When it comes to brand creation, I am a huge believer in qualitative research: beliefs are more compelling than facts.
Which is why every brand project I take on starts with a significant number of in-depth one-on-one interviews, with management, team members and clients/customers. These interviews are guided by a custom questionnaire that usually runs about a hundred questions, exploring every aspect of the business and the brand.
A lot of these questions will be specific to that client, but there are some that I ask of everyone, no matter what.
These are my eight favorite questions to ask:
Tell me the story of how you came to be here.
This is the first question I ask anyone. Every brand starts with Genesis, your creation story. Before anything, the people you care about want to understand how you got to where you are, and what in your past informed your present and your vision for the future.
Because of the very broad scope of this question, two things happen: first, the interviewee is immediately comfortable talking at length. I’ve had people spend 20 minutes just answering this question. And when they’re done, they are warmed up and fully immersed in the interview process.
Equally important is that this question starts to very quickly establish a bond with whomever you’re talking to. The brand process is built on trust: inviting me into your company and empowering me to reimagine your own self-image requires a leap of faith, to say the least.
By letting a client share what from their past they value most, I have very quickly started to forge this bond of trust.
You're talking to a group of 12-year-olds…describe what you do?
I love this question, because it forces you to stop, think and simplify, while still focusing on the big ideas. 12-year-olds are smart. This is someone who has ability to understand what you say, but has no professional context and really no attention span. So, you have to engage them on their terms (you know, like customers).
This is a test: can you explain your purpose in a way that doesn’t condescend to a 12-year-old, but you also doesn’t rely on technical jargon? If you can, you are starting from a very strong place.
I am the fairy godmother. I can grant you three wishes concerning your business and the way things are done/run. What would you choose?
On the face of it you may not realize that this is my “red flag” question. What I’m really looking for are the problems that everyone recognizes and no one is doing anything about. But instead of just asking what is broken around here?, I ask it in a context that gets the interviewee smiling, reframing the question from “fixing problems” to “granting wishes.”
The result is often a bigger and more thoughtful answer, transcending simple operational needs and getting to the heart of what really needs to change for the business to be successful.
Remember, brand is not about sales and marketing. Brand is about culture. Brand is about building cohesive relationships and streamlining operations. Brand is about granting wishes.
What will your competitors say about you, once you have achieved success?
Again, the goal here is to reframe a pretty standard question (“what are your goals?”) and help people think about the answer through a new lens.
In this way, we are shifting from a narrow focus around simply what you will have achieved to the broader question of how your success is going to impact your competitors. And it allows us to start thinking about our Brand Vision, finding the answer to the foundational question, what does the world look like when we win?
Convince me to try your brand for the first time, using only hard facts.
Convince me to try your brand for the first time, using only emotion.
An important part of what you’re doing with this conversation is learning more about the people you’re going to be working with. The answers to these questions will not only add dimension to the brand story but will provide some more subtle insights:
Did one of these to come much more easily than the other?
Is the interviewee clearly more comfortable in the left brain or the right brain space?
Has the brand spent too much time trying to either “prove” claims with facts or “sway” opinions with emotion?
Ultimately, you need to have fully realized answers for both of these questions. What you’re going to find out right away is, which is going to be the harder job?
What is going through someone’s mind when they work with you/buy from you for the first time? What are they hoping for? What are they fearing?
This is a question about empathy: has my client spent enough time thinking not about what they want from a client, but how they can help the people they care about?
Remember that branding is the process of understanding what someone needs and how you can be of genuine value. And marketing is the process of getting someone to do what you want them to do for the lowest possible cost.
That’s not a knock on marketing, but it is a caution: if you have not taken the time to do the branding work, then your marketing will inevitably feel selfish and thoughtless.
Window or Aisle?
This is a question I like to ask toward the end of an interview, when the person I’m talking to has started to get a little worn out (most interviews last about an hour; interviews with principals can easily go 1 ½ - 2 hours, so getting worn out does happen). When I’m building the questionnaire, I’m always sensitive to the fact that long and involved answers become more challenging as the interview goes on.
I have no scientific data to back this up, but in my experience, choosing to sit at the window versus the aisle says something much larger about a person: do they see their role and purpose as one of Vision or one of Function.
Window people dream, they imagine, they think about what’s coming next. Aisle people focus, they enact, they get s#!† done. You will never learn this by asking someone if they think of their role as visionary or functionary. So just ask them where they sit on a plane.
(And no, in the 800+ interviews I’ve conducted, no one has ever said Center.)
Your Mountaintop
Spending an hour or more talking about your business, exploring it from every possible angle, will leave anybody pretty fried. Knowing that, this question is the one I save until the end.
The longest and very last question I ask every single person I’ve interviewed is this:
Imagine I gather together all the people who are really important to your business – employees, clients, stakeholders, referral partners, and so on – and place them all down in the valley. Then you and I walk up to the top of the mountain, and as you look down and see them all, you can shout down anything you want, a word, a phrase, an idea, one thing that everyone will hear and believe. What’s the one thing you want everyone to know about your business? What do you shout from the mountaintop?
In the end, the branding process is about distilling a massive amount of information down into a single pure perfect statement, and then building the brand back up around that crystalline vision.
This last question is the one that asks the client to do just that: to stop and consider, you’re your gut, when all is said and done what is the one thing people must understand about your business?
Because if I know what we want to shout from mountaintop, I can build the rest of the story to make sure we get there.
Let me know if you'd like to talk: greg@brand-birth.com