Viet Hoàng

My name is Viet, I am currently based in Amsterdam and I currently work as a brand strategist at a network advertising agency.

What does a brand strategist do?

First, I think in order for me to define what a brand strategist does, it's helpful to think about what a brand is, right?

If you're familiar with the concept of a company or an organization, a company could be a bank, could also be an orange stand, could also be the UN (United Nations). All of these company and organizations are broadly categorised as an entity. And then let's say you have bank number one, bank number two, bank number three, they're all banks. And in a general sense, these are all places where you can go to, to deposit your money, to withdraw your money, to get all of the banking needs that you might have with them.

So in theory, you should be able to go to any one of them. But then in reality, if I were to be a person who worked at a bank or even owned a bank, I would want to think about how can I make my bank more attractive to you? How do I make my bank become a bank that you feel like you want to go and do business with me and deposit money into my bank rather than the bank next to me, right?

And in order for me to appeal to you and to make it attractive, I could do multiple things. I could make my bank really big, make my bank really beautiful. Maybe if I know that you like a particular colour, I could paint my bank in that colour to really attract you. And all of the things that I just told you. Improving my banking service, painting my bank in a certain way that might appeal to you, and just making it more attractive.

Everything that I just described to you when you put all of that together, that is brand building. Brand building is ultimately is a collection of all of these decisions that you do in order for you to become more attractive and more appealing to somebody else who you want to do business with.

And in order for me to find out what can they do to attract other people to their organizations, I need to first understand what do people want, which allows me to do research and in which allow me to have this kind of conversation where I talk to people, I ask them questions, I learn more about them.

Because the more I learn more about them and their preferences, I can then distill that information, go back to my clients who would be any organization and tell them, Hey, the majority of your audience, the majority of the people who you want to attract, really like this colour. So you probably should have this colour in your bank.

That is the simplest way that I can explain my job, I hope it's making sense.

What a typical day looks like for me... When I wake up in the morning, what I like to do is to try to read up on the news. And when I say the news, it's actually not the newspaper. I mean, the news for me is, could be social media, could be newsletter, could be any sort of algorithmic feed that I have kind of tailored to my interest. It just kind of helps me begin my day with some sort of new information.

And then I like to bike to work, so when I commute to work, I typically listen to podcasts. I have a selections of podcasts which the people would host on topics that I'm interested in, some of which are relevant to my work, some aren't. And then by listening to these conversations in these podcasts, you know, I get a bit of inspiration before I get into my workday.

And as I get into the office, my day can get really unpredictable. But if I have to make it a very typical day, it would be probably a couple of meetings with my colleagues to align on what are the objectives of the day.

If I have, you know, a team member who I am managing or who is working with me, I would ask them, what are they working on? Are there things that they need my help with? Because if I can help them with something, I will prioritise helping them, unblocking them so then they can go ahead and do their job.

And once I have catched up with everybody, once I have unblocked everyone, then I have some time for myself to think about, okay, I also need to plan and prioritise my tasks to make sure that I'm working on the most important thing. And then I just go through the list as simple as that.

For example, a typical day could mean getting into a meeting and checking on my team members on where they are with a visual identity that we are working on for a brand. It could be having a conversations with my clients, for example, an organisation who sells a lot of cars, asking them about like whether or not, you know, the latest campaign or the latest advertisement that we have run with them is performing well.

If it's performing well, why did it do so well and how can we keep doing that? If it did not perform well, then what can we learn from it so that we can make sure that the next time we do it, we can do it better? And then I take that information back to my team and think about the plan to do better.

Everybody has almost a different working style because they come from a different background. They have different expectation when it comes to how to give feedback, how to receive feedback, how to collaborate.

Some people really prefer to work on their own. Some people would rather sit in the same room with a lot of people and brainstorm different ideas. So it depends.

So to answer your question around how I work with other people, what I typically do is try to have like a one-on-one conversation with a new colleague. And in that one-on-one, I always ask them what is the one or three things that I really need to know about you in order for you and I to have a really good collaboration? And then I would then also tell them the same.

For example, I would tell them that I am very direct but I'm never disrespectful, which means that if I don't understand something that somebody said, I would always ask them, like, could you explain it to me?

I'm also very comfortable with people being direct back to me. Even in a meeting, if I say something that might be misunderstood or I actually mis-recall certain information and they correct me, I will be very appreciative of it.

So I wanna make sure that this kind of expectations was communicated upfront because then when we work in a day to day we have to move really fast. It's always good to like think about these things so then I can tailor my way of working with others. But they also, the other people also, you know, make some sort of compromise and meet me in the middle ensuring that we have a collaborative process.

