Expecting Aurora

Much of the answers to questions 4–6 are meant for internal guidance, whether it’s the core values that will shape your culture and steer important decisions or the tonal dials a copywriter uses to communicate with multiple audiences. Everything else can and should be used for public communication and business development. Even your values can be publicly visible if they’re written like an ethical contract with your ideal customers.¹

Here’s how Jon and I answered these questions for ourselves.

When it comes to the bottom line, purpose can help you move the needle.² Purpose makes it possible for people to do hard things, venture into the unknown, try until they succeed. Purpose is a motivational life force that no one can take away from you. And it’s infectious. People smell what you’re cooking and want to warm themselves by your fire.

Writing a purpose statement can feel like a daunting task, and that’s why I always make a collaborative start with clients. Atop a real or virtual whiteboard, we’ll write the start of a sentence: We exist to / because. These variations allow us to explore essential action (we exist to) and essential belief (we exist because). There are three sections below. At the left, we write lists of purpose-related verbs and descriptive phrases. At the far right, we list nouns and adjectives. In the middle, we write rough purpose statements from words in both banks.

As in client workshops, our goal was to write rapidly, no filters and no edits. I’ll often tell clients we’re there to gather grist for the mill, and I actually want them to give me bad ideas. As we collaborate, one person’s trash can turn into everyone’s treasure.

This module takes an hour. Any longer, and people run out of steam. Sometimes we jot down ideas that don’t make their way into a purpose statement but find a different home as a tagline or in a positioning statement. Occasionally, we hit on what turns out to be the final purpose statement.

Here’s what we made for ourselves, slightly dressed up because tables in Google Docs are gross.

These workshops are intense, fun and fruitful. Everyone’s drained afterward and needs to put their brains on ice. For those of us tasked with the next steps of distilling and writing, we crack a beer, get a good night’s sleep and lock ourselves away until a semi-coherent story emerges.

In “North,” one of my favorite poems by Seamus Heaney, an ancient voice speaks in the last three stanzas, admonishing the poet to work with what he knows, hold temperate expectations, and all the while to write with clear intent.

It said, ‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.’

After burrowing the coil and gleam of my brain in the word-hoard for a couple of weeks, and after a few reviews with Seth, I think we found aurora borealis. So without further ado, here’s our brand strategy and messaging, along with explanations in italics.

This section is purely for internal guidance, especially when we hire a full-time writer who will need to assimilate our brand’s voice and tonal range.

The Wild Prophet, aka The Messenger. One locust shy of John the Baptist. Primarily based on Matt’s Enneagram type Four, the Intense Creative, with a dominant attraction instinct. Energized and made more direct by dialing up the Eight, Seven and adaptive components that Jon brings. Balancing the Poet and the Soldier.

Attributes & Tonal Dials
Adventurous
Courageous
Personal
Playful
Poetic
Vivid

A straightforward yet distinctive description with a dash of purpose. Meant for external communications on our website and social media profiles.

Steel Brothers is a brandworks and design practice for people who think fitting in is overrated. We help brands communicate in a world that won’t stop yelling.

How we’re turning our vision into reality and what clients can expect. Useful for public-facing copy that follows our profile and for internal clarity about our services.

Traction Follows Attraction.

We begin with ignorance, assuming nothing and exploring everything. We gather the parts and pieces of where you’ve been, who you are and where you stand. Most importantly, we discover why your business exists and why it matters. We then weave words and images around your purpose to create brands and experiences that people love.

Magnetism is what we sell. Brand strategy and design – that’s just what we do.

The principles that define our practice and how we show up. Useful for our About page and as an internal compass for making decisions and managing our culture. Think of these values and the supporting copy as our behavioral contract with clients and ourselves.

Love Deeply.
You love what you do. We love what we do. Kinship is, quite literally, in our dna. We cook up brand names over breakfast and fall asleep thinking about typography. When you hire us, you hire a plot of mental real estate in our brains until the job’s finished.

Love propels us toward the unobtainable ideal. Love ensures symphonic order at the 5,000-foot level, and love drives craftsmanship in the subtlest of details. Now you see it, now you don’t – but it’s always there, always felt by your audience.

Think Independently.
Blending in is useful when you’re a lone antelope and a hungry lion catches your scent. In business, camouflage is insanity. You need bold, uncommon ideas to secure a foothold in your market. You don’t need safe. Predictable is forgettable. Boilerplate is fine for contracts, awful for brands.

We started our studio with a strong desire for creative and personal freedom, and our independent spirit infuses every project. We dream with clients in tightly structured workshops, and then we execute alone. Because we take time to build a creative vision with you, when we deliver the work it’s never a big scary reveal – it’s a big of course.

Find Meaning.
Were you the kind of kid who always asked why? Same here. We grew up peeking under rocks, exploring hidden nooks, imagining what we might find around the bend or over the ridge, hunting the origin of everything that captured our attention. Looking for Narnia. We never outgrew that curiosity, and we never will.

