Imagine you’re staring into the eyes of Tej Lalvani, Deborah Meaden, Peter Jones or Touker Suleyman (deep breaths). It’s the ultimate elevator pitch. Not only do you have to show the financial potential of your business through stats and figures, you also have to take the Dragons on a journey. To show them why your business is worth an investment.
We’re not saying that embarking on brand strategy work is anything like appearing on Dragon’s Den, but the concept of taking key stakeholders on a journey applies. There’s always a core team at the centre of a strategy project. Founders, marketing directors, brand managers. And just as a story, tone or positioning needs to filter through every part of the business – not just the marketing team who implements it in your comms – the strategy process has to engage with and convince the people who help steer decisions.
This might be an investor or a financial director, who will be coming into the project from a profitability angle. Or a business development manager who’s looking at a ten-year road map. Maybe it’s a co-founder who has nothing to do with marketing, but has a unique, personal insight into the business. Or a head of customer services who is one of few to have actually interacted first-hand with your community.
These stakeholders should be part of the process from the beginning. That doesn’t mean every creative decision or change of direction needs detailed in multiple emails with everyone in cc (let’s not forget the carbon footprint of the Internet): it’s more about involving them at key milestones, so they can assess and express their thoughts in real-time. If you wait until the last minute, there’s a chance a project will get overturned very quickly. And that’s when it starts feeling like the last few minutes of a Dragon’s Den episode: tense.
When you start a project, identify who the key stakeholders are (versus who the core decision-makers – they might be different). Invite them to initial presentations to offer opinions, then keep them in the loop of any developments moving forward. Your stakeholders need to be as comfortable and confident with the brand strategy as your core team is. They need to invest in the creative process, not just the outcome. Otherwise, the strategic work won’t hold. To have longevity, it needs buy-in from your customers (we wrote about the importance of customer research last week), but also the people who power the brand, too.
The Advice
“Defining the value created for and from each stakeholder group adds perspective, ensuring that you look at your business from all angles. And by focusing on value creation for all your different stakeholders, you will be creating a business that is more sustainable — in all senses of the word.”
Taken from an article written for Harvard Business Review, by growth specialist Jack Springman, on Implementing A Stakeholder Strategy
We’re in the business of creating tones and helping brands follow through with their voice. It’s one thing to create a tone of voice; it’s another thing to consistently use it across all your platforms. Loïs Mills, Brand and Community Manager at Homethings, took on the brand’s bonkers tone in 2019, and has run it – and had fun with it – ever since. We caught up with Loïs to talk about how she inhabits the tone, what their newsletter, The Tap, is all about and how Homethings would invite us to a party (they’re bringing the vegan burgers).
Claim to fame: we were supporting Homethings long before they appeared on Dragon’s Den (see how they fare in the episode tonight). We crafted a bonkers tone of voice that showed just how nuts the world – particularly the global threat to the environment and single-use plastic – really is. When you’ve got Kim Jong Un riding on a white horse and videos of tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos going viral, surely an eco-friendly all-purpose tablet that dissolves in a glass spray bottle that can be used to clean your kitchen and bathroom surfaces makes sense? We built out a tone that’s equal parts challenging, current, activating and dry. Over the past year, we’ve seen Homethings take this tone and run with it.. And we feel like proud parents.
Write an elevator pitch for a brand project that you could present to your key stakeholders. Talk about the business and how your creative can solve problems across different aspects – be it finance, customer service, marketing or product development.
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