EPISODE 70

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 Derek, on today’s episode of Brands Made Meaningful, I want to talk about something that comes up a lot in our board meetings with clubs. We talk about brand and all the components that go into brand. We talk a lot about flexible brand systems, and this sounds like a behind-the-scenes kind of conversation, but I think it’s really relevant for this because the modern way we look at how we build brands is not the same as how it used to be.

Derek In the old days, a company or an organization would have one logo used maybe two ways. One would have been in color and the other would have been reversed out of that same color. I remember seeing a brand style guide for a Fortune 500 corporation that’s headquartered here in the Twin Cities, and this thing was inches thick on all the ways you could not use this one very specific logo. So it was an inflexible system which at that time made sense. This was like pre-digital media, pre-social. It was used in a different way at a different time. And those times, in our opinion, have changed.

Tucker When you say flexible or when we look at flexible systems, I think that a lot of people go, What do you mean systems? I’m going to nerd out a little bit on the definitions, but when we get into what is a brand asset system, that’s what we’re talking about. Like what is your primary logo? All of the lockups, which we call them, but they’ll be the variations of that logo. And then all of the graphics that hang underneath that which I would say all of the messaging. So taglines, headlines, and all those things as we come through that system and build it out for the future.

Derek Think of all of the ways and places your brand, your branding, and your logos live. They live on things like the medium’s website, for example. You might need a horizontal version of the logo for the header of the website. You probably need a square or round version of the logo for the Avatar on your Instagram page. You have logos that need to be legible when they’re large as signage, but you also have to have logos that will hold up when you embroider them on merchandise so that they don’t get so small that they don’t fall apart. So you think about being adaptable to all the different mediums and platforms, digital print, fabric, etc. The one-size-fits-all no longer makes sense. I’m thinking of a primary logo that we are designing for a club right now that has a lot of type words and a tagline underneath it. It has an established date. One of the merchandising people that we were talking to when she reviewed it, her first reaction was, Well, that’ll never hold up when I embroider that on the front of a shirt. And our reaction was, Well, of course not. That’s not the version that we would put on a shirt. That’s why there’s a system that we’re showing you so that that logo is as successful as possible on the shirt, for example.

Tucker The amount of information that we could put on something like the marquee sign out front versus what we can put on the sleeve of a shirt are very different things and they should be different things. They need to communicate different things, but they also need to establish the brand and all of those components. So we want the brand to be able to live in all these areas. That’s why you call it adaptable. We call it flexible, but there’s this level of being able to adapt to the area that it needs to fit into and to the communication style that it needs to do. But why this really matters goes into three buckets, I would say – why board members should care, why GMs should care, or why anyone should be paying attention to this. If you don’t have a flexible system, what that is holding you back from is really three things. And the first thing is strategic brand planning. When we go through this, a lot of clubs talk about how they have a strategic plan for their clubhouse, they have a strategic plan for their course, but they don’t necessarily have a strategic plan for their plan. Think about how our brand is going to move forward with the club and how we are going to utilize it as we keep growing and evolving and changing as an organization.

Derek You need a strategic plan for your plan – for how to plan your brand. And that’s where, and I’ll let you jump into this first one, but flexible, adaptable – the designer term that we use in our office is responsive. And that’s the theme that we’re going to be talking through over and over and over. But jump into the first one underneath the strategic planning portion.

Tucker So we talk about future-proofing a lot. It’s when we go into how we make sure this brand lasts decades rather than years. There’s a lot of people that go into this, and the first question we get from a lot of board members is, so we’re going to do advertising. That is not what we’re doing at all. When we talk about building out a new brand system, a new flexible system for your brand, this is meant to last a very long time. This is meant to be that piece that you can lean on because you say we’re going to try to build equity in this one mark. And that needs to be flexible across all these things. So that’s why we talk about that adaptability. It needs to be able to work on digital and print, and it needs to work on your business cards. It also needs to work on your website. It needs to work on the front side. It also needs to work on the sleeve of a member’s shirt. That is us thinking long-term about how we futureproof this and make sure that your brand is not something that just looks great today but also looks great ten years from now so that you can have confidence in that piece because this is a huge project for a lot of clubs. It would be a shame for it to just be a short-term endeavor.

