Bruce Quande didn’t win.
In fact, he didn’t even place in the high jump that day.
It was May 1963, at the Montana Interscholastic Track Meet, when Bruce was photographed1 using a weird backwards technique his coaches didn’t love - five years before Dick Fosbury won gold with the “Fosbury Flop” and redefined the sport forever.
Fosbury himself is on record jumping backwards in Oregon (also in 1963), hundreds of miles away from Bruce.
Two different fellas - total strangers - trying a backwards approach to solving the same problem, in the same year.
This little story came to mind when Matt Holmes first said to me, "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and brand teams should be best friends".
See, I agree with Matt, but I’d twist the idea a bit to say that good organic marketers and brand teams have been independently bending toward each other for years.
And they’re probably more like-minded than it seems.
Let’s jump* in…
*sorry
Backwards from the Beginning
I was an Imaginative Writing graduate, with a bit of journalism experience, when I got my first job in SEO, in 2011.
No formal marketing education. No clue about brand strategy.
Before I even passed my probation, Google Panda was in full effect. A piece of the Google algorithm that pushed SEOs (like the ones showing me the ropes) towards “better content”.
A year later, Google Penguin nudged the industry toward better PR practices.
Then Google Hummingbird helped the search engine get better at understanding meaning and intent - raising the bar for the content we created, again…
By my second anniversary, I’d experienced many updates to the machines, each one steering me further down the path of becoming a “content marketer”.
But I wasn’t like Bruce Quande. I needed coaches to show me the way - and I found them at Copyblogger.com.
This is where I learned about market research, audience personas, customer needs, content calendars, keyword research, audience building, internal linking, content promotion, empathy mapping, and authority-building.
If you come from the world of brand marketing, try going back to the 2011-15 archives of Copyblogger, and see what you think of the lessons in there.
I think you might just find yourself leaning forward, clicking your fingers, and pointing at the screen - in the style of that DiCaprio meme.
That’s deffo how I feel whenever I come across brand thinking from the likes of Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Les Binet, or my former colleague Tom Roach.
Tom wrote a lovely piece last year on AI as a real audience - suggesting that the same associations a brand seeks to build, increasingly need to work for people and large language models (e.g. ChatGPT) alike.
I agree with Tom. I also think the balance of marketing to minds and machines in tandem is something that good organic marketers are well accustomed to.
The need for alignment between brand and organic has gone beyond a nice idea. And way beyond a single “brand immersion” session at the start of an SEO engagement.
The good news - I believe - is that the best practitioners in both fields have been asking versions of the same questions for over a decade.
Questions that give both teams plenty to work on together...
- Who is our customer?
- What are the situations that bring them into the category?
- Where do they discover, research and buy - online and offline?
- Why would a customer choose our brand over another?
- How do we show up in the situations and places that matter?
- How does that compare to our competitors (direct and indirect)?
- What levers can we pull to do a better job?
For modern organic growth - and all the overwhelming things that come with “winning in AI search” - I’d say you’re off to a good start if you have a marketing team obsessed with questions just like these.
A mix of specialists - real friends - bringing different expertise to the same challenges.
And, before we templatise the shit out of the craft too much, the courage to try jumping in a new way sometimes - even if you lose - as marketers first, specialists second.
PS: Bruce Quande and Dick Fosbury weren’t the only ones trying a backwards technique in the 1960s. Debbie Brill was developing her “Brill Bend” independently, too. I like that detail because I don’t think this is only a story about SEO and brand. In my experience, the best specialists - in all channels - often bend toward the same bigger marketing problems from different directions.
1 - If you’d like to see that Bruce Quande photo, go here: The First Fosbury, Flathead Beacon ↩