The Brand Truth: Liberating your brand with courage

?“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

The Digital Age calls for many things. Above all, truth. Truth wasn’t the intent of the digital revolution or a creation of the connected world. But the unintended outcome of this connectedness is that the collective gets to examine everything from all angles publicly, and there is no escape from it. What does this mean for businesses, their product/service and marketing?

The paradigm of ‘Meaning’ in business

To say “the world has changed beyond anyone’s wildest imagination in the past decade” is an understatement. Technology and digitization have enabled this hyper-transformation. And, well, here we are, feeling, seeing, doing everything, everywhere, all at once. Possibly the most spontaneously interesting time to be alive in all of history, when one has the luxury of taking a break from being busy to watch a few seconds of our existential activity in peace.

Of all the things happening in this world, I find the rise of the meaningful start-ups the most daring, inspirational and earnest phenomenon. Here are a bunch of people, not waiting around for other people or companies or governments to solve problems they care about, and instead venturing out to find a solution. Some don’t even get funded if the ideas don’t seem “investable” as of today.

On the other side (the consumer’s) too, big changes happened. Till yesterday, big advertising budgets solely influenced buying decisions, held the power to manipulate consumer behaviour and even ended up impacting society negatively in many ways.

Today, brand communication is no longer one-way, whether the company intends it that way or not. And it’s no longer possible to just advertise to build a great brand. It was never that way anyway, but today it’s like not even a little, don’t even think about it if your ambitions are long-term. Via social media and other platforms, the digital age has put the customer truly in power, and ensured that brands are held to higher standards of accountability, transparency and purpose.

Companies that don’t fit into boxes

I co-founded an anti-advertising agency L-m-n-tree 6 years ago with the intent of helping build meaningful, spirited, soulful brands. We preferred working with early-stage start-ups because some of the work involved in building resilient companies is foundational, and better done from the start than a few years into its growth.

We worked on a freelancer job platform, a software developer platform, a digital publishing solutions company, an Indian pay-later start-up, a herbal soap maker, a college focused on experiential learning, a marketplace for the woke, a live-entertainment start-up, a decentralised identity solution, a women’s fashion brand in the UAE, a web3 payments interface and a few more. A reasonable variety of domains.

One thing we found while working on these businesses was that the frameworks, strategies and tactics that worked for the successful brands of yore didn’t work for these. And not because these companies are too small, or don’t have the budgets to do what the big companies do or anything like that. Surprisingly, it was because these companies had something more to them. They had a real spirit, something that would almost come through and make itself felt in candid conversations and debates with every stakeholder or employee. A strength of purpose felt and shared by every customer. And the raw <personality> (I can’t think of the right word to put here) of the founder/founding team.

The existing processes and frameworks of figuring out the identity, the positioning and the communication strategy were lacking, not doing justice.

We kept doing the work anyway, and tried different things – spoke to thousands of users, scrolled for hundreds of hours reading comments on social media, wrote comments, wrote social media posts, blog content, experimented with ads, landing pages, events and so much more. After much trial and error emerged a new framework that could work as a key for meaningful brands.

And at the centre of it, holding it all together was what the truth.

The Brand Truth.

What is it? Is it a set of values and beliefs? A ground-shaking insight?

We didn’t know, but we drew some diagrams putting what we saw as the important attributes of the modern brand in relationships with each other, and looked for what held them together. A Venn diagram emerged, with the Brand Truth at the centre.

Are we breaking the brand out of old boxes and putting them in a new box?

Yes and no. For one, we made circles :D

And two, these are not rigidly defined attributes like benefits, differentiators, insights and who the competition is.

The Brand Truth is a guiding star full of possibilities for everything the brand could be, just like all other positioning systems. A blueprint of all the fundamentals that matter in the building of the purposeful brand.

Why break out of myth-marketing?

Half of the reason to find your brand’s truth is that in the Digital Age, marketing is not something you do to help your company grow. It’s everything the company is and does. From who you are, what you do, how you do it, what your product/service experience is like, where you want to go, what kind of a relationship you have with your customers and every single thing related to every part of the business.

If ever there was a difference between the business, the brand and its marketing before, the lines are too blurred now.

The other half is that people no longer want or relate with ads except maybe as entertainment, and to pass judgement on it. It’s already happening with digital audiences, and will probably happen for the rest of the world too. The ads that do work on digital are charming, honest pieces of communication from the company’s heart to the audience’s. The less they look like an ad, the more impact they have.

Truth and authenticity are not just preferred, it’s demanded, exacted and excavated out by your audience if you won’t do it yourself. Like Marc Matthieu said, “Marketing used to be about making a myth and telling it. Now it’s about telling a truth and sharing it.”

L-m-n-tree's approach to marketing came about from these learnings about the world, and our yearnings as marketing people who weren’t satisfied with creating shareholder value maximisation.

Finding a Brand’s Truth

It’s an explorative exercise in 3 parts – the same as the timeless principles used in brand building. Just differently structured and designed specifically for the Digital Age companies.

