Brand5 is Your Most Efficient Minimum Viable Brand Tool
A Minimum Viable Brand (MVB) is a strategic concept that has been put into practice over the past year at Shuka. It is based on the principles of brand archetype combinations and focuses on creating a brand with the essential features to meet basic functional requirements. In this first of two parts of the article, I will discuss the importance of human-centric branding and why brands should embody human personas, influenced by their top five stakeholders.
An MVB is a brand that meets the bare minimum of functional requirements. Much like a Minimal Viable Product (MVP), the MVB tool enables you to save the most expensive resource you have — time, because, as we all know, the global landscape can change very quickly these days. The MVB also saves you the effort and money necessary to develop a launch or re-launch a brand, providing you with the flexibility to try out several different angles.
From our own experience, branding in many cases simply isn’t a top-of-mind matter for founders and a lengthy, labour-intensive brand development process is far from their favourite business activity. Thus, as an alternative to a complete strategic brand process, an MVB serves as an initial brand platform that provides you with the right balance of structure and flexibility to start guiding your business, gluing your employees together and engaging your customers. The MVB helps you:
Humanity is “the new black”
In today’s fast-paced, overly-automated, and digitally-driven society, humanity has become “the new black”. The Internet constantly rewards us with convenience and instant gratification, making the human touch increasingly more valuable. Businesses can no longer afford to be faceless entities. They need to connect with audiences, pull at their heartstrings, and engage with them on a much deeper level than seen before. People don’t want to be mere passive recipients of messages, they want to converse with companies just like they do with their friends.
When building an MVB, it is vitally important that you think of it as a human being (an even easier task in cases involving the creation of a personal brand). Just like how you make a customer persona to understand your clients better, I recommend that you always put some effort into creating a brand persona, putting a proverbial face to your business.
How to determine your brand persona?
Even if you’ve never heard of the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar before, you might still be familiar with one of his theories: Dunbar’s number — the proposition that the average human being can only maintain 150 social friendships with any degree of stability. Of these 150 friendships, some are closer than others. According to Professor Dunbar’s research, the inner circle, the “family”, consists of five people — a considerable drop from the small army we can maintain:
“Five is the number of ‘best’ friends a typical individual can keep.”
We find a similar idea in the words of motivational speaker Jim Rohn:
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
These five people shape who you are. They affect the attitudes and behaviours you are regularly exposed to. Eventually you start to think and behave like they do.
The same is true of brands:
“A brand persona is the average of the five stakeholders it spends the most time with.”
Who make up your brand’s “family” of five? Who are those five stakeholders your brand spends most time with? Who are your brand’s five?
Brand 5 — an MVB development tool
At Shuka we’ve identified those five personas. Having tested several different approaches, we’ve figured out how to describe these five stakeholders, breaking them down into three levels:
I. The internal level — your employees.
There’s usually so much going on with the public on the outside that there’s little time left over to think about our employees too. But employees are the heart of what makes our brand story come to life and create meaningful experiences for our customers. A brand is something that is cared for by your employees. They need to buy into your brand in order to develop and sell it effectively. It’s here that corporate culture comes into play. If you haven’t got one, it’s hard getting people motivated to join you, to work on the product, and to get anyone to invest in your business. When your brand and culture are aligned, you increase operational efficiency and quality, improve your ability to compete for talent and customer loyalty, and move your business closer towards its goals. A strong corporate culture can be instilled via internal communication and HR processes to reinforce the feeling of belonging to a cause and to your employer’s brand.
Thus, the first “family” member is your corporate culture personality.
II. The external level — your customers.
Now more than ever before your brand is owned, at least at an emotional level, by your customer. They are the ones paying for what you offer. Combine that with the buyer’s journey where they are in control of the path to purchase: Buying is now social, self-directed, trust-based and transparent. The Most Valuable Client is the collective image of the group of people you most want to attract to your product or service. We recommend you identify two Most Valuable Clients for your Brand 5 development. These can be the representatives of your two most desired customer groups, or one could be a shopper persona and the other a consumer persona (as, for example, with parents and children in situations involving the development of an educational brand, or a pet owner and their dog when shaping a petfood brand).
So, your second and third “family” member are your most valuable client personas N1 and N2.
III. The communicational level — your storytelling personas.
On one hand, the marketplace is extremely crowded, and competition for people’s attention is getting fiercer and fiercer by the year. On the other hand, in the privacy-first world, it can be a vast challenge for advertisers to capture and hold their viewer’s attention. Thus, generating attention and compelling action online come down in great part to creative execution. Your story can be entertaining or insightful, inspiring or educational, passionate or nostalgic, and so much more besides… But how do you tell it? The tone of voice question is the one every brand should answer. It is very important not only what you say, but how you say it — not only the words you choose, but their order, rhythm and pace. Your brand communication persona, which may be described in terms of one or two characters combined, summarises all this information.
Your fourth and fifth “family” members are thus your external communication persona mixes of N1 and N2.
These three levels of five stakeholders form a tribe of five — set out here in a circle which looks a bit like a spinner. We call it the Brand 5:
Brand 5 parameters
Beside five personas described with the archetype language, we’ve also included in the Brand 5 the core elements of a brand that are necessary to ensure internal focus and alignment as well as external relevance and differentiation.
In the next article we’ll go deeper into the Brand 5 parameters and talk about the overall tool benefits for different users.
This was the first of two parts of the article. In the next part I will discuss Brand 5’s significance to stakeholders, its role in decision-making, startup branding, personal brand building, and its foundational use for designers.
Illustrations: Alexander Koltsov, Alexandra Gerig
