Nov 26, 2018
This week's guest is Miriam Stone, an independent strategist who works with agencies around the Bay Area, including lifestyle branding agency Noise 13, where she's Strategy Director. In addition to her brand consulting work, Miriam's helped create and develop brands from inside the organization, as a Co-Founder of Swing Left, a national political movement, and previously as VP of Business Development for VisionSpring. Miriam and I first met at Interbrand San Francisco in 2012. Since then, we've become good friends and frequent collaborators. She's one of the smartest, most thoughtful strategists I know. When she told me she'd been working on documenting her process for getting from facts and observations to useful findings and insights, I jumped at the opportunity to have her walk through it on the podcast. This is exactly the "practical and tactical" information for which I created How Brands Are Built. It's an in-the-weeds conversation, but if you're working in branding and looking to get more systematic in your approach to insight generation, you'll want to tune in. Miriam walked through four steps to insight generation. Her perspective is that, while some parts of brand strategy may require "that little, extra, innate spark or talent," other parts, like those below, can be approached systematically. Step 1: Collecting
- Try not to make any judgements until the research is done. Miriam: "Just listen. Read, and listen. ... Just be a sponge."
- Use the "Three C's" to collect information about the Company, the Category (including competitors), and Customers.
- At a minimum, do a few fact-gathering sessions with the client team and supplement with desktop research.
- One exercise recommendation: Have the client list every competitor, then prioritize the top three. Break into groups and list out points of differentiation between the client's brand and competitors' brands-not just product benefits, but brand strengths and weaknesses.
Step 2: Grouping
- Put everything up on the wall with sticky notes-one fact per note.
- Group similar or related facts and findings, without trying to draw out insights yet. Miriam: "I think that takes the pressure off of you as a strategist. It takes the pressure off of the data."
- At this point, you might have 10 or 20 different groupings, which is way too many to present to a client as "insights."
Step 3: Synthesizing
- Take a step back and ask yourself what themes you see-what the groupings are telling you on a deeper level.
- Look for points of tension between the themes, ideas that are strongly supported, or anything that doesn't make sense.
- Ultimately, you should be able to get down to five or six big insights.
Step 4: Storytelling
- Don't think in PowerPoint. (Credit to Caren Williams)
- Write an outline-what's the key observation or insight on each slide, and what facts or quotes will you use to back each one up.
- You should feel like your outline is 70-80% complete before you move to slides (assuming that's how you'll present).
- The outline allows you to see any holes in the story.
Miriam's a big proponent of using sticky notes throughout these steps, an approach she learned from Caren Williams, with whom we both worked at Interbrand. Caren is now an independent brand strategist working in the Bay Area. Despite having tried other methods, Miriam finds that sticky notes work best for a number of reasons:
- They "force you to distill as you're doing your research."
- "Because you can only write so much, you have to abstract a little bit as you're writing."
- "You can move them around really easily."
- They force you to switch medium (from screen to physical paper).
- You stand up and move around while using them. "I think it does something good for the brain."
- When working with other people, you can look at the wall together and discuss what you're finding.
We also talked about competitive audits, getting from insights to a brand platform, what "ingredients" should be included in a brand platform, and what makes a good brand essence. To learn more about Miriam, visit her website Brand Plume, or Noise 13. You can also find some blog posts she's written on How Brands Are Built.