Find your brand DNA and get noticed with the help of Digital Surgeons

Find your brand DNA and get noticed with the help of Digital Surgeons

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.

Pete Sena has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Digital Surgeons. In the recent episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about how entrepreneurs can find the DNA for their business and identify their category of one. He also discussed how he helps them get noticed.

Image from LinkedIn

Cutting Through the Noise

The first thing that Pete does is ask entrepreneurs to tell him their story — what their company is and what they’re aiming to do. Ideally, clients should be able to answer this question in 30 to 60 seconds to 2 minutes. But typically, it takes him an hour or more to unwind the stories that his clients are trying to tell him.

Ultimately, what he does comes down to positioning and understanding how an entrepreneur should put themselves in a category of one — because there’s too much noise out there today. There’s Uber for dog walking. This business is kind of like that business.

With so much noise, consumers are easily mulled over with messages every single day. So he thinks a lot about how he can help clients tell stories in a way that will resonate — with their internal staff, their customers, and, more importantly, with the market.

Image from Pexels

Some entrepreneurs aren’t able to describe their business in a minute. He helps them address that through simplified frameworks, which Pete is a big fan of. He takes clients through a series of exercises and shares a number of conversations with key stakeholders.

Typically, he’ll interview the CEO and Founder, the Head of Technology, or the Head of Product (depending on the company's size). When he says “stakeholders,” it refers to anyone whose opinions or the things they do — how they communicate their product and company vision — would largely affect their business.

When he talks with these folks, he looks for what he calls “the intersect.” What is the pain point that the market or customer has? What is the promised land? When they deliver their product and the vision of their CEO or Founder, how does that vision and customer pain point intersect? Then, he finds a way to help them communicate that.

His goal is that clients should be able to tell their full story within two minutes or less when he gets back to them after six to eight weeks. They should be able to say it in a sentence or two — which they can already use on their website, branding, and other things.

Articulating Problems and Stories Better

Many find articulating customers’ problems and their stories difficult. But for Pete, the thing about problems is that if you can make them personal, it will be easier for you to articulate them in a way that matters.

A lot of times, he’d encounter CEOs and Founders who were trying to solve problems for a large Total Addressable Market (TAM). They’re looking for that product market fit: What’s the thing that everyone needs in this large market?

Often, they’d end up using a lot of jargon and getting stuck in their own smarts.

Take this statement for example: “We’re in the business of innovating transformational communication platforms that unlock new paradigms of growth.” In reality, no one talks like that. You can unwind that, simplify, and say, “We make it so people can talk to each other easily on a program.” It’s easier to comprehend and is more likely to prompt the audience to ask a question or lean in with curiosity.

Working with smart people (including those with a doctorate or in the academe), he realised that they often speak non-human communications — they use a lot of jargon and get lost in themselves.

Knowing Your Audience, What You’re Communicating, and Their Triggers and Touchpoints

Digital Surgeons has a framework called “The Brand DNA Framework” (which people can download to play with it themselves).

Pete believes that creativity and curiosity in the world — and in business — are broken. As he’s seen in his own story and the stories of the entrepreneurs he’s worked with, when you’re living a curious, creative life, you have a much higher chance of being happy in that life. And happiness, in many ways, often leads to success if done properly or with curiosity and creativity.

It’s why he offers their framework to everybody. This, along with other different toolkits, will help you identify your category of one.

Image from ThinkFWD

One of the simplest ones is the so-called ACT; it lets you figure out who your audience, what you are communicating, and what triggers and touchpoints will ultimately reach that customer.

In the case of Starbucks, for example, their audience would be busy entrepreneurs who don’t have much time but need a boost in the morning. Their audience is niche. Everyone wants and drinks coffee — but if you’re marketing to everyone, then you’re marketing to no one (in some cases). This shows what Pete always says: The riches are in the niches.

Now, what is Starbucks communicating? They’re telling their audience that they’ve got a fast, consistent, caffeinated beverage that will get you excited to jump out of bed in the morning.

Their triggers and touchpoints would probably be a billboard or an ad on Spotify, Instagram, or TikTok that showcases other types of entrepreneurs and how much they love the product. If that ad reaches you and you identify with those entrepreneurs, you’d also want to buy something from Starbucks.

This is one toolkit that he’s been using with CEOs. You can do it digitally or print it out yourself, fill out a bunch of different hypotheses, or even crumble them up — after all, they’re impermanent. People need to serve multiple types of audiences. Some call that the ideal customer persona (ICP) or customer avatar.

The Brand DNA Framework

Pete believes that all humans are storytellers. That goes back to the time when people were still living in caves. What he wants is to arm people with tools to do storytelling.

Image from ThinkFWD

These are the eight steps in their Brand DNA Framework:

1. Name and Architecture (What is your name? Keep in mind that your name says a lot about you)

2. Purpose (What is your purpose?)

3. Vision (What is your clear vision? What will the world look like in the future if you’ve achieved that promised land?)

