Copyright © 2018 by Greg Kihlström.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), you must obtain prior written permission by contacting the author using the contact information provided below.
Published by:
Yes&
1700 Diagonal Road, Suite 450
Alexandria, VA 22314
First Edition: May 1, 2018
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. All logos are property of their respective owners.
Edited by Anna-Marie Montague and Janelle Kihlström
Cover Design by Alicia Recco
eBook ISBN - 978-1-54393-261-4
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Part 1: The Basics of Brands
1 | What Is Branding?
2 | Why Do We Brand?
3 | What Makes a Brand Successful?
4 | The Evolution of the Brand-Consumer
Relationship
Part 2: The Agile Brand
5 | What Changed?
6 | What is Agile?
7 | Agile Marketing & Design Thinking
8 | The Agile Brand
9 | The Agile Brand Manifesto
10 | The Duality of the Agile Brand
11 | How to Create an Agile Brand
12 | An Agile Brand Example
Part 3: Building a Successful Agile Brand
13 | Storytelling and Agile Brands
14 | The Agile Brand’s Responsibility to Society
15 | Agile Brands and Future Generations
16 | Conclusion
About Greg Kihlström
References
FOR EVERYONE WHO HAS TAUGHT ME
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT BRANDING & MARKETING.
THERE HAVE BEEN MANY.
THERE WILL BE MANY MORE.
As with any effort of this kind, there are many people I’d like to thank for their support and patience. While there are many more than those mentioned below, the following are a few without whom I could not have produced this book.
I’d like to thank the Carousel30 team for their support over the 14 years since I founded the company in December 2003 through the fall of 2017, when the company was acquired by Yes&.
My partners throughout the years there gave me the support to pursue things like writing books and other beneficial, though sleep-depriving endeavors: Brandon Prudent, Curtis Morehead, and Rohit Rao. In particular, Romie Stefanelli has been invaluable as a sounding board and counterpoint for some of my crazier ideas over the years.
Thanks to Alicia Recco for her wonderful work on the cover design and for creating all of the original illustrations for this book. Likewise, I’d like to thank everyone at Yes& for being such a great team to work with as I finished this book while completing the merger.
From Yes&, this would not have been possible without the support of the President and CEO, Bob Sprague, who was also kind enough to contribute the Foreword.
Anna-Marie Montague was invaluable to this effort as she helped shape some of the key parts of this book, and challenged me to go deeper on several points as she also edited it. Also, Bob Derby, with whom I’ve had a number of enlightening conversations and who helped particularly with the inflection point concept discussed in this book.
Gail Legaspi-Gaull of Hat Trick3C and Wendy Hagen of hagen inc. were greatly helpful in sharing their thoughts on the future of branding, and I’ve appreciated working with them on various branding projects over the years.
Lisa Nirell has remained an inspiration as I continue writing and speaking and I appreciate her thoughts on a draft of this book.
I also want to thank my sister, Janelle Kihlström Pomery, for her help in editing this book, and in untangling my initial words and thoughts into something which I hope marketers will find meaningful and helpful.
Finally, thanks to my wife Lindsey for her understanding of the many nights and weekends spent writing and researching this book, and for her support throughout the process.
“All things come into being through opposition and all are
in flux like a river.”
—Heroclitus, ca. 500 B.C.
The Agile Brand. It sounds like an oxymoron. You know, like “jumbo shrimp,” or “military intelligence,” or “Andrew Lloyd Webber masterpiece.”
I think most of us have thought of a brand – especially an established consumer brand like Procter and Gamble, IBM, or Ford – as something monolithic. Eternal. Something a company builds over decades, until it achieves intrinsic value. A brand, therefore, is to be guarded, protected, and preserved on all fronts.
“Ha!’ says Greg Kihlström in this entertaining and provocative book. A brand that remains static in today’s environment is an anchor dragging its owner down. Today’s consumers, empowered through social media, online reviews, and other phenomena of our digital age, want relationships with brands – and it’s hard to have a relationship with a monolith. Instead, a brand must achieve agility – the ability to evolve over time in response to changing consumer tastes and market conditions.
