When a company has too many messages, too many audiences and too many ways of explaining itself, the problem may start much further upstream.
I was at an event at the yacht club when the CEO I knew walked over and said something I often hear from business owners.
“Hey Jennifer, I think we could use some help.”
Of course, that sentence can mean a lot of things. This time, he was leading a substantial company with a strong business model, real relationships and an established place in the market.
He was also tired of all the ways they were explaining what they do, and they had five target audiences. “We have so many different communications,” he said. “There are so many things we say. It’s painful. Can you help with something like that?”
I love it when business owners are honest about the pain they are experiencing; it helps me understand the problem and identify the right solution more quickly. And it’s a sign of a good working relationship.
Painful is often the right word for what this CEO was experiencing.
This company was in the disaster and home repair space. Their business is instantly activated whenever a natural disaster hits, like a hailstorm, hurricane, or tornado…well, you get the gist. A homeowner’s first call in the aftermath is to their insurance agent or carrier. The insurance carrier then alerts the companies it has contracted with to help. Each company then deploys its network of contractors to the affected areas to do the repairs.
You can imagine how chaotic a situation like this becomes. If the company the carrier contracts with doesn’t respond with speed, courtesy, quality and ongoing follow-through, problems start cascading.
So, the company’s primary target audience was insurance carriers, but its influencer audiences were adjusters, agents, contractors and homeowners.
The company was managing five separate communication sequences and was getting buried in the complexity. The time, energy and sheer scale of the effort had become unsustainable. Too many messages. Too many ways to talk to each audience. They were drowning in communications.
Brand confusion is expensive. It often shows up as inefficiency. The company was doing excellent work, had very smart people, and a solid internal culture. But with all the disconnected ways of explaining why someone should choose them, they sounded like any other contractor network.
I recognized this immediately as a missing strategic brand foundation that would simplify and unify all communications around one central idea, then carry through to each of the five audiences.
At the heart of a strategic brand foundation is clarity about who you are, what you do differently, why you do it and why anyone should care. The next heavy lift is how to communicate that to your audiences. After all, there is more than one way to communicate something. Should you sound funny, quirky, inspirational, reverent? The list goes on. This is important for how to position a company in the minds of its ideal audience. This leads to the next step, a positioning line, which may look like a tagline but it is much more strategic. It is a word or phrase that can be lived internally and delivered externally.
While many companies skip all the strategy and jump straight to a clever-sounding tagline, a positioning strategy simplifies all communications, aligns and energizes the company culture, generates faster growth, and builds enterprise value. I honestly don’t understand why any company would skip the effort and languish in complexity hoping to stumble onto the right combination of conditions.
So, we began the work with the organization to create the missing brand foundation. We learned that they had a pretty remarkable five-year warranty for roof repairs. If one of their contractors went out of business, the company itself stood behind the work. Their model not only sent contractors into the field but also certified their work.
We identified a few more notable differentiators and recognized that the value was certainly there. This company stepped into situations other companies might avoid and created order.
This exploration led us to a brand strategy that felt both true and useful.
The positioning line became Overachievers.
It worked across the audiences—insurance carriers, adjusters, agents and homeowners. The contractor hiring strategy became “hire overachievers.”
Their Why Statement became We live for challenges.
That fit because it captured the nature of the business, a company built for difficult times.
This same idea helped shape the people strategy. Internally, the lens for hiring every employee was how well they performed in stressful environments and whether they embraced challenges.
This company could not hire people who needed calm conditions and predictable days. They needed people who could handle pressure, serve customers well and still care about the details. Overachieving was about bringing a higher standard into every part of the business, from worksite performance to customer service, coworker relationships and service to the community.
This is how brand becomes much more than communication. It gives leadership a clearer way to make decisions. It gives employees a clearer standard to live into. It gives the market a clearer reason to believe.
The brand work gave the company’s value a distinctive frame with easy-to-understand differentiators, making the company easier to trust and easier to choose.
Oh, and by the way, Overachievers gave the CEO one place to start every communication.
When a business becomes clear enough to be recognized, trusted and chosen, growth no longer has to fight through marketplace confusion.
You can read more of Jennifer’s latest thinking on all things brand on Substack.