4. Position (How do you position yourself in your category of one?)

5. Personality (How do you express your personality?)

6. Rituals (What are the things that people associate with your brand? In Starbucks’ case, it’s their tall, grande, and venti sizes. With search engine giant Google, it’s “I’m going to google that.” )

7. Voice (What’s your voice and tone?)

8. Visual language

The framework is downloadable and has questions and prompts that founders and their teams can go through. By answering those, Pete hopes to help them get to clarity.

By doing the framework and the ACT exercise previously mentioned, you can quickly and efficiently get to “the intersect” (some call it The North Star). As stated, it’s where the pain points of real people intersect with the promised land you’re going to deliver.

On Positioning and Vision

Pete also has a podcast called “Forward Obsessed,” where he helps entrepreneurs always think ahead. But how does he reconcile the duality that entrepreneurs have — the need always to be looking ahead and the need to address today’s customer, employee, and partner requirements?

He believes that a company or a brand’s position should focus on a 12 to 18-month time horizon, while their vision should be permanent. That vision should be the thing that you’re always chasing.

Positions and visions do change (because change is the only thing permanent in life). But he’d like to separate these two.

Image from Unsplash

Take a look at Volvo. Today, like their other peers, they’re also into electric cars. But their vision early on was to be a safe automaker. They were one of the first people to put seatbelts in automobiles. They invented the three-point harness. An interesting thing people don’t know is that they could have kept that technology and intellectual property to themselves. But they released it like how Tesla today has been releasing patents as an open source. With what they did, everyone could have the benefits of car safety.

Volvo has always stood for safety. And their vision is to be in a world where they’re in service to the drivers and be able to protect them. When they started to make it personal and emotional and build their story around that, it allowed them to let their position be changed and their vision to remain consistent throughout the years. Even when they’re making an electric car or a self-driving car, what matters is that Volvo is the safest car company.

However, car companies can be a little bit different from Software as a Service or SaaS companies (most of Digital Surgeon’s clients are SaaS companies). They’re different in the sense that the latter is using software to help address business problems like workflow issues.

When helping clients position their company, one of the exercises he gives is the classic elevator pitch exercise that goes like this: “For (target audience) who (main need/s), (your product or brand name) is a (category) that ( benefit to customer). Unlike (competitors and differentiating factors).”

For example, for Superhuman, it will go like this: For people who get a ton of emails and spend over an hour of their day labouring an email, Superhuman is the fastest email experience that lets you, busy entrepreneurs, spend less time in your inbox and more time building your companies and changing the world. Unlike other email platforms like Gmail and other things that slow you down and keep you bogged down with inbox zero, Superhuman gives you the shortcuts and the speed that you need so you can move at the speed of the market.

In their case, their positioning today is that they’re the fastest and the best email experience. Their vision is much bigger than that — to get entrepreneurs to spend less time bogged down in correspondence and more time transforming their companies.

Five years from now, if email goes by the wayside, Superhuman has a choice: They can keep chasing their vision, change their vision, or shift their position into email going away and being replaced by this or that.

Image from ThinkFWD

Doing this simple elevator pitch exercise will help you understand how to be in a category of one, what are the problems you’re trying to solve for your customers — and how you can unlock that through a language that gets you there.

What Sets Digital Surgeons Apart

One of the things that they at Digital Surgeons talk a lot about is what makes them different. A million agencies and consultancies exist that do branding, brand experience, and marketing. In the US alone, there are over 60,000 businesses that provide those. And the number’s probably much higher than that if you also consider the gig economy, solopreneurs, and single shops.

Their company’s differentiation is built around the concept that they design demand. But people need to see proof — they need to know you, like you, and then trust you. If you’re lucky, they’ll buy from you.

Digital Surgeons is a company selling to founders, brand and business leaders, challenger brands, and enterprises. They promise they will help you design demand and grow your company.

This goal is great but every other agency can say the same thing. What not every other agency or consultancy can say is that they are makers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

Pete is proud to say that they have built and launched software themselves. They understand what it’s like to make physical and digital things. They are marketers for both themselves and their clients. Most importantly, they’re entrepreneurs. He himself has been an angel investor for a number of years. He’s helped several companies get to IPO or initial public offering, and acquire and sell companies.

The proof that they were able to do all that is what sets them apart.

Image from Freepik

A lot of people can make you a website, design a brand, a logo, or a marketing campaign, but not many have done it for themselves and built a business. The experience of doing all this themselves has created a tremendous amount of empathy in Pete and his team. They think of customers’ money as if it’s their own.

Pete can say all these things because this is what their customers have been saying. Remember that a brand is a space you occupy in your customer's hearts, minds, and wallets. It's the thing that people say about you when you're not in the room.

If you’re trying to get noticed, listen to the market, your team, and your customers. Understand what others are saying, listen to their pain points, and think about how their pain points and your promised land can come together — and what that promised land looks like.

Learn more about them at www.digitalsurgeons.com.

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.  

Cover image by rawpixel.com on Freepik