I am STOKED for you to meet today’s guest.
She is the CEO & Founder of Backroom, a brand strategy and activation agency, meet Kara Redman.
Working with some of the biggest brands across the U.S., crafting messaging frameworks that ACTUALLY CONVERT, and building campaigns that shape the way people interact with brands, she does it all.
And lucky for us she gave us a sneak peek into her brand positioning fundamentals that can take you from out of touch, to in the know.
Here’s what she had to say in her own liiiiiiightly edited words.
1. Need to Refresh Your Brand? Read This:
“Refreshing your brand identity and positioning is part data and part creativity. That’s why it’s one of my favorite types of projects.
If you’re working with founders, it’s a feeling they have in their soul, they have a vision of what it should look and feel like, but they just haven’t been able to document that.
To really hone in the identity and positioning we start first with looking at competitors, what else is out there? How are they positioning themselves? What are they known for? (You need to become familiar with what your customers are already seeing.)
And something that I like to do with all my clients that is so easy, but many people skip over, is just asking the types of people you want to sell to, what problems they’re facing.
Now I’ll add on to that to do an entire aspirational brand exercise outside of your industry. No guardrails, what are brands doing that you think is really cool or maybe a part of it embodies what you want to do in yours.
Document everything and begin to piece it together (Mhmmm).
There’s a really cool tool called branding.cards you can get a physical packet or do it online and it’s a nice, simple, creative exercise to the adjectives you want to be associated with, the characteristics, and attributes that you want your brand to have.
Once you have those pieces, start writing out your messaging framework.
Work with a designer to do logo iterations, and bring it together. Marketers tend to overcomplicate the branding process, but it’s really part gut and part gathering first-party data.
2. This Makes Up for Ugly Creative:
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Visual identity is important, the look and feel is great, but the number 1 indicator that someone has no idea who their audience is, is their messaging.
You know when you’re sitting around the couch scrolling through Instagram, you see an ad and you’re like what the hell is this? (Yes, this happens legit 2x a day.)
That messaging piece, you can have the ugliest ad, you can have the ugliest landing page, but if the messaging speaks to your emotions, your feelings, the problems you have, you’re going to be hungry for more information.
It’s deep thought work, it’s not always the most fun because you have to check your ego and risk being wrong about assumptions you have and actually listen to people.
But it’s the single most powerful lever to pull and that’s how brands really stand apart.
3. How to Create Consistent Brand Messaging:
The first thing that we do is a vision session with our clients to understand from a performance level, what does this brand have to do.
At the end of the day, we’re trying to make money, we’re trying to build a customer base, generate demand, generate leads.
The rest is just a vehicle to that.
We create a brand requirements document that becomes our foundation of the engagement so 6 months down the road, when we’re refreshing materials and someone’s wife likes the color purple (🤣), and the client thinks we should put more purple in the logo we have something to point to that says does that accomplish this goal for us?
We’ve all heard of design by committee. We’ve all had clients that bring 20 people into the creative process, and it drags out for months because no one can agree.
If you’re working in that way on a brand, it’s very subjective and everyone comes with their own baggage, their own preferences, and we don’t really get anywhere.
This will cause your brand to end up like Frankenstein (which last time I checked, WE DON’T WANT).
We avoid design by committee at all costs and focus on how to create a brand that PERFORMS FOR YOU.
It needs to generate outcomes at the end of the day.
This gets us in the headspace of acknowledging that we want to impact human’s brains in a certain way so that they take action, and we shape the brand messaging from there.
Pretty and eloquent brand messaging doesn’t cut it, we want results.
4. Does Differentiation Even Matter:
I don’t know how much differentiation matters. I think we used to have to differentiate between others in our geographic market, and it’s important on some level, but if it’s the only thing we’re thinking about then actually creating differentiation becomes impossible.
Everything is saturated and so what happens is we try to find different ways to say the same thing, we start to compete on features, and commoditize our category.
I think what’s more interesting is figuring out how to build community with your brand (ouu okay).
People will be loyal if they believe in what you’re doing, if they’ve been using your product for a long time, and you’ve given them an exceptional level of service, AND LISTEN TO THEM.
We all want to be heard and taken care of (retweet).
So the best brand for community building right now in my eyes is Gymshark. They’re bringing their community into things like product development, making them part of their athlete team, getting feedback on products.
Involving them gives a sense of belonging.
My stance is if you focus more on your customer, what they need, bring them into your ecosystem, and focus less on what your competitors are doing, you’ll stand out substantially more.
5. Where Great Positioning Stems From:
Anybody who’s interested in positioning and has a weekend to spare should pick up Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
It’s a delicious book on positioning (I second this BIG TIME).
People try to position their brand by doing things to their brand when the reality is positioning happens in the minds of your customers.
A great example to illustrate this is all these new apps have come out, and they’re claiming they’re the “Uber for [insert new industry]”.
The reason we speak like that about things that are new is that it’s easier for us to comprehend and get the use case.
If you can relate your product to something else, that’s already useful to your target demo, that is an exceptional messaging trick.
But it’s also a really powerful tool in positioning to understand what we call the holes in people’s minds. A classic is 7 Up when they came out, they were the 1st clear cola, they didn’t try to compete with the brown colas.
There were no holes left to have another cola come out, so they created an entire new category.
The people-first Marketing portion of this is how do you understand what gaps there are, what holes there are in people’s minds, and then how can you fill them?
Sometimes it’s via features. Other times it’s realizing everybody else in your market is missing this one important thing that everyone’s asking for.
Uber did it, they said we don’t need to do faster cars, they found out by listening to people that the pain point was paying when you get out of a taxi.
So they made it that you don’t have to pay when you get out anymore.
The best brands ALL come from listening, finding the hole in consumer’s minds, and creating an entire category around that positioning (BOOM).”