Hello there, and welcome back to the brand-building course.
Please reference our syllabus here. You can find the brand audit template here.
So far, we’ve established a foundation for branding and how it impacts your organization, hammered home the importance of aligning with company goals, developed our brand personality, voice, and tone, and finally wrapped up our brand guidelines.
In module five, we start putting all of this into action by looking at brand messaging.
Earlier in the course, we discussed the metaphoric handshake our brands first make with people and how it combines the visual elements with the written. For many, this may be an ad, billboard, or booth branding at a conference. Others may have been told about the brand and get their first real exposure via your website.
Regardless of the first touchpoint, consistency across your brand is crucial to connect people to a singular core concept, which is typically what you hear people refer to as your brand promise. However, most companies have too many branches in their branding tree, which dilutes their effectiveness, which is one of the biggest challenges associated with brand messaging.
As you can imagine, the easiest brand elements are where you can spot inconsistencies surrounding your visual identity and related brand elements. This is particularly true if you have a well-crafted set of brand guidelines.
However, it can be more challenging to maintain the same standards for voice, tone, and style. So when people start to consume your content-be it written, video, or audio- if they feel it it’s too far outside of your guardrails, it may lose some of its impact and points of connection.
If we had to sum it all up, consistency is your biggest asset to ensure your intended audience immediately connects to your brand through their five primary senses. When someone sees or hears your brand elements, they should see who you represent. A good example of this is two monster brands: Coca-Cola and Red Bull.
Coke offers a set of beverages, but its branding has multiple layers ranging from its iconic red and wordmark to its polar bear mascots. Now, when you see cartoon polar bears, especially around the holidays, you think of Coca-Cola. For Red Bull, they became an experience brand that acts more as a media company than one that sells energy drinks. They are the kings/queens of capturing your attention and have since created experiences that pull in their customers for things like the Red Bull Flugtag (where people create flying machines and launch them off into water or the Red Bull Soapbox races. Rather than just sponsoring existing sports, they built their own. Now that is brand building…
And with that, we’re off to lesson 1 of module 5, where we discuss message clarity and alignment.
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