Episode 9: Brand Themes
“We’re here to sell stuff, but we’re also here to make people feel connected. And it’s the poignancy that rests in themes. That really, I think, is the basis for a powerful brand.
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Marissa: I’m Marissa la Brecque, founder of Hyperflore.
Eric: And I’m Eric La Brecque, principle of Applied Storytelling.
M: And today we're talking about brand themes. Some people call them drivers or brand strengths, we call them themes. And we'll get into that. But first Eric, how're you doing today?
E: Well, I’m working on a lot of things. Probably the thing that's most relevant to our conversation today is a messaging deck that we're working on for a fast-growing cybersecurity company. And so, when we're working on messaging, we're working on themes. We're turning themes into value propositions, and then building out the messaging from there. So that's what I'm working on. Just a side note about messaging decks is that they're challenging in the sense that companies have very different expectations around what messaging is. Some companies want very simple decks that are essentially big chunks of copy that are pretty much ready to go. Others are more interested in just having the content down and not having it necessarily rendered as ready-to-use copy, so there's this issue that we're always dealing with. Some companies want a lot of detail to cover every different audience scenario and some just want to keep it light and general. So finding the right balance for a client is a bit of a challenge. And that's what I'm working on today.
M: Do you find that clients usually are able to articulate what their need is going in?
E: We try to show them examples of what we're going to build and get their feedback from there and adapt accordingly. So that helps and I think we've gotten better about doing that over time. But there's always a bit of always a bit of fiddling and we're always refining the tool. It's not always just customizing it to them. That's a big part of it, but it's also asking ourselves, what's the best basic deliverable? What's the right level of detail that we want to use as our starting point?
Then we're changing that all the time. So what are you working on?
M: I mentioned last time I've been in content corner working on a lot of copywriting. But I did something I haven't done in a long time, which is to take on a copywriting job for a client when I haven't been part of building the brand. And actually, this client hasn't really built a brand and they don't have a platform. And it's really reminding me why I don't do that anymore.
E: Very honest review to lay it out there.
M: Yeah, I mean, partly it's just I'm used to having an advisory role that doesn't always exist when you're writing copy. They just want the result generally and don't really want to hear your two cents on how you might shape the brand. But also, there's just a lot of holes and how they're expressing themselves that I would have filled in through the course of building a brand and so it just makes the work a little more challenging.
E: The other thing I'm working on today is the flip side of the challenge. So I'm also working on some coPY, which is not how I spend most of my time unless it's sort of proof of brand concept, right? Like I'm more than happy to write copy for something that shows how the brand voice should be interpreted.
So this is for Lutheran Services in America, which is a big and great client and we over the past year developed their platform and developed their messaging and lots of other tools and have written a lot of things including their voice guidelines. So now I'm finding myself writing against the voice guideline that I helped to develop. And what, it's not going all that smoothly. I have to say, I mean, we will obviously get there, but just because I've written the guidelines. I'm sure I know them better than somebody who's coming to them fresh but it doesn't mean I know every single one by heart right and there are a lot of them and I'm missing some of the guidelines the first time out. As I pointed out to the client, the good thing is that we have the guidelines now so when the guidelines are missing, we can point to exactly what's not right, so there's even time savings. But it's a it's a pretty humbling experience, to be honest.
M: Yeah, I mean, something we talk about personally a lot is that part of this work is processing negative feedback and keeping the client on track and not taking it personally, even though you always take it personally. Telling yourself like, , we're in round one. This happens, , and sometimes the client feels really disappointed and that's hard.
E: Yeah, I think the thing to keep in mind for me always is it's a multi-round process. And I'm confident wherever we start, we're going to make progress, as long as the lines of communication are clear. And we're asking accurate detailed focus questions. And the client is providing feedback with goodwill and attentiveness, will always get there. The first round is can be there can be a real gap between where you start and where you end up, though. So I guess the benefit of just having been in the trenches awhile.
