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The Lean Brand: Applying Lean Principles to Eliminate Marketing Waste
In this week’s Labcast, Jeremiah Gardner and Brant Cooper, authors of the upcoming book The Lean Brand, explain why we need a new approach to branding that centers around quick iterations and removing waste.
Key Takeaways
* Branding typically has a lot of waste: Lean branding is about eliminating waste and engaging in value added activities to deliver value for your customers. For startups, since many companies don’t have a large amount of data to work with, a good first step is to document your assumptions and start running experiments to discover the value you are creating.
* A product is simply a utility to solve a problem. A brand is the emotional impact that the product and the company have on the customer: A strong brand leads people to care about your organization and creates passionate customers.
* Your story is their story: Be familiar, be confident, and be able to talk about your story to your audience in an honest way. If your story resonates keep a note of what’s working, what’s not, and what you can iterate on. Remember, you and your customer have a shared aspiration that you’re trying to achieve together.
* Don’t ask “how do I get my first 1,000 customers?” Rather ask yourself, “How do I get one truly passionate customer?” If you can understand why you’ve resonated with that customer, chances are you can replicate that passion in others.
* Forget traditional marketing strategies to gain feedback: Surveys will never fully answer the question, “Are you passionate about us?” You need to go out and test your branding face to face, through interactive experiments, to determine the level of emotional impact your company will have on your customers.
* The brand is the responsibility of everyone in the organization, and it’s shared between you and your audience: Your brand is not just your assets, but everything you do and don’t do to interact with your customers. Customers will ultimately attribute value or render you irrelevant.
* There’s no one-size-fits-all equation for the branding process: The company’s mission, vision, values, logo, and color scheme added together does not equal a brand. Rather, branding takes on meaning when people gain value from it. As a result, the journey to developing a brand is different for everyone.
Listen Here
Subscribe to Labcast
Transcript
Recording: This is Labcast, ideas and insights for the expansion stage senior manager, hosted by OpenView Labs.
Jonathan Crowe: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Labcast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. This week’s guests on the program are Jeremiah Gardner and Brant Cooper, authors of the new book, “The Lean Brand.”
I’m particularly excited to have you guys on board this week because, as everyone probably knows, we’re big fans of lean and agile development here at OpenView. But one thing I personally really enjoyed is seeing that the discussion around lean is starting to break outside the confines of product development.
All of a sudden, there are people other than developers talking about being agile and about applying lean, agile principles to other disciplines, like marketing and sales. I think that’s fantastic. I think it’s really, really interesting.
So a great case and point is this book, which is the first in applying lean principles to brand development. I’m really excited to dive in. But before we do, I thought we could step back just a little bit and mention that, Brant, we’ve had you on the program before, last year, around the release of your first book, “The Lean Entrepreneur.
View all episodes
In this week’s Labcast, Jeremiah Gardner and Brant Cooper, authors of the upcoming book The Lean Brand, explain why we need a new approach to branding that centers around quick iterations and removing waste.
Key Takeaways
* Branding typically has a lot of waste: Lean branding is about eliminating waste and engaging in value added activities to deliver value for your customers. For startups, since many companies don’t have a large amount of data to work with, a good first step is to document your assumptions and start running experiments to discover the value you are creating.
* A product is simply a utility to solve a problem. A brand is the emotional impact that the product and the company have on the customer: A strong brand leads people to care about your organization and creates passionate customers.
* Your story is their story: Be familiar, be confident, and be able to talk about your story to your audience in an honest way. If your story resonates keep a note of what’s working, what’s not, and what you can iterate on. Remember, you and your customer have a shared aspiration that you’re trying to achieve together.
* Don’t ask “how do I get my first 1,000 customers?” Rather ask yourself, “How do I get one truly passionate customer?” If you can understand why you’ve resonated with that customer, chances are you can replicate that passion in others.
* Forget traditional marketing strategies to gain feedback: Surveys will never fully answer the question, “Are you passionate about us?” You need to go out and test your branding face to face, through interactive experiments, to determine the level of emotional impact your company will have on your customers.
* The brand is the responsibility of everyone in the organization, and it’s shared between you and your audience: Your brand is not just your assets, but everything you do and don’t do to interact with your customers. Customers will ultimately attribute value or render you irrelevant.
* There’s no one-size-fits-all equation for the branding process: The company’s mission, vision, values, logo, and color scheme added together does not equal a brand. Rather, branding takes on meaning when people gain value from it. As a result, the journey to developing a brand is different for everyone.
Listen Here
Subscribe to Labcast
Transcript
Recording: This is Labcast, ideas and insights for the expansion stage senior manager, hosted by OpenView Labs.
Jonathan Crowe: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Labcast. This is your host, Jonathan Crowe. This week’s guests on the program are Jeremiah Gardner and Brant Cooper, authors of the new book, “The Lean Brand.”
I’m particularly excited to have you guys on board this week because, as everyone probably knows, we’re big fans of lean and agile development here at OpenView. But one thing I personally really enjoyed is seeing that the discussion around lean is starting to break outside the confines of product development.
All of a sudden, there are people other than developers talking about being agile and about applying lean, agile principles to other disciplines, like marketing and sales. I think that’s fantastic. I think it’s really, really interesting.
So a great case and point is this book, which is the first in applying lean principles to brand development. I’m really excited to dive in. But before we do, I thought we could step back just a little bit and mention that, Brant, we’ve had you on the program before, last year, around the release of your first book, “The Lean Entrepreneur.