1. Know Thyself

We’ve all seen the Start With Why talk and maybe also read the book by Simon Sinek. Knowing the ‘why’ is the most basic thing to do as a human, a business, an idea, a movement, whatever. Even while writing a customary brief for a PoS dangler, we better start with why – why is this brief here? If it’s not clear to the brand owner or the account manager, little chance of a creative team knowing what to do with that brief. And then the output reflects all kinds of the lack of clarity the input brought into it.

Building further on this in the context of building communities, an article by planetary community builder Michel Bachmann suggests that we start with who . Today, in the start-up age, community or no community, Starting With Who is critical to finding your audience.

If you don’t know who you are, it’s unlikely anyone else can see it, or be interested or care about your why or what. It’s the spirit of your company that shines through in everything you do, and which connects with the audience with similar values, needs, goals and maybe even personality.

In addition, startups are a reflection of their founders. Not just startups, but any enterprise that was founded by someone who cared about it and poured their energy into building it. If you look at any company, how they do things is a reflection of the founders and the key decision-influencers. In effect, the brand is who makes it.

But that’s not all. There’s also the invisible co-founder. One of the clients I work closely with, has 3 founders. Often during key strategic decision-making times, I feel the presence of the fourth entity, which is the spirit of the brand itself. And if you look and listen closely, it has its own identity, way of doing things, ambitions, moral outlook. And if ever in doubt, the best voice to listen to is that spirit’s, if you can tune in and listen. Turns out it’s not a crazy hallucination, but a widely researched and documented thing.

The fundamental questions to answer include:

• Who are you?
• Why do you exist?
• How will you make a difference and to what or whom?
• What are your values and beliefs?
• What makes you unique?
• What is your core, your essence?

Note, the Why, the uniqueness, your core, your values are all a part of who you are. These questions look simple but it takes a lot of thinking, debating, brainstorming, defining, experimenting and doing, failing, succeeding, selling, getting stuck and more to figure this out.

Most importantly, a lot of courage, faith and openness to feedback and change. Because once you put the idea out into the world, it’s no longer just yours. It’s its own. Like Kahlil Gibran’s poem On Children said.

In setting out to answer those questions, the aim is to arrive at clarity, which may take a few months or a few years depending on a lot of internal and external factors. And maybe a few more to evolve with the business, adapt and grow outside its comfort zone. The journey is its own reward. This is where the founding team’s mettle outside of fundraising and day-to-day ops come to be tested.

2. Be Thyself

Authenticity and originality. We love that stuff! Rather than be a copy of a copy of a copy, it pays to invest time and energy in knowing yourself, and then taking the effort to be truly originally authentically you.

Be brave to break the rules of Best Practices and what everyone says about how to cultivate the world’s perception of you/your idea/your business. Don’t listen to people and institutions that say, don’t be this way or that way – you can be loud, negative or angry, shout at the leaders of the world or preach or be apologetic when you make a mistake or dance into the office and put it on social media if that’s who you really are. Express your fears and concerns. In short, be really, authentically you instead of saying stuff like “we are proud to announce the launch of this latest feature on our app to help you do things better; try it out and you too can be your best like over 40K+ of our happy and successful customers!”

I’m putting so much stress on the words ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ because I see people and business leaders so afraid to be transparent and real. They believe they are somehow damaging their company by exposing its softness and vulnerabilities. And on the other side, I see #buildinpublic kind of movements where the ups and downs and fears and wins and failures are shared in real time.

Some questions to think about:

• What are you like? What’s your personality?
• What things can you do together with your audience?
• How do you present yourself to the world authentically, but also in a way that your tribe can find you?
• How do you do things? What kind of discipline, structure and values do you embody??

These are things you can discover only by doing. You can’t really write down “my personality is that of an introvert who is also disdainful and passionate”. When you start doing what you need to do, your personality comes out and leads your words and actions from the front. What you can do is, be mindful of why and how we do certain things and be sure that this is coming from a place of authenticity and genuine intent.

3. Do Thy Thing

What’s the point if you have a great idea, started a business and then kept it to yourself and your network? Especially in the tech world, there are lots of founders who don’t believe in marketing or know it to be the scourge that destroyed the world.

A business needs to figure out how to show up, and then do it consistently to whatever extent it can. Don’t be like L-m-n-tree, which really wants itself to show up and spread its ideas and wings but thanks to me, it never even got a chance!

• How/where do you want to be present, be relevant, add value?
• What are the things you would do if you were most authentically yourself?
• What is the brand story that unfolds across all touch points?

Today, it’s easier than before because you don’t need big marketing bucks to do this. You don’t need a graphic designer or a writer to start with, or make good-looking ads with celebrities or even have a shiny logo. You can take your idea far before it comes to a point where it needs to design its identity and have a communication team in place. And it can go a long way without these.

I can vouch for this with Geektrust.com, which grew for the first 6+ years with 90% of the content, ads, social media, emails and every other communication being done by me or one of the founders. Not a professional creative team. We didn’t plan it that way, but it happened, it worked, and we continued with it for as long as we could + had to.

