Branding as pattern recognition
(We see it all)
I like people and learning new things. This makes branding a good job for me. In any given week I’m likely meeting at least a handful of new folks. And if I’m lucky, I’ll get to learn all kinds of things about their little corner of the world—and whatever it is they’re working tirelessly to create. Maybe I get to dive deeply into fermentation in plant-powered proteins; or how machine learning is changing personalized medicine; or the front lines of grassroots climate advocacy. People and their passions are what drive our work.
When people hire us at A Hundred Monkeys, they know they’re bringing on a partner with decades of experience building brands. They have a problem and they believe we can help them solve that problem. They’ve decided we’re the right ones for the job. The job is seeing them—really seeing them. Then, using our words, showing the client (and the rest of the world) what we see.
What I don’t think people realize is how our work gives us a bird’s eye view of a much bigger picture. Because we partner with so many different companies in a given year, across all sorts of industries, we also get a unique perspective on trends in language. We know when everyone sounds the same (hint: it’s because they’re using the same words).
This perspective gives us the ability to challenge folks to find new ways to communicate. When it comes to your key differentiator, if we’ve heard it before, even once, we’ll say so. And certain turns of phrase are D.O.A.—I’m looking at you unlocking, leveraging, democratizing, at scale. Differentiation doesn’t mean saying something slightly different using the same words as everyone else. It means saying something no one else is saying.
At the end of the day, having industry-specific knowledge is useful when we’re approaching a given project, but only to a certain degree. Having a more expansive portfolio gives us an even wider lens through which to consider the challenge of building your brand. Brands don’t simply live in the vacuums of their industry. They live within the messy and chaotic everythingness of our society, just like the rest of us. We want your brand to stand apart with a meaningful story to tell. We want your brand to matter—not just relative to your competitors, but to the broader world.
