Embodying Your Brand in Real Life

Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your fonts, or your colors, or your voice. It’s not your content. It’s not your mission.

Your brand is:

↳ Whether you come through on the promises you make to your community
↳ The actions you take
↳ How your team shows up each and every day

But what happens when you paint a picture of those values and promises, but don’t come through on them for your community?

And how can you ensure that your brand values and promises are EMBODIED by everyone on your team in real life?

In today’s episode of Designing Tomorrow, Jonathan shares exactly how he and his team have done this at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and his past roles in his social impact journey.

Eric and Jonathan emphasize the need for consistent brand experiences across all interactions, especially during rebranding efforts. The conversation provides practical strategies for ensuring that both internal and external communications reflect an organization’s core values and promises.

Episode Highlights 

• [00:00] - Eric and Jonathan discuss the disconnect between brand promises and actual delivery, reflecting on past experiences at a B2B software company.
• [01:01] - They delve into how nonprofits can enhance donor retention by embodying their brand effectively in real life.
• [02:00] - Eric and Jonathan talk about the risks of rebranding and the importance of internal alignment.
• [07:12] - They offer tips on storytelling for nonprofits, emphasizing the need to balance vision with authenticity.
• [10:04] - The discussion turns to making supporters the heroes of the story rather than the organization itself.
• [13:02] - Jonathan shares a real-world example of how a small change at the front desk of an educational center reinforced a community-focused brand.
• [14:55] - The impact of inconsistent brand experiences and the importance of aligning internal actions with external messaging.
• [17:27]- Methods for assessing how well employees embody the brand, including coaching and feedback mechanisms.
• [21:08] - The concept of "pulses" for obtaining customer feedback and compares it to traditional surveys.
• [25:18] - Embodying the brand is crucial for authenticity and long-term success.
   

Quotes

• "One way to address this is by approaching branding strategically, not just aesthetically, ensuring everyone understands the purpose behind the rebrand." — [04:08]
• "You want your supporters to be the hero of the story, not your organization. The focus should be on how they can make a meaningful impact." — Eric Ressler  [09:44]
• "If your brand's promise isn't met in real-world interactions, there's an instant lack of trust and credibility." - Eric Ressler [15:38]
• "Every single human being who's a part of your organization is in some way embodying and creating your brand." - Jonathan Hicken [16:12]
   

Resources

• They Said - pulses mini surveys 
• Storybrand by Donald Miller
• Create Better Social Impact Messaging by Finding Your Brand Voice 
• Unexpected Ways a Rebrand Can Supercharge Your Team Culture

Transcript

Jonathan Hicken [00:00]:

Eric, we've been talking a lot about rebrands and strategic positioning, and it reminded me of a story from my time in tech. I was at this B2B software company called user testing and I ran a team called Customer Success and it was our job to take care of customers who signed up for these annual or multi-year subscriptions and make sure that that customer got value and renewed ultimately at the end of their contract. A challenge we had was often dealing with what the sales team promised our customers for us to deliver. So while we thought we were delivering usability testing services, sometimes we would have to deliver trampolines or birthday cakes or whatever sales may have actually promised this customer.

Eric Ressler [00:46]:

Yeah, I'm shocked to hear that. Truly.

Jonathan Hicken [00:48]:

So it got me thinking about the social impact space and specifically for nonprofits who deal with donors and we talk a lot about donor retention and growing a donor's investment in the organization, and I have some ideas about how brands social impact organizations can embody their brand in real life to make sure they're hanging on to their most ferocious supporters. You ready?

Eric Ressler [01:13]:

I'm in. Let's do it. 

Jonathan Hicken [01:38]:

So Eric, let's imagine you have undergone a major strategic rebrand. Perhaps you have shifted or honed your niche, shifted or changed or focused your strategy or your programs in some way, shape or form. Perhaps it's your product if you're in the for-profit space and now you're out in the real world, you yourself as the leader, or maybe it's your customer service team or maybe it's your fundraisers and you're talking to somebody who found you online, who found your digital assets, your website, your social media, your blog posts, whatever it might be, and they're really bought into this vision that you're selling online and then they meet one of your people and that person is not telling the same story or not showing up in the same way that your brand is promising. I believe that that is an instant trust killer, and I want to unpack that with you today a little bit. So let me ask you first, you at Cosmic, you spend a lot of time with your clients on their digital assets and things. Tell us a little bit about the conversations that you have with your clients as it relates to embodying their brand in the real world.

