The 3 Questions Every Strong Brand Should Answer
Next time you're at a networking event, listen to what happens when someone asks "so, what do you do?"
I go to a lot of events (more than my diary would like) and I've watched the same moment play out many times. A pause. A little laugh. Then "it's a bit hard to explain, but basically..." followed by a minute that leaves everyone more confused than when they started!
That pause usually gets put down to nerves. I think it comes from something more fixable: the business has never properly answered three questions.
What do you do?
Why does it matter?
Why should people choose you?
Strong brands can answer all three quickly and they sound sure of themselves when they do. Weak ones circle around them. Here's what I mean:
What do you do?
I'm not asking for your full list of services. I mean one sentence that a stranger could repeat to someone else tomorrow.
It matters even more online, where nobody is polite enough to stay while you find your words. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group wrote up data from Microsoft Research showing that users often leave a web page within 10 to 20 seconds. Pages that hold attention for around 30 seconds often keep people for two minutes or more. His advice was to communicate your value proposition within the first 10 seconds. That data is from 2010 so the exact numbers will have moved, but I haven't met a business owner who thinks people have got more patient since!
Try this: "I help [who] to [what]." Say it out loud. If you wouldn't say it to a friend over coffee, rewrite it.
Why does it matter?
Nobody wakes up wanting to buy your list of services. They want to know what changes for them.
For a restaurant, it's the night out someone has been looking forward to all week and the dinner is only part of it. For us at Yellow Zest it's the relief of finally being able to explain your business without cringing.
This is the question I see skipped most often. "Quality", "passion" and "great service" all sound lovely but every business says them, so none of them tells anyone why they should care. If you can't say what changes for the customer, they'll assume nothing does.
Why should people choose you?
Here's where the business down the road comes in. They probably do something similar at a similar price and they might be perfectly good. Most owners respond by trying to be better, which is very hard to prove from the outside. I think it works better to be clearly different and to make that difference easy to spot.
Making the choice easy matters more than we like to admit. A Harvard Business Review article, To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple, reported on a Corporate Executive Board study of more than 7,000 consumers. Brands in the top quarter for "decision simplicity" were 86% more likely to be purchased than the bottom quarter and 115% more likely to be recommended. It's survey data so I'd take the exact figures with a pinch of salt, but the direction matches what I see with clients: when it's easy to understand you, it's easier to choose you.
Why unclear answers make marketing so hard
When these three answers are fuzzy every marketing decision turns into a guess. What goes on the homepage? What do we post this week? What's the story for the press? What should the logo say? Each one gets worked out from scratch, so the website says one thing and Instagram says another and the pitch says a third.
I see it most on social media, where an unclear brand means every post is a fresh debate about what to say. Once the answers are clear those decisions get faster because you're checking each one against something. It's also why branding, your website, social and PR work best as one connected strategy.
Clarity creates confidence
There's an odd bit of psychology behind all this. In 2006 the Princeton psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer reported that stocks with easy-to-pronounce names did better in the days right after their IPO than stocks with names that were hard to say. Oppenheimer himself cautioned that it's no basis for investing and that it isn't a reliable long-term indicator. What it shows is how much we lean toward whatever is easy for our brains to process. A clear brand gets that advantage before anyone has even met you.
It helps you too. When you know your three answers you stop apologising for your prices, stop rambling at events and start sounding like someone who knows what they're doing, because YOU DO.
A quick test
Write one sentence for each question. Read them to someone who doesn't know your business and ask them to say them back to you. If they can't, that's useful information and it simply tells you where to start. I wrote about the one sentence test in a previous post and it's still the first thing I ask new clients to try.
Where to start
Our Brand Strategy Workshop is built around exactly these questions. It's one focused two-hour session where we work out your positioning, who you're really speaking to, what makes you different and how your brand should sound. You leave with a written strategy that's yours to use, whatever you do next.
Clarity first. Everything else gets easier.
