Identity, Story and Conversion: How the Three Parts of a Brand Fit Together

Agencies like to name their process. This is not one of those. What follows is simply the three pieces of work that make up building a brand that earns business, the order they are normally tackled in, and the places where that order breaks down — because it does, and pretending otherwise is how sensible plans go wrong.

The three parts, and why they get built in this order

The order is practical rather than philosophical. You cannot write the story before you have decided what the business is, and rebuilding a website before either is settled means paying to encode an unmade decision in HTML. Almost every expensive rebuild that disappoints started at the bottom of that list.

Identity: making the decision you have been avoiding

Identity work sounds abstract and is mostly a series of narrow, uncomfortable choices. Which customer are you for. Which work will you turn down. What do you charge, roughly, and are you the cheap option or not. What is the one claim a competitor could not honestly copy.

The test is whether anything on the list would irritate someone. A positioning that pleases everybody has not decided anything, and it produces exactly the copy you would expect: quality, service, tailored solutions, a passion for excellence. Every business in your category says it, which means none of them are saying anything.

• A named customer, narrow enough that some readers rule themselves out
• A claim only you would make, and could defend if challenged
• An honest position on price — not a number, but where you sit
• The work you decline, written down, so the team can decline it

It is worth separating two things that get conflated here. Consistency means people recognise you as the same organisation across a website, an invoice and an email. Distinctiveness means they can tell you apart from your competitors. Consistency is largely a discipline problem. Distinctiveness costs you something, which is why so many brands stop after the first.

Story: saying it early enough for anyone to notice

Most brand stories are not badly written. They are late. The particular, only-you sentence exists, but it sits in the fourth paragraph after some throat-clearing about a rapidly changing market.

That delay is expensive. Drawing on a Microsoft analysis of more than 205,000 page visits, Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group concluded in 2011 that users often leave a page within 10-20 seconds, and that keeping someone for several minutes means getting your value proposition across within about 10 seconds. The same group’s 2008 study of 45,237 page views found that on an average visit users have time to read at most 28% of the words, with 20% the more realistic figure. Both are old studies, and nothing since suggests people read more than they used to.

Write the last paragraph first. If the distinguishing fact about your business is not in the first screen, it is not in the story at all.

In practice that means conclusions in headings rather than at the end of sections, benefits before mechanisms, and a ruthless attitude to the paragraph that restates the paragraph above it. Proof belongs early too — a named client, a photograph of your own work, a figure the client agreed to. A story with nothing checkable in it reads as advertising, and gets the attention advertising gets.

The site: where the decisions meet the load times

The third layer is where abstractions become concrete and where the money usually goes. It is also the layer with the most measurable evidence behind it.

Speed is the clearest example. In Milliseconds Make Millions, research commissioned by Google and carried out by 55 and Deloitte across 37 brands, a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed moved 3.2% more shoppers from a product listing to a product page and 9.1% more from that page to the basket, with retail spend up 9.2% and travel bookings up 10%. Those are retail and travel figures rather than a universal law, but the direction is unambiguous and the intervention is tiny. Most sites lose more than that to oversized images and unused scripts.

The rest of this layer is similarly unromantic. Fewer form fields. One primary action per page rather than five. Your own photography instead of stock. Clear contrast and labelled fields, which help everyone and are legally sensible besides. None of it is brand strategy, and all of it decides whether the brand strategy ever gets read.

Where the neat sequence breaks down

Here is the awkward part, and the reason to distrust any agency diagram with three tidy tiers. The customer does not experience the layers in the order you build them.

Lindgaard and colleagues at Carleton University, writing in Behaviour & Information Technology in 2006, found that visual appeal ratings from a 50 millisecond exposure were highly correlated with those from a 500 millisecond exposure. The look of the page is judged before a word of your carefully sequenced story is read. Worse for the tidy model, Tuch and colleagues tested 119 real websites for the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2012 and found that low visual complexity and high prototypicality — pages that look like what people expect that kind of page to look like — produced the most favourable first impressions, detectable at 17 milliseconds.

So the third layer arrives first, and it rewards conventionality, which is exactly what the first layer is trying to escape. That tension is real and does not resolve neatly. What it argues for is restraint: an ordinary, legible, fast structure carrying distinctive content, rather than an unusual structure carrying ordinary content. Be conventional in the plumbing and specific in the substance.

If you can only do one

Most businesses cannot commission all three at once, and the honest advice is not to try. Do the deciding. It is the cheapest of the three, it can be done by the people who already run the business, and it is the only one that makes the other two possible.

A clear decision written on one page will improve your existing website immediately, because you will finally know which half of it to delete. It will improve the sales calls, because everyone will describe the business the same way. And when there is eventually a budget for a rebuild, the brief will take a morning instead of a quarter — which is usually where the money went in the first place.