Stop Playing Brand Checkers: Use the Brand Chessboard To Regain Control

Marketing Unfiltered #78 → Why Brand Is Struggling In The New World

Happy Friday, leaders. Another week is done!

Harry’s Vegas revelation last week caused as much surprise as his recommendation to explore prediction markets as a customer feedback and forecasting tool. Thanks to everyone who hit reply and commented over on our LinkedIn.

This week I’m tackling the reshaping of “Brand’ after the over influence of channels and platforms over the last ten years. I offer flexibility within a framework (my favourite way of approaching any problem), with a new brand quadrant x chess board to shape where you place yourself, how your Brand can move and offer some flexibility.

---

Stop Playing Brand Checkers: Use the Brand Chessboard To Regain Control

I have been part of a number of conversations where companies felt like they had lost their Brand… and there isn’t a system or framework that helps them.

I believe this debate is not happening enough, and we have to ask how we actively reshape brand. The recent era shifts include (i) SEO (ii) Social Media (iii) COVID (iv) short form video and then for the current era… AI.

The problem is often: how do we guide the team on where brand starts and stops, where it ends, and where it does not play?

The shape of brand has changed; it’s ballooned for most, shape-shifting constantly and becoming deformed from the different external influences, from social media channels, to platform dominance, to how new forces in brand like:

• Events - including connecting Marketing activities to new calendar events and news events and trend chasing

• Politics - commenting and marketing around political decisions, new presidents, and laws that have been passed
  and

• Culture - where cultural changes and subcultures have come to the forefront

These have become ‘zones’ many companies have ventured into to gain relevance and brand resonance with potential customers, and it has led many to lose their identity

The shape of brand has hugely evolved over the last 10–15 years, and usually not for the better.

You (Likely) Think You Are Bigger And More Flexible Than You Are

Here (gif below) is how and where many brands believe they operate: big, wide-reaching and important. This is often misleading and dangerous internally.

I have been working on ways to rethink and centralise how we bring it back to help guide business leaders and colleagues.

Often we believe our brands are bigger and can attach to far more than it can and then its hard to bring back to where you are and where you can play

Introducing The New Brand Quadrant → The Brand Chess Board Approach To Reshaping Brand

We often think we can sit in the middle and move around seamlessly - our customers have a different view as do your team members…

The chess board is a way to demonstrate simply the important factors at play and how to think about where your home square is and if/how you can move squares.

The Colour System: The chess board has a simple colour scheme:
- Red for extreme positions (not squares many companies would want to place in without specific purposes or positioning, or would choose to move to),
- Orange squares are hot or hard to play in
- Yellow for squares that can lead to issues,
- Green are traditionally safer squares.
- Blue is often seen as a positive or safe square, depending on how you are dragged into specific debates.

The brand chess board is a way to place yourself across the 4 axis that impact and attract customers and opinion on our Brand(s).

Guardrails: You can then say where you can naturally play and the moves you can make - helping to guide the company and the customers while building out the right guardrails.

Examples:

• If you are tech-forward or a truly innovative company pushing the limits, you will want to be high in C

• If you are a brand that connects to culture and drive culture you will see yourself in C4 and C5

• If you are a brand that has allowed politics to overly influence where you play, you could move from B3 towards C3.

Where Do You Place Your Brand?

The first question would be where do you place your own brand today?

I stress tested the chess board, Gemini and I created a list of brands and placed them across the board in the relevant square.

OpenAI have the brand problem of trying to be too much for too many reasons and choose to use dangerous narrative and chase government and defence contracts to shape and reshape themselves.

There are some patterns:

• The large and listed businesses will place into the middle zone (C2 & C3), where they are seen and operate as visionaries and have some flex to move squares from time to time - time to time they are dragged into other squares by their decisions or content

• Content platforms are shaped by the content and its perceived meaning, often dragging them into the politics zone and influencing how they market and promote their services to different creators and audiences.

