By Lucy Woolfenden at The Scale Up Collective

“Brand is the story that other people tell about your organisation.”

I love this definition of brand from Ivan Pols (Chief Creative Officer) at what3words. Most people see it as the story we, as the brand, want to tell. But actually this definition demonstrates that it’s much more about how your business is seen, felt and experienced by others.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ivan earlier this week and pick his brains on the topic, and I made so many notes! He’s worked with huge brands on a global scale, but he’s also worked hands-on in a scaling business and had some incredibly interesting perspectives on the role brand plays, and how to embed it across an organisation.

I highly recommend listening to the full episode. But as always, I’ll share the highlights here. Let’s get into it.

Every experience people have with you is creating your brand.

When it comes to defining what a brand is, Ivan explained it as ‘a collection of bits of information’–everything people are hearing, seeing and experiencing, most likely things that don’t originate from your organisation, that become your brand. It's alive!

Your brand is also part of your creative culture that helps you innovate and adapt as you through the variety of problem solving exercises that you’re going to have to go through as an early stage business.

Organisations with more creative cultures outperform their peers because innovation drives growth.

From Ivan’s point of view, brand has a significant impact on sustainable growth due to its ability to create value for an organisation.

Gartner, Adobe and McKinsey have all got compelling studies that show more creative cultures have higher return to shareholders.  And that’s because businesses with creative cultures are innovative, and innovation drives growth.

A place like Unilever teaches us the face value of a brand on commodity products. For example, Dove is worth over $5B, but the body wash comes out of the same factory as the other products, like Ponds or Axe, that Unilever manufactures. So it's not necessarily just about the product itself, but the brand is a differentiator, and that equals value.

When it comes to getting everyone across the business to care about brand - focus on how it can help make their lives easier.

Ivan’s number one tip for embedding a brand across a business is: don't talk in marketing jargon! Instead of talking about brand specifically, focus on how it can make everyone else's jobs easier.

For example: When Ivan first started at what3words he noticed that most of the business development people were all pitching the business differently. So from a client or prospect perspective - they’re hearing different things from different people. And when that consistency is broken, trust plummets. So in this case, the role of the brand was to help reinforce the product story and create consistency with the language, which in turn builds trust over time.

Ultimately brand is not the most important thing. In a company that makes a product, the product is the most important thing. So think of the brand in service of the product: how can it help the thing you're selling?

Keep it simple and focus on basic principles that people can understand and turn into behaviour.

Your brand principles should be simple enough to remember, easy enough to use, but also give you enough freedom to experiment and grow. It’s also important to give responsibility and accountability for the brand to everyone. Give them the tools to create the brand in a way that they're comfortable doing.

In Ivan’s view, to create a culture that embodies the brand at every touchpoint you need to make it visible:

“There’s a reason I put the studio in the middle of the building. So if you want to go get a coffee, you have to walk past the editor’s screens and see the great stories that are happening in the US, or the things that we're doing in Germany. It's popping up on monitors and you're like, oh, that's exciting!”

Ivan’s advice for getting started: there's no such thing as the perfect

The founder is the first brand storyteller.

Try and get your brand story agreed early so that you don't have to keep reinventing it over and again.

This will save you a lot of time, misunderstandings and error fixing later. And finally, just relax.

80% is good enough! What you know now is enough to get you started, and then you will incrementally, over time, build that up.

Just start putting a framework around you, and then enjoy it - one of the most creative things you can do is tell that story.

Example of where brand has really driven growth:

An 1,800-year-old shrine in Japan…

This might seem niche, but it’s a really interesting story!

The shrine was a shrinking business in a shrinking industry. The owner saved $1,500 over two years and used it to rebuild his brand story - explaining the reason why an 1,800-year-old shrine should exist in the 21st century. With incremental changes it’s since grown 30x over last 10 years!

Example of where a lack of brand has inhibited growth - Allbirds sneakers

In the beginning, they were the new eco friendly, beautifully designed, shoe on the block. But post-investment, they seem to have put a huge investment into sales and stores but not enough into the product and the story behind it. This resulted in a situation where they can’t sell enough to pay back the debts and a plummeting share price.