Your strategy, your values and your org chart are invisible to the people who pay you. Five things are not. Start there.
Last week was about planning the year: decide the promise, then open the spreadsheet. This month is about doing less of it, better. The first step is to find out which parts of the brand a customer can actually see, because most of the brand they cannot.
Think about what a customer actually meets in an ordinary week with your company. They do not read the strategy. They have never seen the values on the wall of the meeting room. The careful work that fills your Tuesday afternoons is, to them, a rumour.
What they meet is a short list, and it is the same short list for almost every company we have worked with. Your name. The first screen they find. The way you answer. The thing in their hands. The bill. Five touches make the brand. The rest is paperwork.
A shop is judged from the pavement
Stand outside your own shop, or your own website, which is the same thing now. A passer-by decides in a few seconds whether to come in. They decide on the window, the sign, the light through the door. They have no idea what the stockroom looks like, how tidy the accounts are, or how good the team meeting was this morning. A shop is judged from the pavement, not the stockroom.
Most brand work happens in the stockroom. Positioning, values, tone of voice, the long document that explains the logo. All of it matters, but only as far as it changes what is in the window. If the strategy says warm and the person who picks up the phone sounds tired, the customer has met the brand, and it was tired.
So here is the exercise. Walk in as a customer, in the order a customer does.
- Search your own name. Look at the first screen. The result, the profile picture, the first line of the website on a phone. Can a stranger tell what you do and who it is for before they scroll.
- Call your own number. Count the rings. Then message yourself on the channel customers use most, and time the reply.
- Unbox your own product. Notice what you notice. The box, the label, the way the thing sits in your hand. For a service, this is the first meeting and the first document you send.
Write down what you saw. That page is a more accurate picture of your brand than anything in the brand book.
The envelope is read before the letter
Every touch has an order, and the first thing is read first. The envelope is read before the letter. The sign is read before the menu. The invoice is read before the thank-you note stapled to it. Customers form their opinion at the first thing and spend the rest of the time checking it.
This is why the five matter more than the fifty. A company has hundreds of things it could polish, and a founder with taste can see all of them at once. But the customer sees five, and sees them in sequence, and the first one colours the rest. Fix the name and the first screen and you have changed the light that everything else is seen in. Fix the typography on page forty of the proposal and you have changed nothing anyone will notice.
Your strategy is private. Your invoice is not. If you have one afternoon this month for the brand, spend it on the things that leave the building.
Most of your brand is in other people's hands
The uncomfortable part of this list is how little of it the founder controls directly. The first screen is a template someone set up two years ago. The reply is written by whoever is on the desk. The box is packed by the warehouse, the bill is produced by the accounts software, and the name is said out loud by customers who have never met you, in whatever tone they choose.
Take away the logo and the brand still stands. Take away the delivery and it falls. A brand is held up by the ordinary work of ordinary days, most of it done by people who do not think of themselves as doing brand work at all. Every unanswered message is brand work, done badly.
That is not a reason to write a longer brand book. It is a reason to make the five easy to get right. One template for the first screen that nobody has to think about. One tone for replies, with three example messages pinned where the desk can see them. One box. One invoice that says nothing a customer was not already told.
Fix the five, in order
When clients ask where to begin, we give them this order, because each one makes the next one easier.
- The first screen: what you do and who it is for, in one line. Before colour, before photography. If the line is right, a plain page carries it. If the line is wrong, no amount of design will.
- The reply: one voice, within one working day. Decide what the company sounds like when it answers, write it down in three short examples, and decide how long a customer waits. Then keep to both. Brand values are measured in reply times.
- The bill: nothing on it that was not said before. The price, the terms, the small lines at the bottom. A surprise on the invoice undoes a year of good work above it. Make the bill the dullest document you produce, and make it match the promise exactly.
The name gets a week of its own later this month.
Five pillars, one roof
This list is not the small stuff under the real brand work. It is the other way round. The strategy exists to decide what the five should be. The values exist to make sure the reply sounds the same on a bad day. The brand book exists so the box looks like the website. All the invisible work is scaffolding for five visible things.
So when the budget is short, or the time is, this is where it goes. Into the window, the sign, the phone, the box and the bill. Get those right and the explaining takes care of itself.
Nobody has ever recommended a brand strategy to a friend. They recommend the shop that answered, the parcel that arrived looking right, the bill that said what it was supposed to say. Those are the five things customers actually see. Make them the five things you look at first.
OmaraniFounder, Basata StudioAll articles