Volume 123: Building A Business Around Your Brand, or…

1. Building A Business Around Your Brand or A Brand Around Your Product?

tl;dr: Thought-provoking, from a surprising source.

Way back when, when I was first starting out in this business, we had the opportunity to pitch a major UK high street bank. It was one of those fast-burn pitches, where because of various logistical issues, we only had two days to put the pitch together, which also happened to be a weekend.

I distinctly remember coming into the office and whiteboarding it out with Brian Boylan, then Chairman of Wolff Olins. The essence of the pitch was that competitor high street banks, which were busily turning branches into coffee shops, were taking the wrong path and that we had a somewhat different vision for what this bank could be instead, which we then proceeded to outline.

The pitch happened, we won, and we later found out that the CEO had immediately couriered the pitch document to the lead transformation partner at McKinsey, with whom they were already working, with a message along the lines of “Read this. It’s our new vision.”

These days, I’d have posted on LinkedIn how humbled I felt that the CEO thought so highly of our meager document, but thankfully LinkedIn didn’t exist back then, so I couldn’t.

Fast forward a few months, and while our team was busy helping the bank figure out a new brand strategy, visual identity, customer experience, retail experience, and unique value propositions, the client team sought a new advertising agency to help bring all this to market. And sure enough, they managed to land the most in-demand agency in London, with a storied creative director vowing to work on the business and be a key part of transformational change for the bank. Only he never got involved. I later found out that he’d been intently focused on a new campaign for McCain Oven Fries instead.

I literally couldn’t figure this out. Be a part of significant transformational change for a huge business that directly impacted millions of people, or execute a TV campaign for frozen potato strips in a plastic bag? Wut.

It always stuck with me because the longer you work in this business, the more you realize just how big the differences are between brands and branding in the CPG/FMCG world, and brands and branding for organizations that might have hundreds of products, thousands of employees, and millions of customers. Especially since advertising agencies still, to this day, treat everything as if it’s oven fries and would gladly do a campaign for fries over anything else if it offered them the “creative freedom” they so desire.

Anyway, this is a feeling that’s only been exacerbated recently, as the rise of marketing science and its attempt to empirically identify what works and what doesn’t from a “moving the merch” standpoint tends to treat every brand the same, irrespective of whether it represents frozen potato strips in a plastic bag or the human endeavor and ingenuity of thousands of people.

My challenge is that I’ve always struggled to find the language to adequately make the distinction…until now. And I have to say, it came from the most unexpected of sources, Interbrand.

Their most recent list of global monopolists distinguishes between companies that “build a brand around a product” and companies that “build a business around a brand.” And while I think the pejorative leadership angle they place around the distinction is nonsensical, the frame of reference is super interesting for my purposes. So here goes.

For many years, the CPG/FMCG world has been focused on building brands around a product. And there’s generally a clear distinction between what goes on inside the package and the brand perceptions that are layered on top of it. In this world, with things like, say, McCain Oven Fries, you really can’t change what’s in the bag, so everything is focused on the image you build around it. It’s an exercise in image-making and little else since you can’t influence the product, you can’t influence the buying experience, and you probably can’t influence the packaging all that much, either. I suspect this is partly why so many CPG/FMCG brands fell down the purpose hole - it represented something novel and new and interesting that you could influence in an environment where there wasn’t much novelty or newness to draw upon.

Contrast this reality with a world where you’re developing a brand for a corporation or any organization, really. Here you’re influencing the behavior of people; you’re impacting way more touchpoints, including the types of products they make, the service model they employ, and the experiences they create. And you have way more stakeholders to think about than just the customer. Like investors, employees, partners, regulators, individual communities, etc. In this world, you’re more likely not just building a brand around your product but building a business around your brand (even if this definition suffers more than a little from hyperbole).

Now, I know it’s far from the perfect description, and I certainly don’t see it as being as binary as Interbrand presents it as. More that it’s a spectrum across which brands might span. But, as a conversation point with clients, I’ve found it very useful lately because it allows you to figure out together which branding approach is right so you can focus attention where it needs to be focused. I can’t tell you how often an implicit disconnect causes real problems, where the client thinks about their brand at one end of this spectrum, and their consulting partner (in this case, me) thinks they’re at the other.

So, yes. Thank you Interbrand. Fair play and credit where credit is due.

2. We Interrupt This Broadcast For A Rather Long Commercial Break.

tl;dr: Time for a self-serving advertorial, well confessional mostly.

