Branding And Advertising in 2023

“Brand” is often the enemy of GREAT advertising:

1: Yes, your company needs a brand

I’m not saying that you go and chuck the whole thing out. Almost all of your product design should stick to your brand.

But only MOST of your advertising should. There’s a small portion that should be experimental.

2: Good ads aren’t always on brand

The best creative ads are a little bit experimental. They’re playing at the edges of what’s interesting.

The Coinbase QR code is a great example. It’s a bit out of the ordinary. The six pack man for bread is another good example. The bread company may not stand for male objectification. But the abs are just too good.

The best ads all push the limit. They’re edgy.

3: Some edginess is okay

Brand voice can take some wavering. As long as 80%+ of what a customer sees about you is one way, you can experiment with the rest.

Consumers will forget one weird thing, if it’s not egregious. So, the upside of a hit is worth it.

4: This is especially true on organic

What do the best viral brand TikToks and tweets have in common? They’re a bit edgy.

Recently there was the TikTok for a sword where the guy cut a bullet shot next to him. Or there was the Netflix sigh photograph tweet. The sword company doesn’t stand for dangerous stunts. And Netflix doesn’t stand for eye rolling.

The creative does not totally fit within the brand voice. But it works because in organic channels, great creative wins. Overly prescriptive brand inhibits the creative process.

Brand is a prescription of a product. It should be likeable:
Adaptable — to current and changing situation
Memorable — first thought that comes to people’s mind when they think of a brand.
Transferable — expanding your products .

Each brand has its personality that communicates to users and building relationship ensures what users get from the brand e.g Apple the moment people think of it they have thoughts such as luxury, seamless high quality products, secure and status icon etc. Brand communicates a lot through its logo, color and visual. Become a sponge and absorb information from everything and everyone around you.

Business Lessons from the British East India Company: From Org Structure, ESOPs to Google-like buffet spreads.

👉🏼 One of the first joint stock companies to be set up was the British East India company — It was governed by 24 Board members who were elected by shareholders. Below them were several different levels of management, including councils, committees, and officials.

👉🏼 Efficiency: It ruled the whole of the Indian sub-continent up to Burma with less than 200 people at the London HQ

👉🏼 Perks: Free breakfasts in London, and on-site cooks (English, Portuguese and Indian) in factories, with plenty of alcohol. On holidays, that menu would swell to 16 courses and include peacocks, hares, venison and “Persian fruits” like pistachios, apricots and cherries.

👉🏼 Variable Pay: In one of the most interesting ways to ensure alignment, personal trading within the employees was allowed. Which means that someone who was truly enterprising could create their own bonus structure, and if successful make enough to comfortably retire thereafter.

👉🏼 High Agency: The reason looking back at this era is so interesting is because communication latencies make almost any remote management impossible. Which means we get to see the benefits (and drawbacks) of having and needing high agency people to basically do anything with minimal oversight.

👉🏼 With the communication latency being so high, it’s well nigh impossible to do anything beyond giving your employees autonomy. The natural end result of the high communication latency was that the authority atop almost always had duties of punishment rather than the ability to charge exactly what a subordinate officer should do.

👉🏼 In the principles of Lean Startups, they were definitely not afraid to move fast and break things, even when things meant entire regions and huge swathes of local population.

👉🏼 That said, I believe such perks and high agencies were all built on the back of loot and blood — almost like saying, if the market you’re operating in is huge and bountiful, even the stupidest / cruelest of operators will thrive.

👉🏼 The idea of the post is to take you through how the fundamentals of business and management philosophies have remained the same on a first principles basis — but hopefully, ethics and ESG should play a greater role today — despite all the greenwashing.

This is one of the biggest lessons Startups can learn from people who climb Mount Everest.

Climbing down Mt Everest is 8 times more dangerous than climbing up.

Apart from requiring immense mountaineering experience and peak physical fitness, other factors that are strategized upon are oxygen carrying capacity in the tanks, speed of the climb, weather, and the time of the day so that there’s enough sunlight.

Considering all of the above, “1 pm” in the afternoon is an established “turnaround time” — the time at which they have to descend the mountain so that they have enough sunlight on the way down, and can also ration their oxygen well enough to make it back in time, and not die of darkness or fatigue.

Similarly, there are several time-based milestones in the journey to scale Everest, which if you as a climber are unable to meet, you are required to go back and try again later.

These milestones and limits are similar to the concept of “stop loss” in stock trading.

It’s defining a limit to which you’re willing to go — beyond which you will take the hard decision of stepping back.

And this “stop loss” or “turnaround time” is an essential metric, which should be discussed in the context of startups like terms such as “runway”.

For example, if you’re unable to get to a revenue of Rs 10L per month by May 2023 with an ad spend of less than 30% revenue, you’ll stop burning money on performance marketing and pivot your business to B2B channels of customer acquisition.

Such “turnaround times” will then become a promise to self to not fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy of pursuing something which is not worthwhile, and gives the team a tangible target, which is not “oh shit, our money is over and we don’t have any runway left”.