Playbook-itis

Is your brand suffering? Check for these common symptoms.

In case of confusion, I am not a toddler in a business suit. I was a toddler in a business suit—that is me in my profile pic. It’s from a campaign my dad did when he was a creative director at Bozell (see below). In an incredible feat of foreshadowing, I did not grow up to be an account executive, but a ~*✰crǝàtive✰*~, just like my father, and my father’s father before him.

I was also VP of brand development at Glossier, where I literally wrote the brand playbook. Ergo, I’m often asked for advice from other brand-builders. I’m both very opinionated (as are you, those are the rules on this sub) and terribly verbose, so I have a hard time giving it. My most useful way of couching advice is to warn of common pitfalls when doing things according to some assumed playbook of successful contemporary brands. This article, “Playbook-itis,” is simply a list of things to consider, which are top of my mind today, and it may or may not turn into a series. Despite what the below commands to “stop” imply, I in no way claim to be the last word on these things, and am only familiar because I’ve done them myself. I see entire universes of exciting possibilities when expressing a brand. I hope you find this list energizing—do not be discouraged!

Regards,

Annie

Stop the royal “we.” I’ll be the first to admit, I find this challenging. However, avoiding first-person plurals in your copy will unlock new phrasing and sentence structures, helping your brand voice feel distinct from the masses of brands which default to what has become standard approachable brand-speak. Using “we” feels natural because your company is, theoretically, not a single person. However, it’s also silly to think about your whole team sitting around the conference table and agreeing on every line of copy as a group—“We love our customers!” Lies!

As a customer of several brands myself, I think it sounds cloying, like I’m being spoken down to. It’s subtle and maybe nonsensical, but even when a customer service rep replies using first-person singular vs. first-person plural, it makes the interaction feel more genuine. I know the entire company is not beside themselves because my order was incorrect, but it’s nice to have my frustration acknowledged by the actual person with whom I’m communicating.

There are rare exceptions, however I advise copywriters to write as if “we” is not an option.

On that note, stop saying that you do things “thoughtfully.” This is table stakes terminology and begs the question, what doesn’t your business do thoughtfully?

[Group activity: Drop your favorite trite brand-defining adjective below in the comments.]

Stop with the three great icons. This is for our digital designers, for whom I have the utmost reverence. I’m more of the Rick Rubin school of creative direction, in that I have no practical training in things like graphic design, typography, and other skills essential to my craft, so those who do these things well are my favorite people to have around. Anyway, the icons—you know what I’m talking about—the three high-level selling points about your business or product represented by three little emoji-style icons that you’ll find in a row across a horizontal interstitial about halfway down as you scroll a homepage, product page, or About Us page. This format is used so much across d2c brands that it appears to your audience as filler content and subliminally categorizes your company as not especially unique or innovative.

Bigger picture here (and truly this is the overall message of this article), is that I suggest starting with a white page on digital design, instead of filling a Shopify template with content. This forces you to really consider what things are essential to communicate, what features are absolutely necessary, so you avoid content bloat and an inefficient user experience. Your brand messaging should inform your design, not the other way around.

Stop stealing content*. This includes inspo pics and repurposed UGC, across all channels. One, people don’t like when you take their things without asking. The creator movement, which rose from the digital ether with the war cry, “Fuck you, pay me!” circa 2015, was driven in no small part by the frustrations of creatives who saw their work ripped and reposted in low-res screenshots with a cheeky credit tag, as if they should be so grateful for the exposure, instead of companies hiring them to create original content. You can also get sued, I’ve seen it happen!

Two, it says, “we’re too cheap to invest in content creation.” But didn’t Glossier do this? Isn’t this just…the internet? Yes, and no. Content culture has evolved over the past decade, and since “found images” and “mood boards” (as they were once so mildly called in bygone times when blogs ruled the digital world) have now become so much part of the basic brand playbook, it no longer is considered tastemaking. In 2024, you are in no way adding value amongst the vast sea of inspo accounts by reposting content. It’s ironic because brands use inspo images as a way to imply a certain taste level, giving a halo-effect to the brand, supplying their followers with some air of aspiration…but is it not simple fakery? What’s the difference between a brand posting a screen shot of a dream interior ripped from Pinterest, and an influencer taking selfies in outfits they can’t actually afford, only to return them after?

From what I understand, social media editors no longer need to stoke the flames of engagement by posting on some arbitrary schedule. This frees them from the rat race, the need to constantly throw in reposts as filler content. They can now use that energy to create original content that has a real chance of breaking through the noise and saying something consequential about their brand.

Three, it doesn’t work. At this point, every existing inspo image has already been posted and reposted, so, instead of setting your brand apart as a thought leader, you’re making your brand a participant. Even Meta is cracking down on brands that recycle found/stolen/aspirational/inspo images, dinging accounts that do this and favoring original content via the algorithm.

Four, there’s no excuse. I remember the days when a screenshot of a juicy grapefruit half (maybe from Tumblr, maybe Twitter, who’s to say?) would outperform an original campaign image that took six people six months of planning to produce. It was demoralizing, and hard to even make a business case for creating original content. But as years have passed, and many a scrappy content creator has proven, any creative team worth their salt can and should be using the tools they have at hand, at whatever budget, to think up on-brand ways to produce original content. We’ve seen for years that lo-fi content generally outperforms high-touch imagery on social media (that’s absolutely NOT to say brands shouldn’t invest in high-touch assets, which I’ll write about some day). However, when presented the choice of stealing content to repost, and creating something new with nothing but a dream and your camera app, choose the latter. People who call themselves social media geniuses, yet simply aggregate others’ work, should be given licenses so they can have them revoked.

