KNC Summer breakfast gathering in Kansas City. Photo by Michael Bolden.

For the past few years I have been working with Knight Foundation to bring brand thinking into the media innovation space. I have had the great pleasure to work with a range of projects—from established organizations such as WITNESS, The Tor Project, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to true startup teams.

This summer, we gathered in Kansas City, Mo., with winners of the Knight News Challenge and did some lightning round sessions to rapidly introduce core concepts of brand building. It’s what I call brand listening; it requires both observation and conversation to understand who an organization is serving and why it exists.

Here are some of the key insights I shared during those sessions.

Peter Spear addresses attendees during KNC Summer. Photo by Michael Bolden.

Emotional manipulation is inevitable (Brand is not evil).

The gathering at the Kauffman Foundation Conference Center began with a wonderful work session led by Lea Thau of The Moth on the art of storytelling. During this session, she was asked how to communicate in a way that assured the audience would not feel emotionally manipulated.

I believe absolutely that this fear of emotional expression limits the amount of change we can make in the world. The single strongest argument I have come across to address this issue is from Martin Weigel.

He references the first axiom of communication from Paul Watzlawick, a family therapist from the influential Mental Research Institute: “You cannot not communicate.” 

Watzlawick talks about the distinction between analog and digital forms of communicating. Analog is non-verbal, implicit, emotional and experienced unconsciously. Digital is verbal, explicit, conceptual and experienced consciously. He goes on to say: “Wherever relationship is the central issue of communication, we find that digital language is almost meaningless.”

So, if relationship is a central issue to your communications, you must begin to understand the analog experience of your category and your product. Otherwise, there is an extremely real risk that everything you are doing is simply not being heard.

Brand building is a choice.

Brand isn’t a pretty wrapper or a shiny event that we put in front of or around the things we do; it is what we do. What brand attempts to do is orient the efforts of an organization around the real-life experiences of a customer or prospect.

In a beautifully written piece, Marc Shillum describes brand as patterns of behavior in the marketplace. This turns the brand and product relationship on its head.

Yes, brand can be a promise of a product experience. But, more important and powerful today, the product is proof of the brand purpose. But—and this is a huge BUT—product is only one instrument in an entire orchestra of available instruments that can increase the surface area of an organization.

Brand is the only part of the business world that gets to go out and play in culture. It’s the only bit of any organization that gets to hang with its customers, unsupervised. Think of it like this: “Brand is how a product navigates culture,” and “Brand is how a product finds its culture.” Both are true. 

Culture is the competitive landscape, whether you’re a for-profit business or a nonprofit like many of the News Challenge winners I met with in Kansas City. It is impossible to impact a culture one refuses to participate in.

Brand is about increasing the surface area of your organization.

I used to work near the Flatiron Building in New York. Around that time, they redesigned the entire space around the building.

They didn’t really touch the building very much, but they did adapt everything around it to give more people more access to what was already there: the building. They had increased the surface area of the building. They gave more people more opportunities to see it.

This applies to organizations, too. If you want more people to have access to what you do, you need to find ways to increase the surface area of your work. If your goal is to turn ice into water, you break it into smaller pieces. To do this requires a powerfully clear brand idea or purpose.

Your brand purpose is your block of ice.

But what does this brand purpose look like and how do you get there? Here’s one example that proved helpful to the participants at this summer’s gathering.

Zipcar describes its brand purpose as “Inspiring Responsible Urban Living.”

What is the Zipcar product? Car-sharing. What are the motivations that drive behavior, or jobs to be done, in the car-sharing category? In the end it’s not about the car, but about exploring a new way of living in cities, and of being responsible. And so, Zipcar’s brand purpose is articulated as a particular form of actual behavior that transcends the category: Responsible Urban Living.

Brands need internal stewards.

Most of my work outside of Knight Foundation is with established brands that have marketing departments, insight departments, creative agencies – entire departments focused on the creation, management and evolution of the brand and product propositions.

When I meet with a not-for-profit – established or new – there is no one. This should change.

Name one individual the chief brand steward or chief brand officer or some such title, and make them responsible for breathing brand life into the communications and innovations of your organization.

Make it somebody’s responsibility to actively listen to and consider the customer and prospect experience in every moment of contact.

As the great brands are champions for a particular point of view or way of doing things and getting things done, a brand’s purpose needs champions internally. Without this accountability, brands are built by committee and lose their distinctiveness. They become boring.

There are two tests for determining the degree to which your brand purpose will prove useful. The first is internal: the degree to which it inspires employees to develop creative, strategic behavior for your organization out in the world. The second is external: the degree to which the culture that matters to your business experiences it.

It all comes down to understanding your business from the perspective of your customer or potential customer. You can’t really understand your own brand or product until you do that.

Peter Spear is a consultant for Knight Foundation.