One year away from the upside-down world my country has found itself in? An inverted unreality held hostage by gun-sucking terrorcrats where racism is normalized, healthcare is sold out, freedom only means acquiescence? One year away from the bloody froth of the media, the detached apathy of the white middle class, bathroom laws, surveillance states, Russian probes, walls, the hypocrisy of the far left, erosion of workers’ rights, fake news, legalized murder by police, celebrity idolatry and its systematized distraction, environmental corruption, and the white-eyed worship of Capitalism?

Not a hard choice. Not by a long shot.

In August 2017, we moved to Munich, Germany. Call it a hiatus, call it sabbatical, call it a Ross/Rachel break.

We all have our Election Stories. Like 9/11, I’ll never forget where I was, whom I was with, the shock, the looks, the bile and nausea. The vertigo of tipping into the bottomless and lightless hole of the future, the suddenly clear and receding view of what could have been. The ultimate moment of tangency.

Days later, we got a dog; he is the literal definition of “trauma pet”. I swore off Twitter, accepting the unresolvable conflict at its core. My wife marched in Washington. We drank too much.

The administration is worse than anyone imagined. Headline after headline, waves of disbelief, watching the fabric of a delicate democracy stretched until the core frays. Dystopia, unfolding in real-time. You see it too. Maybe you have that same nausea.

Leaving the country was not a hard choice. Now we are in the curious position of looking into the windows of our own home.

Appropriately, friends and family ask the most obvious question first: what’s it like living in Munich? (It’s important to be specific. Germany is big and living in Germany and living in Munich is the difference between the East Coast and New York City.)

In summary: Munich is what America could be — before it’s too late.

There’s a lot of nuance there, of course. But here are the two things I start with that every American can understand: imagine not worrying about guns and imagine not worrying about healthcare. Consider how much those two fears distort, distract and debilitate life in America. Consider how much of America’s core cultural context would change if guns and healthcare ceased being daily mortal threats. It’s literally almost impossible to imagine.

That’s the start, but guns and healthcare change so, so much. There are other differences, not all of them as serious. For instance:

• My kids can walk home by themselves and I don’t worry. Thousands of kids ride the subway every day, without parents. Independent mobility at a young age is encouraged.
• Capitalism is real but regulated to squelch predatory practices and protect both the consumer and the worker. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.
• Germans dress better than you; conversely, they’re terrible interior designers. They’re better engineers; conversely, they’re less successful in industrial design.
• Income inequality is a problem, as it is in the U.S. Home ownership in Germany is the lowest in the EU because real estate is stratospherically expensive. Income inequality is a global cancer.
• Five main political parties, not two.
• Foreign terrorism is not an abstract threat and security is tight as a tick’s asshole in public spaces and airports. (And I mean real security, not TSA security.) This is true for all of western Europe.
• The cultural and economic pressure of refugees and immigrants is real, not merely a political scapegoat, and is central to almost every election and leadership coalition in Europe for the past two years. Not always with positive results.
• Travel across borders is an everyday thing. 13 countries border Germany. Vacation in Italy, Spain, Croatia, Morocco, and other points across Europe, Asia and Africa is the normal. Isolationist nationalism is political rhetoric but does not reflect the reality that Europeans move about all the time.
• Labor is value, not expense. Work-life balance is equal. Long vacations aren’t just encouraged, they’re expected. At the same time, healthcare, pension and other systems ensure deep safety nets for citizens, and losing a job does not put your entire life at risk.
• It’s important to say this again: losing a job does not put your life at risk.
• Most people speak more than German. English is common. Many people speak three languages. Education prioritizes this early on. This goes a long way in dissolving nationalistic tendencies because literal understanding creates paths toward empathy. Imagine if most of the U.S. were fluent in Spanish. Imagine if more of the Western world understood Arabic.

