To find new customers, deconstruct your brand

Finding new customers for an existing brand is hard. If you’ve got brand loyalists, you want to stay true to the brand they know and love. But you also want to attract the eyes of new folks. It’s a bit of a puzzle.?

Maybe it’s time for new brand positioning.

You know your brand well—maybe too well. You might have a couple of positions ready to launch. But before you do, consider bringing new perspectives to your brand.

How to generate new perspectives? Get a bunch of people together and ask them to deconstruct your brand into its component attributes. These attributes become your building blocks for new positions. Our typical MO:

Invite plenty of people from within your organization—not just the big titles; the more, the merrier. Frame it as a fun, lively brand exercise/discussion.

Use a collaborative tool to facilitate the brainstorm (our favorite: using digital post-its in Miro ).

Tee up the prompts. Once everyone’s in the ‘room’, ask them to fill out post-its with short 1-5 word answers that answer probing questions like:

How does [brand] make people feel?

What sets [brand] apart from the competition? What makes it better?

What functional benefits do members get from [brand]?

What's the [brand] vibe?

How does [brand] speak to potential customers?

What are the primary benefits of [brand]?

Encourage participants to fill out as many post-its as possible, and remind them that duplicates are a good thing: if multiple stakeholders suggest that “builds confidence” is an attribute, that’s helpful information.

Make sure all voices are heard. Ask stakeholders to elaborate on attributes that are new or have been forgotten. Point out seemingly contradictory attributes. Call in the quieter folks in the room (they often have the best ideas).

Discuss points of debate. Maybe one stakeholder thinks “comforting” describes the brand vibe, and another thinks it’s more like “personable”. Nuanced discussions show your brand’s depth, clarify your team’s understanding, and help you carve a strong path forward.

Start bucketing. Bucket the attributes into thematic groups. Say you’re a cold brew brand and you see a lot of post-its emerge related to convenience. Cluster them and label the bucket.

Inspect, discuss, and vote on attribute buckets. Are there any redundancies? Any buckets that could be consolidated? If you’ve got a lot of buckets, take a vote on which ones to carry forward as bases of brand positions.

Use buckets to form new brand positioning. Let’s use the cold brew example again. If a convenience bucket emerges, investigate the attributes within. There’s usually gold in forgotten attributes—it’s where the big ahas often happen. Think about consumer problems and how your product’s convenience solves them. And think about differentiators: how is your product’s convenience better than the competitors’? Maybe your cold brew comes in a resealable, lightweight bottle rather than a can. With some massaging, a convenience bucket quickly becomes a compelling brand position like “Quality coffee you can enjoy all day, wherever”. Boom, brand position defined.

Here’s why this process works so well:

Hidden attributes inevitably emerge. Your brand has attributes lurking beneath the surface that might be important to potential customers. We see this a lot in our workshops: clients with established brands who rediscover central brand attributes that haven’t been used in positioning.

You’ll realign internally. Even if you think your whole team is totally aligned on your brand definition, pulling apart and discussing its forgotten attributes will provide clarity on what the brand is and is not, giving everyone a truer north.

You’ll unearth some killer new brand positions. Quickly. The process we’re suggesting, from post-its to full brand positions, takes only a few hours of focused, collaborative work.

It’s much more thorough than the alternative. Rather than testing a minute spin on your current brand positioning or going with one exec’s gut feeling on what will attract a new audience, the deconstruction process casts a much wider net. More perspectives give you more room for creativity (and a better chance of finding what will actually work with that new audience).

You may have noticed that we recommend generating multiple brand positions, rather than arriving at a single answer. Testing new positions alongside existing ones with a range of audiences will identify a winning pathway based on data. More positions mean more learning about how each audience segment responds. And more learning means getting closer to that shiny new customer acquisition strategy.