Brand Identity: The 3 Experiences That Count
Every brand, or business, is an experience-generating system.
Yours began generating experiences the moment you decided to entertain your first business idea, and those experiences rippled out and compounded with every action you have taken to bring your brand to life.
Brand experiences can be organized into three groups.
Customer Experience
Team Experience
Founder/Owner Experience
The most commonly discussed is the customer experience.
Are customers experiencing coherence or being bombarded with mixed messages?
Is the resulting sentiment trust, or does each experience fuel quiet churn?
The other two are team experience and founder experience.
Do your people have clarity or are they working in a constant state of confusion? Is there a culture of ownership, or are they waiting on you at every turn?
Are you, the founder, fulfilled or burned out? Are you engaged in deep work and big-picture thinking, or spending your days firefighting?
But don't let these nuances fool you. They have one very important thing in common: humans.
And perhaps the most important variable that determines your business's success over time is whether the brand experience is humanizing or dehumanizing.
Creating A Humanizing Brand Experience
Unfortunately, many, many businesses are the victims of a dehumanizing experience. Let's look at a few examples of how that can happen, bearing in mind these are by no means exhaustive.
Money As Purpose
"Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1."
Warren Buffett
At first glance, you might read that to mean “ money = purpose.” But in my experience, one of the biggest mistakes founders make is treating money as the whole point.
In his book The Living Organization, my new friend Norman Wolfe explains that money is not the purpose. It's feedback. A signal that you have added value.
When money is treated as the whole point, businesses begin to optimize for profit at the expense of the human experience. The result is a culture of burnout, exploitation, overpromising, and underdelivering. And ultimately it costs you money anyway, by way of lost productivity, team member turnover, stains on brand reputation, and customer churn.
"Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave." ~ Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money and The Art of Spending Money
The Customer Is Always Right
"The customer is always right." ~ Harry Gordon Selfridge, retail pioneer and founder of Selfridge's, popularized circa 1909
It's the oldest slogan in retail, and on its face it sounds like devotion to service. In practice, when taken too literally, I’ve seen this become a fast track to dehumanizing experiences for everyone except the customer.
When the customer is always right, the founder and the team absorb every cost of keeping them right. You bend the offer to fit whoever is asking. You say yes to work you shouldn't take. You try to be everything to everyone, and in doing so you become recognizable to no one. The team burns out delivering on promises that never should have been made, and the brand loses the one thing that made it worth choosing: a point of view.
A brand that serves everyone serves no one in particular. The expectations get muddier with every exception, the experience gets thinner, and the people delivering it pay the price.
"The riches are in the niches." ~ Pat Flynn, Serial Entrepreneur & Startup Advisor
"Everyone is not your customer." ~ Seth Godin, Best Selling Author
"When it's a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk... whose side are you going to be on?" ~ Gordon Bethune, CEO of Continental Airlines
The Founder Freedom Trap
"The perfect job is the one that takes the least time." ~ Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
An obsession with passive income and “working smarter” can quickly lead to productizing everything and removing people from delivery, a quest to scale without ever showing up.
Cue the “founder freedom trap” where we trick ourselves into thinking we can sell high-ticket products without no-touch customer experience.
Coaching programs with no live relational component.
Flashy, but false, marketing promises because the funnel rewards volume over fit.
Expensive Saas with no customer support.
The founder gets their calendar back, sure, but the customer feels hung out to dry at best and swindled at worst.
The gap between expectation and delivery widens, and the brand becomes the worst version of itself.
And speaking from experience, having no relationship with the people you serve is an empty life indeed.
"Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose — and commit myself to — what is best for me." ~ Paulo Coelho
The Common Thread
In all three traps, the brand optimizes one experience at the expense of the others.
Money over people.
Customer over founder and team.
Founder over customer.
Each one grasps at a humanizing experience in one realm by settling for a dehumanizing experience somewhere else, and over time, the whole business suffers.
At Humaniz, we believe brand is more than icing on a marketing campaign. We see brand as a decision-making lens, one that can inform decisions at every stage of development, all realms of business, and help realize a holistically humanizing brand experience.
This is exactly why our approach to brand identity is less about building and more about development. Why we start with the founder's vision for brand experience and then anchor everything in a declaration of brand integrity. Our approach is brand as embodiment practice, it’s “be, go, do.”
And the complimentary Brand IdQ™ Dashboard is where you start. Claim your complimentary Brand IdQ Dashboard at humanizcollective.com/brandidq.
Who We Are
"We don’t create brands, because we truly believe that every business already has a brand. Rather, our role is to help founders and their teams embody the brand fully, express it with more clarity, and expand its influence and impact with more confidence."
~ Charlie Birch, Author of On Raising Brands + Founder and Creative Director @ Humaniz Collective
Bringing a brand to market is just the beginning of your brand’s development and life story.
And that’s where we come in!
We’re creative, marketing and operational experts working together to ensure brands come to life from the inside out.
We support brands throughout their lifecycle across three phases of service:
Brand Strategy
Brand Design
Brand Stewardship
If you’re looking for a brand partner to walk beside you, ensuring your brand grows up healthy and strong, makes good life choices, and attracts the right people into its orbit, Humaniz Collective is the obvious choice.
Engage with Brand IdQ - our complimentary brand strategy generator - and let us prove our worth.