No guns, universal healthcare, fair labor laws, deep social safety nets. The U.S. could have these! But our country has succumbed to the oppression of runaway capitalism, disproportionate and irrational defense budgets, and the insane, no-win, bullshit posturing of a two-party political system.

It’s not too late for America. The happiness index of Europe is all the evidence my fellow citizens need to see that there is path out of the darkness.

Until then, we vote, we march, we add our voices to the fray. No matter where we live, home is still home.

A sample of some early responses:

• “Hubspot is … not as powerful for full CMS. Landing pages are fine, but not for a full-blown site.”
• “Don’t try to turn a screwdriver into a hammer.”
• “Hubspot isn’t a CMS. Although they will try to sell you on that.”

I was shocked. I wanted to hear from those who’d tried this; someone, please, give me a reason not to based on your material experience. Had the folks in my network actually tried this and failed? Or were they falling back on assumptions, presumptions, hearsay and anecdotes? Was it the safe space of status quo?

The attitude of “do this because I’ve never tried anything else” is precisely the reason to try something else. Leadership positions are not granted to those who walk straight lines at moderate paces on well-trodden roads. “I’ve never tried” is not evidence. Status quo is a starting point, not a proof point.

I’ll let you know how it goes with HubSpot.

Over the past year, my time invested in Twitter has become increasingly devalued. The once-inspiring exchange of ideas has been displaced by numbed scrolling, overreactive retweets, political echo chambers, and vomit-inducing abuse.

An utter vacuum of critical thought or thoughtful criticism. So I’m done. For a long time.

Specifically:

• For reasons I have yet to articulate, but probably has roots in apathy toward a follower base I suspect is mostly bots, I fail to share links and insights relevant to my professional life: branding, design, content strategy, copywriting, marketing. Because of this lack of contribution into my social ecosystem, my colleagues and professional birds of a feather get nothing from me. That sucks, because the premise of social media is the democratization of exchanging ideas. I am clearly part of the problem, yet I no longer give a shit, and that is a bigger problem.
• The political environment is Fukushima-grade poison, and Twitter acerbates all that’s wrong with modern “debate”. Over and over, I found myself amplifying knee-jerk reactions without thinking, fueling dumpster fires of unhelpful, unconvincing, divisive rhetoric. Again: I was part of the problem.
• More often than not, I use Twitter as an excuse to avoid thinking critically, an activity in scarce supply these days. By glazing over a feed for 30 minutes, I tap into productivity dopamine, but come down from the bender with zero insights or inspiration and a big blob of empty in my brain. Civilization requires critical thought. Twitter, almost by any definition, impedes it.
• And, crucially, the level of unchecked abuse toward women, minorities, religions, and the LGBTQ community is literally insane. I can’t support a platform that refuses to fix a system that destroys people who deserve nothing less than total rights equality and love from the community.

Bottom line: my time is better spent elsewhere. Call it boycott, call it abandonment, call it a giant middle finger. I’m out.

Last week I was challenged to describe how my college education has influenced my current job and I totally failed to say anything interesting. Given my role as a brand strategist and writer, the irony was not lost on me. (Or anyone else in the room.)

In my defense, it was a stretch: in college, I studied audio engineering. Today, I plan global brand strategy. That’s a yawning mental chasm to leap. But someone, at some point, figured out you could put peanut butter on celery, so who’s to say what’s impossible?

After a hard think, I think I’ve arrived at a plausible answer.

Music creation, audio recording and sound engineering require nuanced resonance. The end product is reliant on a hundred layered details meshing as a harmonic whole. It starts with the melody and lyrics and theme, but it’s also the fuzz and blur and microscopic corruption at the edges of audible perception, the accidental compounding reactions of volume, EQ, compression, reverb and a hundred other levers. How just a tiny turn of the knob or the addition of a fragment of a sound placed in the gulf between beats can change the tonal presentation of an entire body of work. How noise can be musical, how music can be noise, how just redefinitions of conventions can stop people in their tracks.

