Embodying Your Brand in Real Life

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 02. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.

Let’s Get Started

In the social impact space — and specifically for organizations that deal with donors — we talk a lot about donor retention and growing a donor's investment. Let’s look at some ideas about how social impact organizations can embody their brand in real life to make sure they're hanging on to their most ferocious supporters. 

As a social impact leader, imagine your organization’s undergone a major strategic rebrand. Perhaps you’ve shifted or honed your niche, shifted, changed, or focused your strategy or your programs. If you're a social enterprise, perhaps it's your product or services that have changed.

Let’s say that you or your customer service or development team is talking to somebody who found you online, or found your digital assets, website, social media, or blog posts and they've really bought into the vision that you're selling. However, when they meet you or one of your people, that person isn’t telling the same story or showing up in the same way that your brand is promising. That’s an instant trust killer. 

Brand Dissonance Breaks Brand Trust

At Cosmic, we spend a lot of time with our clients on their digital assets. Let’s dig into the conversations we have with our clients in relation to them embodying their brand in the real world.

We’ve seen the disconnect between the online and the in-person expression of the brand happen many times — and it just pains us. This part of building a brand or doing a rebrand doesn't get enough attention. Frankly, we're guilty of not doing enough teaching and consulting with our clients on just how important it is to truly embody your brand from the bottom to the top. 

For the best brands, the transition from how your brand is perceived digitally and through marketing to having actual real interactions with people from the organization is such a seamless process. It's so clear that everyone's bought in, that everyone understands the values and the culture of the brand, and that they embody it and live it. When that isn't true, an instant breakdown of trust happens.

Building Internal Consensus is Critical

One of the ways we get around this — or attempt to get around this — is by approaching branding from a strategic standpoint and not just an aesthetic standpoint. If all you do is come up with a new name, logo, brand colors, launch a new website, and tell your team via Slack and then continue on with your daily work, there's going to be some dissonance. The team’s not bought in. They don’t understand the strategic impetus for the rebrand. Even if you're not doing a rebrand, but you're building your brand over time, then there needs to be internal alignment and clarity of purpose around who you are as a brand.

This approach extends beyond what a creative agency like ours can do. Certainly we can help plant those seeds and make sure that we're approaching this work strategically. But it really starts to cross over into what might be described as team building or culture building or organizational development. At its core, it’s behavior change within leadership to make sure that you're constantly embodying this and explaining to the team why this is so important and why it helps them do their job better.

Deliver on Your Impact Promise

Executive Directors and other leaders need to think about how they are breaking these concepts down into actionable pieces. They need to consider what the biggest risks are in setting a new niche or message or strategy. Are you capable of delivering on the promise you’re making? Have you bitten off more than you can chew? I

As an executive director and a fundraiser, a lot of your job is getting people excited about your organization’s work so that they want to invest their time or money. And you want to tell a big grand story so that you're getting people excited. But one risk is that you accidentally over-promise. A donor can end up being disappointed in what you deliver because you told an unrealistic and grand story. 

How to tell an authentic story that represents the scale of your proposed impact

You want to be forward-looking in your impact story. Don’t just tell the story of what you're doing today. That's part of your story. But the more exciting part of the story is how you’re going to move your mission forward to meet the needs of tomorrow — not just today. 

There’s an art and a science to this. You do want to get people excited. Whether it's a donor or your internal team, you need to have vision as a leader and as an organization. But you also have to be grounded in that vision and not over promise or under deliver. One way we encourage clients to do this is we focus our storytelling around impact. 

We recommend against making big claims around what kind of impact you're planning to have in the future. Talk more about why the mission matters and why you need support from your donors and funders. This is true whether you’re talking to a big donor, a small donor, a customer, or a team member. If you’re talking internally, you might put some metrics to your fundraising goals or the number of people you want to reach. 

But honestly, that's not necessarily the best storytelling tactic. People want to know what you’ve already accomplished and what you need to accomplish in the future to address your issue area. Clearly define where you are today, where you're heading, and what it's going to take to get to that next step. 

Then, create a very discreet invitation to the audience you're speaking to about how they can contribute to what's missing. You’ve got to be really, really clear about what's missing and how that person can contribute so that you aren't setting yourself up as some heroic organization that's going to come in — with no help — and get this done. That ultimately is the source of setting unrealistic expectations.

Make Your Supporters the Hero

As a social impact leader, there’s a natural tendency to think about your organization as being the hero. And really you want your supporters to be the hero in this story. There's a very famous brand framework out there called StoryBrand created by Donald Miller. He does a good job kind of breaking down why there's this formula for storytelling in Hollywood, and how it translates to business storytelling as well. 