Eric Ressler [02:58]:

Yeah, I mean, as you told that story, it just pained me because I've seen it happen so many times and I think this is part of building a brand or doing a rebrand or either that doesn't get enough intention and thought, and frankly, I think 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 as an organization because that transition from how your brand is perceived digitally or through marketing, even if it's in the real world to having actual real interactions with people from the organization, the best brands, that 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 they live it. But if that isn't true, there is this kind of instant breakdown of trust that happens.

[03:59]:

I think 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. Because if all you do is come up with a new name, change your logo, change your colors, refresh your website and just put that out in Slack to your team and say the website's up, continue on with your daily work, of course there's going to be some dissonance because the team is not bought in or doesn't understand the strategic impetus for the rebrand in the first place. Or even if you're not doing a rebrand, but you have a brand that you're building over time and you are building a brand whether or not you realize you are, then there needs to be an internal alignment and a clarity of purpose across the team around who you are as a brand.

[04:46]:

What do you stand for? What do you not stand for? And so to me, this extends beyond what a creative agency even like ours can do. Certainly we can help plant those seeds, make sure that we're approaching this work strategically, but to me it really starts to cross over into what I might describe as team building or culture building or organizational development, behavior change within the team, leadership within the team to make sure that you're constantly embodying this as a team and explaining to the team why this is so important and why it helps them do their job better to be clear on these things.

Jonathan Hicken [05:23]:

I think that's brilliant. I think you're absolutely right, and it makes me start to think about how as an executive director am I breaking these concepts down into actionable pieces? And where my mind goes immediately is what are the biggest risks in setting a new niche or message or strategy in some way? What's the biggest risk in doing that? And for me, I think the biggest risk is am I actually capable of delivering on the promise I'm making? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? In my role as executive director and as a fundraiser, a lot of my job has been getting people excited about the work so that they want to invest their time or their money in it in some way. And you want to tell a big grand story so that you're getting people excited, but the risk there is that you can accidentally over promise. And I've done this before. I mean I've made the mistake where a donor ended up being disappointed in what we were able to deliver because I told a grand story. So how do you coach a client through telling a story and being out in the world but doing so in an authentic way that really represents the size of the impact they propose?

Eric Ressler [06:32]:

Yeah, it's a really good question, I think because you do want to be forward looking in your story. You don't want to just tell the story of what you're doing today, that's part of your story. But the more exciting part of the story in my opinion, is what are you going to be doing tomorrow and how are you going to be helping to move your mission forward to meet the needs of tomorrow, not just today? So there is an art and a science to this, right? Because 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 have to be grounded in that vision and not over promise or under deliver. So I think one way we do this is we focus our storytelling around impact. That's already happened when we're talking about impact and around vision and kind of meeting the moment around impact that hasn't happened yet.

[07:20]:

So we usually aren't trying to make big claims around what kind of impact we're planning to have in the future. We're talking more about why the mission matters so much, why this issue is so important and why we need support from people like you, whether you are a big donor or a small donor or a customer or even a team member. If we're talking internally, and we might put out some metrics around our goals around fundraising or number of people reached or some of those kinds of things, but honestly, I don't think that that's necessarily the best storytelling tactic anyway. People want to know what have you actually already accomplished and what do you need to accomplish in the future to meet the needs of the issue area that you're serving?

Jonathan Hicken [08:02]:

That last part is exactly where my mind was going around defining really clearly where we are today, where we're heading, what it's going to take to get to that next step, and then a very discreet invitation to the audience you're speaking to about how they can contribute to what's missing, right to that gap. And you got to be really, really clear about what's missing and how that person can contribute so that you aren't setting yourself as some hero organization that's going to come in with no help and get this done. I mean, I think that ultimately is the source of the problem in some ways.