The Brand Truth System: Putting the truth to work

Once the questions are answered, the next step is to document it + put it in a format that can give a full picture of the brand in one look. This will help as a guide to look back in times the brand needs direction, or when in doubt about any aspect of business, or while taking major business decisions. We tried many frameworks and finally arrived at a Venn diagram where the brand truth is at the centre, holding all attributes of the brand together.

The questions we asked and answered above don’t directly fit into the circles here, but they give the clarity needed to articulate the attributes with precision, pithiness and clarity. Keep answering and trying different variations until you can get to exactly what it is, what feels right, and then the pieces fit well together. Voila!

A closer look via the Lmntree example:

Our Who + Why

The elementary approach is nothing but fearlessly and relentlessly asking questions and finding all the answers until we have total clarity about the problem, the factors and variables, and everything needed to find the right solution. It’s sort of like solving a puzzle or playing detective. If you guessed the name L-m-n-tree was inspired by Sherlock Holmes solving crimes, you’re right. We study problems until we can find a solution that doesn’t break things. Because we believe that brands born today out of great ideas and ideals can shape a very different world if we gave them the chance, a bit of direction and the fuel.

What we do

We liberate potent ideas from the shackles of complicated ever-shifting trend-chasing fear-based cacophonic marketing. An approach that lays strong foundations for the business and brand is required for small businesses with big ideals to go up against the richest corporations of the world. A strong foundation and getting your basics right are absolutely necessary to go to war without running out of patience, willpower, money, clarity of vision and the energy of a super-committed team. We help companies do that.

How we do it

Finding the truth and sharing it with passion – we believe communication needs to be organic, natural, truthful, clean, free of BS and “buy nows” in order to connect with the right people.

The other elements – vision, mission and values – are self-explanatory.

Articulating the Brand Truth

Coming up with a brand’s truth is easier than writing a guide on what the Brand Truth is. It’s not the traditional brand core/essence, or its values and beliefs or what it stands for. It’s what’s underneath all these attributes, giving power to them, illuminating them in a way that only truth can.

The truth is a simple statement, a fact or a fundamental belief that is at the core of everything the business is, does, thinks and feels. When the basics are in place, communication becomes an organic stream of consciousness of the brand.

• The brand truth could be a wise old saying or a proverb or a fact
• It packs a lot of power – it gives power to the business
• It’s simple and easy to relate to
• The logic of it is apparent to anyone who hears it

The benefits of the Brand Truth

As opposed to the FOMO approach to marketing and brand building, with the Brand Truth comes a complete inversion of this approach.

The ‘truth’ approach attracts the right audience, the right partners and the right employees that are aligned with and believe in the brand rather than the brand setting out looking for, finding and “acquiring” them, figuring out how to retain them.

The key difference from other models is that it’s inward-focused and introspective than outside-focused. It’s the power that comes from insight on the self, and an almost-foolish disregard for competition.

Let’s dive into the details.

1. You connect with the right customers – those who would look for and gravitate towards the brand even if it were to communicate in a silo or chose to do only organic marketing. Today, that's not a small number. Every idea, however outlandish, has millions of takers. When the brand knows exactly who it is, exactly what it needs to say or do, 80% of the time and effort + 100% of the money spent in experimenting and taking semi-wild shots in the dark will be saved.
2. Communication becomes more natural and organic. The brand presents itself. Customers choose it because they like who the brand is. It is positioned uniquely, memorably to a 100% matched audience, while it probably doesn’t matter to the rest, and that’s okay.
3. No need to sell. Gives room to do more interesting, memorable things. Someone would always be worried whether the audience will “buy now” unless specifically asked to do so. Whether they will “learn more” or “click here” or believe that they too can become awesome like the person in the testimonial if they used the product. If the conversion rate from a blog post is slightly less (for any number of reasons), people blame it on a weak CTA. But aren’t human beings capable of acting without being told to do so all the time? Or are marketers just being hypocritical when we say the customer is king and all that?
4. Helps build authentic relationships. This can start from day 1 by showing the audience, the team members, partners and the world who you are, rather than what you want from them.
5. The organisation's culture defines itself – can culture be defined? Or is it something that evolves from everything you do and how you do it? Can your organisations’s truth, values, vision and everything else inspire and unite employees towards a common goal? Or does it struggle to make people take ownership? Do people find joy and pride in their work and talk about it? Do people nurture, help and cheer each other? If you feel your team isn't good enough or motivated or you can't trust them, chances are that the problem is not with the people, but with the lack of clarity, inspiration and trust the leaders are able to evoke in them.

Everyone seeks truth, transparency and accountability, not just your audience on social media. In fact, your employees are the most important audience. If they feel what you are, what you say and what you do are not aligned, the customers will feel it 10x.

Refer the diagram above for specific benefits for different sets of audiences.

It takes a lot of courage to find the truth and stick with it. People who set out to solve difficult problems have loads of it. When you have put in the work and got else figured out, communication, branding and marketing should not be the reason why your business shouldn't take off to the heights it should and add its beauty to the world.

If you’re a founder or a marketer working on birthing something new, I’d love you to try the Brand Truth system. If you do, please let me know your feedback, questions or criticism. I’ll be grateful for it.

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