EPISODE 65

Derek Welcome to Brands Made Meaningful conversations with the team at Sussner about how purposeful branding inspires unity, identity, and powerful change for growth-minded organizations.

Tucker Have you ever gone to Ikea and bought furniture?

Derek More times than I would like to admit.

Tucker And have you ever done that and not used the manual?

Derek Absolutely not. You can’t. I don’t know that I would have the tools or the capacity to assemble something from Ikea without the manual that they provide you.

Tucker So I do it all the time out of just pure stupidity, I think. 

Derek You get something from Ikea. You disregard the manual and you just say, I can solve this puzzle on my own. How successful are you?

Tucker It takes probably three times longer than I bet it would if I just used the manual. 

Derek And do you usually have parts left over?

Tucker No, I never have parts left over. But there are definitely lots of arguments. You get into unnecessary fights with the wife to figure out how that all plays out. Anyway, it got me thinking about brand manuals, brand guidelines, and brand rules as we talk about them with our clients. Imagine if you were a membership director or a marketing director for a private club and your GM came to you and said, Hey, figure this out. But you didn’t have a manual. It would take you 3 or 4 or 5 times longer than if you just had the rules in place. Today it’s really important for us to talk about the significance of these manuals. How do you build them and what goes into them? And why would you even want one in the first place?

Derek At least with an Ikea manual, my guess is if that box showed up without one in it, you could Google that specific product and you’d probably find that online. But if you were at your club and didn’t have that manual and you googled, how do I execute and implement our brand identity for this specific component of our business? I don’t know that you would get anything back.

Tucker Yeah, it’s like a custom table that there are no rules for unless you make them yourself.

Derek So it would take you to Etsy, and somebody on Etsy would say, I’m happy to build this table for you.

Tucker I don’t want to knock Ikea because they’re amazing. I love Ikea. Honestly, it’s the Swedish part of me that comes out and I go, I need to go to Ikea.

Derek Greatest meatballs that you can buy in a retail environment for $6.

Tucker Anyway, private club brand guidelines serve as the blueprint to maintain consistency and coherence across the brand. A private club really needs to be presenting itself professionally or in some way, so that it creates this level of professionalism or clarity around what we do, what are we doing, how we are different, and all of those great things. And these guidelines, this blueprint, for how we do this can be super critical for staff and for other people. But they’re really important when you think about how we build out new products so it makes it easier to expand the club. It makes a lot of things easier.

Derek Love the word blueprint. We’ve talked about brand style guide, brand guide, guidelines, brand rule book, etc. I think blueprint is a really great way to describe it. It’s a map. It’s a how-to guide. It makes everything so much easier and efficient because all of the usage and rollout and implementation has been thought through ahead of time. So you’re not in solve mode when you’re going through the brand guideline. You’re in activate and execute mode. As an agency, and as a creative firm, think of this document, this deliverable, as a collection of images, logos, fonts, color, uses, how to translate things to print or digital, etc. But there’s also a really strong brand foundation component that should be included in any successful brand blueprint when we talk about that master brand.

Tucker When we go through a process with a club, we really try to hold up their core values, their mission, the vision for the club, where we are going, and how this all works. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit. But to go back to why you need a brand in general is a great conversation for a private club. What’s the importance of having a club brand? Think about every experience feeling unique to your club. That brand can really pull out the uniqueness of your membership, of your culture, of all those components, and then put them into something that’s visual, something that’s verbal, something that people can experience. So think about how most clubs offer the same or very similar experiences across different things. Like maybe they all have golf courses in your area, or maybe they all offer tennis, or maybe they all have dining. But when you come back and go, Well, we all might offer the same thing, but it is different. And how is it different and why is it different? And then how can we showcase that difference within the brand? That’s why we do branding in the first place. But then it goes, Well, why do we need rules for it? It’s so that it’s cohesive and it’s clear and it’s consistent. Consistency is a huge part of this because, as many people know, if you give a head pro just a bunch of assets and let them go crazy in the merchandizing, they will. They’ll just go and do whatever they want to do. And that’s great. And it’s exciting for some people. For others, it becomes a practice of consistency that becomes frustrating over time.