But “agile” does not mean “wishy-washy,” Greg further explains. A brand that is truly agile draws much of its strength from the permanent characteristics a company does or should maintain. Values. Mission. Purpose. It is this duality – roots in the eternal, relevance to today – that allows a brand to achieve agility, and to deliver its distinctive benefits.
This is what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their seminal Built to Last, dubbed “the genius of the AND.” Visionary companies, said Collins and Porras, preserve the core AND change the rest. (This was also partial inspiration for the name of the new agency Greg and his Carousel30 team have joined – Yes&.) Greg’s thinking about brand provides us with a liberating principle: we need not choose between a brand that is responsive to change and one that has perpetual value: the Agile Brand is both.
How does one build an Agile Brand? Ah, you must read on. Greg’s practical ideas and approaches fill these pages. Do not miss, however, his overriding message – one that I find both challenging and hopeful.
“Authentic” is a word that appears over and over in this book. The Agile Brand must be authentic, says Greg, or it is useless. Today’s consumers are too savvy to be fooled for very long. No one, no matter how clever, creative, or well-funded, can build an agile brand on a lie.
Now contrast that, if you will, with the current political climate. As I write these words, our country has descended into an era in which it seems de rigeur for political leaders of all stripes to spout falsehoods and exaggerations daily. The fact checkers have thrown in the towel. Victory goes to he who lies loudest and longest.
Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if we – the marketers, branders, and advertisers – began to be revered for our authenticity and truth telling? If consumers started to view our agile brands as particularly honest and trustworthy? (Our politicians and media have made the bar pretty darn low, believe me.)
I think we have the opportunity, through the Agile Brand, to build relationships in which consumers appreciate our efforts to make them aware of products and services that – authentically – would make them happy or improve their lives. I hope you, as I do, find Greg’s ideas about the Agile Brand both powerful and refreshing.
Bob Sprague
February 2018
“Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer
touch points.”
— Jonah Sachs
When I was way too young to drive anything but a bicycle (age 6 or 7), I became fascinated with cars. All kinds of cars. I drew them, read magazines about them, got my dad to take me to some car shows, and all in all, consumed a lot of information about them. This was well before the Internet was available (let’s say early/mid-1980’s), so most of what I consumed was printed materials like magazines.
There were so many styles and types of cars, and yet it became clear to me that there were certain car makes and models that seemed “right” for not only different activities (e.g., pickup trucks could haul all manner of things, and station wagons or minivans could transport kids to soccer games), but also for people with specific tastes.
When I think back, I was much less interested in how fast a Lamborghini could go from 0-60 miles per hour than what made it truly different from a Ferrari, and why someone would want one over the other. Or a Corvette, a Porsche – well, you get the picture. I guess I was a pretty lucky and/or spoiled kid (thanks Mom and Dad!) to at one point have had subscriptions to at least three different car-related magazines, and pick up a few British ones from time to time when I could convince my parents to add them to the cart. What I found on the pages of those magazines was a mix of advertising, opinion, and facts and figures. I got the story the car manufacturer wanted to tell, the experts’ opinions, and the objective statistics and data, all in one.
Though at that young age I didn’t have the vocabulary for it, the answers I was looking for came down to branding. On paper, there often wasn’t a lot of difference between one mid-size sedan and another. After all, measurements like wheelbase or front seat headroom often varied only a little bit from the least expensive Chevy to the most expensive Mercedes. Instead, so much depended on the aesthetics of the car, the way it was portrayed in advertisements, its pricing tier, the story the company wanted to tell about its history and its customers, and all those other things that boil down to one thing: branding.
Ironically, I lost my interest in the minutia of all things automotive as I reached driving age, but my desire to better understand brands, branding, and our relationship with them was translated into many other areas of interest since then.
