The Mound - #18 - Your Identity Is Not a Strategy

Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems

Remember when weaknesses were just things that you… you know… weren’t good at? 

Hismile founder, Alex Tomic, is a self-confessed introvert but, according to the AFR, this allows the 30-year-old teeth-whitening magnate to “sit back and observe” which really “drives his business success.”

You heard it here second, folks. Sit back, observe, and get richer than God. 

The only thing keeping the world from outright deriding such sentiments are how often we hear them coming out of people so successful that we daren’t question them for fear of exposing our own inability to also drive business success (?). 

But of course it wasn’t Alex’s introversion that catapulted Hismile to its heights. It was the brand’s clever use of influencers at a time when Instagram was still queen, celebrities’ images carefully manicured, and the end of the Facebook-duck-face days meant we were all thinking about our smiles again. 

We see it again and again. Where discussion of brand strategy should lead to the play-by-play of a group applying a strength (low-cost production of teeth whitening products) to an opportunity (Instagram circa 2014), we fall back on trivial archetypes, on Introverts/Extroverts, brand values and narratives. 

These elements of brand identities aren’t damaging in and of themselves - but the frequency with which they are updated and the length at which they are discussed has cost businesses untold riches and has destroyed the credibility of marketing departments the world over. Now, don’t get us wrong. Brand identities are very, very important in ensuring that, when you do advertise, your efforts aren’t credited to a competitor. But, once sorted, it’s very rarely your logo that needs changing. 

We recently spoke with someone who wanted some help with their brand. As part of the discussion, the CEO shared with us their current strategy, written for them - at great expense - by a reputable agency. It was 85 pages long and less than two years old. “None of it’s wrong,” the CEO said. “We just… we just don't know what to do with it.” 

This is the most common problem Good One is called in to solve: brand identities masquerading as strategies - dense, tome-like documents that, rather than empowering an organisation, seemingly exist to prevent junior social media managers from posting anything other than a resized version of a TVC from 2013.

The confusion of brand identity and brand strategy might happen for any number of reasons. I suspect it occurs mostly because, without a prioritised set of challenges to overcome, organisations look inward, hoping that by really getting to know themselves - and then cementing that understanding in a 400-page document - the way forward and all its requirements will make themselves known.

Of course that doesn’t work because, even if it is achieved, consensus is not a direction. 

Tik Tok’s insatiable hunger for content, its almost daily demand for video content is exposing a great many brands’ inability to operate or even exist outside of completely controlled environments. Unfortunately for them, those environments are expensive to book and to fill - and, worst of all, that’s often not where the customers are. 

To offer brands something of a quick fix - just remember that right now we are in story-gathering and story-telling years (youth markets, especially). Just as Instagram shaped our faces, our concerns, and our facial concerns, the shape of the stories we now tell each other online are largely dictated by Tik Tok’s algorithm and what it’s built to promote - which will always be engaging videos from consistent posters. 

So our advice to brands seeking youth markets: next time you’re tempted to update or change your logo, just think instead about your target audience and all the different kinds of stories they’re telling online. In how many of those could your brand cop a mention? PLEASE NOTE your brand is very, very unlikely to be the focus of this story. 

From here - with all these different stories - you’ve got the basis for a content calendar and a lens with which to view the news for culturally relevant opportunities. Now get out there and introduce yourselves, you gosh-darn introverts. 

You’re welcome, Australia.