Jackson: Define brand purpose by pairing cultural tensions with product strengths
Arielle Jackson · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital) · Aug 18, 2022 · at 49:09
Marketing expert Arielle Jackson explains an Ogilvy-derived branding exercise to Lenny Rachitsky for determining a startup's core purpose statement.
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“What I like to do is list all of the cultural tensions that are happening in the world that are relevant to your business first. And so for alt, that would be things like there's an increase in Interest in alternatives. People are nostalgic. People who are now in their thirties are nostalgic for things that happened in the nineties. There is at the time, really low interest rates and people are not getting any sort of like edge off of investing in the things that their parents used to invest in. So those would be like examples of cultural tensions. Cultural tensions are zeitgeists. They're things that you're Audience might be thinking of their things that they may be even subconscious to them, their current events. So you make a long list of all of those. Then you make a long list of all the ways that you might describe your brand's best self. And this is related to your product positioning, but let's say you haven't done it yet. So just think of it as your brand's best self. How would we want someone to describe us when everything works perfectly and our product really delivers? What does it deliver? And again, like bullets, just ways that you would talk about that. And then you pick one from each side. That's really the best articulation of what's happening in the world, what your product delivers. And with that context, now you're primed with that context in mind. Now you do the brainstorm of we exist too.”
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