Derek And if you do this, if you do approach your brand identity as a flexible system, I believe it will differentiate you from other clubs. It will help you stand out to prospective members who might be considering you versus somebody else. I’m thinking about a club that we’ve just recently in the last few months launched their updated brand and their brand system. Their previous brand was one logo. It was one crest, and that was all they had, and that was used on everything. So it was the old-school way of approaching how to implement your logo. It was one version and it didn’t hold up. When it was small, it was hard to embroider. It fell apart at certain sizes, but that’s the way that they approached it. And if you compare their brand now – it’s the Club of Golden Valley, which we just walked through their case study in our previous conversation. If you look at the depth of that comprehensive system, you can see for yourself the difference between having the room and the difference that having a flexible system will do for your club, and for your brand.

Tucker And you’re talking about a competitive advantage when it comes to the way that members see you. And I think that’s absolutely relevant. The biggest feedback is actually from employees to come back and say, I have something now. If I’m the communications director or I’m the membership director, I actually have tools now to use this in ways and then guidelines to show me how to do that. That’s a huge competitive advantage when you talk about resource allocation and moving that forward. So that leads me into the second bucket. If we move on from strategic brand planning, flexible brand systems are really about effective implementation. That’s a huge part of this to be able to make sure that you have the tools and everything at your disposal to implement it properly. So we go into what I was talking about before which is resource allocation, knowing the importance of all of these areas. You then don’t have to spend the time figuring it out. You can then go, Okay, so I can use this here and this here and this here. The merchandising team loves us when we come in because they don’t have to guess anymore. It’s to say, okay, cool, now I get to figure out what types of shirts and what materials and all of that stuff. I get to spend my time figuring out those really critical components because I don’t need to try to figure out how I’m going to make this badge that’s incredibly complex work on a really, really small stitched area. That’s not my challenge anymore and they love that.

Derek We actually just had this experience this week in presenting a brand system to our customer, to a client of ours. Somebody said, Well, what about this situation? They actually made a perfect recommendation of a version of the logo that needed to be added to the system to round out and address one specific way that they use their brand that we weren’t aware of.

Tucker This makes it easy from a board perspective or a GM’s perspective to look at this and say, I hired that person to make sure all of our communications are great, for example. We’re talking about a communications director. Their job isn’t to spend hours figuring out how to use the brand assets in their communications. Their job is to make sure the communications go out on time, are very professional, and communicate the things they need to communicate. If I’m a GM or I’m a board, I want that person focusing on that aspect of the job. I don’t want them distracted by the challenges of trying to figure out how to put this crazy, massive logo with all the detail in the world in it on the header of an email. That shouldn’t be their job. Their job needs to be focused on communication rather than placing the brand in all these different areas.

Derek Let’s talk about the third reason, the third way, that this really matters.

Tucker We’re going to get into member experience. I think everything in club comes back to member experience. That’s natural to say, How does this affect my members? How does this affect their experience on a day-to-day basis? And what this comes back to, if you don’t have a flexible brand system, let’s say you have one logo and it’s very, very structured. You don’t have a minimized version of it or any of that. What’s going to happen is it’s going to make members feel like the brand that they belong to, that the club, is a little out of date. But it also makes them feel like they’re not thinking about all the different ways. I think about when I walk into the club, to have this brand be flexible gives me this enhanced perception of my club to say, Wow, we look really professional. We look really great in our presentation. That’s this next level of brand experience that we can give for members because of this modern, adaptable way of looking at the system.

Derek You know, I think if a flexible system is done right, people won’t even notice the way that the brand is applied. In the places in which it lives will feel appropriate and natural and it’ll feel thoughtful like it was meant to be there. It’s when something shows up in a place where the proportions are off, or the legibility doesn’t work, or it feels like it’s not working right, that’s a sign of something that hasn’t been designed to be flexible. When we say flexible, and we talked about this in the previous conversation, we don’t mean to be overwhelming. We don’t mean to provide so many assets to the team at the club that this is a challenge to manage, but rather to put together just the right amount of pieces to cover all of the various situations in which this brand shows up. And like I said, I think if it’s done right, it’ll be seamless, it’ll be effortless, and people won’t notice. And that effortlessness, I think, will help that club come across as a little bit more contemporary, a little bit more future-minded, one that’s evolving versus just stamping that old crest over and over and over on everything.

Tucker Effortless is a great word to think about it. When we build out these brand systems, we want them to delight. We want them to stand out. But it should never be a hassle to represent your club. That should never be the case. If you are struggling with that representation piece to say you’re a member and you go, God, I’d really like to rep something for my club, but I can’t walk around with this logo that takes up almost my entire left chest because it’s just so big and gaudy that it just doesn’t work or I don’t even know what I’m looking at. That’s a problem. So what we try to do is make sure that it feels like it’s just naturally fitting into a system. It needs to naturally fit into its environment, and that’s physical and that’s digital. But it needs to look good. You call it the hat test. It needs to look good on merchandise for sure. It needs to look good on a hat. It needs to look natural. It also needs to look supernatural on signage. It needs to look natural on a website. It needs to look like it absolutely fits there because it was designed to fit there, but it needs to look as if it was just never a problem at all.

