Frames rule everything around me
Where this post started
Over the last few years, I’ve noodled over the problem of building a great brand in India.
What used to be a novel idea for marketers- that any attention is good attention- is now widely understood. All companies are content companies. The battle to produce louder, more outlandish content is on.
Therein lies the problem: how does a new brand break through the clutter?
So I talked to some friends…
In a world where distribution is expensive and mindshare is slim, these three guys have figured it out against the odds. Raj Kunkolienkar of Stoa School, Misbah Ashraf of Jar, and Ashwin Suresh of Loco and Pocket Aces.
While speaking to them I realized something important which I had been missing all along- building a brand isn’t just about picking a good mission and talking about it.
It is about making your brand a lived experience for customers.
It’s about creating frames that your customers can step inside, which make them feel like participants in the mission you’ve chosen. More on this below.
What does great branding look like?
(At the risk of being reductive) Great brands convince customers to make irrational decisions.
Why do people buy Apple when Androids are 50% cheaper? Because Apple is for artists. And green texts are ‘not cool’.
Why do young engineers work grueling 90-hour weeks at SpaceX? Because they are working alongside the smartest minds to make it possible for humans to exist on other planets.
Why do founders want to raise capital from the Tier-1 investors like Benchmark or Khosla, even if the deal is on less than ideal terms? Because these VCs know how to pick winners. If they back your startup, you’re a winner too.
These organizations have shrouded their reality in status and emotion, which makes their whole greater than the sum of the parts. They have the ability to make their customers feel rational while making an irrational choice.
How have they done it?
Picking your purpose
As is probably obvious to you, the meaning behind a brand has a powerful influence on consumer decisions. It entirely shapes the way consumers perceive a company.
Founders decide this purpose early on, usually in the form of a mission statement. But picking a good purpose is not enough. The only way to build a truly legendary brand is to find moments to authentically convey that purpose-- aka ‘creating frames’.
Any company can claim their purpose is to save the environment. They can claim to be a sustainable brand. But that doesn’t make them The Brand that environmentalists want to champion. You can’t build a brand as cherished as Patagonia by simply espousing your values on a website and doing some PR that no one reads.
How do you become The Brand? You must draw your customers into an emotional space where they can understand and connect with you. You must create authentic ‘frames’ that your customers can step through.
Meaning is experienced through frames
For many Tesla customers, driving a Model-S is not just about getting from point A to B. It’s about supporting the environment. It’s about being on the frontier of technology.
To a devout Teslan, the drive is much more than a car ride. It’s a special feeling. For a few moments, while driving that car, Tesla customers get to don a new identity. They are one step closer to an ideal version of themselves. They’ve gone “super-saiyan”.
That’s the kind of feeling that great companies can engender in customers. It’s that feeling that makes you want to tell others about a product you tried.
How do you get your customers to this place? How do you get them to conflate a product experience with something that is much more- a feeling that borders on transcendent?
Framing. Elon has spent the last decade owning the frame of electric vehicles and what they mean for the future of humanity. When you drive a Tesla, you too are part of this movement.
And, whether we realize it or not, we are constantly slipping in and out of frames each day. A few examples-
A marketing-led frame
Patagonia receives the same sustainability ratings as other competitors like The North Face and Columbia, yet their customers claim that Patagonia is a far more environmentally conscious brand.
Why? Their messaging and marketing campaigns communicate an extreme view on environmentalism, which translates to how customers perceive them. They exude their value of sustainability.
Patagonia’s “Don’t buy this jacket” campaign was designed to tackle the issues of consumerism head on. Patagonia recognizes that buying less is one step shoppers can take to reduce their eco footprint, saying “It would be hypocritical for us to work for environmental change without encouraging customers to think before they buy.” That’s a message that resonates with environmentalists.
Now, next time someone steps inside a Patagonia store, they know it’s entirely their own decision to buy. They are buying solely because they “need” the product, not because the company has pedaled some message. In fact, the company has gone so far as to discouraged them from buying too many products. It’s a powerful frame.
There’s that quote- “Those who least want power are most deserving of it.” Well for environmentally-conscious consumers, those who least want their business seem to be most deserving of it.
