Takeaways:
Brand is the sum total of your customers’ experience with your products and communications, as well as their understanding of how others perceive you. It isn't just your ads.
Kurzgesagt (maker of popular educational Youtube videos) have a highly consistent and beloved brand. They stick rigorously to their tenets of quality, knowledge and storytelling, and when they screw up, they own it.
Through brand consistency, Kurzgesagt has built a huge, loyal following in a historically uncool sector (education). They have 20MM subscribers, 200k members in their subreddit, and a passionate fanbase. Integrity and growth are not mutually exclusive - quite the opposite.
I am a Kurzgesagt zealot - a subscriber, a Patreon supporter and an owner of Merch relating to the science-based Youtube channel. There are very few brands I feel this way about, because there are very few companies that manage to balance earnestness + integrity with entertainment + humor. And there are even fewer that manage to have those values so fully permeate their products and communications.
Kurzgesagt was founded in 2013 in Germany by recent university graduate Philipp Dettmer. The company (whose name roughly translates to “in brief”) produces short, animated, educational videos across a broad set of science-y topics, from climate change to black holes to the mysteries of human consciousness. The channel quickly gained popularity, and Kurzgesagt grew to a design studio of more than 50 people who work on content production, merchandising, and partnerships with philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The average Kurzgesagt video gets between 5-10 million views.
Getting to this scale required a huge dedication of time, passion and energy from many people. However, the reason the channel maintains such an adoring audience is the team’s consistent adherence to their ‘brand promise’, laid out on the Kurzgesagt homepage:
What’s in a promise?
The term ‘brand promise’ sounds woolly, vague and vaguely suspect to many people. Why does Coca Cola need a brand promise if all they do is sell sugar-water? Do I really care about the ‘brand promise’ of the company that makes my toilet paper?
Brand 'promises' draw our suspicion because often a company’s actions have nothing to do with what they promise us:
We’re primed to be distrustful of private companies because most try to gloss over wrongdoing with lies and marketing, rather than admitting mistakes and making long-term, systemic efforts to define their values and live up to them.
Why is Kurzgesagt different?
The first and most important reason Kurzgesagt is different from someone like ExxonMobil is that (so far as we know) they aren’t actively doing anything evil. If you’re in the Oil or Arms or Payday Loans industries, you’re unlikely to be a beloved brand even if you live your cultural values 100%.
Secondly, Kurzgesagt was thoughtful in defining its values (humility, optimism, playfulness, science-driven) and diligent in ensuring that they manifest across all of its content and communications.
Finally, Kurzgesagt has a keen understanding of its audience (younger, nerdier, interested in unusual and speculative science) and is comfortable focusing on growth. As well as exciting science videos that have a sense of awareness and self-deprecation, the channel also produces lots of videos that resonate with the emotional and social needs of a younger audience - topics like finding fulfillment in life, and maintaining relationships in the digital age:
How does Kurzgesagt ‘live its values’?
It can be hard to explain how a company's values can 'permeate' the work that it does. One great example of Kurzgesagt doing this is the intro to every Kurzgesagt video:
Within 6 seconds the team manage to pack in almost all of the organization's core values:
Awe & curiosity at the power of nature and our history with the exploding volcano on a primordial earth.
A focus on people, and optimism around humanity’s technological trajectory, with ape-like ancestors giving way to modern skyscrapers that in turn give way to a futuristic mega-city.
Aspiration, with a mysterious ‘future-science’ portal taking you out into space, and introducing the brand and its tagline ‘in a nutshell’.
Throughout, a playful animation style with fun easter eggs for superfans.
Outside of this intro, the values crop up everywhere.
Curiosity and awe is apparent in the speculative videos tackling humanity’s evolution and far future. And outside the videos, Kursgesagt’s website and merchandise is highly mission-driven, focusing on how to inspire a love for science and learning, and making personal progress in manageable steps.
Science-driven optimism is a core element of Kurzgesagt's videos tackling existential crises for humanity, like climate change.
Humor and playfulness is core to building an educational brand that doesn’t feel boring and aloof, and Kurzgesagt leans into this with light relief amongst serious topics, as well as an occasionally absurd animation style.
Perhaps the most important qualities that have allowed Kurzgesagt to build such a loyal fanbase, though, are integrity and humility. Instead of pandering, the channel often takes a contrarian stance on polarizing issues, in order to challenge its audience’s preconceptions. At the same time, it is engaged in a continual dialogue with its viewers on its own credibility.
Kurzgesagt publishes periodic videos challenging itself - stressing the limits of what can be covered in short Internet videos, and making it clear that even the most well-researched videos from people with the best intentions to stay objective will contain ambiguities and inaccuracy.
The channel has acknowledged inaccuracies and biases in its early videos, and takes the stance of being an imperfect ‘work in progress’, in stark contrast to the brittle partisanship of mainstream news, or big corporations that refuse to acknowledge failures under the guidance of their large legal teams.
Quality and integrity = Good Business
The stewards of Kurzgesagt are also savvy about their Internet presence and growth, and think a lot about their audience. Releases carefully balance scientific questions, personal questions, crowd pleasing videos about horrific creatures, and meta videos about Kurzgesagt’s own creative process.
As well as that, Kurzgesagt invests a lot in building recognizable brand assets - like its iconic ducks - and is quite happy to meet demand from its fanbase for all sorts of cute and visible merchandise.
What we can learn from the Kurzgesagt brand
While it’s true that Kurzgesagt does not have the brand challenges of a global megacorp employing hundreds of thousands of people, or engaged in drilling oil out of the ground, or producing military hardware, none of this should detract from the impressive work the Kurzgesagt team have done to do something which is very hard - building and maintaining a brand beloved by hundreds of thousands of people.
Nor does it mean that bigger or different companies can’t learn from what Kurzgesagt has done well - they can. In storytelling and brand-building, all of us would do better if we think more about the following:
Don’t do evil things or generally be evil (99% of the time you know if you are)
Build something people want and know your customers intimately
Be thoughtful about your values, and consistent in staying true to them over a period of years
Have humility: admit when you make mistakes and focus on doing better