A Chaotic Brand Personality Building Example

Now, for a quick example, let’s look back at what I shared in Module 1. I built a quick affiliate site that would provide some value to cybersecurity companies who state they provide Zero Trust solutions. Clearly, vendors are my customers or primary audience, right?

Please reference our syllabus here. You can find the brand audit template here.

Well, let’s bust open the good ole brand overview document that includes our purpose, vision, mission, and values.

Chaos is a storytelling company focused on delivering authentic concepts to the audiences we cater to and sharing our experiences with those seeking to be their best self.

I don’t know, an affiliate site that suggests Zero Trust, of all things, is a product or service? An affiliate site that would have me take in money just to list them in a directory, or worse, rank them by whatever method we chose?

This doesn’t feel authentic, honest, or beneficial to the wider cybersecurity industry, and certainly doesn’t map up to our mission of:

We seek to bridge the gap between cybersecurity vendors and the people they support.

Let’s just make a quick adjustment to the site, and I think we’ll be in a better spot.

Much better. And when you hit the directory, we find alignment. I think you all can tell where this is going, so let’s lock in the brand personality of Chaos… not Top Zero Trust.

I will skip the competitive part, and we’ll just jump right into my scales system.

You’ll notice that I’ve deviated a bit from my Initial instructions and identified a more balanced approach depending on the context and situation. That is because an external chaotic approach, say, for example, trashing the concept of Zero Trust as a product, aligns incredibly well with security practitioners who already know what Zero Trust is.

This means I can add some ad budget behind getting traffic to it, maybe get a laugh, and increase the subscribers to the Adopting Zero Trust podcast. Once they are in, we find a balance between chaos and structure, but when it comes down to chatting with potential sponsors, we have to be a bit more formal.

Now on to module 3!