In a world saturated with competing messages, it takes more than good marketing to stand out—it requires messaging with clarity, authenticity, and purpose. Thad DeVassie, Principal of Ratchet Strategy, brings a unique perspective to branding by digging deep into what makes an organization tick and crafting narratives that connect from the inside-out. With a career spanning strategic communication, art, and writing—his award-winning book “Splendid Irrationalities” and fine artwork are testaments to his creative breadth. Thad helps brands build trust and stand apart in a “sea of sameness.”
In this conversation, Thad shares his insights on the future of branding, trust-building in a skeptical age, and the ever-evolving role of AI in messaging. He also offers practical advice for marketers looking to stay sharp, curious, and relevant in their craft.
What key shifts do you see shaping the future of branding, and how can organizations ensure their messaging rises above the “sea of sameness” in a noisy, crowded marketplace?
I think shifts are constantly afoot, and most of those shifts are largely driven by a perceived lack of desired outcomes, often by people who don’t fully grasp or appreciate the overarching purpose of branding. We are living in an attention economy that rewards immediacy over patience. That makes it easy for people to get hung up on things like SEO, algorithms and AI—there’s always something to point to suggesting organizations need to retool. But these have little to do with branding, and a lot more to do with targeted marketing efforts.
In organizations where brand, messaging, and marketing don’t have strong ambassadors, the slightest downtick in performance can lead an anxious leadership team to act against their own best interest—and that best interest is consistency. Because in an attention economy, a lot of people are jockeying for position, for eyeballs. To get them, they are willing to try anything and go anywhere. That’s a herd mentality, that’s your sea of sameness where people are doing whatever it takes. That, by definition, is the opposite of a focused brand—one that knows its customers, what it stands for, and shows up for their audience in a consistent way. If that’s not your organization, then do the work to figure it out and then double down on being consistent.
What strategies do you recommend for brands to build and sustain trust with their audiences?
Play the long game. As boring as this sounds, it’s a strategy for winning once you’ve clearly defined your brand. Campaigns will come and go, but the core of the brand and what the consumer allows to live rent-free in their brain should not waver. Arguably this is where great creativity gets to shine, not because anything is possible but by playing within a limited space with well-defined guardrails. This puts more pressure on the creative process to be nothing less than spectacular and on-brand. That pressure creates diamonds.
Fact: You will tire of your own brand long before it has the chance to build the loyalty you think it deserves. Think Energizer batteries, Nike or Patagonia. Think of your favorite local coffee shop. These are brands that aren’t concerned with chasing what’s next for the brand. They do what’s consistent for the brand. These are brands that evolve with the times and customers in such subtle ways we barely notice them, if at all. The product line might expand, the technology might improve, the purpose might gain a wider focus, but the brand remains the same and that brand equity pays dividends by committed customers.
For those who continuously tweak and tinker, rebrand and retool, it signals they haven’t built something they believe, over time, difficult markets and trends, can endure. We can’t talk about sustained trust when we haven’t established a sustained commitment to building something over the long term that’s worthy of people’s recurring trust.
“The moment an employee fails to deliver the experiences customers expect because of the ways customers have been led to believe it will happen, trust erodes, and marketing messages become meaningless.”
How has AI impacted the way organizations craft and distribute their messaging, and what role should AI play in building authentic connections?
AI is a tool, not the solution. As a writer and artist, I can see its infringement on my turf. But I’m not wringing my hands yet. As a tool, I do believe it can be helpful. Using ChatGPT as an example, I contend you don’t want it writing for you for obvious reasons—accuracy, tone, knowledge of your audience in ways that only your people know inside and out. However, it can surface ideas, spur different thinking and uncover potential blind spots. It can help branding and marketing professionals accelerate the research that enables them to get closer to the customer and ask the right or better questions. It can help drive better human engagement and the creativity that comes from actual human interactions.
As business leaders we must ask ourselves—what do we care about? What are our must-haves versus nice-to-haves? What are our non-negotiables? This is where vision and values come into play. What we say, claim to believe, and how we act upon those claims are how we’ll be measured. We were not having these conversations around the aggregation of Big Data a decade ago, at least not like we’re having in the mainstream about generative AI today. Businesses should be concerned about how they show up via the words they use, the imagery they connect to their brand, and the interactions their customers have though chatbots instead of actual people. They should be finding out if their customers do or don’t care about these new realities.
Being authentic in the world of artificial intelligence should mean cutting against the grain. AI is an accelerator for sure. I’ve written extensively about business obsession with speed and how it permeates the business vernacular—sprints, agile, nimbleness, next, go-to-market, the race we are positioned to win, the speed of retail or fashion or whatever industry you’re in. We have been coaxed to believe that those moving faster are destined to win. But the bigger questions we should be asking include: What are we accelerating toward and at what cost, especially as the goalposts keep moving? Do we value what’s authentic or artificial? Is our purpose titled toward profit or people? In business both are essential, but the tilt will define a lot about your brand regardless of what you say and how you attempt to say it.
With marketing playbooks constantly evolving and buzzwords becoming obsolete almost as quickly as they appear, how does a marketing mind stay sharp, curious, and relevant in such a dynamic field?
Many of us tired of “branding” long ago but it is still with us. We are likely beyond the saturation point with “story” and “storytelling” as well. But because these buzzwords speak to practices, they aren’t going away, and I contend the genuine work inside these practices remains important.
