Brand Storytelling and Positioning

Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself.

“Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like,

We’ve gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes that the commercial war of the future will be about identity rather than value —Iannaccone

thoughts on the creative tensions of Disneyland: between art and commerce, the child vs. the adult, what you can see vs. what’s hidden, and surrendering vs. control.

In the old world of broadcast communication that Naomi Klein wrote about, promotion was limited to a few channels, so multinationals with massive advertising budgets had the power to sell a brand monoculture. Now every night, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, we scroll and see brands smushed up next to real people in the feed. Branding altogethe

If you find yourself in a culture of Tension, the best way to move that culture forward is to create a sense of clarity and opportunity. Show people what’s possible. Even better, show people what they could be capable of.

This is a time to inspire and allow people to see themselves in a new world. Give them something to dream about. Turn them into e

For brands who find themselves in a culture of Exploration, the goal should be to usher their users into a culture of Transformation by creating certainty in the market.

In a high optimism, high risk environment like this, people need to be instilled with confidence to move forward.

Transformation can be a long golden age for brands. Cultures in this phase can feel new for a very long period as people take time to settle into their new normal. It’s the reason why somewhere in the recesses of our minds we still feel Google is a startup or Netflix is a challenger brand. Neither is true anymore, but that mentality speaks to the p