Eric Ressler [08:39]:

And I mean you use the word hero and I think there is this natural tendency to kind of think about your own organization as being the hero. And really you want your supporters to be the hero in this story. And this is, there's a very famous brand framework out there called StoryBrand. I think Donald Miller I believe is the author of this. He does a good job kind of breaking down why there's this kind of formula for storytelling in Hollywood, but that also kind of translates to business storytelling as well. And really you want the customer or the supporter to feel like the hero of the story and not painting your organization as the hero, but more the guide. You're the organization that's out there enabling people who do support the organization to take part and to take action and to make a meaningful difference. So I think a lot of times a common mistake in messaging and storytelling is to make the story about you and your organization, and I think instead, it's much more effective to make the story about how your supporters can actually get involved to make a meaningful impact and about the issue that you're serving and the people that you're helping and how they need help and they need support.

[09:46]:

If you're talking about people or if there's an issue that needs support, if we're talking more about let's say climate or energy resilience or whatever it is, the issue area, the core purpose of your organization, that needs to be the focus of your story. And there's a careful balance there because 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 you're actually making an impact. They're like, well, 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 with most things a balance to strike there, but I think if there is a hero in the story, it should be your supporter or your customer.

Jonathan Hicken [10:34]:

All of this makes for embodying your brand in real life possible when you define these steps and you define these pieces and you define these roles. And that actually gets me thinking about how I would orient my own team towards embodying this theoretical new brand once it were to launched. And the thing that I would do, Eric, is I would think about every role, every single role, every single function in my organization, and I would write out what does it look like to embody our brand as it is today, as it is today excellently and in a poor way? And then I would write, what does it look like to embody our brand excellently and in a poor way with this new brand or this new message or new strategy? And get that in front of the people who are actually doing the job and have a conversation with them and say, Hey, this is what it looks like to do your job excellently today, and this is what it's going to look like to do your job excellently tomorrow. Do we think we can do this shift together? What is it going to take for you teammate to make this shift?

Eric Ressler [11:42]:

I really like that a lot because I think one thing that can happen with a rebrand, even with really good intentions, and I've been part of these presentations before where we're kind of unveiling the new brand and the new strategy to the internal team is people are nodding along. They're like, yeah, this all sounds great, but I also can see them processing and their gears turning around, what does this mean for me? And it's not clear you can't do that in a presentation to the entire team. You need to essentially personalize it like you're describing and get really clear as a leader with your team around how does this affect your work day to day? And obviously it's going to affect different people quite differently. If you are a CMO or a similar type role within an organization, this is going to drastically change your day-to-day and your work and how you show up. If you are another member of the team that's maybe not quite as integral into let's say marketing and brand building, in my opinion, it still affects your work if it's a strategic conversation, but maybe not in the same way or to the same degree as someone like a CMO type person. So I really like this idea of essentially personalizing it and thinking about it through the lens of each team member instead of more of a top down kind of trickle down style rebrand approach.

Jonathan Hicken [12:55]:

Yeah, let me give you a real example. So at the organization I work now, it's a public space and there's a front desk and you pay admission. The team as it existed when I came in, their primary role was to take people's money and orient them to the space, and that was serving the organization as an educational center. When I came, one of the things I really wanted to bring was the sentiment that this was a welcoming community space for gathering of any kind and what does it look like to actually create a community space where people could gather comfortably and what role does the front desk play in making that possible? And so just one simple shift that we decided to make was every person that walks in our doors, the front desk needs to ask, are you a member? Because we wanted to create this sense that this is a place where people are buying in and investing their time. And so it's just one simple question, excellence. Now working at the front desk, one of those markers of excellence is that you have to ask every person who comes in, are you a member? And that's just one example of how we broke down the kind of story, the kind of space we wanted to build and made it into a very concrete action for someone who worked at the front desk.

