No one likes a word salad. They're packed with pretense and everyone ends up with lettuce on their teeth. What am I talking about? Brand Platforms, of course.

Still not clear? Hang in.

A Brand Platform is a powerful tool for businesses of any size.  It contains everything from customer segmentation, brand positioning and strategy to value props, design language and messaging frameworks. When done well, it can drive business activity for many years.

Brand Platforms are often commissioned when a business is on the cusp of change. It is common to see one when a company launches a new vertical, makes an acquisition, repositions around a new segment or experiences rapid growth.

The scope is defined by the business transformation. An acquisition, for instance, could rip right to the studs of your company and change the entire brand strategy and visual identity (big deal), whereas, a brand refresh, could be more cosmetic with some nuanced shifts in values, customers and messaging.

What a Brand Platform is Not

Even with the context above, it is common for a Brand Platform to be confused with an ad concept known as a "Hook" which it very much is not.

The key thing to remember is that a Brand Platform has many deliverables and a Hook is one deliverable. Let’s start by defining a Hook: it is a cleverly written phrase that embodies a campaign strategy. Written to be clear, memorable and shareable, it often appears at the end of commercial or a static visual.

When used in a brand campaign, a Hook will capture the essence of your brand promise, but, within a seasonal campaign, it might persuade a target audience to take a specific action– like booking discounted inventory, entering a contest or buying something in a certain timeframe.

In either instance, the foundation for this Hook is rooted in a unique insight about your customers.  This insight typically identifies a problem–or set of problems–your customer wants to solve, and the Hook swoops in and resolves that problem in a novel way.

Key takeaway: a Hook is the 'big idea' that drives a brand or a seasonal campaign.

Hooks are for Fishing

To be clear, the Hook impacts a wide range of marketing outputs, generates buzz and drives traffic to your business.  However, Hooks within seasonal campaigns are time bound.  They are meant to be responsive– to things like holidays, big games or eclipses. 

In those instances, the Hook has a shelf life.  In fact, your seasonal marketing programs will often have multiple Hooks sequenced and allocated across different channels at different times of the year. 

While important to driving quarterly KRs, the Hook alone is not your Brand Platform.  That’s a different kettle of fish.  

Building a Brand Platform

Scoping a Brand Platform starts with understanding the type of change your business is navigating. For instance, launching a sub-brand to support a new product will have a different set of challenges than rebranding a company navigating an acquisition.

However, once you've reconciled those changes and implemented them into a company-wide Brand Platform, you are creating a powerful tool that product, sales, marketing, human resources, business development and others can leverage to attract customers, employees and investors. The goal is to make such a compelling argument that success becomes inevitable.

Given its impact, it is important that the following inputs are collected, analyzed and interpreted: stakeholder interviews, market analysis, competitive analysis, white space identification, customer segmentation, customer insights, journey mapping and brand positioning.

All of this intelligence is then channeled into a Brand Platform which distills the findings into a creative and emotional framework for TLDR consumption. This will include your brand belief, purpose, values, positioning, identity, personality, voice and target audience. You will often see the first creative expression of this platform take the form of a manifesto film or a vision deck, but it will also spiral out into a whole ecosystem of product, marketing, and employee communications.

But, this world-building exercise is just the beginning. Marketing uses it as a foundation for full funnel brand and seasonal campaigns. It can also become a briefing tool for new initiatives like product design systems, user experience flows, 'about' pages, onboarding materials, organizational restructuring, employee education, presentation decks, company comms, integrated marketing campaigns, ESG initiatives, PR, business dev and much more.

By its very nature, a Brand Platform is designed to be a change agent and a rallying cry for the business. By challenging assumptions, it clarifies values, sharpens focus and builds excitement for every stakeholders in the business .

When employees and consumers feel an authentic connection to something bigger than themselves–whether it's the products they purchase or the company they work for–productivity and consumption go up and marketing costs go down.

A well-crafted Brand Platform delivers this type of experience to your customers, your employees and your investors.

Insurance in Reverse

Take comprehensive insurance disruptor Lemonade as an example. Their Brand Platform is built on not being an Insurance Company.  They invite you to “Forget Everything You Know About Insurance”, and buck tradition at every turn through a unique flat fee model that returns excess premiums to a non-profit of your choosing. And they encourage you to think of them as an ‘insurance company in reverse’ by running their business as certified B-Corp with social impact as a legal requirement. 

This charming mix of transparency, fairness and good-will suffuses their entire customer experience, from their world-beating claims turnarounds– often measured in seconds– to their annual gift truck surprising policyholders.  Their use of pink, cursive, serif and line-art illustration reinforces their difference from the more rigid, masculine landscapes of rocks, whales and farmers that dominate the industry.  They have differentiated themselves as a multi-stakeholder, community-based product that values fairness. 

Notice how I’m not talking about Hooks and Taglines. When a brand has a strong platform, it's not just a catchphrase briefly trotted out for campaigns. There's a truthful, cohesive through line that customers are consistently exposed to across every touchpoint.

True Grit

Consider outdoor lifestyle outfitter REI as another good example. The Seattle-based retailer's Brand Platform is deeply rooted in a celebration of the outdoors and a membership-minded "We're all in this together" communications. This ethos percolates through their retail experience, from their cavernous store layouts evoking gorgeous national park visitors centers to their emphasis on free in-person classes and hands-on gear demos. 

The towering in-store displays feature images not of grinning athleisure models, but real outdoorsy members getting properly dirty on trails. And even during the holiday crunch, REI famously closes on Black Friday to encourage employees and customers to #OptOutside. It's a strong and coherent Brand Platform that reinforces their image as a facilitator of true adventure and outdoor fellowship, rather than just another place to mindlessly shop.

A Long Term Investment with Short Term Gains

Look under the hood of any iconic brand from Airbnb to RXBAR, and you'll find a rigorously defined Brand Platform fueling their tremendous success– a holistic operating system for distinguishing their narrative across every conceivable touchpoint. It's this level of alignment - this commitment to an anchoring brand philosophy - that elevates companies from unknown to iconic.

So whether you're building a startup or rebooting an established brand, defining your Brand Platform should be a key priority. In today's supercharged media silos, that strategic north star will keep your brand story clear and consistent as it scales.