Create an engaging brand narrative and experience through brand messaging

Business benefits

Design a compelling, authentic brand story and develop a brand culture that resonates with all of your stakeholders.

List and prioritize the internal and external audiences for which you are looking to develop your brand messaging.

Find the people within your organization whose personalities and styles best exemplify your brand.

Use these employees as models for building your brand messaging and story. Pay attention to what they say, how they sound, and their attitude towards the values important within your company.

Define your core brand values based on your organization’s purpose, vision, and mission.

Avoid using common attributes like honesty, reliability, integrity, and respect. Instead, focus on more distinctive values that accurately and describe your organization and can be readily backed up with your actions, such as promoting sharing, empowering communities, focusing on the future, or maximizing service.

Establish your brand voice using key adjectives that define how you want your core audience to perceive your brand and reinforce brand values.

Use the people you identified as best embodying your brand to check that your chosen adjectives describe them. Examples of potential brand adjectives include serious, contemporary, humorous, inspirational, formal, informal, calm, traditional, modern, punchy, cheeky, and conservative.

Determine the visual association you want people to make with your brand, based on your core audience and the differentiators from your brand positioning.

How Subaru appeals to outdoorsy audiences

Subaru positions itself as an active, family friendly car brand by showing families with small children enjoying the outdoors, in its messaging.

How Mercedes-Benz attracts luxury audiences

Mercedes-Benz aims to connect with the luxury demographic, with models, business executives, and celebrities representing the brand.

Check your values, voice, and visual associations to verify you created a brand personality that is authentic, shared, held, and applied.

  • Authentic: All messaging should be an accurate representation of the organizational culture.
  • Shared: Messaging should also be possible to share publicly.
  • Held: Messaging should be connected to the daily workings of the company.
  • Applied: Messaging should be developed in a way that can be applied as a recruitment, marketing, and performance measure.

Create a core story narrative, based on your brand personality, with which your audience can identify, and that makes them want to join your cause.

One common tactic is to position your brand as an underdog against an evil villain that stands in for customer pain points.

How Chipotle used a scarecrow to tell its brand story

Chipotle once brought its brand story to life with an animated short featuring a scarecrow working in a massive corporation that eventually breaks out to form its own, more humane and healthy alternative, ending with the “cultivate a better world” slogan.

Base your brand story around the reasons why your company came to be, what motivates your team to wake up for work each day, and how your customers find value in working with your brand.

The brand core values, voice, and visual association you have developed serve as building blocks and inputs to your brand story.

Use your brand story as a way to express your brand purpose in more realistic terms that your audience can understand.

It should work as a natural extension of your purpose, vision, and mission.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:08:50Z