The invisible brand bank

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A thought from me

It is always worth going above and beyond if it puts money in the brand bank.

Earlier this week, I was working on an inline video player for my new portfolio. This player autoplays videos on a loop. The videos are short and silent. It’s a common way for studios and agencies to showcase their designs.

Almost all of my competitors have a similar component, but after auditing dozens of their sites, nearly every one fails to address accessibility. If the visitor prefers reduced motion, the videos still autoplay. If the visitor has disabled JavaScript, images and videos often don’t display at all.

One of my brand’s core promises is that good design should be accessible to everybody. So I spent many hours working on an accessible video player that goes past what WCAG requires. Videos pause on click, work from the keyboard, and hold still for anybody who prefers reduced motion.

This was a lot more work than settling for what my competitors do. If I were to evaluate the cost and benefit of doing all this work, it probably wouldn’t be ​“financially worth it.” But I chose to make a deposit into my brand bank and live up to my brand’s core promise about accessibility and inclusion.

Many years ago, a nonprofit client needed help with a new website, and a new payment system in particular. They were using PayPal, and their setup was slowly crumbling like feta cheese.

I could have simply switched them to Canada Helps, or Shopify if we wanted something more robust. But instead, I advocated to trial a few different options. I set up a skunkworks R&D department that played with multiple different e‑commerce vendors, knowing that even though I had to move fast, the client only got to shoot their shot once.

Out of that experience, it became clear there was one vendor that worked particularly well. They handled all the hard transactional stuff that you really want offsite, but otherwise allowed the client and me to build something almost entirely from scratch. We could control the entire process. We designed an e‑commerce flow tuned precisely for a nonprofit, with forms that were accessible and easy to read.

This was costly compared to ​“just using Shopify,” but it became a success multiplier. Revenue for the client increased 20% YOY for four straight years, and has now doubled compared to launch. The new e‑commerce system is a big part of the reason for that.

It didn’t look like it at first, but that decision to turn a choice about e‑commerce into a skunkworks R&D project was a brand deposit. And years later, it’s made bank.

Not all brand deposits make money, but they all make the brand better. In most ways, the brand bank works like any other bank account: you can make deposits or withdrawals. Withdrawals are inevitable: at some point, you’ll need to update prices, kill a product line, or change one of your policies in a way that prevents abuse at the cost of your most well-meaning customers. 

Deposits, on the other hand, are not inevitable. Much like a normal bank account, you must choose to make deposits. When you need to make a withdrawal, you must never be net negative. You must always make more deposits than withdrawals. After enough deposits, you have a better brand and a bigger safety net for those inevitable withdrawals. 

The time I spent on my video player is a deposit. Most people won’t notice it, but the people who need it will appreciate it. It reinforces a brand promise of making good design accessible to everybody. And making the video player more accessible for them made it more polished and robust, which made it better for everybody.

Sometimes, if you choose not to make a deposit, you choose to make a withdrawal. In this case, if I hadn’t put in the extra effort on my video player, it would have contradicted my accessibility efforts elsewhere, and it would have made it harder to walk the talk with clients. 

Some withdrawals are invisible, and the invisible ones are often expensive.

A deposit needs to be championed. Somebody in your organization (maybe you!) needs to recognize the circumstances in which going above and beyond is actually an investment, and they need to advocate for it. You have to unlearn the dollars-and-cents language you’ve internalized.

So how can you tell when going above and beyond is an investment?

A brand is not a company or a logo. Marty Neumeier (author of The Brand Gap) says that a brand is ​“a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” So if your work improves the gut feeling of your customers, particularly your most loyal ones, then it’s a deposit. If it improves the gut feeling of potential customers that your competitors neglect, it’s a deposit (and a wedge). 

Brand deposits aren’t like money deposits. You deposit cash and see the value of an account change instantly. You make a deposit in the brand bank and wait for it to pay off.

But each deposit that makes your brand better for a few people adds up until, one day, your brand is better for a lot of people.

Things worth sharing

1. Via friend of the studio Declan Chidlow, here’s how to design a website in 4 minutes. (Similarly: what happened to frontend development?)
2. “ ​‘Does it work?’ is a binary question. ​‘Is it good?’ is a subjective question whose answer lives at the intersection of multi-disciplinary knowledge and taste.” Make it work vs. make it good.
3. Great new work out there from other agencies and studios: MAKEBARDO’s brand identity for E11VN is unique and playful. Pentagram’s new identity for Rugiet is bold and masculine (as it should be for a men’s wellness brand). And Coca-Cola has a new global identity. (The marketing team says it’s new, but I would describe it as ​“refined.” It’s clearly been more rigorously systemized, which should make it a lot easier for designers and brand managers across the world to prep advertising. I assume that’s the point. It’s very good work regardless, and because it’s a cohesive system, it’s well-timed for the AI era. A great example of how to evolve a brand.)

A question to ponder

Do you have any language you use internally that shows how you approach things differently from your competitors? Can that internal language become a marketing asset that your customers can understand?

Until next week,

Nathan

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with me, I won’t attempt to sell you, but I’ll point you to the right next step.