Eric Ressler [14:09]:

And I think especially the way you're describing it seems really powerful to me because you didn't just all of a sudden write a memo to your front desk team and say, you must ask this question now with no context, right? You connected it to a larger strategic goal of changing the perception and the experience of the organization to being community focused. So not only did you get clear about what actions you're asking your team to take, but you connected it back to a purpose and a reason that people could understand because I think a lot of times within any organization, people are thinking, where is this coming from? Why all of a sudden do I need to ask this question? If they don't understand it, it's going to be hard to get them to buy in on it. And if you can't get buy-in inevitably people will stop doing it eventually.

Jonathan Hicken [14:56]:

And I think about on the flip side of this example, someone coming in having seen our messaging and having seen our content online about this warm, welcoming, vibrant space for science and education to only be met with somebody who isn't welcoming them with that kind of warmth and that invitation, the trust we would lose with that person walking through the door if that was a dichotomy that they experienced as they walked in.

Eric Ressler [15:25]:

Yeah, I think we've all experienced that before where you have a perception of a brand through their marketing or through a story from a friend or however you first start to build a picture or paint a picture of a brand in your head. And then when it's not met in the real world with your actual interaction with that brand, there's this instant lack of trust, lack of credibility, and even more so this kind of disappointment where you're like, oh, I thought this was this kind of brand and that's not the experience that I had. And that's where you start to really start to lose

Jonathan Hicken [15:56]:

Trust. And it's not just about people at front desks taking admission tickets. I mean, there's people who might be manning your phones or there might be people even over email responding to customer questions or constituent questions or program participant questions over email. Are we representing the values and our written communication too? I mean that every single human being who's a part of your organization is in some way embodying and creating your brand. And you as a leader have to ask yourself, are we all feeding into this in the way that is going to advance the organization the most?

Eric Ressler [16:32]:

Yeah, I mean, I think about building a brand as this continuous process of reinvention and your brand is not a stagnant thing. It is constantly being built and either in the right direction or the wrong direction with every single micro interaction that anyone who touches your brand has. So you really need to think about it that way and think about all of these little interactions that people have, because those are the things that actually build a brand even more so than your logo and your colors and your marketing. Those should be setting the stage, but really the performance happens when real world interactions happen and you're either living the virtues and the promise of your brand and reinforcing that story or you're moving away from it. It's very rarely neutral.

Jonathan Hicken [17:28]:

So Eric, I'm going to propose that there are a couple of ways to evaluate whether or not your people are embodying your brand in real life. And I'm going to propose some of these to you now, and I want to hear if you have seen other organizations evaluate this differently or in a better way. So the first thing is because this is very qualitative in many ways, as you're undergoing a rebrand project or a strategic planning project, I think you need to build in hands-on face-to-face coaching with every single human being in your organization. You are observing them in their real life job and giving them live feedback on how they may improve or may correct the way that 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 I think every single person needs coaching, especially when you're launching a new brand.

Eric Ressler [18:30]:

Yeah, I mean I think I would love if all of our clients did. That is the short answer. And this is an interesting topic to me because again, I think there is some level of collaboration between a creative agency like Cosmic doing, leading a rebrand or helping with just branding and brand building in general, and the responsibility of a firm like ours or a contractor or whoever might be helping you with your brand and your internal team culture and behavior change. And there might be some folks 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, but the challenge from my perspective is that every team culture is distinct to some way or another. And how your team might best embody a rebrand could differ wildly from another team.

[19:18]:

And there's not really one way of doing this. In my work, I'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 own culture and behavior change within an organization. I could see that approach that you just outlined working really well with the right support and the right approach and the right kind of leadership and management team supporting that work if those scenarios are not right. I could see it backfiring too, even just the way you approach it. Again, if it feels like this kind of, why are we doing this? It's like extra thing. I'm just trying to do my real job already don't have enough time to do that. Why are you hitting me over the head with this rebrand thing that wouldn't work, right? So I think so much of it depends on how you approach it, how you explain it, making a case for why it's important and why it does matter to their job.

[20:13]:

But I really like the idea of approaching it from a support standpoint of like, Hey, we're doing a rebrand, or we're really trying to improve our brand perception and come through more on the promise that we're setting out for our brand. Here's how we need you to help do that. As a team player, you might, if you're making a big strategic shift as a sports team and you need everyone rowing in the same direction, if you've got a coach who's got a new idea around how they're going to approach the game philosophically and that doesn't get embodied by the team, it's never going to work, right? Similar, a rebrand. So yeah, your approach I think could work really well if the right conditions are in place.

