Why Does a Growth-Stage Company need a Brand Platform?
A brand platform is a unique positioning and expression borne out of key insights from your company, category, customers and culture.
It uses consistent, distinctive brand assets to build strong memory structures, which generate preference. The result: you get noticed and selected more frequently. As the big ad platforms (Meta and Google) increasingly use AI to tune ad messages and targeting, the greatest risk a company has is to be optimized the same as your competitors.
The expression of a brand platform can live across your communications and customer experiences, from video to in-feed ads and in customer lifecycle marketing. Great practitioners incorporate brand platforms into their product development. Each customer interaction with your brand platform builds equity, differentiates you from your competition and makes your performance (and loyalty) marketing work more efficiently.
What is Brand Platforms _ _
(and what’s with the _ _ lines)?
For 20+ years I helped scale one of the largest independent agencies in the US by connecting performance marketing with iconic brand work. Brand platforms are reservoirs of brand equity. More than taglines, campaigns or design, brand platforms unlock ideas, beliefs, icons and assets that break through category conventions. Brand platforms make customers seek you (not just see you as just another ad in their feed).
The best brand platforms are simple, but work hard (in some ways, even harder than performance marketing). They transcend ads, campaigns, spokespeople and show up in product experience, lifecycle messaging and definitely on social platforms.
For decades, great brand platforms required a top agency, often a big team and high cost. Top agencies are staffed with incisive strategists who use proven workflows. Those strategists desperately want the brand to grow, but they refuse to “drink the kool-aid” that pervades their client-side organization partners. No great strategist is sycophantic.
But access to those proven workflows, incisive thinkers and truth-tellers has changed. New tools are in the hands of strategists, who can work in lean methods. These tools help identify insights, understand essential customer touchpoint, architect communication JTBDs and shine the light on how to be your customer’s first choice, with pricing power.
Oh, and the _ _ in our company name is a choice. There’s a framework for developing great brand platforms (it’s not a secret art). And there is space available for your brand.
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