, at which you excel.

Or, your product/service is the same as that of a competitor, but you differentiate through a unique brand. Either can lead to a differentiating position in the market.

But how do you get there?

There are a lot of unwritten rules and faux-pas in the social space that keep people playing it safe. Imagine a group of impact investors that are looking to invest money in solar power that benefits underserved communities. They will listen to presentations by six organizations that do just that, and all of them have the social good as the driving force of their brand. How will one stand out?

Of course, you could try to be top of the charts when it comes to social impact: the most sustainable, healthy energy source, the fairest, the most inclusive payment scheme. But often these claims are hard to quantify for you and hard to verify for your audience.

Here are five brands that have chosen to do things a little differently.

1. Differentiate by Design: Tesla Solar Roofs

In a see of solar panel companies that all talk about environmental and financial benefits, Tesla Roof solar panels differentiate on beauty: capitalizing on the fact that many people would love solar panels, but think they ruin the look of their house. Their value proposition: “Solar Roof complements your home’s architecture while turning sunlight into electricity.” It will come at a higher price point, but by addressing a huge barrier to adoption, Tesla will no doubt get an entirely new audience hooked on clean energy.

2. Differentiate by Brand Personality: FuckCancer

FuckCancer differentiates from other (cancer) charities through its in-your-face personality. What more is there to say? The name says it all, it’s an attitude that is embedded in the brand and in everything they do.

When you have a strong brand, there is not much convincing that needs to be done — Julie Greenbaum, co-founder and CRO of ‘FuckCancer’.

3. Differentiate on Price: Brandless

Brandless is an organic online grocery store competing on price, in a market where everyone is busy trying to invoke the most authentic organic homemade, natural look and feel for a brand. The founders have taken a nice PR spin on saving money by not investing in branding (fooling a Wallpaper reporter for instance), but it’s easy to see through that marketing talk, because making something look this simple and good, so consistently, is in fact an extensive branding exercise. And by the way, it has been done a thousand times before by retailers all over the world, for their own labels, think of Target, HEMA, Euroshopper, etc. So don’t be fooled: Brandless is a price fighter spiel.

4. Differentiate through Niche: Charity Water

Charity Water differentiates from classic development aid organizations with a broad area of focus, by concentrating purely on water. They bring that focus to life with an engaging, digital performing brand built on storytelling that appeals to a new generation of donors, making it cool to do good.

5. Differentiate by Sex Appeal: It’s Archel

And the prize for the most original differentiator goes to… It’s Archel! Perhaps the only social entrepreneur I have ever seen that ditches the goody-two-shoes look of the social impact fashion label and cliché imagery of the ‘empowered seamstress’. It’s Archel has chosen an approach that captures a lot of eyeballs (and no doubt raises a few eyebrows): sex appeal. It’s Archel and the Bombchel clothesline came into existence to empower women in Liberia, hard hit after the Ebola crisis, to produce contemporary African fashion for the global market. Instead of showing her seamstresses their new jobs, Archel puts her own curves and stunning looks in the spotlight, showcasing her designs from lounge chairs and poolsides, often in provocative poses. This brand is breaking all the social impact rules, and I just got to love her for it.

These five brands have dared to do things differently, and are pushing the limits for others with social impact ambitions. Differentiate or die!

More on building brands for change

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

Brand the Change Community — Join our support network and let’s help each other to build the brands the world so desperately needs.

The newsletter — feed your brand-thinking brain with regular updates and bite-sized knowledge.

My TED Talk: How branding can help accelerate social change.