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One Agency, Two Brands? WTF?
When most of us think about brand, we think logos, color palette, voice, that sort of stuff. We might even consider website layout, business cards, and all that.
Brand is about so much more than just what you say. It's about the way you operate, the way you communicate, and the way you engage. It's really pretty amorphous, but here's something I want you to think about. It's sort of nuanced, so stick with me for a minute. You've got your CATEGORY BRAND and your BRAND BRAND.
Category Brand vs Brand Brand
Your CATEGORY BRAND is everything you say and think about the space that you operate in. I
t's the stuff that you say about the industry that your target market operates in. It's your point of view about the market you serve. Your category brand is tactical, operational. It is where you show how clever you are, how insightful, how data-driven, how in tune you are with what your target market experiences.
Your BRAND BRAND is what you say about yourself.
Your BRAND BRAND is how you express yourself to prospects, clients, employees, and partners. Your BRAND BRAND is how your team feels on Monday morning when it's time to come to work. Your BRAND BRAND is what your clients know to expect from you on every call. Your BRAND BRAND is what your agency looks like when you close your eyes?
If you've been a reader of this newsletter for any period of time, you are thinking, "Hey, Tim, isn't your BRAND BRAND your VVV (Vibes Vision & Values)?" They are definitely related. Your VVV is something you excavate from the way that you operate. Your VVV is based on who you are, what you think, and how you feel. Your BRAND BRAND, on the other hand, is the presentation layer of your VVV. Your VVV is your context. Your vision, in terms of your VVV, is two-fold:
Your vision of what your agency is growing towards
Your vision of what the market and the industry are doing
Vision bleeds over more into CATEGORY BRAND than into BRAND BRAND. Your VVV is a tool set that you use to create your BRAND BRAND and your CATEGORY BRAND .
Your VVV is raw & your BRAND BRAND is a more polished presentation of your VVV. Since your VVV contains your experience, your learnings, your insight, and your vision, it also feeds your CATEGORY BRAND. Your VVV serves as the engine for these two disparate presentation layers.
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
Why Do We Need BRAND BRAND & CATEGORY BRAND?
CATEGORY BRAND creates awareness. BRAND BRAND creates conviction.
CATEGORY BRAND gives your market & prospects permission to engage with you. It earns the click, the follow, the newsletter subscribe.
CATEGORY BRAND is your attention-getter. It's really the thing that allows people to remember, "Whoa, that person is smart” or “they get it “ or “I didn't know that." CATEGORY BRAND is the thing that makes you a consideration set perennial.
BRAND BRAND has a completely different job…
BRAND BRAND fills in the doubt
Once you've grabbed attention, there are all of these trust issues that need to be resolved before someone can jump over the final hurdle of a contract and enter into the paradise of being your client. The questions are things like:
Are they going to spend my budget well?
Are they going to lead or follow?
Are they going to help me grow or hold me back?
Am I valuable to them, or do they just want my fees?
There is a gap that is approximately 7.3 times bigger than the Grand Canyon between "I’m aware of this agency" and "I want to work with this agency." This is where your BRAND BRAND earns it’s keep. Your BRAND BRAND makes the promises of insight from your CATEGORY BRAND real. It brings your Vibes & Values into context. Your BRAND BRAND is the epoxy that fills in any cracks
Different Tempos For Different Brands
CATEGORY BRAND moves really fast. It reacts to things like technology changes, economic conditions, consumer sentiment shifts, platform adjustments, algorithmic changes, geo-politics… Your CATEGORY BRAND is constantly in motion and maybe even seems like it's vibrating because it is reacting to many inputs all at once. Your CATEGORY BRAND changes along with the forces that impact the category you serve.
BRAND BRAND moves slightly faster than tectonic plates but significantly slower than today's pace of change.
Your BRAND BRAND does not change with iOS updates, new frontier model drops, or if Amazon has a 3.5% fuel surcharge or not. Your BRAND BRAND change happens when there is a fundamental change in who you are as a leadership team, as a delivery team, as a business.
A BRAND BRAND example to grab on to:
Apple has not changed its value proposition significantly since its infamous “1984 Big Brother" commercial or its iconic "The Crazy Ones" ad campaign. It has an intention of being different. Whether they are or not is immaterial; their BRAND BRAND is about being iconoclastic, creative, and human.
An anti-BRAND BRAND example to avoid:
Meta has no BRAND BRAND.
2003 - Facemash: Which college girls are hot?
2004 - The Facebook: Which colleges and student bodies are cool enough to get behind the velvet rope.
2005 - Everybody is cool enough. The whole world is invited.
2016 - Feed the algorithm with outrage.
2018 - Yo, dawg…want some PII? But we'll tell everybody else that we respect user privacy.
2019 - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. We are surrounding you with ads.
2021 - Welcome to the metaverse, where nobody is real and legs are too confusing to render reasonably.