This year has seen so many new Off Kilter sign-ups; thank you all. I truly love that you’ve signed up, and I deeply appreciate it. You’re the reason I keep writing this stuff every week.

As more have signed up, more have reached out to ask who I am, what I do, and whether I work for a living or write newsletters all day. (Yes, I do work. I’m a consultant focused chiefly on brand strategy. Newsletter writing is a passion project for nights and weekends because it pays zip).

So, I figured that since we’re approaching the end of the year, perhaps I should do an advertorial disguised as a confessional for all of you folks that don’t already know me. And while I’m cringing at the prospect of writing about myself, here goes.

Hello. I’m Paul. I’m from the Shetland Islands in Scotland. Until I was a teenager, I lived on the island of Unst, the furthest North you can go while still being in the UK. It’s the same size as Manhattan but only has 600 people on it instead of 6 million.

I hated my childhood, hated being stuck in Shetland, hated the dark nights of winter, hated the parochial reality of small-town living, and despised my time at high school, where bullying was baked into the very fabric of the place. Realizing that education was my only way out, I did just enough to make it to college. (As an aside, whoever described school years as the best of your life was delusional).

I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where I went to less than 40% of my classes, spent weeks at a time in a drunken haze, developed tinnitus from waaaaayyy too much time in nightclubs, and somehow worked my way into something approximating adulthood. Then, through sheer luck, I graduated with an upper second-class BA with Honors in Marketing because the economics classes I’d also been studying required math skills I didn’t have and wasn’t interested in developing.

After four years of bliss, real life hit me like a truck when I realized I was way behind everyone else. A feeling that still haunts me to this day. While my peers were busy lining up jobs months before graduation in exotic fields I’d never heard of, like investment banking and management consulting, I naively went about my business thinking you only applied for jobs after graduating, which meant there were only crappy jobs left to apply for. So that’s what I got. Eventually.

I quit that job after two weeks. It was in Salford, a distinctly downtrodden part of Manchester in England, and it was a disaster. All I’ll say is that the office was ram-raided on my second day and that the owners insisted on calling me Thomas (My middle name, my dad’s name, not my name) because they already had “too many Pauls.”

Slinking back to Shetland with my tail between my legs, I vowed that to get out permanently, I needed to become successful enough at something, anything, because if I didn’t, I’d be stuck there forever.

After a brief sojourn on the Isle of Skye (beautiful but even more parochial than Shetland), a failed application for a job with the Stewart Formula One team drove me back to academia. I had the hard realization that I wouldn’t have hired me either and that I’d be stuck in the backwaters of Scotland forever if I didn’t do something about it.

So, I begged my parents for money they didn’t have (thank you, both) and did an MBA at Lancaster University in England, which I loved, where I met people I’m still good friends with over twenty years later and where I realized that while I was still way behind everyone else, I had the good fortune to be at least as smart as they were. Since I had unfinished business with academia, I buckled down this time and graduated with distinction, which is similar to one of those Cum Laude things if you’re from the US.

This time, I tried to find a job before graduating, but even as I watched my classmates get plenty of offers, for me, there were none. Notable among many rejections, McKinsey sent a rejection letter a full two years after I applied, and P&G offered me an interview two weeks earlier than the letter informing me was postmarked. Since I can’t time travel, it meant I couldn’t interview with them again for another 12 months. Global Crossing briefly raised my hopes before refusing to pay interview expenses, so I couldn’t go because I couldn’t afford the trip to London and back. In hindsight, I dodged a bullet as it went spectacularly bankrupt shortly after.

At my lowest point, while openly considering using my degree certificate as toilet paper, I saw a recruitment ad in the Sunday Times from Wolff Olins looking for senior strategy consultants. Now, I knew I was far from senior consultant material, but I’d also been watching Wolff Olins from afar for years because I was obsessed with their work and had seriously considered sending a speculative letter anyway.

So, I wrote a desperate letter born from the depths of despair. Little did I realise it then, but it was the first Off Kilter. I can’t remember all that was in it. I’m sure there was plenty of boot-licking. But I do remember three things. First, it said, “I know you’re busy, so just read the bold bits,” which I duly bolded. Second, because they’d asked for outside-the-box thinkers, it said, “Thinking outside the box first requires you to accept that there is a box. There is no box.” And finally, I begged. Saying something like, “I know my resume is unimpressive, and I won’t get a job as a senior consultant, but it costs almost nothing to do an interview. I’m not asking you for a job; I’m simply asking you for a chance to talk.”

