Brands are everywhere these days. At the grocery store, sure. But also in your Instagram feed, on banners sponsoring your favorite sports team, even on LinkedIn where people are cultivating their personal brands.

So what’s a new brand to do if it’s trying to break through all that noise?

“The world is full of brands, it’s full of communication. But we don’t have enough special brands, and there will always be room for those,” explains Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing.

Calkins, a former marketer at Kraft, is talking here as part of a new podcast from Insight called Insight Unpacked. In this 5-episode season, we tackle the question of how to build an extraordinary brand that stands out from the crowd. The first episode was released this week and focuses on three big questions you need to ask yourself before launching a new brand. That’s what we’ll discuss today.

Future episodes in the podcast series build off the answers to questions such as what to name your brand, how to tell your brand’s story, and how to measure whether your brand is working. To get each episode as it’s released, subscribe to Insight Unpacked on your favorite podcast platform. (Subscribers of our Insightful Leader podcast will also see it in their feed.)

Does Your Brand Need to Exist?

Before you launch a new brand—be it a new product line or your personal brand when looking for a job—you need to pause and take a look at the big picture, Calkins explains.

“In all things marketing, you really take a step back, and you begin with the objectives,” he says. “You really want to go back and say, ‘What are we trying to achieve here?’ And once we know what we’re trying to achieve, then we can assess the options.”

To figure out what you’re trying to achieve, try answering three fundamental questions:

What’s the brand’s purpose? Brands that are driven by a purpose are more likely to stand out to consumers, particularly in 2022. And that purpose needs to be something beyond, “the brand will help us make money!” For Warby Parker, for instance, their purpose is to make eyewear more affordable. For Airbnb, they aim “to create a world where everyone can belong anywhere.”

The key is to think about why your brand needs to exist in the world. This isn’t an easy question to answer. Our professors suggest a few prompts, such as what impact do you want to have? What’s your rallying cry? What will success look like for you?

Do you need to start from scratch, or should you build on what you already have? This question only applies to those who already have a brand. But it’s a crucial one to ask if you do. Because while it’s tempting to conceive of your brand as an exciting departure from what you currently have, “trying to completely reposition a brand often leads to disaster,” explains Alice Tybout, professor emeritus of marketing. Tybout points to the marketing debacle that was the McDonald’s McLean as an example of a branding about-face that failed spectacularly. Most of the time, instead of going for a dramatic change, she says, existing brands should “figure out how you can be what you are more effectively.”

What is your brand position going to be? This question has several components to it. You need to define your target audience; who you’re competing against for your customers’ attention; what sets you apart from that competition; and the reason your customers should ultimately choose you. (Whew, that’s a lot, I know, so I recommend listening to the full episode.) But, in short, it’s all really important to think through up front. “Being thoughtful and disciplined about how you build your brand is really important,” Calkins explains. “Because if you don’t really have a strong point of difference that makes your brand unique and special, if you don’t have that, it’s going to be very, very hard to break through the clutter.”

LEADERSHIP TIP

“Storytelling has both good and bad aspects to it. Stories can be fantastic; you might want to use them. However, there’s a ‘but’—and I think it’s a pretty important one: a story can limit our ability to process facts.”

—Professor Derek Rucker in Insight, on research that shows there are limits to the persuasive power of stories.