2024 - Just kidding. Meta really means artificial intelligence, and legs are completely unimportant
Your CATEGORY BRAND is a bullhorn. Your BRAND BRAND is a handshake…
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The Trouble With CATEGORY BRANDS As A Standalone
Because agency owners are shiny object syndrome personified, so many agencies overindex on their CATEGORY BRAND. I get why. It's that CATEGORY BRANDS are actually more exciting: they move, they change, you get to be clever, and you get to adapt tactically. As you chase the category brand motion, if you don't have a BRAND BRAND as a base, you are completely transient. we know who these agencies are. They've gone from SEO to paid search to paid social to NFT & crypto agencies, to TikTok agencies to UGC agencies to AI agencies.
They don't have an anchor, so they are buffeted about by broad marketplace changes and don't really have an intrinsic value or point of view that can create trust
The Trouble With BRAND BRANDS As A Standalone
On the other side of the ledger, we've got BRAND BRAND only agencies. These are typically very mature agencies that have weathered the transition from print to pixels and still have a concept that their previous tactical excellence is uniquely relevant today. These are agencies that have not adapted as the market has changed, but rather have doubled down on who they used to be.
There's an agency with a rare storefront office in Boston. In the window, they have Best of Boston 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 awards. Within a half decade of any of those years, that recognition would be relevant. But we are now more than two decades away from their last Best of Boston award. When I first became aware of them, when I was a fledgling agency owner, they were an agency that designed and printed beautiful things like magazines, catalogs, annual reports and those fancy books that colleges used to send to prospective students.
Now they offer websites and digital advertising too. With a quick glance at their website or office, it’s clear that they still have their brand tied to the expertise of taking a physical place or a physical thing and turning it into a beautifully designed, beautifully printed paper artifact. They still have fantastic clients.
Their business isn't irrelevant today. It's just that their BRAND BRAND has become static because their CATEGORY BRAND become stale as the power of the printed book has waned. Even if they were able to develop the most magnificent, fully interactive, AI-powered, unique digital experience, nobody would consider them for it because they are stuck with their BRAND BRAND and it hasn’t been fed by their CATEGORY BRAND since those halcyon Best of Boston Award days
Do You Actually Have 2 Brands?
If you were suddenly kicked off LinkedIn, could no longer send emails, and YouTube decided that it didn't want to show your face anymore, do you know what your current clients and employees would say about your business? Do they have a baseline of understanding?
If you believe they could still articulate who you are, what your quality is, and if the way they feel about working with you is evocative of a positive emotion, congratulations! YOU HAVE A BRAND BRAND!
This is going to sound like one of those terrible guru coach exercises, but if you were dropped in a city with $39, a laptop, no contacts, no existing business & no one you could call to throw some business your way, could you get somebody to pay enough attention to you to be able to enter into a real sales conversation?
If you are confident that you could do that within a reasonably short period of time (30 days, maybe), then congratulations are in order! You have a CATEGORY BRAND.
You need both kinds of brands in order to grow.
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CATEGORY BRAND Creates Prospects. BRAND BRAND Creates Clients.
Your CATEGORY BRAND is your ante at the poker table. In order to be in the game, you've got to pay. It isn't a one-time payment. You've got to ante up with every hand. Your CATEGORY BRAND is a persistent, dynamic presence. it lives in that sort of weird space between your business and the market. Your CATEGORY BRAND is not what your agency does or how your agency works. It's what you think, how you feel, the stories you tell. It’s how you attract attention and create visibility
Your BRAND BRAND fills in the spaces that your prospect hasn't articulated yet. It builds trust. It creates safety. It's what gives your point of contact the confidence to go to their boss and say, "I think we should hire this agency."
CATEGORY BRAND earns the opportunity. BRAND BRAND earns the yes.
This is pretty challenging. The idea of brand attention, awareness, commitment, trust, and conversion is a big, hairy theme to keep in your brain.
Other than managing people creating this dual set of articulations around credibility and trust is perhaps the hardest thing to do in this business. Because on some level we are all really good marketers, creating attention and trust in our space requires a lot of work. In a dynamic and really noisy space like ours, there is a strong temptation to chase what is different & a desire to try things that are new. But your prospects who become clients want something that is trusted and settled.
DemandOS helps you create awareness, visibility, and lead generation on a cacophonous market. DemandOS learns from market input and transforms that into stronger, richer language that expresses the things about you and your business that are more true than they are about anyone else.
DemandOS is an arc of awareness that alerts the people who need you that you exist. DemandOS creates permission for an observer to become a lead. It is a transformative machine that turns a lead into a satisfying & profitable business relationship. When done really well, DemandOS gives you the tools to transcend a buyer/vendor relationship and turn you and your client into a team achieving a shared goal.
If you aren’t ready for all that transformation stuff - maybe check out our free agency growth tools…
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