In our
last post, Derek mentioned that change without chaos requires knowing what should never change. Easily said, but in practice that's often the hardest part. Defining and protecting a brand's Core is a key need that often gets lost in the daily business of launching and running a successful brand, but without a clear definition of Core, a brand either crystallizes, becoming inflexible to the changing needs of the consumer and culture at large, or disintegrates into the demand of "now."
Action sparks our clients: new packaging, a new site, a new innovation launch. In opening conversations, we often hear that the Core is settled. Once stakeholder interviews start, we find it isn't nearly as universally held. In one round of discussions, we might hear sales say "we exist for the x consumer," production say "we exist for a dedication to craft," the CEO say "we exist to serve x position in the marketplace," and marketing say "we exist for the vision in our brand book." In these cases, we recommend spending a bit more time defining their Core, because a new look can't fix a brand that doesn't know what it believes.
A Level Deeper Than "Why"
A lot of smart people have thought about the Core, and that thinking influences our approach every day.
Simon Sinek’s "start with why" is still a darling of brand marketing fifteen years after publishing his book by that name. In
Built to Last, Collins and Porras argued that enduring companies preserve their core while pushing everything else forward. We aim to go a level deeper: What is a Core made of? How can we tell whether a stated Core is real? To do this, we look at Core as two essential elements: conviction and equities.
Conviction is the belief a brand will defend–even when defending it is inconvenient. Equities are the symbols that people connect to your conviction, even when your name isn’t attached. They're the visual, verbal, and sensory signals that carry your conviction. Understanding and defining these elements of Core lets brands move through Culture, evolving while staying essentially themselves.
It's a simple formula:
• Hold your brand's conviction. It doesn't move.
• Protect the equities. They move slowly, and only with evidence.
• Evolve expression. It moves as often as Culture and the business need.
That's why we say, "Change anything but your conviction." We believe conviction is what a brand stands for, and equities are how people recognize it. When we understand our core conviction, we know what to hold, what to protect, and what's free to evolve.
What's best is that understanding your brand's Core improves every kind of brand moment. At launch, we state a conviction and choose which equities to build. When we expand, we carry the conviction into new territory while selecting the equities that must be retained. A rebrand keeps the equities people hold onto and changes the rest.
Step One: ask the people inside
Because Core is made of two parts, identifying it is a two-step process. It doesn't need to take six months, but it needs to be holistic. The most reliable way we've found to identify a conviction is to ask the people inside the company. We interview across levels and functions, ask everyone the same questions, and compare their answers. One of our favorites: "Tell me about a time we turned down an opportunity because it wasn't true to who we are."
When the Core is real, the answers converge. We hear the same stories and the same throughlines. When it isn't, it breaks down in familiar ways: split by department, interchangeable with a competitor, describes the product instead of a belief, or maybe it's only understood at the top of the organizational chart.
Step Two: ask the world at large
Step two is equities, because a Core isn't only what a brand believes. It's also how the brand’s conviction is known by the world. Measuring equities checks what customers actually recognize, and that takes a quantitative baseline. This baseline measures which of a brand's assets people understand as symbolic of the brand: colors, shapes, characters, phrases, sounds, pack structures. What is liked and understood? And importantly, what is distinctively owned by the brand and also communicates conviction?
Teams tend to overrate the assets they look at every day and underrate the ones customers actually hold onto. The gap between step one and step two is often the most useful finding. We've learned this through many trial-and-error conversations with our clients when determining the stretch of a brand. Until we codified a baseline for distinctiveness, we often found ourselves at odds over what could change and by how much. With baseline testing, assets sort themselves into tiers. Those that people both recognize and link only to your brand are the ones to protect. Assets people half recognize can be strengthened. And ones that nobody links to are free to evolve. Regular measurement means that equity is tracked over time, so the next change is made with evidence rather than guesswork.
Moxie Sozo in Flux
When thinking through our own repositioning, we considered our Core from the perspective of conviction and equities. As Derek mentioned, some of our deepest held attributes are "grit, determination married with intelligence, creativity." But our conviction, the one that hasn't changed in 25 years, is that creative work earns its place by what it does for a business over time, not by how it looks at launch. That conviction plays out in every conversation at Moxie Sozo. Making something not just beautiful, but successful, is our chief concern.
Our equities are just as simple: our distinctive name, our independent agency status, and our deep relationships with purpose-driven brands. Clients know us and come to us for that reputation. We're also building newer equities, like the Moxie M and our use of blue, and we're giving them time to earn recognition. Expression is where we flex (or Flux). Over the years, we've put the same conviction into different words, from Make Art Work to Brand Flux. The positioning has changed to keep up with Culture, but the conviction behind them hasn’t.
Conviction tells a brand what to hold. Equities last only as long as people keep recognizing them, and those people keep moving, along with the categories they shop. Keeping up with them is Culture, and that's where we'll go next.
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