We’re super excited to launch our new brand strategy course this week. I speak to Anne about why this course is so needed, and how it came about.

W: Why did we build a course specifically around strategy?

A: During our seven years of training social entrepreneurs, we noticed time and time again that people tend to think of brand as a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘plan to win’. Though working on the ‘thing’ is incredibly valuable (the driving principles, the identity, the interactions) without a smart plan that outlines what role the brand will actually play to get people on board with your idea for change, that ‘thing’ might not be as effective as it could be.

Abraham Lincoln is often quoted for having said “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.”

That’s what a smart strategy is.

We think teams spend too little time sharpening the axe, and too much time on busy work - we’re guilty of that ourselves all the time too.

It’s crucial to first do some serious thinking about the role that brand plays to achieve your purpose.

We always use the analogy of vegan burgers. If you want to get meat eaters to eat less meat, you have a couple of brand strategy options. You could try and build a brand that champions animal rights - which probably will not be very successful with people who enjoy meat right now. The other option might be to champion health benefits, or a third scenario, to get people on board through positioning it as the best tasting burger (meat or plant-based - just the best taste, period).

So…

We wanted to make it easier for people to understand strategy and what it could do for them, and experiment with different scenarios.

W: what are the common mistakes people make in brand strategy for social change?

I think that it’s very natural to think that in the age of purpose, you should lead your brand strategy with that purpose. But the fact is that your purpose might not resonate with audiences. We have to learn to see through their eyes, as well as our own.

That’s the big massive point we drive home in the course.

If you want to get people on board with change, lead with what matters to them. That sounds simple, but it’s not easy to figure that out, and that’s why we include the concept of testing in the course, which will give you lots of insights.

w: What is brand strategy actually, and why is it so complex?

To be honest - I think there is a lot of smoke and mirrors to cover up the fact that a lot of us in the industry actually don’t really understand what it is ourselves.

A strategy is often confused with vision, mission, or values. The wordy stuff. Or the marketing plan. There are a thousand different definitions out there, and the tsunami of low-quality content focussed on brand and marketing written for Search Engine Marketing hasn’t made it any easier to find good answers.

We define brand strategy for change as the plan that outlines the role that brand plays in order to fulfill your purpose. And we pull together the key pieces - the why, what, who, and how, on one page.

I felt it was really important to have some good fundamental work out there that was both smart and actionable. Yes, strategy is about intelligent planning, but without execution it’s nothing.

W: how is the online course different from the book, brand the change?

Aha - yeah the famous yellow brand guide :-)

The Brand The Change guidebook covers the entire brand-building process. We were limited to 240 pages - already it is quite a honker of a book, and we therefore could not dive into each phase in detail.

This course zooms in specifically on strategy, which enables us to dive much deeper into the steps, including the creation of a brand strategy on a page, prototyping, and testing, which are not a part of the book.

Where the book offers 23 tools with examples from dozens of brands, the course shows the progress for one example brand, so you can follow the process step by step and see how one piece of work informs the other.

I think that is also super helpful - because rarely, if ever, do we see that process unfold.

Also in all honesty, the book was written first in 2015, then updated in 2017, and again fully revised in 2018 for the official publication.

I realised around 2019 that I had not made the importance of strategic choices prominent enough in the book, so this was a way to etch that out more.

The book is a living document, and we update the content all the time when we have new knowledge to add. This course’s content will eventually make its way back into the book.

It's the course I wish I had when I started my career, and when I had to create the role of ‘strategist’ at Lava out of thin air in 2010.

W: Tell us a little about the making of the course - it took longer than you expected to launch.

The content that is now in the online course had originally been created for our live online Brand The Change Academy programme. We ran it twice as a 6-month program, and twice as an 8-week program, with a couple dozen participants. So we thought we had stress-tested everything plenty.

But then what always happens, is you take the live element out of it, and the personal coaching, and you start taking a look at the materials purely on their own. You can’t quite get this to an IKEA instruction level, but you need to get it down to the point where it is so clear that people can run with it and can focus on finding answers for themselves, rather than trying to figure out what it is you are trying to teach.

Getting to that clarity is always a process. In Holland we say: I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one. Well, we took the time to write a short letter, and I hope people find that it shows.

Then you have to make sure that you don’t have any blind spots, so we found six dedicated volunteers who went through every minute detail of the course. And they went at it - seriously investigating every nook and cranny of the course. Actually quite frightening the level of detail they picked up on and the attention they paid to this.

And then you can’t really say - wow guys this is great but could you do maybe a less thorough job so we can get on with it?

They take their time, and we’re grateful for it.

W: can people really learn to think like a strategist through an online course?

It’s always good to be a bit skeptical about that. We didn’t design this course with the expectation that people would come out the other end as fully blown brand strategists. I’ve worked in this space for 15 years, I’ve seen amazing strategists at work, and I know that is not something you can replicate in 8 weeks.

But we see amazing things happen when people are offered good models and instruction. It takes the complexity out of it and gives you space to apply that knowledge to your own product or service.

There is also a reason why the course is hosted on our community platform, like all our other courses. It means the material is embedded in a place with lots of like-minded people who are eager to lift each other up. It’s not just some empty forum that sits there gathering dust.

We have monthly open hangouts that people can join to learn together and get ideas and feedback. So we’re pretty confident that if you have a business, movement, personal brand or project that you are passionate about, and you are willing to put the course to practice by doing the assignments and the prototyping required, you will take away so much from the experience.

w: any words of encouragement for those on the fence about taking the course?

A: The world is at a tipping point. We are still at a point where there are several outcomes possible for the future. Let’s make use of that window. Is that too heavy-handed?

Seriously. The world really does need you to be great at selling the change that we need. So do us all a favor and sign up! I wish you the brand they deserve.