I joined a tech startup in 1999 that grew from zero to over a million users of what we would now call social networking or software as a service (SaaS) tools, and had the opportunity to build products for large brands like Coca-Cola, Lionsgate Films, and Amnesty International. All the software we created was centered on communications and connectivity, and though it pre-dated social media, we shared the same beliefs that brands can be more powerful when they connect with consumers, and allow consumers to connect with each other.
Around the end of the early 2000s tech boom, I was doing freelance creative for AOL, GEICO, Starbucks, and some smaller brands, and formed a digital agency called Carousel30. Over the next 14 years we built many new brands, grew existing brands, and created hundreds of marketing campaigns and websites. Carousel30 gave me the chance to work with brands like Toyota, Porsche, United Nations, Abbott, VW, and many more, and to be awarded and recognized by some of the top names in the marketing and advertising industry.
Whether I was playing a strategy, design, or technology role, I always got the most satisfaction from the contributions my team and I made to organizations’ brands, and in finding ways to connect them with their customers.
Let’s face it. There are too many stimuli today, from the constant barrage of advertising on every device, medium and channel, to push notifications on your smartphone, to your flooding email inbox, and, well, you get the picture. Consumers with information overload need a way to make quick, informed decisions and choose the right product or service.
Just because a lot of content is being pushed to consumers doesn’t mean that, beneath the noise, they aren’t eager to solve their problems or find the things they want or truly need. Because of this, it is vital to have a strong brand that sets your company, your products and/or your services apart from your competition.
I also believe that brands can have a strong, positive influence on the world. Regardless of your political affiliation or socioeconomic background, the power, resources, and influence that a brand can have are extraordinary. With the right mission and values, anything from a one-person company to a multinational multi-billion-dollar corporation can have a tremendous effect.
If brands are so great, what is wrong? Or, to put it another way, with all the books, blog posts, podcasts, and other material about branding, why another book?
Although there are many books on branding, I felt a need to write about a dawning era of branding and brands’ relationships with consumers. This book will focus on what the new brand, the agile brand is, where it originated, and where branding as a discipline, and an interaction between companies and consumers, is going. While many successful brands have found ways to interact with customers in creative ways for decades through fan clubs, product demos, publicity events among other ideas, there is something different about the brands of the present and future.
Today, we as marketers are creating living, interactive relationships with our customers that extend well beyond a recognizable name and mark.
These consumer-brand relationships are also based on product benefits which go beyond the superficial and difficult to prove (i.e., drinking Pepsi will make you happier, or driving a Corvette will make you feel younger), and are more authentic, measurable, and genuine. We will explore what a brand means and how it behaves almost as an organism with a life all its own, and how, with the right kind of direction, care and feedback loop, it can become benefit everyone around it: customers, shareholders, and the world at large.
Anyone interested in brands may find some engaging nuggets, but this book is primarily for marketers, brand managers, and others who work on behalf of an organization to maintain and grow one or more brands.
My goal is to illustrate how the evolution of brands has both shaped and been shaped by our culture and society. It is also for the marketer who needs to understand where brands and branding are headed, and for the branding professional who needs to understand how the latest in agile marketing affects how brands operate.
This book is not intended to be a branding primer. We won’t be discussing how to design logos or name companies, nor describing the proper way to write a mission or positioning statement. While it is not about agile software development practices, it touches lightly on how this shift in development influenced agile marketing, to paint the picture of what we mean when we say, “the agile brand.” The book also includes some basic branding definitions and precepts as context for why brands are evolving and the purpose that these new, agile brands play in our society.
Part 1 will provide the background for our journey through the new brand with context and background on how we’ve gotten where we are today.
Part 2 will discuss what we mean when we use the term “agile” and how the agile brand has come to be, its place in the current marketing environment, and the future of branding.
Part 3 focuses on the future of the consumer-brand relationship and where we go from here.
Enough with the setup. Let’s get started with an introduction to the vocabulary we will use for brands and branding.
“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
—Seth Godin
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
–Jeff Bezos, Amazon
The following is my definition of branding, and I’ll revisit several of these concepts later in discussing the agile brand.