So we talked, and I got an entry-level job as a junior consultant (thank you, Robert), mostly, I think, because I was a novelty from far away, and they took pity on me. And even though I was grateful, I was also driven because there was no way I intended to end up back in Shetland again. And even though being a junior consultant meant you had to carry everyone else’s bags to client meetings, at least I was in the meetings, where I could listen and learn and try to figure out what the hell it was we were doing.

I spent ten years at Wolff Olins, from 2001-2004 in London and 2004-2010 in New York. I arrived in NYC with two bags of clothes to my name, and by the time I left Wolff Olins, I’d worked with some of the world’s largest corporations, was a client principal, as well as head of strategy in the US, a member of the US management team, and the global leadership team. You know, all the bollocks you write on your resume that don’t really mean much. What you can’t put on your resume is having a colleague and friend refer to you as “The Rain Man of Branding.” I love that and occasionally use it as a tongue-in-cheek description of myself to this day.

More importantly, I had the distinct pleasure of working with some of the best, smartest, most creative people I’ve ever worked with, including the amazing woman who foolishly agreed to become my wife.

But, by the end, I was done. Burned out, jaded, pissed off, you name it. The financial crisis hit us hard, and my first act as strategy head had been to lay people off, which I never really got over. I blew a disc in my back. I had to do the hard yards of helping build things back up by winning clients in Tokyo, Qatar, LA, and Seattle, but I was based in New York. And after spending my son’s second birthday interviewing a Sheikh about a museum in the Middle East, I knew I was done. Pissing American Airlines off in a pitch where they wanted a new logo, but I insisted we focus on fixing their shitty experience instead was simply the period at the end of a ten-year sentence.

Since I’d previously helped us win a considerable pitch for Microsoft, I realized there was now a window of financial security for the business that meant I could leave without it being hugely traumatic. So, I decided on a Friday and quit on Monday. I’ve never felt freer than the weekend in the middle. I had no plans, nowhere to go, no career goals, no direction, and no job. All I knew was that I didn’t want to work at the only place I’d ever wanted to work anymore.

I bounced around freelancing for a bit before quickly realizing there isn’t much of a place for senior freelance strategy talent. You’re just too expensive for agencies that want to mark up your fees by 3X, and I don’t find it very satisfying anyway.

Then, I got an opportunity to work directly with a client Wolff Olins had passed on, so I took it. My accountant told me I needed a corporate entity to shield me from liability, so I came up with Invencion. I could give you a song and dance about how this name came about, but the reality is that my wife and I batted ideas around in front of the fire in the back room of the Clover Club in Brooklyn on a wintery March afternoon while getting blasted on gin cocktails. And, well, the Invencion dot com URL was available for $749. So I bought it.

Thus, Invencion, Inc. was born. If I'm honest, there weren’t any plans, certainly no business plan, or even much of a clue. There was never any intent to hire anyone else but me (I retain the view that while I don’t mind taking a risk on my ability to pay my own mortgage, I won’t take that same risk with anyone else’s). It was just a vehicle through which I could do business. I put the website together myself using Squarespace, as you can tell, and it hasn’t changed much since. Frankly, it’s awful and makes me cringe. I try not to look at it. I fantasize that if I ignore it for long enough, it might go away or magically become good.

At some point, someone asked me what I do, and I flippantly responded that I help corporations figure out who they’re going to be when they grow up. And, well, that’s still the best description I’ve come up with.

However, the longer answer is that Invencion is a strategy consultancy that works with leadership teams going through periods of transformation to help them match their brand to their business relative to whatever change it is they face. I probably could zhuzh that description up a bit with a few more buzzwords, but that’s what I do. I’m good at working with senior business leaders and adept at connecting the dots between business strategy, brand strategy, and design in interesting ways that often differ from what you’d get from anyone else. And finally, in addition to being a practitioner, I’m a student of my field because if you’re going to do something, you’d better damn well educate yourself to be good at it.

Which, neatly brings me to Off Kilter. I started Off Kilter in 2019 for two reasons. The first is that we’d moved to Cambridge, MA, a couple of years earlier so my wife could take a job at a startup. Because my network was all New York-based, I found myself with a huge “out of sight, out of mind” problem, which meant business opportunities were drying up, and I didn’t have a Boston area network to take up the slack.

