A conversation on branding AUTHOR Andrew Hayward @ahaywa
s the world’s largest esports merchandising company, We Are Nations has worked with a wide number of team brands, including G2 Esports, OpTic Gaming, Origen, and more. Over time, collaborating with so many major esports brands sparked Nations to begin its own internal brand strategy and licensing direction.
A
We Are Nations is currently working on an initiative to help organisations hone their brand voice and strategy - and while the team isn’t quite ready to spill all of the beans, they did share some insights on their philosophy on branding with The Esports Journal. Here’s what Nations’ Trenton Pierson, and Philip Bartko, who make up the company’s brand strategy group, had to say on the topic. Pierson: Ever since we started with Nations, we’ve always been this voice of making sure that there is an actual brand direction. What are your core principles to what your brand is? Even when we went over to Riot for the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), it got reinforced by working with a lot of different esports organisations about the importance of what a brand strategy can actually do. There’s examples all over the place of how brands, big or small, can get lost in the shuffle if there’s nothing to cling to. That thing is the brand voice or brand strategy.
30
Here’s a great example of what we’re looking at here. You can compare other organisations to a team like 100 Thieves. They get brought up all the time, like: “We want to do what 100 Thieves does.” So we ask these teams: What do you see 100 Thieves doing that makes them so successful? A lot of the time, what they lack in that response is really the fundamental idea that 100 Thieves has defined its brand, given itself brand guidelines, and have followed those brand guidelines from the minute they started. They’ve followed the same exact pattern about how they interact with everything, and they’ve really pushed their core principles on all of the projects that they do. Bartko: Last year, the most in-depth experience I had was working with the LCS. I got to go into all of their houses, see what they were working with, and work directly with their brand guidelines. Without throwing anyone under the bus or anything like that, the brand guidelines across the board were either nonexistent or not terribly hashed out. By no means am I saying that Trenton and I are trying to create a branding agency. But one of the things that I wrote in a general assessment about the LCS teams is where they needed help. They needed to go to an outside agency or bring in a professional with experience to help them identify what
Trenton Pierson Senior Vice President of Strategy
their brand is and to help them establish core values. We’ll use 100 Thieves again as a good example. 100 Thieves is always pointed at as “streetwear” or something like that, but ultimately it’s really, really good merchandise with a really, really strong and direct brand voice behind it. It supports marketing and the merchandise is supported by marketing. Watching and paying attention to who’s doing it right, and finding out how, we can (to a degree) help teams establish what they need to support them in that brand vision - what is going to help them overall to promote their vision and experience. One of the companies that was working on a brand voice and vision that I liked, and they recognised this in the throes of working with us, was FlyQuest. They might not be the biggest example, but they have a vision and they have core values, and they created a deck that really showed how you would promote and perpetuate that. That has to be assisted by a lot of other factors, like marketing and a team that can really put that out there and push it, but it was good to see certain brands recognise that and start to develop