The term that I would put to rest is “differentiator”—yet it is regularly championed by practitioners within our industry to companies looking to get ahead. What differentiators exist in, say, alkaline batteries? Between Energizer and Duracell? And does it even matter with a commodity product like batteries? What differentiators are you claiming in your approach to customer service and can you prove it? Do customers actually believe you are somehow different or do they perceive it as inflated marketing blather? Does the desire to make unrealistic claims (e.g., first, best, only, unparalleled, unrivaled, etc.) backfire and work against you?
A friend of mine likes to say even well-crafted differentiators are temporary at best. I tend to lean into this reality: Differentiators are stale and outdated the moment you mention them. In part because this is a reaction to the competition (taking the focus off your own org’s work) and hedging your bet that certain things that weren’t visible to you assumes they don’t exist with your competitors… yet. That’s a risk and a bet I would be unwilling to take.
Sharp, curious minds are always mining the product, the service, the user experience, listening both inside the company and among the customer base. What moves you forward, I find, is almost always hiding in plain sight. To identify it, you need to be curious and courageous enough to question your success as much as your failures. That is the unsexy way innovation really happens—by refusing to get too comfortable and expectant with your success and backsliding into complacency.
How can organizations ensure their internal culture, values, and vision align with the external brand narratives they project?
Imagine you lead a national or international business with tens of thousands of employees. Each one is an ambassador for your company. What do you want them to know, and say, about the company, not only on the job but also outside of work? This is a simple question that makes a lot of leaders uncomfortable, and it’s because they haven’t valued or prioritized internal communication. Assuming every customer interacts with an employee, what should that engagement be like versus how it actually plays out? How about that challenging or trouble-shooting moment? Are they empowered to solve problems or forced to follow protocols? Are the words employees say believable and felt, or are they scripted? Values and culture are about empowering your people to make the impact you want them to make. That’s how you deliver on a mission and pursue a vision.
Simply put, if the messages don’t fly internally with employees, then those messages will fall flat with customers, too. The moment an employee fails to deliver the experiences customers expect because of the ways customers have been led to believe it will happen, trust erodes, and marketing messages become meaningless.
Internal comms is not marketing to employees. It is about modeling a vision and bringing a set of values to life in practical, meaningful ways that don’t feel contrived. Belief in that vision and those values because meaningful experiences occurred is what gives birth to messaging that resonates and can then become a rich well of messaging material for internal and external narratives.
“Campaigns will come and go, but the core of the brand – and what the consumer allows to live rent-free in their brain – should not waver.”
Your work as an artist and writer clearly informs your strategic communication practice. How do these creative pursuits shape your approach to solving client challenges and crafting impactful messaging?
Pivoting from client work to painting and writing books that have nothing to do with work is an exploration into wonder and possibility. It is an opportunity to toggle my brain to think about something other than work or not think at all, which as an entrepreneur is a difficult thing to do because you’re always thinking about the business and work. But what I do for clients is also creative work, and the single most important thing I can do for that work is give it space—space to let ideas breathe. They will either find the oxygen (revisions) needed to survive and grow, or die on the vine. But the only way to know is to walk away from it. Maybe it’s a day or two, or a week. But when you come back to it, and your brain hasn’t been held captive to it, whatever was written will look different. It will demand a new lens and different language. It exposes gaps in your best initial thinking, because first drafts are rarely ever final drafts if you care about delivering your best. Doing the work is relatively straightforward. Being open to “what if” questions and revision is where ideas begin to morph into answers or solutions.
Our job as messengers is to push the boundaries of what’s expected and, more importantly, what’s uninspired. In creating a painting, or a story, I follow an intuition that is fueled with questions of what if and constant revision to get where I am going. That journey is always more interesting to me than arriving on a final product. This is what makes it art—and I believe we have lost so much of the art of business in the belief that the science of business is the preferred and measurable path.
Lastly, I find that my work as an artist is like a palate cleanser. When I paint, I’m wiping away the work of the day. And inevitably, when I spend time with art, new ideas emerge for business work because I’m not forcing myself at that moment to find it. It bubbles up. Stories hold age-old themes: love, loss, conflict and the hero’s journey. Still-life and landscape paintings don’t reveal something new—they present new ways of seeing or experiencing something we’re already familiar with. Whether this is color, or character or language. That’s the purpose of messaging, and how I approach strategic communication: We all know the plot line, so how do we make it interesting, more inviting, and still make sure we’re telling a story rooted in truth, because your story and messaging is and always will be a nonfiction narrative.
Thad is the founder and principal of Ratchet Strategy + Communication, a consultancy focused on helping organizations both large and small better articulate their reason for being, and to tell compelling stories that are as accurate and forthcoming as they are effective. His work is straightforward: listen, ask questions, push where necessary, unearth the stories, and develop the key messages. Thad has served quietly as a trusted, behind-the-scenes communicator and advisor for more than 25 years collaborating with a diverse clientele ranging from start-ups and university presidents to CEOs and leadership teams of organizations of nearly every stripe.
Prior to launching Ratchet, Thad spent 16 years in a boutique public affairs and PR agency tackling a variety of communication challenges while honing his interest and skillset in internal communications, branding and messaging.
Thad is a graduate of The Ohio State University with a B.A. in Journalism. His creative writing has been nominated for prestigious awards including The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. He won the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2020 for his collection, Splendid Irrationalities. He is the author of three collections of short prose/poetry, including a micro-chapbook containing 11 original paintings that became a stand-alone art exhibition. His paintings have appeared in galleries and juried exhibitions throughout the United States.
