Branding Fundamentals: brand filter

This is the sixth and final post in a series of posts unpacking the key concepts at the core of your brand strategy. At A Brave New, we call these your brand drivers.

A company is only as important as the memory it leaves in its customers’ minds. And each business must curate that memory diligently. That’s difficult to do if you aren’t clear on what that memory should be, which is where the brand drivers come in.

Brand drivers have their roots in the Integrated Branding method. We think of them in simple terms: Brand drivers are the building blocks at the center of your brand that define what makes you unique and memorable. Stated another way, while your mission and vision are what you do and what you are trying to accomplish, your brand drivers are the unique way that you accomplish your mission and vision.

In this series, we’ll be spending time unpacking each of the following brand drivers:

1. Essence & promise
2. Core attributes
3. Brand positioning statement
4. Personality 
5. Benefit ladder 
6. Brand filter (this post)

Today we’ll explore the brand filter. 

What is a brand filter?

Up until this point in this series, the brand drivers we’ve discussed explicitly define what makes your brand unique and how that uniqueness should be expressed by your brand. The brand filter is a bit different. It’s a tool that helps you bring the brand out of the theoretical realm and into the practical.

Now for a definition: 

A brand filter is a set of five or six questions that anyone on your team can ask themself — as they make decisions (big or small) — to ensure they stay aligned with your brand.

There’s a formula we use at A Brave New for building out a brand filter:

Question 1 relates to the brand essence. This question helps your team explore whether or not the decision/initiative/effort they are pursuing aligns with the essence.

Questions 2-5 relate to the core attributes of the brand. Each question is constructed to ensure that your team is thinking through how to infuse each core attribute into their work.

Question 6, relates to your brand personality. This question makes sure your team is thinking about the vibes so that their work feels on-brand.

Let’s make this real with an example. If you worked for ClarisHealth and your essence was related to simplifying complexity or bringing clarity, then you might construct question 1 of the brand filter to be: “How are we making things simple and clear?” or “How specifically are we reducing complexity?” 

As you can see, the question is simple, but also profound. It forces you to think deeply about what you’re doing and how it fits the brand. When combined with questions related to core attributes and personality, it becomes a powerful tool for brand alignment.

Once you’ve built out your brand filter, you should then provide explicit instructions to your team to use it as a decision-making tool in their day-to-day work. You may go as far as printing them out for each person to keep at their desk. Training on how to use the filter is valuable as well.

Why does a brand filter matter?

Your brand filter is a simple and easy-to-use tool that you can give to each and every one of your employees to empower them to make on-brand decisions no matter the situation. With this brand filter and a decent dose of brand training to ensure they have a grasp of the high-level details, they will have the tools they need to stay true to the brand each and every day.

Why does this matter?

Because all memorable brands have a few things in common:

They are more than a marketing campaign: Memorable brands ensure that all of their processes are influenced by the brand. They’ve done the hard work to build their brand drivers into the DNA of their company. It’s hard but rewarding work. When used correctly, the brand filter can be a key tool to aid in this effort.

Every employee in the company knows how to live out the brand: Memorable brands ensure that all employees understand their brand at a high level and can represent it to their team members, vendors, partners, and clients/customers. Again, the brand filter can help teams think through how to talk and, more importantly, think about the brand.

The brand is implemented consistently: The final commonality between all memorable brands is consistency. They represent their brand in the same way over a long period of time. The brand filter can be a key tool in doing this, constantly snapping people back to the core of the brand in each and every decision they take.

What is an example of a brand filter?

Ok, enough theory. Let’s look at a brand filter in the wild. We developed this brand filter a few years back in our work with Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Is our deep personal commitment reflected in this decision?

How are we considering all the small details and not just the big ideas?

Are we considering the different needs of each community with this decision? Are we thinking beyond Salt Lake City to the rural Mountain West and those who are underserved? How?

How are we pioneering the future with this decision? How are we looking beyond what we already know?

Are we being diligent? In what ways can we follow through on what we are doing?

Is this decision bold and is it right? Would we make a different decision if we stopped thinking simply about the pitfalls or potential ways this decision could fail?

How does this decision embody a compassionate approach to treating and researching cancer?

How does this decision convey our commitment to training and education?

How to create your brand filter

Creating your brand filter is fairly straightforward. It’s simply a matter of crafting questions that will perform the dual function of reminding your team about your brand drivers and helping them think through how to apply it. I recommend keeping a few things in mind as you create your questions:

• Open-ended questions are best. Don’t make the questions ones that take a yes or no answer. Craft questions that someone will have to think through to answer.
• Be brief, when possible. Short questions without caveats are more effective than long questions. Make your team think hard about the questions, not the answers.
• The questions are only questions. If you want people to adopt the brand filter, you will need to have consistent training and accountability built in so the filter isn’t used just once before being discarded.

If you want to learn more about A Brave New’s approach to branding, check out our guide: The secret to an accelerated branding process.