The song is nothing without its production. Brilliant songwriters matched with pedestrian producers are poets without pens.

This is no different than other expressions of creativity.

In my designer days, I can’t tell you how many creative reviews contained the phrase “this is good, but it just needs a little something”. Good designers blend typography and color and whitespace into communication that works inside grids and expectations. Great designers tweak the knobs and introduce a fragment of dissonance, an unexpected overtone, a playful echo inside the stereo field. Impression leaps from “it works” to “it’s perfect”.

This extends to writing. Words are symbols, sentences are meaning, but communication is about the holistic production of ideas.

So I use my background in audio engineering to explore the resonance in writing. The way words rhythmically interlock, or audibly flow from one to the next. Is there a staccato beat, a more ambient tone? Is punctuation providing the mental white space, like the subtlest intake of breath in a trumpet solo? Is there deliberate dissonance to force the reader to dead stop wait reread?

Resonance is not an audible quality, but a mental aesthetic. All of the details of feel inside audio recordings that snag our attention can be triggered with rhythms of writing, creative language application, and straight up rule breaking. And when done well, impression leaps from “I read it” to “I remember it”.

Thanks for reading.

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Resonance and Harmonics in Writing was originally published in Evoking Brand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Headlines are important. There is article after article about writing great ones. And according to Ogilvy, “4 out of 5” people don’t read beyond the headline, which feels a bit hyper-contextual and arbitrary and akin to myths like “people don’t scroll”. But still: we know a great headline elevates an entire body of work.

But that’s not why we’re here today. Let’s talk about the entire corpus of copy: the head, the guts, the end. In advertising, the entirety of copy might fit comfortably inside a haiku. For brochures, web copy, presentations and other marketing material, it’s much longer: hundreds of words with paragraphs, bullets, subheads, callouts and illustrations.

Format, medium, tone, audience and length don’t matter. Anytime I review a chunk of copy, there are only three imperatives.

#1 … Is the one key message evident?

Everyone loves to talk. When it comes to promoting our product or service, it’s tempting to throw words, concepts, proof points and the kitchen sink at our audience. Shock and awe in selling.

This is a terrible idea.

No brand has the luxury of remaining front-and-center to our attention. At some point, the audience hangs up the phone, closes the website, tosses your brochure, deletes your email, walks out of your store, exits the trade show booth. When they do, they’ll never remember the 17 Most Important Things. At best, they’ll retain one. At best. Make sure it’s the right one.

Boil everything away, and you’ll find every brand exists for a reason. One reason. The Big Idea. Intersect that with intended audience, and you have the one key message to capture the market’s attention. It doesn’t need to be transcendently novel, or presidentially inspiring, or whatever, it just needs to be defining. Yours and yours alone.

Focus on the Big Idea. Hammer it home. Don’t leave any ambiguity as to the single message you want your audience to absorb.

#2 … Is the benefit clear?

It’s easy to talk about ourselves. Attributes. Features. Specs. Stats. Speeds and feeds. Shit the brand has accomplished. What the brand does.

This is b o r i n g.

Instead, write about what the brand provides. What customer problem is solved? What perceived gap in the market is filled? What is the meaningful, tangible, measurable, relatable value to the customer?

View the brand through the customer’s eyes and you’ll find deeply resonant ideas waiting to be surfaced. Customers want to hear their challenges framed as a solution. Once that value is discovered, it’s simple to find language that drives engagement.

#3 … Are you providing a next step?

Copy never exists without context. It is one line in a dialog with the customer; maybe the first, maybe the tenth, maybe the 1,235th. Great copy leverages that position by inviting further conversation.

Like it, pin it, tweet it, visit this website, contact customer support, register for our event, download the asset, call me. It’s a back-and-forth: ask and get, get and ask. Always offer a next step; a customer should never not know what action to take if they wish to further the dialog.

Find your key message. Surface value, not features. And then provide a next step. Anything else is sawdust.