You want the customer or the supporter to feel like the hero of the story. Don’t paint your organization as the hero, but as more of a guide. You're the organization that's out there enabling  the supporters of your organization to take part, take action, and make a meaningful difference. 

A common mistake in messaging and storytelling we see is to make the story about you and your organization. We find it's much more effective to make the story about how your supporters can get involved to make a meaningful impact. It’s better messaging to talk about the issue that you're serving, the people that you're helping, and what help and support they need.

Make the People You Serve the Heroes

The focus of your brand story needs to be the people you help or the issue you address. Whether that’s climate, energy resilience, or whatever your issue area is — that’s the core purpose of your organization and needs to be at the heart of your storytelling. 

But know that there's a careful balance there. If you take that too far and you don't ever tell stories about your accomplishments and you stay too humble, then people don't know that your organization is actually making an impact. If you’re not telling that story, it’s easy for people to wonder, “Why should I support your organization? I get that this issue is important, but what have you actually done to help improve that issue?” 

So there's always a balance to strike, but if there is a hero in the story, you should default to your supporter or your customer. Defining these steps and roles makes embodying your brand in real life possible.

Orient Your Team Towards Embodying Your Brand 

Think about every single role and every single function in your organization. Write out what it looks like to embody your new brand excellently, and in a poor way, in terms of new messaging and a new strategy. Get that in front of the people who are doing the job and have in-depth conversations with them. Ask them: 

• What does it look like to do your job excellently today, and does what I have written align with what it's going to look like when you do your job excellently tomorrow within the context of this new brand?
• Do you think we can do this shift together? 
• What is it going to take for you and your teammates to make this shift?

One thing that can happen with a rebrand — even with really good intentions — is that team members ultimately want to understand how the rebrand affects them.

We’ve done presentations before where we're unveiling the new brand and strategy to the internal team and people are nodding along. Inside, we know that many are thinking that this all sounds great, but they’re also processing the impact on their job. And as a leader, you can't do that in a presentation to the entire team. You need to personalize it and get really clear with your team around how this affects their day-to-day work. 

Obviously, it's going to affect individual people quite differently. If you’re a CMO or have a similar role within an organization, this is going to drastically change your day-to-day and how you show up. If you’re another member of the team — who's maybe not quite as integral to marketing and brand building — it still affects your work from a strategic perspective, but not in the same way or to the same degree as the CMO. 

The Theory in Practice

Let’s say you run an organization that’s open to the public, like a museum or nature discovery center. And let’s say that there’s someone at the front door who collects admissions. This person can either be a cashier, or some one who creates a welcoming and inviting community space.

Prior to your rebrand, the person at the front desk could greet people by saying, “Admission is ten dollars for adults and five dollars for children over three.” After your rebrand into a more community-focused organization, they might say, “Hi, are you a member?” Strategically, you’re creating a sense that people are walking into a place where people buy in and invest their time. The greeting communicates that this is a community space where people gather. You are choosing the story you want to tell about your organization from this important in-person contact — and it provides your front desk person with a way to embody your brand.

This is more than writing a memo to the front desk team telling them that they must ask a specific question now with no context. You connect the greeting to a larger strategic goal — changing the perception and the experience of the organization into one that’s community focused. Not only do you get clear about what actions you're asking your team to take, but you connect it back to a purpose and a reason that people can understand. 

If you don’t communicate your brand strategy, your people will wonder where this new directive is coming from. Why all of a sudden do they need to ask this question? If they don't understand it, it's going to be hard to get them to buy into it. And if you can't get buy-in, inevitably people will stop doing it.

On the flip side, if someone comes in having seen your messaging and content online about your warm, welcoming, vibrant space and is met by somebody who isn't welcoming them with that kind of warmth, then you lose trust with the first interaction that person has walking through the door.

When someone has built a perception of a brand and that perception’s not met in the real world, there's an instant lack of trust, lack of credibility, and even more so — a kind of disappointment. And it's not just about people at front desks taking admission. There are people answering your phones and responding to customer, constituent, or program participant questions via em

As a social impact leader, you have to ask yourself, are we all feeding into this in the way that is going to advance the organization the most?

Brand Building is Ongoing

We think about building a brand as a continuous process of reinvention and that brands aren’t stagnant. A brand is constantly being built — either in the right direction or the wrong direction with every single micro-interaction that anyone has who touches your brand. So you really need to think about all of these little interactions that people have, because those are the things that actually build a brand — more than your logo and your colors and your marketing. 

Your visual brand identity sets the stage, but the performance actually happens when real-world interactions happen and you're either living the virtues and the promise of your brand and reinforcing your brand story or you're moving away from it. It's very rarely neutral.

Getting Your Team On Board

One way to help your team understand how to embody your organizational culture and brand is to build hands-on face-to-face coaching with everyone into your organization. You might give them live feedback on how they're showing up in interactions. 

