Drive to being, what the brand is, its story, the innovation that their needs fill, they all come from there.
— Make your promise true, your premise proud. If your positioning sets a premise, the leadership needs to drive to the promise —the emotional gifting of the offer. It’s not just a transaction, it’s an emotional reach-back by the brand. As a startup, defining these mechanisms and clarifying that all on the team get it are paramount conclusions.
Be different.
— A Jobsian proposition was the unique spin that made the core product offerings of Apple a new reason for being, working in, presuming personal creativity — it was an invitation. Think about your startup as having a unique proposition, that is about the foundation of “think different.” That says something about your brand, your team, your attitude — and ultimately, the altitude of your reach.
The Wachowski Siblings.
This is a different premise of a startup, that is, a movie, which — in the beginning and the end — can affect the lives of millions of people; innovatively realized cinematic stories can change entire worlds of thinking, communities, memes that are created, new ways of visualizing the realm of — in this instance — fantasy.
And like a brand, and an enterprise, they can employ literally 10s of 1000s of people and render millions of dollars into the startup investment team’s fund rosters.
Build a story thread — what is the core principle?
My startup story in connection with the Wachowski’s comes through the angle of Joel Silver — I’d pitched him on customized identity and he remembered that and asked that I come to Silver Pictures, the next day — to talk about working on a film. So too, the Wachowski brothers “let’s talk” — who, at that point, spoke excitedly about the premise and structure of their story, and the worlds they were built — a split-coded world — “what you know, and what lies behind it, defining everything that you see on this side of things,” the one, and the other side of "The Matrix" —which can be entered and exited like the spark of a transmission. So defining the principle driver, the core story, the threading is one element of a startup postulate. The other?
Building the brandcode®.
We refer to the visual and messaging code of any brand as the brandcode® — it’s the genetic detailing of your elemental materiality, it’s how and who you are. Leaders and C-team members need to define it, and every member needs to know what it is, means and stands for. A code could be a patterning, it could be colors, it could be a way of speaking — it’s the language of, in this instance, The Matrix — and how it looks and feels, and how the telling spools out.