The HASTINGS Method
Over the years I have spent a lot of time sitting across the table from brand leaders trying to solve what they believed were marketing problems. Campaigns were running. Marketing activity was happening. But something about the brand was not sitting right.
The instinct is to fix the marketing. Adjust the message. Launch another campaign. Refresh the creative. That is almost never the issue.
You do not have a marketing problem.
You have a brand problem that has been covered up with layers.
The HASTINGS Method gets the brand back to what is true, gives that truth language the whole team can lead from, and moves it into the world at the standard it deserves.
Over the years I have spent a lot of time sitting across the table from brand leaders trying to solve what they believed were marketing problems. Campaigns were running. Marketing activity was happening. But something about the brand was not sitting right.
The instinct is to fix the marketing. Adjust the message. Launch another campaign. Refresh the creative. That is almost never the issue.
You do not have a marketing problem.
You have a brand problem that has been covered up with layers.
The HASTINGS Method gets the brand back to what is true, gives that truth language the whole team can lead from, and moves it into the world at the standard it deserves.
— THE PATH —
A fifteen minute conversation.
A fifteen minute conversation.
Then a Brand Guidance Session. Then Clarify, Create, and Connect, in order.
Each stage builds on the one before it. Nothing gets skipped.
— CLARIFY —
— CREATE —
Once the truth is named, the next step is expressing it. Creative work should never exist apart from what the brand actually stands for. Every element should reinforce it.
During Create the verbal and visual language takes shape.
The voice. The messaging. The identity. The photography direction.
All of it built from the same foundation, so the brand finally sounds and looks like what it actually is.
The truth surfaced. Then raised to the level it was always capable of reaching.
Over time, layers accumulate. Messaging. Campaigns. Opinions. Market pressure. Input from the sales team. Feedback from customers. Each one reasonable on its own. Together they blur the truth of the brand.
Clarify steps back from tactics and returns to three questions.
Clarify steps back from tactics and returns to three questions.
What is true about this brand?
What makes it meaningfully different?
What role should it play in people's lives?
The work produces a Brand Foundation Chart. Not a document you file. A cheat sheet the marketing leader can point at when they have to walk a decision down the hall and explain why they signed off on it. That is where the second-guessing stops.
The work produces a Brand Foundation Chart. Not a document you file. A cheat sheet the marketing leader can point at when they have to walk a decision down the hall and explain why they signed off on it. That is where the second-guessing stops.
— CREATE —
Once the truth is named, the next step is expressing it. Creative work should never exist apart from what the brand actually stands for. Every element should reinforce it.
During Create the verbal and visual language takes shape.
The voice. The messaging. The identity. The photography direction.
All of it built from the same foundation, so the brand finally sounds and looks like what it actually is.
The truth surfaced. Then raised to the level it was always capable of reaching.
— CONNECT —
Most brand work does not fail because the thinking was wrong. It fails because no one was ever shown how to use it. Within a few months the team drifts back to what felt familiar, and the foundation ends up in a folder. Connect is what keeps that from happening.
The Connect Playbook is how the work gets adopted.
What leadership says. How the team uses the foundation.
What happens in the first thirty days. Where the brand shows up first, and in what order.
What leadership says. How the team uses the foundation.
What happens in the first thirty days. Where the brand shows up first, and in what order.
A brand truth is only worth what the organization can carry forward.