Lesson 1.1: What Is branding, and what is brand voice?

Please reference our syllabus here. You can find the brand audit template here.

Defining Branding or Brand Building

Lesson 1.1: What Is branding, and what is brand voice?

For this course, we will define branding as the distinct identity an organization crafts in an effort to stand out in a crowded market. A brand touches or impacts everything that your organization is involved with. Your employees, leadership, investors, customers, partners, and everything in between. This is why creating an integrated system that aligns with the rest of the company is crucial because the brand represents everyone it touches.

Beyond people, branding applies to your products, solutions, and services, and allows you to shape your market’s perception AKA your reputation.

The keyword being shape. Much like in cybersecurity, you can only control what is directly within your perimeter, and everything external requires calculated risks and the development of policies to impact or shape your brand’s reputation. You can’t control what a partner or employee says, for example, but you can offer guidance, policies, and resources to guide them.

In this course, we will specifically hone in on building an authentic brand. A brand that appeals to your current and future customers. This means aligning your efforts from the very top, starting with the company’s purpose, mission, vision, and values. If you work for a company that has yet to flesh these out, well, you’ve got a lot more work cut out for you before you can get to the branding aspect.

Anyway, we do this by establishing consistency that empowers our entire company and those associated with it to connect with specific values, experience, expertise, and outcomes. That means we will also not be chasing categories and buzzwords and folding them into our story.

As I mentioned a moment ago, we won’t specifically focus on the brand identity aspect of the equation-logos, color palette (just pick cyber blue, everyone else does), typography, etc-but these are just as important as your brand voice and overall strategy. Perhaps even more so because capturing attention is done through visual and auditory senses well before someone reads a single word.

This means we’ll primarily dig into brand strategy (alignment with company goals) and voice, consists of tone, style, and even personality. Combined, you can develop and align your language with cybersecurity practitioners and economic buyers, use messaging that speaks to their understanding, and begin carving out how the world around us sees you.

I know I’m repeating myself here, but branding alone does not shape your reputation, of course, but infusing it into how you communicate with prospects, customers, partners, employees, and even competitors puts more control back into your hands.

Read on to module 1.2 to learn about why authenticity matters.