• The “anti” brands lean heavily into politics, from Rumble (the video platform for conservative and far-right leaning creators and audience) and the rebellious brand that is Brewdog (lets see what happens to their square post sale). This is not right or wrong, it is where you have selected to operate in and likely helping you to win albeit with constant questions and charged conversations for your placement and product decisions

• Culture shifting and culture influencing brands like OF are on their own square, the way they have reimagined their industry and became a platform for what their CFO smartly calls “small business owners” is powerful and unique - OF is likely the only brand that could easily move towards events and politics and not be harmed.. (their creators can expand and shift away from their adult core, and as a platform they will be uniquely safe)

• Visionary companies like Chinese company BYD, NVIDIA’s with their thoughtful and industry leading investments in chips and AI and Space X have placed them into the highest vision square. These brands MO is to stay there and drive the industry forward, slipping back or trying to move towards events or culture will likely negatively impact them.
  These brands are often brought into political debate because of their tech and the connected power but aren’t placing themselves there.

• Red Bull is another stand out, their brand is connected to their own big events but also shaped by how they show up in sports, particularly in their ownership & sponsorship of sports teams: 7 football teams ownership (or majority ownership), 5 motorsports teams, 2 ice hockey teams, and investments and deep sponsorship in cycling, Paris FC, Leeds United FC, sailing, skate and surf teams.

The New Moves In Brand Reshaping

If you have moved to be shaped too heavily by events and trending topics you can move from D3 and move to C3 in a fairly flexible way.

If you are a brand that has allowed politics to overly influence where you place you could move from B3 and move towards C3.

A simple way to see what moves are available to you

Brands Disjointed By Their Marketing Efforts

Many brands allowed channels and platforms to confuse where their brands moved to, one move is (usually) fairly trivial and has flex in it for most but moving two moves on the board can be a real challenge or feel like a huge leap often going against brand momentum.

Move On Up? If you are in C3 and feel like you need to move to C1 that is a difficult move but an aspirational move. This will often be a long deliberate process.

Shift To Political Leaning? Moving from C3 and wanting to become politically driven that is a really hard move and something you will likely struggle to come back from if there are any issues.

Caution: Brands shouldn’t try to move more than two moves in any direction, those that do struggle with their identity and can hinder how customers think and feel about you, while internal team members will question motives and confuse future campaigns and projects.

This week Duolingo’s CMO said they are stepping away from unhinged marketing and going back to creator army’s and concentrating on “Reddit, WhatsApp, and good-old-fashioned blogging” - lets see which square they land themselves in…

External Warnings

It is important to note that outside influences can be truly impactful, with customer sentiment and now non customer videos causing huge backlash and moving you into squares you will not want to be seen as operating in. This is where your leadership and guidance makes all the difference.

Comms Issues & Challenges: YouTube, Disney, Amazon and Starbucks have all been pulled into political issues with how their content is being framed, CEOs miscommunicating their perspectives, managing internal incentives via press interviews and using politically charged statements all influence how your brand is shaped and placed.

Always Be Testing: Something you will want to push is testing, on where you sit and where you want to play - guided by how many squares away you are from where you want to test and play. Pushing out political statements can alienate, leaning into cultural debates will put you in the crosshairs and connecting to large events you have never been connected to before will create questions.

Test away but know too many square shifts will have a knock on effect.

I CHALLENGE YOU!

The real challenge I want you to undertake is asking your exec team, your social team, brand team, agencies and if you are brave enough customers on where do they place your brand on the chess board?

I have run this a few of times recently and it is truly enlightening.

I bet the answers do not align and very often it will enrage & then engage many important colleagues into a good structured debate.

So which square do you place your brand in?

Where do you think your colleagues will place you?
And how will you bring everyone back to the same squares and the moves you can make?

Still struggling with this and want to chat through? Drop me a email here or just hit reply.

↗ Share: You can hit forward to share with your team or copy and paste https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/78 and share in Teams or Slack for the team to complete the challenge.

---

FYI: This was part of a much larger deep dive into brand shaping and the evolution of brand, including how CEOs act as brand extensions and new storytelling brands are constantly reshaping how their brand shows up - often not in a good or positive way.

If you would like a run through of this deck, hit reply or the ❤️ button and I will record as a presentation run through.

Thanks for reading again today. Go well and have a great end to your week. We will land in your inbox again next Friday!

Danny Denhard