The best thing about being a brand strategist for me is the idea, the notion that you can be very imaginative.

I think before I become a brand strategist, I really wanted to become a scientist or some sort of a researcher. And, I mean, what's nice about it is because I can really look into something, I can really research and analyse and really find, you know, the the answer, I guess the answer to the question. So one plus one has to be equal to two. What are the molecules that make up this, you know, chemical compound? So I would like to get into the bottom of thing and getting the result, getting the answer, which, which gives me a lot of energy and that is still a lot of what I'm doing.

But what makes being a strategist different from that is once you get the answer to your questions as a brand strategist, you need to think about what am I going to do with this? Then I start imagining different sort of like solutions.

So to give you a very tangible example, we're working on a brand right now, it is a financial brand. It's a bank actually. And then through research, actually research with gen Alpha and Gen Z, like so younger generation about their relationship with money, what we've learned is that the younger generations, they are very interested in learning more about how they can work with money and how they can kind of manage their money better. So that's the finding. The finding is kids these days, according to my research, actually want to be a bit more in control of their finance, want to understand money better.

And then the second learning that we had is that at the same time, they don't like sitting in classes. They don't like to just go to school and having you know, a teacher tell them that, oh, in order for you to be better at money, you need to do X, Y, Z.

So then the third learning is that we know that these kids, they also love being on the playground. They also love going on camping. They also love traveling because they're also learning something through these activities but they aren't boring.

So now I have three different ingredients. You know, like kids want to learn more about money, they don't wanna sit in class, and they want to travel and do something fun.

These are the three answers. If I were to be a researcher, I would just bring this to my client and say, here you are, this is what they want. And then the client would ask me, but then what do I do with this? How can I actually make these kids go to my bank?

And that's the imagination part. I need to look at these three different things and imagine what I can do with it. And one imagination would be, oh, so what we can take away from this is kids actually like to learn through experience. They don't want to learn through books. They want to learn through what they can experience, so can we as a brand create a sort of educational experience so that they can learn how to use money, how to do saving without having to sit in class.

That's the best part of my job, that you just don't take the answer for what it is. You kind of like, almost like clay, you just like play with it a little bit, turn it into something else and like, oh, this is interesting, let's do it. So there's a bit of an imagination in there and I think that's the best part of my job.

The worst thing about being a brand strategist is exactly the same thing as the best thing. It's the imagination. You never gonna know that it is exactly the right answer. Right, because you have to make a leap of faith. You need to kind of trust your intuitions. And sometimes some people like to just know that, no, if I put this colour in this colour, it's gonna produce this colour.

I don't want uncertainty. But for some people, uncertainty can also be an opportunity for something magical that you never know about. And for me, like some, you know, I enjoy the imaginations. I don't enjoy the uncertainty but if you were to take the uncertainty away from my job, then the imagination isn't there either.

So for me, that's, that's really what it is.

So, for me, brand strategist is not like, I don't walk on the street and I see like, oh, look at the brand strategist sitting in the corner. I wanna be like them. Or there's no really, there are a lot of movies or TV that talk about brand strategists. I had no point of reference.

What I did know was that I like to imagine, what I did know was that I like to tell stories because I love reading stories. And then when I went to college and I was exposed to different clubs and one of the clubs was the advertising club where I learned that there, oh, there's actually a job where all you do is to learn a lot about the people around you and then find these answers, and then tell what you've learned about these people in a very imaginative way.

And then I was like, whoa, that's kind of what I want to do. Then that's how I landed on my job. It's, you know, like there's never a straightforward, I mean, there's typically not a straightforward line as to what you want to do as a kid and then where you end up. But if you're lucky enough to keep, you know, holding onto what gives you a lot of energy as a kid, you might end up somewhere kind of close to where you want it to be.

Whatever you do in life, be it at work or outside of work, instead of trying to like collect materials, collect rewards, trying to like, I wanna be the best of this, the best of that, or winning this award, winning it, you know, recognitions and accolades.

Instead of trying to chase those rewards, I think trying to chase the people that bring you a lot of joy in your life and that is your clients, your colleagues, your friends, your family.

When I was earlier in my career, I was very driven by working for the biggest brands. And I ended up working with them at some point and that's when I realised there was no magic because the people that I worked with didn't bring a lot of kindness to the relationship, the working relationship.

Then when I work for a mom and pop shop, or somebody who owns a brand that is very struggling, that is not very cool at all, but they come to our working relationship with so much respect and kindness, and that gives me so much more energy in what I do to them is also very meaningful.

So I think like, yeah, my advice would be: the thing that you thought matters when you were younger actually doesn't matter that much if it's just a superficial thing. Look for people who bring kindness to your day.