We set up Simple Revolution for a reason, and the clue’s in the name. We’d all been in the industry (brand, marketing, communications) for a while – and we were fed up with it. There was too much bullshit and self-absorbed complexity. (These are my words. My partners may be a bit more polite.) We wanted to strip it all back and focus on doing good work for our clients, in a way that they could not only understand but enjoy and find practical – we wanted to make it as simple as possible. And, hopefully in the process, start a movement (the ‘revolution’ bit) to re-simplify the industry.
Brand strategy shouldn’t be a mystery
For the bit of the business I lead – brand strategy – this was vital. Unlike regulated industries, with official qualifications, anybody can waltz into the brand world and call themselves a ‘brand strategist’ (including me). There’s no guarantee of quality or outcome.
As a self-identified idiot with imposter syndrome, I wanted to be sure I didn’t fall into the complexity traps that a lot of brand people fell into. So I went back to basics about brand strategy, to make sure I was doing the right things in the simplest way possible.
The definition of strategy I found most useful was along the lines of intelligently allocating resources through a unique set of activities to achieve a goal. Quite simple. You’ve got a finite and (often) limited amount of resources. You’ve got goals to hit. How do you best use what you’ve got to get there?
Three questions keep us honest
In the case of building a brand, Mark Ritson (yet again) came to the rescue to help answer that question. He says that we need to answer three more questions to get it right:
- WHO are you talking to?
- WHAT do you want to stand for in their minds?
- HOW are you going to (allocate and deploy your resources to) get there?
To me, brand strategy is no more complicated than this. We have a simple definition of what a strategy should do. And we know the three questions we need to answer to do it properly. Simple.
In fact, this is how we explain it to our clients – and the structure we use to organise our projects. Whether we’re defining a brand from scratch, developing a value proposition, or any other brand and marketing problem. It’s all essentially answering the same questions.
The beauty is, if we can THINK and ORGANISE our thoughts this simply, there’s a better chance that what we produce is useful.
When strategy gets in its own way
I had a client recently who came to us to help them re-do the brand strategy that another agency had done for them. There was nothing wrong with the underlying work. The research was excellent. The recommendations were solid. The problem? It was in two PowerPoint decks – one with 125 slides, another with nearly 200 slides. The client couldn’t use it. It was too much.
This is why I like Dieter Rams’ principle about good design being ‘unobtrusive’ – and why I think it applies so much to what we do in brand. But also why I made the point earlier about ‘simple’ not being the same as ‘easy’.
Simple isn’t easy
We took the client’s strategy, analysed it, ran a few workshops with them to get to the few most important points – and presented it in 12 slides, organised according to WHO, WHAT and HOW. It covered their audience, their positioning, their key messages, their brand architecture and naming system, and design attributes.
It informed the design work that our partner agency did. And it will (hopefully) inform all the messaging, brand experiences and products they create from here on in.
Of course, it took some hard work, a lot of experience and several weeks to do. We needed to use our knowledge of research, segmentation, targeting, positioning and all the other brand theory that floats around.
It wasn’t easy. But the result was simple. Because the process and the thinking was simple.
It was unobtrusive. We got out of the way. We got our egos out of the way. We knew it was complex, but we removed the complexity from the client’s list of worries. Because that’s our job. We’re here to create practical answers that our clients can understand and use.
Simple. Not easy. But simple.