Thanks for reading.

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The only three things I look for in copy was originally published in Evoking Brand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s start with the obvious way to define audience: personas based on role. By partitioning people inside discrete, functional segments, we can describe practical interaction with the brand — how it’s used, adopted or perceived — based on homogenized character motives, patterns and responsibilities.

Personas are effective, but one-dimensional. They only describe a character (who am I?), not necessarily a relationship (where do we stand?).

Relationship is tricky. I mean, what is even the baseline? We need a common denominator, a universal to any company/product/personal brand.

One path: money.

Using financials as a brand barometer sounds superficial, but it’s not. Black ink matters. Financial performance equals brand performance, even for nonprofits. This is a highly pragmatic way to frame a relationship between people and brands.

So let’s put personas aside and instead map relationship by slicing audience based on financial investment to the brand. A person could be an all-chips-in evangelist, a minor investor, zero-investment oblivious, or anywhere within that spectrum.

Together, traditional personas and relationship mapping can enable precision audience targeting and better communication. Let’s explore.

Rings of Relationship

Imagine, for a moment, a radio station broadcasting your brand. The center is the source of your signal. Like radio waves, proximity matters; brand signals degrade reaching over distance and dodging through obstacles. At a certain point, the signal disappears completely.

Now envision four concentric rings expanding outward from our radio tower. Each ring is a stage of financial dependence.

Ring 1: The Dependents

Clustered tightly around our radio tower are individuals whose livelihoods are literally dependent upon the brand’s success. Typically, these are company founders and employees. If the brand tanks, they’re in trouble. Unless you’re a trust-fund wanker spending your days with doses and mimosas, most of us are financially dependent upon at least one brand — typically our employer.

This white-hot proximity tunes Dependents into the brand signal. Above all else, they crave clarity. Ambiguity is uncertainty, and that unravels financial stability.

This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, Dependents are sensitive to brand weaknesses, and are the coal mine canaries that first sniff trouble. On the other hand, these folks can act as the brand’s fiercest defenders and ambassadors, amplifying the signal to more distant rings.

Ring 2: The Patrons

Just outside the Dependents are the Patrons. At one point in time, these folks financially invested in the brand, but they are not literally dependent upon its success.

Customers are the most important Patron group. Shareholders and equity investors are another.

Patrons actively listen for the brand signal. They talk to the company and read the news. However, because they don’t live it every day like employees, that signal arrives weaker and more sporadically, often indirectly. Not every message is heard. A brand must work to keep Patrons satisfied and informed.

When this group is happy with brand performance, they are the most effective advocates to the Watchers, our next group.

Ring 3: The Watchers

Our third ring are the Watchers. Far less dense but still willing recipients of the brand signal, these individuals have no financial ties to the brand, but are still paying attention.

The most important segment of the watcher group are prospective customers. It also includes financial analysts (Goldman Sachs, etc) and industry analysts (Gartner, etc), as well as media like reporters and bloggers. And of course the general public and their social punditry.

Watchers harbors natural and healthy skepticism despite being the target of most marketing and public relations. A brand must work extremely hard to maintain a positive perception. Patrons, our previous ring, are the most effective way to draw Watchers toward the brand. Customer case studies, testimonials, recommendations, App Store ratings, eBay seller scores, TripAdvisor reviews and the like are highly effective. In the B2B world, concepts like Net Promoter Score and Voice of the Customer are increasingly popular for this reason.

Ring 4: The Uninitiated Universe

Beyond the Watchers is the last ring, which is not really a ring at all, but the ever-expanding and infinitely variable universe of uninitiated. In a nutshell, these are the folks disassociated and mostly unaware of your brand. The signal to noise ratio is low here; the brand is more perception than fact, more hearsay than direct experience, more unknown than known. Mythology and infamy run strong. The brand signal reaches this place in fragments, rarely as the organization intended, more impression than expression. Marketing campaigns can only build awareness at this level.