Derek It’s also not just differentiation in your amenities and all the cool things that you might have. It’s also a differentiation in your unique culture. This brand guideline, this blueprint is also an incredibly helpful onboarding tool, or even a hiring or interviewing tool when it gets back to the mission and vision and the cultural components that you just referenced. But it’s a game changer in helping you set your organization apart to the people that work there who might not care about the amenities that you have. They’re just looking for a really great, rewarding, fulfilling place to work. And they want to understand what kind of membership and culture that you’ll be serving up.

Tucker The baseline for private club brand guidelines is going to be the visual stuff as in what’s our logo? How do we use our logo? What are the colors we use? What is the typography that we have? What are all the styling components that we use? That’s a super baseline where I think it becomes more helpful for the staff and other people on the team when you get into verbal things, as in how do we talk? What do we say? Why do we say it? What kind of language do we use? And then hospitality practices, as in how do we treat our guests? What makes an experience – our club versus a different club? And how do we interact with people? So when you get down into establishing rules, guidelines, a blueprint or whatever for all of those components, it starts becoming very apparent to a lot of people why they need to do this type of work to figure out, well, if I’m going to onboard a new person, what am I telling them so that they have a consistent experience so that a member can go talk to one staff member, and then a member can go to the next staff member, and it feels like they’re trained on the same rulebook?

Derek So expanding on that, as we look to some of the symptoms and problems that somebody might be experiencing or actually will be experiencing if they do not have this sort of guideline and blueprint in place specifically to that messaging. If they don’t have a guide on how we talk and what we say, what are some of the things that they may be experiencing in lacking those guidelines?

Tucker You’ll have mixed messaging within maybe the voice and the tone of things. And I think that this becomes really easy to understand when you look at what we say on our website versus maybe a brochure. You could read both of those and say that this doesn’t even sound like the same club. Then there’s the conversational piece to say when I talk to the head pro who might have been here for 25 years or the new bartender who started last week, the way that they talk to me is going to be different. And that mixed messaging creates this level of, well, I don’t want to talk to this person. They don’t understand what I need. I’m going to go talk to this person. It actually creates a bottleneck within your membership or your staff for the membership to say everyone seems to go to this person for all their problems because they don’t feel like the other people understand and can solve these other things for them. That to me is this mixed message where we don’t have one solidified team wall where you can go to any of us and ask us any question. We can answer it the same way.

Derek When you look at that same issue from an external conversation, you can get into all kinds of issues when your members describe your club to their friends and colleagues in completely different ways. You say, tell me what this place is all about. Who are you? Tell me about your membership. What do you stand for? There’s a short, easy answer, which might be that individual person’s experience and how they relate it to. But if at a minimum, the staff, the leadership team, the board, etc. have a unified statement that gets to the root of who you are, what’s different and unique about your club, and why anybody should care, then at least you’re talking consistently to prospective members and to guests in a way that you know you believe will benefit your club.

Tucker And we’re not going to get into brand training today. But that’s a huge part of this. What we’re really talking about within this entire conversation is brand governance. We need rules, we need regulations, and we need to have governance. A lot of clubs know what governance is. A lot of people who work within the club space understand that there may be board governance or maybe there’s HOA governance or whatever is specific to your club. For us to say, what is your brand governance and who’s in charge of that – I don’t like to say brand police – but there’s probably someone in your club that’s in charge of making sure things are consistent, making sure that not only the visuals are good, but also what it’s like when someone gets trained. So when you get into brand training, which we should have a conversation about some other time, we really talk about how we are training our staff. That’s absolutely a part of this. But how are we training our members to understand who we are and what we’re all about? Some of the great projects we worked on with private clubs is giving the members that training in a really creative way that doesn’t feel like training. It shouldn’t feel like a job to them. We’ve delivered letters to the members to say what we’re all about in a cohesive way so that when they go, Oh yeah, I’m a member at this club and this is what you can expect here. They already have the answer to that. We’ve just done it in a nice way of taking them along the journey.

