1. Part 1: The Shift
1.1. 1: What is a brand?
1.1.1. A brand is a relationship between an organization and an audience
1.1.2. Between organization and an audience because relationships are shared, not owned
1.1.3. Connection at the junction of who you are (as the organization) and who your audience (customers, employees, evangelists) aspires to be.
1.1.4. The Brand Language Ecosystem
1.1.4.1. Branding
1.1.4.1.1. Intentional Branding
1.1.4.1.2. Unintentional Branding
1.1.4.2. Brand Development
1.1.4.2.1. Brand-formation
1.1.4.2.2. Brand-growth
1.1.4.2.3. Brand-management
1.1.4.3. Logos or visual identity systems, products or advertising campaigns are only micro meanings of a much bigger, deeper and significant macro-meaning: the relationship.
1.1.5. Key is to discover what most enthusiastic audience is looking for, and testing every piece of intentional branding effort at small scale.
1.2. 2: The myth of the brand genius
1.2.1. BRANDISM
1.2.1.1. The Product Belief
1.2.1.1.1. "My product and my brand are one and the same"
1.2.1.2. The Rite of Passage Belief
1.2.1.2.1. "Brand development is for when my business grows up. Right now it does not matter."
1.2.1.3. The Silo Belief
1.2.1.3.1. Branding is just part of my advertising strategy and lives in my marketing silo.
1.2.1.4. The Control Belief
1.2.1.4.1. I define my brand. My brand is what I say
1.2.2. Branding is about discovering shared value in authentic, consistent, and intentional relationships with your audience.
1.3. 3: Brand, meet lean
1.3.1. If you strip down your product to only the problem it solves, what do you have left? Where can people connect? How do people become passionate about you? This is a question too few founders have asked themselves.
1.3.2. Products create functional-value. Branding creates emotional-value. And culture creates the impetus for both product and brand.
1.3.2.1. Why should employees come aboard (culture)?
1.3.2.2. What problem do you promise to solve (product)?
1.3.2.3. What aspirational impact will that have on your customer (brand)?
1.4. 4: The lean brand framework
1.4.1. 1.
1.4.2. 2.
1.5. G A P S
1.5.1. GAP1: The Hypothesis Gap
1.5.1.1. Fundamental beliefs
1.5.1.1.1. Who you are
1.5.1.1.2. Why you will matter
1.5.1.1.3. What people desire, like, think, believe, want and will ultimately become passionate about
1.5.1.2. Emotional-Value Hypothesis
1.5.1.2.1. Expansion of value hypothesis to include leap of faith assumption about emotional-value you will create
1.5.1.2.2. Functional-value hypothesis describes the value created in solving a problem for a customer.
1.5.1.2.3. The emotional-value hypothesis describes the value created in the relationship your customers will form with you.
1.5.1.2.4. Functional-Value hypothesis + Emotional-Value hypothesis = True-value hypothesis
1.5.1.2.5. We believe (this set of people) will (care / be passionate about us) for / because (this reason)
1.5.2. GAP2: The Validation Gap
1.5.2.1. To eliminate waste in the discovery of value, a startup has to resist the temptation to simply start building final versions of its branding elements based on its assumptions.
1.5.2.1.1. Move from your emotional-value hypothesis into a phase of learning and validation to discover what works and what does not.
1.5.2.2. Crossing the validation gap is demonstrated by business growth and a passionate group of customers.
1.5.2.3. A Minimum viable brand gives a starting point for your intentional brand development by distilling your brand down to the most critical elements - story, artifact and invitation
1.5.2.3.1. Story
1.5.2.3.2. Artifacts
1.5.2.3.3. Invitation
1.5.2.3.4. Measuring impact
1.5.3. GAP3: The Growth Gap
1.5.3.1. Transitioning from experimenting with the MVB to forming a validated brand platform from which to scale.
1.5.3.2. To scale you must move from your emotional-value hypothesis to your growth hypothesis.
1.5.3.2.1. Has to test how to create external demand to grow the depths and scope of relationships with your audience without adversely affecting existing value.
2. Part 2: Build: Minimum viable brand
2.1. 5: Story
2.1.1. Aspiration
2.1.1.1. Aspiration is our strongest driver of behavior. It is the drive to fulfill our dreams and to live a deeper life.
2.1.1.2. Aspiration invites passion.
2.1.1.2.1. By engaging a person's aspiration with your story, you invite others to be passionate about you.
2.1.1.3. To get to passion, you must tell a story that resonates emotionally to engage your audience's aspirations.
2.1.2. Your story
2.1.2.1. The founder story
2.1.2.2. The startup story
2.1.2.2.1. Starts with your aspirations as a startup
2.1.2.2.2. "Stories don't create our beliefs. Rather, their themes are like magnets that find and attach themselves to beliefs that already exist. Additionally, the best stories amplify the importance of existing beliefs by charging them with emotion."
2.1.2.3. WHY do we exist?
2.1.2.4. Your Rally Point
2.1.2.4.1. Common place where the pieces of who are as an organization, who you are as founders and who your audience is can coalesce.
2.1.2.4.2. For sustaining startups, where the market is known and the value isn't, your rally point is your point of view. What you're fighting for. What you're fighting against.
2.1.2.4.3. What do you believe?
2.2. 6: Artifacts
2.3. 7: Invitation
2.3.1. Invite, Invite, Invite
2.3.1.1. Invitations are active calls for people to join you as participants on a shared journey of value creation
2.3.1.2. What you say, where you say it and how you say it impacts the way people respond to you.
2.3.2. Message Pull
2.3.2.1. Harder than ever to get people's attention as they are being bombarded by marketing messages (300-20,000)
2.3.2.2. Message Pull is the work of constructing invitations based on validated demand generated from a customer.
2.3.2.2.1. Who is your audience?
2.3.2.2.2. What is the content of your message?
2.3.2.2.3. How do you say it?
2.3.2.2.4. Where do you say it?
3. Part 3: Measure
3.1. 8: The emotional-value stream
3.1.1. What is value?
3.1.1.1. Functional value
3.1.1.1.1. Products & services are responsible for creating functional-value through the tasks they accomplish.
3.1.1.1.2. Classic pain & solution framework of product development.
3.1.1.2. Emotional value
3.1.1.2.1. Brands create emotional-value through the relationship they facilitate.
3.1.1.2.2. Emotional-value describes the relational bias or preference we have for one product over another and more importantly one company over another.
3.1.1.2.3. Emotional value is how your customers think about the unique relationship, attributes and expectations your organization has to offer that no one else does.
3.1.1.3. In the context of Lean Brand development, value is defined as the functional benefit plus the emotional impact as experienced by your audience.
3.1.2. Value Stream Discovery
3.1.2.1. Cooper model to expose assumptions about how an organization creates and delivers value.
3.1.2.1.1. Acquisition
3.1.2.1.2. Funnel
3.1.2.1.3. Conversion
3.1.2.1.4. MVP
3.1.2.1.5. Growth Engine
3.1.2.2. Founders hypothesize what 'activity' the business must conduct in order to help the customer transition to the next state, what behavior the customer performs to indicate the transition and how to measure the behavior
3.1.2.2.1. When you add an emotional-value component to the value stream discovery framework, you begin to see just how integrated brand (emotional-value) and product (functional-value) are in each stage of a startup's development.
3.1.2.3. Validated Learning
3.1.2.3.1. VL is the system that allows the decision makers of the organization to prove objectively the iterations they are making to their brand development are having a measurable impact on the value being delivered to their customers.