[Newsletter] Who Am I? - Re-defining Your Brand and Yourself in 2025
WHO AM I?
“Who Am I?” seems like a good question for 2025.
At a time when everything in your life might be turned to ashes, when you’re not sure whether AI might upend your profession, the economy might fall out beneath us and we’re not sure how to interact with the world and other people - you might be asking who you are now and who you want to be going forward.
But the world isn’t waiting, and our business is brimming with entrepreneurs starting new things and companies reinventing themselves.
In this issue we talk about how to find inspiration and uncover distinctive differentiation. Upcoming issues will cover brand personality, pinpointing customer needs and creating cultural alignment.
Below we share how we:
Find inspiration
Identify brand personality
Pinpoint customer needs
Create brand and culture alignment
Find distinctive differentiation
Want to talk about you and your brand strategy, positioning, messaging or go-to-market plans? Great!
“It’s never too late to become who you want to be. ”
1. Beginners’ Mind
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”
Starting with “beginners’ mind” helps you stay curious and open to new possibilities. Hailing from Buddhism, it asks you leave judgment at the door.
Which is why it’s nearly impossible to do branding , positioning and messaging for yourself (including personal/executive branding).
Inspiration is our stock in trade, so we ask a lot of questions. We want to understand the brand culture and the external forces impacting the brand and audiences. We want to know how they’re impacted by politics, economics, social culture, technology, and the environment. We explore “who, what, where, when and why” which ultimately informs the brand story.
Sometimes our clients get annoyed. They think the answers are so obvious we should know the answers. They say, “Why do you have to know about production, finance, HR? It’s all on our website.”
We ask because 99% of the answers we get from CEOs and their teams don’t match. We ask because it inspires our clients to think deeper, too.
We question customers, suppliers, board members and employees. Since most decisions involve influencers, champions, decision-makers, users and approvers, we need to create messaging that resonates across all audiences and their appropriate channels. Messaging must be aligned or there is reputational risk in this era of radical transparency.
And we ask because we’re looking for levers we can pull to achieve distinctive differentiation. We want to understand which of the 7 Ps of marketing might be the key (we’ve added two Ps of our own): Product, Price, People, Promotion, Place, Personality and Purpose.
2. Distinctive Differentiation
“Differentiation doesn’t come from your product or marketing. It’s a result of what the customer gets from it.”
We think differentiation comes in two sizes: “Big D and Little d.”
“Big D” differentiation is when your audiences achieve something of emotional, physical or spiritual value. It’s the key to how you can be relevant in their lives.
“Little d” differentiation can be achieved with things like language, images, and price promotions. It’s clever ads, funny social media or a nice logo.
Our goal is to identify Big Differentiation first, then both big and small differentiation are expressed in execution.
Big Differentiation is not competitive differentiation (or comparing yourself to other people). It’s not your product or marketing (or your job, if you’re branding yourself).
Big Differentiation is achieved when “Who Am I” is reflected in your personality traits, capabilities, and values - and they are relevant to your audiences.
Big Differentiation incorporates the needs of your audiences, your brand traits and capabilities, and what the culture calls for. It reflects an understanding of your audiences’ lives and their needs and expectations.
Big Differentiation doesn’t focus on features and benefits, but instead knows the emotional, physical, and spiritual value the brand provides.
Big Differentiation is the result of cultural alignment, both internal and external.
And Big Differentiation needs a heaping helping of inspiration.
If you ask the right questions of the right people, find inspiration in the research, and understand the emotional, physical or spiritual value you provide to your audiences, you’ll nail it.
Knowing who you are and being true to that will make you relevant to the right audiences.
If you continue to nurture “beginners mind” and talk to your audiences, and truly listen, your brand will not only be relevant, but it will remain an indispensable part of their lives.
3. Personality: Carl Jung Knows Who You Are
Carl Jung was a psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He outlined common patterns and traits derived from myths, religion and culture.
Brand personalities are reflected in values, goals, capabilities and vision. Like characters in a movie, brand personalities are emotionally connective, compelling, relatable, and memorable. They’re great communications tools, and no two are alike (like people).
Carl Jung’s Archetype theory helps us wrap our minds around fundamental traits, beliefs and drivers that reflect the founders, the business and the audiences. Sometimes we find the perfect archetype, sometimes we create our own.
No matter what you do or say, your personality will be transmitted and interpreted whether you’ve crafted it or not.
4. Needs: Maslow Understands
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.”
You may think that your differentiated value lies in the features and benefits of your product or service. It doesn’t.
Your true value lies in how well your features and benefits meet your customer’s physical and emotional needs and expectations.
That’s why we use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to think about our audiences.
To get a visual feel for where our audiences are, we plot them on a Radar chart based on Maslow’s thinking.
This chart demonstrates how healthcare audiences (green) skew towards love and belonging among their teams, safety & security for patients and self actualization in mastery of their work. AI Tech audiences (blue) often seek affirmation and mastery in their profession, and Gamers (yellow) are most likely to seek love and belonging and mastery of the game.
5. Brand and Culture Alignment
“Brands are living entities that are enriched or undermined by culture.”
Brands live in an internal company culture as well as an external one. Your brand values, beliefs, capabilities, products and services must make sense within both cultures, or you risk losing employees and customers.
We’ll skip internal company culture here (that’s a whole newsletter), but to understand external influences, we conduct PESTLE research. It’s designed to reveal how politics, economics, social/cultural conditions, technology, legal and the environment impact our clients’ brand.
We’ve identified untapped audiences, shifted our language, and created ground-breaking campaigns for clients based on the PESTLE, questioning and interviewing. Like Restaurant and Fashion Weeks for New York City and Bring Your Parents to Work Day for a tech company.
The PESTLE analysis provides game-changing insights and sometimes even changes our clients’ business model.
About Us
Outfront Solutions helps businesses strengthen their market relevance and become indispensable to their audiences through transformative marketing, communications and sales solutions. At the forefront of cultural transformation, we drive business success for companies like Apple, Accenture, Redfin and Omnicom through our unique blend of hands-on business experience, strategic marketing insights and global perspective. Let’s Connect!