Ring Relationships

Typically, brand strategy furthers one agenda: growth. Growth is when all of these rings are growing together.

Each audience ring expands by cannibalizing from those farther out. Members of the inner ring can come from anywhere. But to grow Patrons, we pull from Watchers. To grow Watchers, we pull from the universe. The universe, of course, has no problem growing on its own.

Where Personas Fit

If we think about our brand signal stretching across our audience rings, personas are vertical audience segments that cut into the horizontal layers.

Consider the “executive” persona, common to so much brand marketing. In the inner ring, it’s very small — a few people, typically. But many executives exist in the Patrons, more in the Watchers, and a bazillion in the uninitiated universe. We end up with an infinite pizza slice of a role-based group segmented four ways.

Mix in more vertical personas, and we end up with a tasty map that lends itself to more purposeful messaging. For example, instead of targeting “executives”, we speak to “executives of current customers”, where we immediately have assumptions: this is decision-making leadership that at some level is questioning, defending or advocating the investment in your brand.

Two dimensions enable better outbound communication and more relevant brand measurement and analysis of messaging and tactics.

Beyond Two Dimensions

At a minimum, this model provides two key facets of our audience: what they want, and their level of investment to get it from you.

A third dimension would be journey. Is a persona’s relationship with a brand ascending, peaking, or descending? Harder to plot, certainly, but intriguing regardless. With advances in analytics and marketing automation techniques, this is closer than ever.

Regardless: the more specificity we have when kicking off communication, the farther and clearer our brand signal will land on interested ears.

Thanks for reading.

If it struck a note, recommend it to others with a quick click on the heart icon below. If you’re interested in digging deeper, please consider subscribing to the Evoking Brand publication.

Audience Mapping in Two Dimensions 🙌🏼 was originally published in Evoking Brand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Like “design” and “identity”, “voice” and “tone” each offer a means of describing a particular facet of the brand.

Voice

Voice is the character of the brand. These are the core tenets, the evergreen principles. Perhaps they evolve over time, but slowly; their value is routine, predictable. We befriend characters because we get to know them and find their behavior consistently aligns with our expectations.

Examples of voice characteristics:

• Cordial but reserved.
• Battle-tested and ready.
• Humble generosity.

This is less how a brand speaks and more how it acts. Ideally, it transcends writing to encompass all expression: written, presented, acted. The voice of Starbucks is so much more than the copy on its website.

Tone

By contrast, tone is the expression of that brand character to the audience at hand. Tone changes all the time. It must change — that’s how empathy and relevance are surfaced. How I speak to my kids is much different than how I speak to my coworkers. (Luckily for both groups.)

Tone guidelines are hard to holistically define because they’re entirely driven by context, and the best writers tease it out through instinct. But if we were to write guidelines for tone, we might articulate it like this:

• For first-time sales pitch: Upbeat positivity.
• For new customer onboarding: Cheerful encouragement.
• For emergency response: Brief, precise, and careful.

These describe how a brand literally speaks. For brand guidelines written for a particular medium or channel of engagement (for instance, a brand’s marketing automation campaigns), tone guidelines are essential.

Climate vs Weather

In essence, voice is to climate as tone is to weather.

The first is a set of defining principals, the second an expression of those principals blended with environmental variables. Climate is consistent and predictable across wide coverage; weather is highly local and changes frequently. The first is the average we take for granted, the second what we’re worried about for this weekend’s picnic.

Style guide writers and brand strategists: leverage this difference. You have two lenses with which to focus. Articulating voice is mandatory, but exploring tone for different audiences or contextual situations can be equally valuable.

What is the difference between voice and tone? was originally published in Evoking Brand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The frequency at which men in power are accused of rape and sexual harassment is staggering. Athletes, politicians, executives. And musicians: James Brown, Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, Ian Watkins, David Bowie, Sean Kingston. All of this is very abstract if you’re not a fan; you know their name and a song or two, but the accusations and denials become just another headline.