Now, it doesn't need to be you personally. Depending on the size of your team, you may have managers or supervisors that can do this as well, but every single person can benefit from coaching, especially when you're launching a new brand.

We would love it if all of our clients did this. There’s always some level of collaboration between a creative agency like Cosmic leading a rebrand or helping with branding and brand building in general. We believe that it’s the responsibility of a firm like ours to help their clients with brand building in terms of the internal team culture and behavior change. 

There might be some agencies out there who sit on both sides of that and really get deep. We don't do that. We consult with our clients on how they can do this well themselves. B we also recognize that every team culture is distinct in some way or another. And how your team might best embody a rebrand could differ wildly from another team.

We also know that there's not really one way of doing this. In our work, we've struggled to create a framework for how to embody a rebrand — simply because so many organizations are so different in how they do their internal culture and behavior change. The approach we just outlined could work really well with the right support, the right approach, and the right kind of leadership and management team. 

But if those scenarios aren’t right, it could backfire. One-on-one coaching might feel like an extra thing to do. Someone is just trying to do their ‘real job’ already and doesn't have enough time to do that. They might wonder why you’re hitting them over the head with this rebrand thing. So communicating these ideas internally really depends on how you approach it, how you explain it, and how you make a case for why it's important and why it matters to each person’s job.

One strategy we like is to approach communicating these changes from a support standpoint. You can tell your team something like, “Hey, we're doing a rebrand and we're really trying to improve our brand perception and come through more on our brand promise. Here's how we need your help to help do that.” 

To us a sports analogy, If you're making a big strategic shift as a team, you need everyone rowing in the same direction, If you've got a coach who's got a new idea around approaching the game philosophically, and that doesn't get embodied by the team, it's never going to work. A rebrand is similar. 

Keep in mind there are going to be people on the team or in the community who may not come along. And that's okay. But it is the leader's responsibility to make sure everybody has an opportunity to find their fit in the new brand and strategy. 

Getting External Stakeholder Feedback

During a rebrand and strategic shift, you're going to need to get some customer and constituent feedback along the way. While we think that surveys actually are a big ask and should be used very, very judiciously, we have seen some organizations employ a type of feedback mechanism that works really well and gets really high response rates. It’s an approach referred to as pulses. This approach employs mini one-question surveys that are really easy and fast to answer. Each question is also contextualized in terms of when constituent or participant gets the question. These one-question pulses can be really valuable in helping organizations understand all of the qualitative elements of the services and impact that they provide.

But be cautious. What people often want to do is design massive surveys and then essentially just use the survey data as gospel moving forward. And that's a really bad way to use surveys. In the rare times that we do use surveys, we intentionally design them to be extremely short and extremely easy to answer. 

We look at survey answers as a data set amongst much more nuanced data, largely in the form of individual interviews — because you can get so much more context and go so much deeper with individual interviews. The reason that we typically use both, is because of the obvious benefit of scale — the number of participants can give you a little bit more data to interpret. 

Pulses are an interesting way to start to build some data in a piecemeal fashion. They are an easier entry point than asking your constituents to fill out a big survey, incentivizing them to do that, and perhaps putting them in the wrong headspace to give valuable feedback — which influences the data that you get back. 

Authenticity = Success

Embodying your brand in real life and measuring whether or not you're actually doing it is an art. There's going to be an element of it that you don't ever fully understand. And as a leader, there are times where you know you need to go with what you believe — go with your gut. Teaching your team to embody your brand and measuring it is hard to manage. But it's really important when you decide to do a rebrand that you’re ready to commit to coaching and evaluating your team.

You don't need to go from zero to a hundred. If you're not doing any of this right now, and this starts to feel overwhelming, just take some small steps. Even that is going to make a big difference. You might start by just having conversations with your team about this, and even if it's not fully operationalized or a solid framework at the beginning, just getting out there and starting to tell a story around why this is important and why your team should care is a a good first step. 

Be sure to listen to the feedback that you get. And if you're starting to hear a bunch of people saying, “Well, I don't think this actually makes sense because of X, Y, Z, that’s something worth listening to. And be prepared to make sure your team has what they need in order to successfully make the shift when you rebrand and update your brand strategy. 

If you don't embody a brand, then it's just a hollow shell. And that's when you start to see a huge disconnect between what's being promised through brand storytelling, marketing, and communications and people's lived experience with your organization. The general population is getting incredibly savvy at sniffing out BS marketing and cause-washing because there's just so much of it out there. And if you're not embodying your brand, then you're not being authentic. Authenticity is really the root of so much success today for social impact organizations, leaders, and brands. It can make the difference between a trust killer and a trust — and brand — builder.