Death to Bland Brands: Developing a Strong POV Worth Fighting For
UVP Before POV
One of the staples of marketing 101 is the concept of a unique value proposition (UVP). Typically, we’re told to create a UVP along these lines:
- What you do
- Who you do it for
- How you do it differently or better than everyone else
Because it’s marketing, and there’s never only one way to do anything, you’ve likely seen other variations of this. For example, the Steve Blank Method focuses first on the consumer benefits derived from product features, instead of the features themselves. This method is brought to life by following a formula that connects the target market and their pain points to the solution:
We help (X) do (Y) by doing (Z).
UVPs may be a basic framework for expressing a company’s core existence, but that doesn’t mean we should neglect them as social marketers. I know it’s a lot more fun to talk about new platform features, going viral, and engagement, but we can’t neglect the marketing in social media marketing. And UVPs, regardless of whether you refer to them that way or not, should be baked into everything a company does. This is especially true on social media, where it can be so tempting to stray from what we’re selling and who’s buying it in the pursuit of attention.
I do think framing your UVP via the Steve Blank formula is a better practice for Social First Brands because it puts the focus on the consumer benefits first, above what the company is doing. For our purposes in this chapter specifically, UVPs are important because they are a building block for our Social First POVs. Only once they’re in place and understood can we move on to establishing the points from which we’ll be doing our viewing.
There is, however, one more thing you can do to help bridge the UVP to your POV. I recommend putting a slight twist on your UVP from a content perspective by creating an audience empathy statement. Similar to how we put the consumer benefits first in our UVP, an audience empathy statement puts our audience’s desires above our own. Here’s a simple exercise for crafting one.
The output of this exercise should be a succinct statement.
Our audience wants ___________ and our content helps them by ___________.Depending on your brand, this doesn’t have to be an overly serious statement. For example, if you sell razors and razor blades and you’ve identified that your audience online wants a quick mental escape from their day, you could very well net out at something like:
Our audience wants a mental escape from their day, and our content helps them by providing the most uniquely entertaining content on this side of the bathroom door.With the UVP and audience empathy statement in place, you should have something in front of you that reflects an empathetic worldview. By putting the audience first—and your desires second—you’ll have an easier time of earning their attention and connecting with them. Don’t show people what you want them to see. Show them what they want to watch.
Death and Murder: How to Develop a Strong POV
Based on my experiences of working with brands around the world, most have either never officially documented their POV or they have a lukewarm version that attempts to cater to everyone. My working theory is that this is no fault of the brands themselves; it’s mostly a symptom of all the tools a brand has in place for understanding itself.
These tools are great for creating things like logos, colors, and brand values that go into brand guidelines, but they aren’t so great at helping brands become Social First and stake out a POV on topics from the world around them. It’s no surprise that so many brands refer to their guidelines as the Brand Bible. Your brand can feel like a religion when it’s all about you, all the lovely things your brand embodies, and how great you are.
To the brand strategists and designers reading this, rest assured, I am not coming for your brand guidelines. They are important internal systems for how to think about the perception of the brand, and every brand should have them. But to become Social First, a brand must learn to think beyond the perception of itself to perceive the external world around it. And this is where our POV comes in.
A POV is about having an opinion or a set of opinions about the world. We already know a brand’s opinions about its products without them needing to say it: They’re the best products. And we know the opinion the brand has about itself: We’re the best brand. Instead of wasting anyone’s time on these points, brands should draw on their broader experiences to communicate their views about things outside of the brand bubble.
How we do this is quite simple. To develop a Social First POV, you need these three things:
- An understanding of the audience you’re speaking with
- A topic that you have credible experience in
- A unique opinion or set of opinions challenging the status quo of that topic
Together, these three things give us an audience, a topic, and unique beliefs. But where many brands fall short is in the third one. Having an audience and a credible topic but not expressing our own unique viewpoints leads to uninteresting brands and bland content. I call this “newspaper social” because it’s about as exciting as reading one.
