I’ve been a marketer for over 20 years.

I’ve managed small marketing teams and led campaigns for Fortune 500 organizations. I’ve worked on teams of 7 and in an organization of 17,000.

And I’ve noticed one common problem that all marketers, creatives, and developers experience:

We all rely on siloed knowledge.

What do I mean by that? How many times have you found yourself recreating the same content over and over again? Hunting for the same product copy? Tracking down the correct press photo? Or trying to find that version of the corporate logo with a transparent background? And of course, getting the HEX code for the company color?

Marketers, creatives, and developers all need access to this type of core brand information every day. But too often, it is not readily available.

Color codes are always buried in a PDF style guide. You end up re-writing the value prop on again for the product feature you’ve talked about a dozen times. Press photos are on a shared network drive somewhere, saved under an indecipherable naming system. And then my favorite, you end up searching Google for your own company logo.

Maybe you’ve even created a system for yourself so you have quick access to important information like this. Maybe you store local copies of the the files you need regularly so they’re convenient for you. I know I even have kept an Evernote doc just listed with brand color codes so I have quick access.

The thing is this only solves the problem for you. What about the rest of the team?

This is the problem with a knowledge silo. Important information that everyone needs is segregated and stored in a whole mess of different places, and there isn’t a reliable single source of truth.

This problem is rampant. And it exists in every organization I’ve ever worked at.

Solutions do exist to tackle these challenges, but they’re often really expensive, too inflexible, or too restrictive.

So I’ve been in the process of developing my own solution to this problem of tribal knowledge.

It will be a full-featured brand management platform that I am calling Rubicon.

Since Rubicon will be software that helps teams manage their brand, and since this is the Brand Together podcast, I want to offer you a case study of building out the brand strategy and brand identity for this app. It will be a peek behind the curtain of building a brand as the brand is being built in real time.

What I’ve found out on the internet is that there are a lot of articles on the elements that should go into building a brand strategy. They define components like mission, vision, values, emotions, audience and a lot more.

But rarely do you get to see good examples deconstructed sowing each of those elements are actually built, and how they all work together to form a seamless whole. If you’re a new entrepreneur or a founding team, this can leave you can confused as you try to launch your own organization.

You feel a little bit like you’re stabbing in the dark. Am I writing a mission statement? Or is this really a vision statement? Is there a difference? Do I need both?

And this can really start to sound like semantics, especially as you’re trying to build your first product, get accounting set up, navigate hiring, build a website, and start attracting customers. It’s tempting to want to ignore brand strategy details.

But you can’t. I believe defining your brand strategy is the first and most important element to getting off the ground running strong. It’s more important than fleshing out your first product, and certainly more important than creating that company logo. 

Your brand strategy is the map showing you where you are today and what you aspire to be in the future. It casts the vision of the customers you want to serve, the challenges they face, and the solutions you will deliver to them to add value to their lives.

What could be more important than understanding how you will add value for your customers? If you’re not adding value for your customers, there is no way your product will be successful long-term, no matter how well it is built. Doing brand strategy work can’t be skipped.

But guess what? I’ve tried it. I’ve tried to launch products before without having a good grasp of my brand and seeking to understand who my customers really are. I’ve went out half cocked with a decently good idea, only to fall short because I didn’t take the time to define where the brand needed to go.

Why?

Well, part of me was energized to just get something – anything – out the door and start making money. So I poured all my energy into building the product.

But I was also lazy. Defining the brand strategy is hard head work. It can be a little abstract and seems far removed from building the actual tangible product, so you naturally want to avoid it.

Part of defining a strategy is doing competitive research. I won’t lie – there was a part of me that feared discovering that there might be competitors out there with ideas similar to mine. I wanted to stick my head in the sand and ignore the potential of others treading on turf I thought I’d carved out for myself.

The result of all these rationalizations for why I couldn’t be bothered to define my brand strategy is that I ceded control to my customers. I let them start making decisions for me. I allowed their demands, feature requests, and threats to take over my role in the decision-making process of where to take my company.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to customer feedback — listening to your customer is incredibly important. But you can’t sacrifice the long term mission of your organization based on the short term whims of your loudest customers. That’s a plan for failure.

So, I’m now on a new venture. I’m exploring how I can tackle the pervasive problem of tribal knowledge in organizations so that Rubicon can help them better manage their most important asset: their brand.

I want to invite you along on this journey with me. It is critical and necessary for me, and I hope it will be interesting and educational for you. You may have your own brand that you’re seeking to launch — this work can be a template for you as you tackle it.

My whole goal with Rubicon is to help teams move as one and brand together.

We’re going to do that on the Brand Together blog. I hope you’ll stay tuned and join along.