Follow the Feeling

Brand Building in a Noisy World

Kai D. Wright

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119600480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Elevate your brand, create a compelling brand story, and build brand loyalty

In Follow the Feeling, strategy advisor Kai D. Wright answers a critical question plaguing entrepreneurs, brand strategists, marketers, and leaders: how do you grow your brand in a noisy world? Analyzing 1, 500 fast-growing companies from Alibaba to Zara, the Columbia University lecturer and Ogilvy global consulting partner unpacks five branding secrets. Starting with behavioral economic principles and ending with a new systems-based approach to brand building, Wright offers readers one constant that trumps the hundreds of factors entangling brand value—feelings.

Follow the Feeling will show you how to best build and position your brand so you can stand out from competitors, build a tribe, and engineer a positive feeling across five important branding territories—lexicon, audio cues, visual stimuli, experience, and culture. Sharing real-world lessons and practical advice he has gained helping everyone from Sean Diddy Combs and Meghan Trainor to Bank of America and HP, Wright can help you develop and implement shareable, culturally-infectious branding strategies. Through storytelling, global research, and practical tips, this valuable book will help you and your organization:

• Efficiently create and deploy a comprehensive brand strategy across the organization
• Quickly launch new brands or reboot existing brands for growth
• Build tribes from audiences, consumers, clients, and partners
• Lean into the convergence of communication, culture, digital, and technology

Regardless of industry or sector, branding is essential for companies, nonprofits, and even individuals. Follow the Feeling: Brand Building in a Noisy World is a must-have resource for anyone from C-Suite executives to aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to unleash the full potential of their brand. And in this world of ever-increasing metrics paired with waning attentiveness, it's not just what your brand does, it's how your brand makes your customers feel.

1
INSIDE OUT: What's the Value of Being an Outsider?

When my family moved back to the United States from the Army base in Germany, I was shy of five years old. Because I was experiencing America for the first time, I was reserved and spent a lot of time observing others. I was a sponge; every new concept magnified through relentless question asking, learning, and doing.

When I was nine years old, teachers were mystified as to how I could finish my work so quickly. What was happening inside my mind in such a short period? And then the first indication that I was a misfit appeared: I passed a test for gifted students. Thereafter, a few hours weekly, in what now seems like a social experiment from science fiction, I was taught skills of pattern recognition, synthesis, and problem solving. For each session, we selected new puzzle boxes with surprising contents—sometimes cards, other times physical objects to untangle, and what felt like an endless number of tangrams.

I learned to be okay with being an intellectual misfit. Twenty years later, all those skills proved invaluable when I became a researcher and strategist. That experience of feeling like an outsider empowered me to live comfortably anywhere. Over time I learned how to define myself, and my own personal brand, and champion the point of view of the outsider.

One semester while lecturing at Columbia University, I started class by challenging students to think about subway systems. How would you use communication to design a new customer experience that encourages people to move away from the doors and toward the center of the cars? Many students thought about lexicon—asking people to move—while others were more inventive with experiential solutions—putting USB plugs in the middle of the cars to reward individuals who comply. After running that behavioral science simulation so many times, I started to take away a few observations: what a brand says (i.e., lexicon) and what it does (i.e., experience) are two gravitational forces around brands. And slowly, they informed two parts of the LAVEC system.

I also fill a role as a strategic advisor, working with marketers, celebrities, influencers, startup founders, and executives. Clients employ me to prepare and position their brands for the future by developing narrative (comms and public relations), storytelling (content), and experience (omnichannel) solutions. I work mostly within media, entertainment, and technology, but also have major clients ranging from financial services to consumer electronics to beauty, spirits, and food. You see, planners at agencies have a reputation for being what I like to call “brand promiscuous.”

Whether teaching students or advising clients, my singular goal is always creativity applied strategically. These dual experiences helped me cultivate a scholar-practitioner mindset. There's likely a dual-mindset waiting to be unlocked in you, too, which will forever change your point of view and the way you approach work.

A RED-HOT INDUSTRY

“Sell, or else.”

David Ogilvy was known for short, impactful phrases like this one. And when Ogilvy—the agency, not the man—hired me out of college, its purpose made its mark on me: to make brands matter. It was a magical time for the agency and its work: the launch of the iconic Dove Real Beauty campaign had the industry abuzz; Ellen DeGeneres and Beyoncé were new stars in American Express commercials; and a long-standing courtside courtship of the US Open had our IBM teams busier than ever applying data to sports. They were big brands … the biggest … and I was hungry to take a bite. I was soon steeped in the art of account planning, a function and set of tools developed over decades by an agency considered to be a pioneer in the field.