We’ve spent our entire lives questing for deeper meaning. We break through the surface crust of appearances to find the essence of your brand. And we bring that essence back up to daylight, where it lights minds on fire and sparks action.

Apply Grit.
The best output in any field comes from people who’ve lived through tight spots and long nights. Who came back stronger and somehow more whole. When you work with Steel Brothers, you get a poet and a soldier in your corner. Two flavors of courage.

We stick to our beliefs and fulfill our promises. When we make a mistake, we own up and make it right. Above all, we’re here to help Wayfounders find their way. That takes creative leadership, and it takes grit born of experience and hope.

Be Authentic.
Pretending to be someone else is just too much work unless you’re impersonating Gollum arguing with Sméagol. At Steel Brothers, we aren’t slick or tame. We reject fakery and fluff. We talk straight and practice vulnerability. We accept our imperfections and follow the grain of our design rather than grinding against it.

We encourage others to be themselves, too. We help clients say what they mean by using real, warm-blooded language. You won’t find robot words like actionable, disruptor, moving forward and synergy in the copy we write. That kind of nonsense comes straight from the mouth of Bezuckerbub and we gleefully flick it back to the pit from whence it came.

Simplify.
Brands that say just enough get heard more. The end.

The purple cow, the value proposition. The reason we stand out and the perspective from which we operate. Useful for all marketing and sales communication.

Connection to Source

Faith supercharges our work and connects us to the source of creativity.

We’re followers of Jesus. Faith informs everything we do but we never beat people over the head with it. We work with anyone seeking to make a difference, no matter what they believe.

We use the Enneagram, a framework for self-knowledge, to give your brand a human soul. We use what’s unique and often subconsciously hidden within you as the main point of difference for your company. You get an authentic identity that slices through the noise. And you get tools that will strengthen your team for years to come. Value far beyond the brand.

Holistic authorship weaves all these threads into a unified body of work. At Steel Brothers, writing and design are one. That translates to strategic and aesthetic standards you usually find at big branding agencies.

We adapted Donald Miller’s BrandScript model for this section. The narrative at the end will appear on our homepage.

In their own words: the hero’s profile and problems

I’m a leader of an established or new venture. People look to me for vision.

Wealth and comfort are fine, but I love the impact my work has on people’s lives and that’s what drives me. I find uncharted territory exciting, and I have a high tolerance for risk.

I’ve always been curious and questing, and I read a lot because it makes me a better leader. My business heroes are Warren Buffett, Tony Hsieh and Yvon Chouinard, not Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos.

My business needs to connect with our audience, and we need to stand out in order to compete. We’re either brand-new or undergoing metamorphosis.

Behind closed doors, my team and I are confused and frustrated. We need clarity. We have a sense of purpose and vision but no idea how to articulate it. We don’t know what makes us different. We don’t understand our customers beyond a superficial level. Our values are undefined, unused or inaccurate. We’ve outgrown our brand, either due to a lack of authentic purpose and durability from the get-go or a change in business strategy. We need a sherpa. Maybe even a brand therapist. But if we’re going to invest in our brand, it should last at least a decade, perhaps much longer.

Invisibility is our real villain. The feeling of being ignored and overlooked. Not enough inquiries, losing to better competitors. If our communications lack substance and purpose and therefore fail to stand out, we might as well be invisible.

We respond with empathy and authority and give them a plan that ends in success…

Invisibility Kills Good Stories.

It’s hard to communicate when the world won’t stop yelling. Lots of messages. Tons of images. Many promises. Most of them empty.

We know what it’s like to have a unique idea and be ignored or overlooked. No one wants to be the lonely kid on a playground. The desires we all have – to find identity, be known, make a difference, connect – these are older than cave paintings.

Brands are no different. They’re made by and for people.

To connect and inspire, find your company’s purpose and use it to change how you do business. If you want an identity, you need to define it and design it.

This is where Steel Brothers comes in.

Our clients love uncharted territory. They forge paths no one else could imagine. They believe branding shouldn’t be a tool for manipulation but rather a way of sharing beliefs and ensuring that good ideas are seen and heard.

We call them Wayfounders.

We turn their companies into brands that people love.

Purpose is the heart of our brand. We summarize our brand purpose with a short headline statement that describes our essential action – what we’re here to do. But essential belief is what’s really under the hood and it’s the hearth fire that will attract Wayfounders. Our manifesto lists fifteen beliefs that drive us and define our practice. The last belief also serves as our tagline.

Strengthening Thoughtful Ventures with Unbreakable Purpose

1. Meaning and beauty are one.
2. Story is the soul, design is the body.
3. Creation without purpose is pollution.
4. Design should be illuminating, authentic and strong.
5. Design should drive with clarity and dance with ambiguity.
6. Ethical branding amplifies truth.
7. Magnetic brands are built around real human beings.
8. Responsible branding creates more money than it costs.
9. Durable brands never lose sight of why they started.
10. Essential brands last decades, not years.
11. Values are the health of any culture.
12. Life without play is worse than death.
13. Detail is the substance of glory.
14. God is making all things new.
15. Purpose never rusts.