- kevan's Newsletter
- Posts
- 53. Why it’s so hard to stand for something
53. Why it’s so hard to stand for something
And 5 steps to take the leap and make your stand
You are not wrong to feel as if the world is already full of opinions. Go figure, then, that having an opinion and taking a stand remains one of the hardest things about building a brand and putting our creative work out there.
In our advisory work at Bonfire, we encounter this friction all the time where companies are reluctant to take a stand on something they believe in. We’ve even experienced it ourselves, in our own work with the Bonfire brand, when it comes to talking about the stuff that really matters to us.
Why the hesitation? In our experience, there are a few different reasons that might be at play (sometimes all at once!):
You don’t want to alienate people. In a business sense, this could mean alienating potential customers, which means alienating potential dollars…and few CEOs are interested in that.
It’s scary showing people your true self. Telling your story with conviction requires a good amount of bravery and vulnerability. We’ve all spent time on the internet and know how judgy the place can be. Being judged doesn’t feel good.
You might not know what it is you stand for—or you haven’t yet found the words to express it. The process of discovering your why is both a deep thinking exercise and a writing exercise, and sometimes one or the other just doesn't come as easily as you’d wish.
Part of our job with our Bonfire agency is to help clients articulate what it is they value. Part of our job as business owners is to do this work ourselves, too. So we have a fair bit of practice overcoming the discomfort of standing up so that you can stand out.
In our experience, having a clear point of view and standing for something is one of the single biggest factors behind the most iconic brands. Being authentic toward your purpose brings along so many benefits: attracting values-aligned people to your cause, clarifying the messaging you put out in the world and the way that others experience the real you, and building trust, loyalty, and real relationships with customers, audiences, friends, and fans.
We’re happy to share some of the ways we approach this work in case it sparks any reflections for you and your pursuits, no matter what they might be.
How to stand for something, in 5 steps
Step 1: Figure out your why
To take a stand, you must know what to stand for! This is one of the reasons keeping some businesses and individuals from taking the leap, and we like to solve for this Big Why by helping to articulate a purpose.
In the branding world, a purpose statement is the reason why your company exists. We’ve asked the Big Why to countless founders and marketers, and we often need to couch it with the disclaimer: “Why does your business exist, apart from making money?” You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) about just how many businesses are in business to make money, full-stop.
One of our favorite ways to land on a Big Why is to use a purpose framework called The Big IdeaL, which was popularized by the advertising agency Ogilvy (the agency that inspired the Mad Men TV show 🍸). The Big IdeaL works like this:
Identify a tension or trend that exists in the broader culture today.
Identify the best version of your brand or product or software.
The intersection of these two is your Big IdeaL, your reason for being
Check out some examples here.
To complete the exercise, you fill in the blank “We believe the world would be a better place if _________.”
By nature of this Mad Lib sentence, this means that you have to stand for something. You are framework’ed into taking a stand. (And the answer can’t be: “We believe the world would be a better place if we made ourselves more money.” Against the rules.)
Step two: Name your fears, then file them away in the fears folder
I have a widget on my phone’s home screen that displays favorite quotes, notes, and images from a Pinterest board of encouragement. Each time I open my phone, I see a new random image. This one delighted me today:
This is the beauty of purpose-driven brands and standing for something. If it all works out, what an amazing impact you’ll have! What an amazing story you can tell.
Of course, to get there requires navigating a fair amount of fears.
Last week, we shared about the desires at the heart of our business, to purchase a real-life property in France—yes, a chateau is on the wish list, and yes, chateau means “castle” in French!—where we can host in-person experiences to celebrate creativity and artists and community. Our fears with saying this out loud were legion:
What will people think about the idea?
What will people think about our business acumen?
What will people think about our fiscal responsibility?
Will this make us more or less attractive to work with?
What if people don’t “get it”?
What if people hate France?
What if people hate chateaux?
What if people are jealous and/or secretly hate us now?
What if we never make good on this promise and now it’s out in the world for everyone to see?
Phew!
Having gone through many purpose exercises before, we know that every creative decision and business decision will come with some fears. It’s normal. It’s to be expected. It is a feature, not a bug.