A service-led frame
Costco claims to be extremely customer service oriented, and if you’ve visited any location you know about their generous return policy. They allow members to return almost any product if they are not satisfied with it. Literally anything— electronics, appliances, and even food items.
This is a powerful frame for Costco. When a customer walks into their store, they can rest easy knowing they won’t experience buyer’s remorse. By creating an environment where customers can return a product at any time if they are not satisfied with it, they are more likely to feel confident in their purchases and to buy more things during a trip to Costco.
A powerful frame that changes the shopping experience and results in more spend per store visit.
A personal frame
It’s not just companies and marketers that create frames. We do it all the time, with each other.
One common way that people use frames is by ‘name dropping’. By getting you to associate them with other people you may know and respect, they take on a higher status. This is a frame.
They are bending their perceived status. They want you to interact with them through this distortion field, rather than meet them in reality as they are. (Thanks Raj, for this one)
So what’s the TLDR?
In short, frames rule everything around us. You too must learn to control the frame through which customers interact with your product.
These frames can and should be placed everywhere- at the brand awareness stage, all the way down to core product experience and customer support. In the Costco example, their generous return policy is a frame that comes at the very end of the shopper’s journey, but has a powerful upstream effect on purchasing decisions.
Frames are not just for big companies. To win at any scale, you must create and own frames. We call this a “unique value proposition”. But it’s the “proposition” part where most marketers fail. We list reasons why we are better or different than competitors, but fail to translate that to a “feeling” that customers can experience.
Feature comparison lists don’t convert customers to champions. Missions and Frames do. Here are a few examples of startups that have nailed framing--
Stoa: Good vs. Evil
Many of you know Raj because of his active voice on Twitter and his authentic, even outlandish, branding work. Over the past 2 years, he’s successfully deployed an excellent frame for Stoa’s mission: a ‘David vs. Goliath’ story.
The ‘Goliath’ in this story is the Traditional MBA run by old-school administrators who prey on the millions of students desperate to find good jobs.
Enter Stoa, the unlikely hero. Study part-time, learn useful information, and then get an excellent job at a modern technology company.
When students get admitted to Stoa, they feel they are joining a tight cadre of independent thinkers. They are outsiders, taking a contrarian-right bet against the status quo. It’s an incredibly powerful feeling and results in a lot of student-led promotion and word of mouth.
(I can personally vouch for the program. We’ve hired several Stoans and they are excellent.)
Jar: It’s about great people
From Day 1, Misbah has been dedicated to working only with the most talented product builders in the country. For him, the single most important input for a successful business is having great people.
Every executive team says this, but the team at Jar lives it. Every quarter Misbah brings together hundreds of product managers to talk about user insights and to share learnings.
The conversation is not about Jar. It’s about the craft of building great products. Hundreds of PMs show up for dinner and regularly stay until 3 am in heated discussion.
Over time, the best builders have come to see Jar as the place where they can do their life’s best work. It’s the reason that several of Jar’s top executives are successful ex-founders. Jar is a place where good ideas get heard and meritocracy reigns.
Misbah’s careful cultivation of this frame will result in years of positive downstream effects for the company.
Loco: Meeting your users where they are
A core part of Loco’s mission is community building. So when they originally launched the platform, they decided to do everything they could to make the platform feel like a real community.
A few months in, an interesting trend emerged- Everyday, users would casually ping moderators on the Loco platform, asking questions like “how’s your day?” and “what are you having for lunch?”.
Rather than ignore these seemingly insignificant messages, Ashwin decided he would personally respond to as many as he could. This was unscalable of course, but created an important frame for early users. One that made them feel they were part of a real community where they could meet the admins and get to know them as humans.
The Loco team understood that “community” wasn’t just a value to talk about, but something they had to cultivate intentionally, even painstakingly, starting with the smallest interactions.
To wrap it up
Why share these examples of Stoa, Jar, and Loco?
Because it’s easy to point to established brands and stitch together a story about frames retroactively a.k.a. “hindsight is 20-20”.
What’s more telling is when talented startup founders who have limited capital and time still dedicate so much time and attention to crafting the right frames.
As founders and operators, it is our job to act on behalf of our mission. Not just to build great products, but to find those reality bending frames that make our customers feel they are on our mission with us. That’s the secret sauce. Use frames to bring your customers on your mission with you.