Truly, Madly, Deeply? How Much Do Our Words Impact Our Brand?
Recently, I was asked to lead an effort to revisit and refine our agency’s differentiators. Every organization should have them—a set of specific identifiers that set you apart from any competitor in your industry.
After a couple of months of collaboration on the differentiators—eventually renamed “resonators”—we were close to finalizing them: These would be Mighty Citizen’s formal differentiators. This would be the official list, seven items deep, of the things we think are genuinely, demonstrably special about how we work. This much-discussed and (lovingly) debated document would become how we’d stand out in a competitive field. Huzzah!
But then a comment appeared in the Google Doc:
Insights, delivered.
That’s a branding question. Whether to include the adverb “deeply” is a branding question.
You cannot control your brand—i.e., what your customers and stakeholders think and feel about you—but your branding can try and influence that perception. Branding, then, is the collection of everything your organization does to create a particular, specific mood. Branding is vibes.
Let’s return to the question of whether to add “deeply” to one of our agency’s differentiators. For me, the question sparked at least five other questions. Here are those five questions (answers attached).
Remember: Raising and answering these questions is the work of branding Mighty Citizen.
1. Are we the kind of agency that truly, authentically cares deeply about the mission of every organization we work with?
Turns out, we do. We know this is true for two reasons.
First, we’re an agency filled with people who care deeply in general. So over 26 years, we’ve created a culture around active care. We match our employees’ charitable donations. We offer extra time off work for volunteering. We offer big grants to great nonprofits.
Second, we work only with mission-driven organizations. All of our clients aim to improve the lives of the people they serve.
2. Do we feel the need to explicitly define the degree of our caring? Do we need the adverb?
Not as a rule, no. Because our clients are trying to solve important problems every day, they don’t have much of an appetite for marketing-speak, especially claims that sound generic or performative.
Would the fact that we add that word, “deeply,” convince an otherwise unconvinced CMO to hire us? Unlikely. What might convince them, however, is seeing real evidence of our care. The proof is nearly always in the pudding.
3. Why should we use “deeply” when there are cooler words available—like “fiercely” or “profoundly”?
Words matter, in part because most of the work we do arrives in the form of words—e.g., research findings, marketing campaigns, copy, website content, campaign plans, etc.
Given words are essential to the value we provide, we try our best to get them just right.
In this case, “deeply” felt like a good choice over the alternatives. “Fiercely” felt too humorless. “Profoundly,” too braggy.
4. Do we know what you’ll think of “deeply”?
Kind of. We don’t know you personally; you might think “deeply” is an overused say-nothing term. (Much as one high-school English teacher would mark us down a full letter grade if “really” or “very” showed up even once in our essays.) .
You might hate all adverbs on principle. (And on that issue, a few of my colleagues would co-sign.)
But we bet against this being the case.
Branding is often exactly this: Getting real with yourself about how much you actually know your constituents (students, members, donors, etc.). It’s for many organizations to delude themselves, to assume that because they do what they do 40+ hours per week, they necessarily have a real-time, sophisticated, concrete understanding of their customers.
(One of my go-to lines when training on content creation is: “You think about your org 40 hours per week. Your audience thinks about you roughly zero.”)
To put this another way: Branding is a series of decisions you make, and when you make a decision to do X, you’re necessarily not doing Y and Z. These are called tradeoffs, and they’re a defining characteristic of true branding work. Saying “we care deeply” means not saying simply that “we care.”
5. Is this for you—or is it for us?
The best branding is both. Of all the branding traps I can think of, this one’s the most diabolical because it’s so personal.
Here’s what happens:
An organization sets out to provide value to a group of people.
They think deeply about how to help people.
They devote countless hours to the effort.
They’re thoughtful, sincere, and good at their job.
But the floodgates don’t open. The organization isn’t drowning in people begging to “engage with them online,” “fill out that RFI form,” “donate all their disposable income to the cause,” and so on. Even when they’re successful, there’s still room to grow.
That’s when branding quietly shifts its purpose. Instead of helping others understand the value of the organization, it starts helping the organization explain itself to itself. Language becomes more affirmational than useful. Claims get broader. The work starts to sound like reassurance.
Effective branding pulls in the opposite direction. It is almost recklessly focused on them. Their context. Their decisions. Their stakes. Not what makes us feel credible, but what actually helps them choose, trust, act, or believe.
When we say something like “we care deeply about your mission,” the question isn’t whether it’s true. The question is whether that language exists to calm our own doubts or to genuinely serve the people we’re speaking to.
Answering that question is the work of branding.
In my deeply humble opinion.
Did we end up using the word or not?
Find out by reading it for yourself: “The Mighty Citizen Resonators.”
And if your brand isn’t yet doing the work it should be doing, let’s talk about how to make it resonate.