M: Yeah, and with certain clients like you don't get the information you need until you give them something to bounce off of. It can feel like just going out into the field of battle unarmed but you got to just take the shrapnel that first round. All right, so brands themes.
E: Yeah, brand themes. So we call these things themes. Which is maybe not standard usage, but it ties to the idea that what we're really doing is telling a story and you can call them drivers, you can call them other things, but when you think of them as themes, you're staying in the story mindset and Graham, my colleague, Graham Banks, who's the Account Director for Applied Storytelling, made some observations yesterday that I think brought home the distinction between themes and well they can lead to value propositions but between themes and other kinds of high level messaging, he pointed out that as opposed to messaging that’s geared to products, themes tied to the larger idea of the brand, and if you're a CEO or a senior leader, and you're sharing the story of the brand, you're getting people acclimated to the big ideas that are driving your business decisions, your product strategy, your approach to the market, all of that themes can really help you. It keeps you up out of the weeds and keeps you from going into the product specific discussion too soon. And too long. , people who are more who are product marketers who are communicating at that level, don't often see that forest for the trees until we show how it works and it's very important for us.
Going back to messaging, which I have on the brain right now, to point out that what we're developing is really brand messaging, brand marketing messaging, as opposed to sales play messaging. So it's not there to drive the sale directly. It's there to build the relationship and get the interest, get the client to choose you and ultimately get into a sales conversation. But that's a different messaging that may complimentary messaging and there's overlap, but that's a different messaging that may carry forward. That might be a little digression, I don't know. But themes are just very important for shaping how you start with the overall brand points of difference, the brand positioning, the promise, their ways of really fleshing those things out and taking those down to the next level.
M: If you think of a story, like we have used before the the plot of a hero's tale, a theme would be a strength that they come back to again and again— their cleverness, or their courage, or their kindness or whatever those things are. If you think of them like that, I think it's clarifying for how they fit into the brand story.
E: So it's great that you bring up themes in other kinds of storytelling. Movies, books, they all have two or three themes. Some may be more important than others, just like some themes are more important to a brand than others, but there may be multiple themes that are important.
So if you think about Star Wars, most people have seen Star Wars and I could understand when you mentioned that like those are those are through lines in the story. They're important parts of the story, like ingredients almost, right? And so the idea that you respect elders when you think about the relationships between some of the younger characters and Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda, right, there's this strong respect for elders. That's a theme that runs through Star Wars. The fact that people of different backgrounds can work together to accomplish something great— you have really diverse species, , working together, it's not just people of different kinds, but species of different kinds.
Even though it's a space opera, there's a theme about not relying too much on technology. It'll take you so far, but on one hand, you've got people like Han Solo who are customizing it and bringing their humanity to it to make the Millennium Falcon perform better. And on the other hand, you've got the Death Star, which is ultimate piece of technology, capable of destroying entire worlds but over reliance on that is what hobbles the Empire. So that's another theme. And then finally, the, probably driving theme is hope, , breathing and what you can't see, listening to the force, trusting your instincts. So these are all themes that are enriching the story of Star Wars, and if you think about what could you tell the story without those themes, like maybe in a synopsis form, but once you really get into making it feel like it fits and playing with emotions, you got to have the themes, and that's really what we're talking about here, too. It's not just about information and organizing it. It's about emotion and evoking it and dialing it up.
I can riff a little further on themes. I was thinking about themes this morning, when I was reading Medium, and not in the world of fiction but I was reading an article about the Russian military and how incompetent it seems to be on the battlefield, so far anyway, with Ukraine. The article I was reading was by a US military vet who pointed out that the difference between the US military and the Russian military seems to be a focus on discipline, commitment and skill. And those might be values. I don't want to muddy that line between values and themes, but he told the story of how the US military is different by talking about discipline and how it works and talking about commitment and how it works and talking about skill and how those three things interweave to make a stronger US military on the ground. So just evoke themes, even in the even in the news.