While those early lessons provided an ironclad framework for developing brand strategy, we were still essentially in the P.D.E. (predigital era). Yes, social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had just launched, but brands were not using them. It was 2007. Many didn't believe that digital media would gobble up traditional marketing dollars, but I did. Having been one of the initial 100,000 people on Facebook during college and having competed for five years during middle and high school in the Intel Science Fair—Intel's long-standing STEM investment—I had a hunch that this “digital” thing would win attention. And in 2018, digital spending finally reached an inflection of getting over 50% of budgets from the Top 100 advertisers.

While working at the world's largest advertising agency taught me how to combine observations and turn them into insights that could spark creative ideas for communication, it was in my next job in digital that I developed my mindset to “persuade, or else.”

When you think about the goals of branding, public relations, business development, and licensing, they are all similar: to persuade people that a particular brand is superior to all others. And those people are more than just current customers: they are prospects, consumers, vendors, suppliers, partners, and everyone who has a hand in your brand’s ecosystem.

Formerly, the options for persuasion were print, broadcast, and radio, and the field was relatively narrow. But this isn't our world today. As channels and platforms proliferate in every company's ecosystem, the most skilled Six Sigma marketer can lose almost total value in a digital world if they can't manage a social media team through an always-on reality. And with every new platform and technology, there's a wake of new metrics, forcing any decision-maker to assume the role of a data scientist.

When does an organization know it has enough data? Is there such a thing as enough data? Which data is more important than others? Is something unimportant just because you can’t measure it?

Persuasion is a complex web, indeed.

A FEW THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

In the Introduction I mentioned that the role of a strategist is to simplify. And thus, in this book, we will redux all of the data down to meaningfulness in the single metric of feelings. And get comfortable living in that empathetic space. That feeling, though, does not emerge from staring at 100 metrics that are changing each week … instead, it arises from a conscious decision. A decision to focus on one thing rather than two, two things rather than three, and so forth.

When you can do that, you can start engineering that singular-minded feeling into brand expressions, experiences, and the ideal lifestyle that your potential customers are looking for. In addition, this singular focus will help in looking for places where the target feeling comes to life, to determine where the brand can thrive and interact with customers rather than just pursuing a “reach and repetition” approach.

Most undergraduate economics students or social science graduate students take courses on research methods, measurement, or analytics. I was no different. And the one takeaway from these studies, at whatever level you take them, is that data can be skewed, faked, and misinterpreted. When marketing teams, social media teams, PR teams, or any team gets their hand on data, and they're not data scientists or trained in data techniques, then as a strategist, I would be wary of their work. And when consumers, customers, or audiences only have to check a “man-made” box on a brand survey, then I'd be equally wary of how representative that response is when consumers are probed to reduce experiences down to only words or numbers (e.g., rating scores). Can words and numbers fully capture the spectrum of expressiveness of people? We'll dig into this more.

The science behind measuring feelings is leading to more accurate and real-time analysis of our emotions. Yes, there's some error. But as technology continues to iterate and as machine learning continues to reduce bias, just as in manufacturing, the errors will be driven to near zero. And when that happens, feelings will become one of the most universally relatable, subconsciously triggered, and age-agnostic methods of tracking brand health. What matters most in branding is the feeling that you convey to your customer.

Feelings can penetrate the skin and raise goosebumps, they can resonate and send shivers down your customers’ spines, they can warm spirits and inspire actions. And they're also sensations that fewer than 1% of people can hide on their face, for instance.

In order to be an innovator for your tribe, your job is to keep showing up and exceeding expectations. According to Capgemini—a global consulting firm started in 1968 that boasts over 200,000 employees—pushing a brand to excel is rough going: from 2000 to 2015, over half of all brands on the Fortune 500 list either went bankrupt or altogether ceased to exist.¹ I know what you're thinking … all of those companies must have had a Kodak moment or a Blockbuster flop. However, the reality is that no one loses their brand overnight. Those companies lost their markets because of an internal culture of paying attention to cold numbers rather than to warm and fuzzy relationships with their customers. People were happier getting, seeing, and sharing their photos instantly, and people were happier getting content they wanted on demand. Brand building starts with audience empathy, and empathy lives in emotions and feelings, not dashboards full of data.

Note

 1. Capgemini, “When Digital Disruption Strikes: How Can Incumbents Respond?” LinkedIn SlideShare, February 20, 2015. https://www.slideshare.net/capgemini/digital-disruption-44929928.

2
GOING HAYWIRE: What's the Relationship between Economics and Communication?

I've always been attracted to “the next big thing.” So, based on the University of Chicago's reputation for having produced the greatest number of Nobel laureates in economics, it was my first-choice school … and, besides that, Harvard wait-listed me. The university's open enrollment policy quickly lured me into the business school—first doing research for a professor and then taking classes.

Sarbanes-Oxley. Pink Sheets. Stock performance. Financial reportin...