Derek Exactly. The hat test is a great one. A lot of clients that we talked to refer to the airport test. When they’re repping their club’s brand on the sleeve of the shirt that they’re wearing, and somebody else in the airport sees that and either says, Whoa, you’re a member somewhere. Tell me more about that. Or they recognize the brand and say, You’re a member of that club. Very cool. I have a friend there. Tell me more about that experience.

Tucker There’s this level of every member is different. Those in the club world who are on the management side know for a fact – that every member is different. There are pockets. A lot of memberships are the same, but the members inside those memberships have various opinions, various perspectives, and they have different preferences. So this flexible system will allow us to say some members love just the icon, nothing else. Maybe there’s a bird as a part of your logo. But maybe there are members who just love the bird and no words around it at all because they don’t want to rep all of the names and all of that stuff. They just want the symbol. They want to be simple. There are other members at that exact same club that might want that bird with the name of the club around it because they want people to know exactly where they come from and where they belong. And so what our job is, is to give those members the opportunity to represent their club the way that they want to represent it versus forcing them to only represent it all one way or another. So when we work with merchandising teams, we try to balance that out and say, If we have multiple logos here, let’s try to divide this up a little bit and make sure that we give members the opportunity to pick and choose the type of representation they want rather than forcing them into you get this logo, and that’s it. And you have to pick it for any of these pieces of apparel.

Derek That’s a perfect way to describe and explain adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness that in the end, it’s for your members. Your organization’s customers are your members. And if you can not only delight them with the way that they experience your brand, but you can engage them by giving them a little bit of choice of how to represent your brand – I don’t even know how to finish my sentence – that would be the epitome of flexibility.

Tucker There’s this level of members and guests. We don’t talk about guests that much on this podcast, but guests come up a lot in our behind-the-scenes conversations. How do we get guests to like that? And if you’re a guest of a club and you’re with a member and you love the experience, you probably do want something with the name on it. You probably want something to say, Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s more of a landmark type of purchase rather than an everyday purchase for you. So that also gives that opportunity to say, How do we delight guests and how do we give them the options that maybe our members don’t want because they see it every day? They don’t want all of this stuff. Whereas guests probably do want all of that because they only see it once or maybe even twice.

Derek I think we’ll have a whole separate conversation on member-only logos versus member-guest internal-only facing brand applications versus external. When is it right for you to have a well, if you know what this means, you know, versus this is a souvenir of someplace I’ve been and I want to rock that on my sleeve? That is absolutely part of what we think about when we are creating these systems.

Tucker So the takeaway is by embracing that flexible system that we’ve been talking about, Ppivate clubs really can maintain long-term relevance using these assets across various mediums moving forward in the ways that say, we can put this on physical, we could put this on digital. It does a lot of those things. It also enhances member engagement. It allows you to offer members certain ways that they get representation and that’s huge. It’s easy stuff. I mean, when we talk about taking a logo, for example, and breaking it down into the most complex, to the most simple, that’s not a ton of work. What the work is, is just establishing those guidelines and making sure your team understands it. But from there, it makes it so much easier for them to do their jobs and to place it properly. And then the third thing that we talked about is effectively communicating identity. That’s going to be huge when we talk about this goes on signage or this goes on a website or this just goes on the inside of a shirt or things like that. The difference in identity is it doesn’t need to be in your face all the time, but it should be a part of all the pieces of your club. It should find its way into every corner of the club so that when you look across it, it feels natural, it feels seamless. It doesn’t feel like it’s in the way at any point.

Derek We’ll come back to this conversation in a future episode with some visuals and we’ll share exactly what we mean by a flexible brand identity system. We’ll show you what logos and branding and colors look like in a handful of different applications so you can see what that means. But in the meantime, consider this approach. If you are rebranding your club, if you are refreshing your identity, consider looking at this approach in a modern way because we believe it will strengthen your brand, it’ll elevate your brand’s perception, it will differentiate you from these other clubs, and it will help you allow consistency in how you present and communicate that brand. And I think it’s going to help attract new right-fit members ultimately, especially if that symbol and that brand represents your club, your culture, what you’re all about, and where you’re going.

Tucker Good conversation. Till next time.

Derek See you next time, guys. 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.