M: So a theme is a topic that's interesting and relevant to the brand. And you're touching on this, like, let's talk about how they play with the other elements of the brand platform. The promise, the positioning, and then like you were saying values.
E: In the very early days of working out our little model, the Brand Wheel, which you can see on brandfrontlines.com, I didn't put a lot of stock on that. And this is years and years ago, it seemed like we could do our storytelling work without them, but we would get the positioning done, get the promise done, get the personality done, and go from there but it left out a few things. One is it didn't give us enough of a framework to tell the story efficiently, so there was a lot of extra work to make it sound right. And it also created too big of a gap between getting the fundamentals down and the messaging. So we still had to organize the messaging and we did so by value proposition so we'd get those worked out but working that way from the ground up was not very efficient.
It's working with value propositions that opened our eyes to the fact that themes are actually really important. We can tie these rational things that we want to use to get somebody interested in what we have on offer, back to more emotional connections that they can make that are orbiting the promise, if you will. So if the promise is tied to the positioning, and the strongest thing that a brand has to offer the really defining point of difference.
There are these other strengths, that might not be the main ones or the most differentiating ones, but they're still very real. We may not be about convenience, that may not be the thing that sets us apart, but we're really, really convenient. And we want to tell you that it's important for you to know that that's good, too. if we're for all about innovation, that's the driving theme of our tech brand. We may still be really caring and and this idea of compassion or human connection may be something that we have a lot to say about. So if if the positioning and the promise are like the sun, close to the center of the brand, these are orbiting, it in a way.
M: I do feel like they sort of encompass parts of the positioning, the promise, and the values— like they sort of bring all that together and flesh it out.
E: Yeah, they definitely flesh out the story. As we work with themes, we realize there really aren't that many of them. There are themes that that come up a lot like innovation is (if it's not a positioning in some categories), it's a theme in tech. You’re going to want to talk about your innovation strength a lot. I suppose over the course of my career, I've worked with a couple dozen at most, but knowing exactly which ones are the right ones for your brand is really important. Yeah, and also making sure people know how to use them, which as you're getting into value propositions that makes it more clear.
M: I don't always do messaging decks. For my clients who tend to be smaller, the messaging decks are visually overwhelming and more money than they really want to spend on the brand. So the themes a lot of times are our messaging. I explain them as like a lens for all the things they want to talk about. Put on the lens of innovation. If you want to talk about a new product that you have like, here's a one way that you can talk about it. You can also talk about it with your other strength of leadership. These are ways you don't have to hit people over the head with a sales pitch and you can also get in some of your brand's strengths.
E: I love that idea of lenses. That's, that's really cool. I'm gonna steal that. I think there's something else about that too, which is when might you want to use a certain lens. And I think that one way to think about it is certain audiences are going to be more interested in looking at your brand through one lens than the other. Or certain types of decision makers or users are going to be more interested in looking at your brand through one lens than another. We have a client called CourseKey, which is a company in the tech space specifically in the area of vocational schools. And they're telling their story to the owners of vocational schools and key administrators but they're also talking to students. The thing that they're really trying to say, is that CourseKey fits into your life and the way you live. The themes of relevance and convenience, are really important to many students, many kinds of students and those are maybe not the driving themes for the decision makers at the top who are thinking about the long term financial success, profitability, growth of their school. They want things to be a good lifestyle fit for their students, but they're more concerned about themes of scale, themes of robustness, themes of insight to what they're doing.
M: So we touched on the fact that themes will emerge based on the industry and the brand, but let's talk about that process of extracting or landing on a theme.
E: How do we get there? Yeah, well, things develop more like photographic film- good clarity in this area, not a lot of clarity in another area for a long time. Getting after themes comes from just reviewing what we've heard, and seeing where the client takes things. And following the terrain of interest of the conversations that we're having, and we're shaping those conversations, we're coming in with questions. We might have some themes in mind going in, but I tend not to over prepare around certain themes. Specifically at the starting point, I tend to let them emerge.