Derek If you are interested in a preview of what ultimately will be that upcoming extended conversation, in Episode 27 I think was called Living Your Brand. That’s where we start that conversation.

Tucker We do so many of these conversations that I kind of forget about them. I’m not going to lie. And we’ve done them for over three years now. So it feels like a really long time. So the things that I would say to a general manager or a membership director or a marketing director or just a new staff person who doesn’t feel like they have anything – how would you go about identifying these problems? And then how would you start the process of solving that? There are a ton of ways you can identify the problems. I actually came up with 12 when I was thinking about this conversation, but I don’t want to go through all 12 because a lot of them are super nuanced to maybe people on our team. Like I would be able to identify that, but maybe not a normal day-to-day person would be able to. So here are four ways that I would say are really, really impactful. The first one is do you have inconsistent visual identity pieces? Maybe you’re using multiple logos, or maybe you’re logos use multiple colors, or you have like five different fonts that you use in different ways. You can tell when something’s inconsistent. You’re like, Oh, where did that come from? I’ve never seen that before. Or maybe you put them all on one pile and you’re like, Okay, we have ten different logos. How do we use these? That’s something that really stands out to a lot of people in the first couple of tries at looking at their guidelines. The second one is mixed messaging. We’ve already talked about this a little bit. When you look at your website and you look at a brochure and maybe you look at a member packet or material or something like that, you see that these all read completely different and all sound different. You could tell me that this is a club down the road and I wouldn’t know the difference. That inconsistent mixed messaging can become a huge red flag for a lot of people. And it really points out the need to put some standards around your verbal communication.

Derek The next one is staff confusion. We’ve just talked about this. This is all weaved together. But if you see employees struggling to live the brand like we said, to even know what the brand’s value’s identity is, what the culture is, what their expectations are, then that’s going to not only lead to inconsistent experiences with members, it’s also going to lead to challenging interactions with other staff members, especially if they’re not on that same page because they haven’t been provided with that guidance.

Tucker A managerial, knee-jerk reaction to someone not behaving or working with guests or maybe members in a certain way is that they just say, Well, they don’t get it. I would say the majority of the time it’s not that they don’t get it, it’s that it’s never been explained. It’s never been actually laid out for them to build on to what you’re looking for. And that’s exactly what guidelines are for.

Derek One of the things that I love about brand and how it can be leveraged within an organization’s business in so many ways is that it extends into areas of the organization, of the business, that far exceed the sales and marketing chunk.

Tucker Absolutely.

Derek To talk about how you can leverage your brand to have better leadership so that you can have a unified staff is an incredible asset that comes out of doing this right.

Tucker The fourth one that I identified is if it’s difficult for clubs to expand or evolve. If you are a golf club and you want to add amenities like tennis or pool or things like that and you can’t seem to figure it out, or it’s just taking a ton of work to figure out how to expand your brand, that means you probably don’t have rules and regulations. It should be easy for you to go, Oh, we have a new restaurant. Here’s what we’re going to do about that. Or, Hey, we have a new menu at the pool bar. Here’s how we build that out. It should take no time at all. But when people start spinning their wheels and second-guessing and not knowing what to do, that’s a clear and obvious way for me to go, well, you probably don’t have guidelines, or you don’t have guidelines that you believe are true.

Derek We’re not saying that you’ll have all of those pre-baked and solved in this blueprint, but you’ll have the steps, the guidance, the baseline, and the foundation to then make the execution of those new brand extensions easy. They should be easy. You should be able to have so much guidance by that point in time where you’ve already put in the hard work, that rolling that out should just be a simple extension.

Tucker We’re working with a club right now that’s trying to add an additional course wondering what should that be. Well, what does your brand architecture tell you to do? And if they don’t have that, it makes it really hard for them to answer that question. And it makes it really hard for the board to know what to do next. Whereas the brand pieces should be an easy, exciting next step saying, Hey, we’ve greenlit this new course and now what do we call it? And how does this come to life? Well, let’s just look at our brand standards. It should be there. The answer should be kind of laid out.

