A consumer ecom brand I work with rebranded a few months before I joined the executive team (as a contractor).
I was handed well-designed brand standard guidelines in a handy PDF. But the PDF had no sections or chapters, so users have to scroll through the pages one by one to find the section they are looking for. Worse, the guidelines spanned nearly 100 pages.
This rendered the brand guidelines virtually useless. And looking at how the marketing team and agency partners were managing the brand, that was obvious.
Meanwhile, the agency that handled the rebrand work believed the extensive guidelines would blow us away and leave us thrilled with the comprehensive nature of the deliverable. Instead, we fired them.
Brand guidelines must be practical above all else.
Break brand guidelines down by focus and purpose, with content people getting a custom version focused on what they need. Email, SMS, and social teams must have a custom version designed for what they need. And so on. And I mean a single pager, not a dozen pages. One is best. Two if we must.
The massive brand bible is useful, but not for marketing and brand-building operations. I serve my clients as a VP of brand strategy & creative director; I want the fat ass brand bible because I own the brand, and I need every drop of info I can get. Brand agencies, build that out for me, and for the presentation and reveal to me and the CEO. But don’t get too excited with it, because only 1-2 people will see it. Optimize the other pieces per application and user. Sound familiar? Because that’s what every aspect of marketing should be doing.
Agencies: get serious with your work.
I see way too many marketing teams, designers included, using whim, ego, emotion, and opinion (WEEO) to drive decision-making. You’re thinking, “This will get the decision maker to say yes.” That’s a critical failure in your thinking. And it will eventually cause you to be fired. If you act and feel like a vendor, you are, and if you are a vendor, you are a commodity. If you don’t want to be a commodity, thinking and performance must be the greatest value you deliver.
Brands: demand more from your agency partners.
If they feel like a vendor, something is wrong (this can mean they are the wrong fit, or you have the wrong people managing them). They should be showing outcomes and wins, not by showing a report of the hours used and the tasks completed, but by the outcomes and performance of their efforts.
This is how you build marketing operations that perform. And if at the heart of your strategy and decision-making isn’t WEEO, but doing what’s best for the brand and future customers, everything becomes easier, unified, and performs like crazy. And only then do you start building a brand people believe in, not just recognize.
And before you ask, the benefits are fabulous:
- Higher revenue
- Lower CAC
- Great customer lifetime value
- … and a brand that is a whole lot more fun to be a part of.
