How to discover your true brand strategy (not the forcibly thought up one)
Here’s a little secret: it’s hidden in clues you left yourself right from the start.
The reason “coming up” with a brand strategy is so hard is because ultimately it’s inauthentic and forced. Most of the time, you are doing it for the sake of solving the “not knowing”. Instead of trying to find the real truth of it - it’s easier to just make it up.
But I’ve got good news. The brand strategy secret is that it’s right under your nose right from the start. It’s simply a matter of excavating it.
You know how they say a picture says 1000 words? This illustration is on the last card of Workshop Tactics, the first Pip Deck launched four years ago. but what’s so special about it?
When the first print run was being put together, I was one card short. so I found a chance put a part of me into the deck. I wanted to remind people of something that is so easily forgotten:
There are more important things than your work. There is a big wide world of life to be lived. Work should not get you down. But with some optimism I hoped the product itself would create space and equilibrium in people’s work lives, so that moments like these were possible. There’s more…
It’s accompanied by a quote: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” by your stoic boi Marcus Aurelius.
Here’s where things get interesting.
I had largely forgotten about this card. Until a little while ago when I had a chat with
to do some noodling on the brand marketing (he is a fantastic left-field consultant for this kind of work). His thoughtful questions brought focus to this very card.Like a typical detective story, the innocuous character at the start of the story turns out to be the missing piece of the puzzle for the twist at the end. And the same feels true about this card. It carries the very essence of why Pip Decks exists. And in actual fact, the company Why and my Why are the same: to live a happy life. It’s simple. Fishing on a boat is simple. Enjoying an evening is simple. And how do you have a happy life? As Aurelius says, it’s in your way of thinking. Little is needed.
And so that’s Pip Decks’ brand strategy: Simple tools that change how you work and how you think about work. A happy career / business creates a happy life.
So my prompt to you: go back to the start of your business venture. What’s in those first notepad scrawls or WhatsApp conversations? What weird thing was in the early version of the product? Why did you put it there and what does it mean? The stakes were low when you were working then. And your core philosophy likely attached itself to something somewhere.
Go find it, and amplify it once again.
Maybe that was useful, maybe not. Let me know.
- Charles Burdett