Finally, five—it’s bad form to take UGC and change it. This is why I used “repurposed” instead of “reposted” at the top of this rant. People often don’t realize that UGC stands for “User Gifted Content,” so don’t bite the hand that feeds you by using their image or video without asking permission for things like ads, or any content wherein you edit the original in some way (adding text overlays, etc). While most of the time your customers who post UGC are fans of the brand and would be honored to have their content repurposed, that’s not always the case. Better to ask, and foster a relationship with the creator. I do think that reposting UGC on the same platform with credit is fair game.

Stop shoehorning a founder’s story. You may very well not need a founder’s story, or to even include your founder as part of your customer-facing messaging. Into The Gloss and Nécessaire cofounder Nick Axelrod-Welk and I discussed this at length in a recent episode of our beauty news podcast, Eyewitness Beauty. (Similarly, we discuss our confusion over Bella Hadid’s new brand’s point of view, or lack thereof—an example of a founder who has a lot to work with in terms of story, but needs a major edit.)

In researching how the popular brand Youthforia so impressively fucked up by attempting to pass off actual black pigment as foundation for Black people, we realized that the founder, the face of the brand, had no background in beauty before starting Youthforia. In fact, we found that she’s not even gen Z, the consumer base her brand was so lauded for appealing to. What is she? She’s a millennial start-up graduate who wanted to start her own company. I know the feeling. So, she sort of defined some white space (“makeup so good for you, you can sleep in it!”), based on a problem that maybe didn’t really need an entire brand to solve (“I travel a lot, so I need makeup I can fall asleep in! On the plane!”), raised some money (anywhere between $400k-$2mil depending on which AI-generated profile you read across sites like Crunchbase and Pitchbook), and figured out how to make the associated products. She had a ton of success marketing on Tiktok, which should be at the top of her skillset where “developing makeup products beloved by the Tiktok generation” used to be. The thing is, a lot of successful companies are started by founders who have no real founder-category fit. Not a lot of them put that founder front and center.

The “founder’s story” is a potentially fatal playbook trap—making your brand unnecessarily synonymous with your founder, a human… flawed… free-willed… born a sinner in the eyes of God. Unless the founder is a true expert in the category, and/or is willing to make themselves the face of the brand—for better and for worse—consider not making them part of your brand story at all. That’s not to say they should be completely anonymous, or that a brand should go to great lengths to hide them, but brand people should strategize where their founder’s resume and skillset truly adds value to the brand story. And the angle needs to be good—for instance, not everyone who had acne as a teenager should start a brand of acne-fighting products. What can you say about your founder that no one else can claim?

Operationally, your founder might be a genius, and can turn a profit by creating a business out of literally any product. This person needs to be put in front of investors, industry press if you’re looking to raise your series A, and when the company does well, let them loose to do some interviews about your competitive advantages that aren’t normally discussed when it comes to your category. Then, back in the basement they go! Don’t make the mistake of styling them as a category expert, just because you say they are.

I suspect that Youthforia would have had an easier time repairing the damage done had they not positioned the founder as the expert behind their products. Imagine if she had been more behind the scenes, and, as any founder and CEO should, she came forth to take accountability. She could have said, truthfully (with some edits, don’t quote me):

“I’m Fiona, I’m the founder of Youthforia, and I apologize for the approach I took in developing our foundation. Although I had some early success with personally overseeing the development of our beloved x, y, and z products, I do not have a background in makeup artistry, nor product development, and I completely missed the mark on this shade range. This has been a painful, but much needed learning experience about my own limitations, and I am making it my priority to surround myself with the best PD talent to better serve Youthforia’s customers going forward.”

Call me crazy (you wouldn’t, because that would make you crazy), but if this were the first time most customers were introduced to her, I feel like the brand might have been cut a teensy bit of slack. Assuming the best of people—that this product was truly a gross error, and not some deliberate, nefarious message—it’s a relatable tale for anyone who has experienced an ambitious streak: she was overconfident, and found herself in over her head.

Instead, she had already been introduced in all of the brand’s beauty press speaking to her wunderkind ability to create great makeup products, and her face is all over Youthforia’s socials—with multiple extremely cringey pieces of content created to convince her audience, and apparently herself, that this black shade of foundation worked on real human skin. Oh, and she was on Shark Tank. At the time of writing this, she has posted and since deleted a poorly-received apology video, and the brand has yet to release another statement despite the controversy bubbling up over a week ago. Youthforia has been dropped by retailers including Revolve and Credo, and major influencers have denounced the brand. All of which is to say, I’m sure at this point, she wishes she had a bit more plausible deniability in calling this an oversight by a first-time founder, and not a deliberate choice by a self-styled product expert.

Stop making lip balm. This is more for the sake of humankind rather than advice for your brand. Though, at this point I do think that every founder who plans to produce a product that is housed in plastic and has a 15k unit minimum should definitely ask themself, “Are there already more of these existing on earth than we will be able to utilize before the End Times?” If the answer is yes, then your product probably lacks differentiation, which is not only bad news for your brand, but will inevitably contribute to the collapse of society. And then how will you fund your next round?

Thank you for reading. If you’ve found any of the above useful, please share.

*Icons of the sad Macintosh and the pixel bomb, designed by the iconic Susan Kare, were indeed stolen from Apple Corporation without their express written consent. Pwease don’t sue, I’m just a toddler in a business suit.