Your brand book is outdated — get over it

Happy Sunday!

I'm writing this email from the technology epicenter of the country — beautiful Miami! I came down here to run a 5K that I spent all of January training for with 64 miles in the bag, and thanks to my Eight Sleep, Essentia Water, and House of Wise strength gummy, it was a total success. Never been a runner, in fact, most of the time always hated it, but I’ve really started to enjoy it!

I hope you have a Masala Chai in your hand because we've got some tea to discuss today! But before we get into that...

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Last week I mentioned a podcast I did with Levels where we spoke about growth levers. You can listen to it by clicking here.

Between the clients we work with from a very early stage and a couple of internal projects at Sharma Brands, we've done a lot of work fusing performance marketing and brand identity, brand strategy, visual identity, etc. — the stuff you'd go to a Red Antler or a Herman Scheer for.

For context, let me share two examples before I enter into the rant/learning of today's email. We've had 2 brands that were very early stage. Instead of the branding agency working in isolation to design the brand's identity, we worked in tandem with them to test and validate ideas. If there was a certain hypothesis of who the customer is, we built landing pages, drove paid traffic, validated that demographic on the ad platform, and then re-validated it using analytics tools like Quantcast Measure. 

If we had a hypothesis of what kind of models, visual assets, messaging/copy, or what would appeal to this customer... all of it was validated using small, but effective, tests. If we were spending between $80k and $250k on a brand's visual identity, we should validate everything so that:

1. The branding and identity can last a much longer time.

2. Our soon-to-be customer feels connected to us from the beginning.

If it's helpful to write an email solely about that process, reply with an emoji. If 628 people reply with an emoji, I'll make it next Sunday's newsletter with a detailed overview and how-to.

Another project was for an internal brand, we built an entire brand strategy deck, which is completely different than visual identity. With the brand strategy deck, we are focused on everything including:

• The brand origin story

• Why does the brand exist

• Who does the brand serve

• Mission statement

• The tone of voice/personality

• Internal brand mantras (if the brand was a person, what would be their mantras)

• Love language

• Dream partnerships

• Customer profile

  • Demographic

  • Interests

  • Neighborhoods of residence

  • What do they watch, listen to, read, drink, eat, exercise

  • Apps they spend the most time on

  • Favorite follows on social media

  • Retweets & IG story shares

  • etc.

• Large incumbent competitors/threats

• Startup competitors/threats

• etc.

With brand strategy, you might add or subtract things based on your specific vertical. With the two scenarios, you can see the difference. One is focused on if the brand was a person, what are all the aspects of it. The other is focused on visual identity.

The important thing to note is your brand strategy shouldn't change. The best brands, from a mission standpoint or core identity standpoint, don't deviate from that unless there's something alarming that causes it. Whether it's McDonald's, Eight Sleep, Apple, Haus, AngelList, or Native, they all have the same values, identity, etc. as they did on day 1. On the other hand, the visual identity can evolve, change, be altered, be revitalized, and you shouldn't be romantic about adapting to the market.

Even when you run tests to validate your thinking with a visual identity, it's very possible that the market can change, and you'll need to update parts of the visual identity. If the brand wasn't designed with data, and just "vibes", inside of a conference room by people who don't actively see the data, learnings, market for what you sell, then you should absolutely not be romantic about what is in your brand book.

Sticking to visual guidelines simply because "that's what is inside the brand book" is about as supported of an argument as "because I said so". There's no reason you cannot update your visual identity as you go along, test, learn and see what works better. And, for the sake of you doing the best you can as it relates to your own return on investment, you should absolutely be open to the idea of testing new things which might yield you (& maybe your investors) a better return. When something works, double down, and understand if it's something that should be universally applied.

This can be how your photos are taken, your videos are edited, your tone of voice speaks, your copywriting educates someone, or your brand's personality makes someone feel. Test, understand, apply learnings, repeat.

The punchline for today: Be okay with changing how different elements look as it relates to your visual identity, especially if it's a small and isolated test to see if you can get a better return.

Reminder: If it's helpful to write an email solely about that process, reply with an emoji. If 628 people reply with an emoji, I'll make it next Sunday's newsletter with a detailed overview and how-to.

On to some fun stuff... 

Software/App of the Week:

Postscript — The best SMS platform for Shopify brands

Through our clients, whether it was vetting or actually using them, we've seen every SMS platform. The one that consistently wins from a standpoint of having the most robust, reliant, and compliant SMS marketing product is Postscript.

The biggest key to good SMS marketing is making sure that your actual message feels like it was written specifically for you. This either requires you to text your entire list one by one or use a sophisticated campaign creator so you can send texts to specific customer segments based on purchase frequency, AOV, time of purchase, etc. You can also insert dynamic variables in each message for further personalization.

Postscript also makes sure from a legal compliance standpoint that you're collecting numbers properly and with the right permissions. When laws change or get updated, Postscript makes sure you are aware and you're compliant. The fees for non-compliant SMS marketing start at around $500 per number, so this in itself is worth it. 

Lastly, Postscript is maybe the most loved platform of any by actual marketers. Why? Because they give a sh!t about you. Their customer success team will literally help you from scratch, they come out with resources, they make sure any SMS/email agency you work with has the latest and greatest practices, updates, features, etc. 

Try Postscript's free trial and see why thousands of brands, including Feastables, Magic Spoon, Native, Dr. Squatch, Homesick Candles, and others, use Postscript for all their SMS marketing.

Brand of the Week:

House of Wise — CBD for Sleep, Sex, Stress, and Strength

When I woke up at 6:40 for the 5K run, I didn't go for coffee, instead, I ate a House of Wise strength gummy, which has about 60mg of caffeine in it. Then at night when I was ready to sleep, I took a House of Wise sleep gummy; I have the worst time falling asleep (usually 30-90 minutes) but this sleep gummy makes it less than 15 minutes.

The quality of their ingredients is better than any other sleep aid I've used in the past, and now I don't go anywhere without making sure I can take a sleep gummy at night. And the best part, since I know you're wondering, is there's no morning grogginess from the gummy. I feel ready to start the day, and my Whoop recovery scores are in the green as a result of being able to fall asleep, stay asleep, and the ingredients are clean.

Try their SLEEP gummy or STRENGTH gummy and I promise you'll become as much of a fan as I have become.

That's all for this week!

I'm currently flying over the border of Delaware and Maryland and can't wait to land and head to Trader Joe's — one of my favorite companies, ever (click here to read why).

I hope you have an incredible upcoming week. Get those 9 hours of sleep. Cook something you haven't cooked. Meet a new friend. Give a ring to someone you haven't talked to in 3 years. Stay hydrated with water that tastes good (I'm speaking to you Evian drinkers). Get a sweat in. Have fun!

I'll see you next week. As always, you can reply to this email directly or shoot me a message on Twitter with any feedback, questions, comments, or if you just want to say hi!

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