03 Feb Does your brand persona match your brand strategy?
Translate your positioning into your brand persona
You know your company. You know its purpose, vision and differentiators better than anyone. But sometimes that positioning can get lost in translation from conceptual strategy to visual and messaging identities, especially if the internal decision-making process is weighed down by tunnel vision, personal preferences, or blind spots.
Brand messaging is the language, voice, and tone you use to talk about your brand. Combined with a visual identity, like your logo, color palette, and fonts, you establish a persona that customers recognize.
Brand identity is a core element of your overall brand strategy and should be a clear, documented vision for how your company will effectively communicate the positioning and differentiators defined by your brand strategy.
Building (or re-visiting) a brand identity
A well-defined and well-executed identity sets the tone and voice for all aspects of your messaging, from website, to emails, to presentations. Your language and visuals should work together to create content that resonates with your target audience and communicates a consistent personality.
Overall, your brand identity should achieve the following elements:
- Create a consistent voice and tone through which to communicate your brand positioning
Are you casual or formal? Are you more like a friendly neighbor, a wise mentor or an always-on-trend pal? Determine how you want to come across to your audience so that you can align your brand with that persona. - Develop the foundation of your identity with recurring elements of messaging and visuals
This is the high level stuff. For content, it’s elements like names, value proposition statements, brand pillars, taglines, boilerplate overview copy, and calls to action. Visually, it’s your logo, color palette, fonts, and styles. These foundational brand elements provide consistency across content channels and implement the tone you’ve established. - Provide a style guide for your team and partners so they can properly execute the strategy you’ve devised
A style guide is essential to getting your whole team on the same page. The key to branding is consistency, and you can’t have consistency if everyone’s not on board or in-the-know. The level of depth in your style guide is up to you, but consider including writing best practices and guidelines for correct logo and color palette use. - Build out new content and refine existing content to reflect updated branding
Let your foundational messaging elements guide you as you create new content and update existing content to reflect your newly established identity.
Solid brand persona is not
A tagline or logo
Sure, a tagline or logo that succinctly communicates your brand and its tone is an important part of a consistent strategy. However, these are just a couple of features of a much broader identity.
- Don’t get caught up in creating only the assets you absolutely need for your letterhead. A healthy brand identity gives your brand a well-rounded persona.
- The style guide may feel like an after-thought, but you don’t want your hard work and creativity to go to waste because your teams don’t understand the strategy.
Your product or service
Rather, it’s how you represent your products or services and communicate them to others. The answer is to “who is your brand” shouldn’t be just a laundry list of offerings.
- Thanks to your brand strategy, you know how you want to be perceived. Use this as a jumping off point to determine how to frame your brand in the eyes of your customers.
- Having a solid background of research into your brand’s audience and differentiators will set you up for success in determining how you want to talk about your business.
Only for the marketing department
In-house creatives or specialists at your partner agency should be leading the direction and development of your brand identity. However, the result should be actionable for your entire team.
- Your brand identity is a roadmap that your whole team can use, because it’s not an identity if only a small portion of your company executes it.
- Do your sales team’s presentations share a unified look, feel, and messaging? How will executives speak to the brand at conferences and events? Does your product team understand the most important values your brand is trying to convey?
Identity builds familiarity
Set your company up for success with a solid brand identity that is consistent across all platforms, and that all of your brand representatives understand and execute. How you talk to your buyers is such an important part of your business – some brands’ differentiators are built entirely around their tone and voice. A strong brand identity makes you more familiar and more memorable in the eyes of potential customers.
Whether you’re ready to up your branding game with a whole new voice and tone, you need a fresh perspective on some of your storytelling, or you’re stuck anywhere along the pipeline, Modicum can help you communicate your concept. Reach out to us.