Derek: With all due respect to this club that we’re talking about, they’re working through their own name ideas for this new short course to add to their overall facilities and their struggling. I’m not making fun of them, but I get why it’s a struggle. It’s because they don’t have the guidance. And as their brand now looks to evolve and expand and become more comprehensive, the typical result is people name on. You brainstorm, you spitball, you default to some of the easy stuff. But to have it truly be meaningful and long-lasting requires a little bit of that hard work.

Tucker: It’s really hard to do if you don’t have those things together. We’re working with another club that is building out a new clubhouse, and they’re kind of spinning their wheels. What should we name all the restaurants in here? And what should we name all of the different areas and amenities within the clubhouse? The first question I had was, do you guys have a naming convention that you use across your club? And they go, No, what is that? That’s a part of this guideline set.

Derek Do you have a brand strategy in place that you’ve all agreed on that is unified based on the vision of what your club is evolving towards? Do we know what your members want? Do we know what the perception is of how you want that clubhouse and those restaurants to be seen by your members, to connect with them in a meaningful way?

Tucker So how do we solve this? If there’s a bunch of challenges that come from all of this, that’s great.

Derek You call us.

Tucker Well, yeah. If you’re like, Oh God, my phone’s not working, how do I do this? Or maybe the power’s out or something like that. How would I start going about this? I’m not going to go through it. You can see our notes there. It’s like five steps generally, but there’s a million steps within each step. But I’m going to go over the five really high-level steps. And then you ask questions along the way.

Derek First I do need to read this statement that you’ve written. And I know these are our inside show notes, but I do need to read this because I almost laughed out loud into the microphone. It says, so you’ve discovered that there are no rules, no guidelines, and no hope for your brand. Now, what do you do?

Tucker Yeah. I’ve had enough conversations with marketing directors or membership directors that talk to me and they go, We just don’t know what we’re doing. We have no idea where we’re going. And they’re almost verbally reaching out with a hand to say, please, pull me into the light and let me see this.

Derek And when you go big picture like that, it’s absolutely overwhelming. This is why we’ll go through this list that just starts to break it down into some more digestible steps.

Tucker So the first step is going to be to do a thorough brand audit. And you might have not done a brand audit in the past. A brand audit is so much fancier sounding than it really is. Grab all your stuff, grab all of your materials, and all of the collateral that you use, and go on to your website, go to your social media accounts. Pull everything from communication channels. Just kind of spread them all out on a table and say, Okay, what are we using? How do we sound? What do the visuals look like? Just start evaluating that and you can start seeing consistencies or inconsistencies as you roll through those pieces. And I don’t want that to sound like Hey, go do all of this and then point at the person who’s in charge of marketing and say, what is wrong with you? But the point is, is to really look at this and go, how many times have you as a club been really, really specific around looking at what you’ve done in the past versus just trying to accomplish the next to do?

Derek The challenge with this step is being too close to it though. So if you are the owner of the materials, if you’re the creator or the designer or the writer, if you’re the one that’s produced all the materials that your organization is using and you put all those out in front of you, it takes some bravery to then bring in some other stakeholders from the club, whether it’s other staff or members or members that maybe have marketing or branding backgrounds and saying, help me review this so we can understand what’s working and what’s not and what we have the opportunity to do better.

Tucker If you’re at a club and you don’t have guidelines, if you don’t have a rulebook, if you don’t have brand blueprints that you’re working off of, this isn’t your fault. You’re going off of something. It’s the Ikea example. You’re building the same chair over and over and over again, but you don’t have rules or regulations or a manual to work off of. So it might come out a little different every time.

Derek And you might be trying to keep that same chair fresh and exciting and new and engaging. So then you’re trying to think of ways to tweak it, modify it, add to it, and update it so that it’s still fresh and fun.

Tucker This is the same thing as maybe the person who owns food and beverage, right? The food and beverage director might go through their things and be really critical of how the restaurant looks, or how the food tastes, or how it’s being presented. If you don’t do that, things get left unchecked and things get left unevaluated, and that’s a problem.