Jonathan Hicken [20:52]:

Yeah, I mean, I would say that in any sort of rebrand, there's going to be people on the team or in the community who may not come along, and that's okay too, but it is the leader's responsibility to make sure everybody has an opportunity to find their fit in the new brand and in the new strategy. One other way I would think about evaluating this is obviously you're going to need to get some customer constituent feedback along the way. And I'm kind of a survey hater. I think that surveys actually are for the most part, a big ask and should be used very, very judiciously. But I have discovered one sort of customer feedback mechanism that works really well, and we get really high response rates, and it's a company called they said, and they do what they call pulses. And so they're basically mini one question surveys that are really easy and really fast to answer, and they're also contextualized in terms of when your constituent or participant gets the question. And these one question pulses have been really valuable in helping us understand all of the qualitative elements of the service and the impact that we provide. But I do think that there is a space for gut checking. Did the service or did your experience match your expectations in some way?

Eric Ressler [22:09]:

Yeah, I mean, I think we use surveys in our work sometimes, and I am also a survey skeptic to some degree. I think sometimes what people want to do is design these massive surveys and then essentially just use the survey data as the gospel moving forward. I think that's a really bad way to do surveys. When we do use surveys, when we use surveys, we intentionally design surveys to be extremely short, extremely easy to answer for the most part. And we look at it 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 you can go so much deeper with individual interviews. The reason that we use both typically is because, and the obvious benefit of a survey is scale, just the scope, the number of participants, you can start to get a little bit more data to interpret. So I like the idea of the pulses. I mean, I've seen those show up in my own life through e-commerce or whatever. And I think that's an interesting way to start to build some data in a piecemeal fashion. Instead of asking your constituents to fill out this big survey and having to incentivize them to do that, maybe they're not in the right headspace. And that starts to influence even the data that you get back. So there's some obvious flaws with surveys too.

Jonathan Hicken [23:30]:

So embodying your brand in real life and measuring whether or not you're actually doing it, some of it, as you said, is an art. There's going to be an element of it that we don't fully ever understand. And as leaders, I know that there are times where I feel like I need to go with what I believe and go with my gut. And so there is a little bit of an act of forgiveness for the listeners is this is a hard thing to manage it, embodying it and measuring it. But I do think that it's really important as you decide to do a rebrand, to be ready to commit to this level of coaching and evaluation for your team.

Eric Ressler [24:06]:

You don't need to go from zero to a hundred on this, right? If you're not doing any of this right now, and this starts to feel overwhelming, just start, right, take some small steps and even that is going to make a big difference. What's the right way to start? I don't know. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind to me is just having conversations with your team about this, and even if it's not fully operationalized or framework at the beginning, just getting out there and starting to tell a story around why this is important and why they should care. And listening to 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 X, Y, Z, that might be something to listen to as a leader too, right?

Jonathan Hicken [24:54]:

Embodying your brand in real life. I mean, I think that's something that you need to be prepared to do for any strategic shift, and you need to be prepared to make sure your team has what they need in order to make that shift successfully. Eric, is there anybody that you've come across that this advice would not apply to?

Eric Ressler [25:09]:

I can't think of a single scenario where you should not embody your brand, especially if you're about to do a rebrand. And that is changing to me. If you don't embody a brand, then it's just kind of a hollow shell, right? And that's where you start to see this huge disconnect between what's being promised through brand storytelling and marketing and communications and people's lived experience with your organization. To me, that's a huge miss and it's never going to work. I think 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 so I think authenticity is really the root of so much success today as an organization, as a leader, as a brand. And if you're not embodying your brand, then you're not being authentic.

Jonathan Hicken [25:59]:

Alright, well thanks for your thoughts on embodying your brand in real life, Eric. I think that'll do it for today.

Eric Ressler [26:04]:

Awesome. Thanks Jonathan.