Really interesting case in point again, this is from a cybersecurity client. A lot of their messaging, a lot of their story, such as it was before we came in, was was around resilience. And there's a value proposition there. You can also look at it as a theme. And in the course of talking to them, we realized nobody talks about resilience. We're talking dozens of conversations. We came back and said, “So where does this really live in your brand? Is it a coincidence that you're not using it to tell the story, or is it a crutch that you think the industry needs to hear about resilience and it's just not really where you guys are at?” And in the end, we've left it out. They have plenty of other stuff to talk about.
And that leads to another important point about themes is you don't want to have too many. The most number of themes we've ever had, probably like personality attributes, is probably five. I don't know if that's an absolute rule, but like everything you want to have a manageable number. Not too few. Not too many.
M: I feel like the golden number is always three. If a client is pushing for another one, it’s usually a shade of one that’s already there. It could just be folded into another one, or we can add a little nuance to one of them.
E: I’m glad you mentioned three and we're talking about the number of things too, because this goes back to storytelling and composition. A symphony has three movements and each one has a certain role to play, or when you think about making an argument, or the three-act play is a rich framework for human action and character development and the emotional roller coaster that a play should take you on. There's also a case for five that's a little bit more elaborate, but also easy to sort of grasp and in some ways three and five and oddly not four, are useful numbers for composing. Yeah.
M: My process is pretty identical to yours. I mean, it just comes out of conversation. I find it's actually one of the most natural, easiest things to arrive at throughout this process, generally it just comes. People talk about what their strengths are. And you hear the same words come up over and over again, the same ideas from people in different departments. There's usually some zhuzhing but they come pretty intuitively.
We also talked about how you can come to strengths based on what your audience wants or what different personas are looking for. If you have a client that's done that work or you're doing that work with a client, you can use that as a starting starting point.
E: You can also use competitive work. So when we're looking at the way competitors for a given brand, who's a client of ours, are communicating, we're looking at their value proposition inventory and the themes that they seem to be using as anchors for their story. And it's usually pretty clear what those are. If they haven't done a good job expressing themselves they might be hidden. But generally speaking, we can isolate a lot of them. They're never going to tell you exactly what they are, of course, you've got to interpret it. But it's really important to see who's hitting on what themes and what value propositions are the indicators of those themes. Themes may be visual, not just spoken narrative or written narrative. They can come from not only visuals even but how things are organized and how much weight is given to content of whatever kind.
M: So let's talk about moving from backstory and brand themes into messaging and value propositions.
E: Yeah, and that's normally the direction. Sometimes we build a messaging framework first and then have to reverse engineer. Nine times out of 10, we’ve got the themes understood before we're doing any of this. So themes are very similar to value propositions. What I would say the differences is there can be more than one value proposition living under a given theme. So for example, and I was thinking about this this morning, working on this security brand’s messaging deck. Performance is a big theme. And under performance, they've got value propositions around things like speed, precision, detail, and even around cost savings. And all of those roll up to this idea that it's a very high performing solution or a set of solutions that they deliver. So sometimes they're just one or two value propositions. Maybe there’s a case where there's just one value proposition tied to a theme.
M: And then we talked about how there can be value propositions that do not belong under any theme.
E: So that would be like the number of years we've been in business. I mean, you could turn that into a theme but most, most companies use it more as like a basic intro. We're working on a presentation right now for a company that leads in the firmware space. And they want you to know certain things about the company before getting into the story and where they see firmware going and all these cool things they’re doing. And they want you to know ‘We've been around for a long time. We've done a lot of innovating over the years. We've got a whole erg load of clients. And we have a large share of the market.’ That basic calling card stuff doesn't tend to fall into themes as much. It's useful. I mean, it does position the company as a credible company, but tends not to be tied to the bigger themes.