This meant Off Kilter was created as a vehicle to try and stay top of mind with the people in my network, of which 90 odd were sent the first edition. Putting a sign-up box on the website was more of a “well, I can, so I may as well” kind of thing. Since I’d never had more than 2 or 3 site visitors a month at that point, I never for an instant thought anyone would sign up, and I remain shocked and grateful to this day that so many of you have.

The second reason was my increasingly fraught relationship with LinkedIn. I felt this incredible sense of anxiety every time I opened the app, looking at all the big jobs my peers were getting, with all of their not-so-humble, “I’m so humble,” bragging about it. I felt like I was way behind again because the truth about working for yourself for even a short time is that whatever recruiter calls you may have been getting (and I’ve never had more than a handful ever in my life), they dry up completely when you don’t have an Ivy League college or a well-known employer on your resume. It’s an ongoing irony that I advise senior people in organizations where I know I’d never get close to an interview if I applied for a job there.

Anyway, because of all of this stress and angst I created for myself, I felt the need to shout into the void just to remind myself that I still existed. Today, I refer to this as catharsis by newsletter.

In addition to my existential anxiety, I was angry at the utter nonsense and snake-oil people were peddling on the platform and felt there had to be a counterpoint. I think the thing that really pushed me over the edge was some idiot blathering on about Tesla being inordinately successful without spending a penny on marketing. It was complete bullshit, but the thousands of likes and hundreds of “right on” comments it garnered were most shocking. Christ, I remember thinking that if anyone actually followed this advice, they’d likely be bankrupt in months, if not weeks.

So, in addition to remaining top of mind with my network and shouting into the void to remind myself that I still existed, I also wanted to be a counterpoint to the bullshit and snake oil and hopefully give people a laugh while learning about this stuff. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and it’s not brain surgery. We’re just trying to get people to buy stuff, so why take it all so seriously and wrap so much nonsense around it?

Fast forward to today, and we’re now in Connecticut, living the boring suburban life of middle age, with two dogs and an excellent high school for our son. Invencion is still going, 13 years later, and I get to advise a broad range of fascinating clients with equally fascinating problems. Writing Off Kilter forces me to keep my edge, and some have suggested I also do a podcast, but I’m unsure. I like writing. (Let me know if you think it would be worth it or not)

I talked at the Brand New Conference this year because Bryony and Armin find Off Kilter funny and a non-designer with strong opinions on design a bit of a novelty. It was nerve-wracking and exhilarating, and I’d like to do it more often. So if anyone is hosting an event and wants a live Off Kilter with a speaker who swears too much yet makes up for it with a Scottish accent, I’m there for you.

So, there you have it. This is who I am. This is why I’m here. And this is why Off Kilter exists. Thank you for reading what accidentally became a long and rambling essay. I sincerely appreciate that we’re on this ride together.

Advertorial over.

Peace.

3. 2023 Prediction: More B2B Focused Branding.

tl;dr: Here’s a quickie to round out the day.

Over the years, I’ve done much of my work with B2B clients. It’s not hard to figure out why, after all, B2B represents a significant amount of economic output, and often their challenges are vastly more complex and interesting than your average B2C peer.

What’s interesting is that sales cultures often drive B2B corporations. And, while all salespeople want a strong brand (makes it easier to sell), they rarely have the appetite to invest in building one, especially since it means spending money that might not pay off until multiple quarters in the future. An anathema to a salesperson used to performance being measured in days, weeks, and occasionally months.

So, it’s no surprise that so many B2B businesses completely skipped brand-building when digital came along and gladly dove all the way to the bottom of the lead generation pool. Only now, they’re beginning to figure out that this may not have been the smart move they believed it to be and that, shock horror, the techno-utopians selling them on the vision were lying (As an aside, is there any arena of business where technology firms haven’t promised the world only to deliver a tiny sliver of the promise? It’s shocking that anyone still takes what they say at face value). Anyway, as a result, we’re beginning to see the pendulum swing back the other way.

I have to give credit to the LinkedIn B2B Institute on this. I believe the research they’ve been publishing has made a distinct impact. I’ve certainly been using their data with my clients and prospects, even if their website is shockingly hard to navigate.

And now MarketingWeek in the UK is predicting more B2B brand action in 2023, and I have to say, I think they’re probably right.