Derek So auditing the brand and reviewing all the materials is a relatively easy step in actually just physically getting all that stuff in one place. But when you are reviewing that, and I’m leaning into the next step, what are the objective guidelines to help you determine whether or not this batch of materials is actually conveying the club appropriately?

Tucker So the next step would be to blow the dust off of your brand strategy and those brand beliefs if you have them.

Derek Like what?

Tucker Virtual high five to you. This would be things like collecting things like your club mission, your club vision, your club’s values, understanding the position your club wants to take, understanding the membership target that you’re going after, and things like that. If you have things like brand attributes or personality, things of your brand that you’re trying to go after. What we call brand strategy is basically how are we trying to position ourselves, or what are we wanting to stand for in the eyes of our membership and the public? And if you have that documented, which a lot don’t, so don’t feel bad if you don’t. But if you don’t, then that would be your next step. Go document those things or build that out or be really meaningful about that. If you have those, I would just grab those and review them all to make sure that they’re all still very relevant and go, yep, this is good, this is good, this is good. When a club goes through its mission statement, they tend to just go, yeah, this is going to be a lot of work. So we’re just not ever going to touch it. That’s where I would go if there maybe a sentiment of it. If you can understand what it’s all about, then that’s good enough for me. There’s a good – not great – kind of a thing. Better done than perfect is absolutely how I would go about this if I was someone working within a club.

Derek The mission should be memorable, not memorized. You need to know the sentiment of it. We run into all spectrums. We’ve worked with clubs that lived their mission statement. Not only is it on the wall but it’s referenced in conversation in the first few minutes of meeting them. This is what we do here. This is what we’re about. This is why we were founded, and this is where we’re going. To the other spectrum of, Yeah, I think there’s a mission statement in a book someplace, in a drawer somewhere. But I couldn’t tell you what it says. And so getting the sentiment of it understood and correct and believed in and authentic and true and relevant to your club is incredibly foundational to all these other things that then come out and come to life in visual and verbal assets.

Tucker If you’re struggling, because there are a lot of words thrown out here, what I would say is, if you can take a document and answer the questions what do we stand for and what do we want to be seen as? That is the absolute foundation of a brand strategy.

Derek I would layer on what do we do. Who do we do it for? And why should those people care? Why should they be attracted to what we are doing?

Tucker So all of those things, I would grab those and/or answer them. So I would say either collect or define. Let’s say you have an audit of everything, you’ve looked at everything, and you have your foundational direction that you have put up against or your objectives. And then I would go to the step of organizing the assets and deciding on the rules. You might have ten logos that came out of your audit. Make a decision on which one is best for you and why based on those strategy components we’ve just talked about. Why does that make the most sense? And then just be really, really clear on how we’re going to use that. So this is our logo that we’re going to move forward with. We’re not going to do the green version. We’re not going to do the maroon version. We’re not going to do the navy version. We’re going with the gold version.

Derek We’re not going to do the crest version.

Tucker Well, you might do the crest depending on what your strategy says. And then you would come back and say, this is what we’re going to move forward with. Here’s our primary. And this is how we’re going to leverage it in different ways. And you start putting rules around that. So you start doing things like defining our colors and putting a Pantone number to it or putting a CMYK number to it. Here are the rules that we use this for. Every time we deliver a brand book or private club brand guidelines, it has these rules in it to say when we use type, we use this font. And when we use this font, we use it in these sizes and these levels.

Derek And when that font’s not available in some software that you’re in, then this is the backup font that should be available. Google font, for example, should be available to anybody, anywhere.

Tucker We should make it so easy that anyone in the club can look at this and say, Okay, I’m making a new document. How should it look?

Derek The word rules don’t convey ease, but that’s exactly what they do. It makes things way more easy. Establishing the guidelines is the hard work. Executing within those guidelines, that’s what becomes not only easy but allows incredible consistency in every way. 