M: I have a restaurant client, through our competitive value prop inventory, discovered that they're the only restaurant in their town that was open between lunch and dinner. Not part of their themes, but a useful value prop.
E: I think about our own pitch decks and when we're introducing ourselves to people and it's that same setup stuff like, we have these clients, we've been in business for this long we have these values. And there's nothing in that information that would tell you, aside from our name, that we're really focused on a storytelling-based approach, and that there are certain things about that approach that are really important for us to share and that prospective customers find really interesting and valuable.
M: So let's talk a little bit about how a theme looks when you're presenting it. You obviously just don't slap a word on a slide. There's other information that goes along with it. How do you present themes?
E: Let me ask you first of all, how you present the themes, starts with how you label them, right? I tend to use single words, like performance, like innovation, not always, but that's sort of the default mode, but I think you go about a little different, right?
M: I usually I'm more of a two-word gal. I usually do like community leadership or the joy of service, things like that. I put a little more spin on the ball, I guess.
E: Probably that's one of those things where it comes down to what is the most useful, accessible way for this for the client, for the people who are going to be using these tools to tell the story, right, so yeah, I think that's something to look at. And you can make things a little bit more interesting by adding a word or two.
How you might see a theme in a platform deck: Usually you're gonna see the word or the label, whether it's one word or two short phrase, and then we're going to provide a very short statement. So for example, I'm looking at versatility, which is one the themes for a client that we have. And this client has to say about versatility: we readily enable users to address a broad range of needs, essential to business and training success. So that's a simple statement that defines versatility for them at a very high level, and we're going to use provide a little bit of backup for that. So what did we hear that led us to this? What are a few of the topline things that lead us to suggest this? What does it tie to, in terms of the company's product or its business practices? There are usually some breadcrumbs that take you to the theme so we're going to support the theme. We may also talk briefly, like one line, about how we see this theme being relevant or interesting to the main audience or to a general audience. So why it may tie to the audience's desire for this or that. That's pretty much it. If we're gonna go a little deeper, we might break that little sentence down. So let me go back to it. We readily enable users to address a broad range of needs, essential to business and training success. So we might say, okay, what are the broad range of needs? What do you mean by that? What do you mean by essential to business and training success? What do you mean by readily enabling something? And those start to be the bridge into the value props.
M: I will usually provide quotes from discovery or I'll pull things from their existing site or newsletters or , whatever they've given me that's already there. And then an explanation. That's probably it in the first round, and then when I deliver the final Brand Wheel, or platform, then I'll share how you could express one idea through those three lenses. And you might use more than one strength, in a given communication, but just to give them an idea of how they can use those strengths to communicate, in a deeper way, make a stronger connection with a customer.
E: Yeah, that's great. Really clear.
As we're closing, I want to just share one last thought on themes that go back to story. And, again, as we're looking at the mechanics of storytelling and the foundational pieces of a story, we all the way back to the vision. We've talked about how themes are like the things that support a promise, a promise is really like the premise of the story. It's the thing that you're constantly fleshing out if you think about the vision as setting things in motion and setting the characters in motion, the themes are the lived experience, right, the themes are really how the vision comes to life, through your daily interaction with the world and the stuff you're really doing. Themes are what add poignancy to a story. You think about someone saying,”His entire life was a constant struggle against poverty.” or “Her entire life was was about searching, trying to find herself.” These are themes that summarize people's journeys through this world and that to me, again, is a strong case for thinking in that way and not so much from the rational, sort of value prop first way. We're here to sell stuff, but we're also here to make people feel connected. And it's the poignancy that rests in themes. That really, I think, is the basis for a powerful brand.
M: Yeah, well said. So that's themes.
E: As we say, in the storytelling world, Hey, theme on.
M: That that's it on themes. In the next episode, we will be talking about brand backstory. So until then, see you on the frontlines.