It’s healthy to acknowledge these fears and also to have a safe place to put them so that they don’t get in the way of you actually acting and taking a stand and staying true to you. Label the fears, file them away, and don’t forget to think about the other end of the spectrum where all the light and possibility and how-great-it-could-be exists.
Step three: Invite, don’t alienate
As we mentioned, one of the big fears around a clearly-stated, opinionated YOU—whether it’s you as a brand or you as a person—is that it might scare some people away. It can still be scary even if we know intellectually that there is value in having a discrete audience and differentiated positioning. You want to appeal to the people who are most likely to want to be near you. A good amount of business churn and relationship churn can be chalked up to a mismatch of expectations.
But it’s not a total us vs. them situation.
In fact, an authentically built, genuinely realized persona will attract just as much as, if not more than, it repels. It will bring in the right kind of people who “get” you from the get-go. If it does end up turning some people away, that may not be a bad thing. Often the ones it turns away are the ones who wouldn’t have stayed.
Being authentic is attractive to others for several reasons:
It lets people know exactly what they’re getting into. This level of expectation-setting can be calming and reassuring to new joiners, even if they don’t immediately fit the mold of your ideal audience person.
It lets you stay true to your message. Consistency is one of the biggest elements in building trust, and being comfortable with yourself means that you can maintain consistent communication, content, output, and vibes because you are always you.
It lets people connect to attributes they aspire to. Self-esteem is one of the sought-after traits; by being yourself, you exude a level of self-esteem, belief, and power that you might not even realize!
Step four: Avoid hedging, unless it makes you feel better
Note to self: That headline is itself a hedge!
See how easy it is to pull back on a hard opinion?
To give another example, let’s say that we were to be tempted to hedge with some of the purpose-driven language with our business.
At Bonfire, we are FOR creative people.
We believe that everyone is creative. (Hedge on a hedge: we believe that everyone has the potential to be creative, if they want to, if they are able, willing, or interested in leaning into this part of themselves.)
Therefore, our job is easy! We’re for everyone!
This same hedging formula can apply to any company. You can back into a safe opinion by choosing to be for a universal trait that everyone has, thereby being “for” something and also “for” everything. And sometimes it takes a loophole like this to get brand purpose work off the ground. If you’re finding that your team or your company does not have the appetite to be full of big opinions from day one, then maybe this is your strategy: Pick something you believe in, something most people believe in, and use that as your starting point.
However, a couple things to note:
Hedging rarely makes for iconic brands in the long-term.
There will come a point in time where even the most palatable of opinions will be put to the test. The zeitgeist will give you litmus tests to see how strongly you really feel about your beliefs—the politics of elections, the threat of layoffs, crisis comms, customer complaints, etc.
Step five: Take heart in all the hero-villian stories out there
Some of the most famous storytelling frameworks promote the virtues of a hero-villain structure in your story. Brand frameworks have borrowed this language to arrive at a similar tension: your brand is elevated when it is pitted against a competitor, against the status quo, against the culture. An upstart AI photo editing app’s enemy might be Photoshop. A global hiring platform’s enemy might be Return-to-Office mandates. A chocolate company’s villain might be child labor (literally, this is the enemy of Tony’s Chocolonely).
And this should give storytellers and brand-builders and opinion-adverse individuals encouragement to really go for it and to not be afraid to put yourself in positive opposition to something else.
Ideally we’re not creating villains out of other humans, of course. But instead, don’t shy away from having a villain that is a well-known problem, a universal trend, an intriguing concept, or even just a vibe. Villains as a gateway to stronger stories—even Disney knows how important this stuff is.
Over to you
Do you feel like you’ve taken a stand with an opinionated point of view, for your brand, your business, or your creative work? What have you found helpful? What have you found to be a hindrance? We’d love to know!
For more…
Follow us on LinkedIn and on Instagram. Stay tuned to our Substack space for new community features and ways to meet your fellow subscribers.
1:1 coaching and mentorship
Team workshops and consulting for marketing and leadership
Speaking and appearances on podcasts and at events