Your brand’s reason to believe, courtesy of Nope

Still from the film Nope, 2022.

The deep work of crafting a brand reason to believe has been a theme recently—for clients, for us.

And for good reason. Industries are crowded, stuffed to the gills, spilling over with brands powered by the same promise. Having the most succinct, direct, clearest, unfluffed, can’t-be-questioned way to define what your brand is and what it does is critical.

Despite its essentialism, we’ve noticed tension in clients around what this statement is and how it functions within an overall brand strategy. There’s a spontaneous ranch analogy coming up here, inspired by Jordan Peele’s Nope , so let’s go with it.

If your brand is a horse farm (perhaps one like Nope’s Haywood Hollywood Horses), your reason to believe is your workhorse, Lucky. It’s your tried-and-true, tenaciously tested, cannot-be-contested statement about what your brand is. It’s not your flashiest horse, it’s not all of your horses, and it nowhere near functions as your entire farm. It is your steady, stalwart right hand. If you asked anyone on your team to recite the name of your workhouse, they would respond, unthinkingly, with the same answer: Lucky.

The simplicity of a reason to believe is so clean and clear that it can make people feel uncomfortable. Like it’s too modest; not enough. They want their reason to believe to reflect their tonality, to be more pie-in-the-sky, to sound so aspirational that it sends people to their knees, agape and agog. But that’s not its job. It’s your workhorse; you put it to work, and everything else falls into place. Similarly, the other myriad pieces of your strategy will come together to fully express your brand—your voice positioning (tonality), manifesto (aspiration), vision statement (pie-in-the-sky)—guided by your reason to believe, your workhorse.

The most important thing about your reason to believe is that it has to be unassailably true.

When you start trying to church it up so it sounds better—so that it represents who you want to be rather than who you are right now (your vision statement)—you put your brand strategy at risk because you’re building it on a shaky foundation. A mistruth.

How do you get to the core of your reason to believe? It’s the problem or aspiration people have + how your product solves for that = why their life is improved because of the problem you solve. If you cannot fill in the pieces of that equation, the problem is not that your reason to believe doesn’t sound exciting or ownable enough. The problem is that you need to create a product that appeals to genuine, human aspirations and gives people a reason to believe.

In Nope, you wouldn’t get Emerald’s 11 o’clock number of a monologue (a manifesto) without her family farm’s unparalleled equity in horses and motion pictures. The reason to believe for Haywood Hollywood Horses. The truth of what their business provides is so elemental, and the need they solve so specific, that Emerald can extol its virtues sensationally and passionately and genuinely—and you can’t help but be moved.

Your brand’s reason to believe is not your 11 o’clock number. It’s not the whole farm. It’s why you have a farm, and why you’re able to speak so effectively, creatively, and compellingly about it.

Does your brand’s foundation need firming? Let’s (re)establish your reason to believe.