We kick-started this process with our UVP and audience empathy statement, so now I want you to start imagining the ideal future state of whatever industry you’re in. The best way to do this is to position it against what’s wrong, outdated, or not good enough about the industry your brand operates in. Applying a challenger mindset, even if you’re not a challenger brand, is an effective way to take a stance and stake out a strong position. Tepidness is the enemy of a compelling POV, so we want to eliminate it from the jump by boldly claiming who or what it is that we wish to challenge.
But before you run off challenging the world to fisticuffs, there are two important constraints to remember about sharing opinions:
- The more experience and authority you have on a given topic, the easier it is to share credible opinions;
- The more you’re willing to challenge the status quo (specifically as it relates to your area of expertise), the more interesting your opinions become.
On the first point—credibility—it’s a universal truth that the more personal experience someone has, the more relevant their point of view. For example, if two of your friends are consulting you on the housing market and homebuying, but one has never owned a home and the other recently bought a home for the second time, you’re going to listen more closely to the latter. Because their view is pointedly more credible. But let’s say that the first friend works in local politics and city elections are coming up, while the second friend works in something unrelated, say, for a local sports team. Which friend has the more credible point of view on the inner workings of local elections? Suffice it to say that the more experience someone has, the more likely others will listen.
To illustrate both these points in Brandland, let’s look at Liquid Death, a Social First Brand valued at over $1 billion that sells canned water, seltzer, and iced tea. If you’re not familiar with Liquid Death, the unique brand name was intentional, as the company aims to murder your thirst in a healthy way while also bringing death to plastics by packaging everything in recyclable aluminum cans.
If you’re a brand that sells water, you’re going to have opinions about beverages because you have credible experiences here. And if you sell that water in aluminum cans while everyone else uses plastic water bottles, then your POV challenging the status quo of single-use plastics is quite interesting and unique.
In Liquid Death’s case, they experience something at scale on a daily basis—selling healthy beverages in recyclable cans—and that experience gives them authority to talk about it and have a point of view. What the brand says when talking about beverages, water, or single-use plastics is then the view from which they point. And when it comes to Liquid Death, you’re all but guaranteed to be in for a treat.
From the burning skull imagery they use as a symbol in their mission to kill thirst and plastics, to their heavy metal-inspired flavor names like Severed Lime and Mango Chainsaw, Liquid Death is not afraid to let you know how they see the world. And in a category full of brands that have historically all run the same generic playbook by signaling purity, Liquid Death’s use of irreverent humor is truly refreshing. The brand’s point of view is made credible by their experiences, and their rebellious and playful challenging of the status quo makes it interesting.
When you define your brand’s POV, it’s a good idea to follow Liquid Death’s lead by being unwavering in your commitment to it. Even if it’s at times uncomfortable. For instance, Liquid Death once sold an iced tea/lemonade beverage and named it Armless Palmer, an irreverent wordplay on the famous golfer and namesake of the ubiquitous drink, Arnold Palmer. After receiving legal threats for infringing on IP, the brand renamed it to Dead Billionaire. What a perfect example of having a strong POV. Even in the face of legal threats, the brand stayed true to its POV and used it as an opportunity to further rebel.
If you find yourself getting hung up on the jump from your UVP to POV, take note of Liquid Death. There’s nothing particularly unique about the value proposition of the liquids they sell. Your UVP doesn’t need to be world-changing, and nowadays—in a saturated marketplace with countless similar, competing options for most brands—it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that it will be all that unique. Instead, Liquid Death was co-founded by a former agency creative director who understands the power of Social First Brands. The company identified their unique, standout attributes primarily on an emotional, human level (i.e. social) and laddered this up to their POV. If you’re attempting this with your brand, remember that the most difficult part is unlearning the habits of brand first thinking.
This edited excerpt is from Social First Brands by Tom Miner, ©2025, and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
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