Build a brand subculture with unshakable conviction
No agency can install conviction in a company. Calvin Ross Carl argues that owning a subculture takes real conviction, and good strategy just brings it back to the surface.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl explains a pattern Parliament sees often: great companies making incredible products that keep struggling to define a target. The cause is usually missing conviction. Sometimes the agency’s job is to remind a company of the conviction it already has and reinvigorate it; when it isn’t there, the work has to route around it.
Highlights
- Conviction and vision can’t be created from outside a company.
- Struggling to pick a target is often a conviction problem.
- Respecting a brand subculture takes real conviction.
Key insights
Targeting reveals conviction
When a company can’t settle on who it’s for, the real gap is usually belief, not research.
Strategy can resurface, not invent
An agency can bring buried conviction back up and get a team excited about it again, but it can’t manufacture it.
Detailed analysis
This ties the subculture idea back to leadership. Committing to a subculture means choosing a side and staying there, which only works if the company genuinely believes in what it’s doing. Without that, any subculture strategy will feel borrowed.
Conclusion
A brand subculture starts with conviction inside the company. Find it, reinvigorate it, then build on it.
This goes back to the classic: you still can’t create conviction and vision within a company. That kind of has to exist there. We run into this all the time, where we work with companies, great companies making incredible stuff. And once you get in deep with them, you realize that they keep kind of struggling with a target because the conviction isn’t there.
And so sometimes you have to remind them of that conviction. That’s our job: remind them of the conviction, bring it back up to the surface, and get them reinvigorated on it. But sometimes it’s just not there, and so you have to kind of work around it. So I think you do need quite a bit of conviction as a company to really respect and focus on your brand subculture.