Today, I wanted to talk about what’s happening with traditional branding? Why doesn’t it work anymore? Why is it broken and how brand hacking can actually address that.
The last two episodes, I was sort of introducing what brand hacking, the podcast was all about and also about the 30-day kind of challenge that I’m planning to launch in the next couple of weeks.
So going back, I started a branding agency back in, well, it was actually a graphic design firm back in 1998 with a partner. Prior to that we were working in a big agency. I was also working in a software company and as a part-time hustle, I was working in a graphic agency. I met my business partner in that agency and he and I had really strong opinions on how design should work, how design should communicate and what kind of elements should have priority, and the hierarchy and all that.
To cut the long story short we were very unhappy working in that graphic agency. One day we decided, “Okay, let’s cut to the chase. Let’s just do our own thing. Let’s start a graphic firm, just the two of us, and then let’s see where that goes.” So we quit our jobs, and we started this graphic. Well, you can’t even call it a firm. It was just the two of us from the bedroom actually, from each other’s bedrooms. Those were our offices in those days.
I will be going into more detail of my personal journey from that two-man, kind of graphic firm to what is now brand, which is a branding agency with five offices around the world, and a multimillion dollar company in future articles. We routinely handle huge accounts for Fortune 500 brands and we build strategies and we build brand identities and marketing campaigns and things like that. So it’s been a long journey about 20, 21 years.
It was not easy of course, but there were many different points throughout the journey where I personally sort of transformed. I recognized what was going on with the industry and then made a strategic decision to change course. That has always helped me and that’s exactly what’s happening now. I’m starting to recognize this change in the way brands are being built, or rather changing the perspective of the consumers, of the audience. That’s why a brand should be built in a different way.
So what is the traditional way of building a brand or even trying to achieve success? You start a brand of course. You start a company, you start a business. So you’ve got a name, you’ve got maybe a bit of an identity done. You throw together a website or maybe you do invest in a good website and then that’s it, right? You then parked the vehicle onto the side and then you jump onto another vehicle, which is marketing or sales. In fact, actually you jump on to the sales vehicle because people are interested only in selling, selling, selling, which is not bad, but it used to work well before. It’s not gonna work that well. It hasn’t actually. It’s starting to break down in the last two, three years.
Moving forward the next two, three, four, five years, it’s going to die out where selling in the traditional sense is not going to work. So what is the solution? In my opinion, and that’s what my challenge is based on, that’s what Brand Hacking is based on, is that you need to hack your brand.
What does that mean? It means that you take your brand and you immerse it. So you create this brand immersion. You don’t just park your brand vehicle to the side … Sorry, I’m just having my coffee. So you don’t just park your brand vehicle to the side, and then jump on the sales vehicle. But rather you continue in the brand vehicle and you upgrade the vehicle to have sales, but sales in the form of marketing, because to me marketing is not just about sales, it’s about building brand awareness. It’s about building brand recall. It’s about building the brand story.
There’s lots of elements to it, but sales is just about saying, “Hey look, this is my product here, and you’ve got to buy it.” Yes, if that person needs that product, yes, they may buy it, but then products are now commodities. Even services are becoming commodities. Art is becoming a commodity. Everything is a commodity. Even wine. I mean, you take anything and it is a commodity.
Even brain surgery has become a commodity. Plastic surgery has become a commodity. So that is the premise of brand hacking, is to really immerse your audience into your brand world view.
So the way you would do that is you take each segment of traditional marketing, and traditional brand building and you hack it. You hack it so that it sort of fits into what’s happening with how communication is changing, how social media is changing, how consumers are changing, how the audience is changing. You then put together new policies, new methodologies in place, which are strategic, which are based on a strategy and not just about the ultimate goal, which is to make money because money would follow strategy. So you need to start with strategy and then of course money would follow that.
So just to come back to the 30-day challenge. Brand hacking is on the side. Why do I want to create this 30-day challenge, is because I believe every entrepreneur needs a coach. Every business needs a coach. That’s what’s going to happen in the 30-day challenge, which is brand coaching, brand hacking and hacking coaching.
If you look at athletes, for example, even the best of the best have coaches. In fact, maybe I put it in the wrong way. They become the best of the best because they’ve had coaches. You would not see any serious athlete without a coach. So why shouldn’t brands have coaches? Why shouldn’t businesses have coaches? So that is the premise. I will talk more about each component in the upcoming episodes. That’s all for now today. I hope you have a great day and like always go forth and prosper.
