Why I ♡ Asana’s Rebrand: A More Compelling Narrative
In my strategic messaging and storytelling workshops, I always show participants the home pages of a few prominent companies, and we dissect the story they’re telling.
I’ve often included Asana’s home page in this exercise, but as a counter-example: it didn’t tell a compelling story.
The new messaging is a lot better, and I’ll explain why.
The key story element I look for in strategic messaging is stakes. Basically, what’s the Promised Land (positive future) you’re laying out for your audience — and why is it more compelling than the (negative) future your audience will endure without you? Often, it helps to name an enemy: Who or what is stopping your audience from reaching the Promised Land today?
To be sure, Asana’s old messaging identified an enemy:
So email was the enemy, but what was the Promised Land? Teamwork without email? And why do I want that? There’s the line about “getting more done with less effort,” but it gets kind of lost. For this messaging to work, you’d have to feel like email is your enemy — the thing holding back your team. For me and the many clients I’ve shared this with, that never resonated.
In the new messaging, the finger-pointing at email is gone. It’s now all about the Promised Land:
The future Asana holds out now is one in which its audience’s teams make progress. The enemy portrayed here is more implicit: the dozens (millions?) of things that can get in your team’s way, of which email is only one (if that). That rings truer to me.
Of course, messaging can’t convince anyone that your story is true. It only creates a framework for doing that. It’s up to Asana’s team to demonstrate — through their product and their actions — that they really can help you move work forward.
But that’s a far more inspiring mission than simply ridding teams of email.