I have followed the Swans since … 1995 maybe? My formative years played out in the crucible of The Great Annihilator. Two decades later, I still collect, listen and write about them because Michael Gira, the Swans’ nucleus, has maintained a fearless musical vision. I was proud to be a fan, as weird of a thing as that is to say.

Which is why the abstraction of “just another headline” evaporated when I read this:

Indie singer-songwriter Larkin Grimm has accused Michael Gira, longtime leader of the band Swans, of raping her while she was signed to his Young God record label in spring 2008.

Like seeing a family member’s name in the headline. Denial, anger, resentment — all within a heartbeat.

The disappointing, tone-deaf response from Gira was prototypical brostance:

This is a slanderous lie. I will respond vigorously to defend my name against this horrible slur.

Unfortunately, we know from painful experience that in our rape culture, a wisp of smoke means fire. And sure enough: Gira admits it was “a consensual romantic moment that fortunately was not consummated” and his wife lays out an incoherent, self-centered tirade that promises “proof” of innocence but an unwillingness to share it. Clearly, whatever happened was not consensual.

But what just sent me over the edge was Gira’s parting words:

My hope is that Larkin finds peace with the demons that have been darkening her soul since long before she and I ever met.

This thrown shade to discredit Larkin Grimm’s mental state and deliberately deflect blame is a vicious tactic. It immediately reminded me of this shrewd observation voiced by Louisa Curry in the wake of #brockturner.

I can’t un-buy my ticket to tonight’s show.

They have my $20. But I won’t help build the crowd, won’t cheer, won’t acknowledge them. I can’t undo the crime, but I can unsupport the criminal.

Growth is looking really good.

In addition to hiring employee #100, you’ve outgrown two offices. Sales are even better than expected. You have a full-time HR person. Customer reviews remain outstanding. Your business, launched with a spare bedroom and a cashed-in 401k, is succeeding.

As you ride this trajectory, you’re worried about everything: competition, market trends, security, litigation, acquiring (and keeping) talent, maintaining growth, getting enough sleep. Not fucking everything up.

You want this upward trend to continue, and your reflexive instinct is offense. Sales. Biz devs. Demand generation. Growth hackers. Revenue rocketeers. Profit pirates. Tacticians executing tactics to maximize tactical results.

But brand strategy?

Branding, you think, is not my problem today. Your brand is solid! Your logo looks awesome on the t-shirt you’re wearing. You have a mission statement somewhere, and that agency you hired last year to re-do the website put together something about values. What does it matter? I have numbers that need to be solved before the end of the quarter.

You, burgeoning start-up founder, glance at “brand strategy” and smirk: what a luxury.

But what if 100 employees grows to 10,000?

In a bigger company, everything changes.

Your product expands to a portfolio and your office grows into a campus. Customer reviews are eclipsed by investor skepticism. Your business plan grinds to the slow lane as it’s reviewed in a board meeting in a boardroom with board members who are not your friends. Double-digits fall to single-digits and worry coagulates into pressure.

At 100x scale, there will be no shortage of threats. Customers will jettison to some hot young competitor, and analysts will publicly question your business strategy. Your product naming will scatter all over the map, and squabbling dissension from the teams of acquired companies will unglue strategic cohesion. Marketing assets will lag. Sales will scream for “a new story to tell” and you will schedule interviews for your fourth CMO in five years.

One day, trapped in the trough of flagging confidence, you will think: Customers know us. The market hears about us all the time. We have great name recognition — maybe a rebrand will jumpstart the business.

Here is the problem: legacy name recognition is not equal to long-term brand viability. Visibility is a surface game. Mindshare is fickle and fragile. Betting on brand coverage when your problem is brand depth is a great way to lose a big stack of money. Just ask the Fortune 500 of 50 years ago. Today, almost 90% are gone.

