A brand strategist explains why defining what your brand fights against matters as much as what it stands for. Their agency rallied around one villain: content that wastes people's time.
The thing that was really hard was figuring out what our villain was. What was the thing that we were trying to unify the market around that we could all rally against. I'm typically like, I want to build things up, let's build things up together as opposed to tear things down together. But it's just impossible to look at the market and see that the way Drift did it with forms. In any classic brand story there is a villain that you are trying to attack and in our case that villain was content. But it took us a lot of workshopping and talking and this was not just like I didn't have a two hour calendar block on my calendar one Wednesday to say come up with the sweet fish villain. It doesn't work that way. It's lots of conversations, it's lots of feedback on LinkedIn posts, it's hours long conversation with different people on our team where we're just trying to wrestle through what is the thing that we are ultimately fighting against.