Tucker So do all of that. I’m not going to go through all the guidelines on all of them, but go do that through the visual things like color, logos, and fonts. Do it through all the verbal things. We use this language, not that language. We talk like this. Maybe this is our tone. Here’s how we write about things. Here’s how we address members. How that works within the verbal language. And then do that for hospitality. Here’s how we serve people. Here’s how we ask them questions. Here’s how we go about doing some of those tasks. And then also doing it for the next step is across mediums. So what gets really, really difficult for some people is that transition from, I could do a letter to the members, a printed letter. I can type out a letter or an email and I can make that happen. But where it gets really complex is what social looks like. How we speak and how we sound and how we look on social is is a whole other thing. So what we try to do is build out a whole other medium guideline set. And I don’t want to keep talking because I’m probably overwhelming some people who are listening to this. And then the last step of all of this is to distribute those guidelines, or I call it to train people on them. It doesn’t have to be this super formal training, but just sit down with a couple of people and flip through it and go, Hey, this is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it. Here’s kind of the rules and regulations we’re putting up against. Am I missing anything here? Is there anything that would be helpful as we keep going forward? You help me because every club we’ve worked with has a different expectation. How long is that leash? How much leash are we giving our staff members on our brand? Some give it none at all. Here are very, very tight rules and regulations that we have to abide by because this is the way we need it to be. Others are way more flexible with that because our brand is X and it allows us to be more flexible. You know your club, you know what you need to do. Distributing guidelines is the same as making sure someone understands what’s expected of them, and making sure that you feel confident that they can go do their job.

Derek It’s handing you the manual for that Ikea piece of furniture that you’re about to put together. The biggest miss in these guidelines, once you have that work, is not using them. We’ve talked about people that don’t have them at all. Some people have them, but they’re outdated and maybe under utilized. But what’s even worse is when somebody actually has this and it’s locked away in a drawer or in a computer file someplace, and nobody even knows that it exists. So it’s not being utilized at all. That’s a huge miss. It’s the same as working on a mission statement.

Tucker I was just going to say it sounds like a mission statement. So to summarize the steps I would take to solving building out brand guidelines, this is that whole part why it’s so complex is most of the time why clubs come to us and go, this is something that we don’t have time to do. We need help with this. But it’s to do a thorough brand audit to build out or to go find your strategy and/or brand beliefs, to organize your assets and make decisions on those assets, like, what are we using and what does that mean? And then to select the mediums that you’re going to use it on, think social web, print, all those great things. Maybe it’s signage too. And put those rules to it to make sure that the application is clear and cohesive and then distribute them. So it’s basically finding a way to define your process and then tell everybody about it.

Derek If you start with strategy and you define who you are, which takes creative thinking, you end up with strategy, which is then the objectives that then influence these guidelines to make being consistent and coherent and authentic and repeatable in a way that’s representing your club and your brand in the way that you want it to be very intentionally, is kind of how it will all come to work.

Tucker Branding committees shouldn’t necessarily just be focusing on things like social posts, or what the next member output looks like from a marketing standpoint. They should really be focusing on what a brand consistency across the board is and owning that process so that when they’re going to different elements, they’re focused on consistency rather than just output.

Derek Perfect. So, to wrap up, what are some key takeaways that will help people as they think about their private club brand guidelines? To your point before, they do have rules. They do have guidelines, and they do have hope for their brand.

Tucker By investing your time and effort into developing clear and comprehensive guidelines, you can do things like strengthen your identity across all the different touchpoints. You can enhance member experiences. To say our brand is found in every corner of our club and is really long-term, you’re focusing on the success not only of the brand, but the club. To say if we’re moving forward, we’re going to do it with our new identity of who we are rather than just reverting back to how we used to do things and how we used to look, feel, sound, etc.

Derek Success and consistency in efficiency – there’s a financial component to that too.

Tucker Next time talk about more things along how do you maybe roll out a brand? How are you talking about launching that brand to members and how that works? But until then, we’ll see you soon.

Derek Talk soon. Until next time. Sussner is a branding firm specializing in helping companies make a meaningful mark. Guiding marketing leaders who are working to make their brand communicate better, stand out, and engage audiences to grow their business. For more on Sussner, visit sussner.com.