Brand Strategy
There's an outsider inside all of us.
How do you capture the heart and soul of a brand? You spend way too much time making a brand book that few will see – except for the people who really matter.
There are two crowds when it comes to brand books.
The first believes in the utilitarian. A brand book should lay out guidelines, punctuation guides. Those useless voice and tone scale diagrams dreamed up in the seventh layer of Silicon Valley hell. These can be useful to a point. As a writer on the receiving end, at least, I'll understand that I should "write like a human." But where they ultimately fail is establishing that feel-it-in-your-gut point of view that makes you interesting in a world awash in sterile, feature-centric hogwash that means nothing.
Then you've got the design fetish brand books, and even worse, the design fetish videos that explain typeface and logo choices like product launches. These ultimately fail because, well, nobody cares. They're also useless.
I think, at least I'd like to think, there's a happy medium here: a brand book that tells a story in a way that people get it. They understand what you're about. Instead of having to explain that you're "human" or whatever, they pick up design and tone cues because they're actually humans with brains and good taste. Not too much. Not too little. Just right.
The bears and the bees.
Did we get this one just right? I don't know. I looked at it for way too long, to the point where discernment has withered. But it does make me feel something.
We spent a lot of time focusing on YETI's point of view. It's always been there, but we had to coax it out of the brand.
There's an outsider inside all of us.
Every great brand plays off tension. Apple knows that people, deep down, want to feel creative and inspired. At YETI, we understood that we're hardwired to be in nature. But everything around us – meal delivery, on-demand entertainment, at least a dozen subscriptions competing for our attention means that we have little reason to leave the house. Forget about making the time and effort it takes to spend time in nature. But there's always that twinge. That gnawing we should be there.
That tension drives the POV, and that POV informs everything you do. The photographs, the ambassadors, the communities, R&D, Sentence structure, events, etc. Simply telling the world why you exist has never been enough. People have to have emotional skin in the game to invest their attention in the brand. And today tension is the ultimate currency.
Of all the paths you can take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.
The thing about tension, though, is that you can't arbitrarily pick it. It doesn't come from focus groups. An agency isn't going to tell you what it is. The tension is there. If you think about it long enough, spend enough time arguing about it in meetings, and don't give up, you'll find it.
Not everyone is going to experience (or want to experience) floating the Middle Fork of the Salmon or surf Jaws. But if we could get people one step closer to home (nature), we'd done our job – not getting people to buy because that's corollary. We'd made them feel something. And feeling something today is rarer than we might imagine.
A brand book should be a good book.
Making a brand book served as a form of catharsis for us, but if you're thinking of making one, I'd suggest starting with what makes a book worth reading: bring people in. Help them see the world through your eyes. Impose your imagination and perspective onto theirs. You might find out you have more in common than you think.