Still, you eye that heap of business challenges. The more problems you find, the more they all start to look like a nail that could be solved by one hammer. My company needs a goddamned rebrand. Let’s fire up a project.

You’ll consider your tactics.

Agency!
Newly hired CMO #4 could blow their agency whistle and a half-dozen account reps will happily zoom by to drop a proposal at your door. Upside: good agencies do amazing work you can brag about. Downside: good agencies cost a fortune. Upside: if it gets all fucked up, you have someone else to blame and no one internally is held accountable. Downside: you’ll end up diluting their vision into something palatable for committee approval anyway. Upside: everyone will agree. Downside: it will suck.

Roundtable!
Alternatively, you could call a leadership roundtable and internally workshop your way to a plausible solution. That always go well.

Delegate!
Or you could delegate this whole problem to a VP, who passes it to the new marketing program manager, who misinterprets the “project” as a logo redesign, and who subsequently tosses it to a product designer, where it smolders like uranium 235, slowly boring a hole to the bottom of her inbox because what the hell can be done with a pile of problems and no strategy and budget to actually fix them?

Actually!
Or you could lie down, have a cookie, and accept an inconvenient truth: reinventing, renewing and repositioning a brand for the long run is not a one-time project. You cannot fix broken limbs with band-aids and makeup. A brand is a complex, living thing that needs to be nurtured as such.

In fact, a brand is not a logo, mission statement, website, nor app interface. It’s not marketing, sales, nor product design. It’s not what you think, what I think, nor even what your spouse thinks.

A brand is all of that, and more. It is the experiential composite of every touchpoint with every constituent — employees, customers, media, investors, prospects, the world at large — compressed into a pea of an impression. Your brand brings baggage everywhere it goes. It’s the market’s mental record of everything you’ve put into it.

But brand strategy can course-correct and lighten that baggage.

By establishing relevant values and principals — ideas that every individual can not just aspire to but actually implement down in the most pedantic, tactical, day-to-day responsibility — brand opens the door to strategic alignment. Common compass points we all see and follow.

Alignment is not top-down instruction. It’s equal communication up and down the hierarchy. Brand, as a system of guiding principals, serves as a higher religion, enabling questions like “is this on-brand?” to blossom into fruitful conversation.

When brand strategy offers bearings upon which to march, you have the tools and permission to face business challenges head-on and untangle organizational, operational and perception issues. Not that that’s easy. Alignment requires steely-nerved managers to surface problems, and even more steely-nerved CEOs to rip out those problems from the roots.

The best brand strategists are business strategists. Trusted consultants. Adapting and learning. Always seeking opportunities for alignment across people, portfolio and promotion.

So. Before you reach the point where the easiest way to fix your brand is to invent a time machine to return to the days when you were only 100 employees and everything was swell, remind yourself that while tactical execution is mandatory, long-term brand strategy is best seeded in the fertile years before what-if-we-could atrophies into that’s-how-it’s-always-been.

No time machine necessary.

But here you are! You don’t need a time machine yet! You aren't burdened with the pressures of a 10,000-person organization. You’re still a thriving small business of 100 hard-working folks with a brand that’s zinging along in the market.

Take advantage of this crucial early stage, and offer brand strategy a seat at the table. Establishing healthy patterns now is far more cost-effective than assuming what’s working today will work tomorrow.

Don’t you have a #101 to go hire?

You don’t need a time machine for brand strategy was originally published in Evoking Brand on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The iTunes interface is a ____________ of an experience.

• Septic smolder
• Urinal dookie drop
• Dump truck dance party
• Cheddar chow mien funk off
• Polytetrafluoroethylene circle jerk
• Cherry bomb in an outhouse
• Shit pit
• Enron reach-around
• Ulcerated fleapit
• Trump taco dump
• Drunk-ass tractor relay
• Deep-fried dirty diaper bin
• Skrillex-and-scrapple mash-up
• Budweiser